Category: .

It’s a truism about certain people that they would have been ‘the greatest leader we never had’. I can’t think of any examples off the top of my head, but then I’d probably disagree with most of them anyway. It’s obvious to most people who don’t think that evolution is ‘the stupidest thing I ever heard’ that Al Gore would have been a preferable President to George W. Bush, but that’s partly because more people voted for him. In British terms, it’s clear to me that instead of that succession of toddlers, nobodies and ghouls who have fronted the Conservative Party in the last few years, Michael Portillo would make a much more charismatic and convincing leader, but for obvious reasons I’m not about to write to the Daily Mail and tell them so – besides which, something tells me that I wouldn’t get much of a hearing. I just hope that his sexual orientation causes him just as much pleasure and relief as it causes us.

It’s unlikely that if Michael Portillo had ever met Zhao Ziyang that they would have found they had very much in common. As far as I know, the reason for Zhao no longer being the Chinese leader by June 1989 had nothing to do with being gay, although of course he might have been, in which case spending the last fifteen or so years of his life under house arrest can’t have done wonders for his sex life. I don’t know what Zhao’s English was like, and I’d be very surprised if Michael Portillo could communicate in Chinese; Zhao was also a dedicated leading member of the Communist Party. Why, then, did he spend the last fifteen years of his life under lock and key? According to Wikipedia:

Zhao was a solid believer in the party, but he defined socialism much differently than party conservatives. Zhao called political reform “the biggest test facing socialism.” He believed economic progress was inextricably linked to democratisation. As early as 1986, Zhao became the first high-ranking Chinese leader to call for change, by offering a choice of election candidates from the village level all the way up to membership in the Central Committee.

He was known in the west for two things, one of which was when in May 1989 he went down to Tiananmen Square to talk to the students, listen to their demands and try to persuade them to leave peacefully. During the subsequent crackdown he was at first sidetracked and then purged, disappearing suddenly and completely from public life. Think of it as kidnapping, if you like. The other major event was in February this year, when his death sparked panic in the Chinese authorities. They tried to control every aspect of his funeral and of every word of the coverage of his death in the media, and only just a few weeks ago arrested a Strait Times journalist who was trying to get his hands on a copy of his memoirs.

What is it about his memoirs and his memory that the Government is so nervous about? A recent article shed some light on the issue:

Crackdown on China’s little-read book
3 June 2005

A SECRET manuscript Beijing is desperately trying to stop from being published outlines purged leader Zhao Ziyang’s plea for China to abandon one-party rule and follow the path of democracy.

It also airs Mr Zhao’s opinion the government blundered in its crackdown on the 1989 democracy protests that led to hundreds, if not thousands, of citizens being killed, the author says.

The sensitive manuscript is now at the centre of the arrest of Hong Kong-based Singapore Straits Times reporter Ching Cheong. He was detained while trying to obtain a copy of the manuscript that has yet to make its way out of mainland China. China on Tuesday said Mr Ching was arrested for spying and had confessed.

Its authorities have pressured author Zong Fengming, an old friend of Mr Zhao’s, not to publish the book.
The 85-year-old, who compiled the manuscript from conversations he had with Mr Zhao while he was under house arrest, said what makes it so threatening to Beijing is the late Mr Zhao’s belief China must have democracy in order to prosper, and economic reforms are simply not enough.

“He said China’s development must be on the path of democracy and rule of law. If not, China will be a corrupt society,” Mr Zong said.

Reporting of Zhao’s death was limited to a terse few paragraphs in the state-controlled media as part of an official campaign to erase his memory.

Mr Zong believes the government fears if a book about Mr Zhao’s views is published overseas and copies find their way to China, it could have a detrimental effect on the communist regime, making Mr Zhao a hero even in death.

Mr Zhao’s views run contrary to the path China’s leaders are taking. The Chinese leadership is intent on maintaining one-party rule and quashing dissent or freedom of expression.

It seems to me that if, following the death of Hu Yaobang, there was a candidate for China’s Gorbachev it was Zhao. Maybe if he had stepped into that hypothetical power vacuum in mid-1989, there would have been no crackdown, no unleashing of all the forces of political repression, no increase in political indoctrination for the young, no attempt to rehabilitate that monster Chairman Mao, and maybe the Chinese would have been allowed to freely use the internet to develop deeper and more open relationships with the rest of the world. Maybe China would have seen the flowering of a free press, and maybe there would have been some form of development of alternative political parties and perhaps even multi-party elections. Of course it is also possible that a China suddenly impatient for change would have pushed him aside in favour of an outsider, someone more radical and not connected with the Party machine.

Obviously there is a possibility that the hardliners would have fought back and tried to regain power. It happened in 1991 with Gorbachev. But maybe, just like in 1991, the world would have seen this old guard for what they really were – old men whose time had passed, isolated and powerless, railing against a world that had left them behind.

Although I am by nature a lazy thinker, I do try and bear in mind when thinking about things like the events of 1989 that oversimplistic analysis will lead me straight to the wrong conclusions. Furthermore, comparisons, says the old adage, are odious, especially, as the Chinese Government is always so keen to point out, when they concern China and the West. I am also no expert on recent Chinese history. There are almost certainly people reading this who know a thousand times more about these things than I do, and I would be grateful if they would step in and correct me if I get too carried away.

China and Eastern Europe are a long way away from one another, and the prevailing circumstances in 1989 were different in all sorts of ways. This is why the Chinese Communist Party survived not just the turn of the decade but also into the new millennium, while the Communist Parties of Eastern Europe simply disappeared. Here I want to concentrate on those different circumstances:

1. The economy. Although China was still in the process of recovering from complete devastation, the economy was growing, and on the whole people were enjoying an improving standard of living. There were problems with inflation, huge disparities of wealth and low wages throughout the country, but the country was not on its last legs like the countries of the soon-to-be-former Eastern Bloc.

2. The political situation. I think generally people were happy that their leaders were heading in the right direction, albeit perhaps too slowly. People were enjoying more freedom than they had experienced within living memory, given that most of the adult population had experienced at least part of the Cultural Revolution.

As far as I can see, the demonstrations in 1987 and 1989 expressed a growing political confidence which derived from ten years of liberalisation. People were making demands of the system – greater freedom of speech, an end to corruption, better and more responsible government – but I don’t think they wanted to see an end to Party rule. The demonstrations were quite different from the ones we don’t see reported in the state media today, which tend to be localised reactions to individual cases of corruption and injustice. This is one of the things that I’m completely happy to admit being mistaken about.

3. Lack of political leadership. Jung Chang refers in her new book to the Cultural Revolution as the ‘Great Purge’. Successive generations of potential dissidents had been massacred, driven to suicide, locked away or forced to leave the country. The person who was perhaps China’s best hope of a Václav Havel, Wei Jingsheng, was part of the Beijing Wall group of dissidents and was locked up in 1979 for 14 years. There was, therefore, no previous generation of rebels from whose mistakes the protestors could learn.

Students groups obviously played a role in the building of the demonstrations, but they certainly didn’t constitute a ‘government-in-waiting’.

The leader who most resembled a Chinese Gorbachev, Hu Yaobang, had been sacked by Deng Xiaoping in 1987 for being too liberal, and it was his death two years later that was the initial pretext for the build-up of protestors around the square in April 1989. They were of course other reformists high up in the party, but it seems that around this time they did not have the upper hand.

4. Lack of foreign media influence. The state media was very tightly controlled, and the only alternative, the broadcasts of the BBC and other media news organisations, could only be listened to by the tiny proportion of the population who could understand English.

These were I think some of the most important differences between the situation in China and in the countries of Eastern Europe in 1989. However, this set of circumstances did not have to inevitably lead to the events that followed – the Massacre and the unleashing of political repression. It might be interesting, just now we’re here, to speculate about how, given the circumstances above, things might have turned out differently.

Let’s just say that, instead of giving the order to physically clear the square at all costs, the leadership had dithered. Maybe nobody wanted to be responsible for taking such a momentous decision. Or maybe, having received the order to attack, the army chiefs had not felt comfortable with the situation, and refused to do so. Or even if, and this is probably stretching it quite a bit, the soldiers of the 27th Army had refused to open fire. The leadership would have faced a crisis, and maybe, sensing that the Government didn’t know what to do, the protests would have kept on growing throughout the country. The eyes of the world would have been focussed on Beijing, through the lenses of the new global 24-hour news gathering organisations. Protests were growing throughout Eastern Europe too; could the line of dominos reach China? Maybe heads would have rolled in Beijing, people resigning and being forced to resign, nobody sure what to do in this unique situation, nobody wanting to be remembered as the leader who stood in Beijing 40 years on and told the growing mass of Chinese people to sit down again. Maybe the drama would have unfolded with a gradual hollowing-out of the centre of power as the leadership tossed the poisoned chalice of leadership back and forth.

In many accounts written by people who defend the use of force to clear the square, one factor is all important. With the approach of that 40 year anniversary, a special guest was expected, and the Chinese could not be seen to lose face in such a dramatic fashion. Mikhail Gorbachev had recently stood with the East German leadership at their 40th anniversary parade. He had told them what they least wanted to hear, that ‘die Wende’ had passed:

Mikhail Gorbachev stood next to Honecker, but he looked uncomfortable among the much older Germans. He had come to tell them it was over, to convince the leadership to adopt his reformist policies. He had spoken openly about the danger of not ‘responding to reality’. He pointedly told the Politbüro that ‘life punishes those who come too late’. Honecker and Mielke ignored him, just as they ignored the crowds when they chanted, ‘Gorby, help us! Gorby, help us!’

If Gorbachev had arrived in Beijing in the midst of this crisis armed with the same advice, how would he have been received? Perhaps the hardliners like Li Peng would have chosen to ignore him, in the same way that Honecker and Mielke chose to take no notice. But maybe at this stage he wouldn’t have been dealing with the hardliners. Would there have been anyone among the leadership of the Communist Party who might have been prepared to listen, who might have seen a potential way out of the deadlock? Another Chinese Gorbachev, if you like?

Obviously it’s a mistake to see the post-war pre-1989 Eastern European countries as one huge homogenous monolith governed by Moscow, but each of the Eastern Bloc states did either collapse or rapidly wither away during the historically brief period from 1989 onwards. The events in each country had certain basic things in common.

1. The economies were in tatters. Call it soviet-style communism, state capitalism or whatever you like, but by the late 1980s it had ruined the economic life of the countries.

2. The Communist Party leadership was ideologically bankrupt. They could no longer claim to be marching towards freedom, equality and prosperity for all. The 40 years of spying on each other and political repression was enough proof for the citizens that they were not really marching in any direction at all.

3. People could see and hear for themselves, on foreign TV stations and on radio drifting in from abroad, that things in neither the west nor their own countries were as the leaders told them they were. Furthermore, they could keep up to date with events in Russia and in their comrade nations, and know that changes were taking place and that their own leaders were starting to panic.

4. In most countries, there was an organised opposition. It may have been in prison or in exile, but it existed and it was clear that its ambition was to take power away from the Party.

5. In a lot of countries, the organised oppostion was led by a very clear figurehead. Probably ten years before, neither the leader of Solidarity Lech Walesa nor the intellectual dissident Vaclav Havel would have imagined that they would one day become President. But as events moved on it must have become clear that the people flooding into the streets and squares saw them as leaders. Hence it is very easy to look back now and see them as Presidents-in-Waiting.

6. According to one account I once heard (repeated here), the KGB had a decisive influence on events. They had allegedly decided to oversee the removal from power of the first generation of Eastern Bloc leaders, and settled on street demonstrations as a means of achieving this. Things subsequently got out of hand – I’d imagine that Vladimir Putin was not well pleased.

Then there was the domino effect, and the most significant factor here must have been the USSR itself. Change in Russia, as we all know, was not led from below but from above. Mikhail Gorbachev was, like De Klerk in apartheid South Africa, an insider who wanted to essentially preserve the system, but realised that it would have to change if it was to survive:

The Party, which I had joined, itself badly needed to be reformed and reoriented toward democracy. And through this, the country could begin to gain some freedom. That came later, but it all started with the desire to do something and show initiative. That was what led many good people to join the Komsomol (Communist Youth League) and the Party.

At a certain point, though, the momentum for fundamental change had built up to such an extent that ‘die Wende’ was reached. There was no turning back.

So when in August 1991 some Communist Party hardliners briefly kidnapped Gorbachev in an abortive coup attempt, the world saw them for what they really were: desperate old men whose time had passed. Not only were they no longer at the wheel of the ship of state – they had been thrown overboard.

Incidentally, the fact that the ex-head of the KGB is firmly entrenched as leader of the Great Bear tells us a lot, I think, about the difference between overthrowing a totalitarian state through popular uprising, and waiting on the leadership to quietly reform it and their own positions, powers and privileges out of existence.

Tags: china politics, china, tiananmen square massacre, da shan

• The Da Shan Dynasty part 3: Stasiland

  June 17, 2005, 07:58

  

  It always used to be really good fun in left-wing circles to sit around speculating about who, come the revolution, should be among the first to be put up against the wall and shot. The people I talked about yesterday would appear at first glance to make ideal candidates, but I think it’s generally better to go straight for the top guys, even if their power is only symbolic. The Bolsheviks knew it was essential to get their hands on the Romanovs in order to make their revolution complete, and I’m sure dictators and despots all over the world are haunted by the fate of Ceucescu in Romania – they did actually put him up against the wall and shoot him, and his wife, and furthermore they showed it on TV, which must have come as a bit of a shock to Gil-Scot Heron.

  Other former Eastern Bloc leaders weren’t quite so unfortunate. East German President Erich Honecker was released from prison with cancer in 1992, and subsequently died in Chile two years later. Erich Mielke, the head of the Stasi, the hated GDR secret service, was also released from prison on the grounds of ill-health, and still lives quietly in Berlin.

  The Stasi was allegedly even more fearsome than the KGB. In Stasiland – Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall, the Australian writer Anna Funder has this to say:

  The Stasi was the internal army by which the government kept control. Its job was to know everything about everyone, using any means it chose. It knew who your visitors were, it knew whom you telephoned, and it knew if your wife slept around. It was a bureaucracy metastasised through East German society: overt or covert, there was someone reporting to the Stasi on their fellows and friends in every school, every factory, every apartment block, every pub. Obsessed with detail, the Stasi entirely failed to predict the end of Communism, and with it the end of the country. Between 1989 and 1990 it was turned inside out: Stalinist spy unit one day, museum the next. In its forty years, ‘the Firm’ generated the equivalent of all records in German history since the middle ages. Laid out upright and end to end, the files the Stasi kept on their countrymen and women would form a line 180 kilometres long.

  No surprise then, that when the regime’s days were up in 1989, it was the Stasi offices that were targeted by the demonstrators all over the country, beginning in Leipzig, the second biggest city:

  In early October, Leipzig was at a flashpoint. Petrol-station attendants were refusing to refill police vehicles; the children of servicemen were being barred from crèches. Those who worked in the centre of town near the Nikolaikirche were sent home early. Hospitals called for more blood. People made their wills and said things they wanted their children to remember, before going out to demonstrations. There were rumours of tanks and helicopters and water cannon coming, but then so were the postcards from friends who had already reached the west. The people went on to the streets.

  Honecker ordered that the ‘counter-revolutionaries’ in Leipzig were to be ‘nipped in the bud’. ‘Nothing’, he said, ‘can hinder the progress of socialism.’ On 8 October Mielke began to activate the plans for ‘Day X’, sending out orders to the local Stasi branches to open their envelopes (containing the lists of the people in their area to be arrested). But things were already too far gone. Instead of incarcerating the people, the Stasi, hiding in their buildings, locked themselves up. In the regional offices they had 60,000 pistols, more than 30,000 machine guns, hand grenades, sharpshooter’s rifles, anti-tank guns, and tear gas. Fears of lynching ran high. Leipzig police were shown photographs of a Chinese policeman immolated by the mob in Tiananmen Square and told, ‘It’s you or them.’ But they were also ordered not to shoot or use violence unless it was used against them.

  On 7 October 1989 the GDR celebrated its forty years of existence with lavish parades in Berlin. There was a sea of red flags, a torchlight procession, and tanks. The old men on the podium wore light-grey suits studded with medals. Mikhail Gorbachev stood next to Honecker, but he looked uncomfortable among the much older Germans. He had come to tell them it was over, to convince the leadership to adopt his reformist policies. He had spoken openly about the danger of not ‘responding to reality’. He pointedly told the Politbüro that ‘life punishes those who come too late’. Honecker and Mielke ignored him, just as they ignored the crowds when they chanted, ‘Gorby, help us! Gorby, help us!’

  In Leipzig the extraordinary courage of the people didn’t waver, and it didn’t break out into anything else. On 9 October 70,000 protestors went out in the dark, in big coats and carrying candles. They stood outside the local Stasi headquarters with their demands. ‘Reveal the Stasi informers!’ ‘We are not Rowdies – We are the people!’ and the constant, constant call of ‘No Violence!’ From that night on the demonstrations grew, footage of them was smuggled to the west and Leipzig came to be known as ‘the City of Heroes’.

  There were now protests outside Stasi offices all over the country. But even in the smallest towns, the Stasi men in them continued their meticulous work, faithfully sending back to Berlin reports of the demands of the crowds outside: ‘Stasi to the factories’ (heard at Zeulenroda), ‘We earn your money!’ (from Schmalkalden) and the prescient ‘Your days are numbered!’ (Bad Salzungen). In Leipzig the demonstrators had started to shout, ‘Occupy the Stasi Building Now!’ and ‘We’re staying here!’.

  In summer 2003 I went to the Stasi headquarters in Berlin, which is now the Stasi museum. A lot of the offices have been preserved exactly as they were on the last ever working day – the calenders on the wall all display a date some day early in 1990. Despite the relatively short period of time that has passed, it’s a very eerie place. I have never been to Pompei, but I’d imagine that it feels not too dissimilar. Within a very short few months following what the Germans call ‘die Wende’, the turning point at which it was clear that the regime was finished, the entire state security system was dismantled and everybody went home and tried to pretend that none of it had ever existed. The most striking parts of the exhibition for me, in fact, weren’t the empty offices or the displays of the astonishing range of spying equipment they used, but the posters advertising youth events, the front pages of newspapers, the clips from TV shows and the displays of the products that (sometimes) filled the shelves of East German supermarkets. These were the mundane events and items of everyday life, and after 1989 they were gone. It was as if an earthquake had suddenly swept away an entire civilisation.

  The suddenness of the changes that took place is captured in the film Goodbye, Lenin!, from 2002. It is a retelling of the story of Rip Van Winkle – on the eve of the revolution, the mother of the main character collapses into a coma, and when she wakes up several weeks later the doctor warns her family that the slightest shock could kill her. Her family go to all sorts of lengths to protect her from the truth, searching all over town for fast-disappearing products from the fast-disappearing GDR, and even filming pretend news broadcasts showing Westerners flooding over the border into East Germany in search of the good life.

  The film was hugely popular in Germany, particularly in the still much poorer east, where over the last few years there has been a popular wave of ‘Ostalgie’, or nostalgia for all those everyday items and events that disappeared so suddenly – the Trabants, the music, the films, and the TV personalities and programmes which occupied the screen every night throughout the GDR years, and then just vanished.

  It’s a bittersweet nostalgia of course – very, very few people would want to go back. In the book Anna Funder talks to a friend about her memories of East German TV:

  ‘The school was strict,’ she says. ‘There were things about it that were seriously traumatic, such as what we used to call ‘TV-torture”.

  By the 1980s most people in East Germany watched western television, especially the news bulletins. No-one watched the GDR news, despite the fact that it screened daily on both state-run television stations, in a long and a short version. Julia smiles. ‘At the school every night without fail we were sat down and made to watch ‘Aktuelle Kamera’ in the long version. It was hell.’

  The news program was so long because when Erich Honecker was mentioned, he was announced with every single one of his titular functions. Julia sits up straight with her hands on the table and puts on a media voice. In the flickering light and with her flickering hair she is a newsreader from outer space, coming through static: ‘Comrade Erich Honecker, Secretary-General of the Socialist Unity Party of the German Democratic Republic, First Secretary of the Central Comittee, Chairman of the State Council and of the National Defence Council, leader of the Fighing Groups bladibla-‘

  We laugh and she pushes back onto two legs of the chair. She is a relaxed and confident mimic. ‘And then the actual news item that came after all that would be null!’ She straightens up again. ‘ – today visited the steelworks such and such and spoke with the workers about the 1984 Plan targets which they have over-over-over-achieved by so and so per cent’ or, ‘today opened the umpteenth apartment built in the new district of Marzhan’ or, ‘congratulated the collective farm of Hicksville this morning for their extraordinary harvest results, an increase of so-and-so-many-fold on previous years.’

  We are laughing and laughing under the strobing light. ‘And the thing about it was,’ she slaps the table with her fine white hand, ‘it never told us anything that happened in the world!’ She shakes her head at the wordiness of no-news.

  Worse though than the no-news, was the anti-news. The students also had to watch ‘Der Schwarze Kanal’ (The Black Channel), with Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler. I have heard about this man, the human antidote to the pernicious influence of western television. ‘At home,’ Julia says, ‘everyone called him ‘Karl-Eduard von Schni-‘ because that was how long it took before one of us could jump up and change the channel.’

  Von Schnitzler’s job was to show extracts from western television broadcast into the GDR – anything from news items to game shows to ‘Dallas’ – and rip it to shreds. ‘That man radiated so much nastiness it just wasn’t credible. You’d come away feeling sullied, as if you’d spent half an hour atrociously badmouthing someone.’ Julia crosses her arms.’I mean you might have your doubts about the west – I sure did – but we also felt that our own country was feeding us lies and that our futures depended on seeming to agree with it all.’

  In the book the author tracks down and interviews both the victims of the Stasi and a lot of the people who worked for it, attempting to trace the real story of the GDR through the stories of ordinary men and women, since she contends that a veil of embarrased silence descended over the whole subject when Germany was united in 1990. And one of the people she manages to track down is the presenter of ‘Die Schwarze Kanal’, Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler.

  It’s a fascinating and often hilarious conversation, and I think it’s worth posting most of it here because it tells us a lot about the mentality about the people at the top of secretive totalitarian regimes, as well as showing how an insider rationalises the failure of a soviet-based centralised planned economic and social system. I’m not going to post the whole chapter, partly because it’s too long, partly because I don’t want to get told to take it down, but mainly because I hate typing and the space bar onmy keyboard doesn’talways work properly.

  By the way, if anyone is reading this looking for articles on China and wondering what the point of all this is, I can assure you that there is one, I’m just making my way towards it very slowly. Here goes:

  ‘The Black Channel’ aired until the very end in October 1989. ‘How did you start it? Was it your idea or were you given the task?’

  ‘It was my idea,’ he says. ‘I once saw the western politicians on the television news sprouting filthy lies about the GDR and before the program was even over I had prepared a script for broadcast! I socked it right back to them. Then the question was: how often? I insisted on once a week. Today-‘ – he leans towards me, furious – ‘Today I could make one every…single…day!’ This is a tantrum designed to frighten me. ‘That’s how disgusting this, this shitbox television is!’ He points with his stick at the set in the room.

  All right, I think, we’ll go in his direction. ‘What angers you most about the television today?’

  ‘Nothing ‘angers’ me!’ he says. He is incandescent with rage. Out of the corner of my eye I see Frau von Schnitzler raise her head.’That’s why I’m a Communist! So nothing can anger me!’ Then suddenly he’s quiet again. ‘What makes me sorry,’ he says in a withering tone, ‘is what is dished up today on that piece-of-filth television. For instance that, that idiotic program -whatsit called?’ He addresses no-one in particular, but a murmur comes from across the room.

  He ignores it. ‘They are all idiots, aren’t they?’ he says to me. ‘Marta, do you have to grimace like that?’ Then, as if to himself, ‘What was the name of that program? B-Block’?

  ‘B-Block?’

  ‘That one where they locked up ten people -‘

  ‘Ah yes,’ his wife says loudly, ‘now I know what you’re talking about. ‘Big Brozer’.’

  ‘Yes,’ he says, ”Big Brozer’.’

  He is looking at me. ‘I think that television tyrant of yours was involved in that -‘

  ‘She’s Australian,’ Frau von Schnitzler corrects him, ‘not American.’

  ‘I know what I’m saying,’ he says.

  ‘Murdoch,’ I say. ‘Yes, he was Australian but now he’s American.’

  ‘Who cares?’ von Schnitzler counters airily. ‘He’s a global imperialist.’

  I open my notebook. I want to quote him back to himself. I am apprehensive. ‘Can I read you something?’ I ask. ‘In November 1965 two easterners tried to get over the border, and one of them was shot to death. And at Christmas time that year you made a program -‘

  ‘Escapes were always tried on at Christmas time,’ he says. He uses the word ‘insziniert’ which means ‘staged’, as though escapes were orchestrated deliberately to make the regime look bad.

  He is so offhand about it, I feel my apprehension being replaced with something more businesslike. ‘I want to read you this text from your program, and ask you if you still agree with it.’ I read from my transcription:

  The politics of ‘freeing those in the Eastern Bloc’ is code for liquidating the GDR, and that means civil war, world war, nuclear war, that means ripping apart families, atomic Armageddon – that is inhumanity! Against that we have founded a state! Against that we have erected a border with strict control measures to stop what went on during the thirteen years that is was left open and abused – that is humane! That is a service to humanity!’

  When I finish, he’s staring at me, chin up. ‘And your question, young lady?’

  ‘My question is whether today you are of the same view about about the Wall as something humane, and the killings at the border an act of peace?’

  He raises his free arm, inhales and screams ‘More! Than! Ever!’ He brings his fist down.

  I’m startled for an instant. Then I’m concerned that Frau von Schnitzler will stop the interview. ‘You considered it necessary?’ I ask quickly.

  ‘I did not ‘consider’ it necessary. It was absolutely necessary! It was an historical necessity. It was the most useful construction in all of German history! In European history!’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it prevented imperialism from contaminating the east. It walled it in.’

  The only people walled-in were his own. It is as if he has followed my thinking.

  ‘Moreover people in the GDR were not ‘walled-in’! They could go to Hungary, they could go to Poland.They just couldn’t go to NATO countries. Because, naturally, you don’t travel around in enemy territory. It’s as simple as that.’

  This is so mad that I can’t think of an answer immediately. But in the next breath he contradicts himself. It seemsto be his modus operandi to have a bet each way.

  ‘I do think, though, that in the last few years they should have opened it up earlier,’ he says. Then, almost ruefully, ‘The people would have come back again.’ I wonder if he can truly believe this. The eastern states are still, seven years on, losing people. He shifts in his seat. ‘Most of them, most of them would have.’

  Von Schnitzler is one of the cadre whose ideas were moulded in the 1920s by the battle against the gross free market injustices of the Weimar Republic and then the outrages of fascism, and who went on to see the birth and then the death of the nation built on those ideas.He is a true believer and for him my questions only serve to demonstrate a sorry lack of faith.

  ‘You lived through the whole GDR, from beginning to end -‘

  ‘So I did, so I did.’

  ‘Is there anything in your opinion that could have been done better, or differently?’

  ‘Oh I’m sure that there are things that could have been done differently or better, but that is no longer the question to examine.’

  ‘I think it is,’ I say, although something stirs uncomfortably in the back of my mind. ‘There was a serious attempt to build a socialist state, and we should examine why, at the end, that state no longer exists. It’s important.’ The something reveals itself to be the memory of the westerners I’ve met also having so little interest in the GDR.

  ‘I noticed relatively early,’ he says, ‘that we would not be able to survive economically. And when we started to get tied up in this ridiculous GDR success propaganda – exaggerated harvest results and production levels and so on – I withdrew from that altogether and confined myself to my specialised area: the work against imperialism. Exclusively. And for that reason today I am so be-lov-ed,’ he says, heavy with sarcasm.

  ‘What do you mean ‘beloved’ – by whom?’ I ask.

  ‘That’s why I’m so beloved by all those who think imperialistically and act imperialistically and bring up their children imperialistically!’ Each time he says ‘imperialistically’ he thrusts his fist on the stick forward towards me. This man, who could turn inhumanity into humanity, faces now perhaps his greatest challenge: to turn the fact that he is hated into the fact that he is, in spite of all available evidence, right.

  ‘Your program was based on exposing the lies of the western media. When you noticed the false success propaganda at home, didn’t you feel a responsibilty to do the same?’

  ‘No. I focused in my program quite deliberately and exclusively on anti-imperialism, not on GDR propaganda.’

  ‘But you understand my question., Herr von Schnitzler. The success propaganda in the GDR was also lies -‘

  ‘It did distance the people from us, because it was in such stark contrast to the reality.’ He can switch from one view to another with frightening ease. I think it is a sign of being so accustomed to such power that the truth does not matter bacause you cannot be contradicted.

  ‘Why didn’t you comment then on these lies?’

  ‘I wouldn’t even consider it!’ He frowns and pulls his neck in like a turtle in digust. ‘I’m not about to criticise my own republic!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘The critique of imperialism is quite enough!’

  ‘I criticise my own country -‘ I say

  He doesn’t miss a beat. ‘You’ve got a lot more reason to.’

  There’s nothing for it but to laugh. ‘That may be,’ I say.

  We switch to the present. He starts to talk about ‘my very good friend Erich Mielke’.

  ‘Did he have a file on you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You haven’t applied to have a look at it?’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘Out of curiousity.’

  ‘My curiousity is directed solely towards the machinations of imperialism and how they can be countered.’

  Checkmate. So I start another question. ‘The internal observation of the GDR population, with the apparatus of official and unofficial collaborators -‘

  He cuts me off. ‘You can throw 90 per cent of what you know about that out.’ He’s angry again. ‘It’s all lies. Mind you, in my opinion even 10 per cent of what they’re saying would have been too much.’

  ‘Are you saying that there was only 10 per cent of the number claimed of Stasi employees assigned to work on the East German population?’

  ‘Yes. It’s all been exaggerated immeasurably. In any case I am exceptionally sceptical about numbers.’

  He changes tack, back to his friend Mielke.’The Wall was necessary to defend a threatened nation. And there was Erich Mielke at the top, a living example of the most humane human being.’

  I have never heard Mielke referred to in this way. He was too fierce and feared to be referred to with anything like affection. I look away to the shelves on the wall close behind him. They are full of books and small objects of memory, a row of pill bottles and and a cheap tape deck. The words ‘the most humane human being’ hang in the air. He starts to cough, hacking and deep, into a handkerchief, then raises a pink drink to his lips.

  ‘And how are you finding it now after 1989, now that you are living in capitalism, or, as you say, in imperialism? Is it what you expected,’ I hold his gaze, ‘or is it not as bad as you thought?’

  ‘I live,’ he says fiercely, ‘among the enemy. And not for the first time in my life. I lived among the enemy during the Nazi time as well.’ He works himself into another little fury. I see Marta watching him, and I wonder if the medicine is to deal with this, or with its effects. ‘What I can tell you,’ he says, ‘is that as long as the GDR existed no swine in Bonn would have dared start a war!’ He gasps for breath. His hand has formed a fist, but he keeps it in his lap. ‘The GDR would have prevernted that by its very existence!’ He means that so long as the Iron Curtain was up, the NATO countries would not have bombed the former Yugoslavia for fear the Russians would have retaliated on behalf of the Serbs.

  He’s puffing and cross and, I think, finally stuck. He looks at me and I can see the tiny red veins filigreed across his eyeballs. ‘Full Stop!’ he screams. ‘This ….conversation….is….now….over!’

It always used to be really good fun in left-wing circles to sit around speculating about who, come the revolution, should be among the first to be put up against the wall and shot. The people I talked about yesterday would appear at first glance to make ideal candidates, but I think it’s generally better to go straight for the top guys, even if their power is only symbolic. The Bolsheviks knew it was essential to get their hands on the Romanovs in order to make their revolution complete, and I’m sure dictators and despots all over the world are haunted by the fate of Ceucescu in Romania – they did actually put him up against the wall and shoot him, and his wife, and furthermore they showed it on TV, which must have come as a bit of a shock to Gil-Scot Heron.

Other former Eastern Bloc leaders weren’t quite so unfortunate. East German President Erich Honecker was released from prison with cancer in 1992, and subsequently died in Chile two years later. Erich Mielke, the head of the Stasi, the hated GDR secret service, was also released from prison on the grounds of ill-health, and still lives quietly in Berlin.

The Stasi was allegedly even more fearsome than the KGB. In Stasiland – Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall, the Australian writer Anna Funder has this to say:

The Stasi was the internal army by which the government kept control. Its job was to know everything about everyone, using any means it chose. It knew who your visitors were, it knew whom you telephoned, and it knew if your wife slept around. It was a bureaucracy metastasised through East German society: overt or covert, there was someone reporting to the Stasi on their fellows and friends in every school, every factory, every apartment block, every pub. Obsessed with detail, the Stasi entirely failed to predict the end of Communism, and with it the end of the country. Between 1989 and 1990 it was turned inside out: Stalinist spy unit one day, museum the next. In its forty years, ‘the Firm’ generated the equivalent of all records in German history since the middle ages. Laid out upright and end to end, the files the Stasi kept on their countrymen and women would form a line 180 kilometres long.

No surprise then, that when the regime’s days were up in 1989, it was the Stasi offices that were targeted by the demonstrators all over the country, beginning in Leipzig, the second biggest city:

In early October, Leipzig was at a flashpoint. Petrol-station attendants were refusing to refill police vehicles; the children of servicemen were being barred from crèches. Those who worked in the centre of town near the Nikolaikirche were sent home early. Hospitals called for more blood. People made their wills and said things they wanted their children to remember, before going out to demonstrations. There were rumours of tanks and helicopters and water cannon coming, but then so were the postcards from friends who had already reached the west. The people went on to the streets.

Honecker ordered that the ‘counter-revolutionaries’ in Leipzig were to be ‘nipped in the bud’. ‘Nothing’, he said, ‘can hinder the progress of socialism.’ On 8 October Mielke began to activate the plans for ‘Day X’, sending out orders to the local Stasi branches to open their envelopes (containing the lists of the people in their area to be arrested). But things were already too far gone. Instead of incarcerating the people, the Stasi, hiding in their buildings, locked themselves up. In the regional offices they had 60,000 pistols, more than 30,000 machine guns, hand grenades, sharpshooter’s rifles, anti-tank guns, and tear gas. Fears of lynching ran high. Leipzig police were shown photographs of a Chinese policeman immolated by the mob in Tiananmen Square and told, ‘It’s you or them.’ But they were also ordered not to shoot or use violence unless it was used against them.

On 7 October 1989 the GDR celebrated its forty years of existence with lavish parades in Berlin. There was a sea of red flags, a torchlight procession, and tanks. The old men on the podium wore light-grey suits studded with medals. Mikhail Gorbachev stood next to Honecker, but he looked uncomfortable among the much older Germans. He had come to tell them it was over, to convince the leadership to adopt his reformist policies. He had spoken openly about the danger of not ‘responding to reality’. He pointedly told the Politbüro that ‘life punishes those who come too late’. Honecker and Mielke ignored him, just as they ignored the crowds when they chanted, ‘Gorby, help us! Gorby, help us!’

In Leipzig the extraordinary courage of the people didn’t waver, and it didn’t break out into anything else. On 9 October 70,000 protestors went out in the dark, in big coats and carrying candles. They stood outside the local Stasi headquarters with their demands. ‘Reveal the Stasi informers!’ ‘We are not Rowdies – We are the people!’ and the constant, constant call of ‘No Violence!’ From that night on the demonstrations grew, footage of them was smuggled to the west and Leipzig came to be known as ‘the City of Heroes’.

There were now protests outside Stasi offices all over the country. But even in the smallest towns, the Stasi men in them continued their meticulous work, faithfully sending back to Berlin reports of the demands of the crowds outside: ‘Stasi to the factories’ (heard at Zeulenroda), ‘We earn your money!’ (from Schmalkalden) and the prescient ‘Your days are numbered!’ (Bad Salzungen). In Leipzig the demonstrators had started to shout, ‘Occupy the Stasi Building Now!’ and ‘We’re staying here!’.

In summer 2003 I went to the Stasi headquarters in Berlin, which is now the Stasi museum. A lot of the offices have been preserved exactly as they were on the last ever working day – the calenders on the wall all display a date some day early in 1990. Despite the relatively short period of time that has passed, it’s a very eerie place. I have never been to Pompei, but I’d imagine that it feels not too dissimilar. Within a very short few months following what the Germans call ‘die Wende’, the turning point at which it was clear that the regime was finished, the entire state security system was dismantled and everybody went home and tried to pretend that none of it had ever existed. The most striking parts of the exhibition for me, in fact, weren’t the empty offices or the displays of the astonishing range of spying equipment they used, but the posters advertising youth events, the front pages of newspapers, the clips from TV shows and the displays of the products that (sometimes) filled the shelves of East German supermarkets. These were the mundane events and items of everyday life, and after 1989 they were gone. It was as if an earthquake had suddenly swept away an entire civilisation.

The suddenness of the changes that took place is captured in the film Goodbye, Lenin!, from 2002. It is a retelling of the story of Rip Van Winkle – on the eve of the revolution, the mother of the main character collapses into a coma, and when she wakes up several weeks later the doctor warns her family that the slightest shock could kill her. Her family go to all sorts of lengths to protect her from the truth, searching all over town for fast-disappearing products from the fast-disappearing GDR, and even filming pretend news broadcasts showing Westerners flooding over the border into East Germany in search of the good life.

The film was hugely popular in Germany, particularly in the still much poorer east, where over the last few years there has been a popular wave of ‘Ostalgie’, or nostalgia for all those everyday items and events that disappeared so suddenly – the Trabants, the music, the films, and the TV personalities and programmes which occupied the screen every night throughout the GDR years, and then just vanished.

It’s a bittersweet nostalgia of course – very, very few people would want to go back. In the book Anna Funder talks to a friend about her memories of East German TV:

‘The school was strict,’ she says. ‘There were things about it that were seriously traumatic, such as what we used to call ‘TV-torture”.

By the 1980s most people in East Germany watched western television, especially the news bulletins. No-one watched the GDR news, despite the fact that it screened daily on both state-run television stations, in a long and a short version. Julia smiles. ‘At the school every night without fail we were sat down and made to watch ‘Aktuelle Kamera’ in the long version. It was hell.’

The news program was so long because when Erich Honecker was mentioned, he was announced with every single one of his titular functions. Julia sits up straight with her hands on the table and puts on a media voice. In the flickering light and with her flickering hair she is a newsreader from outer space, coming through static: ‘Comrade Erich Honecker, Secretary-General of the Socialist Unity Party of the German Democratic Republic, First Secretary of the Central Comittee, Chairman of the State Council and of the National Defence Council, leader of the Fighing Groups bladibla-‘

We laugh and she pushes back onto two legs of the chair. She is a relaxed and confident mimic. ‘And then the actual news item that came after all that would be null!’ She straightens up again. ‘ – today visited the steelworks such and such and spoke with the workers about the 1984 Plan targets which they have over-over-over-achieved by so and so per cent’ or, ‘today opened the umpteenth apartment built in the new district of Marzhan’ or, ‘congratulated the collective farm of Hicksville this morning for their extraordinary harvest results, an increase of so-and-so-many-fold on previous years.’

We are laughing and laughing under the strobing light. ‘And the thing about it was,’ she slaps the table with her fine white hand, ‘it never told us anything that happened in the world!’ She shakes her head at the wordiness of no-news.

Worse though than the no-news, was the anti-news. The students also had to watch ‘Der Schwarze Kanal’ (The Black Channel), with Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler. I have heard about this man, the human antidote to the pernicious influence of western television. ‘At home,’ Julia says, ‘everyone called him ‘Karl-Eduard von Schni-‘ because that was how long it took before one of us could jump up and change the channel.’

Von Schnitzler’s job was to show extracts from western television broadcast into the GDR – anything from news items to game shows to ‘Dallas’ – and rip it to shreds. ‘That man radiated so much nastiness it just wasn’t credible. You’d come away feeling sullied, as if you’d spent half an hour atrociously badmouthing someone.’ Julia crosses her arms.’I mean you might have your doubts about the west – I sure did – but we also felt that our own country was feeding us lies and that our futures depended on seeming to agree with it all.’

In the book the author tracks down and interviews both the victims of the Stasi and a lot of the people who worked for it, attempting to trace the real story of the GDR through the stories of ordinary men and women, since she contends that a veil of embarrased silence descended over the whole subject when Germany was united in 1990. And one of the people she manages to track down is the presenter of ‘Die Schwarze Kanal’, Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler.

It’s a fascinating and often hilarious conversation, and I think it’s worth posting most of it here because it tells us a lot about the mentality about the people at the top of secretive totalitarian regimes, as well as showing how an insider rationalises the failure of a soviet-based centralised planned economic and social system. I’m not going to post the whole chapter, partly because it’s too long, partly because I don’t want to get told to take it down, but mainly because I hate typing and the space bar onmy keyboard doesn’talways work properly.

By the way, if anyone is reading this looking for articles on China and wondering what the point of all this is, I can assure you that there is one, I’m just making my way towards it very slowly. Here goes:

‘The Black Channel’ aired until the very end in October 1989. ‘How did you start it? Was it your idea or were you given the task?’

‘It was my idea,’ he says. ‘I once saw the western politicians on the television news sprouting filthy lies about the GDR and before the program was even over I had prepared a script for broadcast! I socked it right back to them. Then the question was: how often? I insisted on once a week. Today-‘ – he leans towards me, furious – ‘Today I could make one every…single…day!’ This is a tantrum designed to frighten me. ‘That’s how disgusting this, this shitbox television is!’ He points with his stick at the set in the room.

All right, I think, we’ll go in his direction. ‘What angers you most about the television today?’

‘Nothing ‘angers’ me!’ he says. He is incandescent with rage. Out of the corner of my eye I see Frau von Schnitzler raise her head.’That’s why I’m a Communist! So nothing can anger me!’ Then suddenly he’s quiet again. ‘What makes me sorry,’ he says in a withering tone, ‘is what is dished up today on that piece-of-filth television. For instance that, that idiotic program -whatsit called?’ He addresses no-one in particular, but a murmur comes from across the room.

He ignores it. ‘They are all idiots, aren’t they?’ he says to me. ‘Marta, do you have to grimace like that?’ Then, as if to himself, ‘What was the name of that program? B-Block’?

‘B-Block?’

‘That one where they locked up ten people -‘

‘Ah yes,’ his wife says loudly, ‘now I know what you’re talking about. ‘Big Brozer’.’

‘Yes,’ he says, ”Big Brozer’.’

He is looking at me. ‘I think that television tyrant of yours was involved in that -‘

‘She’s Australian,’ Frau von Schnitzler corrects him, ‘not American.’

‘I know what I’m saying,’ he says.

‘Murdoch,’ I say. ‘Yes, he was Australian but now he’s American.’

‘Who cares?’ von Schnitzler counters airily. ‘He’s a global imperialist.’

I open my notebook. I want to quote him back to himself. I am apprehensive. ‘Can I read you something?’ I ask. ‘In November 1965 two easterners tried to get over the border, and one of them was shot to death. And at Christmas time that year you made a program -‘

‘Escapes were always tried on at Christmas time,’ he says. He uses the word ‘insziniert’ which means ‘staged’, as though escapes were orchestrated deliberately to make the regime look bad.

He is so offhand about it, I feel my apprehension being replaced with something more businesslike. ‘I want to read you this text from your program, and ask you if you still agree with it.’ I read from my transcription:

The politics of ‘freeing those in the Eastern Bloc’ is code for liquidating the GDR, and that means civil war, world war, nuclear war, that means ripping apart families, atomic Armageddon – that is inhumanity! Against that we have founded a state! Against that we have erected a border with strict control measures to stop what went on during the thirteen years that is was left open and abused – that is humane! That is a service to humanity!’

When I finish, he’s staring at me, chin up. ‘And your question, young lady?’

‘My question is whether today you are of the same view about about the Wall as something humane, and the killings at the border an act of peace?’

He raises his free arm, inhales and screams ‘More! Than! Ever!’ He brings his fist down.

I’m startled for an instant. Then I’m concerned that Frau von Schnitzler will stop the interview. ‘You considered it necessary?’ I ask quickly.

‘I did not ‘consider’ it necessary. It was absolutely necessary! It was an historical necessity. It was the most useful construction in all of German history! In European history!’

‘Why?’

‘Because it prevented imperialism from contaminating the east. It walled it in.’

The only people walled-in were his own. It is as if he has followed my thinking.

‘Moreover people in the GDR were not ‘walled-in’! They could go to Hungary, they could go to Poland.They just couldn’t go to NATO countries. Because, naturally, you don’t travel around in enemy territory. It’s as simple as that.’

This is so mad that I can’t think of an answer immediately. But in the next breath he contradicts himself. It seemsto be his modus operandi to have a bet each way.

‘I do think, though, that in the last few years they should have opened it up earlier,’ he says. Then, almost ruefully, ‘The people would have come back again.’ I wonder if he can truly believe this. The eastern states are still, seven years on, losing people. He shifts in his seat. ‘Most of them, most of them would have.’

Von Schnitzler is one of the cadre whose ideas were moulded in the 1920s by the battle against the gross free market injustices of the Weimar Republic and then the outrages of fascism, and who went on to see the birth and then the death of the nation built on those ideas.He is a true believer and for him my questions only serve to demonstrate a sorry lack of faith.

‘You lived through the whole GDR, from beginning to end -‘

‘So I did, so I did.’

‘Is there anything in your opinion that could have been done better, or differently?’

‘Oh I’m sure that there are things that could have been done differently or better, but that is no longer the question to examine.’

‘I think it is,’ I say, although something stirs uncomfortably in the back of my mind. ‘There was a serious attempt to build a socialist state, and we should examine why, at the end, that state no longer exists. It’s important.’ The something reveals itself to be the memory of the westerners I’ve met also having so little interest in the GDR.

‘I noticed relatively early,’ he says, ‘that we would not be able to survive economically. And when we started to get tied up in this ridiculous GDR success propaganda – exaggerated harvest results and production levels and so on – I withdrew from that altogether and confined myself to my specialised area: the work against imperialism. Exclusively. And for that reason today I am so be-lov-ed,’ he says, heavy with sarcasm.

‘What do you mean ‘beloved’ – by whom?’ I ask.

‘That’s why I’m so beloved by all those who think imperialistically and act imperialistically and bring up their children imperialistically!’ Each time he says ‘imperialistically’ he thrusts his fist on the stick forward towards me. This man, who could turn inhumanity into humanity, faces now perhaps his greatest challenge: to turn the fact that he is hated into the fact that he is, in spite of all available evidence, right.

‘Your program was based on exposing the lies of the western media. When you noticed the false success propaganda at home, didn’t you feel a responsibilty to do the same?’

‘No. I focused in my program quite deliberately and exclusively on anti-imperialism, not on GDR propaganda.’

‘But you understand my question., Herr von Schnitzler. The success propaganda in the GDR was also lies -‘

‘It did distance the people from us, because it was in such stark contrast to the reality.’ He can switch from one view to another with frightening ease. I think it is a sign of being so accustomed to such power that the truth does not matter bacause you cannot be contradicted.

‘Why didn’t you comment then on these lies?’

‘I wouldn’t even consider it!’ He frowns and pulls his neck in like a turtle in digust. ‘I’m not about to criticise my own republic!’

‘Why not?’

‘The critique of imperialism is quite enough!’

‘I criticise my own country -‘ I say

He doesn’t miss a beat. ‘You’ve got a lot more reason to.’

There’s nothing for it but to laugh. ‘That may be,’ I say.

We switch to the present. He starts to talk about ‘my very good friend Erich Mielke’.

‘Did he have a file on you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You haven’t applied to have a look at it?’

‘Why should I?’

‘Out of curiousity.’

‘My curiousity is directed solely towards the machinations of imperialism and how they can be countered.’

Checkmate. So I start another question. ‘The internal observation of the GDR population, with the apparatus of official and unofficial collaborators -‘

He cuts me off. ‘You can throw 90 per cent of what you know about that out.’ He’s angry again. ‘It’s all lies. Mind you, in my opinion even 10 per cent of what they’re saying would have been too much.’

‘Are you saying that there was only 10 per cent of the number claimed of Stasi employees assigned to work on the East German population?’

‘Yes. It’s all been exaggerated immeasurably. In any case I am exceptionally sceptical about numbers.’

He changes tack, back to his friend Mielke.’The Wall was necessary to defend a threatened nation. And there was Erich Mielke at the top, a living example of the most humane human being.’

I have never heard Mielke referred to in this way. He was too fierce and feared to be referred to with anything like affection. I look away to the shelves on the wall close behind him. They are full of books and small objects of memory, a row of pill bottles and and a cheap tape deck. The words ‘the most humane human being’ hang in the air. He starts to cough, hacking and deep, into a handkerchief, then raises a pink drink to his lips.

‘And how are you finding it now after 1989, now that you are living in capitalism, or, as you say, in imperialism? Is it what you expected,’ I hold his gaze, ‘or is it not as bad as you thought?’

‘I live,’ he says fiercely, ‘among the enemy. And not for the first time in my life. I lived among the enemy during the Nazi time as well.’ He works himself into another little fury. I see Marta watching him, and I wonder if the medicine is to deal with this, or with its effects. ‘What I can tell you,’ he says, ‘is that as long as the GDR existed no swine in Bonn would have dared start a war!’ He gasps for breath. His hand has formed a fist, but he keeps it in his lap. ‘The GDR would have prevernted that by its very existence!’ He means that so long as the Iron Curtain was up, the NATO countries would not have bombed the former Yugoslavia for fear the Russians would have retaliated on behalf of the Serbs.

He’s puffing and cross and, I think, finally stuck. He looks at me and I can see the tiny red veins filigreed across his eyeballs. ‘Full Stop!’ he screams. ‘This ….conversation….is….now….over!’

One of the most useful tips in the not-always-reliable Rough Guide to China 2002 edition concerns Chinese television. You would, it points out, have to be desperately bored to resort to it for entertainment. Well, I have to confess that very occasionally, when I am extremely bored in hotel rooms or at home, I do find myself watching CCTV9. I’m not proud of it, and it never lasts very long, but there is a certain perverse fascination with some of the ‘useful idiots’ that present the shows. Unlike Edgar Snow and the British spy circle, however, I think it probable that a lot of the people on CCTV9 genuinely are idiots. At least you can say with some certainty that people like Snow, Burgess and Maclean were extremely intelligent individuals who had probably drawn some of the right conclusions about their own societies; they just seem to have been tragically misguided about the nature of the regimes they crossed over to (with the possible exception of Israel Epstein, who as far as I can tell was a great deal more Chinese than anything else). However, the ex-pats on Chinese TV are not quite in their league.

You have this guy, for example, who preens and stammers his way through some pretend economics programme, accompanied by a Chinese woman whose attempts to pronounce the word ‘aluminium’ brought tears of pity to my eyes – although I hasten to add that he didn’t do much better. There is a young American woman who, during an incisive piece I saw on the important subject of how mobile phones, like, exist?, and how, like, people in China use them?!? changed her clothes no fewer than seven times, which is more costume changes than in an average Kylie Minogue concert. Then there is a fairly geriatric guy who provides the links between the domestic news (propaganda) and the foreign news (footage from international news agencies with all the interesting bits cut out), and whose exclusive qualification for the job seems to be an Australian accent. Also, viewers are treated to the sight of a team of wide-boys in ill-fitting suits who tell us about China’s weather. They do it surprisingly quickly considering the size of the country. They also bounce in a jolly and wide-eyed fashion around the screen, and I could try and think of something nice to say about them but to be absolutely honest what most comes to mind is the word wankers.

I have to admit that with a lot of these people I don’t actually know what their voices sound like, because I find the only way I can abide CCTV9 is with the sound turned right down and the PC picking its way through my Kate Bush mp3s. The full stereo effect of the programmes is a bit too much to bear.

It would be interesting to know whether or not any of these people have ever worked in news media before. I suspect that in most cases they haven’t, partly on the basis of this very enlightening, often hysterically funny and surprisingly moving account of behind-the-scenes life at CCTV:

We lead a broadcast with a Xinhua item stating that 2,500 people have died as a result of the Falun Gong’s influence. The writer makes a mistake, it’s read on the air as 25,000. I’m the only one to notice, because it happens I read the same item that morning in the China Daily. We strike out a zero for the next broadcast and never hear from the audience or management. We report on an 8:00 a.m. broadcast that China will definitely launch a manned space mission in 2003. On the noon broadcast, “the launch date is still uncertain,” and the writer tells me it may be years away. Once again, writers of the source material at Xinhua or CCTV-1 are unavailable or irresponsible and there’s no one in our newsroom who knows or cares enough to pick up a phone for clarification. We don’t strive for it either; just change the story according to the latest copy and trust that no one expects any better.

The question I’m interested in is what happens when they leave China. Do they then try and put their journalistic experience to good use and try and find work in the media? Apart from the ignomy of working for an organisation called CCTV (“what, you were a Security Guard?!?“), there is a world of difference between the Disney Channel or CNN on the one hand, and totalitarian state media churning out nothing but state propaganda on the other.

Actually, on that last point about CNN, I suppose on the face of it they could always try applying for a job there!

When Mark Rowswell (aka Da Shan) is back in Clark Kent mode in suburban Canada, perched on the edge of the sofa chez les voisins politely sipping coffee, how does he explain what he does in life?

Does he say anything like “I’m the fresh-faced poster boy for the post-1989, post-WTO, pre-2008 Chinese Communist Party Government?” I can imagine the reaction. Because, let’s face it, he’s not quite pretty or memorable enough to make a convincing icon for revolutionary struggle, is he?

Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m not the best judge of this. So, to any women, or gay men, reading this, I would ask: which of the two pictures above is more likely to make you start perspiring slightly and feel a bit faint? And for everyone, male or female, I’d be interested to know, which of the two photos would make you feel more like manning the barricades and storming the palace? And which, while we’re at it, would be more likely to cause you to splash out 1,000 Kwai on a fairly crappy copy of a PDA?