2022-11-30
The following is from a special roundtable discussion published in the January 2023 issue of the monthly magazine WiLL, released on November 25, 2022, under the title “I Want to Curse It to Death—Xi Jinping’s Dictatorship!”, featuring four participants: Tomoko Ako, Professor at the University of Tokyo; Lumei Tan, writer; Yi Yang, writer; and Yanzi Liu, scholar of Chinese literature.
As I have mentioned repeatedly, WiLL and Hanada cost just 980 yen despite being packed with substantive articles!
It is no exaggeration whatsoever to say that they are currently the finest monthly magazines in the world.
This article is essential reading not only for every Japanese citizen but also for people throughout the world.
It is essential reading for everyone, young and old, men and women, and especially for all young people.
Some passages already foreshadowed the developments now taking place in China.
Emphasis within the text, other than in the headings, is mine.
A People Who Rely on Others
Ako
The same is true of the human rights lawyers I support: when financial assistance arrives from Western human rights funds, the first thing that happens is a scramble for the money, and they begin trying to undermine one another.
Yang
Among democracy activists overseas, quite a few treat opposition activism purely as a business, and watching them fight over funds and donations from Western sources supporting China’s democratization leaves me feeling hopeless, unable to see any prospect of hope.
Liu
They are a people with thousands of years of a poisoned history, so it cannot be helped.
However, in defense of the intellectuals and students who fled abroad after the Tiananmen Square incident, they face intertwined linguistic, cultural, economic, and psychological difficulties, and their circumstances are extremely serious.
Might this not also partly explain why they fight over financial assistance and become suspicious of one another?
Tan
I think Chinese people have a strong tendency to rely on others.
A prominent democracy activist invited to a U.S. congressional hearing gave a speech declaring, “The reason democratization is not progressing in China is that American support is insufficient!” leaving the Americans dumbfounded.
He had it wrong: improving China is the responsibility of Chinese people themselves.
The Writer Lu Xun’s Confession
Yang
I believe the reason the Chinese Communist Party regime survives lies with each individual Chinese person.
The dystopian society under totalitarian rule that George Orwell depicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four has become a reality in China, yet the people living there have grown accustomed to it and now accept it as a matter of course.
Furthermore, unlike Ms. Liu and me, almost all Chinese people living overseas are patriots who praise the Communist Party regime.
Ako
Might it be that Chinese people today are so tightly bound by the surveillance system that they cannot resist even if they want to?
Yang
That is one aspect of it, but there are examples of people who stood up to similarly authoritarian rule rather than submitting to it.
One such example is Pope John Paul II’s visit to Poland in 1979, when it was still a Soviet satellite state.
Although the dictatorship of the time prohibited people from going out into the streets to welcome the Pope, crowds gathered wherever he went, filling the roads to welcome him.
This religious activity eventually developed into a political movement and led to the subsequent movement for democratization in Poland.
I believe freedom and democracy are not “gifts” from developed countries, but things that each and every person must fight for and win.
Tan
When the writer Lu Xun was wrestling with the overall direction of his writing, he made the following confession.
“There are many Chinese people in this room now.
They are suffering terribly, but they themselves are ‘dozing.’
I am now wondering whether I should tell them, ‘The situation you are in is hopeless.’
Even if I tell them, they cannot leave this room, so would I not merely make them more miserable?
If they remain unaware, they can continue to pass their days in a haze, ‘dozing.’
Perhaps they would be happier that way.”
The “dozing” Lu Xun described is precisely the condition of Chinese people living in today’s surveillance society.
The reason Chinese people do not say no, despite such an absurd social system, is probably that Xi Jinping’s patriotic education has permeated society so thoroughly.
Yang
I do not think so.
Individual Chinese people know that the current social system is riddled with contradictions, and they also harbor dissatisfaction with the regime.
Then why do they not rebel?
One reason may be “education”: in particular, is the Communist Party today not making even greater use than the dynasties did of the Confucian value of obedience to brainwash the people?
And in recent years, it has been establishing Confucius Institutes throughout the world and trying to impose this on foreigners as “Chinese culture” as well.
Tan
Some time ago, an American television outlet was reporting from rural China and asked a middle-aged woman passing by, “What is life in China like?”
The woman replied, “I want someone greater to emerge and make the country better.”
The American presenter was astonished and shouted at the television screen, “Why do Chinese people always rely on their rulers instead of thinking about making their country better themselves?”
Their reliance on others is so great that Americans cannot comprehend it.
But Chinese people in their twenties through forties did not receive a Confucian education at school, did they?
Yang
No, they did not.
My generation did not receive a Confucian education either.
But Confucian education takes place within the family, so it becomes deeply ingrained.
What one is taught in early childhood cannot easily be erased, and for the Communist Party regime to collapse, Chinese people must first free themselves from Confucian thought.
To be continued.