WHY VICTOR HUGO IS ADORED IN CHINA
by
AMY HAWKINS & JEFFREY WASSERSTROM
_________________________________________________
Despite
worldwide popularity for a Frenchman who died in the late 1800s,
Victor Hugo remains a mystery. His novels and the films they inspired
are beloved from Hiroshima to Hanoi. When South Korean demonstrators
toppled a corrupt president several years ago, one song their
marches featured was “Do You Hear the People Sing?”
from the musical Les Misérables. In 2019, this
anthem has been among the rallying cries of Hong Kong activists.
Even on the Chinese mainland, Beijing theatregoers flock to a
dramatization of The Hunchback of Notre Dame while Shanghai
art lovers take in a show dedicated to his “legendary life.”
Hugo’s
current prominence across the People’s Republic of China
is particularly intriguing. How can a man linked to a song that
has been key to anti-Beijing struggles in Hong Kong since the
2014 Umbrella Movement – one removed from Chinese music-streaming
platforms – simultaneously be celebrated in China’s
capital, where his many fans include Xi Jinping himself? The answer
lies in the multifaceted writings of Hugo spread by globalization,
relaying the struggle taking place in China and Hong Kong about
what it means today to be both Chinese and a citizen of the world.
For the
young generation of Hong Kong protestors, the question of being
“Chinese” is a moot point. Joshua Wong says that although
he is “ethnically Chinese,” he identifies as a Hong
Konger. “It’s hard for me to recognize myself as a
Chinese citizen because I am blacklisted by the government and
not allowed into the country,” says the 23-year-old high-profile
activist. Even for those not blacklisted, growing up speaking
Cantonese and enjoying the internet free of the Great Firewall
has inserted distance from their supposed overlords in Beijing.
They sometimes mine distinctively Chinese traditions, such as
the Confucian adage that suggests students have a special duty
to serve as the moral consciences of their communities. Protesters
also look far afield for inspiration, quoting Hollywood movies
(the phrase “If we burn, you will burn with us” is
from the Hunger Games series) and embracing tactics from
Eastern Europe (the recent Hong Kong Way handholding spectacle
was an adaptation of the 1989 Baltic Way protest).
For older
Hong Kongers, the relationship is more complicated. Living for
decades under distant British rule, many see themselves as first
and foremost Chinese, even if they dislike the Communist Party.
Hong Kong welcomed political refugees after 1989’s June
4th massacre. It is still the only place in the People’s
Republic of China where mass remembrances of that event are held
annually, with smaller gatherings in Macau. These vigils are seen
by some, especially those older than 40, as signaling that the
fight to protect Hong Kong’s freedoms is linked to struggling
for a future that includes a freer China.
Beijing’s
leaders do not recognize either position as legitimate. The Communist
Party does not tolerate any questioning of national identity amongst
those of Chinese descent living in the territories it considers
sovereign, including not just Hong Kong and the former Portuguese
colony of Macau but also Taiwan. In Beijing’s eyes, such
Chinese people were “liberated” by Mao Zedong and
his successors and they owe the party gratitude. Indeed, the seizing
of Hong Kong by British forces during the 1841 Opium War ushered
in China’s “century of humiliation” that the
CCP vowed to end.
This
makes it ironic that Hong Kong – a place of little import
before the Opium War that went on to become a global financial
hub – has humiliated Beijing afresh in novel ways since
June. And just as the protestors have on occasion ironically directed
Mao’s own slogans back at Beijing, like “a revolution
is not a dinner party,” the writings of Hugo, one of the
first foreign writers to be translated into Chinese before 1949
and a darling of the Communist Party throughout much of the last
70 years, are used in varying ways. Both the party and its opponents
in Hong Kong see their revolutionary spirits reflected in Hugo’s
work, while strident nationalists on the mainland laud him as
a western defender of China’s cultural heritage, due to
his famous letter castigating France for taking part in the 1860
sacking of Beijing. These competing perspectives reveal the messy
nature of the spread of global ideas.
Hugo’s
enduring and complex place in Chinese imaginations became clear
when Notre Dame burned earlier this year. Some mainland residents
wept, as their thoughts turned to the iconic structure in The
Hunchback of Notre Dame, a book beloved in China long before
the play opened in Beijing. But others thought, with a touch of
schadenfreude, of Hugo’s famous letter in which he lambasted
the destruction of China’s own cultural icon, the Old Summer
Palace, at the end of the Second Opium War (1858-1860). After
English and French forces burnt Beijing’s imperial dwelling
to the ground to avenge violent acts against Westerners by soldiers
of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912), Hugo wrote: “All the treasures
of all our cathedrals put together could not equal this formidable
and splendid museum of the Orient.” He continued: “We
Europeans are the civilized ones, and for us the Chinese are the
barbarians. This is what civilization has done to barbarism.”
This letter has been taught in high schools across China, and
there have even been rumours of Chinese state-sponsored art heists
across Europe to reclaim the looted treasures from western galleries.
Perhaps Hugo would approve.
Hugo’s
championing of the striving poor against inheritors of power and
riches as well as China against the West makes him an easy writer
for today’s Beijing leaders to love and, in Xi’s case,
to quote, even at a time when their families hold vast wealth.
The Chinese extol Hugo’s celebration of the revolutionary
spirit and workers despite the mainland having become a place
where young people channeling his ideals – and those of
Karl Marx, for that matter – are met with prison, oppression
and harassment. This is demonstrated by the disappearance of Peking
University students who campaigned to support striking factory
workers in Shenzhen.
Hugo’s
diverse meanings in China might seem curious to western observers,
but we do the same with China’s most famous figures, such
as Confucius. To Voltaire and other Enlightenment thinkers, the
Chinese sage’s ideas were in step with their own intellectual
movement: rationalism that favoured rule by moral people. But
by the late 20th century, Samuel Huntington’s Clash
of Civilizations – a work with an overly simplistic
and flawed thesis – has gained new purchase since being
embraced by influential figures in the Trump administration, and
"Asian values,” such as Confucius’s emphasis
on filial piety and stability at the expense of autonomy, were
presented as completely inimical to democratic Enlightenment ideas.
If Hugo
were alive today, what would he make of the country he so admired
in the late 19th century? Would he support the Chinese government's
efforts to repatriate artefacts looted from the Old Summer Palace?
Or would his sympathies lie with the outraged Hong Kong youth
who reject what Beijing has to offer? Les Misérables
celebrates those who challenge a corrupt society that exploits
the poor. The Chinese Communist Party claims they seized power
to do just that, but the country leads the world in purchases
of luxury goods and prohibits labourers to form independent unions
to fight for better pay and working conditions.
Wherever
his sympathies lay, Hugo’s ghost would probably shake his
head in befuddlement. He would be no less baffled than the ghost
of Confucius might be if told his views were viewed by some in
the West as in step with and, by others, at odds with the Enlightenment
– or that the Communist Party whose leaders once reviled
him now regard him as a national saint. Onlookers might do well
to remember what Confucius's famous follower Mencius stressed
long ago, using wording that brings the Les Misérables
anthem to mind – rulers may rule via the support of Heaven,
but Heaven “hears with the ears” and “sees with
the eyes” of the people.
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