Xu Zhiyuan - Paper Tiger: Inside the Real China

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This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PENs PEN Translates programme, supported by Arts Council England. English PEN exists to promote literature and our understanding of it, to uphold writers freedoms around the world, to campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and to promote the friendly cooperation of writers and the free exchange of ideas. www.englishpen.org

It was hard to write this preface, much harder than I expected.

This book is made up of a few dozen short essays. Some essays describe my travels throughout China and Asia, some are commentary on current events and some are descriptions of public figures. Most of the essays were written between 2007 and 2013, when the China model was extremely popular. In this book, I hope to show that behind the faade the China model is absurd, unjust and unsustainable.

In general I would call myself a liberal. I believe that if a government is not based on personal freedom, it is contemptible. Everything Beijing does is suspect and full of chicanery, no matter how much wealth or power it brings, no matter how much wonder it gives the average person. I have never believed in the concept of the China model. The economic miracle in China is the result of the hard work of the Chinese people and not the leadership in Beijing.

Most of these essays were originally published for Chinese media outlets based outside of Mainland China, specifically for Yazhou Zhoukan in Hong Kong and the Chinese edition of the Financial Times in London. Still, I have never considered myself to be a dissident writer.

I am afraid of being pigeonholed and having to make a definitive judgment on China when there are so many grey areas. Chinas story is a strange and complicated one. There are countless examples of political stagnation, violations of human rights, and the suppression of individual voices. But at the same time, I have seen economic and technological reforms that not only turned China into a modern nation but also made its society more open and diverse. People care more about protecting individual rights and young people are much more open-minded. All in all, I am very optimistic about Chinas future. The sclerotic political system and the strength of the steadily progressing society are in fierce competition, but I think the latter will ultimately be victorious.

In the past two years, however, my optimistic outlook has been tried and tested. I never expected to see my country to go backwards like this. Not only have the rulers of China launched an unprecedented crackdown on their own citizens, they are trying to revive Communist ideology even though it has been proven to be completely ineffective. As political commentator Timothy Garton Ash puts it, Xi Jinping is trying to steer a complex economy and society through difficult times by top-down changes, led and controlled by a purged, disciplined and reinvigorated Leninist party.

I have known too many friends who have been put behind bars. Some of them have made only the mildest of criticisms of the regime and yet their works have been banned. That means I am not able to publish books in Mainland China for the time being.

But that is not the whole story. As a miasma of oppression, fear and silence continues to spread, society has been engulfed by a wave of entrepreneurship and consumerism. Huge companies dominate the market and swarms of young people are leaving home to start their own businesses. Chinese consumers are flocking to cities around the world to see their sights and to shop. China appears to be a land full of opportunity.

My own life is filled with these contradictions. I am a writer who is unable to publish in my own country, and yet my friends and I have successfully raised venture capital to start our own social media company. It seems that I have been oppressed and given a rare opportunity at the same time. I doubt that the intellectuals based in Warsaw, Prague and East Berlin during the era of Soviet domination, who were never given a chance freely to express themselves, would ever have dreamed that such an opportunity could exist in a one-party state. My counterparts in present-day Yangon, would, I suspect, be similarly surprised.

My publisher and I chose the subtitle Inside the real China to emphasize the fact that, unlike outside observers, I come from China, and my commentary is (perhaps) more authoritative. But I suspect that there are disadvantages to this as well. An insider is like a fish in a fishbowl, unable to see the exact shape of its surroundings even though those surroundings are perfectly clear to everyone else. Ultimately we are all like blind men feeling an elephant; we cannot fully understand the way China is changing.

I cannot provide a clear-cut prediction on Chinas future. But my instinct says that Chinas party-state power is stronger than I imagine. Moreover, a majority of Chinese people believe in and rely on this power. No intellectual, no entrepreneur, no human rights activist, no dissatisfied worker or farmer can pose a serious challenge to this party-state power. As a result, the current China model will continue for a long time.

I wish I had more courage and optimism in terms of the ability of the people to overcome this totalitarian regime. Unfortunately I cannot hide my hesitancy, my evasiveness, or my confusion. Compared to my friends who are writers and lawyers and have been forced to leave the country or are detained for their views, I am embarrassed to think of how ambivalent my views are.

20 October 2007

The people flooding the stock market in China today are not white-collar workers from the city or financial experts. Everybody buys stock university students, farmers, vendors, even the old lady down the road. Ordinary people have no confidence in society, so they rest all their hopes on the security that a huge amount of money can bring.

She carried Elliott Wave Principle: The Key to Stock Market Profits and a biography of Warren Buffett in her book bag. She was searching the shelves of a bookstore trying to find a textbook on probabilities. I understand what my friend was doing. At school, she always said that maths gave her a headache. She had studied some accounting but still couldnt get the hang of a profit and loss sheet. When it came to the Chinese economy and the corporate world, not only did she lack a complete understanding, most of her ideas were wrong.

Everyone at the table was talking about stock, she said, recounting her experience of a reunion with some friends, trying and not succeeding to hold back her excitement. It seemed like everyone was making a ridiculous amount of money. She had heard a number of stories of the fortunes made from investment, all of which ran along similar lines. A young graduate who was earning only 4,000 yuan (260) a month decided to take the 200,000 yuan (13,000) that his family had given him to buy a house and invest it in stock. In a couple of months he had earned 700,000 yuan (46,000). After hearing so many stories like this, she wanted to set up a trading account. In the past few months, between 20,000 and 30,000 new stock trading accounts had opened every day. She still regretted having joined the game later than everyone else. The people flooding the stock market in China today are not white-collar workers from the city or financial experts. Everybody buys stock university students, farmers, vendors, even the old lady down the road. Everyones business seems to be booming all over China, and people mortgage their cars and homes or take out a loan to buy stock. On average, the market is still surging, but many people dont even understand what P/E (price-earnings ratio) means.