Free your mind, China
In mid-1978, Deng Xiaoping launched a nationwide movement calling on people in China to 'emancipate their mind'. He did this to loosen the mental shackles imposed on the people for decades and to prepare them for a dramatic reversal in the Communist Party's direction from class struggle, which had been the focus of Mao Zedong, to economic development.
The change at the top was immediately reflected at lower levels. On my next trip to Beijing, I discovered that my previously strait-laced guide from the China International Travel Service looked quite different, having permed her hair. 'My mind has been emancipated a bit,' she said.
Instead of the Maoist injunction to 'put politics in command', Deng decided that every policy had to serve economic development. As a result, the country's gross domestic product quadrupled by 2000, and Deng's successors have announced plans for another quadrupling of GDP by 2020.
Deng's successors have recognised the need to continue this liberation. The then president, Jiang Zemin, while addressing the Central Party School in May 2002, called on the whole party to adhere to the ideological guidelines of 'emancipating the mind' as well as 'seeking truth from facts'.
Recent events, however, suggest that the party needs to work harder. Last month, at the closing of the annual session of the National People's Congress, Premier Wen Jiabao gave a press conference. An Associated Press correspondent asked about a letter written by a prominent physician, Jiang Yanyong - who exposed the Sars cover-up - calling on Beijing to declare the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations a patriotic movement and to admit that it had made a mistake in cracking down on the students.
Oddly the interpreter decided to edit the question, presumably to make it less offensive. She left out Dr Jiang's name, using instead the term 'certain persons'. She even left out 'Tiananmen Square'. In his response, Mr Wen did not mention Dr Jiang or his letter, so it is unclear if he understood the entire import of the question. It is unfortunate that the interpreter failed to simply translate the question.
The official visit by US Vice-President Dick Cheney last week provided additional evidence that Chinese officials are not sufficiently liberated mentally. They censored statements by Mr Cheney to make them more palatable and more consistent with China's world view.
Mr Cheney, who addressed the student body at Fudan University in Shanghai, spoke at length on US-China relations, the war on terror and other issues. While his speech was broadcast unchanged, it was heavily edited when translated into Chinese by the People's Daily and Xinhua.
Mr Cheney said he first visited China in 1975, together with then secretary of state Henry Kissinger and president Gerald Ford. 'That was only three years after president Richard Nixon had paid his historic visit to your country,' he said. 'Mao Zedong still held power. The aftershocks of the Cultural Revolution were still being felt. There were some hopes of reform, but people largely kept those hopes to themselves.'
Those remarks were apparently considered offensive by China's censors. The reference to Mao was edited out and several sentences were combined. The result was that the censors ended up having Mr Cheney say he had accompanied Nixon to China. The term 'Cultural Revolution' was also dropped, as was any mention of people keeping their hopes to themselves. In fact, although the Chinese version is presented as the 'full text', it was actually carefully edited, with whole sentences dropped.
These are not the acts of an individual translator. They are the institutional acts of the government and the Communist Party and show that China is still far from Deng's ideal of 'seeking truth from facts' and the 'emancipation of the mind'.
Frank Ching is a Hong Kong-based journalist and commentator
