Prologue
That day I was twenty-one — the golden age of my life — and I had so many extravagant wishes. I wanted to love. I wanted to eat. I wanted, in an instant, to become a half-bright, half-dark cloud in the sky. Later I learned that life is a slow process of being beaten down: a person grows older day by day, the extravagant wishes fade day by day, until in the end one becomes like an ox that has taken the hammer. But on my twenty-first birthday I did not foresee this. I felt I would forever be wild and unbroken, that nothing could ever beat me down.
—— Wang Xiaobo, The Golden Age
The German line in the title comes from a Latin original. Stanford’s first president, David Starr Jordan, quoted Ulrich von Hutten’s famous remark on the killing of Martin Luther: “Don’t you know that the air of freedom is blowing?”[1] Perhaps, as an ordinary person who longs for freedom (and by “ordinary person / I” I mean not just myself, but Yu Hong, the Polish Weronika, and all those who urgently seek freedom — I’ll return to this), my heart desperately wants there to be such a place, where a school or social institution protects the full freedom of individual thought, where ideas can collide and intermingle, where there is no “wrong” and no “politically incorrect,” where the lights of every civilization diffract through one another, where the wind of freedom blows hard, where one need not fear persecution for words and is not made guilty by speech, where “literary inquisition” becomes a joke of the past, where humanity, drawing on the limits of creativity, produces the most exquisite sparks of thought — where the light of the Academy of ancient Athens, and of Peking University in the Republican era, lives again. Here you can see humanity stumbling and groping for truth in the dark, drawing step by step closer to the light.
But, perhaps because of COVID-19, perhaps because of subtle shifts in the external situation, people around me have begun to treat “freedom” as an enemy — especially freedom of thought. We need to “unify thought,” we need “ideological-political education,” we need to point our gun-barrels uniformly outward, no dissenting voice allowed, because in the face of “national righteousness” the small self does not exist — only the enemies of the “people” and the great sacrifice. And so we begin to see freedom as the wellspring of evil, as something bound up with social instability; people cite Hong Kong, they cite the recent United States, and conclude that freedom must lead to chaos, simplifying the essence of the matter into “too much freedom blowing through.” But why is it precisely “freedom” that is being stigmatized? Why is this word — printed again and again on walls as one of the country’s own “core socialist values” — now to be treated as the dregs of capitalism?
The word “freedom” (自由) is not native to Chinese. It was brought in by progressive intellectuals from the West at the end of the Qing and the beginning of the Republic — borrowing a classical Chinese word and filling it with Western meaning to render a related Western term. The Chinese 自由 generally translates “Freedom” or “Liberty”; in early Sino-British dictionaries we find renderings such as “principles of self-rule” (FREEDOM, in Morrison’s A Dictionary of the Chinese Language, 1822), “magnanimity” (Liberal, in the Shanghai Dialect Dictionary, 1869), and “without others’ constraint” (Liberty, in the Chinese-English Dictionary, 1887).[2] Back then, freedom was discussed mostly as the opposite of “restriction” — meaning self-indulgence or licence. A more philosophically Western discussion of “freedom” comes after the Hundred Days’ Reform: Liang Qichao wrote Free Talks, drawing on Fukuzawa Yukichi’s An Outline of a Theory of Civilization and Tokutomi Sohō’s The Future Japan and Nationalist Series, briefly outlining the relation between “the freedom of the collective” and “the freedom of the individual.” Later, Yan Fu translated John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, taking the concept deeper, discussing freedom from the angle of the boundary between individual rights and social rights, and translating “Liberty” with the much more precise qún-jǐ quán-jiè (群己权界, “the bounded rights between collective and self”), overturning the older limited reading that treated “freedom” as the overemphasis on individual rights alone.
If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. The use of compulsion in conformity with public opinion is as harmful as — perhaps more harmful than — its use against public opinion.[3]
—— John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
So writes Mill in On Liberty. He divides freedom into two kinds of different nature. One is the freedom of the individual (that is, the individual not being excessively constrained by others or by power), guaranteeing a certain extent of individual rights. The other is democratic freedom (the freedom to make certain decisions on the basis of some public justice), which emphasizes collective freedom. The freedom of the individual stresses individual feeling and difference; it is conflictual, hard to unify. Democratic freedom pursues public moral right, stresses unity and sacrifice, denies difference. The collective and the self are opposed — but not absolutely. They are Epicurus and Plato, Nietzsche and Kant; the extreme of each is equally an abyss. Usually, they shift into each other under given conditions, rather than sitting as a simple binary.
The charm of language is that it shifts with changing public sentiment, quietly transforming its own meaning to fit a new linguistic ecology. An extreme linguistic environment, and the short-fast pulses of online information, have caused “freedom” to gradually lose the painstakingly cultivated sense of “the bounded rights between collective and self” of Yan Fu’s day, and slide back toward the earlier, simpler, more labelled sense of “no restraint,” “licence.” But that is not freedom. True freedom carries not only respect for the individual but also reverence for the collective; it is restraint and tolerance. As Robespierre, the French Revolutionary, put it: liberty is the power inherent in human beings to exercise all their faculties at will; it has justice as its rule, the rights of others as its limit, nature as its principle, and law as its safeguard…[4] And Robespierre, who said this, in the later stages of the Revolution could no longer control the ideal of “freedom,” was swallowed by it, became a “dictator.” This essay has never set out to judge who was right and who was wrong. I only want, by means of my clumsy pen, to revisit the weight and complex relations of the word “freedom,” so that meanings once hidden may have a chance to see daylight again.
I want, by way of this, to look back at the turbulent 1980s — that era when Petőfi’s “Liberty and love: these two I must have; for love I’ll sacrifice my life, for liberty my love” was everywhere — and see how the people of that era explored, and ran up against walls, on the path of freedom.
I also believe I have no right to judge that era (and I try, as much as I can, to force myself not to define it as good or bad). What I can do is to put heavy history into dialogue with the images of cinema, and try to elaborate what the filmmakers wanted to express.
I. The Double Life of Véronique and Polish Democratization
Krzysztof Kieślowski’s films were never lacking in history and politics. Born in the Second World War, having lived through the strong-state Poland of the 1960s and the chaos of the 1980s, Kieślowski knew well the cost and the meaning of freedom. His images always carry political undertones[5] (as he himself said, “we are surrounded by politics; when we make these films, I find politics significant, it influences us at every moment”). In Dekalog, and even in his early documentary Workers ‘71, you can feel the abiding concern with social problems and the universal compassion in his image-making. The Double Life of Véronique is no exception.
There are two things I want to talk about. One is the (vague) movement happening in the background of the story. The other is the contrast between the two Véroniques’ different temperaments.
After the Polish Weronika finishes singing, she and her friend are running home, and a truck drives toward them carrying a Lenin statue that has just been pulled down. At this moment — 1990 (the stamps in the French section of the film indicate the time, though the events should be set just before 1990) — Poland, after a decade of turbulence, has already changed colour.
In 1980, the Edward Gierek government in Poland, which had long taken Western loans, faced an economic crisis. It decided to slow wage growth and raise prices. This drew workers’ anger; they took to the streets, and strikes broke out in multiple Polish cities. The workers then founded the famous “Solidarity” trade union at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk (Danzig), and elected Lech Wałęsa as its chairman. After many rounds of negotiation between striking workers and the government, the famous Gdańsk Agreement was signed. This agreement directly led to Edward Gierek’s removal from office, and made Solidarity a legal organization within Poland — the first non-communist-controlled trade union within the Warsaw Pact — and set off a powerful anti-communist movement.
In 1981, after a year of expansion, Solidarity had grown rapidly, accounting for one-third of all Polish workers. Large numbers of intellectuals and Church members began to support Solidarity and joined its affiliated organizations. By this point Solidarity had moved from its initial economic-strike form into a social movement that hoped to build a “self-governing republic.” Under pressure, the Polish communist government declared a state of emergency, the military government took over the country and enforced martial law (Martial Law in Poland, 13 December 1981 – 22 July 1983), Solidarity was banned, and political persecution began.
After that, Solidarity was forced underground for a time. After 1985, with Gorbachev coming to power and leading reform across the socialist bloc, the persecution of “Solidarity” inside Poland began to ease. In 1988, with foreign sanctions and a slow pace of governmental reform, Poland slipped into a deeper crisis, and a new round of strikes broke out (I suspect the demonstration in the Kraków square in the film may refer to this round, though in fact the whole of 1980s Poland — and even the post-transition 1990s — was full of such strikes and demonstrations; which specific one matters less than what it represents: Kraków, and Weronika bathed in freedom). Under pressure the government agreed to begin negotiations with workers. In 1989, the opposition, with Wałęsa as its representative, sat down with the government (the Polish Round Table Talks). The result of the negotiation was that Solidarity was once again legalized, and a partially-free election would be held. On 4 June 1989, the candidates of the Polish United Workers’ Party were thoroughly defeated by Solidarity; a Solidarity-led coalition government was formed; in August of the same year the socialist People’s Republic was abolished and replaced by the democratic Republic of Poland (Wałęsa was elected president in 1990, becoming Poland’s first popularly-elected president — I’ll come back to this). The event was imitated by other Eastern European countries, triggering the later Revolutions of 1989.
Later the puppet-master discovers the photograph of the French Véronique. The French Véronique says, “That was taken on a trip — I went to Czechoslovakia (the Velvet Revolution), Hungary (the Socialist Workers’ Party giving up its ruling position), Poland” — all countries of the Revolutions of 1989, all members of the Visegrád Group, the vanguards of the Eastern European upheaval, sharing a common culture. I think Kieślowski’s idea here is a comparison: between the French Véronique, who lives in an already-democratic country (one that has known both the wounds and the beauty of freedom), and the Polish Weronika in Kraków, who is just being bathed in the sun of freedom (or perhaps not only Kraków, but all of the changing-colour Eastern European countries). One has grown up watching the vast stars; the other reads the fine veins of leaves. They have the same body; both like to use a ring to comb their lashes; both carry a transparent marble. But they make different choices.
The Polish Weronika has a serious heart condition, but she still chooses to sing — because singing is what she pursues. Only when singing can she feel individual freedom; only then does she want to make love with her boyfriend in the corridor; only then does she feel the calling of heaven. As Liu Xiaofeng writes in The Burden of the Flesh:
The ideal of a free, democratic society opens up the contingency of individual passion. Because individual happiness contains the differences of individual souls, and because once the imagination of individual passion is less constrained by social conditions — and a free society is committed to reducing such constraints in the name of individual happiness — the possibilities of realizing imagination increase; and the increase of possibilities also means an increase of possible negations. But the ontological limit encountered by the individual’s vital passion is not only something the institutional design of individual freedom cannot overcome — it appears, after the contingency of individual passion has been opened up, even more starkly as a limit.[6]
Weronika recognized the limit of the body, but she ignored that natural limit and went to embrace individual passion — leading, in the end, to self-destruction (or self-transcendence?). Like the Eastern European countries in their pursuit of liberalization: for the sake of freedom, the Warsaw Pact collapsed, totalitarianism was thrown off, the Soviet Union fell, a new Europe was born.
The camera then moves to France, a country that had been through the labour-pains of its own great revolution (on the streets you can still see cars wrecked by “too much freedom”; it had once been one of the most totalitarian states on the European continent; after order was rebuilt, people there pursue more “the sense of security,” “the sense of order”). The French Véronique, because of physical limits, gives up her pursuit of music. But her life is always being drawn along by something; this “acceptance of fate” makes her feel the loneliness of life. As Qin Hui writes in Ten Years of Vicissitudes: “Human beings are born with two desires — the desire for freedom, and the desire for security. Human nature makes it possible for us to trade freedom for security.”[7] (I think this is also why human beings move from the state of nature, as Locke describes it, to a contract-based social state.) The French Véronique, in stability, feels life’s loneliness; her desire for security has been satisfied, her desire for freedom is locked away, waiting to be awakened. Unlike the Polish Weronika, she watches the stumbling old man calmly; she cannot help him (the Polish Weronika wanted to help the old man). She will live a long life — but her heart will be eternally restless.
Professor Su once said in class that he was swimming on the beach one night; the tide began to rise; people advised him not to go on swimming, he might drown. “If I die, I die — it doesn’t matter,” he said. When a person loses the body, the spirit is no longer constrained: it drifts wherever it pleases, and embraces the ultimate freedom a human being can have. Only then is there no boundary; only then does the body let go of its grip on the ideal. When the temptation of freedom reaches its peak, death becomes trivial — because by death one already has what one most wanted: “ultimate freedom.” Like that puppet show in the film: the dancer who lives inside the box wants to dance, but breaks her leg, and so gives up her life, no longer bound by the world — turning, like a cocoon, into a butterfly.
In the film, Weronika sings (from Dante’s Paradiso, the opening of Canto II)[8]:
O ye, who in some pretty little boat,
Eager to listen, have been following
Behind my ship, that singing sails along,
Turn back to look again upon your shores;
Do not put out to sea, lest peradventure,
In losing me, you might yourselves be lost.
The sea I sail has never yet been passed;
Minerva breathes, and pilots me Apollo,
And Muses nine point out to me the Bears.
But as people living in the world, we must endure the constraint that the body’s limits place on the ideal. Man is born free, and yet everywhere he is in chains.
II. Summer Palace and the June Fourth Student Movement
Lou Ye said, in a documentary about Summer Palace, that he knew from the very beginning the film could not possibly pass censorship — but he decided to make it anyway, because the subject pulled him and his team in too strongly. (Isn’t this exactly the Polish Weronika? Doing what one knows cannot be done, pursuing freedom, a martyr for freedom — though I’m getting ahead of myself.) And the meaning of this film is not only about Chinese cinema or the censorship system; its meaning lies in the way the whole of Chinese arts and letters remembers that era — even if we are no longer allowed to discuss the event.
The whole film centres on Yu Hong; it is intensely subjective in its viewpoint. Yu Hong is a very interesting character — some have called her “overly dissolute,” others a “nymphomaniac.” So what is sex here? Traditional Chinese ritual culture demands “restrain oneself and return to the rites,” replacing human desire with solemn ritual; this produced millennia of sexual repression in China, and stripped human beings of the most basic right that comes with being animal. The revolutionary morality of “people’s democracy,” in turn, demands that people be “pure,” demands “sacrifice,” exalts selfless devotion — like the abstinent Oceania of Nineteen Eighty-Four (“sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema”; “matters of reproduction were to be handled like a yearly procedure of ration cards”), and this likewise strips away the body as belonging to humanity. As Liu Xiaofeng writes:
Danton felt: if the public moral will of the community can replace the morality of the individual (sensual preferences), then individual life no longer belongs to itself, but to an abstract community, to the interests of democracy or of the state — and this is no different from despotism. Once the freedom of the community’s (the nation’s or the people’s) public moral will is placed above the freedom of individual sensual preferences, the tyranny of moral despotism becomes inevitable.
So, on the other side, all manner of social-equality movements bear the label of sexual liberation; Yu Hong’s ethic, body-centred, in my view actually leads revolution and freedom. Feminism, queer equality — all of them are sex-led, and that movement was the same. So sex is the forerunner of freedom: sex liberates the human being’s own person first, and then rises to the height of liberating others (teaching Dongdong to masturbate, “going to bed” with a boy from another school whom she has just met), or to the height of liberating society.
But this release of individual life also carries a self-destructive tendency. She is Kundera’s unbearable lightness of being — a truly carnal, dissolute beauty — and this body-led ethic was something the over-collectivist era could not understand. Wang Xiaobo, in Our Spiritual Homeland, writes: “Western feminists hold that sex is to feminist theory what labour is to Marxist theory. This view comes as a surprise to Chinese readers. A few more years, and Chinese will come to understand what it means; the current trend is gradually drawing women into the circle of sex. Sex is very important to human beings.” It was precisely at Tumen that Yu Hong first tasted the forbidden fruit of freedom — and that gave her the taste of freedom’s beauty. Those who judge Yu Hong by the morality of sex are inevitably shallow and authoritarian.
Delacroix painted a famous picture of the French Revolution, Liberty Leading the People: at the centre of the canvas, the goddess of liberty, holding the red-white-blue tricolour, bares her breasts without restraint and rushes toward the enemy (those not yet liberated). “Sex,” as a need that comes from the body, is a thought that breaks bondage; it is the symbol of love and hope. In my eyes, Yu Hong’s body is like the bared breasts of the goddess of liberty here — leading freedom, leading the youth of that era.
So the Yu Hong in the film may not be just Yu Hong; she is the people of that era who yearned for, and pursued, freedom — who stood in front of the tanks and said “This is my duty” — and she is also a China that yearned for freedom.
In 1987, Yu Hong left a home with a portrait of “Great Leader Kim Il-sung” pasted on the wall, left behind the wild and the ignorant, walked out of the mountains. On the train, she wore a smile, her eyes full of expectation. Early 1980s China had been through the pain of the Cultural Revolution, had just finished the Sino-Vietnamese War, and was in a honeymoon period with America. Speech in China during that time was unusually free. In art there was the famous “‘85 New Wave,” with artists raising the slogan “No U-Turn” to express their love of the new era. China loved the world then, and the world loved China.
Later, through Li Ti’s introduction, Yu Hong came to know Zhou Wei, a fellow student at the same school. Zhou Wei is also an interesting character: there are essays that read his image as standing for “the state.” At first I couldn’t accept that; on this land, the state apparatus seems more like a “father” figure, embodying traditional patriarchy, not a young man in love with a person. But last year there was a piece of news: the Communist Youth League issued a pair of virtual idols, “Hong Qi Man” and “Jiang Shan Jiao.” I realized that the state media is deliberately personifying the state apparatus into “idols,” into a dateable “oppa.” There is a documentary in which an elderly woman says that when she was little and heard Mao Zedong had died, she felt the sky had fallen, tears rolled out, and she cried as if a relative had passed. Perhaps in that era people loved the country as if they were in love with the country. Lou Ye said: every action of Zhou Wei’s is because of Yu Hong, and every action of Yu Hong’s is also because of Zhou Wei — perhaps that confirms the reading.
In their relationship there is a scene where they quarrel — a scene most often read as “the occupation of the square.” Yu Hong runs to Zhou Wei’s dorm singing “Snail’s Home” and demands to stay the night. In the surviving footage of June Fourth, people in the square were singing — like a celebration. Many people who lived through that era did not, before the event, believe the government would do anything to the students, because the government would “protect workers, protect peasants, and protect intellectuals like you” (as a line in the bar scene puts it). At first, then, everyone was singing, everything was in harmony. “Snail’s Home” goes: “Among the dense high-rises I cannot find my home; in crowded streets full of passing strangers, I drift wherever I go; with a heavy shell on my back I climb upward, but can never keep up with the soaring house prices.” That period saw inflation and rising prices — perhaps the main factor pulling ordinary citizens behind the “occupation.” But that period of China also bore corruption, widening rich-poor gaps, a stack of social problems. The song obliquely shows the mood of those occupying the square: Demand reform!
Yu Hong: “Zhou Wei, tonight I’m staying here.”
Zhou Wei: “No.”
Roommate: “Chen Qun, weren’t you hungry? Hey — go get something to eat…”
Roommate: “Can he have my bed? Like we said before.”
Yu Hong: “I’m staying here.”
The June Fourth period also coincided with a thawing of Sino-Soviet relations: Gorbachev’s historic visit to China. Deng Xiaoping demanded that during Gorbachev’s visit the protestors be cleared from Tiananmen Square, so that the welcoming ceremony could be held there. Zhao Ziyang sent Yan Mingfu and others to negotiate with the students; they had persuaded some of them, but factional problems among the students meant the square in the end was not vacated, and Gorbachev’s welcome ceremony had to be moved to the airport.
The screenplay reads: “That night was a victory for Yu Hong. All the boys in the dormitory went elsewhere to sleep. The lights went out, Yu Hong was still sitting motionless, Zhou Wei lay there — and neither of them spoke a word.” It was indeed Yu Hong’s victory. After Gorbachev’s visit ended, large numbers of foreign correspondents decided to stay in Beijing and report on the demonstrations; the students’ actions gained still more sympathy. From 17 to 18 May, millions of Beijing residents from every walk of life joined the demonstrations — among them PLA soldiers, police, Communist Party members, and lower-level government officials.[9] But after one round of dialogue, the hardliners took over on the government’s side.
Slightly drunk with her small victory, Yu Hong was pushed by Zhou Wei to the door.
Zhou Wei: “No — I said you can’t stay here.”
Yu Hong: “I’m staying here, unless you hit me.”
Smack! Zhou Wei’s hand came up. The other students were also stunned: “He’s actually hitting her? Hitting her?”
On 20 May the Chinese government declared martial law. Large numbers of troops began to deploy toward Beijing. Deng Xiaoping warned that if the demonstrations did not end soon, China would face civil war, or another Cultural Revolution. At this point, some moderate students and intellectuals proposed a temporary withdrawal, but the hardline students insisted on staying. During this time, because of foreign reporting, overseas Chinese protests of support also broke out — but Beijing was already out of control.
Yu Hong, tears streaming: “Hit me one more time, and I’ll go.”
Smack — another slap. Yu Hong let out a ripping, anguished cry.
On 1 June, Li Peng submitted the report “On the Essence of the Unrest,” labelling the demonstrators as “terrorists” and “counter-revolutionaries.” Over the next days, the Party in turn published articles preparing for the clearing of the square. The situation was decided. There was no way back; some in the square still held the last stand. From this point, Summer Palace begins to render those final days of June in flat, plain strokes, even cutting in raw documentary footage.
Yu Hong’s diary reads:
Halfway through I wanted to leave, but I hesitated, and stayed. Later Zhou Wei hit me, and I cried. He held me for a long, long time. This is not the unhappiest thing. The unhappiest is that I know this kind of thing will happen to me again. I curse myself: stupid, lost. There’s always this illusion in my heart that when I want to see him so desperately, so urgently, I have actually overshot — I thought you were far away, and instead, quietly, from the side, you reached over and took my hand…
The extremism of the students missed the chance to talk with the government; the hardline of the government missed the best opportunity for democratization since the founding of the People’s Republic.
III. The Dialogue Between The Double Life of Véronique and Summer Palace
In the second half of Summer Palace, Zhou Wei, now in Germany, goes to Li Ti’s (or Ruo Gu’s) place to gather with German friends. (By this point in the film, Germany has torn down the Berlin Wall; the two countries of different social systems have fused — and this scene feels less like a domestic gathering than a crossroads on the question of social system and ideology. Former comrades from the socialist camp are sitting together, talking about the past, talking about the future.) There he meets a Polish girl, Nina (think back to the Poland we discussed earlier: Poland then, like China, had just lived through a social movement; and Zhou Wei, in the entire German section, has only this one “strange” conversation with a new character — it is not a romance, more like two old friends sitting knee-to-knee, talking about recent changes. Lou Ye has also said, on multiple occasions, that this is a film about “June Fourth”; and on 4 June 1989, two important things happened in East and West: one was the clearing of “Tiananmen,” the other was the partial-democracy election in Poland — an election that “Solidarity” won. The two countries took two different roads: the former continued, after the event, as a socialist people’s-democratic dictatorship; the latter walked into capitalist democratic politics). Zhou Wei has two conversations with this girl. Both are worth chewing over. I’ll mark them down.
Nina: “Why are you working in a warehouse?”
Zhou Wei: “It just had to be this way — the pay’s all right. I can get by for a while.”
(There are two interesting translations of the German line I found: “I don’t speak German very well” and “There I don’t have to talk too much” — i.e. my German is not good, and so, working in the warehouse, I don’t need to talk too much.)
At the end of 2001, after decades of negotiations, China finally joined the WTO, and began at a faster pace to enter the chain of international division of labour. But because of the lack of core technologies (poor German, can’t adapt to the bigger environment), for a long time China has existed in world trade by exporting the cheapest labour, rare earth minerals, at the cost of the environment, deflation, mass unemployment…[10] in exchange for the overall development of society, and standing as the “world’s factory” in global commercial operations. So when the Polish girl asks Zhou Wei why he is working in a “warehouse,” in such a not-quite-decent job, it is because “the pay’s all right” — enough to keep this country’s economic development going for a long stretch.
And as Daniel A. Bell, the Tsinghua scholar, argues in his essay Why China Won’t Collapse (Soon)[11], the three sources of CCP regime legitimacy are Performance, Political meritocracy, and Nationalism — and “Performance” especially, in that period, with China’s economic take-off, became the single greatest source of regime legitimacy in the first decade-plus of Reform and Opening. So after that movement, the government — which had for a time lost legitimacy and people’s hearts — could, on the back of “development is the hard truth” and “look at money in everything,” make people put aside, for the moment, the pursuit of freedom and democratization; and Zhou Wei, as the state apparatus, could “get by for a while” on “all-right pay.”
Nina: “Do you want to go back to China?”
Zhou Wei: “Mm.”
Nina: “Why?”
Zhou Wei: “I’ve got a friend in Chongqing who has offered me work. I feel my life here is only temporary (flux). I don’t like it.”
Nina: “Then when will you go back to China? Do you think things are clear (Clear) now?” “Next time, let’s talk in private.”
“I have a friend in Chongqing.” Why Chongqing? In the earlier portions of Summer Palace this city is never mentioned; it appears out of nowhere. So what does Chongqing symbolize? What happened in 1997?
Think about what happened in China that year: on 19 February, Deng Xiaoping died; on 18 June, Chongqing became a directly-administered municipality (Deng’s last wish in life); on 1 July, Hong Kong was returned; at the end of the year, the first phase of the Three Gorges Dam was completed (in Chongqing). All of these were, more or less, accomplished under Deng Xiaoping’s direction (he was the “chief architect,” and also the one who ordered the clearing of “June Fourth”); and all of these “great feats” were, more or less, achieved under the blessing of “Reform and Opening.”
In the original screenplay there’s a passage describing Chongqing:
Scene 222. Chongqing, an aerial view of Chongqing, day, exterior.
From the air, the plane has reached the sky above Chongqing and is descending slowly, approaching Chongqing little by little. From the air you can see a new, modern city full of life rising amid the mountains, slowly extending toward us, closer and closer, until at last the plane lands at Chongqing Airport (the whole descent and landing).
Before Reform and Opening, Chongqing was a former wartime capital of the Republican era, an old industrial base. After Reform and Opening, Chongqing had become “a new, modern city.” So “Chongqing,” in some sense, stands for the Reform and Opening that sacrificed the interests of some so that society could move forward, and stands for Deng Xiaoping… “He needs my help” — he has “offered me work.” This “work” may stand for “a road” (in contrast to “the temporary warehouse job that can hold me over for a while”), and that road may be the fabled “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Zhou Wei — who represents the state, the state apparatus — must throw himself onto that road.
And there’s an interesting word in the following line, “temporary” (Zhou Wei: “My life here is temporary.” In English: “I feel like I’m in transit here, as if everything is in flux, and I don’t like the feeling.”). The word in the English subtitles is Flux — meaning “flow, change, instability.” The Oxford dictionary gives the example: “Our society is in a state of flux.” In the years after June Fourth, the conservatives returned to power, and the guiding ideology again raised the slogan “take class struggle as the key link.” Reform and Opening stalled for a time. Combined with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the colour-changing of multiple socialist states, not only China but the entire global political ecology was in an extremely “turbulent” environment. Was it “Capitalist” or “Socialist”? What would be the fate of socialism? Where should China go?
So an over-eighty-year-old Deng Xiaoping had no choice but to make his “1992 Southern Tour.” A China that had slowed the pace of “reform” was, by Deng’s tour, bent back onto the track; the pace of Reform and Opening was restarted. This is very interesting: if June Fourth was an excess of liberalism, the years after it were a re-monopolization of social power by collectivism. Deng said, “Those who don’t support reform must step down” — making the continued development of society possible. So Zhou Wei says, “I don’t like it” — does not like the turbulent feeling of a China still searching for its own way of developing.
Then Nina says: “When will you go back to China (when will you start on your road?) — do you think things are clear yet?” What is clear? Has the road of “Capitalist or Socialist” been made clear? It is also the doubt and questioning of countries observing the changing internal environment of China. By the way, this balcony exchange was not in the original screenplay; I suspect it was something Lou Ye improvised in Germany.
After this, the camera cuts straight to the next conversation between Nina and Zhou Wei. They walk with coffee to a piece of empty ground, sit on a bench, smoke (in the screenplay, marijuana), stare into space.
Zhou Wei: “What is Warsaw like?” (In the screenplay this line is followed by “How is Wałęsa?” — Wałęsa, as we mentioned, was one of the founders of Solidarity, and Polish President from 1990 to 1995.)
Nina gazes into the distance, thinking for a long time.
Nina: “Mm. Not bad.” “And Beijing?”
Zhou Wei: “Not bad.”
Nina: “Do you have a girlfriend?”
Zhou Wei: “Yes.”
Nina: “Where is she now?”
Zhou Wei: “Far away.”
Do you have a girlfriend (your people)? Far away (my girlfriend’s heart and I are very far apart).
Nina: “In China?”
Zhou Wei: “Maybe.”
Nina: “But where are we, now? In Berlin?”
The camera moves into the distance.
Before 2003, after June Fourth, the development of China was as uncertain as Poland’s. What would China become? What would the future look like? Would reform move forward? Would there be a historical reversal?
IV. The Missing Ruo Gu and the Departed Li Ti
After that event, Zhou Wei went to Germany; Yu Hong continued to drift. In 2003 Zhou Wei returned to China; Yu Hong was working at a toll booth in Qinhuangdao. Lou Ye said: this is a film about people who lived through that era; the hard thing is not the event itself, but how those who lived through it, after the event ended, face it. They still have to live; on top of carrying that one night, they still have to go on. That is the hardest thing.
On the road of pursuing freedom, some chose martyrdom (Li Ti’s suicide in 1998; the Polish Weronika); some chose evasion (Ruo Gu’s disappearance in 2000; the French Véronique; and us); but some are still holding on — Véronique and Yu Hong are the same. They are pure, free, love without looking back; the spiritual ideal and freedom that belong to them are great. But human beings are after all flesh-and-blood; they are limited by the body. So the French Véronique chooses for now to give up singing, and Yu Hong is buried by life.
I think humanity has not yet found the perfect social system. So if you ask me what “freedom” is — I find it hard to answer. It is the chaotic “French Revolution,” and it is the Statue of Liberty that one yearns toward. It is the endless struggle between the collective and the self, each for its own interest; it is licence, and it is restraint — but it is certainly not the simplified chaos and violence. Freedom leaves people scarred — and yet I would still, without looking back, choose freedom, because freedom is a longing for the real. Without freedom, life is left with nothing but lies.
The path of pursuit may be winding; mistakes may be made along the way. But one must trust in human power, trust that the ideal can transcend its own limits. Freedom is never wrong; those who mock freedom are despicable. They use “reality” as their chip, to force the idealist to compromise, even to retreat, saying this is “Chinese characteristics,” this is “national conditions.” Bullshit! Human beings have an eternal pursuit of freedom — even if for now they stop because of the body’s limits (stopping because of reality, and stagnating because one is content with the status quo, are completely different things) — but they will never come to a halt!
A human being cannot transcend the limits of the body — but this does not stop a human being from being able to dream.
Don’t you know that the air of freedom is blowing?
Postscript
Because I am too young, I did not live through that era, and I dare not pass careless judgment on the right and wrong of it. I have tried, as much as possible, to talk about that history with a minimum of subjective consciousness — but inevitably some of it leaks in, so please forgive me. On the symbolism of Summer Palace, there’s a long online essay that gave me a great deal of inspiration. Liu Xiaofeng’s The Burden of the Flesh has been my bedside book during this period, opening up a lot of thinking for me, and I’ve quoted it here.
A side note: both Lou Ye and Kieślowski use a very blurred mode of expression for history. That hazy feeling is in both The Double Life of Véronique and Summer Palace. Lou Ye borrows love as his medium, Kieślowski borrows the loneliness of the individual. The era, after all, is not the most important thing: what matters is the people in that era, and their individual feeling.
The “extremists (uncompromising idealists)” in both films are rarely understood by the compromisers. They hold firmly to their bottom line and their faith, but inside they are very fragile, urgently needing affirmation and support. So she opens herself up, gives the most tempting side of herself to “men” (“Why am I always so eager to do that thing with you, my boys? Because only in the doing of that thing do you understand that I am kind.” — from Yu Hong’s diary), in the hope of being understood.
If you meet someone like that — give them a hug. Perhaps love is more powerful than a tank.
Notes
- President Gerhard Casper on the history and origins of Stanford’s motto ↩
- Feng Tianyu, “The Evolution of the Concept of ‘Freedom’” ↩
- Mill, On Liberty. The Chinese paraphrase the author drew from follows Meng Fanli’s translation. ↩
- Robespierre, On Revolutionary Legality and the Trials. ↩
- Mentioned in the documentary I’m So-So… (Kieślowski Speaks). ↩
- Liu Xiaofeng, The Burden of the Flesh, p. 134. ↩
- Qin Hui & Jin Yan, Ten Years of Vicissitudes, p. 10. ↩
- Dante, The Divine Comedy; Chinese translation by Wang Weike, English translation here by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. ↩
- Some historical background drawn from Wikipedia. ↩
- Cui Zhiyuan, “The Pros and Cons of WTO Accession,” China Textile Leader, 1999, no. 5, pp. 72–74. ↩
- See CASS: “Sources of the CCP’s Governing ‘Legitimacy’” and Daniel A. Bell on HuffPost, Why China Won’t Collapse (Soon). ↩