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Factories without Smoke

By Chris Cherry

Chen Jun

Tianjin to Shahe Village, Henan

They are China’s most precious economic asset: migrant workers. Each year, millions upon millions untie themselves from the rhythms of rural life to chase down a future in the prestige cities and sudden boomtowns of the eastern and southern coasts. In doing so, they begin a dramatic journey from farmer to worker; one marked by a profound shift from cultivating land they own, to producing goods they don’t. But few will be allowed to transform completely. Oft belittled for their unsophisticated ways, to urbanites they are forever “waidiren” — outside people. Most will be marked by their speech the moment they open their mouths.

On the factories and construction sites where they will find work they are considered lower still. Here migrants are merely human capital, valued for their sweat and energy — the raw materials of capitalist growth. As anonymous as lumps of coal, their sheer numbers only act to deepen their insignificance; if one decides to revert from worker back to farmer, more will inevitably arrive to fill the vacancy. But such a throwaway quality is also what makes them of unique value to the nation. Over three decades of growth and development, it is they who have supplied China with its competitive edge — a miraculous, low cost, infinite resource. Chinese newspapers even like to celebrate them as such with a heroic communist sobriquet: ??????, or “factories without smoke”.

This is the beginning of a series of photographs that tries to return a modicum of identity to these people. It will be a set of portraits taken at various train stations across the country — the most obvious place to locate a transient population, and what seemed a fitting backdrop for a people in flux. Subjects are either on their way to cities, or are returning home to their villages. Often, candid postures make it easy to guess at which. After the click of the camera shutter, I conducted brief interviews, during which I was repeatedly reminded that these are men and women who have been dealt hard hands in life. But what could I really know of that? I decided only to take a note of their names, and their individual journeys — to try and etch a few humble lines of migration onto an imposing map. It seemed appropriate. Each of these has surely made a mark on the rise of a great nation.

Royal wedding of William and Kate: Hardly a frivolous story

The wacky hats, the British pomp and the bride’s gorgeous dress were a lot of fun, but the royal wedding was an important story.

When an audience of 3 billion sees a couple exchange the wedding vows, the event reminds everyone of the importance of marriage. Doesn’t that divorce-plagued institution need a lift?

Prince William and Kate Middleton — now Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge — certainly got the trappings right. She was simply lovely, and he was understandably dazzled when she arrived at the altar. ABC News brought in lip readers to decipher what William and Kate were saying.

But it’s the words they said aloud – and the way they said them — that matter. They are obviously a couple in love, and the kisses on the balcony at Buckingham Palace were charming. Yet the looks between them during the wedding vows were poignant, hopeful and inspiring.

Those moments supplied an example: This is how it should be. And the happy wedding news offered a temporary break for a world beset by storms, wars, earthquakes, unemployment and economic uncertainty.

We live in a world of symbols and examples. William’s mother, Diana, continues to fascinate millions long after her death. Her big wedding day ended years later in headline-making shambles. But that wasn’t the end of the story, and so a great portion of the world tuned in Friday.

Her children, William and Harry, have grown up to be charming, handsome and dashing. William, who isn’t fond of the press, certainly understands the importance of putting on a good show, and the grand wedding had a fairy-tale feel to it.

Yet during the vows, you could sense that he and his bride understand that a lot more is at stake than making the public feel good. The look of love was more impressive than any of the pomp. Friday was a grand day for marriage.

Casey Anthony: What’s the best option for defense team?

What  is the best defense for Casey Anthony?

WESH-Channel 2 explored that issue after a series of evidence rulings by Chief Judge Belvin Perry bolstered the prosecution. Anthony is charged with first-degree murder in the death of her daughter, Caylee. Jury selection starts May 9.

“The scientific evidence is pointing towards the fact that Casey Anthony knows or had knowledge of the events that took place with this child,” said retired Circuit Judge O.H. Eaton Jr., who is WESH’s new legal analyst.

In Bob Kealing’s report, Eaton saw only three viable defenses for Anthony: 

1. Say Caylee’s death was an accident, which Eaton picked as the best option.

2. Say Caylee’s death was a crime committed by someone else

3. Argue that the state has failed to prove that Caylee was murdered

Of the prosecution, Eaton said, “They have charged her with premeditated murder, and they’re going to have to prove that.”

What do you think?

Book Review: A Critical Introduction to Mao

Cheek, Timothy, ed. A Critical Introduction to Mao. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xxi, 369 pp.

By Brian J. DeMare

At the outset of the final chapter of A Critical Introduction to Mao, Jiang Yihua, a senior Chinese scholar, suggests that it will still be many years before historians will be able to draw any definitive conclusions concerning Mao Zedong, revolutionary China’s most imposing figure. This inability to give a final and authoritative interpretation of Mao, Jiang suggests, is due to difficulties of archival access as well as the fact that Mao is still being recreated and reshaped by his ever loyal followers and his equally dedicated detractors. Jiang’s skeptical approach to the problem of knowing Mao, a problem rarely mentioned by his biographers, is both telling for the challenges of studying Mao, and for why editor Timothy Cheek’s excellent collection of essays should be considered essential reading for students of Chinese history.

For this collection, Cheek has gathered a diverse set of scholars to tackle the problem of understanding Mao and his legacy. This has long been a vexing issue for historians. In any given modern China survey course, students might be introduced to Mao as an insightful intellectual, writing in defense of feminist empowerment as he laments the suicide of Miss Zhao. The image of Mao during later lectures, particularly during the PRC era when Mao ruled in an increasingly tyrannical style, is never so positive. Cheek and his authors confront this problem by embracing the multiplicity of Mao, both in the complexity of his longtime role as historical actor in revolutionary China and in the contested legacy he has left behind. The Mao that emerges in these pages resists easy categorization, a sharp contrast to biographies that push to demonize Mao as a monster or praise him as a perfect revolutionary. But it is this nuanced view of Mao that the non-specialist audience needs to see, and as such Cheek’s collection serves as a necessary counterweight to recent narratives of Mao’s life. Its sophisticated approach to the problem of knowing and interpreting Mao as a historical figure, moreover, makes it an excellent choice for undergraduate seminars.

The text is divided into two parts, the first covering Mao’s life, the second his legacy. Timothy Cheek and Joseph Esherick’s chapters covering Mao’s life and the historical context from which he emerged are followed by Brantly Womack’s overview of the first half of Mao’s life, with special attention to Mao’s rural turn and the resulting creation of what would eventually be canonized as Mao Zedong Thought. Hans J. Van De Ven then explores Mao’s rise to paramount party leader and his concurrent push to eliminate “cosmopolitan” or international Marxism in favor of a Chinese and highly nationalistic Marxism; one of Van De Ven’s key insights is to examine the Yan’an Rectification Campaign as an attempt to suppress cosmopolitan Marxism. Using digestion, one of Mao’s favorite topics, as a metaphor, Michael Schoenhals then examines the final two decades of Mao’s life with an eye on explaining how Mao’s desire for rapid change encouraged him to purge the CCP and create all-out chaos in China.

Subsequent chapters on the historical Mao focus on key themes in his life. Frederick C. Teiwes takes up the problem of Mao’s willing followers, focusing on the top level leaders who served Mao out of a mixture of fear and loyalty. Similarly, Hung-yok Ip looks at the troubled relationship between Mao and China’s intellectuals, emphasizing that Mao’s “anti-elitist elitism” was in fact common among China’s educated elite. Delia Davin follows with another chapter on Mao’s ties with key groups, here women, tracing the disappearance of his feminist ideals as he adopted Marxism as his guiding ideology. In the final chapter on the historical Mao, Daniel Leese sifts through the massive iconography built up around Mao, a process that started as early as the 1930 and steadily gained steam up through the Cultural Revolution. As Lesse makes clear, Mao was well aware of the power of his image and even today he remains a powerfully divisive symbol.

The second part of the text moves to an analysis of Mao’s legacy, starting with Geremie Barmé’s investigation of the oft cited Mao-as-emperor metaphor. Barmé admits that the imperial metaphor is an easy fit, especially given Mao’s increased autocratic behavior in his final years, but ultimately finds this metaphor limiting. Xiao Yanzhong introduces readers to recent Chinese scholarship on Mao, and perhaps unsurprisingly finds that in the PRC there also exists a multiplicity of Maos, with emerging “schools” variously promoting critical, idealized, or increasingly historically grounded views of Mao. Maoism in the “third world” is the focus of Alexander Cook’s chapter; he argues that Maoist thought has been effective as a military strategy, but not as a ruling ideology. Charles Hayford highlights how Mao has been understood in the West, tracing the Chairman’s trajectory from menace to partner. The final chapter of the text provides a forum for two senior Mao specialists, Jiang Yihua and Roderick Macfarquhar, to offer their unique perspectives on Mao. Jiang praises Mao for liberating the Chinese people while admitting that Mao failed to create a utopia for them. Macfarquhar, meanwhile, suggests that Mao’s legacy would have been better served if he had exited the historical stage after establishing the PRC.

In sum, the chapters in Cheek’s collection contribute to an understanding of Mao Zedong that is as messy and complex as it is compelling. The text, moreover, encourages readers to engage the problem of knowing the historical Mao, while reminding the reader of the equal importance of Mao’s ahistorical legacy. Sadly, this text will most likely never be sold in airport bookstores alongside popular biographies of Mao, but Cheek’s collection will hopefully spark lively discussion in seminar classrooms.

Brian J. DeMare is Assistant Professor of History at Tulane University.

© 2011 by Twentieth-Century China Editorial Board. All rights reserved.

Casey Anthony: Which way you going, Belvin Perry?

A View on Ai Weiwei’s Exit

By Geremie R. Barmé

Author’s Note:

A much shorter version of this essay was originally destined for a leading newspaper outlet. Unfortunately, so much editorial “back-filling” was required to transform it into something more accessible to even a relatively sophisticated readership, I decided that it would be best to pull it. Instead, I offer it here with considerable additional material to readers of China Beat.

This essay was written on the eve of the 2 May unveiling by New York City and the arts group AW Asia of Ai Weiwei’s “Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads” at the Pulitzer Fountain, Grand Army Plaza (located at the south-east corner of Central Park). That sculptural work is the artist’s over-sized comment on the controversy surrounding the auctioning of two of the twelve bronze “Zodiac Heads” plundered in 1860 from the Garden of Perfect Brightness (Yuanming Yuan, which is always erroneously referred to as the “Old Summer Palace”), the Qing-era garden palace to the northwest of Beijing. As Weiwei said of his reinterpretation of the originals:

My work is always dealing with real or fake, authenticity, what the value is, and how the value relates to current political and social understandings and misunderstandings. I think there’s a strong humorous aspect there. The [Yves Saint-Laurent] zodiac auction [in February 2009] really complicated the issues about art, about the real, about fake, resources, looting, about the appreciation of objects—all these kinds of issues. [From an interview with the artist by Eugene Kan]

[For further background to the “Zodiac Heads” of the Garden of Perfect Brightness and the history, as well as the contemporary significance, of China’s formerly ignored “national ruin,” see China Heritage Quarterly, No.8 (December 2006).]

In the event, as an Australian writing about Ai Weiwei and the broader context of his detention at this time, it seemed timely in another regard as our Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, was undertaking on 25-28 April her first visit to Beijing as head of government. On her arrival the PM was peremptorily cautioned by the Chinese ambassador in Canberra to be mindful of the country’s “tremendous progress” in the area of human rights. While by necessity economics dominated the state visit, as it indeed dominates the bilateral relationship, issues related to minorities, Christian groups and human rights abuses could not easily be avoided. Not surprisingly, Gillard was reassured by the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao, that the country was not “taking a backward step” in these areas, despite glaring evidence to the contrary widely reported in the international media.

It is also worth noting a 22 April 2011 opinion piece in The Global Times in which the official Chinese stance, one that is repeatedly critical of former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s stewardship of the Australia-China relationship in 2008-2010, was made quite clear:

What is especially unacceptable to the Chinese people is Australia’s challenging of Chinese values. The two countries are vastly different in their national situations, especially in term [sic] of population. If China has no right to make light of the Australian model, Australian should not belittle the 1.3 billion Chinese people’s right to choose their own political path, either.

We hope Gillard can bring some changes. The Australian government should at least show basic respect to China. This is one of the fundamental rules of this civilized world.

Moreover, Canberra should be more tolerant toward a rising China. This will also make Australia happier. [See: “Redefining Australia-China Ties”]

In the particular lexicon of the party-state, “basic respect” means support or at least tacit acceptance of even the most egregious acts of Chinese officialdom.

Fortuitously, an English-language selection of Ai Weiwei’s Internet writings has recently appeared, providing the general reader, as well as easily cowed foreign government officials, a first-hand account of how a major contemporary Chinese cultural figure sees the dilemmas surrounding “basic respect” in China today. [See Lee Ambrozy, ed., Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009, Cambridge, Ma.: MIT Press, 2011.] I should also not that, in mid April, a major international petition addressed to the Chinese Minister of Culture on behalf of Ai Weiwei was launched by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and, at the time of writing, had amassed 123,509 signatures, a number that continued to grow, despite attempts by unidentified hackers to disable the host site. [For the online petition, see here.] One would observe that presumably to the Beijing authorities such international support merely confirms their view that Weiwei is a nefarious agent of the West, itself hell-bent on regime change and “peaceful evolution” in China.—Geremie R. Barmé

***

On 11 February 2010, in response to a question from a foreign journalist the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu observed: “There are no dissidents in China.” This came only hours after a Beijing court had quashed an appeal by Liu Xiaobo, the democracy advocate who had been jailed for eleven-years on charges of “subverting the state.” The charges related to his involvement in the Charter 08 petition movement. Asked to elaborate, Ma said: “In China, you can judge yourself whether such a group exists. But I believe this term is questionable.”

Shortly after the People’s Republic was declared a “dissident-free country,” the artist and cultural blogger Ai Weiwei offered his analysis of Chinese-style doublethink via Twitter:

Foreign Affairs Ma’s statement contains a number of layers of meaning:

1. Dissidents are criminals;

2. Only criminals have dissenting views;

3. The distinction between criminals and non-criminals is whether they have dissenting views;

4. If you think China has dissidents, you are a criminal;

5. The reason [China] has no dissidents is because they are [in fact already] criminals;

6. Does anyone have a dissenting view regarding my statement?

On 3 April this year, Ai Weiwei was detained while preparing to board a flight to Hong Kong. It is claimed that he had been taken into custody on suspicion of economic crimes. Whatever that case may be, there is little doubt that the Chinese party-state had finally decided to silence its most outspoken free-range dissident.

For some years observers have marveled at what for official China was extraordinary leniency towards Weiwei’s increasingly provocative behavior and statements. In a sense, from 2008, he became a one-man work of dissenting performance art (although the harassed popular activists, lawyers, journalists, academics, aggrieved citizens, Christians and NGO figures subject to what has since become the worst period of repression since 1989 are never far from mind). Many have enjoyed the spectacle; others have dreaded the reckoning. In the end, there were rumors that amidst the police provocation and escalating bullying, the authorities had also essayed a softer, tried-and-true formula, one that had worked with so many other disaffected members of the élite over the years: they are said to have offered Ai Weiwei membership in the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. After all, if he wanted to seek redress for injustices or to raise his voice in protest, where better than within the capacious tent created by the party in the 1950s? The NCCPPCC was after all a broad, if impuissant, church that had become the last refuge for so many of the thinking men and women of China who had initially been lured to support the party in the 1940s only to suffer betrayal subsequently. It also offers impotent status to numerous other cultural and business worthies today. Someone must have thought it was a perfect fit for Weiwei. When the artist rejected this final, and to the bureaucratic mind, magnanimous gesture, however, and given the atmosphere of alarm generated by events in the Middle East, conciliation necessarily gave way to confrontation.

Although known to cognoscenti of China’s alternative cultural scene from the late 1970s, Weiwei shot both to local and to international prominence for his role as a design consultant to the Swiss architects of Beijing’s “Bird’s Nest” National Stadium, the main site of the 2008 Olympics. Although his role in that project was lauded by the authorities, at the same time, for the years around China’s Olympic moment, Weiwei, in what have been described as Internet “rants”, recorded his mounting outrage at the glaring clash between his country’s avowed new openness and the party-state’s old repressive, corrupt and mendacious ways. Like so many before him, he well knew that the price for candour would be high. In a blog-post dated 13 April 2009, for instance, he wrote: “The truth is always terrible, unfit for presentation, unspeakable, and difficult for the people to handle, just speaking the truth would be ‘subversion of the state’.” [From Ai Weiwei’s Blog, p.218.]

Some commentators have remarked that the relentless appetite of the international media for China controversy in recent years served to goad Weiwei into making ever more extreme statements, ones that would lead to the same place that outspokenness has guided so many others before him: jail. All the while his words were not easily accessible in China itself, where despite often extraordinary official toleration he was regarded as being too much of a firebrand, or rather as a noxious figure who contributed to upsetting the chummy relationship between power, commerce and global capital. It is now virtually de rigueur for writers to hedge their remarks about prickly individuals like Weiwei and their plangent fate with the balm of happier observations to do with general overall improvements in China, its relatively flourishing intellectual scene, the lot of the common man and woman, and so on and so forth. But it is too easy to take Weiwei’s splenetic rants as constituting his only message, for him to be out of kilter with the times, a distasteful (if colourful) irritant to “business as usual”, or indeed to regard international readers as his predominant audience.

Rather Weiwei has been very much a Chinese critic, addressing internal concerns but speaking far beyond the borders of the party-state. In fact, he belongs to a long line of modern Chinese thinkers and cultural figures whose moral outrage in the face of tyranny has taken the form of lambast, irony or biting satire. Lu Xun (d.1936) is the most famous in this lineage, but their number also includes the early Republican journalist Huang Yuansheng (murdered in 1915), Deng Tuo (committed suicide in 1966), Yu Luoke (executed in the early 1970s), the Taiwan-based writers Bo Yang and Li Ao, the Hong Kong humorists Hah Kung and Yau-ma-tei, the essayist Lung Ying-tai (recently banned in China), the journalist Dai Qing (censored since 1989), the novelist Chan Koon-chung (banned in China), the playwright Wu Zuguang, a man still celebrated although his sharp criticisms are deleted from the record, and the blogger Han Han, who still remains at large. Then, of course, there is the imprisoned Liu Xiaobo.

These are but a few of China’s voices of conscience; their ideas, and their fate, have not been limited to a particular Chinese polity, rather they are part of the “Chinese commonwealth.” It is a commonwealth that has finally achieved much in material terms, but one that has repeatedly failed to realise the promise of a more equitable, free and democratic society, one championed by the Xinhai Revolution that marks its centenary this year.

In the context of this century-old lineage then Ai Weiwei was treading very familiar ground when he published blog-posts during the dizzying days of the Beijing Olympics, including the following, which appeared on the last day of the Olympics, 18 August 2008:

For a moment, forget the struggle between tyranny and civil rights; forget the extravagant dreams of referendums or citizen votes. We should struggle for and protect those most basic, miniscule bits of power that we truly cannot cast aside: freedom of speech and rule of law. Return basic rights to the people, endow society with basic dignity, and only then can we have confidence and take responsibility, and thus face our collective difficulties. Only rule of law can make the game equal, and only when it is equal can people’s participation possibly be extraordinary.[From Ai Weiwei’s Blog, pp.181-82.]

For its part the Chinese press has been unequivocal in stating why this gadfly artist has been disappeared now, despite the nebulous talk in Beijing about his “economic malfeasance.” In an article published under the name Liu Yiheng that appeared in the Hong Kong version of the official mainland daily Wenhui Bao on 15 April, Weiwei is denounced for “five poisons”. These are his: 1. Contempt for art and public decency; 2. Allowing himself to become a tool of the West’s anti-China machinations; 3. Flouting of numerous laws; 4. For being a suspected bigamist; and, 5. For insulting the nation. [See, Liu Yiheng, “Ai Weiwei zhen mianmu: Wu wan yishujia—wu du ju quan,” Hong Kong Wenhui Bao, 15 April 2011, A2.]

The attack was written in the cloacal prose so favoured by party hacks since the early Maoist days of the 1940s—a style that combines the diction of the guttersnipe with a posture of high dudgeon. The nub of the matter, the article avers, is that for years Weiwei has been producing “art that confounds the boundary between the artistic and the political; in fact, he uses it to engage in political activities.” The author then sums up Ai’s crime du jour: “During the recent unrest in the Middle East he actively encouraged local protesters and has intimate links with those who are plotting a ‘Jasmine Revolution’ in China itself.”

The article was accompanied by a photographic work by the artist featuring Ai Weiwei standing in front of Tiananmen Gate with the English word “FUCK” stencilled in red on his bare chest. “Not only does this reflect the hooligan nature of Ai as a person,” the denunciation claims, “it reveals his contempt for our nation, evidence that he is a pawn in the anti-Chinese machinations of the West.” After deliciously listing Chinese dialectical variations of the word “fuck” the author quotes Ai on why he decided to employ an English rather than a Chinese term: “I’m offering this to foreign friends who understand the word and who love China.”

The attack ends with a reminder that the artist’s long-dead father was the famous patriotic poet Ai Qing. The poet’s son, however, “insults the Chinese nation, shows contempt for the state and is inciting rebellion.” The official Chinese media can always be relied on to outstrip the irony of even the most pointed critic: One of the things that forced Weiwei into open rebellion against the government was his fury at the repression of popular protests over the death of thousands of children in the Wenchuan Earthquake of April 2008 due to shoddy school-building construction. The faux-official commentator ignores this and concludes that only days after the earthquake Ai Weiwei had posted a performance art piece that featured oral sex. “His brazen contempt for basic moral decency is horrifying,” comes the rebuke. “If Ai Qing knew of this in the afterlife he would surely rebuke this unfilial son.”

I first met Ai Qing in late 1978, shortly after the family had been brought back from decades of internal exile. I was introduced to them by a mutual friend, the translator Gladys Yang. Gladys knew of my interest in Chinese literary history and the fate suffered by dissenting Chinese writers under the Communists. In particular there was the 1942 purge in Yan’an when Mao condemned arrant writers like Ai Qing, Ding Ling and Wang Shiwei for their criticisms of party corruption and privilege. As the tough-talking army man Wang Zhen put it at the time (much to Mao’s approval): “Our comrades are shedding blood and dying on the front line for the party and the People of China, while you’re eating your fill and attacking the party in safety” (qianfangde tongzhi wei dang wei quanguo renmin liuxie xisheng, nimen zai houfang chibaofan ma dang). Accused of threatening the party’s unity all three were detained. After a harrowing, often violent, re-education campaign Ai and Ding were “rescued”. They had recognized the follies of their ways and were subject to the party’s munificence. Wang Shiwei, however, condemned as a Trotskyite and a KMT spy was beheaded in 1947.

After his second rehabilitation in the late 1970s (he fell foul of the authorities again in 1957), Ai Qing would be lauded as a great poet, a patriot and a faithful party man. But during our first meeting in 1978 it was obvious that both he and his wife, Gao Ying, were profoundly shell-shocked. The Cultural Revolution was not long over and de-Maoification was only just starting in earnest. As Gladys and I got up to leave he gave me a copy of a new poem entitled “Living Fossils” (Huo huashi). With a grin he said, “This is autobiographical.” It was about a gambolling fish caught up in a sudden cataclysm. Discovered millions of years later it looked as vital as the day on which it had been buried alive. “But you are silent, breathless,/… Faced with this fossil/ any fool can see:/ We cannot live unless we can move./ To live is to struggle, /to advance/ We must expend our all/ Before the advance of death.”

The sentiment behind that poem is worth recalling now that Ai Qing’s son, Weiwei, has been immobilized. Idiosyncratic and highly individualistic, influenced by a youth spent in the company of his exiled parents and long years in New York, Weiwei is also part of a unique generation. The men and women of that generation were witness to the hysterical rise and the ignominious failure of the political ideals of the Mao era; it’s a generation that has been at the forefront of the inventive changes that have created China’s miracle, and have laid the foundations for its future potential.

Of the artistic avant-garde that developed from the 70s but gained international recognition only from the 1990s, few like Ai Weiwei have maintained the bond between creativity and arrant opinion. Many have absorbed the lessons of the repeated political campaigns of the 1980s, and have learnt well the rules of China’s “velvet prison”, one which offers generous rewards to those who master the canny art of post-socialist survival. Today, a majority of the celebrated stars of the Chinese arts are complicit in the party-state enterprise that permits them a measure of artistic license as well as boundless freedom to make money. It is a formula that works well too for foreign investors, governments and cultural bodies alike. But increasingly, Ai Weiwei and a few other bold individuals confound this comfortable arrangement. They offer words of caution in an age of exuberance, theirs are voices of possibility that draw on the past, as well as the present, to speak to China’s future, or at they least pinpoint today the hazards that block the way ahead. Many—and not just the authorities—would prefer them silenced, if not merely for the sake of political expediency, then because their existence pricks the conscience of those who have learnt how to accommodate themselves to China’s regnant harmony.

One of the rare few to have spoken out on Weiwei’s behalf is the immensely popular Shanghai-based blogger Han Han. On 14 April, he released a blog-post entitled “Good-bye, Ai Weiwei!” Needless to say, it was soon “harmonized” from the mainland Chinese Internet. In that short essay he speaks of his sorrow at hearing the news of Weiwei’s demise. Among other things he declares:

I don’t want to make any more appeals; nor do I have the energy to call for anything. Starting from the founding of this dynasty in 1949: the Anti-Rightist Movement, the Cultural Revolution, the Strike Hard Campaigns, the Student Movement, the Campaign to Maintain Stability… in each and every one of these periods countless people of conscience have been jailed, and countless individuals of conscience have been executed. Why is the Five-Star Red Flag so very red? That’s because it’s soaked in the fresh blood of countless men and women of conscience.

Ai Weiwei spoke out on behalf of petitioners; he spoke out on behalf of those harmed by melamine in milk; he spoke out on behalf of the primary school students killed in the Wenchuan Earthquake. Ai Weiwei can speak out no more. Who among us will speak out now on behalf of Ai Weiwei? If indeed there are none either with the courage or the sense of decency to speak out today, then the old catch-cry of China’s dynasties past—“Ten thousand long years of life to the Emperor!”—will finally have come true again. Let me conclude with a line from a song by Li Zhi: “The best era is one in which the people don’t need freedom.” [From Han Han, “Zai jian! Ai Weiwei.”]

Ai Weiwei’s denouement would have been long contemplated and carefully considered by the authorities. Its potential to generate international embarrassment and opprobrium has clearly been offset by its immediate, symbolic, and practical impact. But Ai Weiwei’s exit is only a short-term solution to an intractable long-term problem: whither China? Meanwhile, it confronts the West and even the very people who claim cultural fellowship with him.

For years Ai Weiwei’s brazen truth-telling has been a challenge to the other prominent darlings of the international film, art and literary circuit. Will they now stand in solidarity with one of their own, even though he has repeatedly caused them discomfort? Or will they, like the hundreds of other “transgressive” (that is, “naughty but not dangerous”) representatives of China’s globally vaunted new culture, remain silent and continue to enjoy the rewards available to those who acquiesce in measured cultural repression while never having to take a stand?

Geremie R Barmé is professor of Chinese history at The Australian National University, editor of China Heritage Quarterly and founding director of the Australian Centre on China in the World.

Note:

For more on my views on both cultural rebellion and complicity in post-Mao China, I would direct readers to the volumes Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience, edited with John Minford (1986, New York: Hill & Wang, 1988, 2nd ed.), New Ghosts, Old Dreams: Chinese Rebel Voices, edited with Linda Jaivin (New York: Times Books, 1992), and my In the Red, on contemporary Chinese culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). See also my previous essays on related subjects in China Beat: “China’s Promise” (10 January 2010) and “The Harmonious Evolution of Information in China” (29 January 2010). Unless otherwise indicated, all translations in the above essay are my own.—GRB

Photos via WNYC Culture and Huffington Post.

WMFE: Did public broadcaster give enough warning about TV problems?

In January, public broadcaster WMFE sent a letter asking backers for financial contributions. “Your support is critical. Now more than ever,” Jose Fajardo, WMFE’s president and CEO, wrote.

But WMFE didn’t explain how dire it considered the situation for Channel 24, which airs PBS programs. WMFE’s announcement on April 1 that it is selling the station took many longtime supporters by surprise.

“Mister Rogers is probably turning over in his grave,” said David Odahowski, president and CEO of the Edyth Bush Charitable Foundation. “We all own WMFE. In fact, WMFE’s real name is Community Communications. That’s what was lacking: community communications. I can’t think of a great American city that doesn’t have a PBS station.”

That’s a recurring theme in letters objecting to the sale.

In a letter to the FCC, Orlando resident Michael Ashington-Pickett, a longtime Channel 24 supporter, complains: “The first knowledge that the public in Central Florida had that WMFE had financial difficulties was when a report was published in the local newspaper stating that the trustees for the station had signed a contract to sell WMFE to another broadcasting company! According to the report, the trustees had known about the financial difficulties for some time. For reasons known only to the trustees, their concerns were never made public.”

Lawrence D. Stephey of Winter Park writes: “The contemplation of this sale was never pre-announced to the general public by the current governing organization. Had the public known, I’m sure a number of extraordinary fund-raising campaigns would have been launched to preserve the frequency for educational use.”

Fajardo has said the problems at the TV station had been unfolding over the past four years. He noted the staff reductions and loss of viewer contributions during that time.

Viewers have complained that buyer, for $3 million, is Community Educators of Orlando Inc. Marcus Lamb, president and CEO of religious broadcaster Daystar Television Network in the Dallas area, is listed as group president.

Stephey writes: “There is already a number of religion-based programming television channels serving the Orlando market. Adding another at the expense of our sole educational channel could not possibly be justified by the Communications Act of 1934.”

Bob Showalter, chairman of WMFE’s board of trustees, has said he heard few complaints about the sale, but one viewer wrote that he was disappointed that sale was “sprung” on the public. The board will meet at 6:30 p.m. May 25 at the station, where viewers could raise objections.

But objecting to the FCC, which has to approve the sale, has the most impact, and there is May 5 deadline. If you need details about registering a complaint, check my blog post.

There are three informal objections to the sale with the FCC. One comes from Michael Slifker, a former editor-director at WMFE who was laid off two years ago.

He wrote to the FCC: “No one really owns WMFE. No one holds any stock. No one bought the station. All of its assets were donated by individuals, companies or from the government. WMFE uses Community Communications as its name, but in actuality, this is just for legal purposes. WMFE’s board of directors is chosen by the CEO. They are a lay board with no real say or involvement. It is a local community asset. They have no more right to sell it that I have to sell you the sun and the moon.”

What do you think about the sale? And did WMFE give enough warning?

Casey Anthony: George, Cindy Anthony unlikely to do pretrial interviews

Don’t expect to see George and Cindy Anthony doing interviews before the trial of their daughter, Casey.

“I don’t think they’re going to be doing any interviews,” Mark Lippman, the couple’s attorney, told “In Session” this afternoon. “There’s enough pressure with the trial starting. Certainly if they decide they want to, we’ll let everybody know. But they’ve been pretty quiet since August of last year.”

But Lippman said there could interviews during the trial or afterward. “I think they’re trying to keep everything together, and they want the trial to start as much as everybody else,” Lippman said.

Jury selection begins May 9. Casey Anthony is charged with first-degree murder in the death of her daughter, Caylee.

Lippman said George and Cindy Anthony are “prepared to testify as directed by the state or the defense. Certainly, they’ve never wavered from their testimony.” If the state proves the death penalty, the Anthonys “will do what they have to as far as testifying if they’re directed to by the state or defense,” Lippman said.

“In Session” will offer an interview with Jose Baez, Casey Anthony’s attorney, starting Thursday.

The CW renews ‘Supernatural,’ ‘America’s Next Top Model’

“The Vampire Diaries” will return for another season, but that’s not surprise because it’s the CW’s most popular show.

The network also announced four other series will be back, including “Supernatural,” “Gossip Girl” and “90210.”

“America’s Next Top Model” will return for two more cycles, and the first will be an all-star version of the long-running contest. Who will be back? “Models who became breakout characters and who had the most memorable stories from past cycles,” The CW said.

It will be the seventh season for “Supernatural.” Were you worried that it might not return?

The Internet and China’s Response to the Japan Earthquake

By Daniel Knorr

A few days after the Japan earthquake last month, the high school student I tutor asked if I had considered leaving Beijing with my wife. I had been keeping up with the news about the crisis at the Fukushima nuclear plant, and to the best of my knowledge there was no real threat to us in Beijing so I was a little surprised by his question. Even though I assumed the nuclear plant was the source of his concern, I asked what he was referring to. (Honestly, part of me was a little afraid that he knew something I didn’t.) When he confirmed that it was Fukushima that was on his mind, I tried to reassure him that there was little or no danger to Beijing, but he was still rather worried—understandable given the magnitude of the disaster that had just occurred not so very far away.

In the face of such a massive crisis and the subsequent frightening possibility of a nuclear meltdown, people understandably reacted in very different ways. Along with my student, a lot of people here in China were simply afraid and thus prone to believe all sorts of rumors, many spread online. Although not surprising, the role of internet communication in responses to the earthquake and tsunami is what has struck me most in the weeks since the earthquake. The internet has been talked about quite a bit recently in relation to stories such as Egypt’s internet shutdown after the outbreak of protests and the Chinese government’s increased censorship of the internet and telecommunications (as well as the apparent recent Gmail hack). Because the issues of social media and online communication in China have been attached to questions of censorship and political protest, though, I think it is worthwhile to think about them in another context that may shed some more (or at least different) light on how they relate to current events, the mainstream media, government controls, and the lives of ordinary people.

The most well-known example of rumors going viral online, of course, is the one that caused a panicked buying of salt in many parts of China in mid-March, out of a belief that eating enough table salt could offset the effects of radiation poisoning, as well as a fear that radiation contamination would lead to a shortage of sea salt. One of the originators of this rumor has been detained and fined, but the effect was widespread and far outpaced the ability of news outlets and government offices to combat it. I heard another earthquake-related rumor second-hand, through a teacher of mine. She asked a classmate and me if we had heard that Yuko Yamaguchi, the designer of Hello Kitty, had died in the tsunami; I only found out several days later from a news report that this too was a fictitious rumor, as were others about the deaths of various Japanese celebrities. Fortunately, false reports about the spread of radiation into China did not cause a panicked exodus from coast cities, which certainly would have caused more harm than buying some extra bags of salt and wrongly believing a celebrity had died.

I don’t know why exactly people started these rumors, but their lightning-fast dissemination confirms the power of the internet to rapidly spread information regardless of whether it is true or false, as well as its capacity to prompt mass action or belief, a fact as true of China as of anywhere else.

To some degree, this could actually justify the government’s policy of censorship and desire to control the flow of information. I found it hard to disagree with the decision to arrest and fine the internet user who started the spread of the salt rumor. Of course, this is hardly unique to China: after all, free speech in the U.S. has its limits, such as the prohibition against shouting “Fire!” in a crowded movie theater. Maybe the enormous effect of a single rumor spreading to millions of people through the internet emphasizes the inherent interest of the government in protecting the stability of the crowded movie theater that is China (and the whole world wide web, for that matter). At the same time, though, it showed that censorship and official news outlets cannot match the speed at which this kind of rumor can spread, and that repairing the damage caused by false information disseminated online is no easy or simple task, particularly when the public has little faith in the official media. Once the cat is out of the bag, it’s very difficult to get it back in—and even government control is no match for a spontaneous uprising of salt-buyers.

It would be wrong to think that the only reactions to the disaster have come from the media, people who spread rumors online, and those who blindly listen to one and/or the other. A couple of days after the tsunami, one of my teachers started talking with my class about the safety of nuclear plants, how many there were in the U.S., where they were, how reliant the U.S. and China are on nuclear power, etc. Of course, this is a large and ongoing issue in the U.S., and I suspect that it is that way for a number of people in China as well. However, the reports I have seen about nuclear plants in China and about the possibility of radiation coming from Japan have been reassuring in tone, and the media doesn’t seem too ready to wade into this issue.

This is not to say that safety is not a concern for the Chinese government, or for the Chinese media. Everywhere you go in Beijing you see signs exhorting safety, especially when it comes to transportation and construction:

Pollution and environmental protection are big issues, too, so it seems natural that there would be official and public concern about the safety of China’s nuclear plants, especially when people hear about rural villages whose land and crops have suffered long-term contamination from nearby factories and numerous dairies being shut down because of quality concerns. While the role of Chinese media vis-à-vis holding the government, individual officials, and large state and private enterprises accountable is still developing, some journalists are undeniably interested in highlighting environmental issues and their impact on the Chinese people (as discussed in this report by The Guardian’s Jonathan Watts).

As one would expect in the response to a major catastrophe, reporting and public attention has ebbed as time has passed. While there is still uncertainty about the final, overall effects of the radiation leak, the real issue now, I think, is how this disaster will settle into the minds of people here. Will it be remembered as another tragic, yet unavoidable natural catastrophe? Or will it come to represent something more, as, for example, Hurricane Katrina symbolized social inequality and the aloofness of the federal government for U.S. citizens? It is possible that Japan could become a cautionary tale about the dangers of economic development and the need for public accountability. The final outcome, I think, will depend on the response of the Japanese people and the attention their actions receive from Chinese media and the discussion this may or may not prompt among China’s informed netizenry.

Daniel Knorr is currently a student at the Inter-University Program in Beijing and will be attending graduate school at UC Irvine in the fall.