Mutant Palm

The Wall Street Journal has the tragic story of Wang Guocheng, a schizophrenic who could not receive treatment and whose family (and neighbors, and local police) caged him after he stabbed an old woman to death. He later beat his mother to death as well. One form that his mania took was this:

At one point, Guocheng spent his time painting over slogans written on power poles by supporters of Falun Gong, a banned spiritual movement. Adamantly opposed to the group, Guocheng once held a knife to his father’s neck, saying, “If you are a member of Falun Gong, I will kill you,” his father recalls.

It reminds me of the Human Rights Watch report on the political use of psychiatry in China, Dangerous Minds: Political Psychiatry Today and its Origins in the Mao Era [blocked]. As Jonathan Mirsky summarized in the New York Review of Books:

One of the main categories of “people taken into police psychiatric custody” for diagnosis, according to an official police encyclopedia cited by Munro, are those

commonly known as “political maniacs,” who shout reactionary slogans, write reactionary banners and reactionary letters, make anti-government speeches in public, and express opinions on important domestic and international affairs.

In 1994, a case of what a senior official termed “utter political lunacy” was published in a training manual for Chinese forensic psychiatrists. According to Munro’s account in Dangerous Minds, “Zhu,” fifty-seven, an army veteran, Communist Party member, and retired worker, had been diagnosed as a “paranoid psychotic” and probably confined in one of China’s special Ankang. Although Zhu had been praised in the official newspaper People’s Daily as a model activist during the Cultural Revolution, by the Eighties, still an ardent Maoist, he spoke and wrote against Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping. His workmates regarded Zhu as quiet, respectable, orderly, and sane, although somewhat eccentric; he never discussed his “reactionary” views with them. He wrote a 100,000-character manifesto, bought a printing machine, and sent his views to various leaders.

Psychiatrists found Zhu “politically deluded,” and deemed his views and writings “incompatible with his status, position, qualifications, and learning” (he was, after all, a mere semi-educated worker, and hence seen as not being qualified to speak on politics and economics—despite having held a leading position on his local Revolutionary Committee). They declared that he was “divorced from reality,” although his delusions were said to be “not entirely absurd in content,” and his “overall mental activity remained normal.” His fate in the Ankang [asylums] is unknown, as is almost always the case.

This approach, according to Munro, has been reapplied to Falun Gong members:

In another case, a “female,” age forty-five, described in the Chinese Journal of Clinical Psychological Medicine in 2000, was arrested for being a member of Falun Gong and practicing the qigong exercises which Falun Gong claims improve spiritual understanding and health…

The only “mentally dangerous” symptom or activity cited in the forty-five-year-old woman’s police psychiatric report was:

Even after the government declared Falun Gong to be an evil cult, she refused to be dissuaded from her beliefs and continued gathering people to practice Falun Gong.

Moreover, she went to Beijing to petition the authorities “about the suppression of the group.” She was then “placed under criminal detention.” Her official diagnosis: “mental disorder caused by practicing an evil cult.”

…In both cases a serious sign of their “mental disorders,” frequently cited in similar Chinese psychiatric diagnoses of political or religious “crime,” was that, unlike what are called “genuine dissidents,” the accused made no attempt to “disguise their identities or run away.”

The NYRB article was about how the World Psychiatric Association was attempting to investigate China’s psychiatric hospitals as a result of the report in 2003. Haven’t figured out what happened since. I do know one thing: the U.S. executes schizophrenics sometimes.

Because they’re Japanese. The original fortune cookie, called “tsujiura senbei (“fortune crackers”), omikuji senbei (“written fortune crackers”), or suzu senbei (“bell crackers”)”, appears to be from bakeries surrounding a Shinto shrine in Kyoto, and when Japanese immigrants introduced them in America, Chinese immigrants picked up the ball and ran with it. Japanese fortunes seem more practical than today’s lottery numbers: “To ward off lower back pain or joint problems, undertake some at-home measures like yoga.”

China Media Project’s David Bandurski points out that Hu Jintao’s political report to the 17th Party Congress placed some emphasis on increasing China’s “cultural soft power”. China’s soft power pundits, apparently, believe that culture is a tool in “international struggles” and that America uses its music and movies to promote its strategic interests. Hu Jintao proclaimed:

“[we must] create more excellent, popular works that reflect the people’s principal position in the country and their real life… vigorously develop the cultural industry, launch major projects to lead the industry as a whole, speed up development of cultural industry bases and clusters of cultural industries with regional features, nurture key enterprises and strategic investors, create a thriving cultural market and enhance the industry’s international competitiveness.”

Of course, this all must be done under “correct guidance” - nothing “very yellow, very violent”, I presume, would be one of those things. Bandurski ends by saying:

Suppression, macro-meddling, nationalism and cultural snobbery. Now there’s a recipe for a cultural renaissance.

But the proof, as Hu would tell you himself, is in the business. And the question is now set: when the flowers of China’s “soft power” are brought to market, will the free world care to buy them?

The simple answer is no. And to provide the answer, I turn to the philosopher-poet Will I Am, producer and member of the Black Eyed Peas, who have turned out “some of the catchiest, most shamelessly commercial, unapologetically stupid hit songs of the 21st century”, when asked about why his band isn’t compared to more high-brow groups like the Roots anymore:

People always want to say you’ve lost your mission, but you can’t let that distract from what you love to do. I love to make music. If I were a painter, I would paint beautiful bodies—I would paint nipples, and I would paint Bibles. Am I going to say, “I’m not going to paint this woman’s neck because people will think I just want to lick on necks?” Please! That’s not what art is about. Some people could say “My Humps” isn’t art, and I’d say, cool. But I think it is. Also, our biggest hit ever was “Where Is the Love,” which is a very political song…

No one really thinks of the Black Eyed Peas as a political band (at least I don’t), but I’ll say one thing for them: in the summer of 2005, I heard the song “Let’s Get Retarded” in Urumqi (where all my Russian and Central Asian friends played it endlessly), Shanghai, Vienna, Budapest, Hvar, Mostar (nice clubs next to the new bridge), Belgrade (where I also saw on Euro MTV that they were performing it in Ibiza), and then finally the radio edit version “Let’s Get It Started” on American television for the NBA. The entire Western hemisphere. And it’s about being “retarded” (under the influence). And one of their other songs was lip-synched by the Backdorm Boys.

If China wants to make some big bucks spread their cultural products around the world, pop music and movies are where its at (and comic books, but they totally botched the 5155 Project, which just proves how doomed these campaigns are). And globally, nothing sells like booty shaking and giant robots. But all that is going to be too low brow for the Chinese state-dominated media. China’s not going to have much cultural soft power until the State Council loosens up. Which ought to be some time around, oh, never. And a nations turns its lonely eyes to Hong Kong…