"I don't want to have to lie": meeting the Good Person of Szechuan
It's Valentine's Day evening and I have a blind date. I'm sitting in the lobby of a well-known London campus waiting to meet a first-year student who has just finished his day's lectures. OK, it's not really a date in that both parties expect the affair to be entirely platonic, and it's not really blind as we have met once before.
But it's only when he spots and waves at me, and I take a second or so to register, that it strikes me I haven't seen his face before. For when we met, on a January demonstration opposite the Chinese Embassy on Portland Place, he was wearing a face mask. Having attended a number of pro-Hong Kong marches last year, the sight of masked East Asians had become very much a norm to me. So what compelled me to talk to this young man in particular? Namely, the fact he was also wearing the Chinese Olympic tracksuit, and holding a homemade banner saying "Love China. Love Democracy." My story-senses were tingling: a mainlander!
I approached him at the end of the (long) series of speeches organised by the One World Movement but we kept it brief as the weather was truly biting. I took his email address, partly in the suspicion that having a Chinese pro-democracy contact might be half a good idea. Just in case something, y'know, happened.
Within a matter of weeks, something did happen. When Wuhan central hospital announced the death of the 34 year old doctor and coronavirus whistleblower Li Wenliang, the grief poured from the Chinese public like a flood, but one suffused with fury. Extraordinary tributes appeared online, right under the noses of the normally censorious Chinese authorities: "They owe you an apology, and we owe you our gratitude. Take care, Dr Li." was one, in the comments section of a People's Daily obituary. And who wouldn't be angry? Instead of Dr Li's fortitude being rewarded or supported with all the financial, material and personnel support he might need to face down a deadly and unknown disease, he was hauled into a Wuhan police station and forced to sign a spirit-crushing statement, retracting his "spreading of false rumours". Hence the dramatic ascent of the hashtag #wewantfreedomofspeech on Weibo, reaching 1.8million views by 5a.m., before being censored.
It's primarily that context I want to talk to CC in, but not at all exclusively. Prior to our meeting he has shown me his blog, which elucidates his emerging worldview. There is a great deal of nuance in his writing, as is a must for anyone tasking themselves with reconciling Chinese culture with elements of a Western political system. There are also the political realities; I ask about a recent post concerning President Xi Jinping's New Year Message and the response to the coronavirus, which expresses gratitude to the government of China for its vast reductions in poverty both at home and abroad, and insists all his output comes from a sense of civic duty and a desire for an ever-greater China. "Everybody has to do that," he smiles.
It's not just politic though. At the demo, CC had expressed his disappointment at the 'radical' nature of most Hong Kong protestors and his clear commitment to a united China that includes the former British colony, so I am quite prepared to hear from a genuine Chinese patriot that wants to learn from, not slavishly imitate, the West. This is no Yankee stooge. He had also proved eminently more realistic than the romantic simplicity his banner implied; Chinese democracy is a distant prospect at best, and CC operates well within the political art of the possible.
Sure enough, as we sound each other out on some of the 'hotter' topics around China in his student union bar, he laughs off the tentative suggestion that there might be a majority for Tibetan independence. Not if the increasing Han population of the 'Autonomous Region' has anything to do with it, he reminds me. I wonder how the picture might look had it been left just to Tibetan Tibetans. But I feel as if we are off on the wrong foot.
I ask about his journey from teenage nationalist to sceptical quasi-democrat. "There were more than two steps along that", he says, including a stage at which he had "hated everything the Party did". As a 15 year old, he'd taken himself on a trip through several US states, and discovered with building rage the crimes committed by his government, including the atrocity at Tiananmen Square. But, by continuing his voracious reading, he came toward a balance in which he "can see the value of the Chinese way". He is very conscious that every system has its flaws; he is baffled by what he sees as the enormous waste of money and time hurled at election campaigns, particularly in the States. He also harbours doubts about the value of a free media that appears almost entirely dedicated to "digging dirt". The mercurial flip-flopping of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson also gets a mention.
But at least there is an attempt at governing with the consent of the governed. In China, consent is assumed: the Communist Party, CC tells me, regularly claims to be acting on behalf of 1.4 billion people, who haven't been, nor are likely to ever be, asked. Nothing changes unless the government wants it to. Take the environment, a particular concern for CC as it is for many Chinese. The efficient executive machine rolls out instantly when a perceived national interest flicks the switch, like an Olympics to run; factories in and around Beijing were ordered to close for the duration of the Games and opened immediately afterwards. But out near CC's home in Sichuan there is a river which looks... "not what a river should look like", he says wryly. There is a noticeboard by the river, bearing the name and number of the relevant official for addressing local riverine concerns. "The board has been there for as long as I can remember but the river has always been...", he tails off, but his meaning is as clear as the river is (presumably) caliginous. He's thought about calling the number, but knows there is no point.
Not that CC can be accused of giving in easily. To confirm a hypothesis about the futility of local elections in China, he conducted his own survey, the scale of which is impressive in itself. He knocked on over 600 doors, asking people if they'd taken part in the elections. His results suggested just 16 per cent of people had (the CPC claims participation exceeds 80 per cent). No surprise to CC, of course; why would people bother turning up for a closed-shop farce? All candidates are pre-selected by the Communist Party. "The local elections affect nothing, and they won't even allow any control at that level."
It's not the only time CC has gone to lengths to prove a point about the public sphere in China. His blog recounts a time he attempted a one-man sit-in protest in his home city. Having jumped through all the hoops erected by the Parade and Protest Law, including applying for a permit and proving residence in the city for more than six months, the local police failed to uphold the authorities' side of the bargain, rejecting his application without the required written notification.
But it takes more than that to upset CC's equilibrium. He talks with a command of nuance that eluded me at his age about the continual dilemmas faced by the Communist Party in judging a golden mean of transparency. Permitting enough to enable open discussion of societal problems, without unleashing a storm of expectation that would gather into the dreaded typhoon of civil unrest, is terrifying to contemplate. No-one wants to be the Chinese Gorbachev. CC educates me about previous advances toward openness, far more cautious than glasnost, namely under Deng Xiaoping who brought in a reformist editor to the People's Daily only to get cold feet and fire him again. CC tends toward reading such to-ing and fro-ing as earnest toe-in-water moments rather than as cynical ploys to smoke out dissent. My spotty regurgitation of an old A-Level question on whether the abrupt shutdown of Mao's experimentation with free speech in the Hundred Flowers Campaign was cock-up or an entrapping conspiracy receives a firm answer in the former: even pre-Communism, the Chinese state had more insidious ways of knowing what its detractors were up to.
But by remaining unresponsive to a tricky question, the Communist Party could be making an unpalatable answer more likely. What if, in seeking to keep mass discontent at bay by keeping a lid on free expression, they end up provoking more, rather than less, anger? That seems to be the Box that has been ripped open by the Fates, rather than by a naïve Party Pandora, in recent weeks.
By the time China entered her New Year, the virus had officially infected more than 400 people, killing four and ravaging the People's Republic's reputation abroad, the Party has found itself playing catch-up with regard to transparency, and then in a fashion only they could pull off. The Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, the main body in charge of law and order, announced that those who continued to cover up information on coronavirus would be "the sinner of the millennium to the party and the people" and "nailed on a pillar of shame for all eternity". For Chinese transparency advocates, this must have been like receiving a Valentine's Day address from Nelson Muntz.
CC helps me out with some of the chronology of this: the immediate catalyst for that quintessentially Maoist call for openness was a distribution scandal at the Chinese Red Cross, in which crucial medical supplies were not sent to Wuhan at the outbreak of the crisis. Obviously it was too little, late to save many, not least Dr Li. But in the cacophonous wake of his tragic demise, it is easy to miss some of the more significant expressions of outrage and dismay. My rudimentary preparation for this meeting has alerted me - via the work of Hong Kong-based Guardian journalist Verna Yu - to two state-approved publications that released unusually overt criticisms of the authorities. One was Caixin, a Beijing-based financial publication, which published the following headline, alongside a black-and-white selfie of the late doctor:
“A healthy society shouldn’t have just one voice: Novel Coronavirus whistleblower Li Wenliang dies”
This genuinely gives CC pause for thought: "That is surprising." He'd assumed, as I had, that all such remarks had been restricted to the fringes, to furious but uninfluential ordinary Weibo users. He does a bit of digging himself, and discovers that "A healthy society should have just one voice" is actually a quote from the late doctor himself; a caveat, but only a slight one. There is no way, CC assures me, that this would've stood under normal circumstances. His research also reveals the juicy nugget that the founder of Caixin Media is world-renowned Hu Shuli, whose parents were underground Communists in '30s, and fought the Japanese.
He is a little less impressed by the second of the two, from a Weibo post from another official economic periodical, the Economic Observer:
“Dr Li is telling us what kind of future we will face if we lose the ability to express ourselves. In the eyes of the people, Dr Li was the hero who bravely told the truth. Wuhan should vindicate them and pursue those who abused their powers to suppress the ‘rumour mongers’.”
The attack on the Wuhan authorities is currently de rigueur and very much the Party line response to Doctorgate; it runs through the public reaction like Brighton rock. "The Party can never be wrong", says CC; there has to be some scapegoat, lower down the pecking order. Not to say that they aren't at fault, of course; when your response to uncomfortable truths from a doctor is to lock him up 'til he changes his mind, you have a basic priorities issue. But "it's systemic...the same thing would've happened in Sichuan, or Shanghai, or Central Beijing". The Wuhan authorities were, if not quite 'following orders', then certainly acting in the spirit of Communist governance.
But that initial phrase..."what kind of future we will face if we lose the ability to express ourselves". Again, he says, not something that would be published were it not for that official call for openness from the Party.
To think that this is some irrevocable tipping-point for Chinese free expression and will lead to the Tiananmen portrait of Mao joining the Berlin Wall and the Saddam statue on the scrapheap of History by the mid-Twenties would be to check in at Cloud-Cuckoo Land. Indeed, as Verna Yu reports today, the ongoing fallout from the coronavirus crisis appears to be a net-loss, rather than gain, for openness in China. But there is little doubt that, when and if the story of China's Long March to Freedom is ever told, those feverish hours succeeding the death of Dr Li Wenliang will be a notable chapter.
Almost as intriguing a question as where China's future lies is that of CC's, and it's just as difficult to answer. Will he take the road less travelled, and choose the life of the dissident? Or will he take the rational, gradualist option, of joining the Party, and seeking to reform from within? His ability to strike an intelligent balance between the pros and cons of China's regime - gently, and fittingly, informed by a latent Confucianism and yin-yang principles - seems to suggest the latter. But he's well aware of what he'd be sacrificing, and it clearly weighs. "I don't want to have to lie," he says pensively.
There's both an impish humour and a radical honesty to CC. In a clumsy attempt of my own to restore some East-West counterpoise to the conversation, I ask him what he thinks the West can learn from China. He light-heartedly invokes the meeting between President Xi and King Felipe of Spain: "I remember thinking 'King Felipe is probably asking Xi how to deal with the Catalans, and Xi is asking Felipe how to be a king...'" (unrelated: CC is a massive Barcelona fan). Pressing for something more serious, I suggest education, which doesn't go down that well. He recounts the ludicrous hours; the public shamings; the corporal punishment that often strays into plain abuse, with teachers even kicking students. He paints a picture of an accountability-free system, where teachers are free to become little tyrants in their own right, letting out their frustrations in life at the assembled young citizens. But if it's aimed at breaking independent spirits, it at least hasn't got to CC:
"I personally was the kid challenging authorities and questioning everything, for which I got into tons of trouble and was seen as a weirdo by some of my classmates. Luckily, I had the oral ability of explaining myself and debating with my teachers and authoritarian figures, which showed to my peers that I am something more than a weirdo (perhaps a weirdo with an actively open mouth."
Whatever path lies ahead, it is encouraging for all those who wish to see a more open China, that as the nation entered a New Year, the weirdos with open mouths had their say, even if for the briefest time.
But it's only when he spots and waves at me, and I take a second or so to register, that it strikes me I haven't seen his face before. For when we met, on a January demonstration opposite the Chinese Embassy on Portland Place, he was wearing a face mask. Having attended a number of pro-Hong Kong marches last year, the sight of masked East Asians had become very much a norm to me. So what compelled me to talk to this young man in particular? Namely, the fact he was also wearing the Chinese Olympic tracksuit, and holding a homemade banner saying "Love China. Love Democracy." My story-senses were tingling: a mainlander!
I approached him at the end of the (long) series of speeches organised by the One World Movement but we kept it brief as the weather was truly biting. I took his email address, partly in the suspicion that having a Chinese pro-democracy contact might be half a good idea. Just in case something, y'know, happened.
Within a matter of weeks, something did happen. When Wuhan central hospital announced the death of the 34 year old doctor and coronavirus whistleblower Li Wenliang, the grief poured from the Chinese public like a flood, but one suffused with fury. Extraordinary tributes appeared online, right under the noses of the normally censorious Chinese authorities: "They owe you an apology, and we owe you our gratitude. Take care, Dr Li." was one, in the comments section of a People's Daily obituary. And who wouldn't be angry? Instead of Dr Li's fortitude being rewarded or supported with all the financial, material and personnel support he might need to face down a deadly and unknown disease, he was hauled into a Wuhan police station and forced to sign a spirit-crushing statement, retracting his "spreading of false rumours". Hence the dramatic ascent of the hashtag #wewantfreedomofspeech on Weibo, reaching 1.8million views by 5a.m., before being censored.
It's primarily that context I want to talk to CC in, but not at all exclusively. Prior to our meeting he has shown me his blog, which elucidates his emerging worldview. There is a great deal of nuance in his writing, as is a must for anyone tasking themselves with reconciling Chinese culture with elements of a Western political system. There are also the political realities; I ask about a recent post concerning President Xi Jinping's New Year Message and the response to the coronavirus, which expresses gratitude to the government of China for its vast reductions in poverty both at home and abroad, and insists all his output comes from a sense of civic duty and a desire for an ever-greater China. "Everybody has to do that," he smiles.
It's not just politic though. At the demo, CC had expressed his disappointment at the 'radical' nature of most Hong Kong protestors and his clear commitment to a united China that includes the former British colony, so I am quite prepared to hear from a genuine Chinese patriot that wants to learn from, not slavishly imitate, the West. This is no Yankee stooge. He had also proved eminently more realistic than the romantic simplicity his banner implied; Chinese democracy is a distant prospect at best, and CC operates well within the political art of the possible.
Sure enough, as we sound each other out on some of the 'hotter' topics around China in his student union bar, he laughs off the tentative suggestion that there might be a majority for Tibetan independence. Not if the increasing Han population of the 'Autonomous Region' has anything to do with it, he reminds me. I wonder how the picture might look had it been left just to Tibetan Tibetans. But I feel as if we are off on the wrong foot.
I ask about his journey from teenage nationalist to sceptical quasi-democrat. "There were more than two steps along that", he says, including a stage at which he had "hated everything the Party did". As a 15 year old, he'd taken himself on a trip through several US states, and discovered with building rage the crimes committed by his government, including the atrocity at Tiananmen Square. But, by continuing his voracious reading, he came toward a balance in which he "can see the value of the Chinese way". He is very conscious that every system has its flaws; he is baffled by what he sees as the enormous waste of money and time hurled at election campaigns, particularly in the States. He also harbours doubts about the value of a free media that appears almost entirely dedicated to "digging dirt". The mercurial flip-flopping of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson also gets a mention.
But at least there is an attempt at governing with the consent of the governed. In China, consent is assumed: the Communist Party, CC tells me, regularly claims to be acting on behalf of 1.4 billion people, who haven't been, nor are likely to ever be, asked. Nothing changes unless the government wants it to. Take the environment, a particular concern for CC as it is for many Chinese. The efficient executive machine rolls out instantly when a perceived national interest flicks the switch, like an Olympics to run; factories in and around Beijing were ordered to close for the duration of the Games and opened immediately afterwards. But out near CC's home in Sichuan there is a river which looks... "not what a river should look like", he says wryly. There is a noticeboard by the river, bearing the name and number of the relevant official for addressing local riverine concerns. "The board has been there for as long as I can remember but the river has always been...", he tails off, but his meaning is as clear as the river is (presumably) caliginous. He's thought about calling the number, but knows there is no point.
Not that CC can be accused of giving in easily. To confirm a hypothesis about the futility of local elections in China, he conducted his own survey, the scale of which is impressive in itself. He knocked on over 600 doors, asking people if they'd taken part in the elections. His results suggested just 16 per cent of people had (the CPC claims participation exceeds 80 per cent). No surprise to CC, of course; why would people bother turning up for a closed-shop farce? All candidates are pre-selected by the Communist Party. "The local elections affect nothing, and they won't even allow any control at that level."
It's not the only time CC has gone to lengths to prove a point about the public sphere in China. His blog recounts a time he attempted a one-man sit-in protest in his home city. Having jumped through all the hoops erected by the Parade and Protest Law, including applying for a permit and proving residence in the city for more than six months, the local police failed to uphold the authorities' side of the bargain, rejecting his application without the required written notification.
But it takes more than that to upset CC's equilibrium. He talks with a command of nuance that eluded me at his age about the continual dilemmas faced by the Communist Party in judging a golden mean of transparency. Permitting enough to enable open discussion of societal problems, without unleashing a storm of expectation that would gather into the dreaded typhoon of civil unrest, is terrifying to contemplate. No-one wants to be the Chinese Gorbachev. CC educates me about previous advances toward openness, far more cautious than glasnost, namely under Deng Xiaoping who brought in a reformist editor to the People's Daily only to get cold feet and fire him again. CC tends toward reading such to-ing and fro-ing as earnest toe-in-water moments rather than as cynical ploys to smoke out dissent. My spotty regurgitation of an old A-Level question on whether the abrupt shutdown of Mao's experimentation with free speech in the Hundred Flowers Campaign was cock-up or an entrapping conspiracy receives a firm answer in the former: even pre-Communism, the Chinese state had more insidious ways of knowing what its detractors were up to.
But by remaining unresponsive to a tricky question, the Communist Party could be making an unpalatable answer more likely. What if, in seeking to keep mass discontent at bay by keeping a lid on free expression, they end up provoking more, rather than less, anger? That seems to be the Box that has been ripped open by the Fates, rather than by a naïve Party Pandora, in recent weeks.
By the time China entered her New Year, the virus had officially infected more than 400 people, killing four and ravaging the People's Republic's reputation abroad, the Party has found itself playing catch-up with regard to transparency, and then in a fashion only they could pull off. The Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, the main body in charge of law and order, announced that those who continued to cover up information on coronavirus would be "the sinner of the millennium to the party and the people" and "nailed on a pillar of shame for all eternity". For Chinese transparency advocates, this must have been like receiving a Valentine's Day address from Nelson Muntz.
CC helps me out with some of the chronology of this: the immediate catalyst for that quintessentially Maoist call for openness was a distribution scandal at the Chinese Red Cross, in which crucial medical supplies were not sent to Wuhan at the outbreak of the crisis. Obviously it was too little, late to save many, not least Dr Li. But in the cacophonous wake of his tragic demise, it is easy to miss some of the more significant expressions of outrage and dismay. My rudimentary preparation for this meeting has alerted me - via the work of Hong Kong-based Guardian journalist Verna Yu - to two state-approved publications that released unusually overt criticisms of the authorities. One was Caixin, a Beijing-based financial publication, which published the following headline, alongside a black-and-white selfie of the late doctor:
“A healthy society shouldn’t have just one voice: Novel Coronavirus whistleblower Li Wenliang dies”
This genuinely gives CC pause for thought: "That is surprising." He'd assumed, as I had, that all such remarks had been restricted to the fringes, to furious but uninfluential ordinary Weibo users. He does a bit of digging himself, and discovers that "A healthy society should have just one voice" is actually a quote from the late doctor himself; a caveat, but only a slight one. There is no way, CC assures me, that this would've stood under normal circumstances. His research also reveals the juicy nugget that the founder of Caixin Media is world-renowned Hu Shuli, whose parents were underground Communists in '30s, and fought the Japanese.
He is a little less impressed by the second of the two, from a Weibo post from another official economic periodical, the Economic Observer:
“Dr Li is telling us what kind of future we will face if we lose the ability to express ourselves. In the eyes of the people, Dr Li was the hero who bravely told the truth. Wuhan should vindicate them and pursue those who abused their powers to suppress the ‘rumour mongers’.”
The attack on the Wuhan authorities is currently de rigueur and very much the Party line response to Doctorgate; it runs through the public reaction like Brighton rock. "The Party can never be wrong", says CC; there has to be some scapegoat, lower down the pecking order. Not to say that they aren't at fault, of course; when your response to uncomfortable truths from a doctor is to lock him up 'til he changes his mind, you have a basic priorities issue. But "it's systemic...the same thing would've happened in Sichuan, or Shanghai, or Central Beijing". The Wuhan authorities were, if not quite 'following orders', then certainly acting in the spirit of Communist governance.
But that initial phrase..."what kind of future we will face if we lose the ability to express ourselves". Again, he says, not something that would be published were it not for that official call for openness from the Party.
To think that this is some irrevocable tipping-point for Chinese free expression and will lead to the Tiananmen portrait of Mao joining the Berlin Wall and the Saddam statue on the scrapheap of History by the mid-Twenties would be to check in at Cloud-Cuckoo Land. Indeed, as Verna Yu reports today, the ongoing fallout from the coronavirus crisis appears to be a net-loss, rather than gain, for openness in China. But there is little doubt that, when and if the story of China's Long March to Freedom is ever told, those feverish hours succeeding the death of Dr Li Wenliang will be a notable chapter.
Almost as intriguing a question as where China's future lies is that of CC's, and it's just as difficult to answer. Will he take the road less travelled, and choose the life of the dissident? Or will he take the rational, gradualist option, of joining the Party, and seeking to reform from within? His ability to strike an intelligent balance between the pros and cons of China's regime - gently, and fittingly, informed by a latent Confucianism and yin-yang principles - seems to suggest the latter. But he's well aware of what he'd be sacrificing, and it clearly weighs. "I don't want to have to lie," he says pensively.
There's both an impish humour and a radical honesty to CC. In a clumsy attempt of my own to restore some East-West counterpoise to the conversation, I ask him what he thinks the West can learn from China. He light-heartedly invokes the meeting between President Xi and King Felipe of Spain: "I remember thinking 'King Felipe is probably asking Xi how to deal with the Catalans, and Xi is asking Felipe how to be a king...'" (unrelated: CC is a massive Barcelona fan). Pressing for something more serious, I suggest education, which doesn't go down that well. He recounts the ludicrous hours; the public shamings; the corporal punishment that often strays into plain abuse, with teachers even kicking students. He paints a picture of an accountability-free system, where teachers are free to become little tyrants in their own right, letting out their frustrations in life at the assembled young citizens. But if it's aimed at breaking independent spirits, it at least hasn't got to CC:
"I personally was the kid challenging authorities and questioning everything, for which I got into tons of trouble and was seen as a weirdo by some of my classmates. Luckily, I had the oral ability of explaining myself and debating with my teachers and authoritarian figures, which showed to my peers that I am something more than a weirdo (perhaps a weirdo with an actively open mouth."
Whatever path lies ahead, it is encouraging for all those who wish to see a more open China, that as the nation entered a New Year, the weirdos with open mouths had their say, even if for the briefest time.
Fascinating!
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