Is Democracy Chinese? An Interview with Journalist Chang Ping

Ian Johnson

This is the fourth in an NYRblog series about the fate of democracy in different parts of the world.

Ian Johnson

Chang Ping

Chang Ping is one of China’s best-known commentators on contemporary affairs. Chang, whose real name is Zhang Ping, first established himself in the late 1990s in Guangzhou, where his hard-hitting stories exposed scandals and championed freedom of expression. As censorship has tightened in recent years, Chang’s pleas for openness and accountability have put him under pressure. The 43-year-old is currently living with his wife and daughter in Germany at the former country home of the Nobel Prize winner Heinrich Böll, which has been converted into a refuge for persecuted writers.

Chang’s travails began in 2001, when he was removed as news director ofSouthern Weekend, then a daring weekly that had won readers across the country. He became deputy editor of Southern Metropolis Weekly, but was removed in 2008, and subsequently banned from print, after publishing an editorial questioning government censorship of that year’s Tibetan uprising. One year ago, he was finally fired by the newspaper, with an editor saying his work was “inappropriate.”Last March, Chang joined a newly launched Hong Kong-based magazine, iSun Affairs, as chief editor but was denied a visa and has not been allowed into the former British colony.

Ian Johnson: You grew up in the 1970s; did you experience anything of the Cultural Revolution?

Chang Ping: My father was a low-level official in our hometown in Xichong County (in rural Sichuan) and got caught up in the factionalism of the Cultural Revolution. When I was young I attended an elementary school that was located on the side of the road. If you entered or left the village you passed it. I remember one day he was standing outside the window looking in at me. That afternoon I went home and said to my mother: “Dad was very strange. Dad was outside the school window staring at me.” My mother started crying and said, “Dad has gone and we don’t know if he’ll ever return again.” He had fled to a neighboring county to escape violence. We couldn’t visit him but we would get letters from him and my mother would read them to us. I was about eight years old.

Soon after this, reform and opening up started. We studied the Four Modernizations (a project to develop the fields of agriculture, industry, defense, and research and development) and were told that they would be realized by 2000. We wrote so many essays about how to achieve the Four Modernizations. I remember very clearly in 1984, at the 35th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic, how the students at Peking University said “Hello Xiaoping!” to Deng Xiaoping when he drove by at a rally. It was on the radio and I was really moved. I thought: China has got such hope, such a bright future.

So you thought everything was great. You heard about the developments in Beijing and were excited.

Yes and I was doing well in school too. When you’re personally successful, you tend to think that things are going well. You’re optimistic. I thought things were going well but in some ways I was an angry youth. There’s no contradiction there. You believe, but you want to improve things. During the 1986 student movement, people like Liu Binyan, Fang Lizhi, and Wang Ruowang criticized the party and Deng Xiaoping. I remember hearing about it on the radio and felt in my heart that they were heroes.

At the time I loved literature. In the 1980s, literature was at a peak. I subscribed to a lot of magazines like Harvest and People’s Literature. I remember reading Mo Yan’s Red Sorghum and thinking, Wow, someone can write like that. I remember vividly that I was sitting outside and was so moved by that story. I didn’t quite understand everything but was influenced by it. Also Yu Hua’s short stories, for example. But you know that at that time I was still a complete believer. The books I wanted to read the most were the original works of Marx and Engels. I wanted to learn German to read them.

I went to college in 1987. Until then I’d been reading the classics of world literature, and contemporary Chinese fiction. But then at Sichuan University (in Chengdu) I read a series of books called Moving Toward the Future (走向未来丛书). It was an edited series introducing the great thinkers in other fields. This was a start for me and afterwards I read a lot of western literature, philosophy, and history. The series was really influential in the 1980s and if you look at the editorial staff, they all suffered after June 4 (the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre). I guess from today’s point of view you’d say they had intellectual property rights problems—they just translated or cribbed from foreign publications. But for us it opened a world of psychology, sociology, and literature. One book I have to mention is A Theory of Justice by John Rawls. We’d just read these books so fast and share them. Everyone was fascinated by Western philosophy especially. It didn’t matter what your major was, you were interested in Western philosophy, like Heidegger or Sartre.

How did you experience June 4? In Chengdu, you were quite far away from Beijing, the center of it.

A lot was going on in Chengdu. We had protests all the time. People came from Beijing with news and we’d put them up in our dorm rooms and share their information. There were dialogues and demands to negotiate with the government. I helped organize protests.

But I didn’t really join the main student protest committee. Ever since high school I made one of Confucius’s sayings my motto: “The superior man is dignified, but does not wrangle. He is sociable but not a partisan.” So I did not want to join any movement. In high school I was in the Communist Youth League and wanted to leave. They said, you can’t leave; there is no mechanism to leave. But I didn’t join the party. I didn’t want to be a member of anything, so in 1989 I wasn’t in the student committees. Still, I organized protests and was seen as a leader. I got arrested after June 4. However, during the protests many students had been on a hunger strike and I had opposed that. For that I think they let me out of jail earlier. I think some students opposed me for opposing the hunger strike but that was my view: a hunger strike was pointless. I thought it was good to propagate democracy in factories and in the countryside.

So you’re a pragmatist?

Actually, many people think I’m more of an idealist. I still think China needs democracy, that it needs to change. I really oppose several arguments [that are commonly made] about why China can’t have democracy, such as the argument that China is unique—that Chinese people need to wait because their “quality” [a Chinese term, suzhi, that implies everything from educational level to manners] isn’t high enough and other ridiculous things like that. Some people said that democracy wasn’t part of Chinese culture, and then Taiwan became democratic. Then they said that Taiwan was a special case. Now look at Wukan. They had their own elections. People say it’s special, but in fact Wukan is really typically Chinese. It’s a Chinese town but they organized everything. So what argument are you left with? If Wukan can have democracy so can other parts of China.

I’m not saying that China should have western-style democracy. In fact, there’s not a single western model. What do they mean? Germany didn’t copy America and America didn’t copy Britain. The issue isn’t copying. It’s do you or don’t you want democracy? Of course democracy has a lot of problems but it’s a way forward.

Since the 1980s, Chinese have been pragmatic. The question since the Cultural Revolution has been: can it work? This was Deng Xiaoping’s biggest influence on Chinese people. They ask if it’ll work or not. Now China has the world’s second-largest economy and could overtake the US. So in terms of market economics it’s been successful and I support this. What we lack is justice. There is no justice in the current system. It’s a practical issue. We need justice. Democracy is a way to bring justice. This is why democracy is necessary.

The government doesn’t discuss rule of law much anymore. It’s become more and more a hooligan way of ruling. They just arrest people and throw them in jail or mental asylums. So the past decade has seen a hooliganization of the political system. Many of the old virtues are destroyed by this. The virtues of humanism, responsibilities of the government—the bottom line is things are disappearing. That’s why we’ve had these terrible events of recent years, like Yue Yue.

Yue Yue is the little girl who was run over by a van and no one stopped to help her. One recourse to this perceived spiritual vacuum has been that people are getting more and more interested in religion.

Many are interested in it. Scholars hope that this will help develop more virtues in society or provide some moral guidelines. There is a spiritual vacuum. I really respect religion, but I believe in the special importance of democracy, civic spirit, and freedom in politics, society, and culture for solving the spiritual crisis.

What about your new magazine?

It’s run by iSun Cable Television from Hong Kong. Right now we’re a new media organization. We offer on iPad, Android and are planning a Kindle version too. You can also get copies as a pdf. But we are going to print too. We have a staff of twenty. We have 6,000 subscribers on iPad, mostly on the mainland. We also have more than 10,000 who get it as an email. We’ve been able to report on taboo topics in China, such as [jailed Nobel Peace Prize winner] Liu Xiaobo, press controls, and the trend of independent candidates running for office.

Obviously the authorities knew about the project before it started. You haven’t been able to get a visa since you applied last March and Reporters Without Borders sent an open letter to Donald Tsang, chief executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

According to the Hong Kong authorities’ own rules they should have answered my application within a month, but they haven’t approved or rejected the application. It’s already been nine months, so this is why people are talking about influence from the mainland.

The magazine was one of the first to cover several recent key political events, like the Wukan uprising. You have had by far the most comprehensive coverage of it. But you also have much on culture. Over the past year cultural figures in China have become embroiled in politics. How do you see the role of people like the artist Ai Weiwei?

The original work of the popular and famous artists was all political—many of them were influenced by people like Andy Warhol. They dealt with issues in society. But after a while when they sold so much that they became super rich and didn’t care much for social issues. To be honest, they just repeated themselves a lot. I have respect for Ai Weiwei because he is concerned with society. He is involved and engaged. It’s not his fault that he’s become more and more popular in the West. It’s the same with Liu Xiaobo or Vaclav Havel. This criticism isn’t fair.

What about the writer Han Han’s recent blogposts arguing that democracy may not be well suited to Chinese people? This seems to echo some of the other critics who say that China isn’t read for democracy.

He mentions that people have a “low quality” and that democracy could become a problem because it could lead to violence. This is a view the government has propagated for a long time. It’s like saying you can’t practice swimming until you can swim and you can’t swim because you can’t practice. Also, the arguments aren’t new. Many were made publicly last year, around the time of the centenary of the 1911 revolution.

But he influences a lot of people so his bringing it up is interesting. It shows how restricted China’s political system is. I think that what we’re seeing is the loss of hope by a lot of people in change taking place, so they’re making excuses about why it can’t happen. The decline in morals has lead to an increase in violence—violence against opponents, protesters, and others—not because we’re having a revolution but because we are not.

January 27, 2012, 1:45 p.m.

JOURNALIST CHANG PING YET TO RECEIVE A WORK PERMIT

PUBLISHED ON TUESDAY 6 DECEMBER 2011.

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In an open letter in the Hong Kong government, Reporters Without Borders asks why the visa request by journalist Chang Ping remains unanswered.

6 December 2011

Donald Tsang 
Chief Executive 
Hong Kong Special Administrative Region 
People’s Republic of China 
Tamar, Hong Kong

Immigration Dept. 
Immigration Tower, 
Wan Chai, Hong Kong

Dear Sir

Visa application by Mr. Zhang Ping

Reporters Without Borders, an organization that campaigns for freedom of the press and freedom of information, wishes to draw your attention to the case of Mr. Zhang Ping, also known as Chang Ping (长平). A journalist and blogger, he is a former deputy editor of Nanfang Zhoumo (南方周末) and for the past five months he has been unable to take up his post in Hong Kong as editor of the online magazine Sun Affairs(阳光时务), owned by Sun TV, which he was due to have started in July this year. Up till now, Zhang Ping has faced unexplained silence on the part of the Hong Kong Immigration Department.

After he was appointed to the post in March, Mr. Zhang Ping applied to your government’s Immigration Department for a work visa. As a general rule, applications of this kind are dealt with in four weeks. As of today, he has received no response, either accepting or rejecting his request. No explanation has been given for this silence. The department concerned has merely informed him that his application is under review.

This unusual and unexplained delay leads us to fear there has been direct political interference by the Beijing authorities with the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region in order to prevent the journalist from taking up his post with a newspaper that Chinese officialdom has had in its sights for several years. The recent blockage of the website of the Sun TV online magazine that he was meant to edit is not unrelated to our concerns. With no warning or explanation, the television station was refused permission by the Chinese authorities to broadcast its programmes by cable at the end of 2009.

On several occasions Mr. Zhang Ping, a respected journalist in China, has paid for his stand in favour of press freedom and his refusal to work under censorship. In 2008, he was dismissed as deputy editor of the daily Nandu Zhoukan Zazhi (应为南都周刊杂志) for publishing editorials on Tibet that were at odds with the official line. On 28 January this year, he was forced to resign from his post with Nanfang Baoye Jituan (南方报业集团) for refusing to make changes to articles he had written. Since then, he has been banned from publishing anything he has written in any medium, whether in newspapers or on the Internet. All of his articles published online have been deleted.

In the light of these worrying events, we request that you do all in you power to ensure that Mr. Zhang Ping’s work visa is granted without delay so that he can take up his appointment as soon as possible.

Thank you for your consideration of this matter and please accept my sincere regards.

Jean-François Julliard 
Secretary General, Reporters Without Borders

November 30, 2011 1:22 am

Talk is cheap in the world’s factory

By Rahul Jacob

Wang Yang, the Communist party secretary of Guangdong and the wealthy southern Chinese province’s most powerful official, has a nice populist touch. To honour the province’s 30m migrants from elsewhere in China who have made Guangdong the world’s largest factory, he last year invited a couple of hundred migrant workers to a movie about migrants.

More recently, he turned his charm on for executives from EDF, General Electric and Fujitsu at a meeting to discuss transforming Guangdong’s industrial base and attracting more high-tech companies.

That might be part of the reason, but dispassionate observers would say the lack of freedom of expression and the inability of people to vote is responsible for China’s shortcomings when it comes to innovation.Speaking about the need for more innovation, Mr Wang said China’s students lacked an innovative spirit. “Compared with students from developed countries, we still have a lot of room to improve,” he said. He blamed a culture of exams and a tendency for more than 2000 years to regard “a teacher’s answers as the final answer”.

Since Mr Wang took over as the province’s leader in 2007, Guangzhou’s Southern Metropolis Daily – known for its relatively hard-hitting coverage – increasingly reads like a propaganda sheet. Chang Ping, a well-respected Guangzhou columnist, is no longer able to write articles for the city’s newspapers.

Call it contagion, but some of this is travelling across the border to Hong Kong, which enjoys an autonomous city administration under the terms of its return to China in 1997 – and, notably, a robustly critical press. Mysteriously, however, Mr Chang’s employment visa to work in Hong Kong as the editor of a magazine has been delayed by Hong Kong’s immigration department for eight months.

Last month, Mr Wang is understood to have told Guangzhou’s editors to report more freely, but on Monday he clarified and said what he wanted was more good news.

Bright sparks

It’s hard to tell whether some celestial prankster has put something into Guangzhou’s water supply recently, but its citizens’ propensity to protest against the government’s initiatives is ever more innovative. Earlier this year, a teenager started a lone protest against the wasteful redecoration of an underground station. Another Guangzhou resident took on the city’s plan to light up the skyline at night, estimated to cost Rmb150m. He started a bizarre online effort to persuade people to shave their heads, arguing that this was a cheaper way to illuminate the city as the light bounced off their bald pates. Amazingly, 80 people joined this protest. Then, like a baton being passed effortlessly, a college student asked the city’s authorities to explain why they were spending so much money on lighting up the city’s buildings by the river. When she did not receive a satisfactory reply, she sent the authorities a rubber ball – a Chinese way of saying that the person receiving it is passing the buck.

In the past two weeks, when a couple of demonstrations turned violent after the police beat factory workers protesting a cut in wages, Mr Wang himself bore the brunt of the province’s scatological wit. Earlier this year, he had taken a leaf out of Bhutan’s playbook by suggesting that the province focus on well-being and happiness. “Happy Guangdong”, one of Mr Wang’s slogans, should now be changed to Rioting Guangdong, say his critics.

Civilized cities

This week, Guangzhou was selected as one of the finalists in China’s civilised city campaign. Guangzhou gets our vote as a far more civilised place than Linyi City in the northern province of Shandong, also a finalist. On the outskirts of Linyi City, reporters and well-wishers of the blind human rights lawyer, Chen Guangcheng, have been brutally beaten for trying to visit him. By contrast, for months Guangzhou’s pedestrian crossings have had volunteers wearing bright yellow sashes ushering people across. There is a need for such courtesy to be transported to the mass transit system. Line 3 features a station where both sides of the subway car open and people from one platform try to cross to another line by hurling themselves in the path of people disembarking from the train. It’s more like a rugby scrum than a rugby scrum. I have a few bruises to show for it.

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Hong Kong visa held up for veteran editor

By David Bandurski | Posted on 2011-11-25

According to a report in yesterday’s Ming Pao Daily, an application for a Hong Kong work visa by veteran Chinese journalist Zhang Ping (张平), generally known by the penname Chang Ping (长平), has been held up for eight months by the Immigration Department, raising concerns that his application might be subject to political interference by Chinese authorities.

Chang, a well-known Chinese commentary writer who was formerly a top editor at both Southern Weekend and Southern Metropolis Daily, was offered a position at Hong Kong’s Sun TV in March this year and filed a visa application under Hong Kong’s Admission Scheme for Mainland Talents and Professionals. Visas under the scheme generally require no more than four weeks to process, but reportedly neither Chang nor his would-be employer have received notice of acceptance or denial.

“I have asked them [the Immigration Department] about it, and they simply say that [my application] is under review,” Chang was quoted by the paper as saying.

Chinese authorities recently blocked internet access on the mainland to an online magazine published by Sun TV that Chang Ping was expected to head up as chief editor.

References:

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,15557479,00.html

:http://news.mingpao.com/20111125/gca1.htm
http://news.mingpao.com/20111125/gca2.htm

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,15543653,00.html

http://www.changp.com/2011/11/841.htm

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/28/world/asia/28china.html?_r=1

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/27/china-press-freedom