Cow Sticks and the Party’s Inner Workings

As I may or may not have written earlier, my last night in GZ I went to dinner with one of my students, Figo.  This act in and of itself is significant because I was very careful all year to draw a clear line between myself and my students.  However, Figo was one of my favorite students and definitely one of the most tortured because of his thoughts about Chinese society, the government, and his place in the middle of it all.  As a parting gift, I decided to give him a copy of Zhao Ziyang’s “Prisoner of the State” that I am currently reading.  It’s the first and only account of what really goes on in the upper echelon of the Chinese government and it’s centered around Zhao’s experience as the effective head of the Chinese government and Communist Party at the time of the Tiananmen Massacre.  Zhao was against sending government tanks into Tiananmen Square and for this position, he was stripped of all of his power and placed under house arrest until he died in 2005.  The book has been transcribed from secret tapes he made and had smuggled out of China during his years under house arrest and discuss the inner-workings of the government at the time of Tiananmen and also chronicle his thoughts on the changes that took place in China during the 1980s, as well as his thoughts on the future of the country.  It’s hard to read the book at times because I kept getting the feeling that Zhao was this lone wolf trying to take on the 800-pound gorilla of the Party.

Anyway, I had copies of the book made at the copy store on campus and dropping it off to be copied felt like a small act of subversion because the book is banned on the mainland, even though it was in English and no one in the copy shop could understand it.  In true Chinese fashion, the shop did a pretty good job of copying and binding the book, but of course the title had a mistake:

Prisoner of the State as copied

So I met Figo that evening for dinner and presented him with a copy of the book.  I asked if he knew who Zhao Ziyang was and he said that up until two days ago he had no idea, but then he broke through the Great Firewall and read an entry about Tiananmen on Wikipedia that provided him with all the necessary background information that he was missing.  He was extremely happy to receive this book and began asking me if I knew about protests that had been taking place in other parts of China over the past few days about environmental issues and lost wages. Only because I had read the South China Morning Post that morning was I somewhat knowledgeable about what he was talking about.  Figo is a student who has his ear to the ground and is trying to get as much information as he can about what’s going on in today’s China, but censors and other obstacles make that task difficult.  I asked him about the protests in Iran and he said he had heard about them, but that it was hard to find inf0rmation about them in the Chinese media.  This response confirmed what had been written in the Western media about China’s thoughts on the Iranian presidential election; that it did not want its people to get wind of these protests because them they may get unhealthy ideas about how to take on their government.

We had a great dinner.  Hanna, who is one of the other fellows, joined us and we went to my favorite 川菜 restaurant right off campus for my last meal in GZ.  Figo told us about how he can’t really talk to his five other roommates about politics because they do not agree or do not care.  We tried to steer him towards other students of ours who we thought had similar ideas so they could at least realize that they are not alone in their thoughts.  We also told Figo to email us if he ever had any questions.  I am definitely curious to see what he thinks of Zhao’s book when he finishes it because it’s really a fascinating look at what goes on when decisions are being made at the top of the Chinese government.  Kind of confirms what I wrote about over nine years ago in my thesis at Yale; that when making economically-focused decisions at least, the Chinese government does not always adhere to sound economic principles, but is usually governed by some distorting mix of political pressures and some economic theory that may or may not be correct.  This framework still holds today in a variety of areas where the government has control, thus it makes it hard to predict with any accuracy how the government will respond because it really depends on the internal and very not transparent dynamic among top government officials.

But on a light note, I leave you with some pictures of some of the more bizarre and not quite useful gifts we received upon leaving China.

A bedazzled bear impaled with Picasso-inspired fondue forks

The cow stick in glasses sitting in a baby bottle piggy bank