U.S. scholar Perry Link talks about self-censorship in China

Taipei, Sept. 12 (CNA) Perry Link, the China scholar who coined the metaphor "the anaconda in the chandelier" to describe the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 2002, revisited the idea in a talk on Thursday in Taipei.

Link, 80, is currently visiting Taiwan to give a series of talks on human rights development in China and how the authoritarian regime represses and threatens not only its people but also those beyond its borders.

During a talk at Academia Sinica on Thursday, he shared how he first came up with the idea to describe how the CCP exercises its censorship as "a giant anaconda coiled in an overhead chandelier."

"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," Link said in Chinese.

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, everyone in its shadow makes his or her large and small adjustments-all quite 'naturally.'"

First, it is "fear-induced self-censorship," then it becomes "naturalized," he told the audience in the Thursday talk.

"The red-line is intentionally vague, as the less one knows about the reason, the more they would undertake self-censorship," Link said.

He joked that being blacklisted actually granted him more freedom in speaking about the CCP, using the Chinese slang of "dead pigs are not afraid of boiling water."

"The U.S. media likes to interview me as they know I would not self-censor," he said.

In a 2005 article, Link said he was blacklisted in 1996, but the real reason was never given, an example of the anaconda metaphor.

He noted that the Chinese people who are being constantly surveilled are then subjected to "divided consciousness."

"Lashing out at the leaders at night when drunk and changing gear to another set of language during daytime at work," Link said. "Everyone is having two lives."

"This kind of divided consciousness would become fossilized... and people gradually don't know the true value of being human," he stressed.

Link also raised the problem of some Chinese people referring to living in a tech-aided surveillance society as "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 UC Riverside. He helped Fang Lizhi (方勵之), a Chinese democrat and dissident, leave China after the Tiananmen Square protests 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.