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Do you hear the people sing?|Michelle Ng

蘋果日報 2021/06/03 10:05


When censorship is the order of the day, people gravitate towards communicating in riddles.
And so it came as no surprise that of late, in mainland, after state media admonished young people for opting out of the rat race and being drawn to the “lying still” (躺平) lifestyle (work only to earn the bare minimum to survive), some mainlanders sought a more subtle way to express their exasperation at the difficulties of completing the rites of adulthood (mortgage, marriage, kids) in China, where the non-elites are confronted with such an unequal playing field. Soon, an animal fable began making the rounds on social media: “The other day, a TV documentary gave me the chills: as a swarm of bats makes a frenzied dash at a cow to suck blood out of him, they do their utmost to force the cow to stand up. This way, they can have a much larger surface to feast on.”
Sharing this tale about bats was far from the only outlet mainlanders seized on to voice their discontent. They also passed around this rather risqué drawing showing a stark naked young couple who is about to have intercourse. The narrative has a twist, though: the man is positioning himself from behind all right, but neither he nor his partner has time for each other. For both have their eyes glued to their laptops - the woman is laying hers on the bed while being on all fours, the man is resting his on the woman’s derriere. “A position also suited to answering incoming emails,” the comic’s caption says in jest. “How absurd! Encourage 996 (working from 9 am to 9 pm six days a week) while encouraging people to give more birth!” quipped a netizen.
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The swiftness with which the term “lie still” caught fire among mainlanders reminded me of a similar (albeit smaller-scale) incident two months ago. Right after Phoenix Media published a criticism China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi made of the US - “China will neither tolerate nor acknowledge a country that positions itself high above others” - netizens left some biting remarks for the regime Wang represents:
“This is what ‘a country that ranks itself high’ means: the mightier the party, the meeker the people.”
“Under a state that reigns supreme, serfs have to 996.”
“The only thing the lowly masses care about is when they will no longer need to work 996.”
Predictably, before long, the censors became aware of the commotion going on in this corner of the internet; they promptly deleted over a thousand comments, according to China Digital Times.
And let’s not forget that several years ago, when the CCP’s grip on mainland was firm but nowhere as firm as it is today, we also heard the voice of grievance from unexpected quarters. In 2018, when a Berlin theatre company performed Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People” in Beijing, this play on government corruption resonated with Beijingers so deeply that for a full fifteen minutes, audience yelled phrases like “so unaccountable to the people, just like our government,” “our media distorts the truth too,” “here people are likewise exterminated,” leading the CCP to bar the company from staging the drama further.
A few days later, after the curtain fell on a performance of the Broadway musical “Les Misérables” in Shanghai, the audience spontaneously broke into singing “Do you hear the people sing?” A netizen remarked “Even if we are too timid to bring about change, at least we can sing our hearts out. This isn’t entirely useless, for by singing we are signalling our stance.”
It was also in around 2018 that we last heard the liberal-minded Peking University economist Zhang Weiying (張維迎)speak out against the “China Model” that Xi Jinping is so enamoured of. Crediting the prosperity China has achieved over the past 40 years to the hand of the state instead of to market-oriented policies and western technology, Zhang argues, is like seeing an armless athlete race at great speed, and attributing his swiftness of movement to the fact that he doesn’t have an arm. So, trying to maintain mainland economy’s growth by letting state-owned companies take over private enterprises is like trying to help athletes run faster by chopping off their arms.
Judging from China’s economic slowdown and the loss of optimism among mainlanders in recent years, Zhang probably has a point.
(Michelle Ng (吳若琦) is an independent bilingual writer based in Hong Kong. Her blog is https://michellengwritings.com, and she can be reached at [email protected])
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