Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [65]
And furthermore, when the national situation permits, the state can always relax its restrictions and permit up to 95 percent freedom. Maybe we already have 95 percent? That would be very little less than in the West. Western nations also have some restrictions on freedom of speech and action. The German government restricts neo-Nazi organizations, and many states in the United States deny homosexuals the freedom to marry. The only disparity is that, theoretically, the power of Western governments is given to them by the people, while in China the people’s freedom is given to them by the government. Is this distinction really that important?
Now even his cleaning lady tells him, “Things are much better today than they were before.”
It’s all that bloody Fang Caodi’s fault, grumbled Lao Chen, with his nonsense about a missing month and Yang Jiang’s books being unavailable—he’s messed with my mind.
Now Lao Chen had only two worries, both of his own making: what to write about in his next novel, and how to find his long-delayed love.
He phoned his friend Hu Yan from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Hu Yan had also come to understand that she should stay at home and rest at the weekend and not go to work. She was reaching late middle age, her children were all in university, and she didn’t need to work so hard, or so her husband had been telling her for some time.
She also knew that she could never expect to finish all her projects. Things were very different for her now. In the past, her research projects had not been considered important, she couldn’t find funding, and the projects often got her into trouble. But now she could be considered as a leader in her field, and research on rural society and culture had become an important field of study.
She remembered that in the early 1990s, when she’d been investigating in southeast Guizhou how the girls of minority peoples were unable to attend school, she had had to rely on money donated from Taiwan and Hong Kong to fund the project. In the mid-1990s, when she’d studied the lack of access to schools for the children of peasant workers in urban areas, Beijing academic circles had deprecated such projects, and various levels of government had resisted and even tried to suppress her investigations. It was not until 2000 that things took a 180-degree turn, when the central government announced its new rural policies. Local administrators all had to develop corresponding policies, and so they sought out many academic specialists for consultation. Hu Yan received large government grants to investigate construction and the circulation of goods and capital in rural areas, grants large enough to make many of her colleagues jealous.
In more recent years, while conducting field research, Hu Yan had become aware of an interesting phenomenon: the very rapid growth of Protestant churches. According to the figures in a 2008 survey, the combined number of adherents to the Protestant “underground churches,” to the government-sanctioned Protestant Three-Self Patriotic Church, and to the Catholic Patriotic Church was 50 million, but in Hu Yan’s mind the figure should have been 100 million; this 100 percent increase had all taken place in the last two years. But Hu Yan was concerned that she already had so many big projects in hand, more than she could handle; she wondered whether it would be worth the trouble to study informal rural churches. Especially because the sociology of religion was not her specialty, and if she successfully set up a project and obtained government funding, even more people would be green-eyed with jealousy. The gossip and innuendo bruited around would be pretty nasty—accusations of academic hegemony or intellectual imperialism would be the most polite of the lot.
Hu Yan had always maintained