Much of Madeline Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing centers around music. Jiang Kai, Sparrow, and Zhuli are three of the novel’s protagonists, and all study music at Shanghai’s Conservatory as the Cultural Revolution progresses. Due to the Cultural Revolution, the government censors the music that members of the Conservatory can play, in the hopes that the musicians will only learn, compose, and play “revolutionary” songs. The musicians, on the other hand, enjoy playing all sorts of music for the sheer joy of creative expression. In emphasizing the conflict between the people’s desire to express themselves freely and the government’s desire to spread propaganda and maintain complete control, Thien celebrates the value of freedom of expression and warns against the dangers of censorship and propaganda.
When Zhuli, Sparrow, and Kai are at the Conservatory, the censorship of their music becomes increasingly stringent as the Cultural Revolution progresses. At the Conservatory, composers have to give their compositions revolutionary titles, such as “The Sun Rises on the People’s Square.” The fact that the government seeks to control even the titles of instrumental music compositions (which audiences may never see) suggests that its efforts at spreading propaganda are exaggerated, and that perhaps the goal of censorship isn’t merely to make sure no counter-revolutionary messages are being spread, but rather simply to suppress the people’s creative expression in order to control them. The censorship becomes even more extreme when many students of the Conservatory join the Red Guard. During a political studies class, one of Zhuli’s classmates criticizes her for “favoring music in the ‘negative’ and ‘pessimistic’ key of E-flat minor.” In response, Zhuli “rebuke[s] herself fiercely, vow[ing] to embrace the optimism of C major and G major keys.” In this moment, the other student’s need to politicize even the key of a musical piece is so extremist that her position becomes ridiculous. Her effort to make everything a tool for propaganda causes her to destroy Zhuli’s right to her own individual taste and ignores the fact that music does not communicate such simple, direct sentiments as “optimism” or “pessimism,” but rather speaks in far more abstract ways.
Indeed, Zhuli and Sparrow value music precisely because through music, they express complex, abstract, but deeply felt emotions. For them, music is a tool for creative expression rather than political propaganda. The language Thien uses when describing the feelings that classical music evokes in her characters often involves contradictory emotions. For instance, Sparrow appreciates the piece “Moon Reflected on Second Spring” for its being “a spiral of both radiance and sorrow.” Radiance and sorrow are vastly different sentiments, and yet the composer Sparrow admires is able to evoke both in his piece. The fact that Sparrow admires this quality suggests that for him, music is about communicating abstract, complicated feelings, which is the exact opposite of music that is aimed to convey simplistic, pro-government propaganda to its audiences. For Sparrow, music is about expressing the multiplicity and variety of human experience, rather than the straightforward party line of the government.
Sparrow embodies the tension between propaganda and freedom of expression through his life’s work. As a musician and composer, he refuses to give his work propagandistic titles, and he seeks to write sonatas that evoke a wide range of human feeling. However, when the government removes him from the Conservatory, he is forced to work in a factory that produces radios. Radios symbolize the omnipresence of propaganda in China—throughout the book, characters are forced to listen to government announcements, warnings, and propagandistic news on the radios, which are in homes as well as public spaces. Thus, Sparrow goes from someone whose work embodies freedom of expression to someone whose work facilitates propaganda. During the Tiananmen Square protests, Sparrow hears the “fact of martial law” repeated over and over on the radio, and “regret[s] every radio he [has] ever built.” Readers can interpret Sparrow’s regret as his frustration at having helped to create a tool that spreads propaganda and oppressive messages to the people. By seeking to distance himself from his work building radios, Sparrow also tries to separate himself from participation in the government’s propaganda. Through detailing his and other characters’ experiences with propaganda and stifled freedom of expression, Thien demonstrates to readers just how insidious propaganda can be, and, by contrast, how important it is to live in a society that allows for freedom of expression.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Freedom of Expression vs. Propaganda ThemeTracker
Freedom of Expression vs. Propaganda Quotes in Do Not Say We Have Nothing
Remember what I say: music is the great love of the People. If we sing a beautiful song, the People will never abandon us. Without the musician, all life would be loneliness.
Big Mother continued through the rooms. Now she found herself at the foot of the alcove steps. Putting aside her walking stick. She paused to offer a poem to the God of Literature because, after all, these mysterious notebooks belonged to his domain. She recited:
When the mind is exalted,
the body is lightened
and feels as if it could float in the wind.
This city is famed as a center of letters;
and all you writers coming here
prove that the name of a great land
is made by better things than wealth.
“One should be careful of the sun,” the man said, as if talking to himself. He reached out, pulled the string, and the fan started up once more. “One should learn to practice in the shade.”
The students began offering criticisms of themselves and each other, and the girl next to her, an erhu major, mocked Zhuli for favoring music in the “negative” and “pessimistic” key of E-flat minor, and continuing to play sonatas by revisionist Soviet composers, including the disgraced formalist, Prokofiev. Zhuli rebuked herself fiercely, vowed to embrace the optimism of the C and G major keys, and ended her self-criticism with, “Long live the Great Revolution to create a proletarian culture, long live the Republic, long live Chairman Mao!”
Men whose only crime was honest criticism were digging ditches and wasting away. Meanwhile, back home, their families lived in ignominy, their kids were hounded in schools or kicked out altogether, their houses were confiscated, their possessions trashed, their wives forced to beg on the streets […]
Young people were ransacking the distribution warehouse, even pulling out the workers. Zhuli closed her eyes. “Unmask them!” “Bourgeois rats!” “Drag them out!” The shouting had a merry, dancing quality, a French pierrot two-step. “Cleanly, quickly, cut off their heads!” From where had this crowd appeared? She heard a rupture like a pane coming down to land, but it was only this electrified, heaving mass of people. Time was slipping away. Soon it would be too late. “Just shout the slogans,” the girl beside her whispered, “Quickly! They’re watching you. Oh, why are you so afraid?”
“I am ready now,” she thought, “to bring all these flowers for…I will find all the flowers, even if I must steal them from the hands of our Great Leader, I will lay them at Prokofiev’s feet.” She had given every bit of her soul to music.
The official news program announced that Lao She, whose plays Wen the Dreamer had loved, and who had once been celebrated as “the People’s artist,” had drowned himself. To celebrate his death, joyful marching music danced from the speakers.
She wrote directly overtop of the denunciations on the poster, so that “brother” appeared over “leader,” “vague” over “reactionary,” and “high bluffs” sat overtop “demon-exposing mirror.”
“You wrote to Chairman Mao? You ridiculous oaf of a man.”
“Our own sons denounced me,” Ba Lute said, broken. “Da Shan and Flying Bear say they want nothing to do with us. But I have faith that Chairman Mao, our Great Leader, our Saving Star, will redeem us.”
It was, and would always be, the only thing he had ever said that made her weep.
In school, they recited essays about what made a good revolutionary. She began to wonder what made a good father, a good grandmother, a good enemy, a good person.
In the morning, loudspeakers cried out the same turbulent song: “The Esteemed and Great Leader of our Party, our army and the People, Comrade Mao Zedong, leader of the international proletariat, has died…” Big Mother walked the shrouded streets. […] She thought of her sister and Wen, of her lost boys and Ba Lute, the unwritten music, the desperate lives, the bitter untruths they had told themselves and passed on to their children. How every day of Sparrow’s factor life was filled with humiliations. Party cadres withheld his rations, demanded self-criticisms, scorned the way he held his head, his pencil, his hands, his silence.
“The music you used to write, Ba, was it criminal music?” He could only say, “I don’t know.” That same night, he wrote a new banner for the front door which read, May the Red Sun keep rising for ten thousand years, in calligraphy that was accomplished but empty, a fixed smile. He might as well have written Joy! on a plastic bucket.
For as long as she could remember, right and wrong had been represented by the Party through color. Truth and beauty, for instance, were hóng (red), while criminality and falsehood were hēi (black). Her mother was red, her father was black.
The architecture was intended to make a person feel insignificant, but Ai-ming felt confusingly large, there was so much room here, a child could run in any pattern, any shape, never encounter anyone or anything.
