|
|
|
|
|
Closed books in China
By Sreeram Chaulia
This month, 36-year-old dissident writer Yu Jie is releasing
a controversial book in Hong Kong that has been banned in
mainland China for "hurting the nation's interests and
security".
Provocatively titled China's Best Actor: Wen Jiabao,
the work (expected to be translated into English later this
year) takes pot shots at one of the holiest cows in the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership, the 67-year-old
"people's premier", who has been labeled in state-run media
as "Grandpa Wen".
Several books that target lesser figures and phenomena have
been driven underground in China, but a frontal attack on
the nation's premier sticks out for its high potential for
heresy in the censors' eyes. In the run-up to his latest
release, Yu, a founder of the Independent PEN Center in
China, which advocates freedom of expression in the country,
has openly criticized Wen and President Hu Jintao as
intolerant hardliners who actually belie their crafted
images of benevolent shepherds tending to people's
suffering.
Yu was a best-selling author before his books were banned in
China soon after Wen became premier in 2003. Anticipating
grave personal repercussions for portraying Wen as a "clever
opportunist", Yu has thrown down the gauntlet at the Chinese
government by saying that arresting him now "would ruin the
image of an open-minded administration that both President
Hu Jintao and Premier Wen have pulled out all stops to build
up over the past eight years". Yu has reportedly said that
the Chinese-language book, to be published on August 16, is
to made available later in English.
The author has revealed that he was recently interrogated
and threatened with the same fate as human-rights activist
Liu Xiaobo should he go ahead and take advantage of Hong
Kong's freer environment to publish the book. Liu, author of
the Charter 08 call for reform, was jailed for 11 years last
December.
Pro-democracy intellectuals across mainland China have
reported being invited to "have a cup of tea" with the
secret services with increasing regularity since the Beijing
Summer Olympic Games ended in 2008. These sessions are said
to involve polite but subtle warnings not to transgress
limits on behavior that challenge the CCP's control.
While physical assaults and persecution of writers and
artists peaked during Chairman Mao Zedong's reign, the
party's eyes and ears have been increasing the levels of
surveillance and softer intimidation of dissidents in the
past couple of years in light of uprisings in the far
western territories of Tibet and Xinjiang.
This month, Tibetan author Tragyal (who writes with the
pseudonym "Shogdung") will face trial on charges of "splittism"
in the western province of Qinghai for
publishing a best-selling non-fiction
book, The Line Between Sky and Earth. A collection of
essays that became widely sought among Tibetan-language
readers since its release in March 2009, the book exhorts
Tibetan intellectuals and civil servants to wage a "peaceful
revolution" and a campaign of "civil disobedience" against
Beijing's heavy-handed rule in the disputed region.
Tragyal is viewed by Chinese authorities as an especially
worrisome thorn in the flesh because he is a defector from
the government's PR bandwagon - who used to be a loyal
employee with the state-run Tibetan-language
publishing
house that churns out propaganda
literature about the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the
Dalai Lama, and the ills of feudalism in pre-1949 Tibet.
For a bureaucrat who had been involved in bashing aspects of
Tibetan Buddhism as "backward" and antithetical to modernity
to undergo a conversion of heart and turn into an astringent
chronicler of the post-2008 crackdown on monks by the
central government is exactly the kind of trajectory Beijing
would vehemently discourage.
Passages in the illegally published book, The Line
Between Sky and Earth, which speak of "my hair standing
on end" due to "the methods of torture used by the
dictators", are proverbial red rags to the CCP bull and
invited instant detention for Tragyal last year. Now that a
lengthy dossier of crimes has been collected, he is expected
to be handed a punitive sentence by a court in Xining, the
capital of Qinghai.
Perhaps the most striking example of a
publishing intellectual falling foul of
the central government is the case of Xiao Jiansheng, the
author of the book with an anodyne title, Chinese History
Revisited, which was re-released in September 2009 by
the same free expression-promoting Hong Kong
publisher, New Century Pressธ that is now
bringing out China's Best Actor: Wen Jiabao.
Unlike Yu and Tragyal, Xiao's survey of China's past does
not cover the CCP phase and is not as glaringly
iconoclastic. A product of 20 years of research and
reflection, Xiao's
book avoids the contemporary upheavals
since 1949 and instead tries to grapple with the official
spin on China's history from ancient to modern times, which
emphasizes the virtues of tightly centralized government and
despotic rule.
Instead of ad-hominem barbs against current party bigwigs,
Xiao lambasts the "imposition of imperial absolutism and
centralized government since the Qin Dynasty" (221-206 BC),
traits that returned with a vengeance with the Yuan Dynasty
(1271-1368 AD).
What irked the censors, who decided to ban the original
version of the book in the mainland in 2007, was the rebuff
Xiao issued to the conservative notion of the desirability
of a strong state.
Chinese History Revisited praises periods of the
nation's past such as the Song Dynasty (960-1279 AD) that
were characterized by small government, commercial autonomy
and religious diversity. Indirectly, the author laments
restrictions on individual and group creativity in the
current era by asking why post-Song "China has not produced
the democratic politicians of ancient times, nor the great
thinkers like Laozi, Confucius and Mencius", nor "inventors
in culture, science, religion and education".
Deep horizon gazing and cross-era comparisons, which show
contemporary
China in poor light despite its tremendous
material advancement, are affronts to the model of economic
"progress" on which the central government's legitimacy
largely rests.
Xiao's book, which is believed to be frequently smuggled
back to the mainland by visitors to Hong Kong, is another
bestseller in China's samizdat-style piracy market
due to the originality of his revisionism, a quality that
has been missing in Chinese public discourse even after
three decades of economic liberalization.
Xiao's pitch for a political system that nurtures
creativity, critical analysis and diversity of opinion has
ramifications not only for civil liberties but also for the
competitiveness of the Chinese economy in the long run. Can
China manage to move beyond the mass-manufacturing model and
remain a pre-eminent power in the post-industrial knowledge
economy with strict shackles on information flows?
The censors in Beijing know only too well that the pen is
mightier than the sword as a threat to regime survival, but
forward planners piloting China's ascent in the 21st century
are handicapped by the historical reality that sustainable
winners have always been driven by structures that permit
the unfettered exchange of ideas.
Sreeram Chaulia is associate professor of world
politics at the OP Jindal Global University in Sonipat,
India.
(Copyright 2010 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights
reserved. Please contact us about
sales, syndication and
republishing.) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
All material on
this website is copyright and may not be republished in any form
without written permission.
© Copyright 1999 -
2010 Asia Times Online (Holdings), Ltd.
|
Head Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li
Yuen Street East, Central, Hong Kong
Thailand Bureau: 11/13 Petchkasem Road,
Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
|
|
|
|
