Empire of Lies

The Truth about China in the Twenty-First Century

Guy Sorman

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781594032844
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Before the totalitarian reign of Mao Zedong and his immediate successors, never in human history had an entire nation been under such intense surveillance. The Chinese not only had to speak alike; they had to think alike. Traveling to China regularly since 1967, and spending all of 2005 and 2006 there, Guy Sorman saw it all, and in this jaw-dropping book, he documents the horrifying stories of China through the 21st century. He shows how the Party's primary concern is not improving the lives of the downtrodden; it seeks power more than it seeks social development. It expends extraordinary energy in suppressing Chinese freedoms-the media operate under suffocating censorship, and political opposition can result in expulsion or prison-even as it tries to seduce the West, which has conferred greater legitimacy on it than do the Chinese themselves.

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.

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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 for too long, Communist leaders have twisted tradition and Confucianism to suit their own ends. The teachings of Confucius can be interpreted any way one wants. They can be used to oppress the people or to guarantee their rights. Wei defends Confucianism: “At the time of the Empire, Confucianism ensured social peace by respecting the independence of families and clans; the emperor did not interfere in the private life of the Chinese. Maoists replaced Confucianism with constant police surveillance, leaving the people with no choice but to become robots in the service of the Party.” Confucius hijacked by Wei the democrat? Master Kong, so dear to Voltaire, seems to be the quintessential man for all seasons.

I think of Nelson Mandela, Václav Havel, and all those who came to power after years of incarceration. In 1911, Sun Yat-sen returned from his exile in London to become president of the first Republic of China. Is Wei a likely candidate for president in China? “Impossible,” he exclaims. “I have no desire to perpetuate central rule in China.” Countering the argument of tyrants, who maintain that centralized power is the only form of governance possible in order to justify their existence, Wei believes that any democratic renewal must recognize the diversity of the Chinese. “China,” he says, “is more diverse than the United States, which has a common language, but less so than the European Union.” The institutions of democratic China could thus incorporate some elements of the American model and some of the European Union. Such an arrangement could easily accommodate Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia—inconceivable in a centralized China.

Is such a scenario unlikely? How would the transition from a dictatorship to a democratic federation take place? Wei is waiting for the differences between the pragmatists and dogmatists in the Communist Party to erupt. This, he feels, is bound to happen. With the inevitable economic debacle and rising unemployment, change must come. A day will arrive, he concludes, when the police and the army will get tired of being despised. He is also counting on the United States, “the only democratizing force in the world.” For the moment, however, the American government has abandoned the cause of Chinese dissidents. Wei, who met President Clinton after his release, no longer enjoys official support. Even the innumerable American foundations for freedom have succumbed to Communist Party pressure. After discarding Wei, the Ford Foundation was allowed to finance local elections in the villages of China. The extent to which the West stands in awe of a powerful China is nothing short of madness.

Wei Jingsheng says that the fear of losing the vast Chinese market is making people cowards. He feels, however, that this situation will not last for long. “Sooner or later, the Americans will realize that the Communist Party has been lying to them about everything, be it intellectual property, human rights, Taiwan, or its support to North Korea.” Is a conflict between the United States and China inevitable? Wei replies that a showdown is inevitable with the Communist Party but not with the Chinese people. He reminds us that so far, twenty-six dynasties have ruled over China. Now the time for democracy has come. China will be a nation like any other, its people at last able to lead the normal life to which they aspire. Will the Chinese forgive those who succumbed to the pressure and the lures of the Communist Party, believing them to be one and the same? Yes, provided that Wei Jingsheng, or someone like him, becomes president.

The Tiananmen survivor

In Taipei, I mentioned my meeting with Wei Jingsheng to Wuer Kaixi. He immediately distanced himself from Wei’s approach. He said, “Wei is a symbol I respect but he never took the plunge. I was at the forefront of the protesting crowd at Tiananmen Square; I led the Tiananmen Revolution; I was its commander.” Wuer Kaixi likes being called the commander, a title given to him by Western journalists present in Beijing at the time, and he uses it often when referring to himself.

In the portly gentleman before me, I found it hard to recognize the slender young boy who, in May 1989, led half a million students, heckled the Chinese prime minister, talked with journalists from all over the world, started a hunger strike, and unwittingly led his troops to disaster.

At present, Wuer Kaixi lives peacefully with his wife and children in Taiwan. But when he speaks, there are still sparks of the old fire that galvanized the crowds and shook the establishment in China. The Chinese army had to be called in to silence him. His black eyes are as intense as ever, and in his gaze are shades of Genghis Khan. Chinese by culture, Wuer Kaixi is not a Han but an Uigur, born to a Muslim family from Xinjiang. Wuer Kaixi is the Chinese transcription of the Turkish name Uerkesh Daolet. His story is startlingly similar to that of another famous revolutionary, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the leader of the May 1968 uprising in Paris.

Both men were outsiders—one a German Jew, the other an Asian Turk. They stood out in the crowd; perhaps this aloofness explained their charisma and large following. Both were powerful orators, displaying the same irreverence for the establishment, refusing to accept its legitimacy or might. They could be dispassionate precisely because they were outsiders. Unlike their fellow citizens, neither Cohn-Bendit nor Wuer Kaixi stood in awe of the state. No doubt, it was easier for Wuer than for a Chinese of old stock not to submit to authority in the name of an eternal China. He holds that in the struggle for democracy, the notion of “Chineseness” has to be dispensed with; from time immemorial, tyrants, unable to tolerate dissent in any form, have conjured “a certain idea of China” to quell protest. The communists were no different and used the same strategy to put down democrats.

The communists said that the temerity to ask for freedom was shameful, since it went against the grain of the Chinese ethos. When Wuer Kaixi was “commanding” his troops at Tiananmen Square, Alain Peyrefitte shared the communists’ view and thought it appropriate to tell his French readers that Kaixi “was not Chinese.” The idea of the Chinese ethos was dear to Peyrefitte; as he wrote his piece he must have been thinking of that other foreigner, Cohn-Bendit, who had crossed swords with him when he was minister of education. Had Wuer Kaixi been a respecter of “Chineseness,” he would have submitted his complaint to the “emperor.” If this elicited no response and heightened his indignation, he would have committed suicide. Such interpretations, however, are not borne out by Chinese history. Confucius is dead and gone, and the last 2,500 years have been marked by numerous instances of popular revolt.

Both Cohn-Bendit and Wuer Kaixi took the escape route of exile, but here the similarity ends. The former embarked on a conventional political career, the latter, cramped and homesick in Taiwan, clings on to his dreams of revolution and a greater China. “A revolution would be ideal,” he says. He imagines himself returning under cover to Beijing to stage a grand reentry at Tiananmen Square under the nose of the police. Then the dream fades away in the tropical heat of Taipei. In anticipation of the great evening, Wuer Kaixi cherishes the memory of Tiananmen. In defense of his action, he says that the Beijing government recognized its political, thus legal, character. His students were not aiming to overthrow the Communist Party; they were only asking it to enter into a dialogue with them and respect the freedom of expression granted in the constitution. Perhaps the students were naïve. It was the time of velvet revolutions in Eastern Europe and perestroika in the Soviet Union. General Secretary Zhao Ziyang embodied the liberal school in the Party. The students hoped for a Chinese Gorbachev, not a coup d’état. Obviously, they had misread the character of the Chinese Party, which was far more totalitarian than its Soviet counterpart.

Wuer Kaixi knows that the Party is not going to change, but the least the Chinese democrats can do is to acknowledge the positive nature of Tiananmen. But democrats both in China and in exile have remained divided on the issue. Did the 1989 revolt hasten or slow China’s march toward freedom? This question exercises the exiles, putting them at loggerheads with one another.

Kaixi is clear in his mind. Since Tiananmen, “the Chinese have gained in self-respect, both in the way they view themselves and in the way the world views them.” That Beijing spring was also a reminder that whenever the Chinese gathered it was in support of political freedom: from the first student demonstration at Tiananmen Square of May 4, 1919, to April 1989, the demand for democracy is what brought the demonstrators out on the streets. The Communist Party has never been able to get public support. When its members convene at the People’s Palace, next to Tiananmen Square, tens of thousands of policemen and soldiers stand guard outside. Does the Party fear the people? In March 2005, 65,000 policemen were deployed at the annual meeting of the National People’s Congress, the puppet parliament of the regime.

How many people were killed at Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989? The Chinese government maintains that not a single death took place on the square; it was only later that the army gunned down 3,000 demonstrators trying to flee on the nearby streets. Nineteen years later, there is complete silence on the subject: speaking about Tiananmen or carrying out any research on it is strictly forbidden. An organization of the parents of the Beijing victims, headed by Madam Ding Zilin, is being hounded by the police for trying to draw up a list of the missing. All reference to Tiananmen is banned even in literary works. At the same time, the Cultural Revolution is discussed in literature and cinema, though not in school textbooks. In Beijing, I asked the novelist Mo Yan, known both in the West and in China for Red Sorghum and the film based on it, when he would deal with the 1989 massacre. “Not before fifteen years,” he whispered, embarrassed by my question.

In comparison with the millions of victims of the civil war, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the laogaï, the Tiananmen carnage appears insignificant. Deng Xiaoping, who gave the order to shoot, was surprised by the Western outrage. Public opinion in Europe and the United States had been far less critical during Mao’s time. But that was before television. Captured on camera, Tiananmen will remain inside and outside China as the indelible stamp of the Communist Party. When China becomes a democracy, June 4 will be celebrated as a day of national commemoration. The Party fears this, for every year on this day security is reinforced in Beijing. As June 4 approaches, police cordons in the city center are tightened, mobile phones of democratic intellectuals stop working, SMS and Internet communication gets jammed, and sensitive websites are blocked. Yet despite all its might, the Communist government seems afraid of a handful of dissenters.

Our memory is short-lived

It did not take us long to forget Tiananmen. June 4, 1989, a day on which the Western world was filled with righteous anger at the massacre of students, is not so long ago. On July 14 of that year, the bicentenary of the French Revolution, dissidents who had fled from China led the parade on the Champs-Elysées. The image of Chinese students in Paris leading the parade produced as strong an emotion among the Chinese as the emotion we felt when we saw a boy standing up to a row of tanks lined along the boulevard with nothing more than his schoolbag. Europe and the United States, it appeared, had learned their lesson: there would be n...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• PROLOGUE
• CHAPTER ONE - The Dissenters
• CHAPTER TWO - Wild Grass
• CHAPTER THREE - The Mystics
• CHAPTER FOUR - The Dispossessed
• CHAPTER FIVE - The Downtrodden
• CHAPTER SIX - Skewed Development
• CHAPTER SEVEN - Shadows of Democracy
• CHAPTER EIGHT - The Savage State
• CHAPTER NINE - The End of the Party
• CHAPTER TEN - The Republicans
• CHAPTER ELEVEN - A Moral
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliography
• Guy Sorman
• INDEX
• Copyright Page