Is Democracy Chinese? An Interview with Journalist Chang Ping -- Ian Johnson
丘延亮
Is Democracy Chinese? An Interview with Journalist Chang Ping
Ian Johnson
This is the fourth in an NYRblog series about the fate of democracy in different parts of the world.
Ian Johnson
Chang Ping
Chang Ping is one of China’s best-known commentators on contemporary affairs. Chang, whose real name is Zhang Ping, first established himself in the late 1990s in Guangzhou, where his hard-hitting stories exposed scandals and championed freedom of expression. As censorship has tightened in recent years, Chang’s pleas for openness and accountability have put him under pressure. The 43-year-old is currently living with his wife and daughter in Germany at the former country home of the Nobel Prize winner Heinrich Böll, which has been converted into a refuge for persecuted writers.
Chang’s travails began in 2001, when he was removed as news director of Southern Weekend, then a daring weekly that had won readers across the country. He became deputy editor of Southern Metropolis Weekly, but was removed in 2008, and subsequently banned from print, after publishing an editorial questioning government censorship of that year’s Tibetan uprising. One year ago, he was finally fired by the newspaper, with an editor saying his work was “inappropriate.” Last March, Chang joined a newly launched Hong Kong-based magazine, iSun Affairs, as chief editor but was denied a visa and has not been allowed into the former British colony.
Ian Johnson: You grew up in the 1970s; did you experience anything of the Cultural Revolution?
Chang Ping: My father was a low-level official in our hometown in Xichong County (in rural Sichuan) and got caught up in the factionalism of the Cultural Revolution. When I was young I attended an elementary school that was located on the side of the road. If you entered or left the village you passed it. I remember one day he was standing outside the window looking in at me. That afternoon I went home and said to my mother: “Dad was very strange. Dad was outside the school window staring at me.” My mother started crying and said, “Dad has gone and we don’t know if he’ll ever return again.” He had fled to a neighboring county to escape violence. We couldn’t visit him but we would get letters from him and my mother would read them to us. I was about eight years old.
Soon after this, reform and opening up started. We studied the Four Modernizations (a project to develop the fields of agriculture, industry, defense, and research and development) and were told that they would be realized by 2000. We wrote so many essays about how to achieve the Four Modernizations. I remember very clearly in 1984, at the 35th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic, how the students at Peking University said “Hello Xiaoping!” to Deng Xiaoping when he drove by at a rally. It was on the radio and I was really moved. I thought: China has got such hope, such a bright future.
So you thought everything was great. You heard about the developments in Beijing and were excited.
Yes and I was doing well in school too. When you’re personally successful, you tend to think that things are going well. You’re optimistic. I thought things were going well but in some ways I was an angry youth. There’s no contradiction there. You believe, but you want to improve things. During the 1986 student movement, people like Liu Binyan, Fang Lizhi, and Wang Ruowang criticized the party and Deng Xiaoping. I remember hearing about it on the radio and felt in my heart that they were heroes.
At the time I loved literature. In the 1980s, literature was at a peak. I subscribed to a lot of magazines like Harvest and People’s Literature. I remember reading Mo Yan’s Red Sorghum and thinking, Wow, someone can write like that. I remember vividly that I was sitting outside and was so moved by that story. I didn’t quite understand everything but was influenced by it. Also Yu Hua’s short stories, for example. But you know that at that time I was still a complete believer. The books I wanted to read the most were the original works of Marx and Engels. I wanted to learn German to read them.
I went to college in 1987. Until then I’d been reading the classics of world literature, and contemporary Chinese fiction. But then at Sichuan University (in Chengdu) I read a series of books called Moving Toward the Future (走向未来丛书). It was an edited series introducing the great thinkers in other fields. This was a start for me and afterwards I read a lot of western literature, philosophy, and history. The series was really influential in the 1980s and if you look at the editorial staff, they all suffered after June 4 (the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre). I guess from today’s point of view you’d say they had intellectual property rights problems—they just translated or cribbed from foreign publications. But for us it opened a world of psychology, sociology, and literature. One book I have to mention is A Theory of Justice by John Rawls. We’d just read these books so fast and share them. Everyone was fascinated by Western philosophy especially. It didn’t matter what your major was, you were interested in Western philosophy, like Heidegger or Sartre.
How did you experience June 4? In Chengdu, you were quite far away from Beijing, the center of it.
A lot was going on in Chengdu. We had protests all the time. People came from Beijing with news and we’d put them up in our dorm rooms and share their information. There were dialogues and demands to negotiate with the government. I helped organize protests.
But I didn’t really join the main student protest committee. Ever since high school I made one of Confucius’s sayings my motto: “The superior man is dignified, but does not wrangle. He is sociable but not a partisan.” So I did not want to join any movement. In high school I was in the Communist Youth League and wanted to leave. They said, you can’t leave; there is no mechanism to leave. But I didn’t join the party. I didn’t want to be a member of anything, so in 1989 I wasn’t in the student committees. Still, I organized protests and was seen as a leader. I got arrested after June 4. However, during the protests many students had been on a hunger strike and I had opposed that. For that I think they let me out of jail earlier. I think some students opposed me for opposing the hunger strike but that was my view: a hunger strike was pointless. I thought it was good to propagate democracy in factories and in the countryside.
So you’re a pragmatist?
Actually, many people think I’m more of an idealist. I still think China needs democracy, that it needs to change. I really oppose several arguments [that are commonly made] about why China can’t have democracy, such as the argument that China is unique—that Chinese people need to wait because their “quality” [a Chinese term, suzhi, that implies everything from educational level to manners] isn’t high enough and other ridiculous things like that. Some people said that democracy wasn’t part of Chinese culture, and then Taiwan became democratic. Then they said that Taiwan was a special case. Now look at Wukan. They had their own elections. People say it’s special, but in fact Wukan is really typically Chinese. It’s a Chinese town but they organized everything. So what argument are you left with? If Wukan can have democracy so can other parts of China.
I’m not saying that China should have western-style democracy. In fact, there’s not a single western model. What do they mean? Germany didn’t copy America and America didn’t copy Britain. The issue isn’t copying. It’s do you or don’t you want democracy? Of course democracy has a lot of problems but it’s a way forward.
Since the 1980s, Chinese have been pragmatic. The question since the Cultural Revolution has been: can it work? This was Deng Xiaoping’s biggest influence on Chinese people. They ask if it’ll work or not. Now China has the world’s second-largest economy and could overtake the US. So in terms of market economics it’s been successful and I support this. What we lack is justice. There is no justice in the current system. It’s a practical issue. We need justice. Democracy is a way to bring justice. This is why democracy is necessary.
The government doesn’t discuss rule of law much anymore. It’s become more and more a hooligan way of ruling. They just arrest people and throw them in jail or mental asylums. So the past decade has seen a hooliganization of the political system. Many of the old virtues are destroyed by this. The virtues of humanism, responsibilities of the government—the bottom line is things are disappearing. That’s why we’ve had these terrible events of recent years, like Yue Yue.
Yue Yue is the little girl who was run over by a van and no one stopped to help her. One recourse to this perceived spiritual vacuum has been that people are getting more and more interested in religion.
Many are interested in it. Scholars hope that this will help develop more virtues in society or provide some moral guidelines. There is a spiritual vacuum. I really respect religion, but I believe in the special importance of democracy, civic spirit, and freedom in politics, society, and culture for solving the spiritual crisis.
What about your new magazine?
It’s run by iSun Cable Television from Hong Kong. Right now we’re a new media organization. We offer on iPad, Android and are planning a Kindle version too. You can also get copies as a pdf. But we are going to print too. We have a staff of twenty. We have 6,000 subscribers on iPad, mostly on the mainland. We also have more than 10,000 who get it as an email. We’ve been able to report on taboo topics in China, such as [jailed Nobel Peace Prize winner] Liu Xiaobo, press controls, and the trend of independent candidates running for office.
Obviously the authorities knew about the project before it started. You haven’t been able to get a visa since you applied last March and Reporters Without Borders sent an open letter to Donald Tsang, chief executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.
According to the Hong Kong authorities’ own rules they should have answered my application within a month, but they haven’t approved or rejected the application. It’s already been nine months, so this is why people are talking about influence from the mainland.
The magazine was one of the first to cover several recent key political events, like the Wukan uprising. You have had by far the most comprehensive coverage of it. But you also have much on culture. Over the past year cultural figures in China have become embroiled in politics. How do you see the role of people like the artist Ai Weiwei?
The original work of the popular and famous artists was all political—many of them were influenced by people like Andy Warhol. They dealt with issues in society. But after a while when they sold so much that they became super rich and didn’t care much for social issues. To be honest, they just repeated themselves a lot. I have respect for Ai Weiwei because he is concerned with society. He is involved and engaged. It’s not his fault that he’s become more and more popular in the West. It’s the same with Liu Xiaobo or Vaclav Havel. This criticism isn’t fair.
What about the writer Han Han’s recent blogposts arguing that democracy may not be well suited to Chinese people? This seems to echo some of the other critics who say that China isn’t read for democracy.
He mentions that people have a “low quality” and that democracy could become a problem because it could lead to violence. This is a view the government has propagated for a long time. It’s like saying you can’t practice swimming until you can swim and you can’t swim because you can’t practice. Also, the arguments aren’t new. Many were made publicly last year, around the time of the centenary of the 1911 revolution.
But he influences a lot of people so his bringing it up is interesting. It shows how restricted China’s political system is. I think that what we’re seeing is the loss of hope by a lot of people in change taking place, so they’re making excuses about why it can’t happen. The decline in morals has lead to an increase in violence—violence against opponents, protesters, and others—not because we’re having a revolution but because we are not.
January 27, 2012, 1:45 p.m.
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Democracy may be a cure for injustice, but it brings with it new problems. Even if Han Han's statements are propaganda, there is some truth in them. It is the same truth espoused by the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov: people aren't ready for freedom. Judging from the current trajectory of the West, caution may be in order. Look no further than the Republican presidential campaign in the U.S., which makes a mockery of justice, social responsibility, sustainability, and, surprisingly, economics, which is speciously vaunted as a Republican strength.
“董建華於2004年的施政報告提出將香港醫療發展為產業“......台灣現在也要搞這個，不要到時和港府同樣的搞法，搞出同樣的衝突與問題
內地人，滾
面書上的潮流，變化萬千。早幾年，反高鐵沸沸揚揚，保育也掹車邊登堂入室。後來，政改方案、變相公投、雙普選，以至地產霸權等，也相繼在面書上霸佔不少版面。
奇怪的是，去年區選過後，近日的面書，充斥著仇視內地人的內容。早前為公義反高鐵爭民主的網友，也紛紛投入仇視內地人的懷抱。這種潮流，不知從何而來。
仇視內地人的情緒，當然由來以久，最遲在1999年當政府在港人內地子女居留權官司終審敗訴後，拋出167萬內地人有權來港這個數字，以製造輿論，為釋法鋪路，這種仇視情緒便已出現。及後，內地實施「自由行」，內地人因生活習慣不同，在香港遭人白眼，逐漸發展為衝突，加上「雙非嬰」問題等，使這種仇恨情緒愈演愈烈。
前任特首董建華於2004年的施政報告提出將香港醫療發展為產業，為內地和亞洲地區居民提供服務。及後，董建華及繼任的曾蔭權在每年的施政報告均有提及醫療改革，至2009-10年施政報告，曾蔭權再次提出發展醫療產業。然而，本地父母仍然床位難求，醫護至今仍然投訴資源不足。去年「醫生工時策導委員會」向醫管局呈交的《醫生工作改革報告》顯示，公立醫院醫生工時雖然於過往數年持續下降，但至今公立醫院醫生每周工時平均仍達65小時。政府說要發展醫療產業，不知採取了甚麼措施？如果說是資源問題，那麼，2007年起醫管局向非本地孕婦預約產子收取3.9萬，沒有預約收取4.8萬，據報道，每年因此帶來超過4億元收入，這筆收入不知有多少再次投放於增加人手或改善設施之上？在入境政策及內地情況不變的情況下，可見父母均非香港居民的嬰兒在香港出生的需求不會有很大的改變，加上政府於8年前已號稱發展醫療產業服務內地及亞洲地區居民，不知政府因此投放了多少資源？落實了甚麼措施？現時人手及設施仍然不足，是誰之過？
此外，有說「雙非嬰」衍生醫療、教育或其他開支，由於雙非嬰父母皆非香港人，沒有在香港納稅，不配使用香港資源，而雙非嬰長大後亦未必貢獻社會。然而，稅款及公共財政開支，本來是財富再分配的過程。以有否納稅衡量應否使用公共資源，這種說法同樣可套用在土生土長的低下階層身上，可見在道理上說不過去。引入公民權，或者是另一條出路，但細節執行上如何與內地配合，確保真正有需要的人士不會因此在香港及內地均不能使用公共資源，是另一個課題。至於說雙非嬰長大後未必貢獻香港，一則只是臆測，二則良禽擇木而棲，賢臣擇主而事，我們即使不反省我們的社會及經濟制度如何留不住人才，似乎也不能把責任推在別人身上。
又有說「自由行」改變了旅遊點如旺角、銅鑼灣的商店生態，令有本土特色的小商店消失，代之以奢侈品或大集團連鎖店。然而，香港人不是向來崇尚資本主義大市場小政府自由經濟嗎？大地產商為了賺取更大利潤，提高租金，令小商店無法生存，是經濟制度之過、是地產霸權，還是我們可以簡單地諉過於自由行？領匯一役，令小商店由此再無生存空間，我們還沒醒覺問題所在嗎？
誠然，內地資源壟斷於少數既得利益者手中，造成資源匱乏的現象，加上中共刻意打壓傳統文化，而又未能有效建立一套新秩序，以致內地人在排隊、搶購、衛生等各種習慣，都與香港人有所偏差。然而，以於火車等交通工具上的表現為例，香港人每每欣賞日本人在公共交通工具上不會使用電話高談闊論，以保持環境寧靜，不騷擾他人，香港人即使土生土長的，又有多少能做到在公共場所不騷擾別人？相反地，韓國地鐵車廂內不但容許飲食，甚至容許小販叫賣，又有甚麼亂象？此外，在衛生方面，香港每每在大型活動或例如年宵花市、中秋、聖誕、萬聖節等人群聚集的地方，活動過後遺下隨處亂拋的垃圾輒以噸計，我們又有沒有因此自省？不是說五十步不能笑一百步，但我們身為五十步的，在仇視一百步以外，又是否也應該借此作為提醒，改善自己的行為？
香港人對公共資源不足及對本土文化失落的種種憂慮，都是合理的，但凡此種種，不是跟政府政策或香港人崇尚的資本主義大市場小政府自由經濟更有關係嗎？是甚麼我們的焦點由針對政府及經濟社會制度，變成人民互相仇恨敵對，而反而對政府或商界或其他既得利益者的種種行為視若無睹？
早前提及過，上世紀初，意大利思想家葛蘭西（Antonio Gramsci）提出了文化霸權（Cultural Hegemony）的想法，指出「一個社會階層，可以通過操縱社會文化（信仰、解釋、認知、價值觀等），支配或統治整個多元文化社會，統治階級的世界觀會被強製作為唯一的社會規範，並被認為是有利於全社會的普遍有效的思想，但實際上只有統治階級受益。」（引自維基百科）。因此，民間的反抗，應該是團結起來，反抗統治階級。相反來說，統治階級要維持有效管治，就要拆散民間社會的團結，在民間社會挑起矛盾，使民間社會耽於互相對抗，並且接受統治階級的世界觀，而不再反抗統治階級。
因此，當我們的焦點由反高鐵、爭普選、反霸權，矛頭本來指向政府和大商家，一轉而成為仇視內地人，現時最得益的，到底是誰？我們是否甘於成為仇視內地人的一份子？
Bruce Yuan-Hao LiaoAssociate Professor of Law, National Chengchi University College of LawS.J.D., Indiana University Maurer School of Law-Bloomington (2003)Office: 271613Tel: 886-2-29393091 ext 51613E-mail: yl...@nccu.edu.tw ; liao...@alumni.indiana.edu
