Twelve years later, on New Year’s Day, 1990, just days after being elected the first president of post-Communist Czechoslovakia, Havel delivered a famous speech and returned, I notice, to the political implications of produce: the doomed regime, he said, cultivated “special farms, which produce ecologically pure and top-quality food just for them” rather than send “their produce to schools, children’s homes, and hospitals.”
To a reader in China, Havel’s focus on the symbolism of “special farms” has a certain resonance. There are few issues more deeply and universally felt in China than the safety of its food; after years of scandals on cooking oil sifted from gutters, glow-in-the-dark pork, deadly infant formula, and so on, it has become a proxy for fraying public trust in the system to put the public interest above all. So it was grim news last fall when Chinese reporters uncovered a network of “special farms” dedicated to providing Party leaders with top-quality vegetables, chicken, pork, rice, beef, fish, and tea oil. In the province of Zhejiang, for instance, forty “high-class eco-farms” were said to have been earmarked to supply the land-resource department, water conservancy, agricultural units, and other government offices. (What are we to make of the fact that the offices receiving special food are exactly the ones overseeing the public’s supply?)
Historically, the leaders of the People’s Republic maintained tegong—special supply—farms, but in the nineteen-nineties the irony became too much (or too public) to bear, and they were thought to be shut down. But it seems they are thriving in the age of dusky noonday skies and counterfeit beef. The foreign press got wind of it, and found other examples of well-guarded farms that sell only to the political élite; the Los Angeles Times noted the state-owned firm that called national banquets and meetings “the cradle of safe food in Beijing.” It wasn’t just food; a few weeks later, we learned that leaders are not breathing the same air, either, thanks to two hundred air purifiers installed throughout the Great Hall of the People and in the offices of top leaders. Word got out because the company that makes them crowed in its promotional materials: “Creating clean, healthy air for our national leaders is a blessing to the people.”
Havel’s death is one of those moments that is easy to write off in China; it means nothing to hundreds of millions of Chinese people who are too absorbed in the minor ups and downs of their lives, and who can blame them? And yet his life meant something powerful and transformative to a realm of Chinese intellectuals, who have found great relevance for his ideas in their time. As Michael Anti, a blogger and activist, put it, Havel’s effect in China was less an exhortation than a habit of mind. “I try to live in the truth and as a normal person,” Anti told Radio Free Asia. “Only when you lead a normal life can your confrontation against the regime last longer.”
Historically, the leaders of the People’s Republic maintained tegong—special supply—farms, but in the nineteen-nineties the irony became too much (or too public) to bear, and they were thought to be shut down. But it seems they are thriving in the age of dusky noonday skies and counterfeit beef. The foreign press got wind of it, and found other examples of well-guarded farms that sell only to the political élite; the Los Angeles Times noted the state-owned firm that called national banquets and meetings “the cradle of safe food in Beijing.” It wasn’t just food; a few weeks later, we learned that leaders are not breathing the same air, either, thanks to two hundred air purifiers installed throughout the Great Hall of the People and in the offices of top leaders. Word got out because the company that makes them crowed in its promotional materials: “Creating clean, healthy air for our national leaders is a blessing to the people.”
Havel’s death is one of those moments that is easy to write off in China; it means nothing to hundreds of millions of Chinese people who are too absorbed in the minor ups and downs of their lives, and who can blame them? And yet his life meant something powerful and transformative to a realm of Chinese intellectuals, who have found great relevance for his ideas in their time. As Michael Anti, a blogger and activist, put it, Havel’s effect in China was less an exhortation than a habit of mind. “I try to live in the truth and as a normal person,” Anti told Radio Free Asia. “Only when you lead a normal life can your confrontation against the regime last longer.”
Original Article
Source: New Yorker
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