Why has Song Binbin mishandled her public statements? In all three settings,
Morning Sun,
Remembrance, and this week, she appeared in very controlled settings, even with her face blacked-out in
Morning Sun. The way that Feng-whatever-her-name-is moderated
Remembrance was a farce. Song came out worse for
Morning Sun and
Remembrance than she was before (This week's may be too soon to tell, but the early returns are not good.). I have not seen video, if video exists, of this week's, so I cannot gauge her sincerity but again, very controlled setting: at the school, media alerted, bows to the bust of Bian
click-click-click, reads prepared text, the "meat" of which is identical to what she said in
Remembrance.
I've thought about reasons for this. One may be that Song is just a cold human being who has a tin-ear for public relations and who has committed too many acts of violence than she could ever apologize for. Next on the Song Apology Tour: Wuhan! This may be the preferred theory. She's smart but dumb in the way smart people can be dumb, lacking common sense; she doesn't realize how she comes across. And doesn't learn from her mistakes! But, I wonder if there is also some cultural thing going on here that I am not picking up on. I have read the writing of highly-educated Chinese, or those of Chinese descent, that are not coherent,
Tocqueville in China is the one that immediately comes to mind. They have the form of coherence,
Tocqueville ended as it began, a technique that is taught, but not the substance of coherence. In between beginning paragraph and ending paragraph in
Tocqueville were a a lot of squiqqly lines that went nowhere. And the author of
Tocqueville is a Stanford (as I recall)-trained lawyer! Weili Ye's opus,
The Death of Bian Zhongyun (Sorry,
The Death of Bing Zhongyun) exhibits another characteristic I've seen before: talking all around a point but never addressing it directly. Ye was a student at the school at the time, interviewed Song and Liu for
Bing, says "I believe it is possible to identify the initiators of that day's event" and then doesn't! Including end notes
Bing is 37 pages long of sound and fury, signifying nothing. When I read the English translation of
Remembrance, I remember sitting in front of my computer, shaking my head and saying to myself, "Chinese do not argue well" (which was the first thing I posted). Not Song does not argue well; my thought was "Chinese do not argue well" because it wasn't just Song in
Remembrance, it was a roundtable discussion with, among others, Weili Ye, it was Bing, it was Tocqueville, it was Feng. Feng was awful, just awful in
Remembrance. She did Song no favors.
Remembrance was so bad it could have been a Saturday Night Live parody.
So, cultural explanations: (1) I've read that there is more rote memorization in Chinese schools than in America today. (Fifty years ago we memorized too.) (2) Not as much critical thinking in the schools. What's safe to criticize? I've read that Premier Wen Jiabao has said "Chinese need to think more critically, more imaginatively, to keep our economy growing," which is true. I have read that American educators are being invited to observe Wen's new "critical thinking" classes. I have read that Wen's new critical thinking classes would also work well on Saturday Night Live. (3) China doesn't have a political system or a legal system like in America so I would highly suspect that the forensic arts are not a big part of the curriculum. (I think at one point I wondered, "Are there any debating societies in China?" and then found out there were!)
Now, a reverse cultural explanation: What would any red-blooded American-in-a-tight-spot like Song Binbin do--book an interview with Barbara Walters; appear on Letterman; go to Red Fox News or some other friendly TV network. To humanize yourself: "I've made mistakes in my marriage;" "I've made mistakes with a butcher knife in my hand." If you're sincere, that stuff can work. Hell, even if you're not sincere sometimes it works: Nixon and his Checkers speech. Is that just an American thing? We're schmaltzy, sentimental fools, we fall for that crap all the time. I don't think so: My Red Guard friend Zhou Jineng became the star of
Red Art because he so movingly confessed to beating people. I don't know much about the other notable Red Guard confessors of the last few years but my sense is they helped themselves by confessing or apologizing. Song has not. Song has never done what Zhou did: appear in his own kitchen, dressed in a tee-shirt and just emptying his soul to Hu Jie. Song has not gone to whoever China's Barbara Walters is if there is one--Maybe Hu!--she has never spoken without a script, as Zhou did, never appeared without her handlers. She has only appeared in these carefully-controlled "events." Maybe these are so unsatisfying and seem so sterile because Song isn't engaged, she doesn't interact with people, she makes statements, she is not questioned, she is just allowed to make statements. Why wasn't
Mr. Wang present this week? Why didn't she apologize to him? Interact with him? She can't do that. It isn't in the script.
