This Generation (24 page)

As for myself, I'm still in the habit of leaving home with a thousand yuan in my pocket. But when I went to Hong Kong a few days ago I was taken aback how cheap things were there. Today I asked for an ice cream cone at KFC and gave the girl two yuan. “That's three yuan,” she said. Maybe because KFC and McDonald's haven't raised their prices much, I'm still accustomed to thinking that burgers cost just ten yuan. But there's one happy piece of news. Today,
as housing prices and gas prices and utility prices are all going up, there is one expenditure that the government has slashed by almost half. Typically it raises prices by ten or twenty percent, but now I find it can be very generous when it thinks it necessary. Yes, the marriage registration fee has been reduced from nine yuan to five. In other words, if you marry three times in the course of your life, the government will have saved you a full twelve yuan! Thanks a lot for that.

May 4, 2011

Recently I was stunned to
hear about Huang Yibo, who wears a badge with a full five stripes on it signifying his achievements as a member of the Young Pioneers.
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It gives me a real inferiority complex. When I was at school I only made it to two stripes, although I did almost once make it to three. In the class elections in my primary school, a classmate and I were both equally popular candidates, but I ended up with one more vote than she, and the teacher ascribed this to me being too competitive and voting for myself. The result was that she was elected instead of me, and I missed out on my third stripe. I was always under the impression that two bars put me up near the top third, but now I realize I never made it out of the bottom forty percent.

Everyone's now making fun of Huang Yibo and his parents, but I can't go along with this. My experience of holding a student leadership
post at school has made me realize how fragile the mentality shaped by the nightly TV news broadcast on state television is. And that experience has never provided any confidence-boosting capital to us after we grow up or fostered any genuine class consciousness—years later when we have a student reunion, it's the person who makes the most money who is everyone's role model and no one commands respect for having once held a post in school. When I was in school, the TV in our classroom was used exclusively for watching the news broadcast, and the papers we subscribed to were
Red Scarf, Shanghai High School, Global Times,
and
Reference News.
So in those days we were all hoping that war would break out with the United States, and I was convinced that as soon as the People's Liberation Army brought into action the secret weapon they had stashed away in the mountains, U.S. imperialism would suffer a crushing defeat. I continued to have that fantasy about China's advanced technology for years after I graduated, until I became a race car driver and realized that China can't even manufacture a durable ball bearing or hydraulic valve, let alone a decent internal-combustion engine. I realized then that we had no secret weapon at all, and began to worry: If there really is a war, how are we going to manage? In the end I realized that our national defense strategy is not geared toward guarding against foreign armed forces but toward maintaining readiness against the people of our own country.

Even if we concede the possibility that after Huang Yibo grows up he will stay just the way he is now and proceed to serve in officialdom, I have every reason to believe that he will be a good cadre—although, perhaps, a frustrated one. If he started watching network news when he was two and started reading
People's Daily
when he was seven, he has to have an instinctive love of this regime, a love of this political party, a love for the people who inhabit this land. But the cruel history of power struggles in our country tells us that the more you love this party and the more that you try to act in the best interests of this regime, the more quickly you will be purged. Our young friend Huang Yibo doesn't realize that in
China, to be a successful administrator, there are three things you have to remember:

1. You can't love this party.

2. You can't love this country.

3. You can't love this people.

Once you've mastered these three “can't loves,” and have paired off with the right interest group, you have a good chance of a flourishing career in the bureaucracy. Classmate Huang Yibo innocently believes everything that the network news and
People's Daily
tell him, but the problem is that the leaders themselves don't believe a word they say—Huang Yibo is the only true believer. So we have every reason to predict that Huang Yibo will find himself elbowed out in the future. Because among a bunch of people who don't believe any of this stuff and just want to use their position to get some benefits, he is going to stick out like a sore thumb.

Secondly, although Huang Yibo's posture may strike us as ridiculous, it's in a child's nature to act that way. When I was young, for example, I used to watch a TV series about the Qianlong Emperor. Thereafter, I would imitate Qianlong and stroll about all day with a fan in my hand, longing to hit somebody with it. After watching all these broadcasts of network news, Huang Yibo naturally is imitating those high-up leaders he's seen so many pictures of. Although his mimicry is not entirely convincing, the way he holds himself does remind one of the mannerisms of a provincial city-level bureaucrat. His body type already shows some similarities, so that whereas his classmates' physical ideal is shaped by their manga heroes, his idea of good looks is probably that beer belly you see leaders sporting—but that, too, is an expression of individuality. And there's nothing wrong with watching network news from an early age. Many people fear that politics may be detrimental to the outlook of primary school children, but I think that the fairy tales you see on network news are actually perfectly appropriate for young minds. And any
real effects from prepubescent brainwashing will be scattered to the four winds after the children have experienced adolescence, and will even recoil with a vengeance. Which of us hasn't felt the reverse effects of all that education? What's more, Huang Yibo is kind to the elderly—one has to admire how he went out of his way to visit an old people's home and take an interest in the residents, even without a television camera following him around.

And I don't feel that Huang Yibo has lost out on his childhood. Everyone has their own idol, and ours were hard to emulate, because we couldn't fly around the universe, changing shape and demonstrating miraculous powers like our manga models, so our childhood was a disappointment, whereas Huang Yibo's idols are easy to imitate—all their activities involve is inspecting Unit A and inspecting Facility B, reading this document and reading that, meeting here and meeting there, issuing a directive now and another one later, and wrapping things up with a lot of empty platitudes, so Huang Yibo's childhood is a happy one. It must give him a great sense of satisfaction that he and his idols can merge together so completely. Not only that, but he has got recognition as well—that five-bar badge which makes him the incarnation of an official. Huang Yibo is doing things he loves, so his childhood must be a total delight. We, on the other hand, were miserable, because nobody believed us when we told them we were incarnations of the manga knights, and we kept having to do things we hated.

What a shame that, just as I was writing this essay, the Young Pioneers of the National Youth Work Commission issued a statement to the effect that they have never authorized the award of five stripes, that this innovation is entirely the brainchild of the local Wuhan committee, and that it has no institutional basis. Reading this report, I'm upset on Huang Yibo's behalf. He has done so much, developing an image so close to that of the central leadership, but he has failed to win their recognition and has ended up simply as Wuhan's guinea pig, one that has created tension between province and center. Little did Huang Yibo realize that these five stripes have created
extraordinary complications for the Youth Commission. The organization never cares for controversial characters, and it's bound to be seen as ominous when Huang Yibo's school in Wuhan is called Slippery Slope Primary School. The leadership sets a lot of store by auspicious signs and names, and this unfortunate Slippery Slope has really cramped Huang Yibo's style. It's a fair guess that he won't be progressing any further in the Young Pioneers' leadership.

I wish him luck in the Communist Youth League, however.

May 22, 2011

Recently, the Three Gorges Dam
has come under a lot of criticism. Many people have deep concerns about the project, claiming that it is likely to trigger earthquakes, disrupt ecological balance, or provoke drought, and as a way of emphasizing the gravity of the crisis they cite Huang Wanli's prediction that sooner or later the dam will have to be demolished. As a staunch supporter of the Three Gorges dam, I am convinced there is no substance to any of these fears; not only do the dam's advantages outweigh its disadvantages, but its advantages are legion and its disadvantages nonexistent!

As everyone knows, the Three Gorges project
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was surrounded by controversy from the start, to the point that it attracted several hundred negative votes and abstentions at the National People's Cheerleading Congress, something that only happens once every hundred years. But these objections failed to prevent the project from going ahead. The dam on the Yangtze, like the aircraft carrier commissioned by our navy, is without question an iconic symbol of
China's national strength. In this essay, I will refute the criticisms one by one.

Critics tell us that the dam will degrade the environment in both the upper and the lower reaches of the Yangtze. But before the dam was built the environment was already degraded, so there is no merit to this criticism.

Critics tell us that the dam will become a huge, sitting target for a military attack and a strike against it would wreak havoc on the power supply and the inhabitants of the lower Yangtze valley. I believe we have already resolved this issue in the most satisfactory manner possible. We have installed numerous enterprises like Foxconn in the cities of the lower Yangtze, and if the dam was blown up and those cities were inundated, the world would be unable to enjoy the fruits of China's cheap labor and—most important—the U.S. imperialists would be unable to manufacture the iPhone. Just that point alone is enough to discourage foreign adversaries from attacking the Three Gorges Dam.

Critics tell us that the dam will trigger earthquakes. First of all, this is just speculation, and it cannot be proven. Second, even if we entertain for a moment the possibility that the Wenchuan earthquake was caused by the Three Gorges Dam—well, didn't you see that at the various events commemorating the third anniversary of the earthquake the emphasis was all on the miraculous reconstruction efforts? For us, the earthquake prompts no reflection—instead, it is an occasion for celebrating triumph. Thinking through this logically, then, we can conclude that the Three Gorges Dam has simply triggered Chinese miracles and in so doing has achieved a wonderful victory—could there be anything in the world better than that?

Critics tell us that the dam will provoke drought. This year, China's largest freshwater lake—Boyang Lake—has only ten percent of the water that it used to have, and many people find this very worrisome and assume that the Jiangxi provincial government must be terribly concerned. They are missing the point entirely. Local
government revenue depends largely on the sale of real estate, and a lake with water in it can't be parceled off and sold. What Jiangxi Province should do is seize the opportunity and dam the headwaters of Boyang Lake, getting rid of that remaining ten percent—that way, the provincial government will soon have tens of thousands of square miles more land to sell off! And a slogan like “Original Site of Boyang Lake” will make a great selling point and be a godsend for advertising—“Fertile Spring,” “Bountiful Basin”—they'll be raking in the cash! Then all they need to do is invite one of the old gentlemen who pushed the Three Gorges Dam project through and have him draw a circle around where Boyang Lake used to be and make that a Special Economic Zone—that would be another splendid exploit, a huge boost to the hinterland economy.