Absurdity, Allegory and China

In a land where media services are controlled by or sub-branches of government ministries, it is not surprising to finally conclude – whether sooner or later – that news, or what passes for it, is not really news when it’s spun into the larger cloak of maintaining, at every cost, the power. News stories are planks in the platform, or, perhaps a better analogy would be posts upon which all else is built and hung. Like cloaks, as in “Hang your cloak on the post to keep it from dragging the dirty floor.”

Sometimes this even happens in lands where the media isn’t punching the same clock as the political bosses. In the US we saw this sort of spinning after 9/11, as well as during the lead-up to the most recent Middle East disaster. Rather than clearly and rationally applying scrutiny to the words of the US government and their fumbling spokespersons, many of the news people hopped into the bumbling bed, waved the battered flag, and loudly yelled, “Charge!” It happens.

This is what you get when you have a free press. The concept of a free press means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but what it always implies is that some of those free press people will be publicly as stupid as they can possibly get away with. A free press is the guarantee that not all events are interpretable from a single vantage point. This also implies that a free press can muck things up badly, as it has proven time and again and will continue to do: who can forget Richard Jewell and the 1996 Olympics? But in the end, we’re better off for the ability to raise the muck rather than to be forever drowning in it. That some undeservedly do drown is tragically unfortunate, and if it can happen to the former Mr. Jewell, it can happen to any one of us, and “bad karma” is about as rational a conclusion as we’ll ever to be able to muster to explain the arrival in our lives of such unimaginable chaos. That the press makes mistakes is part of the deal, though the other part of the same deal is that when their mistakes criminally cross the line, they can be legitimately punished. It’s not easy to develop a responsible press, but it’s better to make the attempt to have one than not. It all eventually comes down to this: if you’re going to be stuck in a small room, better that it’d be with few frenzied Chihuahuas covering their turf than a hungry bear sitting in the corner. You can bat a few dogs away, but that bear’s in a whole different league, and, like it or not, he gets to make all the rules. And, like it or not, you’re probably going to let him. When the bear’s in charge, equality in any form is never part of the relationship. You either dance the dance or you get eaten. It’s pretty simple. Simpler than it ought to be. So much simpler than it ought to be that it can only be considered, at best, as low-browed.

Which reminds me of a story. Back in 2001, in Shijiazhuang , the provincial capital of Hebei province, a couple hundred miles south of Beijing, a man named Jin Ruchao did the unthinkable. For the equivalent of barely more than a hundred bucks he was able to buy enough homemade explosives to take down four apartment blocks, killing 108 people. His reason? The best I can surmise is that Mr. Jin, deaf and unemployed, was a man who had what he considered irresolvable issues with some specific family members, one of whom was his stepmother. If there were other motives, we’ll never know since he’s no longer telling, and hasn’t been since 37 days after the bombing when he and the two unwitting others responsible for selling Mr. Jin the explosives and detonators were dispatched after a ride through town on the back of flatbed trucks (blue Dongfeng I imagine, if Shijiazhuang was anything like Tianjin was seven or eight years ago) in the best Legalist fashion that would have made Han Feizi proud.

Jin Ruchao was deemed to have acted on his own when he took out the relatives who’d worked their way to the top of his to-do list. Unfortunately, those relatives lived in very close proximity to a lot of other people, so Mr. Jin took them out too. Nothing political. Nothing religious. Just a man, his anger and 1,300 pounds of ammonium nitrate which he bought for 980 RMB. Sound familiar? The People’s Daily reported he took a cab from one explosive site to another in the predawn hours of March 16, 2001, each bomb having been strategically placed in advance as he shuttled about setting them off.

So why mention all of this when I am trying to get around to the alleged young – possibly suicidal – Uighur woman with three jars of gasoline on an airplane heading from Urumqi to Beijing? Well, it’s about the reporting, the 2001 attempt to come clean via the press, as opposed to what the monolithic response in these sorts of situations usually is. As it turns out the explosions in Shijiazhuang were on the heels of another tragedy, an explosion two weeks earlier in a fireworks plant in Jiangxi province that killed 42 people, 38 of them children between the ages of 9 and 11, who were required to participate in a “work-study program” – forced labor, by any other name. The internet was up and running and “citizen journalists” turned the official story of a deranged suicide bomber on its head, which repercussed all the way to Beijing. The prime minister at the time, Zhu Rongyi, had to take to the podium and do his best to wipe the egg off the government’s face. Caught by their own folks trying to spin a mad bomber tale.

The people, or at least some of them, were not pleased with how the fireworks story first went down, knowing it to be a lie as soon as it was spoken. But the mad bomber tale was out and once it got some tooth it developed its very own bite. Or back-bite, as it would prove to unravel. Mr. Zhu, knowing a rotting fish when he smelled it, formally apologized.

”I want to apologize and reflect on my own work,” the prime minister said in a quiet voice at a news conference on the closing day of the Chinese legislature’s annual session. He added that the State Council, or government cabinet, which he heads, bears ”unshirkable responsibility” for the explosion.

His apology was issued the day before the explosions in Shijiazhuang. Bad timing. To offer to take the heat for a bad story that the people knew from the beginning was a stinker, was, in a sense, a step forward. But when the apartments went down a few hours later, no one was about to believe the official story, even if it was indelibly true. To stamp out their backfire they came clean with what was supposed to be the real story of Jin Ruchao, the lone bomber with serious family and psychological aggravations, who had ready access to cheap, illegal explosives that were being cooked up in an empty building in a local village for sale to local quarries. Was it the story or was it just more fabrication, another lone bomber when actually it was possibly the beginnings of something else? The seeds of doubt had already sprouted. After all, the government was the one that had gotten this whole thing going. Twice in two weeks the official story was that there were bombers among us. As it turned out, there had been other bombings in Shijiazhuang, and the ones on the morning of March 16^th were just the latest. Was it some sort of plot?

My answer is an educated, “I don’t know,” though I tend to believe that the fireworks story was eventually sorted out, and that the explanation for the carnage in Shijiazhuang was probably close enough to true as to be credible. If there were more bombings in Shijiazhuang after Jin’s execution, they were probably due to explosives being the weapons of choice for settling scores, since it was infinitely easier to get explosives than it was to get a gun. (I am not advocating gun rights here, just stating the fact.)

But this is not about explosions. This is about how China mishandles the news. That the incident on the plane between Urumqi and Beijing smells like more than gasoline is to be expected, since all stories at some level have a whiff of fish to them, perhaps rotting, perhaps not. But what doubt in the news has created is a society of rumors, where unreported stories get wildly embellished and twisted as they pass from one mouth to another, gaining some form of odd substantiation despite how wild they become.

I have more examples than I have time to get into here, though two are worth mentioning. Though I am unclear on the exact dates when these two were running wildly free, the first was, I believe, spring 1999, long before the SARS scare; the other in late 2002/early 2003, in the month prior to Spring Festival.

The first had to do with bubonic plague. Word got rolling that a kid or two at a local middle school had died from the plague, after having eaten from one of the street food sellers outside that particular school. People talked about it, but nothing was ever reported in the news. Eventually I heard from a person I knew who had a child at that school that there had been a ‘memo’ sent home with all the children that warned the parents of the evils of buying food from unauthorized street vendors. This was happening as China was making its bid to enter the WTO. Another rumor circulating at the same time was that someone from an international funding agency had visited Tianjin and assessed that the roads were too jammed with bicycles and people selling everything from vegetables to family antiques to be seriously considered as a target of development monies, and that if they wanted to get the goods they had to do something about the unfathomable congestion. And this began the street sweeping campaign to get Tianjin up to some level of international credibility, as the mobile entrepreneurs disappeared.

The next one was an equally alarming health rumor: there were disgruntled AIDS victims from Henan province who were turning up along the Binjjiang Dao downtown walking mall in the evenings, poking the innocent with infected needles. This too was reported to have been the topic of a memo that went home with students from schools, though there was no mention of anything on the news. I was not able to come up with a reason for getting this one going, but I found it curious that, again, the avenue of ‘reporting’ was a memo from the schools. This was just prior to the SARS outbreak, and though I could stretch things here, I will not. Curiously, both instances were rumors of diseases, the great invisible, the viral fear.

The tainted needles story is a well-documented urban legend that sports a variety of distinctive twists to adapt to particular sets and settings. The bubonic plague as a prelude to clearing the streets is one I am not familiar with, though it turned out to be an effective ploy, if, in fact, the funding rumors were true. Today Tianjin’s streets are wider, the majority of bikes have disappeared, and the city has gone from one crowded with bicycles to one jammed up with cars. Progress.

The Uighur-in-the-plane is one that will continue to play out in all its inglorious fog. There will be no ‘coming clean’ on it, since it feels a lot more like the ramped up version of the plague. One has to look beyond today and see what will happen over the next week, the next month, or next several months to begin to put this in a perspective that specifically links to other events or a particular plan. Fear may be as close as we’re ever able to get on this, and this is because there is a failure to understand the necessity of a politically disinterested press. Although there may not really be such an animal, it’s one that we should do our best to imagine into existence.

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