NINETEEN YEARS AGO, during the student-led pro-democracy movement in Beijing,
a band of 500 or so of China's most successful writers poured out of the
gates of the Chinese Writers' Association and marched through the streets
calling for political reform and an end to government corruption.
The democracy movement was at its height. University students from Beijing and
the provinces had occupied Tiananmen Square and staged a mass hunger strike,
urging the Government to engage with them in direct talks. The entire city
had joined the protests - workers, stallholders and even the tireless
pickpockets.
But the writers, exposed as they were, required special courage.
Under Mao's rule, intellectuals had been branded “The Stinking Ninth” - the
last and the worst category of class enemy. They were made to act as humble
servants of the revolution. In the Anti-Rightist Campaign of the 1950s,
writers considered to have strayed too far from political orthodoxy were
banished to remote labour camps. During the Cultural Revolution, about 200
writers were killed or driven to suicide. The veteran novelist Lao She was
so humiliated after being beaten by Red Guards at Beijing's Confucius Temple
that he drowned himself in the muddy waters of Taiping Lake.
After Mao's death in 1976 and the fall of the Gang of Four, Deng Xiaoping rose
to power. He realised that market reforms would be the best way of securing
communist rule and winning back the support of the people, but that such a
strategy would depend on the collaboration of the intellectuals. To appease
them, he encouraged a more open cultural climate, loosening state control of
the arts. J.D. Salinger, Gabriel García Márquez and Allen Ginsberg suddenly
appeared in Chinese translation. A burst of literary creativity soon
followed. Some writers experimented with avant-garde styles. Others
discovered a sense of social responsibility and focused on the dark,
hitherto neglected margins of society, and their painful recollections of
the Cultural Revolution.
As members of the state-run Chinese Writers' Association, the writers who
marched through the streets in 1989 were the cultural elite. The association
provided them with a salary, free housing and medical care, and
opportunities to travel abroad. By taking to the streets and calling for
political change, they were jeopardising not only their newly won social
status but the livelihoods of their families. This was the first time in the
40 years of communist rule that writers had united as an independent
collective that would speak out on behalf of the people.
But the Tiananmen massacre put an end to all that. In the early hours of June
4, 1989 Deng Xiaoping decided that the student movement had gone too far and
ordered the Army to quash it with force. Soldiers shot indiscriminately into
the crowds. Tanks headed for the Square, rolling over unarmed protesters.
They crushed not only the innocent bodies of civilians and students, but the
idealism and moral conscience of a nation.
Those who had played an active role in the movement, such as the political
essayist Liu Xiaobo and the novelist Zheng Yi, were either imprisoned or
forced into exile. The dramatist Gao Xingjian, who later won the Nobel Prize
for Literature, was in Paris at the time. Disgusted by the barbaric
slaughter, he resigned from the party and as a consequence has never been
allowed back into China.
No sooner had the Government washed the blood from the streets of Beijing than
it began to wipe the tragedy from history. Numbed by horror and fear, most
Chinese writers fell silent. Some even parroted the party line that the
demonstrations had amounted to a “counter-revolutionary riot” and that the
violent suppression had been essential to return the nation to order.
They turned away from the real world and retreated into the cozy confines of
their silk-padded prison. They chose to write melodramas set in China's
imperial or Republican past. As the regime began to develop the market
economy to quell demands for political reform, novelists found their silence
on political issues richly rewarded.
The idealistic writers who marched through the streets in 1989 are now
luminaries of the literary establishment. The Chinese Writers' Association
has provided them with villas in the countryside equipped with saunas and
gyms, and almost limitless expense accounts. When they go to give public
lectures, police cars with blaring sirens clear the roads for their
chauffeur-driven limousines.
Although officially they are government cadres, they refuse to admit their
complicity with the repressive political system. One famous writer compares
politics to a fly. “If its noisy buzz disturbs me, I can just shut the
window and concentrate on my art.” When he travels to the West on book
tours, he portrays himself as a dissident writer. He doesn't realise that
what he shut out was no mere fly. It was an entire landscape of morality.
A few of the braver writers still dare to tackle sensitive topics, such as
official corruption, the plight of Chinese peasants and the growing gap
between rich and poor. But while shedding tears of sympathy, they are quick
to add that the Government is making great strides in solving the problems.
They don't want to lose their free medical care.
As the market economy has flourished, a new generation of writers has emerged
who can live comfortably on the earnings from their publications and need no
government support. These are the so-called “hooligan writers” who focus on
the alienation of urban youth; “beautiful-women writers” who produce reams
of narcissistic chick-lit. They purport to be apolitical, but their refusal
to question the fundamental structures of society is itself a political act.
In China, every aspect of life is political, including literature.
A savvy young Chinese writer who spoke in London recently was asked about his
views on the Tiananmen massacre. He said with a self-satisfied smirk that he
was asleep in bed when it took place, and that he never joined the marches
because he found them exhausting. There is a word in Chinese that describes
this attitude: xiaosa. It means imperturbable, detached, nonchalant. This
carefree denial of the meaningful role of an artist in society is a blight
that inflicts great numbers of China's unofficial cultural elite.
Before state-approved writers travel abroad, the Chinese Writers' Association
calls them in for a pep talk, warning them, with a wink, to “speak about
what you should speak about, and not speak about what you shouldn't speak
about”. The writer nods in acquiescence, and no more is said.
There is little need for literary censors these days. The writers have learnt
to do a proficient job of censoring themselves. Chinese fiction is in the
main a fiction of compromise. But the real problem is not so much the
quality of what has been written, but the vast quantity of what has not been
written, the experiences and emotions that have gone unchronicled.
While the stars of the literary world have failed to form an independent,
critical voice, the role of moral arbiter of the nation has fallen to a few
commentators such as the now-released Liu Xiaobo; authors such as the
Tibetan writer Öser, and her Chinese husband Wang Lixiong; and a small army
of brave bloggers and journalists who dare speak out on injustices.
Thirty-eight of them are now in jail, including Shi Tao, a poet who passed
on to a Western democracy website a government document banning the media
from mentioning the anniversary of the June 4 massacre.
The most powerful words written in Chinese last year were not by a novelist,
but an unknown citizen who placed in a Sichuan newspaper an ad that simply
said: “Respect to the mothers of the victims of 6/4.” The young clerk who
had approved it for publication hadn't grasped the significance of the date.
The slip was soon discovered by the authorities, and three of the paper's
editors lost their jobs.
The Chinese people have been denied knowledge of their past and the right to
reflect on it. Large gaps exist in the collective memories of the nation. It
is the role of Chinese novelists, poets, bloggers and journalists around the
world to help fill them.
Translated by Flora Drew
Ma Jian's novel about the Tiananmen Square massacre, Beijing Coma, is out now. Buy
the book here
