刚刚收到个Email──
文章分析得确实挺有意思的。不过，事实上，附件中的那篇文章并不是什么叫做Steven Zuckerberg的“在中国学习生活的美国青年”写的，而是一名叫做Wang Hongzhe的25岁的地地道道的中国青年写的。Wang Hongzhe是北京大学传播系的研究生，他给自己取了个Steven Zuckerberg的假名（缩写其实就是S.Z,山寨），写了这篇文章，甚至还将文章伪造成“译文”的形式。他的目的，是做一场“社会试验”，看看中国人对待批评是否会“内外有别”。结果，在他看来，中国人果然对“老外”的批评更宽容，而对另一篇以Wang署名的文章却更尖刻。详细见Letter from China的报导。
March 5, 2009
A Chinese Pirate Unmasks
One of the more popular items on the Chinese Internet in the last few weeks is an essay entitled “Zhengge Zhongguo Jiushi Yige Shanzhai”—“All of China is a Knock-Off.” It first appeared on Douban, a culture forum, written in Chinese but, curiously, with a Western byline: Steven Zuckerberg. It was scooped up by Chinese news portals, which described it as the translated writings of an American and gave it a headline: “An American Youth Says: All of China is a Knock-Off.” The piece cited a long list of pirated music and Nokia knock-off phones and Nike rip-offs and the like to argue that China is racked by a culture of imitation that stifles genuine creativity. The piece was polarizing, drawing criticism from China’s patriots and praise from liberal Chinese writers who credited a foreign writer with an astute observation.
But the essay is a more subtle piece of work than you might think: A tip from a Chinese friend led me to contact Wang Hongzhe, a twenty-five-year-old graduate student in mass communication at Peking University, who acknowledged that he is the reputed Steven Zuckerberg. (He chose the initials S.Z. as a nod to shanzhai, the Chinese term for “imitation.”) His essay was an experiment: Would China respond differently to criticism from abroad than it would to criticism from homeàIt’s a long-running question that gets to the heart of China’s erratic appetite for dissent, and the same question that vexed Lu Xun, the famous social critic, who wrote seventy-five years ago: “Throughout the ages Chinese have had only one way of looking at foreigners. We either look up to them as gods or down on them as wild animals.”
In his Internet experiment, Wang has added a compelling twist on the nature of Chinese nationalism. He did not simply want to prove that patriots would predictably bristle at the criticism, but that Chinese readers of all stripes would listen to criticism more closely from an outsider, even if they did not agree with it. “Before this little trick, I wrote some sincere essays about the Chinese Internet and pop culture to express my thinking….But Chinese netizens always regarded my essays as bullshit,” Wang told me. “They did not understand them, and, more importantly, they were not willing to understand them, because of my identity as a Chinese guy.”
As Wang sees it, people gave more credence to “Zuckerberg”’s appraisal than to “Wang”’s because China spends too much of its time on the hunt for prejudice, only to “find out what this prejudice is based on and give one’s own response or counterattack.” They “feel some kind of invisible threat—that a foreigner might understand China more deeply than ourselves.” It’s a provocative argument, and I’ll be curious to see how comments change once Chinese Web users know that the author was, by design, a knock-off American.
