A famine that killed tens of millions of people? Blame it on natural disasters and that damn Khrushchev. Political campaigns that became wildly murderous? Not our fault — those excesses were the work of overly zealous, even rogue, local officials. Any awkward truths that can’t be swept under the carpet must be explained away, woven together with half-truths and lies into the fringe of the carpet itself.

Journalist Ian Johnson’s new book, Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future, relates the stories of people, extraordinary in their tenacity and courage, who persist in peering at the mess under that carpet and unpicking the tightly knit threads. They sneak their cameras into former labour camps to reveal human bones still protruding from the soil, interview the last survivors of famines and massacres, and create online archives and offline samizdat journals to record their findings. Among their number are the “citizen journalists” who record history in the making, including those who documented scenes in hospitals and elsewhere in Wuhan during that city’s draconian Covid-19 lockdown in early 2020.

For thousands of years, as Johnson notes, history has been “inseparable” in China from the concept of moral instruction. The independent researchers devoted to historical investigation he is writing about believe that “a moral society cannot be based on lies and silence.” But to refute the lies and break the silence, these intrepid men and women, sometimes armed with little more than curiosity, a smartphone and internet access, must play a dangerous cat-and-mouse game with security forces.

Many do their work under suffocating levels of surveillance. Others have been put under house arrest or worse, with some prison sentences longer than those handed out to convicted rapists. If they risk their freedom and even their lives to shine a light into some of contemporary Chinese history’s darkest corners, they do so because they believe that “the party’s monopoly of the past” is “the root of their country’s current authoritarian malaise.”

These “counter-historians” are generally less interested in the elite machinations behind catastrophic events than the “degradation of the individual” after the events have been set in motion. To discuss the culpability of party leaders would be asking for even more trouble, of course. But they are genuinely devoted to recovering and honouring the stories of ordinary people. At the same time, Johnson writes, they tend to avoid “heroizing” the victims. The histories they produce may necessarily be incomplete, but they are persuasively nuanced.

The carefully constructed official history, by contrast, is intolerant of nuance or deviation. Engraved in textbooks, promoted in films, enshrined in museums and embodied in the sacred sites of “Red tourism,” it lies at the heart of the party’s legitimacy. It narrates the story of how the communists saved the Chinese people from a “feudal” past as well as the Japanese enemy without and the class enemies within. It tells how the party has kept China safe in a hostile world, governed it wisely and justly, and raised it from poverty to prosperity and power.

Over the past eighty years the party has produced three historical resolutions, “each a cartoonish version of history” intended to justify the rule of the latest leader. The official history endorses the party’s right to rule China today, more than seventy years after the revolution that brought it to power. It paves the way for that rule to continue into the future without any need for checks and balances or popular elections.

To raise questions about the great famine or the systemic nature of the violence during the land reform era or the Cultural Revolution is to ask, in effect — why are you still the boss of us?

The party watched with apprehension and then with horror as the policy of glasnost (transparency) championed by Gorbachev in the mid 1980s led to a rush on the Soviet Union’s historical archives. Soviet citizens were suddenly free to remember and discuss the savagery of the Stalinist era: the political purges, the famines, the midnight knocks on the door, the desolate and murderous gulag of labour camps, the ruined and wasted lives. Just six years later, the Soviet Union collapsed.

Lesson taken. The Chinese Communist Party’s post-Mao leadership, also shaken by the mass pro-democracy protests of 1989, tightened control over political and intellectual discourse. Yet independent thinkers, many of whom had personal experience of upheavals like the famine and Cultural Revolution, both as participants and victims, were compelled to record, research and analyse. Work that couldn’t be published in the mainland was frequently published in Hong Kong.

Among those who laid the path walked by the generation described in Sparks were the oral historian Sang Ye, the writer Liu Binyan, the historical investigator Dai Qing and the journalist Yang Jisheng. If there is one criticism I have of Sparks, otherwise an exemplary, well-researched and vital book, it’s the author’s failure to mention these pathbreakers, the post-Mao pioneers of the movement to which the people he writes about belong. Another curious omission is Wang Youqin, whose epic archival work on the victims of the Cultural Revolution was published in English in an abridged and edited form in 2023.

Johnson’s focus, however, is on more recent times. He observes that a confluence of events and trends in 2003 led to a surge in grassroots history writing. Contributing factors included popular outrage over the government’s suppression of news about the SARS epidemic that year and the application of market forces to Chinese media, which led to a partial liberation from direct control by the party. Xi Jinping’s ascension less than a decade later marked the end of this brief golden age and the beginning of what Johnson describes as Xi’s “forever crackdown” on “historical nihilism.”

And yet the independent historians persist, driven by the importance of what they are doing. The focus of their work may be as narrow as the experience of a single county in a single month of the Cultural Revolution or as broad as the question of guilt and the value of apologies. Collectively, their work reveals that even when the Communist Party shifts the blame for mistakes and crimes onto a few bad eggs, it rarely punishes them, and if so, even more rarely to any degree commensurate with their crimes. They also demonstrate that violence has always been far more pervasive and systemic than the official story suggests.

It’s not just the Communist Party that resists telling these stories. Many of those who have suffered through the events these historians are studying don’t want to talk about them. Some just want to put the trauma behind them. Others don’t want to get in trouble or jeopardise their children’s futures. They have buried the past to rebuild their lives as though, Johnson writes, “The suffering somehow cheapened this world of newfound prosperity, a reminder that it was built on violence.” In a different context (the Wondery podcast Ghost Story) the British historian Nicholas Hiley has discussed the “destabilising” nature of revealed historical truth — the past is not always a happy place and the truth does not always set people free. And yet we carry that past around with us — and it informs the present whether we like it or not.

Ian Johnson is a veteran, Pulitzer Prize–winning China journalist and a Sinophone whose work balances academic rigour with good storytelling. Sparks is the culmination of years of meeting with and even going on reporting trips with the underground historians he profiles here. He inserts between the chapters short vignettes, “Memories,” that offer, in his words, “sketches of people, places, and iconic works of counter-memory that demonstrate the ambition of China’s underground historians: to write a new history of contemporary China in order to change their country’s future.”

Sparks takes its title from a samizdat journal from the 1950s whose history has been uncovered by one of the historians Johnson profiles. The book joins a growing list of publications in English that together are creating a far richer picture of China’s history than that to which non–Chinese speakers have previously had access. They include works like Yang Jisheng’s Tombstone and Wang Youqin’s Victims of the Cultural Revolution, both of which were edited and translated by Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian; Louisa Lim’s brilliant Indelible City, about Hong Kong; Jonathan Clements’s essential new history of Taiwan, Rebel Island; and Tania Branigan’s Red Memory, in which Wang Youqin features heavily.

Johnson contends that the “vibrancy of China’s counter-history movement” — which also includes creative reconstructions of historical events and personages by artists and writers — “should force us to retire certain clichéd ways of seeing China.” These include the tendency to see its authoritarianism as successfully monolithic. While not denying that “these are dark times,” he champions the counter-history movement as a significant form of resistance. As one of the young members of the group behind the original samizdat journal Spark put it back in the 1950s, “If you do not break out of silence, you will die in silence.” •

Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future
By Ian Johnson | Allen Lane | $55 | 400 pages

The post China’s underground historians appeared first on Inside Story.

But it is complicated by social and economic inequalities, as Wanning Sun explains in her new book, Love Troubles: Inequality in China and Its Intimate Consequences. And in the case of China’s migrant workers, it can’t be considered apart from broader issues of history, politics and economics. Reading this important, pathbreaking study of the personal lives of the new Chinese proletariat, we might well conclude that if love really is chicken soup for the soul, those at the bottom of China’s social and economic heap struggle for a sip.

For most of Chinese history, parents arranged their children’s marriages, a deal typically cemented by either a dowry or bride price, depending on local custom. Men of means were free to seek romance outside the home with professional courtesans or bring choice into the home through concubinage. Women enjoyed no such second shots at happiness.

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, progressive and revolutionary thinkers advocated for an end to arranged marriages. The end of dynastic rule and the birth of a modern republic in 1911 created the opportunity for change, with rising educational rates for girls, industrialisation, the entry of more women into the work force, and exposure to Western ideas and culture all playing a role. The wild popularity of a sentimental literary genre known as “Butterfly and Mandarin Duck” fiction over much of the first half of the twentieth century reflected widespread yearning for relationships based on romantic love.

When it came into being in 1949, the People’s Republic of China abolished arranged marriages and other “feudal” customs such as bride prices. Yet its new, purposeful culture subordinated romantic love to revolution and comradeship. By 1966, when Mao launched the decade-long, ultra-left Cultural Revolution, the only sanctioned passion was for revolution itself. With the arrival of the Reform Era in 1978, love quickly divorced revolution to flirt with freedom and eventually marry the market.

Fast-forward to the 2010s, the decade when China’s economy roared past Japan’s to become the world’s second largest. Sun, who provides a brief overview of the history, picks up the story here. If revolutionary China had never been quite as egalitarian as it claimed to be, by the mid 2010s, she notes, it was “one of the most unequal countries in the world.” The new urban middle classes — including, with some caveats, those in the LGBTQI community — enjoyed relative freedom in their romantic and sex lives. Those with more precarious social status and economic stability, such as the migrant workers who are the focus of Sun’s study, faced a very different situation.

The legacy of the decades-long one-child policy, particularly in rural areas has been an outsized gender imbalance. Which is why so many of China’s internal migrants who travel from the countryside to the cities to seek work — its “migrant workers” — are male.

Unlike in nations where people are free to settle where they find work, the People’s Republic has a strictly managed system of urban residence permits called hukou. These permits define who may reside legally and permanently in a city and enjoy its hospitals, schools and other social services. The hardworking villagers who build China’s fast trains and gleaming office blocks, keep its assembly lines humming, deliver its meals and packages, and cook, clean and otherwise serve the middle classes and their businesses don’t for the most part have the right to settle in the city or send their children to schools near where they work.

They’re not an insignificant portion of the population. Before pandemic lockdowns returned most of them to their hometowns for a spell, they numbered 286 million. That’s about a fifth of China’s population. This makes Sun’s close look at how social and economic inequality affects their lives — and at the interdependent structures of capitalism, patriarchy and state socialism that reinforce these inequalities — essential reading for anyone interested in a deeper understanding of China today.

By the mid 2010s, when Sun began her field research, many of the migrants she met belonged to a second generation, born in the 1990s. The first, born in the eighties or earlier, typically retained stronger ties to their home villages, to which they planned to retire. Many were already married when they set out for the cities. The second generation, which includes children of the first, enjoy a less certain identity, caught between home villages to which they lack strong emotional connection and the cities whose urban and consumerist dreams they have absorbed while lacking the means to realise them.

They are thus more or less permanently migratory, mobile mainly in a lateral, geographic sense. With hard work — and most of their work is punishingly hard — they can improve their situation. Buying a flat in a township close to their village, where they can live with their children (typically farmed out to grandparents in the meantime) is a common aspiration. But the difficulty of obtaining an urban hukou means they have only limited hopes of joining the urban middle classes.

Those middle classes, in turn, regard them with a mix of conditional appreciation, distaste and fear. Sun notes that the Communist Party itself, for all its trumpeted and historical proletarian affinities, shares the middle-class unease at the “perceived threat” this majority-male cohort poses “to public health, moral order and social stability.” A key source of anxiety centres on the sexual desires of a floating single-male population, and the ancillary underground prostitution industry, involving migrant women, that has sprung up to service them. Many of the migrant workers (including sex workers) with whom Sun has spoken appear to have internalised this shame, knowing that they may be (however unfairly) perceived as living on the moral as well as economic margins.

I recall when migrant workers first began appearing in the cities in significant numbers in the 1990s. Friends in Beijing and Shanghai expressed what seemed to be outsized fears of these mostly male workers, whom they believed capable of the most heinous crimes. It was reminiscent of the eighteenth-century “soulstealers” panic, when mass hysteria grew around the idea that sorcerers disguised as itinerants were clipping the ends of men’s queues for dark rites that allowed them to steal the men’s souls. As Philip A. Kuhn wrote in Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768, such apprehensions reveal much about a society’s structure and internal tensions.

Researching Love Troubles, Sun cultivated relationships with workers at the Foxconn plant in Shenzhen, speaking to them at length and over the years to be able to present nuanced portraits of their lives. There’s PC, for example, witty, vivacious and talkative, whose two children live with different sets of grandparents back home. She is constantly arguing with her husband about his gambling habit — not an uncommon vice among migrant workers. He infuriated her by secretly giving away half a year’s wages to his nephew, another gambler, while she was slaving on the assembly line to buy a three-bedroom apartment in a township near their hometown. She became a campaigner against domestic violence and a labour activist with links to a local NGO involved in workers’ rights. As her NGO-backed struggles with Foxconn’s management accelerated, her husband’s support for her activism helped them reconcile.

PC’s story is just one of many personal accounts threaded through this book, deftly contextualised and considered through the lens of ethnographic and other theories. The examples illuminate not just the variety of migrant experience but also issues including “male grievance” among the involuntarily single (and often celibate) members of the migrant labour force; the cohort’s higher-than-normal divorce rates; the “dark intimacy” of prostitution, exploitation and abuse; and how women especially typically face “compromises” rather than “choices” in their intimate lives.

Among the many intriguing subjects tackled in Love Troubles is the politics of romantic imagery. Sun begins the book with a description of her first meeting with some of the workers who would become her long-term informants. She thought to break the ice by asking about their favourite love stories. Some of the men openly scoffed at the idea, saying there was no such thing as true love. Then one of them began talking about the film Titanic. This drew the group into passionate discussion.

What most resonated with them was the fantasy of a poor working-class boy being loved by a rich girl — and how it was doomed to a tragic end, as they felt it certainly would be in China. One young woman, meanwhile, was most struck by the fact that following the death of her true love the heroine was nonetheless free to find happiness with another man, whereas traditional Chinese mores would have condemned her for not remaining chaste and “virtuously” true to his memory.

Other types of romantic imagery discussed by Sun include migrant workers’ self-portraiture in photography and literature, the culture of wedding photography (including a controversial artistic intervention in which an urban photographer posed migrant couples dressed in wedding clothes inside the factories where they worked), and documentaries produced by state media that portray workers’ relationships as unfolding within a broader China Dream narrative of hard work towards a brighter future.

The workers’ responses to such imagery often contrast with the reactions of the wider community. For example, a migrant worker published a suite of photographs of his peers titled “Rural Migrants’ Love in Dongguan.” It included candid shots of lovers, sometimes still in their factory clothes, snatching a cuddle on a park bench or sharing other intimate moments. (Two of these photos appear in the book; one wishes for more.) Widely viewed online, the series incited a range of comments from the patronising and sentimental (“how sweet”) to the moralising and condemnatory (“they’re not interested in learning, they have no souls”).

As Sun writes, the migrant workers’ “right to intimacy” is inescapably “contingent, conditional and vulnerable to violation and exploitation.” In their search for happiness in their personal lives they must balance their employers’ demands on their energy and time, frequently measured in twelve-hour shifts, with family pressures (including around the resurgent custom of bride prices) and their own desires for, and definitions of happiness. As Sun amply demonstrates, neither the men nor the women of this precariat are free from the “triple oppression” of “global capitalism, state socialism, and familial patriarchy.” Love can try bloody hard, and it does, but it can’t always conquer all. •

Love Troubles: Inequality in China and Its Intimate Consequences
By Wanning Sun | Bloomsbury Academic | $153 | 216 pages

The post Stolen moments appeared first on Inside Story.

In recent months, China’s exports, along with its currency, its consumer confidence and the price of pork, have begun to tumble. The real estate sector, broadly responsible for 30 per cent of the country’s GDP, is looking more and more like an empty tower block teetering on a foundation of debt. Banks have shaved another 2 per cent off an already modest economic growth forecast in 2023 of 5 per cent. One economic indicator that is rising is youth unemployment, though after it surpassed 21 per cent last month the government stopped publishing statistics.

Until recently, the Communist Party under Xi Jinping has been able to muddle through crises, including those of its own making. Yet fears are mounting that the People’s Republic could be entering the kind of deflationary spiral that took a rising Japan back to ground in the 1990s.

While trying to stamp out spot fires, the Communist Party has predictably grabbed the oldest fire extinguisher in its cupboard, labelled Blame the West. It has sprayed abuse at outside observers who have been so rude as to raise the alarm. “At the end of the day, they are fated to be slapped by reality,” asserted a foreign ministry spokesperson in August, doing his best to block the view of the front door burning.

What props up that door is the subject of economist Keyu Jin’s new book, The New China Playbook: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism. It lands in bookshops just as it has become urgently necessary to understand how China’s economy really functions, and the less obvious ways it fits into global economic and financial systems.

Beijing-born and Harvard-educated, Jin splits her time between Beijing and London, where she teaches at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is well connected in Beijing — her father, Jin Liqun, is a former vice-minister of finance and current president of the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank. Her intimate understanding of the system, ability to explicate complicated economic issues in plain English, and emotional investment in a thriving China all inform this most timely book.

China’s economic success, she writes, has defied all the usual assumptions about the necessary ingredients for long-term growth: a strong rule of law, for example, along with robust corporate governance and solid intellectual property protection. What’s more, neither its consumers, nor its entrepreneurs, nor the state itself have behaved like “conventional economic agents.” Rather, she contends, their actions are shaped by culture and history as well as ideology. These particular conditions cast doubt on whether China’s growth model could be replicated elsewhere in the developing world. But if it’s unique, she argues, it’s far from a “miracle,” as some have called it: China has simply caught up to its own potential.

How it has done this is the interesting part. The old playbook, Jin writes, referring to the first decades of reform, was all about “short and fast” development, a “febrile rush to boost GDP.” She chronicles how Deng Xiaoping and his successors progressively introduced market mechanisms into what had been a central planned economy, putting it on the road to becoming the manufacturing powerhouse and global economic power it is today.

One of the central and widely misunderstood aspects of the “new China playbook,” which she says aims for “a slower but saner pursuit of growth,” is how closely interconnected are the country’s state and private economies. There are numerous partnerships between state-owned enterprises and private businesses. These partnerships, in turn, are typically situated in what is nicknamed the “mayor economy”: a synergy between local government, state enterprise and private business. Other central aspects of the new playbook include the country’s idiosyncratic stock markets and the widespread “shadow banking” practices that introduce both risks and benefits into China’s finance sector.

Jin counters some common misapprehensions. In her chapter on China’s role in global trade, she shows that burgeoning US–China trade and investment did not in fact cause a net loss of American jobs. Less-skilled workers certainly suffered badly from trade-related job losses. Yet, she notes, that’s partly because the American economy privileges employers over employees: the impact of trade on workers was less in the European Union because of the strength of unions there and its fairer labour practices and laws more generally.

As for innovation, it’s often said that industry in China is better at copying than creating. But she points out that economists distinguish between “from zero to one” innovation — the production of a first-of-its-kind device, method or process — and “from one to N” innovation, which seeks to improve on existing technologies. She describes “from one to N” as China’s innovation “sweet spot.”

In March this year, incidentally, an Australian Strategic Policy Institute report concluded that China already leads the United States in thirty-seven out of forty-four critical technologies, including drone technology and critical minerals processing.

In discussing the agility of Chinese companies, Jin relates how the ridesharing company Didi has used its flexibility in adapting to local conditions to make inroads into places where Uber has failed to establish a presence. In Brazil, for example, where many drivers live hand-to-mouth, Didi pays them on a daily basis, and for those without a bank account, it helps them apply for one through its app.

Jin’s accomplishment is to illuminate the workings of this ever-evolving system, using a mix of statistics, narrative and anecdotes. Less impressive are some of her breezy references to Chinese culture and history, those “underlying fundamentals” (as only an economist could call them). She makes numerous minor mistakes. For instance, she places the invention of paper, the compass and printing in the Song dynasty (960–1269) when they arrived more than seven centuries earlier, in the Han.

Her insistence that China has had meritocratic government since the third century BCE stretches the definition of meritocratic: it wasn’t until the late seventh century that Empress Wu Zetian, incidentally the only woman to rule in her own name in all Chinese history, reformed the procedures for entry into the civil service so that exams would be held on a regular schedule and be open to men of humble background for the first time. (Women, no matter how meritorious, were never eligible). There would still be debates, which heated up in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, about whether the exams produced an actual “meritocracy” or simply elevated to power men who were able to memorise and regurgitate classical texts.

Jin similarly credits Confucius with providing the Chinese with an ingrained work ethic married to respect for authority, nodding to the popular view that Confucianism has been a foundation for economic success not just in China but in South Korea, Japan and other societies influenced by Confucian thought. She speaks of “996” (Chinese slang for working 9am to 9pm six days a week) as a “work ethic,” when in most Chinese discourse it’s more of a complaint. If it is a work ethic, it’s one many young people have rejected, choosing instead to “lie flat,” to engage in extremely non-Confucian “quiet quitting” or even actual quitting. It’s also a reason that the public service, with its regular hours and less hectic demands, has re-emerged as a desirable employer for many of China’s youth.

Simplistic and uninflected views of history chime with contemporary Communist Party narratives aimed at promoting cultural pride, but they can’t carry the full freight assigned to them here of providing a meaningful explanation of Chinese economic and other behaviours.

Jin confronts problems such as ballooning debt and an ageing population head-on. Yet she doesn’t adequately address the underlying ideological and political issues that have in many cases an outsize impact on China’s economic policies, performance and behaviour. The party, by its own proclamation, wants to control everything; there is no sphere of life exempt from political “leadership.” The recent draft patriotic education law made that clear by mandating that its demands extend to how parents speak to their children.

If the party controls everything, Xi Jinping controls the party. It seems odd for an economist not to question whether this will lead to better or worse economic decision-making. Jin notes that Xi Jinping has “himself taken over the job of overseeing China’s technology advancement, previously under the supervision of a government minister.” She likens this to wartime mobilisation, explaining that “China sees being at the forefront of developing key technologies as a matter of survival.”

But she doesn’t ask whether having Xi — a non-technologist — in charge is the best bet for guaranteeing that survival. After all, Xi, dubbed by Geremie Barmé the “chairman of everything,” is not just leader of party and state but chair of the Central Military Commission and numerous other central bodies, including those with responsibilities for Taiwan affairs, Hong Kong and Macau affairs, foreign affairs, national security, financial and economic affairs, defence and military reform, and cyberspace. What’s wrong with having a dedicated minister in charge of each of these important portfolios? Xi’s assumption of leadership in the technological sphere hardly seems the acme of rational decision-making, economic or otherwise.

It would certainly not be comfortable for someone who lives part of the time in China and has family there to focus on such things, but the avoidance of politically sensitive topics and analysis compromises the value of The New China Playbook. It also draws attention to the odd narrative lacunae.

For example, Jin speaks in positive terms of the rising demands of the people for civil society, and backs this up with statistical evidence. The problem is that the data refer to the period right before Xi took power in 2012–13. She doesn’t add that, almost from that moment, Xi has ruthlessly set about crushing that civil society, silencing legal academics, detaining feminists planning to protest sexual harassment on public transport, clamping down on LGBTQI activism, and imprisoning lawyers who argue for rights given to the Chinese people by the Chinese constitution itself.

She also writes admiringly of China’s data protection laws — and yet doesn’t tackle the problem of the clauses regarding “national security” (which is defined very loosely in China) that allow the state itself to access pretty much whatever data it wants. Her claim that Chinese people “feel very differently” from those in the West about issues like privacy and surveillance, thanks to a cultural preference for stability and safety, might be broadly true. There are plenty of people, including in Xinjiang, on the other hand, who feel rather similarly to people in the rest of the world.

On the subject of Xinjiang, the vulnerability of the Chinese economy to political boycotts of its products would seem a useful subject for examination in a book like this, but no.

The problem is that China’s political and economic goals are frequently in conflict: the need for foreign investment, for example, is frustrated by increasingly strident anti-foreign rhetoric and rising party interference in the business sector that make China a more difficult, or at least less enjoyable, place for non-Chinese to do business in. She does acknowledge that China’s relative lack of soft power acts as a barrier to global economic leadership (including greater use of its currency in international trade). She also observes the paradox that the pursuit of economic stability through control can actually trigger instability.

We’re seeing plenty of evidence of that now, and it’s unclear whether Xi Jinping and the party he leads can control their way out of the mess. There’s no pleasure in contemplating the possibility that Xi might steer the Chinese economy off a cliff and drag the rest of the world down with it. Jin professes to feeling optimistic “that pragmatism and rationality will eventually prevail.” I’m not persuaded. But I hope she’s right. •

The New China Playbook: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism
By Keyu Jin | Swift Press | $36.99 | 368 pages

The post Slapped by reality appeared first on Inside Story.

Postwar Germany dealt openly, painfully and at length with the history of the Nazi era. After apartheid, South Africa established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission aimed at restorative justice, another harrowing but necessary process. Argentina and Chile have undergone similar processes, and so too have other countries, some with more success than others.

For the Communist Party of China, though, the most relevant, instructive — and alarming — precedent for dealing with past injustice comes from the Gorbachev years, when the Soviet leadership allowed access to historical records, including those of the Stalinist era, with its purges, labour camps, man-made famines and killings. As the Chinese communists witnessed with alarm, it was not long after glasnost and its accompanying program of political reform, perestroika, that the Eastern bloc disintegrated and the Soviet Union collapsed.

None of China’s post-Mao leaders have permitted a full and honest reckoning with the Cultural Revolution (or other inglorious episodes in the party’s past for that matter). But Xi Jinping has made it a personal mission to eliminate what he calls “historical nihilism,” which is essentially any version of history that contradicts the highly sanitised party-approved version: something something misapprehension something something counter-revolution.

This historical obfuscation has been so effective that I was once asked by a young person in Beijing whether the Cultural Revolution took place “before or after Liberation [in 1949].” Yet, as Tania Branigan puts it in Red Memory, understanding what happened in the Cultural Revolution is vital to understanding China today. It is nothing less than “a silence, a space, that [makes] sense of everything existing above or around it.”

Red Memory is one of two important new books that offer English-language readers a look at the history of that period and how it continues to affect society and politics in China today. Both Red Memory and Wang Youqin’s monumental Victims of the Cultural Revolution shift the usual focus from the pronouncements and machinations of the top leadership to the experiences of the people, inside and out the party, who were directly affected by them.

Branigan, who reported from China for the Guardian for seven years beginning in 2008, interviews survivors, victims and perpetrators, and their children, an artist who paints them and psychoanalysts who treat them. She meets people whose actions — or failures to act — led to the torment, torture and even murder of friends and family, and who must cope with that hard truth every day, and others whose lives and families were destroyed by the violence. She shows how the trauma inflicted by the Cultural Revolution was not just national and individual but intergenerational as well.

Given that it was “an age of betrayal, of political choices fuelled by fear, idolatry, adolescent rage, marital bitterness and self-preservation,” Branigan is impressed by how many “stood firm” and refused to bend under pressure. She is taken aback by those who cling to the ideas and ideals of the period, whose phones ring to the tune of the “Internationale” and who organise trips to North Korea “to admire society as it should be.”

Among Branigan’s interviewees is the author of Victims of the Cultural Revolution. Wang Youqin was fourteen when her Red Guard classmates battered their teacher to death in what would later be seen as a pivotal moment in the movement’s violent turn. She reflected in a secret diary at the time that she was powerless to change the “bad things” that were happening all around her, but she could at least record them. Wang, who counts Anne Frank and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn among her inspirations, has since moved to the United States, where she teaches university-level Chinese while continuing the documentation that has become her life’s work.

Conservative estimates place the number of unnatural deaths associated with the Cultural Revolution’s violence, including murders and suicides, at nearly two million. Most victims have never had their stories told or their sacrifices honoured. To date, Wang has interviewed more than a thousand survivors and witnesses, meticulously checking archives and other sources to corroborate their testimonies and fill in, or correct, details. Since 2000, she has been publishing the results on her Chinese-language website Chinese Cultural Revolution Holocaust Memorial. Unsurprisingly, the website is blocked on the mainland.

She has now produced from these materials the prodigious Victims of the Cultural Revolution. Superbly translated, annotated, edited and abridged by Stacey Mosher, it tells the stories of 659 people. They include famous writers and political figures as well as cooks, police, factory workers, farmers and sports coaches, among many others. But the majority are educators, from primary school teachers up through professors and university presidents. Educators were archetypal targets of the violence and students among the worst perpetrators.

The Chinese original was ordered alphabetically by name (according to Pinyin romanisation), which would have condemned the book to obscurity in English, a resource for specialists only. By working closely with Wang to reorganise the text with attention to chronology, theme and place, Mosher has helped craft a compelling and contextualised narrative that is essential reading for anyone with an interest in modern Chinese history.

One breakout from the text is a table that lists sixty-three victims from Peking University alone. The table has columns for names, gender, ages (ranging from twenty to seventy-seven), status (typist, professor, worker, librarian, canteen cashier, student, “father of legal department administrator,” equipment room manager), department (name it), Communist Party or Communist Youth League membership (which twenty had) and cause of death (beatings, leaping from heights, poison and vein cutting, shot in crossfire, hanging, lying on railway line and so on).

Wang doesn’t spare the reader the details of the physical and psychological savagery experienced by the victims. The images of the Cultural Revolution encountered by most Western readers probably include pictures of Tiananmen Square crowded with Red Guards ecstatically waving Mao’s Little Red Book, and kitschy stills from Red Detachment of Women, as well as the odd photo of a struggle session with victims kneeling on a stage wearing giant dunce caps and placards around their necks, perhaps with a Red Guard gesturing above them, belt in hand. Wang tells us how heavy those caps were, and how some people were whipped so fiercely with the belts that their shredded clothing was embedded in their broken flesh.

Woven throughout these stories of terror, moral plight and violence are Wang’s astute observations and analyses, personal stories from her meetings with witnesses and survivors, and comparisons both with other repressive historical eras in Chinese history and with the Stalinist purges and the Khmer Rouge’s killing fields.

She shows that both Mao and premier Zhou Enlai (generally seen as a mitigator of the movement’s worst excesses) knew, often in significant detail, about specific acts of violence. Their enthusiastic support for the Red Guards meant that the murders, especially on campuses, “were carried out with great fanfare and were considered meritorious and honourable.” They received appeals from some victims, and occasionally intervened on their behalf; but Mao ignored a personal appeal from Li Da, the president of Wuhan University who, along with Mao, was one of the dozen or so founding members of the Communist Party. The seventy-six-year-old was “struggled” outdoors multiple times in the furnace heat of Wuhan’s summer, soon after which he collapsed and died.

Wang writes of how her immersion in these tragic stories has affected her. She admits that friends supportive of her work worry about her mental health. Yet “now that I’ve started,” she writes, “I have to continue, even if it tears at my soul like a wire brush.”

Strikingly, the longer biographies in Victims often include the victim’s role in the many political campaigns from the early 1950s onwards: some were victimised again and again. Others were former models of official thought reform, and even participated in the persecution of “class enemies” or “counter-revolutionaries,” never dreaming that they would one day find themselves so accused. “People who helped build the machinery of persecution,” Wang observes, “risked being crushed alive by that very machine.”

As for those who, under torture or threat, made false confessions or incriminated others, she comments: “It is futile to hope for people to be impervious to gun and knife; the best we can do is glean some kind of truth from history and use it to establish a system under which human flesh is no longer obliged to withstand the cold, hard steel of autocracy.” •

Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution
By Tania Branigan | Faber | $32.99 | 304 pages

Victims of the Cultural Revolution: Testimonies of China’s Tragedy
By Youqin Wang | Oneworld Academic | £50 | 592 pages

The post The silence that makes sense of modern China appeared first on Inside Story.

Not long after the photo is taken, Clementis commits a grave ideological error. He is arrested as a traitor and hanged. Party hacks meticulously erase every mention of him from the historical record and airbrush him from every photo. And yet his hat, now part of the party leader’s image, remains in that famous photo. Like the sight of the bare wall where Clementis once stood, the hat is an obscure but indelible reminder of the person who has been struck out.

Historian Julian Gewirtz examines another blank space in his new book, Never Turn Back: China and the Forbidden History of the 1980s. This is the stretch of wall where former premier and party general secretary Zhao Ziyang once stood. Gewirtz restores to Zhao’s head the hat of the “architect of reform and openness” that has sat on Deng Xiaoping’s head in the decades since. The result is a landmark work of historical scholarship with profound significance for understanding China today.

When Mao Zedong died in 1976, the Chinese economy was in tatters. Mao’s “continuous revolution” and factional infighting had broken China’s politics, and more than two decades of violently waged ideological campaigns — which had culminated in the 1966–76 Cultural Revolution — had left society scarred, cultural heritage decimated, and educational institutions and intellectual life eviscerated.

The new leadership that coalesced under Deng Xiaoping in 1978 needed to tackle political, economic and social dysfunction. The key, they agreed, lay in modernising agriculture, industry, defence, and science and technology: the “four modernisations.” The central, burning question of the decade was how exactly China would achieve those modernisations.

Deng was prepared to tolerate a certain amount of systemic change to make government more efficient and less top-heavy, to encourage local initiative, to promote professionalism, and to create the legal and other structures under which the economy could grow. He also recognised the need to prevent the emergence of another leader like Mao who would concentrate power in his own hands and rule for life.

He left the details to others. Those others included Hu Yaobang, who helmed the party from 1981 to 1987, and Zhao Ziyang, who was premier from 1980 to 1987 and then, following Hu’s purge from the leadership, party general secretary from 1987 to 1989, when he himself was purged.

In Never Turn Back, Gewirtz focuses on the contribution of Zhao and the advisers he gathered around him. He notes that the assiduity with which the party has sought to erase Zhao from the record only underlines his importance. (Hu Yaobang leaves a similar patch of blank wall, but it’ll require another book to fully restore him to view.)

Fixing the economy was among the party’s most urgent priorities. Extreme poverty was widespread, especially in the countryside, and industry was almost uniformly heavy, with consumer goods from clothing to radios in scandalously short supply. Zhao was a chief proponent of the “coastal development theory,” which promoted light industry in coastal regions, close to ports, with access to cheap labour. The last would be of advantage in encouraging foreign investment, with an emphasis on investment involving technology transfer.

The United States was among the many advanced countries eager to exploit the economic opportunities that came with China’s economic reform and opening up. Export-oriented coastal development helped not only to build China’s foreign reserves but also to drive the country’s transformative economic growth during the 1980s and beyond.

Another driver was the decision to invest heavily in science and technology, in particular information technology and biotech: a plan inspired by Zhao’s reading of Alvin Toffler’s Third Wave that chimed with Deng’s interest in modernisation.

But Zhao and his circle were also interested in systemic change. They saw political and economic reform as two sides of the same coin. Among the ideas they discussed, Gewirtz writes, were methods for “separating the party and the government, building up more independent institutions of the media, the judiciary, and the legislature, and increasing transparency, accountability, and even freedom of speech and debate.”

They even discussed how to adapt the notion of checks and balances to Communist Party rule. Thinkers in Zhao’s circle, including Bao Tong, who described democracy as “a kind of mechanism that can correct its own mistakes,” sought a balance between democracy and the “dictatorship” baked into the definition of governance in the People’s Republic.

Gewirtz cautions against concluding that Zhao or Hu were “inborn liberal democrats.” He stresses that Zhao explicitly and frequently endorsed “methods of dictatorship” and in no way advocated for a democratic free-for-all or an end to party rule. There were obvious tensions and contradictions in the two men’s thinking, and it also brought them into conflict with others in the party.

The 1980s were marked by incredibly vibrant cultural ferment, and ideological and intellectual contestation extending far beyond the relatively closed circles of the policymakers. From artists and poets asserting their right to creative expression to students inhaling Sartre, Nietzsche and rock’n’roll, there was a sense of infinite possibility.

That didn’t mean that anything was possible: when a young electrician called Wei Jingsheng had the temerity to suggest in 1979 that without the “fifth modernisation” of democracy there was no guarantee that Deng himself wouldn’t become a tyrant like Mao, he was slapped in prison with a fifteen-year sentence.

The danger for Zhao and those around him was that conservatives, already hyperventilating over “the sight of people drinking Coca-Cola in the streets of Shanghai,” would associate the reformists with genuine radicals like Wei Jingsheng.

When Wang Ruoshui, deputy editor-in-chief of the party mouthpiece People’s Daily, asked why such tragedies as the Cultural Revolution “happen repeatedly in socialist societies” and suggested that the Communist Party embrace the previously taboo notion of “Marxist humanism,” the hardcore ideologues lost their minds.

The subsequent 1983 campaign against “spiritual pollution,” initially endorsed by Deng, gave expression to the conservatives’ fears that the changes set in train by modernisation and economic reform could bring down the party itself. Like “bourgeois liberalisation,” “spiritual pollution” was a catch-all term that could signify anything from street crime to obscurest poetry, high-heeled shoes, “erroneous trends of thought” and the generally “foul smell” of new ideas from the West.

Deng put the brakes on the campaign when it appeared to threaten modernisation itself. The 1980s were riven by many such ideological tugs-of-war, and Gewirtz argues that they should be taken seriously.

Today, the Communist Party promotes the line that economic development thrives best under authoritarianism. It touts the “China model” of autocratic rule, social stability and economic growth as a logical and historical inevitability. Any other choice by the post-Mao leadership, the line goes, would have led to collapse and chaos — the crumbling of the European socialist bloc and Soviet Union from 1989 being instructive and, for party leaders, frightening examples. To think otherwise is to be guilty of “bourgeois liberalism” or labelled an agent of global capitalism’s “peaceful evolution” plot to dupe the Chinese people into spurning communism.

Yet Gewirtz’s “forbidden history” shows that the party leadership once seriously contemplated comprehensive structural, political reform. He contends that many of the persistent contradictions within and obstacles to China’s economic development in the decades since — including the persistence of corruption — are directly linked to a refusal to contemplate more systemic reforms. The 1980s was a genuine sliding-doors moment; there were other conceivable futures, albeit still under party rule.

Zhao was purged from the leadership in 1989 and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. The immediate trigger for his downfall was his visit to protesters in Tiananmen Square, where he spoke sympathetically and emotionally to hunger strikers. But this was just the final straw as far as his enemies within the party were concerned.

After crushing the student-led movement on 3–4 June that year, the party decoupled economic reform from political reform. Zhao disappeared from the record and Deng got to wear the former general secretary’s hat as the “architect of the reforms and openness.”

There is much rich detail in Never Turn Back, for which Gewirtz delved deep into archives, papers, official accounts, diaries and memoirs, some of which have only recently become available. The result is a provocative counter-narrative to the Communist Party’s account of that era and the reforms that turned China into the economic great power it is today.

“What would happen,” Gewirtz asks, “if the Chinese people were allowed to know this history? Would it produce the terrible chaos so feared by the Communist Party?” In his conclusion, he sounds a note of hope: “Just as greater openness can be found in China’s past, it might well be found again in China’s future.” •

Never Turn Back: China and the Forbidden History of the 1980s
By Julian Gewirtz | Harvard University Press | $55.95 | 432 pages

The post China’s forgotten reformer appeared first on Inside Story.

But if they are eager to defend the patriarchy, they are even more devoted to the Fatherland. They act as online vigilantes on the lookout for anyone — Chinese, foreign, or foreign Chinese — who has “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.”

The feelings of the Chinese people can be hurt in many ways, according to the most vocal and thin-skinned of their self-appointed representatives: call out human rights abuses in Xinjiang, support Hong Kong democrats or Taiwan autonomy, criticise Xi Jinping or ask #WhereIsPengShuai, to name some of the most obvious. Little Pinks keep a beady eye on artists and entertainers, trawling for current offences and past missteps, ready to foul the reputation and break the careers of any they’ve deemed to have crossed the Red line. Among those who have felt their wrath are Chloé Zhao, Oscar-winning director of Nomadland, for something she said (the mainland is a place of “lies”) and something she didn’t (“The US is now my country” — she actually said “not my country”). Another was a Chinese model living overseas who wished her followers “happy lunar new year” instead of “happy Chinese new year.”

The Little Pinks demand apologies, and frequently receive the most grovelling of ones, from those who want to keep working, or at least making money, in China. For one of the most bizarrely entertaining, see that of Fast and Furious star John Cena, apologising for calling Taiwan a country in mildly fluent if syntactically eccentric Mandarin, painfully wrestling each syllable to the floor as he professes his love for the Chinese people.

Little Pinks and apology videos were ripe for satire. The Malaysian-Chinese hip-hop artist and filmmaker Namewee and Kimberley Chen, an Australian singer living in Taiwan, have now delivered it in spades with their parodical music video “Fragile,” or “It Might Break Your Pinky Heart.” In the process they have, if not broken, at least cracked the internet.

The video begins with a tongue-in-cheek trigger warning for Little Pinks, opening in a Hobbiton-like rural idyl. A panda, dressed in pink camo overalls and matching military hat, wakes up and does his morning calisthenics while waving a banner that says NMSL (ni ma si le, “your mother’s dead,” one of the Little Pinks’ favourite terms of abuse). We see pinkish bales of cotton (symbolising Xinjiang) and garlic chives (internet slang for the cynical government and corporate view of people in China as a harvestable and replaceable resource: cut them down, and more grow back). As the duo sing lines such as “You never listen to what I have to say… you treat the world as your enemy… you say (I belong to you)… and want me to protect your fragile glass heart…” the panda frolics, plays wine glasses, breaks wine glasses, chops garlic chives and cooks up a pink bat stew. When the doe-eyed and hammily rueful Chen croons, “I’m so sorry” for hurting his feelings, she’s clearly anything but.

The song and video are a rich Where’s Wally of symbols, verbal puns, political barbs and piss-takes. Its frothy pink surface and sweet, energetic vocals are suffused with references to the forced closure of Hong Kong’s lively anti-Communist paper Apple Daily, re-education and forced labour in Xinjiang, the production of counterfeit goods, Covid-19’s origins, territorial claims in the South China Sea and Taiwanese autonomy. There’s even an allusion to Xi Jinping’s boast about humping one hundred kilos of wheat on a carrying pole for five kilometres during the Cultural Revolution without switching shoulders.

Namewee released the video on his YouTube channel on 15 October; by the end of November, it had more than thirty-four million views, hundreds of thousands of comments and almost one million “likes.”

“Fragile” has given a boost to what we might call “Pinkology,” with apologies to all the Redologists out there. Redology, hongxue, doesn’t refer to the study of communism or “Red China,” but is the field of academic study devoted to commentary and exegesis on the eighteenth-century novel Dream of the Red Chamber. But there is a link: like many other of China’s ancient literary classics, poems and songs, Dream is full of cryptic political and other references.

Chinese literary culture, with its accretion of thousands of years of references, intertextual quotations and riffs, has long provided satirists with what the scholar Geremie R. Barmé described to me as “a haystack of allusions in which to hide your needles.” Barmé and the linguist Stuart Jay Raj are among those who have contributed to Pinkology by decoding and contextualising the multilayered satire of “Pinky Heart” for an English-speaking audience.

Although Communists aren’t generally renowned for their sense of humour, Mao Zedong openly admired one of the greatest and most acerbic of modern China’s literary satirists, Lu Xun (1881–1936). Had Lu Xun, with his mordant wit and commitment to social justice, lived to see the founding of the People’s Republic, however, it’s not at all certain that he’d have survived communism itself. Despite official insistence that Lu Xun’s barbed criticisms of the Chinese character apply only to the “old society,” his work stubbornly continues to offer insights into today’s China. In fact, his most famous creation, the character Ah Q, thin-skinned, obsequious towards his superiors and a bully to those he considers his inferiors — a man who insists every slap in the face is a victory — might even be seen as the Great Ancestor of the Little Pinks.

Yu Liang, an influential journalist and academic at Shanghai’s Fudan University, has written a seminal work of Pinkology: “The Genealogy and Ecology of the Little Pinks, and the Future of Chinese Youth.” He traces their origins, and that of their style of action, to China’s overheated online fan club culture, in which fans typically mob-attack anyone criticising their beloved idol, band or team — in this case, Team China or Team CPC. Too young to know about the Cultural Revolution, or the early years of reform, never mind much of real life itself, Yu observes, “They were born on the Internet and will die on the Internet.” Yu, himself a proponent of China’s new nationalism, derides the Little Pinks’ ideology as “video-clip Marxism.” Their patriotism is entitled, middle-class and consumerist (their calls to action typically take the shape of consumer boycotts) and conforms, he notes, to a “welfare” rather than a “class” narrative.

Another person who has studied the Little Pinks is Fang Kecheng of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Despite their hardcore support for communism, he says, their biases mirror those of the Western alt-right: anti-feminist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, racist and ethnically (Han) chauvinistic. Some even voice support for far-right and neo-Nazi figures. They also share the right’s contempt for the liberal, progressive left: their favourite insult of baizuo translates perfectly as “libtard.” Yet their behaviour parallels the hyper-policing of identity politics and “cancel culture” of their left-wing peers in the West. Yu Liang wonders too “if Little Pinks share the fragile psyche of American youth.”

In response to “Fragile,” Chinese official media, on cue and without any sense of irony, have accused Namewee and Kimberley Chen of hurting the feelings of the Chinese people. The authorities have shut down the pair’s Weibo accounts and scrubbed their names and work from the Chinese internet. Namewee, implacable and seemingly delighted, told the BBC that the ban completed the artwork. As Chen sings in an ironic apology video, posted two days after the original went up:

Sorry to have hurt you. Weibo deleted me — whatever.
I can hear a sound — it’s hearts of glass shattering.
It’s okay, I still have IG and FB.
Maybe I shouldn’t be so direct, so super-direct.
I’m so sorry
YouTube trending at number 1. •

The post Little Pinks and their achy breaky hearts appeared first on Inside Story.

Five years on, it’s officially a problem. At a business dinner in July, a manager and client of the ecommerce giant Alibaba pushed a female employee to get drunk and then sexually harassed and raped her. The distressed young woman reported the incident to her superiors and Alibaba’s human resources division. When they took no action, she posted an eleven-page account on the company’s intranet.

Word got out and Chinese social media blew up. The hashtag “firmly refuse vile business drinking culture” attracted 220 million views and tens of thousands of comments. Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang went public to condemn the “ugly culture of forced drinking” and fired the alleged rapist. Two other managers who had failed to act on the woman’s complaint resigned. Even the Communist Party’s powerful anti-corruption body, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection weighed in, condemning the culture of compulsory drinking at business and other dinners as “odious.”

Out came other shocking stories of sexual assault and more. There was the boss who slapped a new employee for not returning a toast by a higher-up, and the professor who forced a postgrad student to drink so much he passed out — and then refused to teach him because he wasn’t a good enough drinker. Criticisms of the contemporary drinking culture — endless forced toasts, typically with strong spirits called baijiu, and a bullying power dynamic — had been growing for years. In 2021, they reached critical mass.

Some commentators have pushed back. Drinking, they claim, is part of traditional Chinese culture. The ancient Book of Odes, compiled almost three millennia ago, contains at least twenty references to alcohol. Wine played a role in formal rites and rituals. One of the most famous works of calligraphy, “Preface to the Orchid Pavilion Poems,” celebrates an afternoon playing a game involving drinking and poetry.

One of the pithiest and most-quoted tributes to drink came from the brush of Cao Cao (155–220), a military man and a poet. Part of a longer poem, it honours the semi-mythical inventor of fermented drink, Du Kang: “How to dispel one’s sorrows? Only Du Kang.”

Li Bai (701–762), considered one of China’s two greatest poets, was a renowned inebriate. Among his many tributes to the joys of intoxication, he penned the following lines, which may well resonate with the generation of young burnt-out workers who talk longingly of “lying flat” (dropping out and doing nothing), here translated by Amy Lowell and Florence Ayscough: “Why should one spend one’s life in toil?/Thinking this, I have been drunk all day./I fell down and lay prone by the pillars in front of the house.”

Yet the drinking culture of old was not quite what it seems. For one thing, when Li Bai, in another poem, hails “a cup, a cup, and yet another cup,” he is talking about a very small cup, filled with wine fermented from fruit such as grapes, or grains such as rice or sorghum, with an alcoholic content well under 20 per cent.

Distilled spirits, baijiu, only came to be produced in significant quantities sometime in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). Up to 70 per cent pure alcohol, baijiu was cheap and potent, predominantly a drink of the poor. It did not appear at the banquets of the rich or powerful, nor did it fill the poets’ tiny cups.

Everything changed in 1935, when an army marched with sore feet into a small village in southwestern Guizhou province. The Communists’ Red Army was in the middle of the legendary Long March, a tortuous, two-year, 9000-kilometre retreat, during which it fought off bandits, warlords and attacks by government troops while traversing some of China’s most rugged terrain, from malarial swamps to snowy mountains.

In the Guizhou town of Zunyi, the Communists made Mao Zedong their leader. In the village of Maotai, they made the fierce local baijiu their drink. It didn’t just numb pain and stave off cold. It could sterilise wounds as well, and, as Red Army generals discovered to their delight, it was perfect for soaking their blistered, aching feet.

After the Communists took power in 1949, the state nationalised and combined the handful of baijiu distilleries in Maotai, and named the product after the village (spelling it Moutai in English). In 1951, premier Zhou Enlai created a standard for state banquets. The food would be of the refined and not-too-spicy southeastern Huaiyang cuisine. The drink would be the fiery Moutai. The proletarian sauce that had played such a welcome role in one of the party’s foundational legends became the national drink of the People’s Republic of China.

Baijiu manufacture boomed. In 1949, China produced 108,000 tonnes of baijiu; by 1975, annual production had reached more than 1.7 million. The Soviet Union, where no deals were done without lashings of vodka, also contributed to the reshaping of China’s drinking culture, especially among officials. Online commentators looking for the source of China’s toxic drinking culture point the finger at one man in particular: Dmitry Ustinov, the Soviet central committee member responsible for the Soviet Union’s military-industrial complex from 1965 to 1976 and defence minister from 1976 to 1984.

Some of Ustinov’s Soviet colleagues claimed he put an end to messy drinking culture within the Soviet defence establishment. By contrast, Chinese accounts, which credit Ustinov with an almost inhuman ability to hold his liquor, relate how he notoriously insisted that negotiations, over arms deals for example, begin with marathon bouts of drinking. He would get his guests so thoroughly pixelated that they would sign off on deals they’d wholly regret in the morning. In one infamous example, when India was trying to talk down the price of Soviet arms, six Indian negotiators ended up in hospital with alcohol poisoning; the ones who remained upright blearily agreed to double the original price.

In the early 1990s, in a case of what you might call “reverse Ustinov,” the Chinese historian of Sino-Soviet relations and the cold war, Shen Zhihua, fed up with the obstructively slow pace of Russian archivists, plied them with baijiu. The files fell open.

It was in the 1990s that the Chinese Communist Party expanded its economic reforms and businesses boomed. Entrepreneurs readily adopted official, Sovietised banquet culture, with its baked-in hierarchies and negotiations over endless toasts of baijiu. To refuse a drink was to cause one’s superior or host to lose face, or so they said. And a sip wouldn’t do — the expression ganbei was a command to drain the glass in one go. A straight line led from here to the scandal at Alibaba.

Forcing people to drink as a sign of subservience was not unknown in ancient times. Cao Cao is said to have laid on a banquet for a general who surrendered to him at which he toasted each guest in turn, a strongman with an axe by his side. Refusal was not an option.

These days, China leads the world in total alcohol consumption. The legal drinking age is eighteen, although enforcement is, to say the least, patchy. But China’s younger generation, and especially those among its better-educated, well-travelled middle class, are increasingly rebelling against “bottoms up” culture. A recent survey revealed that people under forty tend to consider baijiu both bad-tasting and old-fashioned; many prefer beer and wine and even low-alcohol drinks, and bars over banquets.

In another online survey, 84 per cent of the almost 700,000 respondents expressed “extreme disgust and zero tolerance” for coercive drinking at business and other banquets. Baijiu production peaked in 2016 at 13.6 million tonnes; by 2020 it dropped to less than 7.5 million.

At one point in my misspent youth, as a young magazine reporter attending a banquet with officials from the All-China Journalists Association in Beijing, I acceded to a drinking contest. Twenty glasses of Moutai later, I declared victory. The following morning, I woke up with drums in my head, the imprint of a toilet seat on my cheek, and colour literally drained from my vision for several terrifying, sepia-tinted hours. An end to coercive and competitive drinking? I say cheers to that. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Last call for China’s drinking culture? appeared first on Inside Story.

Feng’s 600,000 followers gave the adorably weird video half a million likes within three days. Feng had already won fans and courted controversy by modelling, stunningly, the dress style known as qipao. But this time, he went one “peach peach” too far. Douyin banned him from the platform, officially for soliciting virtual gifts from minors but also, according to the Global Times, because “numerous netizens” complained that his videos lacked “masculinity.”

The Communist Party of China wants boys to harden up. It has gender-bending niangpao (“girlie guns”) like Feng in its sights, along with other offenders against cis-gendered heteronormativity such as K-pop-inspired “little fresh meat” boy bands and anyone whose initials even appear to include LGBTQI. “Girlie guns” don’t need to be as extreme as Feng Xiaoyi. They may simply be boys who like wearing nice clothes, enjoy shopping, or have close female friends, who are self-effacing, gentle and timid — all of which are deemed signs of excessive “feminisation.” The masculinity drive is part of its campaign against “unhealthy” social tendencies such as excessive online gaming, celebrity worship, and any expression of queer life in films and TV.

In June, the father of a seven-year-old boy became a hero to gender nonconformists after posting on Zhihu (a Quora-like website) about the day his son, who liked wearing skirts, wore one to school. The teacher harshly reprimanded him: “Boys should act like boys.” When female classmates leapt to his defence, saying boys should be “free” to wear dresses too, the teacher snapped that “freedom” was “an American thing.” The father decried the teacher’s intolerance. His post went viral, attracting tens of thousands of likes and mostly supportive comments.

Like their counterparts elsewhere, many mainland Chinese, especially younger ones, perceive rigid gender-based norms as oppressive. They are pushing back against the official promotion of “masculinity” across social media. Even some official media, including the Global Times, have published contrary views.

Yet party advisers, bloggers and others whose opinions dominate state media frame the problem of boys not “acting like boys” as nothing less than a threat to the survival of the nation. In a widely republished post, the ultra-leftist blogger Li Guangman wrote that “if we allow this generation of young people to lose their mettle and masculinity, then who needs an enemy — we will have brought destruction upon ourselves, much like the Soviet Union back in the day.” Vladimir Putin, alongside Jordan Peterson, is something of a pin-up for the boys-should-be-boys brigade.

Patriotism is embedded in native Chinese concepts of masculinity. A common phrase signifying a “manly” man, nanzi han, dates back about 2000 years, and originally described defenders of the Han dynasty against the Xiungnu, or Hun. As for the qualities that define masculinity, these are usually summed up as yanggang zhi qi — the qi, or vital essence, of yang (broadly: male, bright or positive energy) plus gang (morally upright). The phrase has etymological roots going back at least as far as the sixth century.

Yet it’s not strictly gender-specific, as acknowledged in the title of a recent education ministry document on the “problem” of “feminised” Chinese boys: “The Cultivation of yanggang zhi qi Doesn’t Distinguish between Male and Female.” The phrase denotes qualities of mind as expressed in speech and action. But officially sanctioned remedies for building up boys’ yanggang zhi qi focus on ramping up sports and physical education and recruiting more male teachers as role models, even those less qualified than their female counterparts.

The focus on physicality reflects a national anxiety that originated during the late Qing dynasty. Beginning in the 1840s, Western imperialist powers bullied and attacked the Qing for the right to push opium into China, establish semi-colonial enclaves in its ports and exploit the country’s resources. Reformist thinkers argued that in the “struggle for existence,” the “physical vigour” of the populace was as decisive as intelligence and moral rectitude. They promoted calisthenics and military drills. This push continued years after the republican revolution of 1911. In one of his first published essays, a young Mao Zedong wrote about the importance of exercise (for women too). Shortly after the revolution of 1949, the Communist Party introduced universal morning calisthenics, performed to radio broadcasts.

The party today speaks of the need to return to “revolutionary,” “socialist” and “traditional” masculinity. Yet both the revolution and the period of “socialist construction” that began in 1949 demanded physical strength and courage — yanggang zhi qi — from both men and women.

As for “traditional masculinity,” the classical ideal of manhood was an educated man who was upright, filial to his parents and ancestors, loyal to his ruler, and ideally a fine calligrapher and poet as well. The third-century warrior general Guan Yu, later immortalised as Guan Gong, the God of War, is typically portrayed with bright red skin, the result of his brimming yang energy — as “masculine” as it gets. Yet despite a lack of solid evidence that Guan Yu was literate, he is often represented holding a scroll as well as a weapon — further elevating his status in a society that esteemed men’s educational accomplishments over physical prowess.

Traditional culture offers many different types of male archetypes. As a number of recent commentators have wryly noted, Jia Baoyu, the female company–loving young male protagonist of the great eighteenth-century novel Story of the Stone, is an archetypal “girlie gun.” Just as the early twentieth-century male player of female roles, Mei Lanfang, created some of the most exquisite archetypes of femininity in the Peking Opera, so did a later female player of male roles, Pei Yanling, give opera fans some of the most indelible performances of heroic masculinity.

The odd thing about the current masculinity panic is that by any measure, China today is militarily and economically stronger than at any other time in the last 150 years. And for all the pretty boy actors and singers testing the party with their sculpted eyebrows and designer clothes, there are plenty of muscular, hard-bodied action stars like Wu Jing of the wildly popular Wolf Warrior films.

So what gives? Does the existence of more diverse forms of masculinity threaten the nation — or just the patriarchy? Lü Pin, founder of the banned media channel Feminist Voices, suggested the latter when she told America’s NBC News that “the concept of masculinity forces every man to be tough, which excludes and harms men with other types of characteristics. It also reinforces men’s hegemony, control and position over women.” The Global Times quoted a law professor who similarly argued that gender stereotypes victimise both men and women, trapping men in a “suffocating, outdated masculinity stereotype, which supposes being vulnerable means being emasculated” and excludes “fear, grief or tenderness.”

Promoting “masculinity,” in other words, could mean that men end up resembling a certain rugged-featured older bloke who posted one of a number of online “peach peach” parodies. His video simultaneously sends up Feng Xiaoyi and stereotyped notions of masculinity. In it, he bellows like a drill sergeant: “EAT PEACH PEACH!” Take that, men men! •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Shooting down the “girlie guns” appeared first on Inside Story.

By committing suicide in their shared office, Xi implicated Tang in her death: in the traditional moral code, suicide was the ultimate reproach, and the unsettled ghost of the dead was said to linger until justice was finally served. But Xi didn’t leave a note, or at least none was ever found. Did she kill herself because Tang had invested — and lost — a significant sum of her money on the stock market? Or because he had suggested she become his concubine, as her family later alleged? The tragedy and the surrounding intrigue, which touched on so many facets of China’s transition to modernity, captured the public imagination and inspired an outpouring of commentary. No fewer than three books about the incident were published within weeks.

Historian Bryna Goodman has delved deep into a story that has since lain forgotten among the greater dramas of the era. More than two thousand years of dynastic rule had ended only ten years earlier, with the republican revolution led by Sun Yat-sen. But the government had already split into warring factions, with further challenges to its authority from regional warlords, who carved off chunks of territory to rule themselves. The patriotic May Fourth movement of 1919 had galvanised students, workers and businesspeople alike to fight for national revival and cultural rejuvenation and helped to inspire the founding of the Communist Party of China in 1921. The semi-colonial exploitation of the country that had begun under the fallen Qing dynasty, meanwhile, continued into the modern era, with European powers and Japan controlling a number of key ports and resources.

Semi-colonial, transnational Shanghai was China’s most modern city, yet old ways and thinking maintained a stubborn hold. In The Suicide of Miss Xi, Goodman draws on a huge range of original sources, including court transcripts (Tang was subsequently convicted of financial fraud) and Xi’s own writings, to show how this incident illuminates the social, political and economic contradictions and tensions of its time.

Both male and female supporters of women’s rights had argued passionately for women’s participation in education, work and nation-building. Yet many also agonised about how women could preserve their “virtue” in male-dominated workplaces. After Xi’s death, even feminists spoke of her according to what Goodman describes as a “formulaic pattern of virtue”; she was, they said, “quiet, diligent and chaste.” That Tang might have proposed concubinage to her — as a way, perhaps, of helping her out of the financial hole he’d helped dig for her — struck them as particularly odious given that Xi had previously vowed that she would never marry.

Feminists of the time tended to view concubines as embarrassing, even morally tainted, leftovers from the old society. New marriage laws forbade a man taking more than one wife, and marriage was henceforth to be an arrangement freely chosen by both sides, in theory at least. Betraying their elite perspective, many feminists failed to consider that concubinage, which persisted as a practice, may have remained the only option for some less-privileged women.

Instead, they assumed that concubines, along with prostitutes, had made their choice out of avarice. Progressive women’s associations in Shanghai at the time of Xi’s suicide typically denied membership to concubines or even former concubines. To their minds, Tang’s alleged proposal was both outrageous coming from a man of supposedly progressive ideals and a profound insult to Xi’s character and identity as a modern woman.

Then there was the question of her shares. It was one thing for a woman to want to achieve economic self-sufficiency — to become, as Xi did, a provider for her family — but quite another to be greedy and profit-seeking. Many commentators, sympathetic and less sympathetic alike, noted that Xi was hardly alone in having risked money in this way. Pretty much everyone in Shanghai with money to spare was investing in the stock market — or rather, markets. By the end of 1921, more than 140 stock exchanges were operating, including some that traded in single commodities. Tang’s Journal of Commerce was one of many outlets founded on progressive ideals that promoted investment in stocks as a social and political good. Progressives had observed how stock markets in the United States, Japan and elsewhere contributed to the strength of these countries by raising capital for their industries as well as helping democratise wealth.

This is one of the details that has been largely lost in the telling of the story of modern China. As Goodman notes, “Historians have not generally placed economics, let alone stock exchanges, among the structuring ideas of the early Republic or as a constituent element of May Fourth ideas of science and democracy.” Her work here is a major contribution to modern historiography.

As Goodman shows, regulation was a lot scarcer than enthusiasm. The markets were rife with speculation, insider trading and other forms of manipulation. When the inevitable crash came, it took with it the precious savings of many, making Xi “a symbol of human vulnerability, an individual swept into the whirlpool of financial temptations, in a city of untrammelled greed.” Some of the fury that Tang copped in the aftermath of Xi’s suicide resulted from his paper’s previously enthusiastic endorsement of stock-buying combined with his own vested interests in the exchanges: he became, as Goodman observes, “a perfect target for public rumination over the immorality of the new order.”

That rumination had a platform in the vibrant and diverse local press that sprang up in the early republican era. In response to Xi’s suicide, the papers published a great stream of cartoons, commentary, reportage and even poetry written by readers; several even featured word-by-word transcripts of Tang’s trial. Women’s groups, chambers of commerce, and hometown or home-province associations — indeed, grassroots public organisations of all sorts — weighed into the controversy as well. With a dysfunctional polity, both public associations and the press stood in as arenas for public life, testing grounds for democracy, and arbiters of social justice.

The semi-colonial nature of Shanghai factors into this complex story as well. The Journal of Commerce had its offices in the city’s International Settlement, which had its own courts separate from China’s legal system. When Chinese judicial officials determined to put Tang on trial for financial fraud, they had to kidnap him in the foreign concession and take him across the street to Chinese sovereign territory. Yet because Xi had clearly killed herself and there was no evidence that Tang had committed any crime, and given that China was still years away from its first civil law, the fact that he was arraigned was a travesty of justice.

When Tang went to trial, the courtroom was packed with members of the public, journalists and even actors from a theatre troupe preparing to perform a play about Xi’s death. Despite the evidence for criminal prosecution being, as Goodman writes, “illogical, unsupported, and unwarranted,” the judge dismissed the brief prepared by Tang’s excellent legal team as “confusingly irrelevant.” Although the charges revolved around financial misdeeds, the judge was more interested in the accusation that Tang had pressured Xi to be his concubine. In the end, he sentenced him to three years’ imprisonment. Moral judgement, including the view that the stock markets were intrinsically malevolent and unethical, trumped the law.

Among those disturbed by the verdict was Sun Yat-sen himself, who asserted, “It is particularly inappropriate for a court of law to ignore the evidence in favour of the popular sentiment.” What’s more, a military man whom Tang had offended over other matters ensured that he served more than twice his sentence, and in a military prison.

The People’s Republic of China today continues to wrestle with many of the issues raised by Xi’s suicide. These include the relationship between private wealth accumulation and national flourishing, the nature of the judiciary and its relationship to the law, and the contradiction between the opportunities available to young women and societal expectations. Even concubines — now called “mistresses” — remain a hot topic that divides Chinese feminists. If, as ancient Chinese historians liked to say, history is a mirror, there are plenty of apposite reflections to be found in this one. •

The post Death in Shanghai appeared first on Inside Story.

These were the antithesis of the voices of official media — polished, political and performative, suffused with what the Communist Party calls “positive energy.” They sounded like my friends on the mainland, people I’d met, and people I wanted to know.

The voices I’ve heard since then on StoryFM — which now attracts about 700,000 listeners per episode — are those of “ordinary” people and they continue to speak about things that bring them joy, sadness, moral confusion, anger or even transcendence. One man described growing up on a small houseboat that ferried goods along the Yangtze. Another told of being gay, closeted and secretly in love with his straight best friend.

I’ve listened to people talk about surviving sexual abuse; dealing with relatives in prison or addicted to drugs; working as a zookeeper, telehealth doctor or nanny; having a mother who was a sex worker; losing a young wife to cancer; being “fat-shamed”; being kidnapped in Syria. They’ve spoken of first kisses and first jobs, of being a teenage mother, of surviving floods, and in one hilarious and surprising episode, of living in the United States, catching a thief and, feeling sorry for him, making him something to eat. Episode 541, which dropped not long after the fall of Kabul in August, featured a woman whose mountain-climber father had been murdered by the Taliban in Pakistan in 2012.

When StoryFM started, the Chinese podcasting scene was still small, DIY and relatively free of commercial pressures and official attention. Like elsewhere, podcasting grew off the back of blogging, beginning around 2004 but not taking off until much later. In the West, it was 2014’s phenomenally popular Serial, produced by This American Life (itself an inspiration for StoryFM), that really kicked things off. Yet, as one Chinese podcaster told the tech-media platform KrASIA, podcasting in mainland China still had the feel of “pirate radio” as recently as 2019.

These days, there are around 16,000 Chinese-language podcasts, reflecting the variety of contemporary Chinese life. Some are short-lived by accident or design; others, like StoryFM, are long-running. They focus on topics as broad as pop culture, entrepreneurship and technology, or as specific as app design, museums and the care of pets. Some are passion projects: Wang Yuezhou, the human resources manager at a Shanghai tech firm, collects the stories of places and people threatened by urban renewal for Urbanlog.

Many, like the popular The Unemployables, which covers freelance life, are wide-ranging “chatcasts.” Listening to the best of them feels like dropping in on a party full of fun and interesting people. I’ve heard men talk about why they love to knit, and young women reacting frankly (and none too positively) to the party leadership’s idea that they should consider having three children. On one recent episode of The Unemployables, an astronomer revealed how he found happiness by quitting academia, with all its internal politics and bullying of junior staff, to become a home renovator.

As Fang Kecheng, who researches digital media in China, recently told the Shanghai publication Sixth Tone, “When you’re tired of all the hate and irrationality circulating online and want to listen to light-hearted and civilised discussion, you tune in to a podcast.” (In this, China is not so different from the rest of the world.)

According to a 2020 survey by PodFest China, almost 90 per cent of the eighty-five million–plus subscribers to China’s podcasts are under thirty-five. They are typically single and live in first- and second-tier cities, and 86 per cent of them have university degrees (versus 20 per cent of the general population). When the host of The Unemployables opened the episode featuring the astronomer-turned-renovator by playing a snippet of Peter, Paul and Mary’s “If I Had a Hammer,” he could assume enough listeners would get the joke.

Financial sustainability, as in the West, can be tricky. Chinese podcasts may look to sponsorship, investment, subscriptions, built-in micropayments, virtual gifts from listeners or advertising to survive. The first podcasts used Apple as a platform, and some still do, though listeners may need a VPN to access them.

Ximalaya, the first China-based platform, which was launched in 2012, was a game changer. With 250 million monthly active users, today it is the local market leader; it looks after hosting, distribution and RSS feeds for podcasters, offers audiobooks, and has plans to become an “online audio ecosystem.” Other major mainland platforms include Xiaoyuzhou, which comes with inbuilt social media so listeners can follow one another, and Lingzhi.

Yet even as these local options have boosted the profile of podcasting, with popularity have come new pressures. Previously, so long as hosts didn’t draw undue attention from the authorities by touching on Xinjiang, Taiwan, Tibet or other hypersensitive subjects, they could speak relatively freely, including about LGBTQI life and other topics heavily censored in mainstream mainland media. But the space for free speech in the world of podcasting is shrinking, with commercialisation playing a part: advertisers and investors want more mass appeal and less political risk.

Chinese censorship is not just about policing from above, or clear red lines: across the media and cultural industries, creators and publishers must often guess where the lines are in the first place — and that promotes caution and self-censorship. It’s hard to say why, for example, some podcasts dedicated to LGBTQI topics stopped production earlier this year. Apple, meanwhile, has made some Chinese podcasts, including one that mentioned the events of 4 June 1989, either unavailable in the China region or difficult to discover.

Podcasters’ strategies for not attracting official attention include anodyne episode titles and descriptions. Then there’s cabianqiu, “the ball that scrapes the edge,” a term taken from table tennis to indicate a play that, daringly, is just within bounds.

In 2019, The Unemployables published an episode in which a mainlander in Hong Kong, having witnessed the protests there, confessed he found the mass solidarity in the face of political injustice inspiring. The episode is still accessible, but it’s now two and a half minutes shorter than it was. Another podcast, Surplus Value, hosted by three irrepressible young feminists, suddenly disappeared from Ximalaya after a guest criticised both hyper-nationalism and the government response to Covid-19.

The women of Surplus Value now host Stochastic Volatility, on Apple. In a recent episode the trio talked about seeing a male passenger upskirt a flight attendant on a plane. Whipping into action, they documented the man’s behaviour with their own phones while alerting the crew.

This segment segued into a lively, informed discussion of the sexualisation of flight attendants globally and a survey of their depiction in Chinese popular culture, a look at the sexist media commentary on female athletes’ bodies at the Tokyo Olympics, and a quick history of synchronised swimming, before circling back to where it began, with another true story about a man on a plane. And so, at least for now, Chinese podcasts are flying high. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post First kisses and invisible red lines appeared first on Inside Story.

Beyond the light shows, the awards ceremonies, the patriotic pop and rap songs and the grand spectacular at Beijing’s “Birdsnest” stadium, a ubiquitous media, cultural and educational campaign is unfolding, all of it designed to propagate the official version of party history.

The story of the date hints at the challenges of trying to reconstruct party history. So many official versions have circulated over time, and most of them — rather inconveniently — have been preserved. In the early 1960s, Vice-Premier Lu Dingyi, a long-term political commissar and party member since 1925, came up with one solution to the problem when he explicitly forbade the writing of any party history at all. This helps to explain why, if you compare different accounts of the meeting at which the Communist Party of China was born, you’ll discover no one can even say confidently whether twelve or thirteen delegates were in attendance.

Almost certainly, two advisers from the Kremlin’s Communist International, or Comintern, were present: the Dutch communist Henk Sneevliet, who went by the alias Maring, and Vladimir Abramovich Neiman Nikolsky. The fact that Nikolsky was killed in Stalin’s Great Purge in 1938 might explain why he sometimes drops out of the story. (Mao admired Stalin.) Because no original Chinese documents from the meeting survived, the official Chinese records are translations of Russian-language Comintern documents — and these, together with the memoir of Chen Gongbo, a founding member who left the party soon after, provide just about the only evidence as to what transpired at what was, after all, a secret meeting.

At the time of the meeting, China was in chaos. Ten years earlier, in 1911, a republican revolution had dethroned China’s last dynasty, the Manchu Qing, which had been in power since 1644. Military aggression, land grabs and unequal treaties imposed on China by imperialist powers including Great Britain, France, Japan and Czarist Russia had left China impoverished, humiliated and, as the saying went, “carved up like a melon.” The first president of the new republic, Yuan Shikai, sabotaged the attempt to establish a stable democratic government when he declared himself an emperor of the “China Empire” in 1915. From then on, warlords — military men with a territorial base and an army to defend it — fought each other and what remained of the central government.

A New Culture movement had arisen on the campuses of newly established Western-style universities, demanding cultural, social, intellectual and political change, including individual freedom and rights for women and workers. Among the movement’s figureheads was Chen Duxiu (1879–1942), editor of the hugely influential magazine New Youth. Chen would be elected, in absentia, the party’s first secretary-general.

A radical thinker, Chen had readily agreed when a critic accused him of setting out to “destroy Confucianism.” He’d be happy to see the destruction of China’s “national essence,” he wrote, if that’s what it took for the survival of the Chinese people themselves. Although he had previously embraced Enlightenment and Western democratic ideals, he was captivated by the Russian Revolution of 1917.^⁠ In 1919, after the Soviets relinquished^⁠ all former Russian imperialist claims on China, making the Soviet Union and Marxism even more attractive to thinkers like Chen, who began to establish proto-communist organisations such as Marxist study groups. The party that today has over ninety million members claimed not much more than fifty adherents in 1921.

Having been arrested in Beijing for publishing “inflammatory literature,” Chen moved to Shanghai’s French Concession. The fact that Chinese law didn’t apply in such semi-colonial holdings — an outrageous assault on Chinese sovereignty embodied in the treaties — made them a refuge for all kinds of outlaws, including political ones. Unable to attend the founding meeting, possibly because he was by then in trouble with the French authorities, Chen sent a twenty-three-year-old student leader called Zhang Guotao in his stead.

The group convened on 23 July in a tidy grey brick house on Wantze (now Xingye) Road in the French Concession that was owned by the brother of one of their number, Li Hanjun. The Comintern representatives reportedly gave speeches on the first day, and on the second the Chinese delegates exchanged information about the work they and their comrades were doing. The next several days were devoted to drafting the party’s platform and plan.

On the evening of 30 July, tipped off by a spy who’d intruded on the meeting a short time earlier, French Concession police raided the meeting and searched the premises. Although they made no arrests, it spooked the delegates. The following day, they decamped to Zhejiang province’s South Lake, where they rented a brightly painted houseboat and continued the meeting.

This boat, rebuilt since, is now hailed as an object of veneration, a symbol of the party’s “Red Boat Spirit” and a major site for “Red tourism.” Or, as a China Daily writer put it, in a stellar example of Red prose, “That boat has sailed through turbulent rivers and treacherous shoals and voyaged across violent tidal waves, becoming a great ship that navigates China’s stable and long-term development.”

The first party congress established the Communist Party of China as a “militant and disciplined party of the proletariat” that aimed to organise workers into a revolutionary army to overthrow the bourgeoisie and seize the means of production from capitalists. Years later, following schisms within the leadership that would see Mao Zedong, one of the founders, rise to power, the party broke with the Soviet model of urban-based revolution, placing the peasantry, rather than industrial workers, at the movement’s centre. The Leninist style of party organisation they adopted at the meeting would, however, remain.

The Comintern delegates convinced the group to form a strategic alliance with the Kuomintang party of the republican revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, then leading a government in exile in the south, in the ongoing struggle against warlords and imperialists.

Mao Zedong (left) and Dong Biwu at Tiananmen in October 1949. Mondadori Portfolio/Getty Images

Only two of the Communist Party’s founders, Dong Biwu and Mao, would mount the rostrum of Tiananmen for the ceremony of the founding of the People’s Republic of China on 1 October 1949. By then, Mao was the party’s undisputed leader and would remain so for life. Dong went on to occupy various high-level positions in the party and state, including president of China, which he held for three years before his death in 1975 at eighty-nine, a year before Mao, too, “went to meet Marx.”

As for the first chairman, Chen Duxiu, he was kicked out of the party in 1929 for differences of opinion, including with Mao, and for his criticisms of Stalin. A Trotskyite, he spent thirteen years in a Kuomintang prison, later dying in obscurity in an isolated Sichuan village in 1942.

As for the other two original members of the “Central Bureau,” one, Li Da, also left the party in the 1920s due to differences of opinion, although he re-joined after 1949. When Red Guards attacked him in the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), he appealed to Mao, but Mao declined to save him, and he was “struggled” to death. Zhang Guotao, the third member of the Central Bureau alongside Li and Chen Duxiu, left the party in 1938 after a leadership tussle with Mao. He went into exile in Hong Kong and then Canada, where he converted to Christianity and died at the age of eighty-two in 1979.

Several founders died for the cause. The strategic alliance with the Kuomintang ended when the hardline anti-communist military man Chiang Kai-shek became effective leader of the party after Sun Yat-sen’s death. In 1927, he launched a “White Terror” that claimed the lives of 70,000 communists and sympathisers, including suspected sympathisers, among them many students.

Deng Enming, only twenty at the time of the congress, was arrested by the Kuomintang in 1929 and executed publicly two years later. He Shuheng was killed in 1935 by Kuomintang troops while engaging in guerrilla warfare in Fujian province, not long after Mao and others broke out of a Kuomintang encirclement and began what would become known as the Long March. Chen Tanqiu was killed by a warlord in 1943. A warlord also murdered Li Hanjun (1890–1927), although by then he had left the Communists for the Kuomintang.

One founder died of illness: Wang Jinmei, who participated in the party’s fourth congress in Shanghai in January 1925, succumbed to tuberculosis at the age of twenty-seven just seven months later.

After the Japanese invasion and occupation of China, two founders served as ministers in the collaborationist puppet government. One was Chen Gongbo, the author of the memoir mentioned above. The other was Zhou Fohai, who had first abandoned the communists for the Kuomintang in 1924. In 1946, the Kuomintang executed Chen for treason. Zhou, his sentence commuted to life thanks to connections, died in prison in 1948.

Two others had more complicated stories. Liu Renjing became a Trotskyite, and was first imprisoned by, and then worked for, the Kuomintang. After 1949, he wrote a statement of regret for his political sins and the Communist Party accepted it, allowing him to work in minor positions in publishing. He was victimised and imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution, but survived, and reputationally “rehabilitated” in the early 1980s. In 1987, at the age of eighty-five, he was run over and killed by a Beijing bus.

Bao Huiseng, meanwhile, had also switched sides, joining the Kuomintang, but after a brief spell in Macao, returned to the mainland with Mao’s permission. Following a period of “political study” he became a researcher in the State Council. Red Guards beat him viciously too during the Cultural Revolution^⁠, leaving him so badly traumatised it’s said that he never fully recovered. Sadly for historians, he burned approximately one hundred letters from Chen Duxiu he’d kept carefully hidden for forty years, terrified what the Red Guards might do if they found them. He died in his early eighties in 1979.

As for Maring, the Dutchman was executed by the Germans in 1942 for his part in the communist resistance to the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.

If “history is a mirror,” as Xi Jinping likes to say, quoting a Tang dynasty emperor, some polishing has certainly been going on.

Just ahead of the centenary, Xi helped inaugurate a spanking new exhibition hall devoted to party history: the Museum of the Communist Party of China. Located in a nouveau-Stalinist pile near Beijing Olympic Park, it holds some 2600 photos and 3500 “relics”^⁠ that present the story of the party’s history over the last century exactly as its leaders want it told. It is, in Xi Jinping’s words, a “sacred hall.”

Language like that suits a party that describes itself as “Great, Glorious and Correct” and has launched what amounts to an enormous campaign of catechism in party doctrine. There is even a hotline for dobbing in heretics — or in the party’s language, “historical nihilists,” anyone who questions the official version of party history. Xi believes “historical nihilism” contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union.

The spectacle and the careful polishing of the historical mirror are all about cementing the party’s legitimacy as the rightful rulers of China, for the next hundred years and beyond. The central role of Xi Jinping and “Xi Jinping Thought” in the celebrations shows that he has every intention of guiding it as far into that future as possible. But if there are any lessons to be had from stories of the founding fathers, it’s that where you begin is not necessarily where you end up. •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

The post Shanghai, July 1921 appeared first on Inside Story.

The first question was the starting date. Beginning with the first written records, 3500 years ago, would have been reasonable. But that would have meant leaving out one of humankind’s oldest ancestors, Peking Man, not to mention the Neolithic communities that established patterns of Chinese agriculture and built communities that lasted well beyond the Stone Age.

Yet even starting back then would be to ignore the mythic origins of Chinese culture and civilisation that are still common reference points in political and other discourse. And if I went that far, why not go all the way back to the legend of how a horned giant named Pangu created the universe after hatching from a giant egg of Yin and Yang? The narrative would need to move at a good clip to get from Pangu to Xi Jinping.

A history of China must necessarily tell a story of rulers come and gone, the intrigues in their palaces and the popular rebellions that threatened their rule. Among them are many larger-than-life figures, not least the plus-sized Ming emperor Wanli, who, in a fit of pique at his ministers, spent the last twenty years of his reign banqueting, designing his tomb and consorting with his true love, who was not among his assigned empresses. Some emperors, empresses, kings, presidents and chairmen (all men so far) ruled wisely, some less so. Their realms’ global prestige, economic wealth, and technological and scientific vibrancy, and their people’s livelihoods, rose and fell accordingly.

For long stretches, sometimes hundreds of years, the land was fractured into rival, even warring states. These precarious times instilled into the collective psyche a fear of the chaos that comes with division. The knowledge that corruption contributed to the fall of many a ruling house, meanwhile, has left leaders from ancient times to Xi today determined both to persecute venality within their courts and to silence criticism lest the people discover its extent.

The violence of so many leadership successions — from the “axe blows in the night” of imperial times to the mysterious loss of the plane carrying Chairman Mao’s erstwhile “closest comrade-in-arms” and chosen successor, Lin Biao — has also long haunted those aspiring to stable government. It was important to pack (and unpack) these themes as well: division vs unity, the scourge of corruption and the challenge of orderly succession.

Underpinning all this are the unique schools of thought that have shaped Chinese governance and society for thousands of years. Any history of China, however short, must consider the influence of Confucius (born 551 BCE), who advocated for good, moral government and an ordered society. Equally, it must take account of the competing philosophy of Legalism, which argued that right and wrong were whatever a ruler wanted them to be. The Legalists didn’t believe, as Confucius did, in governing by example; rather, they favoured laws that shaped behaviour through punishment and reward. In reality, most rulers have drawn from both streams of thought. The social credit systems being rolled out in the People’s Republic of China today owe much to Legalism.

Art, poetry and literature are densely woven into Chinese history too; they illuminate its patterns with their bright, shining threads. To fully understand the implications of a poem Mao wrote about heroism, you need to know he was riffing off an eleventh-century poem that reflected on a third-century battle which, thanks to a fourteenth-century novel, has been a big part of popular culture and political rhetoric ever since.

Much of what we know about the lives and concerns of ordinary people, meanwhile, comes from ancient folk songs, literary works and paintings. The story of the evolution of the Chinese language itself is another inextricable part of China’s story.

My carry-on was bulging. But I wasn’t about to leave the women behind: from ancient warriors to fierce early-twentieth-century feminists to the “mother of Chinese computer science” who built China’s first computer in 1960 and a whistleblowing physician in 2020, women deserve more attention than they’ve been given in most general histories.

Likewise, I was compelled to include the great nonconformists, eccentrics and dissidents who, from ancient times to the present, have demonstrated that China has always been a multiverse, full of wit and humour and defiant individualism. As I write in my introduction, its unruly complexity has always been part of its greatness. •

The post Everything under heaven appeared first on Inside Story.

Who would dare? Xi’s speech has been likened to Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art” of 1942, in which Mao demanded that art serve the Party and the people and help vanquish the enemy. Xi did the same, extolling the Stalinist idea that writers are engineers of human souls; but he also talked about market influences, popular culture and other contemporary phenomena. He called for Chinese artists to create “socialist culture and art” that is “artistically outstanding and morally inspiring,” and stressed that art must serve “correct” views of history, nationality and culture. It must feature, he said, “positive energy.”

At the forum, Xi praised two young bloggers – Zhou Xiaoping (over eleven million views) and Hua Qianfang (over 87,000 fans on Weibo) – for their “positive energy.” Among Zhou’s writings is a blog post from June 2013 called “Please Don’t Be Unworthy of This Age.” A paragraph towards the end of the piece gives some idea of what “positive energy” means:

I, Zhou Xiaoping, do not deny that China has corrupt officials, prison guards, bad people, bullies and crazy people. In the same way I wouldn’t deny that a beautiful woman has thickened skin on the soles of her feet, snot, bowel movements, bacteria or germs, inflammation of the mouth, swollen lymph glands, or pancreatic juices (what’s more, these things make up no small proportion). But when I see a beautiful woman I still feel delight in my heart and eyes, and I still hope that I can hold her in my arms. If at the moment, you are standing to one side nattering on, saying: “You’ve been brainwashed, this beautiful woman is made of the skin on her feet, snot, bowel movements, germs and viruses, inflammation of the mouth, pancreatic juices, intestines, organs and lymph, it’s extremely disgusting, hurry and wake up.” I honestly don’t know whether I’m blind or you’re mad. If you don’t do anything but natter, at most I’ll just smile. But if one day, someone makes a move to eliminate this “harmful beauty,” I will certainly not stand idly by. The reason is very simple: if I failed to act, would I be a man? A man’s greatest virtue is that of guarding and protecting.

Zhao Benshan was only one of a number of major state-supported artists, including the veteran painter Fan Zeng, who lavished praise on Xi’s speech – much as state-supported artists have done since 1942, whether out of genuine enthusiasm or simply because they are mindful of the price of opposition. (The writer Wang Shiwei, the first to pay the ultimate price for dissent, was expelled from the Party in 1942 and beheaded in 1947.)

Xi has expressed specific as well as general views on the arts. He has revealed, for instance, that he hates the “weird” architecture that has come to define China’s modernising cities. Weird architecture presumably includes the work of figures like Zaha Hadid and Ma Yansong (of MAD Architects) as well as numerous high-concept, low-value knockoffs and buildings designed to look like lotuses, teapots, coins and even a piano and violin. “No more,” said Xi. It’s uncertain what this diktat will mean in practice for projects already contracted or under way – or what the speech as a whole will mean for art, literature and film that is already out there but doesn’t sing along with what the Chinese media and propaganda arms have long promoted as “main melody” art.

After all, China has been home since the 1980s to a flourishing counterculture of independent visual artists, film-makers and writers who support themselves outside the state system or use it cannily to pursue their careers. Many other artists who work within the system (in the sense that they must pass the censors) have nonetheless managed to make boundary-pushing works. Take, for example, the directorial debut of rock star Cui Jian, whose songs have been banned and unbanned over nearly thirty years. Blue Sky Bones, which deals with the Cultural Revolution, sexuality (including homosexuality) and a corrupt media, screened nationally in Chinese theatres from October 2014.

Or take Chen Qiufan’s first novel, The Waste Tide, which describes a dystopian near-future where, on an island built with e-waste off the Chinese coast, migrant workers battle capitalist elites and powerful local forces for control. The novel won Best Novel at China’s Nebula Awards in October 2013 and the Huadi Best Work of Science Fiction Award, sponsored by Guangzhou’s Yangcheng Evening News, in March 2014. The Waste Tide “paints China as a conflicted nation,” according to the Women of China website, “powerful enough to convince other countries to accept its ideologies, but not strong enough to pull its population out of poverty.”

Chen, who was born in 1981, obliquely addressed the question of Shared Destiny when he wrote that his generation encompasses Foxconn factory workers, princelings “who treat luxury as their birthright,” entrepreneurs pursuing dreams of wealth, and college graduates who must “compete ruthlessly for a single clerical position.” Yet, Chen observes, the Party persists in speaking as though the “People” all share a monolithic Chinese Dream. “Between the feeling of individual failure and the conspicuous display of national prosperity,” Chen writes, “lies an unbridgeable chasm.”

How the party-state will address political heresy in the domestic cultural sphere – including among “globalised” artists and writers and in imported popular culture – will become clear in the coming year. In the Mao era, and through much of the Deng era, the authorities accused creative artists whose work offended them of “counter-revolution,” “spiritual pollution,” “bourgeois liberalism” and other ideological crimes. In more recent times, the party-state has preferred criminal to political charges. These have the potential to smear artists’ reputations, especially within China itself, punish them financially through fines and tie them up in legal cases they can’t win.

When authorities detained the artist-activist Ai Weiwei from 2011, for instance, they charged him with tax evasion and put him under continuing surveillance. After the Australian-Chinese artist Guo Jian created a diorama of Tiananmen Square smothered in rotting meat to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the violent suppression of the 1989 protest movement, the authorities detained and then deported him on charges of visa fraud.

The consequences are generally more severe for artists with less clout. In November 2014, for example, the independent film-maker Shen Yongping, who had produced an eight-episode internet documentary about China’s constitutional governance (posted in April or May 2014 through Weibo), faced trial. During the filming, police had warned him that if he went ahead he would go to prison. What they have charged him with, however, is engaging in “illegal business activity.” (This came during the last week of October, when state media was singing the praises of the Fourth Plenum under Xi Jinping, with its stated focus on rule of law and constitutionalism.)

There is also a third way: in October, police detained thirteen artists in the Beijing “artists’ village” of Songzhuang on charges of “creating trouble.” All had indicated support on social media for the pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong or were planning to attend a poetry reading in solidarity with the protests. (Human rights monitors have reported the arrest of dozens of mainland citizens who have indicated support for the Hong Kong protesters.) Reports in the foreign press at the end of October indicated that police were swarming through the once-relaxed village and many artists had closed their studios to outsiders.

The artists, for their part, can accept the Party’s leadership and reflect Xi’s guidance in the kind of art they produce. Or they can make the sort of art they consider meaningful and risk the consequences. Or they can attempt to hit “graze-edge balls,” named for a play in ping-pong in which the ball grazes the edge of the table – technically still “in” or legal and yet almost impossible to counter.

Or, if they have the means, they can send their art overseas. Chen Qiufan published the essay from which the earlier quotation was taken, translated by his fellow science fiction writer Ken Liu, on the science fiction and fantasy website Tor.com in May 2014. Writers Murong Xuecun, Yu Hua and Yan Lianke (a finalist in the 2013 Man Booker International Prize and, the following year, the first Chinese writer to win the Franz Kafka Prize) are among those who have increasingly turned to websites, journals and newspapers including the New York Times to publish essays that can’t appear at home.

Working remotely, Ai Weiwei created a giant, site-specific installation for the infamous former island penitentiary of Alcatraz, in San Francisco Bay. It includes a colourful dragon with Twitter-bird eyes, 175 Lego representations of prisoners of conscience from around the world and a dozen gleaming steel stools individually installed in one of the cells in Cell Block A. Into the cell are played songs and speeches of protest, including Martin Luther King’s 1967 anti–Vietnam War speech, music by the imprisoned Tibetan singer Lolo, and Hopi chants representing the Native Americans incarcerated in the nineteenth century for resisting assimilation.

Guo Jian, meanwhile, went to New York in the second half of 2014 to collaborate with the American artist and Iraq war veteran Marcus Eriksen on an anti-war multimedia installation called Surrender. They asked people all over the world, especially soldiers in uniform, to send photographs of themselves with their hands up in surrender. Like Ai Weiwei’s Alcatraz work, it was a rather different vision of Shared Destiny from that of Big Daddy Xi. •

This extract is from the China Story Yearbook 2014: Shared Destiny, which will be launched by Andrew Leigh MP at Parliament House, Canberra on 24 November, 6–7 pm.

The post Engineers of human souls appeared first on Inside Story.

ABOUT halfway into this intriguing and much discussed political novel, the protagonist Lao Chen refers to Lu Xun’s poem “A Good Hell Lost.” He poses a question: “Given the choice between a good hell and a counterfeit paradise, what will people choose? Whatever you say, many people will believe that a counterfeit paradise has got to be better than a good hell. Though at first they recognise that the paradise is bogus, they either don’t dare or wish to expose it as such. As time passes, they forget that it’s not real and actually begin to defend it, insisting that it’s the only paradise in existence.”

The story of The Fat Years unfolds against the background of a strong and risen China, a China in its “Golden Age” – or as one wag puts it, the “Age of Complacency.” It takes place in the very near future: 2013. Two years previous, the world had suffered a catastrophic economic meltdown; the crisis threatened to drag China down into economic, social and political mayhem. Miraculously, China emerged, apparently instantaneously, into its new Golden Age, strong, prosperous and stable. As the world’s preeminent power, it has rewritten the global economic rules of the game to its own advantage, yet thanks to a strategic soft-power approach, the result has been harmonious and beneficial international relations.

As for the people living in this paradise, they are happy, almost eerily so; there are echoes the Stepford Wives or a Truman Show, albeit with Chinese characteristics. They have wealth, they have entertainments and divertissements galore, they know how to have fun, and they know their French wines. They spend a lot of time on the internet and on self-congratulation, frequently combining both activities. They are able to do and get almost anything they want in life, so long as they don’t cross certain boundaries of acceptable behaviour, including those related to political expression. Because these boundaries have a way of shifting, people involved in borderline activities such as worship in non-sanctioned Christian churches tend to remain more alert and anxious than most. But who cares? Lao Chen describes this situation as “ninety-percent freedom.”

Lao Chen, whose parents were Shanghainese but who grew up in Hong Kong and Taiwan, lives in the capital of this paradise, Beijing, and is pretty happy with it. As the novel opens, however, he encounters several people from his past whose different take on reality threatens his own complacency. The first is Fang Caodi, an intellectual whose personal history reflects the vicissitudes of modern China. Fang’s words, “A month is missing. I’m saying an entire month has gone missing,” open the novel. Fang is obsessed with discovering what happened in what he insists was a “missing month” between the global economic crisis and China’s rise. Lao Chen, unable to recall that there was any gap between the two phenomena at all, doesn’t understand the problem and thinks Fang slightly mad.

Others who have somehow failed to buy into the general air of cheerful insouciance include the former child labourer turned runaway and guitarist, Zhang Dou, and Dong Niang, a prostitute and heroin addict who likens the ambient vibe of contentment to a kind of “lukewarm little high” or, in her Australian boyfriend’s formulation, “hi-lite-lite.”

Lao Chen is reluctant to think about all this, much less get involved. But when he re-encounters another malcontent, Xiao Xi, he finds himself drawn in despite himself.

Xiao Xi had been a young low-level magistrate whose first job was to help carry out the fierce anti-crime campaign of 1983, in which people were sometimes arrested, tried and executed in the space of a day. She was so traumatised by the callous abuse of people’s rights, the disproportionate fierceness of the sentences (death, in many cases) and the number of innocent people who suffered as a result, that she quit the legal system then and there.

Lao Chen first met Xiao Xi in the eighties, when she and her mother ran the Five Flavours restaurant near Peking University. The restaurant was popular with students and foreigners, and served as something of an intellectual and artistic salon. Lao Chen was a habitué of Five Flavours and had always been attracted to Xiao Xi, whose good looks were complemented by her fiery intelligence and strong sense of right and wrong. At first, on their reacquaintance, she too appears somewhat mad, anxiety etched into the lines of her aged but still attractive face, continually switching email addresses and convinced (rightly, as it turns out) that she’s being watched by the security forces. Lao Chen knows that to pursue her is to court trouble and indeed, to lose paradise, but love has its own logic.

Fang, meanwhile, has begun to piece together evidence that the events of the missing month included an anti-crime campaign that made 1983 look like a pair of fake-fur handcuffs but which, like the concomitant food hoarding and unrest, has been meticulously purged from the historical record. How and why is only part of the mystery that drives the novel; the real question is how and why the people who lived through it are, only two years on, so able and willing to forget.

THE POST-1949 history of China is littered with such mysteries: the intense and frequently coercive campaign to bring China’s intelligentsia round to communism in the early fifties, which is described in Yang Jiang’s 1988 novel Baptism, for example, has been almost entirely forgotten today. It’s a fair guess that most people in China today would be hard-pressed to come up with many details of major post-’49 historical traumas like the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957 or even the more recent events of 1989. Chan Koonchung has said that while writing The Fat Years he was thinking about these things but also more specifically about 2009, when China emerged from the global economic crisis of 2008 healthy and sound – and then sentenced the intellectual Liu Xiaobo to eleven years in jail for an act of dissident political expression. Although The Fat Years appears to be speculative fiction, in that same interview Chan describes it as a work of “realism.”

Chan paints a vivid and detailed portrait of China as simultaneous utopia and dystopia. In order to accurately describe China today, he has written elsewhere, one needs to be like the famous Tang Dynasty songstress Jiang Shu, who was capable of singing two songs at the same time, one in the back of her throat and the other from her nose.

Chan Koonchung has a similar background to that of the narrator Lao Chen and, one imagines, he shares a similar sense of both familiarity with and alienation from the world in which he lives: as Lao Chen puts it, he is a “dispassionate observer.” Chan came to prominence in Hong Kong in the eighties as the founder of the stylish City magazine, and was for a time its overseas publisher/distributor. Those in the know will see the wink in the novel’s many references to Reading magazine. The Fat Years is his first novel set in China. Although not published there, enough copies have got in to make it a hot topic in intellectual circles; at a fashionable party I attended in Beijing in late 2009, the host presented all of her guests with a copy as a gift.

The author’s fictional style could be described as reportorial, with few metaphors or other stylistic flourishes. The narrative logic of switching between points of view (first and third person, multiple perspectives) is not apparent and more than once he undercuts his own narrative suspense with foreshadowing. One of the more fascinating characters sadly more or less disappears from sight by the end: Xiao Xi’s son Wei Guo, a hyper-nationalist, neo-fascist and intellectual thug whose most ardent dream is to work for the Department of Propaganda: “I think that the Central Department of Propaganda is so romantic… [It] leads the spiritual life of the entire country and the people.”

Yet for the most part the story is compelling, the humour satisfyingly dry, the characters vividly drawn and their stories cleverly interwoven. On the other hand, just as The Fat Years prepares to deliver the narrative punch the entire book had been leading up to, Chan pulls it in order to pronounce, via a character who is a Politburo member, a barely interrupted treatise on China’s domestic and foreign policies for an age of prosperity, which runs on for forty-odd pages. Lao Chen is a fan of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett; Chan Koonchung would know that either of them would have tightened it up.

Yet the exposition contained in these forty pages is in many ways at the heart of the novel. Not only does it explain the lost month, it presents the logic of it: the confident assumption of the Communist Party leadership that in China, “the people fear chaos more than dictatorship.” It presents a relatively coherent, persuasive and detailed master plan for China’s economic and political future that may be far-fetched but is not implausible and is in sometimes oblique ways reflective of current affairs:

There are people who are probably thinking now that China has risen and entered into an age of prosperity, we can bring an end to one Party dictatorship! Twenty years ago, He Dongsheng himself had also thought that. He would probably have joined a faction in the Party that advocated democratic reform and even gone so far as to have supported a Chinese Gorbachev. But by now He Dongsheng had lost any faith he might have had in Western-style democratic systems. More importantly, he knew that after 4 June 1989, there were no idealists left in the Communist Party. As the group with a monopoly on political power in China, the Communist Party exercised power in order to protect itself – people became officials in order to profit from their position and there was absolutely no chance of a Gorbachev-like figure emerging.

He Dongsheng not only had lost his passion for political reform, he cynically now believed that not only shouldn’t reform be carried out but that it cannot be carried out, that reform could only lead to chaos… He could not imagine what a post-communist democratic China might be like. He said, and not without sarcasm: “Political reform? Is it that simple? In the end, you’ll emerge from the transition, not with the commonwealth you desire, not the European style of social democracy or the American style of a free, democratic constitutional government, but rather a Chinese style fascist dictatorship that’s a compendium of nationalism, cultural traditionalism, patriotism and national racial purity.”

Xiao Xi retorted: “You’re fascists already, don’t tell me you need a transition?”

Earlier in the book, Xiao Xi reflects that “Beijing in the eighties was such a charming place, an era full of possibility.” In prosperity, paradoxically, the possibilities narrowed.

“Which would you choose: the good hell or the false paradise?” she asks. Chan Koonchung lets the reader decide. •

Postscript: I wrote this review for the China Heritage Quarterly after reading the novel in its original Chinese, and I’ve made only minor changes to that version here. The translations from the text quoted above are my own.

Michael Duke, who translated The Fat Years into English for Doubleday, has arrived at different conclusions from my own with regard to some of the trickier phrases in Chinese, including what he calls “The Age of Satisfaction” but I believe is better rendered as the “Age of Complacency,” with that word’s implication of uncritical satisfaction. Similarly, I think that “age of prosperity” is a closer approximation to the Chinese title than “the fat years,” which calls to mind the prophecy in Genesis that seven “fat years” will be followed by seven lean ones. There’s no sense here that it has to end.

I have other quibbles but they’re relatively minor. This is a book worth reading. I especially commend Julia Lovell’s preface, which deftly contextualises the novel for the general reader, demonstrates its relevance to the understanding of contemporary China and gives a lively account of its reception among the mainland readers who’ve avidly sought it out despite the fact that it’s officially unavailable.

The post Something in the water appeared first on Inside Story.