[Joint House and Senate Hearing, 109 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS IN CHINA
=======================================================================
ROUNDTABLE
before the
CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA
ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
MARCH 10, 2005
__________
Printed for the use of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China
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CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA
LEGISLATIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS
Senate House
CHUCK HAGEL, Nebraska, Chairman MEMBERS TO BE APPOINTED
SAM BROWNBACK, Kansas
GORDON SMITH, Oregon
JIM DeMINT, South Carolina
MEL MARTINEZ, Florida
MAX BAUCUS, Montana
CARL LEVIN, Michigan
DIANNE FEINSTEIN, California
BYRON DORGAN, North Dakota
EXECUTIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS
STEPHEN J. LAW, Department of Labor
PAULA DOBRIANSKY, Department of State
GRANT ALDONAS, Department of Commerce
David Dorman, Staff Director (Chairman)
John Foarde, Staff Director (Co-Chairman)
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
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Page
STATEMENTS
Goldman, Merle, professor emerita of Chinese history, Boston
University and executive committee member, Fairbank Center for
East Asia Research, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.......... 2
Link, Perry, professor of Chinese language and literature,
Princeton, University, Princeton, NJ........................... 4
Hu, Ping, chief editor, Beijing Spring, board member, Human
Rights in China, and a regular commentator for Radio Free Asia,
New York, NY................................................... 8
APPENDIX
Prepared Statements
Goldman, Merle................................................... 24
Hu, Ping......................................................... 27
PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS IN CHINA
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THURSDAY, MARCH 10, 2005
Congressional-Executive
Commission on China,
Washington, DC.
The roundtable was convened, pursuant to notice, at 10:05
a.m., in room 385, Russell Senate Office Building, John Foarde
(staff director) presiding.
Also present: Susan Weld, general counsel; Carl Minzner,
senior counsel; Adam Bobrow, senior counsel; Katherine Kaup,
senior advisor; Keith Hand, senior counsel; and William Farris,
senior specialist.
Also present: Michael Yan, U.S. Department of State,
interpreter.
Mr. Foarde. Good morning. Welcome, on behalf of the Members
of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, to this
issues roundtable.
I wanted to bring to everyone's attention that the
statements of our panelists this morning will be up on the
Commission's Web site, which is www.cecc.gov, and that you
should routinely check the Web site for witness statements for
our issues roundtables. The full transcript of the proceedings
will be there in a few weeks, as well as copies of previous
roundtables and hearing transcripts.
In addition to those items, we have on the Web site news,
information and analysis about human rights and the development
of the rule of law in China. The part of the Web site known as
the ``Virtual Academy,'' I recommend to you because it is
becoming an increasingly popular part of our site.
This morning we are gathered to hear from three quite
distinguished panelists about the current crackdown on Chinese
intellectuals, and its implications. Throughout the history of
modern China, scholars and intellectuals have helped to guide
China's
political and social development. They have served as voices of
introspection, reform, and in some cases dissent, against the
excesses of China's leaders. Some observers had expressed hope
that the succession of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao to the top
leadership posts in the Party and the Chinese state might usher
in a new period of openness for Chinese intellectuals. In
recent months, however, government intimidation and harassment
of public intellectuals appears to have intensified.
In September 2004, the publication Southern People's
Weekly, a publication in the relatively progressive Southern
Daily group, published a cover story entitled, ``Fifty Public
Intellectuals Who Influenced China.'' Later that fall, official
newspapers published a series of editorials critical of the
concept of public intellectuals. Since then, numerous prominent
intellectuals, many of whom have published writings critical of
the Chinese government, have been detained, demoted, or
blacklisted from publishing.
To help us understand these developments, we have three
enormously distinguished panelists this morning. I will
introduce each before he or she speaks, but I wanted to remind
our panelists and the audience about the format of our
roundtables.
Each of the panelists will be asked to make a 10-minute
opening presentation. After about eight minutes, I will let you
know that you have two minutes remaining. After all panelists
have spoken, we will go to a question and answer session. Each
of our staff panel here will have about five minutes each to
ask a question and hear the answer, and we will continue to go
around in questioning until either the subject matter is
exhausted, which hardly seems possible, or 11:30 arrives,
whichever comes first.
So it is my great pleasure to introduce our first panelist,
Professor Merle Goldman, who is Professor Emerita of Chinese
History at Boston University, and executive committee member of
the Fairbank Center for East Asia Research at Harvard
University. Professor Goldman is the author of numerous books
and articles on Chinese intellectuals and their role in modern
China, including ``China's Intellectuals: Advise and Dissent,''
from 1981; ``Sowing the Seeds of Democracy in China: Political
Reform in the Deng Xiaoping Decade,'' from 1994, and she is
currently completing a new book entitled, ``From Comrade to
Citizen: The Struggle for Political Rights in China.'' In
addition to her teaching duties and scholarship, Professor
Goldman serves as an adjunct professor at the Foreign Service
Institute of the U.S. Department of State here in Washington. I
had the enormous pleasure, many years ago, of being her student
there.
Welcome. Over to you for your presentation.
STATEMENT OF MERLE GOLDMAN, PROFESSOR EMERITA OF CHINESE
HISTORY, BOSTON UNIVERSITY AND EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE MEMBER,
FAIRBANK CENTER FOR EAST ASIA RESEARCH, HARVARD UNIVERSITY,
CAMBRIDGE, MA
Ms. Goldman. In the short paper I wrote, I said that
``public intellectuals'' are not just a modern phenomenon in
China. They actually existed back in the Confucian era. It was
the responsibility of Confucian literati to criticize the
leaders if they diverged from Confucian morals or if they were
engaged in unjust kinds of practices. As I see it, this is a
tradition that is not unique to Western civilization. This is
also part of Chinese civilization. It was only under Mao Zedong
that the public intellectuals were silenced and not allowed to
speak.
In the post-Mao era, there is a reemergence of public
intellectuals, but there has been a change from the traditional
role of public intellectuals. In the 1980s, most of the public
intellectuals were people who became part of the reform
process; they were members of the intellectual networks of
reform leaders, such as Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang. So they
were part of the establishment.
After June 4, 1989, however, they lost their positions.
Some of them were imprisoned; others were forced to find work
as workers or small businessmen. Therefore, in the 1990s,
something new begins to happen. Public intellectuals emerge who
are not part of an official establishment and do not have
political mentors who can protect them. So the 1990s sees the
emergence, I believe, of independent public intellectuals. Some
of them had participated in the Democracy Wall movement in 1978
and 1979. Some of them were the participants in the 1989
Tiananmen movement and were put in prison. When they were
released, they went back to being public intellectuals. Since
they were no longer members of the establishment, they became
freelancers.
Something very new was happening here. They had access to
publishing through private contractors. They were able to get
their ideas across through the foreign press because the
Chinese were opening to the outside world so that they could
give interviews on Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, the BBC,
and in Hong Kong that would be broadcast back to China. They
also publicized their ideas on the Internet. These were all
areas in which they were able to express themselves and get
their ideas before the public.
By the late 1990s, a new phenomenon developed: the effort
to establish an opposition political party, the China Democracy
Party. This party is the first time there is a joining together
of intellectuals with workers and small business people in an
unofficial political organization. The party included veterans
of Democracy Wall and the 1989 Tiananmen movements; it also
included workers who were dissatisfied with increasing
exploitative working conditions. Among the members of the
opposition party were small business people who were once
public intellectuals. They had been thrown out of the
establishment, and then turned to the market to make a living.
It is not the large entrepreneurs or the middle entrepreneurs,
but the small entrepreneurs, who were once intellectuals, who
helped finance the effort to build an opposition party.
So what you see developing are freelance intellectuals, in
combination with other social groups--workers and small
business people who help to establish an opposition party.
That, to me, is something very new in the People's Republic of
China. The question I have always had is what role can the
United States, or human rights activists outside of China, play
in helping these people?
I mean, the United States cannot be right there on the
scene as it is today in Iraq. We can only be a catalyst. But I
think there are ways in which we can help and I am sure other
speakers will talk about that as well. Because China, unlike
under Mao, really does care what the outside world thinks about
it and wants to become a respected member of the international
community, it is open to outside pressure. I saw that when I
was a member of the U.S. delegation to the U.N. Commission on
Human Rights during the Clinton era. At Geneva I saw how much
effort the Chinese put in to making sure they were not
criticized in that forum.
My belief is that the threat of criticism plays a great
role in influencing China's actions on human rights. One area
in which I think we can make a specific difference is on the
issue of having the National People's Congress ratify the U.N.
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The Chinese signed onto
the covenant in 1998, but they say it is not operable until it
is ratified by the National People's Congress. We can bring
pressure on the National People's Congress to ratify the
Covenant.
I think the very fact that the Chinese have already
released political prisoners early, before their term is up, is
an indication that they seek to stop any kind of criticism of
them at the annual meeting of the U.N. Commission on Human
Rights. Even though China's having signed the Covenant on Civil
and Political Rights may not affect what the leadership does,
it does affect the people who are demanding human rights in
China. We saw the same thing in the former Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe. The Helsinki Accords played a great role in
activating the dissidents and the human rights activists,
though it did not play much of a role on the Soviet leaders
until Gorbachev. Nevertheless, it did play a role in bringing
pressure from below.
So, I guess I would like to conclude with saying that I
believe that the way we are going to see change on the issue of
human rights in China is through pressure from below, coming
from intellectuals, workers, small business people, plus
pressure from outside. Hopefully someday there will be a leader
in China who will say, ``All right, we are moving toward some
kind of democracy here, let us recognize it,'' as occurred in
Taiwan in the late 1980s.
So, on that optimistic note, I will conclude.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Merle Goldman appears in the
appendix.]
Mr. Foarde. Thank you very much for giving us a good start
with a lot of rich issues to explore during our question and
answer session.
I would now go on to recognize Professor Perry Link,
Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at Princeton
University. Professor Link has been a distinguished scholar for
many years, specializing in 20th century Chinese literature. He
has written widely on Chinese literature and culture. His
publications include: ``Evening Chats in Beijing,'' (1993), a
discussion of modern China as viewed through the eyes of
Chinese intellectuals; and ``The Uses of Literature: Life in
the Socialist Chinese Literary System,'' in 2000.
Professor Link, of course, also co-edited the ``Tiananmen
Papers,'' which provided an inside account of key leadership
deliberations over the Tiananmen democracy protests in 1989. In
addition to this teaching duties at Princeton, Perry Link
serves on the Board of Advisors of Beijing Spring, a Chinese
language magazine dedicated to the promotion of human rights,
democracy, and social justice in China.
Perry Link, welcome. Over to you for your comments.
STATEMENT OF PERRY LINK, PROFESSOR OF CHINESE LANGUAGE AND
LITERATURE, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY, PRINCETON, NJ
Mr. Link. Thank you. I want to try to make three points in
my 10 minutes.
One is that public intellectuals' willingness to speak out
has declined, in my view, over the last 15 years. You just
heard about my book, ``Evening Chats in Beijing,'' which makes
a lot of what Merle just mentioned about the traditional role
of the Chinese intellectual to ``take responsibility for all
under heaven,'' (yi tianxia wei ji ren) and to speak truth to
power.
I regret to say that I think there has been a considerable
decline in that spirit, partly because the Communist Party has
been successful in co-opting intellectuals by using higher
salaries, better housing, higher status, access to travel
abroad, more publishing freedom for writers who can write just
about whatever they want to now--as long as you do not cross
the government--and so on.
The second main point I would like to make, and here I will
take a little more time, is that, despite my pessimistic first
note, I think that public intellectuals do remain, and are,
important. They are fewer than before, and fall into several
kinds of fairly disparate spheres, which I will call (1)
Internet essayists, (2) journalists, (3) muckraking novelists,
(4) special cause activists, and (5) lawyers.
1. Internet essayists. We know about the recent detentions
of Yu Jie and Liu Xiaobo. People like this are important
because they provide a critical voice. But if we ask what their
impact is, we need to divide the question between an
international, external impact and the internal impact inside
China.
Inside China, the impact is not as great as one would hope.
These writers are banned from print publication. They do
publish on the Internet, and there are, of course, about 90
million Internet users in China. But the Internet users are
blocked, usually successfully, by 50,000 or more Internet
police. The actual readers of these Internet essayists are
primarily the overseas diaspora. Inside China, only a small
group of sophisticated computer users who can get around the
government's firewall get access to these writings.
It is worth asking why the ruling authorities allow these
dissident voices onto the Internet at all. They could easily
detain them and keep them off the Internet if they wanted. One
answer, of course, is that there would be an international
outcry if such famous voices were squelched. But an even more
important factor, in my view--if I imagine myself in the place
of the authorities--is that outside China it enhances the
government's image to be able to show that people are
publishing what looks like liberal thought from inside China.
Defenders of the regime--at the U.N. Human Rights meetings in
Geneva, for example--can point to them and say, ``Look, Liu
Xiaobo is publishing pretty wild stuff, so is China's media
control not loosening up? '' But this induces a fundamental
misperception, because most media control--the bottom of the
iceberg--is not loosening up at all.
2. Journalists. The journalist He Qinglian has written a
couple of very important books in the last five years:
``China's Quagmire'' (Zhongguo de xianjing) and ``How the
Chinese Government Controls the Media'' (Zhongguo zhengfu ruhe
kongzhi meiti). She, of course, is in exile from China now. But
inside China--and I don't have time to go into detail here--
Liao Yiwu, with his ``Interviews from the Bottom of Chinese
Society'' (Zhongguo diceng fangtanlu), Xiao Shu, with his
``Harbingers of History'' (Lishi de xiansheng), Chen Guidi and
Wu Chuntao, with their ``Investigation of the Chinese
Peasantry'' (Zhongguo nongmin diaocha) have all written very
important books. Some in this group are sociologists, like Cao
Jinqing, with his ``China Along the Yellow River'' (Huanghebian
de Zhongguo). These are all important works that remind people
that there are basic truths beneath the fluff and the rosy
surfaces that get projected not only by the Communist Party but
by rosy-eyed Westerners.
It is worth noting, though, that there are fewer of these
books now than there were even a few years ago under Jiang
Zemin. I am not enthusiastic about making Jiang Zemin look
good, yet this statement is true.
3. Muckraking novelists. Here again, a professor could go
on for hours, but let me be brief. In the 1990s, long novels by
Lu Tianming, Chen Fang, Zhang Ping, Wang Yuewen, Liu Ping, and
others have exposed corruption in China. These are partly
entertainment, to be sure. There is murder, sex, detectives,
and so on. But they are more than that. They expose wrongdoing,
and thrive on a strong public interest in watching wrongdoing
get exposed and allow readers to let off steam vicariously.
Things can be said in this fiction that are remarkably
bold, so long as they come out of the mouths of villains. A
villain can say the Communist Party is done for, that it is not
going to last even a couple of more years--and so long as the
character is a villain, the novelist can get away with the
statement. When it reaches a reader, though, the reader can
take it as he or she likes.
4. Special case advocates. Here I mean people like Ding
Zilin and her Tiananmen Mothers Movement, or the very important
movement for AIDS activism led by Dr. Gao Yaojie, Hu Jia, Wan
Yanhai, and others. Efforts like this do a lot of good. Here
intellectuals engage people ``on the ground,'' making a
difference where, in the American cliche, ``the rubber hits the
road.''
5. Lawyers. I want to spend a little time on this topic
because I think this is becoming a very interesting and
important kind of public intellectual. Beginning with Zhang
Sizhi, who defended Wang Juntao, to Mo Shaoping, who defended
several dissidents, to Zheng Enchong, imprisoned for his
defense work, to Guo Guoting, who defends journalists and Falun
Gong believers, to Pu Zhiqiang, who is defending the authors of
``Investigation of the Chinese Peasantry''--and several
others--quite a cadre of very useful legal ``public
intellectuals'' seems to be emerging.
Let me read a few sentences from Vaclav Havel, ``The Power
of the Powerless,'' that tell why even futile legal activity
can be important under Communist rule. Havel writes--of
Communist Czechoslovakia--``Because the system cannot do
without the law, because it is hopelessly tied down by the
necessity of pretending the laws are observed, it is compelled
to react in some way to these kinds of appeals that lawyers can
make. Demanding that the laws be upheld is, thus, an act of
living within the truth.''
At a minimum, appeal to the law in China today has this
same function of exposure of hypocrisy. Increasingly, though,
it has been doing more than that. Lawyers are actually getting
some very good things done these days, and for a couple of very
interesting reasons.
Twenty years ago, the ``work unit'' (gongzuo danwei) system
still held sway in Chinese cities, and virtually all social
conflicts were settled by work unit leaders. Today the power
and scope of work units both are greatly reduced, but of course
there are still conflicts in society, and they still need to be
settled somehow, so courts and lawyers have become much more
important even if the leaders had not planned that this happen.
The increased role for lawyers makes space for those among them
who want to try to nudge political rights forward.
Another interesting aspect of the role of lawyers is that
they by nature abstract the question of rights. Traditionally
in Chinese politics, and especially in Communist Chinese
politics, battles were conceived as having only two sides: I'm
right and you're wrong; the Party is right and Falun Gong is
wrong, etc. There was no in-between position. But a lawyer,
now, can distance himself from a ``wrong'' point of view but
still defend the person who holds it. He can defend Falun Gong
without being vulnerable to the charge of believing Falun Gong.
Hence his position serves the function of ``abstracting'' the
concept of rights above the question of substantive right-or-
wrong. This is a first step to universalizing rights. The
Communist Party is not used to handling this kind of problem.
Rulers may come to realize that lawyers are undermining
authoritarian power, but they will not easily be able to crack
down on the trend, because, as Havel points out, their
legitimacy depends on the pretense that rule of law is
observed.
I want to turn to my third main point now, but make it only
briefly because of time constraints. It is this: if there is
hope for political reform in China, or--dare we say it--regime
change, I am not sure it will come from intellectuals. I am not
as optimistic about them as I was 15 years ago. I think the
impetus for change is more likely to come from the less
educated classes.
The West tends to underestimate the sea of change in
popular Chinese thinking that grew out of the Cultural
Revolution. Although these results were hardly what Mao Zedong
planned, the Cultural Revolution years did revolutionize the
way a generation of people think about their rights and their
ability to protest.
The distinguished writer Liu Binyan made a very interesting
point to me the other day. He asked: why was the suicide rate
in China in the 1990s so much higher than it was in the 1940s?
There certainly was much more money in society, generally, in
the 1990s than the 1940s, yet more people killed themselves in
the 1990s.
He says that this was because in the 1940s, the poor and
the destitute did not much expect that they should have respect
or rights. But during the Cultural Revolution, with its
combination of egalitarian ideology and social chaos, there
grew a notion that ``I ought to get respect if I am a worker or
farmer--and if I don't, there'd better be a good reason why
not.'' But now, when you look around at society, there do not
seem to be any fair reasons why the rich are rich and the poor
are poor. It looks like corruption and
unequal opportunity are the reasons. The ``losers'' feel
insulted, humiliated, disgusted--hence the higher suicide rate.
The other source from which change might come--Merle
referred to this briefly a moment ago--is a move by a top
leader. Frankly, I do not pin any hopes on Hu Jintao in this
regard.
The compiler of the Tiananmen Papers recently told me he
does not think that top-inspired political reform can happen in
China until about 2020, or at the very best maybe 2010. But to
me it is significant that he still believes top-down change to
be a possibility. A top leader could look at the situation and
see the historic opportunity to be a world-class figure in
Chinese history by ending the rickety, corrupt, and very un-
modern political system that still burdens the Chinese people
today.
Mr. Foarde. Thank you very much, Perry. Again, a rich
presentation with many issues to go into during our question
and answer session.
It is now my privilege to introduce Mr. Hu Ping. Mr. Hu is
chief editor of Beijing Spring. He has been the chief editor of
this monthly Chinese-language magazine that is dedicated to the
promotion of human rights, democracy, and social justice in
China since 1993. He is also a board member of Human Rights in
China, the respected NGO, and a regular commentator for Radio
Free Asia. Mr. Hu received his master's degree in philosophy
from Beijing University and studied at Harvard University.
During the Democracy Wall movement of 1979 in Beijing, Mr. Hu
published a long essay entitled, ``On Freedom of Speech.'' In
1980, he was elected as a People's Delegate in China's first
free local election, and he is also former chairman of the
Chinese Alliance for Democracy.
Mr. Hu will speak in the Chinese language and will be
assisted this morning by our friend and colleague, Mr. Michael
Yan, one of the premier interpreters and translators from the
U.S. Department of State.
Michael, welcome, and thank you for your help.
Mr. Yan. Thank you, sir.
Mr. Foarde. Mr. Hu.
STATEMENT OF HU PING, CHIEF EDITOR, BEIJING SPRING, BOARD
MEMBER, HUMAN RIGHTS IN CHINA, NEW YORK, NY; INTERPRETED BY
MICHAEL YAN, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Mr. Hu. I would like to thank everybody for giving me this
honor to be here today.
Today I will be talking on three issues. The first is the
fact that since Hu Jintao took office, the plight of the public
intellectuals in China has not improved; in fact, it has
worsened. As a matter of fact, the lack of improvement, in
itself, is tantamount to worsening, because the same oppression
becomes more and more onerous as time goes on, and the
consequences of that oppression become more and more severe.
Not long ago, the Hu Jintao regime unleashed a new crackdown on
intellectual circles. This shows that Hu Jintao and his
predecessor, Jiang Zemin, are cut from the same cloth.
The Chinese Communist leaders are deeply cognizant of the
fact that their political power is entirely based on the fear
of the masses. Consequently, if they are to preserve their own
rule, they must keep the people in fear. This means they cannot
appear amicable and big-hearted in front of the masses. In
their mind, if the people feel the authorities are amicable and
big-hearted, they will dare to speak out, saying things they
would never have dared otherwise. Then they would dare to speak
out demands they would not have dared otherwise. If that
happens, of course, the authorities would have to make more
efforts to crack down. That is why, after Hu Jintao took
office, he took a hard-line approach to everything, with a goal
of consolidating the rule of his Party. That way he would nip
it in the bud, and that way he really does not have to crack
down on a bigger number of people. That is why many people
outside of China are feeling disappointed by what Hu Jintao has
done, but actually that is precisely what he wanted to achieve
in the first place.
After Hu Jintao took office, he reiterated time and time
again his concerns for the disadvantaged groups. However, he
absolutely does not permit the people to initiate any open
collective actions or to stand up to defend their own rights,
because they are really afraid of the possibility that the
people would obtain the ability to engage in independent
collective activities. Also, the Chinese authorities are well
aware of the fact that the allocation of wealth in China is
based on injustice, and all that allocation is illegitimate. In
China, the poverty of the poor exists for different reasons. It
is not the product of history. It is not the product of the
market. It is the product of political power.
As we can imagine, if the people do have their political
power, do have their rights, they are not going to be satisfied
with a tad more added to the unemployment, or a small
additional subsidy for the poor. They will, first, demand that
a group of people who use their power to enrich themselves turn
over the property they plundered, and that, of course, will be
a threat to the regime itself. That is why the so-called
concern for the disadvantaged touted by the Hu Jintao regime,
in reality, is no more than a desire to employ controlled
oppression and to maintain continued squeezing.
Second, I would like to talk about the control that the
Chinese Communist regime has on the intellectuals in China. On
the surface, it seems that the intellectuals in China are very
active in today's politics. On the Internet, even in the
official media, discussion of certain public issues is quite
open, and even quite likely. Some dissidents express themselves
without fear and nothing happens to them. They sit at home
quite well. Nothing happens. However, I must bring to your
attention the fact of a principle being implemented by
authorities in China today, and that principle is that all
people are not equal before the law.
When the authorities handle issues related to expression
and speech, there is no single standard measure used. The
standards vary by person, by time, and by place. That is why we
cannot draw the conclusion, based solely on the situation of a
few well-known dissidents, that freedom of speech in China has
expanded. Of course, the number of people who have been
arrested and who have been detained is very high, and that puts
China in first place in the world. However, this should not be
the only yardstick with which we measure freedom of speech in
China. Nations that arrest a smaller number of dissidents do
not necessarily have more freedom of expression than those that
arrest many.
We know that traditional autocratic regimes use
investigation and punishment after the act to control freedom
of speech, whereas, the Communist Party in China takes a
preventive approach before anything even happens.
If we liken the traditional method of autocracy and its
treatment of free expression to killing people or butchering
children, then the Communist autocratic methods are not limited
to killing people and slaughtering babies, but also includes
abortion and contraception.
Now, the effects of this oppression are not only more
severe and far-reaching, they are also more insidious and more
apt to fool people. On the surface, the yardstick used as a
measure for the control of free speech by the authorities is
broader than before, with the standards not only looser than
those of the Mao era, but also even looser than those of the
1980s. Now, there are many factors that resulted in this. One,
with the June 4th massacre as the landmark, the Chinese
Communist regime has lost the traditional support of belief. It
has been transformed into a rule of naked violence. Violent
rule results in people's passiveness and political apathy. It
means widespread cynicism. Under these circumstances, the role
that the intellectuals play is much, much smaller in today's
China.
Simply put, the government really does not care about your
criticism any more. The attitude is, ``You yell about what you
want, and I will do what I like, all the same; what can you do
to me? '' I think Wang Shuo put it very well by saying, ``I'm a
rogue, who should I fear?'' That means the authorities have
become even more shameless.
So that is why liberal intellectuals all over feel that
their situation has worsened in these circumstances. These
activities still hold on tenaciously among the people, but it
is very difficult for them to develop any further.
Third, I would like to talk about the fact that, contrary
to the early hopes of many people, economic reforms and
economic growth in China have not put China on a pathway to
freedom and democracy. On the contrary, the reform and the
economic growth have become the main reason the authorities use
to claim to one-party rule and to deny freedom and democracy.
From Li Peng and Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao,
leaders have taken China's successful economic growth as their
basis to justify the crackdown on June 4th as necessary and
right. They use it to show that a one-party autocracy is
necessary and right. In reality, China's privatization of the
``China model'' or the ``China miracle,'' has not brought out
democracy and freedom. They have thrown obstacles to developing
democracy and freedom.
If the truth can be told here, privatization in China was
nothing more than officials using their power to misappropriate
resources that originally belonged to all the people. This sort
of privatization reduces the ``transaction cost'' to a minimum,
making it far quicker and more effective than privatization
accomplished with democratic participation. However, such
reforms are bound to be of the type that can never be approved
by the people. The blocks, the groups of people who profit
immensely from all this, are those who are most in fear of
democracy and most stoutly oppose it. This is because these
officials know very well that if they open the door to freedom
and democracy, they will not only lose their monopoly on
political power, but also, very possibly, will be called out by
the people on charges of economic corruption.
I would like to close this by saying that in today's China,
the Mao era is gone forever. Even the ruling class itself is
not willing to go back to the days of Mao. Today's China must
concern herself with something that seems even more old-
fashioned, but which could be an even more persistent type of
oppression: that of rule by people who believe in no ``ism''
but wield enormous power, and are determined to use every means
at their disposal to preserve it.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Hu appears in the appendix.]
Mr. Foarde. Thank you, Mr. Hu, for, also, a very rich and
deep presentation. We will be coming back to some of your
themes in our question period.
I would like to give our panelists a moment to rest their
voices and gather their thoughts, and make a brief
administrative announcement.
The next CECC issues roundtable will be held next Monday,
March 14, at 2 p.m. in room 2255 of the Rayburn House Office
Building, over on the other side of the Capitol, entitled,
``China's New Regulation on Religious Affairs: A Paradigm
Shift?'' This roundtable will examine the Chinese government's
new regulation on religion, which became effective on March 1.
We have three quite distinguished panelists for that
roundtable as well: Dr. Carol Lee Hamrin from George Mason
University, here in the area; Professor Daniel Bays of the
William Spoelhof Teacher-Scholar in History at Calvin College
in Grand Rapids, MI; and Mickey Spiegel, senior researcher at
Human Rights Watch/Asia in New York City. So we hope to see all
of you on Monday afternoon at 2 p.m. in 2255 Rayburn.
With that, let us go to our question and answer period. I
will exercise the prerogative of the chair and address this
question to all of our panelists.
Given that you have given us an extremely sobering
assessment of the condition of the public intellectual in
China, and given the history of public intellectuals in China
that you have limned for us since 1949, what would possess
anyone in China to want to become one of the members of the
four categories, Perry Link, that you traced in today's
environment? What motivates people to do this? Anyone can
begin.
Mr. Link. Well, for some, idealism. I think that the
traditional Confucian ideal of serving the good of society and
thinking that that is a right thing to do still has life. It is
somewhat in recess now, but it is too big and too strong to
have died completely.
To put another possibility on the table, though, it is
sometimes hard to separate idealism from careerism in contexts
like this. There can be a certain careerist benefit in making a
name for oneself as a dissident intellectual. People
occasionally make a splash in hopes of becoming well-known for
having made the splash. But to view them as purely so motivated
is usually too cynical. Often idealism and careerism are both
there, mixed.
Ms. Goldman. But besides that tradition, I think, also,
Chinese are very much influenced by the West. The West does
have a big influence through the Internet. The Internet is
censored; there is no question about that. But they find all
kinds of ways, as I find out when I interview these people, to
get around the censorship. I am amazed of what they can do to
get around the censorship. If they are blocked at one Web site,
they go to another one, and so forth. So, they learn about the
West and there is a great attraction to those interested in the
free exchange of ideas.
You are right. Even under Mao, there were intellectuals,
like Liu Binyan, who spoke out. The difference was that under
Mao they did it when he let them do it, as in the ``Hundred
Flowers movement.'' Now they speak out and act politically
whenever they want to.
I would just like to add one other thing. I do not
necessarily agree with Hu Ping. I believe that the move to the
market and the move to the outside world has really made the
political system less rigid. Let me put it this way. The
oppression is less rigid; they have found ways to get around
it. There is more freedom of speech, at least in private
meetings and even in academic meetings. I am amazed, when I go
to some academic meetings in China, at the kinds of things they
say.
What there is not, is more freedom of association. Any
group that wants to join together for some kind of political
purpose will quickly be repressed.
But on the whole, among themselves, they can say almost
anything--Perry has written about this very well. So, I am not
as pessimistic as the others here.
I do agree that the Chinese young people, students are less
politically involved than in the 1980s. But they also want more
freedom and more political participation.
My two fellow panelists have said intellectuals are not
going to play the political role they had in the past. In the
last part of my forthcoming book, I deal with ordinary people
demanding human rights, whether they are peasants or they are
workers who are beginning to demand political rights. Usually,
it is an intellectual among them who helps them articulate what
they believe or helps them in what they are doing. So even if
the intellectuals, as a group, are not going to play a role in
political affairs, they will play a role, I believe, with other
social classes. That is where I think they get their clout.
Mr. Foarde. Useful. Thank you.
Mr. Hu, do you have a comment?
Mr. Hu. Now, that is a very interesting issue. A lot of
times we find ourselves asking ourselves the same questions.
``Why did we put ourselves in situations like that? Why did we
speak out, saying things that the authorities did not want to
hear? Why did we, as intellectuals, do that? ''
In addition to the reasons that Professor Link and
Professor Goldman have listed just now, there is another
reason. That is, in recent years there is a bigger and bigger
group of young people who do have some religious beliefs. They
have to somehow find some sort of moral support to prop
themselves up so that they can keep doing what they think is
right, but not officiated by other people.
Another fact I would like to draw everybody's attention to
is that compared to the 1980s, or compared to even the 1990s,
the role that intellectuals in today's China play is much more
marginalized.
Of course, there is another fact which is that in today's
China, intellectuals have become really meek and docile. They
know what to say, at what time, and they know what not to say
under what circumstances. So when they do speak out, the
outside world would be under the impression that these are
daring people, they are speaking out as a matter of fact. These
intellectuals who are speaking out are speaking within the
dictates of what they can and cannot do.
Mr. Foarde. Thank you all very much. A useful set of
responses.
These roundtables take a great deal of teamwork to
organize, but there is always at least one person at the head
of the organizational pyramid. I am happy today to recognize
that person, my colleague, Keith Hand, who is a senior counsel
with the Commission staff. Over to you for some questions,
Keith.
Mr. Hand. Thanks, John. Thanks to all of you for coming and
for a fascinating set of presentations.
I wanted to discuss a bit more deeply an issue that
Professor Goldman just touched on, that is the relationship
between intellectuals and the public at large. We have talked a
lot about state repression and how the new regime is dealing
with intellectuals. Has the public view of the role of
intellectuals changed? Do intellectuals still hold a special
place in the eyes of the public? If intellectuals were able to
circumvent some of the state controls we have talked about
today, would they be able to mobilize public opinion?
Ms. Goldman. That is a good question. Here, I guess I agree
with my colleagues on this. The intellectuals today do not have
the kind of honorable role that they had in the Confucian era,
or even in the Mao era. Today they are seen as part of the
commercialization of Chinese society. They are out to get as
much as they can; they are less interested in political issues.
There is no question about that.
Yet, I still think--and this gets back to the other
question--there is a residual desire to play a political role
and a residual respect for intellectuals. If someone has a
little more education and they become part of some kind of a
protest movement, they usually move to the fore. They usually
are the ones who help organize it or help articulate what the
participants want. So, whether it is workers or it is peasants,
it is usually the one with a little more education who plays a
leadership role and is able not only to mobilize, but also
articulate what these views are.
I would agree with my panelists here that the ordinary
people are getting a sense of rights. You can see this all over
China today. Last summer, I was in Xi'an and I saw huge posters
in front of the Big Goose Pagoda. They were put up by peasants
who were complaining about their land being taken away for
modernization projects. But what arguments did they use? The
posters said that their rights had been taken away. They said
that they wanted back their land and wanted back their rights.
In other words, they were not just acting to demand their
rights. They are beginning to articulate those rights as well.
Now, it is not clear whether the intellectuals have gotten
to them with that concept or it is coming out of their own
experience, it is probably both. So even though the
intellectuals are seen as part of China's modern
commercialization, I still think they play this residual role
as public intellectuals.
Mr. Link. Let me take another crack at what I tried to say
about the groundswell of secular change during the last 50
years in ordinary Chinese people's consciousness of their
independence. I hesitate to use the word ``rights,'' because
that almost crosses a borderline that is a little bit too
modern and Western for what I mean. But just to try to put a
nub on it, let's go back to the protest movement in 1989 when,
of course, at Tiananmen Square there was lots of superficial
representation of Western democratic influences. You will
remember students bandying Lord Acton's famous phrase about
absolute power corrupting absolutely. Dan Rather was at the
square, Mikhail Gorbachev came, and so on. It was all called a
Democracy Movement and seemed to spring from Western influence.
In fact, though, the power of the movement came from the bottom
up. The discontent and the demonstrations were not just in
Western-influenced Beijing but all over China--as the Tiananmen
Papers make clear. There was hardly a provincial capital that
did not see major demonstrations, and many middle-sized cities
had them as well. All this was not because Dan Rather was in
the square in Beijing. It was because of discontent that came
deep out of China's recent historical experience.
Much of it originated in the Cultural Revolution years,
when, along with all the hate and turmoil, people began to
think, ``I am a person, I can stand up, I can argue back, I can
criticize my leadership.'' Again: I do not believe that Mao
foresaw the effects of what his movement was doing, but his
movement unleashed the effects nonetheless. Then, when the
unfairness of the 1980s became so obvious--when people saw the
massive misappropriation of
resources by officials called guandao--they grew angry and
indignant. We need to understand that long-term groundswell in
popular thought.
Still--with all that said--I do agree with Merle that it
tends to be true in Chinese history that disaffection gets
channeled through or captured by an intellectual, or a quasi-
intellectual. This pattern is visible in many of the peasant
revolts at the ends of earlier dynasties. Rebellions usually
had a quasi-intellectual or religious leader. This, of course,
is one reason why Falun Gong looks so frightening to the
current regime: the spark that a charismatic leader provides
can be important.
Mr. Hand. Thank you.
Mr. Foarde. Let me go on and recognize our friend and
colleague Kate Kaup, who is with us as a special advisor here
during 2005 on her sabbatical year from her professorship at
Furman University in Greenville, SC. Kate, please.
Ms. Kaup. Thank you. And thank you to all the panelists for
coming, and for your interesting comments.
I would like to pick up the discussion of the role of the
peasantry and the workers that both Dr. Goldman and Dr. Link
mentioned. Several political theorists have noted the
contribution of the middle class in democratic transitions
outside of Asia. Bruce Dickson and other China specialists have
discussed the role of the middle class in China as being
somewhat unique, however. Will you speak a bit about whether or
not there are any public intellectuals emerging from the
entrepreneurial and middle classes?
Ms. Goldman. Certainly, in Western history it was what we
have called the bourgeoisie who made the revolution, and they
became an independent middle class.
I think one of the big differences in China is that there
is a fast-growing middle class, getting very wealthy, but they
are not independent. They do not have an independent status.
They do not have the rule of law to help them maintain their
independent status. Most important, they have been co-opted
into the Party. The largest percentage of people going into the
Party today are the new business people. That is what the
``Three Represents'' of Jiang Zemin is all about.
So like the literati who were co-opted into the
establishment, this large middle class is being co-opted.
However, the people I am talking about--members of the small
entrepreneurs--are people who the Party will not take because
of their past political activities. In other words, some people
who were in the Democracy Wall movement and the Tiananmen
demonstrations or demonstrations that Perry mentioned that are
going on all over China. What do they do to make a living? They
have gone into some kind of business, and it is not at a very
high level.
But whether they are engaged in private contracting, or
whether they are in some kind of technology, they are willing
to put money into some kind of political activity such as the
China Democracy Party. Some of its members were on the fringes
of the emerging middle class.
So, I think where you are going to see the change in China
coming, is from ordinary people, workers, peasants, as well as
some of these intellectuals we talked about, and some of these
marginal people in the middle class. It is not going to come
from an independent bourgeoisie. I would like to think it
would, but so far there is no evidence of that.
Mr. Foarde. Would anyone else like to remark?
Mr. Link. I agree with that.
Mr. Hu. In China, what is happening is that it is very hard
to come to a conclusion by a very simple process, predicting
what is going to happen in China. It really depends on the big
picture, on the environment in which these events happen. To
put it very simply, the June 4th movement, in 1989, was a big
watershed. Before the June 4th event, with the deepening of
economic reforms, people were coming up with more and more
demands for political reforms. However, after the June 4th
event, the opposite became true. The more successful the
economic reform was, the less demand there was for political
reform. The same thing can be said of the intellectuals, as
well as of the middle class.
Before the June 4th event, the status of intellectuals got
higher and higher. With that ascending status, they had more
and more political demands. However, after the June 4th event,
some of these people got well-to-do and some of these people
got better treatment from the authorities. With that, they had
fewer and fewer political demands.
Ms. Goldman. Can I just say, I really disagree with Hu Ping
on this one. Before the 1980s, intellectuals were talking about
political reforms within the Marxist-Leninist framework. In
other words, they were humanistic Marxists, and in some ways
they echoed what was going on in Eastern Europe. After June
4th, Marxism-Leninism, as a motivating ideology, I believe,
became bankrupt. So for the first time, intellectuals are
beginning to contemplate another political system.
What is unusual is that they use Marx to do this. They do
it very cleverly. Marx, after all, talked about, when you have
a change in the substructure then you have to have a change in
your superstructure. So, obviously as China moves to a market
economy, it must also move to a different political structure.
They are talking about systems of checks and balances and some
are talking about an opposition political party. The ones who
are talking about political reform are asking for much more
radical reforms than they were in the 1980s.
Mr. Foarde. Thank you. Useful.
Let me recognize Susan Roosevelt Weld, who is our general
counsel on the Commission staff, for another round of
questions. Susan.
Ms. Weld. My first question is quite simple. It is whether
Wen Jiabao has any influence on Hu Jintao in the tenor of the
leadership's attitude toward intellectuals. Just after the two
came into power we saw, on May 4, at a speech on the campus of
Qinghua University, Wen Jiabao calling on the ideals of the May
4th movement, and saying China should push forward with them.
Is there anything you could tell us about that?
Ms. Goldman. Let me put it this way. I think there was
great anticipation that a younger generation of leaders would
be more liberal and more open. Initially, it seemed that way,
especially because they were interested in dealing with the
growing inequalities, especially in the countryside. We thought
that they were going to be a much more receptive, or certainly
flexible kind of leadership. But in some ways--and this comes
from the people I have talked to in China--they say it is much
more repressive today than it was in the later years of Jiang
Zemin.
Even a famous political scientist--I mentioned him in my
statement, Liu Junning, who was thrown out of the Chinese
Academy of Social Sciences by Jiang Zemin personally, said he
could say more, and he could do more under Jiang Zemin than he
can today. He is the one whose Web site is being closed down
constantly.
I will give you another example of increasing repression of
public intellectuals. The leadership says they are concerned
about the increasing inequalities among the peasants. Yet, when
a survey of the Chinese peasants, written by a couple based on
their work in Anhui province, came out describing the
inequalities and showing what caused them, China's new leaders
banned the book the next month.
Unless the leadership approves, public intellectuals cannot
express their own criticisms. And if they do it is likely they
will be repressed. If it is not a designated representative, an
intellectual that represents the leadership, then they crack
down. So, I see this as a much more repressive regime than the
later years of Jiang Zemin.
Because Hu Jintao came out of the China Youth League, which
was always considered to be the center for more liberal
political views, such as those of Hu Yaobang, we expected more
of the new leadership .
Mr. Foarde. Do either of the other panelists want to
address that question?
Mr. Hu. Well, talking about Hu Jintao and Wen Jiaobao's
concerns for the disadvantaged groups, one example I would like
to cite here is the attention they are paying to ``xinfang,''
which means to appeal to a higher authority with your concerns.
Now, as a result of the reforms over the years, there
emerged a lot of disadvantaged groups who find themselves in
difficulty. They find it necessary to cut across several layers
and appeal to higher authorities with their concerns.
On the other hand, since Hu and Wen took power, they have
been saying that they are close to the people. That, in itself,
kind of encouraged these ``letters and visits.'' But, as a
matter of fact, both of them know very well that this method of
appealing to the higher authorities, cutting across several
layers of authority, by doing this, nothing can be resolved. It
does not really help at all.
Of course, both of them know very well that a democratic
system would very easily take care of issues like this. Either
you have a very independent media or you have an independent
judiciary system, and all these problems would be taken care of
automatically. Of course, they reject the adoption of
democracy, they reject the emergence of an independent media,
an independent judiciary system. Instead, they do it with what
is in place. That is why the whole situation remains the same.
Mr. Foarde. Thank you very much.
Let me now recognize my friend and colleague, Carl Minzner,
who is a senior counsel with the Commission staff. Carl.
Mr. Minzner. Thank you very much, John. Thanks to all of
our participants for coming here today.
I want to address the portrayal in the American or Western
media that all Chinese public intellectuals are cut from the
same cloth; that they are all promoting democracy, that they
are all promoting limited government. I want to ask the
question, is that true? Is that an accurate portrayal? To what
extent are public intellectuals in China taking up the flag of
nationalism, such as with the book, ``China Can Say No,''
espousing policies that might be more hard line than government
policies? That would be the first question.
The second question is, is there a difference in treatment
by the Chinese government of these intellectuals vis-a-vis
those who are promoting democracy and limited government?
Ms. Goldman. There is certainly much greater intellectual
pluralism today in China than there was under Mao, and in fact,
more even than there was in the 1980s. There is, I think, also
an increase in nationalist feeling. I have not yet been able to
pinpoint it in the intellectual community and I have not seen
any recent works on that. But that certainly is a rising
source.
The more nationalist views appear to be coming from the
younger generation. This is also true of what we call the ``new
left.'' They want to go back to some of the ideals of the Mao
era in the Great Leap Forward, and even in the Cultural
Revolution. In other words, some form of collective ownership,
some form of direct democracy. They give those as their two
major examples.
Of all the ideological groups, the one that the leadership
has most directly repressed is the neo-Maoists. But they are
dying out. The neo-Maoists wanted to go back to Mao before the
Great Leap. This was something the leadership did not want to
do. The next group that the leadership has repressed are the
liberal intellectuals because they are calling for a change in
the political system. They are losing their positions in the
establishment. They have now become part of this non-
establishment group.
The leadership has not yet turned against the new left nor
the nationalists. Now, it could be that if some of these
intellectuals, particularly the nationalists become too fervent
and too jingoistic, they might crack down because jingoists
would hurt the leadership in their relations with the outside
world. Thus, so far the only intellectuals who have been
criticized by the new leaders have been the liberals and neo-
Maoists.
Mr. Link. I would say that we need to notice two things
about independent thinking in China--and maybe anywhere. One is
that, almost by definition, it exhibits variety. So what Merle
sketches here about liberal intellectuals, about the more
radical crypto-Maoists--and, of course, there are many shades
in between--are all there.
The other thing to say, though, is that from the current
government's point of view, no independent political thinking
is really welcome. The government does not like people to think
differently from the way they are supposed to think--to put it
very bluntly.
So the government takes what you might call a pragmatic
attitude toward this variety of opinion: it is ready to
cooperate with those who express views that are supportive of
or compatible with its own views--but will ignore or repress
others. The question of the difference between the ``new left''
(xinzuopai) and the government is subtle, because sometimes the
new left thinking coincides with and is useful to the
government, but other times not. I do not think there is a
fundamental trust there.
And if you go all the way over to the ``China Can Say No''
people, then the confluence of what the Party wants and what
intellectuals are saying is pretty complete. But in cases like
that, one has to ask whether we are observing a ``natural
confluence'' of opinion or a case of people who lack
intellectual integrity saying what they calculate that the
Party would like to hear. With ``China Can Say No'' or ``Behind
the Demonization of China,'' certainly the latter is involved.
The result is what one might call ersatz intellectual opinion.
Mr. Hu. There are two things I would like to point out
here. One, is before June 4th, it was very obvious that most of
the intellectuals in China were for more freedom and democracy.
Afterward, there appeared to be a division among the
intellectuals in China. Now there is a group of intellectuals
who have come out openly expressing their opposition to freedom
and democracy. However, the impact that these intellectuals
have on society, by and large, is very limited, the reason
being very simple: they do not have a substitute for freedom
and democracy. They do not have another choice to replace what
they are opposed to. That is why, among intellectuals circles
nowadays in China, a popular view is that democracy is a good
thing for China, but China is not ready for it now. Of course,
this is exactly what the Chinese leadership has been saying.
The Chinese leadership would say, from time to time, that what
they want is a ``socialist democracy,'' and what they do not
want is Western democracy. However, if you follow up by asking,
what is ``socialist democracy,'' they cannot explain
themselves.
Of course, sometimes they resort to this tactic by saying,
``Well, the United States has been there for over 200 years and
we are much younger in that respect,'' meaning that it would
take them much longer to get into this developmental stage.
What they do not want to discuss with you is whether concrete
steps would be taken, what we should do as the first step, what
we should do as the second step, and whether people can reach
agreement on an over-arching principle regarding democracy.
They are not willing to talk about all these issues. So on this
very issue, they have taken a defensive approach.
Mr. Foarde. Thank you. Public intellectuals are involved in
nothing if they are not involved in expression. Our staff
expert on freedom of expression issues is my friend and
colleague, William Farris. William.
Mr. Farris. I would like to ask two related questions. Mr.
Link mentioned that people today are free to publish anything
as long as they do not cross the line. I would be interested in
hearing what the three of you think that line is. What is it
that people cannot actually say?
In a related matter, Mr. Hu mentioned the preventive
measures and how important a role they play in preventing
people from speaking freely and publishing freely. I would be
interested to hear if any of you have any thoughts on the role
of the General Administration of Press and Publication, and the
Central Propaganda Department, in squelching public
intellectuals' right to publish.
Perhaps, Professor Link, you could maybe just expound a bit
on what you think that line is, to start.
Mr. Link. It is a very fuzzy line. I wrote a piece a few
years ago called ``The Anaconda in the Chandelier,'' that shows
how the line is intentionally made fuzzy. If the line between
what is permitted and what is prohibited were clear, that would
let people, whatever they said, know for sure either that ``I
am safe'' or that ``I am risking something.'' But if I don't
know exactly where the line is, I need to guess, and guessing
turns me subtly into my own policeman--and in most cases
pulling back even further than I would need to, just to ``be
safe.'' From very early in the Communist movement--right from
Yan'an times--it has been a standard ploy to keep the
borderlines fuzzy.
That said, though, in a nutshell, what is prohibited is
anything that threatens the power of the regime, directly or
indirectly. Directly, by saying that policy toward Taiwan is
wrong, or that Hu Jintao or other top leaders are mistaken, and
so on; indirectly, by saying something good about Falun Gong or
famous political dissidents, because these are viewed as forces
that could become rivals for power. One way or the other, the
nub is always the question of whether the current regime can
keep its grip on power. That is the principle that determines
what you can and cannot say in public. But even then, it is
fuzzy, because who you are, as Hu Ping said, and under what
circumstances you are speaking, matters in a number of
different ways as well. It is a very complex question.
Mr. Foarde. Anyone else want to comment?
Mr. Hu. Of course, this situation brings us back to the
changes that China saw in 1989. In the aftermath of the June
4th event, the Chinese people, whether they were in China or
overseas, many of them burst out cursing the Communist Party of
China. Of course, it was impossible for the Communist Party to
have everybody un-say what they had said. So now their approach
is, ``just say whatever you want, but do not say it in the
open.''
Another result of the June 4 event in 1989 is that even
though people are still clear about what is right and what is
wrong, they are not holding the government, the regime, to that
standard any more. So, they kind of leave the government alone
to do whatever it wants, whether it is right or wrong.
The story of Zhao Ziyang is a case in point. No rules or
regulations stipulated that he should have been under house
arrest for that long a period of time. However, he was. After
his death, while there were no rules and regulations
prohibiting people from attending his funeral, the authorities
simply said, ``If you attend, you will be in trouble.'' So, the
authorities have really resorted to this undisguised method of
controlling.
In the past, when the authorities wanted to ban a book,
they would go to all the trouble of letting people know what
the contents of the book were about. The authorities would try
to mobilize the masses to criticize the book in question. Now
if the authorities want to ban a book, they do not really have
to do any of that. The authorities would simply issue an order
and the book is banned.
Ms. Goldman. Let me just say something about that, if I
could.
Mr. Foarde. Please.
Ms. Goldman. That is true, the book is banned. But one of
the differences now even from the 1980s is that because China
has moved to the market and, because there is more economic
freedom, these books are banned, but they can still be bought
on the black market, even in airports and on street corners.
People continue to sell them.
So the point is that they are daring in what they publish.
The book will be banned, yet the book still circulates because
the market situation is open and freer, and these ideas and
these books are able to circulate. So, I am not as pessimistic
as Hu Ping on this issue.
Mr. Foarde. Thank you for that observation.
Let me recognize my friend and colleague, Adam Bobrow, who
is our senior counsel for commercial rule of law. Adam.
Mr. Bobrow. That was, Professor Goldman, the perfect segue
into the issues that we have been discussing in terms of the
difference of opinion that the panelists have expressed about
the effects of economic legal reform and how the kaifang gaige,
the
reform and opening up, have actually interacted with this
movement for public intellectuals.
I am going to ask a wide-open question, because I would
just like to see the debate continue a little bit. That is,
what has been the most direct effect of the dramatic economic,
commercial, and legal changes on public intellectual in China?
I would throw that open to the whole panel.
Ms. Goldman. The Party emphasizes the rule of law. Of
course, it is rule of law to carry on business. Yet, we have
seen, in the 1990s, in particular, the emergence of some very
brave defense lawyers who defend some of these people when they
are brought to trial, and do it very effectively. Of course,
they never win, but the point is that they are making a
statement there. So that is another real change in that a group
of lawyers now are willing to take on politically sensitive
cases, even though they know they are going to get in trouble.
Certainly, the opening to the outside world is also a major
factor. Yu Jie, for example, certainly is a public
intellectual. He travels abroad a couple of times a year. He
gets new ideas. He gets his ideas discussed in China. He is
able to function in China, even though he has been periodically
detained, and he is under surveillance. The point is, these
people are not locked away. They are not totally silenced. They
do have contacts at home and abroad. So they are very brave
people, there is no question about that. But the big difference
is that they are not silent the way they were in the Mao era.
Also, public intellectuals are more independent than they were
in the 1980s.
So my view is not as pessimistic as my colleagues. I really
do see some positive changes coming out of this loosening up,
opening up economically, and engagement with the outside world.
Mr. Link. I would agree that opening up has had good
effects, but would separate that from the question of whether
the effects of more money-making have been uniformly good. To
highlight a couple of the ways in which more money-making has
had a deleterious effect on intellectuals speaking out in the
public interest, I would go back to the first point I made in
my presentation about the phenomenon of being ``bought off'' in
the last 15 years.
In 1988 and 1989, when the intellectuals were complaining
so articulately, they still felt they suffered from the stigma
of the ``stinking bottom'' of society (chou lao jiu). Their
expression of discontent was couched as social idealism but was
considerably fueled by self-advocacy.
Deng Xiaoping and the Party, quite cleverly said, ``All
right, here is some money, some status, some housing, some
artistic freedom.'' In this case money--not by force but by
inducement, has led people to be much less critical than they
were before. In particular, in the field of creative
literature, which I study professionally, I think the trend is
pretty obvious. Creative writers were getting more and more
deeply probing and reflective in the 1980s, but in the 1990s
and after either went into fairly arcane kinds of a vanguard
experimentalism or turned toward money-making by writing
popular
entertainment or by writing for television or film. The Chinese
intellectual's ideal of loyal remonstrance, of speaking truth
to power on behalf of the populace, has been hurt by the
rampant make-money-quick atmosphere of the last 15 years.
Can I make one last comment, and then sign off? In answer
to William's question about the controls, there is one aspect
of the complexity that I did not mention, and I really want to.
It is, the public/private distinction. Of course, there are
layers within this distinction. But what you can say in private
and what you can say in public, as I am sure you know, varies
immensely.
A few years ago, I did a paper on the popular ``rhythmic
sayings'' that abound within China's underground grapevine.
They are wry sayings and, I believe, are created primarily by
intellectuals. They are very blunt and hard-hitting, skewering
Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and virtually any top leader by name.
They not only survive but travel all over China orally--a state
office collects them to monitor popular opinion for the
leaders.
All this happens except: you cannot put them into print, or
onto a broadcast, or recite them openly in a public place--if
you do get a few into public media, they are bowdlerized. The
public/private distinction is not absolute, it too admits a
certain spectrum. But the two ends of the spectrum are very
different.
Mr. Hu. Of course, there is no question that China today is
very different from China in the Mao era. There is room for the
intellectuals in China to express their political opinions.
What I want to emphasize here is the fact that this room will
not be expanding as time goes. For instance, if we compare
China with China 16 years ago in 1989, I do not think that room
has expanded any.
By the same token, if you asked Chinese dissidents, whether
they are still in China or they are overseas, if you asked them
their expectations for political reforms, for democratic
reforms in China, I think their expectations are much, much
lower than 10 years ago.
Mr. Foarde. Thank you very much. Unfortunately, the time
that we have available this morning for our conversation is
gone. So, it is my duty, on behalf of the members of the
Congressional-Executive Commission on China, to first thank our
three panelists, Professor Goldman, Professor Link, and Mr. Hu,
for coming and sharing your expertise with us this morning.
Next, I would like to thank all of the members of the
audience who came to attend today, and hope that we will see
you next Monday, March 14, at 2 p.m. over on the House side for
our roundtable on the new religious regulations, and that you
will continue to follow our roundtables and hearings series
this year for the Congressional-Executive Commission on China.
Thank you all. We will adjourn this one for today.
[Whereupon, at 11:41 a.m. the issues roundtable was
concluded.]
A P P E N D I X
=======================================================================
Prepared Statements
----------
Prepared Statement of Merle Goldman
march 10, 2005
The Role of China's Public Intellectuals at the Start of the Twenty-
first Century
``Public intellectuals'' are not unique to Western civilization.
Public intellectuals have played a role throughout Chinese history. It
was the responsibility of the Confucian literati to criticize officials
and even the Emperor when they diverged from the Confucian ideals of
morality and fairness. Public intellectuals helped to bring about the
end of the dynastic system and prepare the way for the 1911 revolution.
Sun Yatsen personified a public intellectual. Even though the
Kuomintang government of Chiang Kai-shek (1927-1949) attempted to
stifle criticism and dissent, it was too weak to silence the public
intellectuals, who continued to criticize repressive officials and
policies and advocate political reforms. With exception of during the
Hundred Flowers period (1956-June 1957) and a short time in the early
1960s, it was only during the era of Mao Zedong (1949-76) that public
intellectuals were silenced and unable to play their traditional role.
Of course, one major difference between the West and China is that
during the dynastic, Kuomintang, and Mao Zedong eras there were no laws
to protect public intellectuals when what they said displeased the
leadership, who could silence them with relative impunity.
In the post-Mao period, beginning soon after Mao's death in 1976,
during the era of Deng Xiaoping (1978-97), there were also no laws to
protect political and civil rights. Nevertheless, virtually all the
intellectuals whom Mao had persecuted were rehabilitated and most found
positions in the political and intellectual establishment. The public
space for political discourse opened up in the media, books,
universities, and research centers. Yet, even though a number of the
rehabilitated intellectuals became members of the intellectual networks
of party general secretary Hu Yaobang (1980-1986) and his successor,
Zhao Ziyang (1987-89), when these intellectuals called for reform of
the Communist party-state, they were purged once again. But unlike in
the Mao era, though they were silenced for a while, China's move to the
market made it possible for them to make a living, speak out, and
publish on political issues by means of the new communications
technologies, private publishing, and contact with the foreign media,
such as VOA, BBC and Radio Free Asia, which would then beam back their
views into China. For example, though the prominent political scientist
Liu Junning was purged in 2000 from the Institute of Political Science
of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences for having criticized party
secretary Jiang Zemin (1989-2002) for demanding that the Nation rally
around his leadership, Liu was not jailed and completely silenced. He
was able to get his ideas discussed by setting up his own website and
as a free-lance writer, often publishing under pseudonyms.
When the fourth generation of leaders, led by Hu Jintao came to
power in 2002-2004, it appeared that they would continue the opening up
of public space for political discourse, though circumscribed within
certain limits, as we see in the case of Liu Junning. But that has not
proven to be the case. In fact, there has been a contraction of public
space for political discourse since Jiang Zemin announced he would step
down from his last position as head of the state military commission in
the fall 2004 and Hu gained full power over the government. The Hu
leadership has cracked down on a number of people who use the Internet
or publish their own websites to discuss political issues. A number of
cyber-dissidents have been imprisoned as a warning to others as to how
far they can go in discussing political reforms on the Internet.
Independent intellectuals who speak out on controversial issues have
been briefly detained as well. For example, the military doctor, Jiang
Yanyong, who had countered the party's assertion in 2003 that the SARS
epidemic had been brought under control, was detained and then put
under surveillance when in 2004 he called on the party to reassess the
1989 Tiananmen demonstrations as a ``patriotic'' movement.
Ironically, the Hu Jintao crackdown coincided with the publication
of a list of ``Top Fifty Public Intellectuals'' in September 2004 in
the Southern People's Weekly (Nanfang renwu zhoukan), connected to the
Guangzhou Southern Daily media group. With China's move to the market,
most of China's media were no longer funded by the state and were
forced to be self-financing. One result has been a more daring and
interesting media in an effort to gain readership and survive
financially. The Guangzhou Southern Daily media group is one of the
most daring. In an accompanying commentary, the Weekly praised public
intellectuals, pointing out that ``this is the time when China is
facing the most problems in its unprecedented transformation, and when
it most needs public intellectuals to be on the scene and to speak
out.'' \1\ Although the list included intellectuals in a variety of
professions--writers, artists, film directors, cartoonists, lawyers,
environmentalists, and a number of overseas Chinese intellectuals--the
list was dominated by intellectuals who in the 1990s had called for
political reforms, free speech and association and greater political
participation.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ ``Under Fire Again, Intellectuals in China,'' The Economist,
Dec 11, 2004.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
On November 23, an article in the Shanghai Party Committee's hard-
line Liberation Daily (Jiefang Ribao) attacked the concept of ``public
intellectuals,'' claiming that their ``independence . . . drives a
wedge'' between the intellectuals and the party and the intellectuals
and the masses.\2\ It insisted that China's intellectuals belonged to
the working class, under the leadership of the party and therefore
could not be independent. Moreover, it called the concept of ``public
intellectuals'' a foreign import. The Liberation Daily article was then
reprinted in the party's official newspaper, People's Daily, giving the
criticism of public intellectuals the party's official imprimatur.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\2\ David A. Kelly, ``The Importance of Being Public: Gagging
China's Thinkers,'' China Review (London), Issue 31 (Winter 2004/2005),
pp. 28-37.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Although the Hu Jintao leadership is much more concerned with the
increasing inequalities spawned by China's economic reforms, and
particularly with alleviating poverty in the countryside than Jiang
Zemin, the Hu leadership has suppressed the very people, other than
those they officially designate, who try to draw public attention to
the growing inequalities and distress in the countryside. This can be
seen in its treatment of A Survey of Chinese Peasants, written by Chen
Guidi and Wu Chuntao and published in January 2004, based on interviews
over several years with farmers in the poor province of Anhui.\3\ This
husband and wife team, who were both born in the countryside and had
spent their early years there, described the developers' seizure of the
land of rural residents without providing adequate compensation, the
imposition of unfair taxes by local officials, and the lack of recourse
available to farmers to right these wrongs. Their vivid depiction of
the increasingly impoverished lives of peasants was exactly what the
new generation of leadership had declared it sought to alleviate. Most
importantly, the survey revealed the official abuse of power, which the
new leadership seeks to remedy because of fears it would undermine the
party's hold on power. Yet, in February 2004, just one month after its
publication, their book was banned. Nevertheless, because of China's
market economy it continued to be sold on the black market and by
private book-sellers.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\3\ Chen Guidi and Chun Tao, Zhongguo nongmin diaocha (A Survey of
Chinese Peasants) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2004).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
At the close of 2004, the party detained a number of well-known
public intellectuals. In December, the writers Yu Jie and Liu Xiaobo,
both typical examples of public intellectuals, were taken into custody,
supposedly because their independent chapter of PEN had given an award
to the writer Zhang Yihe for her memoir The Past is Not Like
(Dissipating) Smoke about the party's 1957 Anti-rightist campaign
against intellectuals. Ironically, even the Deng Xiaoping leadership
had denounced the campaign in the 1980s. Though the book was banned, it
too continued to be sold on streets corners and pirated copies
continued to circulate. The political theorist Zhang Zuhua was likewise
detained. All three were criticized for articles they had originally
published in overseas journals and then had found their way back to
China via the Internet. Although the three were later released, they
remained under surveillance and served as a further warning to public
intellectuals.
Along with the crackdown on a number of well-known independent
intellectuals and the banning of discussion of ``public
intellectuals,'' the Hu Jintao government tightened controls over the
media. Reports on the growing protests against corruption, abusive
officials, and property confiscation as well as reports on peasant and
worker demonstrations were banned from the media. Journalism professor,
Jiao Guobiao, who on the Internet had criticized the repressive
controls of the media by the Propaganda Department (now referred to as
the Publicity Department) was no longer allowed to teach at Peking
University. Another public intellectual Wang Yi, a law lecturer at
Chengdu University, who called for a system of checks and balances, has
also been barred from teaching. The journal Strategy and Management
that had been an outlet for intellectuals of a liberal persuasion such
as Liu Junning was closed down. The administrative editor in chief of
the monthly China Reform magazine, Chen Min was briefly detained. Using
the penname Xiao Shu, or Smiling Sichuanese, Chen had declared in one
of his commentaries that a natural gas explosion in December 2003 in
Chongqing that had killed several hundreds of people demonstrated a
lack of concern for human lives.\4\ The China Reform magazine also
published many articles on the plight of the peasants. Even the editor
in chief of the China Youth Daily, the newspaper affiliated with Hu
Jintao's China Youth League power base, which had been very aggressive
in exposing official corruption, was detained.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\4\ Hong Kong: AFP Dec. 22, 2004.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nevertheless, despite the crackdown on public intellectuals and the
media, unlike during the Mao period when millions were harshly
persecuted for the acts of a small number, in the post-Mao period
persecution for political dissent has not reached far beyond the
accused and their immediate associates. Moreover, though they might
lose their jobs and may be briefly detained, they have been able to
find jobs and outlets for their views in China's expanding market
economy. Thus, unlike during the Mao era, they are not completely
silenced. Some still try to function as citizens, either on their own
or with others and they continue to express their political views in
unofficial publications, on the Internet, and in increasingly organized
petitions and protests. In addition, though their writings may be
officially banned, they continue to be distributed over the Internet
and sold on street corners.
There were also differences between the public intellectuals in the
1990s and at the start of the twenty-first century from the public
intellectuals in the Hundred Flowers or even in the 1980s. It was not
so much that the 1990s public intellectuals are imbued with a different
political consciousness, but that they use different political
strategies. Unlike their Marxist humanist predecessors of the 1980s and
earlier,\5\ most public intellectuals in the 1990s came to believe that
more had to be done than just educating the people ideologically in
order to bring about political change. It is necessary to establish new
institutions to make possible the practice of democracy. Moreover,
whereas until the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations, public intellectuals
acted as an elite who did not join with other social classes in
political actions, in the 1990s they began to join with workers and
small business people in organized petition drives and political groups
to try to bring about political change. Therefore, at the start of the
twenty-first century there has been a qualitative change among public
intellectuals, a willingness to join with other social groups in
political actions, that may make them increasingly independent actors
in China's struggles and may allow them to have a greater impact on
China's political scene.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\5\ Merle Goldman, Sowing the Seeds of Democracy in China
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Clearly, it is in the U.S. interest that China move in the
direction of political reform. Although the United States can bring
pressure on China to release public intellectuals from detention and
imprisonment, it is difficult for the United States to make China's
political reform the central issue in the America's policy toward
China. Not only is China becoming a power with considerable
international economic and strategic clout, there are other interests
in the U.S. relationship with China, such as prodding China to put more
pressure on North Korea, reducing
China's huge trade imbalance with the United States, and negotiating a
peaceful resolution of the Taiwan issue. The United States can use
external pressure to encourage China to live up to the two U.N.
Covenants on Human Rights which it signed onto in 1997-98 and to have
its National People's Congress (NPC) ratify the Covenant on Political
and Civil Rights. (The NPC has already ratified the Covenant on
Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.)
A genuine transformation of China's Communist party-state into a
democracy, however, can only be achieved by the Chinese themselves.
Although China's public intellectuals are unable to speak freely, it is
through their efforts in alliance with other social groups, that can
bring pressure on the Chinese government to reform. One way to help
those seeking political change in China is for the U.S. Government to
criticize China's repression of public intellectuals. Since China's
present leadership wants to be considered a responsible member of the
international community, it is sensitive to U.S. and European criticism
of its human rights abuses. It does not want to seen as a pariah in the
international community. Therefore, while the United States cannot be a
major actor, it can be a catalyst in the effort to democratize China's
Communist party-state.
* Merle Goldman is Professor of History, Emerita of Boston
University and a member of the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research
at Harvard University. Her forthcoming book is From Comrade To Citizen:
The Struggle for Political Rights in China, published by Harvard
University Press will, be out in fall 2005.
______
Prepared Statement of Hu Ping
march 10, 2005
What Does This New Crackdown Tell Us?
Since Hu Jintao took office, the plight of the intellectuals in
public life in China has not been bettered; in fact, it has worsened.
In reality, the lack of improvement in and of itself is tantamount to
worsening, because the same oppression becomes more onerous as time
goes on, and the consequences of that oppression more and more severe.
Not long ago, the Hu Jintao regime unleashed a new crackdown on
intellectual circles. The authorities once more raised aloft the banner
of ``anti-liberalization,'' and stridently criticized ``liberalized
thought'' and ``public intellectuals.'' The Central Propaganda
Department brought out a list of names and banned a number of liberal
intellectuals who had a tiny foothold in the official media from making
more statements. The Ministry also demanded that the media implement
rigorous checks, as they ``may not report on premeditated bombings,
riots, demonstrations or strikes.'' A batch of books was banned, and a
number of Web sites were closed down. At the same time, the authorities
also utilized administrative means and autocratic methods to persecute
some liberal intellectuals. Some were discharged from their jobs, some
had their houses searched and notes confiscated, some received very
stern warnings, and others were arrested and sentenced. When Zhao
Ziyang died, it was as though the CCP authorities were on their guard
for all possible danger. They took all sorts of measures to strengthen
their control, and many dissidents were subjected to house arrest, with
others taken into custody. Those inside the system received harsh
warnings: they were not to participate in any memorial event on pain of
losing their posts. Moreover, we must not forget the world-renowned Dr.
Jiang Yanyong, who fought against SARS. For no greater reason than the
fact that the letter he wrote to the National People's Congress and the
Chinese Political Consultative Conference last Spring asking for a
rectification of names for the June 4th event was published overseas,
he was kidnapped and held in custody, and continues under house arrest
today.
The facts demonstrate that Hu Jintao and his predecessor Jiang
Zemin are cut from the same cloth. In 1991, Jiang Zemin quoted a
literary reference from the ``Commentary of Zuo,'' a famous Classical
Chinese work, while speaking privately to a visitor from Taiwan. The
passage basically holds that in politics it is better to be fierce than
lenient. Fire is fierce, and everyone who sees it is frightened and
hides away. As a result, very few people are burned to death. Water
seems to be gentle and weak, so many people do not respect it. They
fool around in the water, and even more people end up drowning. (Later
on, this exchange was published in the August, 1996 issue of ``The
90s,'' a Hong Kong magazine.) The Chinese Communist leaders are deeply
cognizant of the fact that their political power is entirely based on
the fear of the masses. Consequently, if they are to preserve their own
rule, they must keep the people in fear. That means they cannot seem
warm or enlightened in front of the masses. If the people feel the
authorities are kind or enlightened they will dare to speak out, saying
things they would never have dared otherwise. The more they dare to
speak out with demands they would not have dared offer otherwise, the
greater the pressure and the challenges become facing the authorities.
The authorities must invest a great deal of energy if they are to
repress (if indeed they are able to do so). At the end, their image may
be even more severely tarnished. Hu Jintao showed his true face of
cruelty the moment major power was within his grasp. His primary goal
was to maintain and consolidate the power of intimidation by force and
the effect of fear that the autocratic Chinese government had enjoyed
since ``June 4.'' By so doing, he would then nip any unrest in the bud.
There was no need to use force or violate any taboos on killing.
Everything Hu Jintao has done since taking office has been the cause of
widespread disappointment in him on the part of the outside world. It
has also given people the impression that he has not gone overboard in
any way. However, in reality, that is precisely the effect he wished to
achieve by implementing this sort of strategy.
After Hu Jintao took office, he reiterated time and time again his
concern for disadvantaged groups. Many people mistakenly thought that
Hu would permit events that would safeguard the rights of these groups,
but that simply wasn't the case. For example, Li Boguang, a PhD in law
from Beijing, has helped peasants to guard their rights, always within
the dictates of current law. Not long ago, he was detained by the local
government on suspicion of fraud (he recently made bail and is
currently awaiting trial). This proves that while it's not necessarily
true that Hu Jintao's regime was not thinking of shrinking the huge
disparity between rich and poor to some extent, of putting the brakes
on corruption to some degree, and of improving the lot of disadvantaged
groups a bit, they absolutely do not permit the people to initiate any
open group action or to stand up to defend their own rights. The
authorities can partially satisfy the material needs of the people, but
the thing they fear most is that the people might thus obtain the
ability to engage in independent group activity. Additionally, the
authorities also refuse to implement a true rule of law, in which
everyone is equal before the law. This is because they know full well
that the existing allocation of wealth is based on a huge injustice
that is essentially illegitimate. The gap between rich and poor in
China is unique in that it is not a product of history or of the market
but is mainly due to power. In China, the poverty of the poor exists in
large part because the products of their labor have been appropriated
by those in power. The wealth of the rich is in large measure due to
their use of power to steal the prosperity created by others. The
moment that the people are able to argue strongly based on law and
rationality, the moment they have the ability to band together to make
a stand, they will absolutely no longer be satisfied with a tad more
aid to the unemployed or a small additional subsidy for the poor. They
will first demand that the group of people who used power to first
become rich turn over the property they plundered, and there may very
well be a day of reckoning for privileged rich privatization that will
threaten the autocratic government itself. Naturally, this is not the
wish of the Hu Jintao regime. As a result, the so-called ``concern for
the disadvantaged'' touted by Hu Jintao's regime is in reality no more
than a desire to employ ``controlled oppression'' and to maintain
``continued squeezing.''
Yes, on the surface it seems that the intelligentsia are very
active in today's China. On the Internet, even in the official media,
discussion certain public issues is quite open and even quite lively.
Some dissidents express themselves without fear, and nothing happens,
they sit at home, quite well. But what I must bring to your attention
is the principle being implemented by authorities in China today, that
principle is ``all people are not equal before the law.'' When the
authorities handle issues related to expression and speech, there is no
single standard measure used. The standards vary by person, by time,
and by place. When the authorities oppress the intellectuals, they
often consider a multitude of factors, such as; do you have any
position within the establishment? Are you known internationally?
What's your social network of ``connections'' like? And so on. We
cannot draw the conclusion based solely from the situation of a few
well-known dissidents that freedom of speech in China has expanded
greatly. Again, we cannot forget that the means the Chinese Communists
use to squash freedom of speech have taken on many forms over the
years. For example, during the Anti-Rightist movement only a handful of
the over 500,000 Rightists were actually imprisoned and sentenced, some
Rightists were fired from their jobs and sent to the countryside to do
manual labor. Some were demoted, had their salaries cut, or were forced
to move to other posts. Some Rightists were permitted to show their
faces in the official media to say a word or two. The situation today
is the same.
At this point I should mention that when the outside world assesses
the degree of freedom of speech in China, it quite often focuses on how
many people have been arrested or imprisoned. Without a doubt, a
shocking number of dissidents have been locked up in China, a number
that puts China in first place in such matters. However, this is but
one standard by which we assess the amount of freedom of expression and
the plight of intellectuals in China. First I want to say that
precisely
because there is still no freedom of the press in China, the outside
world does not have an accurate figure on the number of dissidents in
prison there. The figures the world gets are usually greatly
understated. Second, another point that must be made is that the number
of dissidents in custody isn't really as important as it might seem at
first blush. Nations that arrest smaller numbers of dissidents do not
necessarily have a more serious lack of freedom of expression than
nations that arrest many. At times, the situation may be quite the
opposite. We all know that traditional autocratic governments use
investigation and punishment after the act to control freedom of
speech. When the media does not get government approval on articles or
news it puts out, then the chances greatly increase that articles or
news items not favored by the government will become known to the
world. Moreover, it also greatly increases the difficulty the
government faces in penalizing the articles or news items it does not
like. This results in the government being unable to cover up its
oppression and makes its evil deeds obvious. But Communist autocracy
doesn't work this way. The Communist Party takes a preventative
approach before anything even happens. The Communist Party government
not only has its book and newspapers supervisory structures in place
(such as propaganda offices at various levels), but also, quite simply,
has a direct hold on all the media. Party faithful are sent out to lead
the defense effort. This is tantamount to a double layer of insurance.
Under these circumstances, opinions or news items that displease the
Party have no chance of making it to the media. And there is no need to
run out and lock up the occasional minnow that manages to elude the
net. The only thing needed is to mobilize Party sanctions and
administrative sanctions, which are generally enough to resolve the
problem. Doubtless the advent of the Internet has made control more
difficult, particularly when users can post articles on their own, and
it's almost impossible to censor in advance. Accordingly, the Chinese
government has established the largest network surveillance system in
the world. On the one hand, screening programs search for ``sensitive''
words and phrases, while on the other hand the instant any writings
with a ``dangerous bent'' are detected, they are immediately erased. If
necessary, the poster of the content can be found and punished
afterwards. As a result, in a country that undertakes this sort of
rigorous before-the-fact preventive actions, the government has no need
to lock up too many dissidents. In reality, of the dissidents the
Chinese government has in prison at present, quite a few were brought
in for issuing articles or placing news items either on the Internet or
in the foreign media. This is a benefit accrued from today's high
technology and from being opened up to the outside world. If it were
not so, these people would not even have the opportunity to ``commit a
crime,'' and the government would very likely catch fewer of them. If
we liken the traditional model of autocracy and its treatment of free
expression to killing people or butchering children, then the Communist
autocracy's methods are not limited to killing people and slaughtering
babies but also include abortion and contraception. The effects of this
oppression are not only more severe and far-reaching; they are also
more insidious and more apt to fool people.
On the surface, the yardstick used as a measure for the control of
free speech by the authorities is broader than before, with the
standards not only looser than those of the Mao era but also as loose
as or even looser than those of the 1980s. But this doesn't mean
enlightenment on the part of the authorities. It should be said that it
is a number of other factors that are creating this situation. First
and foremost is the impact of the 1989 democracy movement. During that
movement, tens of thousands of people took to the streets shouting ``We
want democracy, we want freedom!'' The butchery of the June 4 incident
caused the common people to be even more incensed. Throughout China,
people of both high and low status began to curse the Communist Party
in untold numbers. No matter what means the authorities adopt, they are
unable to completely return the hearts of the people to their former
cramped and limited space. As a result, the government was forced to
turn a blind eye to many expressions of opinion that are outside the
``norms.'' Second we have the breakdown of the international Communist
fraternity and the bankruptcy of Communist ideology. This includes the
economic reforms promoted by the authorities themselves, in which,
theoretically, they overturned the golden rules of theory that they
themselves had enshrined. This provided the opportunity for all sorts
of other ideologies to have their moment in the sun. At the present
stage, the Chinese Communist authorities are still working hard to put
together a new ideology, doing their utmost to find a theme and
striving in vain to once more unify thought. However, their efforts are
falling short and they have been forced to turn to largely
defensive principles. This means that in the current phase, when the
Chinese Communist authorities are controlling speech, they are largely
looking not at whether something that is said is in line with the
official ideology, but rather thinking about whether it poses a direct
challenge to the current regime. This provides relatively more space
for other thought and speech. Also, with the June 4th massacre as their
landmark, the Chinese Communist government has lost the traditional
support of belief. It has been transformed into a rule of naked
violence. Violent rule means negative indifference toward government by
the people; it means widespread cynicism; and in today's China, the
power of thought and speech to appeal lags far
behind the force these carried in the 1980s. This has increased a
certain type of immunity on the part of the authorities to resist
criticism. Violence does not care much for people's criticism. That is
because violence is forced upon people without the need for the consent
of a third party. You yell about what you want, and I'll comply about
what I like. What can you do to me? Simply put, the authorities have
become even more shameless (``I'm a rogue, who should I fear?'') so the
``degree of tolerance'' for dissidents has, on the contrary, increased.
However, at the same time, the authorities have adopted a more
straightforward means of implementing oppression than they previously
had regarding speech they simply cannot tolerate. In the past,
officials who toed the Party ideological line were all recognized by
the entire Party as having theoretical authority (in more cases, the
tone was personally set by the ``Great Leader''). It was said that only
they could accurately discern what conforming speech was and what was
not. At that time, if the authorities wanted to crack down on some type
of opinion, they would always take care to cobble up some sort of
reason, to show that they had a basis for their actions. Quite often
the offending speech was trotted out and shown to everyone so that the
masses could judge it and criticize it jointly. But now, today's
guardians of ideology don't need to trouble themselves overly much. If
they say ban, it's banned; if they say wipe it out, it's wiped out; and
if they say ``arrest him,'' he's under arrest. They don't need to give
any reason. Sometimes they don't even need to issue formal paperwork.
It can all be done with a single phone call, avoiding all the other
formalities. Today, the Chinese Communist authorities control over
speech is in no way truly looser than it was in the past.
Beijing Film Academy Professor Hao Jian once gave this explanation.
He said, ``We definitely know when we can strike the table in anger and
speak with the force of justice behind us. We also know when we have to
stay quiet about things we are perfectly clear on and keep our lips
sealed. We do something else that's even scarier, we go for the
underbelly, picking the softest, easiest targets and making a great
deal of noise for justice and truth, but in fact it is all a sham. We
also know when to say what so that we can get right to the top for a
nod of approval and what will enrage everyone. For myself, I've
perfected this sort of calculation to a fine art. And it's already
become a part of my subconscious.'' This statement can help us
understand the extent to which pretense flourishes among the
intellectuals of today's China.
Long-term oppression produces very negative results. Up until the
1990s, there were still quite a number of dissidents in China who dared
to speak out that held high posts within the system. For example, some
held posts in Party media organizations, higher research institutes or
in famous universities. Some were even in leadership positions. They
had more chances to speak out and faced less risk. As the years went
on, there were constant purges, and fewer and fewer of this kind of
person remained. What's more, the party authorities stepped up their
control of the media, and liberal intellectuals all over felt their
situation worsen. In these circumstances, dissenter activities still
hold on tenaciously among the people, but it's very difficult for them
to develop any further.
In direct opposition to the early hopes of many Chinese and
Westerners, the economic reforms and economic development in China have
not put China on a pathway to freedom and democracy. On the contrary,
reform and development have
become the main reason the authorities use to cling to one-party rule
and deny freedom and democracy. From Li Peng and Jiang Zemin to Hu
Jintao and Wen Jiabao, leaders have taken China's successful economic
development as their basis to justify the crackdown on June 4th as
necessary and right. They use it to show that a one party autocracy is
necessary and right. In reality, China's privatization reforms not only
were not aimed at setting down a foundation for democratization; they
were actually aimed at throwing up more obstacles to democracy. The
privatization and reform in China, if the truth be told, was nothing
more than officials using their power to misappropriate resources that
originally belonged to all the people. This sort of privatization
reduces the ``transaction cost'' to a minimum, making it far quicker
and more effective than privatization accomplished with democratic
participation. However, such reforms are necessarily of the type that
can never be approved by the people. The great blocs who profit
immediately from all this are those who are most in fear of democracy
and most stoutly oppose it. That is because these officials know very
well that if they open the door to free democracy, they will not only
lose their monopoly on political power but also, very possibly, will be
called out by the people on charges of economic corruption.
In today's China, the Mao era is water under the bridge, and there
is no going back. Even the ruling blocs themselves are not willing to
go back to the days of Mao. China today must concern herself with
something that seems even more old-fashioned, but which could be an
even more persistent type of oppression: that of rule by people who
believe in no ``ism'' but wield enormous power, and are determined to
use every means at their disposal to preserve it.