How free is China today? The Chinese authorities like to answer such questions very precisely (Chairman Mao was 70 percent correct and 30 percent incorrect, the Communist Party has determined). Without any phony attempts at precision, it seems fair to say that China is more and more free for a very large number of people and not at all free for a very small number of people. Hundreds of millions of Chinese are now able to change jobs, get divorced, take vacations, complain vociferously on talk radio and vote out their village leaders. Yet about 3,000 are in prison for their political views, the highest number of any country in the world.
The socialist firebrand Rosa Luxemburg once said that ““freedom is always only freedom for those who think differently.’’ And those people, by definition, are a minority. Singer Lin Jiqiu doesn’t regret her inability to publish an anti-communist newspaper. On the streets of Shanghai these days, no one seems afraid of a Western reporter with an open notebook. ““Whaddya wanna know?’’ asks one cocky teenager, hanging out with his pals outside a popular bowling alley. ““We can make money and have fun. We can do whatever we want.’’ Some people’s idea of freedom is the freedom to bowl. And who can blame them? Those people are free in China today.
Chen Longde is not. The Zhejiang native sent an open letter to China’s Parliament last year, calling for a re-evaluation of the label ““counterrevolutionary’’ to describe the 1989 democracy protests. He was quickly jailed. And just days after he arrived in the Luoshan labor camp last August, one of the prison bosses, Tang Jinbao, beat him so severely with an electric cattle prod that Chen leaped from a third-story window to escape. He broke his right hip and leg, but survived. Relatives told NEWSWEEK that after being discharged from the hospital, Chen was sent to make wool shirts at a new labor camp, Shiliping. Nothing in ““Asian values,’’ even as touted by practitioners more subtle than the Chinese Communist Party, can explain away that kind of treatment. Indeed, Beijing has signed many international agreements renouncing the use of torture.
But foreigners must recognize less tangible measures of freedom, too. Jing Jun, 40, now an anthropology professor at the City College of New York, remembers how his little schoolmates in Beijing used to criticize him for throwing away candy wrappers instead of folding them carefully, the way everyone else did. ““That would never happen today,’’ he says. ““Who the hell cares?’’ China today is hectic, chaotic, motley, uneven and rather wild. It’s a thousand times freer than it used to be. And if it were just a little freer, a smart guy like Jing Jun might want to live there.
