Solzhenitsyn, Yao Chen and Chinese Reform

Evan Osnos, New Yorker, 01/09/13

When a Chinese ingénue, beloved for her comedy, doe-eyed looks, and middle-class charm, is tweeting 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 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 does this 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 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, 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 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 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. “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.

http://www.realclearworld.com/2013/01/09/solzhenitsyn_yao_chen_and_chinese_reform_144060.html