MCLC: Solzhenitsyn, Yao Chen and reform

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Solzhenitsyn, Yao Chen and Reform
***********************************************************

Source: The New Yorker (1/8/13):
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/evanosnos/2013/01/solzhenitsyn-yao-ch
en-and-battle-over-chinese-reform.html

SOLZHENITSYN, YAO CHEN, AND CHINESE REFORM
By Evan Osnos

When a Chinese ingénue, beloved for her comedy, doe-eyed looks, and
middle-class charm, is tweeting <http://www.weibo.com/yaochen> her fans
the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, we may be seeing a new relationship
between technology, politics, and Chinese prosperity.

Solzhenitsyn, who was less known for his comedy, doe-eyed looks, and
middle-class charm, won the Nobel Prize in 1970, and ended his lecture
<http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1970/solzhenit
syn.html> with a Russian proverb: “One word of truth shall outweigh the
whole world.” This week, the actress Yao Chen, who has more followers on
social media than anyone else in China—or, notably, anyone else on the
planet—sent that line out to her thirty-one million fans on Weibo, the
microblogging site, as a show of support for a Chinese newspaper locked in
a battle over censorship. The cosmic distance between Yao Chen, of “If You
Are the One 2,” and Aleksandr Isayevich, of “The Gulag Archipelago,” is
such that their brief intergalactic crossing should make us ask: What
doesnthis mean?

The background is this: Southern Weekend is a newspaper with an
independent streak, based in the southern city of Guangzhou. Last week,
its editors and reporters went online to denounce a senior cadre in the
Propaganda Department, who, it seems, overly involved himself
<http://cmp.hku.hk/?p=30402&preview=true> in rewriting an editorial so
that it went from being a critical call for political reform to a piece of
gauzy praise for the government. By Tuesday, there was talk of journalists
going on strike, free-speech activists were in a shoving match with
nationalist Party faithful on the sidewalk in front of the paper, and—in
the clearest sign that the incident had reached a new level of political
significance—the Central Propaganda Department in Beijing sent out a
secret “urgent notice” to other Chinese media reminding them that “Party
control of the media is an unwavering basic principle.” The notice
included a warning about unnamed “external forces.” This standoff has
emerged as the first major test of new President Xi Jinping’s definition
of liberal reforms, and China’s greatest battle over freedom of the press
in at least five years.

Why has this escalated beyond the level of any of the daily acts of
censorship at Chinese publications? From the look of it, it violated the
delicate balance between dignity and control that allows Chinese
journalists to go to work every day and feel good about themselves. As
I’ve written before
<http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/07/20/090720fa_fact_osnos>, most
Chinese press censorship is subtle; there is usually no man with a red pen
striking paragraphs in the newsroom. Instead, it’s up to editors to
self-censor or face the possible consequences (unemployment, arrest,
etc.), an arrangement that not only allows the government to adjust the
boundaries at will, depending on its needs, but also allows journalists to
feel that they aren’t enacting Orwell’s vision of 1984. And, for the
better part of sixty years, it has worked.

But the balance is getting harder to maintain. In his first two months in
office, Xi Jinping has made a highly orchestrated effort to show
<http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/evanosnos/2012/11/chinas-new-chief-x
i-jinping.html> that he is a more modern figure than his predecessors. He
has tried to show that he is down to earth by doing away with some of the
Party extravagances, motorcades, and pomp. It’s a campaign that has been
distilled into the phrase “four dishes and one soup,” the ostensibly
Spartan menu that Xi has ostentatiously adopted to project his political
credibility.

And therein lies a problem. For the journalists at Southern Weekend—and,
crucially, the widening circle of ordinary middle-class Chinese who are
taking an interest in them, thanks to people like Yao Chen—that bargain is
no good. They are not willing to play along with the idea that the
President’s gestures of reform morally counterbalance the ham-fisted daily
humiliation of censorship. They were supposed to go along quietly, but
instead, they are posting photos
<http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/9aead3c0-58d6-11e2-bd9e-00144feab49a.html#a
xzz2HNS4PAvr> like the one of a dozen men and women wearing Guy Fawkes
masks and holding posters that said, “Four courses and a soup are not real
reform. Only press freedom is real reform.”

The Party loyalists who turned out on Tuesday to represent the opposing
view did their best to argue that criticizing censorship was un-Chinese.
“Southern Weekend is having an American dream,” one of their signs said
<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/09/world/asia/faceoff-in-chinese-city-over-
censorship-of-newspaper.html?hp>. “We don’t want the American dream, we
want the Chinese dream.”

But it’s getting a lot harder to know exactly who represents the Chinese
dream. Yao Chen became a superstar not only by doing meet-cute romantic
comedies and martial-arts pictures, and walking the red carpet at the
world première of “The Hobbit” (for which she wore elf ears); she also
took an interest in social issues, speaking up, for instance, for a
relative whose house was being demolished. It turned out to be the optimal
recipe for Chinese middle-class appeal—Weibo gold—the perfect mix of
conscience, consumerism, and comedy that has attracted her singularly
large following. The thirty-one million followers she had racked up by
Tuesday add up to a little less than half the total membership of the
Communist Party. In the days ahead, we will see which combination of
carrot and stick Xi’s government applies to try to forge a solution.
Whatever it is, the larger battle remains unresolved: the fight over who
defines the truth in China.