China: Battling Spiritual Pollution

The government tries to close the door on Western influence

When Chinese Leader Deng Xiaoping decreed an “open door” policy for foreign capital and technology a few years ago, he somberly warned his people that “the penetration of bourgeois ideas is inevitable.” Sure enough, leggy beauties now glide along sleek runways in Peking modeling the latest Pierre Cardin fashions. Not far away, well-heeled tourists tuck into French cuisine at Cardin’s elegant new Maxim’s de Pékin. Even in rustic glades, jeans-clad teen-agers blast out punk rock from ubiquitous cassette players. Free enterprise has also brought in its wake less innocent forms of freedom. Earlier this year, Story, a tabloid filled with titillating tales of concubines and libertines, was attracting 2 million readers around the country and, according to one Chinese press report, subscriptions from 700 of the 800 pupils at a Shanghai middle school.

The inroads of Western decadence have apparently persuaded the government that it is time to start closing the door. Story, which was recently suppressed, became one of the first victims of China’s newest and most novel political campaign. For the past month authorities have been waging a war to eliminate “spiritual pollution,” a deliberately vague term that embraces every manner of bourgeois import from erotica to existentialism. According to Communist Party Propaganda Chief Deng Liqun, spiritual pollution includes “obscene, barbarous or reactionary materials, vulgar taste in artistic performances, indulgence in individualism” and statements that “run counter to the country’s social system.” Ostensibly aimed at those with a taste for capitalist pleasures, the purge has begun to descend on any artist or intellectual who seems reluctant to promote the orthodox Communist vision.

Many of the first signs of a cultural crackdown were exquisitely subtle. Premier Zhao Ziyang quietly forsook his Western suits for Mao jackets. The Peking municipal government ordered its employees to shave off their mustaches. The capital’s leading hairdressing salon announced that it would no longer give men permanents. Many of the first casualties were similarly obscure: a Peking shopworker who procured two illustrated sex manuals from a Hong Kong businessman and reproduced 7,000 lucrative photos of their choicest scenes; an enterprising commune in Fujian province that used its pooled resources to acquire twelve video recorders and 16 pornographic tapes, then charged viewers $5 admission (about four days’ wages for the average urban worker).

But Western influence has apparently gone far beyond skin flicks and designer fashions, and last week the drive turned serious. Hu Jiwei, director of People’s Daily, was forced to resign, and Wang Ruoshui, one of the paper’s three deputy editors in chief, was dismissed. Their apparent crime: printing a scholarly article eight months ago that dared to suggest that “alienation,” a term reserved by Karl Marx for decadent capitalism, might actually be applicable to Chinese socialism as well.

Ironically, the government almost invited such license as it became more and more lenient. Earlier this year, for example, it tolerated a flowering of experimental and unorthodox dramas. Playwright Gao Xingjian’s Bus Stop presented a story about eight people awaiting a bus that never arrives. Conspicuously absent were all the trappings of conventional Chinese drama: plot, moral and exhortation. Meanwhile, thousands of citizens were flocking to a production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, directed by Miller himself at Peking’s prestigious Capital Theater. The spectators sympathized so warmly with Bourgeois Protagonist Willy Loman that many left the theater in tears.

Such adventurous cultural expansion has accompanied, and maybe encouraged, less welcome winds from the West: a questioning of authority, a sense of ambiguity, even a loss of faith. “Chinese young people don’t believe in anything any more,” complains one young writer. With 20% of the urban young in China less than fully employed, and perhaps all of them sharing the disenchantment that is a legacy of the Cultural Revolution, it is small wonder that college students are said to embrace Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre’s views of alienation. Indeed, before the crackdown, “alienation” had become a rallying cry for those who entertained unauthorized views. According to the official press, 600 articles on alienation have darkened Chinese journals since 1978. The most celebrated essay appeared last March in People’s Daily over the name of Zhou Yang, 76, a veteran of previous ideological shifts and a senior member of the party’s Central Committee. Zhou frankly contended that the principle of alienation could exist even under socialism.

Zhou’s unsettling thesis led to a series of official rebukes. Earlier this month, People’s Daily vilified the “depressed” notion of “alienation in socialism” and complained of “some people who go so far as to take the socialist system itself for alienation.” Then the paper began running a stream of self-criticisms, in which Zhou repented of “betraying the party and the people’s trust.” Finally, the two editors who had countenanced Zhou’s original article were ousted, even though their antileftist sentiments had not long ago been embraced by Deng himself.

Despite the crackdown, the 40 million-member Communist Party has gone out of its way to avoid raising memories of the other purges that have scarred China’s recent history. Said an official editorial last week: “Any campaign or drive like those of the past is strongly banned. Civilized methods must be used to correct uncivilized behavior.” Meanwhile, the government’s new assault on “bourgeois” decadence has perplexingly coincided with, and sometimes overlapped, its official month-old purge against diehard leftists and other remnants of the Cultural Revolution. As the ruling party has taken one step to the left, then one to the right, the nation as a whole has been kept constantly off balance.

Neither the direction nor the duration of the campaign against spiritual pollution can be predicted. Some observers in Peking suggest that Deng may be punishing “rightists” in order to protect himself against attacks from the left; others suspect that the current campaign, like others before it, may have already moved further and faster than was intended. With the government seesawing between its commitment to progress and its loyalty to doctrine, nobody knows which is the safest position to assume. As one typically contradictory press commentary declared last week: “Mao’s thought was essentially correct. This can be seen from his mistakes.”

—By Pico Iyer.

Reported by David Aikman/Peking