{"id":54708,"date":"2026-04-18T09:35:32","date_gmt":"2026-04-17T23:35:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chinaheritage.net\/?p=54708"},"modified":"2026-04-19T05:32:50","modified_gmt":"2026-04-18T19:32:50","slug":"silence-silence-unless-we-burst-out-we-shall-perish-in-this-silence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chinaheritage.net\/journal\/silence-silence-unless-we-burst-out-we-shall-perish-in-this-silence\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Silence, silence! Unless we burst out, we shall perish in this silence!\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Seeds of Fire<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/h3>\n

\u4e0d\u5728\u6c88\u9ed8\u4e2d\u7206\u767c
\n\u5c31\u5728\u6c88\u9ed8\u4e2d\u6b7b\u4ea1<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Silence has been a theme of China Heritage<\/em> since its founding in 2016. In that year, the last in the first five-year installment of the Xi Jinping Era, the basic tenor of the unfolding \u2018New Era\u2019 in modern Chinese history was more than evident. As I observed to the cohort of younger scholars that I addressed when launching China Heritage<\/em> in December 2016:<\/p>\n

You have\u00a0all worked out and will continue to negotiate your own relationship with the Chinese world. Today, I would suggest, you are all faced with the latest version of, to take an expression from Lu Xun, \u2018Silent China\u2019 \u7121\u8072\u7684\u4e2d\u570b (also translated as \u2018Voiceless China\u2019).<\/p>\n

Clamorous public debate \u2014 circumscribed and self-censored discourse even at the best of times \u2014 has been gradually corralled. That is not to say that\u00a0there is\u00a0a dearth\u00a0of noise or\u00a0verbiage in the\u00a0People\u2019s Republic, or a lack of boisterous chatter on its global web, but the\u00a0Storm and Fury is\u00a0increasingly limited to the stentorian\u00a0messages\u00a0of the party-state and its loyalists, although sometimes they sound more like a threnody that repeats itself and reverberates like the death-bed message of the emperor in Kafka\u2019s\u00a0Great Wall of China<\/i><\/a>.\u00a0For me, this new phase of Silent China reached something of a nadir with the closing of Consensus Net \u5171\u8b58\u7db2<\/a> in early October this year. It was supposedly taken offline for \u2018disseminating erroneous ideas\u2019 \u50b3\u905e\u932f\u8aa4\u601d\u60f3.<\/p>\n

The present silencing of China began in earnest around the new year of 2013, shortly after Xi Jinping\u2019s investiture as party-state-army leader. That was when Southern Weekend<\/i> was attacked for advocating\u00a0\u2018constitutionalism\u2019, a code expression for limiting Communist Party power (see China Story Yearbook 2013: Civilising China<\/em>)<\/a>. The silence of China\u2019s Others has spread, and I would emphasise that the pall of The Silence has been partly enabled by the policies of the US Obama administration.<\/p>\n

As I think about China today l\u2019m taken back once more to 1971, the year I participated in that ABC panel discussion \u2018Leave Something for Us\u2019. That was also the year when, as part of our high school ancient history class, I first read selections from Tacitus\u2019\u00a0Annals<\/em>. That historian, who chronicled the rule of the emperors Tiberius, Claudius and Nero, famously wrote:<\/p>\n

Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant<\/i>.<\/p>\n

They made a desert and they call it peace<\/p>\n

Or, as Lord Byron poetically recast these words in\u00a0Bride of Abydos<\/i>:<\/p>\n

Mark where his carnage and his conquests cease!
\nHe makes a solitude, and calls it \u2014 peace.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u2014 from Cutting a Deal with China<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

As I have further observed in Contra Trump<\/em>, a China Heritage<\/em> series launched on the eve of the 2024 US presidential election, the pall of silence, complicity and compromise is hardly limited to modern China.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Since 2020, many of China\u2019s messy discordant voices \u2014 independent-minded academics, citizen journalists, rights lawyers, feminists and cultural rowdies \u2014 have been stifled, or at least educated in the ways of silence and acquiescent. This has left the way open for local opinionators, New China Experts and hoards of China Maxxers to bloviate, self-promote, celebrate, congratulate \u00a0and cash in. For more on this subject, see Kumbaya China: I\u2019ve Seen the Future<\/em>, a multipart chapter in Seeds of Fire<\/em><\/a>, in particular:<\/p>\n