China Remains Its Own Worst Enemy

Who else but a Chinese Communist Party ideological hack would pick a fight with an endlessly charming, even old-fashioned romantic novel? “Waiting” is the 1999 saga of red-star-crossed lovers struggling against the insanity of the Cultural Revolution. It touches the heart as a reminder of love’s awesome power as well as its limitations.

The author, Ha Jin, is much celebrated in the West these days. Having emigrated to the United States in 1985 and now on the faculty of Atlanta’s Emory University, he garnered the 1999 National Book Award as well as other literary honors, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, for his bittersweet novel about an army man trying to be true to two women while believing that he only loves one. Or does he?

Back in China they are not celebrating the triumph of this native-born literary talent. Instead, the party apparatus is on his case like a Stalinist judge. The mainland’s official press, in fact, has begun denouncing “Waiting” as anti-China and its author as a Western sellout. “The price Ha Jin paid to win this prize was too great,” wrote one Chinese reviewer, angry with the novel’s knocks of China during the Cultural Revolution. The result, as Times Beijing correspondent Henry Chu recently reported, is to chill any possibility of homeland publication of the novel for the foreseeable future.

To be sure, it isn’t all that hard to fathom mainland pique with yet another Western effort to canonize an anti-Communist Chinese emigre. Many people on the mainland, not just the party hacks, believe that the U.S. media, whether television, the periodical press or even serious books, purvey little more than a formulaic negativity about China that excludes positive change. It’s the rarest of fair-minded American television pieces that spurns the ritual footage of the Tiananmen Square protester blocking the army tank--an event that happened almost a dozen years ago.

Yet China’s image problem can’t be blamed entirely on the knee-jerk negativism of the Western media. For in too many respects, Chinese officials remain their own worst enemies. By throwing dissidents into the slammer (when, more cleverly, they should be co-opting them into the ruling party) or denouncing talented Chinese emigre artists as tools of Western ideological imperialism (when they should be at least playing it cool), they turn off many in the West. Such official narrow-mindedness mainly prompts people to wonder whether China is truly prepared for rough-and-ready modernization. Indeed, if globalization means nothing else, it surely entails letting in the winds of cultural change. National ideologies will need to broaden and become more cosmopolitan if they are to remain relevant. Nations that expect to benefit from globalization without ceding at least a measure of central control are kidding themselves.

It may be a long time before China ditches its petty provincialism about the arts, but it had better not wait too long before coming to terms with the implications of needing the Internet. Beijing has made at least the intellectual decision to permit the Internet into China. In fact, today China is one of the world’s fastest-growing Internet countries. Yet, from time to time, one official or another pops up and says something that makes you wonder if they even understand the irrepressible nature of this technology. Last month, an official from the powerful State Council, responsible for regulating new technologies, sounded off about the government’s need to monitor any and all kinds of Internet news so as to make sure that all the news sources on the Internet were “reliable.” Good luck! Amazingly, China’s president himself was recently quoted as saying that “no facts should be distorted by the Internet”--a vain hope indeed.

China is not going to get very far trying to harness the Internet or by slapping irreverent artists around in public. If its leaders wish to achieve their goal of economic modernization, they must tame their antiquated censoriousness and control-freak instincts. China needs, and in many respects deserves, to be taken seriously. That’s why so many vigorously supported its campaign for admission to the World Trade Organization and for normal trade status with the U.S. Yet if Beijing expects artists to be reverential and the dynamic Internet to be a controllable information milieu, then its journey of a thousand miles is going to be a bumpy, slow experience for all involved. At some point people may get tired of waiting.