It’s your experience while growing up, I believe, that shapes the direction of your life. A basic image of the world is planted deep in your mind, and then, like a document in a copy machine, it keeps being reprinted again and again throughout your formative years. Once you reach adulthood, whether you’re successful or not, whatever you accomplish can only partially revise that most basic image; it will never be entirely transformed. Naturally some revise the image more and some revise it less. Mao Zedong, I’m sure, made more revisions than I have done.
I began to search my conscience: why was I always dreamìng at night of being hunted down and killed? Surely it was the result of my writing so much about violence and bloodletting during the day. A karmic law of cause and effect was at work, I became convinced. And so in the hollow of the night—the early hours of the morning, perhaps—under quilt damp with cold sweat I issued myself a dire warning: You’ve got to stop writing this kind of story.
This remorse left a profound mark, and it has stayed with me through all my years as an author. It is when the suffering of others becomes part of my own experience that I truly know what it is to live and what it is to write. Nothing in the world, perhaps, is so likely to forge a connection between people as pain, because the connection that comes from that source comes from deep in the heart. So when in this book I write of China’s pain, I am registering my pain too, because China’s pain is mine.
Some Western intellectuals take the view that an economy can enjoy rapid growth only in a society where the political system is fully democratic. They find it astonishing that in a nation where politics is far from transparent the economy can develop at such an impressive pace. But they are overlooking, I think, a crucial point: behind China’s economic miracle there is a pair of powerful hands pushing things along, and their owner’s name is Revolution.
After 1949, when the Communist Party came to power, it steadily maintained its commitment to carry out revolution to the fullest. At that point, of course, revolution no longer meant armed struggle so much as a series of political movements, each hot on the heels of the one before, reaching ultimate extremes during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Later, when China reintroduced itself to the world in the guise of a freewheeling, market-driven economy, revolution appeared to have vanished. But in our economic miracle since 1978, revolution never disappeared but simply donned a different costume.
So China moved from Mao Zedong’s monochrome era of politics-in-command to Deng Xiaoping’s polychrome era of economics above all. “Better a socialist weed than a capitalist seedling,” we used to say in the Cultural Revolution. Today we can’t tell the difference between what is capitalist and what is socialist—weeds and seedlings come from one and the same plant.
After Tiananmen, however, political reform ground to a halt, while the economy began breakneck development. Because of this paradox we find ourselves in a reality full of contradictions: conservative here, radical there; the concentration of political power on this side, the unfettering of economic interests on that; dogmatism on the one hand, anarchism on the other; toeing the line here, tossing away the rule book there. Over the past twenty years our development has been uneven rather than comprehensive, and this lopsided development is compromising the health of our society.
It seems to me that the emergence—and the unstoppable momentum—of the copycat phenomenon is an inevitable consequence of this lopsided development. The ubiquity and sharpness of social contradictions have provoked a confusion in people’s value systems and worldview, thus giving birth to the copycat effect, when all kinds of social emotions accumulate over time and find only limited channels of release, transmuted constantly into seemingly farcical acts of rebellion that have certain anti-authoritarian, anti-mainstream, and anti-monopoly elements. The force and scale of copycatting demonstrate that the whole nation has taken to it as a form of performance art.
In China today, in some spheres there is still a lack of freedom, while in others there is so much freedom it’s hard to believe. More than twenty years ago I could say whatever came into my head when I was interviewed by a journalist, but the interview would undergo strict review and be drastically edited before publication; ten years ago I began to be more circumspect in interviews, because I discovered that newspapers would report everything I said, even my swear words; and now I am often amazed to read interviews I have never given—remarks that the reporter has simply concocted, a gushing stream of drivel attributed to me. Once I ran into a reporter who had fabricated just such an interview and I told him firmly, “I have never been interviewed by you, ever.”
He responded just as firmly: “That was a copycat interview.”
“The arrow hits the target, leaving the string,” Dante wrote, and by inverting cause and effect he impresses on us how quickly an action can happen. In China’s breathtaking changes during the past thirty years we likewise find a pattern of development where the relationship between cause and effect is turned on its head. Practically every day we find ourselves surrounded by consequences, but seldom do we trace these outcomes back to their roots. The result is that conflicts and problems—which have sprouted everywhere like weeds during these past decades—are concealed amid the complacency generated by our rapid economic advances. My task here is to reverse normal procedure: to start from the effects that seem so glorious and search for their causes, whatever discomfort that may entail.
The rapid rise in popularity of the word “bamboozle,” like that of “copycat,” demonstrates to me a breakdown of social morality and a confusion in the value system in China today; it is an aftereffect of our uneven development these past thirty years. If anything, bamboozling is even more widespread in social terms than the copycat phenomenon, and when bamboozling gains such wide acceptance, it goes to show that we live in a frivolous society, one that doesn’t set much store by matters of principle.
Many Chinese have begun to pine for the era of Mao Zedong, but I think the majority of them don’t really want to go back in time and probably just feel nostalgic. Although life in the Mao era was impoverished and restrictive, there was no widespread, cruel competition to survive, just empty class struggle, for actually there were no classes to speak of in those days and so struggle mostly took the form of sloganeering and not much else. People then were on an equal level, all alike in their frugal lifestyles; as long as you didn’t stick your neck out, you could get through life quite uneventfully.
China today is a completely different story. So intense is the competition and so unbearable the pressure that, for many Chinese, survival is like war itself.
When the world is ailing, revolutionary impulses are stirred, just as when the body is ailing, inflammation ensues.