6 Dec 2011 | China
An urgent appeal from Chinese writer Yan Lianke to the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese Prime Minister
Esteemed General Secretary and Prime Minister:
I am a writer and a university professor. Before deciding to write this letter to you, my conscience was buffeted by a storm of hesitation. It was your encouraging and heartfelt speech, General Secretary, delivered a week ago at the opening ceremony of the Eighth National Congress of the Chinese Writers’ Association that has emboldened me to report to you about the forced eviction and demolition of homes that I have witnessed.
Three years ago, I bought a property in Flower City World Garden using royalties from my books and borrowed money. In July this year, 39 families in the compound, including mine, were formally given eviction notices because of the road-widening project on Wanshou Road in Beijing. A few days after receiving the eviction notices, the wall of our compound was demolished at dawn.
Having been told the eviction was for the development of Beijing, the residents initially were cooperative. However, the Demolition and Relocation Office told the residents that regardless of the size or value of their properties, the compensation per household was set at 500,000 yuan, approximately US$ 78,000, and that whoever cooperated would be further awarded 700,000 yuan. Since then, there has been growing discontent among the residents with the local government and the demolition crew. You can imagine how the conflict and confusion surrounding the forced eviction was intensified by quarrels, fighting, theft and bloodshed.
In August this year, the Demolition and Relocation Office stopped mentioning the 700,000 yuan incentive and instead offered each household a one-off compensation package of 1.6 million yuan, or approximately US$250,000. At the same time, the office initiated a countdown to the demolition.
I visited the Demolition and Relocation Office three times and spoke to the person in charge. During each visit, I made it clear that as a citizen, a writer and a university lecturer, I would take the lead and vacate my property to support the development of Beijing. However, as a citizen whose property is about to be demolished, I requested to view the official documents relating to the road-widening project. I simply wanted to know a few things: how much of the residential zone would be required for the road-widening and how many properties would really need to be demolished. I wanted to know how the compensation was calculated and why the compensation was set at a flat 1.6 million yuan rather than based the area of the properties. In short, all I wanted to see was that the demolition process would more or less follow government regulations and legal procedures and that property owners would be provided with some information. The response I received was along the lines of “everything has already been decided by higher authorities” and “it’s confidential”.
Other residents also made numerous trips to city and district governments to appeal and seek resolution through legal channels but for various reasons the local courts declined to hear the case.
On 24 November, things took an even more bizarre turn. The government of Huaxiang in Fengtai District issued a document to all owners who had received eviction notices. The document stated that on 23 September, law enforcement officials discovered houses with no registered occupants as well as houses without their addresses registered with local authorities. Therefore, these houses were deemed illegal structures and would be forcibly demolished at 8 am on the 30th of November. (In fact, Flower City World Garden has existed for six years.)
I went to the compound this morning where I saw crowds of people and groups of uniformed men and many vehicles blocking access. I saw banners hanging in front of all the houses facing demolition proclaiming, “We pledge to sacrifice our blood and lives to defend our homes!” I saw emotional residents who were indeed ready to sacrifice their lives.
No one knew what would happen during a forced demolition. No local government official was there to mediate with the residents. It appeared that blood could be shed at any moment in this game of cat-and-mouse—if not today, then surely tomorrow. Many residents are determined to live and die with their homes.
Esteemed General Secretary and Prime Minister, as a citizen who is about to lose his home, as a university lecturer and a well-known writer, I have to say this was a shocking scene to witness and experience for myself. The administrators of the People’s University of China where I am employed also attempted to communicate on my behalf with the local government. They were told that the demolition must proceed. You can imagine the distress felt by residents who have nowhere else to go.
As a Chinese citizen, I love my country dearly. As a writer, I am willing to give all I have to promote Chinese culture. As a university professor, I hope to see my students able to study and grow up in a loving and harmonious environment. It is because of my foolish dream of bearing the weight of our nation on my shoulders that I am writing this urgent appeal to you.
I hope the local government will stop playing this game of cat-and-mouse with people whose houses they want to demolish.
I hope this matter can be resolved in a timely manner, in a more rational and a humane way.
I hope all parties will learn from this incident, so that in future there will be fewer farcical forced demolition cases like this, and the Chinese people will live a more dignified life, as Premier Wen frequently stresses.
I hope Chinese people—citizens of China—are given more access to information and can enjoy a greater sense of security and happiness.
My apologies for taking up your time.
Sincerely yours,
Yan Lianke
30 November, 2011
17 Aug 2011 | Index Index, minipost
Local papers in Albemarle County, Virginia, have reported that Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, has been removed from sixth-grade reading lists after a parent complained that it was “our young students’ first inaccurate introduction to an American religion.” In the book, in which a father and daughter are rescued by Mormons on condition they adopt the Mormon faith, Conan Doyle wrote that Mormons were “persecutors of the most terrible description”.
28 Apr 2011 | Index Index, minipost
The Chinese government has refused author Liao Yiwu an exit visa to attend the PEN World Voices Festival in New York. Authors at the event, led by Salman Rushdie, issued a protest on Friday (22 April) and called on the Chinese authority to overturn their ban. Liao is best known for his poem Massacre about the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown for which he spent four years in jail. The festival has vowed to set up an empty chair to represent Liao.
29 Jan 2011 | Iran, Middle East and North Africa
These striking images from a Tehran production of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler caught my eye on the Revolutionary Road Facebook page. Sadly the accompanying statement announced that the play had been shut down by the authorities; the director and cast had been “summoned”, accused of promoting “degeneracy”. Iran’s state television Fars had called Vahid Rahbani’s production a “platform for degeneracy and normalising polyandry, the intermingling of men and women and other worthless proceedings”.
However unreasonable such claims may seem, it’s no surprise that Ibsen’s idealistic heroine doesn’t sit comfortably with the powers set on controlling every outward voice in Iran, however fictional. Fear of impression and influence is paramount.
Later that same week I saw a rather beautiful poster for a August Strindberg play in the heart of Iran and far from the frenzied pace of Tehran. Gleaning as much information as I could from the thumbnail images, I extracted the name of one of the actresses and set out to make contact with her. Strindberg’s The Stronger was opening that Saturday in a small town in a province of Iran in the same week that Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler was banned in the capital.
I arranged an interview with the 28-year-old actress who held the main speaking part in the play. I was eager to find out how they had staged the production, the significance of the work of a Swedish playwright to her environment and if she was aware of the Hedda Gabler story. Days later I was still waiting, anxious because, even though she’d been enthusiastic, I was aware that she may have had second thoughts about the possible exposure — the consequences of which can’t be taken lightly.
Strindberg’s published short stories were openly anti-establishment and as an atheist, socialist and anarchist, he was tried for blasphemy in Sweden in 1882. Today, more than 130 years and many civilisations on, the people of Iran are tried for blasphemy on a daily basis.
Two weeks later we’re in contact again. She tells me that the owner of the venue where they are performing The Stronger has been threatened and photographic evidence of “activities” has been obtained. The group have dispersed and cancelled performances. She felt compelled to contact me. We begin the interview. The following are her reflections on her involvement in the production and her short-lived performance:
The speed at which they land on you doesn’t allow for articles or interviews before it’s all over. From the first day I always said that [the play] was likely to be cancelled, so I set out to at least enjoy the rehearsals. We hadn’t had a good experience of putting on a production. We’d done some Pinter but there was nowhere to show it. As a student in Tabriz, things weren’t as limited. Here, even non-political playwrights are hot eggs.
We had about two and a half months of rehearsals; with everyone in different jobs, twice a week at first, then more in the last month. We met at an empty house that belonged to a friend’s family. It was freezing. The director would say “the cold is character building”. We kept going with hot drinks and coffees. My role in the play is full of extremes — happy, then depressed. Our plan was to travel with our performance — to take it to Badar Pahlavi, Rasht, Tehran. In the performance our prop was a table. We didn’t care what we’d find, whether we’d have a table or not, we’d improvise, we just wanted to perform. That was our plan. The coherence of it was precarious but we thought we’ll perform for one day, one hour and must be prepared for anything that transpired.
One of the main reasons we chose the café was that there’s nowhere else. There is a public hall that we theoretically could use but it has so many pillars there were blind spots everywhere. I’d heard of a café society in Tehran. Here everything is taboo. There are only two cafés in our town — both relatively new — one is completely glass-fronted and therefore not appropriate. In the café we used, you enter in darkness then go through upstairs. The owner has an artistic background. It worked out well. We thought: let’s overcome our [restricted] situation. It’s not worth our consideration. We thought we could put on a play and at the same time promote a new culture.
People of all ages came, from 17- and 18-year-olds to 60-year-olds. It was exciting. Scenarios arose, like I’d be playing with a cigarette and it would make someone in the audience ask a stranger for a cigarette. The café has WiFi so someone would be sitting with a laptop and before long two or three people would strike up a conversation with them and they’d share online stuff together. There was no control in this situation. The place was packed. What we were presenting became almost irrelevant. We were linking people. It was so busy and there was a sense of disorder. The result is that we had no control over who could be filming. The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance contacted saying “we’ve heard that you’re gathering 15, 16 people”. That was too many. In reality there were 50-60 people in a café with capacity for 30. On “stage” I was fully in hijab, it was in character and I had envisaged this happening. But the problem was our audience. We previewed twice for feedback and held five public performances before we were intimidated and shut down.
On Tuesday [the day of the following performance] my friends said “You mustn’t go, don’t expose yourself”. We’ve all dispersed and I haven’t contacted the café since.
We hadn’t put posters up. It was all through Facebook and word of mouth. After the performance people would stay and hang out. They were on a high. The artistic community appeared. One guy who was much older came three times and I said to him “Tonight I will improvise differently so there’s something new in it for you” but he said no, that he was coming to see the original performance, gaining a new perspective each time he saw it. We had a box. At each performance we said, “This box has many roles…it’s for you to give your comments and it also accepts donations, according to your enjoyment.” We decided to wait until the last performance before opening it, so I don’t know what it holds.
When I was at university, there was a committee that came to oversee productions before any stage performance. There was always a mullah among them controlling what you wore, checking how tight our clothes were. We did Chekhov’s The Proposal, I wore all black — which falls in line with regulations — but they still pulled me up for my leggings. The undercurrent of our work — and I never want to forget this — has always been pressure.
I liked my character [Strindberg’s ‘Miss X’] very much. Maybe it’s pride, or vanity, but I like monologues, so I enjoyed it. I enjoy talking. I probably couldn’t write with the same audacity. My character puts all her effort into expressing herself. In some respects it’s like her last breath, an outpouring of everything, a last chance. The scenario is the character but the speech and deliverance was mine. We changed the ending. I was supposed to exit but a friend said, what are we left with? This is a cut, a slice of life. There is an oral tradition in the work of a Chilean group, it inspired the new ending we composed. When I leave the stage the other character is bereft and shaking. So I return, in a worse state than ever, I offer my cigarette and we share it. We realise that even Bob [the unseen male character] isn’t strong. If we’re weak, he’s not stronger. Ultimately, we’ve shaken the foundations through theatre. It’s a nightmare for the authorities.
Later that same day she contacts me to ask that I remove all names and locations as the situation has escalated and members of the production team have been summoned to answer for their actions. The café owner has been implicated and is still “under enormous pressure”. She still wants this interview to be published.
