Xinran talked to Susan Richards, Caspar Henderson, Bola Gibson, and David Hayes of openDemocracy on 25 June 2002.

Who is Xinran?

openDemocracy - Can we begin by asking you to tell us something of your background and upbringing in China?

Xinran - My mother and father were both military officers. My father came from an elite intellectual background: many members of his family were academics in the US and China. During the 1960s Cultural Revolution, my family in China were persecuted for this reason. My mother came from a successful business family. The children received the very best education but the family were not allowed to pass on money after the revolution of 1949.

I was born in 1958 during times of great hardship, when the grain ration for many Chinese people was just a few soya beans per day. In my first years, my family still had privileges: we had our ancestral house, where I was allowed to eat chocolate, listen to birdsong and enjoy the fragrance of flowers. We lost all this in the Cultural Revolution. My brother and I were sent to a disciplinary institution for ‘disgraced children’. Whistling was all I knew of language, and for almost five years, marching army units were the only thing from the outside world I had contact with. Children from poor backgrounds who had struggled to survive spurned me, and insulted and swore at me. It was hard, and the spiritual suffering was greater than the material suffering.

At about the age of twelve I started to look for solace in books. Studying history led me to understand that people have different ways of living. People make history by the ways they live, but also, it is said, by the ways they dream. Maybe it is surprising, but the books that gave me the most consolation were histories of war. From those accounts of bloodbaths and life and death struggles I felt that I was fortunate to live in a peaceful age. These personal accounts of war helped me to forget my humiliation, hardships and worries.

Words on the Night Breeze

open - So with this personal background and history in mind, can you tell us how you came to be hosting the radio programme? Was it your own idea?

Xinran - Before 1988, there was only one voice in the Chinese media. Every magazine and piece of music had only one colour. Five years after China had started to open up economically, many journalists were trying to find a way to open Chinese people’s minds as well. But they had no idea how to do it. We had been deprived of education, access to television and newspapers, and foreign contacts. Even I, an educated person, who could speak English, really didn’t know what was happening with the world.

In the slightly opened atmosphere, new radio programmes or news pages were very tentative. People would talk about the chance to wear beautiful clothes, or to eat a banana for lunch. But journalists were afraid to touch human subjects, human thinking. Public communication on questions like religion and sex education was absent. My colleagues and I discussed this a lot. We wanted to do something, but we didn’t know what!

After a while, my colleagues said: “okay, Xinran, you are the oldest…” – that was true, by the way! – “…and you’ve had a long working experience, so you should do something”. In this way, I was chosen to be a presenter. We also thought that the time to test our ideas was in a programme late at night. Why? Because, we reasoned, no one will be listening! Most of the Chinese people, over eighty per cent, were peasants who have to go to sleep very early. Perhaps then, we could choose bedtime to try something different.

So I started a programme. It was intended for everybody, not just women, but I had at first to tell the listeners about myself as well. It was a slow process. For example, I would describe the way I came to the office or the incidents I saw in the street on my journey. I would tell them about seeing a man and a woman together, not touching, but when it started to rain, the man tried to use his hand to protect the woman from becoming wet. In a way it was a useless gesture but in another way, you could feel the love in it. I described this on the radio, and when I said the word ‘love’, my face became red, because no one at all used this word.

Every day, I told a little story about my feeling connected to incidents like this, perhaps two or three minutes long. Then, I read from a lot of beautiful books, and played some lovely music, which were becoming available in China at that time. After about three weeks, I started to receive many letters – more than a hundred every day. At that time I was very stupid; I didn’t know how important these letters were. I thought most of them had come from peasants, uneducated people, perhaps saying only how much they like my programme, but with nothing to teach me.

Then one day, the parents of a young girl came to the radio station. They said that their daughter had committed suicide, and that I was responsible for her death. She had sent a letter to me, but I hadn’t received it, and she thought I didn’t care about her. What was the reason for her death? Only that she had been seen by her neighbours talking to another boy, and became the object of gossip. She felt guilty, even though she hadn’t done anything wrong; and she wrote to ask, is it my fault? And I didn’t get the letter.

When I heard her story via her parents, I started opening the letters and really paying attention to them. They were full of questions, and it was shocking, because I was being treated as something like a god. Many of the people listening were living in conditions that I could barely imagine or understand. I didn’t know so many people living on the other side of life. It made me want to go out, to learn and report. So I asked my director if I could focus more and more on the lives of the women who wrote to me. He said: “No. Too dangerous. This is about sex.” So I couldn’t; but I also did, without telling them what I was really doing.

Women and men in a changing China

open - It seems extraordinary that even to talk about ordinary women’s lives and experiences was so difficult. How much was that part of the social conditions of the period, and how much part of a broader Chinese tradition?

Xinran - From ancient times, the Chinese have never considered that a woman belonged to a family tree or to the intimate, human world of the family. In the Chinese language, you can’t find a single character for ‘daughter’. ‘Daughter’ is a ‘female son’.

open - When people like Sun Yat Sen, and later the Communists, were trying to create modern China, they looked for sources of inspiration in Chinese history to advance the idea that women and men were equal. Don’t the ideas of equality and respect between the sexes have some historical roots in China?

Xinran - It is true that the people who wanted to modernise China, in 1910 or 1949, wanted to build on the best traditions of the country. The problem is that the ideas of the modernisers were seen as coming from outside the experience of the vast majority of the population, who were poor peasants. These people so often did not understand or see any reason to respond to the demands made on them from far away authorities. And this is true even today.

For example, the population in the last fifty years has grown so quickly, and the government introduced the ‘one child’ policy. In the eastern and coastal regions, the more developed areas where people are better educated, that can work. People may not want to have children, or more than a single child. But in the west of China, poor people may have five or seven children, because they desperately need a son to go on their family tree. It is very hard to carry through the idea of male-female equality in these circumstances.

open - How much has the country changed since you left?

Xinran - I recently went back to China after a two-year break. This time I was very surprised to see people relaxed and open and smiling from their hearts, in the street. In the east, the Internet and email are essential to young people’s lives, and they are learning from each other. They don’t want to live in the shadow of their parents. In my opinion, it’s quite similar to the period after the Second World War among Germans or Japanese. For a long time, the older generation didn’t talk about what they did during the war. Whereas the next generation were much more open. But we must also remember that China is a huge country, and while parts of the east are becoming very modern, much of the rest of the country is still living in the past.

open - You say eloquently in the book that China has grown economically, but that it hasn’t yet grown in ways that will allow it to absorb its truth of freedom. Do you think that the gap is beginning to close?

Xinran - I believe that we need another generation, perhaps two, to close it. The main reason is the education system. Only if, in the long term, China has the right education system, will we find the right people to manage this country at each different level, and to teach the next generation what is right and wrong.

We have opened the window to let fresh air in. But what is fresh air? If one is not familiar with it one has no idea. I think we need another lesson, and it will take two generations or so to learn it. Also, China needs time to develop as a whole, to provide electricity, water, technology and roads to the majority of the population.

open - One of the most moving chapters in your book describes your visit to the poor and isolated community of Shouting Hill in western China, where there was a combination among women of extreme deprivation and evident happiness. Is it inevitable that improving the material lives of women in such areas will be at the cost of their happiness?

Xinran - I think this is true for everywhere, not just China. When we receive a handwritten letter now, the human side of it warms us, because everything today goes through a machine. There is an old saying in Chinese: “The human world is always in the balance of fate; when you get more, you are losing more”.

open - There is an astonishing short chapter in the book, where you are talking to two young women outside a Christian church. One of them says: “Well, when I’m 40 I might be religious, and if I’m not, then I won’t”. The other says: “I’ll take on whatever religion is in fashion”. You also describe a family where the father believes in the god of wealth, the mother in another god, the daughter’s a Christian, the grandparents are Taoist, or Buddhist. In this religious kaleidoscope, are these largely instrumental choices or do you have the sense that the women you talked to have a spiritual strength and longing that will change China?

Xinran - For 3,000 years, China hasn’t had any religion at all. The culture and customs of most countries in the world come from religious roots. But in China, the emperor was God. Yet the emperor always changes, and this is why the people are frightened – they never feel secure. In the Chinese language, the character for religion is a word meaning ‘keep everything inside, together, don’t speak out’. The strength is there but it has been kept secret for so long as a result of people’s fear.

Seeing London, and China, with fresh eyes

open - When you first came to London, what most surprised or delighted you? How did the attitudes and behaviour of women compare with China?

Xinran - I arrived here just a few days after Princess Diana died, in early September 1997. I spent lots of time walking around London and talking to people, especially women. I remember one day, walking between Marble Arch and Oxford Circus. The relaxed way that the women were walking, talking, shopping, with their children or friends, was, to me, a striking contrast with China.

I went to a coffee shop where there were many women relaxing with their babies. I asked one of them if she enjoyed being a mother. She said: “Before six o’clock, it’s fine. After six o’clock, no way!” She explained that her husband spends a little time with the baby in the evening, but after an hour becomes bored and goes back to his work or study. “I understand that he has to make money for the family, but I also know that there is a big difference between us, when I look after our child spoon by spoon”.

open - Surely, that captures something, which is that men in our culture are only just beginning to have a glimpse of what women have done for all these centuries. The gap between the cultures is not as great in that respect, it’s all part of a continuum.

Xinran - My parents came to England two years ago. They are educated people; my father can speak six foreign languages, my mother can understand two. But the first thing my mother told her friends was: “In London, my husband opened the door for me; this never happened in China!”. Actually, my father had tried, but… he grew up in China, without that kind of custom.

Back in China when I was doing my radio programme one day, I said, “I’m opening the line, just for one reason. Men can telephone me, say who you are, and who is your daughter or your mother, and tell them you love them. This is the number, I’m waiting for you”. After twenty minutes, no one had called me! Afterwards I told my colleagues: “This is the result of all our conditioning. When you say you love someone, you are telling them that you can give up your life. But it was impossible for people even to say it”.

open - Is there a connection between what you spoke about at the beginning, your very difficult childhood experiences, and your talent as a listener?

Xinran - Because I have had a lot of hard times, my mind became in a way an empty vessel for other people. In China, we have another saying “If you have everything, this means you have nothing. If you have nothing, you can get everything”.