Author Archives: Joel

Ian Buruma’s chapter, “China in Cyberspace,” begins thus:

The problem of exile is that it becomes increasingly hard to go home. You might eventually be able to return physically, but not to the country you left. Too much will have happened in the meantime. Those who stayed behind will have changed, but the exile, because of his peculiar experience, will have changed even more, marked by exposure to an alien world. There are cases, it is true, where exiles have gone back to be leaders. At the beginning of the the twentieth century, Sun Yat-sen plotted the Chinese revolution in Tokyo, London, and Honolulu, and he returned in 1911 to lead the Chinese republic [though not very effectively]. But this is rare. Former exiles are not usually welcomed back into the fold. [How about Khomeini?] Like Brahmans who leave India, political rebels tend to lose their aura once they step away from their native soil. I once asked an academic in Hunan, who was critical of the Communist regime, what he thought of overseas dissidents such as Wei Jingsheng and Fang Lizhi. He replied that once a dissident leaves China, “he has no right to speak out anymore.” This was not an isolated opinion, which, by the way, is never expressed about overseas Chinese who get rich.

“All the nobodies who cannot return are going home.” This line is from a poem by Yang Lian, a writer from Beijing now living in London. He carries a New Zealand passport and lived in four different countries before arriving in England in 1993. His flat is on the third floor of a redbrick early-twentieth-century apartment block. All his neighbors are Chasidic Jews, who speak Yiddish and wear clothes reminiscent of eighteenth-century Poland. Exiles of a different kind, they regard Yang Lian and his wife You You as exotics. Yang wrote that poem in London. Those who live abroad become nobodies. Home is a land of their own invention.

SOURCE: Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing, by Ian Buruma (Vintage, 2001), pp. 108-109

It is hard to say how many Christians there are in China, since most of them do not belong to officially registered “patriotic” churches. People all over the country gather in private homes, or “house churches,” to pray and preach and generally share in various hybrid forms of folk Christianity. Like Falun Gong, these are often classified as “evil cults” by the government, and believers are regularly arrested. A friend from Beijing once told me that clandestine Christians were the toughest dissidents, because of their willingness to die for their faith. I wanted to meet some of them, but this was not simple to arrange.

Nevertheless, Ian Buruma finally managed, through a network of relatives, to arrange a trip into the farther reaches of Sichuan Province to interview a “house church” leader in a tiny rural village.

After we had gotten back from the village, Cindy and Aunt entertained Uncle with stories of Cindy’s mother and her beliefs. The three of them were shrieking with laughter. Cindy mimicked her mother’s voice and imitated her Christian pieties. Tears of mirth moistened Uncle’s small, red eyes. I asked him why his sister-in-law shouldn’t believe in Jesus if it made her feel happy. Still chortling at the stupidity of his rural relations, he slapped a damp hand on my leg and explained that “Marxism is based on a materialist philosophy and all religion is mere superstition.”

I was aware of the danger of feeling superior to the half-educated ways of Uncle and Aunt, and yet could not help detesting them. There was so much anxiety and shame in their ridicule of the village life they had barely left behind. Hearing their laughter, I could understand the powerful attraction of egalitarian beliefs to people who felt the contempt of the educated classes, and it hardly mattered whether the peasant messiah was called Jesus Christ or Mao Zedong.

Uncle’s faith in political dogma made him feel superior to his village relatives, not only because mastering some of the Marxist jargon marked him as an educated man, just as reciting Confucian texts had for previous generations. but because it sounded scientific and modern, like his giant karaoke machine; and to be “scientific” was to be out of the village, with its age-old superstitions. Perhaps the increasing popularity of many faiths in China is a kind of revenge, against the oppressive dogmas of a morally and politically bankrupt state, but also against the little mandarins who are paid to impose them. It is a case of village China hitting back.

SOURCE: Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing, by Ian Buruma (Vintage, 2001), pp. 285, 298

I left Taiwan [in 1999] feeling elated–not so much because of the election results, which were mixed. [Democratic Progressive Party candidate] Chen Shui-bian lost in Taipei; [DPP candidate] Frank Hsie won in Kaohsiung…. It would be a bit more than a year later that Taiwan passed the real test of democracy: a peaceful transition from one party to another. In March 2000, Chen Shui-bian was elected as the first DPP president of Taiwan, breaking the KMT [Kuomintang] monopoly on power….

Until the 1980s, Taiwanese dissidents abroad were as impotent and as easily dismissed as irrelevant and quixotic as the mainland dissidents are today. But when Taiwan politics began to turn after the Kaohsiung Incident in 1979 [in which police clashed with pro-democracy demonstrators], the overseas activists had the international contacts, the expertise, and the financial resources to play a vital role. They knew how Washington worked. Above all, despite their feuding and the occasionally wild and desperate actions, they had kept the flame alive during the dark years, rather like governments in exile, offering hope that one day change would come.

And yet the case of Taiwan sits oddly within the history of China, for Taiwanese freedom was built in defiance, not only of the People’s Republic of China but of the idea of One China. I was often struck by the Japanophilia among the older dissidents [many of whom have Japanese nicknames] and their contempt for “those Chinese” on the mainland, and I assumed it was a necessary defense against official propaganda of reuniting the motherland. As a gut feeling or prejudice, anti-mainlander feeling can be disturbing. But the belief that the ancient Chinese drive toward central power over a vast land has been inimical to political freedom is surely right. For democracy to succeed, “China” probably needs more Taiwans.

SOURCE: Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing, by Ian Buruma (Vintage, 2001), pp. 205-207

Ian Buruma’s chapter on Taiwan describes his trip to the 2-28 Museum.

As told in the museum, the story of Taiwan, including the 2-28 Incident [see below], is as formulaic in its way as the old KMT [Kuomintang] myth of Nationalist martyrdom. A short historical overview explains how the Taiwanese–that is to say the Chinese who arrived in Taiwan three centuries ago–were always oppressed by foreign conquerors: first the Dutch, then the Portuguese, the Japanese, and finally the KMT mainlanders. This, one is told, fostered a unique love of freedom and a rebellious spirit. But the story had a typically Taiwanese post-colonial twist. Hindsight has given Taiwanese a rosier view of Japanese rule, which, though harsh, also brought many benefits, such as universities, science, railways, and electrification. The KMT, on the other hand, brought only violence, poverty, and corruption. The loathing of aliens that once bound Han Chinese together against the Manchu invaders is replicated in the Taiwanese hatred of mainland Chinese.

The story of 2-28 itself, as described in books, comics, videotapes, photographs, prints, posters, and textbooks, invariably goes like this: On February 27 agents of the Monopoly Bureau, who were little more than mobsters on the government payroll, assaulted an old lady who was peddling cigarettes in Taipei. One of the agents beat her over the head with his pistol. Crowds gathered to protest. The agents, panicking perhaps, began to shoot and killed one of the demonstrators. More people were gunned down the next day, with internationally outlawed dumdum bullets, which rip the body open. The rebellion spread all over the island. Radio stations and government offices were taken over. People suspected of being mainlanders, in or out of uniform, were attacked and sometimes clubbed to death with sticks.

In 1947, Taiwan was a province of China, which was still ruled by the KMT. A meeting was convened between Chen Yi, the KMT provincial governor, a brute with Shanghai gangster connections, and members of the Taiwanese elite. Civil liberties were promised in exchange for a return to law and order. But as soon as more KMT troops arrived from China, the “white terror” began: Martial law was declared and mass arrests, torture, rapes, disappearances, and executions followed. Within about two months, much of the native Taiwanese intelligentsia was wiped out. Many people were so badly tortured that they had to be carried to the execution grounds. Eventually, after he had lost the civil war in China and retreated to Taiwan, Chiang Kai-shek made a gesture to appease outraged Taiwanese feelings: In 1950, after a splendid fireworks display, Chiang’s old friend Chen Yi was executed for being a “traitor.”

SOURCE: Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing, by Ian Buruma (Vintage, 2001), pp. 178-179