Chapter 23 6. Freedom of Speech and Frog in a Well

The United Kingdom is one of the most free countries, but today the United Kingdom has become the country with the highest density of CCTV surveillance in the world.The United States is also one of the most free countries, but the security check at the American airport is the first country in the world to adopt "naked" equipment.The "Patriot Act" of the United States even allows relevant government departments to tap phone calls, check emails, and other activities.Although many people in Britain and the United States strongly disapproved of these government actions that violated personal privacy and freedom, most people finally accepted these measures because they also realized the threat to their lives posed by international terrorism.From this perspective, so-called liberal countries such as Britain and the United States have also entered the era of "post-liberalism".

In fact, there has never been absolute freedom in this world, and freedom and responsibility are always linked together.However, the mainstream Western liberalism after the war believes that people's free development is above all else, and society will become more and more perfect as a result.There are still many people in the West who hold this view.But this view ignores the characteristics of human nature itself: there are both good and evil sides in human nature, and if the evil side is not curbed, it will bring huge damage to society.Intemperate human nature can be very greedy and bring disaster to the whole world.The prevalence of drugs in Western society and the 2008 financial tsunami are lessons from extreme liberalism.

Historically, people's discussions on such issues as "freedom and responsibility", "individual and collective", "rights and obligations", "general interests and individual interests" were generally dialectical.For example, the discourse on freedom in the United Nations Covenant on Civil and Political Rights emphasizes both freedom and responsibility.From the perspective of Chinese philosophy, these concepts are two aspects of a problem, and it is good to strike a certain balance between the two.However, in the discourse dominated by the United States, talking about freedom, individuals, and rights is correct, and talking about responsibility, collectives, and obligations is to suppress democracy.This political view is really superficial.In freedom and responsibility, blindly emphasizing responsibility will indeed be abused by dictators, but conversely, blindly emphasizing freedom will also be abused by various politicians and criminals.

Some great Western philosophers also viewed these concepts dialectically.Kant, for example, was against the separation of politics and morality.Locke believes that independent individuals are the premise of the social contract, but he emphasizes the importance of morality, and he cannot accept people who "violate the moral norms of civilized society".According to my observation, the separation of individualism and morality in the United States has increasingly damaged the interests of the United States as a whole.Drugs, guns and violence are rampant in American society today.In which other big city in the United States can residents safely walk the streets after dark?The United States has less than a quarter of China's population, but has more prisons than China.The Chinese concept emphasizes the unity of freedom and responsibility, which is conducive to reversing the current Western world's excessive emphasis on individualism, universalism and national neutrality.In fact, if you look at the Chinese who have lived in the West for a long time, the vast majority of Chinese cannot accept the kind of argument that pushes freedom to extremes.Even for those overseas Chinese who highly appreciate liberalism, what they really like is the classic and ethical liberal discourse of the past, and it is difficult for them to accept the extreme liberalism of today's Western society.The relative success of the Chinese in the West is inseparable from the fact that they are good at learning the advantages of Western culture and can also insist on their own cultural values.

Many people of insight in the West have also made profound reflections on such issues. For example, the former British Culture Secretary Chris Smith and the writer Richard Kirk wrote "Western civilization is facing harsh conditions." choice”, stating: “Western civilization has come to a crossroads and has followed one path, cynicism, aggression, apathy, neoconservatism, and extreme liberalism. The other path is … building an individual through self- A society that is perfect, diligent, optimistic, rational, sympathetic, equal, and mutually recognized." American historian Schlesinger also pointed out that American society is already moving towards "Balkanization", that is, extreme individualism makes the West Society moves toward constant fragmentation.German political scientist Wolfgang Schäuble also pointed out in the book "Facing the Future": "Today's widespread individualism, self-centered, self-realization lifestyle, As a result, it has become a problem whether people are able to fulfill the tasks and obligations they should have as parents."

In a sense, the relative success of the Chinese model is to reverse what has been reversed by the mainstream Western views.For example, in many countries, maintaining social stability itself is the most important condition for protecting human rights.China's modernization requires a century of stability, and Africa's modernization requires at least two hundred years of stability.Without stability, there can be no development at all and human rights will come to naught sooner or later.But as long as you talk about maintaining stability, the United States says you want to be autocratic, which is really absurd.Stability can be the result of dictatorship, but it can also be the result of good governance. Whether a country implements good governance should be determined by the people of this country, not by Americans.Behind the overwhelming view of human rights of Western political rights is often the consideration of their own strategic interests, which has torn many countries apart. In the end, the West can only clean up the mess based on its own strategic interests.In fact, the biggest feature of China’s reform and opening up in the past 30 years is that people’s freedom has expanded unprecedentedly. From choosing a job to schooling, eating and drinking, men and women, from housing sales to health care and leisure, from media speeches to cultural life, the freedom of Chinese people has never been greater. as wide as it is today.For most Chinese people, this is an obvious common-sense judgment, and any unbiased person will admit it.Of course, we should look to the future and think about how we can do better than the West when it comes to freedom.

In June 2009, the World Economic Forum invited me to introduce the concept and strategy of China's transformation. One of the core topics was freedom of speech and freedom of the press.A scholar asked me whether Chinese journalism would be as open as the West in the future.I said: "Actually, any country has a degree of openness to the news. For example, the United States is not allowed to broadcast bin Laden's speech, the United Kingdom is not allowed to praise Hitler, Japan is not allowed to criticize the emperor, and Thailand is not allowed to make jokes about the king. So on the issue of press freedom, the difference between countries is mainly a matter of degree. Maybe the Chinese media is not as open as yours in some aspects, but in general China's press freedom is getting bigger and bigger, and this openness is still there. It will become bigger and bigger as the country’s self-confidence increases. But facing the future, the question we have to ask is whether China’s press freedom should be based on the Western model. I don’t think it will. The Western media has many advantages of its own. It is worth learning and learning from China, but it seems that several key issues have not been handled satisfactorily, so we have to go beyond the Western model.”

First of all, how can the Western media solve the problem of being too much controlled by commercial interests.Western media are almost all controlled by large corporations, and as a result, many problems have arisen.For example, American TV programs are interrupted once every quarter of an hour, even when they are playing wonderful movies.I hope this never happens in China.In addition, there are reports related to public welfare undertakings. For example, the Chinese media reports on the Paralympic Games with almost the same length as the Olympic Games. This is very positive for promoting the cause of the disabled in China.But such an approach is inconceivable in the West, because the commercial value of the Paralympic Games is far lower than that of the Olympic Games.In Western media reports, the Paralympic Games hardly exists, and the reports on it are probably less than one ten-thousandth of the Olympic Games.Personally, I think China is doing the right thing, because it has greatly promoted the understanding of ordinary Chinese people about the cause of the disabled, and it has also increased the self-confidence of more disabled people.In such matters, I am afraid that the West should learn from China.

Secondly, judging from the Western reports on China, I feel that the Western media has never been able to solve a problem of value bias.Take the British Broadcasting Corporation and American Cable TV as examples. Whenever Chinese political news is mentioned, the host always reminds the audience that China is an "autocratic country" or a "communist country."Frankly speaking, this is still the level of reporting on the West during China's "Cultural Revolution".At that time, whenever the news mentioned the West, adjectives such as "capitalism" were always added, which greatly affected the audience's true understanding of the West.

I personally have no objection to Western media focusing on the negative aspects of China.To be fair, when Western media report their own domestic news, they also mainly report negatively.But I feel that when Western media report on the negative side of their own country, they pay more attention to checking the facts, while when reporting on China, they appear to be much rougher, and even ignore some basic professional ethics.For example, when Western media reported on the Lhasa riots in 2008, they all used photos and pictures of Nepalese police beating Tibetans, and then said that Chinese soldiers were beating Tibetans.Why can't we do more verification before reporting?Why didn't most of the media apologize after the report was wrong?I think there may be a cultural arrogance here as well.

Third, I have summarized the western reporting method on China as "you can't see the forest for the trees", that is to say, your reports and descriptions of a certain event in China may be fairly accurate, but the sum of your various reports on China gives people The overall impression of China is often wrong, or very different from how most Chinese people feel about their own country.Why does your news claim to be objective and free, but the overall impression it creates is so ridiculous?I am afraid that there is a difference in philosophy here. Chinese philosophy always looks at the individual from the perspective of the whole, while Western philosophy generally only focuses on the individual, resulting in a huge difference in cognition. Before the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, the British Broadcasting Corporation conducted a survey of TV viewers in the United Kingdom and the United States, and found that 60% of the viewers believed that the Chinese people were "oppressed people."I really feel sorry for the audience of the BBC, they cannot get objective and comprehensive information about China.I said that thanks to China's strong national defense force today, otherwise the United States would send soldiers to liberate the Chinese people.This example at least shows that the standard of Western mainstream news reports is far from the ideal level.I suggest that as a first step, all journalists stationed in China must understand Chinese, otherwise how can they truly understand a different culture?The second step is that the report must see both the trees and the forest, especially to understand the feelings of most Chinese people on various things, so as to avoid misleading Western audiences. Fourth, from the perspective of freedom of the press, negative reporting and critical reporting seem to be the news concept advocated by the West.But the objectivity of the news should reflect the "seeking truth from facts" that the Chinese say, that is to say, say what is good is good, what is bad is bad, and what is both good and bad is good and bad. Why must it be negative Woolen cloth?Even when reporting the bad news, why not also report the bright side?It's like a person is seriously ill, you can say to him from a negative point of view, you are unlucky, you are going to die; but you can also say from a positive point of view, take good care of your illness, if it comes, let it go, and strive for a speedy recovery .This is what the Western proverb says, when there is half a glass of water in a glass, an optimist sees the half glass with water, and a pessimist sees the half glass without water. This is a matter of value judgment.The western media seems to be a bit gloomy, and they always like to emphasize the half glass without water (now some domestic media also have this problem), why choose the half glass without water as an objective report?A British friend told me that British people have more eccentric tempers. Apart from the lack of sun in the UK, it may also be related to the media's "negative reporting syndrome". I don't know if this is true.Of course, if most British people have this kind of value preference, I have no objection.But Chinese people generally like a sunny personality. Most Chinese people like optimistic and open-minded people. Most Chinese people like to watch movies with hopeful endings, or even happy endings.This is not a question of which value is better or worse, but a collective value preference formed in history.This may be the unique wisdom of "civilized countries", because from the perspective of historical trends, nations with optimistic personalities seem to have a better future.The fact that Chinese civilization has become the only continuous great civilization in the world is related to this collective character. Fifth, when it comes to press freedom, I also thought of a very interesting question, that is, the two different views of news in China and the West have produced completely different results.The newspaper with the largest circulation in the UK is the tabloid "The Sun" with photos of nude girls, and the newspaper with the largest circulation in China is the current affairs "Reference News".As far as I am concerned, the quality of "Reference News" is infinitely higher than that of "The Sun".A British scholar who knows more about China also told me that this example can show that Britain will not be able to compete with China.In fact, as early as the 18th century, the great French philosopher Voltaire lamented the vulgarization of the media brought about by British liberalism.On the one hand, Voltaire highly appreciated the free economic system and the stock market in Britain. He believed that the stock market played a better role than the courts in many countries: no matter what beliefs people came here, everyone seemed to believe in the same religion ( In his native France, religious persecution was still a big problem at the time), but at the same time he has repeatedly expressed his difficulty in accepting the vulgarity of the British media. Sixth, there is another problem related to the vulgarization of the media, which is the denial of the educational function of the media by liberal values.Liberalism tends to deny the role of the government in value education, although Britain is still one of the few countries in the Western world that has its own state religion.Liberalism assumes that any value has its own value, and there is no distinction between higher and lower values. Therefore, a certain value cannot be enforced in a society, but it must be ensured that values ​​are diversified.In my opinion, the characteristic of modern society is that social diversification has brought about diversification of values, but each society has its own history and cultural heritage, and a consensus on conscience formed by its own cultural traditions.Whether it is the government, the society, or the parents, advocating this kind of inheritance and consensus is in line with the wishes of most people in society and in line with the spirit of democracy. The great Russian writer Herzen made a classic evaluation of liberal values ​​in the late 19th century.He commented on British economic liberalism in "My Past and Thoughts": "The government tried so hard to avoid the suspicion of interference that it allowed people to starve to death every day, and dared not limit the autonomy of the workhouse, and allowed the people of the whole village Work to death, or become a cretin.” Herzen disagrees with the idea that the less government interference there is, the more independent a nation is in its speech and spirit.He believes that in the UK, the less the government intervenes, the less the people become intolerant of dissidents, and the more stubborn social prejudices become.He said: "Your neighbors, your butchers, your tailors, families, clubs, and parishes are watching you at all times and performing police duties on you." Herzen even sarcastically said: "In a preserved What a level of education and freedom of conscience can be achieved in a country where the Puritans reject alien traditions!" Herzen's insights help us better understand why, after the upheaval in the Soviet Union and the East, racial Discrimination, ethnic prejudice, extremism have all become more serious.I can imagine that during the "July 5 Incident" in Xinjiang in 2009, if the Uyghur media only spoke for Uyghurs, and the Chinese media only spoke for Han people, then more intense ethnic conflicts would be inevitable.This is how the former Yugoslavia disintegrated: media freedom became a catalyst for ethnic killing and state disintegration.In addition, anyone who has lived in the West is also familiar with the ubiquitous "slaves of public opinion" in the West. Most people in the entire society are often conformists (conformists) of the media and public opinion, people with independent thinking ability not much. What happened after media liberalization in Taiwan can also illustrate this point.No-nonsense newspapers went bankrupt, and Lace Lane's Apple News was a bestseller.This is a surprising outcome for the media at the mercy of market forces.Some people say that if Taiwan was a political authority in the past and is now a market authority, then market authority covers a wider area than political authority, and Taiwan's media has also changed from "a pug dog in the authoritarian era to a mad dog in the democratic era."In fact, throughout Eastern Europe, the biggest loss of liberal intellectuals after the upheaval in Eastern Europe is often the vulgarization of the media.Many Chinese intellectuals who are deeply influenced by Western values ​​went to the West, especially the United States, and their biggest disappointment was to find that the media in so-called democratic countries were so vulgar. The prejudice against China formed by the so-called free media in the West is deeply rooted.I even think that no matter what the Chinese do, it will be difficult to change this prejudice, because many things are formed historically, for example, Western children read from elementary school textbooks: China has occupied Tibet, although all Western governments recognize Tibet as a part of China. The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the dissident Liu Xiaobo in 2010 is nothing more than another manifestation of this prejudice. Behind it is an extreme anxiety and fear of the rise of China and the rise of the Chinese model, because this rise has become irresistible and Western discourse hegemony It may also be the end of it. This also reminds me of something that a German sinologist told me at the Frankfurt International Book Fair in 2009: He compiled a collection of short stories by Chinese writers and wanted to publish a review in a major German newspaper Article, introducing the book.But the editor of the newspaper told him that German readers would not be interested unless it was written by Chinese dissidents.The sinologist said in surprise: But do these writers have countless readers in China?The editor still shook his head, thinking that German readers would not be interested. Herein lies a problem: the Chinese say that "one hand cannot sing alone", which means that understanding is a two-way thing. If only one party wants to explain, and the other party is not willing to listen at all, then the bridge of understanding will never be built.The key here is whether the West has the willingness to understand different nations and their cultures, and then how strong this willingness is.According to my observation, the West's desire to understand China has long been far lower than China's desire to understand the West.Because of this, over the past 30 years, 400 million people in China have learned English, and 20% of Chinese publications are translated works from the West. In Western countries, this ratio is less than 2%. China has 1.6 million young students to study English. study abroad in the West. But then again, is this necessarily a bad thing for China?I don't think so.I even think that if the West is willing to choose to keep themselves in the dark, let them continue to keep in the dark, because what we believe in is "know yourself and know the enemy, and win every battle".Because our understanding of the West is far greater than the West's understanding of us, we have been able to avoid disadvantages, learn from others, learn many advantages of the West, and strengthen ourselves. The result was a growing political and economic dilemma.They seem to have only recently discovered that China's competitiveness is so strong.An EU official has said to me many times: When we contact the Chinese, we always find that the Chinese know very clearly what they want from Europe, but we never have a clear concept of what we can get from China. Of course, with the rapid rise of China, the desire of Westerners to understand China is rising rapidly, and more and more people are learning Chinese, and China is less and less concerned about the prejudice of Western media.You have said all the bad things you should say, and you have made all the rumors that should be made. Even the Chinese workers in Africa are prison prisoners, and the Chinese People's Liberation Army did not provide disaster relief in Yushu, but Tibetan lamas did. Such rumors have appeared , but China has not been said to fall, but has become stronger and stronger.Western countries finally recognize their strength.When you develop, the West will start to find ways to understand you.So we can gradually hand over the task of understanding China to the West, and let Westerners do it by themselves, and we can be more relaxed.For example, I don't think it is necessary to send a delegation to Western countries to introduce the Tibet issue.The British never sent a delegation to China to explain the Northern Ireland issue, France never sent a delegation to China to explain the Corsica issue, and the United States never sent anyone to China to explain the ownership of the Hawaiian Islands.He wants to understand Tibet, so he can come to China to do research by himself.Western media will continue to belittle China, but we don't have to care too much about it.See you in ten years.If ten years is not enough, then twenty years, it will not be China that will regret it in the end. French scholar David Gosset published a commentary in Asia Times in February 2009, comparing Western forces that refuse to view China objectively as a frog in a well.Here's what he wrote: Chinese citizens are transforming into citizens of the world.This shift has far-reaching consequences. ... Chinese people's strong interest in the world does not mean that they forget or abandon their traditions.On the contrary, for the vast majority of Chinese intellectuals or Chinese citizens of the world, openness to foreign cultures is aimed at reinterpreting China's own traditions.In fact, China's curiosity about the outside world, returning to Chinese traditions and reflecting on Chinese characteristics are all happening at the same time.While China is opening to the world, can the West also open to China's Renaissance?If the West believes that it has no need to learn from China, its ancient wisdom, aesthetics and values, if the West refuses to question its assumptions about economic and political modernity in the face of the overall success of the Chinese model, then the West may indeed become The last frog in the well.