The Varieties of Chinese Repression – The New York Times

FREEDOM How We Lose It and How We Fight BackBy Nathan Law with Evan Fowler240 pp. The Experiment. Paper, $15.95.

The dismantling of Hong Kong has long been one of the most painful disasters in East Asia. In the past few years, the city has effectively gone up in flames: booksellers kidnapped, student protesters beaten, the free press smothered, election law amended to make sure only patriots can run for office. As 2021 closed out and Beijing hawks took control of the legislature, statues commemorating the Tiananmen Square massacre were being hauled off university campuses. How did Asias most liberal, open and cosmopolitan city change so fundamentally? the activist Law asks in this philosophical memoir, written from exile in London. How was a flourishing and free society undermined from within?

Never an especially political child, Law remembers attending his first vigil as a teenager and weeping over the pamphlets. By the time of the famous Umbrella Movement protests in 2014, Law was a student activist, organizing peacefully for electoral reform; three years later, having won office by sweeping margins at 23, he was retroactively disqualified and thrown in prison. Back in 2014, Law writes, riot police were deployed against a generation in Hong Kong who knew no violence; by 2019, the year of Hong Kongs largest protests to date, some demonstrators carried farewell notes to their families in case they were beaten to death. Law left the next year. Today every organizer of the Umbrella Movement has been imprisoned or fled abroad, saying Free Hong Kong is a criminal offense and people are being arrested for the possession of stickers.

Half memoir, half stump speech, the book often dissolves into vague encomiums to the flame of freedom and textbook bullet points on the rule of law. Freedom could have been stronger had it explored Hong Kong through the lens of Laws own history. In the 90s, his father crossed from Guangdong into Hong Kong on a flat-bottomed boat; the rest of his family followed two years after the 1997 handover. Since 2014 I have regularly been arrested, Law writes calmly at one point, an understated illustration of how much has changed in the city, and might still.

HOW I SURVIVED A CHINESE REEDUCATION CAMPA Uyghur Womans StoryBy Gulbahar Haitiwaji and Rozenn MorgatTranslated by Edward Gauvin 256 pp. Seven Stories. $26.95.

Haitiwaji should never have been back in Xinjiang to begin with. She left her homeland in 2006, seeking asylum in France three years before riots in Urumqi triggered an infamous crackdown. Undermined and subjected to surveillance in China, the family flourished in Boulogne. What brings Haitiwaji back, in 2016, is a mysterious phone call asking that she return to sort out her pension. Despite everyones reservations, she does.

Hours after she lands, the police confront her with a photo of her daughter Gulhumar at a Uyghur separatist demonstration in Paris. With that, Haitiwaji a mother in her 50s is accused of fraternizing with terrorists and sent to a re-education camp. One fellow detainee was accused of selling banned religious CDs, Haitiwaji recalls. Still others had attended a wedding where no alcohol had been served. The women are stowed away in cells, fed cornstarch thinned with water and sent to classes where trembling old women and teenage girls on the brink of tears are taught glorifying propaganda and slapped across the face. Back in France, Gulhumar mobilizes politicians and reporters. In 2019, two years into a seven-year sentence, Haitiwaji is flown back to Paris.

Haitiwaji recited her story to the Figaro journalist Morgat, who takes certain liberties fleshing out a first-person memoir. (One doubts that Haitiwaji told her that laughter mingled with the clink of dishes, a boisterous symphony playing over the melodies of lutes, or that two organizations saw their incumbent directors terms renewed in 2018 for three and four years, respectively.) The book is most valuable as testimony. For Uyghurs, Haitiwaji explains, the camps are a kind of urban legend, made mythic by silence: If no one talks about them, then the camps arent real. Her memoir, dedicated to all those who didnt make it out, contributes to a rich and painful body of memory-keeping that grows all the time.

THE SUBPLOTWhat China Is Reading and Why It Matters By Megan Walsh136 pp. Columbia Global Reports. Paper, $16.

Freedom of expression and, in less lofty terms, the freedom to make juicy fiction has long warred with the regimes exhortation to tell Chinas story well, something Xi Jinping has urged on both artists and diplomats. As the writer Han Dong shrugs in a poem, describing flowers squinted at through smog: Even if I see them I dont remember them / Even if I remember them I cant write about them.

Banned in China is too often the baseline for what is and isnt worth reading, the journalist Walsh observes in this lively, lucid survey of contemporary Chinese fiction. What Walsh calls this intrusive relationship between grand and personal narratives can reduce reading, particularly among Western audiences, to its least interesting question: Is this for or against the party? OK, but what about the characters or the plot? Walsh promises us a glimpse of something deeper: a confusing and intricate tapestry that offers a beguiling impression of Chinese society itself.

Walsh covers the basics in passages on Yan Lianke, Yu Hua, Can Xue, Su Tong and other titans of the past 20 years in mainland fiction. Known for nightmarish, often lurid parables, these writers make dreamscapes where remembering is, at its worst, a prosecutable offense in Su Tongs Shadow of the Hunter, an old man is institutionalized for digging up the streets in search of his ancestors bones or simply tiresome, a point Yan Lianke mocks in a novel where a teenager compares his work to deserted graves. But the reach of Chinese fiction is broad, and so, gamely, is Walshs. She explores alt-comics; martial arts fiction (banned in Maos time: How could there be vigilante warriors in a Communist utopia?); the poetry of migrant factory workers (after it happened she / didnt cry and didnt / scream she just grabbed her finger / and left); online fantasy sagas (their heroes shameless and borderline sociopathic, Walsh notes dryly) devoured by half a billion readers; and Chinas increasingly exportable sci-fi. Walsh delivers a wry cornucopia, inviting for general readers who dont know Mo Yan from Han Han.

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The Varieties of Chinese Repression - The New York Times