Part 7 (1/2)
More than twenty years have pa.s.sed since the Tiananmen protests of 1989, and from today's perspective their greatest impact has been the lack of progress in reforming the political system. It's fair to say that political reform was taking place in the 1980s, even if its pace was slower than that of economic reform. 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 acc.u.mulate over time and find only limited channels of release, trans.m.u.ted 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.
When, on the eve of the Beijing Olympics, the Olympic torch arrived in Chinese territory, the cities among which it was relayed were dictated by official fiat, and every torchbearer was chosen meticulously by government officials. The cost may have been exorbitant, but the cities selected felt honored, and every torchbearer chosen felt proud. A small mountain village in Henan's Hui County clearly did not qualify for such glory, but the locals went ahead and organized for themselves a homegrown version of the relay, pa.s.sing from one person to the next a simple handmade torch. Every villager was qualified to partic.i.p.ate; no government approval was required. They all looked pleased as punch, for their love of China was not in the least inferior to that of the official torchbearers', and when footage of their exploit began to circulate on the Internet, it got a rapturous reception.
Because the West often criticizes China for its degradation of the environment, the Chinese government made a point of declaring the Beijing Olympics a green Olympics. But the official torch relay in China did not give me any sense that the Olympics were green. Led by police cars, the torchbearers would trot slowly along a road lined with crowds, and after the event the city streets were piled with garbage. With the relay in Hui County, on the other hand, I did get a taste of a green Olympics: no car exhaust, no carbon dioxide emissions from overexcited crowds, just villagers with their handmade torches trotting over the spring hills as a mild breeze blew and the sun shone brightly.
Copycat phenomena are everywhere in China today, and even the political arena, so long untouchable, has suffered an invasion. When the National People's Congress and the National Political Consultative Conference were in session, a man from Yibin in Sichuan, who described himself as a ”Copycat Delegate to the National People's Congress,” introduced several motions on the Internet regarding such issues as insurance, old-age pensions for peasants, and personal income tax, hoping for a wide airing of his ideas. His election was laced with black humor, for he explained that he had been the unanimous choice at a family gathering-a sardonic commentary on the government's practice of carefully vetting potential candidates for election to the NPC and NPCC. Although his election was the outcome only of a family get-together, this copycat delegate actually reflected more of a democratic spirit than those official delegates, for he won votes from relatives sincere in their support, not votes rigged by the authorities.
There are even more brazen and outrageous cases of copycatting: some people have adopted copycat tactics to transfer features of China's humorless political system to its dissolute s.e.x industry. Last year I read on the Internet a jaw-dropping feature about a highly successful s.e.x business in one of China's southern cities. The young women employed there were distinguished for their good looks and provided unstinting service to their clients, who unanimously praised the establishment as ”top in the nation, first-cla.s.s in the world.” Why so? It was all due to excellent managerial practices, apparently. The boss had introduced a system that forged a bond between s.e.x and politics, borrowing from the Chinese Communist Party and Communist Youth League their system of branch organization, his theory being that progressive role models had an important role to play in the purveying of s.e.xual services.
In China, if one wants to enter the Communist Party and the Communist Youth League, one must undergo careful inspection and rigorous procedures. This s.e.x-industry entrepreneur, having no affiliation with either the party or the Youth League, set himself up as a copycat Party Committee secretary and established under his banner both a ”party branch” (women well versed in s.e.xual services) and a ”youth-league branch” (unseasoned new recruits), with the understanding that once the youth-league members gained more experience and positive endors.e.m.e.nts from their clients, they could be promoted to full-fledged party members. Applying the time-honored methods of Chinese political organizations, he was able to enhance his employees' work ethic and at the same time have them supervise one another's performance. At regular intervals he would hold ”organizational life” retreats for both categories of staff, where they conducted criticism and self-criticism, studied ”superior methods” and identified ”areas for improvement,” learned how to ”maximize a.s.sets” and ”address deficits,” so that the quality of their services could scale even greater heights.
This real-life-s.e.x-entrepreneur/copycat-party-secretary has also imported the Communist Party's ”advanced worker” category into his management structure, electing every month an advanced worker who has distinguished herself in terms of the number of clients serviced and adding her photograph to the array of top earners listed in the honor roll. In conventional honor-roll photographs in China you always see standard poses and healthy, purposeful smiles. In this copycat honor roll, by contrast, the snapshots look much more like the glossy pictures of starlets you see in fas.h.i.+on magazines, every one of the copycat advanced workers vying to attract attention with a simpering smile or a smoldering glance.
The social fabric of China today is shaped by a bizarre mixture of elements, for the beautiful and the ugly, the progressive and the backward, the serious and the ridiculous, are constantly rubbing shoulders with each other. The copycat phenomenon is like this too, revealing society's progress but also its regression. When health is impaired, inflammation ensues, and the copycat trend is a sign of something awry in China's social tissue. Inflammation fights infection, but it may also lead to swelling, pustules, ulcers, and rot.
As a product of China's uneven development, the copycat phenomenon has as many negative implications as it has positive aspects. The moral bankruptcy and confusion of right and wrong in China today, for example, find vivid expression in copycatting. As the copycat concept has gained acceptance, plagiarism, piracy, burlesque, parody, slander, and other actions originally seen as vulgar or illegal have been given a reason to exist; and in social psychology and public opinion they have gradually acquired respectability. No wonder that ”copycat” has become one of the words most commonly used in China today. All of this serves to demonstrate the truth of the old Chinese saying: ”The soil decides the crop, and the vine shapes the gourd.”
Four years ago I saw a pirated edition of Brothers for sale on the pedestrian bridge that crosses the street outside my apartment; it was lying there in a stack of other pirated books. When the vendor noticed me running my eyes over his stock, he handed me a copy of my novel, recommending it as a good read. A quick flip through and I could tell at once that it was pirated. ”No, it's not a pirated edition,” he corrected me earnestly. ”It's a copycat.”
That's not the only time something like this has happened. 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 circ.u.mspect 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 gus.h.i.+ng 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.”
I was speechless. But that is our reality today: you may have done something illegal or unconscionable, but as long as you justify yourself with some kind of copycat explanation, your action becomes legitimate and aboveboard in the courtroom of public opinion. There's nothing I can do about it, except pray that in the future, when people make up conversations with me, they don't make me talk too much nonsense. If somebody has me say something clever, I'm even prepared to say thank you.
Last October I went on a quick tour of several European countries, sleeping in a different bed practically every single night, and when I got back to Beijing at the end of the month, I felt completely drained. What with jetlag as well, I was in quite a wobbly state for a couple of days, often imagining I was still in Europe. At one point I turned on my computer and did a little surfing on the Internet; soon I came across a copycat news item, one that announced the pregnancy of Prof. C. N. Yang's wife.
Chen-Ning Yang, a n.o.bel laureate in physics, has been a staple of copycat news reports ever since 2004, when at the age of eighty-two he married Weng Fan, then twenty-eight. Now copycat correspondents had concocted this story of his wife being pregnant, a development allegedly revealed by Yang in an interview. Many of the remarks attributed to him were quite absurd-like his saying with a smile that the unborn child had already been proven to be his. That is exactly the kind of fanciful invention I know so well, because in copycat interviews I often say equally ridiculous things.
For me this spurious report served a useful purpose, for after two days in a trance I was suddenly clearheaded once more, in no doubt at all that I was back in China.
If we conceptualize the copycat phenomenon as a form of revolutionary action initiated by the weak against the strong, then this kind of revolution has happened before in China-in the Cultural Revolution forty-four years ago.
When in 1966 Mao Zedong proclaimed, ”To rebel is justified,” it triggered a release of revolutionary instincts among the weaker segments of society, and they rebelled with a pa.s.sion. Everywhere they rose up against those in positions of authority. Traditional Communist Party committees and state organizations totally collapsed, and copycat leaders.h.i.+p bodies sprouted up all over the place. All you needed to do was to get some people to back you, and overnight you could establish a rebel headquarters and proclaim yourself its commander-in-chief. Soon there were too many copycat organizations and too little power to go around, triggering violent struggles between the various rebel headquarters. In Shanghai the struggle involved guns and live ammunition; but the rebels there were outdone by the ones in Wuhan, who used artillery pieces to a.s.sail each other's positions. In efforts to expand their power bases, copycat leaders fought incessantly in conflicts that differed little from the tangled warfare between bandits that was once so common in China. Eventually the victors would incorporate the remnants of the vanquished and emerge with enhanced authority. Once the traditional bases of party and state control had been eliminated, revolutionary committees-representing the new power structure-were soon established, and those copycat commanders who had triumphed in the chaotic factional struggle all of a sudden transformed themselves into the revolutionary committees' official heads.
Why, when discussing China today, do I always return to the Cultural Revolution? That's because these two eras are so interrelated: even though the state of society now is very different from then, some psychological elements remain strikingly similar. After partic.i.p.ating in one ma.s.s movement during the Cultural Revolution, for example, we are now engaged in another: economic development.
What I want to emphasize here is the parallel between the sudden appearance of myriad rebel headquarters at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution and the rapid emergence of the private economy: in the 1980s, Chinese people replaced their pa.s.sion for revolution with a pa.s.sion for making money, and all at once there was an abundance of private businesses. Just as the copycat challenges the standard, so too the private sector a.s.sailed the monopoly status of the state-owned economy. Innumerable businesses soon went belly-up, only for countless others to take their places, just like the constant setbacks and dynamic comebacks a.s.sociated with revolution, or like Bai Juyi's lines about the gra.s.sland: ”Though burned by wildfire, it's never destroyed/When the spring winds blow it grows again.” China's economic miracle was launched in just this way. Through its continual cycles of ruin and rebirth the private sector demonstrated its enormous capacity for survival, at the same time forcing ossified, conservative state enterprises to adapt to the cutthroat compet.i.tion of the marketplace.
In their colorful history during these past thirty years, the gra.s.sroots have performed feats unimaginable to us in the past, doing things their own way, through different channels. In Western terms, ”all roads lead to Rome,” and in Chinese terms, ”when the eight immortals cross the sea, each displays his special talent.” Their roads to success were highly unconventional, and so too were their roads to failure; the social fabric they have created is equally peculiar. Just as the reveille wakens soldiers from sleep, so too, as ”copycat” took on a rich new range of meanings, it has suddenly brought into view all manner of things that have been churning below the surface during these years of hectic development. The awesome spectacle that has ensued is rather akin to what would happen if, in a crowded square, someone yells ”Copycat!” in an effort to catch a friend's attention and everybody in the square comes das.h.i.+ng over, because that is the name they have all adopted.
As miracles multiply, desire swells. Tiananmen Gate, the symbol of Chinese power, and the White House, the symbol of American power, have naturally become the structures most vigorously emulated by copycat architects all across China. There is a difference, however. Mock Tiananmens tend to be erected by local officials in the countryside: newly prosperous villages convert their local government offices to miniature Tiananmens so that when the lowest-level officials in the Chinese bureaucracy are ensconced inside, they can savor the beautiful illusion of being masters of the nation. Imitation White Houses, on the other hand, supply office s.p.a.ce for the rich and also meet their living needs. By day a company executive sits at his desk in a copycat version of the Oval Office, directing the activities of his employees by telephone; by night he takes his pretty secretary by the hand and leads her into the copycat Lincoln Bedroom.
In the course of China's thirty-year economic miracle many poor people from the gra.s.sroots have acquired wealth and power and have begun to hanker after a Western-style aristocratic life; moving into s.p.a.cious villas, traveling in luxury sedans, drinking expensive wines, wearing designer brands, and saying a few words of English in an atrocious accent. As copycat aristocrats proliferate, so too do the social inst.i.tutions catering to their needs: aristocratic schools and aristocratic kindergartens, aristocratic stores and aristocratic restaurants, aristocratic apartments and aristocratic furniture, aristocratic entertainments and aristocratic magazines.... In China there is no end of things claiming an a.s.sociation with aristocracy.
Here's a true little anecdote about one such copycat aristocrat. He built himself a luxury villa complete with swimming pool even though he couldn't swim, his theory being that no rich man's villa would be complete without a pool. At the same time he wasn't happy seeing the pool going to waste, so he used it to raise fish, which-steamed, braised, or fried-could be served up on his dinner table each day. It then occurred to him that five-star hotels have a particular name for their most elegant and extravagantly appointed rooms. So soon a bronze plaque appeared on the door of the master bedroom, inscribed complacently with the words ”Presidential Suite.” Such is the lifestyle of China's nouveau riche.
Finally I need to relate my own copycat story.
In China in the olden days, dentists were in much the same line of work as itinerant street performers and more or less on a par with barbers or cobblers. In some bustling neighborhood they would unfurl an oilskin umbrella and spread out on a table their forceps, mallets, and other tools of their trade, along with a row of teeth they had extracted, as a way of attracting customers. Dentists in those days operated as one-man bands and needed no helper. Like traveling cobblers, they would wander from place to place, shouldering their load on a carrying pole.
I, for a time, was their successor. Although I worked in a state-run clinic, my most senior colleagues had all simply switched from plying their trade under an umbrella to being employed in a two-story building; not one of them had attended medical school. The clinic staff numbered not much more than twenty, and tooth extractions were the main order of business. Our patients, mostly peasants from the surrounding countryside, did not think of our clinic as a health-care facility but simply called it the ”tooth shop.” This name was actually quite accurate, for our small-town clinic was very much like a shop. I entered as an apprentice, and for me extracting teeth, treating teeth, capping teeth, and fitting false teeth were simply a continuous series of learning tasks. The older dentists we all referred to as ”gaffers,” for there were no professors or unit heads such as you would find in a full-blown hospital. Compared with the career of a dental physician, now such a highly educated profession, my job in the ”tooth shop” was that of a shop-worker, plain and simple.
My training was overseen by Gaffer Shen, a retired dentist from Shanghai who had come to our clinic to make a bit of extra money-or ”bask in residual heat,” as we used to say. Gaffer Shen was in his sixties, a short and rather portly man who wore gold-rimmed spectacles and kept his spa.r.s.e hair neatly combed.
The first time I saw my mentor-to-be, he was extracting a patient's tooth; but because he was getting old and had to strain with all his might to tug on the forceps, he was grimacing so painfully you might have thought he was trying to pull his own tooth out. The clinic director introduced me as the new arrival. Gaffer Shen nodded guardedly, then told me to stand next to him and watch as he used a cotton swab to daub the next patient's jaw with iodine and injected a dose of Novocain. Then he plopped himself down in a chair and lit a cigarette. When he had smoked it down to the b.u.t.t, he turned to the patient and asked offhandedly, ”Is your tongue big yet?”
The patient mumbled something in the affirmative. Gaffer Shen rose slowly to his feet, picked a pair of forceps out of his tray, and set to work on the diseased tooth. He had me observe a couple of extractions. Then he sat down in his chair and showed no sign of planning to get up again. ”I'll leave the next ones to you,” he said.
I was a bundle of nerves, for I still had only a rudimentary understanding of how to extract a tooth, and here I was suddenly at center stage. But I remembered at least the first two steps with the iodine and the Novocain, so I awkwardly instructed the patient to open his mouth wide and managed clumsily to complete the procedure. The patient watched me with a look of complete terror, as though one-on-one with a crocodile, which made my hands shake all the more.
As I waited for the anesthetic to take effect, I didn't know quite what to do with myself. But Gaffer Shen handed me a cigarette and suddenly became quite genial, asking me what my parents did and how many siblings I had. All too soon my cigarette was finished and the conversation was over. Thank goodness I was able to recall the next line of the script, and in my best imitation of Gaffer Shen I turned to the patient and asked, ”Is your tongue big yet?” When he said yes, I was struck with horror at the prospect of what now lay ahead, and a chill ran down my spine. There was no way to get out of extracting that unlucky tooth, and I also had to put on a show of knowing exactly what I was doing and avoid making the patient any more suspicious.
That first extraction is something I will never forget. I had the patient open his mouth wide and fixed my eyes on the tooth that had to be pulled. But when I glanced into the tray and saw a whole line of forceps, all of different sizes and shapes, I was struck dumb, clueless as to which one I should use. I hesitated, then slunk back to Gaffer Shen with my tail between my legs. ”Which forceps?” I asked in a low voice.
He got up, shuffled forward a couple of steps, and peered inside the patient's gaping mouth. ”Which tooth?” he asked. At that point I was still vague about the names for the various teeth, so I just pointed with my finger. Gaffer Shen took a squint, pointed at a pair of forceps, then plopped himself back down in his chair and picked up his newspaper.
At that moment I had an intense sensation of being locked in a lonely, daunting struggle, without allies or sympathizers. I didn't dare look into the patient's staring eyes, for I was even more petrified than he was. I picked up the forceps, inserted them into his mouth, maneuvered them into position, and took a firm hold of the tooth. By a stroke of good fortune, it was already quite loose; all I needed to do was grip the forceps tightly and rock the tooth back and forth a couple of times, and it came straight out.
The real difficulty came when I was working on the third patient, for part of a root broke off inside his jaw. Gaffer Shen had no choice but to remove his foot from his knee and let the newspaper slip from his hand, rise from his chair, and come personally to attend to it. To clean out a root is much more trouble than a simple extraction, and Gaffer Shen was dripping with sweat by the end of it all. It was only later, when I knew how to deal with this kind of complication, that he could begin to enjoy a true life of leisure.
Our office had two dental chairs. I would usually call in two patients at once, have them sit down in the chairs, and then, as though dispensing equal favors to two trust beneficiaries, smear some tincture of iodine in their mouths and inject them both with a dose of anesthetic. In the dead time that followed I would take a nicotine break, and when my cigarette was finished, I would ask, ”Is your tongue big yet?”
Often both patients would answer at the same time, ”Yes, it's big.” As though enforcing further terms of the trust, I would pull out their teeth one after another and then move on to the next two cases.
In those days Gaffer Shen and I coordinated seamlessly. I made myself responsible for calling in the patients and attending to their diseased teeth, while my mentor stayed put in his chair, making notations in their medical records and writing out prescriptions; only if I ran into trouble would he personally take to the field. As my skills in tooth extraction grew more accomplished, Gaffer Shen was called to the front line less and less often.
Many years later I became an author. Western journalists were always curious about my dentist past, astonished that with only a high-school graduation certificate and having had no medical education whatsoever I had proceeded directly to tooth extractions. I groped around for an explanation that would make some kind of sense. ”I used to be a barefoot doctor,” I would tell them.
Barefoot doctors were an invention of the Mao era: peasants with a smattering of education were shown how to perform routine medical procedures and then sent back home with a medical kit on their backs. Why were they called barefoot doctors? Because for them practicing medicine was just a sideline activity; their basic work remained going out to the fields and laboring in their bare feet. When peasants around them came down with some minor injury or illness, they would be in a position to provide basic treatment on the spot, or if the case was serious, they would see the patient off to the hospital.
I knew it wasn't really correct to say I'd been a ”barefoot doctor,” for though I couldn't claim to have received much more training than those peasant doctors, I had at least been engaged in dentistry full-time. The problem was that for many years I couldn't find the right word to describe my first job, and it's only with the emergence of new vocabulary in China today that I can finally give Western reporters a more accurate picture of my situation. ”I used to be a copycat dentist,” I tell them now.
*shanzhai.
bamboozle.
What is ?* Originally it meant ”to sway unsteadily”-like fis.h.i.+ng boats bobbing on the waves, for example, or leaves shaking in the wind. Later it developed a new life as an idiom particularly popular in northeast China, derived from another phrase that sounds almost the same: -”to mislead.” Just as variant strains of the flu virus keep constantly appearing, has in its lexical career diversified itself into a dazzling range of meanings. Hyping things up and laying it on thick-that's . Playing a con trick and ripping somebody off-that's , too. In the first sense, the word has connotations of bragging, as well as enticement and entrapment; in the second sense, it carries shades of dishonesty, misrepresentation, and fraud. ”Bamboozle,” perhaps, is the closest English equivalent.
In China today, ”bamboozle” is a new star in the lexical firmament, fully the equal of ”copycat” in its charlatan status. Both count as linguistic nouveau riche, but their rises to glory took somewhat different courses. The copycat phenomenon emerged in collectivist fas.h.i.+on, like bamboo shoots springing up after spring rain, whereas ”bamboozle” had its source in an individual act of heroism-the hero in question being China's most influential comedian, a northeasterner named Zhao Benshan. In a legendary skit performed a few years ago, Zhao Benshan gave ”bamboozling” its grand launch, announcing to the world: I can bamboozle the tough into acting tame, Bamboozle the gent into dumping the dame, Bamboozle the innocent into taking the blame, Bamboozle the winner into conceding the game.
I'm selling crutches today, so this is my aim: I'll bamboozle a man into thinking he's lame.
In ”Selling Crutches” he proceeds with infinite guile, trapping the fall guy in one psychological snare after another, exquisitely employing deception and hoax to lead him down the garden path until in the end a man whose legs are perfectly normal is convinced he's a cripple and purchases-at great expense-a shoddy pair of crutches.