The History Book Club discussion

This is a thread to discuss "censorship, piracy, pollution, income inequality and corruption in China".

A society in which politics came first was transformed into a society where money was all that mattered.-- Yu Hua

Four Fates in a Changing China
December 14, 2018
Allan Barr and Yu Hua
An exclusive new essay by Yu Hua, translated by Allan H. Barr

Translator’s note: Yu Hua, though best known as the author of novels such as the internationally acclaimed To Live, is also an essayist of note.

Since 2009, when he first wrote for the Western press – in the form of an op-ed for the New York Times to mark the 20th anniversary of the 1989 student protests – he has published some two dozen essays on a wide variety of topics, including censorship, piracy and corruption in China, not to mention his nonfiction book of memoir and reflection China in Ten Words.

This latest essay can be read as a companion piece to his recent article that charted changing trends in Chinese society over the last 40 years. – Allan Barr

"By the end of this year, China will have seen 40 years of economic reform and interaction with the outside world – 40 years in which China has undergone earthshaking changes.

In 1978 China’s total GDP was 367.8 billion RMB ($150 billion in current US dollars); by 2017 it stood at 82.7 trillion RMB ($12 trillion). China’s economy has grown at a phenomenal rate, and of course prices have been soaring too.

In 1993 Zhang Yimou paid me 50,000 RMB ($7200 at current exchange rates) for the film rights to my novel To Live. In those days my wife and I lived in a room of just eight square meters, and for us this was an astronomical sum.

We laid the money underneath our pillow, and before going to bed each night we would take it out and gaze at it, dumbstruck that we had made enough to last a lifetime.

It was days before we could bring ourselves to deposit the money in the bank. Nowadays, if you were to try to buy a house in Beijing with 50,000 yuan, you would only get one square meter.

As the economy grows, Chinese society is also changing dramatically. At the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, radical left-wing thought seemed to have run its course, and liberal ideas began to gain currency, leading in time to the Tiananmen protests of 1989.

The suppression of that movement utterly deflated Chinese people’s enthusiasm for politics, and we entered an era when everyone engaged in commerce. A society in which politics came first was transformed into a society where money was all that mattered.

Now, as social issues such as corruption, pollution and income inequality grow more and more pronounced, the radical left thinking that seemed to have run out of steam has made its way back, as though all the time it had just been doing a shuttle run.

As I see it, a radical left-wing society is abnormal, and so too is a radical right-wing society. Chinese society today could be said to be fairly normal, with leftists and rightists and radical leftists and radical rightists; the largest group is the people in the middle.

I should note that today’s radical left differs from the radical left in the Cultural Revolution – leftists today are no longer blind supporters of the people in power.

Not long ago, when employees of Jasic Technology in Shenzhen set up an independent labor union, they were attacked by the government, because unions in China are all under the leadership of the Communist Party and union leaders are appointed by the government.

The employees did not want a government-run union, they wanted one of their own.

In a confrontation with the police, the people who went to Shenzhen to support the independent union were not rightists who value democratic freedoms, but rather leftists – people labeled as followers of Mao Zedong.

This incident signaled that social forms in China today are complex and convoluted. I make this point, however, simply as an introduction to my topic today: how social changes in China have affected people on the individual level.

A society in which politics came first was transformed into a society where money was all that mattered Chinese youth today are unlikely to have such complex lives as people of my generation.

When I was younger, a shared interest in literature brought me into contact with a number of individuals, and over the years they moved in very different directions: some went into business and made fortunes; some went into government and now hold high positions; some ended up in prison; some are still writing; some, sadly, have died.

Remainder of article:


Source: China Channel