China today is not real. That movie is not real. The Beijing Olympics were not real. Their prosperity is not real.
"Chinese do not think for themselves, Ben," a Beijinger said to me in 2008. That is real. That is the reality that has produced all the modern unreality in China. Chinese do not think for themselves, they obey. They were the reddest reds--because the maximum leader said to be that way. That's how China, and individual Chinese would survive, he said. Then a new maximum leader said "to be rich is glorious;" he said for China to survive it and its people must become the opposite, capitalists, fascists. And Chinese obeyed.
I do not think that anything is so ingrained in China's soul nor anything explains Chinese behavior as a people so well as this felt need to survive, an impetus so primordial that it is called an "instinct." An instinct requires no thought.
Soul as survival produces contradictory behavior: Chinese were communists to survive; they are capitalists to survive. Chinese live to survive: not a tautology; to commit suicide during the Cultural Revolution was the gravest political error. It was a betrayal of the Revolution. One had to live through the persecution, the pain, for China; for China to survive.
Chinese die for China to survive. Bian Zhongyun walked to her school on August 5, 1966 knowing that she would be killed. She said goodbye to her husband that morning; She washed her body the night before so that it would be found clean after death.
Chinese killed the innocent to survive: 交换孩子使食物, “Swap child, make food.”
The question that has haunted a generation of Chinese females is how the students of the High School for Girls attached to Beijing Normal University, the best and the brightest in China, "good girls," how did they become responsible for "the first casualty of the Cultural Revolution?" Because they saw a threat to Mao Zedong's, and hence all of China's, survival. There were "counter-revolutionaries," "rightests," "capitalist roaders," those from "black" families, who were attempting to stage a coup d'etat and oust Mao, and they were everywhere. Bian was from a "black" family. She was killed, made a "sacrifice" in Weili Ye's words, so that Mao and China would survive.
And then they went back to being good girls.
And then they went back to being good girls.
It was absurd, bizarrely absurd--and no less criminal--wasn't the whole Cultural Revolution? Liu Shaoqi, the president of the country, the author of the book, "How to be a Good Communist" was ousted by Red Guards and ultimately killed...because he was a "capitalist roader." Aren't labels like "absurd," "contradictory," even "criminal," the product of analysis, of thought? "Chinese don't think for themselves, Ben."
China today is a Potemkin village. One steps through the doorway and right into thin air. I defy any serious China watcher, any scholar, to say, "China will never go back. They have given up communism for good." China is no more capitalist today than it is Swedish and if the maximum leader, like the dictator of San Marcos in Bananas, tells the people of China that they are to speak Swedish and wear their underwear on the outside in order to survive, they'll do it.
