MCLC: Qiu Xiaolong on corruption

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Qiu Xialong on corruption
***********************************************************

Source: Sinosphere Blog, NYT (12/24/13):
http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/24/q-and-a-detective-novelist-q
iu-xiaolong-on-chinese-corruption/

Q. and A.: Detective Novelist Qiu Xiaolong on Chinese Corruption
By EDWARD WONG 

Qiu Xiaolong, the detective novelist and poet
<http://www.qiuxiaolong.com/>, was in the middle of a talk in Beijing
about his latest Inspector Chen novel, when a member of the audience
jumped in with a question: Did Mr. Qiu think there were many undiscovered
corpses in China these days as a result of crime and official corruption?
Mr. Qiu, 60, is neither a police officer nor a Communist Party official.
He doesn’t even live in China anymore; he lives in St. Louis. But his
novels about Inspector Chen Cao — eight so far starting with “Death of a
Red Heroine” — convey such a sense of realism that many people have come
to regard him as an expert on the more sordid aspects of the Chinese
political and legal systems.

Over the years, the novels have become more topical. “Enigma of China,”
published in June in the United States, looks at the intersection of
official corruption and the Internet. Mr. Qiu said he has finished a draft
of the next novel, “Shanghai Redemption,” which will be published first in
France. Elements are drawn from the recent Bo Xilai scandal, which
featured murder, sex and power struggles at the top of the Communist
Party. Mr. Qiu once wrote that he and Mr. Bo
<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/27/opinion/life-in-china-is-stranger-than-m
y-fiction.html> were both students at the Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences in Beijing in the early 1980s, and that Mr. Bo borrowed his
prized table tennis paddle and never returned it.

Following are excerpts from an interview with Mr. Qiu about crime, his
writings and political turmoil in China:

(Q) In your latest Inspector Chen novel, “Enigma of China,” you explore
The phenomenon of Chinese citizens using the Internet to shame corrupt
officials. What interests you about the actions and motivations of these
citizens? What impact are they having?

The phenomenon of Chinese using microblogs to expose corruption is gaining
unprecedented momentum. Like Inspector Chen, I understand why people
resort to that. With the media controlled by the government, with the
Communist Party’s interests placed above everything else, the Internet
becomes the only alternative for people to speak out for justice.

I wrote on the dedication page of “Enigma of China,” “To the Chinese
netizens who fight for their citizenship in the cyberspace — unimaginable
elsewhere — in spite of authoritarian control.” It’s a hard battle because
their voices can be blocked in the name  of “stability maintenance,” and
they often get into serious trouble. Still, their struggle is having a
huge impact. The number of corrupt officials exposed on the Internet is
sending an alarming signal to a regime that is fast losing credibility.
Netizens may be blazing a path to changes once inconceivable in an
authoritarian society.

(Q) Has your opinion on corruption within the party changed through the
years? 

I recall you saying on your recent trip to Beijing that some readers
believe that Inspector Chen has gotten more cynical through the years.
Does this reflect your own sentiments?

Yes, my own opinion of these aspects has been changing. Like Inspector
Chen, I was once optimistic about China’s reform, believing that political
reform would eventually come with economic reform, and corruption could
then be contained. While corruption exists everywhere in the world,
“corruption with Chinese characteristics” has a lot to do with one-party
authoritarianism, in which the ruling party has absolute power, unwatched
and unchecked, with the media and law enforcement exclusively serving its
interest. Now a lot has changed economically, but the political system has
remained unchanged.

Inspector Chen is an idealistic man in the early days of his career, but
he soon comes to find that the anticorruption battle is a losing one. As
readers have observed, repeated compromises and failures make Chen more
cynical. That reflects my own sentiments too.

(Q) How has the character of Inspector Chen changed through the novels?
What has been his emotional, spiritual and professional trajectory?

The first novel, “Death of a Red Heroine,” is set in the early ’90s. A new
chief inspector then, Chen is still idealistic about his police job. With
subsequent investigations, he becomes increasingly disillusioned because
of the conflict between his allegiances as an emerging party cadre and a
conscientious policeman. As for where he is heading next, I think he is
further torn by the contradictions. While he still dreams of making a
difference, he gets more cynical toward the party and the government. So
serious troubles are in store for him.

(Q) “Enigma of China” does not have the sense of closure found in most
traditional mystery novels, which some of the earlier Inspector Chen
novels had. Without giving away the ending to readers, why did you decide
to take a more open-ended approach?

That’s partially because of feedback from the readers. They raised a good
point: How is it possible that a Chinese police officer, having conducted
a number of investigations against the party’s interest, can always reach
a successful resolution like Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot? It won’t
do, I think, to give such a false sense of security, as if things will be
eventually all right with Inspector Chen walking around.

It’s also a fact that corruption investigations in China often have
something like an “open-ended conclusion,” with suspense remaining as to
whether the corrupt officials will be really punished, or punished for the
real reason.

(Q) It seems that these novels are also vehicles to express things you
Find of interest in traditional Chinese culture. There’s the presence of
poetry, and also the detailed descriptions of food.

The poetry comes more in imitation of classical Chinese novels, in which
poems appear in every chapter, often at the beginning and the end of it,
and sometimes upon introduction of a new character as well. For Inspector
Chen, poetry provides him a complementary perspective, albeit a temporary
one, to that of a party-member cop. As a poet, I also think it’s worth
trying to attract more readers to poetry through such a poetry-in-fiction
Approach.

Regarding the descriptions of food, it may have been motivated by
something “selfish.” In St. Louis, where the Chinese restaurants cannot
but be Americanized, writing about authentic Chinese delicacies I miss
presents something like psychological compensation and, to some extent, as
in Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past,” an attempt to find new meanings
in remembrances of things in China. Now for Inspector Chen, with his work
full of frustrations, and his personal life not much better, I want him to
pamper him just a little. Hence food and poetry. But in the latest books,
the indulgences become problematic. In an increasingly materialistic
society, few read poems any more, and he can write only for himself. The
repeated food safety scandals make it impossible for him to enjoy himself
like before. As for the things of interest in traditional Chinese culture,
they certainly appeal to me, and a juxtaposition of things past and
present may provide a comment on what is irrecoverably lost in
contemporary China as well.

(Q) Since you spend most of your time in St. Louis, how do you keep up
With the changes in China?

A Chinese journalist once said to me that I’m in a more convenient
position than the locals to write about the changes in China. Not just
because of censorship or self-censorship of Chinese writers, but because
of the attempts at control by the Internet cops. It’s common now for
people to turn to the Internet rather than the officially controlled
traditional media for reliable information, but many websites cannot be
accessed, such as Google and Facebook, let alone Chinese ones with
sensitive posts. In the United States, I don’t have to worry about
climbing over firewalls to do online research for keeping up with things
in China. Frequent trips back help too. So I believe I may still claim an
insider perspective for the books set in China, while claiming an outsider
one as well from living elsewhere. In terms of writing, a combination of
the insider and outsider perspectives may actually lead to a more
objective verisimilitude.

(Q) Because of news coverage of various scandals since early 2012, the
internal workings of the party elite have been exposed to outsiders in a
way they have not been for decades. You wrote a New York Times Op-Ed about
how the Bo Xilai murder scandal is even more vivid than fiction. Can you
tell us your thoughts on these scandals? Are you finding material there
for future novels?

As a writer, I have to consider myself lucky, given all the coverage of
political scandals in recent years. Instead of worrying about writer’s
block, I’m overwhelmed by the new material. Indeed, realities in China can
be stranger than in fiction. Bo Xilai’s scandal of murder, conspiracy,
ambition and corruption is just an example. When it broke out, an American
friend suggested that I write about it, though he worried that a book
about what had really happened in Chongqing might be rejected by the
publisher as being too crazy. So that’s the genesis of the new Inspector
Chen manuscript I’ve just finished, titled “Shanghai Redemption” and
scheduled to come out in French first next March. It’s a book with details
of the Bo case fictionally included, but not exactly  a book about Bo —
and not because Bo was my schoolmate in Beijing in the early ’80s, with my
favorite Ping-Pong racket still in his possession. Rather it’s an
investigation into the system in which Bo and his like are shaped.

While writing the new book, I was following the Bo trial. I was initially
surprised by its appearance of relative openness, with an official court
feed appearing on the Twitter-like microblog, though no one could tell how
much of it was choreographed. But I soon had more questions than answers.
For one, the trial focused on Bo’s days in Dalian before his taking his
far more powerful position in Chongqing, as if what he did in Chongqing
was of no consequence. That included the disastrous Cultural
Revolution-like campaign of “singing the red and crushing the black.” Its
innocent victims were not even mentioned. So, after all, law in China has
to serve the party’s interests. The trial functions as no more than a fig
leaf on the legal system, which is dependent on the party system.

In the midst of the trial, another scandal broke out that may serve as an
ironic footnote to the situation. This scandal involving Shanghai judges
who were Communist Party members indulging in group prostitution was
brought to light by someone seeking revenge and posting evidence online. A
Chinese friend immediately wrote, saying that the story could work as a
novel as exciting as “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” with the
“China-made private investigator” an intriguing parallel to the one in
Stieg Larsson’s book.

I was still thinking about the possibility when another scandal came up.
The party secretary of the Shanghai High People’s Court, who had condemned
the exposure of the prostitution scandal as instigated by enemy forces,
was exposed as a corrupt official who had embezzled six tons of Moutai
liquor a year. [One 500-milliliter bottle sells for about 2,000 renminbi,
or about $330.] In China, Inspector Chen still has a long way to go.