By Lostalley 12/08/2019
Barely the second week since leaving the States, I’m starting to hallucinate about being vaporized into an unseen smoke, watching Shanghai from above and beyond. A desolate dystopia in the guise of a modern metropolis is what I see, with or without naked eyes. Local self-media rumor mill is busy spewing out lies, semi-lies, half-truth and the in-between. The unnerving one is a complete implementation of the so-called Social Credit System by 2020. The bell of Hell tolls. High tech breeds high check. Already, pervasive government surveillance, public mind control, the voiding of citizens’ rights, become a new norm. A nationalist and collectivist society in which the Party has the final say in everything. And soon, frequency of sex will be monitored to prevent subversive positions. China acts like a surfer, desperate for air, engulfed by tidal waves from Mao’s proletarian and totalitarian legacy, Deng’s capitalist and revisionist reform, and worst of all, Xi’s absurd and surreal deformation.
Last Sunday, on the last metro from People’s Square Station to my hotel, a flashback of the short ride: a bright red poster with big characters “THE RISE OF CHINA IS UNSTOPPABLE”; passengers glued to cell phones thru glasses (minimally 80% of the young are spectacled); eerily silent compartment, a suffocating air of apathy......Stepping out, I glance over the train tracks, the steely parallel, reflecting the dim-lit tunnel vision, seemingly infinite. A metaphorical bipolar disorder:
The best all lack conviction
While the worst are full of passionate intensity
W. B. Yeats’ prophetic pessimism of the uncertain world between the post-WWI and pre-WWII in his “The Second Coming” is echoing afar, a haunted memory re-emerging, the nightmare lingering, annihilation brewing. I pass a posh restaurant window, a well-dressed Caucasian couple are eating their steaks, at this late hour. The scene montages into a gigantic butcher shop, and a grotesque figure is dissecting the familiar historical corpse, with the national anthem blasting in the hollow.
