Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

I went to see the painter Yu Youhan in his mother’s apartment in Shanghai, a few rooms at the top of the house that once belonged to his family. His father, a banker, was killed during the Cultural Revolution, and he went through reeducation after being denounced in school. But when I probed for anger, he shook his head and said, “When we reject Chairman Mao, we reject a piece of ourselves.” The Hong Kong dealer Johnson Chang, who represents almost all of the artists of the current avant-garde, said, “It’s like an unhappy childhood. You cannot dwell on it all the time and impose it on others, but if you disown it completely, you will be an artificial or incomplete person.”

Fang Lijun does not, in general, care to talk about politics, but late one evening we got onto the subject of Mao. Fang’s family used to be landowners, and they had as bad a time as any during the Cultural Revolution. Fang once said he had become an artist because painting kept him busy at home; he could not go out because everyone felt entitled to attack him if the mood struck. “I will never forget the day that Mao died,” he said. “I was at school when they announced it, and everyone broke down immediately and began to cry. And though all of my family hated Mao, I cried loudest and longest of all.” When I asked him why he had cried, he said, “It was in the program, and we lived by the program.” And when I asked him whether he had felt sad, he smiled and said, “That, too, was in the program.”

The Chinese impulse toward conformity runs deep, and I was repeatedly told that the Cultural Revolution had a luxurious quality for many Chinese people, who did not have to consider what to do, what to say, what to think, or even what to feel. Surely, I said to Fang, you must look back on that period with horror. “With some horror, yes,” he said. “But I am glad to have been through that. Younger people are jealous of me. Younger artists are trying to make themselves part of a history that never included them. Do you know, I went on June fourth to Tiananmen Square with a friend? We saw the tanks coming and heard the shots, and he ran away, but I went to the square. Not to be heroic, but because I was drawn there and had to see what was happening. I’ve always thought that my friend must regret forever having run away. You cannot run away from the Cultural Revolution, either. Maybe it’s a very Chinese way of thinking, but I believe you can have a happy present only if you have an unhappy past.”

Ni Haifeng said, “Of course, many were killed in the Cultural Revolution. But many are killed in every era. These people were seized with a fever and could not see that what they were doing was wrong. They gave up a great deal to join the revolution and kill those they thought had to be killed, and that was courageous. I admire that courage.” Later, we spoke of Tiananmen Square. “We all demonstrated,” he said. “And what happened was terrible. But if it hadn’t happened—then maybe there would have been civil war in China, with hundreds of thousands of people killed. Maybe the country would have fallen apart like Russia. You cannot say absolutely that what happened there was wrong.”

The performance artist Liu Anping, branded as a leader of the Hangzhou democracy demonstrations, was imprisoned for a year. “No one at Tiananmen understood or was interested in the principle of free elections,” he said. “To be free in how and where we live, what we do—that’s what we really want. We’d like an end to corruption and to be able to make whatever art we like. But China is too big and too difficult to manage for free elections. We are a xenophobic culture. We are nostalgic for the Cultural Revolution because it was so Chinese. We could never accept Western-style democracy—simply because it is Western. We must arrive at a Chinese solution, and the Chinese solution is never as free as free elections. Nor would we want it to be.”

Zhang Peili, who risked being imprisoned to hang his post-Tiananmen victim painting in Hangzhou, confirmed this view: “Idealism in the hands of an artist is a splendid thing, so we keep it up; it is our right as artists. But idealism in the hands of a leader is terrible.” The rhetoric of democracy is powerful in some circles in China, but not in literal terms. “You can’t run a country on the basis of a billion opinions,” said Zhang. “It would be disastrous, and far more people would be killed than are killed now.”