[Note: Today’s China is undoubtedly a “high persecution” type of country, and because of its large population, studying abroad and exile make “escape” become fashionable again, but it shows another “June 4 green card” and “human blood steamed buns”. Asylum culture”, and the core problem is that there is no value support behind fleeing and asylum, because after the Chinese people have been brainwashed, the biggest dilemma is that they cannot remove the “country” and rebuild the “individual”. 】
When I read Zhang Ailing’s biography, one of the details that impressed me the most was that when she arrived in New York at the end of 1955, Hu Shi came to visit her in the Salvation Army women’s dormitory where she lived. Zhang Ailing later wrote an article “Recalling Hu Shizhi”, which wrote road:
“I sent me to the gate and stood on the steps to talk. It was cold and windy, blowing across the street from the Hezhen River. Mr. Shizhi looked at the empty gray river at the corner of the street. There was fog on the river , I don’t know why I kept looking at it with a smile, and I was stunned…. I also looked up to the river and smiled, but it seemed that there was a sad wind blowing out from the depths of the times across hundreds of thousands of miles. I couldn’t keep my eyes open. That was the last time I saw Mr. Shizhi.”
I was surprised not only by the “grandmother of the Shanghai school” who wrote all the fat and powdery things in the foreign field, but also in the writing of “a sad wind, blowing out from the depths of the times across a thousand miles”, and also The reason is that she applied to come to the United States from Hong Kong as a refugee. That is to say, Eileen Chang, who had been regarded as hiding in an isolated island in Shanghai for ten years during the War of Resistance, was a political refugee who escaped the communist system. The authors seem to have a tacit understanding not to publicize this point, as if it would damage Eileen Chang’s posthumous reputation. In fact, Zhang Ailing’s novels and her experience in the occupied areas are undoubtedly politically suspect based on the logic of the post-1949 CCP.
The “June 4th” massacre in 1989 is said to have two worldwide consequences: one is the “Su Dongbo” domino effect that triggered the collapse of the Communist regime; Taking refuge, I am also involved in this wave, and have been in exile for a full twenty years. This wave seems to be going on until now, but I have never seen any feelings and confusion written by people in this wave, although it is said that the “knowledge content” of this wave of Chinese exile is astonishingly high.
“Escape from the Shipwreck” and the Alienation of Fear
In fact, since the second half of the last century, the number of people fleeing from the CCP’s rule to seek political asylum in Western countries has always ranked first in the world. As early as before and after the Cultural Revolution, millions of people risked their lives to smuggle to Hong Kong to seek asylum from the British. They were standard political refugees. These people later became the backbone of Hong Kong society. kill. Musician Ma Sicong fled and found asylum in the United States during this period. When the Tibet incident broke out in 1959, the Dalai Lama and his followers fled to India to find asylum. This was a major event that shocked the world.
After the “June 4th” fleeing wave in 1989, the statistics released by the US Immigration Service showed that from 1996 to 2002, China ranked first in the number of political asylum cases, regardless of the number of applicants or approvals. And since 1999, there has been a significant upward trend. The reason is well known, namely the brutal persecution of Falun Gong by Jiang Zemin’s regime. During this period, a small number of dissidents, Tibetans, and members of Christian house churches also took the road of asylum.
However, the political reasons for Chinese people to apply for asylum in the United States have expanded significantly, such as the one-child policy, forced evictions, and land enclosure. , also applied for political asylum because he would be “persecuted” (investigated) if he returned home. Migrant workers who come overseas through smuggling channels, falsifying persecuted materials to apply for political asylum has become a common practice for a while.
I remember that when I wrote “River Elegy” twenty years ago, I was stimulated by a psychological atmosphere of fear in society, which I called the collective subconscious of “escape from the sinking ship”—the restless 1988 was the “Year of the Dragon” , People snapped up four kinds of canned food in the store: apples, quail eggs, peaches, and pears (“escape safely”). The evolution has become a reality, and it has also brought disaster to Yuchi to the international community, resulting in many conflicts between Chinese and Western concepts, involving cultural, social, and political fields, and political asylum is one of them.
Undoubtedly, China is a “high persecution type” country. It is roughly estimated that 30 to 40 million people died in the “Great Famine” and the two disasters of the Cultural Revolution in the past 60 years. It is called “hell on earth.” Not too much. Therefore, it is a natural human choice for the Chinese to flee to the sea of anger, leave their homeland, and use “fear” as an excuse to “avoid the Qin Dynasty in the sea” in the West. But don’t forget that there are 1.2 billion people in China. The wave of going abroad, exile, and asylum in such a populous country must be a huge pressure for the sparsely populated and wealthy West (Europe and the United States), but this is still Secondly, the Chinese fled to the West, disrupting their “asylum jurisprudence”, which is even more critical.
China has no concept of “sanctuary”
The original meaning of the English word Asylum was asylum, refuge, and mental hospital, and it was later transformed into the meaning of “political asylum”. In Europe in the 18th century, “madness” was always referred to as animalistic and cruel. It was not until the middle of the 19th century that legal arrangements for “accommodating” mentally ill patients appeared for research and treatment. It was originally called “Bedlam”. The world’s first mental hospital was the Bethune Royal Hospital in the southern suburbs of London. Therefore, “mad asylum” has been expanded to “political asylum”. According to my understanding, it still has the meaning of humane containment-no normal person is willing to pretend to be a madman and be sent to a “lunatic asylum”.
The extension of the principle of sanctuary from the field of “madness” to the field of “politics” is undoubtedly an improvement of humanism in the West. However, for modern Chinese who have neither the concept of “sanctuary” nor the spirit of humanity, all of this is It has become a profitable opportunity, which may also be regarded as one of the Chinese people’s “reform and opening up” ideas after the Cultural Revolution. However, the conspiracy based on “fear” makes the problem very complicated: even if the evidence you provide is false, who can judge whether your “fear” is true or false? Besides, in an autocratic country maintained by a “balance of terror”, who is not “fearful”? As a result, “asylum” retreated from the political field to the “spiritual” field, and even the moral field｜｜In the end, there was only a question of honesty, and this is where the entire Western system has lost its judgment on any Chinese. In contrast, the larger wave of smuggling migrant workers from Latin America, the backyard of the United States, rarely uses this method, although the darkness and fear in Latin America are not inferior to China.
Obtaining “asylum” is “taking advantage”, and it is only in a “no asylum” culture that it becomes a kind of controversy and criticism. A well-known example is the so-called “June 4th blood card” – 93, 94 In recent years, nearly 100,000 mainland Chinese students and scholars studying in the United States successfully lobbied the U.S. government in the name of “fear” to obtain long-term legal residence, and a debate arose, the most interesting of which was the use of Lu Xun’s famous The symbol of “Human Blood Steamed Bun” soaks a purely Western concept into a certain sick Chinese context, tossing it beyond recognition. However, this debate also revealed that the “June 4th green card” case blasphemed the Western “asylum jurisprudence”. Receive domestic wages; at the level of “fear”, they later embark on the “road of returnees”, returning to the country that is said to “persecute” them to contribute.
Is there any “refuge literature”?
At this point in writing, I suddenly discovered that the term “June 4 blood card” was born out of Lu Xun’s “human blood steamed buns”, which is quite symbolic. It is not so much political as it is more literary. Hundreds of thousands of people The “Green Card Army” of China is misplaced between the ambiguity and conflict between Chinese and Western cultures. How can there be no story behind it? This leads to a reference to “asylum literature”, which may be worth discussing.
Famous literary critic and Harvard University professor Wang Dewei interpreted the “literature of foreign students” since the May 4th Movement in China, pointing out that in addition to its exoticism and nostalgic attitude, there is another point that “the behavior of foreign students when they go abroad, return to China, and go abroad, not only show The individual value choices of overseas students also allude to changes in the entire social and political environment. The question of whether to return or not will remain a lingering knot for overseas students in the next few decades, and the writer put it into words It has also become a special case of the syndrome of “feeling the time and worrying about the country” in Chinese novels.” He included some works of Lu Xun, Lao She, Yu Dafu, Bing Xin, Qian Zhongshu, etc. The legacy of studying abroad novels is the first of its kind in the 1960s and 1970s of Bai Xianyong, Yu Lihua, Zhang Xiguo and others’ new overseas student novels.”
According to the above-mentioned spectrum, we will find that since the “opening up” to the “June 4th” incident in the 1980s, the huge lineup of overseas students in mainland China has not appeared “foreign student novels”. Isn’t it strange? The reasons are complex, but I believe that the value and identity conflicts faced by this generation of mainland Chinese students are more complicated, which must be one of the reasons. In Western literature, there is the so-called “exile literature”, while in modern Chinese literature, Wang Dewei pointed out that “works with overseas students as the subject once formed a small tradition”. The Chinese in the West have formed a narrative object and a fairly vast and rich storehouse of stories, or can they give birth to a kind of “refuge literature”?
The “May 4th Overseas Students Literature” with Lu Xun and Yu Dafu as the standard is full of personal frustrations and depression due to the weakness of the nation. Rather, it exaggerates to strengthen national identity. It is a kind of “national” utopia, and Wang Dewei said that “the clues of the birth of modern national consciousness can also be seen from it.” A century has passed, and China has experienced the construction of a “nation-state”, during which blood flowed like a river, and in the end the nation swelled into a behemoth, completely devouring individuals, rights, and goodness, and our literature was also castrated during this period, and it was too late. An opposite path upwards to describe human tragedies.
The “literature of foreign students” that originated in the late Qing Dynasty and has continued since the May Fourth Movement has always been full of two feelings of nostalgia and going to the country. One aspect of the characteristics of literature “concern about the time and the country”. Also in this new direction, for “refuge”, exile, study abroad, part-time job, transnational marriage, etc., isn’t it just like the bizarre scenes and figures in the late Qing novel “The Strange Situation Witnessed in Twenty Years”? “Refuge” is not a journey to the west, let alone enjoyment in heaven. In a certain sense, it is a kind of “shelter life”. Even so, no one has written his personal feelings. million.
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