【英】纽约书评刊登的六四文章选集。内含戴晴、刘宾雁、zzy

About 6 or 7 PM, after box dinners all around, they wanted to "do a formality" about my summons.

"Summons? You mean this was a summons?" I asked. "To me it felt rather more like a kidnapping." I told Zhang Kaijun that if I’d known it to be a formal summons, I would have wanted a lawyer.

Zhang answered that he was basing himself on article 82 of the Penal Code of the People’s Republic of China on the Management of Public Order.

I said that I was used to illegal detention for "chats," but had never received a summons before. So could he please read to me what that article says? He didn’t read it, but showed it to me.

"You’re mistaken," I said after glancing through it. "It says here that a summons may be issued ‘according to law’ only after discovery that a person’s behavior has violated the penal code on public order. My behavior has not."

The police responded that article 82 was only a procedural regulation. "If you don’t agree with what we’re doing, you can go into detail in your statement."

So I "coordinated" again. I answered their questions—pointing out, in passing, where they had broken the law. They took notes. In the end I affixed my signature and thumbprint to their written record, noting explicitly that they had omitted mention of the illegal behavior of the police.

By then I was starting to get cell-phone calls from friends at Tiananmen who wondered where I was. Something else strange was going on, they said. In earlier years the police cleared the square sometime after 9 PM, but this year they were already shooing people out by 8 PM. I explained to my friends that I was at a police station, kidnapped "according to law" for seven or eight hours, and that they should take care not to get into trouble.

At 9:30 PM Sun Di asked me to sign my name "confirming" that my summons had ended at 10 PM. It had begun at 2:30 PM, he said, and as long as it ended within eight hours it was legal. I congratulated him on the successful completion of his mission, which was, as both he and I knew, to thwart my plans to go to Tiananmen. On my side, though, the half-day detention at a police station made me feel as if I had, in fact, kept my promise to remember the massacre victims.

I reminded Sun Di that, counting the two hours of summons in the middle of the night, the total for the day was more than eight. Was this not a dangling vulnerability in his work?

"The morning wasn’t a summons," he said. "It was just a private chat."

At noon on Sunday, June 4, I went into the offices of my law firm to do some overtime work. Two policemen, assigned to "maintain overall stability," came with me.

—Translated by Perry Link

Notes

China: The Uses of Fear

By Jonathan Mirsky
Tiananmen Follies: Prison Memoirs and Other Writings
by Dai Qing,translated and edited by Nancy Yang Liu, Peter Rand, and Lawrence R. Sullivan, with a foreword by Ian Buruma
EastBridge, 162 pp., $24.95 (paper)
Instilling deadly fear throughout the population was one of Mao Zedong’s lasting contributions to China since the late Twenties. In the case of Dai Qing, one of China’s sharpest critics before 1989, fear seems to explain the sad transformation in her writing that is evident but never clearly acknowledged in Tiananmen Follies. Arrested, she confessed and was set free; her writing about the regime then took a different turn.

Dai Qing’s transformation—what in 1942 Mao’s chief torturer and extractor of confessions called "becoming conscious"—its causes, and its consequences are never explicitly mentioned by the translators and the editor of her essay collection. Yet here is a stark example of how mental persecution, so acute it must be called torture, can result in jettisoning a lifetime’s convictions. In Dai Qing’s case she feared execution and considered suicide.

The process of instilling deadly fear, which Mao admired when he saw peasants torturing and killing landlords in 1926 in Hunan, his home province,[1] was perfected in 1942 at Yanan, his guerrilla headquarters. No one has described that "Rectification Campaign" better than Yale’s David Apter and Harvard’s Tony Saich in their Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic.[2] In 1994 the authors interviewed 150 people from every walk of life, including peasants and poets, who had endured the Yanan ordeal; some of them were the "angry widows" of husbands who did not survive.

"Very few of those interviewed had been exempt from physical abuse and verbal abuse, if not before then during the Cultural Revolution," write Apter and Saich.

All had survived by learning to keep their mouths shut, except to parrot the appropriate line and use the exact words, phrases, and expressions countenanced by the authorities.
Such abject and long-lasting obedience was produced by terror followed by confession. Mao’s master at extracting information at Yanan was Kang Sheng, who had been trained by the NKVD and wore a black uniform. He saw confession as "a form of repentance that would bring the individual back into the fold." To his victims he said,

Why does the Communist Party make so much effort to rescue you? When a person confesses to the party we immediately remove the evidence about him,…and we are happy that he has become conscious…. Finally, I warn those people who do not wish to confess, we have maintained a lenient policy, but leniency has a limit.
And just as the 1942 Rectification at Yanan concentrated the Party’s efforts to secure, through fear, the abject loyalty and acquiescence of its victims, so did the Tiananmen events after June 4, 1989. Last January the regime attempted to curb outpourings of emotion after the death of Zhao Ziyang, the Party general secretary in 1989 who spent fifteen years under house arrest for sympathizing with the Tiananmen demonstrators. Zhao would have known of the nationwide arrests and executions of those condemned for participating in the hundreds of other uprisings throughout China in the spring of 1989, comprehensively described by James A.R. Miles in The Legacy of Tiananmen.[3] In addition to the hundreds of Chinese imprisoned last year for "endangering state security" and similar crimes, two hundred Tiananmen activists reportedly remain in jail; anyone who posts a critical remark about 1989 on the Internet risks arrest.

It is therefore an immediate difficulty with Dai Qing’s eight short essays and letters, all linked to her frightening seven months in solitary confinement after Tiananmen, that it is called Tiananmen Follies. Follies are foolish, useless, and ill-considered things—or light entertainment. None of these words apply in the case of Tiananmen. But the title Tiananmen Follies is not a mere publisher’s invention. Dai Qing regards what happened in Tiananmen as a series of mistakes by both the demonstrators and the government and she regrets her own—very tiny—part in them.

uring her months in Qincheng prison she was accused of being involved in a conspiracy and she was eventually released with what seems at first a mild rebuke. Her detention was especially unfair because she had very little to do with the Tiananmen protests. Most Beijing intellectuals in the spring of 1989 kept their distance from the demonstration. It is plain from Dai Qing’s narrative that she knew almost nothing about what was happening in the square. She assumed that the students would treat her with respect since she was famous for her outspoken writings about the regime. Indeed, a sign had been held up in the square demanding "Where is Dai Qing?" On May 19, when she spent an hour or two with the demonstrators, she was treated with some derision.

This was unjust. Dai Qing’s life before May 1989 was exemplary. Born in 1941 (her original name was Fu Ning), the child of a Party martyr, she was raised in the family of Ye Jianying, one of China’s revolutionary marshals, and was, as she says, a "[Communist] Party princess." She received an elite education in rocket science, working on the type of missiles, she says, that were aimed at the US, and she admits that she was trained as a spy. When she was twenty-three, "I was so loyal to the party. I was so loyal to Mao Zedong, I thought I would die if Mao Zedong needed me to die."[4] But in her late thirties she decided to become a writer and her writing made her reputation as an independent thinker. Her independence was her main quality, as Ian Buruma writes in his short introduction.

In 1978 she began her career as a journalist on Guangming Daily, a newspaper often overpraised for its appeal to intellectuals. She began writing on a variety of subjects. Using her high-level knowledge of the Party’s history, she showed how long, and in what ways, the Party had been persecuting its critics. Most startling was her analysis of the fate of Wang Shiwei, an intellectual who criticized corruption inside the Party during Mao’s guerrilla days at Yanan. Her article in 1988, "Wang Shiwei and ‘Wild Lilies,’"[5] revealed that Wang was falsely accused of being a Trotskyite and Chiang Kai-shek spy—and had been beheaded in 1947, and that some of those involved in his case were now among China’s leaders. She wrote, too, about Chu Anping, an editor of Guangming Daily, who in 1957 became a victim during the Anti-Rightist Movement. She condemned the "world of the party" for, as Princeton’s Perry Link puts it, its "slow pulverization" of "liberalism in almost any form."[6] In 1989 Dai Qing told Professor Link that between 1936 and 1946 perhaps 10,000 Communists, accused of being Trotskyists and spies, had been "’eliminated’ by drowning, burying alive, or death in squalid prisons."[7]

Perhaps Dai Qing’s most famous contribution to public life was Yangzi, Yangzi,[8] her edited collection of essays exposing the corruption and environmental destruction of the Yangzi Gorge Dam project. She condemned China’s leaders who

don’t know the difference between a country and a family. To them, the dam is fun, like their big toy. It gives them great face…. To me all this "national prestige" business, at the Olympics or anywhere, is shallow, worthless stuff.[9]
In March 1989 Dai Qing was one of the signers of a petition calling on the government to allow more political freedom and to cease imprisoning people for their ideas. Zhao Ziyang ordered that no newspaper should publish any of the petitions or, for six months, any articles written by the signers.

In the West we are used to revelations about the past and public life, and we value whistleblowers, but in China such acts are rare and anyone who makes unauthorized revelations about abuses is in danger. Their corresponding effect, therefore, is explosive. Dai Qing has vividly described this:

To appreciate why Chinese readers can be so interested in one little article, you should imagine living in a dark room with all the shades drawn. If one shade goes up—just a crack—the light that enters is suddenly very interesting. Everyone will rush to look. People in a normally lit room would find the same ray of light unremarkable.
But it is not mere curiosity, Dai Qing contends. People want to know "How did we get into this mess? Where did we go wrong?"

ai Qing, then, was a significant voice for liberty for at least a decade before June 1989. So why is it, as Ian Buruma puts it in his introduction, that

she [has] ended up being distrusted, even hated by all sides. The government regarded her as a dangerous, subversive liberal, and the students as an establishment stooge who stood in the way of their ideals.
Tiananmen Follies, however, conveys nothing of Dai Qing’s transformation. It consists, rather, of short pieces about her imprisonment, including her confession. A smattering of footnotes by the translators identify a few of her allusions; hardly anything is said about her admirable past. One of her editors has explained that Dai Qing wants her readers to figure out for themselves what the text means, without the interpretation of an expert. This is very different from the previous approach of a writer who made her reputation by clear explanation. Nor do the editors correct her errors, such as her statement that Wei Jingsheng, China’s most famous political dissident, was putting out a journal at a time when, in fact, he was in prison.

As one would expect from a confession made under the Maoist system, Dai Qing suggests more than once that illegal conspirators had fomented the Tiananmen uprising; she makes a cryptic reference to "the one who was ultimately behind the ‘planned conspiracy.’" It would have been easy for her editors and translators to ask Dai Qing who this was, or whether she still thinks there was such a person. She is hinting here at dark forces, thus echoing the Party’s traditional suggestion that any organized acts it deplores are the result of "black hands." Yet in another one of her short essays Dai Qing also dismisses the idea of conspiracy, deriding the Party’s official view of a "planned conspiracy" as "careless" and criticizing Deng Xiaoping’s opinion "that everything transpiring outside his window [during Tiananmen] was the product of such a ‘conspiracy.’"

I sympathize with Dai Qing’s confusion. I was in Tiananmen Square from almost the beginning of the demonstrations until the killings of June 4 and for both foreign observers and Chinese participants—many of whom were workers and citizens of Beijing, and who are barely mentioned in her book—it was impossible to know who, if anyone, was guiding the demonstrations, and what the attitude of the regime was. Until May 20 and the declaration of martial law, the authorities were silent. Nor were we aware of the increasing number of demonstrations in other cities and towns resembling those in Beijing. What we journalists saw, with astonishment, was that the normal forces of law and order in Beijing had almost completely disappeared. There were no policemen to be seen, although undercover agents must have been present. We knew there were army units outside the city and we knew they were drawing closer, often through Beijing’s network of tunnels. We all wondered how this drama would end.

I agree with Dai Qing’s estimate:

At that time, my own opinion was that the government was simply too inefficient and cumbersome to respond to the students…. If there were leaders with such capabilities, they were repressed at the top levels because of a fundamental difference of opinion. Either way, the distinct impression one came away with was that in ignoring the good youth of our nation the government presented itself as cold and heartless—which caused more people to become even more angry.
This view has been confirmed by many sources, including the Tiananmen Papers,[10] the government’s own condemnation of Zhao Ziyang, and the vast qingcha, or ferreting out, of Tiananmen participants which lasted through 1990.

But Dai Qing promptly undercuts her own insight when in the next sentence she suggests that "those who were involved in the ‘planned conspiracy’ were storing up their energy waiting for the prime opportunity." She makes the unfounded and disgraceful charge that student leaders like Wang Dan, who were imprisoned for about seven years after Tiananmen, were manipulated by the real masterminds, whom she does not name. Does she still think "that if troops had been brought in at this moment [April 1989] the situation would have been resolved very quickly"?

ere Dai Qing simply ignores that what happened in the spring of 1989 was a nationwide movement of which Tiananmen was the most significant part, but only a part; if she does know this, does she think that protests were provoked throughout China by—unnamed—conspirators? Indeed, does Dai Qing still believe what she says she told a Hong Kong radio station in May 1989: "I support the announcement of martial law"—which occurred on May 20—"and propose that the martial law troops carry out the order immediately, something that I have reiterated time and again." What did she think would happen when the army entered the square? Those who compiled Dai Qing’s essays take no interest in these matters, and particularly in Dai Qing’s contradictory statements, a serious editorial failure. The editors play into the hands of those Chinese, some of whom now live safely in the US, who were in Tiananmen and now condemn the demonstrators for not leaving Tiananmen earlier or, even more severely, for "destabilizing China," the very charge the Party makes to this day. Meanwhile the regime arrests those who use the Internet to call for a reversal of the official verdict on Tiananmen.

How much more valuable this book would have been if the compilers had been willing to ask Dai Qing, during her visits to the US, about how her opinions changed and what she thinks in retrospect. During her one brief visit to the square on the night of May 14, she and a small group of well-known Beijing intellectuals tried to persuade students to leave. She says she told the students, on the basis of a meeting earlier that day with some relatively high-ranking officials, that "the Premier [Li Peng] and the Party General Secretary have agreed to see you." The students turned Dai Qing down flat.[11]

Disheartened, she returned home where she stayed for several days. Without naming them, she disparages other scholars, "who were spending much of their time playing at the ‘Democratic Movement.’" She admits that most Beijing citizens "strongly supported the students." But she opposed the large-scale changes she said the demonstrators demanded, including a shift toward democracy, because what was needed, in her view, was small incremental reforms. She feared—rightly, as it happens—that "the situation could get totally out of hand and a disaster would befall everyone." More robust democrats like Wang Dan and Wei Jingsheng have dismissed such incrementalism, sometimes described in China as "neo-authoritarianism," as a trap that would maintain the dictators in power.

Tiananmen Follies is nevertheless an important book not only for its comments on the Tiananmen events but for what it tells us about how the Chinese authorities treated a distinguished prisoner. On June 4, 1989, when the army moved into Tiananmen, Dai Qing, who once would have died for Mao and was a "child of the Party," resigned from it. Arrested on July 14, she was taken to Qincheng, Beijing’s prison for elite political prisoners. Her account of her arrest, imprisonment, and confession are the truly valuable parts of her book. After her arrest, Dai Qing told friends, her hair turned white.

Dai Qing conveys with telling detail—but not at all "wittily" as the book jacket puts it—the deliberate, and increasingly terrifying, way the Chinese security services close in on a victim, in Dai’s case with elaborate false courtesy, and how quickly, even in a five-star prison like Qincheng, fear becomes overwhelming. It is incorrect to say, as one translator’s note states, that she makes "no full-fledged confession or expression of remorse." In fact, as the book’s jacket and the text make clear, Dai Qing did confess and expressed remorse.

2.

The book begins in mid-July 1989, more than a month after the Tiananmen crackdown and Dai Qing’s resignation from the Party. The government had already published a list of twenty-one "most wanted" student and other leaders, and there were plenty of rumors, "some far-fetched, others quite scary," of arrests of this or that person. Dai Qing heard that a Beijing newspaper would publish her name in a list of people facing imminent arrest. She and others immediately asked themselves the questions that had become familiar when they learned such lists were about to be published: What title precedes your name; for instance, are you called "comrade"? (Zhao Ziyang was called "comrade" in his brief official death notice, which meant that he had not been cast into political outer darkness.) On what page is the list published in the newspaper, how big is the type font, and where does your name appear on the list?

Dai Qing hears that her name will be the fifth or sixth on a list of twelve scholars and writers. "It is by such ranking that your fate is determined." She starts thinking about prison:

I was a mere grain of sand on their large chessboard…. I was unable to control my fate. My only wish was that I would be allowed to remain intact, and not be crushed to smithereens.
On July 13, "a single cop" comes to her apartment; he gives no identification, although it is plain what he is. He asks if she will be home the next day. "In so many words my guest was telling me, ‘Tomorrow we plan to take action and we want to know where you will be.’" The next morning an elderly woman from the neighbor-hood surveillance committee—usually called "the granny police"—arrives to inquire about Dai Qing’s plans for childbirth. Of course she wants to make sure Dai Qing is at home and Dai cannot resist saying, "Perhaps you’ve forgotten how long it’s been since I passed the age of childbirth."

That evening she is arrested in front of her husband and daughter. Still confident that she would not be convicted because she "had set foot in Tiananmen" only once, well before the declaration of martial law, Dai Qing writes that she "had no idea that I was being delivered to Qincheng, the most infamous penitentiary for political prisoners in China." She recalls that very high-level enemies of the state have been locked up in Qincheng during various regimes. Some, she remembers, were former security and military bigwigs who committed suicide there.

fter one day in prison, Dai Qing begins to give up her hope that China’s post-Mao reformists might treat her properly. "What," she asked herself, "if they now need to create an atmosphere of terror that would involve framing people?" She seems to be referring to the common practice during the post-Mao years of accusing prisoners of things they hadn’t done, always citing some law. The famous saying, which she herself quotes, "Verdict First, Trial Later," bears this out. She is allowed to receive a limited number of approved books and to exercise in an open space (where she never sees another prisoner) and she can listen to the radio. But she is forbidden to change the station, on which she hears lectures on how to raise snails and Western music conducted by Herbert von Karajan.

She estimates that there are about thirty prisoners in Qincheng while she is there. She writes that she admires the guards for their patience, incorruptibility, and discipline, and their "impervious[ness] to lust." They display degrees of "civilization and humanity." One of them tells her, "Don’t worry, we’re all family here." A "strikingly handsome" young guard chats with her about ice-skating and playing the guitar and permits her to look at a scar on his ear.

In her reconstructed account, she imagines that the decent behavior of the guards toward the important prisoners in Qincheng reflects the "general approach" of Mao and Zhou Enlai. This sounds either like wistful fantasy or an attempt to show she is patriotic; no one familiar with her previous writings can read it without skepticism.[12] She says she knows there have been "dark and poisonous" interrogators in the Party’s past, but she now believes they no longer exist, a misconception when we consider what was happening to most prisoners throughout China in the aftermath of the attack on Tiananmen. She describes her own interrogators as trained in legal ethics, and she regrets that "no one outside will know about the high quality work of investigators like those in charge of my case…they never once tried to coerce or cajole evidence out of me, even when I displayed a ‘bad attitude.’" In the light of her full-scale confession and repentance, this statement rings hollow. Dai Qing expresses sympathy for the "burdens of security" her interrogators shoulder: trapped between the bad past and the reformist present, they know that many are watching them. One mark of progress, she writes, would be if China stopped insisting it had no political prisoners.

Soon she begins to fear the worst, a heavy sentence, and she wonders if she will be executed. This is especially unfair, she writes, because she is opposed to overthrowing the present system. She favors "enlightened despotism," and fears that a revolutionary change now would be worse than the "present political order." As for the institution that will bring about change, "I have always believed that it is only the army leadership who have the capacity to transform the traditional leadership in China into a more open system." This is a startling belief, for which she provides no further explanation or evidence. Again the editors and translators fail to inquire when she formed this view and whether she still holds it. But the Party is progressing, she emphasizes; she wishes the Tiananmen students had been willing to accept the concession that the leaders would no longer import luxury cars.

In her account Dai Qing shows almost complete ignorance of what the demonstrators throughout China were actually demanding, although she is well aware of the implacable system in which she grew up. She describes its shabby record, starting with the 1942 Rectification Campaign in which thousands were executed, and moves through increasingly destructive "movements" and "campaigns." She concludes that "several generations lost their capacity to think independently, and their basic human rights." It is hardly surprising, then, that she supposes none of her lawyer friends will speak up for her, and that in any event her trial will be a "mere formality." She fears a sentence of more than fifteen years—Wei Jingsheng’s sentence—rather than the two the law appears to warrant.

By the end of 1989, as interrogations continue and she sees no way out of prison, she considers suicide. Kang Sheng’s methods, learned from the NKVD and introduced at Yanan, have worked. All that is necessary now is a confession.

In January she is told she will leave solitary confinement and be placed under "supervised residence," which means she can live in several places in Beijing under almost ordinary conditions, although not at home. She is first moved to the Qincheng staff dormitory with a retired guard to keep watch on her. It was while there that she wrote this memoir, which, she says, is uncensored, although she never says whether officials read it. She is released from prison on May 9, 1990, accused only of "the ‘error’ of ‘supporting and participating’ in…’political turmoil.’"

The translators add a note: in January 1991 Dai Qing told a Hong Kong journal, "You could say about my release that they’ve let me out of a small prison into a massive jail." This is evidently true, but what happened to her next remains somewhat mysterious. First she was moved to several different locations, apparently so that she could not speak with an American State Department official who wanted to visit her. Then quite suddenly she was allowed to go to Harvard as a Nieman Fellow. She still had, she says, some writings that she had hidden from the guards (although we are never told how); and it is in one of these concealed prison essays that she attacks those who, she says, "provoked" Tiananmen. She doesn’t say that one of them, Wang Dan, would soon turn up at Harvard after a much longer sentence than hers.

he last essays in Tiananmen Follies consist of Dai Qing’s confession and what might be described as confessional materials. It is here that the translators’ brief note claims "she is no snitch" and that she expresses no remorse. This is clearly false, although there is no evidence that anyone Dai Qing condemned suffered because of her accusations. What has happened is that Dai Qing has, in one of the Party’s oldest triumphal terms, "turned over" or, as Kang Sheng put it, she has "become conscious." She is willing to say things that would have been unthinkable before she was arrested.

She names names of political activists and accuses them of acts for which she has no evidence. She says that Tiananmen demonstrators hoped people would die in the square to make the situation worse. The translators of this book do not ask her for any evidence or explanation. The only such expectation—not hope—of deaths I know of was expressed by Chai Ling, one of the student leaders, in a filmed interview during Tiananmen, in which, plainly exhausted, she said she expected the army to kill students in the square. This, she said, would inform the world what China was like, but she would flee before this happened because she knew she would be a target. This interview caused Chai Ling’s reputation to suffer. But in spite of what she said, Chai Ling remained in the square throughout the killings of June 3 and 4 and its clearing by the army early in the morning of the fourth. She then fled China.

As for remorse, Dai Qing confesses she regrets almost everything she did from April 1989 on. She says that while the students were sincere in their demands for social justice,

I failed to observe, or, perhaps, observed and did not admit, the many defects of this generation of university students, especially the absence on their part of a rational spirit and their inability to exercise self-restraint when emotionally stirred up.
Referring to her own way of using "surprisingly dazzling words," she declares that she expressed her opinions "recklessly without much real thought or careful consideration…. It was exactly the kind of erroneous style of thinking that our Chairman Mao once criticized." In what sounds like a complete victory for Kang Sheng’s idea of being "conscious," she promises

never again [to] involve myself with political issues nor express opinions on important matters, especially since I am no longer a Party member.
In November 1989, Dai Qing heard from a prison interrogator that "she would be among the very few to be ‘executed.’" I suppose very few readers of The New York Review or its reviewers would refuse to cooperate under such pressure. We, too, might well confess and express remorse. In any event Dai Qing did the opposite of what she declared she would do. She broke the promise in her confession never again to pronounce on important political matters. She has written vigorously—and falsely—about the Tiananmen events.

Her book is an example of that broken promise. But more than that it is a frightening example of how mental torture and the fear of death can do lasting damage. Dai Qing’s treatment in Qincheng by the guards and interrogators she says she admired led, after her release, to the public condemnations of the Tiananmen students for which she is now so well known. She says, "I made a lot of compromises [with the Chinese authorities], and now I have got the right to live here [in the US]."[13] This, it must be said, is an unusually privileged position, especially when we think of the refugees from the Tiananmen repression who cannot return to China, as Dai Qing can and does.

Jung Chang, the author of Wild Swans, whose powerful book on Mao has just been published in London,[14] recently stated that "the Chinese must be the most traumatized people in the world. Fear is embedded in the national psyche."[15] Only Dai Qing knows for certain what happened to her in Qincheng prison. But the woman once admired as China’s most fearless and effective investigative journalist has changed, and her book, if read carefully, suggests why. She continues to live with the fear that caused her hair to turn white.

Notes
[1] Mao’s Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings, 1912–1949, edited by Stuart Schram and Nancy Hodes (M.E. Sharpe, 1994), Vol. 2, pp. 425ff.

[2] Harvard University Press, 1994.

[3] University of Michigan Press, 1996.

[4] "Dai Qing, Environmentalist, Writer, China," BusinessWeek online, June 14, 1999.

[5] Dai Qing, Wang Shiwei and "Wild Lilies": Reification and Purges in the Chinese Communist Party 1942–1944, edited by David E. Apter and Timothy Cheek (M.E. Sharpe, 1994).

[6] Perry Link, Evening Chats in Beijing (Norton, 1992), p. 146.

[7] Link, Evening Chats in Beijing, p. 147.

[8] International Rivers Network, 1991.

[9] Link, Evening Chats in Beijing, p. 209.

[10] Compiled by Zhang Liang, edited by Andrew J. Nathan and Perry Link, with an afterward by Orville Schell (Public Affairs, 2001). See my review, "The Truth About Tiananmen," The New York Review, February 8, 2001.

[11] Link, Evening Chats in Beijing, pp. 144–147. Merle Goldman of Boston University also discusses Dai Qing’s pre-1989 writings and sets them in a wider political context in Sowing the Seeds of Democracy in China: Political Reform in the Deng Xiaoping Era (Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 284ff. For a selection of these writings, including an erotic short story, "A Sexy Lady," see Geremie Barme and Linda Jaivin, New Ghosts, Old Dreams: Chinese Rebel Voices (Times Books, 1992).

[12] For a detailed study of how Mao and Zhou treated political prisoners see Michael Schoenhals’s "The Central Case Examination Group, 1966–79," China Quarterly, Vol. 145 (1996), pp. 87–111.

[13] "My Books Are Banned. But I Can Speak Outside," BusinessWeek online, June 14, 1999.

[14] To be published in the US by Knopf in October.

[15] BBC Radio 3, "Nightwaves," May 25, 2005.

Letters
April 27, 2006: Geremie Barmé, ‘Tiananmen Follies’: An Exchange
November 17, 2005: Jonathan Unger, The Case of Dai Qing

‘Tiananmen Follies’: An Exchange

By Geremie Barmé, Dai Qing, Reply by Jonathan Mirsky
In response to China: The Uses of Fear (October 6, 2005)

To the Editors:

In his review of the English translation of my prison writings, Tiananmen Follies, Jonathan Mirsky [NYR, October 6, 2005] makes a number of claims in relation to my work and my public stance both prior to, and since, the Beijing Massacre of June 4, 1989, that call for some comment.

Based on his reading of Tiananmen Follies, Mr. Mirsky reaches two conclusions. The first is that the Communist Party authorities employed the same methods of emotional torture and terror in dealing with those incarcerated as a result of the 1989 Tiananmen incident as they did during the Yanan "rescue movement" of the 1940s. Secondly, he avers that in 1990s China such methods were still effective, or at least they proved to be so in the case of the author of that book, that is to say, myself. As a result Mr. Mirsky claims that while I wrote some worthy things in the past, following my imprisonment I was cowed into abandoning my former beliefs.

The truth about me is quite the contrary. Even though I had been on a list in prison of people slated to be executed, I remained determined throughout that ordeal to stick to my convictions. When I was released from prison in 1990 I gave an interview to a foreign journalist in which I declared, for publication around the world, that "you could say about my release that they’ve let me out of a small prison into a massive jail." I have continued to speak and write in a forthright fashion ever since my release—on the environmental dangers China faces, on the sensitive issue of repression in the Chinese Communist Party’s history, and on a wide range of equally sensitive topics. As a consequence, at one point I was placed under house detention, and at another I was exiled to Hainan Island in the extreme south of China.

In his response to the letter to the editors from Geremie R. Barmé and Jonathan Unger published by The New York Review [November 17, 2005], Mr. Mirsky repeats his earlier claims against me and expresses a wish to hear directly from me. Well, I have the following to say:

In his response Mr. Mirsky remarked that "the Three Gorges essays, as I pointed out, were excellent, but were written before her time in prison." He attempts to demonstrate that I have been frightened into silence. Surely, this is at odds with the facts.

Prior to my imprisonment I produced only one book related to the Three Gorges Dam, the edited volume Changjiang, Changjiang (Nanning: Guizhou Renmin Chubanshe, 1989). Following my release from jail, I edited another work, Shuide Changjiang (literally, "Who Owns the Yangtze?"), a book that appeared in Chinese in 1993 through Oxford University Press in Hong Kong. The English version of that work was published in 1996 under the title The River Dragon Has Come.

In relation to my public opposition to the Three Gorges project, for example, I would have thought that any reader of Chinese with an interest in my work, or for that matter a concern for the environmental fate of China, would have easily been able to find the numerous essays that I have published in the mainstream international Chinese press and on the Internet since 1992.

Furthermore, for over a decade I have given speeches, keynote addresses, and talks relating to the Three Gorges Dam in many countries, although on one such occasion, in Vietnam, my speech was canceled at the last minute due to official Chinese government pressure. My most recent engagement with this issue was in October 2005. I was able to make a public speech in Beijing for the first time in some fifteen years at Sanwei Bookstore on Chang’an Avenue, Central Beijing. My talk was entitled "The Three Gorges and the Environment." The Chinese transcript of that speech was posted on the Web for a week before being deleted by the authorities. However, both the English and Chinese versions of my remarks are readily accessible internationally on the Internet.

In regard to my engagement with other controversial issues of moment, I repeat here what I said on the tenth anniversary of Tiananmen at a commemorative symposium held at the John King Fairbank Center of Harvard University on May 13, 1999. I told my audience that:

I have lost my voice in China; I have lost my true audience, my supporters and critics in China; and I have been deprived of a chance for open and direct public engagement with my world. Yet although I have been thus diminished, I have not given up hope. Nor have I given in to the fashionable opinions and simplistic caricatures of China that prevail, both in China itself and here in America.
In China I have refused to mouth the government lies about 1989; I will not uncritically sing the praises of the power-holders and what they have done during these ten years.

And here, in America, I won’t parrot the simple slogans and extreme rhetoric that so much of the US media delights in. I refuse to play the simple-minded dissident; I refuse to give in to the thoughtless stereotypes that so many public figures in this country pursue when talking about China; I won’t follow the crude claims of some critics that unless you mount a direct and provocative challenge to the Communist Party, you are nothing less than a toady to the power-holders.

In my own limited way I want still to write and speak of the vast, complex, and rapidly changing realities of China.

In his response to Barmé and Unger’s letter to the editors, Mr. Mirsky expressed some regret that the editors of Tiananmen Follies had failed to ask me whether I still stood by "some of the things she said in the book." I presume he is referring to passages that I wrote in prison such as the following:

Would it have been possible with a certain timely control to keep the Beijing student movement from turning chaotic in the streets between April and June of 1989? The answer is yes. If, at any time during the end of April, early May, mid-May (when the hunger strike began), and late May (once martial law was established), the government in power had really intended to put an end to the movement and had ordered the students and city residents to leave the streets, it would not have been difficult. But without such action, it is quite natural that matters escalated rapidly, because two kinds of people wanted the protest to escalate in the hope that some people would die and the protest might then turn into an "incident" of some magnitude.
Do I still hold to these views? Yes. I maintain the view that by declaring a hunger strike on May 13, 1989, the student leaders contributed to a precipitous escalation of a situation that, until then, might have been defused. The relatively open-minded faction of power-holders who were in the public eye and who had been charged with dealing with the protests were now put in a very difficult position. From the perspective of Deng Xiaoping, the paramount power-holder, these developments were proof that the "reformist faction" was incapable of containing the situation, and therefore it would no longer enjoy his confidence.

Mr. Mirsky is convinced that any talk of there being a "black hand working behind the scenes" is nothing more than a repetition of a government calumny, one aimed against the intellectuals who supported the students. He hasn’t managed to work out what I, writing in jail and faced with the prospect of death, was saying in my prison writings: that the people who hoped that the situation would spiral out of control were the factional opponents of Zhao Ziyang. As for the student leaders themselves, I believe that their problem was their youthful rashness.

Seventeen years have passed since the events of 1989, and it is clearly evident today how profoundly the value system and thought processes inculcated by Mao Zedong have beguiled generation after generation of China’s young people. Take Chai Ling for example, the activist who famously said that what her group of student leaders were "actually hoping for is bloodshed" on the eve of June 4, 1989 (yes, Mr. Mirsky, the word Chai Ling uses in Chinese, qidai, does mean "look forward to" or "hope for"). People show their true colors in extreme situations, and Chai Ling proved to be a good student of Chairman Mao’s. Furthermore, there were others who really did hope that the hunger-striking students would stay in the square. Various factions among the power-holders reasoned that if they did so they could be used as political pawns during the National People’s Congress that was soon to be held.

As to my evaluation of the question "Who benefited and who lost out?" as a result of the massacre of June 4, 1989, I would say that perhaps even Deng Xiaoping himself did not want to see such an outcome. This is because there were indications in China at the time that he was actually planning to speed up the process of political reform, a process that had long been bogged down. Indeed, shortly before the Tiananmen demonstrations erupted, I was present when Wang Feng, the head of the Taiwan office of the Party’s Central Committee and one of Deng Xiaoping’s intimates, remarked that "Comrade Xiaoping is actively considering removing the Four Basic Principles from the Constitution and having them limited to the Party Constitution." The Four Basic Principles, it should be recalled, were introduced in February 1979 at the time of de-Maoification, and they were used to maintain ideological rectitude during the years of economic reform that followed. They were like a Sword of Damocles that hung over the heads of people, forcing people to conform to the Party’s norms. Such a decision to remove the Four Basic Principles from the Constitution would have augured a major development in the political reform of China, just as a similar act by Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union had signaled a major political transformation in that country.

Those who got the most out of the situation were the political opponents of Zhao Ziyang, who hoped to force him and his associates from power, as well as those members of the nomenklatura, that is, the Party gentry, who enjoyed all the privileges afforded by the monolithic state created under the conditions of the "proletarian dictatorship."

To this day I say, as I wrote then in prison, that I "support the martial law order issued on May 20, 1989, and support the army implementing it immediately." I would emphasize to Mr. Mirsky that martial law was declared on May 20, but it was not implemented immediately. Indeed, the weeks between the declaration and the final tragedy of June 3–4 saw the further unfolding of a complex political drama involving internal Party factions and the manipulation of restive mass and student opinion.

The question I ask in Tiananmen Follies is: Weren’t the authorities willfully allowing the situation to get out of hand? Weren’t they manipulating things so that they could undermine the reformers who were in favor of using martial law as a way of restoring order, reformers who were anxious that things not spiral out of control? If martial law could have been imposed quickly, the power-holders in favor of democratization would have been able to shepherd their forces and make a comeback at some time in the future.

In his review, Mr. Mirsky was also particularly disdainful of my remark that the students should have been satisfied with the government’s concession that henceforth the authorities would no longer hold party meetings at the seaside resort of Beidaihe, or avail themselves of imported luxury vehicles. I still believe that squeezing such a concession out of the Party at the time was a big victory for the protesters. Over the years, the Party had proved itself to be extraordinarily reluctant to relinquish any of the perquisites of power. And, after all, Mr. Mirsky may recall that in my work on the early Yanan-era dissenter Wang Shiwei, which he avows to admire, I outlined that one of the reasons for the denunciation (and the eventual beheading) of Wang was that he had the temerity to question the special food and clothing allowances the Party leaders gave themselves at a time of supposed egalitarian frugality.

As for my "confessions" in jail, Mr. Mirsky declares himself to be particularly offended by my references to "Chairman Mao" and "ideological method," as well as my confession’s promise not to get involved in political issues in the future. Of course, I wrote this in my confession; my life was at stake. It is ironic that having weathered the interrogations of the Communists, years later I am subjected to the intemperate declamations of a reviewer who has so obviously misread my book. Well, Mr. Mirsky, I’d like to spell it out for you: I was using my "confessions" to explicate my position, and to announce my innocence. The vast majority of these written statements were laden with diversionary tactics, or commonplace irony, "slipping away under the cover of a big coat," as we say. These are all devices with which the average Chinese reader is completely familiar. I also used the Party’s language to make fun of it.

Of course, I should acknowledge Mr. Mirsky’s detestation of communism and note his sympathy for the Chinese people. However, if he presumes to have anything of value to say regarding the complex and confusingly intricate realities of China, I would suggest that he’ll have to work quite a bit harder. All right, if his Chinese isn’t quite up to the task, he could always have spared a few minutes Googling my name in English. At least in that way he could have avoided making the most elementary mistakes regarding my work. Or, if his Chinese was equal to it, over these many years he could have read at least a few of the many dozens of articles I have written for a worldwide Chinese-language audience, essays that touch on a wide range of subjects related to his own interests in contemporary Chinese politics, culture, society, life, and civil liberties.

Anti-Communist sloganizing does nothing so much as mirror the kind of mentality favored by Mao and Kang Sheng during the 1942 rectification campaign. Mr. Mirsky praised me for exposing the horrors of that campaign to the world. The mentality of that campaign has played an invidious role in Chinese politics and life ever since the 1940s. It is, I’m afraid, a mentality that has been shared by many others. In the end, extremist and simplistic ideologies express themselves in the same strident fashion, only the wording differs. While one chants "Chairman Mao is our savior!," the other shouts "Mao Zedong is a monster!"

Dai Qing, with Geremie R. Barmé
Beijing

Jonathan Mirsky replies:

In Dai Qing and Geremie Barmé’s letter criticizing my review of Ms. Dai’s book, Tiananmen Follies, there is much material on what she has done since her release from prison in 1990. My review, however, was of her book, which is devoted to her arrest and her time in prison. She thought well enough of these materials to publish them under her name.

When I was preparing my review I sent a list of questions to the editors. Did she still stand by what she had written? Were there, for example, "black hands" behind Tiananmen? Ms. Dai still says flatly that there were. Does she really believe that the Beijing "black hands" were behind the other four hundred uprisings throughout China that spring? She says I should have been able to "work out" what she really meant. She could easily have made this plain in her book, but, one of her editors explained, "while a general reader might need a longer introduction I don’t think this book calls for one. Anyway, Dai Qing didn’t want one."

I sent the editors a final draft of my review to check for factual errors. This was the response: "review looks good, reads well, no surprises…Sullivan team [i.e., the book’s editors] not unhappy or displeased."

The key matter here is her confession. I asked the editors, "Is the confession real or just something she was forced to say. In the introduction it says she is no ‘snitch’ but she is, and she shows plenty of remorse, though it is said she doesn’t." So was it real or was it staged, and if staged is this obvious? Ms. Dai now says: "I was using my ‘confessions’ to explicate my position, and to announce my innocence. The vast majority of these written statements were laden with diversionary tactics, or commonplace irony, ‘slipping away under the cover of a big coat,’ as we say. These are all devices with which the average Chinese reader is completely familiar. I also used the Party’s language to make fun of it."

Does that mean that the—rare—footnote in Ms. Dai’s book on her confession is false? In it she says, "I had told the truth and nothing but the truth, mainly because this would make things much easier and more convenient. This, I believe, was something that left a profound impression on the minds of the comrades of the special case group [her interrogators]."

On the book jacket, in words I presume were approved or written by Dai Qing or the editors, it says of her confession that it is "at times quite unflattering to the author…. She begins to accept the government’s view on certain matters, ending up fingering others in a manner that suggests previous collaborationist actions in China."

So whether the confession is true, as she emphasizes in the book, or was really "slipping away under the cover of a big coat," Ms. Dai misled her publisher, her editor, and me. She must take responsibility for her text, which contains the words about which I wrote my review.

Letters
November 2, 2006: Dai Qing, Disheartened Author

The Case of Dai Qing

By Geremie Barmé, Jonathan Unger, Reply by Jonathan Mirsky
In response to China: The Uses of Fear (October 6, 2005)

THE CASE OF DAI QING

To the Editors:

In a review of the prison memoirs of the Chinese writer and dissident Dai Qing ["China: The Uses of Fear," NYR, October 6], Jonathan Mirsky wrote that after her post-Tiananmen release Dai Qing’s "writing about the regime then took a different turn" and that "fear seems to explain the sad transformation in her writing,…jettisoning a lifetime’s convictions."

We would like to set the record straight. As China specialists who have personally known Dai Qing for a long time and who keep abreast of her prolific writings, we can affirm that she did not jettison her convictions. Indeed, she remains one of the most courageous, controversial figures on the Chinese cultural and intellectual scene today.

In the years since her release from prison in 1990, Dai Qing has been a persistent proponent of freedom of speech and a critic of censorship. She has also gained an international reputation as one of China’s staunchest environmentalists. Her energetic work against China’s gigantic Three Gorges Dam has deservedly won her awards from environmental organizations around the world. For this and other courageous public efforts, she has been under house arrest more than once.

She has kept up a constant flow of writing, translating, and editing on a wide range of topics despite her work being banned in China. Under a variety of pen names (and also through essays published in Hong Kong and Taiwan and on the Chinese Internet), she continues to lambast cant and political hypocrisy in a uniquely powerful writing style that uses delicate sarcasm and irony to withering effect. Jonathan Mirsky is an admirer of her earlier writings, and he will be happy to know that she has lost none of her polemical vigor.

On an important point, both Mirsky and we ourselves disagree with a political view held by Dai Qing. She does not believe that China is ready for democracy—that is, multiparty elections to select China’s leadership. She has long been convinced that without a lengthy period of independent publishers, a decent education system, and a large, well-educated middle class, any democratic vote in China would be fatally undermined by demagoguery and corruption. She believes that until the conditions for democracy are ripe, China would be better off under an increasingly relaxed Party rule. She expressed such sentiments in her prison writings—which Mirsky presumed was a sell-out of her convictions. What he does not realize is that Dai Qing expressed such a view in writings published prior to the Tiananmen protests, just as (consistent to a fault) she holds fast to such an opinion in conversations and in her essays today.

This does not make her a toady or friend of the Party. What Dai Qing above all will be remembered for is her well-researched, truly extraordinary studies of the darker side of Communist Party history. Mirsky admiringly notes her writings in this vein from the 1980s. Again, he will be glad to know that Dai Qing continues to write and when possible publish major essays and books that dissect and confront important past episodes of Party repression, with scarcely concealed lessons for today.

In short, Dai Qing has not been scared into submission and has not betrayed her ideals. She has remained a true, effective, courageous dissenter, contrary to the impression Mirsky gained from her prison memoirs. She deserves to have this erroneous impression corrected in The New York Review’s pages.

Geremie Barmé
Jonathan Unger
The Australian National University
Canberra, Australia

Jonathan Mirsky replies:

I did not say Dai Qing had sold out. I said she was terrified into making the statements she includes in her book. I was also, as they say, careful to write at some length that until 1989 she did great work for freedom of expression. The Three Gorges essays, as I pointed out, were excellent, but were written before her time in prison. Neither in the book’s introduction nor in the edited material is this made nearly as plain as I wrote in my review.

I said that Dai Qing’s editors should have asked her if she still believed some of the things she said in the book. She called the Tiananmen demonstrations a conspiracy caused by a mastermind, "the one," whom she never names, while also saying he had used as a mouthpiece the admirable dissident Wang Dan, who served seven years in prison after Tiananmen. She said she regretted condemning the troops for entering the square and stated that "I support the announcement of martial law and propose that the martial law troops carry out the order immediately." This is precisely what happened.

Mr. Unger and Mr. Barmé, both well-respected China specialists, do not deal with what Dai Qing actually says in her book. They have told me they were unable to read it because almost all the copies were destroyed in a fire at the publisher’s. I am happy to learn that Dai Qing has resumed her libertarian work, but she has done herself a great disservice in Tiananmen Follies and would do well to write to the Review herself and say what she now believes. Does she still claim, as she does in the book, that she wrote "recklessly without much real thought or careful consideration…. It was exactly the kind of erroneous style of thinking that our Chairman Mao once criticized…"? Does she still promise "never again [to] involve myself with political issues nor express opinions on important matters, especially since I am no longer a Party member"?

Does she still say she acted "out of pure emotion and irrationality" and that "deep down in my heart I had forgotten all the responsibility [of being a Party member]…to protect the reputation of the government above anything else"?

I wrote that few people would have been able to stand up to what happened to her in Qin Cheng prison; any critical comment on her book should be seen in that light. But her statements in Tiananmen Follies are all the more in need of clarification following the letter of Mr. Barmé and Mr. Unger.

Casting a Lifeline

By Francine Prose
Beijing Coma
by Ma Jian, translated from the Chinese by Flora Drew
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,586 pp., $27.50
Sixty pages or so into Ma Jian’s novel Beijing Coma, the hero, Dai Wei, is troubled by the memory of a harrowing anatomy lecture that he attended as a university student. Taught by "a celebrated cardiovascular specialist," the class observed the dissection of the fresh corpse of a criminal whom the government had just executed (in celebration of National Day) and whose organs had been speedily harvested for transplant.

Dai Wei’s moral revulsion was tinged with personal anxiety, for this was not the first time that politics had placed a serious strain on his love life. In high school, he had been interrogated and beaten by the police for meeting his girlfriend in a cement culvert, the only place they could be alone. And now the distressing physiology lesson reminded his college girlfriend of why she had been so reluctant to obey her parents’ wish that she cross the border from Hong Kong to study medicine in the brutal, unenlightened People’s Republic. How she longed to go to Canada to major in music or business management!

Like much else in Beijing Coma, this incident provides telling and subtle information about the characters and their milieu. At the same time, the insight it offers into Dai Wei’s academic background enables the attentive reader—in whose intelligence Ma Jian has unusual faith—to answer a nagging question that has been implicit since the book’s opening paragraphs. That is the mystery of why Dai Wei’s earthy, lyrical, and, despite everything, humorous narrative voice is so heavily inflected with scientific terminology—"a bioelectrical signal darts like a spark of light from the neurons in your motor cortex," in Flora Drew’s exemplary translation. The technical language of the surgical theater has been used, as it will be throughout, to convey Dai Wei’s efforts to diagnose his own medical condition; he is asleep much of the time, and in fact, he gradually realizes, he is in a coma into which he has fallen after being shot in the head during the 1989 demonstration-massacre in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

For much of the book, Dai Wei lies in bed, paralyzed, mute, his eyes shut, cared for by his mother, and hearing himself referred to as "a vegetable." Yet he is acutely conscious of his situation and painfully aware of the past, which he searches for scraps of memory to assemble a coherent self. A doctor whom Dai Wei’s mother consults informs him that

if I want to come out of my coma, I must make a deliberate effort to remember events I’ve chosen to forget. Before I return to my old life, I must first complete this inward journey into my past.
Trying to follow this advice, Dai Wei rediscovers not only the forgotten events of his own life but the events that marked decades of seismic historical change in China.

Among his earliest recollections is one of a summer night in 1980, when his father returned home with a shaven head after twenty-two years of "re-education" through imprisonment and hard labor. A talented violinist, he had visited the United States as a young man and flirted with the idea of an American concert career. In punishment for his youthful folly, he was branded as a rightist, dooming his stigmatized family to poverty, ostracism, and derision:

When my brother and I were walking through the school cafeteria at lunchtime one day, two older kids flicked onto the ground the plate of fried chicken I’d just bought, and shouted, "You’re the dog son of a member of the Five Black Categories. What makes you think you have the right to eat meat?"
Dai Wei’s grandfather, a landowner, was executed during Mao’s land redistribution program, and in the lobby of the public bathhouse that Dai Wei and his family patronized when he was a child was a red box in which bathers were urged to deposit denunciations of politically suspect neighbors.

By the time Dai Wei turns eighteen, China has changed so drastically—at least on the surface—that thanks to his father’s foreign connections, he is given preferential treatment when he applies to Southern University in Guangzhou City. As Chinese society veers between repressive isolationism and a willingness to admit a trickle of information from the outside world, cultural novelties such as the stories of Hemingway and the paintings of Van Gogh come into fashion, and Dai Wei and his college friends first hear about Freud, whom they imagine to be the author of sex books as they argue about whether or not they possess unconscious minds. Kafka’s The Castle inspires Dai Wei to read the journal his father kept during his imprisonment, in which he learns about the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. Thanks to the diary, Dai Wei develops a new understanding of the parent whom he had always despised for making his childhood so difficult. His mother, he was told, was forced to give birth to him wearing a shirt embroidered with the words WIFE OF A RIGHTIST.

afka’s shadow falls heavily over large sections of Ma Jian’s work, which teems with the sort of Grand Guignol nightmares that haunt some of Kafka’s stories. It’s not enough that Dai Wei’s father be sent to a soul-destroying labor camp; the camp is located in a region whose starving inhabitants have been driven to cannibalism. When Dai Wei’s mother must conspire to get her wounded son medical treatment because the government has made it illegal to have been injured by the government, the logic could hardly be more Kafkaesque.

Yet much about Beijing Coma may remind the reader less of Kafka than of Proust—or, if such a thing could be imagined, a Proust who had somehow survived, and emerged from, the violent whirlwind of modern Chinese history. Like In Search of Lost Time, Beijing Coma is driven by the obsessive force of its narrator’s desire to retrieve the past, and derives its formal structure from a highly particular inquiry into the nature of time.

As Dai Wei recalls moments from his youth and writes about the often grotesque incidents (visits to traditional healers, the arrival of a pair of workmen who believe that the apartment’s immobile resident is deaf, and the mercifully brief stay of a sexually predatory boarder) that break the monotony of his comatose existence, a sort of novel within the larger novel begins to take shape. That interpolated narrative, which focuses on the buildup to the massacre in Tiananmen Square, is at once dramatic and so slowly paced that it almost seems a minute-by-minute reconstruction of what happened. The reader is provided with details of the factional conflicts and power struggles, the committee meetings, the rumors, the triumphs and humiliations, the guest appearances of intellectual and pop celebrities, and the individual decisions that initiated and concluded the student hunger strike and led to the confrontation, on June 4, between the demonstrators and the army.

Some of the novel’s most evocative passages capture the atmosphere and the mood of the crowd in the square in the days before the crackdown:

The restless, sweaty bodies below us suddenly resembled maggots wriggling over a lump of meat. We descended to the lower terrace and slowly pushed our way into the tightly packed crowd. It was almost impenetrable. When someone in front of us wanted to go to the toilet or look for a friend, a tiny crack would open, and we could follow behind them for a while. The people lining these narrow pathways, which coursed through the Square like veins, would instinctively raise a foot or shift their shoulders back to make way for us as we passed. If they happened to be sitting down, we had no choice but to climb over their heads. When someone shouted a new slogan, the crowd’s focus would shift, and a new path would open for a second before quickly closing again, like a wound healing over.
On June 1, the mounting tension is briefly dispelled when a crowd of children visit the square in honor of Children’s Day, and a pair of demonstrators, who have fallen in love, celebrate a mock wedding:

The children shouted, "When are the bride and groom going to hand out the sweets?" The bright sunlight shone down on us benevolently. It felt as though we were attending a wedding ceremony on the green lawn of some beautiful estate. The people at the front of the crowd pushed back the people behind…. Chen Di announced that it was time for the groom to put a ring onto his bride’s finger…. Mou Sen pulled out a ballpoint pen from his pocket, got down on his knees, then took Nuwa’s finger and carefully drew a ring around it.
The trajectory of Ma Jian’s narrative comes more or less full circle, as it does in Proust’s masterpiece. And yet the consciousness in which this epic drama takes place could hardly have less in common with that of Proust’s hero. Dai Wei clings desperately to the hope that memory (his own and that of his compatriots) may hold the key not only to individual identity, but to national and cultural survival. The speed with which we forget, the novel suggests, is the velocity at which we rush toward our doom.

oon after he is transferred from the hospital to his mother’s flat, Dai Wei recalls leaving Guangzhou City for Beijing, where he planned to earn a doctorate in molecular biology. But the heady distractions of the pro-democracy movement rapidly diverted his attentions:

I remember setting up amplifiers in the canteen one afternoon during our first term at Beijing University. Frustrated by the slow pace of political reform, the students had set up unofficial "salons" to discuss the taboo subjects of freedom, human rights and democracy. Some fellow science graduates and I had formed a discussion group called the Pantheon Society, and had invited the renowned astrophysicist Fang Li to give a lecture on China’s political future. He was an outspoken critic of the government. The students held him in high esteem. We nicknamed him China’s Sakharov. The previous month, the Democracy Salon, a rival forum founded by some liberal arts students, had invited the respected investigative reporter Liu Binyan to give a speech. So our society felt we needed to invite someone of Fang Li’s stature to gain the upper hand.
The final sentence typifies Dai Wei’s sensibility—and Ma Jian’s method. Accounts of the most high-minded revolutionary struggles are gently undercut by an ironic, almost whimsical recognition of the emotions and instincts—competitiveness, pettiness, ambition, vanity, lust—that characterized the students’ behavior. In the most anxious moments preceding the Tiananmen Square debacle, Dai Wei pauses from the demands of being a leader to admire the beauty of the female students who arrive to offer support or exhort the assembled crowd, and the novel captures the charged, aphrodisiac aura that surrounds groups of attractive young men and women who believe that they are effecting historic political change.

hen Dai Wei recalls a series of demonstrations that occurred in 1987, the novel’s playfulness takes a surprising turn as a story by Ma Jian himself is brought into the narrative:

A few days later, the People’s Literature magazine published Stick Out Your Tongue, an avant-garde novella by a writer called Ma Jian. The Central Propaganda Department denounced it as nihilistic and decadent, and ordered all copies to be destroyed, then proceeded to launch a national campaign against bourgeois liberalism.
By the time Stick Out Your Tongue was banned, Ma Jian, who was born in Qingdao in 1953, had already been charged with spreading "spiritual pollution." This accusation, related to his participation in Beijing’s dissident artist movement, led him to quit his job as a photojournalist for a state-run propaganda magazine and begin a three-year journey across China, documented in his remarkable travel book, Red Dust. His experiences in Tibet inspired Stick Out Your Tongue, a novel in stories that portrays an unwelcoming landscape, a devastated culture, and a ferociously savage society with little resemblance to the popular image of a country inhabited by beaming peasants and beatific, sonorously chanting monks.

"The poverty I saw," Ma Jian writes in an afterword to that novel,

was worse than anything I’d witnessed in China. My idyll of a simple life lived close to nature was broken when I realised how dehumanizing extreme hardship can be. The Tibetans treated me with either indifference or disdain. Sometimes they even threw stones at me. But the more I saw of Tibet and the damage that Chinese rule had inflicted on the country, the more I understood their anger…. Tibet was a land whose spiritual heart had been ripped out.
Ultimately, the furor over Stick Out Your Tongue drove Ma Jian into exile, first to Hong Kong and then, when Hong Kong came under Chinese rule, to Germany and later London, where he now lives.

In 1989 he left Hong Kong and briefly returned to Beijing. Persuaded that his native land was changing, and wanting to be part of that transformation, he spent six weeks with the demonstrating students, sharing their dormitories and tents. "I watched them stage a mass hunger strike," as he writes in an explanatory essay,

dance to Simon and Garfunkel, fall in love, engage in futile power struggles. I was ten years older than most of them. Their passion and idealism impressed but also worried me. Denied knowledge of their own history, they didn’t know that in China political protests always end in a bloodbath.
When the violence finally erupted, Ma Jian was a thousand kilometers away, safe in his hometown, where his brother had walked into a clothesline and hit his head on the street and slipped into a coma; in Beijing Coma, Dai Wei’s mother will tell this story to explain her son’s injury and avoid admitting that he was part of an illegal movement. At his brother’s hospital bedside, Ma Jian learned that

hundreds, perhaps thousands, of unarmed students and civilians had been gunned down and crushed by army tanks…. In a state of numb despair, I kept watch over my comatose brother, until, one day, his eyes still closed, he moved his finger across a sheet of paper to write the name of his first girlfriend. His memories had dragged him back to life.
Ma Jian goes on to say that it is now forbidden in China to mention Tiananmen Square. "The Chinese are a people who ask no questions, and who have no past. They live as in a coma, blinded by fear and newfound prosperity." Part of what gives his novel its highly energized, manic edge is the fierceness of his conviction that it might be possible for a work of literature to function as a lifeline to cast out into the world, on the chance that it might save even a few of its readers from drowning.

s Dai Wei’s ten-year coma drags on, his mother is contacted by the families of other victims of the massacre, parents who have formed an underground group, Tiananmen Mothers, dedicated to tallying the dead and wounded and keeping alive the memory of a tragedy that the government claims never happened. Every year, on the anniversary of the demonstration, the police move its surviving victims—including Dai Wei—from Beijing to suburban hotels, in order to prevent them from talking to foreign journalists.

Meanwhile, the collective memory is being efficiently erased by the popular enthusiasm for high-end electronics, showy weddings, and luxury automobiles. "No one talks about the Tiananmen protests any more," Dai Wei says.

The Chinese are very adept at "reducing big problems to small problems, then reducing small problems to nothing at all," as the saying goes. It’s a survival skill they’ve developed over millennia.
Like Ma Jian’s brother, "dragged back to life" by the name of his first girlfriend, the persistently romantic Dai Wei remains in love with all three of his former sweethearts, even after he learns that the girl he used to meet in the cement pipe has become a real estate developer whose latest project will destroy his mother’s apartment. When his withered body is no longer capable of pursuing the objects of his desire, he develops a passion for a visiting nurse, and finally a deep attachment to a sparrow that flies into his open window.

Now when Dai Wei’s old friends visit, they wear expensive suits, carry cell phones, and proudly display the accoutrements of their prosperous new lives. Suddenly, everything is for sale, and, in the burgeoning Chinese economy, even the country’s traditional healers have turned into profiteers. "The best hope for him now would be to put him on this 20,000-yuan treatment plan," one doctor tells Dai Wei’s desperate mother.

This 6,000-yuan plan he’s on now gives him just five of my qigong sessions, an acupuncture session and a course of Chinese herbal medicine. It only lasts twenty-four days. There’s no way he will have come out of his coma by then.
Dai Wei also undergoes a profound metamorphosis, as his own suffering gives him new respect for the courage and endurance shown by his parents in managing to endure the barbaric era through which they lived.

Only the harsh realities of fear and repression remain essentially the same. Granny Pang, the neighborhood informer, alerts the police each time a representative of Tiananmen Mothers comes to visit. When Dai Wei’s mother is forced to sell one of his kidneys to pay for his medical bills, she brings forged records to the hospital where the surgery will be performed so the doctors will not suspect they are treating a victim of the infamous protest. Having endured the Cultural Revolution and witnessed her husband’s grisly fate, she has lived her whole life in terror of committing the most trivial infraction of government or Party regulations. So one’s heart sinks when she casually mentions that she has been feeling healthier and happier since she joined the Falun Gong movement.

s the novel nears its conclusion, Dai Wei’s present and past converge. Not only do we know how the story of Tiananmen Square will end, but we have learned the fates of the characters when a group of Dai Wei’s former comrades gather at his bedside and discuss which of their friends were killed and wounded, which were jailed and driven mad by torture, which have become entrepreneurs or gone abroad to pursue academic careers and form dissident exile groups. Nonetheless, as the army assembles and the tanks roll toward the square, the suspense and horror are almost unbearable. At the same time, we may find ourselves paging rapidly through the final section to see if some miracle may yet cure Dai Wei before what remains of his mother’s sanity is destroyed by the government persecution of a harmless sect of mystics with ideas about inner wheels that can be set spinning by meditation and proper breathing.

During the reunion of Dai Wei’s friends, Wang Fei, whose legs were shattered during the army attack, delivers a rousing speech:

We’re the "Tiananmen Generation," but no one dares call us that…. It’s taboo. We’ve been crushed and silenced. If we don’t take a stand now, we will be erased from the history books. The economy is developing at a frantic pace. In a few more years the country will be so strong, the government will have nothing to fear, and no need or desire to listen to us. So if we want to change our lives, we must take action now. This is our last chance. The Party is begging the world to give China the Olympics. We must beg the Party to give us basic human rights.
This hortatory passage seems appropriate and fully earned by everything that has preceded it; and it testifies to the success with which Ma Jian has accomplished something extremely difficult. That is, he has created a work of art that functions simultaneously as literature and as a call to action.

After reading Beijing Coma, you want to encourage the sad little protest groups of Falun Gong practitioners, kneeling on the sidewalks outside Chinese embassies and consulates. You want to inform people that China’s human rights abuses extend well beyond the Tibetan borders, and that dozens of Chinese journalists and writers are currently serving prison terms. Your sympathy for the victims of the recent, catastrophic earthquake is intensified by awareness of how their suffering has been exacerbated by man-made factors: the rigidity of China’s one child-per-family policy and the shoddy building methods of rapacious developers. And you wish that copies of the book could be distributed along the route of the Olympic torch’s progress toward the upcoming Beijing games, an event that might not be taking place had the world not succumbed to the seductions of forgetfulness—the same dangers and temptations that Ma Jian’s hero, and his novel, struggle so valiantly to resist.

Diary
Chaohua Wang
Contrary to their intention, commemorations of historical events are more often reminders of the power of forgetting: either official ceremonies that gradually lose their meaning, becoming public holidays like any other, or gatherings of tiny bands of militants or mourners, whose numbers dwindle to nothing as the years pass. In Los Angeles, you can see both kinds. If you ask people what Memorial Day stands for, virtually no one, not even professors of history, can tell you. As for the other sort, I myself stand every summer with a small band of friends outside the Chinese consulate in downtown Los Angeles, holding placards scarcely anyone notices. But what we commemorate has, unusually, not been forgotten elsewhere. It is now 18 years since soldiers and tanks entered Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Yet every year since then, on the night of 4 June, tens of thousands of people gather in Hong Kong and, whatever the weather, light candles in memory of what happened then, and those who died as a result of it. I don’t think any other mass commemoration has lasted so long. But what is remembered so powerfully in Hong Kong cannot even be mentioned on the other side of the border that separates the Special Administrative Region from the rest of the People’s Republic of China.

Eighteen years is not a short time; it’s long enough for a baby to become an adult. On 4 June this year, a strange incident occurred. In Chengdu, the capital of the province of Sichuan, a city with a population of 11 million, the small-ads pages of an evening newspaper contained a short item that read: ‘Salute to the steadfast mothers of the 4 June victims.’ The entry was noticed by some readers, scanned and uploaded onto the internet, where it rapidly circulated. The authorities jumped to investigate. Within days, three of the paper’s editors had been fired. How had the wall of silence been breached? The girl in charge of the small ads, born in the 1980s, had called the number given by the person who placed the ad to ask what the date referred to. Told it was a mining disaster, she cleared it. No one had ever spoken to her about 1989. Censorship devours its own children.

The mothers the ad was honouring are a small group of elderly women who have become the symbol of the event the country cannot refer to. Ding Zilin, who organised the women, is now 71. She used to teach Marxist philosophy at the People’s University in Beijing. In 1989, when Tiananmen Square was occupied by thousands of students, her 17-year-old son, who was still at school, got caught up in the movement. On the evening of 3 June, as the atmosphere grew increasingly tense, she feared the boy might join other demonstrators in the streets and locked him in her apartment. He escaped through a bathroom window, and was killed that night, when troops marched into the centre of the city. No one knows how many died alongside him. Government repression has been so complete that the number of victims remains a mystery. When Li Hai, a former activist from Peking University, tried to collect information about them in the early 1990s, he was sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment for ‘leaking state secrets’. Despite constant police harassment and repeated house arrests, Ding persisted in her inquiry, and in 1994 published, in Hong Kong, a verifiable list of victims. Every year the list has expanded, and it now has 186 names. More and more people who lost family members have gathered around Ding. Inspired by the example of the Mothers of the Disappeared in Argentina, and with help from human rights activists in Hong Kong, Ding and her friends some time ago named themselves the Tiananmen Mothers. Actually, the group also includes fathers, wives and husbands of those who were killed, as well as some of those who were injured during the repression. Qi Zhiyong, a worker, lost a leg from a bullet wound near Tiananmen. For trying to get redress and compensation, he has repeatedly been beaten by police thugs in his home; this year he was put under precautionary arrest before 4 June, and only released when the anniversary was over. His case is typical.

The government’s fears are not irrational. Over six weeks, what began as a student demonstration became a national political crisis, in which the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party’s monopoly of power was seriously challenged for the first time since the foundation of the People’s Republic. The government resolved the crisis by ordering regular troops, brought in from the provinces, to enforce martial law in Beijing, even at the cost of opening fire on the crowds and rolling tanks over peaceful protesters in order to seize control of Tiananmen Square, the most powerful symbolic space in modern China. For a whole week after the first gunshot, not a single political leader came out to face the nation, leaving the capital in the control of a professional army, a situation Beijing had not seen since the Allied Expedition against the Boxer Rebellion of 1900.

With Deng Xiaoping’s decision to crush the demonstrations the Party recovered its monopoly of power, but not its legitimacy or its authority. To fill the ideological void Deng set China on an accelerated path of economic change, announced to the nation by a speech in the southern city of Shenzhen in the spring of 1992, and expressed in the message ‘to get rich is glorious.’ Plastered on billboards across the country, the Party’s new slogan dismissed any possibility of discussion of ideas or principles, proclaiming simply: ‘Development is the Irrefutable Argument.’ Fifteen years later, China is the industrial wonder of the world. The average standard of living has improved, poverty has been reduced, urbanisation has exploded, exports and financial reserves are sky-high. Abroad, admiration for the People’s Republic has never been higher. National prosperity and pride typically go together. With such achievements to boast of, why should the Communist Party still be so fearful of something that happened an epoch ago? Why does it go to such lengths to distort and repress the past, and where it is unable to erase people’s memories entirely, why does it try to portray the demonstrations of 1989 as senseless turmoil and the movement’s activists as conspiring tricksters? But the real question is this: what was the conviction that led the protesters to stand up to the military machine?

Two opposing interpretations of the movement of 1989 have gained ground, mainly in the West but also to some extent in China. The first is socio-economic. In early 1988, the government pushed forcefully to free prices, but the inflation that followed provoked such strong reactions throughout the country that it was compelled to reinstitute food rationing in the big cities in January 1989. Some American scholars have argued that this was a factor in the massive social unrest that manifested itself in the spring of 1989. In China itself, thinkers on the New Left have taken this argument a step further, seeing the military crackdown of 4 June as essentially paving the way for the marketisation of the economy, by breaking resistance to the lifting of price controls (they were removed again, this time successfully, in the early 1990s). According to this view, the driving force behind the mass movement, even its inspiration, was the refusal of reforms that would deprive the population of established standards of collective welfare. What the gunshots in Beijing shattered were the last hopes for the ‘iron rice bowl’ of socialism, clearing the way to a fully-fledged capitalism in China.

Another school of thought turns this argument upside down. In this account, the mass movement, far from clinging to the socialist past, looked boldly ahead to a liberal future. The growing number of banners written in English, and the styrofoam statue of a ‘Goddess of Democracy’, modelled partly on the Statue of Liberty, erected on Tiananmen in the last days of May, all show that America was the demonstrators’ real dream: not the iron rice bowl, but the market and the ballot box. Last month, George Bush presided over the erection in Washington of a monument to the Victims of Communism, in the form of a scaled-down bronze replica of the styrofoam goddess.

It is true that socio-economic discontent, especially following on the rapid inflation of the summer of 1988, played an important role in generating support for the student protests of the next year. But these economic grievances were unambiguously transformed into political protests in the movement of 1989. Their target was the way Deng Xiaoping and Zhao Ziyang, then secretary-general of the Communist Party, ruled the country. Particularly powerful in mobilising protest was Zhao’s description of his reforms as ‘crossing a river by stepping one by one on stones under the water’. If all you can do is test the stability of unseen stones on the riverbed, what entitles you to a monopoly over policy-making? Why should we wait while you pick your way through the current, now and then finding yourself on the right stone, and letting us drown when you step on the wrong one? That was more or less the feeling of the movement. The economic slogans of 1989 were mostly attacks on past policies that had gone wrong, and especially on corruption among high officials. But these never took the form of specific economic demands, nor did any demands of that kind come into the many attempts at ‘dialogue’ – i.e. negotiations – between protesters and officials, before talks finally broke down. What dominated were unequivocally political demands for freedom of speech, civil rights and citizen participation.

As for the movement’s ideology, one must remember that this huge social upheaval erupted very quickly. When a hunger strike among the students put pressure on the government in mid-May, the news media, including the People’s Daily, enjoyed a week of press freedom unprecedented in the history of the PRC. On the streets people from the most varied social backgrounds were suddenly able to voice their ideas and debate among themselves. In the ensuing hubbub, it was easy to overinterpret a few isolated symbols. Popular imaginings of America are an example. A highly abstract idea of the US, based on very little knowledge, became one of the vehicles – a shell, if you like – in which people’s imaginative energy was invested. This shell was filled, however, with understandings – and critical reflections – based on life in the socialist, or semi-socialist, society of the previous decades. Socialist discourse and notions of an idealised America were mixed together in people’s minds. This can be a disappointment for today’s intellectuals, who occupy much more clear-cut ideological positions, liberal or leftist. Yet below the Goddess of Democracy, armbands on the picket line were red. The historical significance of the upheaval of 1989 in Beijing does not lie in one paradigm or another, espoused by this or that spokesman or leader. It lies in the space the movement opened up for creative imagination and the opportunities it offered for experiment. The focus was always on the right of citizens to participate in the public life of the country, and the channels that would enable them to do so.

However important economic developments or ideological cross-currents in the making of the crisis, the incontestable fact is that the millions who demonstrated in Beijing between April and June 1989 formed what was essentially a political movement. What was its aim? On several occasions in this past year, Party officials have, at last, publicly broached the topic of democratic reform. It seems they think that time, and repeated lies, have created enough of a barrier to stop people from relating the word ‘democracy’ to the protests in Tiananmen. However, I have always believed that the courage of the demonstrators came from the power of a mass movement’s desire for democracy.

The movement was, of course, led by students, although by the end they made up only a modest proportion of those who took part, and they have consistently been singled out for criticism, not only by the government, but by a number of intellectuals in China and abroad, who claim that had they taken power, they would have exercised a more extreme dictatorship than the Party itself. In reality, most of the students were troubled by the question of the democratic legitimacy of their actions. They did go beyond inviting public sympathy for their protests, but they never meant to overthrow the government or to usurp its authority. Although they lacked practical experience, owing to the vigilant ban on non-governmental organisations, they benefited from the more open and reflective intellectual atmosphere of the 1980s. Ideas of democratic reform had been widely spread by the dissident physicist Fang Lizhi and others. The political principles of autonomy and transparency were hot topics at the time.

Less than a week after the death of the reformist Communist Party leader Hu Yaobang in mid-April 1989, those who gathered to mourn him began to form independent organisations. On campus after campus, as soon as one individual took the initiative, many students followed. That, in effect, is how the Beijing Autonomous Association of College Students, the core organisation of the 1989 protest, came into being. Every university had student representatives who used their real names rather than sheltering in anonymity – a great difference from the student movements that had emerged since the late 1970s. I was among them.

With their college IDs as identification and their names out in the open, the students had to take responsibility for what they were doing, and to recognise their own positions of power as representatives of the student body. Under tremendous political pressure, as well as pressure of time and space, the student organisations encountered numerous obstacles in their efforts to learn about and practise procedural democracy. Some students’ status was representative in name only, and would not withstand scrutiny. Yet faced with the final decision whether or not to withdraw from Tiananmen Square, the student leaders still relied on a vote to persuade their followers, as well as themselves, of the rightness of their course of action. The internal working of their organisations was always dependent on democratic legitimation.

This is not to claim that every twist of events was democratically determined. There were many imperfections in the students’ exercise of practices that were so new to them. Among today’s intellectuals in China, one sometimes hears a distinction being made between a republic and a democracy. Adapting it, I would use the term ‘republic’ for the united will that establishes a political collectivity in the first place, and ‘democracy’ for the procedures that govern it once unity is established. Ideally, the two should be complementary, for without republican unity there is no framework for democracy, and without democracy the original spirit of a republic is never guaranteed. At one level, the students knew this. They demanded democracy, but always assumed it would be realised in the context of the People’s Republic, and this was how they justified their confidence in marching through the streets. But at another level, the connections were not always well understood. The group of hunger-strikers, for example, paid little regard to the larger student body represented by the Beijing Autonomous Association of College Students. In effect, it functioned as a little ‘republic’ of its own. The hunger strike had an electrifying effect in the city, but when the strikers attempted to speak on behalf of the students as a whole, sidestepping the BAACS, something I argued against, there was inevitably confusion and a crisis of legitimacy. Many students were aware of the contradiction, and desperately tried to figure out the conceptual problems confronting them in the little time they had. But it is fair to say that virtually all of them shared some basic understanding of democracy, as the right to express different opinions and to participate in public decision-making, to elect representatives or to recall them; and these simple principles were quite sincerely, if at times awkwardly, practised.

A different criticism that has often been made of the students is that they did not merge with the citizenry, once the population of the capital took to the streets in vast demonstrations. Had the student organisations consciously sought to lead a mass movement, it would certainly have been the wrong approach. What their ‘exclusivity’ showed was their reluctance to abuse their power: they were aware of the limits of their own legitimacy. Not all the student leaders were flawless – how could they have been? – but I am certain that if the government had fallen, no student-led autocracy would have followed. Instead, student organisations would have asked the people to elect their own representatives, not least to reduce the already unbearable burden of responsibility. The National People’s Congress would have been the most likely agency for the next steps in a long process of democratisation.

What of the citizens themselves? During the 20 days of the student occupation of Tiananmen Square, huge numbers of them paraded under the banners of their different work-units and affiliations, as if this helped to justify their actions. But when night fell, they went out on the streets individually, representing only themselves. Many confronted government officials face to face. These different ways of participating, by day and by night, gradually merged. Once the government declared martial law, and stepped up control of all workplaces, people realised that the socialist structure tying their economic and political rights together into their work-unit was collapsing in front of their eyes, and took a clear stand as citizens, casting off the ambiguous safety of their institutional affiliation, confident that the government was in the wrong.

What brought the people out onto the streets was not only the wish to express sympathy with the students, but also the denial of their rights as citizens. Whether it was the unexpected success of the 27 April march, the proclamation of martial law on 20 May, or the first gunshots on the night of 3 June, the largest response was always in reply to the government’s toughest measures. Without this huge outburst of energy, the upheaval of 1989 would never have taken place.

These days, you can see many short videos on the internet commemorating the events in China in 1989. What is most striking about them are the expressions on people’s faces – excitement, anxiety, hope, determination and compassion – across all groups and generations. The demonstrators were interested in democracy, not in overthrowing the government. Only if one recognises this can one understand why, throughout weeks of protest, people displayed so much self-discipline. This did not come from a fear of government revenge, but from a strong feeling of pride in their ability to take their fate into their own hands – visibly a legacy of the Chinese revolution and a socialist past. The crime rate in Beijing fell sharply. Not a single incident of looting or vandalism was reported. In Beijing and Chengdu at least, even the thieves went on strike to protest against the government. Spontaneously, there was order everywhere. On 17 May, in an atmosphere of crisis, there was a televised discussion between the prime minister, Li Peng, and some of the student leaders about the ‘anarchy’ of the movement. An argument broke out over who was responsible for the scenes in the square, interrupting one of Li’s patronising speeches, and I watched his face turn red and then white as he clutched the armrests of his chair with both hands. I remember insisting, when my turn came to speak, that the students were demanding rights guaranteed them by China’s constitution, and that what characterised the movement was the opposite of anarchy: calm orderliness, confidence and self-restraint. Of course, this was what the government was really afraid of.

Three days later, martial law was declared, and there were tanks on the outskirts of the city. For two weeks, the people held them off. No one who was there, as the people of Beijing confronted troops in trucks and APCs, will ever forget their spirit. When the crackdown came on the night of 3-4 June, most of the victims were not students, but ordinary citizens. Strangers helped each other without asking questions, and some were killed as they tried to save the lives of others. The world remembers the image of a single man standing alone, in front of a column of advancing tanks. The city was full of such courageous people that night. The reason for commemorating 4 June each year is not simply to remember its tragic cost, but to recapture the magnificent spirit of the movement, rarely seen in China in recent centuries.

That this was the real meaning of the social movement of 1989 can be seen from the government’s lasting fear of it. Had it been spurred mainly by economic grievances, it would have little resonance in today’s China, where the standard of living in the cities is so much higher than it was then. If it had been moved by a desire for things American, satisfaction has in many ways been more than granted: fast food, Hollywood films, television quiz shows are everywhere, business principles are exercised more vigorously at all levels of administration than in the US itself. The reason the memory of 4 June still haunts officialdom is that it was about something that high-speed growth and giddy consumerism have not altered. For despite all the economic records it is setting, China today is not a sea of social calm. Soaring inequality, collapsing welfare systems, environmental disasters, land seizures, mistreated migrants, labour ruthlessly exploited, children abducted and enslaved, the unemployed cast aside, and – in many ways the most hated thing of all – rampant corruption, have bred widespread discontent. Local explosions of popular anger, especially in the countryside and smaller towns, where social conditions are worse and police control is stretched more thinly, have multiplied in recent years. In this poisoned social environment, in which the crudest profiteering by crooks and officials, typically in league with each other, is a daily reality, the root of such evils is clear. It is the monopoly of power by the ruling party, which makes it impossible for people to check the abuses from which they suffer. Only democratic rights could make the holders of power accountable for their actions and release the popular energies needed to achieve all the things of which they are incapable. That is why, even today, whenever indignation over injustice or corruption boils over, the collective memory of 1989, we can be sure, lurks in the minds of the rulers, and – how often we can only guess – in those of the ruled.

The situation is not unchanging. This year, Professor Ding was for the first time allowed to commemorate her son’s death on 4 June. Followed by a squad of plain-clothes policemen, she went from her apartment to the spot beside a subway station where he was killed, and laid flowers on the pavement. Photographs of the scene found their way onto the internet, where also for the first time this year, an online gathering in memory of the victims of 1989 was held through a web-server based overseas, but which could be accessed from the mainland with the help of special software. This is a small advance; much more will have to come. Chinese society needs to acknowledge the tragedy, condemn the killings, accept and respect the families of those who died, and honour the work of the Tiananmen Mothers in preserving the memory of the collective national past. It has not been in vain. When it was learned that the young subeditor at the Chengdu Evening News had not known what the date of 4 June referred to, many young Chinese born in the 1980s made it clear on the internet that they did know.

He Would Have Changed China

By Perry Link
Zhao Ziyang: Ruanjinzhong de tanhua (Captive Conversations)
by Zong Fengming
Hong Kong: Kaifang, 399 pp., HK$98
In trying to make sense of their country’s turbulent modern history, Chinese intellectuals sometimes resort to counterfactual speculation. How might things have been different if one or another accidental event had happened differently? For decades it was a sort of parlor game to guess how long the great writer Lu Xun, who died in 1936 possessing a keen eye for hypocrisy and a stiletto wit, and whom Mao Zedong praised in 1942 as "the bravest, most correct national hero," could have survived in Maoland had he lived beyond 1949. Eight years, most people said. If he had somehow managed to avoid prison until 1957, the Anti-Rightist Campaign of that year surely would have got him.[1] Harder to fathom is a question like what would have happened in China if Mao Yichang and Wen Qimei, parents of Mao Zedong, had lived apart in the spring of 1893, when Mao was conceived.

Zong Fengming’s new book, Zhao Ziyang: Captive Conversations, raises a question of the same sort, and it has stimulated much debate both inside and outside China. Zhao Ziyang was premier of China from 1980 to 1987, during which time he gained much credit for pushing China’s economy forward, and from 1987 to 1989 was general secretary of the Communist Party, when he became known for advocating reform of the political system. During the demonstrations at Tiananmen in 1989, Zhao advocated using "democracy and rule of law" to settle the crisis. But Party elder Deng Xiaoping, who held ultimate power and who was swayed by Premier Li Peng and others who saw nefarious intent within the student movement, chose repression.

After Deng had already ordered troops to surround Beijing, he summoned Zhao to ask that he concur in possible use of the military, but Zhao, well knowing that intransigence would cost him his position, declined. After the massacre on June 4, Zhao was charged with "splitting the Party" and "supporting chaos." He then further sealed his fate by declining to write the kind of "self-criticism" that is customary in the Chinese Communist Party when one is disgraced. He spent the next sixteen years under house arrest at his home at No. 6, Wealth and Power Alley, Beijing. In 2004 he developed pulmonary fibrosis, and he died on January 17, 2005, at the age of eighty-five.

Meanwhile the Deng Xiaoping formula of "market yes, democracy no" marched forward under Zhao’s successors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. China’s economy, military, and international influence have grown steadily while inequality, discontent, repression, and environmental degradation have worsened. All this is background for the counterfactual questions that frustrated Chinese reformers now ask about 1989. How would China be different if Zhao had stayed on? And how might he have done that?

In August 1991, when Boris Yeltsin climbed atop a tank in Moscow to defy a coup by Soviet hard-liners against Mikhail Gorbachev, and when Yeltsin won the support of a cheering crowd and helped to turn the tide against the hard-liners, some in China were led to ask why Zhao Ziyang could not have done a similar thing in 1989. There were about a million people in Tiananmen Square on May 17 of that year, and they were overwhelmingly on Zhao’s side of the political debate. A New York Times reporter heard a policeman shout, "The student movement is terrific! If the Government commands a crackdown, will I obey their order? No, I will go against it."[2] Large crowds of similarly inclined protesters were in the streets of nearly all of China’s provincial capitals.

ut this flight of fancy is far-fetched. Zhao Ziyang by nature was circumspect, a bit timid, and hardly comparable to Yeltsin; moreover it is almost unthinkable that China’s military, whose command is steeped in personal loyalties, would have obeyed Zhao instead of Deng Xiaoping no matter how many people were in Tiananmen Square. But what if the protesting students had listened to the outspoken journalist Dai Qing and her delegation of liberal-minded intellectuals who urged them on May 14 to declare (partial) victory and go home? If they had, the crisis would not have come to a head and Zhao might have remained general secretary. Or what if—even assuming that the students remained in the square—Zhao had made some compromises with Deng in order to stay? How much of a difference could he have made?

The question has layers. To guess what Zhao might have achieved one needs first to estimate what he might have attempted, and that requires us to extrapolate how his thinking as general secretary might have developed after 1989. As a first, albeit imperfect, approximation, we can look at how Zhao’s thought actually developed even though he spent his post-1989 years observing China from house arrest. But on that question, until now, there has been extremely little to go on. We have a letter that Zhao wrote to China’s Politburo in 1997 asking (futilely) for a reconsideration of the verdict on the Tiananmen demonstrations. We have a revealing account of a two-hour talk that Zhao had with a friend named Wang Yangsheng in July 2004 and that Wang published in Hong Kong shortly after Zhao’s death. But that’s about it. Zhao released no memoirs, and a family member told me recently that "as far as I know, there is nothing left behind." Hence Zong Fengming’s new book, containing 385 pages of records of conversations with Zhao Ziyang between 1991 and 2004, is an almost unique resource.

Zong, three months younger than Zhao, had known him a long time. They were both from Henan and had fought Japan together in the 1940s. Both had careers entirely within the Communist Party system. Zong was Party secretary at the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics until he retired in 1990. His book is based on more than a hundred visits that he made to Zhao’s house, which he entered at the sufferance of a squad of military police stationed inside the residence. Plainclothes police from State Security occupied the building directly across the alley, and from the second floor monitored comings and goings by camera. Periodic "renovations" of the Zhao compound kept electronic surveillance systems in shape. Zong was able to enter this police web in the guise of Zhao’s qigong ("breath exercise") teacher. It also helped that Zong had played no role in the "turmoil" of 1989. The two elderly men talked outdoors in the courtyard, presumably to minimize electronic eavesdropping. Zong did not use a tape recorder and took no notes, but went home after each talk to write down what he could remember.

The book is arranged chronologically and is not tightly edited. The conversations, which retain their chatty flavor, are wide-ranging. They seem frank but not soul-baring. There no doubt were levels of Zhao’s thinking that died with him, or—if they have survived—live only in the memories of people extremely close to him.

Zhao’s family members say that Zhao was opposed to publishing the book because he feared that "inaccuracies" might result. Zong Fengming himself quotes Zhao as calling the talks "just some random thoughts and casual comments"—but whether this was from caution or from self-effacing convention is hard to say. Zhao’s long-time political secretary Bao Tong, in his own memoirs, writes that when Zong Fengming presented the conversation records to Zhao for review, Zhao did not even look at them but said, "Let Bao Tong decide what to do." But Bao declined to edit them, fearful that his own taint (he had recently served a prison term for "counterrevolutionary agitation" and "leaking state secrets") might only make things worse for Zhao and his family.

Bao clearly treasured the book, however, as is shown by his agreement to write a second preface to it. The first preface is by Li Rui, once a secretary to Mao Zedong and now another leading reformist thinker. With few exceptions the book has been championed by liberal-minded Chinese everywhere. Even Zhao’s family members, despite their reservations about accuracy, have expressed warm feelings toward Zong Fengming.

he state has taken a different view. Before the book appeared, a deputy chief of the Science, Technology, and Industry Commission of the State Council (the "leadership" authority for the university where Zong had worked) visited Zong at home, warning darkly that, in earlier times, his book would have been judged "counterrevolutionary," and demanding that he hand over the manuscript. Zong said no. His book was published in Hong Kong and banned in China.

It is easy to see why top leaders were worried, because Zhao’s conversations address China’s problems with a depth and clarity that they have been accustomed to calling "dissident." Zhao may not possess Fang Lizhi’s elegant reasoning or Liu Binyan’s magisterial grasp of Chinese society, but his basic outlook, especially near the end of his sixteen years of house arrest, bears close resemblance to theirs. His thinking does not show any radical breaks, but it does evolve as he watches developments and comes to see things in new ways.

He comes to see, for example, that democracy is not just an attractive luxury that a modern nation ought to want for its own sake but an indispensable condition for the survival of a healthy economy as well. He told Zong that, during the 1980s,

I thought that as long as we get economic reform right and the economy develops, the people will be satisfied and society will be stable.
But by 1991 he felt that

political reform must go forward in tandem with economic reform …[otherwise] a lot of social and political problems will appear.
"Democratic supervision" is necessary. By 2004 he had concluded that "a market economy under a one-party system inevitably produces corruption" and that China’s economic growth was now "deformed."

Zhao’s analysis of how China’s growth came to be distorted is very close to that of He Qinglian, whose 1998 book China’s Pitfall Zhao read in captivity.[3] In Zhao’s words,

people who hold political power use that power to control resources and to turn the wealth of society into their own private wealth.
This happened inside a "black box," beyond public supervision, and on "an enormous" scale. On September 18, 1998, Zhao tells Zong:

As the market economy grows, it leads to the marketization of power and the fungibility of money and power, which leads to large-scale swallowing up of state resources, chaotic capital formation, extortion, and blackmail. This, in turn, makes popular opinion boil and leads to the formation of a privileged class, a growing gap between rich and poor, and other social problems that only get worse the more they pile up.
Five years later Zhao observes:

The government seizes land from the people, pushing the price down to a minimum, then hands it over to developers who sell it at a huge mark-up. It also manipulates stocks and figures out how to siphon off society’s monetary resources—like the savings accounts of ordinary people—using the funds for public construction that stimulates internal demand and keeps growth high…. If people were free to shift their savings out of state banks, the savings would flow overseas and growth would end. There could be a rush on withdrawals and banks would be in crisis.
And where were China’s intellectual gadflies as this went on? The voices that had been so eloquent in the late 1980s? By 2004 Zhao Ziyang saw the intellectual elite as having been co-opted:

Economic reform has produced a tightly knit interest group that is now joined by students who have been educated in democratic countries of the West. These people have succumbed to power, and what we now have is a tripartite group in which the political elite, the economic elite, and the intellectual elite are fused. This power elite blocks China’s further reform and steers the nation’s policies toward service of itself.
Zhao concludes that "socialism with Chinese characteristics" has produced "power-elite capitalism," which is "capitalism of the worst kind." He reflects that he had once accepted the argument that free speech is a luxury when people have empty stomachs, but now (in 1998) sees that the two are connected: without free speech, one gets a "deformed economy."

hina’s common folk can see the deformed economy, and those who are losers within it—farmers whose land has been seized, state workers who have been laid off, retirees whose pensions vanish—have been protesting at increasing rates since the late 1990s. In 2003 the number of "mass incidents" reported by Public Security rose to 60,000, a sixfold increase since 1993. This rise helps to explain the tighter controls on unauthorized speech, publication, and assembly during recent years. In 2004 Zhao Ziyang told Wang Yangsheng:

They [in the government] are afraid. They are afraid to open even a crack, because all kinds of unsolvable problems might then spill out. They have to protect their interests and those of their interest group.
In New York the exiled dissident Hu Ping, editor of Beijing Spring, has noted that when a booming economy creates a need for increased repression, as it has in China, a favorite theory of Western politicians is challenged. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Tony Blair are all on record as predicting that economic growth inevitably will pull China toward freedom and democracy.[4] Hu Ping sees increased wealth for China’s elite as providing not only better means to repress but more reason to, as resentment between haves and have-nots grows. The result, instead of democracy, could be turmoil—or, if the repression works, a successful monster state.[5]

Such a state would surely make use of Chinese nationalism, which Zhao Ziyang, in his chats with Zong, comes to see as "the greatest threat" to "China’s progress toward a modern civilization." Nationalism has understandable roots, Zhao felt, because of "the sting of China’s past century of foreign encroachment and bullying." But authorities can easily exploit this sentiment to "ignite parochial ethnic hatred" and build "the internal unity required to preserve stability and to consolidate rule."

By the end of his life Zhao feels that China’s politics needs at least three things: a free press, an independent judiciary, and an end to the Communist Party’s monopoly of power. Without a free press, citizens turn into "loyal instruments of authority." As for the courts,

the experience of our own country shows that there is no good at any level, including the top level, in political interference in the judiciary.
And on Party power:

The Party must release its right to control everything…[otherwise] other social organizations cannot get started and cannot marshal the power to do oversight.
The concept of "dictatorship of the proletariat" must go, and "parliamentary democracy is the necessary way forward."

Did Zhao hope that China might actually get these things anytime soon? At the end of his life he seemed pessimistic. The biggest obstacle to abolishing one-party rule, he suggests, is one-party rule. The privileged group that sits atop China and enjoys its boom will not easily give up and, as Zhao told Wang Yangsheng, "to confront such a large interest group would be very difficult" even if a leader wanted to. For Zhao there was not the slightest sign that China’s current leaders wanted to. He told Zong Fengming that

the policy of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao is only to hand out little favors to the common people in order to bolster their image of "caring for the people" without infringing any serious interests of the elite, let alone changing the system in any way. This just will not solve the problem.
he sharpness of Zhao Ziyang’s views near the end of his life makes it more important that we recall what we know of his thinking before 1989. For most of the 1980s, Hu Yaobang, as general secretary of the Communist Party, had been leading the way for political change while Zhao, as premier, attended to economic matters. In 1987, when Deng forced Hu to resign as general secretary and transferred the title to Zhao, Zhao clearly wanted to continue Hu’s political work. He established a "Central Small Group for Study of Reform of the Political System" and gave it a substantial staff. Asked at a news conference in October 1987 what his top priority as general secretary was, he minced no words: "political reform."

Before 1987 Zhao had not said much that was politically sensitive. He did allow for small-scale "capitalism"—restoration of private farming, free markets for certain agricultural products, and partial autonomy for industrial enterprises—as part of his plan to open the economy to market forces. But he conceived such changes within a Marxist frame, saying "the initial stages of socialism" needed to include capitalism. According to Zhao, Marx’s argument that all capitalism must end in order to bring about socialism had not taken sufficient account of the necessity of capitalist enterprise to prepare the ground for socialism. Stalin and Mao had made big mistakes by expecting that a socialist utopia could spring directly from a peasant society. The capitalist stage cannot be omitted, Zhao argued, so China needed to go back and "make up this class." It would be, though, "capitalism under the leadership of the Communist Party" and only a passing stage. In the early 1980s Zhao saw no problem with the formula "capitalism plus one-party rule."

Between 1987 and 1989, however, he had begun to see how this formula bred corruption. Bao Tong records in his memoirs that Zhao not only realized that democratization is the answer to corruption but further saw that corruption, as a public issue, could be used to stimulate popular interest in building democratic institutions. This was a truly astute insight. The Chinese populace at the time was incensed at the growing evidence of official corruption, and if rule-based institutions like a free press, transparent administration, and legal procedure could be presented as instruments with which to combat corruption, there would instantly be public support for the efforts.

How would Zhao have been inclined to move after 1989? His notions about how to make the transition to democracy seem never to have changed much. He consistently held that, for China, the change should happen slowly and in stages. He cited the example of Hong Kong as showing that there can be civil rights without electoral democracy. So one could start there: release controls on speech and the press in China generally and encourage the establishment of nongovernmental organizations. Give more power to the provinces, less to the center. Then take steps to make the judiciary independent. Next press for more transparency and democratic decision-making inside the (still-monopoly) Communist Party. When all this is done, move toward democracy in general elections. One reason why Zhao felt that a transition to democracy could be carried out by an authoritarian leader was that such a thing had recently happened in Taiwan. Zhao admired Jiang Jingguo, son of Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek):

Jiang Jingguo is an amazing person; he deserves to be studied carefully. He followed a world trend and pushed democratic reform on his own. He was educated in the traditions of KMT one-party rule, and also, for many years in the Soviet Union, in the tradition of Communist one-party rule. That he was able to walk out of these old modes of thought is truly impressive.
During his house arrest in the 1990s, Zhao retreated from thinking strictly in terms of Marxist "stages of history" in favor of more varied ways to measure a society’s progress, including by its standard of living, life expectancy, educational level, and the size of the gap between skilled and unskilled labor and between rural and urban ways of life. Prescient among Chinese leaders, Zhao was worried about the effects of economic development on the natural environment as early as 1992.

ut it is one thing to have a blueprint, another to carry it out. Here two questions arise: Would Zhao have really pursued a transition to democracy, had he been in power? And if so, could he have pulled it off? The first question arises because of a general pattern, widely observable in Chinese journals in recent years, of retired officials who, once free of the pressures of working within the bureaucracy, suddenly sound much more liberal-minded than before. Zhao’s house arrest may have had this effect on him, and we cannot infer that what he thought at home is what he certainly would have done as general secretary. There is, moreover, evidence that an ideal image of the Communist Party of China, arising from his experience with it in the 1940s, survived in Zhao’s mind to the end. If he had stayed in power and had peered across the brink of actually ending the Party’s system, would he still have moved forward?

The question is interesting but probably moot, because it is not likely that Zhao could have had much power after 1989 even if he had accommodated Deng and stayed on—not, anyway, before Deng died in 1997. Zhao’s talks with Zong Fengming make it quite clear that throughout the 1980s both Zhao and Hu Yaobang were only "frontstage characters" for Deng. All real power rested with "the two old men," Deng and Chen Yun, each of whom had his network of loyal followers. Deng and Chen divided power awkwardly, controlling somewhat different spheres but with the balance favoring Deng. Zhao reports that Deng once sent a message to Chen that "this Party can have only one grandma." The seven-man standing committee of the Politburo meant even less to Deng, who called it a "many-headed horse cart" whose meetings are a waste of time. "As Party general secretary," Zhao asks Zong Fengming rhetorically, "could I change the chief of the Organization Department? The Propaganda Department? I could not—not so long as ‘somebody’ supported him." To fully grasp Zhao’s predicament one needs to appreciate why Deng was using "frontstage characters" in the first place. Why didn’t he just dictate?

Political power within the Chinese Communist system depends almost entirely on the favor of one’s bureaucratic superiors, not on opinion "from below," but there is an interesting exception at the very top where no superior exists. There, the opinion of people at the level immediately below the top can matter considerably. If the top leader makes "mistakes," these can be grounds on which his rivals who are one level down can try to move him out.

Even Mao Zedong was subject to this dynamic. When his Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s precipitated a famine that began costing millions of lives, his "mistake" made him vulnerable. His launching a few years later of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was in large part a counterpunch at rivals who had been holding him responsible for the famine.

Deng Xiaoping came to power in the late 1970s fully aware of the political role of mistakes. He was charting a radical new course for the Chinese economy and he knew that the risks involved might be tremendous. If something went wrong he might lose power. By bringing in "frontstage" people like Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, Deng gained not only energetic executors of his program but potential scapegoats as well. Of course, the underlings would need to remember who was really in charge, and in 1986 Hu seems briefly to have forgotten. When Deng offered that year to step down as chair of the Military Commission, he apparently expected Hu to say, "No, no, you have to stay." But Hu unwisely agreed to the idea. Deng then saw Hu as a usurper and nine months later Hu was out, ostensibly for "bourgeois liberalization."

Two years later it was Zhao’s turn to feel the pinch of the "frontstage" position. In May 1988 Deng decided that China’s system of fixed prices should be removed for an experimental period. Skirting Zhao, who was worried about the dangers of doing this too abruptly, Deng began to announce to visiting foreign leaders that China was instituting price reforms, and this left Zhao with no choice but to go along. In summer 1988, when rapid inflation led to panic buying and social unrest, and it became obvious that a "mistake" had been made, Zhao, as general secretary of the Party, had to take responsibility. In September, "representing Party Central," he published an official apology. Many people were left with the impression that Zhao had been the originator of the ill-conceived reform, and his authority suffered. But even people who knew the truth knew that it did not much matter; right or wrong, Zhao was now falling from favor. People close to Zhao say that by 1989 he was already so weak that he might not have lasted long even if there had been no demonstrations at Tiananmen.

Moreover, if he had wanted to keep his position beyond 1989, small concessions to Deng would not have been enough. He would have had to completely endorse the Deng approach, including Deng’s decision to use troops at Tiananmen. But to do that, while still in a "frontstage" role, would mean that the massacre could have been blamed on him. Zhao does not say in his chats with Zong Fengming that he made such a calculation at the time, but several people close to Zhao have said that it could—and certainly should—have been part of his thinking.

ny doubt that the octogenarian Deng was still capable of such a maneuver against Zhao was dispelled in 1992 when Deng stripped his longtime comrade Yang Shangkun of his power base in the military. The purge of Yang left behind a tripartite division of power among Party chief Jiang Zemin, Premier Li Peng, and Party elder Qiao Shi, among whom relations were sufficiently strained that Deng, standing above them, could still dominate.

Zhao Ziyang would not have done well in such an environment. He never developed much of a power base even in his special field of economics. In early 1988, a chief of the State Bureau of Price Control, whose "backstage somebody" was Chen Yun, could still openly defy Zhao at meetings. For Zhao to have embraced controversial political reform in the 1990s would have required patience, persistence, and Herculean effort, and it is not clear that Zhao, for all his other virtues, was capable of these. Some of his friends defend his 1989 decision to quit rather than to persist by saying that his image as a martyr turned out to be the best practical contribution he could have made to the cause of political reform. A shining example of principle, they hold, has more value than a doomed effort.

Still, to "predict" a counterfactual past is as risky as predicting the future. Who knows? It is indeed far-fetched to imagine Zhao Ziyang atop a tank proclaiming a republic, and yet there was nothing imaginary about the broad, nationwide character of the 1989 upheaval, the government’s fear of it, or Zhao Ziyang’s lasting association with it. Zhao’s sixteen-year house arrest was less intended to punish him than to foreclose any possible revival of his appeal. Could there have been any warmth left in the 1989 embers by the time he died?

China’s top leaders apparently thought so. Within days of Zhao’s death, Hu Jintao had formed an "Emergency Response Leadership Small Group" with himself as chair and China’s top policeman Luo Gan as vice-chair. This group put the paramilitary People’s Armed Police on alert, issued instructions on riot control, and declared "a period of extreme sensitivity." The group ordered the Ministry of Railways to speed up the movement of people, especially students, who were leaving the capital and to screen tightly anyone moving in. News of Zhao’s death was kept out of the press and television. People approaching the Zhao residence to offer condolences were screened or blocked by State Security.

In fall 2006, when Zong Fengming’s book was about to appear, some friends of his, including Bao Tong and Li Rui, became concerned. Beijing had just banned several other books; the authors were coming under considerable pressure; and Zong had a heart condition. Zong’s friends sent a delegate to suggest that he postpone publication for a while. But Zong was unpersuaded. He was already eighty-six years old; what could they do to him now? Moreover the book was, in a sense, his own declaration of independence. He sent the messenger back with this poem:

SPITTING IT OUT

—on the concern that my friends feel for me

I’m a silkworm, I just expectorate,
Cheer for the truth, nudge justice along,
And hope to leave some pure strands behind.
But I’m a free moth, too.
Broken out of the cocoon, like a Buddha-spirit
Floating aloft, untouched, untouchable.
Zong underwent heart surgery on March 20, 2007, and seems to be doing all right.

Notes
[1] Mao himself contributed to the parlor game on July 7, 1957. In addressing a group of writers and others in Shanghai, Mao said, according to someone who was present, "Lu Xun? He’d either be writing his stuff in prison or else saying nothing at all." Huang Zongying, "Wo qinling Mao Zedong he Luo Ji’nan duihua," Wenhui dushu zhoubao, December 6, 2002.

[2] Sheryl WuDunn, "A Million Chinese March, Adding Pressure for Change," The New York Times, May 18, 1989.

[3] See Liu Binyan’s and my review of her book in The New York Review, October 8, 1998. Zhao Ziyang, although formally educated only through high school, became an assiduous reader during house arrest and seems to have had a special taste for "dissident" writers. He mentions He Qinglian, Wang Lixiong, Wu Guoguang, Gao Wenqian, Gordon Chang, and others in his chats with Zong.

[4] See James Mann, The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression (Viking, 2007), pp. 2–3.

[5] See, for example, Hu Ping, "Pochu jingji juedinglun de shenhua" (Abolish the myth of economic determinism), Beijing Spring, No. 147 (August 2005), p. 3.

http://lawprofessors.typepad.com … beijing_and_why.pdf
The Price China Has Paid: An Interview with Liu Binyan

By Nathan Gardels
Liu Binyan is a sixty-two-year-old writer and journalist who is regarded as the preeminent intellectual advocating reform in China today. During the mid-1950s and again throughout the post-Mao period, he has strongly criticized Communist party officials for abusing their power and suppressing people’s rights.

In the 1950s Liu wrote stories intended, in the tradition of Confucian literati, to express the views of the inarticulate masses to the country’s leaders. In 1957 he was, as a result, expelled from the Party and sent from Beijing to the countryside to do hard physical labor and was prevented from publishing. After further persecution during the Cultural Revolution, he returned to Peking in the late 1970s to produce an extraordinary series of investigative reports, stories, and essays that were published in Chinese newspapers and periodicals. One of the most powerful and widely praised of these, "People and Monsters," published in 1979, was a report on the behavior of corrupt Party officials in northeastern China that was seen as applying to corruption in the Party generally. Because of such writings, Liu became one of the main targets of the regime’s campaigns against intellectuals launched in 1981, 1983, and 1987. Along with the physicist Fang Lizhi and the Shanghai writer Wang Ruowang, he was expelled from the Party after Hu Yaobang, the reform-minded General Secretary of the Chinese Communist party, was demoted in 1987.

Liu’s views have gradually but radically changed since the 1950s. He has moved away from the traditional Chinese reliance on ideological persuasion to restrain people in power and now puts more emphasis on the need for legal and political institutions to protect liberties, particularly freedom of the press. While Liu remains a Marxist, he began to express such views publicly and repeatedly during the 1980s.

No writer in the Western countries seems comparable to Liu. His position in China resembles that of Eastern European intellectuals such as Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia who, while apparently powerless, can have a deep effect on their society. The great respect now accorded him throughout China derives from his courage in saying what many believe and talk about privately but are afraid to say openly. Now visiting Harvard as a Nieman Fellow, Liu was interviewed by Nathan Gardels, editor of New Perspectives Quarterly, which will publish a somewhat different version of the following interview later this winter.

—Merle Goldman
1.

NATHAN GARDELS: Fang Lizhi, the physicist, and yourself are the most prominent intellectuals expelled from the Communist party during the reform period. Fang Lizhi has concluded that socialism failed and Marxism is irrelevant at the end of the twentieth century. You, on the other hand, remain a committed Marxist. Why?

LIU BINYAN: The problem does not lie with socialism itself. The socialism imported from the Soviet Union and implemented in China was not true socialism. From Stalin to Mao Zedong, we have had false Marxism.

NG: The head of the Soviet Writers Union has said Stalin compromised socialism on a world scale by his crimes. Do you feel the same way about Mao Zedong?

LIU: Stalin was the first to ruin socialism. The second was Mao. Cambodia’s Pol Pot was the third. All of these men completely destroyed the meaning of communism.

These men were not really Marxists at all. They ignored Marx’s basic tenet that socialism presupposes a high level of material development. The conditions in each of the countries where these men came to power were not economically mature enough to build a socialist society.

If we construct a building where there’s no foundation, it’s not a surprise when the building collapses. A society that is supposed to emerge from a materialist theory of development cannot simply be willed into existence.

NG: Is that how you would summarize the experiences of Stalin and Mao—trying to force socialism into existence through political power?

LIU: Yes—utopia through the barrel of a gun.

In the beginning, Lenin himself believed socialism could not happen in an undeveloped place like Russia. He looked to revolution in advanced Germany and Austria to lead the way. When their revolutions aborted, the need to maintain state power persuaded Lenin to push aside the materialist science of Marxism and attempt to establish socialism in one backward country. The result was not true socialism.

Furthermore, there can’t be socialism without democracy. Gorbachev has now made this tenet of Marx into an influential slogan in the ussr—"More democracy means more socialism." But over the last thirty years there has been less democracy and freedom in both China and the Soviet Union. This can’t be socialism.

NG: So, China has to develop, or redevelop, a market in order to build a more advanced economy before it can become truly socialist?

LIU: That was even Mao’s original theory. In fact, he named the postrevolutionary stage, during which market forces would develop the economy, "the new democratic phase." In 1949, Mao said China’s "new democracy" would need fifteen to twenty years before it could change over into socialism. But in 1953, Mao wanted to be the leader of the world communist movement so he attempted to leap into socialism. He ignored the material reality and tried to rush into the "glorious future."

NG: You sound very much like Abel Aganbegyan, an economic adviser to Gorbachev, who has remarked that everything since Lenin was a mistake!

LIU: Even though the Maoist course was premature and mistaken, there were achievements. We built heavy industry; culture and education advanced; the people’s standard of living was raised. But we paid a great price—twenty cents for something that should have cost only five cents.

Perhaps our enormous suffering has contributed to humanity. We have taught other countries not to take our disastrous path.

NG: The price China must now pay for this tragic past is the deep disillusionment of today’s youth. What can a young person believe about the future in China?

LIU: So many of our youth have seen nothing good since they were born. Now, everything depends on the reform and democratization process, including reform of the Communist party itself. I believe our youth will gradually see that there is hope for China.

2.

NG: What is the difference in outlook between a Chinese intellectual in 1956, at the time of the Hundred Flowers Campaign, and an intellectual now during the reform period?

LIU: There is a profound difference. In 1956 Chinese intellectuals still believed in the Party. Now they don’t.

Chinese intellectuals awoke in 1956 from the slumber of Stalinist "socialist realism," in large part as a result of Khrushchev’s thaw in the Soviet Union. They realized then that idealizing life in literature and the arts had been a mistake. Instead of writing that everyone lived well, they now sought to depict life realistically, with all the contradictions and conflicts of socialist society that "realism" had attempted to suppress.

Paradoxically, just as this "new wave" thinking began to take hold, China embarked on a new phase of "socialist construction" patterned after Stalin’s industrialization of the Soviet Union. This course transformed the Chinese Communist party into the very bureaucratic and oppressive apparatus that Khrushchev was criticizing. The Party soon clamped down brutally on critical thinking, which was not reactivated until after the Two Great Disasters—the Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution—completely destroyed faith in Mao and the credibility of the Party.

When intellectual life awakened in 1979, twenty-three years after the 1956 Hundred Flowers Campaign, the faith of Chinese intellectuals in the Party was profoundly shaken.

In 1979, many intellectuals nevertheless took the new opportunity to begin developing a theoretical framework to support the economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping. Essays and reports published in the People’s Daily negated the era of Mao as a total mistake. But no sooner did this begin than the Party leadership decided that they could not allow the complete delegitimation of Mao without endangering their own power.

Rather than a new ideological openness, Deng himself put forward the Four Cardinal Principles in 1979 which constrain intellectual freedom in China to this day. Those principles are keeping the socialist road; upholding the People’s Democratic Dictatorship; respecting the leadership of the Chinese Communist party; and adhering to Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong thought.

I was expelled from the Party in 1987 for breaching these principles.

NG: What on earth does Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong thought mean? I asked a twenty-one-year-old student in China this question, and all she could answer was "love the motherland."

LIU: There are many slogans like "Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong Thought" in China which are not taken seriously either by those who shout them or by those who listen.

Over the last ten years, the more intellectuals have fought for the reforms launched by Deng, the more they have been attacked for breaching the Four Cardinal Principles, including the violation of Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong thought. Since the reforms are totally opposed to the economic ideas of Mao, the officials launching reforms have found it necessary to proclaim unanimously their loyalty to the Four Cardinal Principles. In fact, these principles, that have been put into a constitution that guarantees freedom of thought and expression, do not belong there. I suppose these weird juxtapositions can only happen in China.

NG: What accounts for the two-steps-forward, one-step-back nature of change in China?

LIU: Since 1979, liberalization has occurred in an on-and-off fashion, opening up and closing down. Virtually every year there has been a campaign against liberalization, but each campaign gets weaker and weaker.

In 1981 there was the long campaign against Bitter Love, the film by Bai Hua in which he exposed the people’s sufferings during the Cultural Revolution and laid the blame squarely on Mao. In 1983 there was the Campaign Against Spiritual Pollution which lasted only twenty-seven days. In 1987 there was the Anti-Bourgeois Liberalization Campaign that was stopped after three months.

These campaigns all belong to a single strand of counterreform which emanates from one faction of the leadership that is obviously getting weaker as time goes on.

NG: But didn’t former chairman of the CCP Hu Yaobang’s dismissal last year mean a weakening of liberalizing forces in the Party?

LIU: Even though Hu Yaobang has been removed, the forces that he represented inside the Party have actually become stronger. They’ve expanded even in the last year because the Anti-Bourgeois Liberalization Campaign provoked very strong negative reactions both inside and outside the Party. The dismissal of Hu Yaobang and the expulsion of Fang Lizhi and myself were viewed as illegal acts against the Party and the Constitution. For the first time, people publicly opposed a political campaign and defended its victims. They asserted that the Party’s actions were against the Constitution.

There is another reason why progressive forces in the Party have become stronger: the Party anticorruption, or "rectification," program of 1983 and 1984 failed. Originally a lot of people had put their hopes in the rectification program, because it was going to eliminate the corrupt elements from the Party. Even some conservative-minded people in the Party wanted to see the Party improved, and they also opposed corruption.

So, when Hu Yaobang was deposed and I was expelled, there was sympathy for our position, even from many conservatives, because not only had the corruption problem not been solved, but those who opposed corruption had been thrown out of the Party! As a result, the corrupters became more brazen and attacked those who had exposed the corruption. Their brazenness, which has become more blatant, has upset even some conservatives who are moving closer to our side.

This realignment is key to understanding the current political situation in China. "Conservatives" realize that opposing the free expression which exposes corruption harms their own interests in reestablishing the credibility and leadership of the Party. That’s why the Anti-Bourgeois Liberalization Campaign ended so quickly.

The Party leadership also finally understood that every time it unleashed a new campaign the economy was severely damaged. Private businessmen and foreign investors, already nervous about Party stability, were worried; and these campaigns only proved that the fears of the private concerns were correct.

3.

NG: Does the Party leadership now believe that political reform is necessary for economic reform? Or, in effect, is Deng Xiaoping for perestroika without the glasnost?

LIU: The economic reform is a very long leg in China, while the political reform is a very short one. One can’t proceed without being tripped up by the other. The student movement in 1986 exploded because political reform has hardly begun.

Actually, the first person to bring up the idea of political reform was Deng Xiaoping. In 1980 he said we must reform the political system, fight feudalism and bureaucracy, and expand democracy.

But it never came to pass. The resistance within the Party was too strong. Senior officials refused to give up their positions and privileges. They are not concerned about socialism; they are concerned only with their own interests and that of their children and grandchildren. I think real glasnost, or openness, will gradually come about, not because conservatives want it, but because the people will force them to accept it.

NG: Is there another conservative reaction on the horizon?

LIU: If there is it will have different rationalizations than past campaigns.

It’s possible high inflation will be the excuse. Inflation has caused a lot of dissatisfaction among the masses. Conservatives could use economic reasons to attack the reforms, saying, "Look! The majority of people are suffering from inflation while a minority who benefit from the market reforms lives well!"

That approach might be effective because people are upset about the new social inequality and what they perceive as a falling standard of living. Peasants are often richer than urban dwellers, and a cab driver, for instance, can make ten times as much as a bus driver and even an intellectual.

NG: How would you compare China’s progress under reform to the Soviet Union’s?

LIU: There are many areas where conditions in China are behind those in the Soviet Union, including political and cultural conditions, and the state of the legal system. The Soviet Union is also riddled with corruption, but Gorbachev has been more effective in exposing this corruption.

But we are better off than the Soviets in the sense that, after the Cultural Revolution, nobody in China believes anymore. As a result, if a drastic reform program is put forward in China that challenges all dogma, the people will not oppose it the way many are opposing reforms in the Soviet Union.

Another distinction. While the Anti-Bourgeois Liberalization Campaign got rid of Hu Yaobang, the reforms went forward. It was decreed in March 1987 that in the elections to the local people’s congresses there would be more candidates than positions to be filled and that the candidates can be nominated not only by the Party but by the people themselves. If the Soviet Union were to have an antiliberalization campaign that removed Gorbachev, their reforms would be in real difficulty.

NG: How important for the Chinese is the Soviet experience of perestroika and glasnost?

LIU: Very important. We are watching Gorbachev because he began his reforms with politics and the media. He is very good at glasnost, which is exactly what China lacks.

So we would be very concerned if Gorbachev should fail. If Gorbachev is successful, it will encourage Chinese intellectuals and the media to demand greater freedom. One of China’s biggest difficulties is that our problems are always covered over. For example, China has never fully revealed the Party’s role in the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s. We have to open up and face our problems if we are going to fix them.

If we don’t open up, then we won’t have democracy. Democracy means the power to choose, and choice is an illusion without information.

4.

NG: As the substructure of the economy evolves under market reforms, the Chinese economy will develop different strata with conflicting interests. Some people will become richer than others; peasants will want more for their crops, urban workers will want cheaper produce.

Won’t these different interests seek expression in multiple political parties?

LIU: Before 1957, the question of multiple parties was actually raised in China, but for the near future I don’t think it’s possible to have multiple parties.

China is a very special country. There is no other country with such a long "feudal" history—two thousand years, ten times the length of European medieval times. Furthermore, in the forty years since the revolution the Party has not allowed opposition parties or tolerated people with different political ideas. It has not allowed nonpolitical ideologies to spread.

As a result, it is even more difficult for a political society or organization to appear in China than in the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe. Unless social chaos and popular pressure develop to the degree that they render the Party utterly powerless, a new opposition is not likely to appear. The more realistic possibility is the evolution of pluralism within the Party.

NG: What would pluralism within the Chinese Communist party look like? After all, there seems to be no room for critical Marxists like yourself. You were expelled.

LIU: But so many of my comrades are still in the Party; and, because they are in the Party, in three to five years the Party will change internally, even though the outer shell of the CCP may not change. In fact, the Four Cardinal Principles are themselves a statement that this outer shell cannot change. But the insides will change. The Communist party is right now in the midst of internal change. The Party leadership has lost control over the Party itself. The progressive forces at different levels disregard instructions from above when they feel they are not beneficial to their districts. So, there is room for pluralism in the Chinese Communist party.

NG: Does that internal pluralism satisfy your idea of socialist democracy, or are you simply admitting the upper historical limit of what is now possible in China?

LIU: I’m not at all satisfied. But China is a country with a lot of walls, symbolized by the Great Wall. Many changes occur behind the wall, but it is difficult to see these changes because the wall itself is the same as before.

It’s hard to say in what form future changes will take place. Perhaps one day the different factions within the Party will publicly acknowledge their differences, and there will be an organizational mechanism for Party pluralism. At present there is no organizational mechanism, but the factions nevertheless exist and struggle without a set of rules. In the secret elections at the Thirteenth Party Congress in the fall of 1987, in which it was possible to choose among several candidates, several conservative candidates lost out.

NG: What are the most important historically and politically possible reforms that could help curb corruption and the abuse of power?

LIU: There are two vital reforms. One is to expand freedom of the press. The other is to strengthen the legal system.

Freedom of the press means that existing newspapers, Party newspapers, have more freedom to expose, criticize, and express different opinions. This process has already begun. Papers such as the China Youth Daily are still Party newspapers, but in reality they aren’t the same newspapers they once were. For example, the president of China’s elite Beijing University, Ding Shixun, criticized the government for not giving enough attention and money to education. Even though the authorities were angered by this criticism, the China Youth Daily published his speech. The editors knew they would be censured for it, but they did it anyway. In addition, we also need to establish independent newspapers that are outside the reach of the Party.

Interestingly enough, Beijing People’s University recently polled two hundred high-level Party cadres. Seventy percent believed that Party newspapers were not managed well. More than 70 percent said they did not believe the newspapers. Thirty-four percent believed that there should be a large independent newspaper. As the inflation continues to accelerate, the Party’s power continues to weaken, and a relatively independent middle class emerges in the countryside and cities, a constituency is being formed that could support independent newspapers.

Reform of the legal system has only just begun. Previously, we had the pitiful situation where there were no private attorneys at all, only government attorneys. Now we at least have a small number of private attorneys who may be able to defend victims of official abuse.

NG: After all you’ve been through, all the ups and downs, the backward and forward patterns of reform and reaction, do you still have faith that China can build the type of socialism that inspires you?

LIU: Yes, because of my faith in the Chinese people. We are a very intelligent and industrious people. And we have paid such a high price—Americans can’t understand because they have never had to pay such a price. The deaths, the suffering, and the misfortune have forged a strength that will push society forward.

In 1957, before our great man-made disasters, the Chinese people were not strong enough to push forward. Now, they are.

[ 本帖最后由 曰耳又 于 2009-12-3 08:27 编辑 ]