Yesterday’s NY Times notes
that the charges against long-time Chinese journalist (and current NY Times researcher) Zhao Yan 赵岩 which had previously been dropped before president Hu Jintao’s visit to the US last month, have now been reinstated. The Times speculates that the decision to reinstate the charges may have been a result of China’s indignation at the mistreatment of Hu Jintao during his visit. Another possibility, however, is that the original decision to drop the charges may have been merely an instance of diplomatic window-dressing, wherein “the Chinese may have decided to take Mr. Zhao's case off the docket before the visit to Washington and simply resumed the prosecution once Mr. Hu had returned.”
Whatever the reason, the decision to reinstate the charges against Zhao Yan is curious because, although Hu Jintao’s visit has indeed concluded, issues of press freedom remain very pertinent as China continues to prepare to host the 2008 Olympics. For instance, just last week the International Olympic Committee completed a three day inspection of Beijing, during which issues of press freedom were apparently a central concern (after the visit, inspector Hein Verbruggen fairly gushes that
he was happy with assurances from the Beijing Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG) that media would be able to operate freely.
"We have a guarantee in the host city contract that journalists would be able to operate as they do in other Games in other countries," said Verbruggen.
“It's a very important part of our discussions, a very important subject because the media is the largest group of people we're going to have here.")
The developments in Zhao Yan’s case, however, raise serious questions regarding the sincerity and reliability of these sorts of commitments, suggesting that they (like the initial dropping of the charges against Zhao Yan) may perhaps be little more than cosmetic adjustments to achieve an immediate end. This theme of cosmetic adjustments in preparation for the Olympics, in turn, is elaborated hilariously in the latest novel by Yu Hua 余华, entitled Brothers 兄弟 (2006), which contains an extended sequence featuring a virginal beauty contest (explicitly compared to the Olympics) in which virtually all of the contestants have surgically reconstructed hymens (in fact, the winner is found to already have a child). Reminiscent, perhaps, of China’s pre-Olympics make-over, these reconstructed hymens are literally cosmetic adjustments designed to create an impression of purity and innocence, and erase a more sullied past. They raise important questions (albeit in a parodical way) about the workings of power, the limits of privacy, and the role of the media in mediating between the two.
Zhao Yan (who, somewhat ironically, was a policeman before becoming a journalist, and had long been the object of official attention as the result of his “previous work as a muckraking journalist and rural activist”) was arrested on Sept. 17 of 2004 on charges of revealing state secrets to the NY Times (for which he worked as a researcher). Although the investigation against Zhao appears to have begun in response to a Sept. 7 Times article announcing that former PRC president Jiang Zemin had unexpectedly offered to resign his leadership as head of the military (a report which proved to be accurate), the actual evidence cited against reportedly concerns, not the issue of Jiang’s resignation, but rather a note he had written two months earlier consisting of, according to The Times,
a few paragraphs of political gossip about jockeying between Mr. Jiang and his successor, Hu Jintao, over the promotions of two generals.
The information was included at the bottom of the Sept. 7 article to provide context about the rivalry between the leaders.
At issue here is not only the basic issue of freedom of the press, but also the legal question of what constitutes “state secrets” and, conversely, what rights State has to obtain ostensibly private and personal information (for instance, The Times mentions that the original copy of Zhao’s note in question is still in the possession of the newspaper’s Beijing office, raising the question of whether the government may have violated its own laws on proper search protocol in secretly obtaining a copy).
The imprisonment of Zhao Yan, meanwhile, is reminiscent of the difficulties currently faced by another Chinese researcher for the NY Times: Zhao Jing 赵京 (no relation to Zhao Yan), who is best-known for the Chinese-language blog on political and media-related issues that he publishes under the name “Michael Anti” 安替 . Known for his open criticism of government policies, Anti came under increased scrutiny at the end of last year following his support of journalists at the Beijing Daily News following a press crackdown. It was a result of those postings that his MSN blog was shut down in early January of this year. What is important about this case is that, unlike the government’s persecution of Zhao Yan, Zhao Jing’s (Anti’s) site was censored, not by the government, but rather by Microsoft itself. As with the recent controversies over Yahoo’s decision to provide the Chinese government with confidential information which led to the arrest and imprisonment of journalist Shi Tao 師濤, as well as the new Chinese Google’s (Guge 谷歌) decision to cooperate with the Chinese government in censoring its search results, in the Microsoft case we similarly have an instance of a major internet company voluntarily compromising its independence and (in the case of Microsoft and Yahoo contributing directly to the censorship and arrest of Chinese journalists) out of purely commercial considerations. (My student Chelsea Peoples is currently writing a very interesting senior thesis on related topics).
This apparent act of self-censorship, however, may not be the end of the story, as Rebecca MacKinnon and Roland Soong note the possibility that Microsoft’s decision to close Michael Anti’s site may instead have resulted from a turf war with Bokee, the Chinese blog-hosting giant. At any rate, regardless of the reasons for the closing of the MSN site, earlier this year Anti’s blog was reestablished earlier this year at a blog-city site hosted in the US (which will therefore presumably not be taken off-line, but which is nevertheless unavailable in China for those not using proxy servers), though even this site has not been updated since March 20th.
Both the cases of Zhao Yan and Zhao Jing center around issues of free speech; of the power of the media; and the redefinition of the boundaries between public and private, between the visible and the invisible or proscribed. A similar set of issues, meanwhile are explored at a more allegorical level in Yu Hua’s latest novel, Brothers.
Just as the most recent controversy over Zhao Yan’s incarceration has its roots in Hu Jintao’s visit to the US in April, Yu Hua’s Brothers similarly has its origins in his own trip to the US in the fall of 2003 (the novel is published in two volumes, with the first volume appearing last year, and the second volume published earlier this year). As he describes in his postface, about five years ago Yu Hua (who initially established his reputation in the late 1980s as a writer of exceedingly violent “experimental” short fiction such as the story “1986,” before moving on to more melodramatic fare in the 1990s) started working on a novel which sought to narrate the entire century. After his trip to the US in 2003, however, he found that he had lost his appetite for long narrative, whereupon he started writing Brothers. He says that he initially expected Brothers to run about 100, 000 characters, but it eventually grew to 400,000 characters (and was ultimately published in two volumes— with the first volume appearing last year, and the second volume published earlier this year). Rather than attempt to cover the entire century (as did, for instance, his earlier novel To Live 活着), Brothers instead seeks merely to explore the relationship between the Cultural Revolution era, which Yu Hua compares to the European dark ages, and the contemporary era, which Yu Hua similarly compares to contemporary Europe.
Brothers traces the relationship between these two historical eras through the figures of two brothers (actually, stepbrothers): Li Guangtou 李光头 and Song Gang 宋钢. The work begins in the present, but then immediately segues into an extended flashback starting from a defining moment in Li Guangtou’s youth when, as a fourteen year old, he was caught trying to peer under the partition of a public outhouse to peek at women’s posteriors as they squatted down to relieve themselves (we are told that, unbeknownst to him, his father had actually drowned in an outhouse cesspool while attempting the same voyeuristic trick). Li Guangtou is caught by another local teenager, a certain Zhao Shengli 赵胜利 a.k.a “Zhao the Poet” 赵诗人 (no relationship, presumably, to the journalists Zhao Yan or Zhao Jing), who is then joined by the town’s other aspiring literary talent, Liu Chenggong 刘成功 (a.k.a. “Liu the Writer” 刘作家). This ribald and scatological scene subsequently comes to function as a leitmotif throughout the novel, repeated time and time again until it comes to assume an almost legendary status.
More specifically, although Zhao first witnessed and reported the incident, it is actually Liu who, many years later, included it within a larger biographical piece on Li Guangtou. In Liu’s account, he “borrows” Zhao’s original description of the incident (much to Zhao’s subseuquent consternation), but subtly alters it in Li Guangtou’s favor by alleging that Li had actually been leaning down to pick up a key that he had dropped when he accidentally caught sight of the women’s bottoms. This article then receives tremendous national attention, helps put Liu Village on the map, and also Liu earns Li Guangtou’s favor, and as a result Li then hires Liu to be his personal secretary.
In his new position, Liu’s primary responsibility is to help manage the countless letters from beautiful virgins that the wealthy Li receives everyday. Li is so taken with these offers of love and devotion that he receives from these virgins that he decides to host a “national virgin Olympic competition” to select the most attractive virgin (which Liu then suggests they rename as the “First national virginal beauty competition”). When the idea of the beauty contest is initially introduced, a reporter asks why it is necessary to host a national “virginal beauty competition,” and Liu replies that the competition will help
promote traditional Chinese culture; help today’s women love themselves more, whereupon they will be more confident; but also to make today’s women healthier and more hygienic.
The reporter then asks what is meant by hygienic, whereupon Liu explains that, “The hymen plays a very important role in preventing the invasion of foreign microbes, protecting the internal reproductive system, and preserving the body’s reproductive ability.”
[This emphasis on protecting the body from foregin microbes may be compared to the metaphorical uses of immune system metaphors, during the early decades of the twentieth century, to describe the body politic's need to protect itself from foreign pathogens (both internal and external). More immediately, the interest in hymen reconstruction in the novel has a real life correlate, insofar as these procedures have become increasingly popular in contemporary Chinese society.]
The problem, of course, is that it turns out there are very few true virgins available, and therefore the competition also spurs a run on hymen reconstruction surgeries. Appropriately enough, the domestic brand of artificial hymens which is marketed in the Liu Village is called “Meng Jiang Nü” brand—alluding to the well-known folktale about the Qin dynasty (221-206 BCE) woman whose husband was recruited to help build the Great Wall. She eventually decides to take him some padded clothing, but when she finally succeeds in tracking him down she learns that he has died and been buried underneath the wall. She starts wailing, and eventually her tears touch heaven and cause it to topple the wall. The Great Wall’s symbolism of the artificial hymen is obvious, and, indeed, shortly before coming up with the idea for the competition, Li Guangtou had found himself getting excited at the thought of “all of the nation’s hymens [sic] lined up into a Great Wall, like so many troops standing at attention.” We might, however, push the metaphor further and ask whether Meng Jiang Nü’s dead husband (buried underneath the massive prophylactic and sanitizing barrier that is the Great Wall) might perhaps represent the dissidents like Zhao Yan and others who are being swept in China’s current efforts to remake its public image.
The resulting scene of countless women throughout the country repairing their hymens in order to compete to win Li Guangtou’s affection, furthermore, has its immediate origins in a class-action paternity suit brought against Li (who, by this time, has become a quite wealthy businessman, in addition to being a veritable Don Juan and sleeping with countless women) by dozens of women who each claim he is the father of their child. The trial ultimately devolves into a farce when Li presents medical documentation proving that he had a vasectomy performed years before, and therefore could not possibly have fathered any of the children. Like the hymen reconstruction surgeries, Li’s vasectomy is a quintessentially private and invisible procedure which has now been made very public.
While both forms of surgery operate by figuratively eliding the subject’s sexual past (for the women, in the sense that their prior intercourse is no longer immediately visible; and for the men, in the sense that the vasectomy precludes the possibility that offspring will be used to prove a prior sexual relationship), though the first accomplishes this by increasing the women’s desirability, while the latter procedure essentially blunts the man’s presumptive virility (if, of course, one adheres to the sort of conventional attitudes about gender roles implicit in the virginal beauty contests themselves). If the hymen reconstruction may be read as a metaphor for China’ cosmetic improvements in preparation for the 2008 games, Li’s vasectomy can perhaps be read as a metaphor for the government’s process of systematically blunting appearance of overt power (its “virility,” to use the terms of the metaphor), precisely in order to more effectively leverage the power which it does have (in effect, playing possum, as I suggested in an earlier post).
While Yu Hua, in writing Brothers, was presumably informed by the media spectacle accompanying the current preparations for the 2008 Olympics, he may also have had in mind an earlier parody of China’s pursuit of the 2000 Olympics in Please Don’t Call Me Human 千万别把我当人, written by Yu Hua’s friend and fellow novelist, Wang Shuo 王朔. This hilarious novel centers around the figure of Tang Yuanbao—the grandson of one of the heroes of the Boxer Rebellions at the end of the turn of the twentieth century. While Big Dream Boxer is immediately secreted off by the authorities to be interrogated regarding his role in the century-old rebellion, his grandson is instead carefully cultivated to redeem China’s pride in international wrestling competition. The international competition which Tang Yuanbao ends up representing China in at the end of the novel, however, is not wrestling (in any conventional sense of the term), but rather a competition in which each contestant tries to exceed the others in act of self-humiliation. Tang Yuanbao ultimately prevails, through an act of almost unimaginable self-mutilation:
He smiled and calmly, somewhat mischievously, held up a shiny, razor-sharp boning knife. Raising his head and stretching his neck taut, he slowly cut his own throat from ear to ear; blood oozed from the gash. Then, putting down his knife, he reached up with both hands, grabbed the skin between this chin and his ears, and began tugging upward.
The peeled-back skin look like a perfect cicada slough. [….]
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