Kafka at the Gates of Dawn
A collection of essays by sinologist Perry Link is a could-be autobiography, but thankfully it tells us far more about the bizarre cultural evolution of post-'liberation' China than it does Link.
‘The Anaconda in the Chandelier: Writings on China’
Perry Link
Publisher: Paul Dry Books (February 18, 2025)
Print length: 372 pages
ASIN: B0DW4HMLX2
IF THE TITLE tells you nothing else – and nobody can deny that the title is less than revealing – Anaconda doesn’t shout out: “Everything you wanted to know about China but were afraid to ask.”
But, then again, at least for this reader, Anaconda comes as a relief from some of the tomes that arrive with an agenda: The Coming China Century/Collapse, China’s Long Game, AI and Chopsticks, etc – that kind of thing (and apologies if you actually wrote one of those books; I’m sure it had to be done).
Perry Link, a sinologist and professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Riverside, and Emeritus Professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton University, brings a mostly light, conversational tone to a diverse array of subjects grouped under four China categories: “Captive China,” “Learning,” “Teachers,” and “Day Job Joys.”
Yes, the categories are less than promising – that’s another thing that cannot be denied – but somehow they deliver far more than they appear to advertise. As for the essays, they’ve all been published elsewhere. But apart from the contributions that have run in, say, The New York Review of Books, many will be new even to the most zealous China watchers.
There are only one or two of the essays that can be described as less than engaging – and that’s only because most of Link’s observations require more than a passing interest in China. For the average reader that does not, for example, include the translatability of Tang Dynasty poetry.
(Personally, I think the chapter on poetry is one of the best in the book; I’m flagging it for those who will possibly disagree.)
Much of the time, Link’s approach is to engage with an issue that’s broadly agreed upon and then pick it apart and come up with an angle that casts the subject in a fresh light. Take the gunboat diplomacy that swept Qing Dynasty China into the global arena, foisting “newness” – and collapse – on the dynasty in the process:
To China the West seemed to say, “Catch up or perish.” How to modernize became a Chinese obsession that led to many things, including the fevered contortions that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has put the country through over the past seventy years. One way to measure China’s urge to transform itself is to note how often the word new has been used by Chinese leaders. In 1902 the concept of the “new citizen” took hold in Liang Qichao’s New Citizen Journal. Twenty years later the May Fourth Movement came to be known as the New Culture Movement. Its seminal magazine was called New Youth. In 1934 Chiang Kai-shek launched his New Life Movement. The Communist takeover in 1949 was the advent of New China, and the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s touted a “new socialist man.” After Mao Zedong died in 1976, the next few years were called “the new period.” Today, Xi Jinping’s watchword is “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era.” It is important to note that new in these cases never refers to the same thing; each is a new new.
The tragedy, in Link’s view, is the way in which – particularly in CCP centrally-governed China – the zeal for new upon yet new new has led to ill-conceived shortcuts followed by crashes. Mao’s Great Leap Forward led to an estimated 30 million deaths by starvation. His Cultural Revolution, which aimed for the Chinese people to “make revolution in the depths of your soul” and “love Chairman Mao more than your parents,” led to mass violence, murder and the physical demolition of much of China’s culture – some 6,000 temples in Tibet alone, and, yes, Tibet was not even China until it was made so by invasion in 1950. Meanwhile, don’t forget:
Deng Xiaoping’s one-child policy, intended in the late 1970s to jump-start a modern economy, led by the late 2010s to problems in labor supply and elder support sufficiently severe as to require abrupt reversals.
Let’s not forget, while we’re at it, that Xi JInping has brought the emergence of the “new era for socialism with Chinese characteristics” – or national rejuvenation, and perhaps reordering the global order while he’s at it – forward to 2035. It was originally slated for 2050.
Such introductory material doesn’t represent Link’s book perfectly overall. Anaconda is a slippery book to pin down, something of a critique by stealth of the impossibility of China becoming what the CCP dreams of. That is most evident in the tortured struggles that Link depicts taking place in literature, the arts, in the realm of human rights and even in obscure cultural sectors such as the traditional comedic form or xiangsheng (xiàng shěng, 相声), usually translated as “cross talk.”
But Anaconda does all the above while not holding back on calling a spade a spade. On post-Tiananmen CCP rule of China, Link writes:
In the post-massacre 1990s, as the top leaders dropped even the pretense of interacting with society, they turned to a pillaging of the Chinese economy that resembled guandao [official corruption] but dwarfed it. High-ranking officials lopped off great chunks of the economy—electricity, IT, banking, shipping—and placed control in the hands of their own families, who then raked in stupendous wealth. This pattern seeped downward as they essentially said to those under them, “We give you license to plunder as long as you prevent ‘trouble’ by keeping the lid on in your area.”
It is at this point that Link’s essays turn towards the dissident – or simply intellectual – critics that give the lie to Beijing’s projection of confidence. In an essay on the prominent Chinese writer, filmmaker and professional racing driver Han Han, who as early as the 1990s attempted to stand up for China’s maligned youth:
He defends China’s young people who are not always vocal about justice from the charge, which their elders sometimes level, that they are materialistic and do not “care about politics.” Han answers that the older generation has a horrific record of being knocked around by politics, but being [that kind of] victim is no decent topic of conversation, any more than being raped has a place in a proper range of sexual experiences. The era when one can care about politics has yet to arrive …
Han observes that, in officialese, statements about the people supporting the government are not empirical claims but true by definition. This is because anyone who withholds support automatically is not one of the “people” but some other category—“reactionary,” “bad element,” or whatever. He argues that, to ordinary Chinese, the “news” in the official media, even if it is true, always seems phony after its official packaging, because of its official packaging. But—and here his remarkable perspicacity appears again—that doesn’t matter, because the regime does not ask credence from its citizens, only the pretense of credence … Han goes on to argue that the Party actually prefers that people not be too sincere about loving the Party. After all, where might that lead? To cleaning up corruption? To telling the truth?
There’s too much packed into Link’s collection to go through it essay by essay and it’s too diverse to summarize. But in essence, Anaconda takes on, in lucid, measured prose, the issues that Link obviously sees as worthy of discussion – both good and bad.
Of course, turned away at the border in Beijing in 1996, Link is barred from visiting China – but precisely for what reasons he himself can only guess … as he writes in a previously unpublished essay, “Life on a Blacklist:”
Which of my “errors” might be the one that precipitated the regime’s decision? I had written about censorship and repression in China, had translated dissident writers, and had joined human rights groups. But exactly what line had I crossed, and where?
He’s phlegmatic about his blacklisted status:
I miss China’s life on the ground: the sounds, sights, and smells of the streets, the charming snacks that can be had there, and the lively, authentic speech. My 2013 book, An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics is about contemporary Chinese language and draws examples not only from published writing but also from T-shirts, graffiti, slang, jokes, and other ephemera that I could collect easily during times I spent in China but since then can gather only second hand. I also miss face-to-face encounters with writers, scholars, activists, booksellers, and people on the street.
All the same, most of the commentary in this book has been written and published since Link was blacklisted. It’s far easier for us today to observe and comment from afar, in nonattendance, and Link is probably as in touch with China as he might have been reporting from the streets of Beijing. There are even benefits, writes Link:
Blacklisting leaves a person freer than before. This is because once a blacklisting happens, the fear that it might happen disappears. After all it is dread of the event—not the event itself—that causes people to self-censor. Relieved of the pressure, it becomes much easier to say what one thinks. My favorite expression of this principle is the Chinese farmers’ proverb sizhu bupa kaishui tang “dead pigs aren’t afraid of hot water” …
In 2015 the Dalai Lama was interested in having a small meeting with American China scholars, and the scholars whom the Dalai Lama’s office approached showed strong interest. But the question of who would host the meeting became a problem; to do it would be to risk blacklisting. Someone called me to see whether I could help. I would not need to raise money or do any organizing—just be the official host. I agreed. Why not? A second death would be redundant.
That first death has no doubt given Link the freedom to write some of the pages in this book: his passionate support of Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who died a prisoner of conscience in 2017, for example.
In a memorable passage, Link even compares the Nobel Prize winner with Xi Jinping:
The two were separated in age by only two years. During Mao’s Cultural Revolution both missed school and were banished to remote places. Xi used the time to begin building a resume that would allow him, riding the coattails of his elite-Communist father, to one day vie for supreme power; Liu used the time to read on his own and learn to think for himself. One mastered the techniques of betrayal and sycophancy that a person needs to rise within a closed system; the other learned to challenge received wisdom of every kind, keeping for himself only the ideas that could pass the test of rigorous independent examination. For one of them, value was measured by power and position; for the other, by moral worth. In their final standoff, one “won,” the other “lost.” But two hundred years from now, who will recall the names of the tyrants who sent Mandela and Havel to jail? Will the glint of Liu Xiaobo’s incisive intellect be remembered, or the cardboard mediocrity of Xi’s?
Elsewhere, on the subject of “Liu’s stout independence,” Link writes:
In the 1980s, while still a graduate student in Chinese literature, he was already known as a “dark horse” for denouncing nearly every contemporary Chinese writer: the literary star Wang Meng was politically slippery; “roots-seeking” writers like Han Shaogong were excessively romantic about the value of China’s traditions; even speak-for-the-people heroes like Liu Binyan were too ready to pin hopes on “liberal” Communist leaders like Hu Yaobang. No one was independent enough. “I can sum up what’s wrong with Chinese writers in one sentence,” Liu Xiaobo wrote in 1986. “They can’t write creatively themselves—they simply don’t have the ability—because their very lives don’t belong to them.”
Amid the controversy – in some quarters – that erupted when the Chinese novelist Mo Yan was awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012, Link felt free to let it be known that he thought that when Mo touched on catastrophic episodes like the Great Leap famine, “he deflects attention from true horrors by resorting to what I called ‘daft hilarity’” … while making no mention of starvation that cost thirty million or more lives.
On whether Mo, who defended CCP censorship in his acceptance speach, should have been awarded the Prize, Link provides a list of writers whom he considers truly deserving, Mo is not among them.
When a deadly virus began seeping out of Wuhan, Link against a grain that was taking shape worldwide despite the lack of an intermediate species culprit (we still haven’t found one), spoke out on the origins of the virus simply based on the language the CCP were using as they stalled on all attempts to bring about an outside inquiry:
I am as eager as anyone to follow the world’s virologists as they try to determine how COVID-19 emerged in Wuhan, China. But as a long-time student of Chinese Communist political language, I will need considerable persuading that the disease came from bats or a wet market. The linguistic evidence is overwhelming that Chinese leaders believe that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the source—or, at a minimum, fear that this is what the world will believe. Many years ago a distinguished Chinese writer, Wu Zuxiang, explained to me that there is truth in Communist Party pronouncements, but you have to read them “upside down.” If a newspaper says “the Party has made great strides against corruption in Henan,” then you know that corruption has recently been especially bad in Henan. If you read about the heroic rescue of eight miners somewhere, you can guess that a mine collapse might have killed hundreds who aren’t mentioned. Read upside-down, there is a sense in which the official press never lies. It cannot lie. It has to tell you what the Party wants you to believe, and if you can figure out the Party’s motive, which always exists, then you have a solid piece of information.
The stories far from end there, and along the way he scatters ones I’ve failed to give a nod, along with some unforgettable anecdotes.
On Fang Lizhi, an astrophysicist, vice-president of the University of Science and Technology of China, and activist who partly inspired the pro-democracy student movements of 1986–87 and Tiananmen Square in 1989:
When the government began using the slogan “modernization with Chinese characteristics” (i.e., modernization except for monopoly power for the Communist Party), Fang responded satirically by asking students if they believed in physics with Chinese characteristics.
In 1991, on Wan Runnan, the head of the Sitong Company who was obliged to flee China after the June Fourth massacre
“China belongs to the people of China; it is not the private property of the Communist Party.” This assertion, obvious in one sense, was unutterable during the Mao years and still sounded radical in 1991.
Oh, and in that chapter on the translatability of Tang Dynasty poetry, Eliot Weinberger, who wrote:
Confucianism taught that when the government is bad, one should head for the hills. (Taoism taught that, regardless of the government, one should head for the hills).
“It doesn’t matter what you’ve done, just say “yes,” urge the inquisitors, “and everything will be alright.”
And as for that anaconda in the chandelier – it’s there, insatiable in its quest for digestible victims, winding and unwinding with barely a flicker of the lights.