dagblog - Comments for "‘Pressure for Change is at the Grassroots’: An Interview with Chen Guangcheng"

Good to hear that someone of

artappraiser — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 04:11:26 +0000

Good to hear that someone of your caliber found it as intriguing as I did, moat! Sincerely; sometimes I wonder if I am reading things into an article that aren't there. Of course everything from an exiled dissident must be taken with a grain or two of salt, but I was getting a narrative there that seemed not so much grievances as just descriptions, and what he ends up getting across for me is many in the west are fearing the wrong things about China. For example, the excerpt I used he mentions in passing (not his main point,) the kind of poverty in the country that conventional wisdom here claims doesn't exist any more in China.

As for his main crusade, it's almost creepy that his complaints are like those about the later Soviets, dejas vus allover again. Not the nastiest of Soviet rule, not Stalin, but just the classic Orwell/Kafka bureaucracy, the frustration of dealing with a huge state that is in denial about reality, that almost everything about seems to insure denial of reality.

Chen's comment about the

moat — Sat, 30 Jun 2012 17:53:16 +0000

In reply to ‘Pressure for Change is at the Grassroots’: An Interview with Chen Guangcheng

Chen's comment about the brutality of Tiananmen Square being very immediate in everybody's mind is interesting (along with the rest of the interview):

No. June 4 was really big, even in the countryside. In the countryside, in the summer people have a habit of sitting around together after dinner to talk about things and escape the heat. They know exactly what happened on June 4. Everyone knows that a lot of people died, that the tanks crushed a lot of people. No one thinks that June 4 was a small thing. People still refer to it. If there’s a dispute with the government and people are discussing it, they’ll say “Right or wrong, what can we do? Weren’t the students right on June 4, but they were crushed to death? What chance do we have?”

Chen makes it sound like the government there usually wins all of the minor dis-information battles but has already lost the most important one.