Yang Rui's monologue
January 17, 2009
THE EXECRABLE Yang Rui is the host of CCTV 9's Dialogue, but Monologue would be a more appropriate title as he fritters away yet another valuable half-hour of airtime to prove to the audience how large and throbbing his English vocabulary is. A few weeks ago, the prospect of any sort of dialogue at all was even more remote as Yang and an elderly Chinese academic agreed wholeheartedly and without fear of contradiction that President Nicolas Sarkozy of France was "hurting the feelings of the Chinese nation" by meeting with the ageing Tibetan cleric known as His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
Yang understands that the trick is to draw attention away from Tibet and instead focus on the devious motives of western governments and the efforts to persecute the Chinese nation. The presenter did his best to link the Sarkozy meeting with every other instance of foreign perfidy over the past century, taking particular care to include the "provocations" of US navy reconnaissance planes during the Hainan incident of 2001, which caused the death of a Chinese air force pilot and prompted patriotic hooligans to hurl rocks and bottles over the walls of the US embassy in Beijing.
Sarkozy's meeting with the Pariah Lama has been interpreted as the latest move in a centuries-long Western conspiracy aimed at bringing China to its knees, and any attempt to suggest that Tibet deserves any sort of special treatment, or even that the Tibetan people have suffered unduly under the clumsy and cackhanded rule of the Chinese Communist Party over the last fifty years or so, has become tantamount to burning down the Summer Palace and replacing it with a giant statue of General Hideki Tojo holding a banner saying "Chen Shui-bian forever".
By repeatedly doing their utmost to stir up feelings of indignation among ordinary members of the public, the state propaganda organs are making it impossible for any sort of dialogue at all, and that, one assumes, is a deliberate strategy. Even His Holiness admits that the integration of Tibet with the rest of China has now become a fait accompli, and that the only realistic way forward is to persuade Beijing to offer a modicum of autonomy to the region.
But presumably, the CCP is afraid that by doing so, it would be showing weakness. Benevolent liberalism is not yet an option as it tries to deal with a myriad of social conflicts and "contradictions" throughout the provinces, most of which have now been made considerably more complicated by the global recession. The default setting of the Chinese state is still brute force. China is no longer ruled by the whims of a dictator, but by the group-think of an entire generation of apparatchiks, and - like any ruling elite - none of them has the faintest idea how to keep the people happy. Fear and conservatism have, naturally, become the prevailing emotion.
When 20,000 members of an "evil cult" gathered outside Zhongnanhai in Beijing in 1999 to protest against the government for failing to censor a number of critical articles that had appeared in official journals, relatively enlightened leaders such as Zhu Rongji, the premier at the time, argued that the best way to handle the problem was to ignore it and let it wither on its own volition. By cracking down on the cultists, the government would merely exalt them. But fear and instinct kicked in and the movement was quickly banned, pour encourager les autres.
Fear and instinct have also prevailed in Tibet, but there is something more going on. It is no secret that the Chinese Communist Party has struggled with the issue of legitimacy ever since the death of Chairman Mao and the start of the reform process. It is also quite clear that it has deliberately stoked up feelings of national indignation in an attempt to portray itself as the uniquely qualified defender of Chinese civilization in the face of global prejudice and double standards. It has thereby sought to create a siege mentality capable of co-opting the most miserable and indignant members of the population and making them believe that the western world is out to undermine them. Tibet, the propagandists say, is one of the tools being used by foreign powers to bring China down. Granting any sort of autonomy to Tibet would be an admission of guilt and failure and weakness.
All regimes are cynical. There is always a distance between the professed ideological aims of a government and the aims of the actual people who govern. Despite claims that Tibet is and always has been an inalienable part of China, there might still be some room for manoeuvre. The latest generation of leaders are among the most pragmatic in the world, and one can only hope that circumstances - economic or otherwise - will eventually give them the opportunity to demonstrate a little enlightenment.
