In September 1997, the fifteenth congress of the Chinese Communist Party instituted policies to shepherd the country into the twenty-first century. The congress sanctioned a new and radical move toward the marketplace. The spirit of the meeting was soon described in the state media as a "thought liberation movement." The liberation was simple: China's unprofitable state sector, especially its massive state enterprises, required downsizing and structural reform. And the bureaucracy itself, bloated beyond control despite numerous attempts to reduce it, was to be radically reshaped.
It was also in the autumn of 1997 that the cultural world experienced the first hint of what in 1998 would be dubbed internationally as yet another "Beijing Spring." There had been any number of political and cultural thaws on mainland China since 1978, when the party launched its economic reform program. Presaged by some shift in central government policy or factional realignment and blossoming amid an outpouring of controversial cultural activity and ideological lobbying, each "spring" in the past had waxed in tandem with economic bullishness and waned as the situation deteriorated; each was invariably followed by a harsh winter of Central Committee discontent. Sensitive to the mood of the policymakers and long before the actual spring of 1998, canny writers took advantage of the relaxation augured by the party congress to indulge in what is traditionally known as "settling scores after the autumn harvest" (qiuhou suanzhang). The main objects of their scorn were the fall guys of the reform age, the political stalwarts of the Mao past: China's ultra left.
Since 1992, when Deng Xiaoping had personally revived the reform effort, the proto-Maoists, often dubbed "red fundamentalists" by their critics, had petitioned the Central Committee, strenuously objecting to the capitalization of China. The authors of these petitions warned that Communist Party rule faced a crisis like that seen in the former Soviet Union; that economic inequities were generating serious social conflicts and even new class warfare; that ideological decay was corrupting the heart and mind of the party (as well as causing mass disaffection within China); and that bourgeois liberalism and cultural liberalization threatened to undermine what remained of socialist thought. Given the hegemonic position of the United States, they cautioned, the nation must be on guard as never before against the enemy within, an enemy that was in league with global capital to achieve a "peaceful evolution" of China into a bourgeois country. Unless resolute action was taken, they declared, counterrevolution and widespread civil strife were inevitable.
These dire predictions had been made secretly within the party, but during the spring of 1998 they were published in a book supportive of President Jiang Zemin that gave a detailed history of the internal ideological strife of the previous years. Entitled Crossed Swords, the book was part of a series released under the aegis of Liu Ji, vice president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). It was coauthored by Ma Licheng, a People's Daily journalist who had once been condemned for supporting Zhao Ziyang, the liberal party leader purged during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest movement in Beijing.
The official left, or the conservative socialist camp, has become all but outlawed. Although not subject to the same kind of bans applied to those who espouse liberal democracy, the Maoists hold sway only over a few tawdry publications that cater to a feeble audience, one that in terms of its size and age is perhaps not that dissimilar to the faithful but aged patrons of traditional Beijing opera.
Since the early 1990s, the voices of these advocates of state socialism, central planning, and communism have been generally silenced in the mainstream media. Just as they once repressed alternative visions (and paradoxically inculcated the political culture that led to their present waning influence), they are now out of step with the prevailing line and, in 1998, were publicly excoriated for their recidivism.
When observing the exigencies of cultural control in mainland China, it is important to remember that censorship and its polar opposite, self-expression or resistance, are most familiar and reassuring when egregious and uncompromising. The black and white of lies and truth can be circumscribed neatly and remorselessly by the red incisions of the censor's pen. But when that pen is used to highlight and overstate, then self-promotion often fixates the expressive, and the desire to be heard regardless of what all the clamor and outspokenness may really signify often comes to rule the day. When censorship is more a matter of negotiation than negation, when compromise replaces the cudgel and opportunism is married to opposition, the rules of censorship are finessed and categories blurred. If the openness of 1997 and 1998 was built on the "positive censorship" of unpopular opinion in the party, then it did not evince a change in political culture so much as a shift in priorities.
Jiang Zemin followed the September 1997 party congress with a state visit to the United States that, in its own way, contributed directly to the publishing license of 1998. And on the eve of President Bill Clinton's June 1998 trip to Beijing, the remarks that CASS's Liu Ji, a man rumored to be a confidant of Jiang, had made about the future of the Sino-American relationship during a mid-1997 visit to Harvard University were published in China. After critically assessing Richard Bernstein and Ross H. Munro's The Coming Conflict with China, a prominent work by two Americans that offered ideological support for United States triumphalism, Liu warned his audience that, like America, China was also prone to waves of antiforeign sentiment and irrational nationalism. To keep these forces at bay, he said, "the Chinese government has formulated a policy of 'nonconfrontation, reducing conflicts, increasing mutual understanding, and enhancing cooperation.'"
China's foreign affairs offensive was launched in response to American attempts to engage China in a constructive relationship. It was a strategy of immense significance regionally, politically, and economically. It also had an immediate impact on the intellectual and cultural life of the mainland, areas that were particularly sensitive to every nuance of the love-hate relationship between China and America.
Speculation about the underlying reasons for the Jiang-led thaw with the United States has been rife. While pundits may debate the inner workings of rapprochement, a raft of policy shifts in the arts has had a delightfully bizarre effect in China. The signs of the change were, as is so often the case with the mainland, first publicly visible in culture. For example, Jiang, who also holds the post of Communist Party general secretary, exhorted his Politburo colleagues to see the film Titanic, claiming that it was a moving Hollywood depiction of class tensions and love. And for the first half of 1998 the adolescent mien of Leonardo DiCaprio graced the covers of most mainland glossy publications.
If only China could deliver its wholesome political messages with Hollywood style, it was reasoned, party propaganda would have a glorious future. In keeping with Jiang's gleeful Americophilia, Ding Guangen, the glum Politburo ideology stalwart whose policies had cast a pall over the arts for years, gave voice to the shift in government policy and encouraged film and television producers to be more daring in their work. With the fiftieth anniversary of the People's Republic, the eightieth anniversary of the student-led May 4th Movement, the return of Macau to the motherland, and the cusp of the millennium all coming up in 1999, buckets of state money were available for stage, screen, and publishing ventures, and it was hoped they could successfully marry official homilies to commercial entertainment. Many of the nation's edgiest arts figures were enticed by the blandishments of the party.
Not all anniversaries were that far off, however, and Beijing University celebrated its centenary in mid-1998. It was perhaps merely an unhappy coincidence that the most internationally famous graduate of Beijing University in the 1990s, Wang Dan, a student leader during the 1989 protests, was expelled from China just as his alma mater was preparing for its birthday.
Wang's involvement in a democracy salon at the university led to his active participation in the mass protests that brought the capital to a standstill for nearly two months in 1989. A moderate voice amid shrill calls for radical if not revolutionary change, Wang was eventually purged by his extremist fellows prior to the June 4 crackdown. As a ringleader accused by the government of instigating the disturbances, he was jailed. His eventual release and expulsion to the United States in 1998 came at a time when many scholars and writers were recalling the original spirit of Beijing University and the tradition of intellectual commitment that had been nurtured there in the 1910s and 1920s.
The authorities orchestrated a cheerless commemoration for the school's centenary in the Great Hall of the People on the west flank of Tiananmen Square on May 4, the day of the symbolic Youth Festival of China that itself marked the antigovernment patriotic student demonstrations of 1919. In his congratulatory message, President Jiang lauded the university's "glorious tradition of patriotism, progress, democracy, and science" and enjoined students throughout the nation to strive "to revive the nation with science and learning" while establishing a correct communist worldview inspired by "the older revolutionaries and the people." The occasion was variously marked by cultural performances, seminars, and lavish on-campus building projects. Far from the pomp and ceremony of the Great Hall, others used the centenary to reconfirm what they saw as the true heritage of the university: free thought and support for democracy.
Qian Liqun, a Beijing University professor of twentieth-century literary history, commented on the original educational ethos of the university in the lead story of the May 1998 issue of Reading, the major semi-independent journal for intellectual debate in China. In it he spoke in particular of the guiding force of Cai Yuanpei (1868-1940), the chancellor of the university when it was the focus of the nation's New Culture Movement. Cai had defined the university as home to "absolute academic freedom and the unhindered expression of divergent theories."
Since the inception of economic reform two decades ago, Qian Liqun observed, a mood of independence had once more flourished on the campus. However, the pressures for the university to "constantly provide the machinery of state with 'pragmatic' talents" were enormous. They were also at loggerheads with ideals first propounded by Cai that aimed at making Beijing University a training ground for independent intellectuals who were "outside the state establishment; people endowed with an eternally critical spirit who would not be obsessed with the advantages and disadvantages of their independence and its consequences." At the new millennium, Qian wrote, the university was confronted by the same issue with which it had to grapple in Cai's day: what type of university should it be? "In my view," Qian continued, "its central task should be to encourage people with independent critical faculties. It should be concerned with the long-term benefit and fate of this nation in particular and humanity in general. It should be a training ground for thinkers and writers who can provide new ideals and approaches not only for China but for humankind."
Qian Liqun was concerned not only with commemorating the past, short-lived glories of his university. In November 1997 he had also written the preface to a volume of essays published under the title Fire and Ice by a student at the school who has since been hailed as one of the most outspoken new writers in Beijing.
Yu Jie was a 25-year-old scholar of Chinese literature at the capital's preeminent university. His writings, which ranged from somewhat juvenile meditations on youth, integrity, and life to book reviews and critical essays or zawen, an acerbic form of literary feuilleton, had previously enjoyed considerable currency as "literature hidden in the drawer" (chouti wenxue) that had reportedly circulated in manuscript for some time.
In "The Lost May 4th," one of the essays in Fire and Ice, Yu wrote that the original slogans of the 1919 student movement for "freedom, democracy, science, and human rights"--demands that had found a home in particular at Beijing University--had been subsequently stifled. The spirit of protest was diminished, so "May 4th is now but a distant backdrop. . . We don't really know what it means at all." Certainly, he wrote, the authorities were right to claim that the May 4th period had generated a modern strain of patriotism, but it had also given birth to the traditions of intellectual independence, freedom, and democracy. "What was really unique to May 4th were these latter values; they are what the rulers fear. That is why it has been subverted, and dressed up in a garish costume to perform in public, little more than a drawing card for curious onlookers." In 1998 it was far too premature to talk about "moving on" from or "surpassing" the May 4th tradition, Yu wrote. "What we need to do is to make a concerted effort to appreciate what it was really about."
Fire and Ice also included reviews of the writings of Osip Mandelstam, Stefan Zweig, Joseph Brodsky, George Orwell, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Milan Kundera in which Yu offered meditations on the state of literature, culture, and politics in mainland China in the late 1990s. While his critiques were an example of "civilization between the lines," Fire and Ice was undoubtedly the most provocative book of its kind to have appeared in years. Nonetheless, its reception even among unaligned intellectuals and readers was not one of unalloyed delight.
While many would have agreed with Yu's sentiments--if not always appreciating his barbed style--the packaging and marketing of the book caused some critics to reflect on the fate of controversial opinion in China's modern market socialism. Although he was promoted by the publisher as the author of underground literature that had been "surreptitiously circulating" around universities in the capital for many months before publication, people were skeptical of the credibility of the new literary firebrand. While deploring the political censorship that had kept such work from appearing previously, critics with whom I spoke about the book this May were also repulsed by the market hype surrounding this young writer of middling talent. They protested that the right stuff was being published and hawked for the wrong reason. It is no small irony that whereas socialism had made people cynical about official politics, the market now engendered a wariness toward dissident writing and engagé literature even among some of its avowed supporters.
The appearance of Yu Jie's book amid a flurry of other controversial polemical works in 1998 was made possible by the period of relaxation that began in the autumn of 1997 and continued as Sino-American relations enjoyed a rare halcyon phase. Writers like Yu could, for a time, exploit a freedom from innuendo that made it possible for them to express controversial ideas directly to the reading public. As has been usual during periods of liberalization over the past 20 years, few active writers were willing to let this latest opportunity for graphomania pass. But, as had been the case many times before, the publishing frenzy was due to the good graces of political leaders and a new period of officially ordained "liberated thought." The publishing surge was not a victory for the cultural market as such; it was more a by-product of the state's constant incursions into and manipulation of the marketplace of ideas.
One of those who articulated these concerns was Liu Junning, the editor of the main forum for liberal thought on the mainland, Res Publica. Liu was skeptical about the latitude that committed intellectuals and citizens throughout society really enjoyed. Whatever scope for public expression and limited political debate existed, it was still the prerogative of particular leaders, a result of policy shifts rather than the outcome of a fundamental or systemic change. "For China's liberals," Liu wrote, "the question is how we can transform a tolerance for divergent views into a mechanism for the protection of liberalism so that we will not merely be at the mercy of individual personalities. . . If the situation does not change, any improvements will be transitory."
By the time Bill Clinton went to Beijing University on June 29 to lecture the student body on the need to protect individual rights, media freedom, and democracy, there was nothing much he could say that had not already been prefigured in books and magazines freely available in the city in the months prior to his visit.
Whereas elite intellectuals had generally applauded the overtures made by the Chinese authorities to the United States during the 1980s, in the late 1990s there has been a growing sense of disquiet and uncertainty about just what a constructive partnership with the homeland of global capital might really signify. Although liberals like Liu Junning and communists like Jiang Zemin would both agree on the need for China to find "common cause" with the United States in the next century, what they would mean by that would be vastly different. And while Liu was nostalgic for a form of Western liberal democracy, Jiang Zemin and his cohorts were more in tune with the trends of global markets today. Meanwhile, other thinkers have taken advantage of the openness to express their resistance to globalization and Western hegemony; they are deeply suspicious of the post-Deng government's agenda for China's future. There is even evidence to suggest that their "common cause" might well be with the proponents of a rejiggered Maoism.
In 1978 the Czech playwright Václav Havel wrote one of his most famous essays, "The Power of the Powerless." In it Havel declared that those deprived of political rights and freedoms in a totalitarian environment have a particular kind of power. In such a society "'living within a lie' confronts 'living within the truth,' that is, where the demands of the post-totalitarian system conflict with the real aims of life every free human act or expression, every attempt to live within the truth, must necessarily appear as a threat to the system and, thus, as something which is political par excellence."
Havel argued that "modest expressions of human volition" would work to undermine the primacy of the state and mitigate against the regime of lies that distorted the lives of all who lived under it. The "parallel structures" that formed around individual initiatives were, he believed, most highly developed in the cultural sphere. But Havel, whose translated essays have been circulating in China in the last decade, was responding to conditions in Eastern Europe in the 1970s, a time and place at a considerable remove from 1990s Chinese market socialism. And the parallel polis that developed in China was not necessarily a liberated zone, for it bordered both on the state system and the hungry world of commerce.
In May 1998, Cui Jian, the leading dissident rock star of Beijing, released his latest album, which he called, in English, "The Power of the Powerless." The Chinese title--which was not as prominently displayed on the cassette cover or in promotional materials as the English--was far more innocuous, and less media-savvy: "Wunengde liliang." The cover of the cassette featured a blob-like infant nursing a baby bottle as if it were a rifle.
Cui Jian, long hailed as "China's Bob Dylan," was not working in an "invisible republic," however, for the new album was released by the state-run China Music Company, and marketed by the singer-songwriter's own Beijing East-West Music Manufacturing Corporation. It was on sale at music stores throughout the country from midyear, and promoted widely on air and by a blitz of music store posters featuring the sometimes-banned star. In a mid-June issue of the Internet Chinese entertainment newssheet Mandopop! it was reported that the long-awaited collection had actually fueled a Beijing-wide increase in record sales, with 200,000 units being moved in the first few days of its debut, "earning [Cui] rare praise from music industry suits."
According to Mandopop!, diehard fans described the release as "a modern classic, combining Cui's trademark buzzsaw guitars and intense lyrics with leading-edge jungle loops." But for this jaded listener it was the lyrics of Cui's "Fresh New Rock 'n' Roll" in particular that struck a familiar chord:
Your style's the same as decrepitude
You both use lies to maintain pedestrian joys
You embrace a guitar, eyes wide open
Lookin' for new lovers of rock 'n' roll.
But, people argued, northern rock was better than southern bubblegum pop. And, as Cui said in defense of his songs, "People try to read so much meaning into every contemporary Chinese cultural work. Hey, it's really not so serious. It's only rock and roll."
The new album enjoyed an immediate laying on of hands by the cool capital media, including a cover story in the major hip English-language weekly Beijing Scene. The paper itself was a beneficiary of the 1998 spring fever; founding editor Scott Savitt returned from a period of self-imposed exile in New York to revive it.
In an interview with a correspondent from that paper, the middle-aged Cui opined: "Pop music as a strictly commercial product, that is, for money only, I am not interested in and am indeed opposed to." Still deprived of chances to perform regularly in Beijing and Shanghai, Cui surprisingly irritated some of those in authority while being typecast internationally as a "rebel rocker." As both he and his music mellowed, though, Cui, like aging icons of youthful rebellion elsewhere, found that the market, whether political or commercial, is a hard master. As for his Teflon rebel-without-a-cause pose, one can only conclude that "It's the difference between personality and a persona: one's something you live, the other's just one more thing to sell."1
While Ma Licheng and Liang Zhijun's Crossed Swords, Yu Jie's Fire and Ice, and Cui Jian's new album are among the success stories of the cultural market in 1998, the long-term effects of political manipulation and censorship are increasingly evident in the realm of serious debate.
In 1996, as part of a renewed campaign for the "construction of spiritual civilization" (jingshen wenming jianshe), the party banned a number of important cultural and intellectual journals. Other forums for concerned writers and thinkers continued to flourish, and many important books were published, but their reception was limited to the urban cognoscenti who, through their access to bookstores and insider gossip, enjoyed a privileged knowledge of such work while society at large remained generally unaware of their existence. Recognizing that in the past controversial works had enjoyed considerable cachet because they had been criticized, the authorities, in their wisdom, adopted a laissez-faire attitude. This cauterization through neglect, or passive censorship, while certainly an improvement on the past, raises complex issues that belie simplistic assumptions that free market principles evolving in the publishing sphere function outside China's political culture, or without constant reference to it.
It would be churlish not to affirm the importance of recent developments. However, the combination of party censorship (even in its more benign 1998 guise) and market forces (which are neither as blind nor as free as generally imagined) continues to stifle public debate and awareness of important social and political issues. As Liu Junning observed when commemorating the tradition of liberal thought at Beijing University, without systemic change any toleration for divergent views in China may prove to be illusory.
Mao Zedong once predicted that eventually intellectuals, workers, and peasants would speak "the same language, not only the common language of patriotism and of the socialist system, but probably even that of the communist world outlook." In the new China at the end of the twentieth century, there is more than ample evidence to suggest that fewer people in any group speak the same language at all, and, despite unprecedented freedoms, many are speaking at cross-purposes.
GEREMIE R. BARMÉ is a senior fellow in the Research School of Pacific and Asian History, Australian National University, Canberra. His recent books include Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1996) and In the Red: Contemporary Chinese Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming), from which this article draws.
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