Would you prosititute yourself for your students?
I was over at EastSouthWestNorth and encountered the story of a rural teacher (presented as the girl to the left) who began selling her body to raise money for the school she was teaching at, already for free. Twenty months later, she passed away.
Apparently, the story made some waves within China and even reached some foreign audiences.
It was also completely fabricated.
The person who posted the story has clarified his intent as trying to raise awareness for the impoverished schools of the mountainous western region of China. Through his dramatic fictional story, he feels he has already done good and accomplished his goals due to increased public attention and “awareness” and some resulting allocations of funds by the relevant government authorities.
Zhang said: “I want to clarify to the media. The story about the memorial meeting for the teacher-prostitute has even reached the north American and European forums. It is a public interest campaign that I am doing for the poor schools in the mountainous western region. As a Chinese person with a conscience, I want to call the people’s attention to education in western China. As an individual, my means are limited. So I created a touching story to motivate people to take action. Although this has created many doubts and controversies, all of that is not important. The important thing is that my essay has caused certain western mountainous region education departments to allocate funds to the impoverished schools. I am very grateful and that is enough for me. As for the vicious rumors and insults, I will ignore them with a laugh, because those people failed to understand why and what I wrote.”
This is very much a “do the ends justify the means” sort of issue.
More interesting were the comments Zhang, the writer responsible, gave during an interview regarding his ideas about the internet and the “truth and lies” of information:
“More than half of the information on the Internet is false. Actually, it does not matter whether they are true or false. The important thing is just what the Internet media bring us…”
“I want people to pay more attention to my work and their inner ideas and spiritual content. I used to be in the advertising business, and I want to inject my ideas into cases of marketing through the Internet platform. I want to make money while purifying the Internet. Using sensationalistic methods or subjects is just one way of Internet promotion.”
“The Internet is a virtual society with all sorts of people living in it. Because of the differences in topics and ideas, people have different actions and reactions. Some people are fooling with the Internet, while others are fooled by the Internet.”
“Truthfulness is unimportant in a literary work, even though some media may treat a fictional story as news.”
We can also see the issue between what should be and what is. Believing everything you read to be true (which includes disclosures of what is fictional and what isn’t) is an ideal. Few people enjoy being deceived and tricked especially when emotional investment is involved. That’s reasonable. The reality, however, is just as Zhang points out: people fool and are fooled. Within that, we can try to draw arbitrary lines of what was done with good intentions versus what was done with malicious intentions…but that is a value-judgement. Is truth more important than a cause to action?
That’s a decision everyone has to make for themselves and I can certainly see how disclosing his teacher-prostitute story as being fictional would have lessened the impact such a story would have on readers. Could he have added an ambiguous disclaimer along the lines of: “this story reflects real situations in China’s mountainous western region?” In of itself, we could interpret the “real situations” as reflecting the poverty and difficulty of getting funds allocated to these poor schools OR we could interpret as there really being teachers prostituting themselves altruistically for their poor schools and students. I’m sure plenty of people could get riled up about even the ambiguity…and, again, reasonably so.
But, at this point, I do want to draw attention to what I think is the more profound concept that Zhang reminds us: It doesn’t matter if the information is true or false, all that matters is Google the Internet (or the information medium) itself. More or less, I agree. Be that it may be a “buyer beware” sort of environment, the Internet is nonetheless a medium through which information is exchanged. It empowers people, even if that power requires their own responsibility to discern fact from fiction. Yes, it can be a tool for good and for evil, but the existence of the tool itself is key. The Internet gives us choice and voice which is, perhaps, something that Chinese society hasn’t had as much benefit of (or experience) as many Western societies.
Therefore, the ends (good and evil uses) are not necessarily as important as the means (having the Internet). I’m going to go out on a limb here, risk getting a knock from the CCP secret police, and try to suggest some parallels that may help many Western readers grasp this concept: Maybe it is like the Christian concept of “free will,” where God gave Man the ability to choose right or wrong even knowing that Man would often choose wrong and disappoint Him. Or, maybe it is like democracy, where the masses accept that they will occasionally choose the wrong leader but the important part is that they have the choice and the power to elect their representatives.
Of course, this all depends on what is more important to someone: the end result or the process. Amongst many things, Zhang’s managed to increase funding for poor schools, raised awareness, and pissed off many people who believed his story to be completely true. He’s also managed to show how the internet can be used, harnessed, even manipulated by and for anyone.
Tags: choice, democracy, ends justify the means, fiction, free will, hoax, hype, internet, manipulate, media, poor, poverty, promote, prostitute, schools, story, students, teacher, voice, western region