No Enemies, No Hatred by Liu Xiaobo & Link E. Perry & Martin-Liao Tienchi

Author:Liu, Xiaobo & Link, E. Perry & Martin-Liao, Tienchi [Liu, Xiaobo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2012-01-16T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

China has transitioned from politics-are-everything in the Mao era to money-is-everything in the post-Mao years. A totalitarian society dominated by politics has turned into a post-totalitarian society where the economy is king and “stability” is the government’s top priority. But a commonality—amorality—has underlain the two periods and has been there all along. The extreme political hypocrisy of the Mao years has blossomed, in post-Mao times, into a bouquet of hypocrisies in the several spheres of public life: officials are cynical about their governing duties, businesses are cynical about product quality, and scholars are cynical about academic standards. The whole society seems to have tossed integrity aside, as fakes and counterfeits sweep the nation. In this sea of counterfeits, the mightiest of them all—counterfeit democracy—is precisely the area that the current regime is most loath to let anyone talk about. In short, the inhumanity of the Mao era, which left China in moral shambles, is the most important cause of the widespread and oft-noted “values vacuum” that we observe today.

In this situation, sexual indulgence becomes a handy partner for a dictatorship that is trying to stay on top of a society of rising prosperity. Chinese people were so repressed during the Mao era, sexually and otherwise, that when ideas about freedom trickled in from the outside, many of them had great appeal. But while ideas about political freedom—speech, assembly, elections, and so on—could have led to a liberation in the Chinese people of humanity’s best qualities, and could have brought dignity to individuals, the idea of sexual freedom did not support political democracy so much as it harked back to traditions of sexual abandon in China’s imperial times. It siphoned interest in freedom toward thoughts of concubinage, elegant prostitution, and the bedroom arts as they are celebrated in premodern pornography. This has been just fine with today’s dictators. It fits with the moral rot and political gangsterism that years of hypocrisy have generated, and it diverts the thirst for freedom into a politically innocuous direction.

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