Perry Link, the sinologist who in 2002 coined the metaphor “the anaconda in the chandelier” to describe the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), revisited the idea in a talk earlier this month in Taipei.
During a talk at Academia Sinica on Sept. 12, he shared how he first came up with the idea to describe the CCP’s censorship of Chinese society as like “a giant anaconda coiled in an overhead chandelier.”
Speaking in Chinese, Link said that “the inception of the idea first came with my subjective feeling of uneasiness when talking to CCP officials, as it was not easy to speak my mind freely.”
Photo: Reuters
In the 2002 article first published in the New York Review of Books, Link wrote: “[The anaconda] feels no need to be clear about its prohibitions. Its constant, silent message is: ‘You yourself decide,’ after which, more often than not, every one in its shadow makes his or her large and small adjustments all quite naturally.”
First, it is “fear-induced self-censorship,” which becomes “naturalized,” he said.
“The red line is left intentionally vague, as the less one knows, the more they would self-censor,” he added.
He joked that being blacklisted by the Chinese government granted him more freedom to speak about the CCP.
He described his situation using a Chinese phrase: “Dead pigs are not afraid of boiling water.”
“The US media likes to interview me as they know I do not self-censor,” he said.
Link said he was blacklisted by the CCP in 1996, but the authorities never informed him why, an example of the anaconda metaphor, he said.
He said that Chinese people are constantly surveilled and have a “divided consciousness.”
“Lashing out at the leaders at night when drunk and changing gear to another set of language during daytime,” Link said. “Everyone has two lives.”
“This kind of divided consciousness becomes fossilized... and people gradually do not know the true value of being human,” he said.
Link said it is problematic that many Chinese say living in a tech-aided surveillance society is “safe.”
“Can we as human beings really be okay with being surveilled 24/7?” he asked, saying he believes it is against human nature.
A long-time China watcher and researcher, Link is a distinguished professor of comparative literature and Chinese at The University of California, Riverside. He helped Fang Lizhi (方勵之), a Chinese democrat and dissident, leave China after the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989.
Link also translated Charter 08, a citizens’ manifesto calling for constitutional democracy in China co-authored in 2008 by prominent dissident Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波), who was later awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 and died in 2017 after repeated arrests in China.
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