This paper was originally presented at a meeting held at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars on October 24, 2001 titled “Scholars Under Siege? Academic and Media Freedom in China.” It is published here with the permission of the author.

The Anaconda in the Chandelier: Censorship in China Today

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:

• A vague accusation frightens more people. If I am a Chinese scholar working in the U.S., as Gao Zhan was, and I don't know why she was arrested, then the reason could be virtually anything; therefore it could be what I am doing; therefore I pull back. (Result: many people begin to censor themselves.) If, on the other hand, I could know exactly why Gao Zhan was nabbed, then I could feel fairly confident that my own work was all right--or, if not, how to make it all right. (Result: few people would pull back.) Clarity serves the purpose of the censoring state only when it wants to curb a very specific kind of behavior; when it wants to intimidate a large group, vagueness works much better.

• A vague accusation pressures an individual to curtail a wider range of activity. If I don't know exactly why I was "wrong," I am induced to pay more attention to the state's strictures in every respect. This device has been used in literary and social campaigns in China since the 1950s. Who can say--or ever could--what exactly is meant by "spiritual pollution" or "bourgeois liberalism"? The cognitive content of such terms is purposefully vague; only the negativity is clear. To be safe, a person must pull back in every respect, and must become his or her own policeman.

• A vague accusation is useful in maximizing what can be learned during confession. When Li Shaomin was arrested, he asked his captors the reason and they answered, "You yourself know the reason." It was up to Li to "earn lenience" by "showing sincerity" through "confession." The word game is standard. The police routinely say that they already possess an exhaustive amount of information on your crimes; the purpose of interrogating you is not to get information but to measure your sincerity in confessing. In fact, though, this is often a lie. The point is precisely to get new information from you, which can then be used either on yourself or on someone else. Clarity about the accusation would obviously destroy this tactic.

• A vague accusation allows arbitrary targeting. Leaders who exercise arbitrary power normally want to disguise the real reasons for their actions. In a culture like China's, where the "face" of the leader represents his morality and hence his claim to political legitimacy, the need to pretend that one is acting legally and morally is especially crucial. (The need for pretense only increases as the leader's moral behavior worsens.) In this context, the availability of vague and even self-contradictory laws is very useful to the leader. For example, a rule might state: "It is forbidden to collect internal materials." Yet, as everyone knows, many such materials are easily available, and many people collect them. This makes it possible for me, the authority, to use the rule to arrest Gao Zhan or Li Shaomin or whomever I like--for who knows what reason?--and at the same time to have a ready, face-saving justification for my exercise of arbitrary power. China's constitution itself illustrates this handy flexibility. It provides that citizens have freedom of speech, of assembly, and of the press. But its preamble also sets down the inviolability of Communist Party rule, Marxism-Leninism-Mao-Zedong-Thought, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the socialist system. The huge space between these two contradictory poles (both of which, by the way, are poor descriptions of the actual patterns of life in China) gives leaders immense room to be arbitrary while still claiming to be legal.

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.

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