LOVE, as Ali MacGraw once sobbed, means never having to say you’re sorry. Working in China is the opposite: you have to say sorry quite often. A handwritten sheet of paper, ideally smudged by contrite teardrops, used to do the trick. But these days, it sometimes seems, an apology is worth anything only if it is made on national television. In recent months all sorts of people have unburdened themselves in this way: a leading financial journalist distressed at having helped create the “panic and disorder” in China’s markets; a Hong Kong publisher of muckraking books about Chinese politics, who disappeared from a beach resort in Thailand; a Swede who had for seven years run a group in Beijing offering legal help to Chinese citizens.
They and many others have confessed their “crimes” to the cameras and apologised for the trouble they have caused. Westerners, even those addicted to reality TV, find these displays on prime-time news shows appalling. America’s State Department expressed concern this month about the growing number who “appear to have been coerced to confess to alleged crimes on state media”. It does indeed look bad—an echo of...Continue reading
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