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Reflections on the Qinghai Earthquake

April 28, 2010 in China Behind the Headline by The China Beat | 1 comment

Nicole Barnes, a graduate student in the Department of History at UC Irvine, is currently conducting research in Chongqing. Here, she shares her thoughts on the Chinese media’s treatment of the Qinghai earthquake; see “I want to grow up to be a volunteer,” a guest post by Katrina Hamlin at Alec Ash’s blog, Six, for more reflections on the earthquake and youth involvement in relief efforts.

By Nicole Barnes

As the Qinghai earthquake turns into yesterday’s news overseas and begins to sink into the sea of usual economic stories here in China, I would like to reflect upon the position of 10-year-old volunteer Tsering Dan Zhou in earthquake media.

News coverage of the earthquake here in China is impressive in many ways. The programs convey the information that everyone desires, but are also clearly designed to incite sympathy and get people to dig into their wallets for donations to the Chinese Red Cross and other relief agencies. They also pointedly emphasize “social harmony” (shehui hexie 社会和谐, Hu Jintao’s favorite slogan that is a much-repeated mantra throughout the country) between the Tibetan Chinese majority of Yushu county (which, as Robert Barnett pointed out here, is a Tibetan region) and the local Han Chinese. They frequently feature 10-year-old Tsering Dan Zhou, who volunteered as translator for many of his fellow Tibetan-speaking patients who could not otherwise communicate with the Chinese-speaking doctors.

Tsering Dan Zhou

Tsering Dan Zhou and an aid worker

His heroism has been celebrated on many a news program, and he also mounted the stage in a special ceremony to give a tearful and very moving speech of gratitude to all the Chinese people who had come to Yushu to help the earthquake victims. Another Central Chinese Television news program featured a reporter entering one of the canvas tents supplied as temporary housing to four different families, asking the occupants their ethnicity (both Han and Tibetan) and whether or not they shared food and fun with their fellow tent-mates. Their positive responses prompted him to emphasize the “good relations” between the locals.

Doubtless such situations exist, and it is a good thing to point them out. However, this story of ethnic harmony is the only story that is being told. As Bruce Humes pointed out here, comments about anti-Han tensions have been taken out of news commentary.

Such television coverage proffers an unmistakable message of Han charity and good spirit, which is duly appreciated by the “good child” Tibetan who is moved to tears of gratitude. The imagery of the child is significant. As one of my neighbors here in Chongqing said to me, the government looks upon the minorities as children who need both to be well cared for, and also to learn to appreciate the parents’ hard work and sacrifices made on their behalf. In this context, Tsering Dan Zhou is both a heroic young volunteer who deserves to be recognized, and a fortuitous (for the Party) poster child of the Yushu earthquake who is being manipulated by the media. You can see a Chinese-language news feature of him on Sohu’s website.

Yet there is another truth to this situation. Despite some criticism of China’s relief response, thousands of volunteers have gone from sea level to over 11,000 feet to dig people out of the rubble. Many of them had to seek medical assistance when altitude sickness got the best of them, and went back to work after only a short rest. Certainly when compared with the Bush Administration’s tepid response to my own country’s largest natural disaster of recent times, Hurricane Katrina, China’s relief response was extremely rapid, given the remote location of the earthquake zone from most of the country’s population centers. Canvas tents, emergency food supplies, medical supplies, trained rescue workers, and health professionals have been sent from practically every province. Volunteers have gathered donations from citizens on the streets and in shopping plazas all around the country. It takes a massive amount of resource to muster such a relief program, which is much more readily available in a huge nation of 1.3 billion people than it would be if, say, Qinghai province were its own nation. So despite media manipulations, there is still room for gratitude toward the Chinese people, and even for reflection on the advantages of membership in a nation with such a long history of emergency relief and charity (which you can also read about on China Beat,in posts collected at point #8 on this page). As in all situations, there is no single truth about the Yushu earthquake.

Previous pieces by Nicole Barnes for China Beat include a review of Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem and an interview with Antonia Finnane.

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Behind the Headline: Water, Water Everywhere…

January 5, 2010 in China Behind the Headline by The China Beat | 3 comments

In mid-December, Financial Times published a piece about China’s south-north water diversion project. Writer Jamil Anderlini begins the article with a brief description of the project:

“[The government] told us they were moving us to new lands to become rich and prosperous but they’ve thrown us into a fire pit,” sobs Ms Li. “The new land and houses are worthless and our lives there are so bitter.”

The peasant farmer is among the first batch of 440,000 people who will be uprooted to make way for the reservoir and a canal that will carry water from the Yangtze river and its tributaries in the south of China to the arid northern plains and Beijing.

This project, with its echoes of Maoist megalomania, does not fit easily with modern China, where Beijing is making concerted efforts to clean up its tormented environment and foster its own green revolution.

Ken Pomeranz, who has been studying and writing about China’s water control and conservation efforts, wrote the following response to the article.

By Ken Pomeranz

The Financial Times article points to very real problems with the south-north water diversion scheme – and there are others besides. But at the same time, the article is quite one-sided (one would never know, for instance, that Chinese water use in agriculture has already declined close to 20 percent since the 1980s, while production has increased a bit), and it misses the reasons why people who are by no means crazy might think this is an idea worth trying. (I have written on issues related to this project – especially the Western leg of the plan, which is its most ambitious and controversial part – at much greater length elsewhere: an easily accessed version is “The Great Himalayan Watershed: Water Shortages, Mega-Projects and Environmental Politics in China, India, and Southeast Asia” in Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, July 27, 2009.)

On the negative side, it is not at all clear that the Yangzi basin can actually spare the 47 billion gallons per year that would be diverted under the complete version of the plan – particularly since climate change is likely to drastically shrink the Himalayan glaciers that are one important source for the Yangzi. And if the plan decreases the rate of flow in the river, and in some of its principal tributaries – the Han River is a particular point of concern — it will decrease those rivers’ capacity to flush out their pollutants. And the problems of displacing people are certainly real enough.

Moreover, technically speaking, the project is almost certainly inefficient. Its estimated price tag is $65 billion (though less if the Western leg never gets built, as some people, not including me, predict). If you put that much money into fixing leaky faucets, lining irrigation ditches, and improving basic waste-water treatment (allowing more water to be re-used), you would almost certainly do more to relieve pressure on North China’s water supply than the diversion will do. But there are serious obstacles to these solutions. It is not at all clear that Beijing has the capacity to monitor the implementation of such a low-tech, decentralized solution – in other words, to make sure millions of faucets and pipes and so forth get fixed, and, more importantly, stay fixed. If you wanted to make sure that water conservation became and remained a priority in the countryside – which is where something on the order of 80 percent of water use (and an even higher percentage of water waste) occurs, you would need to raise prices dramatically – one recent study (by Scott Rozelle et.al.) suggest that a price hike of 150 percent would be needed to even make a dent in the problem. (You would also need to build a lot of infrastructure – among other things, in much of rural North China, water meters simply don’t exist)

What would such a price hike mean? Almost certainly, a significant reduction in North and Northwest China’s agricultural production – beginning with the winter wheat crop, which is almost entirely dependent on irrigation, and with cotton production. This would mean significantly greater agricultural imports – which China could certainly afford, from a foreign exchange perspective, but which makes officials nervous, both for geo-strategic reasons and because the responses of other countries to possible global food price increases are unpredictable. But probably even more important than these factors would be the social effects. For millions of farmers whose incomes already lag far behind those of urbanites, and whose profit margins are often very thin, more expensive water might well push them off the land and towards the cities –at least seasonally (the end of winter wheat production would mean very high seasonal unemployment) and in many cases permanently. Given the already daunting challenges posed by very rapid urbanization in China, it is not at all clear that one would want to make the process even more rapid. Nor is it clear that one wants to make those who would stay behind in the North China countryside even poorer, as this would certainly do.

So while the water diversion scheme carries enormous risks, and is certainly very far from the optimal solution, it may, by default, become a bad idea whose time has come. It’s not, I think, that people in the government don’t realize that controlling demand (and pollution) may be more promising than increasing supply, or that they aren’t trying to do those things, or that those who support the water diversion scheme are indulging in nostalgia for Maoist gigantism. The real point is that its not at all clear that efficiency gains can be realized fast enough to keep North China, which has about 6 percent of the global average per capita water supply, from facing a devastating water crunch – especially if its people are to see their living standards improve. (Remember, for instance, that even a small increase in the amount of meat people consume increases water demand very sharply.) The project may well be too much of an environmental gamble to undertake, at least in its full-blown form; I lean towards that position myself. But it is a response to very real dilemmas: when the Financial Times article calls it a “pharoanic gesture,” and treats it simply as an anachronistic and brutal act of a government completely heedless of its people, it distorts a much more complicated reality.

The Curious Case of Jia Junpeng, or The Power of Symbolic Appropriation in Chinese Cyberspace

October 20, 2009 in China Behind the Headline, blogging by The China Beat | 3 comments

This essay was originally presented at New Media and Global Transformations, a conference that took place at Columbia University on October 9, 2009. It has been adapted for China Beat.

By Guobin Yang

An Uncanny Story[1]

On July 16, 2009, an anonymous internet user in a popular Baidu discussion forum posted a message titled “Jia Junpeng, your mother wants you to go home to eat.” The message has only twelve Chinese characters in its title and has no other content. Yet it got 3,000 responses within five hours, responses that range from the routine socializing type (“Support!” “Interesting!”) to the funny and sarcastic (“I am not going to eat at home today. I’m eating in the Internet bar. Please pass on my message to my mom.”). Within one day, it received seven million hits and 300,000 comments. Large portal sites like sina.com, netease.com, people.com and newspapers like Southern Metropolis began to cover it, adding to its popularity. A cryptic posting was thus turned into a national media event. Jia Junpeng became a household word in Chinese cyberspace overnight.

No one knows who posted the message or who the Jia Junpeng in the message is. In their responses, many people doubted whether the Jia Junfeng in the posting refers to a real person. The name might just have been made up by whoever posted the message.

As people were puzzling over this bizarre phenomenon, two new developments happened. First, several business firms claimed that the Jia Junpeng event was the product of their online marketing.  The CEO of a new media firm, for example, alleged in early August that the entire event had been created by his firm. He claimed that his firm had hired over 800 marketing personnel, who then registered over 20,000 user IDs to post responses to that cryptic sentence, thus turning it into a national media event. None of these firms has released evidence to prove their claim. It is possible that their real marketing strategy is to try to get some share of the media limelight by making a sensational claim. Even if these claims are unsubstantiated, however, they do suggest that it is possible to manipulate or manufacture public sentiments in cyberspace.

The story does not end here. Just one day before the Jia Junpeng message appeared, a blogger by the name of Guo Baofeng was detained by local police in the town of Mawei in Fujian province. Guo Baofeng was accused of using his blog to spread rumors about local police. At the police station, he secretly sent a text-message asking for urgent help: “I have been arrested by Mawei police. SOS.” Upon receiving this message, his friends started campaigning for his release. Inspired by the Jia Junpeng posting, one well-known blogger called on people to send postcards with the phrase “Guo Baofeng, your mother wants you to go home to eat” to the police station where Guo was detained. The address of the police station was posted online. This created a “postcard movement.” Some well-known names in the Chinese blogosphere began sending postcards to Guo Baofeng through the post office (whether they reached Guo is another matter). Similar messages were posted in online forums. Although it is not clear how much this postcard movement might have helped, Guo Baofeng was soon released.

It is mind-boggling that such an innocuous short sentence could generate so much interest and then was appropriated in rather surprising ways. What does it tell us about new media and social transformation in China?

I think the main message is that in China today, the internet can always be appropriated by users for their own purposes, however closely it is monitored or controlled. Much more than the newspaper and television, the internet depends on user participation. Bulletin boards, blogs, video web sites, social networking sites all depend on users to contribute content if they are to survive. As long as this feature does not change, internet users can always make creative or subversive use of it.

Why do people appropriate the Internet?

The Jia Junpeng case shows that there are both general and specific reasons that users appropriate the Internet. At a general level, their appropriation of Internet forums and spaces is a reflection of social sentiments. Chinese commentators point to the sense of alienation and isolation in contemporary life. Many responses to the Jia Junpeng posting express feelings of boredom. One post says, for example, “What I am posting is not a post. I am posting loneliness.” Other social sentiments, such as nationalism, patriotism, and anger with corrupt officials have also electrified Chinese cyberspace from time to time.

Specific reasons for appropriating the internet vary a great deal. In the Jia Junpeng case, Chinese observers have remarked that it was at least partly an outpouring of frustration by members of that particular online forum. The forum is set up for players of the popular game World of Warcraft. At that time, the parent company of World of Warcraft, Blizzard Entertainment, had just selected netease.com as its new China representative. In preparing to launch the game, however, netease.com had encountered difficulties in obtaining a license. On June 30, 2009, Netease issued a public statement apologizing to consumers for the delay in launching the game. This was frustrating to the members of the forum. Thus, the Jia Junpeng posting became an occasion for expressing their frustration. This would seem to suggest a kind of consumer activism – people appropriated the Jia Junpeng message to express their dissatisfaction as consumers of a popular internet game.

Users also appropriate the Internet for political purposes. This is what happened when the Jia Junpeng phrase was later used by Chinese bloggers to call for the release of activist-blogger Guo Baofeng. At that point, an innocuous and cryptic phrase turned into a potent political slogan.

It is well known that the Internet is closely monitored and controlled in China. How can people use it for subversive purposes?

The issue is not simply a matter of citizen expression versus state control, or freedom versus repression, though these are of central importance. Even during more controlled periods such as the Cultural Revolution, there were what Tang Tsou calls “zones of indifference” which state power did not try to penetrate or control. In some ways, cyberspace is easier to control. A vast online community, for example, may be monitored from a small central control office. Entire networks can be shut down. Yet this does not mean Chinese cyberspace does not have its own “zones of indifference.” Gaming communities, like the one where the Jia Junpeng case happened, are less of a concern for state authorities than online forums on current affairs. In Chinese cyberspace there are also issues of indifference to the state – everyday-life issues that do not touch on the state’s central nerve systems. The Jia Junpeng posting is such an issue (if it is an issue at all). Yet as often happens in Chinese politics, it is through these zones and issues of indifference that people begin to make difference. There exists only a thin line between matters of indifference and difference.

Moving beyond the state-society framework, we will also need to look at the multiple dimensions of the Internet – its economics, culture, society, as well as politics. The government is not the only player in this game. There are other players as well, especially commerce and community. Internet businesses have a vested interest in encouraging user participation. Online communities are an essential component of all major commercial web sites, because they help to build a user base and attract web traffic. Commercial and social forces thus provide favorable conditions for user participation.

Why are some internet postings transformed into major media events, while numerous others attract no attention at all?

Here the Jia Junpeng message poses the ultimate challenge. Does it make sense that such an apparently pointless phrase should instantly go viral in Chinese cyperspace? On the internet in the US, for example on YouTube, there are also postings or videos that occasionally go viral. Although analysts have puzzled over such phenomena and business firms have picked up the concept of viral marketing, no one knows yet why, when, and how a YouTube video or internet posting will go viral.

It seems to me that Internet postings become popular and are widely circulated for the same reasons that folk sayings, folk songs, legendary tales, rumors, or even forbidden books have always been circulated. These popular cultural forms often enjoy no official support. In fact, state authorities often try to suppress them. And yet they have always managed to find their way into society and enjoy wide if sometimes surreptitious circulation.

The reasons are more social than technological. After all, folk sayings and rumors, which are traditionally among the fastest to spread, are low-tech cultural forms. They circulated by word of mouth or relied on primitive media forms (such as hand-copied manuscripts during China’s Cultural Revolution).

Most cases of popular Internet incidents in China, like the Jia Junpeng case, are fairly low-tech by the standards of rapidly developing digital technologies. They happen mostly in online bulletin board systems. People occasionally use cell phones to post messages in online forums. There are sometimes postings of digital images. But most interaction consists of text-based BBS postings. BBS is a dated form of network service in the US, but in China it is still a major platform for online interaction. Blogs and social networking sites are catching up, but their influence still pales in comparison with BBS. The main reason for the sustained popularity of BBS in China is history and culture. Generations of Chinese Internet users, whether they are high school students, college students, or urban professionals, started with BBS when they first went online. As a result, there has formed a rich and dynamic culture of BBS that encourages participation. There is even a form of competitive participation as people try to outdo one another in their jokes.

Another social factor that helps to explain why some postings go viral is the issue under discussion. The Jia Junpeng case is exceptional in the sense that the original posting did not have a clear issue (only the forum members knew they were angry with the delayed launch of their favorite game) and it was in the middle of interaction that people attached issues to it. In less exceptional but equally popular cases, the issues usually resonate with the public. They are often emotionally stirring. They typically concern blatant violations of law and the norms of social morality, such as corruption or violence inflicted on the poor and the vulnerable the rich and powerful. Cases like the death of Sun Zhigang in 2003 or the abduction of teenagers into slave labor in 2007 immediately come to mind. These and other similar cases pressured government authorities to take action after provoking public uproar.

Finally, one must not underestimate the power of play in online interaction. Play is a social act, an essential ingredient for community. Many responses to the Jia Junpeng message are sexual jokes, jokes about family life, workplace relations, school life, and so on. People compete to see who is funnier. Such playfulness is typical of Chinese Internet culture in general – recall how Chinese netizens have recently played with the Grass-Mud Horse or the Green Dam Girl. There is evidently also abundant play in the case of Jia Junpeng and the postcard movement.

Play is also a creative act. The social history of the Chinese Internet in the past ten years is a history of play. Indeed, it is a history of growing playfulness. In content, design, and style, today’s web sites in China are a world apart from those in the late 1990s. In the early 1990s, when Chinese students overseas began to run Internet magazines, those magazines did not look very different from the print magazines they had been familiar with. Today, it is hard to imagine how many different forms Internet publications have morphed into. When personal homepages were in fashion in the late 1990s, people were publishing their personal diary entries, a predecessor of today’s blogs. Yet even a cursory comparison will show how much more playful today’s blogs are compared with the web diaries in the “primitive” days of the Internet. And of course, for those who do not often go online, Chinese Internet culture presents a different kind of challenge – there is a whole new language that netizens have invented in the process of play, a language that makes little sense to those who do not partake in the play. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the main features of Chinese Internet culture today are the products of a history of play.

All this is to say that the seemingly curious case of Jia Junpeng is not so curious after all. A pointless phrase does not go viral in cyberspace for no reason. I am not saying, though, that the circulation of an Internet posting is the same as that of a rumor or folk saying in earlier times. The Internet differs in one crucial aspect. It changes the speed and scale of communication. When large-scale communication happens rapidly, the speed of social transformation quickens and the frequency of transformative events increases dramatically. Consequently, it creates a more acute sense of immediacy and urgency in our consciousness of current affairs.

This has both positive and negative consequences for political action and critical analysis. This sense of urgency demands immediate action against violations of law, morality, and our sense of social justice. It demands instant results. This is of vital importance. Yet I also wonder at times whether this sense of urgency and immediacy, by fanning our desire for instant results, may not be guilty of creating a sort of myopia. By focusing our attention on the possibilities and prospects of overnight transformation, it makes us forget that the seeds of dramatic institutional transformation are often planted in the small changes in everyday life.  Such a myopic view little aids our efforts to gain a more sophisticated and historical understanding of the complexities, multiple zones, and  uncanniness of Chinese Internet culture and politics.

Yang Guobin is an Associate Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College.  He is the author of the recently published book, The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online.

[1] Author’s note: For the use of the term “uncanny,” I am indebted to Lydia Liu, “The Freudian Robot: The Figure of the Uncanny in New Media.” Talk at the conference on “New Media and Global Transformation” on October 9, 2009, Columbia University.

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The Frankfurt Book Mess

September 28, 2009 in China Behind the Headline by The China Beat | 3 comments

By Nicolai Volland

The Frankfurt Book Fair (Frankfurter Buchmesse), the largest trade show of its kind, turned messy this year before it had even started. At the center of the brouhaha: China, the official guest of honor of the book fair 2009. Or, to be more precise, the row over the revoked invitation of two Chinese “dissidents,” Dai Qing and Bei Ling, to a symposium in the run-up to the Book Fair. The incident had an air of tragicomedy, and turned into a public relations disaster for the organizers as well as an embarrassment for about all those involved. In a larger sense, the debacle illustrates the paradoxes in the public perception of China in Germany; it also raises questions about the status of China-related knowledge in Europe and its ability to reach and influence decision makers in politics and business.

In comparison with the fallout, the story itself seems simple. During the planning stages of a symposium on “China and the World: Realities and Perceptions,” the hosts decided to invite, apart from representatives selected by the Chinese co-organizers, two intellectuals well-known for their critical opinions. The participation of Dai Qing and Bei Ling was announced to the press, only to be revoked a few days later after protests from the Chinese side: The Chinese co-organizers had threatened to withdraw from the event if Dai and Bei were allowed to participate in the planned symposium. After an internal debate (the actual process of the deliberations that took place remain unclear) the German side withdrew their earlier invitations and asked Dai and Bei not to come. Predictably, the revocation of the invitations caused a public outcry and allegations in the press that the organizers of Germany’s most time-honored cultural event were bowing to bullying from a Communist Chinese regime. Once the incident spilled over into the international arena – with reports that the two Chinese intellectuals had been “banned” from the Book Fair (patently untrue of course: they had been disinvited from the symposium, but not barred from participating in the book fair, which will be held four weeks later, from 14-18 October) – Dai and Bei were under pressure to react. Initially annoyed by the flip-flop of the German event management, both decided to attend the symposium nonetheless. Dai secured a visa with sponsorship of the German P.E.N. club (miraculously, she found her ticket to Frankfurt cancelled despite reassurances from the travel agency), while Bei flew to Germany at his own expense. Amidst enormous press attention, Dai and Bei attended the symposium as audience members, and – predictably – triggered a walk-out from the Chinese delegation, who agreed to return only after Dai Qing and Bei Ling had left the conference venue. The spectacle was perfect for the press.

Why Dai Qing and Bei Ling? Dai has received a considerable amount of attention both in China and abroad for her lobbying against the Three Gorges Dam hydroelectric power project (which has gone ahead despite her protests and is nearing completion this year, amid continuing concerns about its environmental impact and the embezzlement of relocation funds) and other ventures into investigative journalism. Her work on the Three Gorges Dam has been translated into English. Bei Ling is a U.S.-based poet and founder of the literary journal Tendency, whose poetry has been translated into numerous languages, including English and German. Both Dai Qing and Bei Ling are thus modestly familiar to China-interested audiences in Europe. The German press (and journalistic peers elsewhere) has been quick to invest Dai and Bei with the honorific “dissidents,” a label that may be disputable, to some extent, and that has contributed to the multiplicity of misunderstandings. After all, Dai Ling continues to live and work in China; she has difficulty publishing in China but retains her passport and is allowed to travel freely. Dai Qing and Bei Ling are dissidents in the sense that they hold opinions at variance with those of the Chinese government, and insist in publicizing these opinions, at sometimes considerable personal cost. For European audiences, however, the category “dissident” is shaped chiefly by the image of activists from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (Aleksandr Solshenitsyn, Vaclav Havel, Wolf Biermann), who were openly hostile to the political regimes in their countries and thus faced constant and highly visible repression. The European press is usually quick to use the term “dissident” in the discussion of Chinese independent intellectuals, and it is not always clear if doing so actually helps their respective domestic audiences to understand the situation of critical minds like Dai Qing.

By revoking the invitation to Dai and Bei, the organizers of the event invited controversy. In fact, the choice of China as “guest of honor” was controversial to begin with. The Frankfurt Book Fair has a history of selecting news-making (headline grabbing) countries as “guests” (the 2008 “guest of honor” was Turkey; in 2004 the focus was on literature from the Arabic world). But the invitation of China may have been especially prone to evoke emotions on radically different ends of the spectrum of political imagination. Perhaps even more so than in the U.S., the public in Europe is torn between the image of China’s economic juggernaut and that of the nation as the last bastion of Communism. Press voices continue to hail China as the “white knight” who is going to save the world from the fallout of American’s reckless financial binge with its massive stimulus program. At the same time, 2009 marks the twentieth anniversary of both the Tiananmen Square massacre and the collapse of those repressive Communist regimes that had cast a shadow over Europe for four decades.

The clash of these two distinct images of China also reveals the schizophrenic nature of the Frankfurt Book Fair. On the one hand, the Buchmesse is the largest trade fair worldwide, attracting more than 7,000 publishers and booksellers worldwide. The Book Fair is a crucial venue of copyright trading and deal making, an industry event that few important players in the industry can afford to miss. During the first three days, admittance is restricted to industry insiders; it is only during the last two days that the Book Fair opens its doors to the general public. Then, however, the fair presents itself in a radically different light: From a multi-billion dollar industry, publishing then becomes a bastion of culture and entertainment; publishers compete with each other to present their stable of writers, by organizing book signing event and public readings. The Book Fair styles itself as the celebration of High Culture, drawing the attention of the German intelligentsia with innumerable discussion forums, many of which are carried in the press and on television.

China, the “guest of honor” 2009, has been torn between these two identities of the Frankfurt Book Fair. Industry interest in the Chinese publishing market is huge. Despite its admission to the WTO in 2001, China has kept its publishing industry almost entirely off limits to foreign investment; while some international publishing groups have tried their luck in fringe businesses, with mixed results (for example, the German giant Bertelsmann Bookclub), no foreign companies have been allowed to enter the market nor has the Chinese government approved foreign investments in Chinese publishing houses. There have been signs recently, however, that the Chinese publishing industry is being prepared for the next step in marketization; after the establishment of publishing conglomerates that have become the new behemoths of the industry, these conglomerates are expected to go public on the Chinese stock market before long, and there have been rumors for some time that the semi-official “gray” publishers (these “second channel” publishers usually operate as “publishing consulting companies”) may be given increased legal leeway. For the foreign publishing industry, the potentially huge Chinese print market thus remains enormously attractive. The consideration to invite China as “guest of honor” to the world’s biggest industry fair is motivated by these considerations. The fact that sixty Chinese state-owned publishing houses have heeded the call to Frankfurt shows that there is considerable interest on both sides to increase collaboration.

On the other hand, the Frankfurt Book Fair mobilizes the German intelligentsia with a wide array of meetings, symposia, and public debates organized in the run-up and on the sidelines of the fair – events that receive ample press coverage. In these debates, a very different image of China surfaces: The critical lens of the European intelligentsia tends to zoom in on topics including human rights and democracy; in the public imagination, publishing and the world of books are inseparable from the freedom of speech and related core values of the democratic polity – Gutenberg’s printing press in Mainz (a stone’s throw from Frankfurt) and Martin Luther’s print rebellion against the imprimatur of the Roman Catholic church go hand in hand. China’s political system and the Communist Party’s censorship of the press flies in the face of the professed core values of the German intelligentsia, which celebrates itself annually at the book fair.

The decision to name China as the guest country of the 2009 Book Fair made the clash of the economic-superpower-China and the repressive-Communist-regime China virtually inevitable. Both images are simplistic and little more than caricatures of the complexities embodied by contemporary China. It is discomforting to see, then, how easily an otherwise well-informed European public could be taken hostage by images so crude and superficial. The brouhaha around Dai Qing and Bei Ling shows exceptionally poor judgment by the organizers of the symposium and the managers of the Book Fair. Yet the incident also highlights the deplorable limitations of China-related knowledge in Europe. Germany is home to first-rate scholarship about modern China (for example at my alma mater, in Heidelberg, or at the University of Frankfurt itself), but sinological expertise is still failing to reach a wider audience and affect decision-making processes such as those at the management level of the Book Fair.

The decision to hold a symposium on “China and the World” in the run-up to the Book Fair was ill-conceived to begin with. To turn the event into a propaganda show for the official Chinese delegation was out of the question and would have invited protests from the critical public, but the decision to mend the situation by inviting two “dissident” writers and asking them to perform a dialogue in front of German TV cameras – and hoping that the official Chinese delegation would comply with this design – must be described as outright naïve. The protests of the Chinese side would have been predictable to anyone with a modest knowledge of Chinese affairs, but it seems that no one in the organizing committee did ever seek expertise from the German Chinese Studies community. If the German side wanted to create a genuine dialogue about “realities and perceptions” of China, there would have been other means than inviting personae non grata like Dai and Bei.

The unrealistic expectations of the Book Fair organizers filtered into the rhetoric surrounding the “China and the World” symposium, and remain visible even in translation, in the awkward term “official China” that was used by the spokespersons for the Book Fair (“The objective of the symposium is to facilitate dialogue with official China…,” as Book Fair director Juergen Boos put it). The German term, das offizielle China, reflects the assumption that there is an official Chinese position on topics ranging from literature to press freedom, in contrast to “unofficial” – i.e. dissident – opinions. Informed observers, including those from the academic community, have tried for years to emphasize the diversity of contemporary China and the complexity of its cultural sphere, but as the tumultuous symposium shows, they seem to have made little headway in communicating this more nuanced understanding to the public at large, which all too readily looks at China through the lens of Stalinist Eastern Germany.

Looking back, who has gained from the symposium incident? No one, I believe. The buzz surrounding the revoked invitations to Dai Qing and Bei Ling has ended in embarrassment for all those involved. The first casualty of the incident is the Chinese government. The concerted walk-out of the Chinese delegation from the auditorium left the impression of an overly nervous government whose representatives duck away from controversy and difficult questions posed by a critical public. Neither has the sentence “We did not come to be instructed about democracy,” which a former Chinese ambassador hurled at reporters, helped the image of China. True, a self-confident and powerful nation can and should resist attempts at moralizing and grandstanding, but the vehemence of the protests against the invitations to Dai and Bei and the walk-out achieved just the opposite. The pressure the Chinese government put on the organizers of the symposium confirmed the image of China as a bully, in blatant disregard of its own rhetoric about non-interference in the internal affairs of other nations (this observation was made by Frank Ching in the New Straits Times). It shows a poor understanding of the workings of a time-honored institution such as the Frankfurt Book Fair, disregard for the conventions of public debate at symposia like this one in a democratic nation and, more generally, utter misjudgment of public opinion in Europe. If the Book Fair was an attempt to bolster China’s soft power abroad, then this attempt has failed spectacularly.

It is questionable, too, what Dai Qing and Bei Ling have gained from their defiant stance. Their decision to come to Frankfurt is understandable, and the ferocity of the Chinese government’s reaction made it almost impossible for them to back down. But was their public protest during the “China and the World” symposium the only – and the most effective – way to voice their protest? The symposium was convened weeks before the Book Fair even begins, and most of the international audience will not arrive until shortly before the fair kicks off in October. During the Book Fair itself, hundreds of China-related events will take place, and it should be assumed that Dai Qing and Bei Ling would easily have found better opportunities to communicate with the German and international public. The Book Fair program itself hosts a wide variety of voices and guests; as Didi Tatlow of the Wall Street Journal points out, hard-core dissidents such as Uyghur independence activist Rebiya Kadeer and representatives of the Dalai Lama are scheduled to speak in Frankfurt during the Book Fair. Dai Qing has generally taken a much less confrontational approach towards her critics; it is not clear how her appearance at the symposium helped to promote her cause in China or to communicate with the public in Europe, beyond the sensational headlines.

The prize for the poorest performance undoubtedly goes to the German organizers. The planners of the symposium demonstrated particularly poor judgment in their attempt to present their German audiences with a stage-managed debate between a Communist regime and its dissident critics; the conceptualization of the event reads like a public demonstration of a European brand of tolerance and dialogue that never took place. A stage-managed confrontation of different opinions has little to do with the commitment to nuance and mutual respect that real dialogue requires. The revocation of the invitations proved to be predictably disastrous, as it alerted the German and international press to an event that would have otherwise received little attention. Instead of fostering dialogue and reducing the temperature of the fraught Euro-Chinese relationship, the symposium incident became a re-enactment of numerous previous clashes in which European politicians exposed themselves to charges of hypocrisy or of “bowing to China” – the German chancellor Angela Merkel has not too long ago learned what it means to be punished by Beijing for meeting the Dalai Lama, and French president Nicolas Sarkozy has had similar experiences. European decision makers large and small, have found themselves caught between their domestic public opinions and the need to manage their relationship with the emerging economic superpower. Sarkozy’s sudden policy reversals have not helped his position, and neither has the statement by Book Fair director Boos that “the Frankfurt Book Fair will not allow itself to be pressured by anyone” enhanced his own credibility. Driven by misjudgment and an overly simplistic view of China, the event management had maneuvered itself into a hopeless situation. The public is unlikely to be served any better unless decision makers such as those in charge of the Book Fair take into serious account the significant amount of expertise on China that is available in Europe, and develop a more nuanced understanding of China that goes beyond the economic-powerhouse and repressive-Communist-regime dichotomy.

Postscript

On Sept. 24, the Spiegel magazine reported that the poet and critic Liao Yiwu had been barred from leaving China to attend a Book Fair related event. Liao had been invited by the Haus der Kulturen in Berlin, a non-profit, to attend a symposium, but had been told by Chinese State Security personnel that he would not be permitted to leave the country. The news predictably caused a storm of protest in Germany, with the head of the German P.E.N. chapter publicly musing that it may have been “too early” to invite China as “guest of honor” to the Frankfurt Book Fair. Stay tuned for more controversy in the run-up to the fair, which starts on October 14.

Nicolai Volland is Assistant Professor in the Department of Chinese Studies at the National University of Singapore and previously wrote “Boss Hu and the Press” and “After the Olympics, What?” for China Beat.

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China Behind the Headlines: Xu Zhiyong

August 6, 2009 in China Behind the Headline by The China Beat | 1 comment

A few days ago we suggested readings about the disappearance of legal scholar and activist Xu Zhiyong in Beijing. There has been more news on the subject here and here. China Beat contributor Susan Jakes, who has known Xu since 2004, contributed the following comment.

By Susan Jakes

Earlier this year, a graduate of his country’s most prestigious law school with an impressive record of public service, a comfortable academic post at a major university, and a political office he’d won in a trailblazing election summarized his life’s mission for a local newspaper. “I strive to be a worthy citizen, a member of a group of people who promote the progress of the nation,” he told the reporter. “I want to make people believe in ideals and in justice and help them see that there is hope for change.”

Like a more well-known community organizer, Xu Zhiyong has made a career of breaching barriers and raising hopes. But, as we were reminded, painfully, last week, this kind of project looks different in the cavernous plazas and narrow lanes of Beijing than it does on the streets of Chicago. The victories are harder to see, the defeats loom larger.

In the week since Xu was detained at his apartment on July 29, much has been written about the reasons for his disappearance, what they may augur, how much worse things may get. Most stories have mentioned at least a few of Xu’s long list of achievements. But none has quite captured the remarkable breadth of his activities and the distinctive approach he brings to his work.

I’ve known Xu for five years. I met him in my capacity as a journalist and got to know him better through his work with my husband who works at Yale’s China Law Center. As was the case for many people in China, I first heard Xu’s name in June of 2003. A young graphic designer in Shenzhen named Sun Zhigang had been beaten to death in detention after being picked up by police for not carrying his household registration ID. In part because of Xu’s involvement, the case had become a national news event and I was covering the story for TIME. Others protested the brutality of the beating and the way the police had mishandled Sun’s arrest or complained about the notorious corruption of Custody and Repatriation, the system of extra-judicial jails for “vagrants” to which Sun had fallen prey.

But Xu, just 30 at the time, took a different tack. In addition to offering legal advice to Sun’s family, he and two of his law school classmates wrote a petition to the National People’s Congress, demanding that Custody and Repatriation be abolished on the grounds that it was unconstitutional. In a matter of weeks, China’s Sate Council ordered an end to Custody and Repatriation. And although none of the official statements made reference to Xu or to the constitution, the prospects for both seemed, momentarily, to brighten.

Xu’s advocacy in the Sun Zhigang case displayed what would become the hallmark of his career: the decision to base his calls for political change and social justice in China’s existing laws and political institutions. Rather than just shouting from the sidelines—the only available options for a previous generation of Chinese political critics—Xu has made a point of investigating and trying to improve troubled political institutions from the inside. This approach is evident in the way he handles his advocacy on behalf of death row inmates—Xu conducts exhaustive, Innocence Project-like interviews with prosecutors, witnesses and judges before he takes on the case. It’s evident in the research he put into his calls for reform of China’s petitioning system—he lived for several months among petitioners in their make-shift “village” on the outskirts of Beijing before circulating his findings. When Gongmeng—an outgrowth of the organization he founded along with Teng Biao and Yu Jiang, the other two legal scholars who co-wrote the Sun Zhigang petition—issues an opinion, it’s a safe bet that careful, thorough research has gone into it. This is part of what makes the group’s recent report on Tibet so powerful and so unusual.

Xu has a knack for seeing what’s possible where others see only futility. In 2003 and again in 2006 he ran as one of China’s handful of independent—that is, not CCP pre-approved—candidates in an election for his district People’s Congress. He not only won by a landslide, but in both of his terms in office has sought to prove through his actions—by providing constituent services, demanding budget reviews, preventing the relocation of the Beijing Zoo and lobbying on behalf of aggrieved dog owners—that the congress was not the parody of a political institution it sometimes seemed to be. “Actually,” he explained, “the People’s Congress has real power. It’s just that people don’t take it seriously.” I interviewed Xu shortly after his first election. When I asked him how he decided to run, he looked at me evenly for a moment before replying. “I ran,” he said, “because the law allows me to.”

Of course, Xu has never been naïve about the degree to which his work takes him into sensitive territory. Over the years following his election I tended to see or hear from Xu when things the law allowed him to do put him at odds with officials nominally in charge of law enforcement. In 2005 we had lunch together after his sojourn in the petitioners’ village. He’d been beaten repeatedly in the process, but he was in good spirits, talking about gradual change and talking with quiet conviction about his faith in “step by step progress.”

In 2006 we talked on the phone a few minutes after he’d been released from a night in detention that had also involved a beating; a group of hired thugs had dragged him off the road to keep him from going to court to defend Chen Guangcheng, a blind activist who himself had studied law and tried to use it to defend the rights of victims of forced abortion. Xu swiftly deflected my questions about his night in jail and reminded me that what he’d been through was nothing compared to the ordeal of his client, who was on his way to four years in jail after an absurd trail in which he was convicted of disrupting traffic.

Not everyone is cut out for this kind of work. But Xu, who happens to have been born in Minquan Xian—literally “Civil Rights County”—in Henan Province and was raised in a Christian family, has a temperament that suits the path he’s chosen. He has an impressive capacity for empathy. As he explained in a recent blog post, he feels “anguished” when he’s unable to help clients, but he channels those feelings into focused hard work. He is also—despite the Ph.D., the official title, the international reputation—self-effacing. When he lived in the petitioners’ village, he was often mistaken for a migrant. Mayling Birney, a political scientist and expert on local elections at Princeton who has followed Xu’s career remembers watching him sit down to talk to a group of peasants who’d traveled days to come to Beijing seeking legal aid. “His respect and humility were so clear I could just see these people’s spirits were fortified,” she recalls, “Xu is among the most talented and inspiring public servants I’ve ever met, and I say this having worked in the U.S. Senate for Bill Bradley.”

Xu’s mission was never going to be an easy one. But he’s been a brave and patriotic contributor to the progress China’s leaders say they embrace and he deserves far better than the attacks he’s had to endure in the past few weeks. He often closes his public speeches by telling people he’s an optimist, that the darkest aspects of life in China are brightening and that there’s good reason to jump into the fray, “to do something.” I believe him every time I hear him say that. And I’m hopeful he’ll be back to work making more people believe it very soon.

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