Michael Sheridan, Free, Yearning and Sterile: the Three Cities Tussling for China’s Soul. London: Sunday Times, Oct 19, 2014.
three consecutive paragraphs:
"A friend here [in Guangzhou], whose parents suffered for their careers in Cantonese opera during the Cultural Revolution, grew up in a tiny flat after the family's modest wealth was confiscated. He remembers walking to school as a child past bodies hanging from the trees. Nobody said anything.
"Today Guangzhou nurtures the few old buildings that survived the frenzy of the Red Guards. Recently I went to the Liu Rong temple 六榕寺, which has been restored. It houses one of the marvels of Chinese culture, a sculpture in black bronze of the Buddhist patriarch Huineng [中国禅宗第六代祖师 惠能 的铜像], which is more than 1,000 years old. A steady stream of worshippers drops by but compared with temples in Taipei or Hong Kong the place seems drained of life.
"Let us not despair, though. A Chinese intellectual spread out for me the pages of the Guangzhou Ribao 广州日报, the city's daily paper. Its headline told us that none other than President Xi Jinping, the Communist party boss, has appointed himself as the guardian of literature. His [Xi's] idea of that role, shall we say, might not go down well at the average literary festival. In his vocabulary, authors are not 'writers' but 'literature workers.' Their task, he said, 'is to serve the people.'"
Note:
(a) scholarlism 學民思潮
zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/學民思潮
(成立日期 2011年; 成立者 黃之鋒及林朗彥)
(b) "When global television channels turn to the Hong Kong protests, [in Guangzhou] bemused foreign businessmen watch the screens go black. Chinese state television, having pretended for weeks that nothing was happening, now shows hilarious reports in which 'patriotic' Hong Kongers sound off [disapprovingly] about the [protesting] kids who are never shown."
(c) The full text of the essay is attached below.
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Free, Yearning and Sterile: the Three Cities Tussling for China’s Soul
By Michael Sheridan Oct 19, 2014
This is a tale of three cities. All of them are Chinese but they are Chinese in different ways. Why does that matter? Because the claim of what it means to be Chinese is about more than heritage. It's also a stake in the future, so any contest between ardent students and unsmiling bureaucrats is a defining moment in a way that cannot quite be understood in the West.
Last spring I stood in the courtyards of the Bao'an temple in Taipei. A throng of worshippers chattered and shoved their way around in an amiable fashion. On the eaves of the temple, beneath rearing dragons, some anonymous artist had depicted quaint Europeans in frock coats. Outside the gates is an orderly city of church spires, coffee shops, packed bookstores and rainbow-hued nightlife, one of the most wired-up online communities anywhere.
Taipei is the capital of Taiwan. It has been an island apart from mainland China for a long time. For a while it was ruled by the Japanese. In 1949, the brutal and incompetent Chiang Kai-shek fled there, having lost the civil war to Mao Tse-tung. He massacred local opponents and installed an inane dictatorship whose governing theme was nostalgia.
All very unpromising, except that three remarkable things happened in Taiwan. The mainlanders brought traditional arts, music, literature and philosophy, so that Taiwan became an ark, a vessel preserving the finest works of millennia from a whirlwind of revolutionary destruction in China. Then land reform, education and sheer industriousness turned the island into a "tiger" economy. Finally, the old man died. Chiang Ching-kuo, his son, although educated in the Soviet Union, was wise enough to end the regime and ease it towards democracy.
Today Taiwan is the answer to the stiff voices from Beijing to Singapore (and even, shamefully, in parts of western academia and business) issuing the racist argument that freedom is somehow unsuitable for Chinese people. Last March throngs of Taiwanese students forced the government to abandon a trade bill that got too close to China. Yet it was the students' foe, President Ma Ying-jeou, who stood up the other day and said that democracy isn't only for westerners but for all humankind.
Which brings us to Hong Kong, the "barren rock" occupied by Britain in 1842, whose governors were appointed by London for 150 years. Most of the kids occupying the streets are too young to remember colonial rule. Walking among the crowds is an invitation to a vigorous celebration of everything Chinese - pop art, songs, oratory, comedy, biting satire, poems and elegant calligraphy. All of it political, all of it taboo for the 1.3bn people up the road. This, too, is a definition of identity.
Hong Kong occupies a halfway house between Taiwan and the mainland. It is semi-democratic. The tug-of-war is over which way it will go. But like Taipei, Hong Kong has something precious. It is a repository of so much that has vanished in China.
When I walk out of my usual hotel in the western district of Hong Kong island, there are sharks' fins drying in the street, newsagents piled with competing papers, incense sticks smouldering on ancestral altars, men smoking and arguing over their breakfast noodles; all the warp and weft of the old society that communism abolished.
It's no coincidence that Hong Kong's protest movement grew out of precisely the kind of civic groups that are persecuted inside China itself. Dissenting churches, environment campaigners, independent lawyers, college fraternities and writers have all come together. Can there ever have been a subversive movement with a less threatening name than "Scholarism"? And what could be more obedient to the venerable Chinese way of educated literati composing memorials to a distant emperor? Now come to Guangzhou, a huge metropolis lying up the Pearl River Delta, the place once known as Canton, where the first foreign traders set foot. Last week it hosted a trade fair that has been China's window on the world since the isolated early years of the Chinese revolution.
Don't expect the window to let in light, though. When global television channels turn to the Hong Kong protests, bemused foreign businessmen watch the screens go black. Chinese state television, having pretended for weeks that nothing was happening, now shows hilarious reports in which "patriotic" Hong Kongers sound off about the kids who are never shown.
The internet resolutely blocks every possible website that might tell Chinese netizens what their compatriots in Hong Kong and Taiwan are saying.
The bookstores are arid. As for the newspapers, they are a helpful reminder of what the 1930s were like.
Such censorship is a telling display of insecurity on the part of a government whose proudest boast is that it represents all of China.
A friend here, whose parents suffered for their careers in Cantonese opera during the Cultural Revolution, grew up in a tiny flat after the family's modest wealth was confiscated. He remembers walking to school as a child past bodies hanging from the trees. Nobody said anything.
Today Guangzhou nurtures the few old buildings that survived the frenzy of the Red Guards. Recently I went to the Liu Rong temple, which has been restored. It houses one of the marvels of Chinese culture, a sculpture in black bronze of the Buddhist patriarch Huineng, which is more than 1,000 years old. A steady stream of worshippers drops by but compared with temples in Taipei or Hong Kong the place seems drained of life.
Let us not despair, though. A Chinese intellectual spread out for me the pages of the Guangzhou Ribao, the city's daily paper. Its headline told us that none other than President Xi Jinping, the Communist party boss, has appointed himself as the guardian of literature. His idea of that role, shall we say, might not go down well at the average literary festival. In his vocabulary, authors are not "writers" but "literature workers". Their task, he said, "is to serve the people".
Chairman Mao, who was a dab hand at calligraphy, would have approved. How very 1949.
LIKE TAIPEI, HONG KONG IS A REPOSITORY OF SO MUCH THAT HAS VANISHED IN CHINA.
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发表于 10-19-2014 09:00:55
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