Confucius the Dissident

Close to the end of last month I wrote an article on the arrest and disappearance of Ai Weiwei, a leading Chinese artist and dissident (China in Night and Fog). I now have to report on the recent disappearance of Confucius, yes, Confucius, the ancient sage whose concepts of social harmony had such appeal for the Communist authorities, always afraid of inharmonious times and inharmonious people. But the wind has changed yet again and harmony, at least in the Confucian form, is no longer quite so fashionable.

Poor Confucius, there he is, forever in and out of Chinese history, approved of at one moment, despised at the next. He was certainly the political fashion as recently as January, when a 9.5 metre statue of the old boy was installed outside the National Museum on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square looking on to the Forbidden City. He was there, stared at by Mao, making the mad Chairman leap in hell.

Confucius, you see, represented everything that Mao hated, the traditional values and the feudalism of the old China. Mao came to China, particularly in the Cultural Revolution, a little like Qui Shi Huang, the first emperor, who tried to wipe out all memory of the past by destroying books and by burning scholars alive. Confucius was the past and the past was Confucius, swept into a form of oblivion.

The recovery of memory began soon after Mao’s death in 1976. Bit by bit the sage returned, tolerated to begin with and then celebrated by a nation and a government looking for roots in the past. Just as the Germans tried to spread their cultural message across the world with Goethe Institutes, the Chinese set up their own Confucius Institutes. Abroad it was a new way of selling China, a more acceptable face than that of the malign Mao, while at home Confucian notions of harmony were a corrective to the upheaval of rapid and socially unsettling economic progress.

Not any longer. At the end of April the statue was removed under cover of dark without any explanation. The thing is Confucius is a rather awkward avatar. Oh yes, there is all that stuff about obedience and duty, of deference to the system, but that’s not the sum total of his thought. In the Confucian scheme of things governments have to be accountable to the people and, what is worse from the apparatchik’s point of view, they only have the right to rule through the exercise of ethical conduct.

Ethical conduct is now the last thing that the Communist Party wishes to be reminded of, ever fearful that it might just lose the mandate of heaven, every fearful that it’s own abysmal lack of any ethical code will become increasingly apparent, ever fearful of its own people. I see from a report in the Economist that neo-Maoist websites are crowing over the sudden removal of the “witch doctor.” But the ‘witch doctor’ has proved to be remarkably resilient. The night and the fog may have descended on him but he will re-emerge, a symbol, seemingly, not just of harmony but dissidence.

China in Night and Fog

In December 1941 Hitler issued one of his most sinister directives. Even the name still carries frightful overtones: Nacht und Nebel – Night and Fog. This allowed for the complete disappearance of anyone in Nazi-occupied territory judged to be a danger to the regime. Relatives would be given no information at all, not even if the people they were inquiring about were alive or not. There was no official record whatsoever, no trial and no appeal. It was as if some malevolent god had suddenly plucked random individuals out of existence, gone for ever into the night and the fog.

Night and fog has come to China. Earlier this month Ai Weiwei, a prominent artist and political dissident, was detained at Beijing airport. Nothing has been heard of him since. His family don’t even know if he is receiving the drugs he needs for a heart condition.

“According to the relevant law, the search results will not be shown”, is the message displayed to users of China’s micro-blogging sites, trying to learn something of his fate. Attempting to get over this Chinese Wall of Silence, bloggers started to use an invented name, Ai Weilai, as a forum for discussion. In retaliation all foreign websites petitioning for Ai’s release have been knocked out. So, if you are Chinese and living in China the chances are you will never read this.

The night and the fog have not just embraced Ai. The latest crackdown has seen others ‘disappeared’, so far more than a hundred bloggers, lawyers and activists for villagers’ rights. On Easter Sunday Christians in Beijing, people who refuse to recognise the officially-sanctioned state church, were rounded up and bussed off after they gathered to attend their own service, this in the face of a constitutional right to freedom of worship. Public places have been occupied by police and thugs in plain clothes, ready to descend on people ‘strolling’ as a veiled form of protest. Yes, one can be beaten up for taking a group walk, yet another face of modern China.

Through history Chinese governments have been notorious for their inscrutability, but the Communists have perfected the practice. Relative liberalisation at one moment can quickly be replaced by repression at the next, with no obvious explanation for the change of direction. The suggestion is that the so-called Jasmine Revolution in the Arab world, brought on in part by internet networking, has resulted in heightened sensitivity, a reasonable conjecture, though impossible to prove with any certainty. The authorities were never that liberal when it came to communication on the internet, a form of free expression they would really rather do without.

Information is power, so to be without information is to be powerlessness. Ignorance is Strength, is the Orwellian motto that governs official thinking in Beijing. Almost anything can trigger a new wave of repression, not just calls for greater freedom. If Japan’s tsunami had hit China instead I can guarantee that only a fraction of the news would have been reported, and almost certainly nothing about stricken nuclear plants. Ai’s first big run-in with the state, after all, came not over his brilliantly unconventional art, or his politics, but his attempt to account for all of the schoolchildren killed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. There are uncomfortable questions here, you see, over the exact relationship between the authorities and companies who erected buildings not fit for purpose let alone natural disasters.

Night and fog is a measure of the political paranoia which grips China, the fear that besets the government, the fear of the state of its own people. The Communist Party here is no more than an organised conspiracy against the population. Secure in their forbidden cities, and their hidden villas, the apparatchiks look across the nation in a mood of fearfulness, seeing conspiracy around every corner, dissension in every tweet, a threat in every artist.

Lighthouses: a Mystery and a Tragedy

I love serendipity, the process whereby one discovers something by chance while looking for something else. I also enjoy mundane incidents leading to darker things, to mystery and to tragedy.

Consider lighthouses, rather boring and functional now but once a fertile source for the Gothic imagination. Anyway, I came across a reference to the complete disappearance of three lighthouse keepers from the remote Flannan Islands off the west coast of Scotland over a hundred years ago. In December 1900 the crew of the Hesperus, a lighthouse supply ship, found the place totally deserted. The subsequent investigation concluded that the keepers must have been swept from the cliffs in a storm. The bodies, though, were never discovered.

There were, however, some intriguing and unexplained facts. The iron railings on the west platform were badly twisted, leading to some speculation that some ‘unearthly’ force was involved. The coat of one of the keepers, moreover, was found inside the lighthouse.

Human imagination, hating a void, has filled the gaps in the story, according to the fashion of the times: that they had been taken by the Devil; that one of the keepers murdered the other then killed himself; that all three had been abducted by enemy agents. Local legend also makes much of the Phantom of the Seven Hunters, the name for the island group in the Middle Ages. More recently-and predictably-the disappearance has been put down to alien abduction!

Lighthouses did not always have three keepers in the British Isles, oh no. Until the early nineteenth century two men were considered all that was necessary….until a gruesome incident at Smalls Lighthouse to the west of Saint David’s Peninsula in south Wales.

The two keepers, Thomas Howell and Thomas Griffiths, were known to be quarrelsome, so when the latter died in a freak accident Howell, fearing that he might be accused of murder, decided to keep the body, lashed to the outside railing after decomposition set in. The makeshift coffin was destroyed by the wind, leaving the body fully exposed. The arm fell in such a way that, moved by the wind, it gave the impression to passing vessels that the dead man was beckoning. When relieved the surviving keeper was unrecognisable, having gone completely mad.