【纽约时报 20150616】中国真正的监察员

满仓

【中文标题】中国真正的监察员
【原文标题】The Real Censors of China
【登载媒体】纽约时报
【原文作者】ERIC ABRAHAMSEN
【原文链接】http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/opinion/the-real-censors-of-china.html?_r=0




所谓的“中国异见作家”仅仅是传说中的洪水猛兽。中国的确有异见人士，其中一些人也是作家，但是想象中那种苏联式的镇压行动——嘴脸丑恶的国家监察员用红墨水笔把作家的作品改得面目全非，作家要么选择屈辱地服从，要么奋起反抗——在今天的中国并不存在。异见人士经常因为他们的学术研究、新闻报道、法律行为或者种族身份而遭到管教，或者被捕入狱，但一首诗并不会给人们招致牢狱之灾。中国的英雄诗人并不存在。

多年来，中国作家的书在中国境内经常被禁，但并没有出现极端的镇压行为。阎连科对于毛式崇拜和中国共产党历史悲剧的回顾，让大陆出版商纷纷回避，但是得以在台湾和香港出版。而且他的其它作品依然在大陆出版，不但未受管制，而且还在中国最好的一所大学里担任显赫的职位。盛可以和陈冠中也有一些触碰天安门×××后续影响的小说类作品，根据他们自己所说，他们遭遇的不过是表面上的责备。

自我监察似乎是最核心的问题所在。与中国最著名的作家莫言一样，很多中国作家似乎主动规避有争议的话题。但是，如果说这些主题并不会引发政府的狂怒，这些作家为什么要限制自己呢？实际上，中国人传统上对权威的驯服心理形成了文学的社会根基，这对于中国作家艺术独立性的侵蚀作用，远大于国家所施加的压力。

这并不意味着官方的监察行为并不存在。一个叫做“国家新闻出版广电总局”的政府部门负责管理中国的出版物，但他给出的政治指示相当模糊，让出版方自己去理解。出版方把这些指示传达给作者，也仅仅是告知一些含义模糊的预告性信息，说它是不幸但无可避免的现实，就像是预报坏天气一样。他们提出预警，表达同情。

作家似乎被同情心所包围——来自出版方、编辑和其他作家的同情。与政府的出版发行制度并肩而立的是一个无所不包、罗织紧密的文学社会结构，包括杂志、文学评奖委员会、学术研讨会和书籍评论家，其底层是一个全国性的政府组织，叫做“中国作家协会”。这个组织是中国计划经济时代的遗留物，它试图让写作职业化的方法是，继续向一定级别的作家发放少量的薪水，同时支付培训、海外访问等费用。

所有文学社团似乎都带有小团体的色彩。但中国的文学组织是一个基于个人关系的“老校友”大社团，其核心宗旨是“看人不看作品”。阎连科与这类组织经常发生冲突，他在电子邮件中写到：“‘看人’就是说要看你支持什么观点，效忠谁，你和我奉行相同的道德和美学观点吗？”

要研究中国作家所面临的压力，首先要区分政治权力与个人权力之间的区别，广电总局与作家协会并没有官方的关联。当一个中国作家试图在体制中生存并努力发展个人职业生涯时，政府的政策仅仅是他们需要考量的问题之一，而且还不是最重要的问题。

要请人吃饭，要投其所好，还要坚持艺术的原则。毫不掩饰的腐败行为屡见不鲜，文学职业的道路被个人恩怨、卖奖鬻爵破坏殆尽。这样的体系，以及它给作家们带来的压力，即使广电总局在明天解散，也依然会存在。

跳出这样的制度需要付出什么代价？要么你把自己永久地边缘化，把书稿丢给那些从未听说过你名字的编辑，期望你从未给予过正面评论的那些作家给你一些掌声。要么，对于那些已经在体制中生存的作家来说，你需要把带给你成功职业生涯的主顾们一脚踢开，羞辱那些和你一样做出妥协的作家。当你成为一名中国作家，反权威就等于反社会。你不但需要面对权威说出真相的勇气，还要具备与朋友们翻脸的勇气。

90年代末，一位南京作家和诗人韩东，伙同朱文和其他几位作家开始一项名为“断裂”的运动，明确地拒绝参与目前的文学机构。接下来的几年，运动吸引了一些关注，但最终逐渐淡化。在某种程度上，这仍然是一个小团体，只不是用一个体制替换另外一个体制罢了。

在一个社交活动高度普及化的中国，很难想象有任何真正反社会的作家，包括与社会完全脱节，或者在必要的时候，表现出彻头彻尾的攻击姿态。这个国家一些最伟大的文学人物——诗人李白、小说家曹雪芹——的确曾经被排斥，但都并非出于自愿，而是遭到流放或者不受关注。

阎连科是一个典型的反叛者，但几乎没有其他人可以遵循他的足迹。尽管他的很多术在中国大陆无法出版，但他依然在体制中占据了一个不大牢靠的位置。他的才华无法被忽视，但他对政治敏感话题的坚持让他的同僚感到尴尬。所以他基本上是孤身一人，甚至他的家人都希望他能放弃。

还有李娟，她或许走到了中国作家所能达到的离体制最远的位置，同时作品还可以被发表。她的生活地和创作地在西部新疆省份的塔城地区，他喜欢思考游牧生活方式和季节的转换。用她自己的话说，她的文学生涯走的是“野路子”。“野”在中国一般指体制外的事情。

她不是那种目中无人、倨傲狂妄的人，而是看起来有些害羞，在公共场合习惯咯咯笑的女孩。十年时间里，她忍受着贫穷坚持写作，不断把作品投向杂志和出版社，她的作品的力量最终得到了认可。她在一封邮件中说：“我事业的成功在某种程度上依赖于主流文学圈的提携，所以我不能说自己完全脱离于他们存在。但我的态度一直是‘不拒绝，不参与’。”尽管名声越来越响，李娟觉得自己进一步的发展希望不大：“除了写作，别的事情我什么也不会。”除了发表她的作品的那些编辑，她在文学体制中谁也不认识。

“有些人觉得我给自己留下一些空间，但是的确有一些大人物在为我说话，我必须感谢他们。”李娟极为礼貌、自谦，只要谈话的内容不涉及写作的技巧。在评价自己和他人的作品的时候，李娟态度变得强硬、不容置疑，让我想到阎连科对于历史问题执着的态度。无论这是一种什么样的品质——强硬的性格、无视别人的意见，这或许是中国文学界中最贴近于异见精神的事物了。



原文：

BEIJING — The dissident Chinese writer is an apocryphal beast. There are Chinese dissidents, of course, and some of them even write, but romantic images of Soviet-style repression — hostile state censors redacting novels with a red pen, writers forced to choose between humiliating submission and courageous defiance — do not apply in China today. Dissidents are regularly disciplined or imprisoned for their academic research, their journalism, their legal activism or their ethnic identity. But a mere poem rarely lands anyone in prison. The Chinese poet-hero does not exist.

For years Chinese authors in China have been writing books that get banned, with no dramatic repercussions. Yan Lianke’s examinations of the cult of Mao and tragic episodes from China’s Communist history are given a wide berth by publishers on the mainland, appearing in Taiwan and Hong Kong instead. But his novels do get published here, he goes about unmolested, and he has a prestigious position at one of China’s best universities. Sheng Keyi and Chan Koonchung have both written fiction touching on the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square crackdown without, by their own accounts, so much as a slap on the wrist.

Self-censorship seems to be the main problem. Along with Mo Yan, perhaps the most famous example, many Chinese writers appear to be avoiding controversial subjects. But if those topics don’t really incur the wrath of the government, why are these authors censoring themselves at all? In fact, the social cohesiveness of the literary establishment, rooted in traditional Chinese attitudes toward authority, is far more corrosive to Chinese writers’ artistic independence than the state itself.

This isn’t to say that official censorship doesn’t exist. A government body known as the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (Sapprft) is responsible for managing publishing in China. But it gives out most political directives as vague recommendations, and leaves publishers to interpret them. Publishers then pass on to authors a general sense of foreboding, casting it as an unfortunate but unavoidable fact of nature, like bad weather. They advise precaution, while expressing their sympathy.

Authors seem to be surrounded by sympathy — from publishers, from editors, from one another. Alongside the government’s publication system is a vast, tight-knit literary social structure, comprising magazines, literary-prize panels, academic symposia and book reviewers, and bolstered by a nationwide government body called the Chinese Writers Association. This group is a holdover from China’s planned-economy years, and in its attempts to professionalize the writing trade, it continues to disburse a modest salary to writers of a certain rank and pays for training, trips abroad and the like.

All literary societies probably tend toward cliquishness, but China’s is an especially monolithic old-boy network driven by personal relations. It is also governed by a tendency known as kan ren bu kan zuopin: looking at the writer, not the writing. Yan Lianke, who has often fallen afoul of the system, explained to me by email that, “‘Looking at the writers’ means looking at where they stand on various issues, their loyalties: Do you have the same ethical or artistic standpoint as I do?”

To study the nature of the pressure on Chinese writers is to draw a distinction between political power and personal authority: There is no official connection between Sapprft and the Chinese Writers Association. As Chinese writers try to navigate the system and advance their careers, government policy is only one of the things they must take into consideration, and not even the most important one.

There are people to take to dinner, tastes to cater to, artistic maxims to uphold. There is also outright corruption, as literary careers are ruined over personal vendettas and prizes are bought and paid for. This structure, and the pressures it creates on authors, would remain in place if Sapprft were disbanded tomorrow.

What does it take to buck the system? Either you remain forever on the margins, pitching books to editors who have never heard your name, hoping for plaudits from authors whose own work you have never praised. Or, for writers already within the system, you spurn the patrons who made your careers, humiliate the peers who made the same compromises you once did. When you are a Chinese author, being anti-authoritarian means being anti-social: It requires not the courage to speak truth to power, but the courage to be rude to your friends.

In the late 1990s Han Dong, a Nanjing author and poet, joined Zhu Wen and a handful of others to instigate a movement called duanlie — break or split — explicitly rejecting the embrace of the literary establishment. The movement gained some traction over the next few years, but ultimately petered out. In a sense it was still a clique; the replacement of one society with another.

In highly socialized China, it is hard to imagine any writer being truly anti-social in the sense of being both disconnected from society and, when necessary, downright offensive. Some of the country’s greatest literary figures — the poet Li Po, the novelist Cao Xueqin — were outcasts, but not by choice: They had been exiled or ignored.

Yan Lianke represents one model of resistance, but it is a model that very few writers can follow. Though many of his books have been unpublishable inside China, he retains an uneasy place within the system. His talent cannot be ignored, but his insistence on writing about politically sensitive subjects means that his peers view him with embarrassment. He is almost alone. Even his family wishes he would stop.

Then there is Li Juan, who may be as far outside of the system as Chinese writers are able to get and still publish. She lives and writes in the Altay region of Xinjiang, in western China, musing on nomadic lifestyles and the turning of the seasons. Her literary career has taken what she calls the “wild path” — “wild” being traditionally used in Chinese to refer to things outside the establishment.

She isn’t defiant or high-handed; instead she seems shy, and is given to giggling in public. After a decade of writing in poverty, pitching to magazines and publishing houses, the strength of her writing gradually gained recognition. “The success of my writing relies to a certain extent on promotion by mainstream literary circles,” she wrote in an email, “so I can’t claim to be isolated from them. But my attitude has always been, ‘Don’t refuse, but don’t participate.”’ Despite her growing reputation, Li Juan claims to be hopeless at self-promotion: “I don’t know how to do anything but write.” She has little contact with anyone in the literary establishment besides the editors who publish her work.

“Some colleagues think I’m giving myself airs, but there have been some senior figures who have been willing to speak up for me, and I have to thank them.” Li Juan is unfailingly polite, almost self-effacing, except when conversation turns to the craft of writing. Evaluating her own and others’ words, Li Juan turns hard and displays a fixation that calls to mind Yan Lianke’s stubborn revisiting of historical subjects. Whatever quality this is — strength of character, disregard for the opinions of others — it is the closest thing China’s literary scene has got these days to the spirit of dissent.

hegieer

人民群众，才是真正的监督员。不过，这样做被人说成文革御姐了。