The Powerful Tool Behind the Big Lie : To Kill Truth, Chinese Leaders Summon Xenophobia

Perhaps it should not surprise us that men who are willing to slaughter peaceful protesters are also willing to slaughter the truth. Yet it is worthwhile to try to understand the nature and functions of the Big Lie, which, like the killing itself, is in fact a powerful and carefully considered political tool.

What are the Chinese regime’s purposes in inventing the truth? One, obviously, is that the truth is embarrassing, and needs to be covered up. More important, though, the lie is an important tool in the “engineering” (Stalin’s term, still used in China) of public opinion. George Orwell was quite correct in saying that a falsehood, after constant repetition, in a context where countervailing expression is publicly forbidden, takes on a “truth” of its own. This transformation is all the more possible in China, where words, from the earliest times, have been understood as tools for moral guidance as much as for descriptions of fact.

In contemporary China, the communist system has added powerful incentives for the average person to surrender to official “truths.” Chinese people belong to “work units” whose leadership controls not only salary and job assignments, but also housing, health care, children’s education, permission to travel and much more. With rare exceptions, one must stay in a work unit for life. And the leaders of work units, who are part of the all-encompassing Communist Party structure, are charged with insisting on official “truths.” Everyone knows that anyone who deviates can be made to suffer in major and often irrevocable ways.

But this sort of blunt threat to personal welfare is not the only way in which falsehoods are used in China’s political engineering. There are standard methods that are sometimes subtle enough that they are best shown by concrete examples. Soon after the dissident Fang Lizhi took refuge in the U.S. Embassy, China’s official media announced that the masses hate him and will not be appeased until he is apprehended and punished, because he is a traitor--that Fang’s request for protection shows that China’s “counterrevolutionary” democracy movement has been backed by the United States all along. Never mind that the statements are false--that Fang is, in fact, one of the most universally and profoundly admired Chinese living today, and that the origins of China’s democracy movement were entirely free of any foreign “conspiracy.”

The point of the statements is neither to describe nor to cover up the truth, but to summon xenophobia to the side of the regime. The top power-holders have, after all, hardly any other moral or political authority to call on: Maoism has become repugnant; Marxism, which never meant much to the common people, now is not taken seriously even by the leaders; ordinary morality provides no authority, because corruption among the the top leaders has become one of the most widespread complaints of the people.

How, then, other than by force, can the regime oppose a thinker like Fang? Only by stimulating a primitive, xenophobic nativism and trying, through the manipulation of words, to direct it at him. Similar word manipulation is aimed at the U.S. authorities. If they help Fang, they seem to be corroborating the lie that he has been their puppet all along; but if, to avoid that appearance, they deny him help, then the word game played by the Chinese authorities will have succeeded in its goal of controlling U.S. behavior.

The demonstrations showed, very early, that Chinese journalists are disgusted at having to accept orders to spread stories they know to be false. The boldest banner in the first student demonstration read, “News media should tell the truth!” Three days later, a large group of journalists joined the demonstrations under the banner, “We want to tell the truth!” In television broadcasts during the martial law of late May, viewers could read plainly on the faces of broadcasters the depth of their reluctance to read some of the official propaganda notices. After the bloody crackdown, the faces of broadcasters were seldom shown; written lists of news “headlines” replaced them.

It is difficult to estimate the reactions of the Chinese public at large to the official falsehoods about recent events. But they can be grouped into three general categories. Among the students, workers and others who were active in the movement, and who know quite directly what the truth is, the effect of the lies has been violently counterproductive. Together with the brutal killings, the lies represent the final and utter moral bankruptcy of the current national leadership.

Among most ordinary citizens--people who supported the students and still sympathize with them--the natural impulse to reject official mendacity is balanced by equally natural impulses for self-preservation, and thus the superficial acceptance of the falsehoods. Such acceptance cannot grow into a sense of full-fledged truth; but it could well grow, as it has before in China’s recent history, into a sense of the practical “usefulness” of always speaking and behaving as if black were white.

Among the large number of people in China’s smaller cities and vast countryside--people who did not witness events and have little access even to the urban rumor mill--the official version of events is all that there is. It is accepted because there is no alternative news source, and because only trouble can come from questioning it. Through no fault of their own, this largest portion of the Chinese populace is now being easily and terribly misled.