A Conversation with a Chinese Person 03 | The Communist Party Beat You. Why Do You Hate America?

"I pay taxes to the Chinese government. I get sick, and somehow an American drug company owes me a life?"

Author / interviewer: Brennan Ruskell

Interviewee: Chen, 45

Brennan Ruskell: Did you look up to the Communist Party as a kid too?

Chen: I didn't just look up to it. I thought anyone who criticized the Party was either stupid or bad. Your own country was getting better and better. If you were unhappy, if you picked at problems every day, something had to be wrong with you. In school I took the words in the textbook as my own knowledge. I thought China was behind because foreigners had done it harm. Once China was strong, we'd naturally live well. It never crossed my mind that after the Party got strong, the first thing it might do was make it even harder for me to refuse it.

Brennan Ruskell: After you started working, how did that idea change?

Chen: Because after you start working, a lot of the bills are yours to pay. The boss makes you work overtime, and you want to know who shows up to enforce the labor law. Your wages aren't enough to buy a home, and you want to know who is in charge of the land and the housing price. You've paid taxes and social security, and you want to know what protection you actually get. You ask and ask, and you always hit the same thing. When they collect the money, you have to go along. When you ask them to answer for it, you have to be understanding. That's when I found out: what they taught me as a kid was how to thank the Communist Party. Nobody ever taught me how to make the Communist Party answer for itself.

Brennan Ruskell: You thought other people would figure it out too, bit by bit?

Chen: I used to think they would. Later I found that plenty of people around me took the same beating, and the one they hate is America. Can't find a job, that's America holding us down. The company can't make the thing, that's the American blockade. Can't afford to see a doctor, that's foreign drug companies being too crooked. Anyway the Communist Party is always standing with him, the two of them getting bullied by foreigners together. The most absurd part is, the person hitting him is right in front of him, and he doesn't dare ask. What he does have a special courage for is hating a foreign government that has never collected a cent of tax from him.

Brennan Ruskell: You say the argument over Dying to Survive, that movie about the price of medicine, shows this problem best?

Chen: Yes. Some people finish it and decide foreign drug companies make their money off patients' lives. I ask him: doesn't the research cost money? Don't the clinical trials cost money? The projects you pour money into that never succeed, who carries that cost? You can demand they talk about the drug price, improve health insurance, help the patients. He doesn't think in that direction. He thinks foreigners should just sell him the drug cheap, and ideally hand the technology over too. If they don't, capitalism is evil. So I want to ask: the government your taxes keep is the Chinese government. How is it that when you need your life saved, it suddenly becomes a foreign company's duty to give itself to you for nothing?

Brennan Ruskell: And they're the same way about technology?

Chen: Exactly the same. Day to day they laugh that America is in decline. The moment they can't get the technology, they curse America for not letting China develop. As if something other people spent money to research is born with a duty to be handed to you. I say: how do your own leaders decide what to spend on research, where the money goes, and who answers when it can't be done? He doesn't answer. He turns around and curses me for speaking for America. Look how high his demands are on foreigners. Then look how low his demands are on the Communist Party. It's not that he doesn't know how to demand answers. He just won't aim them at his own master's head.

Brennan Ruskell: Those internet slogans you used to hear. How do you see them now?

Chen: I used to hear "The motherland is this much of a thug, so I can relax," and I even felt it hit the spot. Later I thought: why would a thug only bully foreigners? When it's my turn to have a complaint, is it going to reason with me just because I'm Chinese? "If you're not doing anything bad, why fear being watched?" is the same. Who decides what counts as bad? Does asking for your wages count as making trouble? Does criticizing the boss count as spreading lies? As for "The public intellectuals are the worst," I used to curse them along with everyone else. Later I found that some of the people being cursed were talking about exactly the things I only learned I needed after I started working. At the time I didn't even have the patience to let them finish.

Brennan Ruskell: Looking back now, what line feels especially bitter to you?

Chen: A few years ago people online mocked kids in Japan and Korea. They said the kids' dream, imagine that, was to be a singer, to be an idol. What future does a country like that have? Now I think: their kids can picture what they'd like to do when they grow up. How did that become a joke? Turn it around and look at us. Parents carry the debt. Young people haven't made any money yet, and they already have to think about the mortgage and old age. They don't even know if they dare have a child. And they're still worrying, on the Party's behalf, whether other people's children have ideals. The Party leads you to laugh at other people for wanting to be an idol, and it won't let you ask: why did we spend, ahead of time, the money our children and grandchildren are going to have to earn, until in the end we don't even dare have the children? Nobody knows yet whether those kids' dreams will come true. Us? The bill is already prepared for the next generation, and the next generation may never be born. And at that point we still laugh at them for having no future. Isn't that fucking ridiculous?

Brennan Ruskell: So after their own lives get worse, do they think it over again?

Chen: Some of them don't. They still pull out Cyberpunk 2077 to tell you how scary capitalism is. I say: did you actually understand the game? The people in it can still march in the street. They can still gather at the door of city hall and demonstrate. They can still say in public that they're unhappy with the government. The companies in the game compete with each other too. Not all the power belongs to the same master. You say the society in the game is hell on earth. When I get to those parts, what I feel is the bitterness. The developers imagined the future that badly, and they still left ordinary people in the game a place to protest in a crowd. I even want to say: these people have had it too good in the capitalist world. When they imagine cruelty, they don't imagine the bottom of it. They really ought to look at how communist countries control people. Look at the Soviet famine, China's Great Leap Forward (when the Party's own campaign left people starving), the massacres by the Cambodian Communist Party. Then think how bad a society can get when it has to wipe out even the voices that oppose it. And then some little pinks, the ones who jump to defend the Party, watch people in the game stand at the government's door and protest, and they don't dare do the same thing themselves. The conclusion they reach is, good thing we have the Communist Party. Tell me, what are they even glad about?

Brennan Ruskell: So you think suffering doesn't wake a person up by itself?

Chen: Of course it doesn't. The propaganda lined up who you're supposed to hate a long time ago. The more you suffer, the more you may hate the enemy it assigned you. The biggest split between me and these people is right here. I started asking who runs my life. They're still waiting for the person who runs them to take revenge for them. The Communist Party didn't solve their problems. It gave them a crowd of people they're allowed to hate, and they feel the Party is still their own people. Now when I hear "America did all of this," I want to ask one thing. Who takes your taxes, shuts your mouth, and decides whether you can get a fair hearing?