Contemporary China: the downside

Many of the characteristics of a free society are now in place in China; but there is as yet nothing approaching a real culture of freedom. As I have pointed out before, the numbers directly affected by state oppression are mercifully small. But, as the latest show-trial of veteran dissident Liu Xiaobo demonstrates, the State can still be very nasty when it wants. And the Chinese are well aware of the function of these examples of tyranny; they quote the ancient phrase “killing the monkey to frighten the chickens”. There remains a pervasive culture of fear. They don’t understand our Western confidence that, so long as we keep within clearly defined laws, we can do as we like without fear. The Chinese are permanently haunted by the fear of offending someone important. If they come up against problems in the workplace, they are most reluctant to to raise them with colleagues or management, for fear that someone might mark them down for rocking the boat.

Freedom of speech is vitiated not so much by actual oppression as by private paranoia. When blogging about China, I will often try out ideas on my wife, but I no longer show her my posts before submitting them. I got sick of “Are you sure you ought to say that?” and “They’ll never give you a visa again, you know”. Ultra-cautious is the default setting; no thought is given to the real probability of getting into trouble.

A painful example of this occurred last week. On 9 December I posted a piece about resurgent prostitution in Beijing. I was given the idea by a girl who worked as a waitress in a notorious haunt of the demi-monde. When I told her I was planning to write an article based on our conversation, she was thrilled. As a courtesy, I showed her the text before posting, just in case she was worried. Again, she was very pleased and flattered. So I sent her the URL so she could read it. But when she saw it in cold print, so to speak, on an international website, she panicked. Suddenly it occurred to her that it could cause all sorts of trouble, and she spent two hours berating me by phone and text message. (Well, as a long-serving heterosexual, I’m well aware that any dealings with what is oddly called the “gentler sex” are likely to lead to a handbagging somewhere down the line.) In vain I tried to convince her that the content was perfectly harmless, that my readership among the cadres of the Beijing Public Security Bureau is statistically insignificant, that the Chinese authorities are far too preoccupied with their own people to care what foreigners write in foreign languages on foreign websites. It cut no ice. I do hope that the Chinese will grow out of this paranoia.