The New Yorker Reader: "A Man Like Him," by Yiyun Li

Online here.

Something I might be projecting onto the story but which I nonetheless find interesting is the parallel Li seems to be making between the respective bullying groupthink community politics of China and, well, much of the internet.

On the one hand there's a guy whose nineteen-year-old daughter starts a blog chronicling her attempts to sue and harass him after he divorces her mother — all the commenters line up behind her, and dissenting voices are shouted down or their comments deleted — and on the other hand there's the main character's father, an intellectual who was denounced and given a job as a toilet cleaner for his "reactionary" politics. In both cases, there's a pile-on, facts are less important than the momentum of the discussion, and their persecutors get to feel righteous and triumphant.

I've been thinking, lately, about how Mao — both in the initial revolution and then with all his campaigns, especially the Cultural Revolution — knew how to get the Chinese people behind him: harness their resentments, basically. You hear about peasants, during the initial land reforms, tying up their landlords and employers (even ones they had good relationships with) and humiliating and torturing them and stripping them of everything; during the Cultural Revolution students went after their teachers for not being sufficiently fervent; et cetera et cetera. It wasn't a state of constant revolution or vigilance or whatever — it was a cynical way of governing an ungovernable country (vast in geography and population and varied in demographics and customs; that much of the country was uneducated probably made it more so, while also making Mao's strategies more effective).

I think, really, of undirected underclass resentment whenever I hear people in the comments section spout phrases like "Mainstream Media," to describe people in better-connected channels of dialogue. And I think of it how it's possible for this resentment to be manipulated, by people who don't really respect the intelligence of the people whose resentment they're manipulating, into something like frothing subservience. I think about this especially when I read about Nick Denton encouraging Gawker commenters to share dirt, theoretically to overthrow the old-media model while exposeing its secrets, but mostly because advertisers pay per page view.

It's a cultural revolution!