Category Archives: China

If the world of intellectuals can be divided, as Isaiah Berlin once argued, between foxes, who know many things, and hedgehogs, who know one big thing, Wei [Jingsheng] is clearly a hedgehog. The one conviction he guards like a precious jewel, and about which he is lucid, always serious, and willing to stake his life, he had already expressed clearly in his 1978 manifesto on the Democracy Wall in Beijing. It goes to the heart of the Chinese problem. “History,” he wrote, “shows that there must be a limit to the amount of trust conferred upon any individual. Anyone seeking the unconditional trust of the people is a person of unbridled ambition. The important thing is to select the right sort of person to put one’s trust in, and even more important is how such a person is to be supervised in carrying out the will of the majority. We can trust only those representatives who are supervised by us and responsible to us. Such representatives should be chosen by us and not thrust upon us.”

Wei Jingsheng was twenty-nine when he wrote that. Memories of Mao worship and its millions upon millions of victims, humiliated, maimed, and tortured to death, were still raw. The statement is as simple as it is true. And Wei has stuck to it. He is often accused of being out of touch with developments in China, of not recognizing the changes that economic reforms, carried out while he was in prison, have brought. But if one believes, as Wei does, that only political change which guarantees the right to criticize and to vote will do, such reforms are beside the point, for they fail to address the main problem. He argues, simply, bluntly, doggedly, at times megalomaniacally, that without democracy–not “socialist” democracy or “people’s” democracy–the Chinese cycle of violence, followed by tyranny, will never be broken.

The way a former Maoist fanatic arrived at this conclusion has been described by Wei himself, as well as by his perhaps too admiring biographer, the German journalist Jürgen Kremb. That he was once a fanatic is clear from his own account: He had wrecked “bourgeois” homes, dragged out “rightists” for public interrogations, and spouted devotional Maoist maxims ever since he was a child, when his father made him learn a new page of Mao’s writings every day. Wei was among the first wave of middle school students to become a Red Guard but also, it seems, among the first to have doubts. Some of the stages of Wei’s intellectual journey from total belief in communism to total disbelief have taken on an almost mythical status. Most poignant, perhaps, is Wei’s glimpse of the naked girl.

To make it easier for the young to spread revolutionary terror all over China, Red Guards were allowed to travel by train free of charge. Wei hopped on a train sometime in 1966, bound for the northwest. When the train pulled into the city of Lanzhou, he was shocked to see children swarming outside the window begging for food. A middle-aged man, sharing his compartment, said they were probably children of landlords, “rightists,” and other “bad elements,” and deserved to starve.

The barren northwestern landscape became more desolate by the mile after the train left Lanzhou. It stopped at a windswept little station so insignificant that it did not even have a platform. Again, the crying and whimpering of beggars drew Wei’s attention. He leaned out of the window. One girl, of about seventeen, her face covered in soot and her long hair caked with dirt, raised her arms, begging for something to eat. She appeared to be dressed in a filthy rag. The middle-aged man sniggered and said girls like that would do anything you fancied for a few crumbs of food. Suddenly Wei pulled back from the window in shock. What looked like a rag was nothing of the kind. The girl was covered in nothing but her own matted hair. Wei was overcome by a wave of disgust–with the obscene, sniggering man, the starving, naked girl, the stench of urine and excrement, the simmering violence among the Red Guards, and the bony arms outside clawing the ground for scraps of food. And he asked himself: Was this the “fruit” of socialism?

There were more shocks to challenge the official version of reality in China. On a trip to the far west, he saw families living in holes in the ground, sharing one warm garment against the freezing winds; he met “rightist” intellectuals there who had been banished in 1957 to do hard labor without a chance of ever going home. In the early 1970s, Wei met his first girlfriend, Ping Ni, the daughter of a high-ranking Tibetan Communist living in Beijing. Her family story was enough to drive away any illusions he might still have had.

Ping’s father was a staunch Maoist, even during the bloody suppression of the Tibetan revolt in 1959. But someone had to be blamed for the escape to India in that year of the Dalai Lama and a hundred thousand followers. So one night in the spring of 1960, when Ping Ni was six years old, there was a knock on the door. Her father was taken away to spend the next twenty years in prison. Six years later, the Red Guards came for her mother, who, in full sight of her daughter, slit her veins with a razor. With blood spurting from her wrists, she was dragged downstairs by the teenage revolutionaries and bundled into a truck. Ping Ni’s last sight of her mother was of her legs kicking before the door was slammed and the truck drove off into the dark.

Wei came to the dangerous, and for him almost fatal, conclusion that “a foremost characteristic of the Communist Party is lying, very effective lying, lying all the time and about everything. It is not easy for ordinary folks to see through this. As the youngest of the [Red Guard] leadership, I saw it clearly, all the cruelties, which totally destroyed my previously conceived impressions of the Communist Party.”

This in itself did not make him an original thinker. Many intelligent Chinese had reached similar conclusions. More unusual was his view that communism was absolutely incompatible with democracy, and there was nothing to gain from making concessions to the Party. This is what drove him to the Democracy Wall.

SOURCE: Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing, by Ian Buruma (Vintage, 2001), pp. 96-98

A common cliché about the difference between East and West is that Oriental cultures are driven by shame whereas the Judeo-Christian West is driven by guilt. In the West, God sees our sins even if no one else does, so we feel guilty. By contrast in the East, which has no God, it is only when the neighbors notice that one needs to worry, and then one feels shame. This has always seemed to me a rickety distinction. What troubles [exiled dissidents] Su [Xiaokang], Xie [Xuanjun], Wang Chaohua, who once tormented her father [during the Cultural Revolution], and many other refugees from China’s dictatorship sounds more like guilt than shame–with or without the all-seeing eye of God. And the guilt goes deeper and back further in time than the events of 1989 [at Tiananmen]. Su said: “All of us who went through the Cultural Revolution feel guilty–of beating our teachers, denouncing our parents, that sort of thing. At least we intellectuals can talk about it. Ordinary Chinese have it all bottled up.

So why was it, I asked, that Su [unlike some of his cohorts] ended up rejecting Christianity after all? His response was a melancholy echo of a distress I would come across often among the survivors of the Maoist era. He said that since people of his generation lost their faith in Maoism, they felt like plants cut off at the roots. It had become impossible to believe in any religion or any ideology, he added: “I tried hard, but I can’t believe in anything at all.”

SOURCE: Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing, by Ian Buruma (Vintage, 2001), p. 58

Korean Studies Review recently posted a review by Michael Finch of Korea Between Empires, 1895-1919, by Andre Schmid (Columbia U. Press, 2002), which reminds us how much Korea followed Japanese models of modernization before, during, and after it was colonized by Japan.

In his introduction Schmid discusses the major themes to be covered in the book: namely, the role of newspapers in defining the nation, Korea’s disengagement from its traditional orientation toward China, the centrality of ‘capitalist modernity’ to both Korean nationalism and Japanese colonialist thought, the importance of Sin Ch’aeho’s “ethnic definition of the nation” as minjok, (p. 16) and the way in which the parameters and frameworks of nationalist discourse in Korean newspapers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries continue to influence the debate on Korean nationalism today.

The opening chapter, “The Universal Winds of Civilization,” examines the concept of munmyông kaehwa (“civilization and enlightenment”). Schmid’s choice of the year 1895 as a starting point for his study is significant in that this year saw the defeat of China in the Sino-Japanese War and China’s official renunciation of its suzerain status over Korea in the Treaty of Shimonoseki (17 April 1895)….

Along with the rise of Korean nationalism came a rising sense of East Asian racial solidarity as defined by the term Pan-Asianism, which saw East Asia as united by the common threat of Western imperialist intrusion into the region. In this world view, held by many of the reformists including the Protestant reformer Yun Ch’iho, Japan was cast in the role of defender of the East and was even supported by the Hwangsông sinmun during the Russo-Japanese War–although as the Korean capital was effectively under the control of Japan during this period, it may to some extent have been coerced into adopting this pro-Japanese line. With the signing of the Japanese-Korean Treaty of Protection in 1905, however, all illusion evaporated. As Schmid makes clear in this chapter, a naivety toward Japanese intentions appears to have been a major weakness of the proponents of munmyông kaehwa, many of whom owed an intellectual debt to Japanese reformist thinkers such as Fukuzawa Yukichi. The ambivalent attitude of the Hwangsông sinmun toward Japan made it a target for the pro-Japanese organization, the Ilchinhoe on the one hand, and anti-Japanese nationalists on the other. The Taehan maeil sinbo, on the other hand, under the ownership of Ernest Bethell, a British citizen protected by extraterritoriality, was exempt from Japanese censorship and was consequently able to adopt a more consistent anti-Japanese stance in its editorials.

Chapter 3 “Engaging a Civilizing Japan” examines the extensive intellectual interaction between Korea and Japan that underlay the developing confrontation of Japanese colonial expansion and rising Korean nationalism. Although munmyông kaehwa had its roots in the West, Japan was its mediator in East Asia. As Schmid points out, “‘The West and Japan’ emerged as standard expressions for the top rungs of the civilizing hierarchy.” (p. 107) It was from Japan that the early reformers who had initiated the Kapsin Coup (1884) drew inspiration and support, and it was to Japan that increasing numbers of Korean students went for a ‘modern’ education. As evidence of the strong link between the reformist movement in Japan and Korea, Schmid brings our attention to the similarities between Yu Kilchun’s Sôyu kyônmun and Fukuzawa Yukichi’s Seiyô jiji (Conditions of the West) and the fact that Yu’s seminal work was also subsidized and published by Fukuzawa. (pp. 110-111)

The wholesale acceptance of the values of munmyông kaehwa in Korea during this period also gave rise to the anomaly of Korean reformers espousing colonial expansion as evidence of superior civilization and enlightenment. Although these reformers were not unaware that Korea might itself fall prey to the colonial expansion of another power, in general they exhorted their fellow countrymen to participate in the reform project so that Korea would escape this fate and be counted amongst the civilized nations of the world. It was only after the signing of the Treaty of Protection that solidarity with other colonized countries such as India began to be expressed.

This week’s Regions of Mind blog cites, among many other stimulating posts, a Progressive Policy Institute study on rising rates of piracy.

A quarter of all world pirate attacks last year took place in Indonesian waters. This region is naturally hospitable to pirates and difficult to patrol since (1) it features shallow waters dotted by lots of little islands and narrow channels, and (2) it is the hinge of the shipping lanes bringing Asian consumer goods to Europe, and Persian Gulf oil to Japan and China. Budget stresses since the financial crisis, meanwhile, have cut Indonesia’s navy budget by about two-thirds. Last fall, an Indonesian navy spokesman noted that the country needs about 400 boats to patrol national waters, but has only 117 at the moment; and only 40 of these are seaworthy.

In second place was Bangladesh, with 58 pirate attacks; Nigeria was third with 39. Somalia had 18 attacks, but despite the lower number of attacks, Somali waters may be the world’s least-policed and most dangerous. The IMO [International Maritime Organization] has a permanent warning to shipmasters to avoid the area altogether if possible, and especially not to anchor within 50 miles of the coast.

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