This Generation (22 page)

If we take a good look at how things have developed, it seems that our leaders are not really that indignant—they just feel useless, so naturally we feel useless along with them. How would it make sense to take to the streets to show how useless you feel—doesn't that show you're even more of a no-hoper? When the leaders lose face, we try to give them a boost, but when they
have
face they slap us down. When I am abused, I can't protest, but when you are abused you want me to protest—isn't that humiliating?

“Well,” you say, “this incident involves our whole nation, our national territory—it's a case of us all being bullied. Even if the government doesn't act, your life is in such a mess that you've got nothing to lose, so why not put yourself in the front line?” Yes, I could do that, but my strong opinion is that it's the government's job to do something, and that's a lot more important than us protesting against the Japanese, because territorial issues have never been things that the people at large can solve or should try to resolve—particularly in our country, where ordinary people don't even own an inch of land, where all land is leased from the government. For me, what this issue amounts to in the end is my landlord wrangling with someone else about a fallen tile. The tile fell off the landlord's
roof in a gale, but the landlord doesn't dare pick it up, because that might lead to a fight with the neighbor. So why would we tenants want to get mixed up in this? People who've got no land to their name go to fight for someone else's land, people stripped of dignity fight to defend someone else's dignity—just how low can you fall?

But it is true that a demonstration on this occasion would be safe, fun, and cool, and the biggest thing in its favor is that after the demo is over you can still work and study normally and you may even get credit for it in the future, so it does no harm for university students and ordinary people to join in—it gives them the chance to try something new and sing blackface. If the government sings whiteface, maybe it will have some effect. What's more, there's a difference between those who join in a demonstration now and those who did so before: In the past there was no distinction between nation and government, and protestors could be sold out by the authorities without it ever occurring to them that they should object, whereas now many young people are capable of understanding more fully what this whole patriotism business is about, and although they are still indignant they have begun to reflect on the causes of their uselessness and passivity, and looking back they can consider more objectively the relationship between the nation and the government, so this is some kind of progress. In any society, the nation is like a woman and the party in power is like a man who possesses her. There are happy, ideal partnerships, there are harmonious relationships, and there are cases of domestic violence and tense relations; there are women who divorce and remarry and others who are never given the chance to remarry, but however it works out, when you love a woman you can't love her man at the same time.

In the end, none of these things matter. What matters is if today I can demonstrate in support of Tang Fuzhen and Xie Chaoping,
³³
then tomorrow I will certainly feel a lot more like taking to the streets in support of the Diaoyu Islands and the Olympic torch. But there's something wrong with that argument: If you actually can demonstrate in support of Tang Fuzhen and Xie Chaoping, it's highly unlikely that there will be issues with the Diaoyu Islands and the Olympic torch and it's even less likely that the Tang and Xie incidents would take place in the first place. When a people cannot demonstrate peacefully in response to a domestic problem, any protest they make about something external has no more meaning than a dance extravaganza.

January 2, 2011

It's been a week since
Village Chief Qian's tragic death.
³⁴
Yesterday marked the seventh day of Buddhist mourning, and the uproar has still not subsided. I read up on the story as soon as I could, and like everyone else I was outraged by the Leqing police spokesman's dismissive remark, “There's no logical explanation for why he died in such unusual circumstances.” But I have let days pass without writing anything about this, because I am not sure what actually happened. A week ago I was chatting with some friends online and one of them said, “It's really terrible! In Wenzhou somebody was held down on the ground by four security officers, and then a construction vehicle came and ran him over, crushing him to death.” The friend said all this in a very confident tone, as though fully in
command of the facts. At the time I didn't know the story of how this whole thing unraveled and responded offhandedly with the comment, “Why did they have to hire four security guards to hold him down? The more people involved, the easier for the facts to emerge.” Only after I got back home did I find out more. Although there were still some questions in my mind, I too was inclined to believe that Chief Qian had been murdered, or at least that there had been some monkey business. But still I hesitated to comment, because I knew that this was simply the story that I needed to hear, and that there was a chance it wasn't quite what had happened.

My family is from a village on the outskirts of Shanghai, an area where large swathes of land are often appropriated at rock-bottom prices, with compensation set at just a few hundred yuan per square meter. Former farmland is sold off at a huge profit to chemical plants and severe pollution ensues. In the face of a river full of dead fish, the National Environmental Monitoring Center can declare that the water quality is normal, and as to why the fish have died, their conclusion is much the same as that of the Leqing police: There's no logical explanation. Later, my home village planned Asia's biggest logistics port, Asia's biggest sculpture garden, and Asia's biggest electronics emporium, but none of these projects actually has reached fruition and all that we are left with is Asia's most poisonous chemical industry. Resenting all those land sales by the government as I do, I have a great admiration for Chief Qian. The story as we would like to hear it goes like this: An honest old village chief, engaged for years in a struggle with the local forces of evil, has been jailed multiple times for defending people's rights, and now he has been murdered by the government—or by a loose alliance of officials and businessmen—and his death has been falsely presented as a simple traffic accident. The villagers, realizing what happened, demanded that the culprits be punished, but they have been ruthlessly suppressed by riot police. The police seized many legitimate protesters and relatives of Chief Qian, carried off
the body, used coercion or bribery to silence people in the know, muzzled the media, making this an appalling miscarriage of justice.

But the question is: Is that really what happened? I know that this is a truth you and I are very happy to accept, one that we hope to see established, one that validates the burning indignation we feel about the injustices that often take place in this part of the earth. What is the real truth, I do not know, because the government often lies and, no matter whether something is true or false, always handles issues as though struggling with a guilty conscience, so I cannot entirely believe the official explanation. But nor do I trust many Internet commentators' conjectures, because I don't believe you can reach a reliable verdict just by looking at a photograph, nor do I believe that just by watching a couple of episodes of
Lie to Me
you can make a judgment about whether someone is lying or not. As for the so-called suspicious points that people came out with later, they are becoming more and more contrived, like the claim that a construction vehicle cannot possibly have covered a certain distance at a certain speed—this shows some people have got so emotional they've taken leave of their senses.

A bit later, some citizens' investigation teams, including a number of lawyers, went to Leqing to look into things. Everyone naturally expected that they would not only refute the police's story and find evidence of murder but also expose an even more sinister plot, but to everyone's surprise the result of their investigation was basically the same as that of the police. If that is the truth, it's a truth that a lot of people don't need, so these investigation teams naturally aroused suspicion, becoming in the eyes of skeptics nothing more than a tour group in the pocket of the government—perhaps specifically sent to the area to soothe and placate those angry commentators. Although the process of the investigation was somewhat rushed and the evidence reviewed was incomplete, I personally have confidence in the lawyers' and journalists' integrity, and I'm not convinced that the government would be able to buy or train these
individuals, who are not normally susceptible to pressure. Nor do I believe that the government would engage in an elaborate masquerade by sending out a citizens' investigation team to pull wool over the eyes of the people, because officials lack this degree of intelligence and resourcefulness—if the government was so meticulous in its efforts to deceive, we wouldn't see so many incidents handled so disastrously and there wouldn't be such an adversarial relationship between the government and the people. The government should take advantage of this period when our naïve citizens still imagine they might get somewhere by going to Beijing to bring grievances before the central authorities to give some thought to these questions: Why do so many people not believe what you say? Why do so many people think that to murder someone who is constantly petitioning for redress is something that you are capable of doing? Why is it that people with credibility immediately become scoundrels when the result of their investigation is the same as yours? Why is it that your way of hushing things up only succeeds in drawing attention to them more? No matter whether he was murdered or whether he died in an accident, Chief Qian should rest easy in his grave, because this incident has made everyone aware of the inequity that villagers suffer and aware that the credibility of his enemies is so very weak.

Sometimes the truth does not correspond to the people's needs, but the truth matters more than sentiment, and sentiment matters more than standpoint. I don't think we should just take it for granted that things are a certain way and then criticize people on that assumption—after all, that's the all-too-familiar package the government has been trying to ram down our throats for years.

February 10, 2011

My car sometimes makes an
incredible rattle, and friends ask me if the exhaust pipe is loose. “No,” I say, “it's money shaking around.” I usually put a bunch of one-yuan coins in the car, so that I have something to give beggars who accost me at traffic lights or in a parking lot.

I have mixed feelings about beggars. On the one hand, I know a lot of them are just pretending to be penniless, because the streets are empty when I tend to go out at night and more than once I have seen beggars being picked up in cars. On the other hand, whether genuine or fake, some of them seem really pathetic, so I tend to dole out a few coins if I run into one. But over time I have become rather numb to it all, and these days my charity is more a habit than a true act of compassion. Chinese beggars are always looking for a handout when you're out and about, and most of them are children. Sometimes they will stick to you like a limpet, especially if you're with a girl. If you don't cough up, you come across as self-important and hard-hearted. If you do give money, you find yourself with a whole cluster of kids around you and no amount of coins
will be enough to go round. If you give out a large sum, it looks as though you're putting on a show, and most of the time you know you're simply abetting evil. Once I gave a twenty-yuan note to one of several children surrounding me and said, “Here, share this with your pals—I don't have any change.” He looked at me and dashed off like a puff of smoke. In a second the other children were all over me, and I found myself with a boy and a girl clutching each of my legs and really understood the idea of “children at the knee.” That being said, beggars do help me appreciate the rate of inflation, for if you offer a panhandler one yuan today, this elicits a very different reaction from that of a few years ago.