Orwellian China

Last year, in the middle of a ruinous financial crisis that wracked the US (and accentuated China’s rise in the world), some dramatic ownership changes were announced at an iconic American media network. 

The Onion news network, best known for its completely over-the-top satire, said it was being sold to “a syndicate of industrious China-men from the deepest heart of the Orient.” The look-and-feel of the website — and much of its editorial content — was changed drastically to serve the heavy-handedly propagandist and commercial interests of the new owners. Article after article, and ‘news clip’ after ‘news clip’ sang unsubtle paeans to China, and mocked America’s ‘decline’.  

For all its excessive, exuberant exaggeration, this package was, as works of satire go, fiendishly funny. Yet, it cut very close to the bone for down-and-out Americans looking on from afar at a rising China, with all its comical idiosyncrasies  — and cultural stereotypes  — intact.

The Onion package even gave rise to several intensely serious academic discourses about why the Onion brand of satire held any sort of appeal at all; most of these commentaries came to the sobering conclusion that it was all probably funny because it rang true. In this case, they reasoned, it reflected underlying American disquiet over the perception that a cash-rich but humour-deficient China would ‘buy up’ America, including, symbols of American soft power.

It’s never a good sign when unsubtle, in-your-face satire is mistaken, in however convoluted a fashion, for reality (or anything close to it). But much the same scenario is playing out in another realm of creative endeavour, closer home to China. 

The buzz this time relates to a new Chinese-language novel, Shengshi Zhongguo 2013 (The Golden Age of China 2013), which has proved enormously popular in Hong Kong (where it was released) and in mainland China (where, despite it being banned, it’s being sold clandestinely). The book is being characterised as a ‘Chinese 1984’ for its Orwellian portrayal of China in the year 2013. 

The novel is a quirky, thinly-veiled narrative of contemporary China, which is widely acknowledged as having emerged from last year’s financial crisis well on top of the Western economies, but where an authoritarian Communist Party is looking to leverage this economic ascendance to tighten its grip on power at home — and implant its ‘Beijing Consensus’ worldview on the world. 

It is also a searing critique of the large and growing number of people in China and around the world who unquestioningly buy into the China miracle narrative and the opportunity it offers them — without the faintest qualms about the trade-offs they make with their acquiescence with China’s naked challenge to libertarian freedoms, both at home and abroad. 

The novel revolves around three ‘discontented’ people in a high-on-adrenaline China of 2013, who sense that something is out of whack in their country (where, bizarrely, no one is unhappy).

They then kidnap a senior Communist Party official, and — after drugging him with truth serums — extract a confession about how the Chinese government used the widespread social unrest following the economic crisis to tighten its authoritarian grip on power, demolish all opposition — and, critically, seize control of the minds of its citizens. They learn that that endeavour — of total mind-control — was achieved when the government injected an amnesia-inducing drug into the water systems in cities, which blotted out people’s memories of the social unrest. Instead, they are floating in a psychedelic state of emotional high — of the sort that was satirised in Onion News’ package last year!

Perhaps the most damning comment in the novel comes from the kidnapped official, who argues that while it’s true that it was the drug that they party injected that induced mass amnesia, it was in fact the people’s own “willingness to forget” that was more critical! And that the party held back from intervening early during the social unrest knowing that only a catastrophic crisis would have facilitated the “popular approval” for the kind of limits on freedom that the party wanted to put in place.

The reality of China today is not quite as bleak as this allegorical narrative might suggest. As the recent trial and sentencing of democracy activists Liu Xiaobo and Tan Zuoren suggest, there is still a small but committed group of Chinese citizens who haven’t sold out to the China miracle story, and who are willing to stand up to authoritarian rule — even at great cost to their personal liberty (and, in some cases, their lives). 

Yet, as reviewers have pointed out, recent contemporaneous events — from the renewed crackdown on civil liberty defenders, the tightening of China’s Internet censorship, and its propagandist, extra-territorial projection of its anti-libertarian worldview — reflect the unflattering reality that China is on a slippery slope towards that Orwellian chamber of horrors depicted in Shengshi Zhongguo 2013.