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Ironically, the government almost invited such license as it became more and more lenient. Earlier this year, for example, it tolerated a flowering of experimental and unorthodox dramas. Playwright Gao Xingjian's Bus Stop presented a story about eight people awaiting a bus that never arrives. Conspicuously absent were all the trappings of conventional Chinese drama: plot, moral and exhortation. Meanwhile, thousands of citizens were flocking to a production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, directed by Miller himself at Peking's prestigious Capital Theater. The spectators sympathized so warmly with Bourgeois Protagonist Willy Loman that many left the theater in tears.
Such adventurous cultural expansion has accompanied, and maybe encouraged, less welcome winds from the West: a questioning of authority, a sense of ambiguity, even a loss of faith. "Chinese young people don't believe in anything any more," complains one young writer. With 20% of the urban young in China less than fully employed, and perhaps all of them sharing the disenchantment that is a legacy of the Cultural Revolution, it is small wonder that college students are said to embrace Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre's views of alienation. Indeed, before the crackdown, "alienation" had become a rallying cry for those who entertained unauthorized views. According to the official press, 600 articles on alienation have darkened Chinese journals since 1978. The most celebrated essay appeared last March in People's Daily over the name of Zhou Yang, 76, a veteran of previous ideological shifts and a senior member of the party's Central Committee. Zhou frankly contended that the principle of alienation could exist even under socialism.
Zhou's unsettling thesis led to a series of official rebukes. Earlier this month, People's Daily vilified the "depressed" notion of "alienation in socialism" and complained of "some people who go so far as to take the socialist system itself for alienation." Then the paper began running a stream of self-criticisms, in which Zhou repented of "betraying the party and the people's trust." Finally, the two editors who had countenanced Zhou's original article were ousted, even though their antileftist sentiments had not long ago been embraced by Deng himself.
Despite the crackdown, the 40 million-member Communist Party has gone out of its way to avoid raising memories of the other purges that have scarred China's recent history. Said an official editorial last week: "Any campaign or drive like those of the past is strongly banned. Civilized methods must be used to correct uncivilized behavior." Meanwhile, the government's new assault on "bourgeois" decadence has perplexingly coincided with, and sometimes overlapped, its official month-old purge against diehard leftists and other remnants of the Cultural Revolution. As the ruling party has taken one step to the left, then one to the right, the nation as a whole has been kept constantly off balance.