From We have been harmonised (Kai Strittmatter, 2020) pp246-50
When the market research organisation Ipsos conducted a global survey in 2017 on what worried people most, the majority of countries placed unemployment, corruption and inequality at the top of their list. China was the only country where people’s top concern was ‘moral decline’. Life under an autocracy corrupts society, poisoning individuals and their relationships with others. “Wherever it has ruled, it has begun to destroy the essence of man” Hannah Arendt writes of the totalitarian state. China’s society is sick, even if at first glance that isn’t always apparent to outsiders.
The law of the jungle. The worship of money and power. A brutal pragmatism, distilled from those long years when basic survival was the only value that counted. One of the most remarkable phenomena during Donald Trumps election campaign and the first months of his presidential term was the growth of his fan club in China. Trump’s anti-Chinese diatribes were far less important to these fans than his shameless campaign against all forms of political correctness. They applauded his attacks on the welfare state and other countries’ refugee policies. In their minds, these things were the work of misguided and despicable Baizuo.
Baizuo are ‘white leftists’. For a while the word was a popular insult among certain Chinese online communities. Its what they call Western liberals like Hillary Clinton or Angela Merkel (for whom the sarcastic term shengmu, ‘holy mother’ was also invented because of her stance in the refugee crisis of 2015) and, more broadly, anyone who speaks up for asylum-seekers, the underprivileged or LGBT rights. Such people are branded hypocrites and weaklings.
Everyone is responsible for his own life, the mantra goes, and for getting himself out of difficulties.
In a 2018 study, Norwegian researchers were surprised to discover that, among the Chinese people they had surveyed, the proportion who held right-wing libertarian ideas, accepted social inequality as the natural order, and opposed higher taxes on the wealthy, was far larger than it was in the USA. One in five Chinese people thought the state should stop all redistribution of wealth. ‘Chinese are more right wing than Americans, Science Nordic announced on its website.’
‘Many Chinese people don’t hate the rich; they want to be rich themselves. Instead, they hate morality. So much has gone wrong here, Li Chengpeng told me in Chengdu. The former sports reporter and liberal bestselling author is among the celebrity social critics silenced in the 2013 campaign against independent bloggers and authors. Social Darwinism, which transposes the ideas of natural selection and survival of the fittest from the natural world onto society, has long since taken hold in China, says the historian Cheng Yinghong: ‘Social Darwinism and autocratic politics are natural bedfellows. It ignores the injustice inherent in the unequal distribution of rights and resources. And it protects the violence, deceit and exploitation on which these things are based’.
“We live in an age when dust blocks the sky. Politics is dirty, the economy is dirty, and even culture smells like it’s rotten, the author Murong Xuecun writes.’ ‘Our heart is supposed to be clear like the water in the autumn and the unending sky, but if we place it in the dust for a long time, then it can’t help but get dirty and frangible’ This is an essay written in the tradition of the great Lu Xun, and it’s one of the most clear-sighted analyses of modern Chinese society around. On the day it was published, it was one of the most shared posts on Weibo, and of course it was deleted as quickly as it appeared. Murong Xuecun describes the devastation that an autocracy wreaks in the souls of its subjects. He identifies several states of mind, foremost among them numbness, blindness to reality, and slavish subservience. All are the result of generations of people for whom basic survival has been a consuming struggle.
Here, for example, is Murong Xuecun on the citizen who has entered a state of numbness: ‘If someone steals his food, he just goes hungry. If he is slapped in the face, he accepts it. If his home is destroyed, he watches. If his baby is terminated against his will, he simply cries. Any injustice is accepted as unavoidable; as expected, even. It would be abnormal if things were any different’ The numbness also applies to other people’s fates. ‘If people are beaten, he just stands and watches. If people complain, all he can do is mock them. When people announce that they are going to commit suicide, he says: “Oh, they just want to be famous.’ If no one speaks up for him, he accepts it. But if someone does, then he thanks the fates and says, “Hey, that’s a stroke of luck!” If someone speaks up for him without success, then he pretends he always knew that this would happen: “A waste of time!” And if someone speaks up for him and is carted off by the police for it, he giggles and says: “Serves him right, the troublemaker.”
When the numbness reaches an extreme level, the subject starts to hate everything that is good and fair. He thinks all idealists are hypocrites, and anyone who stands up for justice is a shameless opportunist, really just pursuing his own interests. A sense of moral inferiority triggers a defensive reaction in people everywhere. In the West, too, studies have shown that when one person in a group does the right thing, morally speaking, they attract hatred rather than admiration from their peers.’*’ Their actions show the others their own flaws and remind them that a different approach is possible. This dynamic can be observed in all societies, but it is especially noxious in places where suspicion of other people’s motives has become a matter of principle.
A hundred years ago, Lu Xun wrote about how readily subjects living under authoritarian regimes become slaves ~ out of fear, opportunism or numbness. “But today, most people don’t think they’re slaves; they think they rule the country, writes Murong Xuecun today. ‘Ever since they were little, they’ve been taught to be loyal to the collective, the Party, the country. There’s only one thing they’re not loyal to: themselves. In a country like this, it makes sense to deliberately steer clear of information. The Chinese are no fools, writes Chang Ping, who today lives in exile in Germany, and was the editor of the Southern Weekend when it was still the best newspaper in China. But, he says, many people are consciously choosing not to think. “Because thinking leads to understanding, and understanding only leads to trouble.”
I’ve heard these thoughts expressed often. “The truly unlucky people in this system are the ones who have seen through it; a Beijing teacher told me. “The best thing is to carry on being one of those people who walk through life in a fog of confusion: then you’re safe: And the artist Ai Weiwei once wrote on Twitter: ‘As soon as you try to understand your motherland, you have set off down the path of crime.’ Very few people have the courage to tread the suicidal path walked by civil rights lawyers and dissidents. For the rest, knowledge only makes living a lie more agonising.
On a trip to Taiwan with a party of Chinese tourists from Chengdu, I saw for myself the extent of people’s determination not to let potentially disturbing information get through to them. One member of the group worked as a Party secretary in a municipal authority. She was a young woman, fashionably dressed, with whom I had lively conversations about Taiwan’ night markets and its wonderful food. ‘We used to have great night markets like that in Chengdu; she said. ‘Sadly, they were all torn down. We were standing near the Sun Yat-sen memorial hall, waiting for our coach, when we were approached by an older man whom we quickly recognised as a member of the Falun Gong sect.
With its mixture of gentle exercise and eclectic teachings inspired by Buddhism and Taoism, Falun Gong drew millions of followers in the China of the 1990s, until the Communist Party started to feel threatened. The General Secretary of the CCP at the time, Jiang Zemin, banned Falun Gong and began persecute its members, sometimes in the most brutal way. In Taiwan, Falun Gong followers now deliberately position themselves in spots that they know Chinese tourists will pass, to inform them about the persecution of their fellow believers on the mainland. They carry placards and brochures bearing gruesome images of torture and organ removal, which they claim are scenes from Chinese prisons and camps.
We were standing on the pavement, then, when the man approached us. He headed for the young Party secretary beside me and thrust his brochures towards her. I saw the surprise in her eyes, which quickly turned to mild panic but what happened next completely took me aback. First she seemed to freeze, then she put her hands over her ears, squeezed her eyes tight shut, and started to stamp both feet on the ground like a little girl, shouting: ‘I don’t see anything! I don’t see anything!”
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