The following is not a verbatim account of a conversation with a single person; it never occurred as such. It is a fabrication of several conversations with several people, and some inventiveness to boot. It is nonetheless true.
A student staring at a picture on the wall of a small modern art gallery: “It is strange that the artist uses the date 1989 in his title. Why do you think that he is doing that? Probably it is an allusion to the Tiananmen Square massacre, what the Party calls the ‘incident.’”
“What do you think it was then?”
“Oh, it was a massacre, all right. Most of the students were gone by the time the army moved in, but people were killed when the tanks rolled over the barricades in the street, and there were some random shootings.”
“Well, do you get in trouble when you refer to it as a ‘massacre’?”
“Not really; only if you say it to the wrong people, someone who is in the Party who cares about it. But there is so much censorship, and everybody is watching and listening to what you’re saying, so you do have to be somewhat careful.”
“So who’s doing the censoring?”
“Party members.”
“But if that’s so, how do you know who those people are? Do Party people look different from others?”
“Oh no, they don’t look any different, but everyone is pretty open about their membership. You know who’s a member and who’s not.”
“Oh, so, you know who to be on guard around; basically all Communist Party members, right?”
“Well, not really. I’m a Party member.”
“Oh.” Double take. “You’re a Party member? So why are you saying that it was a massacre and why are you complaining about the level of censorship, then?”
“Oh, everyone in the Party does. No one really agrees with it, and while we don’t know the whole truth about Tiananmen Square, and we probably never will, we all assume it was a massacre, and not just an ‘incident.’”
“Oh….Hmmm… But you don’t support censorship, and you say others don’t believe in it, and you yourself aren’t doing it. So how is it that it is still occurring?”
“Well, it is primarily being done by people who sit for the Civil Service exams. All of us students know that it is, as you say in America, bullshit, and most of us join the Party just because it is a good decision to help us get ahead – in applying for jobs, and so forth – but we don’t believe in it. It is only a select few who take it seriously and join up to do the kind of work that entails censoring others. And those people you can tell are into it, and they end up sitting for the Civil Service exam.”
“So there is something like a hard core in the Communist Party, who are true believers, that you have to worry about?”
“Well, yes, except that there are many of students who are now taking these exams – I am taking them tomorrow, in fact – and we don’t believe in censorship, and I, for one, don’t know what I will do if I have to do that for a living. But it’s a job, and there aren’t many around at the moment.”
“Hmmm! So you are telling me that really even the hard-core members don’t really believe in this very much. So how important is this censorship?”
“Well it occurs everywhere, but it isn’t that important anymore. Our Facebook, which we call Renren has safeguards and censorship written into, so if you write something that seems at all inappropriate or threatening, to the system, for whatever reason, you get a message saying that what you wrote was inappropriate and that it has been deleted. It happens all the time.”
“But doesn’t that scare you? I mean, don’t you think that they are coming to arrest you when that happens and that you will be in trouble?”
“No, it happens all the time, and no one gets arrested – some of my friends have hundreds of these deletion comments – and nothing happens to them. The comments get triggered by key words or phrases, so it doesn’t matter that much. Sometimes someone from the party will ask you about someone else and what they might be doing, but you just say that you don’t know, and they leave you alone.”
“So if no one really cares about it, and they don’t do anything about it then why do they bother?”
“It’s like an insurance policy. They won’t pick you up for doing it; they will pick you up for something else and use the fact that you have done this as the pretext for picking you up. So as long as what you say doesn’t have a big impact you should be ok; but if you had a following then they would send someone around to invite you for a cup of tea, and then you would know that you are in their sights, and you had better behave.”
“Oh, so it’s like in America – no one drives the speed limit – everyone breaks those rules. Do they want you to drive the speed limit and conform? Of course they don’t. If they did then they wouldn’t be able to pull over the ones that they really want to pull over for some other reason – because they are driving while being black, or because the police think they may have drugs on them – which may be the same thing. So censorship is like that?”
“Yes, it’s like with those arrests occurring now regularly in the countryside. You have someone who is organizing people to protest the horrendous conditions that exist in the countryside. The authorities come along and they concede to all the demands of the peasants for improvements, just to stop the protests. Then they wait a couple of months and they come back and arrest the leader. This tells the people that it is ok to be led in a protest – but leading others in one is not ok and you will be imprisoned. So the authorities end up looking good by responding, and they send a nice little threat along with the eradication of the protest leadership. It is quite effective, actually.”
“But can it withstand the kind of protest, that might come about if there was a major downturn in the economy?”
“No, then things may get very ugly, and then they do have the lists of who has been doing things on their social networking accounts, or wherever, to draw on. That may not be so pretty, and that is why they want to keep Twitter and Facebook out of China, so that they can control these social interactions more minutely. But you also have to recognize that there is a second reason for all this censorship, and that is basically that it simply has to continue because it has been going on so long. It is bureaucratically enshrined – and nothing created by a bureaucracy goes away without a fight – why? – You should know the answer to that. It is because people’s livelihoods depend on it and they don’t want to give up these things. There are people who are employed snooping into others’ lives; if you got rid of censorship altogether you would be laying off thousands of people, people, who one might add, have been trained to do precious little besides snooping on other people – this is their expertise, this is how they have been paid – and they are paid fairly handsomely – and if you took these jobs away, that in itself would lead to considerable unrest.”
“That’s a little scary, that something that no one really cares about actually continue because either some people in the future may care about it (and use it to round people up), or it gives people who don’t care about it jobs. Where is the communism in this?”
“Oh that left a long time ago, and the closest thing you’ll find that resembles that is in Taiwan with the Nationalists. But, you know what? I have to get up early for my civil service exams. If you don’t mind, could we talk about this at some other time? Thanks.”
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