Musings

Our novel Rabbit in the Moon deals with the Democracy Movement of 1989 when students and ordinary citizens rose up to demand reform. Sadly, that ended in a massacre at Tiananmen Square. Nineteen years later, while there has been much change including a certain economic freedom, the Chinese government is still cracking down on freedom of the press. Below is an online report from CaféSentido.com, a digital imprint of Casavaria Publishing.

16 December 2008:: J.E. Robertson

The Communist party government of China has resumed blocking some websites it had unblocked as a gesture of good will, after foreign reporters complained during the Olympics that certain foreign information sources were not available to them. The BBC and Reporters without Borders (RSF) report their sites being blocked, and the Chinese government says sites that contain information sympathetic to Tibetan or Taiwanese independence movements cannot be allowed to be read in China.

President Hu Jintao has, it seems, resumed his “smokeless war” on press freedom, which he announced soon after being named to his office. The campaign of censorship began with the arrest of “dissident” reporters critical of the Chinese state, the mass shutting down of Internet cafés, usually on the grounds of fire or building codes and public safety, and demanding the collaboration of foreign media giants in “filtering” undesirable terms from web searches, like “Tiananmen Square massacre”, “student uprising” and “free Tibet”.

RSF today condemned the Chinese government’s renewed constraints on media freedoms in a press release:

Reporters Without Borders condemns the Chinese government’s censorship of the websites of certain foreign news media such as Voice of America and the BBC and certain Chinese media based outside mainland China, which have been rendered inaccessible inside China since the start of December.

“Freedom of information is widely violated in China,” Reporters Without Borders said. “Right now, the authorities are gradually rolling back all the progress made in the run-up to this summer’s Olympic games, when even foreign websites in Mandarin were made accessible. The pretence of liberalisation is now over. The blocking of access to the websites of foreign news media speaks volumes about the government’s intolerance. We urge the authorities to unblock them again.”

Among the reasons suspected for the sudden retrenchment of Hu’s efforts to gain total control of Chinese media are events or potential commemorations that could cause unrest in China in 2009. June 2009 will mark the 20th anniversary of the student uprising that ended with the Tiananmen Square massacre, an event the Chinese government still openly aims to erase from Chinese historical consciousness. 2009 will also mark the 50th anniversary of China’s seizing control of all of territorial Tibet. The government may fear that both could lead to civil unrest.

But there is also the issue of China’s economic situation. Long the leading light in east Asia’s booming economies, China is now suffering as its main manunfacturing sales markets overseas, the United States and the European Union, suffering deepending economic and credit troubles, undermining business funding, credit for industrial production, and demand for retail conumser goods. There is a rising rate of unemployment and some fear regional ethnic strife and anti-government movements could be inflamed by economic hardship, especially if the impression spreads that the regime is dealing ineffectively with the problems facing the nation.

We recently found among our old slides, several pictures of women with bound feet. The one above is not ours, but shows the actual deformity. The picture below and the ones Joel took himself reminded us of how we came to write our story about a Chinese doctor’s discovery of the secret of long life:  

Foot binding, the rendering of young girls immobile by deliberately maiming them, had been part of the Chinese culture since the eighth century. Some time before the age of five, young girls had the heel and toes of each foot pulled together and bound tightly with cloth, until the toes were turned under. Bones that resisted were broken with a wooden mallet, the resultant pain continued for years until the feet became numb. Such torture produced a teetering, swaying gait regarded as a mark of sexual appeal and endured because a girl’s marriage potential and desirability were determined by the size of her feet, not by the beauty of her face. Unable to move, a helpless woman with so-called “golden lilies” would serve her husband and master in any way he desired. Often young girls died from the infection that developed. Even if they survived, the smell from a continuously festering foot would have been terrible.

This barbaric tradition was finally banned in 1911 so you can imagine Joel and my surprise when we saw several dozen women outside a building our guide said was a Longevity Institute in Xi’an in 1985. We would have expected only a few such women to be alive with this deformity and certainly not congregated in one place. That “sighting” became part of the impetus for our story. Wouldn’t it be interesting, we thought, if the Chinese were secretly working on aging research here and in fact had, discovered some way to extend the normal life expectancy, all the while keeping it secret?  And that’s what we wrote: in our story, Dr. Ni-Fu Cheng has his “subjects’ inside the Longevity Facility, a separate wing of the Xi’an Institute.