Sleepwalking Through Chinese History

The dissident has returned to Democracy Wall. Nearly a quarter-century has passed since he courted danger in this highly politicized part of Beijing by pasting posters demanding electionsand much has changed. Where the wall then stood, the new “Culture Plaza” is now strung with Christmas-style lights and emblazoned with a dozen glowing signboards. One instructs Chinese citizens to “Warmly Congratulate the Communist Party’s 16th Congress.” Another displays a news item about President Jiang Zemin seeking “advice” from Chinese who don’t belong to the Party. Asked what he thinks of the story, a bystander replies indifferently, “These are decisions made at the top. There’s no point having an opinion.” The dissident is dismayed by the man’s apathy. “This is the state of Chinese today,” he says. “It saddens me.”

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But it gladdens the Party. Political season is a time to express fealty. In the old days that meant waving Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book and singing The East Is Red. But these days, the Party has no ideology to tout beyond Jiang’s Theory of the Three Represents, and it is too pragmatic to expect public enthusiasm, genuine or feigned. Indifference is okaybetter, at least, than open opposition.

Yet indifference is a kind of fealty, especially when facing a vast propaganda campaign. Every night for months the top story on the evening news has shown peasants digging ditches for the greater glory of China. In Beijing, the government claims that 2.5 million people have “volunteered” to sweep streets and swab bicycle racks before the congress. Thousands of red flags line boulevards in the capital, and billboards in Tiananmen Square celebrate the “victorious opening” of the congress. By quietly putting up with the inanity of it all, Chinese affirm their acquiescence. Li Shuzhen is one such person. She lives in a stone house within sight of the Great Hall of the People, where the weeklong congress convenes. Local Party leaders made the residents of her neighborhood drape red flags next to their doors. She shrugs, “Everybody does it, so I do too.”

As the Party goes about celebrating itself, few people around here can muster much interest. A few blocks away, the Daguanlou cinema presents the film CEO, a docudrama about refrigerator-maker Haier’s aggressive move into the U.S. market. The Party forced movie houses to carry it as part of a nationalistic film festival pegged to the congress. In one showing the evening before the congress opened, a saintly Haier manager breaks off negotiations with a rapacious American who sneers that he’ll “buy flowers for the graves” of his Chinese competitors. As the scene ends halfway through the screening, the entire audience walks out. It consists of just one person, a guard at the Great Hall who received free tickets. “I was just killing time,” he explains.

In contrast, trouble awaits those who want to get involved. Beside a railway track in south Beijing, five people have camped out in a plastic tent. Meng Jianxin, the most outspoken of them, traveled to Beijing last week from Fengjie city in Sichuan province, where his family home will be flooded by the Three Gorges Dam. He says local officials embezzled much of his compensation money, and he’s here to petition the congress for redress. “I want to ask the delegates who they represent, who elected them,” he says. At the nearby train station, six uniformed police watch from under a banner that reads “Use a Brand New Outlook to Welcome the 16th Party Congress.” With a shout, the petitioners tear off as the police approach, leaving behind their cooking pots and the fire they had built to cook cabbages and steamed buns.

The next day, Friday, the congress opens and Jiang makes his speech. It’s a good thing the Party is willing to live with apathy, given that its leader seriously proclaims banalities such as: “Ensure stability as a principle of overriding importance, and balance reform, development and stability.” Chinese might snicker at home, but they can’t show their outrage or frustration in public. So the Party gets away with itto the chagrin of the Democracy Wall dissident. At home, he still has a memento of that wall: a single brick he saved before the last bit was torn down in 1994. “People seem indifferent to politics,” he says, “but if you look deeper, what they really are is scared. Some day, people will talk back at the Party again.” But not, it seems, at this congress.