Note: I re-published my blogs of June 24 and June 28 yesterday.
I visited Warren Kinsella's bog last Saturday for the first time in a long while. - I have not got time for him lately. - My visit confirmed what I had suspected for almost two weeks, i.e., the hours of my recent blog postings had become the latest focus of yet another politicization.
First blog
It all started, quite unexpectedly, with my blog of June 24, How was your day yesterday. The hour of its posting was 9:22AM. The political interpretation - not what I intended to mean, I would like to emphasize - was that it had a resemblance to 9/11. Indeed, one might argue it gave meaning to "9/11 doubled".
Of course, when I compose my blogs, I never write the hours of their postings. As I said before, I normally use email to publish my blogs. If it is a long blog posting, I would spend hours, or even days because of my depression, time constraint or living condition, writing and editing it in a word processor beforehand. Then I copy and paste it onto my email program, edit it one last time, insert the necessary hyperlinks and finally, hit the send button. I do not pay attention to the clock while toiling these tasks. (Who would?) That there was a resemblance between the hour of this blog and 9/11 was a pure coincident.
In fact, I was quite distressed by my bad luck after I realized the resemblance hours after posting. -- With my situation dire as it was, I certainly did not want any additional problem coming up. -- But I also knew that the Bush administration and its allies would use every opportunity to demonize me. A such, this blog could not possibly escape the same treatment. I thought hard about various ways to remedy the happenstance.
I thought about manually changing the hour to, say, 9:23AM. But I have never done that before and I felt it would compromise the authenticity of my blog.
For a while, I thought about the possibility that it did not happen by chance, but was a deliberate sabotage on the part of Google, as I had a history of problems with them before. But I could not be sure. (I only posted a small portion of the problems online. Other curious incidents included: (1) For a long time, my position on the list of Burnaby, BC bloggers, which Blogger.com used to maintain, coincided with my age; (2) The increase of my profile view number was always 20; (3) I often encountered some technical difficulties when I needed to post a blog at some critical moment tied to the political environment; and (4) While my blog comes up on top of other search engines, Google has been surpressing my ranking for a long time, etc. )
I also thought about explaining, mathematically under a few reasonable technical assumptions, that one of my blog postings would bound to hit some ominous hours connected to 9/11 as long as I kept writing and publishing, given that I have posted hundreds of blogs already and still counting. But I realized that the problem was political, not mathematical or logical.
Finally, feeling fate had played a bad joke on me, I took the whole blog posting down. If you have followed my journey from the beginning, you know that deleting a whole posting was very rare in my blogging as I took integrity very seriously.
Second blog
The second blog, What happened on my Ottawa trip , was published at 11:25PM on June 28.
I started writing this blog while I was in Ottawa. The draft had been sitting there for quite some days. I hesitated to publish it because I felt what the Bush administration/Canadian government/CSIS/RCMP did to me personally was too dirty to be made public.
That evening, I reviewed some of the materials saved on my computer. It was after reviewing that day's Norman's Spectator that I felt I should confront whatever negative feelings I had and publish that blog. I copied and pasted the draft onto my Gmail account, inserted the hyperlinks, did the final editing. Self-conscious about the hour, I looked at the computer clock. It was 11:22PM. Since I had just been burned by the number 22, I decided to wait a couple of minutes, just to be safe. I moved away from my Gmail account window and surfed a couple of web pages. When I came back to my Gmail, the time was 11:25PM. Thinking that 11:25 should not have a problem, I immediately hit the send button.
(In my mind, the vast majority of the 720 minutes should not have any problems. And I do not know about you, but to figure out whether 11:22 or 11:25 - or any other minutes, for that matter - might have any bad political meanings would definitely take me more than 60 seconds. I did not carefully examine every minute of the day after my first blog to find out which ones might have bad political interpretations. For one thing, I did not have that kind of time luxury to do 720 examinations. For another, given my limited political knowledge and experience, even if I did examine every one of the 720 minutes, there was no guarantee that nobody in the world would find crazy political interpretations in the minutes that I had deemed safe to use, especially if one was bent on demonizing me. For similar reasons, I won't likely engage in this exercise in the future.)
It was the next day that I sensed that there was a "problem" with the hour 11:25, after reading Norman's Spectator and after some careful deliberation. The problem seemed to be that, since 25 is 5 squared and I am seen as the 5 th generation of Chinese leadership, one might argue that the hour 11:25 connects me with "9/11 squared". Indeed, as I learned last Saturday, Warren Kinsella's blog on that same day did confirm just such an interpretation. -- With six bulleted points, he basically implied that my candidacy for the 5 th generation of Chinese leadership had been toasted.
As for me, I felt I was being cursed with two problems in a row. I asked aloud (when nobody was around, of course) : " 老天爷为什么要这么捉弄我啊？" It appeared that I had no other way to fix the problem but to take the blog down again. However, taking down one blog was difficult enough for me. I just could not imagine that I would do that twice in a row. After some painful hesitation, I felt I had no choice but to take it down, which I did the next morning. Obviously, I was quite taken down by the whole experience, too. Indeed, for the first time since I embarked on my journey, I felt unsure of myself and I was at the end of my blogging career.
Third blog
It was after I felt resigned to my fate that I had second thought about my situation: Maybe it might turn out to be not that bad.
The reason was that, if the Bush administration gave such crazy interpretations along the line of 9/11 to these two blogs of mine - my previous experience told me that they definitely would even if I refuted such demonization with facts and logic - it would mean the end of my "political career", quote unquote, especially considering the appearance that the publication of my first blog on June 24 unexpectedly boosted President Hu Jintao's political standing, as evidenced by a major "important speech" he gave less than 24 hours later in the Central Party School. But wasn't "getting out of politics" something I had always wanted? As I often say, a large portion of my problems come from the perception that I am the 5 th generation of Chinese leadership and the resulting excessive and over-zealous political interpretations of every single one of my words and actions.
With this thought in mind, I felt relieved and was at peace with myself. I knew that there would always be people who would question my motive and demonize me no matter how many facts and logic I put forward to prove otherwise. I had always wanted to get out of this "f---ing business", to borrow an expression I learned about politics from Earl McRae when I was fasting and protesting in Ottawa. Now it appeared that I had just unwittingly done so.
The third blog, which was published at 8:25AM on July 5, came about completely spontaneously. The idea of the blog hit me during the breakfast that day. Since it's a simple blog, I did not need to write a draft beforehand. And one of the public computers at the shelter happened to be free. So I used it - rather than unpacking and using my own laptop - to post my blog. I went on and off the desktop fairly quickly, probably within a time span of a few minutes. This time, since I was free of all the worries, I was completely oblivious to the hour while posting. By the way, the desktop in the shelter doesn't even keep accurate computer time and freezes from time to time. It would have been virtually impossible for me to have control over the timing of my posting even if I had wanted to. (Just in case you are wondering: I don't have a digital watch. -- In any case, I would suggest that only an accurate digital clock showing all three components of the time could be useful here. )
Amazingly, this blog posting not only has an interpretation, the interpretation actually follows logically from the first two. Since eight is a lucky number in Chinese and usually means good fortune, this blog could mean that, having lost the candidacy for the 5 th generation of Chinese leadership, I should pursue "fortune squared".
Even more amazingly, this interpretation actually is part of my real intention all along, as I mentioned many times before. For example, during the last general election, after I sensed my side was going to win, I wrote my first blog with a monetary overtone.
Of course, the other, more prominent part of my goal is to make sure justice is served for Cecilia Zhang, and in so doing, to contribute building a better Canada. Some people may call my motive "enlightened self-interest". Some may simply call it "doing well by doing good." I would just say that doing the right thing is not easy, but sometimes it is also the right thing to do.
Update 20070730
最近一段时间，我时常在想：为什么会出现一连三个在时间涵义上有巧合的博客？如果是一两个孤立的巧合也就罢了，这么多巧合恐怕只能是天意了。我相信我的上天━━13亿中国人民是有大智慧的；那么，他在向我传递一种什么样的信息呢？
首先，我觉得我的上天理解我。就象我的先父一样，他知道我是个老好人，理解我对从政的顾虑，特别是中共的政治又是那么无情，所以他故意让我在头两个博客的时间上“犯错误”，将我明白无误地从第五代接班人的位置上解脱出来。
我的上天一次一次在我头上显灵，又这么理解我关注我，说明他对我的前途还是有某种设计的。我觉得他是在回应我当第六代接班人的请求。更为重要的是，上述第三个博客的时间涵义刚好是我的真正动机，考虑到承认个人私欲对于当前的中共来说是个“禁忌”，这意味着当我接班的时候，中国的政治将会发生巨大的变化。那时，中国的政治将会冲破这种或那种的“禁忌”，变得更加真实、有效。
这种变化是好的。本来每个人、包括领导人都是有个人利益的；这就象人民有人民利益、企业有企业利益、政党有政党利益、国家有国家利益一样，是很正常的。无论是在政治领域还是在经济领域，大家在公开承认这一点的基础上，制定公平的规则，然后都按规则办事，社会运转会更有效率，政治生活也会自然而然地朝民主方向发展。然而现在中国是“潜规则”盛行，人们普遍觉得活着累。
当然，承认个人利益并不等于我们就不提倡“无私奉献”的精神了。恰恰相反，正是因为“无私奉献”的难能可贵，我们才要大力弘扬它。但是，作为中国社会中流砥柱的执政党，我们不能将自己的行为规范建立在“自律”的基础上；民主监督才是预防和惩治腐败的有效手段。
如果我们看得更广阔一些的话，我们会发现目前中国社会普遍缺少真实。这种真实的稀缺又是从政治领域开始的。比方说，胡锦涛在台面上讲话冠冕堂皇，但用笔手发文和实际操作又完全是另外一套，这种虚伪不可能长久。即使政府完全控制了媒体，老百姓也不可能被永远蒙在鼓里；人们可以从社会现实与台面政策的日益加大的落差中、从整个社会的道德败坏、虚假成风、腐败成风中找到问题的根源。实际上，从最近人们对政府关于“假包子”新闻是假新闻的通告的质疑中可以看出，政府的公信力已大不如前了。这可是一个危险的征兆。
总之，现状不可长久，但改变现状又不可一蹴而就。我想到我接班的时候，中国的政治应该会多一些透明、少一些虚伪；在那种情况下，我想我也还是乐于接受人民赋予我的挑战的。
