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.
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