Discover Top Posts Tagged with #tiny dissident me

On what I can do for the liberation of China

I realize this is a very complicated problem and this is only my probably very naive opinion.

I think the most important thing is to enlighten the people and unmask the current regime: make people realize that the government is lying, that the current regime is oppressive. Only so will the people unite when an opportunity for revolution presents itself. China is now one of the absurd places where some people (not only the government) use “public intellectuals”, “democracy activists” and “human rights lawyers” as derogatory terms. This is the core of the problem. The reason the Tiananmen Square Massacre happened was that the military was still loyal to the regime. If only they refused to obey or even supported the revolution! Many revolutions in history have succeeded this way.

So I think what I should do is to explain to everyone around me the oppressive nature of the current regime: family, relatives, classmates, teachers…and moreover to urge them to do the same, and ask them to tell others to do the same. It is not enough for the people to understand; they must care.

It is for this reason that I do not wish to live abroad in the future. I can, technically; I have the citizenship of a western country. And I want to: I want to be a historian and US universities have a much better academic environment while Chinese universities are very bureaucratic. However I think I can make a bigger difference if I remain in China.

#tiananmen square massacre #tiny dissident me

Confession: I cried when listening to La Marseillaise yesterday. I cried so hard.

Sometimes I think my new found passion for the French Revolution is a kind of escapism, because I could read about the people who fought and died for freedom; I could read their stories and sympathise with them; I could imagine what I would have done in that situation. I could ask myself if I would’ve stood by my conscience like them, or if I would have had the courage to die for the freedom of my patrie on the battlefield.

And I call it escapism, because I feel so helpless in face of the current political situation in my country. The internet censorship, the lack of political freedom is more like an inside joke that everybody knows about than a thing people want to change. We post about the French Revolution(because there are frev fans here too)—the website tells us it contains “sensitive words”—we wonder if it’s “revolution” or “democracy” or “constitution” or what—we try to outwit the censorship with some common techniques(deliberately using the wrong character with the same pronounciation/using English/inserting blanks or irrelevant characters in the middle of the word/using screenshot). And that’s it. There are people who try to change things, but you’ll almost never hear of them (because of you-know-why), and no one I have met personally has expressed the idea.

“There is something more contemptible still than a tyrant, and that is a slave!” ——Maximilien Robespierre, 11 Pluviôse year II (January 30th 1794)

I read about the women’s march in Washington. I would love to join. I read about the Dakota pipeline protest. I would love to join. I read about the Romanian protest. I would love to join. And I’m going to study in the US in a year, and there definitely will be oppotunities for me to join protests, for me to make a difference. And I will join them. But it’s still different for me, because it’s not MY country. But what should I do here, where, while people do care about social justice, no one seriously considers changing the entire political system? What should I do here, where serious criticisms of the government on social media will very soon be taken down? (though they do allow certain criticisms, “the very humble criticism such as the monarchy occasionally allowed”) What should I do here, where my mother was taken to the police station and almost lost her job for attending church service in a non-state-controlled church? What should I do here, where I know nobody but myself who seems to care? Who’s there to join me in the protests, marches and demonstrations?

I almost wish I were born 20 years earlier, so that I could have joined the demonstration demanding political freedom in 1989, even if it achieved nothing. But trying and failing is still better than not even having anything to try at.

There must be something I can do, because there’s always something I can do, of this I’m certain. I just have to think it up.

We talk of how the “so-called revolution for political freedom” ruined Syria. We talk about how the “so-called democracy” makes choices such as Brexit and Trump. We talk about how much our economy has developed because of course money is more important than political freedom. We talk about how good our party is because of course a good king is even better than a republic where different political parties can actually compete. And there are many, many people who genuinely believe these things.

We celebrate our revolutionary past, while having nothing whatsoever revolutionary about us. What we are celebrating is at most nationalism. People on tumblr say they live in a Thermidorian age. I feel we are more like living in a Napoleon age, when La Marseillaise is banned. It’s suffocating.

But who am I kidding, feigning this bravado, when I know I am too selfish, too cowardly to make sacrafices such as the revolutionaries did.

And I’m loathe to post this, because as much as I dislike narrow nationalism, I cannot really separate myself from national pride.(who can?) I wish people here would attack the politics more, yet I feel uncomfortable seeing people from other countries doing it.

Anyway. I’m crying again.

Oh, and I talked about this with my parents. My mom: “So you want to start a revolution here?!”(the tone clearly means “are you out of your mind”) My dad is totally the “look at what seeking democracy brought to Syria” sentiment. Because of course, “look at how France turned into a mess and got so many people killed because they wanted freedom, everybody please just wisely live under your monarchy”. I mean, I TOTALLY, TOTALLY don’t want to start a war, and of course we should try to do things peacefully, but it just irks me how everybody’s all like “fighting for freedom might have bad consequences, so we’d better live in a safe and non-free world”.

#personal #french revolution #tiny dissident me

GOOD QUESTION

#tiny dissident me

So I’ve realized a thing: middle and high school history education in China uses the Marxist framework, because after all, we are at least supposedly a communist country.* e.g. The English Civil War, the American and French revolutions, the Chinese revolution of 1911 are “bourgeois”, while the Russian Revolution and Chinese Revolution 1927~1949 are “proletarian”. Therefore, every high school graduate knows that according to Marxist theory, society is supposed to go from primitive communist to slave-owning to feudal to capitalist to socialist and ultimately communist, that the sourse of progress is ultimately economic and rooted in the development of productive forces, and that history is created by the “people”. It just occured to me that this is probably a thing unique to China. So I’m curious: does high school history education in other countries involve anything about historiography? If so, what is it like? If no, what do you think is the idea of an average high school graduate about the development of history?

*The deal with the Chinese Communist Party is that, they still retain the “dictatorship” part of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, while having largely abandoned the egalitarian ideals that inspired communism in the first place.

#tiny dissident me

Look! Look! We’ve got “democracy”! This is our National People’s Congress! The leader speaks and everyone applauds! What fine parliamentary democracy!

#chinese national people's congress #tiny dissident me

There is at least one good thing about internet censorship though: those whose country doesn’t have internet censorship will never understand the pleasure of managing to bypass the great Fire Wall (it’s actually quite easy, all you need is a vpn) and visiting the forbidden websites: twitter, youtube, tumblr…It’s like enjoying the forbidden fruit. Especially pleasant is reading/watching things the government will absolutely forbid (e.g. the Tiananmen Square Massacre).

#tiny dissident me