"Can the Communist Party and the People's Liberation Army last?… There are some things the results of which can't be seen in ten, even twenty years." So speaks Ren Zhichu, the unforgettable protagonist of Bai Hua's Oh! Ancient Channels.
These are bold musings for a Chinese author to have put into the mouth of any character in any context in any year, but they were especially prescient in 1980, when Bai Hua finished this novella. The post-Mao thaw of Deng Xiaoping was little more than a year old at the time, and the democratic movement of 1978-79, known for brave criticisms on Democracy Wall, had been suppressed.
Today, Ren Zhichu's concerns seem not simply insightful but prophetic. Bai Hua's story of change and continuity in Chinese culture can be appreciated as presaging the painful self-examination that most Chinese writers and intellectuals have been putting themselves through with ever-greater intensity in the past five years.
They are asking whether China can absorb the best aspects of the modern world, or if there is something in Chinese culture that will make that impossible. They wonder if Chinese culture is compatible with the ideals of humanity as a whole embodied in such notions as the global village. Such dark soul-searching among China's educated class in recent years, which has witnessed a slowdown in political and economic reform and increasing corruption, did much to provoke last spring's tragically unsuccessful democratic movement.
Few Chinese would have questioned the longevity of the Communist Party and the People's Liberation Army (PLA) even last year, when the well-known writer Su Xiaokang crated a television series called Death of the River (He shang), which advocated that China reach out to foreign countries and new ideas. Blasting the dragon figure, the Great Wall, the Yellow River, yellow earth, yellow everything, Su created an uproar in the Chinese government and among cultural conservatives who could not bear to see such symbols of Chinese patriotism blasphemed. Su, one of seven intellectuals named in the all-points bulletin of June 23, 1989, is now under arrest.
In the wake of recent demonstrations, China's urban citizens are suddenly wondering if the party and the army might indeed have lost the "Mandate of Heaven," the legitimation through service to higher ideals, rather than through divine right or consent of the governed, that has chastened Chinese rulers for three millennia. Things that seemed settled are not settled after all, even after forty years of communist rule. Already, Chinese intellectuals have begun to adopt the terminology of their ancestors, looking forward to a change of system in "a hundred years," if not in ten or twenty.
Bai Hua's tale of historical circularity and cultural stasis not only evokes the recurring tragedies of the Chinese nation but also of its intellectuals and artists. For Bai Hua preceded Fang Lizhi (who in June took refuge in the U.s. Embassy in Beijing) and Liu Binyan (already in the United States proper) as a national symbol of "remonstrance to the throne" and a cause celebre. Like Fang and Liu, Bai Hua was notorious for telling unpleasant truths; also like them, his fame was thrust upon him by persecution. In China, writers who are so persistent in telling the truth are felt to embody a higher
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