Perry Link, Princeton University
The importance of the Chinese government in the daily lives of ordinary Chinese
people has receded markedly over the last quarter century. No longer, as in
the Mao years, does the state punish citizens for comments overheard among neighbors.
The scope of unofficial life has expanded markedly, and informal speech is much
freer than before. Although newspapers still do not carry barbed political cartoons,
sarcasm no less biting is rampant in jokes and rhythmical ditties on oral networks
throughout the country. Some of these sayings flatly blame the Communist Party
("If we don't root out corruption, the country will perish; if we do root
out corruption, the Party will perish"). Others dare to satirize Jiang
Zemin, Li Peng, and other top leaders by name.
Yet repression remains an important problem, whose extent and methods are still
poorly understood in the West. One must begin by revisiting a dull but fundamental
fact: the highest priority of the top leadership of the Communist Party remains,
as in the past, not economic development, or China's international standing,
or any other goal for the nation as a whole, but its own grip on power. Thus
it continues to ban any public expression of opposition to itself and continues
to crush any organization that it does not control or could not easily control
if it needed to. The fate of qigong breath exercises is a good illustration.
In the 1980s the Party encouraged qigong as an expression of Chinese
essence and a symbol of national pride. The central government even set up a
national qigong association, complete with its own bureaucracy. But in
the 1990s, when some qigong masters (Li Hongzhi of Falungong was not
the first) decided to build their own organizations outside of Party control,
the same Chinese-essence breath exercises overnight became an "evil cult,"
in need of brutal repression. The founders of the Chinese Democratic Party,
all of whom are in prison today, ran afoul the same principle. Their crime was
not the word "democratic" in their group's name (China already had
eight "democratic parties" that were subservient to the Communist
Party); their crime was their organizational independence.
Censorship in intellectual matters broadly follows the same pattern. Nearly
anything can be said in private, which is a big advance over the Mao years.
And because academic journals have such small circulations, they are given somewhat
more latitude than other publishing media. As long as scholars don't confront
the top leadership head-on, they can write in scholarly journals pretty much
as they choose. Moreover, in recent years, what many of them have chosen to
write has been more favorable to the Party leadership than what they were inclined
to write in the 1980s. (The reasons for this shift are complex--some have to
do with government pressures, others with shifting perceptions of China's place
in the world; to probe this topic properly would require a separate essay, and
is beyond my scope here.)
When an intellectual does want to express a politically sensitive idea in public,
it remains the case that he or she must take a risk. As in the past, taking
risks is not just a matter of personal courage, although that certainly is important.
It helps as well to have allies or backers with whom to share the risk. It can
also help to use indirection, such as pseudonyms, surrogates, or Aesopian expression.
Even highly-placed people, such as the sponsors of The Tiananmen Papers,
choose indirection when going public.
Although repression has decreased in breadth during the Jiang Zemin years, its
essential methods have changed little from the Deng era. In fundamental principle
they inherit the Mao years as well. These methods have "Chinese characteristics;"
they have always differed, for example, from those of the Soviet Union. The
Soviets published periodic handbooks that listed which specific phrases were
out of bounds, and employed a large bureaucracy to enforce the rules. China
has never had such a bureaucracy or published any such handbooks. Propaganda
officials rejected these more mechanical methods in favor of an essentially
psychological control system in which the key is self-censorship. Questions
of risk--how far to go, how explicit to be, with whom to ally, and so on--are
moved inside the cerebrums of every individual writer and editor. There are,
of course, physical punishments that anchor one's calculations. If you calculate
incorrectly and go too far, you can lose your job, be imprisoned, or, in the
worst case, get a bullet in the back of the head. If you live overseas you can
run the risk of being cut off from your family and hometown. But most censorship
does not directly involve such happenings. It involves fear of such happenings.
By "fear" I do not mean a clear and present sense of panic. I mean
a dull, well-entrenched leeriness that people who deal with the Chinese censorship
system usually get used to, and eventually accept as part of their natural landscape.
But the controlling power of this fear is quite effective nonetheless.
Outsiders to this system can be puzzled by its use of vagueness. Scholars Gao
Zhan and Li Shaomin are arrested. Why? What did they actually do? What defines
"spying"? Why were these two arrested for using "internal"
materials when so many others who do the same thing remain unmolested? I do
not know the answers to these questions for these two people, but I am not in
the least surprised by the general "vagueness." This vagueness is
purposeful, and has been fundamental in the Chinese Communist control system
for decades. It has the following four advantages:
Although vagueness is especially useful in manipulating groups, specificity
can play its role when the goal is to affect a ceratin person in a certain way.
For example, a number of the Americans who worked to bring out The Tiananmen
Papers are now denied visas to travel to China. Yet one of them recently
received a letter from a high PRC official explaining why that official could
not help: he was "unable to guarantee to the relevant authority that you
will extend certain apologies on your involvement in The Tiananmen Papers
so as to clear your visa problems."
The detentions over the past two years of Gao Zhan, Li Shaomin, Wu Jianmin,
Xu Zerong, Kang Zhengguo, and other scholars with Western ties are part of a
problem that runs far, far deeper than those cases taken individually would
suggest. The majority of such cases never come to light. Kang Zhengguo, writing
in The New York Review of Books, estimates that "hundreds and thousands"
of Chinese who return to their homeland are invited for "chats" in
which the police warn and threaten them in various ways ("You want to come
back to China again?" "You wish the best for your friends and relatives?").
The police also specifically warn them not to say anything about these threats
when they go back to the West. ("Let's not have any loose tongues;"
"Remember to preserve the positive image of State Security;" etc.).
I cannot corroborate Kang's estimate that there are "hundreds and thousands"
of such "returnee interviews," but would note that just within my
own circle of friends I have heard a dozen or so such stories in recent years
(and my small circle, multiplied by the size of the world, may well reach "hundreds
and thousands").
Among "dissidents" it is fairly common to use pseudonyms for the purpose
of returning to China. When one woman, a well-known critic of the Chinese government,
did this last year, the police in her hometown knew who she really was, and
let her know that they knew it, and yet both sides played the language game
of pretending that her "returnee interview," where specific threats
were delivered and received over tea and snacks, was simply a social event.
Back in the U.S., she still abides by certain rules, on pain of threats to her
relatives.
In addition to the (large?) number of people directly affected by this tactic,
a much larger number is indirectly affected through intimidation. For every
person who is threatened with forced exile or mistreatment of relatives, many
more hear about such threats and censor themselves accordingly. Active fear
in such cases is rare. Speaking and behaving within prescribed boundaries merely
seems prudent. With the passage of time, forbidden zones come to seem normal,
even natural. Most Chinese wend their ways through the political landscape without
questioning all of its boulders and ditches, but simply skirting them, getting
where they want to go with minimum trouble. By contrast the "dissident,"
who does raise questions, or states principles, can seem a bit block-headed,
and even in a sense "deserving" of the trouble he or she gets into.
Self-censorship affects the scholarly world more deeply than surface appearances
suggest. When Gao Zhan was arrested in China her academic research was interrupted.
That was a specific loss. But it was a tiny loss compared to what happens when
other scholars observe such cases: research trips are canceled; certain questions
are deleted, or asked in altered form, or written up in less-than-fully-candid
ways. The specific extent of these losses is hard to measure, not only because
people are reluctant to speak about them (no scholar likes to acknowledge self-censorship),
but because the crucial functions are psychological and very subtle. They happen
within the recesses of private minds, where even the scholar him- or herself
may not notice exactly what is happening. (I do not say this to denigrate my
fellow scholars. Over the years I have noticed the phenomenon in myself as well.)
In sum, the Chinese government's censorship is less like a man-eating tiger
or fire-snorting dragon than a giant anaconda coiled in an overhead chandelier.
Normally it doesn't move. It doesn't have to. It feels no need to be clear about
its prohibitions. Its silent message is "You yourself decide," after
which everyone below makes his or her large and small adjustments--all quite
"naturally."
Does the coiled anaconda affect relations between China and other countries?
Of course it does. What could be more fundamental to good relations than accuracy
of mutual perceptions? And how can intimidation or censorship of any sort help
in this regard? To be sure, many other factors contribute to mutual understanding,
and Western countries lag in addressing a good number of them. (To name just
one, young Chinese who study English still outnumber young Americans who study
Chinese by a ratio of several thousand to one.) But in the specific area of
mutual reporting in scholarship and journalism, it should be stated bluntly
that the Chinese government's tactics are harmful to relations. They contribute
to distortions both in Chinese perceptions of the West and in Western perceptions
of China.
When the World Trade Center was destroyed, some Chinese--primarily young, male,
and educated--exulted on the Internet and cheered the flaming images. Later
a group of twenty Chinese scholars issued a statement in which they decried
this reaction and then sought to explain it. Chinese young people, they wrote,
had been "led astray by certain media themes and education guidelines in
recent times." In the early 1990s, when the Deng Xiaoping regime began
to stoke Chinese nationalism as a way to recoup its popularity after the Tiananmen
debacle, it began to employ images of the US as a swaggering hegemon--that frustrated
China's Olympic hopes, that interfered in China's domestic affairs in human
rights, that sought to "contain" a rising China, and so on. These
images are by no means the whole story on why some Chinese youth cheered the
collapse of the World Trade Center towers, but they played a role. The images
were not accurate portrayals of the US and were not intended to be. They were
caricatures produced and spread by Chinese journalists who, themselves living
beneath an anaconda in the chandelier, may or may not have agreed with what
they themselves were writing and saying--and indeed may not even have put the
question to themselves in quite this way.
The anaconda also creates blind spots and undue euphemism in how China is reported
in the West. Scholars are affected more than journalists. In the wake of the
arrests of Gao Zhan, Li Shaomin, and others, a number of scholars of Chinese
background canceled research trips to China, while other US scholars (of various
backgrounds) canceled or altered projects that they feared might compromise
Chinese collaborators inside China. It is impossible to estimate how much is
lost when such long-term investments are at stake. Which of these curtailed
research projects, at what point in the future, might be helpful in getting
the rest of the world to see China more accurately? While this is hard to say,
it is easier to see the effects when the anaconda prevents knowledge that is
already at hand from being properly shared with the US public. This does happen,
in both gross and subtle ways. For example in 1999, when the Falungong organization
suddenly made itself felt in China and the world, the US public could have benefited
from the best scholarly understanding of the phenomenon. But when a major news
organization invited one of the US's top scholars in a relevant field for a
television interview, the scholar declined. He didn't want to lose access to
fieldwork in China by appearing in public on a politically sensitive issue.
He knew that foreigners who displease Chinese authorities can be denied visas,
or, even if allowed into China, denied interviews or access to archives.
The problem is more common, and more complex, for political scientists who study
the Chinese government and need to nurture and preserve their contacts among
Chinese officials. Such scholars tend to form habits of tiptoeing around phrases
that express the stoutly-asserted views of the PRC leadership ("Taiwan
must never be independent," "Foreigners must not use human rights
to meddle in China's internal affairs," and others). I am not a scholar
of the Soviet Union, but from my secondary readings in that field I have the
impression that the Soviet government was never anywhere close to the PRC government
in either sophistication or effectiveness of this kind of psychological pressuring.
And Western scholars did not, I believe, censor themselves to the same extent
when writing and speaking of the Soviet Union.
While the Chinese government's implicit threats against scholars and journalists
have to do with visas and access to interviews, archives, or research sites,
against businesses the main threat is cut-off of access to the Chinese market,
and the threats are not always very subtle. For example when Salvatore Condo,
a supervisor of Li Shaomin when Li worked at AT&T in new Jersey, went to
an AT&T Vice President for help in trying to get Li released from prison,
the VP would not see him and wrote"…".
The prestigious American law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton, and Garrison
for many years has been doing legal work for American businesses in China. When
one of its partners began to do pro bono human rights work, including
assistance to critics of the Chinese government, Beijing passed messages to
the firm asking that it muzzle its wayward member. Younger lawyers in the firm
could see where the boundaries of their own expression were supposed to be,
and understood that those boundaries were to be self-policed. When one of them,
Gordon Chang, decided to write a book setting forth the truth about the Chinese
economy as he saw it (The Coming Collapse of China, Random House, 2001),
Chang knew he would be robustly violating the unwritten rules in his line of
work. He also knew that the legal career he had built would be a casualty. He
feels sure that he could not return to the kind of position he once held at
the level that he held it--not only at Paul, Weiss, et al, but at any similar
law firm. He believes that his wife Lydia, also a lawyer, shares his fate by
association.
Is there anything the world can do about this anaconda? I believe, at a minimum,
that democracies should expose such problems to the light of day; the anaconda's
power is greatest in dim light. Democratic governments could make it clear that
they view censorship, including self-censorship under duress, as a violation
of free expression. Where their own citizens are concerned they should, as President
Bush did in the cases of Li Shaomin and of Gao Zhan's son, press for legal treatment.
Where Chinese citizens are concerned, they could point out violations of Chinese
law and of international conventions. (It is, for example, a violation of the
U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights for a member state to deny entry
to one of its own citizens; yet there are published lists of more than 50 Chinese
citizens in exile who, only because of what they say and write, are to be detained
and deported if they try to enter the PRC.)
I have friends in the Chinese dissident community who argue that what I have
sketched in the preceding paragraph is too weak, and even self-deluding, because
it has no teeth. They point out that PRC leaders are astutely attuned to practical
gains and losses. Moral suasion from the West and ideological riposte from the
other side are viewed as mere fluff by comparison, they say, and tend only to
distract naïve Westerners. If the PRC manipulates passports, visas, and
border controls in order to threaten people, my friends argue, then why should
not the US withhold visas from the PRC political elite? This is tit for tat--and
after all, the US has plenty of capital to spend in this regard. The Party-run
media in China might promote images of a US hegemon; but at the same time the
children and grandchildren of the elite head toward that hegemon--more than
anywhere else--for education, for business, and for the safekeeping of family
funds. (Dennis Halpin, a former chief of the Visa Section at the US Embassy
in Beijing, attests that on many occasions high PRC officials confidentially
and "sheepishly" let him see records of US bank accounts as large
as $200,000 in order to establishment financial security for their travelling
offspring.) Use of some of this leverage, my friends say, could provide the
kind of concrete incentives that would really work.
I feel deeply conflicted in trying to respond to my friends. Should Western
democracies keep out murderers? Certainly. But punish children and grandchildren
for the distasteful behavior of their elders? And advertise the policy openly,
so that it radiates its own intimidation-effects and becomes, as it were, a
baby anaconda? Such steps rather clearly lead away from the very principles
of fairness and freedom from intimidation that democracies seek to defend. On
the other hand, I am convinced that my dissident friends are correct when they
argue that PRC leaders respond best to practical, concrete incentives and that
Washington policymakers have for some time been excessively tangled in diversionary
fluff and have underplayed the US hand.
At a minimum, I believe, the US government should better publicize the phenomenon
of how the PRC elite comes to the US for higher education, green cards, and
banking. (Ordinary Chinese people will have their own speculations about where
the banked money originated.) This may be a job not for the government itself
but for a good investigative journalist; but one would hope the US government
would cooperate with such an effort within the limits of the law. Two important
htmects of "US national interests" would be enhanced: 1) Anti-US propaganda
sponsored by the Chinese state would be exposed as hypocritical and thus lose
force; and 2) the US would tend to be aligned with ordinary people in China,
who in any case widely suspect their leadership of embezzlement, and thus help
Chinese people to see the US as a friend rather than an arrogant world policeman.