LEVEL 1 - 1 OF 35 STORIES
Copyright 1996 The Time Inc. Magazine Company
Time
May 13, 1996
SECTION: INTERNATIONAL EDITION; TOKYO; THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION 30 YEARS AFTER;
Pg. 28
LENGTH: 1202 words
HEADLINE: CASUALTIES OF THE CAUSE;
CELEBRATED, FEARED AND LATER DISCARDED, THE RED GUARDS PAID FOR THEIR ZEALOTRY.
BUT MANY SURVIVED
BYLINE: ANTHONY SPAETH, REPORTED BY OSCAR CHIANG/NEW YORK, JAIME A. FLORCRUZ AND
MIA TURNER/BEIJING AND ANNE-MARIE O'NEILL/SYDNEY
BODY:
Xue Manzi, 43, lives in a 60-room mansion in affluent Tuxedo Park, New York.
Successful in real estate, Xue is among the more fortunate of the 16 million Red
Guards who once flailed the banner of perpetual socialist revolution in China.
For 31 disordered months, the Red Guards controlled the cities. The victims of
Time, May 13, 1996
their idealistic ferocity and physical brutality are virtually countless. But
the Red Guards suffered as well. They are China's Lost Generation, and they
forfeited education, family and much else in the service of Mao. Says a military
official who was once a member of the group: "We were sent to the countryside
when we should have studied. When we should have married, there was a policy
that we could marry only at a later age. When we started working, they said we
had to have an education to move up the ladder." Xue, who joined the Red Guards
at age 13, maintains there was a positive side. "We learned survival," he says.
"There was no authority, no controls, total freedom. We learned self-reliance,
to place our head on our own shoulders."
The Red Guards are now grist for nostalgia. They have been the subject of
eight programs on Chinese television over the past two years. Theme restaurants
featuring revolution-era posters and the simple food of the countryside are
popular in Beijing. Occasionally, former Red Guards hold reunions to search out
old friends and trade tales of their Cultural Revolution experiences--and their
lives afterward. Here are a few of those stories:
DING XUELIANG, 13, had just collected his textbooks for the 1966 school year
when an announcement over the classroom loudspeaker changed his young life: the
Cultural Revolution had begun. Ding's first job as a junior Red Guard was to
destroy the school library, with its bourgeois, counter-revolutionary and
Time, May 13, 1996
revisionist tomes. Soon he was chief propaganda officer for the Red Guards in
Anhui province. "I felt my life was reborn," says Ding. "History would be made
and written by my hand." Weapons too: Ding and his teenage friends tried
constructing bombs and even a makeshift tank for use in factional fighting; a
chemical grenade he was concocting exploded and badly burned his left arm and
hand. In 1969 Ding was exiled to the rice paddies and later to factory work. He
is now a doctoral candidate at the Contemporary China Center of the Australian
National University in Canberra. In 1983 he returned to the school whose library
he helped destroy 17 years earlier and made a reconciliatory gift of 700 new
volumes.
SONG BINBIN was a fervent 19-year-old when she presented Mao Zedong with a
Red Guard armband at the group's first mass rally at Tiananmen Square on Aug.
18, 1966. When the Chairman heard her given name, which means "refined," he
genially proposed that she change it to Yaowu, which means "desire to take up
arms," and she promptly did so. She went to study in the U.S. in the early
1980s, along with a wave of mainland Chinese students and scholars. For most of
them, as for Song, the chance to study overseas was a ticket to a better future,
either abroad or back at home. Song earned a Ph.D. at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and is an environmental researcher in Boston. When her
desire to take up arms died, she renounced her Cultural Revolution moniker and
now goes by her original name.
Time, May 13, 1996
NI YUXIAN was 21 when he started a revolutionary commune in Shanghai. It
ultimately had 800,000 members and controlled the city's railroads, water system
and food supply. Ni was not a member of the Red Guards but belonged to a less
publicized "rebel" group that fiercely competed with the Guards during the early
days of the Cultural Revolution. As a result, his commune was disbanded in
February 1967. He then published a book of Lenin quotations modeled on the
Little Red Book of Chairman Mao. After it sold 10,000 copies--at half the price
of Mao's sayings--he was arrested as a counterrevolutionary. "I was brought
daily before portraits of Chairman Mao and Lin Biao and ordered to bow my head,
fall on my knees and confess my counterrevolutionary crimes," he recalls. "I
refused to confess because I did not believe I had committed any crime." He
spent two years in jail and in 1986 immigrated to New York, where he works as a
prominent activist for democracy in China.
KUAI DAFU was a college sophomore when the Cultural Revolution began in 1966,
and he soon became one of the most ferocious Red Guard leaders. He was in the
forefront of the campaign to discredit Chinese President Liu Shaoqi, whose
rivalry with Mao may have prompted the Cultural Revolution. In 1968 Kuai was an
active combatant in the bloody 100-Day War, in which rival Red Guard groups
fought pitched battles against one another in Qinghua. Kuai's downfall
accompanied that of the Gang of Four in 1976. He was imprisoned during the 1980s
but is free now and waging a very different struggle: he sells computers in
Time, May 13, 1996
the booming southern Chinese city of Shenzhen.
LUO XIAOHAI, a founder of the Red Guards and the author of their original
manifesto, was 18 when he was hailed by Mao personally at the August 1966 rally
in Tiananmen Square. Luo now lives and works in the U.S. The former firebrand
says he became disenchanted with the Red Guards in October 1966, only months
after the movement began, and quit shortly afterward. Then he spent months
traveling to various places in China, mainly by train because for a time Red
Guards were exempted from paying. From 1968 to 1971, he worked as a volunteer on
a farm in Inner Mongolia and later in Shandong. He went to the U.S. in 1981 to
further his professional career. He thinks that the Guards--and especially the
spirit that drove them--are misunderstood. "They were born out of a unique
marriage between the Chinese revolution and Maoism," he says. "We all thought of
ourselves as the successors to our great revolution...for the first time in
communist history, the people were encouraged by the top leader to really
challenge their local party rulers." This was ultimately suicidal for Mao's
regime, he says. "In the end, Mao was unable to contain the genie he had
released."
Luo recalls his Red Guard days as a time of unparalleled freedom and power.
"To us teenagers, this was a period without parental control, without school
control, without party control. We teenagers became our own masters. We
Time, May 13, 1996
discussed politics with the nation's top leaders when we were still in their
favor. When we were out of their favor, we became traveling performing artists.
We became newspaper and magazine publishers. We became banned-book readers. We
became listeners to forbidden Western music. We became writers of taboo
literature. We tried our first romances. Except for a minority of people, I
believe everybody had a good time somewhere, sometime, during the Cultural
Revolution."
Not all Chinese would agree, especially not those who suffered at the hands
of Luo and his fellow Red Guards. Yet for an entire generation, the experience
remains shattering, thrilling, indelible and, most of them probably hope, never
to be repeated.
--Reported by Oscar Chiang/New York, Jaime A. FlorCruz and Mia Turner/
Beijing and Anne-Marie O'Neill/Sydney
GRAPHIC: B/W PHOTO, A NEW MAN Xue Manzi as a Red Guard in the mid-1960s, far
left. After immigrating to the U.S., he made a fortune in real estate, and now
lives in a 60-room mansion [Xue Manzi as a Red Guard in the 1960s]; COLOR PHOTO:
HENRY GROSKINSKY FOR TIME, [See caption above--Xue Manzi at home]
Time, May 13, 1996
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LOAD-DATE: May 24, 1996
LEVEL 1 - 2 OF 35 STORIES
Copyright 1996 The Time Inc. Magazine Company
Time
May 13, 1996
SECTION: INTERNATIONAL EDITION; TOKYO; THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION 30 YEARS AFTER;
Pg. 28
LENGTH: 1202 words
HEADLINE: CASUALTIES OF THE CAUSE;
CELEBRATED, FEARED AND LATER DISCARDED, THE RED GUARDS PAID FOR THEIR ZEALOTRY.
BUT MANY SURVIVED
BYLINE: ANTHONY SPAETH, REPORTED BY OSCAR CHIANG/NEW YORK, JAIME A. FLORCRUZ AND
MIA TURNER/BEIJING AND ANNE-MARIE O'NEILL/SYDNEY
BODY:
Xue Manzi, 43, lives in a 60-room mansion in affluent Tuxedo Park, New York.
Successful in real estate, Xue is among the more fortunate of the 16 million Red
Guards who once flailed the banner of perpetual socialist revolution in China.
For 31 disordered months, the Red Guards controlled the cities. The victims of
Time, May 13, 1996
their idealistic ferocity and physical brutality are virtually countless. But
the Red Guards suffered as well. They are China's Lost Generation, and they
forfeited education, family and much else in the service of Mao. Says a military
official who was once a member of the group: "We were sent to the countryside
when we should have studied. When we should have married, there was a policy
that we could marry only at a later age. When we started working, they said we
had to have an education to move up the ladder." Xue, who joined the Red Guards
at age 13, maintains there was a positive side. "We learned survival," he says.
"There was no authority, no controls, total freedom. We learned self-reliance,
to place our head on our own shoulders."
The Red Guards are now grist for nostalgia. They have been
the subject of
eight programs on Chinese television over the past two years. Theme restaurants
featuring revolution-era posters and the simple food of the countryside are
popular in Beijing. Occasionally, former Red Guards hold reunions to search out
old friends and trade tales of their Cultural Revolution experiences--and their
lives afterward. Here are a few of those stories:
DING XUELIANG, 13, had just collected his textbooks for the 1966 school year
when an announcement over the classroom loudspeaker changed his young life: the
Cultural Revolution had begun. Ding's first job as a junior Red Guard was to
destroy the school library, with its bourgeois, counter-revolutionary and
Time, May 13, 1996
revisionist tomes. Soon he was chief propaganda officer for the Red Guards in
Anhui province. "I felt my life was reborn," says Ding. "History would be made
and written by my hand." Weapons too: Ding and his teenage friends tried
constructing bombs and even a makeshift tank for use in factional fighting; a
chemical grenade he was concocting exploded and badly burned his left arm and
hand. In 1969 Ding was exiled to the rice paddies and later to factory work. He
is now a doctoral candidate at the Contemporary China Center of the Australian
National University in Canberra. In 1983 he returned to the school whose library
he helped destroy 17 years earlier and made a reconciliatory gift of 700 new
volumes.
SONG BINBIN was a fervent 19-year-old when she presented Mao Zedong with a
Red Guard armband at the group's first mass rally at Tiananmen Square on Aug.
18, 1966. When the Chairman heard her given name, which means "refined," he
genially proposed that she change it to Yaowu, which means "desire to take up
arms," and she promptly did so. She went to study in the U.S. in the early
1980s, along with a wave of mainland Chinese students and scholars. For most of
them, as for Song, the chance to study overseas was a ticket to a better future,
either abroad or back at home. Song earned a Ph.D. at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and is an environmental researcher in Boston. When her
desire to take up arms died, she renounced her Cultural Revolution moniker and
now goes by her original name.
Time, May 13, 1996
NI YUXIAN was 21 when he started a revolutionary commune in Shanghai. It
ultimately had 800,000 members and controlled the city's railroads, water system
and food supply. Ni was not a member of the Red Guards but belonged to a less
publicized "rebel" group that fiercely competed with the Guards during the early
days of the Cultural Revolution. As a result, his commune was disbanded in
February 1967. He then published a book of Lenin quotations modeled on the
Little Red Book of Chairman Mao. After it sold 10,000 copies--at half the price
of Mao's sayings--he was arrested as a counterrevolutionary. "I was brought
daily before portraits of Chairman Mao and Lin Biao and ordered to bow my head,
fall on my knees and confess my counterrevolutionary crimes," he recalls. "I
refused to confess because I did not believe I had committed any crime." He
spent two years in jail and in 1986 immigrated to New York, where he works as a
prominent activist for democracy in China.
KUAI DAFU was a college sophomore when the Cultural Revolution began in 1966,
and he soon became one of the most ferocious Red Guard leaders. He was in the
forefront of the campaign to discredit Chinese President Liu Shaoqi, whose
rivalry with Mao may have prompted the Cultural Revolution. In 1968 Kuai was an
active combatant in the bloody 100-Day War, in which rival Red Guard groups
fought pitched battles against one another in Qinghua. Kuai's downfall
accompanied that of the Gang of Four in 1976. He was imprisoned during the 1980s
but is free now and waging a very different struggle: he sells computers in
Time, May 13, 1996
the booming southern Chinese city of Shenzhen.
LUO XIAOHAI, a founder of the Red Guards and the author of their original
manifesto, was 18 when he was hailed by Mao personally at the August 1966 rally
in Tiananmen Square. Luo now lives and works in the U.S. The former firebrand
says he became disenchanted with the Red Guards in October 1966, only months
after the movement began, and quit shortly afterward. Then he spent months
traveling to various places in China, mainly by train because for a time Red
Guards were exempted from paying. From 1968 to 1971, he worked as a volunteer on
a farm in Inner Mongolia and later in Shandong. He went to the U.S. in 1981 to
further his professional career. He thinks that the Guards--and especially the
spirit that drove them--are misunderstood. "They were born out of a unique
marriage between the Chinese revolution and Maoism," he says. "We all thought of
ourselves as the successors to our great revolution...for the first time in
communist history, the people were encouraged by the top leader to really
challenge their local party rulers." This was ultimately suicidal for Mao's
regime, he says. "In the end, Mao was unable to contain the genie he had
released."
Luo recalls his Red Guard days as a time of unparalleled
freedom and power.
"To us teenagers, this was a period without parental control, without school
control, without party control. We teenagers became our own masters. We
Time, May 13, 1996
discussed politics with the nation's top leaders when we were still in their
favor. When we were out of their favor, we became traveling performing artists.
We became newspaper and magazine publishers. We became banned-book readers. We
became listeners to forbidden Western music. We became writers of taboo
literature. We tried our first romances. Except for a minority of people, I
believe everybody had a good time somewhere, sometime, during the Cultural
Revolution."
Not all Chinese would agree, especially not those who suffered at the hands
of Luo and his fellow Red Guards. Yet for an entire generation, the experience
remains shattering, thrilling, indelible and, most of them probably hope, never
to be repeated.
--Reported by Oscar Chiang/New York, Jaime A. FlorCruz and Mia Turner/
Beijing and Anne-Marie O'Neill/Sydney
GRAPHIC: B/W PHOTO, A NEW MAN Xue Manzi as a Red Guard in the mid-1960s, far
left. After immigrating to the U.S., he made a fortune in real estate, and now
lives in a 60-room mansion [Xue Manzi as a Red Guard in the 1960s]; COLOR PHOTO:
HENRY GROSKINSKY FOR TIME, [See caption above--Xue Manzi at home]
Time, May 13, 1996
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LOAD-DATE: May 24, 1996
LEVEL 1 - 3 OF 35 STORIES
Copyright 1995 South China Morning Post Ltd.
South China Morning Post
January 8, 1995
SECTION: CHI; Pg. 6
LENGTH: 2934 words
HEADLINE: Concern grows over secret ban ;
Rights chief puts exiles on agenda
BYLINE: By SIMON BECK in Washington and our Political Desk
BODY:
UNITED States human rights official John Shattuck is under pressure to
protest at China's secret blacklist of exiled dissidents during his visit to
Beijing this week.
Mr Shattuck, who arrives in the Chinese capital on Friday, is already armed
with a long list of human rights complaints, including the treatment of
Tibetans, and concern China's eugenics programme may lead to forced abortions.
South China Morning Post, January 8, 1995
But Hong Kong-based human rights activist Robin Munro said yesterday the US
had little choice but to add the recent revelation of a blacklist of 49
dissidents, who were barred from re-entering the country, to the agenda of his
meetings with mainland officials.
"Since over 80 per cent of those named on the list are currently resident in
the US it is all the more important that Mr Shattuck asks some searching
questions about why dissidents are being secretly exiled," he said.
The list - published below - outlines how the exiles should be treated, if
they try to return to China.
Nineteen are listed as liable for immediate arrest, including former student
leaders Chai Ling and Wu'er Kaixi, as well as Yan Jiaqi, a former aide to ousted
Communist Party chief Zhao Ziyang.
Border guards are instructed to refuse entry to a further 11 dissidents, and
immediately return them to their country of exile. These include labour activist
Han Dongfang, who is now in Hong Kong after being expelled from China in 1993.
The remaining 19 dissidents are subject to less severe restrictions, with
border guards instructed only to seek advice from their superiors if they
South China Morning Post, January 8, 1995
attempt to re-enter China.
Those in this category include former local Xinhua (New China News Agency)
chief Xu Jiatun.
Labour and pro-democracy activist Lau Chin-shek said the revelation of the
list might discourage people from standing up for democracy in Hong Kong, since
they would fear being subjected to similar restrictions after 1997.
"This list has confirmed that Han Dongfang's case is not an isolated one,
but rather a policy set by the central government," he said.
But Mr Lau, previously accused by Xinhua of spying for Taiwan, remained
optimistic the tight controls in the mainland would be eased before 1997. But if
they were not, he vowed to stay.
"I would stay in the territory to avoid giving them a chance to expel me,"
he said.
BEIJING'S DISSIDENT BLACKLIST IN FULL
South China Morning Post, January 8, 1995
CATEGORY 1: TO BE ARRESTED ON ENTRY TO CHINA
Yan Jiaqi, 53. Former aide to ousted party chief Zhao Ziyang. Escaped from
China after June 1989. In New York.
Chen Yizi, 55. Former director of the Chinese Research Institute for Reform
of the Economic Structure in Beijing. Escaped after June 1989. In Princeton, New
Jersey.
Wan Runnan, 49. Former chief executive officer of the Stone Computer Corp in
Beijing. Escaped after June 1989. In France.
Su Xiaokang, 46. Writer, author of controversial TV series
River Elegy.
Escaped after June 1989. In Princeton, New Jersey.
Wu'er Kaixi, 27. Former student leader who escaped after June 1989. In San
Francisco.
Chai Ling, 29. Former student leader who escaped to the US after June 1989.
In Boston.
South China Morning Post, January 8, 1995
Liang Qingtun, 26. Former student leader who escaped after
June 1989. In San
Francisco.
Feng Congde, 28. Former student leader who escaped after June 1989. In
France.
Wang Chaohua, 43. Former student leader who escaped after June 1989.
Studying in Los Angeles.
Zhang Zhiqing, 31. Former student leader, still on Beijing's most wanted
list. Whereabouts unknown since June 1989.
Zhang Boli, 37. Former student leader who escaped after June 1989. In
Washington.
Li Lu, 29. Former student leader who escaped after June 1989. Studying in
New York.
Yue Wu, 49. Former factory director in Shanxi, China. Involved with
organising workers during the 1989 movement. In France.
South China Morning Post, January 8, 1995
Zhang Gang, 46. Former deputy director of public relations at the Chinese
Research Institute for Reform of the Economic Structure. Escaped after June
1989. In New York.
Yuan Zhiming, 40. Writer. Escaped after June 1989. In Mississippi.
Wang Runsheng, 40. Former researcher with the Institute of Politics at the
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Escaped after June 1989. In France.
Chen Xuanliang, 48. Former teacher of philosophy at the Chinese College of
Politics. Escaped after June 1989. In France.
Zheng Yi, 46. Writer. In hiding for three years after June 1989. Escaped in
1992. Now in Princeton, New Jersey.
Lu Jinghua, 33. Former merchant who became involved in the Beijing Workers'
Autonomous Federation in 1989. Now in New York. Attempted to return to Beijing
in June 1993 but was refused entry and sent back to US.
CATEGORY 2: TO BE REFUSED RE-ENTRY TO CHINA
South China Morning Post, January 8, 1995
Wang Bingzhang, 48. Arrived in
Canada in 1981 to study medicine. Founded the
Chinese Alliance for Democracy in 1984. Now in New York.
Hu Ping, 48. Activist in the Beijing Democracy Wall Movement in 1979. Went
to US in 1986. Former president of the Chinese Alliance for Democracy. In New
York.
Xu Bangtai, 46. Former Shanghai student. Went to US in 1984 to study
journalism. Chair of the Alliance for a Democratic China. In San Francisco.
Han Lianchao, 44. Former officer of the Chinese Foreign Ministry. Now a
congressional assistant in Washington.
Cao Changqing, 42. Former deputy editor-in-chief of Shenzhen Youth News.
Lost his job in 1987 after publishing an article calling on Deng Xiaoping to
retire. In New York.
Liu Yongchuan, 36. Went to US in 1986. Ex-president of the Independent
Federation of Chinese Students and Scholars in Washington. Now in San Francisco.
Liu Binyan, 70. Author and former journalist for the People's Daily. In
Princeton, where he publishes monthly newsletter China Forum.
South China Morning Post, January 8, 1995
Han Dongfang, 32. Former leader of the Beijing Workers' Autonomous
Federation. Imprisoned for two years following the 1989 crackdown. Went to US
for medical treatment in 1992. Returned to China in August 1993 but was deported
to Hong Kong.
Xiong Yan, 31. Former student
leader. Arrested in
Beijing and served two
years in jail before leaving China in 1992. Now in US Army. Chair of the Chinese
Freedom and Democracy Party.
Zhao Pinlu, 39. Involved in Beijing Workers' Autonomous Federation in 1989.
Escaped and now in New York. Chair of the International Chinese Workers Union.
Cheng Kai, 49. Former editor-in-chief of Hainan Daily. Left China in 1989.
Now doing business in Hong Kong and has made several trips to China over the
past two years. Blacklisted on August 21, 1993.
CATEGORY 3: TO BE DEALT WITH "ACCORDING TO CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE SITUATION"
Fang Lizhi, 59. Former vice-president of the Chinese University of Science
and Technology. Arrived in the US after a year-long refuge in the US Embassy in
Beijing. Now professor of physics at the University of Arizona.
South China Morning Post, January 8, 1995
Li Shuxian, 60. Wife of Fang Lizhi and former professor of physics at
Beijing University.
Yu Dahai, 34. Went to US in 1982 to study physics at Princeton. Now acting
editor-in-chief of the journal Beijing Spring in New Jersey.
Wu Fan, 57. Former teacher in Anhui University. doing business in San
Francisco. Chairman of the Board of the Alliance for a Democratic China.
Ni Yuxian, 50. Democracy Wall
activist. Secretary general of the Chinese
Freedom and Democracy Party. Attempted to return to China in 1992 but was
refused entry. In New York.
Yao Yueqian, 57. Lives in Tokyo.
Tang Guangzhong, 46. Teacher in US.
Guo Luoji, 63. Former professor of philosophy at Nanjing University.
Punished for criticising the conviction of Wei Jingsheng in 1979. Now a scholar
at Columbia University.
South China Morning Post, January 8, 1995
Harry Wu, 58. Went to US in 1985 as a visiting scholar at Stanford
University. Now executive director of the Laogai Foundation in California and a
US citizen. Refused Chinese visa in Hong Kong in 1993 but managed to twice enter
mainland secretly last year.
Shen Tong, 27. Former student leader who went to US after June 1989.
Studying at Boston University. Chair of the China Democracy Fund. Returned to
China in August 1992, arrested in September in Beijing and deported to the US.
Wang Ruowang, 77. Writer and human rights activist in Shanghai. Imprisoned
for a year after June 1989. Arrived in the US in 1992. Now in New York. Convenor
-general of the Co-ordinating Committee of the Chinese Democratic Movement.
Feng Suying (also known as Yang Zi), 57. Engineer and human rights activist.
In New York.
Liu Qing, 47. Imprisoned for almost 11 years after the Democracy Wall
Movement of 1979. Arrived in US in July 1992. Now chairs New York-based Human
Rights in China.
Xue Wei, 52. Went to US in 1980. Now business manager for Beijing Spring.
Chen Jun, 37. Former democracy activist in Beijing. Deported
in April 1989.
South China Morning Post, January 8, 1995
Now a New York cabbie.
Yang Jianli, 32. Went to US as a student in 1982. Now at Harvard University.
Vice-chair of the Alliance for a Democratic China.
Zhao Haiqing, 39. Went to US in 1982 to study at the University of
Pennsylvania. Former president of IFCSS. Now doing business in Washington.
Chair of the National Council of Chinese Affairs.
Zhu Jiaming, 45. Economist. Former deputy director of the International
Policy Institute of the Zhongxing Investment Company. Now a visiting scholar at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Xu Jiatun, 79. Former
director of the
Hong Kong bureau of Xinhua. Defected to the US after 1989 crackdown. In Los
Angeles.
GRAPHIC: New agenda: pressure is mounting on John Shattuck to protest against
China's blacklist of exiled dissidents - which includes Han Dongfang (top left),
Chai Ling (top centre) and Wu'er Kaixi (top right).
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
South China Morning Post, January 8, 1995
LOAD-DATE: January 10, 1995
LEVEL 1 - 4 OF 35 STORIES
Copyright 1995 The British Broadcasting Corporation
BBC Summary of World Broadcasts
January 7, 1995, Saturday
SECTION: Part 3 Asia - Pacific; CHINA; FE/2195/G
LENGTH: 1046 words
HEADLINE: DISSIDENTS;
Blacklist of 49 democracy activists barred from entering China
BODY:
'Lien Ho Pao', Hong Kong, in Chinese 6 Jan 95
Text of dispatch by 'Lien Ho Pao' correspondent Tseng Hui-yen (2582 1979
3601) in New York entitled: "Guangdong frontier defence puts 49 people on
blacklist, denies them entry to China" ; subheadings as published
New York, 4th January: 'Beijing Zichun' ['Beijing Spring'], a pro-democracy
journal published in New York, recently obtained a " black list" used by the
Guangdong Frontier Defence Bureau to restrict the entry of 49 "personnel from
The British Broadcasting Corporation, January 7,
1995
reactionary organizations" . This newspaper has been given priority to publish
the list, which is divided into three categories of people according to "method
of handling" . The first category lists 19 people, including Yan Jiaqi and Chai
Ling, who are on the wanted list on account of the 1989 pro-democracy movement;
the second lists 11 people including Wang Bingzhang, Hu Ping, and Xu Bangtai;
the third lists 19 people including Xu Jiatun [former director of Xinhua Hong
Kong branch], Fang Lizhi and Wang Ruowang. However, the persons named do not
understand the classification method and handling criteria of the lists.
Those who fled country following 4th June incident to be detained immediately
Officially called a "Detailed List of 49 Personnel of Reactionary
Organizations Outside the Border To Be Kept Under Strict Control" , the list is
divided into "serial number" ; "name" ; "sex" ; "date of birth" ; "type and
number of document" ; "document expiry date" ; " whether or not on wanted list"
; "border control date, communication number, and term of validity" ; "photo
(separately listed as 'yes'or ' no')" ; and "method of handling" in their proper
order. This reporter contacted a few persons named on the list to verify the
data in the list, such as passport number and date of birth, and found them
basically correct.
The British Broadcasting Corporation, January 7, 1995
Those in the first category, 19 in all, were all on the wanted list in the
wake of the 4th June incident in 1989. They are (according to the serial numbers
on the list): 1. Yan Jiaqi; 2. Chen Yizi; 3. Wan Runnan; 4. Su Xiaokang; 5.
Wuerkaixi; 6. Chai Ling; 7. Liang Qingtun; 8. Feng Congde; 9. Wang Chaohua; 10.
Zhang Zhiqing; 11. Zhang Boli; 12. Li Lu; 13. Yue Wu; 14. Zhang Gang; 15. Yuan
Zhiming; 16. Wang Runsheng; 17. Chen Xuanliang; 18. Zheng Yi; and 19. Lu
Jinghua.
The list lays down the method of dealing with people in the first category as
follows: "In line with the relevant spirit of the central authorities, if such a
person is found to enter the border, he or she should be immediately detained
for examination and dealt with according to the law" .
The second category, 11 people in all, includes: 1. Wang Bingzhang; 2. Hu
Ping; 3. Xu Bangtai; 4. Han Lianchao; 5. Cao Changqing; 6. Liu Yongchuan; 7. Liu
Binyan; 8. Han Dongfang; 9. Xiong Yan; 10. Zhao Pinlu; and 11. Cheng Kai. Of
these, Han Dongfang, Xiong Yan, and Zhao Pinlu were placed on the wanted list
after the 4th June incident. The difference is that, while Han was later
arrested and left the country with a Chinese passport after his release from
prison, Xiang and Zhao fled the country.
The British Broadcasting Corporation, January 7, 1995
Xu Jiatun's name is on the list
The method for dealing with people in the second category is: In line with
the relevant spirit of the central authorities, if such a person is found to
enter the border, he or she should be prevented from entering the border and
ordered to leave immediately.
The third category, 19 persons in all, includes: 1. Fang Lizhi; 2. Li
Shuxian; 3. Yu Dahai; 4. Wu Fan; 5. Ni Yuxian; 6. Yao Yueqian; 7. Tang
Guangzhong; 8. Guo Luoji; 9. Wu Hongda; 10. Shen Tong; 11. Wang Ruowang; 12.
Feng Suying; 13. Liu Qing; 14. Xue Wei; 15. Chen Jun; 16 . Yang Jianli; 17. Zhao
Haiqing; 18. Zhu Jiaming; and 19. Xu Jiatun. Of these, Fang Lizhi and his wife
Li Shuxuan were once on the wanted list.
The method for dealing with people in the third category is: In line with the
relevant spirit of the central authorities, if such a person is found to enter
the border, he or she should be dealt with according to the circumstances.
The list shows that the CCP has an intimate understanding of overseas
dissidents and pro-democracy activists, as shown by the listing of their
pseudonyms and aliases. Apart from Yao Yueqian, who is presently living in
Japan, and Wan Runnan, Yue Wu, Feng Congde, Chen Xuanliang, and Wang Runsheng,
The British Broadcasting Corporation, January 7, 1995
who live in France, all the rest are currently in the United States.
It should be pointed out that the number of people barred from entering the
border is far more than the 49 people cited above. For example, the "black list"
does not include noted dissident poet Bei Dao who was barred at the border when
he returned to China in November 1994.
Classification criteria hard to understand
It is not known what criteria were used to classify people in the second and
third categories. For example, Wang Bingzhang, Hu Ping and Xu Bangtai, "bad
ringleaders" of reactionary organizations, are among the 11 people in the second
category; Yu Dahai, Wu Fan and Xue Wei, former leaders of the "reactionary
organization" Alliance for a Democratic and United China, are listed in the
third category. It is hard to understand why Liu Binyan, who was named by the
CCP as a " prominent figure" in the move against bourgeois liberalization, is
listed in the second category, while Fang Lizhi, who the CCP hates most, is
included in the third category. The case of Han Dongfang, who is listed in the
second category, is similar to those of Guo Luoji, Wang Ruowang and his wife
Feng Suying (Yang Zi), as well as Liu Qing, who are in the third category, in
that they had been imprisoned and, after their release from prison after the 4th
June incident, legally left the country with Chinese passports. They are all a
The British Broadcasting Corporation, January 7, 1995
real headache for the CCP.
Moreover, it is also hard to understand why Liu Yongchuan and Han Lianchao
are listed in the second category and Zhao Haiqing is listed in the third as all
of them are former presidents or vice-presidents of the All-America Autonomous
Federation of Students and Scholars and why they are not included in the same
category?
However, the fact that Han Dongfang, Lu Jinghua and Ni Yuxian were expelled
when they returned to the mainland probably verifies the genuineness of the
"black list" .
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LOAD-DATE: January 6, 1995
LEVEL 1 - 5 OF 35 STORIES
Copyright 1994 The Heritage Foundation
Heritage Foundation Reports
February 3, 1994
SECTION: THE HERITAGE LECTURES; An Asian Studies Center Symposium; The Promise
and Peril of China After Deng Xiaoping; No. 499
LENGTH: 8312 words
HEADLINE: The Promise and Peril of China After Deng Xiaoping
BYLINE: Panelists, Dr. Harry Harding, Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution,
Dr. Ronald Mantaperto, Senior Fellow, Institute for National Strategic Studies,
Dr. Anne Thurston, Peace Fellow, The United States Institute of Peace,
Moderator, Brett C. Lippencott, Policy Analyst, Asian Studies Center
BODY:
Brett C. Lippencott
Heritage Foundation Reports, February 3, 1994
Today we are here to talk about the fate of China after Deng Xiaoping. The
question of China's future is being asked by Communist Party research committees
in Beijing, anxious reformers and capitalists along China's Golden Coast, and of
course, here in the United States.
Today's large attendance indicates that the interest in Asia, particularly
China, is quite keen. It also indicates that there are many differing opinions
as to the direction and fate of China after Deng Xiaoping.
It is my honor to introduce our panel. Dr. Harry Harding is a distinguished
visiting professor at the Sigur Center for East Asian Studies at The George
Washington University here in Washington. He is on leave from his permanent
position as Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies program at The Brookings
Institution. Dr. Harding's most recent book, A Fragile Relationship: The United
States and China Since 1972, was named an outstanding academic book for 1992 by
Choice Magazine. Dr. Harding is a trustee at The Asia Foundation and a
consultant to numerous multinational corporations.
Our second panelist, Dr. Ronald Montaperto, is a senior fellow with the
Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University.
Dr. Montaperto was a member of the political science faculty at Indiana
University at Bloomington. He also served there as Director of East Asian
Heritage Foundation Reports, February 3, 1994
Studies. His other appointments include the Henry L. Stimson Chair of Political
Science at the U.S. Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, and Chief
of Estimates for China at the Defense Intelligence Agency. His critically
acclaimed book, Red Guard: The Political Biography of Dai Hsiao-ai, published
with Gordon Bennett, was nominated for a National Book Award.
Our third and final panelist, Dr. Anne Thurston, is currently a Peace Fellow
at The United States Institute of Peace here in Washington. Dr. Thurston is an
independent writer whose personal connection and scholarly efforts in the areas
of Chinese politics and society have drawn praise. Dr. Thurston's books include
A Chinese Odyssey: The Life and Times of a Chinese Dissident, and a personal
favorite of mine, Enemies of the People: The Ordeal of Chinese Intellectuals
During the Great Cultural Revolution. Dr. Thurston also has served as Director
for China at the Social Science Research Council and currently serves on the
board of Human Rights in China.
Dr. Harry Harding
As Brett has said, there is not only a great amount of interest in the future
of China, but a great deal of uncertainty. And I am certainly going to
reinforce that uncertainty today.
Heritage Foundation Reports, February 3, 1994
Before indicating what I think are the several possible courses that China
could take in the years ahead, let me just spend a minute explaining why I think
there is such uncertainty in our thinking about the future of the country.
China has an uninstitutionalized political system. We see a looming individual
and generational succession. China's enormous economic dynamism is leading to a
much more vociferous society. And looming ahead for China are some daunting
economic problems. I think that combination of factors helps explain why it is
so difficult to give any clear or confident forecast about the future of China.
What I would suggest today is that there are three broad directions that
China could follow in the years ahead. In each case, the extreme scenarios,
including some that are discussed quite commonly in China and in the Western
press, are relatively unlikely. But lesser versions of those three scenarios
provide a more realistic survey of the varying prospects for the People's
Republic of China. I will call these three directions "the road to further
reform," "the road of retrogression," and "the road of political decay."
The most optimistic scenario is that China will move rapidly and smoothly
toward economic and political reform in the post-Deng era. The argument for
this is that there will be a new generation of leaders assuming power in the
near future, leaders who are better educated and more exposed to the outside
world, and that there will be pressures for both economic and political reform
Heritage Foundation Reports, February 3, 1994
from a more active and independent civil society. Above all, the external
example of the rest of East Asia, particularly South Korea and Taiwan, will put
great pressure on the PRC to move rapidly away from its present halfway house
toward a more complete democratic market economy. If I had to use a metaphor
for this first scenario, it would be a big Taiwan; the mainland follows the
Taiwan example and moves rapidly and relatively smoothly toward political and
economic reform.
In fact, I think that this extreme version is a relatively unlikely scenario.
We may hope for it, we may try to bring it about, but I don't think it is likely
to happen. China, I think, is simply too big for the process to be so rapid and
so smooth as these optimists would suggest. The problems -- economically,
socially, and politically -- are too great. The political culture of most of
the country is simply too unfamiliar with, and one might even say unsupportive
of, democracy. And above all, institutional reform in the political sphere has
been too slow for the process to be smooth.
The best we can hope for, in my view, is something that is more gradual and
much bumpier, a reform that has its ebbs and flows, in which economic reform
probably leads political reform for a considerable period of time and where
there is turbulence, disorder, and periodic crackdowns. In other words, the
most plausible of these more optimistic scenarios would be a big South Korea,
Heritage Foundation Reports, February 3, 1994
rather than a big Taiwan. If we compare the two, the South Korean process was
much bumpier, but still ended up with both a market-oriented economy and a more
pluralistic and democratic political system.
The challenge for the United States in this scenario will be to decide what
are simply bumps in the road and what are more permanent reversals and how to
respond to them. Even if the process succeeds, I suspect that the pressures put
on the international economy by a successfully reformed China will be one of the
greatest challenges that we will face.
The second set of scenarios involves retrogression. Here the fear has been
that China will move backward in the direction of a more administered economy
and more tightly controlled society. Reform, it is pointed out, has its
opponents, both in the leadership and in society. There are people who believe,
either for practical or for ideological reasons, that much of what has been done
over the last 15 years has been a mistake.
Problems will mount socially and economically as China moves into the second
stage of reform and the bottle-neck sectors become more and more apparent.
There is, therefore, the possibility that there will be a leadership, either
inside or outside the party, that will try to mobilize popular discontent with
reform to try to create what might be called either a neo-communist or a
Heritage Foundation Reports, February 3, 1994
neo-fascist movement that would exercise renewed totalitarian controls. In this
extreme version of the retrogressive scenario, China moves backward toward
totalitarianism and central planning and becomes a big North Korea.
Now, of all the scenarios, this is the one we hear the least about these
days, and I think that is for a very simple reason. I think it is simply
impossible now for China to move very far back in the direction of an
administered economy and a totalitarian political system. The technical
problems of administering so large and complex an economy and society are simply
too great. It is also unfeasible for the present regime to mobilize enough
power to suppress the economic interests that have been created by reform.
However, there is a less extreme version of the scenario that I consider to
be much more likely, and that is what many Chinese themselves call
"neo-authoritarianism." This would include a protracted period in which China
attempts to maintain a relatively pluralistic and outwardly oriented market
economy on the one hand, while trying to maintain an authoritarian political
system on the other.
Why is this scenario possible? First, not all of the new leaders of China
are democrats. There is a notion abroad that this new generation of Chinese is
necessarily going to be democratically or pluralistically oriented. I am not
Heritage Foundation Reports, February 3, 1994
at all convinced of that, at least among those who will be the next generation
of leaders. There is a fear wide-spread in China, both among the elites and
among society, that political reform will lead to chaos and turmoil; and the
example of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia is of course increasingly
being brought out in support of this proposition. If we want another analogy
from the past, I think again it would be a big Taiwan or a big South Korea, but
it would be the Taiwan and the South Korea of the 1960s and the 1970s, rather
than the South Korea or Taiwan of today.
At a minimum, the dilemma for the United States in this scenario will be how
to balance our interests in human rights with our desire to preserve economic
opportunities in China and to avoid strategic confrontation. At a maximum, the
challenge is that a neo-authoritarian China could also be a highly nationalistic
China. That could pose a threat to the security interests of the United States
and its allies if it became assertive internationally, especially if it
continued to enjoy high rates of economic growth.
Finally, the third broad path for China is the one that I call decay. In
this scenario China will collapse into warring states, or warlord states, as has
previously occurred many times in China's history. The assumption here is that
tensions between the center and the provinces, between state and society,
between Han and minority populations are all increasing; that the central
Heritage Foundation Reports, February 3, 1994
government is weakening steadily relative to society and to the provincial
authorities; and that the central government likely will become increasingly
fragmented and ineffective when Deng Xiaoping and the elders die and a new
generation of weaker leaders come to power.
Once again, I think that this extreme scenario, while not completely
impossible, remains highly unlikely. The center remains in possession of
significant levers of power over the provinces. A widespread fear of chaos,
fear of the Yugoslavian example, will help hold things together to a degree in
China. But above all, the growth for the first time in Chinese history of a
large national economic system is giving provinces, both rich and poor, a
growing stake in national unity. I think that all of these factors would tend
to prevent China from descending too far along this particular dimension.
However, a less extreme version of decay is highly likely. This would not
involve the breakup of China, but it would involve extensive corruption,
turbulence in both rural and urban China, immobility and inefficiency at the
center, and very confused and strained relations between the center and the
provinces. China would become something like a big Philippines rather than a
big Yugoslavia.
Heritage Foundation Reports, February 3, 1994
For the United States, the challenge in this scenario would be that China
would be much less coherent. There is a paradox here. Although we often argue
that the promotion of human rights requires restrictions on the power of the
central government, we also want a central government that can prevent things
that we don't like. We want a coherent government that can control illegal
exports, that can control drug trafficking, that can control arms sales, and
that can control environmental pollution. A China that becomes less coherent
will mean that the central government will be less and less able to do these
things.
What I am suggesting here is that there are three broad paths for China. I
see the extreme versions of each path as being unlikely, but I would suggest
that decay, neo-authoritarianism, and bumpy reform all remain very real
possibilities.
Which of them will actually come about? Basically, I think it depends on two
factors: first, whether new generations of Chinese leaders are prepared to move
in a concerted way toward political reform and secondly, if they do so, whether
that process will be overwhelmed by social and economic problems.
A few words in conclusion about the implications for the United States. My
sense is that, more than at any other time since I began studying China, there
Heritage Foundation Reports, February 3, 1994
is a real disconnection between our analysis of domestic affairs and of foreign
policy in China. As I have just suggested, there is enormous uncertainty about
China's future, an enormous concern that there is a process of decay underway
that could have very serious ramifications. And yet increasingly we hear from
strategists, most of whom are not China specialists, that China is a rising
power that is going to pose a major threat to the security of the region and to
the United States. I would suggest that there is a real contradiction here. If
one real danger for China is decay and confusion, then I am not sure that China
will necessarily pose a concerted threat to the United States in the way that so
many people are talking about.
I would suggest that our analysis of the international implications of
China's future should acknowledge as much variety and uncertainty as our
domestic scenarios do. It is certainly possible that there could be a classic
security threat from China if China experiences some of the more nationalistic
versions of neo-authoritarianism, but there are other scenarios that we should
consider. One is that decay would lead not to aggression, but to incoherence.
And further decay could lead to the same massive humanitarian problems and
uncertainties about command and control of nuclear weapon systems that we are
seeing in the former Soviet Union or in Eastern Europe.
Heritage Foundation Reports, February 3, 1994
Obviously, reform is the best scenario for the United States, but even here
there are! complications. Some arise from what I think will be a bumpy process
of reform. Others are reflected in a growing concern among the business
community, both in the United States and Japan about the rising economic
competition from a China which many -- not me -- see as a "low-wage, high-tech"
economy.
My bottom line is that I don't know what is going to happen in China. I
suspect the extreme scenarios are relatively unlikely, but that still leaves a
wide range of possibilities. That suggests to me that, in thinking about the
future of China's international role and position, we need to have a much wider
range of scenarios in mind and not prematurely focus, as so many are, on the
notion that China will inevitably become the next strategic rival of the United
States in Asia.
Dr. Ronald Montaperto
I am impressed that some things never seem to chartge. It was in 1981 that I
was dragged, sort of like the lamb to the slaughter, from a comfortable academic
environment to that of the Defense Intelligence Agency here. My first job at
that time was to work on a national estimate, the title of which was "China
After Deng." It is now 12 or 13 years later, and I can think of no question
Heritage Foundation Reports, February 3, 1994
that has so dominated our concerns for all this time.
Like Harry, I do not know what is going to happen in China. But unlike
Harry, and for purposes of stimulating some discussion, I am going to pretend as
though I do. And I am going to offer my own scenario for what I think will
happen. I will do this in a couple of different ways.
First, I would like to talk about what the succession in China means and what
issues are involved in the succession. I think, and I will try to establish in
a moment, it is considerably more than finding new leaders.
Secondly, I would like to talk about the People's Liberation Army's role in
the succession process.
And finally, if there is some time, I would like to address the three
questions this symposium proposed: How will the post-Deng Xiaoping succession
affect the Chinese internal political scene, China's relations with the West,
and China's regional goals?
First, the succession means finding a new paramount leader for China. China
is a bureaucratic system, and, as with all bureaucracies, it takes personalities
to make it work. China seems to need this more than other systems because the
Heritage Foundation Reports, February 3, 1994
system is not well institutionalized; therefore, the role of the strong
leadership figure, I think, is extremely important. And this is what we mean
when we talk about the paramount leader.
The new paramount leader will not be paramount in the sense of Mao Zedong.
He will probably not even be paramount in the sense of Deng Xiaoping, who is
considerably less powerful than was Mao. There will be a new definition, a new
kind of leader who will not have at his disposal all of the resources that Mao
before him, and Deng before him, had.
But I think it is important to note that this process of finding and defining
a new paramount leader is going to occur within the context of a set of
difficult policy problems. I think there are six major problems that have to be
resolved.
First, there has to be a new relationship between the center, the regions,
and the provinces. New mechanisms of control have got to be developed in order
to accommodate the pressures from the regions and from the provinces that are
the result of rising economic development.
Second, Beijing must deal with the imbalances that exist in the levels of
livelihood within various sectors of China. It is fashionable these days to
Heritage Foundation Reports, February 3, 1994
talk about the Center and the Coast -- the Golden Coast. I think we cannot
ignore that. However, I think I would also argue for a more discriminating,
more sensitive kind of analysis. I suggest that the idea of the coastal
provinces and the interior as the major contradiction is probably a bit
simplistic.
We are getting some data now that suggest a number of other things. While we
need to talk about imbalances in livelihood standards between and among
different regions, we also need to look within regions, and within regions we
need to look at different sectors, and within sectors we need to look at urban
and rural splits. I think that probably we will find as time passes that the
real imbalance, the real fault line, will be urban versus rural.
These have the potential to cut across center/province or, if you like,
interior/coastal boundaries. And we need to look at that. That is a different
question.
A third problem is that the regime will have to build a new social safety
net. As the economy moves toward the institution of market mechanisms, the
things that enterprises now do in terms of providing housing, medical care,
education, all of these social support services will have to be assumed by some
other institutions, that is to say by the state and by private companies.
Heritage Foundation Reports, February 3, 1994
That will be a third problem.
The fourth problem grows out of the third. China must complete the process
of moving toward market regulation.
Fifth, there must be a way of accommodating demands for a greater pluralism.
Tiananmen was, I think, one stage in a process that really began a long time
ago. It began early in this century, or even toward the end of the last
century. There is a desire among the Chinese people, linked always to economic
development and reform, for a greater pluralism in daily social life and for
wider latitude in making political decisions.
The sixth challenge relates to all of the preceding five because the new
successor, or the new regime, will have to find some way of filling what I refer
to as the gap in social values. Marxism in China is dead. It has no relevance
of any kind. It has no appeal of any kind. The Chinese Communist Party is seen
as a stepping stone to advancement, and little more than that. There is simply
no respect for the concept of Marxism. Something will have to fill that gap.
Right now we hear reports of people doing martial arts. We hear about a revival
of religion and Christianity that reflects a desire within the populace to find
some kind of crucial values that will give them some light.
Heritage Foundation Reports, February 3, 1994
Solving these sets of problems will require much time -- perhaps two to four
years. The process is going to involve a great deal of tension and stress. I
would expect to see more demonstrations in the streets. I expect we will also
see perhaps violent suppressions of such demonstrations. We are not out of the
woods on this by any means, because the impulses that lead to these
demonstrations have an historic root, they have a cultural root, they have a
root in nationalism, and they will simply not go away until they are addressed.
So having said all of this, I will get back to the succession. The test of
the new paramount leader, the criterion by which the new candidate will be
judged, will be his ability to deal with this whole range of problems. The
present leadership, in my own view, is not up to this task. So I think we are
going to see a lot of change at the very top. But the process of producing the
new leader, I think, will contain within it a new definition of Chinese
political life, and we will then have a new leader who will personify these new
values, as Mao did for his time and as Deng is now doing for his time.
Now let me talk about the People's Liberation Army. The PLA is bound to be
an extremely important player in this whole process. I would even say it will
be the crucial player. The PLA has its own set of priorities, its own prism
through which it views these six problems that I have set forth. Some of them
are rather broad, and some are narrow and quite professional.
Heritage Foundation Reports, February 3, 1994
The PLA's broadest political concern, in my own view, is expressed in its
nationalism. I believe the Chinese People's Liberation Army is today the
repository of nationalism in China, and that this nationalism is old fashioned.
It is Victorian 19th Century, basic, harsh, strident, difficult to deal with,
and very difficult to apprehend. It is very much in conflict with what you
might call neo-realist notions based upon interdependence. Out of that comes a
desire to see China take its place as a leading regional and global power.
The basis for all of this is seen in two things: continuing economic
development, an economic base to support the second aspect of it -- a world
class military system.
Then we come down to a number of other more instrumental things which involve
professionalization of the PLA. We hear much about it. I am just back, as a
matter of fact, from a week in China. I hope most of you will be happy to know
that we now have a renewed relationship between their National Defense
University and ours, and that the prospects for developing military-to-military
relationships seem to be fairly positive.
But during one visit, I learned that progress within the PLA toward
professionalization is slow. What the PLA is most concerned about is regulating
its budget. They have for years been in business, making quite a pile of
Heritage Foundation Reports, February 3, 1994
money, but the management of businesses runs up against the requirements of
training and professional development. We hear much in terms of PLA doctrine
about active defense and about regional wars of limited duration. We hear much
about combined arms operations. We hear much about high technology warfare. My
own position on this is that there are decades ahead before the PLA achieves
what even it feels it must achieve in this regard.
We asked constantly, "Tell us about active defense. Tell us about people's
war under modern conditions. Tell us about combined arms warfare. What does it
mean to you?" There was no answer. Not because it is a secret, which of course
it is, but also because it simply hasn't been decided yet. Desert Storm was a
wake-up call to the PLA. They understand how they have to do it. They
understand what they need. But there are not the resources, material or human,
yet to bring that into being. And so I would posit that as being a major,
primary concern of the PLA.
All of this is a way of saying, in the words of a former Chief of Staff of
the United States Army, that the PLA is a hollow shell. There are some units
that can do a very good job indeed, but these are very few and very far between.
So what it all comes down to is this. As the PLA approaches the succession
process, its concerns will be framed and shaped by the kinds of issues I have
Heritage Foundation Reports, February 3, 1994
just raised at the two levels. There is the level of nationalism in the sense
of China's destiny, and then there is the idea of military professionalization
and modernization, which seems to be linked to the first.
How will the PLA participate in this succession? I think that the PLA's
participation is likely to be "normal." It is difficult to apply the term
"constitutional" to anything in China, and I would like to avoid that. But I
think we all understand that by statute, by custom, by tradition, the PLA has a
large number of points of access to the political system. And furthermore, it
is my own view that as time passes, the military is getting increasingly
sophisticated in terms of its ability to aggregate its interest and to
articulate it.
Many years ago one of the biggest jokes in the world was a PLA think tank.
It was a true oxymoron. That is no longer the case. What I have found in
two-and-a-half years of visiting back and forth is an increase in the level of
knowledge, sophistication, and the ability to present a point of view in the
larger policy process.
The policy process at this time is by no means institutionalized, but it is
more so than it was five years ago. And part and parcel of that has been, I
think, derived from the PLA's ability to organize itself, to identify the
Heritage Foundation Reports, February 3, 1994
critical modes, and to act upon those critical modes.
Nor is the PLA without other supports. Just over 20 percent of the
membership of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party are serving
PLA officers. Liu Huaqing, probably the most powerful military man in China, is
the leader of the Central Military Commission. More important in some ways is
General Zhang Zhen, a former president of the NDU, who is the funnel through
which PLA positions are articulated to the Central Military Commission and out
again. This is something that needs a great deal more research, but to me it
points out the need to engage the PLA. What I am saying here is that there is
no need for the PLA to intervene in this succession in extraordinary ways.
The military already has at its disposal a whole range of mechanisms,
devices, and structures by which and through which it can influence the policy
process. And further, it shows increasing sophistication and effectiveness as
it does so.
Will China remain a unified state? I think the answer is yes, but not in its
present form. I perceive a new relationship between the center and the regions
based upon different sets of control mechanisms. At present, control is mainly
administrative. Provinces and the center have to bargain. And they find some
kind of consensus, and then the provinces simply evade it. If the present
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mechanisms that are being discussed are implemented, the provinces will not have
that capability, because the value of money, exchange rates, and other things
will be set. They will deprive the provinces in large measure of the devices
they now hold in competition with the center.
I think the new relationship will also be more Chinese, if you will permit
that, because a strong central government is frankly not very Chinese. It never
has been. Also, I think a third reason why the unified state will remain is the
concept of nationalism. The entrepreneurs and officials of the Golden Coast, I
believe, are well aware that any hint, the slightest hint, the slightest
intimation of instability in China will mean an end to all of the investment
that they prize so dearly. It is in their interest to get together to maintain
stability. Also, we need to say that the PLA, when all is said and done, will
attempt to provide the unity that could be lacking.
So, in building toward a model -- we have heard about the Philippines, we
have heard about Taiwan and Yugoslavia and North KoreaBthe one that I prefer is
the Singapore model. There is a great deal of interaction between China and
Singapore. Beijing is trying to discover the secret of Singapore's success.
The Chinese hear such things as "You have got to be efficient. You have got to
be honest. And you have to deliver." And this, I think, clearly gives the
Chinese authority some difficulties.
Heritage Foundation Reports, February 3, 1994
As for relations with the West and with the region, I believe that great
power status will continue to be China's overarching goal. But given all that
we have said, all of that pushes China toward a policy position, toward a
standpoint which says that domestic stability, regional stability, and global
stability are the most important things for the next 10, 15, 20 years. And so I
think that that push for stable international relations, a stable regional and
global security environment, will remain overarching imperatives for Chinese
policy makers. Moreover, in the next 20 years China simply will not have the
wherewithal to adopt military methods. It will probably take that long before
China is anything like a military threat to the United States, or really to any
of its neighbors.
It then comes down to nationalism. When it comes to foreign and national
security policy, I see a kind of dialectic, a tension, in Chinese foreign
policy. There is, on the one hand, the raw, strident, harsh, sort of bitter
nationalism of the PLA. And that is a vital, vibrant strain. On the other
hand, there is another view within China that embraces new concepts related to
interdependence. There is a broader concept of national security, which is more
comprehensive. It holds that enmeshed political and economic ties are crucial
to national security. I think we should all agree that, to this point, the
latter has taken precedence over the former. Whether that mix remains as it is,
I think it is in large measure up to us, up to China's neighbors within the
Heritage Foundation Reports, February 3, 1994
region. But with that caveat, I remain fairly optimistic about the future.
Dr. Anne Thurston
In preparing this presentation, I was reminded of why I stopped teaching.
After four years teaching the same courses, I got bored hearing myself say the
same things. I share Ron's problem with the succession to Deng Xiaoping. I,
too, have already talked about the topic. Since there are a finite number of
people in Washington who come to listen to us, some of you may already have
heard me, so today I will try to say something different.
I knew that Harry could be depended on to lay out a set of scenarios about
what might happen politically following Deng's death. I knew that Ron could be
depended on to tell about the possible role of the military in the succession.
Since my role in life is to listen to Chinese people tell their stories, I want
to try to understand what Deng's death will mean for the Chinese people.
The interviews I conduct in China are of limited use in trying to answer this
question. All of us who go to China have been asking the Chinese for years what
will happen with Deng's passing. The answer is usually pretty much the same.
It was Harry Harding's bottom line: Buzhidao. "I don't know." A few months ago,
when I pressed one of my friends, he said, "Things may get better. Maybe they
Heritage Foundation Reports, February 3, 1994
will be worse. But they won't be the same." A couple of days ago, I called a
Chinese friend here in the U.S. and asked him what he thinks. Again he didn't
know. I pressed, and he said, "It's sort of like a refrigerator. If you pull
out the plug, the ice will melt." This doesn't give me much to go on.
At times like this, China needs someone who is a combination of Vaclav Havel,
Andrei Sakharov, and Maxine Hong Kingston. A Vaclav Havel because he is able to
take a simple daily act, like a green grocer putting a sign in his window that
says "workers of the world unite," and explain the meaning of the act. And
Havel is able to explain so simply and so persuasively the moral corrosiveness
of a "totalitarian" system.
We need a Sakharov to explain what will happen in China because my Russian
friends and specialists on the former Soviet Union tell me that when Sakharov
was finally allowed to return to Moscow and his voice was heard by the Russian
people, he spoke eloquently. He spoke a language devoid of all ideology, all
slogans, all cant. It was a language that people in the Soviet Union had not
heard in decades. Yet what he said made more sense than anything people had
heard in all those years.
We need a Maxine Hong Kingston because she understands the power of myth, and
so much of the functioning of Chinese society depends on myth -- both myths
Heritage Foundation Reports, February 3, 1994
that do make sense and myths that do not.
China has no one who combines a Havel, a Sakharov, and a Maxine Hong
Kingston. I am no substitute. But I will try a rough approximation of what the
passing of Deng might mean to the Chinese people.
I see Deng Xiaoping as the thread of legitimacy holding China together today.
It may be true that he plays only a minor role in the day-to-day administration
of the country, but he has enormous symbolic significance on three levels:
First, he is the exemplar of China's reform policy. He is the man credited
with having returned land to the peasants, who opened up China to the West, who
began the series of economic reforms that have resulted in the startlingly high
rates of economic growth that China has been witnessing in the past decade or
so. It is true that he nearly lost the Mandate of Heaven on the night of June
3-4, 1989, when he ordered the People's Liberation Army into Beijing, but he
regained the Mandate when he went south in early 1992 and called upon all of
China to emulate Shenzhen. Deng's southern trip unleashed the tremendous
economic energy we see today and reestablished his right to rule.
It is true that there are many other reformers in China, and they will be
committed to carrying on Deng's reforms after he is gone. But they are not
Heritage Foundation Reports, February 3, 1994
Deng Xiaoping. None of them will have the authority that Deng Xiaoping has had.
Second, Deng Xiaoping, symbolically, is the last of the Long March
generation, the last of the revolutionaries who established "new China," the
last of the generation who, on October 1, 1949, stood atop Tiananmen to declare
the establishment of the People's Republic of China. Every Chinese to whom I
have spoken over the years who was either present at the event or who heard of
it later reports the thrill, the pride, the exultation they felt -- the tears
streaming down their faces when they witnessed or heard Mao Zedong say that
today "the Chinese people have stood up."
Talking to Chinese recently about the revival of the Mao cult, even the most
disaffected much as intellectuals who suffered grievously under his rule or
people who would date the beginning of Mao's mistakes far earlier than the
official party historystill credit Mao, and by implication those who stood with
him, with having allowed the Chinese people to stand up, of having imbued them
with new pride, new hope. He united them again.
Deng Xiaoping, whatever his differences with Mao, is still a part of that
group. He still stands in the light of Mao, as they say. Much of his
legitimacy derives from this. With his passing, that legitimacy will also be
gone.
Heritage Foundation Reports, February 3, 1994
Finally, metaphorically, Deng Xiaoping is the emperor. Most Chinese believe
he will be the last. There is simply no one in China who has his authority --
or at least anyone we now know. I cannot explain why Deng has this authority.
The sources of legitimacy in China are complex. Myth is important, and perhaps
a Maxine Hong Kingston could help us understand. I am reminded of my book about
Ni Yuxian, a controversial dissident from Shanghai, and the stories his
grandmother used to tell him about how to tell the difference between a real
emperor and a pretender to the throne. Yuan Shikai was a pretender, Ni's
grandmother believed, both because he was a foreigner and because when he tried
to assume the dragon throne, the dragons that served as arms to the throne
suddenly came alive and wrapped themselves around the usurper, crushing him to
death. Yuan Shikai was not a foreigner but Chinese, and he died a natural
death. But these are the myths that Chinese, particularly rural Chinese, tell.
Ni Yuxian's grandmother also predicted that Mao Zedong would become the
emperor because while he was a southerner by birth, he had a northerner's face.
And the mole on his chin united heaven and earth. I do not know what myths have
been built about Deng Xiaoping, or what makes him the emperor, but
metaphorically, symbolically, he is an emperor to the Chinese people, and there
is not another waiting in the wings. Many Chinese say that Communist Party or
no Communist Party, the Chinese people are still Confucian. They need a father.
They need an emperor. Deng Xiaoping is their father and emperor.
Heritage Foundation Reports, February 3, 1994
If I am right about what Deng Xiaoping means to the Chinese people, then
symbolically, in terms of the meaning Chinese people give to their lives, the
loss of Deng Xiaoping will be profound indeed.
I am also reminded of a woman I did not interview but whom Arthur Kleinman, a
psychiatrist and anthropologist at Harvard University, did. The woman's husband
had been declared a rightist in 1958, and he had been separated from his family
for more than 20 years. During that time, the woman had kept the family going
-- kept herself and her four children going. In 1978, her husband was finally
rehabilitated, and he returned to his family to live. After 20 years of
struggle, and finally succeeding, the woman became clinically depressed. This
is what she said to Arthur Kleinman when he tried to find out why she had become
depressed.
Suppose, she said, looking at the ground, you were climbing a mountain and
this mountain was very steep and terribly difficult to climb. To the right and
the left, you could see people falling off the mountainside. Holding on to your
neck and back were several family members, so that if you fell so would they.
For twenty years you climbed this mountain with your eyes fixed on the handholds
and footholds. You neither looked back nor ahead. Finally, you have reached
the top of the motretain. Perhaps this is the first time you have looked
backward and seen how much you had endured, how difficult your life and
Heritage Foundation Reports, February 3, 1994
family's situation had been, how blighted your hopes.
She ended by asking if this was not a good enough reason to become depressed.
The death of Deng Xiaoping may provide the Chinese people the opportunity to
pause for a moment, or for many moments, and look back over their lives and over
what the last 40-plus years under communism have meant. In many respects, the
Chinese people have made it to the top of the mountain. The economy is booming.
Many people are full of hope. But if they are able to use the occasion of
Deng's death to pause, to look back down that mountain, to see how much they
have endured, and how hard those 40 years have been, I wonder what they will
feel. I wonder whether this will be a time for collective depression in China.
When I do press the Chinese about the meaning of Deng's death and what they
fear most about it the answer is luan -- chaos. They fear chaos. At one level,
that means the chaos that Harry and Ron have talked about -- the
decentralization, the multiplication of local power holders, the turmoil of
development, the dislocation of peasants migrating to the cities, the traffic
jams, and the corruption, even the possibility of sporadic violence.
But at another level, the Chinese people are talking about a more personal
luan, a moral luan, the luan of disorderly personal relationships. Both
traditionally and in China under Mao, morality has been defined in terms of
Heritage Foundation Reports, February 3, 1994
orderly human relationships, a proper hierarchy of human relations. Under
Deng's new reforms, those orderly relationships have collapsed. China is in a
state of moral disarray. Old values have crumbled, and new ones have yet to
take their place.
Richard Soloman, the new president of the Peace Institute, points out that
the luan of political struggle under Mao has been replaced by the luan of the
marketplace. While the nature of chaos has changed, something else has not.
Before, under Mao, the end of socialism justified the means of political
struggle, of ceaseless political campaigns -- including land reform, the
anti-rightist campaign, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution -- and
the millions of deaths that ensued.
Now the end is economic development, growth, and prosperity, but the means
include widespread corruption, prostitution, cheating, unbridled competition,
the selling of women and children, the taking of second wives, and sexual
promiscuity. Open the door, as Deng Xiaoping says, and the flies come in.
Despite periodic campaigns against corruption, this immoral economy is seen as
necessary, inevitable to the course, the end, of development.
More fundamental than this is the luan of human relationships. Some people
in China say that the chaos of personal relationships is worse now than during
Heritage Foundation Reports, February 3, 1994
the Cultural Revolution. No matter how many millions may have suffered, they
say, the numbers were still limited, and there was a certain order, a certain
logic in how victims were selected. Everybody had a label. You were a
counterrevolutionary, a worker, a peasant, a rightist. As long as you knew what
your label was, you knew how other people were likely to treat you.
Today, though, nothing makes sense. A lucky guy with no education can make
millions in the stock market. A friend recently told me about a 25-year-old
woman who graduated from a Chinese university only a couple years ago who has
recently come to graduate school in the United States with $ 50,000 in the bank.
My friend wonders how she got the money and what it means. I think of a
23-year-old friend of mine in Beijing whom I first met as an innocent
18-year-old. In the past five years, she has become a millionaire running her
own taxi company. Or one thinks of Daquizhuang, the village outside Tianjin
that raked in so much money that the leaders drove around in Mercedes Benz cars
-- while the average Chinese villager still earns around $ 200 a year and a
third of rural Chinese families do not have access to clean drinking water.
A few months ago, I had lunch with an old friend of mine, a senior engineer
who is now retired and, for the first time since I had known him, he ordered a
beer. In more than a decade, I had never seen him touch alcohol. I asked him
why he was drinking. He said he always drinks now because he is depressed.
Heritage Foundation Reports, February 3, 1994
He is depressed because he had been extremely well educated, and once he had
been an idealist. He had wanted to serve his country, to help with its
modernization. But his entire working life had been consumed by one political
campaign after another, and he had spent some time in jail. He had never been
able to make his contribution, and now he was retired. His daughter, who had
nothing like the education he had, had recently started working for a joint
venture firm and was making lots of money. She had just given him an expensive
bottle of brandy that cost over $ 100, more than double his monthly salary.
As I sat with my friend listening to him look back over his life, I knew that
he did not know what sense to make of it. He was at the top of his personal
mountain, looking back, his productive life over, and he did not know what it
all meant.
Finally, I want to say something about the problem of expiation, of
retribution, and of reconciliation once Deng Xiaoping is gone -- expiation not
only for all the political campaigns of the Maoist period, but also expiation
for the more recent tragedy at Tiananmen in 1989. I want to quote from a
prophecy about another revolution, the French Revolution, that ended in failure.
It appears in the final pages of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities as the
narrator imagines the thoughts of Sydney Carton as he prepares to meet the
guillotine:
Heritage Foundation Reports, February 3, 1994
I see Clyde, Barsad, the Juryman, the Judge, long ranks of the new oppressors
who have risen on the ranks of the old perishing by this retributive instrument
before it shall cease from its present use. I see a beautiful city and a
brilliant people rising from this abyss. And in their struggles to be truly
free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil
of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth,
gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out.
I see the death of Deng Xiaoping, and the death of what he has symbolized, as
bringing with it renewed demands for expiation -- and new demands, too, for
retribution against the new Chinese oppressors who have risen on the ranks of
the old.
I think it would take someone who combines Vaclav Havel's ability to make
sense out of everyday acts of complicity, with Sakharov's eloquence that
everyone understands, with Maxine Hong Kingston's understanding of myth, to make
sense of the past that Deng Xiaoping has played such a great part in making. I
see someone who combines all those qualities as necessary to bring about a moral
reconciliation that could ensure that the expiation that China still must go
through would be peaceful.
Heritage Foundation Reports, February 3, 1994
I agree with what Harry and Ron have said here. I do not think the
worst-case scenarios will come to pass after Deng Xiaoping dies. China will not
break up. What worries me is that when Deng dies, and the Chinese people stand
at the top of that mountain and begin looking back, there will be no one around
to explain to them what happened and to bring them together into a moral
community again.
Nothing written here is to be construed as necessarily reflecting the views
of The Heritage Foundation or as an attempt to aid or hinder the passage of any
bill before Congress.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LOAD-DATE: September 26, 1994
LEVEL 1 - 6 OF 35 STORIES
Copyright 1992 The Christian Science Publishing Society
The Christian Science Monitor
June 3, 1992, Wednesday
SECTION: BOOKS; Pg. 15
LENGTH: 1013 words
HEADLINE: Dissent Within the Great Wall
BYLINE: Elizabeth A. Cole;
BODY:
IN the wake of the stunning events that began in the spring of 1989 in China,
and which continue in the former Soviet Union, China's frozen silence is
troubling. Within China, all movement toward political change seems to have
stopped.
Two new books explore the nature of dissent in recent Chinese history and
assert that dissenting ideas - and voices - have never been lacking in China,
even in the face of fierce oppression.
The Christian Science Monitor, June 3, 1992
Anne F. Thurston's A Chinese Odyssey: The Life and Times of a Chinese
Dissident (Charles Scribner's Sons, 440 pp., $ 24.95), and New Ghosts, Old
Dreams: Chinese Rebel Voices (Times Books, 515 pp., $ 30) edited by Geremie
Barme and Linda Jaivin, offer some reflection on the roots and implications of
the often dangerous search for democracy and modernization that has occupied
China's history throughout this century. The 1989 "Beijing Spring" was only the
most recent stage and the best known outside China.
As these books reveal, this search frequently has led the Chinese people into
conflict with their society and government. The achievements of "A Chinese
Odyssey" are mixed; the success of "New Ghosts, Old Dreams" is stunning.
Thurston is the author of "Enemies of the People," an impressive oral history
of the Cultural Revolution in which she showed a distinct gift for being able to
reveal underlying social patterns through the individual stories she records.
This gift is given somewhat less scope in "A Chinese Odyssey," in which she
recounts a single story, that of activist Ni Yuxian, who left China in 1986.
While not involved directly in the most recent protests, Ni is a
controversial figure whose dissident attitude and activities from a young age
reveal a startling picture of dissatisfaction with the post-1949 China almost
since the day of its inception. This would seem to dispute the Communist
The Christian Science Monitor, June 3, 1992
Party's claim to have improved the lives and won the hearts of most Chinese, at
least within the first 15 years after the revolution of 1949.
Ni was born in a village outside Shanghai to a family of impoverished former
rural gentry. According to his account, the revolution brought this area no
benefits, and his father was attacked during the antirightist campaign, which
left the family permanently branded as politically suspect. His childhood and
youth were marked by public executions and the widespread starvation during the
Great Leap Forward; Ni reacted to the cruel and often shockingly senseless
policies of the government with a rebellious candor that resulted in his being
labeled early on as a troublemaker and, later, as a counterrevolutionary.
Thurston's portrait of a staunch nonconformist and cleareyed observer of the
government's various campaigns is impressive (Ni paid for his refusal to accept
in silence any official lies by his marginalization, a brutal imprisonment, and
then exile).
Yet for those who know the paradoxes of Chinese history and the contradictory
emotions of many Chinese toward the achievements of their government, it is not
clear that Ni is representative of a large number of dissatisfied people rather
than being one of a handful of unusually well-read and independent-minded
Chinese.
The Christian Science Monitor, June 3, 1992
More troubling is the handling of Ni's controversial activities in exile and
his reputation in the overseas Chinese community. Ni has been accused by
prominent Chinese scholars of mishandling funds for an organization he founded
to promote democracy in China, among other disreputable practices, and Thurston
herself points out that his political philosophy and highhanded behavior often
contradict his claim to be simply a fighter for justice and democracy.
Thurston covers the period of Ni's exile and involvement in the overseas
democracy movement in very cursory fashion; her account of his life in China is
tinged with a reverence that prevents the reader from considering the
possibility that Ni's perceptions may be highly idiosyncratic or even not
entirely accurate.
A large number of Chinese concede that their lives improved materially in the
decade after the revolution, and this needs to be noted for the general reader.
But despite these problems and a stilted style (the book reads oddly, as though
it were translated literally from a foreign language), Thurston gives a gripping
and informative portrait of a bold, unconventional man caught up in the
calamities of recent Chinese history.
"New Ghosts, Old Dreams" is a treasure-trove for anyone interested in modern
China. Although its length (497 pages) may discourage some nonspecialists from
The Christian Science Monitor, June 3, 1992
reading it cover to cover, even dipping into it yields riches. A companion to
Barms earlier work "Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience," the book is a
collection of dissident writings representing many genres and writers from the
1920s to the present, with the bulk representing the last five years.
Included in this anthology are excerpts from poems, popular songs, essays,
stories, and the TV documentary "River Elegy," whose iconoclastic approach to
Chinese history drew the wrath of authorities and played a role in the popular
discontent and tortured self-examination that led up to the tragedy at Tiananmen
Square.
Many voices are heard here, from those of the sharp-tongued reformers of the
1920s, to those representing the official position on the 1989 crackdown, to
that of the Dalai Lama. The variety of viewpoints expressed should silence the
assertions that Chinese intellectuals are passive, uncommitted, or complacent
about their country, people, and heritage; it reveals a rich polyphony behind
the monotone of official Chinese discourse.
The translations (even those of strikingly idiomatic works) are uniformly of
high quality and the thematic organization is excellent. The only drawback, a
confusing insertion of supplementary materials into the main texts, is so minor
that it hardly detracts from this moving, valuable, and timely collection.
The Christian Science Monitor, June 3, 1992
Elizabeth A. Cole taught English in China from 1981 to 1983. She is an intern at
the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, D.C.
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS(2): NO CAPTIONS OR CREDITS [book covers]
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LOAD-DATE: June 3, 1992, Wednesday
LEVEL 1 - 7 OF 35 STORIES
Copyright 1992 The Houston Chronicle Publishing Company
The Houston Chronicle
April 26, 1992, Sunday, 2 STAR Edition
SECTION: ZEST; Pg. 23
LENGTH: 1049 words
HEADLINE: Life and times of a stormy, not terribly lovable Chinese dissident
BYLINE: RICHARD J. SMITH
BODY:
""A CHINESE ODYSSEY. ''
""The Life and Times of a Chinese Dissident. ''
""By Anne Thurston. ''
""Scribner's, $ 24.95. ''
NI YUXIAN is an unlikely and fundamentally unlikable hero.
The Houston Chronicle, April 26, 1992
Arrogant, self-interested and unfaithful to both friends and
family, he seems to have been more a persistent troublemaker than a
true political dissident. Even the strident, self-serving and
opportunistic Wuer Kaixi, who assumed a leading role during the
so-called Beijing Spring of 1989, is a more sympathetic figure.
Yet when Liu Binyan, China's most courageous and widely
admired journalist, chronicled Ni's tumultuous life in a famous
piece called ""A Second Kind of Loyalty'' (the title of Liu's
recently published autobiography in English), Ni gained Olympian
stature.
Liu wrote in 1985: ""There are different kinds of loyalty, as
there are different kinds of beauty. One kind of loyalty stresses
meekness, modesty, submissiveness (and) deference. '' The other,
exhibited by Ni Yuxian, ""does not invite approval. '' As Liu
reminded his readers, ""The followers of the second kind of loyalty
have often had to pay the price of freedom, happiness or even life
itself for their kind of loyalty. ''
In his autobiography, as well as in his article, Liu praises
Ni for his intelligence and courage in speaking out against the
The Houston Chronicle, April 26, 1992
tyranny of the Chinese Communist Party; but he is also forced to
admit that Ni was ""a bit too volatile'' for his own good. Even
Anne Thurston, who wanted to make Ni her hero, says that he can
perhaps best be described as a troublemaker. She sees him as a man
who, facing danger, will readily ""sacrifice principle to protect
himself. ''
Thurston's biography, which involved hundreds of hours of
interviews with Ni, and numerous trips to China, both to gather
documents and to talk with friends and relatives, tells a
fascinating tale.
As a 16-year-old soldier in 1962, Ni wrote a bold, 30-page
letter to Mao Zedong himself, criticizing the disastrous Great Leap
Forward of 1958-1960. This got him dismissed from the People's
Liberation Army. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) Ni
invited the wrath of the radical leftists in power by openly
criticizing their policies; and in 1977 he was imprisoned and
sentenced to death for ""counterrevolutionary'' activity --
specifically, for advocating the restoration of Deng Xiaoping to
power by means of a huge poem, 30 feet long and 10 feet high,
pasted on the wall of one of Shanghai's busiest hotels.
The Houston Chronicle, April 26, 1992
This verdict was reversed in 1979, after Ni had endured two
years of beatings and other forms of torture, but he was never
fully exonerated. When Liu Binyan's article appeared in 1985 and
made Ni's name a household word, the perpetual dissident, at age
41, fled to the United States.
The horrors Ni Yuxian, his family and friends endured in
China, particularly during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural
Revolution, are by now too well-known to require retelling,
although Thurston's account is spellbinding throughout.
Furthermore, her understanding and explication of the distinctive
cultural environment that produced both Ni and his tormentors are
extraordinarily fair-minded and intelligent. ""A Chinese Odyssey''
is more than the life and times of a dissident, as the subtitle
indicates; it is a sensitive, intelligent, first-rate introduction
to contemporary Chinese political and social life.
Of all the frightening stories told by Ni in the book, one
of the most interesting is his account of his first night in the
United States, after a dramatic escape from China in early 1986. He
arrived in New York City late in the evening with $ 45 in his
The Houston Chronicle, April 26, 1992
pocket, hoping to get to Los Angeles, but having no idea how to do
so. Deciding to spend the night in the airport, he was awakened by
a cabdriver who offered to take him somewhere to sleep. The cabbie
took Ni to Chinatown, shook him down for $ 40, and left him there.
Eventually Ni found his way to the Port Authority Terminal
-- now with $ 2 to buy his bus ticket to L.A.There, he was teased
and tormented by the notorious lowlife of the Terminal, whereupon
he escaped outside -- only to encounter a completely unfamiliar and
equally terrifying world of drug dealers, addicts, prostitutes,
all-night porno theaters and sex shops.
Fortunately Ni put his hands on a Chinese-language magazine
that offered help for ""overseas students. '' Calling a number with
the help of a Hong Kong couple, he reached Wang Bingzhang, founder
of the Chinese Alliance for Democracy and editor of the overseas
dissident journal China Spring. Wang picked him up by car and
perhaps saved his life. However, when Ni soon thereafter phoned his
old supporter, Liu Binyan, still in China, Liu urged him not to get
involved with Wang's project, since China's problems had to be
settled domestically, by those who remained behind. ""It was
wrong,'' Liu advised, ""for a Chinese publicly to criticize his
country while in exile abroad. ''
Although Thurston does not dwell on this particular series
of events, they seem to highlight many of the ironies of Ni
Yuxian's position. One of these is, of course, that Ni fled an
environment in which there was too little individual freedom for
one in which there was, in a certain sense, too much. Thurston does
not tell us what Ni actually thought about the situation, but I
suspect that like many Chinese who come to the United States from
the People's Republic he was appalled by the permissiveness and
unfettered individualism of American culture -- even as he
appreciated his own new-found liberty. It is also significant that
within months of his arrival, Ni had become estranged from both
Wang Bingzhang and Liu Binyan, critical of the former for going too
far in his dissidence, and the latter for not going far enough.
Perhaps the greatest irony is that after returning to
radical political activism in the United States during the 1989
Beijing Spring and thereafter, Ni -- like many leaders of the
democracy movement in China at the time -- relied heavily upon the
same kinds of autocratic organizational structures and techniques
that he had assailed for so many years. Old cultural habits can be
The Houston Chronicle, April 26, 1992
hard to break.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
TYPE: Book Review
NOTES: "Richard J. Smith is professor of Chinese history at Rice University. His
most recent books are Fortune-tellers and Philosophers: Divination in
Traditional Chinese Society (Westview Press, 1991) and Robert Hart and China's
Early Modernization: His Journals, 1863-1866 (co-authored and co-edited with
John Fairbank and Katherine Bruner; Harvard University Press)''
LOAD-DATE: April 29, 1992
LEVEL 1 - 8 OF 35 STORIES
Copyright 1992 Information Access Company, a Thomson Corporation Company
ASAP
Copyright 1992 The New Republic Inc.
The New Republic
April 6, 1992
SECTION: Vol. 206 ; No. 14 ; Pg. 32; ISSN: 0028-6583
LENGTH: 3109 words
HEADLINE: The Claws of the Dragon: Kang Sheng - the Evil Genius Behind Mao - and
His Legacy of Terror in People's China._book reviews
BYLINE: Nathan, Andrew J.
BODY:
Who was Kang Sheng? Was he really, as The Claws of the Dragon claims, "the
man Mao trusted more than any other," a man who could "control, even mesmerize
Mao," "one of the most influential forces in modern China"? Is it really correct
to believe that "next to Kang, Mao himself seems to shrink in importance and
interest"?
The New Republic, April 6, 1992
Starting in 1927, Kang was one of the leaders in the small Communist
underground in Shanghai, placed by Zhou Enlai in charge of a secret service that
fought a running battle with the Kuomintang's police and conducted
assassinations of Communist defectors. When the Communists pulled out of
Shanghai, Kang went to Moscow for ideological training and allegedly cooperated
with the NKVD in purging "hundreds" from among the visiting Chinese Communist
cadres studying there. In 1937 he returned to China to become head of the Party
School in Yan' an, the Communists' capital. A year later he was also appointed
to head the intraparty security agency known as the Social Affairs Department,
about whose work little is known.
The height of Kang's power as the Chinese Communist Party's secret police
chief was past by the time the People's Republic was established in 1949. From
1949 to 1956, he was either physically or politically ill and out of power. By
the time of the Great Leap Forward in 1958, he had returned to Mao's side, and
although he did not occupy a high post, he was prominent in supporting Mao's
call for the Leap. For the next several years he continued to serve as one of
Mao's theoretical advisers, helping to devise the ideological rationale for the
split with the Soviet Union, and helping, with Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, to
generate the critique of "revisionist" trends in literature and art that led to
the Cultural Revolution. At that time he persecuted a novelist and a philosophy
professor, each of whom had promoted ideas that he deemed retrograde; later
The New Republic, April 6, 1992
hundreds of victims were hounded in connection with each of these cases.
Kang reached a brief second peak of influence during the Cultural Revolution
as a cat's paw of Mao's, without independent power. He was adviser to the
Central Cultural Revolution Small Group and de facto head of the Party's
Organization Department, reached protocol position No. 4 in the Communist
hierarchy, and was elected to the Politburo Standing Committee. He helped launch
the Red Guard movement at the Party School and at Peking University, exercised
influence over the Party Investigation Department and the Ministry of Public
Security, and (like several other CCP leaders) developed a private security
force of 50
During this period, Kang took the lead in a number of intraparty
persecutions, including those of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. Because of his
knowledge of senior cadres' personnel histories, he knew whom to accuse
plausibly of what, though the story is also told of his framing someone as a
traitor simply because he thought the man looked like one. According to John
Byron and Robert Pack, Kang "personally supervised ten special case groups that
investigated the 'crimes' of 220 defendants from the very apex of the Communist
Party." He also gave a talk to Red Guards from Inner Mongolia, who subsequently
carried out a witch hunt that affected hundreds of thousands, and he had vaguely
delineated ties to a purge in Yunnan Province that affected tens of thousands.
They cite an unreliable book in Chinese called Personalities of the Red
Dynasty to assert that in the 1930s Kang was frequently in and out of
The New Republic, April 6, 1992
brothels. They speak of "rumored amorous escapades" during the 1950s with no
cited evidence. They make much of his watching "bawdy" traditional opera in the
early 1960s, sometimes in the company of Jiang Qing, ignoring the fact that this
was part of his job as head of the Theoretical Small Group and that even the
bawdiest of Chinese operas is devoid of pornographic effect. They note
insinuatingly that in the mid-1960s, when Kang helped Mao launch the Cultural
Revolution, he was "aided by several women, including his wife and the ever
present Jiang Qing and a university lecturer notorious for her sexual
opportunism"-a woman who, like many Chinese, had divorced her spouse when he was
labeled a rightist and who later married a highly placed cadre twenty years her
senior.
The Claws of the Dragon often embroiders on the bare framework of Kang's
curriculum vitae, which in many spots is all the Critical Biography provides.
This makes the book slow-moving, as we are treated to architectural detail on
cities in which Kang lived, or accounts of historical events in which he played
no direct role. The authors attribute states of mind to Kang without evidence.
He is described as infuriated, fearful, carefully concealing his jealousy; as
sensing, appreciating, enjoying; as being inspired by the exploits of
traditional Chinese spy-masters. His consistent and sometimes risky support for
Mao's shifting line is portrayed as opportunism, part of "his quest for the
unholy grail of total power."
The New Republic, April 6, 1992
If we are to have an imaginary Kang, I prefer a less banal one. Not knowing
Kang's mind, I prefer to imagine it as Hannah Arendt imagined her totalitarians,
as the mind of a fanatical ideologue who believed that all things are possible.
When Kang justifies the brutality of the Cultural Revolution as a small price to
pay for China's attempt to remake human nature, Byron and Pack see only
nonsense. One might instead see the anfi-utilitarianism typical of totalitarian
ideologies. It was an ideology not generated by Kang, but created by Mao and
voiced at different times by the entire Chinese Communist leadership.
Some of the main Maoist techniques of terror as an instrument of rule were
perfected during the Yan'an Rectification Movement of 1942-44. Byron and Pack
follow the Critical Biography in blaming the mass-meeting denunciations,
arrests, tortures, and executions on Kang. They leave Mao, the progenitor and
the beneficiary of the movement, in the background, ignore the collective
involvement of the rest of the Party leadership (some of whom are still in
power), and overlook the complicity of the victims, without which the vortex of
hysteria could not have been generated.
In any case, the Rectification Movement fits Byron and Pack's thesis poorly.
It marked a shift from secret, professional anti-espionage work to the use of
public spy hysteria as a tool to ensnare thousands of innocent victims and
frighten masses of people into total compliance with the new ideology of "Mao
The New Republic, April 6, 1992
Zedong Thought." For Kang it marked the end of whatever independent power he had
and his enlistment as a loyal tool of Mao.
To say that Kang "used the security organs to turn China into a chamber of
horrors" is thus erroneous in three ways. First, his victims were concentrated
among the Party and intellectual elite, not the whole of China. Second, the
terror that swept both the elite and the entire population was not Kang's
creation but that of Mao and the Party apparatus, though Kang played his part in
spurring the process along. Third and most important, the terror was not the
product of the security organs, but primarily of other institutions in Mao's
system of rule.
Mao's system was totalitarian, but it was not a police state," as Byron and
Pack call it. In a police state, the political police become a separate
organization, more powerful than the regular police, the military, or the Party
organization. They operate without legal restriction, serve as the primary
pillar of the regime, and have direct access to the leader. One thinks of
Stalin's KGB, Hitler's ss, the Iranian Savak, Saddam Hussein's Mukhabarat, or
the former South Korean Central Intelligence Agency. China had no similar
organization. The Party never lost political control over the Ministry of Public
Security, and its minister never ranked among the top figures of the regime. The
Party's internal investigatory and disciplinary organs were independent from
The New Republic, April 6, 1992
the police. So far as is known, these organs concentrated on intraparty and
overseas intelligence work rather than domestic security, although information
on them is extremely scarce. Under Mao, the military and rural and factory
militias also served important security roles.
The huge bureaucracy of the Public Security Ministry reaches from the
central government down to each neighborhood and village. Much of its work is
public and non-political: traffic policing, household registration, criminal
investigations, fire fighting. Until 1983 it also ran the huge network of
prisons and labor camps (since shifted to the Ministry of justice), which is
described in Harry Hong-da Wu's important book Laogai-the Chinese Gulag, just
published by Westview. A prisoner of conscience for nineteen years, Wu collected
his information both during his imprisonment and during several risky return
trips disguised as a Chinese-American businessman, one of them reported on "60
Minutes." Besides providing unique detail on the organization and distribution
of the camps and on life inside them, Wu incidentally provides proof of the
export of labor camp products to the United States and other markets.
Like police anywhere, the Chinese police engage in some amount of
surveillance, opening of mail, tapping of telephones, and infiltration of
political groups, though not with great efficiency. But by far the major part of
the job of political surveillance in Mao's time was performed by the hierarchy
The New Republic, April 6, 1992
of work units-factories, communes, schools, neighborhood committees, military
companies-in which most people were fixed for their entire careers. Each unit
was dominated by its Party secretary and controlled almost all aspects of its
members' lives. The Party apparatus and the security department within each unit
took responsibility for the political lives of its members, as well as for most
criminal problems, and maintained links with the local police. (This helps to
explain China's extremely low crime statistics, because they include only those
cases that get beyond the boundaries of the work unit and enter the regular
police and judicial system.) The police were free to direct their attention to
special targets, to organizations outside of work units, to circles of
intellectuals, students, and workers in larger cities, to foreigners with whom
Chinese citizens might have contact.
Political terror was delivered mostly through the unit. Terror commonly took
the form not of jackboots on the stairs and the knock on the door, but a summons
to a unit political study meeting. The lifelong dissident Ni Yuxian, for
example, constantly ran afoul of the regime. As Anne E Thurston describes in her
recent account of his life, A Chinese Odyssey (Scribner's), Ni's oppressors were
the political instructor of his high school class, his company commander and
political instructor in the military, Party officials in the college he
attended, the worker propaganda team both in his college and in a factory he
worked in, Red guards, and factory militia-in other words, control mechanisms
The New Republic, April 6, 1992
within the unit. When Ni, like millions of others, was incarcerated during the
Cultural Revolution, it was not in the prison system but in his own unit's "cow
shed" (a broom closet, spare room, outhouse, or lavatory). He was never arrested
by the police until after Mao's death, when he hung a wall poster on the side of
one of Shanghai's major hotels.
Kang's trade was not mass terror but intraparty terror. As the Critical
Biography states with outrage, "Those he harmed were not ordinary people." (Kang
also had links to some Red Guard groups during the Cultural Revolution. In
Beijing and elsewhere, Red Guards may have been used occasionally both by
special case groups and by the police to carry out searches or arrests, but
almost nothing is known of this relationship, and The Claws of the Dragon does
little to clarify it.)
Perhaps it was precisely because China lacked a highly developed and
autonomous secret police apparatus, and relied so heavily for security on the
Party hierarchy in the units, that Mao and his allies had to turn to
extraordinary methods in order to purge that very hierarchy. Kang's persecutions
in the 1960s were conducted largely through entities called "special case
groups." These were ad hoc groups of investigators, authorized by the
Mao-controlled Party center to investigate particular suspects. Their task was
not to eliminate victims, but to conduct extensive investigations so that a
The New Republic, April 6, 1992
plausible, if false, case could be put together to justify punishment-just as
was done by the special case group that produced the material for the Critical
Biography. Many persecutions and tortures of secondary people had no other goal
than to collect damaging information on major Party figures. Whether police were
among the case group members, and whether the groups had organizational links to
the police, remain unknown, although it is plausible that the case groups
borrowed professional staff from the police.
With the collapse of the old control mechanisms under Deng Xiaoping's
liberalizing reforms, China has come to resemble a classic police state more
rather than less. Agencies dealing with counterespionage and border security
were removed from the Ministry of Public Security to form a Ministry of State
Security. Deng separated some military units involved in internal security to
form the People's Armed Police PAP). Elite counterterror and civil unrest units
were reportedly established and received training in Eastern Europe. After
Tiananmen, money was poured into the PAP to improve its technical surveillance
capabilities, and control over it was shifted from the Ministry of Public
Security to the more pivotal Central Military Commission. As work units have
increasingly refused to inform on their members or to conduct effective
political campaigns, police surveillance and illegal police detentions have
increased.
The New Republic, April 6, 1992
Not every totalitarian state is a police state, and not every head of party
security is a Beria. So far from being Mao's evil genius, the progenitor of the
Cultural Revolution, or a man more interesting than Mao himself, Kang Sheng
could have said in his defense what his colleague, Jiang Qing, said at her
trial: "I was Chairman Mao's dog. When he said bite, I bit."
ANDREW J. NATHAN is professor of political science at Columbia University
and the author most recently of China's Crisis (Columbia University Press).
IAC-NUMBER: IAC 12088557
IAC-CLASS: Magazine
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LOAD-DATE: August 23, 1995
LEVEL 1 - 9 OF 35 STORIES
Copyright 1992 The New York Times Company: Abstracts
Information Bank Abstracts
ASIAN WALL STREET JOURNAL
March 30, 1992, Monday
SECTION: Section 1; Page 13, Column 1
LENGTH: 49 words
HEADLINE: SEEING CHINA'A DARK SIDE THROUGH CHINESE EYES
JOURNAL-CODE: AWS
ABSTRACT:
Arnold R Isaacs reviews two books that explore dark side of China: As Long as
Nothing Happens, Northing Will, five stories by Zhang Jie, and A Chinese
Odyssey, Anne Thurston's account of Ni Yuxian, political dissident now living
in exile in US (M)