Reading about Moscow (With Beijing on My Mind)

by Jeffrey Wasserstrom

Collage © Lisa Jane Persky

Once upon a time, specialists in Chinese studies, like me, felt we had a lot in common with scholars who focused on Russia. We each shared an interest in large countries that had command economies and Leninist systems of rule. We each struggled to make sense of comparably opaque and often misleading official pronouncements. And when it came to works of dystopian fiction, we both studied places that were widely considered “Orwellian” in nature. But then came a pair of events whose twentieth anniversaries have just been marked: the collapse of the Soviet Union and the founding of a new Russian Federation. In the wake of these major changes, the comparative landscape began to shift. Soon, the contrasts between China and Russia seemed to far outweigh their similarities. After all, 1992 began with a new government in Moscow striving to leave the Communist era behind, while an old one in Beijing expressed its determination to keep China under Communist Party control and territorially intact.

And yet 2012 begins with the Russian and Chinese constellations once again falling into alignment. China is still sometimes referred to as Orwellian, but neither it nor Russia is now seen as the closest real-life approximation of a “Big Brother State,” a title that now belongs to settings such as North Korea where harsher forms of authoritarianism are the rule. Some China specialists, myself included, have recently argued that consumerism, materialism and a culture of distraction have come to play such a pivotal role in keeping Hu Jintao and company in power that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World may now supplant the previous fictional template through which we once viewed Chinese authoritarianism: Orwell’s 1984. My reading of commentaries and reportage on Putin’s Russia suggests that the same shift from Orwell to Huxley makes sense when we look toward this fledgling, and questionable, democracy.

The realignment of the trajectories of the two countries creates an eerie effect for me when I happen to read something on Russia with the goal of forgetting, for a brief moment, about China — the country I teach and write about for a living. My effort to escape is undermined by the feeling I sometimes get when immersed in a newspaper or magazine article about Russia — the feeling that the words coming off the page could just as well have been written about China.

This happened most recently when I picked up David Remnick’s fascinating “Letter from Moscow: The Civil Archipelago,” which appeared in the New Yorker’s final issue of 2011. Focusing largely on responses to Russia’s late 2011 elections, it offers a sweeping look at everything from the complex and challenging activities of human rights groups, to the still-underdeveloped nature of civil society in a post-totalitarian state, to the limits placed on the press in a country whose leaders are determined to contain the flow of information that undermines their authority. The big themes Remnick addresses often brought Chinese examples to my mind, but so, too, did some of its small details. For example, in trying to capture the frustration and outrage that many urban residents feel at the special perks enjoyed by members of the government, their kin and their cronies, Remnick turns to driving habits. Solving traffic congestion in Moscow is a simple matter for “officials and the well-connected,” who employ specially issued “flashing blue lights” that, when placed atop their luxury cars, allows them to zoom through traffic-snarled streets as ordinary drivers have to pull aside to let them pass. To be sure, China does not have the same blue light system. Nevertheless, the Chinese Internet is filled with angry posts describing incidents when officials and their family members acted — and got away with acting — as though the rules that apply to others simply do not apply to them.

I feel a particularly strong sense of “he could have just come back from China” as Remnick describes a recent spate of urban protests in Russia. For Remnick, this form of resistance demonstrates that the authoritarian country’s young professionals are becoming less "bovine," “apathetic” and “anesthetized by stability” than they once were. This exact assessment of Russia’s middle class struck me as something I could have read on the “Letter from China” blog by Evan Osnos. (Osnos, incidentally, reports from Beijing for the magazine that Remnick edits.) It is not just that we have been seeing an uptick in middle class activism lately in the PRC as well as in Russia. It is that, as Osnos often points out, the Chinese authorities have been working overtime to convince upwardly mobile young professionals to continue to accept a flawed status quo, as long as it brings them creature comforts: a deal that the government struck with this demographic group in the wake of 1989, and one that is becoming less and less secure as time goes by.

One particular Osnos post on this theme, written in 2010 and called “The Age of Complacency?”, reviews the main points of a dystopian novel by Chan Koonchung, a former Hong Kong resident now based in Beijing, which was generating enormous buzz in China’s capital. Just released in English as The Fat Years, Chan’s novel (which owes a good deal to both Orwell and Huxley but only name-checks the latter) examines how “the most privileged and educated men and women” in a China just over the horizon (the story is set in 2013), “struggle to balance the benefits and perils of life under high-functioning authoritarianism.” The novel encourages us to wonder about the choices that lie before those who, as opposed to being left behind during their country’s rise, “have reaped the rewards” of economic development, but now increasingly wonder what they have sacrificed in terms of political liberties. Remnick identifies a similarly tricky situation in Russia, at a time when there is increasing unease with Putin’s government among not just dissidents and the poor, but some who have been doing quite well for themselves in recent years.

Osnos’ “Letter from China” is one of the blogs I rely on most heavily to help me track the changes in a country that I can only periodically visit. His April comments on the Arab Spring were particularly fascinating for a China specialist watching from afar. In posts entitled “China: The Big Chill” and “Why Ai Weiwei Matters,” he reported on government moves to intimidate or silence gadfly figures, including many less internationally famous than Ai who were detained around the same time and yet in some cases remain in prison. These moves to quell freedom of expression, Osnos argues, were launched in part because Beijing was jumping at shadows in the wake of Mubarak’s fall. Yes, the Arab Spring touched even China. And, as Remnick notes, the same was true for Russia. The swift transformations in the Middle East and North Africa of early 2011 ensured that the year would be a nervous one for authoritarian leaders of all ideological persuasions, and his depiction of the anxiety in Russian leadership circles was eerily similar in tone to those nervous shudders emanating from Beijing.

The tense state of affairs in Chechnya, a frontier zone with a largely Muslim population, doesn’t do anything to help fears of actual resistance spreading to the capital. Remnick’s “Letter from Moscow” highlights these regional “differences” within Russia. Despite the shift toward Brave New World governance in Moscow, the style of rule in Chechnya seems to be much more akin to the “boot-on-the-face” variety depicted in 1984. In Remnick’s words, the authorities are particularly “ruthless” and “draconian” in dealing with any hint of dissent there, and he describes the dangers journalists face in reporting on and from the region. Chechnya lingers as perhaps the biggest failure in “democratic” Russia, making it, again, not so different from China these days.

Again, Osnos’ coverage of China, in this case of regional strife in the borderland area of Xinjiang, aligns with Remick’s in interesting ways. Like Chechnya, which stands at the very edge of the Russian Federation, Xinjiang is located at the edge of the PRC. In a July 2009 post called “Looking Beyond Ethnicity,” Osnos refers to Beijing’s “decades of trying, unsuccessfully, to snuff out resistance” in Xinjiang. The Party’s mishandling of Uighur/Han tensions — and its overlooking of their economic aspects — has resulted in a region “embroiled in a pattern of uprising and crackdown” that contrasts sharply with the situation in most other parts of the country. In a follow-up (“Xinjiang: The Reckoning Begins”), Osnos describes a Han man armed with a stick who tears open a car door to threaten the pair of foreign reporters inside.

The similarities between Russia (where national elections, no matter how flawed, are held) and China (where the upcoming leadership transition is being worked out in obscure ways) should not be overstated. The Russian press is not controlled as tightly as the Chinese media. Putin is not just like Hu Jintao. Chechnya is not just like Xinjiang. And so on.

Still, even though any China-Russia analogy is bound to be imperfect, imperfect analogies can be useful. They can lead us to break out of entrenched, misleading modes of thinking and help us become attentive to connections and parallels we might otherwise miss. Putting today’s Russia and contemporary China in a shared category, rather than one in a post-Communist box and the other in a still-Communist one, can help us see things about each country more clearly. It also makes it less surprising to hear that leaders in Moscow and Beijing may once more be looking to the other capital for inspiration about how to handle specific problems, as Remnick illustrates in his one comment about China: a reference to members of Putin’s circle studying the sophisticated techniques the Chinese authorities have developed in their struggle to control the flow of dissenting opinions via the Internet.

The imperfect China-Russia analogy inspires a final fanciful thought, triggered in part by 2012 marking not just the 20th anniversary of the founding of a successor state to the old Soviet Union but also the 40th anniversary of a turning point in Chinese history: Nixon’s historic meeting with Mao. If a Rip Van Winkle figure prone to two-decade-long naps woke in late February 1972, after falling asleep in 1952, he would have been shocked to learn that a summit was underway in China between Mao (one of the world’s most famous Communist leaders) and Richard Nixon (a fervently anti-Communist American President). But as the preceding exercise has shown, if the same fellow dozed off again in 1992 and woke up now, he would also be in for an unsettling surprise: discovering it was no longer easy to tell, without paying close attention to details, whether a New Yorker “Letter from…” article or blog post was about a post-Communist Moscow or the still-Communist Beijing.

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Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chair of the History Department at the University of California, Irvine, and the author, most recently, of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2010). His reviews and commentaries have appeared in newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and a wide range of magazines and journals of opinion, including New Left Review, the TLS, the Nation, the Huffington Post, Time and Newsweek. He is the Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies and co-founder of the UCI-based China Beat blog/electronic magazine. Read his first piece for LARB, "Hot Dystopic," which appeared in May 2011.

Articles by Evan Osnos referenced by Professor Wasserstrom are available at Osnos’s blog. Specific links are as follows:

“The Age of Complacency?”

“China: The Big Chill”

“Looking Beyond Ethnicity”