Going off the Rails with Jianying Zha

查建英：我为何要自绝于人民、精英与妈宝男

Li Yuan in Conversation with Jianying Zha

Recorded at the Bumingbai Festival in Washington DC, 18 September 2025

Edited, translated and annotated by Geremie R. Barmé

Maintaining stability (wei wen) is therefore not just a Party priority, it has also been a key value for many ordinary Chinese. In a crisis like a pandemic, physical vulnerability and isolation made people even more fearful of disorder or of being on the wrong side of the majority. For the majority, strength lies in self-control, discipline, and unity.

This is especially true for a survivor like Aunt Dongsheng. I know she would not trade places with me. After Wuhan reopened, she celebrated her city’s return to “normal.” Her joy was genuine: restaurant banquets, social gatherings, walking her dog in the parks—the good life was back, and whatever hardship the people had endured was worth it.

Her reaction reminded me of a confession she had made to me in the summer of 2019. Aunt Dongsheng and Uncle Guan had watched the mainland media coverage of the Hong Kong protest movement, which focused heavily on “violent rioters and overseas anti-China hostile forces.” One of the scenes showed the People’s Republic of China national emblem on a government building being smeared with black ink, another showed some protestors blocking off metro stations—as a result some people couldn’t take trains to work for a couple of days.

We and our old friends in Wuhan, Aunt Dongsheng said to me on the phone, we were watching and talking about the chaos in Hong Kong. “All of us, the technicians and engineers, all educated people, we now look back on what happened in 1989 and feel that Deng Xiaoping made the correct call to clamp down on Tiananmen Square. Back then, your Uncle and I were sympathetic to the students, but now we realized if Old Deng hadn’t decided to take control, China would be a mess today, just like Hong Kong. Our country would have missed the opportunity to develop so fast and so well. We wouldn’t have prosperity. We wouldn’t have the good life we are enjoying now.”

Her words shook me profoundly. Not because they were unique or special, but because they were extremely familiar and commonplace. And because Aunt Dongsheng was not just saying that a good life is better than a good death under the tanks. She was also suggesting that a good life comes at the cost of a good death under the tanks.

Such sentiments, I have learned for quite some time now, are shared by hundreds of millions of ordinary Chinese. It is a majority view. But this was my own aunt. My dear Aunt Dongsheng, whom I have loved and admired; who had suffered and endured so much; who has worked hard all her life; and who is a very, very nice woman.

Is it possible that the Hong Kong “rioters” and the Tiananmen “rebels” had somehow evoked in her mind the Red Guards’ fierce old shadows? What muddled paranoia that would be, to confuse largely peaceful protests for democratic rights with the barbarous trampling of basic human decency.

My old image of Aunt Dongsheng is ruined. Seeing her in a new light hasn’t been so easy for me.
I have come to admit what appears to be a simple, undeniable truth: Aunt Dongsheng is one of the people. The people of my homeland. And why should I be so shocked and surprised? She has probably always been one of the people; it is me, a Chinese native with an odd mindset, a pesky personality, who has been alienated, who has embraced “foreign” values, and made a choice to be an immigrant. Yet I have continued to harbor certain fantasies about the people of my homeland, even though I am no longer one of them.

I am no longer one of the people.

— Jianying Zha

***

Trains: A Chinese Family History of Railway Journeys, Exile, and Survival

***

Aunt Dongsheng: from witnessing the tragedy of her parents in the Cultural Revolution to supporting the suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen Protests

Li Yuan:

Your Aunt Dongsheng and your maternal grandmother lived together during the Cultural Revolution and witnessed how your grandparents were abused. They were confronted, too, by how your grandmother committed suicide. But now, Aunt Dongsheng shares a lot in common with the way many Chinese see history and politics. As you note [in the quotation above], you were impacted by the way in which she reacted to the Hong Kong protests in 2019, as well as by the fact that she’d come to believe that Deng Xiaoping was right to have cracked down on the Tiananmen protests in 1989.

When you were writing this memoir she told you that: ‘So many things happened in that era. They don’t make sense to people today. Good thing it’s over. All passed now.’ You also tell us that Aunt Dongsheng is a very good person, one that you have loved and admired. How do you relate to her present views?

Jianying Zha:

My uncle and aunt were both engineers in large state enterprises. Like other members of my family, at least those in my parents’ generation, they really did suffer: two of their siblings were driven insane by political persecution. Then, despite all of that, Aunt Dongsheng made a point of calling me in 2019 to tell me exactly what she thought of the Hong Kong protests. Of course, I was already familiar with her views, so her call came as no great surprise. Anyway, she’d long been in that kind of lecturing mode … as though she was always trying to talk me around:

‘You’ve been away too long and you’ve lost touch with China. … We all share this view of things. … Life here is good now, everything’s improved. We Chinese all think like this’, and so on and so forth.

But that was the first time that she ever said she thought that Deng Xiaoping was right to have cracked down on the Tiananmen demonstrations. That conversation happened in 2019 [three decades after June Fourth 1989]. She also told me that she had been watching the TV reports about the protests in Hong Kong — she wasn’t watching local Cantonese news from Hong Kong, it was official reports in the mainland media. She’d told me that she’d seen the chaos, the rioters, the attack on the National Emblem at LegCo, protesters blockading metro stations… How things had been shut down for two days and that people’s lives had been disrupted. She told me that she thought Hong Kong was in a state of ‘turmoil’ [动乱] [this was the same trigger word the authorities used in 1989 to justify the repression in Tiananmen in 1989].

[Note: For an account of the 2019 Hong Kong protests in China Heritage, see Hong Kong Apostasy]

That’s why, she said, since both your uncle and I are engineers — in reality she hadn’t gone to university and was actually a technician, though they gave her the title of engineer just before she retired. She went on: back in ’89 we supported the students, but in retrospect, Old Deng was right. If he hadn’t made the correct decision to repress the protests then we wouldn’t be enjoying the good life we have now. We would be dealing with exactly the same kind of chaos that Hong Kong is experiencing today. China wouldn’t have developed as quickly, either, or as well; we simply wouldn’t be enjoying the prosperous life we have now.

Li Yuan:

Those are widely held views.

Jianying Zha:

Sure, all but universal, in fact. A number of my old high-school friends, many of whom were from worker families, really close friends, had similar opinions about the Hong Kong protests. None of them had gone to college and, over the years, our lives had diverged and we’d become increasingly different from each other; most of them had been retrenched by the state enterprises that employed them. Whenever we got talking, apart from the usual nostalgia their take on what was happening in China was very different from mine.

Take Xi Jinping’s controversial third 5-year term in office [made possible by a controversial revision to the Chinese Constitution in 2018], for example. There was this one time we arranged a get-together to make dumplings. I arrived a little after everyone else and found them all quietly nattering about something. My sixth sense told me that I was the subject of their discussion. We had always been like sworn sisters; I was the youngest, so they called me ‘Fourth Sister’. ‘Fourth Sister’s here now,’ one of them said. ‘We’d better tone it down’, or something to that effect. While we were wrapping dumplings they did let on about what they’d been talking about: the consensus was in favour of Xi continuing on in power; otherwise his anti-corruption push would stall. They all thought that.

On a previous occasion [during the Hong Kong Occupy Central Movement in 2014], we had ended up watching TV at my place, I really wanted them to watch the news on Phoenix TV [a Hong Kong station to which none of them had access] so they could see for themselves that the protests were peaceful, but they were completely uninterested and just continued chatting away among themselves — the stock market, this or that, the latest news about Jin Xing [金星, a celebrity who had recently had gender reassignment surgery]. You can well imagine the scene for yourself.

Li Yuan:

But I’m curious: what exactly did the Anti-Corruption Campaign have to do with any of them?

Jianying Zha:

Having experienced the state of rampant corruption before Xi’s rise to power, they were in support of the campaign. This was a view shared by the everyday Chinese people of my acquaintance. Since it was such a commonly held opinion, what they said that night we were making dumplings came as no great surprise. But Aunt Dongsheng’s remarks really shook me. That was because they came from someone whom I admired, someone whom I thought of as being like an Earth Mother, a person who had very much carried our family over the years. Here was an extremely good person expressing her sincerely held beliefs and it really shook me.

How the family sees Jianying’s brother, Zha Jianguo, jailed for 9 years for his involvement in setting up the Democracy Party of China

Li Yuan:

Your half-brother Zha Jianguo was jailed for nine years as one of the founders of the Democracy Party of China [in 1999 and released in June 2008]. He’s the main character in Enemy of the State, one of your most famous New Yorker profiles. I’m curious here because you don’t mention him in Trains at all. While I was reading Trains, I kept wondering what your family made of him? How does Aunt Dongsheng see him? And then there’s the nephews that you mention — do they know his story and what do they think of him?

Jianying Zha:

Of course, they all know about him. Since he refused to admit guilt at any point, the authorities made him serve the full term of his sentence. After he was released, on the eve of the August 2008 Beijing Olympics, my mother organised a big family luncheon at a restaurant to welcome him home. Of course, I had already welcomed him home when the police first brought him back from prison. But that full family gathering was a rather awkward occasion since — I immediately realised at the time — everyone in the extended family, be they the older generations or the young, thought of Jianguo as being a bit of a freak [怪人]. And there was this general disquiet among them that could be summed up in a simple question: ‘Was it all really worth it?’

Today, we’ve just watched the film Hooligan Sparrow [流氓燕, directed by Nanfu Wang] and my family’s question about Jianguo resonates with something they ask in the movie: ‘What’s the use of it all?’ Even Jianguo’s own mother [Jianguo is Jianying’s half-brother from their father’s first marriage] is unable to relate to his behaviour, she feels that confronting an overwhelming force like the state was futile.

What was particularly awkward for me was when my aunty said, ‘But look at Little Ying [that is, me]’ — what she meant was: ‘See how successful Jianying is!’ In fact, none of them had any idea what I write or what I get up to. [Audience laughter]

Li Yuan:

They only know that you’re a writer.

Jianying Zha:

Yes, a writer who lives in the US and whatnot; someone who can move freely between the two countries. The line of reasoning was: how come my brother didn’t try and be like me? That, at least, was the superficial tenor of things on that occasion, though I only discovered an undercurrent later when one of my cousins, a fellow who happens to be even more ‘right-leaning’ than I am — a borderline ‘traitor’ [from a pro-Party patriot’s point of view], in fact — later arranged to meet up with my brother to give him some money. It was a gesture of admiration and respect, as if to say they’ve just let you out so you’re sure to need some cash.

Li Yuan:

So, he gave him some money.

Jianying Zha:

That’s right. That cousin had been working for a foreign firm in China for years so he was pretty well off. But people are complicated like that: on the one hand, he’s a very practical businessman while, on the other hand, he has a sneaking respect for someone like my brother whom he sees as being a real ‘stand-up kinda guy’. He acted out of a sense of decency. In fact, that cousin pretty much shares my brother’s view of things. Over the years, I’ve met other people who’ve also slipped my brother money or have even given him sizeable wads of cash through me, as gesture of respect.

Li Yuan:

They’ve given cash since you can’t just deposit money in his account electronically [because he is subject to surveillance].

Jianying Zha:

That’s right. It all has to be on the down-low; you can’t leave any trace of what you’re getting up to.

Being ‘divorced from The People’ and rejecting the demands of patriotism

Li Yuan:

Let me read a passage from the end of Trains:

‘I, too, love China, but it’s a China of my own definition. I have fantasized about “alien skies” and “faraway cities” since my train-hopping childhood. Moved by the vast expanse of “alien skies” and “faraway cities,” I have grown rather impatient with the endless Chinese patience for despotic rule. I have chosen not to “remain with my people.” Indeed, I have chosen to get off the great train, to leave the tracks far, far behind. To run! Run for my life! This is desertion, maybe some would call it cowardice, even betrayal. But the way I see it, I’m not running to save my skin so much as to save my soul.’

This reads like a response to the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova’s 1961 poem Requiem, which goes in part:

‘Not under foreign skies. Nor under foreign wings protected — I shared all this with my own people. There, where misfortune had abandoned us.’

Unmoved by the glamour of alien skies,
By asylum in faraway cities, I
Chose to remain with my people: where
Catastrophe led them, I was there.

[trans. Stephen Capus]

Can you explain what you mean by ‘I have decided not to be with the people, I’m getting off the train’. Also, when exactly did you decide to ‘make a break with The People’? [Audience laughter]

Jianying Zha:

Let me respond to these questions in order. In the first place, ‘to be divorced from The People’ [自绝于人民] is an expression that is all too well known to those of my generation, although it’s possibly unfamiliar to anyone younger. In Mao’s China, that is in the China in which I grew up, especially during the Cultural Revolution, ‘to break with The People’ was a coded term for suicide. My grandmother, who I report killed herself by lying down on those rail tracks, was posthumously condemned for having ‘broken with the People’. Suicides had became increasingly commonplace and instances of suicide escalated in the early Cultural Revolution. In my youth, I remember loudspeakers blaring out that ‘so-and-so has broken with The People’.

From early on, maybe not from the time of my grandmother but definitely from when I was seven or eight, when the Cultural Revolution started, I saw the bodies of people who had jumped to their deaths from buildings. I remember when one of our neighbours had jumped, her corpse was just left lying there. She had ‘broken with The People’. I didn’t see her jump, but I saw her corpse on my way to school, arms broken. It happened a lot. But to understand the expression ‘to break with The People’, you really need to appreciate what was really meant by the expression ‘The People’ and, by extension, why I now feel proud to have ‘broken from The People’.

I’m sure it’s not just in China since many other places also use the expression ‘The People’ to indicate not an individual but a collective. For example, when talking about ‘popular sovereignty’, Rousseau spoke about ‘people’s will’. Under Mao in the early 1950s this was reworked as the ‘people’s democratic dictatorship’.

By using ‘people’ this way they don’t mean ‘citizens’. After all, a citizen can be a person, an individual social actor. From the time of ancient Greece, citizens had rights. Here I’d emphasize that the Chinese term I’m using is 权利 [rights], not 权力 [power]. Although both are pronounced quánlì, they are written differently. Similarly, ‘citizen’ and ‘The People’ 人民 are two completely different concepts.

Although we might use the term ‘the people’ [人民] as a colloquial term for what ‘people’ generally want or think, many cruel injustices have been carried out in the name of ‘The People’. So, when I used the expression ‘to break with The People’ [in Trains], it is this ‘The People’ to which I am referring. It’s a concept related to an abstract multitude or a plurality, rather than to actual individuals or even to a group. I just wanted to clear that up.

[Note: See The People, China Media Project, or, as the novelist Yu Hua remarks in China in Ten Words:

‘In the forty-odd years from the start of the Cultural Revolution to the present, the expression ‘the people’ has been denuded of meaning by Chinese realities. To use a current buzzword, ‘the people’ has become nothing more than a shell company, utilized by different eras to position different products in the marketplace. 从文革开始到今天的四十多年,「人民」这个词汇在中国的现实里好像是空的。用现在中国流行的经济术语来说,「人民」只是一个壳资源,不同的时代以不同的内容用它借壳上市。]

As for the other string of questions you asked me, one was about ….

Li Yuan:

An explanation of that line in your memoir: ‘I have decided not to be with the people, I’m getting off the train’.

Jianying Zha:

Oh, that’s about Anna Akhmatova and my differences from her. She was a poet whose life and work straddled the worlds of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union; she is recognised as one of the great poets of the twentieth century. She lived during Tsarist Russia, experienced the October Revolution of 1917, survived the Second World War as well as Stalin’s gulags. Her son was even exiled to Siberia.

Li Yuan:

Akhmatova’s husband [Osip Mandelstam] died in 1938, during Stalin’s purge. [Suffering from malnourishment and typhoid, he expired during the transit from place of exile to another.] She was regarded as one of the greatest poets of Russia’s cultural ‘Age of Silver’ [1900-1920].

Jianying Zha:

Akhmatova was under house arrest, so when Isaiah Berlin visited her in 1945 it was added to her tally of crimes. My impression is that over the years she’s gained a kind of mythic stature and has become something of an unassailable saint-like figure — a symbol of a writer who stuck with The People through all of their trials and tribulations. Since there’s a general tendency to turn people like her into unrealistically stellar symbols of heroism, she’s not often spoken about in more realistic terms. It’s the same in the case of Mahatma Gandhi and Aung San Suu Kyi — they’re no longer human beings but rather symbols of something else.

As I see it, that’s also happened to Akhmatova though, if you just give it a bit of thought, you’ll realise that for her to have survived over all of those years she must have also made numerous compromises. In a sense, she too was a ‘collaborator’. To illustrate I’d point out that during WWII [what Russian’s call the Great Patriotic War] she also wrote patriotic poems. She was able to convince herself that this was an act of anti-fascism. She even went to recite her poems to gatherings of Red Army troops. Later she self-censored and that’s why she was banned sometimes and allowed to be published at other times. Like so many things, there’s no clear demarcation between black and white; there are many grey areas hidden beneath the surface of those exemplary figures.

But, back to me: Akhmatova is representative of a broader phenomenon. The literati in both Russia and China share something in common — we are heir to ancient traditions of cultural autocracy and, having lived through a communist revolution, we are confronted by the numerous aftereffects of the revolution as well as the post-revolutionary world. Whether ours is a prison with bars made of steel or of velvet, we share a great deal in common. On top of all of that, we are also bound up in a patriotic over-culture. In China, people live in what is encapsulated in the old Confucian term ‘family-like state’ [家国], and in the Russian context it is about the soil and the Russian Orthodox Church. To make a rather general comparison, I’d suggest that their Orthodox Church is similar to our Confucian tradition. Because of these traditions and our history, we share a lot of ideas and linguistic habits in common.

My generation grew up reading Russian literature, though I guess I belong to an overlapping era. In my youth, I was as obsessed with The Dream of the Red Chamber [红楼梦, a classical work of Qing-era fiction] as I was with the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. I was very young when I read Alexander Serafimovich’s The Iron Flood, Gorky, as well as Quiet Flows the Don by Mikhail Sholokhov. They were like the bibles of our youth. But, upon closer analysis, ultimately, even in the case of Anna Akhmatova, a writer whom I still admire tremendously, there’s quite a few grey areas. You are faced with the question of how she was hijacked by the patria during the Soviet era and how her memory is caught up in the trenchant patriotism of the present Putin era. The same holds true for Alexander Solzhenitsyn who, upon returning to Russia from exile in America, became an outspoken critic of the West. There’s that Russian chauvinism lurking behind it all.

Let me be even more brutal, for in China today, we must ask, as you have, why has there been no Alexei Navalny?

Li Yuan:

True, true. I even wrote about that issue at the time of Navalny’s death.

[Note: See Li Yuan, China Has Thousands of Navalnys, Hidden From the Public, The New York Times, 29 February 2024.]

***

Jianying Zha:

In relation to what you wrote in The New York Times at the time of Navalny’s death, my response is also that, of course there are [‘Chinese Navalnys’]. Liu Xiaobo was just such a figure as, indeed, is my older brother Zha Jianguo. They sacrificed so much for their beliefs, even my brother — although I think that Liu Xiaobo was in a league of his own — said from very early on: ‘I don’t support Tibetan independence because it will rent China apart.’ Of course, later on, he moved away from that view. But he has said to me: ‘I’ll never leave [China]’; he didn’t want to go overseas because life would be meaningless for him elsewhere. He’d also seen how the others who’d worked in the Democracy Party had ended up: overseas they were nobodies living on the fringe of society. He felt being in China at least gave his life some meaning.

But to stay meant that he too had to compromise and that he could never be a truly free person. He too was devoured by ‘patriotism’. In all honesty, the Communist Party is not the only devil in these particular details; there are so many other things at work, including the over-culture of China itself. I’ve gone on at length in response to your question because to get to where I am psychologically today I’ve travelled a long and winding path. But you also asked why I was ‘jumping off the train’?

Disenchantment: June Fourth, becoming an American citizen and COVID-19

Li Yuan:

Yes, when exactly do you feel that you got off?

Jianying Zha:

That, too, was a drawn-out process. Honestly, June Fourth 1989 was a profound psychic jolt. When talking about it in 2019 I said how, as someone who was at Tiananmen, I was deeply shocked to see people killed in peacetime and, when I came back to America, I started thinking about whether I should apply for citizenship. It was 1992. I’d only recently divorced my Caucasian American husband and I found myself faced with a choice, one that up until that point I hadn’t realised would be so confronting. It was actually quite traumatic. On top of that there was the fact that I was a student of Chinese literature who had been reading Chinese classics since my earlier years, something that had a subliminal effect on generating a strong sense of national identity in me. So, there I was, feeling that to change nationality would be nothing less than an act of treason. Eventually, I convinced myself that I wasn’t betraying China so much as I was pursuing the right to free expression, finding an environment in which I wouldn’t have to engage in self-censorship. If I became an American, I told myself, I could keep writing.

That also relates to why I focused on studying English. My academic background was in Chinese literary studies and I was obsessed with Chinese literature. I felt that the Chinese language was such a beautiful vehicle for self-expression that I couldn’t possibly abandon it. In fact, I was one of the earliest ‘sea turtles’ [海归, a returnee from overseas], since I’d actually returned to China in 1986, ’87 with the aim of pursuing my interest in writing fiction.

[Note: On ‘sea turtles’, see Jianying Zha, The Turtles, The New Yorker, 4 June 2005.]

It’d never occurred to me that things would turn out as they did — that I’d become an American and publish work in English. Even so, back then, I still hadn’t ‘jumped off the train’. I was still obsessed with China and travelled back there constantly. I published my first English-language book — China Pop — in the mid 1990s and it finished with what is known as ‘a bright and shiny ending’, one in which I made the case that people involved in commerce and business may well sidestep the whole question of political reform in China and pursue freedom through commercialisation. My view was in alignment with the argument that the gradual evolution of civil society in China would happen with the support of entrepreneurs. In retrospect, it was a pretty naïve perspective.

Li Yuan:

But it was very much the mainstream view at the time.

Jianying Zha:

It was indeed. That’s why I say that I was still firmly ‘on board’, on the train that is. Even though I was an American citizen, there were a myriad of ways in which I was still attached to China and I was constantly being drawn back in, not only to write but also to hope. But, to get back to your question: when did I finally decide to ‘go off the rails’?

It was after I’d paid an extended visit to China in 2019-2020, shortly before the COVID pandemic. For many years I had been spending about six months in China every year and, at the time, it never occurred to me that I would end up deciding not to go back again.

During the pandemic, although I was back in New York, I still kept a close eye on what was happening in China. Let me give you a simple example: I saw those videos of the Big Whites [大白, a slang term for pandemic prevention workers and government law enforcers who wore white hazmat suits] everywhere, and all of them repeatedly, relentlessly, testing for COVID. The soundtrack of many videos was of that stirring kind — you know, the Chinese love that kind of schmaltz — violins and all, with people lined up stretching out their necks like geese waiting to have swabs shoved down their throats, and really deep, too. Everyone lined up so obediently and I kept having flashbacks to images of the Chinese being ordered by Japanese imperial troops to line up, which they did, patiently, obediently, to be buried alive or executed. Previously, such scenes seemed completely unimaginable to me but, now, watching those videos of China under COVID, I finally realised that it had all been true.

Then, during the Shanghai lockdown I saw that people were actually jumping to their death. I felt that it could have easily been me! I had this overwhelming emotional response: fuck, you really do need to have access to guns! Although Americans have plenty of guns, I don’t think they understand how we Chinese feel about the subject. Citizens must have access to weapons. Of course, I was more than aware that if I was in China I’d never have had a gun, so I’d have had no choice but to leap to my death. I’d end up just like my grandmother [lying down on the modern-day equivalent of the train tracks on which she took her life].

I simply wouldn’t be able to submit to such abuse and I recalled Akhmatova’s line, grand, pure, certainly, but today my reaction is this: there’s no way I’m going to end up in a Communist prison, even if it were for only a day. I don’t want to see anyone else thrown into their jails either, though some of my good friends are rotting in Chinese jails: people like the lawyer Xu Zhiyong, who has been given a very heavy sentence. To me it’s meaningless, a waste, because people are happy to eat steamed bread that’s been dipped in martyr’s blood [人血馒头: a reference to an old belief that a martyr’s blood is a cure-all], though not all are dipping it in fresh blood. But then, years hence, when the jailed person becomes a martyr and is viewed as a hero, these people will come out in throngs to praise his glorious sacrifice. Get out of here! You’re just trying to lick on dry blood! What have you done when the martyr was still alive? It’s all such bullshit! What I mean to say is, just shut the fuck up. Get off the damned train if and when you can. If you can’t, well just stay there and do whatever decency demands.

[Note: See ‘I Do Not Believe’ — Xu Zhiyong on being jailed, again; and, From jail, Xu Zhiyong asks ‘Whither China?’.]

As I said earlier, I thought that Hooligan Sparrow — the film you screened this morning — was great and I really do admire the activists depicted in it. But I’d add: they are not ‘The People’, and there is no way I see them as ‘The People’. They are people, individuals; they have decided to stay there, they dare stay there and record their lives. They are really admirable. Like Qi Hong [戚洪], the fellow who projected those slogans on those high-rise buildings in Chongqing. I might have made a break with China, but how could I ever divorce myself from people like that?

[Note: On Qi Hong, see Yuan Li, A Hidden Camera Protest Turned the Tables on China’s Surveillance State, The New York Times, 2 September 2025; and, 袁莉，对话重庆反共标语事件当事人戚洪，《不明白直播》，2025年8月31日.]

Disillusionment with China’s Elites

Li Yuan:

I was worried that in declaring that you were ‘breaking with The People’, you were in effect saying that you were no longer interested in following developments in China. But it turns out that you still have a keen eye trained on the PRC. You even watched the live streaming of my interview with Qi Hong.

Jianying Zha:

As I said, when you talked about Qi Hong’s protest and remarked that ‘it really looks like you’re breaking with The People’, I responded by saying how can you count this kind of stand-out character as being one of ‘The People’ — that ‘People’? He’s a lone wolf, though I felt a rapport with him and was reminded of the expression ‘when you bump into a fellow villager in a foreign land your eyes well with tears’ [老鄉見老鄉，兩眼淚汪汪]. I recognised in him a sympathetic soul.

Li Yuan:

So, what you’re saying is that we aren’t ‘The People’, we’re wolves.

Jianying Zha:

That’s right, though I can’t be compared with him; the action he took was really out there. We do, however, share a sensibility — I grew up drinking wolf’s milk and he knows to keep a distance from wolves. Doesn’t that make him a lone wolf? Not one of ‘The People’ at all?

[Note: On wolf’s milk 狼奶, or the militant propaganda of the Chinese state, see 1900 & 2020 — An Old Anxiety in a New Era.]

Anyway, I seriously doubt that I’d be able to do anything like him — in the first place, I simply don’t have the necessary technical know how. In fact, I’m pretty much a ‘tech illiterate’; I also suffering from ‘topographical disorientation’ [that is, I have no sense of direction]. I’ve got no clue about computers at all. You need talent to pull something like this off. It’s like the case of the fellow at the Sitong Bridge in Beijing, though it’s obvious that Qi Hong’s operation was technically more sophisticated and that he used a high-lumen projector to make his protest. That’s not to say that I’m not in awe of the Sitong Bridge protest [by Peng Lifa 彭立发], and kudos to him, though I don’t think he should have hung around in China, that’s because he ended up being disappeared and thrown in jail. I simply wouldn’t have given them the satisfaction.

[Note: On the Peng Lifa and the Sitong Bridge Incident, see Awakenings — a Voice from Young China on the Duty to Rebel.]

What happened to Tank Man? We simply don’t know. You don’t want to end up like them; that’s why I think this character in Chongqing [i.e., Qi Hong] is the bomb. He set up his protest in advance and then gave the authorities the finger from overseas leaving them nonplussed. But the real question is: why is there only this lone wolf? Okay, forgive me, maybe I’m being too demanding. Of course, there’s a few of them, but just not nearly enough. How many so-called ‘Liberal Intellectuals’ are there in China? I’d guess at least a million. That’s people with a liberal democratic worldview [三观, that is 世界观、人生观、价值观], and there’s far more than a million people who like mouthing off about liberal values — see how they fulminate about it day in day out in online chat groups.

[Note: Here we are reminded of an observation made by Alexander Solzhenitsyn:

‘If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

‘During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn’t change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.’]

Li Yuan:

They’re at it on X, too. Some of them talk about Qi Hong’s real aim being to seek political asylum or some such.

Jianying Zha:

That’s right, the comments are snarky as all get out, too smart by half. Online keyboard warriors enjoy having a go at people who have actually done something in the real world and they make out that acts of protest are ultimately only about seeking political asylum. You just have to ignore people like that. But, there should be at least 1000 Qi Hong’s in China, and that’s only 1000th of the one million liberals I was talking about earlier, not just the online bullshit artists, but those with a modicum of technical know how, people who don’t want to just end up as martyrs and work out a way to get out in time. So in my estimation, there should be 1000 people of that million [willing to protest actively], don’t you think? But, instead of 1000 there’s just the one — Qi Hong. What more needs to be said?

Truth be told, my hopes have not been so much deflated by ‘The People’; I’m disillusioned with China’s elites as a whole. As a group they’ve demonstrated that they are a pretty inferior product. Okay, the state is evil, but don’t just go and blame The People. As Tan Sitong [谭嗣同, the late-Qing reformist martyr] put it, when you’re living under ‘Qin rule’ [秦政], of course it’s obvious that ultimately it’s the power holders who are to blame for the state of affairs.

[Note: 秦政, ‘The Rule of the Qin’ is a shorthand expression long used to characterise tyrannical government. It refers to the draconian ruler of the First Emperor of the Qin 秦始皇, Ying Zheng 嬴政, r.220-210 BCE, a figure praised both by Mao Zedong and Xi Jinping.]

But ancillary to them are the elites — the intellectuals, technocrats and business people. They are in cahoots with the power holders. Here the expression 狼狈为奸 láng bèi wéi jiān comes to mind. It means ‘jackals help do the wolf’s dirty work’ — the ‘vicious wolves’ of the state are bad enough, but don’t forget that the elites act in concert with them, they are opportunistic like jackals scrounging for the leftovers of the kill. So, I’m critical of those who simply lay the blame at the feet of the ‘selfish masses’; I think that from the get go you need to examine the complicity of the elites.

Now I’m really running off at the mouth.

***

On Enemy of the State and Servant of the State

Li Yuan:

You’re on quite a roll. Pure pyrotechnics. But let’s now turn to your writing, a less intense subject, in particular Enemy of the State, the New Yorker profile of your brother. After it came out, Xu Wenli [徐文立], another member of the Democracy Party of China that your brother is part of, was furious because he thought that you had misrepresented the members of the party. Whatever the merits of Xu’s criticism, there’s no doubt that your description of them wasn’t particularly flattering.

After that, in Servant of the State you wrote a strikingly unsentimental portrait of Wang Meng [王蒙], a former minister of culture who also happened to be a friend of yours. In that profile you asked ‘Is China’s most eminent writer a reformer or an apologist?’ The tone of that profile brings to mind an observation made by the Polish-American poet Czesław Miłosz: ‘when a writer is born into a family, that family is finished’. [Audience laughter]

Really, that’s what he said.

[Note: See also Julian Barnes, On being the writer in the family, New Statesman, 7 December 2023.]

All writers know that one of the hardest things to do is to write about people you know. When you write a profile like that are you worried about how your subject might react? What’s your relationship with Wang Meng been like since you published that piece? Or, take Trains, an autobiographical account in which you record some family tragedies, you didn’t give Auntie Dongsheng a pass, or sidestep her views of the Tiananmen and Hong Kong protests.

So, I’d like you to talk about the challenges of writing about people you know, or members of your family. What ethical dilemmas do you face?

Jianying Zha:

Well, in the first place, I’m only really confident writing about people with whom I’m familiar and I have a sneaking admiration for those gifted writers who can produce sci-fi novels in which they imagine a world that’s set 3000 years in the future. I don’t have a clue how to do that. Then there’s authors of genre fiction, creators who compose works according to a particular formula; you know, detective or fantasy fiction. That’s not my thing either, not at all. I can only write about things that really touch me, or about people whom I feel that I really understand. There’s an old saying: ‘It’s easy to paint ghosts, but real people are a challenge’ [画人难画鬼易]. That describes me.

But one of the hard things about ‘painting people’ is how to deal with people whom you actually know. I’ve often been asked how I ‘dared to write’ [敢写] about so-and-so. I remember Xu Jilin, a Shanghai professor [and a noted intellectual historian with a famously meek temperament], once said to me: ‘Xiao Zha, how do you have the gumption to write [敢写] the things you do?’ I knew exactly what he meant — as an intellectual historian he is immediately taken to task whenever he says something about a historical figure that is even only a little off centre. He was saying that writing the way I do would lose me a lot of friends.

That’s only one of the challenges I’ve faced. Another is that if you want to profile a person warts and all you are doing it in the context of China as a surveillance society, an authoritarian culture that requires submission. There’s a shared understanding that the minute you go ‘off the tracks’, or deviate from the general conventions related to describing ‘a good person’ — that is, someone who is conventionally acceptable — you’ll cause them considerable discomfort and you’ll be criticised for not being sympathetic with your subject’s lived reality. So, there’s many challenging dimensions of writing about people in China. It’s not just a politically authoritarian society, it is also one that exists within a complex network of unstated emotional blackmail. By the time you’ve finished writing whatever it is you want to, you might find that you’re left without any friends.

So, you have to overcome all of these challenges, and that’s not even counting the issue of gaining the trust of the people you are writing about. In writing about people I know I find that it’s relatively more liberating to be able to write extended profiles [of the kind published in The New Yorker]. It allows me to explore a subject both at some length and to some depth, it also makes it easier to build up a sense of trust with the person that you’re writing about. In a society like that of China, trust is crucial: their confidence that you won’t purposefully do something to harm or betray them. It’s particularly difficult. I know lots of cases, including those involving Western journalists hungry for a Pulitzer Prize, in which the subject of a story has ended up in jail, their lives destroyed. That’s something I have been sure to avoid at all costs and it’s also meant that I’ve had to give up on many stories because, once you really get deeply into a subject and pursue it in a completely truthful and unsparing way, your subject might not be able to take it, or you might put them in harm’s way. To pursue the truth while taking all of these things into consideration really is challenging.

Let me give you an example regarding Enemy of the State. When it came out, my brother was still in jail, though Xu Wenli, his close comrade, wasn’t and he read a translation of my profile that was circulating online. Xu was the founder of the Chinese Democracy Party and had a particularly close bond with my brother. Although he’d been sentenced to 13 years himself, he’d been let out early on medical grounds. Anyway, he read my profile and before I’d even had a chance to tell my brother about it, Xu told him something to the effect that ‘she’s completely distorted things and it’s full of errors’. The fact was that Xu felt that I hadn’t been effusive enough and that I hadn’t made my brother seem more heroic. I had depicted him as being a fairly normal person.

After Jianguo got out of jail, he wrote me a long letter in which he said that he understood my approach and that I’d pretty much got things right. He said that he appreciated how much effort I’d put into writing about him and observed that it was a reflection of our emotional bond. Although he is my half-brother — we share the same father — we’d always been pretty close. He spent twenty-one years in Inner Mongolia, but his younger brother, my younger half-brother, and I were the only two people in the family who’d ever made the effort to undertake that mammoth train journey to see him. So, the bond was there from our youth and that had helped him appreciate what I’d been trying to do in my profile of him.

Of course, in time he also let me know that he had some misgivings. Looking back on it now, I realise that he’s not quite the same person that he was in those days. In Tourist Trap, the second piece that I wrote about him for The New Yorker [published in December 2018] — the one in which I described how dissidents like him were ‘bei 被’ [to be subjected to a negative action] — it reflected his sense of black humour; like I said, he wasn’t quite the same person as he had been in the first profile.

[Note: As a grammatical particle or ‘preposition’ the word 被 bèi indicates both the passive mood as well as the fact that something or someone is being acted upon, often in a negative way. 被 bèi is used to express ‘the adversative passive voice’, that is, it is used to denote an individual’s lack of control, a state of unwilling subjugation or even foul play. 被 bèi indicates that a person is acted upon rather than acting. As Jianying Zha reports in Tourist Trap, her brother was regularly bei lüyou 被旅游, ‘to be touristed’ or spirited away, by the police during politically sensitive moments. ‘The term is one of those sly inventions favored by Chinese netizens’, Zha writes:
‘whenever law enforcement frames people, or otherwise conscripts them into an activity, the prefix bei is used to indicate the passive tense. Hence: bei loushui (to be tax-evaded), bei zisha (to be suicided), bei piaochang (to be johned), and so on. In the past few years, the bei list has been growing longer, the acts more imaginative and colorful. “To be touristed” is no doubt the most appealing of these scenarios, and it is available only to a select number of troublemakers. In Beijing, perhaps dozens of people a year are whisked off on these exotic trips, typically diehard dissidents who have served time and are on the radar of Western human-rights organizations and media outlets. Outside the capital, the list includes not just activists but also petitioners (fangmin)—ordinary people from rural villages or small towns who travel to voice their grievances to high government officials about local malfeasances they have suffered from.’]

As for Wang Meng, he’s a different case entirely. He didn’t read Servant of the State until it was published, and I’m sure he never imagined that I’d write about him in the way I did. It was quite awkward for a while, in particular because people kept asking both of us about it. That, added to the fact that we often appeared in the media together.

Li Yuan:

You mean on the TV chat show Behind the Headlines?

[Note: Behind the Headlines 锵锵三人行 was a chat show compèred by Dou Wentao 竇文濤. It aired on Phoenix TV from 1998 to 2017, when it was cancelled. Jianying Zha appeared on the program from 2006 to 2017.]

Jianying Zha:

We often appeared on it together and after my profile came out it was pretty evident that there was a certain tension between us. It was pretty uncomfortable for a while, though I really have to give it to Wang Meng since he showed himself to be quite a broad-minded man, moreover, he appreciated the fact that I was writing about him as an historical figure. Ultimately, I think he understood what I was trying to do and, despite it all, we have remained friends, although in saying that I wonder whether anyone can really be his friend. In any event, after that we frequently appeared on Behind the Headlines together. If ours was a ‘friendship’, then what exists between us survived what I had written.

Li Yuan:

I have to confess that I don’t have a TV, so I only ever saw a few episodes of the show on YouTube, back in 2010 that is.

Jianying Zha:

It was cancelled about seven or eight years ago. They killed it off.

Li Yuan:

In the context of the times, Behind the Headlines was an impressive show, be it in terms of the subject matter it touched on or the relative depth of the discussions; it was as though there was nothing off limits. I recommend that people in the audience [and therefore also readers of this translation] take a look at this engaging series.

Let me ask another question, one that had the most ‘likes’ among audience queries. It reads

‘Although you’ve left China and taken up American citizenship, you still have family in China. Do you feel that you are really free from self-censorship when you write? If we really want to speak, write and criticise freely, how can we not be constrained by the fact that we have family back in China?’

Jianying Zha:

Here I must point out that I may well be an exception to the rule. I’m of a certain age and both of my parents are dead. My closest relative back in China is my elder brother, a well known ‘ex con’ and an unredeemable thorn in the side of the authorities. He’s worn out his welcome in Communist jails, so how bad can things really get for him now? Will he be hurt by anything that I do? [Audience laughter.] I don’t believe that he will be. Then there’s Tourist Trap, that second profile that I didn’t show him. He told me that the authorities listen in on our phone conversations, furthermore because of the political sensitivities surrounding his case, he also has a dedicated surveillance team. Eventually, some someone translated Tourist Trap and it circulated online. My brother saw it on a WeChat group and simply said: ‘Ah, I see you’ve written another piece about me.’ ‘That’s right,’ I responded.

So, in a sense, I’m not bothered by the usual sensitivities surrounding speaking out, but anyone with family back in China has to work things out for themselves. People are always seeking my advice on this subject, asking me if it’ll be safe for them, or how they can avoid getting into trouble at either end. I’m even very particular about what I say to my daughter; I don’t want to be one of those mothers. ‘It’s up to you’, I tell her. In China there’s lots of people, in particular men, who are real ‘mama’s boys’. Listen up, fellas: you’re too mollycoddled!

At a meeting of an NGO I’m involved with the other day I saw how people deal with things: holding up a sheet of blank white paper and protesting under a pseudonym. For the most part, the people who work at diaspora online publications are female students, women or gender minorities. In Hooligan Swallow there’s that really tall fellow, the one we’d call the ‘Party rep’; people like that are as rare as hen’s teeth.

Rejecting the Mollycoddled Chinese Male

Li Yuan:

Most of the volunteers involved in our Bumingbai Festival are also female.

Jianying Zha:

Why is that? Is it mostly men who ask the kind of question that I just got?

Li Yuan:

Actually, it’s both men and women. It’s a pretty universal concern because so many young people want to express themselves but are worried about the consequences of speaking out.

Jianying Zha:

I completely understand and that’s why I’d say I can more readily understand the misgivings of women. As for the men: maybe you can try being a little more courageous, more willing to stand up? Because, let’s face it, at the moment, by far the majority of people involved in these kinds of free spaces — where the pay is low, but people share your values — are women. Men are for the most part simply not present, though I believe that online the people with the most critical views of things are invariably male. — while they enjoy the fruits of the labour of others, they take inordinate pleasure in slagging off about it.

And, while we’re on this topic, I really want to get something off my chest: why is ‘fuck your mother’s cunt’ China’s ‘national swear’ [国骂]? It also appears in Hooligan Swallow, though in my opinion the expression ‘fuck your old man’ is far more pertinent. [Audience laughter.] I just don’t get it. It’s not only used in Standard Chinese, it’s just as common in Cantonese, where the expression is ‘diu2 nei5 lou5 mou5’ 屌你老母. Why shouldn’t it be ‘diu2 nei5 lou5 dau6’ 屌你老豆. You can’t find that formulation anywhere and it’s because people don’t say it. It’s always ‘diu2 nei5 lou5 mou5’. This kind of gender discrimination when it’s wrapped up with the whole ‘mama’s little darling’ [妈宝男] effect really has screwed with Chinese people’s heads. So, as I see it, if you want to know what’s wrong with a nation, take a good hard look at what’s wrong with the elites.

In recent years, it’s been pretty obvious to me that the most creative, satirical and insightful things [that appear online] are the short videos made by everyday young people. In WeChat discussion groups, however, what you mostly get is a pile of wordy blather from people, be they politically on the right or the left of an issue, and regardless of whether it’s from public intellectuals or anti-establishment critics. Blah-dee-blah blah. They’re too smug and definitely far too comfortable with themselves.

Li Yuan:

In response let me just say that a statistical breakdown of the listeners and viewers of our Bumingbai podcast on YouTube shows that roughly 80% of our audience are male and only 20% are female. Over the years I’ve put a lot of effort into improving the balance, but it’s been a uphill battle. Among the males, quite a fair proportion are sort of ‘cosplay women’, you know, the kind of ‘twisted sister’ type of person who takes pleasure in telling me how to run the show.

Jianying Zha:

Laughs.

On C.T. Hsia and the China Obsession

Li Yuan:

There’s lots of people like that, all of them men.

On another topic: when you were studying at Columbia University one of your supervisors was C.T. Hsia [夏志清, 1921-2013] who famously commented on what he called the ‘China Obsession’ of modern Chinese writers. He regarded it as being something that cramped their perspective and that prevented them from equating ‘the sick state of his country with the state of man in the modern world’. That was four decades ago. Has your perspective on this issue changed much?

[Note: In discussing the ‘Obsession with China’, Hsia observed that ‘modern Western authors use literary techniques to critique modernity, giving voice to our collective disappointment and disillusionment. Modern Chinese authors, however, labor under a historically imposed limitation in that they restrict their critiques to the dark side of Chinese society, not human society in general.’ Hsia’s view of the ‘Obsession with China’ in part informed the present translator’s work on ‘artistic exile’, as well as being one of the inspirations for Chinese Visions: A Provocation (2007), a project on Chinese intellectual life.]

Jianying Zha:

Of course it’s changed. I was still in my early twenties when I decided to pursue my studies with Professor Hsia at Columbia. He shared his view of what he called the ‘Obsession with China’ quite early on in our teacher-student relationship and he said, in what seemed like a disguised expectation, that he didn’t think I would turn out like that. In fact, he told me that I might prove to be an exception to the rule.

The background to our exchange on the subject was that I’d only recently relocated to New York from South Carolina, where I’d been studying in an English department. Though I had started out studying Chinese literature at Peking University, in the States I’d initially devoted myself day and night to learning English. Since I was still pretty young, by the time I worked with Professor Hsia my English wasn’t too bad. He said that he thought I’d made the right decision to spend time studying in South Carolina rather than coming straight to him. Most of Professor Hsia’s Chinese students were direct transplants from China. For the most part, they only ever ate in Chinatown.

Actually, I was studying in the Department of Comparative Literature, which at the time was headed up by Edward Said. Professor Hsia was my supervisor in the Asian Studies Department. He cautioned me against the ‘Obsession with China’ and said he’d seen too many Chinese overwhelmed by it. Since I was completely focussed on going back to China after completing my studies in the US so that I could write fiction, I didn’t fully appreciate the significance of what he was telling me at the time. Added to that was the fact that my undergraduate major was Chinese literature, so I was hardly prepared to abandon that particular obsession. That’s even more reason why I didn’t fully appreciate his point.

In retrospect, a lot of what Edward Said said also went over my head. I was the only Chinese student in his class and I could tell that he was very curious about me, maybe hopeful even. But, like I said, I was very young and I probably didn’t completely understand his famous work on Orientalism. My general sense was that his theoretical framework, which was focussed on the Middle East, didn’t really tally with the discursive environment of China, a place that hadn’t really been colonised. To my mind, post-colonial ideas of that sort didn’t map neatly onto China’s historical reality. On top of that, I had views about China’s New Left or New Marxist thinkers about whom I thought that ‘there’s leftists, then there’s Chinese leftists’. They were a different animal, a thing unto themselves and I thought they were engaging in a radical misrepresentation of Said’s intellectual framework, something that allowed them to skirt the real and substantive issues of his work and reframing Chinese realities [that enabled them to avoid the substantive issues of party-state domination by focusing in a self-serving way on ‘Western hegemony and capitalist evils in China’] while enabling them still to pose as ‘leftists’. Their gambit was, ultimately, extremely utilitarian. I think that remains the case today.

Western leftists didn’t, and still don’t, appreciate the complex subtleties of the situation since, superficially at least, the rhetoric employed by Chinese New Marxist leftists echoes their language. In retrospect, though, I realise that I didn’t really appreciate what Said was saying about Palestine.

[Note: See also Simon Leys, Orientalism and Sinology (1984).]

As for Professor Hsia, time has proven just how much I remain caught up in my own ‘China Obsession’, though I’d hasten to add that it’s an obsession that also has quite a bit to recommend it. Sure, obsessing over China has been burdensome, and has even been a limitation on me, but I’ve only gradually come to that realisation. Why haven’t I been able to unburden myself from China? And, I think too of all of those other Chinese — like the people who courageously protested during 1989 and have sacrificed so much since then. I look at how in exile although they have been in the US for over thirty years they still only speak Chinese, eat Chinese and obsess about China. I understand that they’re afraid of feeling left behind, not behind the world mind you, but failing to keep up with the changes in China. They fear that they’ll stagnate, though I think they’re wrong.

But let me turn this on its head and take up what Perry Link just said: China specialists really should study Chinese, and not just gain a superficial understanding but really get into it, otherwise they shouldn’t call themselves ‘China Experts’. Chinese have the same issue: unfortunately for every 10,000 people who studies English, only one studies Chinese. But that’s human nature at work. A superpower like America has the kind of cultural cachet that makes English important. It’s similar to how Tibetans have to learn Chinese; that too is a hard but unavoidably realistic choice.

[Note: See 林培瑞, 隔靴搔痒的中国通们; and, Recalling an Expert ‘China Expert’.]

If you want to really understand the meaning of democracy, freedom and what it means to ‘be an individual’, you can’t just focus on China, or the Chinese language. You have to study a foreign language like English. The first time I read ‘On Liberty’ by John Stuart Mill in English I finally appreciated how different the discussion of freedom and liberty were outside of the Chinese context. China had never had any kind of discourse like it. Of course, according to Western thinkers such as Mill or Friedrich Nietzsche, the idea of the individual and individualism is a modern phenomenon, but its origins can be traced back to antiquity. China has no tradition of self governance or individual liberty, or only ever a very weak tradition. You really have to tackle it in English.

I remember how shaken I was when I first read what Mill had to say about China. I’ve forgotten the original text, but he pointed to China as a warning example, an exception with which any country or people who care about liberty should find concerning. He says that despite the genius of Chinese sages and its grand history and culture, ultimately the country had stagnated, becoming a place without individual freedom that was dominated by Confucian thought.

More recently, I delved into some Chinese classics myself and wrote a piece called China’s Heart of Darkness. It’s a study of how Legalism and Confucianism ended up in cahoots. The devil in those particular details is to be found in the Legalists, starting with Shang Yang [商鞅] and Hanfeizi [韩非子] — they were the ones who operationalised ideas of imperial rule. Confucian thought, as adapted by Xunzi, became the handmaiden to power, crushing the individual in the process. The individual was forever imprisoned in the family and the clan. That formula [The Great Learning, a Confucian classic] about ‘adapting oneself to the way of righteousness, cultivating the individual, managing the family, ruling the state and bringing peace to all under heaven’ [诚意正心，修身、齐家、治国、平天下] was a way for them to impose those ideas on everyone.

There’s some individuals, like Liu Xiaobo [刘晓波], who were able to think through these issue. But you don’t see much hint of a collective awareness among the Chinese intelligentsia. China’s Enlightenment died before it could be realised. Without a few centuries of renaissance there would have been no Enlightenment in the first place. The philosopher Li Zehou [李泽厚] has discussed this, as did the Sinologist Vera Schwarz, in her book The Chinese Enlightenment. It’s still worth reading. Only when you see China in a broader, global perspective, can you really gain a deeper understanding of these issues.

[Note: See Liu Xiaobo on the Inspiration of New York.]

So, this is why I suggest that everyone should ‘go on a China fast’ — take a break from your China Obsession, first for a day, then maybe stretch it out into a year. Treat it like a form of Zen-like meditation: banish all thought of China; don’t eat Chinese food; and, don’t speak Chinese. What’s the worst thing that could happen? It won’t kill you, though I think that if you don’t experience a kind of death like that, you can never truly be reborn. You need to experience that kind of death fearlessly, and don’t be too much of a ‘mollycoddled baby’ about it. [Audience applauds.]

And, just think about Chinese public culture: how people socialise at a banquet [饭局] with everyone seated around a round table — it’s always a male-centric affair, from beginning to end.

***

Li Yuan:

Leaving no space for other people to say a thing.

Jianying Zha:

Women simply don’t get a look in; they’re only there to pour tea. You’re supposed to be grateful that you’re even allowed to be in the same room while they natter on nonstop. As I see it, you can trace it all back to the Confucian thinker Xunzi. If you read him you’ll realise that he promotes cliquish behaviour — affirming those who are like-minded and rejecting everyone who doesn’t agree with you while you suck up to the local king. That’s what you get from Xunzi. Go check it out and see who really wrote China’s first big-character poster: it was Xunzi. I’m not exaggerating; take a look at the chapter ‘Against the Twelve Masters’ [非十二子] in Xunzi. You tell me if it doesn’t read just like a big-character poster in which people are denounced, one after the other. The rhetorical style and mindset of the text reflect a kind of servility in the face of power, one that’s typical of the men who parade themselves as ‘teachers of the state’, men who dismiss all other schools of thought and points of view. Here I’m saying all this about China because earlier Perry Link had a lot to say about the state of things here in the USA.

[Note: See 荀子・非十二子篇, where it says that:

‘In the current era, there are people who ornament perverse doctrines and embellish vile teachings, such that they disturb and disorder the whole world. Their exaggerated, twisted, and overly subtle arguments cause all under Heaven to be muddled and not know wherein right and wrong and order and disorder are contained.

‘Some of these men give rein to their inborn dispositions and nature. They are at ease in license and arrogance and have the conduct of beasts. They are incapable of bringing about accordance with proper form or creating comprehensive rule. Nevertheless, they can cite evidence for maintaining their views, and they achieve a reasoned order in their explanations, so that it is enough to deceive and confuse the foolish masses. …

‘Some of these men resist their inborn dispositions and nature. They go to great extremes and look upon what is deviant as beneficial. With impropriety, they take distinguishing themselves from other people as supreme. They are incapable of coordinating the great masses or of making clear the great divisions of society. Nevertheless, they can cite evidence for maintaining their views, and they achieve a reasoned order in their explanations, so that it is enough to deceive and confuse the foolish masses. …

‘Some of these men do not understand the proper scales for unifying the world and establishing states and families. They elevate concrete results and usefulness, and they extol frugality and restraint. But they have disdain for ranks and classes, and so they have never been able to accept distinctions and differences, or to discriminate between lord and minister. Nevertheless, they can cite evidence for maintaining their views, and they achieve a reasoned order in their explanations, so that it is enough to deceive and confuse the foolish masses.’

— from ‘Against the Twelve Masters’, Xunzi: The Complete Text, trans. Eric L. Hutton, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014]

I’m not of a mind to blame the present state of affairs in America on everyday people — be they rednecks, white necks or whatever — I identify the elites as being the source of mischief. Anyway, I don’t think of myself as an outsider; I’m an American, a citizen for many years now. I’ve done my time and, in the past, I was a Beaconist who believed in the saving graces of the United States, and I was circumspect about my criticisms. I needed something with iconic status in my life and for me that was the US of A. It was one that I defended for decades, but now I feel I have the right to give it a poke or two.

[Note: ‘Beaconism’ 灯塔主义 is a term used to describe the idealisation of ‘the West’, especially the United States, as a political ‘beacon of light’. See also ‘Adieu, China!’ — Jianying Zha’s Long Farewell. For the China Heritage view of American politics, see the series Contra Trump — America’s Empire of Tedium.

Since the COVID pandemic and as modern-day political pilgrims beat a path to the People’s Republic of China a new school of ‘Sino-Beaconism’ has taken shape internationally — I’ll dub them ‘中华灯塔派’, in contrast to pro-American 灯塔主义. The party-state has long been a place that ‘holds space’ for those who are willing to validate the Yang and skirt around the Yin and this latest crop of fellow travellers to China’s Velvet Prison seem more than willing to luxuriate in the velvet while turning a blind eye to the prison. Promoted variously by podcasters, influencers, boutique soft-sell authoritarians and a gaggle of those disappointed in ‘The West’, these Sino-Beaconists argue that under Xi Jinping China is not only ‘living in the future’ but that it is a twenty-first century model for modernity. We haven’t witnessed such effusions since 2009, when Martin Jacques published When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order .

See also Han Suyin, Two-faced People and China Experts in a Yin-Yang Nation.]

Guess I’ve really got off track here, but to return to what Professor C.T. Hsia said to me all those years ago, that their China Obsession has crippled thinking Chinese people. I couldn’t agree more, though it’s taken me far too long to truly realise it and get over it. Even if you’re not focussed on China, that old obsession can eat you up. When I said you need to ‘take a break’ from China, I’m being rhetorically indulgent. What I really mean is that you can move beyond the boundaries of just thinking about China even as you follow what is going on in China. Many people, in particular Jews and Eastern Europeans have been able to do something similar to that. They offer a model.

Li Yuan:

I still have a pile of questions to ask, but given our limited time I think that this is an ideal point to bring this to an end. Thank you so much!

***

Source:

查建英，我为何要自绝于人民、精英与妈宝男，DC不明白节，《不明白播客: Episode 169》，2025年9月18日
Podcast:

***

Chinese Transcript

(corrected by Jianying Zha)

查建英：我为何要自绝于人民、精英与妈宝男

不明白播客

[Not translated:

这是第二届不明白节特辑的第一集。嘉宾查建英是文革之后的第一批大学生，80年代，她先后在北京大学、南卡罗来纳大学、哥伦比亚大学上学，1986年，查建英回到中国，但很快，充满理想和激情的八十年代终结在广场的坦克之下，查建英以决裂的姿态离开了中国。然而，她和中国的故事并没有就此划上句号。此后，她一次次回到中国，她以作家的身份观察中国的变迁。过去，她因为《弄潮儿》、《中国波普》、《八十年代访谈录》等书籍为人所知。最近，查建英发表了新的文章《火车：铁路旅行、流亡和生存的中国家族史》，文章描述国家暴力之下的家族命运故事。我们从她的新作《火车》谈起，她为什么选取“火车”作为意象贯穿家族史写作？她为什么选择“跳下火车”和“自绝于人民”？经历了文革、六四、新冠疫情之后，她如何看待自己和国家的关系、又如何思考”中国情结”这个问题？时间轴： 01:47 查建英的扒火车往事，《火车》一文的缘起与“火车”的含义 04:35 家族命运的开端：留法十年的外公1929年被“骗”回了中国 12:30 Dongsheng阿姨：从目睹文革中的父母悲剧，到支持镇压天安门 18:11 家族里的人如何看待哥哥查建国：因组建中国民主党被判刑9年 21:19 “跳火车”的选择： “自绝于人民”，不被爱国话语绑架 30:03 六四之后的幻灭、改国籍的过程、疫情记忆 37:51 查建英对精英的失望 41:03 谈写作：《国家公敌》和《国家公仆》，如何写熟悉的人？ 48:17 观众提问：家人还在国内，如何不审查自己？ 49:24 查建英吐槽妈宝男 56:04 如何看待导师夏志清40年前的话：“太关注中国是一种局限” 相关链接：《Trains: A Chinese Family History of Railway Journeys, Exile, and Survival》《China’s Bizarre Program to Keep Activists in Check》《国家公敌》（Enemy of the State）《国家公仆》（Servant of the State）]

文字版全文：

[Not translated:

01:47 查建英的扒火车往事，《火车》一文的缘起与“火车”的含义
04:35 家族命运的开端：留法十年的外公1929年被“骗”回了中国]

12:30 Dongsheng阿姨：从目睹文革中的父母悲剧，到支持镇压天安门
18:11 家族里的人如何看待哥哥查建国：因组建中国民主党被判刑9年
21:19 “跳火车”的选择： “自绝于人民”，不被爱国话语绑架
30:03 六四之后的幻灭、改国籍的过程、疫情记忆
37:51 查建英对精英的失望
41:03 谈写作：《国家公敌》和《国家公仆》，如何写熟悉的人？
48:17 观众提问：家人还在国内，如何不审查自己？
49:24 查建英吐槽妈宝男
56:04 如何看待导师夏志清40年前的话：“太关注中国是一种局限”

[00:12:58] 袁莉: 对，在文革期间呢，东生阿姨和你的外祖父母一起住，她目睹了父亲，就是你的外祖父母被侮辱，母亲卧轨自杀。但是现在，她对于历史和政治的看法其实和很多中国人很像。比如2019年香港反送中示威的时候，她他会说邓小平镇压天安门广场的决定是对的。这几年，因为你写这个家族回忆录，想了解家族历史上发生了什么事情的时候，她说：“那个时代发生了很多事情，它们对今天的人来说没什么意义。幸好结束了，现在都过去了。”东生阿姨是一个特别好的人，你和她的感情也非常好。她说这些话的时候，你是怎么理解和消化的？
[00:13:57] 查建英: 我的姨和姨夫都是工程师，都在大国营厂工作，而且都是这样的。家族里其实一直是受迫害下来的，至少父母那一代是这样，兄弟姐妹里面有两个发疯，都是跟政治有关系的。
但是她居然在香港抗议的那年，就是2019年的时候，她专门在电话上跟我长途地说。我知道她一贯的观点，所以一点都不意外。她一直就是这样的，一直在谆谆……好像在劝诱我说：你出了国，离开太久了，你不了解中国，我们在这的人就是这样想的，现在生活很好，都改善了。中国人就是这样的等等。
但是具体到她认为邓小平在六四的时候让坦克开出来镇压是对的，这是她第一次跟我说。就是在19年。她说我们都看了电视。她看的电视当然不是香港的电视，不是粤语的，是大陆媒体对香港的报道。她看到的都是那些混乱、暴徒什么的，什么泼国徽，把地铁站也封了。其实可能就封了两天。不能正常生活了。她就认为那个是香港动乱了。
所以她说：我和你姨夫，我们都是知识分子，都是工程师。实际上她是没有上过大学的，她是技工，但是一路提拔到退休之前也都是工程师了。可是我们这些人当年八九的时候都是同情学生的，可是现在回头一看，老邓是对的。如果他当时没有做这个正确的决定，没有镇压的话，就没有今天的好日子，我们今天就会是香港，我们就没有这么快、这么好的发展，今天的生活、繁荣就没有了。
[00:16:08] 袁莉: 这其实是很普遍的。
[00:16:09] 查建英: 对，非常普遍。因为在香港抗议的时候，我的几个高中的好友，永红二小之后我又上了中学，同学也是很多工人子弟。她们跟我非常铁，感情非常好。
但是逐渐地生活轨道越来越差，他们后来也都下岗了，也没有上过大学。再谈的时候，除了怀旧，对当下的中国看法就会有很大的分歧。
然后他们对习的连任。比如说我记得，我去的时候晚到了一会儿，我们一起包饺子，我进去的时候，他们在窃窃私语。我敏感的第六神经就感觉，觉得他们在说我。我们四个人是拜把子的，我年龄最小，是四妹子，他们说：四妹子来了，这个问题不要谈，可能是这个意思。但是还是忍不住漏出来了，包饺子当中还说，其实老习连任还是好的，要不然这个反腐进行不下去，都是这样。
然后我们一块儿看的时候，在我家，我要看凤凰卫视，就是想让他们亲眼看一看和平抗议是什么样的。他们完全没有任何兴趣，一起在谈家长里短。什么股价涨了，东家长、李家短啊，金星又怎么样了，你们可能知道的那个状态。
[00:17:33] 袁莉: 但是我想问，反腐和他们有什么关系？
[00:17:36] 查建英: 她们认为这太腐败了，反腐很好啊。就是这种想法。这就是所谓的普通人吧，中国的普通人，我相信他们大致是一样，所以我并不意外。但是我觉得东生姨的话让我很震撼，因为这是我很敬佩的人，她就真的是那种大地之母的感觉，一直担着全家的担子，人也特别好，但是这就是她最真实的看法。
[00:18:11] 袁莉: 你同父异母的哥哥查建国是中国民主党的创建人之一，也因此被判9年监禁。你最著名的文章之一《国家公敌》就是写你哥哥的。我就是好奇，你在《火车》这篇文章里面没有提你哥哥。但我看的时候就不停的想，你家族里的人是怎么看你哥哥的，比如东生阿姨她怎么看？还有你这个文章里面提到的那个外甥，他们知道你哥哥的故事吗？他们怎么看呢？
[00:18:46] 查建英: 他们都知道，都知道我哥哥，而且我记得印象很清楚的就是，我哥哥做了9年牢，一天都没少，因为他不认罪嘛。出来的时候是在2008奥运会前夕，我和我妈妈张罗了北京的家族聚会，等于也是给他接风。
当时是警察到的时候，我们自己先去的。然后家族聚会的时候就很尴尬。因为我觉得实际上，我那些家族的，不论上辈的还是我同代的，其实都觉得他是个怪人。
而且就怀疑，觉得“他值吗？”，就是前面《流氓燕》电影里面那个人那句话：“做这个有什么用？”连他自己的母亲其实都不认同，就觉得是鸡蛋碰石头。
然后最尴尬还有——不是我姨，而是我姑姑，说：“你看小英”——就是我——意思就是说“你看她很成功嘛”。其实他们也不知道我在写什么，也不知道我在干什么（现场笑）。
[00:19:50] 袁莉: 反正就知道你是作家。
[00:19:52] 查建英: 反正是作家，生活在美国什么的。好像两边走挺好的。觉得我哥哥怎么怎么不走这条路呢？
我要说，人都是很有两面性，虽然家庭聚会的主调是这样的，但后来我才知道，我其中一个堂兄，他的三观——如果我们说左右的话——其实比我还要右，几乎就是带路党级别的。后来我哥哥自己告诉我，他是私下一对一见我我哥哥的时候给他钱表示敬意，说你从监狱出来肯定也不能工作，也没有钱。
[00:20:39] 袁莉: 给你哥哥钱。
[00:20:40] 查建英: 给我哥，因为他常年给外企工作，其实还蛮有钱的。人，带着一个面具，他一方面很务实，但是他心里对有些人还是有那么一点，就是觉得：“汉子！” 他是出于良知。其实他的三观我也认同，就是这样给钱。我遇到过一些人这样私下给我哥哥钱，或者给我一大摞钱，就是说通过我给我哥哥，表示敬意。
[00:21:12] 袁莉: 现金是敢给的，线上转账是不敢的。
[00:21:15] 查建英: 没错，不留痕迹，没有任何痕迹。
[00:21:21] 袁莉: 我来念一下你文章的最后一句话。你说：“我也喜欢中国，但它是我自己定义的中国。从我小时候扒火车开始，我就幻想着外星的天空和遥远的城市，被广阔的外星天空和遥远的城市所感动。我对中国人对专制统治的无尽耐心变得相当不耐烦。我选择不和我的人民在一起。我选择了下火车，把铁轨远远地抛在后面。”
你这段话，我感觉实际上是回应那个俄罗斯诗人安娜·阿赫玛托娃在1961年写的一首诗，我也把里面的一个小节念一下：“不为异乡天空的光华所动，不羡遥远城邦的庇护安宁。我选择和我的人民在一起，灾难引领他们之处，我亦随行。”
你能不能讲一讲，“我选择不和我的人民在一起，我选择了下火车”这句话是什么意思？还有，你什么时候下了自绝于人民（现场笑）的决心的？又是什么时候下了火车？
[00:22:29] 查建英: 这一系列的问题，我一个一个回答。首先，“自绝于人民”这个词，我不知道现在的年轻人知不知道，我的同代人应该都清楚是什么意思。我从小长大的毛时代的中国，尤其到了文革的时候，“自绝于人民”，实际上就是code language for suicide，就是一种对自杀的变相说法。像我外婆那样的卧轨自杀，就叫“自绝于人民”。后来自杀的人越来越多，到了文革的时候又升级，谁谁谁“自绝于人民”，那时是大喇叭文化，整天广播。我从很小的时候开始——我外婆那个时候（自杀）我不知道，可是从我七八岁文革开始了，我就亲眼看到有人跳楼。我的邻居跳下来，就死在那儿，这就叫做“自绝于人民”。没有看到跳的那一瞬间，就看到尸体——我上小学路过的时候，一个女的躺在那，胳膊也断了，这种情况很多。所以，“自绝于人民”这个词是这个意思。
这是“自绝于”。我们一点一点来unpack，来解析这个内容。接下来再说“人民”。为什么我现在变成“自绝于人民”，而且proud of it，还为此自豪。
可能不只是中国，在很多地方，“people”不单纯指一个人，而是“人民”。首先，它不等于citizen，公民的概念。citizen还可以指个人，一个一个的individual，而且从古希腊开始，citizen是有权利的。我说的不是权力，power，而是权利，right。所以citizen和“人民”是完全不一样的两种概念。【我记得在此处我还说了卢梭的“人民主权论” People’s Power后来变成了毛泽东在49年执政初期讲的“人民民主专政”——这几句话比较重要，但是不是被删掉了？
虽然在我们的popular language里面，有的时候可以泛用，比如说“people怎么怎么样”，但其实很多非常罪恶的事情，是假“人民”之名进行的。所以我说的“自绝于人民”里的“人民”是这个词，它是一个复数，是一个抽象的概念，它不是一个个人，也不是一群个人。
所以，我要先说清楚我说的“人民”是这个意思。你前面有一大堆问题，还有一个是……
[00:24:46] 袁莉: 还有一个是你解释“我选择不和我的人民在一起，我选择了下火车”这句话是什么意思？
[00:24:54] 查建英: 这个阿赫玛托娃又是另外一个问题。阿赫玛托娃是一个跨越了俄罗斯和苏联两个时代的诗人，而且她被公认为是一个伟大的诗人。她从旧俄时代出来，经历了十月革命，经历了二战，后来又经历了古拉格，而且她的儿子好像也被流放到西伯利亚。
[00:25:21] 袁莉: 她的丈夫在肃反中被枪决。她被誉为白银时代最有名的诗人之一。
[00:25:30] 查建英: 她本人也被禁，以赛亚·柏林去看也成了她的罪名。她整个的形象，我认为也被处理成了一个神圣的符号——经历苦难留在这片土地上，和这个人民在一起。实际上她不大被提及，因为我们其实都有这种倾向，要把一个英雄的符号弄得金光闪闪。不论是甘地还是昂山素姬，他们已经不是人了，他们是一个符号，是一个symbol。
我觉得阿赫玛托娃其实也是这样，其实你稍微仔细看一眼，你就知道，她为了经历这么多时代还能存活下来，其实要做很多妥协。她其实配合了，比如二战的时候，她写了爱国的诗。因为这个也好说服自己，就是反法西斯。所以她可以去给红军念诗了。到后来她也自我审查，所以她的书后来也被禁，也被允许。实际上这不是一个黑白分明的事情，有很多灰暗的东西藏在这个符号下面。
但是我要说的是跟我自己相关的一点。她代表了一个现象：俄罗斯和中国，尤其是文人，有一个非常有共鸣的一致的特点：我们都是一个古老的、专制的文化传统，经历了共产主义革命，要面对一系列革命和后革命时代的后遗症。不论是铁的监狱还是丝绒的监狱，其实都有很多共同的问题。而且同时绑架你的，是一个更大的爱国话语。在中国叫“家国”，在俄罗斯没有儒家，但是他们有很强的土地情结、东正教符号。他们的东正教相当于我们的儒教，我这是做一个大的类比。所以我们有很多共同的话语，互相有共鸣。
我这一代人也是看俄罗斯文学长大的，而且我也是跨两代的。我既疯狂地读《红楼梦》，同时也疯狂地读托尔斯泰和陀思妥耶夫斯基。我很小就看苏联文学，比如《铁流》，高尔基，还有《静静的顿河》——那都是我们年轻时候文青时代的圣典。但是你要unpack这些，解析这些，走到头的话，我要说，连阿赫玛托娃这样到现在我也非常尊敬的人，如果你敢直面她的话，你就会看到下面很多灰色的东西。她怎么被爱国的、苏联的、一直到现在普京的爱国主义绑架。包括索尔仁尼琴也是一样的。他从美国一回去就变得反西方了，这其中有一个大俄罗斯东西。
然后我要说的更残酷，说到当下，还跟你还有关系。你提到：为什么中国没有纳瓦尔尼？
[00:28:56] 袁莉: “为什么中国没有纳瓦尔尼”，我写过这样一篇专栏文章。
[00:28:58] 查建英: 袁莉有一个《纽约时报》的文章说，纳尔瓦尼死了，为什么中国没有纳瓦尔尼？我的回答是：当然有，有很多啊，刘晓波就是，甚至我哥哥也是。他们做了这么多的牺牲，而且连我哥哥这样的人——我觉得刘晓波还是超越了的——我哥哥早期的时候还说：“西藏独立，我是不赞成的，这是要分裂中国。”当然，后来他超越了这个。
可是他跟我说的是：“我是要永远留在这。”他不肯出去，出去以后他就没有意义了。他也看到，跟他一起创办民主党的人流亡到海外，好像就什么都不是了，变得很边缘。所以他觉得这跟他的生命意义有关。
但是他为了留在这，他必须去做妥协。实际上他不能做一个完全自由的人。他会被“爱国”吞噬的。说实话，魔鬼不光是共产党，还要和很多东西，和更大的文化符号打交道。
所以我说了一大堆，是因为我自己也经历了一个非常漫长的心路历程。你还问什么时候跳火车？
[00:30:14] 袁莉: 什么时候下的火车。
[00:30:15] 查建英: 什么时候下火车，这个过程也非常长。因为坦率的说，其实六四对我是一个巨大的，第一个最大的精神危机。后来在六四事件三十周年的时候，我还谈过，六四的时候，我们是在现场的，我第一次看见和平年代杀人，这是非常震撼的。
后来我又回到美国之后，就在考虑要不要入国籍。92年的时候，我已经离了婚，第一个丈夫是一个美国人，是一个白人，我觉得在面对一个非常巨大的问题，好像那种精神抑郁的症状都出来了。因为好像对我来说，我发现，改国籍是这么大的一件事，我自己都没想到。实际上因为我是中文系，从小长大读所有的中国的经典，潜意识里可能有一个跟自己国家的联系。所以入籍意味着叛国。实际上是这么一个问题。然后我告诉自己，我不是要叛国，我是为了写作的自由，这样我不用自我审查。如果我入了美国国籍，我还可以继续写作。
为什么我要学英文也跟这个有关系。我是中文系的，我非常热爱中文，我觉得汉语非常的美，我非常不舍得。我实际上是最早的海归，86、87年，我回去的时候是写中文小说，我就是奔着那个去的。这一切我都没想到，后来入了美国国籍，还开始写英文，即使是这样，我也没跳火车。我的中国情结就重到病入膏肓，还是不断地要回去。90年代一开始，我出了第一本英文书。。书里的留下一个光明的尾巴，当时觉得可以从商业化入口，没有政治改革不要紧，可以先追求个人自由、商业化。实际上现在回想，我觉得很傻。我的书叫《China Pop》中国波普。当时觉得从这种个人空间开始，然后走向市场、建立公民社会，企业家精神之类的
[00:32:36] 袁莉: 但这是那时候流行的叙事。
[00:32:38] 查建英: 是这样。我就是说我还在火车上。好像我已经变成美国公民了，但是割不断，我还是要回去，还是要写中国，还是要抱着希望。
最后我要回答你，实际上我最终“跳火车”这个事情，就是我最后一次回中国，那是在疫情前夕的19年。我回去了很长时间，半年都在中国的。之后我也没想到我会最终决定不回去了。
在疫情当中，我一直在纽约关注中国。我举一个简单的例子：我看了一些录像，大群的大白、所有的中国人在不断做核酸，中国人还特别会煽情，有些图配着非常煽情的音乐，拉着小提琴，里面的人一队一队像鹅一样伸长脖子去等着被捅嗓子眼，还捅得特别深。每一个人都排队，乖乖的。
我的脑子里就不断在闪回小时候看过的画面：40个日本军官就能让一万个中国人乖乖地跳进坑里被活埋、被枪毙。那时候我觉得不可思议。现在我看了这些录像，我觉得：可信。
我看到上海封城到最后有人跳楼。我觉得那就是我！我就深深地感觉到：他妈的就是得有枪！美国人就是有枪。美国人不懂这个。但是公民一定要有枪。但我知道，如果我要在中国，我是没有枪的，我只能跳楼，我只能做我外婆那样的人。就是这样。所以我就觉得我不要那种屈辱。我回想起阿赫玛托娃那种话，很伟大、很圣洁，但我觉得今天我要说：共产党的监狱，我一天都不想坐，我也不希望任何一个人去坐。我有很好的朋友现在还在坐。比如许志永，判得那么重。我觉得这条路没有意义、没有价值。所有的人都在吃“人血馒头”，甚至不是在吃“湿的人血馒头”。我不是要现在上去踩一脚，等多少年以后再来盛赞他们的光辉，呸！什么盛赞，这是吃“干血馒头”——就是等人死了以后再去纪念这些烈士，你们当初他妈的干什么去了？我就是这个意思，你就闭嘴吧：你要不然就跳火车，能跳就跳；你不能跳，你就留在那，做你能做的人事儿。
就像我刚才讲的，我觉得上午的电影太棒了，对流氓燕这些人，我真的佩服得五体投地。但是我要说一句，她们不是“人民”，我绝对不认为她们是“人民”。她们是“人”，是一个一个的个人；她们要留在那儿，敢留在那儿、还在记录，我觉得太牛逼了。比如重庆投影事件的戚洪，我怎么可能自绝于这样的人。
[00:36:09] 袁莉: 我怕建英的“自绝于人民”就是完全不关注的中国发生的事，其实她什么都看了，连直播都看了。
[00:36:20] 查建英: 袁莉和我说：看来你还不是“自绝于人民”。我说这小子哪儿是人民，这他妈就是一个独狼嘛。孤狼，lone wolf，我马上就觉得这是“狼见狼，两眼泪汪汪”我一看他就是一匹狼。
[00:36:39] 袁莉: 所以我们不是人民，我们是狼。
[00:36:43] 查建英: 对。我不能跟他比，我说的是这个人太牛逼了。我们精神上是相通的，我是喝狼奶长大的，你远离人群，可不是就是独狼吗？你怎么可能是人民呢？
这样的事，我可能做不了。因为我完全没有他那个高科技，我除了是路盲还是一个科盲，电脑这套完全不行。要做这件事得有本事。或者像四通桥那位。现在戚洪的科技水平又高了一些，得有投影仪这样的设备。而且我太佩服四通桥了，五体投地。但是我认为不要留在那，不要坐他们的监狱，不要被失踪。在六·四时候泼毛泽东像的那个人上哪儿去了？我们不知道。不要做这样的人。所以我觉得重庆这小子很牛逼，全干好了，出国来呸你们，笑你们。让你们在那说去吧。问题是为什么只有一匹独狼？我可能太苛刻了，对不起。我觉得虽然有一些，但还是太少。中国号称自由派的有多少？我们说少一点，有100万吗？就是三观属于自由派的，至少口炮党绝对不止100万，整天在微信群里面喷的太多了。
[00:38:12] 袁莉: 还有在推特上喷的，还有说戚洪要政治庇护之类的。
[00:38:18] 查建英: 对。阴阳怪气的，这完全是一帮鸡贼。别人做了还要诛心，还要说什么政治避难。根本不用听这些人。至少应该有1000个戚洪。如果说千分之一的人在三观上是自由派，那中国的千分之一就是一百多万人，对吧？那一百多万的千分之一有行动，不光是口炮党，有这么一点技术成分，而且还不要你牺牲，你能跑。这样的人应该有千分之一，我说的有没有道理？这点算数还是懂的。这样还是可以有1000个戚洪，但为什么只有一个，你还要我说什么？
我其实不是对人民有多失望，说实话我对中国的精英失望。我觉得中国的精英太差了，这个国家坏，不要老去怨人民，就像谭嗣同说的一样，秦政最大的大盗肯定是权力者，这是没得说的。但是第二坏的、第二要负责任的就是知识精英、技术精英、商业精英，这些精英们狼狈为奸。他们是那个“狈”。所以不要怪那些“奸民”什么的，先要检讨这些狼狈为奸的精英。行了，我说得打不住了。
41:03 谈写作：《国家公敌》和《国家公仆》，如何写熟悉的人？
48:17 观众提问：家人还在国内，如何不审查自己？
49:24 查建英吐槽妈宝男
56:04 如何看待导师夏志清40年前的话：“太关注中国是一种局限”
[00:39:58] 袁莉: 特别精彩，特别好。我们来说一下写作吧，稍微缓一下，关于你哥哥的查建国的这篇文章《国家公敌》，它发表以后，另一位中国民主党人士徐文立看了以后很生气，他觉得你把中国民主党的人都写歪了，也可能是这样子。总之就是写得不是很flattery（褒奖）。
然后，你在写另一篇文章《国家公仆》的时候，你毫不客气地描写了你的朋友，中国前文化部长王蒙处在国家辩护人和反叛者之间的一个尴尬处境。我记得应该是米沃什说过：一个家族或者一个家庭，一旦有一个作家，这个家庭就完蛋了。（现场笑）他真的是这样说的。
我们写作的人都知道，写熟悉的人是最难的。你在写作的时候会担心你写的人物的看法吗？就是文章发表以后，你怎么处理和他们的关系？比说你写《火车》这篇长文，你写了家族里面一些很悲惨的事情，但你也没有回避像东生阿姨，她对于天安门事件，还有别的一些看法，你也如实写了。
你能不能说一下，你怎么处理写熟悉的人、写家里人的情况？我觉得这是一个dilemma（两难）的问题。
[00:41:35] 查建英: 首先，实际上我只能写我熟悉的人。我有时候也很佩服那些有想象力的人，写科幻的，一上来就是3000年以后，他们能写。我完全不知道怎么写。或者是写类型小说的人，比如可以follow一个套路，然后就去写比如侦探、奇幻什么的。那不是我擅长的，也不是我会的。我写东西，必须是让我很感动，或者我觉得非常了解的人。不是有句古话：画鬼容易，画人难。我认为也是这样。
写一个人，其中只有一部分难度来自你说的怎么处理熟悉的人。很多人说：你怎么敢写这个？比如上海有一个教授，许纪霖，他就跟我说：“小查，你怎么敢写这些？”我马上就知道他的意思。因为他搞知识分子史，他稍微写一个不是很正面的，马上就被骂，一堆朋友跟你绝交，就这意思。
我知道有这个问题，但同时还有另外的问题。如果我写一个真实的人，在中国这样的监控社会、极权社会和一个顺从者的社会里，大家都有一个共识：你要做一个好人，或者一个正面的人，只要你出了这个轨，就会让这个人很难堪。人家会觉得“你站着说话不腰疼，把我给做进去了。”所以这里面有很多层次。因为中国实际上不仅是政治专制，还是人情专制的社会。你写完了，可能朋友就没了。
这几重意义都要克服，还有一个信任的问题。写一个熟悉的人，我觉得写得比较爽的还是长文，我希望能写到一个深度，那就要和被写的对象有一种信任关系。然而在中国这种社会里，要得到信任，还不能害他、不能出卖他。这很难。我们知道有很多例子，甚至西方记者也是这样，为了拿一个普利策奖，结果写了以后，被写的人坐牢了，他的生活毁了。我绝对不能做这样的事。我其实有过很多稿子废掉了。就是因为了解得越深，我发现如果要按照我的标准，非常真实，非常tough地直接去写，这个人可能承受不了，或者可能有危险。把这些都排除之外，还要写真实，其实的确很难。]
我举一个例子。比如说徐文立不喜欢我写我哥哥。其实我后来写了两篇，都是在《纽约客》上发的。第一篇《国家公敌》发表的时候，我哥哥还在监狱里，他当然不知道。但徐文立他们在外面，而且网上已经有人翻成中文，他们都看了。徐文立是中国民主党的大佬，是和我哥哥关系最近的。他被判了13年，很快就保外就医出来了。他看了以后，在我还没来得及告诉我哥哥我写了这篇文章之前，他已经告诉了我哥哥。而且意思就是说，你妹把我们全写歪了，写得不对什么的。其实就是没有光辉嘛，写得不够光辉，写成了我认为一个比较正常的样子。
好在我哥哥看了以后，给我写了一封长信。他表示理解，而且认为我写得很到位。他也觉得我能花这么多心血写他，实际上我们很有感情的。其实他是我同父异母的哥哥。他小时候去内蒙18年，我们家族里边，只有我和他同父同母的弟弟两个人，坐那么长的火车看他。所以我们之间有感情基础，他能承受。
当然，他之后也表示过一些不满。而且我要说，今天回头看，他已经超越了我当年写的那个哥哥。我后来写的那篇《Tourist Trap》，讲他“被”警察旅游的文章，就已经带有一种黑色幽默了。那里面的哥哥和第一篇里已经不太一样了。
至于王蒙的事，那是另外一个例子。他也没有看过原稿，发表出来以后他也没想到会被写成这样，结果很尴尬，因为被很多人问起。而且我们经常被在媒体上配在一起。
[00:46:40] 袁莉: 在锵锵三人行上配在一起谈话。
[00:46:43] 查建英: 我跟王蒙老配在一起，我印象很清楚，那文章出来以后经常被问到。之后第一次做节目，我不得不说的确比较尴尬，可是我这一点我也是很佩服王蒙的，到底是一个有胸襟的人，而且他能看出来我是把他当作一个historical figure，当作一个历史人物写的。我觉得最后他是理解的，我们一直还是朋友，如果说像王蒙这样的人还能有朋友的话，后来我们做了很多集锵锵。如果它是友谊，我们的友谊也没有因为这种写作被破坏掉。
[00:47:39] 袁莉: 其实我一直没有电视，但是前一阵子我偶尔在youtube上看了锵锵三人行，2010年左右的。
[00:47:52] 查建英: 被毙了，毙了78年了吧，78年前被彻底关了。
[00:47:56] 袁莉: 但是回过头看那时候做的电视节目，当然不可能什么都播，但是当时的谈话内容，那种广度，什么都能谈。我推荐大家到YouTube上搜一下，挺好看的。
我来问一个问题，这是是点赞最高的听众问题。Ta说：查老师您好！我想问，即使您离开了中国，加入了美国籍，但毕竟家人还在国内，您觉得真的能做到完全不审查自己的作品吗？如果我们想自由地发声、写作、批评，怎么样才可以不在乎国内家人可能遭受的压力呢？
[00:48:41] 查建英: 我先说，我可能只能算一个个案。活到我这个岁数，我父母早就去世了。在国内生活的最近家人就是我哥，一个老炮、一个死磕党，他已经牢底坐穿了，他还能坏到哪儿去？还能被我害吗？（现场笑）不可能。再说了，他被警察旅游的这个文章，我都没给给他看。因为我们两个人通话——他自己告诉我的——都是被监听的。有一个团队在全程监控他，就敏感到了这种程度。那篇文章在《纽约客》出来后，他不知道，被人翻成中文在网上传播，他在一个微信群里看到的，才来跟我说“哦，你又写了我一篇”。我说：“对。”。
就我个人来讲，我没有这个问题，这些敏感的问题。对那些现在有家人在国内的人，你们自己做决定。我在各种场合，经常被中国人问：“你对我们有什么建议？怎么才能安全？怎么才能两边都没事儿？”我给我女儿建议都很小心，我不愿意做那种妈。你们要自己决定。你们在中国，中国的“妈宝”太多了，尤其是男士们，我要跟你们说一下。男士们，妈宝们太多了！
前几天我开一个NGO的会议，我发现海外的这些人：拿一个白纸还戴着大口罩、都用假名，网站上做刊物的多数是女生、女性和性少数群体。我刚才看到《流氓燕》里有个高个子的男生，我们叫“党代表”，我觉得这人也够难得的。
[00:50:39] 袁莉: 我们今天的志愿者也多数是女生。
[00:50:44] 查建英: 为什么？是不是问这种问题的也是男生为主？
[00:50:50] 袁莉: 都有，男的女的都有，我觉得这个问题还比较有普遍性，年轻人确实挺想表达，但是对于表达的后果有很多很多的疑虑。
[00:51:04] 查建英: 是有很多疑虑，我也只能说，女性在这点上有顾虑我觉得好像更能理解。但是男性们，你们是不是可以稍微地更勇敢一点儿，表现出来一点。而且在做这种报酬低、又跟你所谓的三观一致，你还在一个自由的空间里，结果最后大多数还是女性在做。男性没有做，然后上网来骂的据说是男性多。他们享受着这些成果，听着，他们还骂。
而且我还有一点我不得不说，凭什么“操你妈”成了国骂？我看见《流氓燕》里出来一句，也是“操你妈”，我觉得“操你大爷”美好的更多呀。（现场笑）
完全不懂。不只是国骂，连粤语都是！什么“ 丢你老母”，为什么不是“ 丢你老豆”。你要去查都查不到，因为人们不这么说，上来就是“丢你老母”。你要查老豆才知道“丢你老豆”是操你爸的意思。这种性别歧视和妈宝夹在一起，哎哟，我觉得真的是让中国拧巴到头了。
所以一个民族出了问题，真的先要检讨精英的问题。说实话，我觉得近年看到最有创造性，讽刺性最尖锐的，反而是一些完全不知名的老百姓做的短视频。而微信里，不论是左派还是右派，公知还是反贼，长篇大套一些哇啦哇啦说的话都在互相重复，他们还是过得太舒服了。

[Not translated:

我举个例子，前些天我看一个短视频，又是无名制作，非常短。在阅兵前后，短视频上来一个图片，鸡鸭鱼肉全摆在桌上，最后一个小酒放在那，可能是二锅头还是五粮液，然后就是地道战、地雷战那种红色电影的音乐，配音是：“区委指示：今后的日子将会很难。坚持，坚持。再坚持。”（现场笑）绝啊！其实觉得是老百姓在讽刺这些口炮党和中产阶级，讽刺他们吃着鸡鸭鱼肉在坚持。。
还有一个视频，画面里是一个土得掉渣的农民，在面前的一个盘子里用叉子和刀切一个黄瓜，然后喝一杯可乐，但他是用红酒的杯子喝，喝一口，再切。我觉得也是非常讽刺。他看起来很明显是一个农民，他背后就是一个村子里的猪场，还是鸡圈，但是他在前面过着一种精致的生活。太绝了。
反而在那些长篇大道的文章里，不论是骂共产党还是骂白左什么的，真的是无聊。谈不了自己身边的事，也解决不了，也不敢行动。然后去谈着遥远的、不了解或者一知半解的事情，还互相掐。过这种嘴瘾，吃着鸡鸭鱼肉。坚持吧，坚持去吧。]

[00:55:33] 袁莉: 我回应一下，我们播客在YouTube上面的观众群确实20%女性，80%是男性。我已经努力了一年了，但是好像性别比例是很难改正过来。然后这些男士里，有很多我叫他们抠脚大汉的人，这些男人特别喜欢跑来教我怎么做播客，怎么写文章。
[00:56:00] 查建英: 哈哈哈哈。
[00:56:04] 袁莉: 这种人很多，一看就是男的。我们再说一个，你在哥大读书的时候，你的导师夏志清曾经说过：“中国文人有一个问题，叫做china obsession，也就是中国的情结太重，太关注中国。他认为这是一种局限，会影响超越中国的世界公民情怀。你现在回过头来看，40年来你对这句话的思考发生过变化吗？
[00:56:39] 查建英: 肯定是发生过。当年我去哥大跟夏老师念书的时候，我还是二十多岁。他很早就跟我说过这句话，说的时候带着一种希望——希望你不要成为那样，希望你是例外。那种语境是：我当时从南卡罗莱纳来，在那里先念了英文系。虽然我原来是中文系出身，其实我那几年是没日没夜地学英文。当时年轻嘛，到夏老师那儿时我的英文已经很流利了。他跟我说的意思是，你先去南卡，没有一来纽约就跟我念书是对的。我周围很多的学生，大陆来的学生，全都是从中国直接到纽约，去唐人街吃饭。
实际上我是比较文学系，系主任是Edward Said。夏老师是我东亚系的导师。他说我不要只有中国情节，他看了太多的中国人是这样。我当时没有完全听懂，因为我一心想在这儿学好，学好了要回去写小说。而且我到底还是中文系出身的，就是放不下。所以我没有完全理解他的意思。老实说，回头想，我也没完全理解我的系主任Edward Said。其实我是他讲座上唯一的一个中国人。所以我觉得他当时蛮好奇，也蛮有期待。但我那个时候年轻，对他的东方主义等名著可能没有完全看懂。主要是觉得这些中东理论与中国语境不太合适。我觉得中国并没有被真正殖民，所以后殖民话语在我们语境里并不完全适用。再加上我对中国的一些新左派的观察，我觉得完全是所谓的“有左派，还有中国新左派”这句话。他们完全是另一种变种。我觉得Said那些的话语在中国语境里已经产生了极大的歪曲，表现为避重就轻、矫情和精致的利己主义者，到今天还是这样。
西方左派不容易看清这一点，因为表面话语相似。最近这些年我回头再看，尤其是看Said讲巴勒斯坦问题时，才意识到当时我也没完全理解Said。
夏老师说的话，是我亲身一步一步走着，我才意识到我的中国情结有多重。我不能说这种情结完全是负面的，但它确实很沉重，在很大意义上是一个包袱，也是一个局限。我是逐渐理解的。
为什么这么长时间我都放不开中国。而且我见到一大群中国人，比如天安门八九一代，他们当年很英勇、牺牲很大，但他们在美国生活三十多年，很多人在美国生活的时间已长于中国，可一见面还是讲中文、吃中国饭、谈中国，仿佛害怕自己落后，不是落后于世界，而是害怕自己中国的判断落后了、滞后了。我觉得这是错误的。
我希望能反过来看一下刚才 Perry的建议：美国的汉学家们，你们应该学中文，而且不要浮光掠影地学，要真学，否则别自称专家。中国人有同样的问题。虽然很不幸，一万个人学英文，一个人学中文，但没有办法，这是人性决定的。一个超级大国的语言影响力大。就像藏族人是否学汉语一样，这是个困难的抉择，但必须面对事实。
如果一个人想看清楚，什么是民主、什么是自由、什么叫做“一个人”，不要只看中国，不要只学中文。一定要学一门外语。我第一次读John Stuart Mill的On Liberty。约翰·斯图尔特·密尔的《论自由》，严复译作《群己权界论》，翻译的很好。我只有看了原文才真正体会到它有多么重要，才明白中国自由的论述有多么不同。中国从来没有这样的论述。虽然按西方人的观点，无论密尔还是尼采，他们认为个人主义观念和潮流在西方也要到近代才有，但它有渊源。中国没有关于自治和个人自由的渊源，非常的弱，所以必须读英文原著。
我记得On Liberty里有段专门谈中国，当时我就觉得：震！撼！我忘了原文，但它说：中国是一个warning example。让所有关心自由的国家，所有的文化，都要看到中国是一个需要警惕的例外。因为它有伟大的文化和历史，它的先贤太聪明了，聪明到把这个社会秩序固化了两千年。没有个人自由，只有一套儒家思想。当然，我前些年重读先秦原典，写了《中国的黑暗之心》（China’s Heart of Darkness），我想重新去看法家与儒家怎么一起狼狈为奸。其中的狼实际上是法家，是君王真正的统治术。那套君王集权的统治术，是从商鞅、韩非那里来的。而孔子这一套、尤其是经过荀子，实际上变成了帮凶，用来压抑个人。个人永远在家、族之内。什么“诚意正心，修身、齐家、治国、平天下”，把它们内化到所有人心里。
现在有很多优秀的个体，比如刘晓波，有很深的反省。但我要说中国精英作为整体到现在还没有出来。很可惜，文艺复兴在中国夭折了。没有200年的文艺复兴过程，也没有启蒙。其实除了李泽厚，之前还有西方的汉学家也很有贡献，比如舒衡哲Vera Schwarcz 的书On Chinese Enlightenment。我觉得也能很值得看。要把中国放进世界的视角，才能看到中国。所以我建议你“戒一戒”中国，这是戒断的戒，能不能有一天，有一年，就像打坐一样，就不想中国，也不吃中国饭，也不讲中文，能死吗？如果你不死，你就不能再生。必须得死一次，不要这么害怕，不要这么妈宝。（现场鼓掌）
而且一群中国人在外面，是那种圆桌文化，你知道banquet (饭局) 永远有一个中心，这个中心永远是男的，从头讲到尾。
[01:05:09] 袁莉: 不给别人说话的时候机会。
[01:05:12] 查建英: 女的根本插不进嘴，就是倒茶去。让你们在那陪坐就不错了，永远在那讲。整个这个方式都是从荀子那来的，你去读荀子就知道了，完全一样，而且党同伐异，排斥异己，巴结君王，都是荀子那来的。你们去看，去看中国历史上第一张大字报是谁写的？荀子。我说话是有根据的，你去看荀子《非十二子》那篇，你去看看像不像大字报，里面的rhetorical修辞、里面的thinking，里面的servile谄媚，要当国师，然后排斥其它的任何学派。我现在只说中国，因为Perry刚才经讲了很多美国。
我看现在美国的问题也不要去怪老百姓，什么红脖子啦，白脖子啦，其实我认为还是美国的这帮精英出了问题。我现在不拿自己当外人，我就是美国人，美国的citizen我已经当了这么多年了。对美国我也够了。我也曾经是一个灯塔派，以前还是很客气，还是需要这么一个icon，我也很维护这个icon，我已经维护了几十年，那我现在可以Poke一下了。
我可能已经跑题了，总之我的意思是夏志清老师说的，中国情结限制了中国知识分子。我觉得说的太到位了，但是花了我太多时间才真正明白怎样超越这个。而且这不是你不关注中国就自然发生的。刚才我说的“戒一戒中国”是一种修辞，其实你可以一边关注中国，一边超越中国情结。很多人，比如犹太人和东欧人，在这方面就做得很好，值得我们学习。
[01:07:09] 袁莉: 我本来可能还有好几个问题，但是我觉得这个地方打住也挺好的。非常感谢。

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Source:

查建英，我为何要自绝于人民、精英与妈宝男，DC不明白节，《不明白播客: Episode 169》，2025年9月18日

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The Other China

脫軌餘生

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