Empire of Lies: The Truth about China in the Twenty-First Century

PROLOGUE

The Myth of China

In the words of Napoleon Bonaparte, When China awakens, the world will tremble. The world will tremble because the myth of China is far more potent than its reality: image, it would seem, prevails over truth. Western observers of China have always proved singularly inept, forever seeing what is not. And down the ages, the Chinese leadership, from the Empire to the Communist Party, has successfully cultivated an air of inscrutability that has taken in a credulous West. The idea of a powerful China submerging the rest of the world is far-fetched; it is a poor nation, its economy barely the size of the French or Italian economy.

The world trembles because it feeds on fantasies. The reality on the ground is far less awesome, if only an attempt were made to understand it. The failure to do so, as we shall see, is not new but part of a long story.

What the Jesuits, Jean-Paul Sartre, and today’s businessmen have in common

Four hundred years ago, when Italian and French Jesuits went to China, they saw all that was trivial and missed all that was essential. Should one go by their accounts, chiefly responsible for the larger-than-life image of China in the European imagination, there was no place for religion in a country ruled by a philosopher-emperor. In Les Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, a 1702 bestseller written by French Jesuits, the Chinese people were portrayed as an amorphous superstitious mass whereas the Confucian mandarins were deemed by our great travelers to be delightful men of letters. So deep was the imprint they left on the Enlightenment philosophers, Leibniz and Voltaire in particular, that Voltaire lived in the hope of Europe being ruled by an enlightened despot and enjoying a godless morality. Voltaire’s Supreme Being has Chinese genes. A portrait of Confucius, bearing the inscription To Master Kong who was a prophet in his own land presided over his Ferney study. And so the reality of China was supplanted by the myth of China and sinology founded as an ideology.

The reality of Chinese society lay elsewhere, however. The mandarins, not always chosen on merit, were often corrupt and made the people submit to their exactions. The people suffered Confucianism as an anticlerical ideology, inimical to their belief in the Buddha and the immortal Daoists. As for the legitimacy of dynastic rule and emperors, no fewer than twenty-six dynasties and numerous palace coups came before the Republican Revolution of 1911.

Understanding the real China seems to be the least of our concerns. Until very recently, most universities in France taught Confucian philosophy and court manners, paying scant attention to contemporary Chinese society. Over the last few years, it is true, a shift has occurred. The fascination for the mandarins, a legacy of the Jesuits and Voltaire, is waning, though slowly. Language courses are being offered, with Chinese being taught like any other living language, for purposes other than sinology. Economists, lawyers, sociologists, and others have started venturing into China and viewing it like any another country, which is how it should be. And yet the tendency to mystify China persists, with scholars hard put to come to grips with flesh-and-blood Chinese. From 1973 to 1994, the French statesman and prolific writer Alain Peyrefitte almost single-handedly shaped our perception of China, with his exotically titled books—When China Awakens, the World Will Tremble; The Immobile Empire; and The Chinese Tragedy—firing the public imagination. The ordinary Chinese people were of no interest to Peyrefitte; his China was an organic mass lost in slumber or steeped in tragedy. I wonder if there is any other country on which we could have projected our hopes and fears as freely as we have on China.

The conservatives were the first to mystify China; a few hundred years later, the progressives, hardly more levelheaded, did exactly the same thing. The Jesuits had dreamed of universal evangelization and philosopher-emperors, and found both in China. In the Seventies, our much vaunted intellectuals, in search of a mentor and a universal revolution, gravitated naturally toward China.

Three hundred years after the Jesuit priests, Roland Barthes, Philippe Sollers, Jacques Lacan, and many others of the same ilk made their pilgrimage to China; like their predecessors, they saw only what they wanted to—that is, nothing at all. When the so-called Cultural Revolution, a euphemism for a civil war, was at its peak, Maria-Antonietta Macciocchi, a self-styled intellectual authority on the subject in Italy and France, wrote: After three years of trouble, the Cultural Revolution will usher in a thousand years of happiness. The New Philosophers Guy Lardreau and Christian Jambet saw in Mao a resurrection of Christ and compared The Little Red Book to the Gospels. This metaphorical approach to Maoism, very much in line with the Jesuit interpretation of Confucianism, was yet another journey in the realm of the imaginary. And Jean-Paul Sartre, receptive at all times to the aesthetics of violence, embraced Maoism without even having gone to China. A learned fool, said Molière, is twice as foolish as an ignorant fool.

A discerning few refused to be mesmerized by this second invention of China. In the Seventies, the Belgian writer Pierre Ryckmans, alias Simon Leys, spoke of how he saw bodies, tied together, floating down the Pearl River to Victoria Harbor. There was also a substantial amount of documentary evidence of the massacres for anyone who wished to consult it. But the perceptive observer’s condemnation of Maoism made for dreary reading compared with the fabulous tales of the Jesuits and the Leftists. In 1971, René Viénet and Chang Hingho published Simon Leys’s The New Clothes of President Mao in their collection The Asian Library, and it went on to become a classic in the analysis of the Maoist dictatorship. The generation of the Seventies turned a blind eye to the blatant crimes of the Maoist regime in the same way that earlier generations had chosen not to see the horrors of the Soviet Gulag or the Nazi death camps.

In the eighteenth century, Europe was enamored of all things Chinese, in the Fifties of all things Stalinist, and in the Seventies of all things Maoist. Nothing seems to have changed, for today we have simply invented a new myth in place of the old.

The steady stream of political and business delegations visiting Beijing these days wears the same kind of blinkers as its Jesuit and progressive predecessors, it seems. Business interests and profit motivate the visitors, but these interests hardly make them more clear-sighted. They are just as overawed as the progressive intellectuals of the Seventies and believe China cannot be judged by the same yardstick as its Asian neighbors such as Korea and Japan. Western delegations visiting the country move as if in a trance, a feeling heightened by their Communist hosts, past masters, like the emperors and Mao, in the art of stage management. When it comes to China, the mindlessness of Westerners is truly astounding. The country is no more exotic than Africa or India; in fact, over the last twenty years, it is even less so. Yet our fascination for the slumbering giant remains unabated.

Like their Jesuit and intellectual forerunners, today’s businessmen deal only with officialdom, though the current set of leaders lacks the refinement of the earlier mandarins. The Communist Party believes in brutal methods, and this is reflected in their style of governance. The gullibility of the hurried visitor is excusable to a certain extent: China is a vast country, access to several regions is forbidden, information is censored, and people are reluctant to talk or are under surveillance. In their individual capacity, the Chinese may express themselves and criticize the regime, provided that what they say does not spread and take on any form of organization. Other than the Communist Party, no form of political, social, religious, or cultural organization is allowed, the leaders of such groups often languishing in jail without trial. The ordinary Chinese are ruled by an authoritarian party, according to the dictates of the Security and Propaganda Departments. The Propaganda Department functions with ruthless efficiency, making gullible foreigners accept unquestioningly whatever it chooses to put out: economic statistics that cannot be verified, trumped-up elections, blanked-out epidemics, imaginary labor harmony, and the purported absence of any aspiration for democracy.

The voice of the common man in China

What does the 95 percent of the Chinese population that does not belong to the Communist Party think? We are talking about more than a billion people, poor peasants and free spirits. In a totalitarian country, it is not easy to measure public discontent with the Communist establishment. But it is possible to meet men and women who have the courage to express their desire for freedom. This is what I did, and the task, though difficult, was not insurmountable. Others—journalists, sociologists, economists—are conducting the same inquiry and coming to the same conclusion: the Chinese people do not like the Communist Party, and the vast majority wish for a less corrupt, more equitable regime. An infinitesimal number of people have benefited from economic development; for most Chinese, the feeling of deep injustice is far greater than the hope for a better tomorrow.

From January 2005 to January 2006, the Year of the Rooster according to the Chinese calendar, and on other trips in 2006 and 2007, I listened to these free-spirited Chinese; it was the least I could do. Though I was in no danger, the people who spoke to me did so at great personal risk. These men and women who cherish freedom and who occupy the center stage of my inquiry were perplexed by the collusion of Western governments with the Communist Party. They wondered how we could have forgotten the Tiananmen massacre so quickly. They wondered if we knew that the authorities had not even bothered to return the bodies of the victims to their families—and that whenever the Party felt threatened, it would not hesitate to call in the army and employ the same brutality. They wondered whether we had heard of the peasant revolts in the countryside and worker unrest in the factories in protest against the Party. The questions kept pouring in. Did we not know that religion was put down and thousands of priests, pastors, and followers of various sects were interned in so-called labor reeducation centers without any trial? Did we not care about the fate of the hundreds of thousands of AIDS victims left to fend for themselves or of the millions of young peasant girls forced into prostitution for—among other reasons—gratifying foreign investors? Did the massive migratory flow—millions of Chinese from the most educated to the humblest—to other countries convey nothing? Did we not know that corrupt Party officials had embezzled most of the foreign investment, leaving workers in foreign companies with a pittance for a salary? Were we unaware of the extent to which Party cadres were fleecing foreign investors and Chinese workers? Had we no inkling about the billions stashed away overseas where families of officials had already fled in anticipation of a coup?

We simply cannot afford to ignore these questions on the pretext that these are China’s internal affairs. The fate of the country hangs to a large extent on decisions made in the West. Should foreign investment and imports begin to peter out, the Chinese economy would come to a grinding halt. Sixty percent of Chinese exports are carried out by foreign companies, and the Communist Party’s survival depends on its ability to maintain a favored relationship with Western decision makers. It is precisely for this reason that the Propaganda Department assiduously woos Western public opinion and tries to buy it off.

Is China a country to be feared?

Western realpolitik with respect to China is clearly immoral; what is debatable is whether the West stands to gain by it. Chinese goods flooding Western markets are a matter of concern but can hardly be considered a serious threat. In any international division of labor, cheap imports may lead to a loss of jobs, but they also raise standards of living and compel firms to become more innovative. The challenge of cheap imports is by no means insurmountable.

The real danger of this cozy relationship with the Communist Party lies elsewhere: we are allowing a totalitarian state to build an arsenal, fraught with consequences for China’s neighbors, Asia, and the rest of the world. Nobody is threatening China, so why does the Party put such store by military might? What is the purpose of maintaining 700 fighter jets and nuclear weapons capable of striking not just Taiwan but also Japan, Korea, and the United States? And more immediately, what is the purpose of the hundreds of medium-range missiles targeting the people of Taiwan from the Fujian and Jiangxi mountains? The Party’s intentions are abundantly clear. It is equally clear that the real threat, both to the Chinese people and to the rest of the world, is the Party. Like citizens everywhere, the ordinary Chinese only want peace and a secure future for their children.

The West has an alternative, and that is to support the Chinese democrats. On the one hand, the Communist Party, dependent as it is on foreign investors, is especially vulnerable to outside pressure in the run-up to the Olympic Games to be held in Beijing in 2008. The Party is pinning all its hopes on these games: if they go off successfully, it will be a consecration of the Party. On the other hand, there is the constant fear of some untoward incident (a revolt, epidemic, or other event) bringing it into disrepute. Two precedents underscore the importance of the 2008 Games: the Berlin Olympics of 1936 that consecrated Nazi ideology; and the Seoul Olympics in 1988 that opened Korea to the rest of the world, heralding the country’s democratization. What will Beijing 2008 be: Berlin or Seoul? The answer depends on the approach of the West, on whether it remains in awe of Chinese might or whether it shares with the Chinese the values of freedom and liberty.

The time is thus ripe to put pressure on the Communist Party to stop jailing democrats and religious leaders, to let political exiles return, to give teeth to the human rights of which the constitution speaks, to allow other political parties to emerge, and to free information from the control of the Propaganda Department. Hu Ping, a Chinese democrat exiled in the United States, says: We are not asking the Party to do anything, we are asking it to do nothing. If the Communist leaders are so sure of their popularity, let them prove it in a free and fair election. The West should press for universal suffrage, as it did in the case of South Africa at the time of apartheid. The principle of one man, one vote would not do China any harm. Stripped of its mystique, China would then become a country like any other.

Do the Chinese really want freedom?

Were the Chinese free to express themselves, they would certainly ask for freedom. They are no different from any other people in their hatred of tyranny, so why should they want to remain oppressed by the Communist Party? We in the West, blinded by our economic and political prejudices, are happy to go along with the Communist propaganda that democracy in China is an aberration, inconceivable at present and, in any case, contrary to the Chinese ethos. The Chinese are as much citizens of our times as they are of their country; they know what democracy is. Having suffered for so long the oppression of the Communist Party, they are just waiting for it to collapse.

Are the people not grateful to the Party for loosening somewhat its grip on society? It is true that with the restoration of the right to live in a family, choose their lifestyle, and, for a small minority, acquire wealth, they are less subjugated. But they are still held on a tight leash by the Party and continue to bear the brunt of its whims and factional quarrels at all levels—in the neighborhood or the village or the factory, everyone is at the mercy of the local chieftain. If the Chinese could, they would consign these apparatchiks to the dustbins of history. Some actually dare to say so openly, displaying great courage.

In the West, we call these democrats dissidents. The term is reductionist: these dissidents are not marginal but speak for the entire Chinese nation. Ever since China has been under the sway of the Communist Party, these extraordinary men and women have worked tirelessly from one generation to the next to spread the message of democracy. The Party may use its coffers to stifle their voices; the purpose of this inquiry is to listen to what they have to say. I would go as far as to state that they are the pride of China, perhaps its future.

A normal China is what the Chinese democrats are asking for. Let us pay heed to what they are saying, so that what follows is not, or so I hope, yet another book on China. It is meaningless to write about China in general, just as it serves no purpose to write about the West in general. Prophesying about China is equally futile, inhabited as it is by an unpredictable multitude of peoples whose situation is becoming increasingly volatile by the day. My aim was to listen, not to all the Chinese but to a few exceptional Chinese, who, I believe, are representative of the present debate between the authoritarian power structure and its opponents; they are men and women of sterling character, convinced of the righteousness of their cause. The present work is not intended as a book on China but as a series of encounters with these indomitable Chinese. The least I felt I could do, in the Year of the Rooster and after, was to listen to China’s democrats as they waged their valiant struggle against tyranny. It was also a way of not falling prey to the strange fascination that sometimes grips the West in the face of tyrants.

CHAPTER ONE

The Dissenters

On the first day of the Year of the Rooster, in a fast-food joint located in the Chinese quarters of Washington, Wei Jingsheng was chain-smoking under a No Smoking sign. People looked on indulgently as he used the butt of the cigarette he had finished to light the next. They all knew about his eighteen-year ordeal in a Chinese prison. The lady who ran the place and the clients were happy to see him, and rushed to greet him. Wei told me over a bowl of steaming wonton soup, The rule of law gives me the freedom to break the law. In a democracy, that is, the law is clear and can be broken without running undue risks.

Wei currently lives in exile in the United States. He is a staunch advocate of democracy despite its flaws and imperfections. He wants democracy for China because he has no illusions about it being perfect; for him, democracy is not a substitute for Marxism but the end of ideology.

The story of Wei, the most well-known and unrelenting of the Chinese dissidents, began on December 5, 1978. That day he pasted a handwritten poster in small letters titled The Fifth Modernization on a wall in Beijing. Deng Xiaoping, the new Party chief, had asked people to put up posters on that particular wall in Xidan, an outlying locality of Beijing, in order to drum up support for his reforms and get rid of the leftists led by Mao Zedong’s widow. Deng favored what in Communist Party parlance is referred to as the four modernizations: agriculture, industry, education, and science. Twenty-nine-year-old Wei, an electrician like Solidarity’s Lech Walesa in Poland, thought it fit to propose a fifth modernization, political modernization. Until that fateful day, the only political activity Wei had indulged in was the mandatory Friday afternoon discussion circle of his work unit at the Beijing zoo.

In his private life, though, he had displayed an independent streak, living with a Tibetan girl born to a counterrevolutionary family. A marriage in China has to be sanctioned by the work unit. Wei was not granted the necessary permission. He had to choose between abstinence, the only course open to him under socialist law, or cohabitation, which was not legal. It goes without saying that the Party leadership is released from such legalities. The sexual pursuits of Mao Zedong are well-known.

The man who isn’t afraid to tell the truth

People need democracy, wrote Wei. The demand for democracy is simply asking for the restoration of what belongs to the people. Whoever dares deny them their rights is nothing but a shameless bandit, more despicable than the capitalist who lives off the blood and sweat of the worker. A little later, he wrote: We need neither God nor emperor, we have no faith in any savior and we want to be masters of our own destiny. Soon after the first poster, he wrote another one: History shows that there must be a limit to the power conferred on any one individual. Those who ask for the unreserved trust of the people are consumed by unrestrained ambition. We must choose people whom we can trust and, more importantly, make them accountable to ensure that the will of the majority is carried out. We can only trust such representatives as those we elect ourselves and who are accountable to us.

In the West, such statements would appear commonplace, but in Beijing, they created a stir. Every day, crowds gathered in front of the Democracy Wall and someone would read out the text for the benefit of the bystanders; many wept, overcome with emotion. After thirty years of propaganda, Wei had touched a chord and put in words what they all felt deep inside. His words were simple, stripped of all jargon, Marxist or otherwise. What made his posters provocative was that he had signed them. He told me that signing his name was his way of restoring the dignity of the Chinese individual and putting a symbolic end to servitude.

For a few weeks, the Communist Party did not react. Then, as soon as Deng Xiaoping got rid of his rivals, he had the Democracy Wall razed to the ground. Wei was accused of selling state secrets abroad and arrested. All he had done was to give an interview to a British journalist. His public trial was held in front of a carefully chosen audience, but a Chinese journalist managed to smuggle the soundtrack out and it was heard around the world. The journalist—Liu Qing—was sentenced to ten years of hard labor. Xinhua agency photos showed Wei, skinny arms and shaven head, reading a text admonishing his judges. He cited the Chinese constitution, which, in principle, guarantees the independence of the judiciary; the judges looked embarrassed but sentenced him to fifteen years of prison nonetheless.

In a windowless dungeon, on a mean bed in a labor camp, the laogaï, or Chinese gulag that French sinologist Jean-Luc Domenach aptly called the forgotten archipelago, Wei suffered the worst kind of humiliation, unbearable ordeals, and horror of the kind experienced by victims and prisoners of the Stalin and Hitler eras. In the West, people are convinced that nothing could be worse than the Holocaust, but many Chinese intellectuals compare the laogaï and massacres of the Cultural Revolution with Auschwitz.

I could not help staring at Wei, looking for the scars of loneliness, torture, and humiliation that were his lot. His teeth fell out because of malnutrition and have been replaced by inexpensive dentures. For the rest, he seems to be in good health, lively and pink like the immortal gods of popular Chinese religion. The years of solitude, the hunger strikes, and hard labor do not seem to have touched his body, but the scars he bears inside have desensitized him. He has lost the capacity to experience pain, to suffer, feel, and love. Except for his struggle, Wei has nothing to live for.

How did he survive? Like Nelson Mandela, by the sheer strength of his conviction. Wei kept telling himself in prison that he was freer than his jailers because he had the courage to say what he thought. I was happier than them because I lived out my conviction whereas the others just did what they were told. After his incarceration, Wei was rearrested in 1994, and again sent off to the laogaï, this time for trying to organize a union. Western human rights organizations demanded Wei’s release, for he had become the best-known Chinese dissident; in 1997, he was expelled from China and sent to the United States on health grounds. In this way, neither the Party nor Wei lost face.

At the age of twenty-nine in Communist China, what did Wei know of democracy? At that time, he explained, I hadn’t read Western philosophers like Montesquieu or John Locke; but I was sufficiently informed to know that democracy was better than communism. Young Wei had been a Red Guard at sixteen. During the course of his travels across the country, he discovered the yawning gap between the glorious discourse of the Revolution and its sordid reality—famine, fear, and the massacres of the Cultural Revolution. He added, My state of mind then was what the Chinese are experiencing now: they know enough to know that democracy is by far the best system.

Wei Jingsheng’s tribulations are now a closed chapter. This at least is the official line in China. The Party wants to forget Wei and others like him and have us believe that his story belongs to a bygone era. So does Wei still represent a threat to the communists? It is hard to say: China in 2006 is no longer the totalitarian nightmare Wei lived through. Even so, the Party is firmly entrenched; it is tyrannical and unwilling to admit its mistakes. Wei’s struggle therefore continues to be meaningful. The excesses of the past and the daily violations of human rights cannot be wished away. If China is to have a normal future, the struggle must go on.

Wei Jingsheng claims that he can feel the pulse of the people better than any journalist or diplomat in Beijing. They can only see what the Party wants them to see. Wei uses the telephonic and Internet feedback to his Voice of America broadcasts to gauge public opinion. He says that people ring him up from all over China because the Voice of America is the only credible source of information. Is it really that popular? Whenever I asked people in China, the replies I got were evasive. They speak excellent Chinese, The sound quality is good, I never listen, it’s the voice of George Bush were some of the standard comments. At the Guangzhou Sun Yat-sen University, one professor told me, All my students listen to it, while another said, No one listens. Whatever the case may be, the Voice of America is recognized. Those who listen in—the politicized minority—know that Wei, the man who did not hesitate to tell off his judges, will not lie to them in exile.

Do the Chinese really want democracy? Would they not be content with an enlightened despot? Wei disagrees. Democracy, he says, may be a relatively new idea in China, but so it is in Europe. Moreover, the preference for democracy is not the result of an ideological conversion but of a pragmatic choice, opting for what works rather than what does not work. Wei, who has never been part of the academic establishment, rejects all theories that the meaning of freedom in Chinese civilization is different. He holds that