Kneeling is not a crime by Bu Din: winner of Human Rights in China's photo contest
By highlighting cultural reform at the end of its annual plenum last week, China’s ruling Communist Party both drew attention to the country’s moral crisis and demonstrated its own ideological bankruptcy. Citizens were shocked and shamed by the recent incident in which two-year old Yueyue was killed and then ignored by a stream of passers-by.
In a characteristic authoritarian reflex, the party announced that it would limit entertainment-based TV programs, while imposing new restrictions on microblogs and other social media. As The New York Times reports in a must-read magazine piece on the-dangerous politics of internet humor in China:
No government in the world pours more resources into patrolling the Web than China’s, tracking down unwanted content and supposed miscreants among the online population of 500 million with an army of more than 50,000 censors and vast networks of advanced filtering software. Yet despite these restrictions — or precisely because of them — the Internet is flourishing as the wittiest space in China.
The Communist authorities have been rattled by an extraordinary on-line campaign which has marshaled ingenuity and humor to mobilize support for the blind barefoot lawyer Chen Guangcheng.*
“Censorship warps us in many ways, but it is also the mother of creativity,” says Hu Yong, associate professor at Peking University. “It forces people to invent indirect ways to get their meaning across, and humor works as a natural form of encryption.”
“Beyond its comic value, this humor shows where netizens are pushing against the boundaries of the state,” Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley, tells the Times. “Nothing else gives us a clearer view of the pressure points in Chinese society.”
Xiao’s Web site, China Digital Times, the Times notes publishes “an entertaining lexicon of coded Internet terms.”
Further evidence that the Communist party is in ideological limbo and eager for some form of moral legitimacy lies, one observer suggest, in Beijing’s growing support for religion:
After decades of destruction, Daoist temples are being rebuilt, often with government support. Shortly after the plenum ended, authorities were convening an International Daoism Forum. The meeting was held near Mt. Heng in Hunan Province, one of Daoism’s five holy mountains, and was attended by 500 participants. It received extensive play in the Chinese media, with a noted British Daoist scholar, Martin Palmer, getting airtime on Chinese television. This is a sharp change for a religion that that was persecuted under Mao and long regarded as suspect. What, exactly, is gong on here?
*The US-based Congressional-Executive Commission on China are hosting an “Examination into the Abuse and Extralegal Detention of Legal Advocate Chen Guangcheng and His Family” on Tuesday, November 1, 2011. 2:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. 2118 Rayburn House Office Building, Capitol Hill, Washington, DC. Witnesses include: Jerome A. Cohen, Professor, New York University School of Law; Co-director, U.S.-Asia Law Institute; and Adjunct Senior Fellow for Asia Studies, Council on Foreign Relations; Sharon Hom, Executive Director of Human Rights in China (HRIC); Professor of Law Emerita, City University of New York School of Law; and Chai Ling, Founder, All Girls Allowed.
China Digital Times and Human Rights in China are supported by the National Endowment for Democracy.
China Digital Times and Human Rights in China are supported by the National Endowment for Democracy.
