dogu-turkistan-sempozyumu

FREEEAST TURKISTAN SYMPOSIUMinstitutions, journalists, publishers, authors, art performers, high-profile athletes,and so on. The government pays all these people off in the form of salaries,bonuses, state-covered expenses, free medical insurance, subsidized housing,free pension plans and so on. The winners take all. Laws and policies more andmore favor this group of people in exchange for their recognition and acceptanceof the political status quo. Their income and perks add up to a wealth that isdisproportionally higher than that of ordinary workers, farm workers, clerks, orsmall business owners. The gap is much larger than that in any other country inthe world. Such a policy of co-opting and buying off potential opposition is quiteeffective in conjunction with the high-pressure purges and persecution that tookplace after the Tiananmen massacre. The cruelty of political reality created terrorin the minds of intellectuals as a psychological deterrent. As time went on, fearturned into cynicism, becoming increasingly indifferent to what was right andwhat was wrong. Indifference and hypocrisy rapidly became a new fashion that allthe modern Chinese intellectuals tried to follow. This, coupled with a piece of theaction in China, Inc., made many intellectuals -who had once been independentand once been considered the conscience of the society- soften up their positionagainst the post-1992 status quo. They swiftly and completely transformed from“men of conscience” into “men of economics.” Now that they hold stock optionsin China, Inc., they consciously follow the rules of the game set by the majorityshareholder -the Communist regime. Although they may not be fully satisfiedwith certain arrangements and may occasionally make some noise, they clearlyremember who butters their bread. They get into the practice of endorsing thestatus quo using seemingly neutral and non-Communist terminology. They havecreated various theories such as “Theory of Special National Conditions”, “Rightsof Survival”, “Stability First”, “Era of Prosperity”, “Chinese Patriotism” and “Riseof China” to cover the bloody past of the Communist regime with a cacophony ofapologetics, and to sugarcoat the unpleasant reality of present-day China. Thesepeople thus form what Havel terms “the despicable power base.”In other words, in today’s China, power (the political elite), capital (theeconomic elite) and “intellect” (the social and cultural elite) are bonded togetherwith corruption as the adhesive to form an alliance that maintains the existingpolitical order. This alliance owns and runs China, Inc., dazzling the entire worldwith its might and glory. With China’s vast geographic size and population, the548