China in Ten Words (22 page)

From this we can see that the copycat phenomenon has a certain positive significance in China today. Seen in this way, it represents a challenge of the grassroots to the elite, of the popular to the official, of the weak to the strong.

More than twenty years have passed 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 accumulate over time and find only limited channels of release, transmuted 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, passing from one person to the next a simple handmade torch. Every villager was qualified to participate; 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 sex industry. Last year I read on the Internet a jaw-dropping feature about a highly successful sex 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-class 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 sex 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 sexual 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 sex-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 sexual services) and a “youth-league branch” (unseasoned new recruits), with the understanding that once the youth-league members gained more experience and positive endorsements 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 assets” and “address deficits,” so that the quality of their services could scale even greater heights.

This real-life-sex-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 fashion 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 circumspect 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 gushing 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 Nobel 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.

I
f 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 passion. Everywhere they rose up against those in positions of authority. Traditional Communist Party committees and state organizations totally collapsed, and copycat leadership 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 assail 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 participating in one mass 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 passion for revolution with a passion 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 assailed 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 associated with revolution, or like Bai Juyi’s lines about the grassland: “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 competition of the marketplace.