S6
PARTISAN REVIEW
neighbors for being rightists or counterrevolutionaries was common. In
the Soviet Union, Pavel Morozov-a child who was murdered by his
neighbors after he reported his father for supplying food to starving
kulaks, the analog of "rich" peasants, one of the five black categories–
was a national hero. China had no publicly honored equivalent of Pavel,
but one of my students-let me call him "Xue Wen"-told me that his
mother had reported his father for having counterrevolutionary
thoughts. The father died in jail. A second student, a month or so later,
told me that Xue Wen had turned in his mother for the same crime. I
knew Xue Wen's mother who seemed to be on good terms with her son.
I never asked Xue Wen about this.
There is no more reporting of family members, but there is still no
civil society-no independent groups, formal or informal, and no sense
of public responsibility independent of the government.
I fought a battle with the local post office. There always was a metal
track from their accordion-style door stretched over the ground at the
entrance. When I almost broke my neck over it the first time I entered,
I told them
"hen weixian"
(very dangerous).
"Mingtian xiuii,"
they said
(they would fix it the next day). The next day, when I tripped on it
again, I told them"
hen weixian."
They fixed it right then and there, but
the day after that it was back.
"Hen weixian,"
I said. Nobody did or
said anything. I went with a translator and told them an old person
would break their head.
"Mingtian xiuli,"
they said. I persisted.
It
took
four months, but they finally removed the hazard. After I left Baoding,
someone wrote to me saying the danger had come back to the post
office. Who knows if any old people have already broken limbs over it.
What I was doing was acting politically. My success, albeit tempo–
rary, happened because I was a foreigner. Chinese people are not sup–
posed to engage in independent political action. There is no way for
public issues, major or minor, to be addressed. No citizen would ever
suggest that it is the duty of the post office to keep the entranceway safe
and free from obstruction. A Chinese who wanted to report a hazard at
a post-office entrance would have had to make the issue a personal one,
and would have tried to persuade an individual employee to deal with
the danger as an act of private altruism-a voluntary sacrifice for the
good of the country.
In a country where civil society existed, a group of local residents
could have organized to get the post office to correct the problem. But
China still honors Karl Marx, who hated civil society. He described in
the dirtiest words he knew: "It is from its own entrails that civil society
