In yesterday’s Times, Edward Wong wrote about the Chinese director Zhao Liang, whose film “Petition,” which I reviewed at the time of its release, is the fiercest and most confrontational film regarding the Chinese government’s suppression of dissent that I’ve seen. Wong reports on Zhao’s new status as an officially accepted, even officially acclaimed filmmaker. Zhao yielded to pressure from the Chinese government to withdraw “Petition” from the 2009 Melbourne Film Festival, which was also screening a documentary about Rebiya Kadeer, a Uighur human-rights activist. The director Jia Zhangke—the leading Chinese director of the last decade, who is a great artistic modernist and a subtle yet outspoken critic of the government’s repressive policies (and the subject of a terrific Profile in the magazine by Evan Osnos, who also posted on his blog about the Melbourne controversy)—also withdrew a film of his, “Cry Me a River,” from that festival. These events led to Zhao’s dispute with the artist Ai Weiwei, a longtime friend. Ai, of course, has also been an outspoken critic of the Chinese government, and has been repeatedly victimized by the regime. (Evan Osnos has reported extensively on Ai’s martyrdom, as he did, for example, last Friday.)
The Times provides the video of Ai’s on-camera challenge to Zhao for giving in to the government’s demands. It’s a sad discussion; the sharpest thing that the filmmaker says is that he has been “harmonized.” (That’s a sardonic twist on Chinese Newspeak regarding censorship.) In effect, Zhao claims ignorance of the matters involved and says that he merely followed Jia’s lead.
One fascinating sidebar concerns Ai’s mention of Jia’s film “Haishang Chuanqi” (“I Wish I Knew”), about the Shanghai World Expo, as having been the government’s quid pro quo for Jia’s knuckling-under. If so, the government didn’t get its money’s worth: the film (which I reviewed when it was shown here earlier this year) is an audacious recuperation of ways of life and thought from pre-Communist China, an embrace of Taiwan and Hong Kong, a poignant lament for victims of the Cultural Revolution, and a depiction of the Expo as an alienating, inhuman monstrosity. (He did something similar when making his first officially approved film, “The World,” at Beijing’s World Park.) Jia’s symbolic art, like that of Howard Hawks and Ernst Lubitsch under the Hays Code, is ingeniously conceived to say exactly what’s on his mind regardless of external constraints.
Ai’s fury is entirely justified—he has endured, and continues to endure, horrific ordeals in order to live freely under a tyrannical regime, and he is entitled to view those who make common cause with it, of any sort, as being on the wrong side of morality. But only he and others who have endured similar persecution are entitled to say so. Heroism can’t be undertaken prescriptively, and those of us who write and make art without fear of arrest should pause before accusing Zhao of collaboration or cowardice. Zhao was already the subject of attention from the police; he told Wong, “I was really pretty nervous,” and, regarding the Melbourne withdrawal, said, “You’re a small figure, it’s scary, and you get stuck in a mess like this, in an international incident…. Yeah, at the time I was pretty much, ‘Let’s think of me first.’ ” (Note: though the Chinese government has freed Ai Weiwei, it it still holding the Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, whose prison term will run through 2020. Iran still holds the director Jafar Panahi. There’s no shame for artists and writers to fear the shamelessness of these regimes.) But Wong reports an added matter of principle that is of great historical significance:
Zhao’s intentions are more modest; but history shows that they are indispensable. The collapse of dictatorial regimes results not from greater repression but from its slackening under more liberal rulers. The Berlin Wall would not have fallen if Eastern Bloc authorities had used as much force to preserve it as the Chinese government exerted in Tiananmen Square. The Egyptian government wouldn’t have yielded power if its leaders had been as ruthless as the leaders of Iran (who seem to be providing the Syrian regime with its playbook). Andrei Sakharov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Joseph Brodsky were among the crucial heroes, and victims, of the Soviet regime, but the U.S.S.R. ultimately came to an end because its leaders, headed by Mikhail Gorbachev, were not ruthless enough to shed enough blood to maintain it.
I don’t know whether Zhao’s deference to the Communist Party is sincere or ironic, but his expression of hope for the ascendancy of its liberal faction, though peculiarly policy-wonky and pragmatic as an artistic vision, aims at a necessary, if not sufficient, stage of political progress.
Still from “Petition.”
