I AM BRAINWASHED (OR NOT): A MONOLOGUE

BY MINQI SONG

Nov 15, 2019. I woke up at 6 a.m, and checked my phone as usual. The first message was from Julie, sent ten minutes earlier. Julie is a core leader of Education Without Barriers (EWB), an education nonprofit I co-founded in 2016. Her message included a screenshot of an anonymous email sent from a volunteer. 

“EWB’s President Florence posted in her Friend’s Circle after she evacuated from Hong Kong. Her expression was very inappropriate because it was a satire to the role of the Communist Party in offering help for mainland Chinese students. This is disrespectful. What she said would pose a great challenge to the public image of the organization. I thus urge the Board of EWB stop her holiday as soon as possible and handle this crisis seriously.”

A little background about Florence: Born and raised in Chengdu, a Southwestern city of China, Yunzhi began her undergraduate degree two years ago at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). November 11 was the day when universities became the latest battleground of the Hong Kong protests. On November 13, Florence decided to leave for Shenzhen, the city that links Hong Kong and mainland China, as she felt the campus was not safe for her. 

This is what she wrote in the WeChat post that troubled the anonymous complainant: “It is really magical realism. Local officials held my hands and said that, ‘the government has prepared all the things you need and will always be your solid backup’.” Like Florence, I am a native Chinese speaker. I read nothing sarcastic or critical in her post. But the concerned volunteer seemed to think that Florence was making fun of the Chinese officials who had helped to whisk her out of Hong Kong.

I was surprised. This email was a reminder, a strike, drawing me to the questions that weighed heavily on my mind since June, when all of a sudden the Hong Kong protests became international headlines.

As I was about to draft a response, two notifications arrived. Reuters showed me a picture of a group of HK policemen hold shields and batons and stand in a line to block a flock of protesters. In contrast, Global Times, a state-owned daily newspaper in China, shared a video where a German reporter from Deutsche Welle challenged a pro-democracy activist in an interview. 

I experience this war of ideas every day. It happens in mainstream media, when contradicting ideologies are trying to force me to choose black or white. It happens in real life, when I counter biases towards the place where I come from, and biases towards myself. These entrenched labels tagged on me come from those single-dimensioned narratives in media and the fractured, limited information. The war challenges me as an insider and outsider——an insider, as a Chinese student in the U.S; an outsider, as a mainland Chinese caring about Hong Kong.

A frog in the well

Before August 2017, Hong Kong in my eyes was almost the same as the perceptions of my friends from other parts of the world: an international financial hub, and an autonomous, democratic, and inclusive society. 

During the summer of 2017, I participated in a three-week academic program held at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). On the first night, I went to a neighborhood fruit market. I soon realized  all the price tags were written in Cantonese, a language I do not speak. Trying to bargain with the fruit vendor in Mandarin was futile, as he only understood Cantonese. Ironically, English was the only language which was mutually intelligible. 

I later found that many students from mainland China had similar experiences. For Jingchun, the only Chinese student concentrating in human rights policy at the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia University, the jolt she experienced in Hong Kong came when she asked whether she could pay a restaurant bill using Alipay, an online service ubiquitous on the mainland. After raising the question, the girl who had been helping her translate what the waiter said turned and left abruptly. “I guess Alipay reveals that I come from the mainland,” Jingchun said. 

Julie, a mainland Chinese student studying at HKU, shared her experience with me as a closer observer. “The ‘segregation’ within the university is deeply rooted,” she said. Before Julie came to Hong Kong, senior students cautioned her that “Hong Kong students always stay up late, are generally impolite, and are too chill about coursework.” According to Julie, many mainland Chinese freshmen had internalized this belief even before arriving on campus. 

For the other open-minded mainland Chinese students, the language barrier can still prevent them from truly integrating with the locals. “Under many occasions, language used in campus events is Cantonese. It is rather difficult for mainland Chinese students to engage in,” Julie said. She then added, “the special dorm culture of HKU is also a shock. You have to stay up the whole night for the so-called ‘bonding activities.’ Hong Kong students would not adjust it even there are lots of complaints about that.” 

Gradually, I realized that the “One Country, Two System” policy endows the city with autonomy and freedom in a way that is incomparable to any city in mainland China. Proposed by Xiaoping Deng, this innovative policy allows Hong Kong to retain its own economic and administrative systems under one China. However, it does not unify identities and ideologies. From the perspectives of many Hong Kongers, Jingchun, Julie, and I are all people who come from “another place.” During my three weeks in Hong Kong, whenever I walked into a bookstore, the “daily recommendations” or “best sellers” were always critiques of the Communist Party, books discussing human rights issues in Xinjiang and Tibet, and biographies of dissidents and activists. These are the perspectives that Hong Kong people are exposed to. These may not be disinformation but they somehow dominate the conversation in Hong Kong. In contrast, the message mainland Chinese receive about China is that theirs is a prosperous country with fast economic growth, emerging technology innovation, and profound culture.  

My three-week stay in Hong Kong also revealed a less alluring but important aspect about its “Tale of Two Cities” inequality. Standing on the top of Victoria Peak, I saw a fancy city with astounding skyscrapers and flashing neon lights, but I also remembered the stories of starving children living in the tiny spaces with their jobless parents I heard in a class presentation, and homeless disabled poor man I came across on the narrow streets. 

“We are staring at the ‘moon’ like a frog in the well,” Julie said. “We thought we know Hong Kong well, but we do not, and sadly, we did not make efforts to know it.” The true status quo of Hong Kong, the history before and after the handover of the city in 1997, and the cleavages within the society, are more or less missing in coverage about the protest. 

When Julie says “we,” she means a combination of journalists, netizens, government, and even indigenous Hong Kong people.

The sobering unobtainable “truth”                                           

I came to the U.S for the first time in my life in August 2018. With the aim of improving my English, my second language, I have followed the BBC, CNN, The Economist, NPR, New York Times, and the Huffington Post since high school. Two months after the protest broke out, I created a Twitter account, curious to read what people outside of Hong Kong were thinking, and followed the New York Times’ Instagram accounts——they have two: one uses Mandarin and the other uses English. 

On November 11, the two accounts published the same picture: a policeman about to shoot a protestor wearing a black mask. The words below the picture in the Chinese account were “A protestor was shot by a policeman within a close distance; A man was doused in a flammable liquid and set on fire after condemning a protestor about his violent behavior…This Monday, the Hong Kong Protest went uncontrolled with protestors’ violent clashes and acts of vandalism…”. The narrative of the English account was entirely different—It was a detailed description of how the protestor was attacked by the policeman. Nothing else.

 

Both my friend Elaine and I noticed this. She soon posted an Instagram story on her personal account commenting, “Do I, or the thousands of the New York Times’ readers, need to be bilingual to avoid selective storytelling tactics?”  

For all the peer students I talked to, the New York Times is mentioned as the media they “trust and regard as most credible” among the outlets they know and consume. So do I, a mainland Chinese student who is perceived to be deprived of freedom of information by Chinese government.

I tried to find out what are the focuses of the stories about the protest through the eyes of my classmates from different countries. For such a complicated issue, they did not see a great variety of opinions and “layers” under the surface coming up. “With the Protest moving on, the coverages I read are monotonous at most. The oceans of stories were very much aligned in terms of their stances,” Wes, a second-year SIPA student came from South Africa, told me. The fight for freedom and democracy, and police violence “are not something surprising at all”. Whereas, the protest did grab the attention for most of them, because of “the provoking pictures illustrating police beating unarmed protestors”, “the classic images of protestors picked up lines across the police officers”, or “the headline news regarding the People’s Liberation Army deployed troops in Shenzhen”.  

The messages, slogans, and appeals proposed by the protestors resonate with the preexisting views of the Western media audience.  Their strategies work well. These messages corroborate the stories about the Communist Party and China before the Protest. They incur sympathy, admiration, and astounding support towards the protestors and democracy. These sentiments are well deserved. But the “uniformed” coverages leave an impression on its audiences that this is the whole “iceberg”, and there is no need to critically think about it.

Chinese readers faced a different scenario. At the beginning of the protest, early June, I and any Chinese people who are eager to know what was happening in Hong Kong, could not find any information related to “Hong Kong Protest” or “Extradition Bill” on Weibo, a social media platform similar to Twitter. However, at a certain tipping point, “the door was opened. Since then, you can find several most searched hashtags related to the Protest on Weibo everyday,” as Julie observed. She followed the official accounts of People’s Daily, Global Times, Xinhua Net in WeChat, and noticed that “the focus of reports are on how ordinary Hong Kong people abominate the protest, support for the police and Carrie Lam, barbaric behaviors of protestors. ” On the same day when protesters occupied the airport, a journalist from Global Times was besieged and assaulted by protestors. It went viral in mainland China, both social media and official outlets.

Jinchun did not follow any Chinese state media, as she does not want coverage from the media that she thinks not trustworthy to show up in her news feeds. My eight classmates from other countries “closed the door” for the same reason.

On October 3, a mainland Chinese student published an article on his personal WeChat account, covering the “butterfly effects” after he hung a Chinese national flag on the window of his dorm in the University of Hong Kong. He wrote, “…in the first night, I heard someone knocked on my door. I opened, only to be verbally attacked and deterred by laser pointers facing a group of people I never know. The next day, I woke up finding my door was scribbled with humiliating slogans.” Like the story of the Global Times’ reporter, his experience totally went into silence in the world outside of mainland China.

With the escalation of the protest and the volume of coverage snowballed, the protest dragged me into self-doubt and sleepless nights. When gas bombs were thrown, bullets went through bone, and hands became weapons, another war was going on at the same time——The stories instigated hatred. They pushed people to the far end of the spectrum. The sunk cost became too high to take any steps back, to compromise, to negotiate, and to start a dialogue. 

Before HKU suspended classes in November, there were many seminars and events addressing the Protest and more broadly, the dynamics between Hong Kong and mainland China. But “students participated in the Protest did not show up and nobody would talk about it because of the fear of becoming a target,” Julie told me. Xuewen, a Ph.D candidate in HKUST from mainland China, commented after a post written by a pro-protest media outlet. The post was shared by one of her friends from Taiwan in Facebook. She commented with the hope of anyone reading it could embrace more opposite views. Shortly after, the friend deleted her comment—“He told me that ‘I am not against you but I do not want you to be attacked.’”

“People who relied on media were driven by what they read. But channels available are limited,” Jingchun said. She cannot help but feel sad and dreary. For the first time her passion for human rights is wavering. “I realize that human rights are weaponized. It may not be a protection of human rights. It becomes a component of politics and is used for attacking whoever on the other side”.

At last, I found that the only “truth” I was able to obtain was the suffering of the countless innocent. In the second day of the violence in universities, as Xuewen told me, the lab of a HKUST professor from mainland China was demolished by protestors. “You remember that I caught a severe cold this October, right?”, Julie asked me. “I was emotionally drought. I was afraid of going out. I could not take the subway train because the stations were destroyed. There was an outage of electricity and water that lasts for about four days. People looted supermarkets. Slogans and political posters are dotted on campus. They are just… everywhere.”

Hard Life Lessons: Beyond the Protest

On Aug 14, Yu decided to post videos and pictures showing the mainland journalist beaten by a group of protestors in the WhatsApp group with more than 200 students of Class 2020. He wanted to know how his peer students in SIPA would react to this. An Indian student I talked to remembered this because “Chinese students do not usually stand out to talk about political stuff. I think it was the first time,” she said.

Yu soon received a response: Should not a graduate student at a policy school have a more sophisticated and nuanced view than the Chinese propaganda you are spewing? 

After several rounds of argument, Yu stopped responding after a fellow student sent a message in the group: Know your audience dude. You should be kicked out of this chatroom. 

Looking back, Yu is still frustrated. He might have learned a lesson from it. And I know, it is one  I am also learning the hard way.

This is my 461th day in the United States. Many times, I was asked by different people why I chose to come to this country. My answer was always the same: not to make my resume more competitive, or to fulfill the expectations of my family, but to know what it really means to be a student in one of the best education systems in the world, along with a curiosity of the U.S. as a beacon of freedom, liberalism and open-mindedness——this is what I learned from books, movies, and news coverage. 

I came here as a Chinese student. I do not know what defines someone as a dissident, but I did not join the Comunist Party. Before I came to the United States to study, I managed an NGO and being interested in public policy uncovered the weaknesses of the governing body and mistakes they made in a rather direct way. 

Back on Nov 23, 2017, on my way back to school, a breaking news alert arrived in my email box: Some teachers at the Red Yellow Blue Kindergarten in Beijing had abused children; the children had been sexually molested, pierced by needles, and given unknown pills. Discussions on social media exploded, along with people’s outrage. But video, coverage and comments about the scandal were soon deleted by the government. 

The kindergarten was only two miles away from my college. I went there to find out what I could know as a curious citizen. While I was there, a mother whose daughter enrolled in this kindergarten told me, some parents were out of contact and turned silent. A young father even begged me to go to another nearing kindergarten, where same things happened but had not caught any attention. Two hours after I came back, I typed down what I saw and heard and published them on my WeChat account (like a personal blog) with great compassion and grief. I then sent a message to my parents in our group chat:

“Sorry, Mom and Dad. I am sorry for not letting you know that I went to the kindergarten this morning. I am sorry for writing this sensitive article. You must be concerned about what I just posted and what I might have to face.”

Mom has always forwarded my articles to her WeChat’s Friend Circle page with detailed and encouraging comments; this time she did not do that. She messaged me: “Angel, I was anxious the whole day and I opened the link time after time to make sure that it is still there. I do not know if it would be a good thing to share it with my WeChat contacts.”

After coming to SIPA, I still take a critical stance on China. When I was in a core class for my concentration called Political Development in Developing World, the professor asked us to apply the USAID framework to analyze a political development issue and its underlying contexts. It took me only one minute to decide on a topic: population control and forced migration in Beijing beginning in 2017, another example of the “dark side” of the governance of Communist Party widely discussed in Western media. 

I do not find it challenging to examine China in a critical thinking mode. It is what I have been doing for my entire adult life. It is, however, a challenge for me to respond to critical sentiments cast on China by outsiders, like my fellow students. I’m not sure if it’s because I instinctively rally to defend my country when it faces criticism from the outside, or if it’s because I find the criticism to be knee-jerk and reflexive, rather than considered. 

While interviewing a Korean classmate, I asked, “Is there a moment of your life that you discovered that you are more or less biased towards a group of people or anything?”

“I think my bias is that I do not like China,” She responded without any hesitation. I appreciated her candor. During my conversations with different classmates, some gave me similar feedback like “China is a rising power and is suppressing its people” or “Chinese people are living a desolate life.”

In fact, I do not need to wait for these interviews to know the existence of these perceptions. Twitter told me. CNN told me. The past 460 days told me—in an event discussing the security of Balkan peninsula I attended in the first semester, Chinese companies’ business in the area were defined as a “container” of the totalitarian government’s ambition. Faces of Chinese students and their achievements are rarely seen in the posts of the Instagram official account of SIPA. Whenever there is an ice breaker session and the question of “which country you want to visit?” is proposed, China is almost never mentioned. When the professor of Infrastructure Cost Benefit Analysis discussed some benchmarks of the highway rail project in California, no one  mentioned China despite its position as a global leader in rail construction?.

At the beginning of each semester or in the first meeting of a group project, I was asked, “What did you do before coming to SIPA?” I always referred to my experience of co-founding EWB. One day after class, an American student came to me. She complimented me on my devotion to the truly disadvantaged at first. Then she asked me, “What is the relationship of your organization with Chinese government and the Party?” “Does the government fund your projects?” 

Having not obtain an NGO status in the mainland, EWB could not launch public fundraising campaign as I mentioned in the class. It is rather apparent that getting any funding from the government is impossible for EWB.

But I understood why she asked. It was maybe out of an assumption because I am Chinese. An assumption indicating that the independence of a Chinese NGO is non-existing, the organization is entangled with political interests, or it is very rare that a Chinese student would devote so much for an unpaid job and I should have gained some benefits from the government.

Both questions are no less tough than “Angel, do you think that democracy will work in China?”, one that I encountered more than ten times during the past 461 days. I grew “resilience” about these challenging moments. I told people how I think and what I experienced. Sometimes I felt that keeping silent might be a better choice as their facial expression looked as if they were thinking “Angel was brainwashed. She is too naive to really know the life of disadvantaged Chinese people.”

Subtle unexpected transformations happened. Jingchun worked in a domestic NGO targeting at basic rights of migrant workers‘ children in China before coming to SIPA. She used to be a person “who always fiercely criticized the government.”All of her sharp criticism was derived from the misalignment between “what I saw through my interaction with the beneficiaries and the narratives of state media”. But when sensed the incessant criticism and “unprincipled attacks” on media in China, when she heard her classmates stated that “Chinese people are mostly uncivilized, poor, and too obedient”, she found herself began to defend the country more than ever.

“It is all about self identity I think,” Jingchun said.

---

I knew Julie had been waiting for my response to the anonymous email. I swiped away the messages from Reuters and Global Times and drafted a reply:

Thank you for your email and sharing your thoughts. In an age when information is overloaded and opinions are polarized, we hope to provide a platform for equal and inclusive dialogue. No matter what intentions it entails, what appeals it seeks, what attitudes it shows, we want to listen.

You are assuming the opinions Florence holds based on her WeChat post. In fact, she was shocked, worried, and overwhelmed during her evacuation from Hong Kong. ‘Magical realism’, is not a satire, but a reflection of all the pains the protest brought on herself. 

When coverages about the Protest are spreading out, the two sides are forming, guarding, and amplifying their ideology battle ground. Evidence can be manipulated and the meaning of a simple word is varied upon contexts and the person’s definition. Expressing anger and standing against someone are our first instinct and the easiest things to do.

I opened the window of my room. A breeze rolled in. A line of verse by the most famous quote of Mattie Stepanek, an American poet, came to my mind: “Sunset is my favorite color. Rainbow the second.”