To Be Young and in China: A Colloquy By Richard Bernstein

The New York Times The poem seemed to express an individual yearning, a personal agony only tenuously related to the pro-democracy slogans recently heard in China. But Wuer Kaixi, the 21-year old exiled student leader who read his short verse at a public meeting in lower Manhattan on Wednesday night; said it reflected the inner life of the student uprising, its wellsprings in alienation and thwarted idealism. The verse goes: I pour my heart out to the white cloud,

I, the homeless wanderer.

O, float back to my native land

And drop the tears I shed for my mother. Mr. Wuer was among several Chinese student leaders, writers, poets and American scholars at the meeting sponsored by American PEN, the organization of writers that promotes free expression. The ostensible subject was the struggle for human rights in China. But many simply spoke of China's contemporary youth culture, using it to explain the forces that pushed thousands of young Chinese to risk their lives confronting troops during the recent upheaval in Beijing. Several themes emerged. One, discussed by Mr. Wuer and other student leaders, was that the students who occupied Tiananmen Square in Beijing in May and June were very different from their elders; they are of a generation, influenced by Western ideas, that is restive under the weight of China's tradition of obedience and insistent on sexuality and feelings. The Favorite Word Is No Mr. Wuer compared traditional Chinese culture and what he called its complete negation of the individual and patterns of well-defined hierarchical personal relationships with the emerging youth culture of China, with its stress on immediacy, sensation and the self. "In recent years Chinese college students have been rebellious against all sorts of authority," he said. "The favorite word among the youth in China is No." "You might find it strange, but I do not," he said, "that one aspect of our movement was the student who stood naked on top of a university building shouting, 'I am what I am.'" But because the preoccupation with who they are is totally contradictory to the reality of our system, Mr. Wuer continued, young people are "lost and disoriented." They seek identity and consolation in part from the songs and poems that Mr. Wuer described as the cultural accompaniments to the political movement. Among the most popular songs is one that begins "I am a wolf from the north" and then describes a kind of lonely wandering through a desolate land, a wandering full of longing and nostalgia or "that beautiful prairie" that is, it seems, a land of unfulfilled dreams. Mr. Wuer said volumes could be written to explain the sensibility behind the words of that song and why it appealed so strongly to young Chinese. The image of the wolf, a lonely, isolated creature, is an uncomfortable one in the context of Chinese culture, with its stress on the family and the group. The song, which could be heard playing on hundreds of little tape recorders during the students' two-month occupation of Tiananmen Square, was an expression, he said, both of the students' despair and of their idealism. The students found meaning in the image of the lonely wanderer trapped in a bitter, empty landscape. They dreamed at the same time of something better. Mr. Wuer's remarks and those of other student leaders now in exile in this country led a Western participant, Robin Munro, a researcher on China for Asia Watch, to talk of a "political economy of libido moving from a primitive to a more advanced stage" among China's young people. Mr. Munro was speaking of remarks by some student leaders that the experience of greater sexual freedom was an important part of the democracy movement. The students gave no details, but they seemed to be describing an element in Mr. Wuer's notion of increased attention to the self, one not all that different from the sexual liberation experienced by students in the United States during the protests of the 1960s. In the past, Mr. Munro said, the sexual energy of Chinese students had been channeled by Chairman Mao Zedong into a frenzied, proto-fascist worship of himself, particularly during the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and early 70s. This time, he said, the youthful libido found an entirely different expression, in both a new exaltation of selfhood and in political outrage at the conservative gerontocracy bent on imposing its values and its will on its children. And that, in turn, was related to another issue arising at the colloquium: whether China's hostility toward greater freedom is embedded in the nation's traditional culture or whether it is something that comes from 40 years of Communist rule. Jonathan Spence, a historian of China who teaches at Yale, enumerated aspects of the Chinese tradition that seemed to explain the country's modern-day dictatorial nature and the violent suppression of the democracy movement in June. Specifically he said, there has long been a tradition of protests by intellectuals against immoral leaders and an even stronger tradition of repression, all of which was played out in Beijing this year. "China has never been able to come up with a concept of a loyal opposition", he said. "For 3,000 years, the authorities have tried to keep people from getting together and speaking freely." A different view was offered by Su Wei, a writer and critic who escaped from China in June. Mr. Su said that the last 40 years had imposed on China a "Communist Party culture," which, he said, is similar to the culture of underground organizations. Each person, he said, has to answer to the Communist Party, or, more specifically to one of the Communist Party warlords, since the party itself is divided into factions. "That's where you get your culture, your identity." Mr Su said. "It's very similar to the society of the Mafia." Thus in Mr. Su's view, China's present circumstances are more a product of this "Communist culture" than they are of tradition. One result of the Communist culture, he said, has been "the systematic destruction of the most brilliant in China." The "best and the brightest," those who show independence of spirit, are crushed, leaving behind "the most retarded, the most dictatorial, and the most moronic." Moreover, the methods used by the cultural authorities have given rise to new and malevolent cultural traditions, Mr. Su said. He identified these as the tradition of lying, the tradition of threat and the suppression of memory. "This is what we have to fight against", he said. "It is a culture dominated by the party that has suppressed free thought and is sustained by lies, by threats and by a requirement to forget." [From The New York Times, October 7, 1989. Reprinted with permission.] | back to top |