A Barometer of Society

Abstract

I watched Aspirations with mixed feelings of joy and anxiety. After the uproar over the production erupted, I became worried. People like myself, who are concerned with writing about contemporary China's historical changes and transformations in social relationships, could not anticipate that something would be exposed in such an indoor television drama. We were taken by surprise. In my mind, the original creative intentions of those who produced Aspirations never were to consciously take on themselves the burden of providing an explanation for the changes in relationships in today's society: It is because of this that Aspirations was able to depict the changes in relationships between the various strata of society more honestly and thus become a barometer of the changes of social moods and attitudes. When in 1976 the Gang of Four was smashed, the people of China were of one mind, and everyone felt that it was right and reasonable to adopt the concrete and practical policies with regard to the cadres, the intellectuals, and the "targets" of the United Front policy. But ten years later, a sense of disappointment has gathered pace among those who have been privileged. To be sure, in the ten years of reform, everyone has benefited in very real ways, but the common people feel that the gap between themselves and other strata in the society has widened. It is a wise move on the part of Aspirations that it deals only with the changed relationship between the urban workers and the intellectuals. When the intellectuals were in trouble back then, the overwhelming majority of workers and peasants had a hand in protecting them or, at least, had sympathized with them. The character of "Guo Bianzi" in Mumaren (The Horse Herder)¹ is a representative one. However, after ten years, as the gap between the cultural differences and social status widened, what has emerged is a new sense of alienation, induced by some people who were on top and some at the bottom. Furthermore, in the past ten years, many literary works have focused on writing about how the cadres and intellectuals have suffered and placed the blame on the worker propaganda teams or the peasant propaganda teams. For this reason, people began to feel that certain mass communication media have not been fair. Besides, the workers and peasants are also disillusioned with the so-called elite and elite culture of these last ten years. With the deepening of commodification of social life, the moral core, once familiar to workers and peasants, has been for the most part cast adrift and lost. The elite culture has not so far been able to deal with this problem directly: What things, after all, should be discarded and what should be salvaged? There has never been a consensus of the entire society on these matters. For their part, the peasants and workers feel that what has been lost is "morality" and "ethics," while only the "elite" has been preserved. If things continued in this way, they would find it impossible to adapt to the change. A strong social sentiment and mood is reflected through Aspirations, and it is quite likely that it could exert a new round of public pressure on intellectuals. No matter how much you say that this is merely a work of art, ten million common mouths are still stronger than one single "artistic" mouth. Unintentionally, Aspirations has helped the workers' stratum seize a moral high ground, by which it is able to obtain a mental and psychological equilibrium with the intellectuals' occupation of the moral high ground. If this kind of antagonistic sentiment is not resolved but, instead, is abetted and then rationalized and made metaphysical, then we could very well see everything we fought so strenuously for in those ten years of reform turn to naught.