Having lost the ability to speak the truth, we will tell many lies. What’s even more frightening is that in addition to lies we have invented a new kind of speech: ghost-talk. Lies are just meant to deceive others: our village produces 20,000 jin per acre. But ghost-talk is meant to hurt, to consume: all our country’s villages must produce 20,000 jin per acre. Anyone who doesn’t comply will be killed, no matter what their rank. When speaking the truth will cost you your life, no one is willing to speak the truth. When telling a lie was rewarded with promotions and wealth, this country became the Kingdom of Lies. This process continues uninterrupted to this very day, and it hasn’t yet reached completion. For example, our railways are the fastest in the world, then accidents happen, or “the Chinese people’s restoration is 62% complete,” and then we discover more than 62% of officials are corrupt….to give you another example, if you want to speak a little truth, there will be a group of people who come out of the woodwork and say, “What makes you qualified to say that so many people died during the Great Famine? Did someone in your family die? Did you see Lin Shao tortured with your own eyes? Were you there at that very moment? If you weren’t there, stop spreading rumors.” They seem to not believe that there is a such thing as records in this world, or documentaries, or people who have testified to these events. According to their logic, Jews could not have died in gas chambers at the hands of Nazis, because you didn’t see it with your own eyes. They can’t even prove they are their parents’ children, because they didn’t see it with their own eyes.

Li has written frequently about the concept of lies and truth-telling in China, notably in relation to natural and manmade disasters such as the collapse of a bridge in Harbin:

…The greatest truth in this place is that we know they are lying, and they know that we know they are lying, and we also know that they actually know that we know that they are lying…so we don’t care about the truth anymore, we just care about the way they put on their show of “truth,” and only the complete compilation of all of these performances is enough to count as the whole truth.

Read more by and about Li Chengpeng via CDT.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: accountability, famine, great leap forward, Li Chengpeng, truth
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I’ve also noticed a bunch of people clamoring for the truth. Actually, you don’t need to seek the truth, because we all know the truth. Last year, at a book fair in Hong Kong, I said that the greatest truth in this place is that we know they are lying, and they know that we know they are lying, and we also know that they actually know that we know that they are lying…so we don’t care about the truth anymore, we just care about the way they put on their show of “truth,” and only the complete compilation of all of these performances is enough to count as the whole truth. It was thunder for the train, or Guo Meimei’s bag, the smile of the Yan’an security official when those 36 people died in the traffic accident, or when the weight of a truck caused the collapse of the bridge, it’s the safe and healthy milk that Meng Niu sends out every day, and the several people who died in the Henan bridge collapse that journalists weren’t allowed to report on.

So you see, the “experts” have come out again. They’re so busy explaining disasters that it’s the only thing they do. Stupid technology wonks have also come out of the woodwork, saying that the science of mechanics proves that the only reason the bridge collapsed is that the driver stayed to one side. They should have just said, “Who told the driver to park on the right side, don’t they know that’s an incorrect political stance?” The audience would have laughed and cheered.

The truth I like the most is: Some people don’t have penises, but they always pretend to pee standing up.

This is why we should relax. In truth, I don’t expect leaders in Harbin to come out and apologize personally, or for a few corrupt officials to get nabbed. They nab corrupt officials every day, and bridges collapse every year, nothing new under the sun. With the passage of time, you will realize that the greatest gift this age has given us isn’t the truth, but all the time and hard work you’ve put into imagining how they will put on a show of “truth.” In this amazing process, they are responsible for lying, and the ordinary people transform these lies into allegories.

Read more by and about Li Chengpeng, via CDT.

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The prizewinners, seven individuals and one environmental group, included the writer Jia Pingwa, the scientist Yuan Longping (known as “the father of hybrid rice”), the TV news anchor Bai Yansong and the Society of Entrepreneurs and Ecology. Founded in 2004, the society works to reduce the sandstorms that plague the north by combating desertification in Inner Mongolia and consists of hundreds of businesspeople like the real estate developer Ren Zhiqiang, chairman of Huayuan Group, and Liu Xiaoguang, president of Beijing Capital Group. The combined wealth of its members and their companies may total around 2 trillion renminbi, or $314 billion, said Zhu Hongjun, the environment correspondent of Southern Weekly, the media group’s flagship publication. Mr. Zhu hosted a morning seminar titled “For the Public Good, For the Republic,” where Mr. Ren and Mr. Liu discussed the advantages of democratic, transparent decision-making, which they say they are pioneering in the society.

Addressing a packed auditorium at Sun Yat-sen University at the other seminar that morning, Yi Zhongtian, a literature professor at Xiamen University who moderated many of the day’s events, said: “People say you can’t tell the truth. People say it’ll get you into trouble.”

“My bottom line is: Don’t tell lies,” he said. “If you think you can’t tell the truth, then don’t say anything. And when you can say the truth, say it.”

His audience, mostly students, laughed and clapped wildly.

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The town of Zengcheng had erupted in protests, with hundreds of migrant workers tipping over police cars, smashing windows, and torching government buildings. Police responded with tear gas and armored vehicles. It began on Friday evening, when Wang Lianmei, a twenty-year-old pregnant street vendor, and her husband, Tang Xuecai, had a run-in with security personnel who suspected that the couple had “illegally occupied the village’s road to sell goods,” according to the China Daily, a state-run newspaper. Word spread that police had injured the expectant mother and killed her husband, and by the middle of the night a crowd was pelting police with stones and bricks. By Saturday morning, the Party chief Xu Zhibiao had visited Wang at the hospital, and “brought a basket of fruit,” the state media pointed out. “Wang and her fetus remained intact,” the mayor declared.

It’s barely the middle of June, and this is shaping up to be an especially long, hot summer in China. There was rioting in another Chinese city last week, unrest in Inner Mongolia, and—rare for China—bomb attacks in two other cities. While it’s worth pointing out, as Jeremy Page does in the Wall Street Journal, that these show no sign of coördination, it’s also worth asking: How did China come to find itself trying to outrun rumors with baskets of fruit?

Read more about the riots in Xintang via CDT.

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Post tags: riots, rumors, social unrest, truth, xintang
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New Weekly: This is a question of historical view: what history is true?

Wu Si: The fact is, there is a kind of state system that makes it extremely easy to produce lies, manufacture lies, under which lying becomes legitimate and cost-effective. Look at this system in our history: an emperor, a bunch of bureaucrats under him, facing a country of peasants, peasants with no open information channels. To the person who fights for state power, who rules the country, whether Qin Shihuang, Zhu Yuanzhang, or Liu Bang, the problem he must solve is how to rule the country. The highest ruler has two options: one is using naked violence, compulsion; another is using persuasive power, benevolent governance. The two options also have to be kept in proportion. Ruling by violence alone is fragile, and will not last, or in other words, the long-term gains are not looking good. Thus the partial adaptation of Confucian ways, to convince you, exhort you, let you approve by heart.

…
New Weekly: Why does the state system that easily produces lies last so long in China?

Wu Si: It has low cost, high benefit. The core of the state system are the rulers, to them this is a natural strategy. The lies are nothing but statements of how the ruling system conforms to the public will. If the system changed to one with elections by popular will, becoming a negotiation between the public and public servants, then the system would be a trading system, the elected naturally conform with the popular will, there’s no need to make lies. Further, in such a trading system, all sides watch to see if you follow the contract. Hence the system is one that destroys lies. If you violate the contract, if you lie, it generally results in bigger loss than gain.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
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Translated from the blog of Anti-CCTV’s founder, Julian.

The theme of anti-cctv.net, as its name implies, is to “anti” the central television station. To borrow a sentence from www.anti-cnn.com ‘s front page, “We Don’t Oppose Media Itself; We Only Oppose Media’s Untruthful Report.” The theme of anti-cctv.net is the same. I guess that the principle of opposing the media’s untruthful reports should not be differentiated on national or regional bases. Should it?

Meanwhile, this site’s main content is also not focused on domestic or international reports about Tibet but gathers some of CCTV’s “untruthful” or even faked reports.

For instance, the slogan “做人不能太CCTV (Don’t Be Too CCTV),” was used earlier than “做人不能太CNN (Don’t Be Too CNN).” Through searching “做人不能太CCTV了” this slogan online, we can find one of CCTV’s most famous faked news events. Let me quote an explanation of it from Baidu Zhidao (Note: Baidu Zhidao is one of Baidu’s functions, similar to Yahoo! Answers):

http://zhidao.baidu.com/question/22892435.html

CCTV: The term originally refers to China Central Television. Its meaning has been extended as a verb describing the action of violating other people’s rights by using illegitimate methods (especially in voting or elections); it can also be used as an adjective to express “despicable and shameless,” which has its basis in CCTV’s cheating scandal against Sky (a Chinese E-sport player) in its online voting of “2006 Top Ten Influential Sports Figures.”

[...] Of course, precisely speaking, I intend to make a comparison with anti-cnn.com. Regarding CNN’s misleading pictures and reports, I have nothing much to say. I support the 21-year-old (Rao Jin) who made this website. [Note: Rao Jin was not 21 at the time of this post.] I also think that there is no reason or organization that can stop them from using their website as a foothold to express their voices and get people’s feedback.

However, in a society with free expression, it should not only be allowed to criticize foreign media but domestic media, as well. Apparently, criticizing CNN is much easier than criticizing CCTV. (I have to say that “trick” is the word I am thinking of in my mind.) It is just like the fact that you frequently hear about the popular movements to defend Diaoyu Islands, but rarely hear about any movements to protect the Stanovoy Range. 

In China’s Foreign Ministry’s March 27 [2008] press release, the spokesman Qin Gang addressed a journalist who asked “You may be aware that there’s now a non-governmental website,ANTI-CNN.COM, where people criticize the untrue reports on the Tibet issue by some foreign news agencies like CNN. Do you appreciate or support this website? Is the Chinese Government providing financial or physical support to this website?” Qin’s response was “[…] you won’t ask that if you take a look at the reports by the western media. It is these irresponsible and unethical reports that infuriated our people to the point where they voluntarily chose to voice their condemnation and criticism. […]” [Note: previously translated by CDT]

Qin Gang’s response is very mannered and moderate. I hope that based on the same reason, the website that I, an ordinary person, established to express my condemnation and criticism of CCTV’s irresponsible and unethical reports will also not get interfered with by certain departments and people — this is only really fair and reasonable. I hope Chinese people can also show some support for it.

Only with both Anti-CNN and Anti-CCTV can we be considered as having a complete picture of the news. If Anti-CCTV will be able to get as little interference as Anti-CNN has gotten, then anti-cctv.net will be just a reasonable complement to the anti-cnn website and also a perfect footnote to Qin Gang’s speech. 

Despite my original intention to “express voluntarily my condemnation and criticism” of CCTV’s “relevant irresponsible and unethical reports,” I have another means, that is to make a sample comparison test, to see whether the anti-cnn.com and anti-cctv.net websites will get the same result. I hope that anti-cctv.net will also be able to freely expose CCTV’s faked reports without interference. I hope to verify that the sentence “We Don’t Oppose Media Itself; We Only Oppose Media’s Untruthful Report” is commonly applicable.

As Julian mentioned in the end, his site successfully got the ICP license from the state’s Ministry of Information Technology. 扬子晚报 Yangzi Evening, a Jiangsu state media production, has also recently given a positive report of the site. The case may suggest to us that Chinese netizens’ voices can be distinct from the dominant voices in society.   

© Thome for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
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It is said that the playwrights for the Spring Festival Gala are the best artists in the country, and that the program is produced under strict supervision and many levels of inspection by officials.

However, I find that many of the dramas in the Gala center on acts of deceit, or even sing the praises of so-called well-intentioned lies. The characters who told lies usually ended up achieving their goals, and were portrayed to be noble heroes.

Let’s briefly review the popular dramas that contain elements of deceit:

1. The first Gala drama that Song Dandan played a role in centered on deceit… The story went like this: A lazy man in a village was trying to find a wife. The village head introduced him to a girl and invited the girl to visit the man’s house. The man was so poor that there was no furniture in the house. So he and the village head made a fake TV set and fake sofa out of paper boxes before the girl’s arrival, and pretended to be rich. The plot of the drama was created largely on deceit. This drama was aired 20 years ago. It set a tone for later shows, many of which borrowed the theme of deceit from it.

2. Another well-known actress, Gao Xiumin, also made her debut in a drama that started with cheating. Gao played the role of a middle-aged woman who went to buy a shirt for her husband at a clothing shop. The shop keeper cheated her by selling her a shirt whose two sleeves didn’t have identical lengths. But it turned out that the shirt fit her husband very well, because his arms had different lengths due to a stroke. Thus both sides were happy in the end.

3. There was a popular drama in 2007 which was named Scheme, played by several celebrities, Zhao Benshan, Song Dandan and Niu Qun. Three characters in the drama planned a scheme and pretended that they found a magic rooster that could lay eggs. Using deceitful tactics and telling lies, they successfully sold this rooster to a credulous customer.

4. Another drama in 2007 was named False Words and True Love. You see, they clearly sang praises full of lies. The belief is that lies are wonderful if they are well-intentioned and told out of love.

5. Kids were encouraged to tell lies in another drama. A father asked his son to tell lies to his grandfather to please the old man. The boy was actually bored by his grandfather’s story, which he had told many times. But he pretended to like the story very much, and even cheered for it, in order to make the grandfather happy.

6. In one drama, a mother helped her son to court a girl by telling lies, and the son ended up winning the girl’s heart.

7. Another widowed mother resorted to cheating to show her love for her son. She asked a vendor to pretend to be her partner, in order to assure the son that she enjoyed herself in life, when the son came to visit her from overseas.

8. The dramas that best represent swindling are the ones produced by Zhao Benshan. In a series of dramas, the character he played swindled a credulous man three times in a row, selling him crutches, wheelchairs, and stretchers that the man didn’t need at all. Thus he made the phrase Hu You (swindling) known in every corner of the country.

Several dramas at this year’s Spring Festival Gala inherited this “core value” of deceit.

1. In the drama Ji Xiang San Bao, a maid fell in love with a security guard but their relationship was opposed by her brother. The girl planned a scheme to change the brother’s mind, using tactics such as false suicide, and she succeeded in winning his sympathy.

2. The drama Huang Dou Huang was also centered on deceit. The main character didn’t get a chance to watch the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, but he lied about it, in order not to disappoint his village head and an important client. Although his lie was disclosed by the end, he was still portrayed as a good figure.

3. In the drama Beijing Welcomes You, after one female character swindled another person of his volunteer outfit, she gladly said, “it’s so easy to swindle him.” Many in the audience laughed at her words. She found out later that the person was actually a fake volunteer — he put on the outfit of his son and walked around the streets to show it off. But both of them were praised as righteous and kind people in the end of the drama.

4. Zhao Benshan’s drama continued to center around deceit at this year’s Gala. The character he played asked a waiter to tell lies for him after paying the young man money.

I could bring up so many dramas that centered on deceit off the top of my head, without doing any serious research. None of them criticized or denounced cheating. All of them sang praise full of lies. Is this the main theme of our society? Is this our core value? It seems that lies and deceit have entered deep into their bones, so they take it for granted and even take pride in it.

Is there any hope for such country?

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: CCTV, CCTV gala, cheating, netizens' voices, nuo ying, social culture, Spring Festival 2009, truth
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Seven-year-old Yang Peiyi sang a lovely song for the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games. However, audiences all over the world thought that the song was sung by another girl, Lin Miaoke, whose picture was published on the New York Times and who became a household name after the ceremony. Lin replaced Yang to appear on stage because she was better-looking. Nobody knew that the lovely voice actually was Yang’s until a music director revealed the truth accidentally. Many Chinese people became outraged at the lie. Why did they cheat? How could the appearance of a seven year old affect China’s national interest?

However, Wang Wei, Executive Vice President of Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee said, “This is a collective decision. It was done to achieve the best dramatic effect. I do not think there was any wrongdoing.”

They covered up this typical cheating behavior as “cooperation,” and thought that it was quite normal! If it was cooperation between Yang and Lin, why didn’t they announce that the voice was Yang’s? Intellectual property rights have been emphasized a lot for the Olympics, how come they forgot about it? In fact, such a cover-up didn’t make much sense, because we know that they were lying. It’s such a great pity that they have never learned how shameful it is to lie in the civilized world.

Fireworks were forged at Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, and Pavarotti’s singing was actually a recorded audio. However, those who cheated then were not as unscrupulous as officials of the Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee. They admitted that the fireworks shown on TV were to create a festive atmosphere, and Pavarotti didn’t sing because he was suffering from cancer. They asked for forgiveness. However, the Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee just said “Oh, it’s nothing.”

BOCOG may feel wronged, or even feel that anti-China media are again making trouble out of the blue. Actually the media’s reaction was quite normal. Reporters are normal people, and all normal people would be angry if they knew the truth after they cheered for Lin. The world was acting in a normal way. It’s the BOCOG bureaucrats who were abnormal. Although they’ve tried very hard, they still are not used to an open and civilized modern society, and they are not used to public criticism, which an official in a democratic society often encounters…

Also, they made a grand announcement of opening three parks for demonstrations, which I had thought to be a sign of openness. However, several petitioners who I am familiar with have disappeared after they applied for demonstrations. It has become a trap. The whole world knows what has happened, but the BOCOG still says that all applications for demonstrations have been “properly handled.” They might think that all mankind are idiots.

China’s image is being ruined by these people who tell lies shamelessly to the world. They should just admit when they do something wrong. What can be lost if they sincerely make an apology? If they take a little bit of responsibility for China’s international image, they should have realized that it’s better to boost China’s image through telling fewer lies than staging an extravagant opening ceremony.

© Linjun Fan for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: BOCOG, CDT translation, Olympics fakes, public intellectuals, truth, Xu Zhiyong
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I received the following email thru a large Buddhist community’s email list. The article claims British intelligence has taken images, via satelitte, of Chinese soldiers dressed as Tibetans starting the recent violence in Lhasa, Tibet. The image that accompanied the article seemed somewhat familar to me… that and the fact that the image’s angle tells me that it could not have been taken from a satelitte raised my curiosity level and prompted me to look into the truth of these claims and image.

He then emailed Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy asking them if they could identify the image, and received an email response that says:

The photo you are referring has nothing to do with the recent unrest in Lhasa… The photo was a part of filmshoot (A MOVIE) made in Tibet where Chinese armies wore the monk robes. We received the photos in 2003.

Chotsam said that he is a member of the Buddhist community and devoted to the Tibetan lineage, but he deplored the practice of using a movie picture as evidence.

I do not believe that the Tibetans’ freedom from oppression (or anyone else’s) will come or should come at the cost of our own honesty. We should not participate in the same kind of disinformation and deceit as the Chinese government. Spreading untruthful rumors based on photographs of a theatrical film and calling it real is dishonest and will only create more suffering, not ease it. It will create more problems, not less.

He urged each individual to take responsibilities in distribute truthful information in this age of immediate global information.

The dissemination of incorrect or inaccurate information can have repercussions that reverberate around the world and become the cause of further confusion and suffering.

Below is the image that was widely circulated on the Internet, via Chotsam’s blog:

© Linjun Fan for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Internet media, Tibet coverage, truth
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President Hu Jintao went to Yunnan to inspect the life of the lower strata and encourage them to tell the truth, which is not only touching but also sad. What is touching is that the president wants to listen to the truth instead of lies (such as one mu of land produces 5,000 kg of rice). Only the truth can lead the country to make the right decisions. The sadness of Hu’s words is that even our president knows that telling the truth should be allowed and encouraged. If he neither encourages nor allows it, Chinese people have no courage or habit to tell the truth.

Telling the truth needs to be encouraged by the national leader, which is news that can be recorded into the history of human civilization!

I hope sometime our president will come to encourage all Chinese intellectuals, either rightist, centrist or leftist, to tell the truth, and will come to listen to their truth.

But do Chinese intellectuals still have the habit of speaking the truth?

Read Chinese original post by Wu Zuolai blog

© Sophia Cao for China Digital Times (CDT), 2006. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: bloggers, Hu Jintao, intellectuals, truth
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Sixteen years ago, on the night of June 4 1989, tanks moved into Tiananmen Square in Beijing and began the violent dispersal of the longest-running student demonstration the People’s Republic of China had seen…

In the weeks after the violence, untold numbers fled abroad. To this day, others remain in prison. In the party itself, thousands were purged for their sympathy with the demonstrators. Today, relatives of the victims continue to ask for justice and – perhaps more importantly for the long-term health of the People’s Republic of China – for a truthful account of the events of that night and the bloody days that followed.

But the Chinese government continues to repress the truth and those who ask for it.

© Li Xiaorong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2005. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1989 protests, June 4th, Shi Tao, student demonstrations, Tiananmen Square, truth
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