CHINA’S SOUL

DOES CHINA HAVE A SOUL?

If China is to navigate the rough waters ahead it will need to show that it is about more than its GDP numbers.

Jiang Xueqin

The Diplomat, February 5, 2012

The New York Review of Books blog has posted an Ian Johnson interview with Zhang Ping (who writes under the name Chang Ping), one of China’s most daring writers whom the Communist Party previously hounded out of reporting from China.

The piece is worth reading for both the interviewee and the interviewer.

Inspired by Liu Binyan to become a journalist, Chang Ping has a career that shares many similarities with that of his role model. But there’s one major difference. Liu, with his journalistic exposes of the inept Communist Party political, economic, social, and moral management of China, inspired a generation of disaffected youth to carry the intellectual flame.

By the late 1990s, when Chang Ping came into prominence at Southern Weekend, a Guangzhou-based newspaper famed for its investigative journalism, the Party had begun to buy out China’s intellectual class so successfully that it could easily persecute those who couldn’t be bought out – individuals such as He Qinglian, Ai Weiwei, and Chang Ping.

Chang Ping now lives in Germany, but is attempting to start a new media organization to effect change in China. Unfortunately, as was the case with Liu and He, Chinese intellectuals tend to fade away once in exile.

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