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Asia Buzz: Thought Police
Sex and drugs irk China's cultural mandarins
By
TERRY McCARTHY
April 12, 2000
Web posted at 4:00 p.m. Hong Kong time, 3:00 a.m. EST
Last week the word went out to newspapers in Shanghai and Beijing: Wei Hui is blacklisted. Wei Hui is one of China's new generation of bad-girl novelists, who write candidly about sex, drugs and nightlife in a deliberate attempt to shock the sensibilities of their Confucian elders. Wei Hui's best known book is "Shanghai Baby," much of which is highly derivative of another novelist in Shanghai, Mian Mian, and serves up a steady fare of sex with foreigners, designer label underwear and other poetic profundities. No matter, sex sells, and Wei Hui's books sell quite well.
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Too well, it seems, for the cultural commissars of this city, which is one of the most conservative in China when it comes to the arts. The ruling came down from up high: all mention of Wei Hui in the press was to be suspended until further notice. Like in the good old days of Stalin, Wei Hui was going to be effectively airbrushed out of the picture.
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Wei Hui is not too bothered--her books have not been banned, and by the time she writes her next novel she expects the press gag to have been forgotten about. Newspapers get these directives all the time in China, a legacy not just of communism but of centuries of Confucian self-righteousness, under which the mandarinate has the duty to make judgements on what is good and what is harmful to the masses. Mian Mian is annoyed, though--she had just begun a campaign to expose in the press the alleged plagiarism of her work by Wei Hui. Now Wei Hui is untouchable, as her name cannot be mentioned, even for the purposes of character assassination. Such are the ironies of thought control in China.
But it does raise the question of how many other events, scandals and so on never make it into the public arena in this vast country. Twenty thousand miners went on strike in north-eastern China in February--but all mention of it was banned in the local press, and it was several weeks before the foreign press got wind of the demonstrations, which went on for some days. The Hong Kong press tries hard to keep up with what is going on in the mainland, but their resources are few. Imagine the Luxembourg press trying to cover everything that happened in Europe, the U.S. and Latin America, with all of those countries suffering government-imposed news blackouts.
Of course the Internet poses a big challenge to the thought police in Beijing--which is why the crack of the whip is loudest around those websites who dare to carry "content" (Imagine such a thing--freely available information. What heresy!). It was all very fine for Sina, the biggest Chinese website, to provide up-to-the-minute information on the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade last year. That helped to martial Chinese nationalist loathing of the U.S.-led NATO and all the demons dedicated to holding China back from its rightful place as a world superpower.
But when Sina thought it could continue to provide and expand its "content" (as opposed to the non-content which is freely available in the People's Daily), the hammer came down. Now as Sina prepares to list on NASDAQ, it has had to structure the company so that the part that produces "content" is not part of the listed company. The Chinese government would probably like to see Sina with no content at all, just free-floating icons of smiling cartoons on their homepage, with links to Beijing Youth Daily and other organs of the sanctioned press. Which would be fine because there, all mention of Wei Hui is banned too, so there would be no problem with sex on the Internet either--unlike the dross that plagues users of the Net in decadent capitalist states like the U.S.
But look out Beijing! Mian Mian has her own website, and soon she and Wei Hui will be going at each other on the Net. Things are getting rapidly out of control for the poor mandarins in the Cultural Bureau, as they try to lay down the line on the decency of content. Could it be too much to hope that they too might, at some point, get simply airbrushed out of the picture?
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