Truth to power
April 3, 2011
THE CHINESE ARTIST, Ai Weiwei, was detained today at Beijing airport, and the incident was accompanied by the now routine mistreatment of foreign journalists trying to take photographs of his home and his studio.
Ai, a rebel to his bones, has been increasingly outspoken in recent years about the abuses of the Chinese government. The government – itself increasingly paranoid about dissent – appears to have responded accordingly.
A couple of years ago, a group of Chinese dissident intellectuals issued a call for democratic reforms that came to be known as the “Charter 08” manifesto, in homage to the Charter ‘77 initative led by Vaclav Havel in Soviet Czechoslovakia. To a cynic, it might have seemed surprising to find that the Beijing government was unduly troubled by the document, especially after it had already rounded up its ringleaders, including Li Xiaobo, and done its utmost to erase all references to it on the heavily censored Chinese internet.
The Centre, one might have thought, could swat away these pointy-headed gestures towards the right to free speech or democratic elections like flies, and therefore pay more attention to the spontaneous outbreaks of popular, plebeian dissent that arise across the country from things like corruption, land rights abuses and economic failure. Say what you want about the Chinese Communist Party, I thought at the time, but they have a firmer grip on power than they have ever had, and to suggest that a group of obscure professors could undermine the regime would be little more than wishful thinking.
But I missed the point of Charter ‘08. Sure, the CCP shouldn’t have felt itself threatened by the Charter, and should sensibly have just let it fizzle out of its own accord, as former Premier Zhu Rongji was said to have recommended when the Politburo was formulating its absurdly disproportionate crackdown on the superstitious, self-aggrandizing sect known as the Falungong back in 1999.
The fact that they went to such lengths to stamp out the charter, and indeed the Falungong more than a decade ago, proves that there is something rotten to the core about the Chinese government. The same goes for the arrest of Ai Weiwei, and for Beijing’s puerile, petty and hysterical “might is right” response to the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Li Xiaobo. It also applies to its heavy-handed attempt to prevent journalists from visiting possible protest sites just before its rubber-stamp parliament opened last month, and to the preposterous lengths it goes to try to censor public discourse, including every online reference to the word “jasmine”. In short, its institutions are hard but brittle, and no longer able to absorb or co-opt dissent.
Despite its overwhelming power and its not inconsiderable popularity among a significant proportion of the newly enriched, this is not a government at ease with itself, or confident about its ability to remain in power. In fact, this is a government clinging fearfully on to the sides of a rollercoaster, vomiting on the crowds as it reaches another crest. This is a government so troubled by the prospects of its own survival that it is prepared to do whatever it feels necessary, however unspeakable, in order to survive.
This is a government so besotted with its own sense of historical destiny, so convinced of its entitlement to rule, and so protective of its elite privileges, that it has already shown itself capable of ditching the vast majority of its principles and ideological shibboleths in order to defy the sort of decay and entropy that inevitably affects all political regimes. The question is: what other principles will it be prepared to discard, especially as the old guard gradually disappears?
