Shenyang's experience

a cautionary tale from a modern Chinese author

The teeter totter feeling in the United States about ‘disinformation’, ‘misinformation’, and absolute distortion is presently an abstract partisan battle but other places actually confront this type of problem with few options to find explanations for facts on the ground. Today’s New York Times nicely highlighted yet another of China’s struggle by examining the motivations behind writer Shuang Xuetao.

Shuang Xuetao is a forty year old author from Shenyang, a dreary city in the northeast of the country in the ‘Rust Belt’ which fell prey to the desperation to modernise industry forty-five years ago. My several trips to this city of a smidge fewer than 8 million invariably remind me of grit, industrial decay, impenetrable air pollution, along with a wealth of Chinese history.

Shenyang had a more Manchu name, Mukden, in 1931 when Imperial Japanese forces manufactured an excuse in invade, then occupy northeast China, presaging World War II by administering ‘Manchukuo’. Some of Japan’s worst behaviour during the following fourteen years occurred in this city as both captured Chinese and westerners endured heinous treatment in freezing, dark prisons in the heart of the city while Japanese troops and scientists conducted biological experiments against detainees nearby. In short, Shenyang was the epicenter of Japanese activity after they began their activities to subdue China as part of the creation of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere that mercifully ended with Tokyo’s defeat in 1945.

Devastated by the decline of the Manchu’s Qing Dynasty (which ended in 1911) and the subsequent internal upheavals in China and Japanese invasion, this was a city ready for revival when the Communists took power in 1949. Sadly, the resulting environmentally devastating factories put locals to work but at a high cost of creating utterly appalling pollution in the air, on the ground, and in the water. Industrial production in China focused, as it had in the Soviet bloc, in the appearance of job creation to stave off further social and economic upheaval. Shenyang did function, however, important as a transportation hub linking the northeastern provinces, with their Russian, Korean, Manchu, and Han populations to the remainder of the country.

As the Four Modernisations took hold in the 1980s, Shuang and others in his city lived in an information bubble preventing them from grasping that their behaviour was not the cause of a rising and unexplained unemployment problem supplanting the traditional donwei, or work unit approach in the city and across China. Deng Xiaoping and the Second Generation leaders used the Four Modernisations, from about 1978, to encourage internal competition between these colossally inefficient Party-run industries and newly introduced companies often co-managed with non-Chinese foreigners.

The consequence was to displace workers whose entire lives were disrupted when thework unit, or donwei, collapsed. This meant job security (or entitlement, depending on one’s perspective) disappeared. It also meant that schools, what limited health care there was, housing, and the associated activities of the work unit no longer were the basis of most people lives and livelihoods.

The point of the article is the disruption Shuang’s writing began producing as he laid bare the pain and guilt so many families confronted as they struggled to explain why the Party had sacked them without any cause the workers could identify. China has always been a place where ‘face’ or public pride of circumstances is one of the most sensitive factors anyone ever confronts. Loss of a job, mental health issues such as depression, physical impairment caused by maiming at work, or a variety of other embarrassing circumstances engender terrible ‘loss of face’ which Shuang struggled with personally, now writes to decypher.

Chinese authorities prefer to discuss happy things as they continue saving their own collective ‘face’ in ‘leading’ China for seventy-five years. The Party explanations have narrowed to a narrative focusing overwhelmingly on success but especially over the past decade as Xi Jinping seeks to reinstate the CCP’s prominence in all aspects of citizens’ lives. State-media driven whitewashing ignore dilaterious effects which misinformation and disinformation create, striving to delay any responsibility for actions creating unaddressed consequences.

Shuang rarely returns to his home town, according to the story. I doubt he is welcome because his fiction still discusses ramifications of the transformation of the city for its residents. Shenyang has prospered during the past forty-five years in some superficial ways but, like so much of China, the superficial changes are now revealing that for many living there, little change will be sustainable in a time of economic slowdown. Few people need reminding.

It’s hardly a workers’ paradise as Xi returns the Communist Party of China, that workers’ party in theory, the center of their lives. This should make for an interesting future in Shenyang and virtually any of the other cities physically corrupted by economic modernisation as they seek to provide a positive future. No wonder few Chinese seek a second child as conditions in Shenyang when I was last there in 2018 hardly appealed to us westerners. The relatively near border with the DPRK is a reminder of how bad things really could get in the future in case of war so many around the world fear.

The one guaranteed effect of the Shenyang saga was to increase doubts even further about the Party’s ability or willingness to be honest with the people from whom it demands loyalty. Ugh.

Thank you for thinking about misinformation and disinformation in an era when we too fear its spread. We are not immune but it splits us rather than isolating us for loss of face. I appreciate any of your thoughts on this question of how damaging it can be for a society.

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It rained all day again. I looked up to see this superb sunlight as I finished my second runthrough. Woo hoo!

Be well and be safe. FIN

Vivian Wang, ‘‘Murder and Magic Realism: A Rising Literary Star Mines China’s Ruste Belt’, nytimes.com, 1 March 2024, retrieved at https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/01/world/asia/china-shenyang-shuang-xuetao.html