This Generation (16 page)

Why do I seldom have good words for our government? One reason is that I don't want other people saying I'm a Fifty-center; a second is that when one has no freedom to criticize, then praise is meaningless; and the third is that I've already paid my taxes, and our taxes are used to foot the bill for the Fifty-centers' expenses, so that is equivalent to me indirectly praising the government.

Finally, I plan to sift through a batch of posts and differentiate which ones were written by the outer circle, which by the competent writers, which by patriotic youth, which by ignorant young
girls, which by unhappy people, and which by idiots. If I put you in the wrong category, and your comment was purely voluntary and not for profit, there's really nothing I can do about that. You should ask your masters why a view like yours could be worth a full ten cents.

March 4, 2010

In recent days the diary
kept by Han Feng, a director in the Laibin Tobacco Bureau, has become a big sensation.
¹⁹
In an era where the Internet is flooded with pinups and videos, I find it refreshing to suddenly encounter such an authentic piece of writing—surely it will go down in history as the work with the greatest literary and social value to be released in China in 2010. Assuming that the diary is genuine, I'm confident that it establishes its author as a fine cadre, for the following reasons:

1. This cadre accepted only sixty thousand yuan in bribes during a six-month period—the first time in several years that I've seen only five figures associated with the word
bribes
. Where else could one find such an honest bureau chief?

2. Of the women he has had affairs with or is currently conducting affairs with, not one has been elevated to full-blown second-wife status.

3. This bureau chief does not gamble or go whoring or bribe his superiors. When purchasing a cell phone, he waited in line like everyone else and it took him two hours to complete his purchase.

4. In the pages of the diary, we find a state official who chases skirt with the least possible financial outlay. At a time when other officials regularly buy their mistresses an automobile or an apartment, the most expensive present he ever gives one of his women is a cell phone or an MP4 player. This shows not only that Han Feng is a decent fellow but that his partners are decent women, too. If there were more couples like this in our country, we could easily afford to build several more aircraft carriers.

5. He attended banquets on only eighty-nine occasions, when I know of many village officials whose banquets over the course of a year number well over three hundred and sixty-five. But he often got drunk, which reflects a poor capacity for alcohol, so in this area he has fallen well short of the standards expected of an official. This has to constitute his gravest offense, for here he has seriously sullied the reputation of our civil servants.

6. Although he sported with women on multiple occasions, he also accompanied his wife on shopping or other excursions on twenty-five days and bought his father a cell phone. There is no evidence that he used his authority to advance the interests of family members.

7. He knows how to install computer software, loves digital technology, photography, and sports, and is capable of using microblog services to maintain his diary; this all shows that he is an official capable of keeping abreast of the latest developments.

8. In his diary we see not the slightest sign of a desire to own luxury cars or expensive property or paintings, calligraphy, and antiques; all he does is quietly do stuff on his cell phone and computer. In his diary he even writes, “Today I spent one hundred sixty yuan on a pair of headphones—they're terrific.” What a modest, easy-to-please official!

9. As for his job performance—although we have yet to uncover evidence of him doing any work, given that he is a bureau chief who has burrowed his way inside a number of female subordinates, his title and his performance more or less match.

To sum up, in the current scheme of things Han Feng is undoubtedly a more than satisfactory official, one who amuses himself with harmless pursuits, one who refrains from excess, one who inflicts no suffering on the people and little damage on the state. In this diary we find an official who is over the moon with a purchase of just a few thousand yuan, who, after buying a new cell phone, for three days straight makes one and the same diary entry: “Fooled around at home with my new phone.” He was so happy he even gave up on fooling around with women! I strongly suggest that we let him off and give his lady friends a break as well, for they are but the tiniest of little shrimp and their biggest sin has been simply to have nibbled on some floating organic matter as they paddle about in the water. We can hope that functionaries like Han Feng will be punished for their offenses, but we certainly should not regard them as the incarnations of official malfeasance. In an official culture where decadence is the norm, they have to count as the most innocuous, environmentally friendly elements. We should let this bureau chief remain in his position and allow him to continue researching his digital products. If he is dismissed from office, his successor is likely to be a bigger threat to society, for the simple reason that he will know not to keep a diary.

March 14, 2010

Since I set up my
public opinion poll, some 210,000 Internet users have registered their votes, and of these, ninety-six percent think Han Feng is a fine civil servant and should retain his position, and only four percent think he is a bad one and should be punished. In the future I plan to conduct other such polls, as a way of compensating for no one ever having seen an electoral ballot, despite all those elections of representatives to the National People's Congress. Starting today, I am unilaterally setting myself up as a strategic collaboration partner to the major governmental websites, so that when they invite participation in some poll or other, I will do the same (but refraining from writing anything that might shape voters' views on the subject), and then see how my poll results compare with theirs.

Among the voters, some feel strongly that Han Feng is really not bad at all, given that his appetite is so limited, and some profess a genuine respect for his decency as an official, while others are mocking or ironic in their comments, but all are conscious that
this is a matter completely out of their hands. In my grandfather's younger days, when everyone was in economic difficulties, local officials were not necessarily any better off, and only later did it become clear that in our country there was a stark distinction between good officials and bad officials. The result of the Han Feng poll shows that we have entered a new era, one in which there is hardly a single official with clean hands, in which it's only a matter of good corrupt officials and bad corrupt officials. People believe overwhelmingly that Han Feng belongs to the first category.

Although Han Feng was recently arrested on a charge of accepting bribes during real estate transactions, when reading reports about him we shouldn't just focus on his fondness for tinkering with technology, abusing his office, and taking liberties with women. In an interview with
New Century Weekly
, one of Han Feng's superiors said, “Tobacco consumption in Guangxi seriously lags behind other provinces. One of Han Feng's achievements was to raise consumption in his area of jurisdiction to over six cartons per capita, exceeding the nationwide average.”

In this admirable part of the country, then, people originally did not smoke very much. So the government set up an agency which had the mission of raising tobacco consumption; success in pulling off this assignment is one of the criteria for identifying an effective leader, and inducing ordinary people to smoke more has become a feat about which a government agency feels proud. It's bad enough for a respectable country to not prohibit smoking—how can you sacrifice public health just for a tiny boost in GDP? But then, when I think about it, there's nothing strange about that—it's been the pattern all along.

When the National People's Congress and the National Political Consultative Conference were in session, reporters were always asking if I had any legislation I'd like to propose, or suggested I record some interviews about people's lives today, or even go to Beijing and mingle with some of the delegates, but I turned all these invitations down. As someone in absolutely no position of authority, what could
I hope to achieve? And besides, for one thing, I can communicate my ideas well enough, just using my laptop; and, for another, I've made it clear already that I'm not into putting on a show.

But now, as those two meetings come to an end, the point I want to make is that our government is really very fortunate. A majority of people always take the view that the top leadership's policies are correct, but are simply mishandled by administrators lower down—never do they question the first part of that proposition. They continue to cling to the most primitive trust in our top leaders. When ordinary citizens encounter mistreatment, their final resort is to go to the capital to denounce their persecutors, although the Letters and Visits Office's main order of business is simply to add their names to the list of targets of security monitoring and send them back where they came from. When they're abused by the village chief they appeal to the township chief, and when the township chief pays them no attention they appeal to the district chief, and when the district chief will have nothing to do with them they appeal to the city mayor, but they have no hope of ever securing an audience with him, and so they fantasize about finding the sympathetic ear of a minister in the central government (or someone even higher up), convinced that these lower-level leaders have blocked the transmission of their complaint. The possibility seems to have never occurred to them that the person they most want to see decided long ago that they were an infernal nuisance, rejecting their petition with an offhand “He's failing to see the full picture.” All they ever seek is a little benefit, never insisting that they have a certain right; they always feel the problem lies with the local officials and nowhere else. Just as long as some big-shot in an Audi extends a greeting at the Chinese New Year, they get a warm sensation inside. They feel an official like Han Feng is really doing a pretty good job, for their hope is not that a functionary will serve the common people, but simply that he won't cause trouble for them. You can live in your fine apartment, drive your nice car, screw your little secretary, and we won't object to any of that. So long as you don't beat up my
son, demolish my little home, or molest my daughter, you count as a good official in the eyes of the people. If bloggers annoy you, you can delete their posts; if writers antagonize you, you can harmonize them; if journalists displease you, you can deal with them in just one short line: “No negative reporting allowed.”

So, as I say, our government is fortunate to have a population that is so simple and kind-hearted and so easy to satisfy. Although they have many gripes, they also have a basic level of trust. Occasionally they may stir up a fuss, but at the most that's because you originally promised to let them have a meat bun if they gave you all their cake, and then you only actually give them a plain bun. All you need to do is pick up a toothpick and dislodge a shred of meat from between your molars to give them as filling for their bun, and they will go home quite contentedly. When dealing with the populace, I really wish the government could forget all the hoopla surrounding GDP and be a bit more accommodating. At your meetings, please recite fewer of those elegantly phrased epigrams and allocate everyone a bigger bowl of soup, subject people to less pressure in their lives, protect them, look out for them, and let them have a little dignity of their own, rather than letting dignity reside only with a notice from the New China News Agency. If you let such a wonderful people die of starvation or illness or poverty or despair or air pollution or toxic food products or rage or mistreatment or contaminated water, or “sleep,” wherever are you are going to find another population?