Biblio-politik

PRC nationalists often tout the Middle Kingdom’s birth five thousand years ago as proof of her cultural longevity and superiority. I beg to differ.

The creative output of the PRC today comes nowhere near the West. I’ll just take the print industry for example. My favorite Barnes & Nobles in New York City’s Union Square has four stories of row after row of fiction, history, art, classical literature, political science and investigative journalism, and every manner of magazine and journal, completely uncensored, unregulated, unfiltered. Such openness is testament to strength of Western culture. It is censorship and the suppression of ideas that is the mark of a weak regime, afraid of transparency and accountability, afraid that open debate will allow the totality of all the legitimate grievances of the people to bubble to the surface, and all the fingerpointing at secretive Western agents and saboteurs will no longer fly.

When the Darfur tragedy entered the public mind thanks to an alignment of the evangelical movement and Hollywood’s Genocide Olympics campaign, the PRC nationalists on the free Internet offered only counter-accusations that the Americans exterminated the Native Americans during our westward expansion and therefore, we have no right to condemn China. Ahhhh, but the People’s Republic and the United States are not on the same moral plane.

I can go into any bookstore in the West and find books on the Indian Wars of the 19th century. I can freely access Internet sources on the Trail of Tears, Scorching Iroquoia, Wounded Knee, the Red River war, etc. Were I in the PRC, I would not find any books on the crisis in Tibet, Xinjiang or the Sudan, simply because they would not be available. Authors would not bother to research PRC’s past policies because they know that no mainland publisher would risk prison. Publishers who want to stay in business will not consider manuscripts that may offend the eye of a state censor. Is the regime so weak that the paper and ink of the Free World can defeat the steel of the State's armored vehicles?

Therefore, my academic and cultural experience in the West is vastly richer and superior to that of anyone from the other side of the Great Firewall. The “moderates” within the regime will offer a fifty-year program of slow, steady, gradual development of democracy. Very convenient. Plenty of time for the tyrants and their patrons of industry to maintain their grip on the people. The CCP claims to be the protectors of the People, but it is that very gang that has sent millions of Han to their deaths in pogroms and wars with every neighbor since its founding 60 years ago.

Censorship is no stranger to Chinese culture. 5,000 years of authoritarian "hydraulic" society has homogenized the Han. Even the folk Buddhism of ancestor worship requires that "Hell Money" be burnt at funerals, so that the dearly departed has enough cash to bribe the guard in the Underworld to permit access to the afterlife. The Emperor even rules in the afterlife! Is it any wonder that Sun Tzu's Art of War, written in a time of wars and warlords, is the most popular Chinese cultural artifact in the West, and not the Analects of Confucius or the I-Ching?

And why are PRC industries so good at imitating and copying products but must hire Western consultants to develop new, original products? Perhaps the Emperor's doors are still closed and will not let the peasants have their own ideas. Once in a while, a movie with an original plot comes out of Hong Kong and a wave of copies shall soon follow; Infernal Affairs, Young & Dangerous, Shaolin Soccer, but in fairness that can be said of the film industry around the world.

There is a huge market for independent films in the West. The number of Western films OFFICIALLY ALLOWED to enter the PRC each year can be counted on the fingers of two hands. (Not counting the massive deluge of pirated DVDs floating around public squares, no doubt with the pre-paid sanction of the local authorities).

And so I rise everyday in celebration of my ability to consume and express whatever I please. And I lament my countrymen who wish to do the same but have the boot of fascists on their necks. And I look down my nose at those patriots of the proletarian revolution who revel in their dark caverns of the mind, and point the finger at everyone else except themselves.

"Buddhism is a religion for the closing, over-wearied stages of civilization. Christianity appears before civilization has so much as begun—under certain circumstances it lays the very foundations thereof. Buddhism is a hundred times more austere, more honest, more objective. It no longer has to justify its pains, its susceptibility to suffering, by interpreting these things in terms of sin—it simply says, as it simply thinks, “I suffer.” To the barbarian, however, suffering in itself is scarcely understandable: what he needs, first of all, is an explanation as to why he suffers. (His mere instinct prompts him to deny his suffering altogether, or to endure it in silence.) Here the word “devil” was a blessing: man had to have an omnipotent and terrible enemy—there was no need to be ashamed of suffering at the hands of such an enemy.—"

Nietzsche