lychees and liberty

it's lychee season. which means i am attempting to write and eat lychees at the same time and dripping sweet lychee love all over the keyboard. (i secretly resent people who are disciplined enough not to eat at the computer.) this week in china has been bittersweet. yesterday was the one year anniversary of the sichuan earthquake, china's largest national disaster in decades. more than the earth opened then, as private citizens, the government, the army, corporations, and civil society all rushed to do what they could. there was such an outpouring of emotion. and for a moment it seemed as though all of these sometimes disparate entities were united in an authentic, albeit tragic, way. the spirit of volunteerism that gripped the nation in the days after 5.12 (as it's called in chinese) is something that NGO leaders and government officials still mention (in addition to mentioning, of course, the spirit of volunteerism surrounding the olympics). wen jiabao himself flew to the scene. everyone was equally shaken by the sheer sadness of it all.

but the equality didn't last for long. according to government estimates, more than 5,300 children died in the earthquake as schools collapsed. as suspicion arose about the high student death toll being the result of substandard school construction, the government began to try to suppress the opening created by the earthquake. this is all over the press, so i hardly need to reheat what you read for breakfast. it is disheartening that so many of the parents, lawyers, activists, journalists, and artists that have tried to ascertain the truth about the conditions in the collapsed schools have been harassed or detained.

yet i wonder whether the government will eventually no longer be able to rely on these tactics, whether one day detention won't do. among the many reasons i feel privileged to do the work that i do, the sheer resilience of china's civil society never ceases to amaze me. for a country that is so committed to suppressing it, civil society here continues to flourish. (and yes, there are openings and space for public participation, we operate in that space and work to expand those openings. but overall, this can be a challenging place to speak truth to power. or advocate. or organize. or even to hold a meeting about law firm pro bono.) this resilience amazes me all the more because of the uncertainty of it all. there's something so precarious about everything right now. perhaps especially now. this is a year full of sensitive anniversaries in china - the tibetan uprising, tiananmen, the 60th anniversary of the founding of the people's republic. as a result, there is a certain tightness. it's as if each of the limited open spaces for civil society engagement could suddenly collapse like those primary schools in sichuan at any moment. i was talking with a colleague the other day about some of the incredibly brave individuals who continually take on the government. and how baffling it is that some people can just seem to get away with real criticism. we questioned whether there was some safety in being high profile, whether that allowed certain people to get away with more. i wondered whether some people just cannot not push. whether such people wouldn't describe what they do as brave or foolish, or even think of it in terms of an adjective, but whether pushing is just who they are. she pointed out that anyone, regardless of who or how or why, can get away with it until one day they can't. of course no one knows when that day will come. if it will. some people suggest that political reform in china will naturally follow economic openness. i am not so sure. what i am sure of is that the will of a people, once stirred, is hard to contain.

similarly and less seriously, lychee juice, once transferred from fingers to keyboard, quickly becomes sticky. at least it smells good.