Apr 23 2007
The Story of Zha Jianguo
Just read a profile in the New Yorker on a Chinese dissident, Zha Jianguo.
It is a moving narrative about a lonely man who is an outcast in a society he cares the most but is hailed a Prometheus in another he refuse to escape to. The saddest thing about him, though, is that even his little sister wrote him with much affection but little conviction. Ever so subtly, she casts doubts on who to blame on her brother’s predicament: afterall, the warden is friendly, the authority is accommodating, his sympathizer in the West thinks he should just pack up and run … and his mother thinks he has a “hero complex” since a kid. Even herself seems to imply that his conviction might have something to do with a succession of failed business ventures.
Zha’s problem is that he is a “professional” dissident that lacks originality. Solzhenitsyn was kind of the same in that he was an endogenous element of the discidence business (where as Andrei Sakharov and Garry Kasparov are outsiders hence an “exogenous” factor upon entry). But Solzhenitsyn had the good luck of being the first to document from within and did so at a time when the liberals in the West was seeking a good excuse to break clean from the Soviets. I read part of the The Gulag Archipelago, it was morally powerful but not a treatise on Communism by any stretch of imagination.
Zha, on the contrary, has neither the fame nor the fortune to be of any significance. The revelation of his failed business endeavors does not help either: he’s had the courage but one wonders whether such courage came from a strong conviction or an opportunitistic speculation that China will eventually liberalize through one of those colored revolutions. If it is the latter, the saddest part is perhaps that Zha hasn’t realized that he’d been victimized twice: once during the Cultural Revolution when he was tricked into Mao’s grandiosity. Once is now: he still believes in the promise of being a dissident–a mirage projected from the West.
It takes me great pain to write this down. I remember being very emotional while reading Anthony Marx’s Faith in Nation–he convinced me how brutal state consolidation is. It is a similar kind of feeling. The great patriot, 谭嗣同, once said: the reform business is going nowhere because no one is willing to die for it–allow me to start the tradition then. I can never have his courage but I wish one day I will have equally strong conviction.