19.
My little uncle Lusheng’s youngest son, Congo (thus nicknamed, in those less-informed times, because he was born in 1964 with very dark skin), told me another revealing detail.
During a period when Grandpa lived with them in Jiangxi in the 1970s, Uncle Lusheng begged him to give French lessons to Congo: The boy was clever, full of energy and mischief, but he was bored at school. Grandpa refused flatly. Learning a foreign language was useless, and potentially dangerous. The boy should love labor. Labor is glorious. And be diligent. Be frugal. The phrase he used (热爱劳动 re’ai laodong) refers specifically to the love of physical labor, not mental labor. “Grandpa really valued labor,” Congo told me. “He said hard work with your hands is a respected virtue in life.”
Uncle Lusheng and his wife Huayu with their second child in rural Jiangxi, 1963. Congo, their third child, would be born in 1964.
Diligent Work and Frugal Study. Sanctity of Labor. They were still there in his head, except study. Grandpa didn’t urge his grandson to study—not science, not French, not anything. He never had a conversation with me about books, or reading, or ideas. No more studying. No more thinking. Love labor. Hard labor. Manual labor.
When my grandfather passed away less than a year before Mao’s death in 1976, he appeared to be a successful product of “thought reform through labor,” the great Maoist experiment. Start with a human being full of his own thoughts, put him in the crucible of physical labor and “political struggle,” keep him there for a couple of decades, then open the lid, and voilà! Nine out of ten times, you’ll see that the thinking human being has been smelted and he is now a bona fide laborer with little bona fide thought left. It’s Great Smelting, Maoist style. And born in the town of Daye (Great Smelting), after so much else had been burned away in Mao’s great foundry, what remained in Grandpa was fear. My grandfather’s decision not to teach Congo French might have been strategic, lest it harm them both.
I wonder how Grandpa would feel if he were alive and could see how labor fares today in China. If he could visit, say, the huge Foxconn factories in Zhengzhou and Taiyuan: long assembly lines and workstations under tall ceilings and gleaming lights, tens of thousands young workers dressed in protective uniforms, deftly assembling iPhone parts. Apple’s biggest supplier is the postcard image of China today: the factory of the world. Would Grandpa feel pride at such an amazing achievement?
How, though, would he feel about Foxconn’s 60 hours work weeks, the extra shifts, the assembly lines buzzing night and day, the lights never turned off? Bathroom breaks kept to 10 minutes. Mind-numbingly repetitive work. Fatigue. Boredom. Depression. How would he feel about the mesh wire installed outside the factory’s dormitories to prevent its workers from jumping to their deaths?
Foxconn’s labor condition is actually considered one of the best in China’s factories. It’s not a sweatshop; the pay is competitive. Yet the company's profit is only a fraction of Apple’s earnings. No Foxconn worker can afford to buy the beautiful gadgets they deftly put together. They buy local knockoffs.
* * *
In recent years, Chinese public opinion has grown increasingly negative toward the United States. Decades of careful, insidious portrayal by official Chinese state media of America as a greedy bully who exploits China’s cheap labor and market but is bent on containing China’s global rise has worked. A growing majority see America—美国 Meiguo, or the “Beautiful Country”—as an ugly hegemon resented by all good and righteous people. Uncle Sam’s large shadow seems to hover behind all bad things in the world. “Little Pinks,” the young, tech-savvy Chinese nationalists who enjoy Western consumer goods but hate America as an imperialist enemy, have become one of the loudest groups on China’s internet. Echoing the “Wolf Warrior Diplomats” at the Foreign Ministry, they wage online battle for their government like a large volunteer militia. Their collective spending power and fragile “glass hearts”—sensitive to any perceived insult to China—have cowed the heads of multinational companies, Hollywood studios, and sports franchises.
Apologize! Or we’ll boycott your products!
It has worked, so far.
The evolving national schizophrenia toward America has led to certain awkward tensions in the lives of my cousin Congo and his two sons.
Congo inherited my little uncle Lusheng’s music genes: He is a very popular high-school music teacher in Jiangxi. For many years he also ran a private after-school care facility on the side. His wife works at a local company. Like many newly middle-class families in China’s provincial cities, their lives have become quite comfortable.
Bo, Congo’s older son from his first marriage, came to the U.S. for graduate school, earned a Ph.D., and now works in a California hospital as a lab biophysicist. A low-key and modest man, a little shy, he relaxes by playing piano. His wife, also a biophysicist, was his college sweetheart and completed her postdoc at Stanford. They have worked hard, and now they are buying a house and having a child. When Bo recently told me they had applied for green cards, I wished them good luck. I was glad they have chosen a life in America.
Congo’s younger son, Shan, is now a college student in Jiangxi. Brash and gregarious, he wears an Essentials hoodie over his Lakers 8 jersey. His taste in music ranges from patriotic Chinese songs and revolutionary classics to the latest American pop. I once watched a video of him performing with a girl on a high school stage, doing an imitation of Eminem and Rihanna rapping in English. It wasn’t bad.
But when the two brothers talk on WeChat or Skype, Shan sometimes suddenly asks Bo: Say, big bro, do you still aiguo? The word aiguo (爱国) is ambiguous in Chinese—it means both “love the country” and “love the state,” and its standard translation is “patriotism.” But today, aiguo is more loaded. Under Mao if you weren’t a revolutionary you must be a “reactionary.” Now you either aiguo or you must be a traitor. And aiguo refers only to China. So Shan’s question was a loaded one, for he was really asking Bo whether he had kept his “love of China” intact while living in America. The fact that Bo had been living in America for a full decade, that he might live permanently in America, didn’t matter. Or maybe it mattered even more.
Shan never asked Bo whether he loved America—or maybe loved both countries?
“Of course I’ve got aiguo,” Bo told Shan on Skype, “But aiguo doesn’t have just one single definition. Each person has his own way of aiguo.”
So Bo deflected. He ducked the arrow his little brother shot at him.
In Jiangxi, Congo’s colleagues, neighbors, and friends have routinely asked him why his eldest son is still in America. A horrible place, they say, where COVID ran amok and the death toll rose beyond belief! Crime! Drugs! Gun violence! Non-stop bad news. White supremacists and Black racists, they all hate us Asians. Rats and beggars in rundown subways. A mess. A society out of control. Scary. Tell your son to hurry back home, they urge him.
I ask Congo: So how do you reply?
He laughs: Oh, I tell them sure, sure, I’ll tell Bo to come back to China as soon as possible. But I don’t and I won’t. It’s his choice, his life. I just want him to be happy wherever he lives.
That’s my cousin Congo. He handles prejudice and hysteria by prevarication because he wants to get along. He humors, equivocates, tells white lies, makes it all light. He ducks, more nimbly than his son Bo, winking on the side.
As a little boy, Congo had to watch his father being paraded on the streets during the Cultural Revolution. One day, when the Red Guards got tired and took a break by the roadside, Congo strolled up to Uncle Lusheng, took the tall dunce hat off his father’s head, and put it onto his own head. Before anyone could catch him, the boy ran away, shouting “Down with Congo! Down with Congo!” The Red Guards looked at one another, shook their heads, and laughed. They didn’t know what to do with such a naughty little boy. For the rest of the parade my uncle Lusheng walked on with no dunce hat.
I teased Congo that he was really the first person to “remove the hat” from his father. He chuckled. But isn’t he worried that his younger son might be turning into a Little Pink?
“Have you told Shan the Liu family history?” I ask him. “Does he know what happened to his grandpa, to our grandparents?”
“Oh, he knows a little,” Congo tells me, “But I don’t want to tell him too much. He’s still too young. Naïve and simple. I don’t want him to shoot his mouth off at school and get into trouble. People are very ignorant. They’ll report you. Now is not the right time. One day in the future, I’ll tell him.”
Congo is not a conservative Hubei elder, and he will not lay a filial trap for his eldest son. Bo is free to choose a life in America. For that, I’m relieved. But the way he is protecting his younger son from the shadows of history, from the ghosts in the closet, reminds me of my own parents, of all my older relatives when I was a child. The carefully selected facts. The self-censorship. So many vivid, feral, complicated, singular memories are carefully deodorized, wrapped, placed in deep freeze until someday far in the future, by which time they will have become a bland, grayish lump. With its blood drained, its bones desiccated, the thing will be safe.
Millions of Chinese parents share Congo’s fear and caution. Some are my very old, dear friends. Theirs is survival behavior. Still, I find it sad, and galling, that the instinct is so pervasive, so internalized, that it has long become a default choice, a self-perpetuating norm. It is as though they have been wearing a mask for so long it now sticks to their face. Their behavior often strikes me as moral indifference. But I try to remind myself that right behind those masks, there are still scars from the old traumas, the pain visceral at the prodding.
Bo is clearly fond of his little brother. Recently he sent me a bunch of photographs of Shan. The lad is broad-shouldered and tall, much taller than all other males in the Liu tribe. He’d look like a giant standing next to my grandfather. He exudes health and good cheer. Well-fed from childhood, obviously. In every picture—alone, with a cousin, with his buddies, in a restaurant, outside a shopping mall—Shan invariably makes a V sign.
Me: Nice pics. He looks like a cool kid. But do you think he might be a Little Pink?
Bo: Oh, that … I don’t know. We don’t discuss things like that on WeChat. Shan is still very young, maybe a little shallow. I’ve given him some advice about girls. I’ve suggested that he focuses on something he really likes and sticks to it—he’s got so many hobbies and interests. But, eh, we don’t talk about political stuff.
Bo sounded like a protective older brother, but maybe he also wanted to avoid another conversation about aiguo.
20.
“Labor” was a featured theme in the centennial celebrations in both China and France for the Diligent Work and Frugal Study Movement. Almost all commemorations were sponsored by the Chinese government and timed as an opening act for Xi Jinping’s state visit to France in 2019. Documentaries. Retrospectives. Photographs. The same stories and images repeated over and over again in the state media. All described the hard labor Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yi and other communist leaders had to endure in the French sweatshops. The resentment, a hundred years later, sounds as fresh as yesterday. A century of humiliation. The scars from the evils of the capitalist West. Deng was only half-joking when he looked back on those days of toiling in the French factories and said: “I haven’t grown taller because life was so hard there [in France], and I didn’t have enough to eat.”
* * *
Labor was a theme, but labor was not enough for the Communist Party. My grandfather believed in the sanctity of labor, but he had no ear for politics. And his love for labor was not enough.
* * *
The Montargis Railway Station, in Loiret, France, November 20, 2008.
Centennial Monument is a large sculptural work commissioned by the Chinese government for the commemorations and erected in Deng Xiaoping Square, in front of the Montargis Railway Station in France. When viewed from above, it forms a 工 gong, the Chinese character for “labor” or “work.” But the figures carved on the frieze are nearly all top CCP leaders: Deng, Zhou, Chen Yi, and Cai Hesen stand front and center in full-bodied images, flanked by other lesser-known figures.
Visible in the far back corner is the painter Xu Beihong, who studied in Paris at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts from 1919 and spent nearly a decade in France. He returned to China in 1927 and in 1949 became president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, where he popularized a combination of traditional Chinese and Western painting techniques. Xu died in 1953, and so was spared the trials of the Cultural Revolution. On the Centennial Monument, his image is blurry and flat. Deng’s hat and overcoat, carved with loving detail, have more character than the face of the token artist.
The monument’s sculptor, Wu Weishan, received an award from China’s State Council for “telling China’s story well.” He has said in interviews that he wanted to erect a monument “to a group of inspired youngsters who changed China and the world.” He obviously wasn’t talking about the Paris Musketeers or Cai Yuanpei, who actually founded the Work Study Movement.
The most brilliant stroke, though, was putting the railway station on the sculpture. When the artist visited Montargis for inspiration, he saw the town’s old railway station and the square before it, which had been renamed in honor of Deng Xiaoping in 2014. He had an epiphany. “I chose the train station as a backdrop for contrast,” the sculptor later explained on CCTV to Chinese audiences. “This train station was there one hundred years ago. France is still the same one hundred years later. But this group of youngsters had gone home, adapted Marxism to China, and created a New China. The Chinese Communist Party has led the Chinese people in a great journey, from standing-up, to getting rich, to now becoming strong. It is a miracle in the history of human civilization.”
Now the head of National Art Museum of China, Wu has sculpted national icons from Confucius to Mao. Watching the smooth, self-satisfied face of this court artist on the screen, listening to him mouthing these stock phrases with such solemnity, I couldn’t help but chuckle. This man has been reportedly hailed in France as “the Rodin of China.” Really?
But he was indeed “telling the China story well.” And the railway station location, I agreed, was perfect. Through Wu’s crafty hands, the angry Chinese students who had once toiled resentfully in the French factories and then derailed the Work Study Movement have returned in bronze triumph.
* * *
Big, imposing train stations have arisen all across China. The Soviet-style Beijing Railway Station, built the year I was born, had charm and beauty to my childish eyes. But that 1960s symbol of progress has long been dwarfed by gigantic new stations. Four major railway stations operate in the capital today. The biggest, the West Station, was built in the year my daughter was born: 1996.
The huge building is, to my eyes, a graceless affair, and the traffic congestion around it is awful. But as the hub for so many high-speed trains that transport millions of passengers all around the country every day, it serves an important function in people’s lives.
Big train stations have become common in smaller Chinese cities and towns as well. In 2018, Thomas Bird, a journalist, described the railway station in the northern industrial city of Baoding as “so big it makes those in Europe look like toy models.”
The reason for Bird’s visit was a travelogue: “On the trail of Deng Xiaoping in the French town where he embraced Communism.” The French town was Montargis, but tracking the trail of the Work Study Movement had led Bird all the way to Baoding, because this was Li Shizeng’s home region, and in 1918, two preparatory schools for the Work Study students were in operation in the area, one of them set up by Li in his own home village. My grandfather had spent about six months in the Baoding prep schools before heading to France. So did Cai Hesen and the Hunan group. Mao was in Beijing, busy networking and contemplating political theories that were circulating in the capital, but he did visit Baoding to show the Hunan group his continued support.
* * *
Two years after French President Georges Pompidou’s visit to China in 1973, the French government invited then Vice Premier Deng to return on a state visit. Premier Zhou was suffering from late-stage cancer and couldn’t make the trip. In response to Prime Minister Jacques Chirac’s welcome at the Paris airport lounge, Deng said:
France is the place where I lived when I was young, and the hospitality of the French people has left a deep impression on me. I am very happy to visit the old place now. I am particularly pleased that the relationship between our two countries has continued to develop since the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1964. This time, I am visiting your country with the sincere desire to further develop the relationship between the two countries. I believe that through our talks, we will gain mutual understanding between us. It will be further strengthened, and the good relations between the two countries will gain new development.
A week later, Deng returned to Beijing and wrote to Chairman Mao and the Central Party Committee to report on his visit to France. The letter was excerpted in an article on the official CCP news website:
According to Chairman Mao’s revolutionary diplomatic line and strategic deployment, we took advantage of the opportunity, did more work, expanded our influence, and increased mutual understanding between China and France. It has advanced our international united front in uniting the Second World against the two hegemons and focusing on fighting the Soviet Union.” This is Deng Xiaoping’s brief summary of his visit to France.
That was at the height of the Cold War. The two hegemons in Deng’s letter have since switched positions. Chairman Xi is now focusing on fighting the United States, hence China has shifted its diplomatic line and strategic deployment accordingly, by re-allying with Putin’s Russia. France remains a target country, to be cultivated as a part of the CCP’s new international united front.
21.
Trains and factories:
In 2010, critical discussions about the spate of Foxconn workers’ suicides were permitted in the mainland Chinese media. Foxconn’s founding CEO, Terry Gou, a Taiwanese billionaire businessman, was attacked relentlessly. Apple was also put under great pressure. Steve Jobs expressed concern; investigators were sent to the Foxconn factories; wages increased by 20 percent or more. But a year later, after a bullet train derailed in Zhejiang and killed 40 people, authorities cut off media discussions about it after less than a week.
I remember this different treatment clearly because, in both years, in the wake of each incident I happened to be a guest discussant on a Phoenix TV talk show. Phoenix is a Hong Kong-based, privately-funded company with studios in both Hong Kong and Beijing. Its programs are aired via satellite into the entire Chinese-speaking world. The talk show I was on was very popular and enjoyed a large urban audience in both mainland and oversea Chinese communities. The show had a liberal bent in its take on current events, but like all Chinese-language media platforms that want to reach Mainland audiences, it is mindful of the shifting official redlines and often does a delicate dance with the censors to stay unblocked.
In the Beijing studio, before recording began that day, the host alerted us that the window of opportunity to cover the train incident would be brief.
The host: Let’s tape two episodes today. We’ll air one tonight and another tomorrow before they shut it down.
Me: How do you know they’ll shut it down?
The host: Because high-speed rail is an all-made-in-China brand. This is symbolic. The national image is at stake.
So it is in a different category from Foxconn, which is owned by a Taiwanese tycoon, laboring for an American brand.
He was right. On the sixth day, the Ministry of Propaganda issued the ban. Overnight, all critical discussions vanished from the media.
* * *
Strength. Speed. Size. Organization. Control. These are key words to understand the China story.
The sky is high, the emperor is far. This hoary Chinese saying describes an idyllic picture of a self-sufficient agricultural society, the lifestyle of a people scattered over a vast land and loosely governed by a remote emperor. That life is over. It was seen, in the aftershocks of the Opium Wars, as a reason for China’s backwardness. Throughout the New Culture Movement and the Republican era in the early 20th century, the lamentation among the educated Chinese about the weakness of their government and the lack of cohesion of the Chinese population had been constant. “A loose sheet of sand” was the catchphrase. A consensus gradually emerged that for a nation of China’s landmass and population to advance into the modern age, you needed a strong government that could forge national unity and cohesion and stand up to the Western powers. The leaders needed to be close by, not far away.
And for China to progress into the industrial age it needed size and speed. Large factories. Fast trains. Size and speed in turn required organization and control. Large mobilized masses engaged in large-scale production need to be managed by strong organizations and controlled by powerful leaders. Organized from the bottom, led from the top: a giant phalanx that could march ahead in lock step, that’s the only way the Chinese could enter the modern era.
The whole world got a taste of the realization of this dream in the spectacular opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, which news reports often called “China’s coming-out party.” Kicked off with beautiful fireworks of giant footsteps transforming into Olympic rings across the night sky, the ceremony showed off perfectly choreographed and synchronized large group gymnastics and militaristic parades with everyone performing in absolute uniformity. To ensure good weather, the authorities even organized a large-scale artificial rain mitigation operation, with cloud-dispelling missiles. It was all dazzling and awe-striking.
Nevertheless, the anxiety about weakness and chaos always hovers in the Chinese consciousness. The fear that the country is just one faltering step away from tumbling back to its pre-modern backward state is real for so many. And who can handle this giant country, this terrifying problem, but the Chinese Communist Party? After all, it was the Party which, with a vision of ruthless clarity, saw the Chinese people not as a plate of loose sand but as a plate of iron chips and then, like magnetic iron, transformed them into an iron fist. The Party alone can tame the giant and fix the problem.
This is the argument the Party has pushed since the founding of the People’s Republic. When I was growing up in Beijing, Red songs like “Socialism is good!” and “Only the Communist Party Can Save China!” blared on the radio all the time; we all sang them and believed in the axioms. The Red songs, and the sloganeering, were toned down a good notch during the first decades of Deng’s Reform and Opening. Or one might say that, with the floodgates opened wide for the gushing-in of foreign capitalist waters, the socialist rivers had turned a little pink. But after Xi came to power in 2012, Red culture returned. With a vengeance, in triumph. And after forty years of rapid economic growth, who can argue with the Party’s sovereign power of control?
Jackie Chan, the Hong Kong movie star who has sung so many patriotic songs on so many Mainland stages since the British handed the colony back to the motherland in 1997, intimated in an interview that the 1989 military crackdown on Tiananmen Square was necessary: “We Chinese need to be controlled,” (“我們中國人是需要管的”), he said in 2009. He was roundly condemned by educated Chinese liberals. What a shameless defender of authoritarianism! The ass-licker wants to make sure his aiguo is not in doubt so he can keep making big dough from the big Mainland market.
But in their hearts the liberals knew Jackie Chan was simply repeating a familiar stereotype about the national character, and they knew many of their fellow countrymen share this view about their own culture and society. Yes, the Chinese need control. Or to put it more bluntly: the Chinese need a boot in their face. Otherwise they’ll misbehave. Break rules. Steal. Cheat. Cut corners. Take advantage of each other. Cut one another’s throats. They need a Big Brother to save them from themselves, to keep an eye on them all, to maintain stability and prosperity. You ask, who will keep an eye on the Big Brother? Well, that makes you a blind person: blind to the unique Chinese character and Chinese reality. It makes you not only an enemy of the Big Brother but an enemy of the People.
In their hearts, therefore, the liberals know that they are a small, shrinking minority in their own country, that their argument has been lost. That China should and could democratize, would move beyond the rule of one party or the rule of one man, toward the rule of law with respect for the rights of citizens and dignity of the individual—that argument has not won popular support. This recognition, and their own inability to do anything about it, their impotency and powerlessness, is a constant source of agony, shame, self-loathing, rage, and despair.
Like it or not, poor or rich, Jackie Chan or Jack Ma, the Chinese today are living with a boot in their face, albeit with some “New Era Characteristics.” As the Australian sinologist Geremie Barmé put it:
…it is likely that the boot of power will be AI-designed footwear crafted from high-end materials and labor-farm leather. These luxury items will be promoted both by Chinese and fellow-traveler influences and available for online purchase as well as international delivery. ‘Click like and subscribe.’
22.
Beating up on a target like Jackie Chan is too easy.
I often think of two sophisticated, quirky characters whose defense of the communist rule cannot be easily dismissed or refuted by Chinese liberals.
One is the renowned Confucian scholar Liang Shuming, whose courage and integrity has been celebrated by Chinese liberals. Less mentioned, however, is the fact that Liang also evinced a complicated perspective on traditional Chinese culture and the communist revolution.
During the Republican era, Liang published several seminal studies on the broad subject of historical, cultural comparisons between Christian, Confucian, and Buddhist societies. He identified the inability to organize on a large scale, and the lack of military discipline and public spirit, as the sources of China’s enduring weakness compared to European cultures. But, noting its positive, secularist attitude toward an active life in this world, he was more hopeful about the prospect of a Confucian society like China than countries influenced more by Buddhism. Liang also examined the fate of the individual in traditional Chinese life and concluded that, caught in an omnipresent web of familial and patriarchal duties and obligations, a Chinese individual could never be truly independent. And that, Liang lamented, was the greatest tragedy in Chinese history.
Liang wasn’t satisfied to be just a scholar. Seeing the conditions of China’s peasant farmers as crucial to social progress, he conducted a “rural reconstruction project” during the Republican era. He personally lived in a village, instructed peasants in morality and modern knowledge, and tried to get them to organize themselves into self-governing cooperatives. He put his energies into this for many years but saw little progress.
Liang was (or was known as) Mao’s personal friend. The two men were the same age and met when they were young. Before and after the PRC was founded, they periodically held long private conversations. In one of their all-night talks in Yan’an, which was a Red Army base in Shaanxi province in the 1930s and 1940s, Liang described his rural reconstruction theory and experiment. Mao laughed and said it was all wrong. Land, that’s what all peasants want, Mao told Liang. They are not interested in your moral education.
On the eve of the communist victory, Liang made a special trip to Yan’an again. He had an urgent message for Mao: Do not adopt Western style multi-party democracy, it would lead to chaos. The Communist Party should first focus on developing the economy for several decades, that’s what China needed the most to be strong. This time, Mao gathered a large group of his fellow CCP leaders to hear Liang. Liang delivered this message to the entire group in one of Yan’an’s large cave houses.
Few seem to know or to pay attention to such odd historical facts. To this day, Liang is widely admired in Chinese liberal circles for two things. One is his (failed) “rural reconstruction project.” The other is the fact that since 1949 only two men ever dared to criticize Chairman Mao in person. One was Marshal Peng Dehuai, who spoke up about Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” policies (which caused the Great Famine), and was purged for it and tortured to death during the Cultural Revolution. Liang was the other man, facing off against Mao in 1953. After making his critical remarks, he was instantly and permanently dropped as Mao’s friend. But, though he never again met or spoke with the Chairman, he suffered relatively little during the campaigns and lived until the age of 94, dying in 1988.
Liang’s critique had been blunt but reasonable. He had simply expressed concerns at a consultation meeting that the peasants might be sacrificed if the Party focused too much on funding rapid industrialization. He was right. But, in his later years, Liang seemed to regret his actions. He shouldn’t have criticized Mao in the presence of others. “I shouldn’t have challenged him so fiercely in public. I hurt his feelings.” Did Liang feel that he had somehow failed to live up to the special friendship the emperor had bestowed on him, a great honor for a mere scholar?
Toward the end of his long life, Liang came to consider Mao one of the greatest figures in Chinese history, greater than many great emperors. “Mao’s greatest achievement was that he almost single-handedly led the CCP to victory, and the CCP created a new Chinese nation,” said Liang before his death.
In the end, on Liang’s Confucian scale, the tragedy of the individual evidently weighed far less than the power and wealth of the nation, of the Han race. Thanks to Mao and to the CCP, the Chinese are no longer a sheet of loose sand. The country has been unified, mobilized, organized, disciplined. A giant tree standing tall in the forest of nations.
* * *
Wang Meng is another eminent figure, one who is regarded as the most liberal Minister of Culture in the history of the PRC. Yet he is just as often accused of being a shrewd apologist for the Party-state.
Wang was one of the over half-million Chinese dubbed a rightist in 1957. He was then 23, a junior Communist Youth League official in Beijing and a budding fiction writer. Banished to “reform through labor” in Xinjiang (a 90-hour journey by train in 1963), he and his wife lived there among the Uyghurs for 16 years. By the time Wang’s rightist hat was removed and the family returned to Beijing, his three children were young adults. Wang re-established himself quickly on the literary scene as a superstar, publishing at a furious pace throughout the 1980s. Between 1986 and 1989, he served as Minister of Culture. Though he quietly stepped down after the Tiananmen massacre, he enjoyed the full benefits of a retired minister (large apartment, secretary, chauffeured car, business-class travel, top-grade healthcare, etc.) He remains a prolific writer and frequent public speaker.
I have known Wang for over three decades. For one decade, he and I were regularly paired as guests on the popular Hong Kong-based Phoenix television talk show I mentioned earlier, in which we managed to discuss the high-speed rail accident before being forced to shut down. The show had the format of one host with two guests. I also had many other occasions—private conversations, meals at his home, travels, writers’ gatherings, etc.—to observe and interact with Wang. Our exchanges have always been very friendly, though I can’t say we’re friends. As the saying goes: A politician has no friends, and Chinese politicians have many, many reasons to be on their guard all the time. Wang, who is as much a politician as a writer, is famous for having navigated both political and literary minefields with savvy aplomb. I don’t think I’ve known anyone smarter or more cautious.
I wrote a long profile of Wang, “Servant of the State,” published in The New Yorker in 2010. The conversation below took place in 2009 at a Beijing café where Wang and I met for tea.
I asked him about the persistent criticism that he is an apologist for the Chinese government. “Churchill once said, ‘I support democracy not because it is so good but because it would be worse without it,’” Wang replied, smiling. “My view of the Chinese Communist Party is the same: I support it not because it’s that good but because it would be worse without it. I once told a friend, ‘You are a very capable man, but if you have to govern China it won’t last more than three days before the country falls into chaos and you lose your own head.’ So, I’m not talking about the legitimacy of the Chinese revolution. I’m talking about its inevitability. Let me tell you about my recent visit to Beichuan”—the center of the devastating 2008 Sichuan earthquake. “I stood there looking at the ruins, awestruck, and it’s absolutely terrifying! Experts tell me a great earthquake like that is caused by an interlinked assortment of underground movements that have been happening for a thousand years. That’s why, when it finally erupts, it must shake heaven and earth.” He took a sip of tea and looked at me closely. “You see what I mean? It’s the same with the Chinese revolution.” The great famine, the Cultural Revolution, the cult of Mao and the Red Guards’ mania, which swallowed up tens of millions of lives: all these are, to him, as inevitable as the eruptions of Mother Earth. Tragic, but also somehow magnificent.
“If the Communists hadn’t won,” I persisted, “isn’t it possible that we Chinese would have suffered less on the path toward modernization?”
Wang wouldn’t admit to regrets; he saw the upheavals as inevitable. “China has a long tradition of violent dynastic changes,” he said. “And what are the two things that excite young people the most? Sex and revolution!”
I pointed out that, despite the revolution’s immense human costs, plenty of the social and moral ills—corruption and inequality—of old China persist.
“Yes, they still do, don’t they?” he said, frowning. And then he sighed. “Jianying, what happened happened a long time ago. I’m not interested in these ‘what if’ questions.”
The conversation reminded me of a story that Wang published in the nineteen-eighties, “Hard Times to Meet.” The protagonist, Wong, seemingly an authorial alter ego, is a prominent Chinese official who meets with an old friend, a Chinese woman who lives in the United States. Preoccupied by the horrors of the Chinese revolution, she insists on having a “deeper discussion” with Wong. Wong mentally rehearses his response: “Those who are terrified by the horrors, please go away. History will not stop its forward march for fear of paying a price…. You may feel depressed. You have the right to feel depressed. But I have no right to feel depressed, because I am a master of today’s China.” And yet Wong is made so uneasy by the prospect of this conversation that he goes on a trip to avoid her.
“I am a master of today’s China”: that’s not something Wang ever said to me, but there was no avoiding the pride, and the responsibility, he felt in belonging to the élite of this new China. The revolution was over, the destructive passions were dissipated, and the Party had turned toward a constructive path. Why not be positive and look ahead? As the protagonist in one of his best-known short stories, “Salute from a Bolshevik,” put it, sentimentally, “The dear mother may beat her child, but the child will never resent his mother, for the mother’s anger will fade and she will hold her child and cry over it.”
In another conversation, Wang had made a remark that has since returned to my mind repeatedly. “We should recognize this phenomenon,” Wang had mused, “evil is sometimes what powers progress in history.”
The Chinese word for evil that Wang used, 恶 (è), may be translated into English as evil, vice, bad. In French, I think it would be “mal,” as in Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal.
Wang, of course, wasn’t speaking about capitalism.