Running this morning I got a second wind listening to the
Byrds “Why?” I’d only discovered it in a
few years back. The lyrics are a stern
reminder to a father of two girls: “Keep saying no to her, since she was a
baby. Keep saying no to her. Not even maybe. Why?”
I always go through the silly mental checklist in my mind. “Well, I, at least did not always say “no.” I say “maybe.” Probably too often.
Roger McGuinn maintains that for the lead in that song,
(rather than say, for “Eight Miles High”) he consciously set out to improvise
in the form of Indian raga modality. The
solo lasts for a full minute, which was inconceivable for a pop song, at that
time. Beautiful. And it helped to get me around the next
corner, there at 6:45 AM, till some other tune picked up the baton and pushed
anew.
Later, when I drove my daughter to school she pointed to the
eerily obscured orb aflame up in the sky.
“Hey baba, is that he sun or the moon?”
Everything was murk. Her question
seemed appropriate from within the dirty aquarium, where so much is
obscured.
Modern Chinese history is certainly obscured with a lot of
resilient pollutants. Why? Why does my generation and the ones that
follow, composed of ever more wealthy and well-educated minds, why do they tolerate
so much systematic obfuscation? They
don’t care, primarily because their gaze is fixed on the future, which seems
more interesting and rewarding than the messy and undignified recent past. Up ahead, a happy ending can always be found.
Americans, of course, do the same. But the recent pass looms like something to
run from here in a way that is quite different.
People have considered some extent, the victims of that chaos, but little to no
reckoning seems to happen among the perpetrators.
I recently read a very interesting article that brought to
mind one of the key themes in “Seven Deadly Starbucks.” (7DS). How does apology and forgiveness play out in
the Chinese world, as opposed to those of the Abrahamic tradition? In Argentina
and Chile the “disappeared” earned the moniker after being rounded up and
thrown, from helicopters into the sea or in some other horrible fashion
exterminated by one or the other junta.
The parents, and the relatives of these disappeared refused to
forget. The Argentine “Mothers of the Plaza de
Mayo” pressed the matter publicly, against all odds, until some reckoning
occurred. And it was not simply the
victims. Perpetrators like retired navy
officer Lieutenant Commander Adolfo Francisco Scilingo who only pushed thirty people out helicopters, personally, could not
live with the weight of what he’d done and made a daring, public confession
about Argentina’s “Dirty War”, which catalyzed a reckoning.
In China a more thoroughgoing descent into chaos was
certainly, the Cultural Revolution.
Beyond the estimated half a million deaths (some 10,000 people are
thought of have disappeared in Argentina’s Dirty War) that resulted there was a
culture of violence and intimidation that impacted all urban Chinese and much
of the countryside.
And it was always amazing to me in the early 90s when I was
first here in China that people rode the busses and worked shoulder to shoulder
and in every way got on with it, with the same people who once tortured,
humiliated or abused them. There was of
course, no popular reckoning and everyone just endured, and got on with
life. This seems, at turns, stoic and
realistic and at the same time pathetic and insane. How could so many crimes remain
unpunished? How could people simply
endure the role as victim or perpetrator to something 惨不忍闻[1]？
The mechanism of confession and forgiveness is, for better
or worse, fundamental touchstone in Western civilization. It is hard to look at any conflict resolution
without considering this basic interplay.
They are not however, central to traditional Chinese civilization. And this goes a long way I think, to
explaining not only the unresolved legacy of the Cultural Revolution but of the
lasting impasse between China, The Koreas and Japan, who similarly as moderns,
understand the concept of confession and forgiveness, but as inheritors of the
Chinese civilizational tradition, are not inclined admit culpability when they
don’t have to, but rather maintain face.
Westerners like John Bohner are, of course, just as concerned
about face, and struggle sessions
during the Cultural Revolution (albeit leveraging a foreign ideology) were all
about extracting public confessions, and for the promise of atonement. There are no pure civilizations. We’re all out here swimming in a postmodern, inter-civilizational soup.
In Argentina it was not simply the persistence of the
mothers of the disappeared, to remember publicly and therefore not forgive,
but something unquenchably human occurred in the mind of officer Francisco
Siling, who couldn’t bear the weight of what he’d done, silently. He needed to confess. And the nation needed to reckon. And Argentina became stronger and more stable
because of it. And China? We shrug.
It simply doesn’t work that way.
And so it was with great fascination that I came across this
recent article by Zhao Jie in “News China” entitled “Too Little? Too Late?”
http://www.newschinamag.com/magazine/too-little-too-late As teenage Red Guards become fifty and sixty year old men
and women there appears to be a trend suddenly of needing to reckon,
publicly, for the violence of their youth.
The person who bears the greatest responsibility is, of
course, still venerated and the implications for decisions he made extend well
beyond simply the Cultural Revolution.
And it strikes me that this is not dissimilar to what happened at the
end of World War II in Japan. When
Emperor Hirohito was pardoned, Japanese citizens could reckon that “well, if he
is not guilty, than certainly I am
not guilty.” Everyone was let off the
hook, in way that did and does smell disingenuous to neighbors and former
victims. Similarly, if the Great
Helmsman himself was not guilty for Wen
Ge, how could I, an individual contributor, possibly be?”
What the dialogue raised by Chen Xiaoyu, (Marshall Chen Yi’s
son) and others suggests is that, individuals as individuals feel the pressure
to address these matters before they pass.
And while his reckoning, may be criticized as typical of “admission
of passive complicity coupled with a denial of active involvement” there is
something hopeful and human about the steps taken. And it may be that once the genie is out of
the bottle people will necessarily demand more of themselves and others.
To this end, I would like to quote at length
from the article, because the articulation by Mr. Liu Boqin and the analysis
offered by professor Zhu Dake at the end, are critical not only to China’s
stable emergence but to stability and reconciliation in North Asia, as a whole,
as well:
“The
sudden flurry of public apologies began with Liu Boqin, who paid to print an
advertisement in the June edition of the history journal Yanhuang Chunqiu
apologizing to the people he had hurt during the Cultural Revolution. Aged 14
at the height of the violence in the summer of 1966, Liu, now 61 and a retired
official in Jinan, Shandong Province, was a Red Guard at middle school.
In
his apology, Liu said he was a “young, ignorant and bad-tempered teenager” who
was encouraged by others to participate in denouncing, humiliating and
attacking his teachers, classmates and neighbors and their families. He listed
all the names of people he remembered having hurt, Liu wrote “Upon reflection
in my old age, I feel really regretful for my misdeeds. Even though what I did
was done in the name of the Revolution, my personal wrongdoings cannot be
forgiven, and my personal responsibility cannot be ignored. So I sincerely
apologize to those I hurt.”
In
response to Liu’s confession, Zhu Dake, a professor at Tongji University in
Shanghai, commented: “In a nation without a tradition of confession, this
apology can be viewed as rare evidence of the awakening of humanity.”
May that “lost” generation, increasingly find their
voice. Certainly the nation and the
region, that disregarded you, as uneducated chaff, during the gallop to
modernity, urgently needs to hear from you, one more time, before your final
departure.
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