BEI
LING, PRISON
(published in the South China Morning Post, August 25, 2000
*****************************************
PHILIP
CUNNINGHAM
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Going
after writers and publishers with "political
problems"
is not a new sport on the mainland, but it
is still
an unfair one. Civil society has not yet
produced
non-state actors strong enough to stand up
and call
a "foul". Given the enormous strides that
China
has made in publishing, from the newsstand to
the
Internet, locking up poets and publishers is a
giant
leap backwards.
The
arrest of poet Huang Beiling in Beijing on August
12 was
reported by his brother Huang Feng, an
independent
publisher, who was also arrested a week
later.
Huang Beiling was detained for more than two
weeks
before being put on a plane and expelled last
Saturday
on a flight to the United States, where he
holds
permanent residency status. His brother was
released
on Friday but placed on a year's probation.
The
so-called "political problem" in which his
impounded
literary magazine Tendency has become caught
up - and
which led to these detentions - is related to
the
Tiananmen Square massacre. Although President
Jiang
Zemin was not directly involved in the
controversial
crackdown, his hands are tied by it. His
mentor,
Deng Xiaoping, got the mainland's dormant
economy
jump-started, which bestowed him with a badge
of
historic greatness, only partially offset by his
humiliating
political miscalculation by letting the
troops
run roughshod over Tiananmen Square on June 4,
1989.
The
legacy of that mad rampage is part of the
political
package that Deng left for his successors to
handle.
One reason why Tiananmen is still taboo, long
after
the key rebels have gone to America to study and
make
money, is to avoid rifts in the Communist Party
and the
military that would emerge with any open
discussion
of who did what to whom in 1989.
Deng's
fallen protege, Zhao Ziyang, famously supported
the
student protesters at Tiananmen and remains
perhaps
the greatest single rival Mr Jiang faces,
which is
why Mr Zhao has been kept under tight wraps,
basically
confined to house arrest for the past
decade.
Mr
Jiang's pact with the military has a hidden
Tiananmen
clause as well. The PLA was a reluctant but
ultimately
loyal servant of the party when called upon
to crack
down on the students. The party still owes
the PLA
for that one and generally it has been policy
to give
the military more, more and then more. More
money,
more power and maybe even Taiwan. Given all the
problems
China faces today, it is surprising that the
police
apparatus still has the time and motivation to
ruthlessly
pursue minor references to the abortive
popular
uprising. Tendency's problem is reportedly
that it
printed a photograph of Tiananmen activist
Wang
Dan, now at Harvard, and a poem by Tiananmen era
political
prisoner Liu Xiaobo, who is an old friend of
the
magazine's editor.
When I
met Huang Beiling at Harvard University where
he
taught Chinese part-time to support his literary
habit, I
was impressed with the elected poverty of his
lifestyle
and his unwillingness to get too involved
with the
Chinese dissidents and their many disputes.
He was
quick to smile and friendly to all, but too
apolitical
and art-oriented to be a dissident himself.
And when
I first met his younger brother, Huang Feng,
at the
China World Hotel in Beijing, he was eking out
a modest
income as an independent publisher, which on
the
mainland means he was working the grey market
between
government propaganda and market-driven
content
as a middleman, matching hot manuscripts with
obscure
provincial publishers. The last time I saw
Huang
Feng, he was looking for manuscripts about
Britain's
royalty.
At the
very least, the arrest of the Huang brothers
serves
as a warning to all writers and artists that
the
party tolerates no political dissent. In the worst
case
scenario, not only will Huang Feng serve an
insanely
long sentence, but similar arrests in the
name of
information control will terrorise the
mainland's
crackdown-weary population.
The
heavy-handed information control raises questions
about Mr
Jiang's vision of China as an information
society:
is it more about the free flow of information
or
digital control? Mr Jiang inherited more than the
legacy
of stamping out democracy. Twenty years on, the
"open
door" economic reform is synonymous with
corruption,
and a widening gap between rich and poor.
Mr Jiang
has tried to address this unwanted legacy
with a
selectively brutal anti-corruption campaign.
Such
actions are starting to infect the general body
politic,
and as a result, Tiananmen activists are
coming
under the axe again as Mr Jiang, nervous about
what's
lurking in the shadows, is over-reacting to
signs of
dissent on all fronts. This is a shame,
because
the President's background as a technocrat
(and
computer geek) made him a prime supporter of the
Internet
in China. His son, Jiang Mianheng, arranges
investment
capital for Internet firms and even has a
hand in
the irreverent Web site Chinanow.com.
Chinanow
enjoys a tactical press freedom at the moment
because
of good guanxi, or connections, but it's not
as
freewheeling as it appears, even though its English
home
page is edited by the talented American writer
Kaiser
Kuo, formerly of the Tang Dynasty rock band.
It's one
thing to write salacious pieces about
groupies,
gangsters and ganja, and quite another to
run a
photo or poem that touches on Tiananmen.
The
business-savvy producers of Chinanow, Beijing
Scene
and City Edition, leading e-businesses of the
moment,
understand that self-censorship is survival.
With
Chinese language sites, the censorship is even
more
stark; Yahoo China is just one of many Web sites
that
heavily filters the news to avoid offending the
powers
that be.
For the
stubborn artist such as Huang Beiling,
however,
the choice is more stark. Self-censorship is
a kind
of artistic suicide, while failing to
self-censor
can lead to incarceration.
In the
past few months, several conscientious,
law-abiding
editors have been sacked, Web sites closed
down,
and promising publications pickled. While the
sheer
volume of information on the Internet defies
efficient
policing, individuals guilty of producing
"inappropriate
content" have been singled out to scare
others.
Furthermore the technology that powers the
information
revolution is a double-edged sword.
Certain
search engines and key words help the
government
selectively monitor individual e-mail and
individual
online activity.
Apparently
alarmed at its own increasing irrelevance,
if not
impotence, under the economics-first paradigm
that has
put food on the table at the expense of books
on the
shelf, the party is exhorting the nation to
"get
ideological" again, but with a twist. Ideological
is
whatever the party wants you to think.
