The great deception continues
Jonathan Mirsky
OUT OF MAO’S SHADOW: THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SOUL OF NEW CHINA by Philip Pan Simon & Schuster, £14.99, pp. 349, ISBN 9780330451031 ✆ £11.99 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 In 1952 the 20-year-old Maoist fanatic, Lin Zhao, ordered that a Chinese landlord be immersed in a vat of icy water overnight. She said this filled her with ‘cruel happiness’. Later she wrote to a friend about how she had helped organise the execution of other landlords, some of the two million killed in those years. ‘Seeing them die this way, I felt proud and happy.’ Lin came from a family which in Maoist terms had a ‘bad class background’, the kind of ‘black’ family that could end up with bullets in the back of their necks, bullets for which their executioners would ask surviving family members to pay five pennies. Reading about her murderous zeal convinced me that she was terrified that her family background would at least taint and probably destroy her.
That is exactly what happened, although not for the reason Lin feared. In 1968 her mother opened the door to a police officer who told her, ‘Your daughter has been suppressed. Pay the five-’fen bullet fee.’ What had changed Lin Zhao from a Maoist killer to an enemy of the Great Helmsman? One of Philip Pan’s subjects in this indispensable book — the most com prehensive and saddest study of China right up to the Olympics that I have read for years — set out, at some risk to himself, to find out.
Many China specialists have sounded the depths of official Chinese corruption, peasant misery, suppression of dissidence and mass persecution. They have shown what may be China’s greatest obstacle to becoming a modern country in the best sense: its obscuring and re-writing of history, notably anything relating to the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976, and the Tiananmen killings in June 1989.
Philip Pan, the Washington Post’s Beijing Bureau Chief until 2007, knocks senseless the notion that China’s authoritarianism must lead to some form of democracy.
What we have here are Pan’s first-hand, hard-won and dangerous encounters with a handful of heroes, some of them now behind bars. He shows how the Chinese Communist Party squashes men and women, like Lin Zhao, who once believed in its legitimacy but lost their faith when they came up against the party’s insistence on utter obedience or else. Where small victories over this behemoth have been achieved, Pan insists, it is because ‘individuals have demanded and fought for [freedom] and because the party has retreated in the face of pressure’.
Pan’s admiration for these daring naysayers reaches from the Cultural Revolution to 2008, and from Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang to a blind advocate (now in prison) for peasants mauled for opposing the one-child policy — which Pan pithily explains was unnecessary since it was promulgated in 1979. But his admiration is cleareyed: the present regime, he asserts, remains like ‘a Mafia organisation and a political system obsessed with profits at the expense of other social goals — public health, environmental protection, economic justice’.
The party could make a case for its authoritarian rule, he suggests, perhaps ironically, by maintaining that without it China’s economic reforms — which Pan does not challenge — would have sunk in a welter of multi-party wrangling. Instead, and absurdly, the party claims that ‘it too leads a democracy’.
Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang was dismissed from office in May 1989 for opposing the upcoming use of force in Tiananmen, and confined to house arrest until he died in 2005. His achievements and even his existence were airbrushed away. Pan met Wang Junxiu, a veteran of Tiananmen, who wrote a eulogy to Zhao, a seriously dangerous act. Despite the efforts of security officers he managed to enter Zhao’s home and offer condolences to the family, and despite more official obstructions attended his funeral. This sounds paltry. But the men who rule China fear what Zhao represented — opposition to invariable violence and an advocacy of modest political reform.
Another of Pan’s subjects, Hu Jie, a middle-aged army veteran turned movie-maker, spent years tracking down what had happened to Lin Zhao. Once a super-enthusiastic, even murderous Red Guard, she lost her faith in the party, and after writing a 438-page declaration in her own blood, was executed, wearing a special headband to muffle her voice, outspoken right to the end. As she told a friend, ‘I finally understood we really were deceived. Hundreds of thousands of people were deceived.’ Zeng Zhong, a teacher and ex-Red Guard, decided in 2005 to count and identify the 500 dead in a Chongqing cemetery, the only one in all China devoted to those who died during the Cultural Revolution. Zeng tracked down 200 of them; one was killed in the same bed with a friend. The son of a victim told Pan that when he was a child, ‘We were told that we needed to use violence to destroy a class. That was justification for torturing someone: they weren’t considered human anymore.’ Disguised as an ordinary Chinese, Pan sat in the back of a courtroom where he observed lawyers score human-rights points before hostile judges so astounded by what they heard that they withheld judgment for years rather than hand down party-pleasing verdicts. ‘But the authorities continue to hire thugs and criminals for the dirty work of assaulting and intimidating lawyers’.
What is beyond sad is the number of Chinese, Pan states, ‘who have been willing accomplices in the act of forgetting’ as long as they get richer. These are the Chinese — one meets them even in London — who label as criminal, China-hating or simply lies any attempt to call Beijing to account for the actions Pan says resemble those of the Mafia. These Chinese, many of them under 40, know nothing of the Cultural Revolution and often state that the Tiananmen killings were the fault of the troublesome demonstrators. They remember the Cultural Revolution, Pan says, ‘only with the kitsch of a Mao watch or a Red Guard theme restaurant’.
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