MCLC: Han Han on revolution, democracy, freedom

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Anne Henochowicz <annemh at alumni.upenn.edu>
Subject: Han Han on revolution, democracy, freedom
***********************************************************

Han Han's three-part essay that fired up the Chinese Internet over the
Christmas weekend:

谈革命 <http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4701280b0102dz5s.html>

说民主 <http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4701280b0102dz84.html>

要自由 <http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4701280b0102dz9f.html>

And Li Chengpeng's rebuttal, one of today's most-read blog posts:

民主就是不攀亲 <http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_46e7ba410102dxkl.html>

Anne

=============================================================

Source: Christian Science Monitor (12/27/11):
<http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2011/1227/The-essay-that-has-Ch
inese-talking-On-Wanting-Freedom>

The essay that has Chinese talking: 'On Wanting Freedom'
A Chinese race-car-driver-turned-politico has unleashed a firestorm on the
Web with a volley of edgy blogs over the weekend.
By Peter Ford, Staff Writer, Beijing

Han Han, a Chinese race-car-driver-turned-political-polemicist who has
become one of the country’s most popular bloggers, has unleashed a
firestorm on the Web with a volley of edgy essays over the weekend.

The essays are on three of the government’s least favorite subjects: “On
Democracy,” “On Revolution,” and “On Wanting Freedom.”

The outspoken Mr. Han reaches more than a million followers and readers
whenever he sounds off, which gives him a degree of leeway that the
Chinese censors do not grant to everybody. And his popularity means that
all of a sudden the sensitive subjects he broached have moved out of the
shadows of intellectual or dissident websites into the glare of the
Chinese Web’s most visited portals.

Han is all for increased freedom of expression. “I believe I can be a
better writer, and I don’t want to wait until I am old,” he says.

But he is ambivalent about democracy in China because he doubts whether
enough Chinese people have sufficient civic consciousness to make it work
properly, and he is against a revolution because “the ultimate winner in a
revolution must be a vicious, ruthless person.”

Ordinary people’s “quest for democracy and freedom is not as urgent as
intellectuals imagine,” he argues, and one-person-one-vote elections “are
not our most urgent need” because “the ultimate result would be victory
for the Communist Party” – the only institution powerful enough to buy off
all the voters, he says.

Instead, he advocates step-by-step reforms to strengthen the rule of law,
education, and culture.

That’s an approach that the government claims as its own, and Han’s essays
have drawn a fair bit of flak from other liberal commentators. “His stance
is too close to that of the authorities,” sniffed dissident artist Ai
Weiwei <http://www.csmonitor.com/tags/topic/Ai+Weiwei> on his blog. “It’s
like he has surrendered voluntarily.”

Han writes in a casual, immediate style that appeals to younger readers,
but his gadfly commentaries are pretty lightweight and not always
intellectually coherent and he often says things on his blog that he is
lucky to get away with. (Ai Weiwei spent nearly three months jailed in
solitary confinement this summer for criticizing the authorities.)

Still, as I read Han’s essay on revolution, something chimed with what I
had come across in a very different sort of document that I had been
perusing earlier in the morning, the biennial “Comprehensive Social
Conditions Survey” just out from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
<http://www.csmonitor.com/tags/topic/Chinese+Academy+of+Social+Sciences>
(CASS).

That report listed the top 10 issues of current public concern in China,
led by food price inflation (59.5 percent of respondents), health care
availability and costs (42.1 percent) and the wealth gap (28 percent)
ahead of a string of other bread-and-butter worries such as unemployment
and housing prices.

It was a Chinese version of the famous note pinned to a board in Bill
Clinton’s campaign headquarters when he was running against George Bush
Sr., “It’s the economy, stupid!” And nowhere on the list was there any
mention of restrictions on freedom of expression, or the lack of democracy
(although official corruption angers 29.3 percent of the population,
according to the survey.)

When I went to see Li Wei, one of the CASS researchers who had carried out
the study, I asked him why this was. Had he not asked about political
issues, or did people just not care about them?

He was frank. Initially, he said, he and his colleagues had planned to ask
about Internet censorship and the lack of freedom of expression. “But when
we tested our questions in preparation for the survey, we found that
villagers did not know what we were talking about,” he recalled. “They
thought they had complete freedom because they don’t talk about politics,
so they don’t have any problems.”

“That is not to say that we think freedom of expression is unimportant,”
he added quickly. “But it is not important enough to enough people in
China to make it part of our survey.”

That is hardly the same thing as arguing, as Han appears to believe, that
the Chinese people cannot be trusted with democracy until they are better
educated and more civic minded. But it must offer the Chinese government a
good deal of comfort.