SIVACRACY.NET

The only website I was unable to access from hotel rooms in China was blogspot.com. New York Times, fine. Washington Post, fine. TPMcafe.com, fine. The Chinese government doesn’t want its citizens to start or read their own individual expressions. While I was there, in fact, the government promulgated new rules restricting not only sites but e-mail lists.

Shanghai: Spectacularly boisterous city of 16-20 million—and who’s counting?—where outside the five-star hotels the kiosks feature not a single Western magazine or newspaper. Yet all are available on-line. Contradictions, comrade.

A few glimpses of states of mind. My first lecture to the American Studies program of ECNU, on the Enlightenment and the decline of Marxism, was interrupted by an earnest student, austerely dressed, who asked me whether I could speak of Marxism as a theology. I replied that that was the right way to put it, all right, and proceeded to answer about Marx’s debt to Hegel, the abstract idea of the proletariat as universal class, and so on. A few minutes later her hand shot up again and she apologized saying that she hadn’t meant “theology,” she’d meant “ideology.” I said that she shouldn’t apologize because “theology” was really the apt word. Afterward she came up to me and said perhaps she really had meant “theology” after all.

The first question after my lecture came from another young woman, wearing a single long braid, to wit: “I read something in openDemocracy that really shocked me. Some people say that Stalin killed more people than the Nazis. I think of Stalin as a great revolutionary leader. But he made some mistakes, and maybe later he was crazy. Do Americans believe this about Stalin?” I assured her that every serious historian believes that Stalin was a mass murderer who was indeed responsible for more deaths than Hitler.

Some teachers defend “Marxism” but hardly any of them have ever read Marx or even heard of his relation to Hegel. In school the students must study something called “Marxism” but it does not include the reading of Marx. This “Marxism” is the same sort of dead catechism they used to teach in the USSR, a “short course in Marxism-Leninism.” Meanwhile, the Party is huge, growing, and calcified—mainly a route to advancement. My talk to journalists had to be canceled because a Party indoctrination session intervened—part of a new campaign to straighten up and fly right.

And so they live at a frantic pace, amid choking traffic, among supermalls and neon, flat-screen TVs and knockoff DVDs, contemplating high-rise apartments selling for $100,000 (that’s US dollars) in a city where average income is of the order $5000. And superficially, at least, my impression is that students are full of hope.