China Witness

phone the presenter of a radio hotline: 'Mr Presenter, can you talk about what the foreigners admire about us now?'

– The internet and blogs: the only places where Chinese people can express themselves fully and without reserve. I have seen Chinese people's search for and defence of their roots, as well as their eagerness to pass on the inheritance of China's culture. The increasing popularity of the Internet has been a true 'cultural revolution' in Chinese society, completely remaking the old system that had lasted for millennia, where words could only travel from the top of society to the bottom in a one-way stream: Chinese people can now say whatever is on their minds without fear. To China's Internet users, the Net is not only a platform for speech, it is also a space of safety and liberation: people who suspect the gods, who question the government, who rebel against their parents, who oppose their superiors, even those who grumble about their spouses or have harsh things to say about their friends and family, whose views would once have been viewed as 'rebelling against authority', 'behaving inappropriately' and 'betraying their own family', can let off steam here, with never a soul the wiser, not even the gods themselves. Now every town and tiny village that has electricity also has Internet cafes and bars, so full that it has become a problem, as old and young alike become addicted to the Internet. Rumour has it that a new 'hot topic' among many women is how to retrieve husbands and children from the Internet cafe for food and sleep.

To tell the truth, I am a little nervous about visiting today's Chinese web pages – the lure of these places really is too great! Leaving aside the fascinating anecdotes, the information on cultivating the body and the sex, the dazzling variety of lifestyle advice, and looking only at the exposed secrets of history, the analysis of the great works of the ancients and of international points of conflict… as soon as you dive in you can easily lose yourself in all those 'nobody can say for sures'.

The first example: China's territory. The People's Republic of China has a land area of approximately 9,600,000 square kilometres, which makes it the third largest country in the world after only Russia and Canada (forty-two times the size of the United Kingdom). It is divided into four directly governed cities, twenty-three provinces, five autonomous regions and two Special Administrative Zones, and the capital is Beijing. China's territory spans forty- nine degrees of latitude stretching from latitude 53°30' north to 4° north, a distance of 5,500 kilometres from north to south. At its easternmost point, Chinese territory begins at 135°05' east, with its westernmost point at 73°40' east, a distance of 5,200 kilometres from east to west, spanning sixty degrees of longitude, with a time difference of more than four hours. This is a national 'definition', the only thing which is recognised to be the same amid all the various 'differences'. Different Chinese official websites give different figures for other things: www.china.org.cn states that it borders on fifteen countries by land, and China's sea areas have an area of approximately 4,730,000 square kilometres, with about 5,400 islands and islets distributed throughout. But www.gov.cn maintains that China's sea area is about 4,700,000 square kilometres, containing 7,600 islands, and that China shares a land border with fourteen nations, and has eight neighbours by sea.

The second example: it is said that at the end of 2005 China's population was 1,306,313,812, and that it has 668 cities, of which 13 have a population of 2 million or more, 24 have a population of 1 to 2 million, 48 have half a million to a million, 205 have a population of 200,000-500,000, and 378 less than 200,000. But on 11 November 2005 the head of the Chinese Construction Ministry said that in less than ten years' time the number of China's megacities of over a million people would already have increased from 34 to 49. No matter which figure is correct, they all imply that in eight years China will have more than ten new megacities! Will these fifteen megacities come from an increase in the non-agricultural population? Will they be capable of absorbing the increase in population? Are housing, traffic, schools, social plans in general, medical protection and green spaces being developed at the same speed? Will the original inhabitants and the newcomers be able to get along and live together side by side? My research teams were unable to find any material with figures on the subject, plans for development or anything of that kind.

The third example: on 18 February 2004 at 20:31 GMT, 04:31 Beijing time, China's Xinhua News Agency released the news that Wu Yi, China's Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Health, met Gao Yaojie, a doctor from China's Henan province. Gao Yaojie is a retired obstetrician who was subjected to many years' official harassment for exposing the truth about the AIDS situation in that province, and was refused permission by the government to travel to the United Nations to receive the Jonathan Mann Award for health and human rights. It is said that when Wu Yi and Gao Yaojie met, all local officials, including the head of the province, were ordered to leave the room, leaving only the two women behind. Wu Yi told Dr Gao to drop all formalities and speak freely, and the meeting lasted for three hours. But even after this highly significant meeting, the government still did not allow Gao Yaojie to collect her prize; it was not until early 2007 that the Chinese government notified the UN that Gao Yaojie was about to begin her journey to receive the award. Why could not even a dialogue with the Deputy Prime Minister get the doctor the support she deserved? And what had eliminated the obstacles set up by the local government after that? Could it be possible that the local government had become an entrenched power in its own right? If not, how could a single-party Chinese government permit a local government to undermine China's international image in that way? Could it be that Henan's AIDS situation had progressed so far that it frightened the central government? Or had three years' delay had a beneficial effect on the treatment of AIDS in Henan? If so, why had the Chinese media, whose 'sole duty is to utter praise', not reported it? As I understand it, by the end of 2006, Henan province had stated that it has 11,844 cases of AIDS, but medical workers and experts say that the number of Aids carriers in Henan province may have reached 1 million.

The fourth example: in recent years, from both inside China and abroad, the calls for the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese government to re-evaluate and officially define the Cultural Revolution have been getting louder and louder. Increasingly, the ruling party is starting to face angry recriminations for its unfairness and weak government, and their toleration and willingness to overlook Mao Zedong's crimes. However, in May 2007 I read on a Chinese official website:

24 June 2005: Official Almanac of the People's Republic of China

The 'Cultural Revolution', which lasted from May 1966 to October 1976, resulted in the gravest setbacks to the Party, the nation and the people since the founding of the People's Republic. This 'Cultural Revolution' was instigated and led by Mao Zedong. The course of the 'Cultural Revolution' can be divided into three parts:

· From the start of the Cultural Revolution to the Party's Ninth Plenary Congress in April 1969. The guidelines and policy of the 'Ninth Plenary' were erroneous in ideology, policy and organisation.

· From the Central Ninth Plenary to the Tenth Plenary Conference of the Chinese Communist Party in August 1973. The Tenth Plenary continued the Ninth Plenary's 'leftist' errors, and made Wang Hongwen Deputy Central Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party. Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen combined in the Central Politburo to form the 'Gang of Four', further increasing the strength of Jiang Qing's counter-revolutionary group.

· The 'Tenth Plenary' to October 1976. In early October 1976, the Central Politburo, carrying out the will of the Party and the people, smashed Jiang Qing's revolutionary clique, and put an end to the disaster of the 'Cultural Revolution'. Hua Guofeng, Ye Jianying, Li Xiannian and others played an important role in this. As to the 'Cultural Revolution', the major responsibility is Mao Zedong's. However, at the end of the day, Mao Zedong's errors are the mistakes of a great proletarian revolutionary.

I am baffled: how can the government 'repudiate the Cultural Revolution and accept the mistakes of Mao Zedong' as part of the official almanac of national history, and yet not allow the media to embark on a full-scale condemnation of the Cultural Revolution? The government still refuses to delete or make cuts in the description of relevant records in school textbooks, and forbids the publishing of literary works on related topics. Does the constitution of a 'democratic republic' allow this garbled, out-of-context history, and this emperor-like avoidance of history? Perhaps the government's silence is for the sake of those peasants who still believe that Mao Zedong is 'the red sun'? Throughout the history of imperial China, many changes of dynasty began with peasant rebellions.

On 15 May 2007, just before I left China, I tried, as I had many times before, to open the Chinese web page of the BBC news, but once again I failed. I hope the day will come soon when I can read the news in my homeland: that will be a sign of China's bravery, and its courage to join the rest of the world.

On 10 August 2007 I got an email from a friend in a Chinese news work unit: the radio station where I used to work, Radio Jiangsu, had been singled out by the central government for punishment. Eight radio stations had ceased broadcasting in Jiangsu province alone, and over two hundred radio stations up and down the country had been shut down with no warning. The reason the high-ups had given was that they had been 'moving too quickly,