This Generation (15 page)

If Google leaves China, the people who should most be wringing their hands are writers. This is not because Chinese writers represent society's conscience and progressive tendencies, for many of them do not care about the limits on expression, and even if the government departments overseeing culture were to block a full half of the Chinese characters in circulation, writers would still find a way of using the remaining vocabulary to sing the authorities' praises. What
will
upset them is that if they had known Google was going to run out on them, they would have definitely accepted those sixty dollars, for this would surely be the first income most Chinese authors have gained in terms of electronic publishing rights. All they wanted, really, was another forty dollars, to make a nice round one hundred.

Finally, I read a report that in the future if a cell phone forwards a dirty joke or some indecent content, the messaging function on that phone will be disabled and you'll have to go to Public Security and sign a promise of good behavior before you can regain messaging capability. That's the government for you: It is always coming out with some verb or noun but never explains what that word means. You're not to be counterrevolutionary, it says, for instance, without defining
counterrevolutionary
. You can't be a hooligan, it says, but it won't tell you what a
hooligan
is. Now, you can't send an indecent message but it won't say what it means by
indecent
. I'd like to follow the government's lead but am stymied when it gives me no clear standard to follow. The result is that some of us step into a minefield without realizing it, and even those Fifty-centers suffer embarrassment when they try their best to suck up to the powers that be only to have their messages rejected as problematic. My suggestion is: with these minefields, You should tell us clearly—this is
a minefield here, and if you enter you'll be responsible for the consequences. But not only do you not put up a sign to warn us away from the minefield, you lay mines under the pedestrian crossing. Whose fault is it if one of those mines goes off?

Given that we're coming up to the Chinese New Year, so as to avoid phone users losing access to their phones just when they're so busy and having to go to the police station on the first day of the New Year, I have decided to sacrifice myself: In the days to come I plan to constantly forward indecent messages of various kinds, until my cell phone has been disabled. After that happens, I will finally be able to tell you what constitutes an indecent message. So, if any of you receive dirty messages from me in the next few days, don't get the wrong idea. It's not that I'm getting horny or trying to make a move on you—I'm just testing.

January 20, 2010

As someone has remarked, the
main contradiction in China today is that between the growing intelligence of the population at large and the rapidly waning morality of our officials. But as our officials' moral sense crumbles, their judgment, managerial ability, command of Chinese, personal appeal, and competence in a crisis are in constant decline as well. After many years of observation I realize that many things are actually not a problem to begin with, but once officials start to intervene, a small thing becomes big, and the big thing blows up in their faces and ends up a major talking point. Here I propose to outline some common-sense approaches that will help leaders at all levels handle issues correctly, so that they can get promoted and make more money more quickly. Here begins Lesson One.

According to a report by Gansu Province's news website, Gansu is about to establish a team of six hundred and fifty Internet commenters to lead public opinion in the right direction. The Gansu
authorities originally planned to promote this as a major political achievement, hoping for some reward from their superiors. Various branches of the provincial government held a meeting in Lanzhou specifically to discuss this issue, and thus a press release was circulated to the outside world.

On the Internet we often see people talking about “the tragedy of Lanzhou”—although the Gansu provincial leadership probably has no clue what they're talking about. Now we see a Lanzhou tragedy unroll before our eyes. The Gansu report was initially posted on major news websites, but when opening these web pages today I found that all the links to this item have been frozen—not one of them can be opened. Who has been “harmonizing” the Propaganda Department, one wonders? The Propaganda Department Central Office, of course. The leaders of Gansu Province, alas, have done a lousy job of interpreting the imperial will. This time they've really put their foot in it with their misguided effort to curry favor.

The other name for Internet commenters is “the fifty-cent party”—hired hands who masquerade as ordinary Internet users—really a variety of mole. It's a colossal mistake to make public the placement and identity of moles. This information should have been passed on to the higher authorities in the form of a secret document delivered by a special agent. Doing that would certainly have elicited a handsome reward. But by publicizing this story, Gansu has laid bare a fact that the government has always been unwilling to admit—the existence of the “fifty-cent party.” If someone has to spend money to buy praise and support, that's a sure sign that he's got a lousy record. This news has directly shattered the false image that the higher authorities have worked so hard to create. I think we can be sure that the leaders of the Gansu propaganda department have not a hope in hell of ever getting promoted now.

According to the report, Gansu Province must speed up its surveillance of the Internet this year and establish an Internet commenter team, a system in which fifty commentary experts form the
core, augmented by one hundred commentary talents, with five hundred commentary writers constituting the outer circle.

If a small province like Gansu needs to hire another six hundred and fifty Internet commenters, it's not hard for those with curious minds to work out that in the nation as a whole there must be at least one hundred thousand people whose full-time job it is to post comments on the Internet. If we assume that each commenter's annual salary is fifty thousand yuan, then the government's annual expenditure on complimenting itself must come to five billion yuan, which is equivalent to twenty-five thousand Hope Primary Schools, or one-tenth of the cost of the Three Gorges Dam, or more or less the cost of the two new Shanghai bridges across the Huangpu River plus the bill for constructing the Oriental Pearl, or thirty Boeing 737s, or a medium-sized aircraft carrier, or ninety of those Mil Mi-26 helicopters that we were in desperate need of after the Wenchuan earthquake and had to resort to borrowing from Russia. If these figures were by any chance to be leaked, this could easily create friction between the people and the government!

It's human nature to make oneself look good by sticking gold leaf on one's face, and it's obviously going to cost money to do that, but if you're trying to stick an aircraft carrier on your face, this shows the face you have is really getting way too big. The good thing is that none of those busybodies has yet got round to adding up all these figures and nobody has yet sounded the alarm, so we can all rest easy.

From this Lanzhou tragedy, you officials will see there's a very thin line between understanding and misunderstanding your superiors' wishes. Propaganda departments far and near, take heed.

February 6, 2010

I wonder if you've noticed
that there's been an increase recently in the number of Fifty-centers appearing in the main online forums and news discussions. Of course, I'm not in favor of labeling as Fifty-centers everyone who disagrees with you, but Fifty-centers are easy to spot, because people who sell their souls—particularly people who sell their souls at such a low price—will say things that have no basis and will climax without any foreplay. When I first noticed the proliferation of Fifty-centers, I was quite perplexed and thought it must be because the authorities had increased their budget, but later I read a report that attributed it to the economic crisis. Recently Section 5, Clause 17 of a document entitled “Internet Commenters' Management Methods,” issued by the Communist Party network in the city of Hengyang, stipulates that the standard remuneration for Internet commenters is ten cents per post. It's pretty obvious that, nationwide, the Fifty-centers have seen a reduction in their pay, and that helps to explain why we have the sensation that all of a sudden there are five times as many of them as there used to be. Actually, it's just the same number of people, but
they're all working overtime. In the past, when we spotted a Fifty-center, we could all gather round and peer at him, but now, with forum administrators deleting our posts and other Internet users chiming in with their own comments, we sometimes find ourselves totally outnumbered by Fifty-centers.

According to that top-secret Gansu document on “The Composition of Fifty-centers,” their ranks are staffed by fifty skilled writers, one hundred competent writers, and five hundred outer-circle writers. The Fifty-centers whose comments we see everywhere are, so far as I can tell, made up largely of the outer-circle writers, but from time to time a few “competent writers” emerge to test the waters. As for the “skilled writers,” I suspect they must have other administrative responsibilities, for we haven't seen much sign of them. Of course, the main reason for their absence is that they're busy attending banquets and raking in gifts during the Chinese New Year.

The recent proliferation of Fifty-centers is one of the reasons I started my microblog. For one thing, the Fifty-centers react rather slowly to new things, and I'm sure that for many “competent writers,” just registering and signing in to the Tencent web browser is already as much as they can manage. At the same time, one can't express views anonymously on a microblog, and that makes them scared to register. And most importantly, if by any chance they perform conspicuously well on the microblog front and their superiors direct them to consolidate their position, they'd have to tie themselves to their cell phone in order to constantly manipulate public opinion, and that would be their ruin. They're only getting paid ten cents per post, after all, and it costs the same amount to send out a text message; if you factor in the cost of recharging their phone battery, then just for them to break even would be a sheer impossibility. You shouldn't make fun of them—they sell their souls for ten cents and would sell a kidney for a thousand yuan, so for them even the tiniest fraction of a yuan is a significant gain or loss. Although ideologically they align themselves most impeccably with the ruling
class, their actual livelihood places them at the bottom of the social pyramid.

I think we should permit the Fifty-centers to exist, for everyone has the right to hire others to speak on their behalf, and every hired worker has the right to speak wherever they please. If you can give Xiaoming a beating and then hire someone else with the money you've pilfered from Xiaoming's pocket to give Xiaoming a scolding, that just shows you've got a good deal of gumption. Every government has an agency that helps to promote it, and that's perfectly understandable. But the Fifty-centers are a fiasco. I used to think that they served to shape public opinion but now I realize that's not so, because nobody who sees a crowd of people standing around eating shit is going to try to squeeze their way in and eat it, too. The Fifty-centers originally were a product of provincial governments trying to curry favor with the top leadership. But now, with so many Fifty-centers on the loose, lots of “upstanding” and “correct” people may simply open their mouths—clearly without getting paid a cent—and they immediately are written off as Fifty-centers, so this has gravely damaged their enthusiasm. You check into a hotel for a one-night stand and when you come out everyone thinks you're a prostitute—this has to be a bit demoralizing. Once you institute this Fifty-center structure, apart from the damage done to your image both domestically and overseas, all of your original supporters end up suspected of being Fifty-centers.