My most lingering memory of my grandma is of the early 1960's, when she came to Beijing to live with us for a while. My family was living in the Textile Ministry's dormitory in the eastern suburb of the city, and she would often give me some odd money to buy my favourite snack TangHuLu (糖葫芦sugar coated hawthorn fruit) from the local grocery shop. When she did so, she took notes or dimes out of her grey cloth gown’s pocket, and usually when my parents were not present. Grandma only spoke the dialect of southern Chinese city FuZhou(福州) which almost nobody else in the dormitory understood, nor in the entire city of Beijing: in the 30 years that I lived there, I very rarely heard people talking in that dialect, except for my family and relatives.
Another lingering memory is of one night when a hen bought and left in the kitchen by Grandma was stolen: the police were called in to investigate, since chickens were expensive property in those days. No culprit was found until several months later, when the police informed us that the thief who stole our hen had been arrested.
My grandma was born in 1893, when China was still under the rule of the Qing Dynasty. Grandma's feet were bound, as a result of the ugly ancient Chinese tradition required of women from an early age: in China this was commonly called "small feet". For some bizarre and twisted reason, for the past several thousand years "three inch golden lotus feet"(三寸金莲) were viewed by Chinese society as a sign of female beauty, despite the enormous physical pain brought upon women. Grandma's bound feet made it slow and difficult for her to walk, with her narrow shoes pointed in the front with a tiny sole. She seldom unbound the long cloth around her feet in front of us grandchildren, but I remember sometimes seeing her washing her feet after leaving a pile of foot-binding cloth on the floor.
Grandma normally lived in her hometown FuZhou (福州), the capital city of the southern province FuJian(福建), where both my parents were born and grew up before the 1949 nationwide communist take-over. Sometimes Grandma would come to Beijing to visit us by taking a long railway trip, and then live with us for several months. She spoke almost none of the Mandarin language that was used in Beijing, but this didn't deter her from shopping around in the nearby grocery shops, where she would use gestures and sign language to communicate with people. At home, Grandma spoke FuZhou dialect with my parents, so this helped me understand it to some degree. Fifty years on, my ears still echo with the sound of Grandma's voice calling my brother and I, in the FuZhou dialect to return home for dinner.
In those days of the 1960s, there was no hot water in the Textile Industry Ministry dormitory where my family lived, which was also true for the rest of mainland China except for those few very high-ranking communist bureaucrats' families, so each time us children finished our toilet business with toilet paper, Grandma would use a basin of warm water to top it off: this extra hygiene process was accidentally run into by some of our playmates, so "wiping bottom" became my humiliating nickname in the dormitory's play yard for quite some time. The dormitory’s residents initially used coal stoves for cooking, but later natural gas pipes were installed so gas stoves were setup into every household. Grandma learned to strike a match to ignite the gas stove immediately after turning on the gas switch, which was a novelty for her since back in FuZhou city coal stoves were still being used.
Grandma was of medium height, usually wore some greyish long gown, and unlike most women around her age she had a straight backbone with no sign of bending when walking and sitting. She was always clean and tidy, and never had any of those unpleasant smells often associated with old people. She had a clean handkerchief hanging off her cloth gown with a pin all times, which she often used to wipe clean the dirty faces of us grandchildren romping around. At night before going to bed, she would tell us to check underneath the beds to make sure no baddies were in hiding; I guessed this was an old practice back in those days when she was living in FuZhou when the community situation wasn't that stable and safe.
Grandma could read and write pretty well. I would sometimes pick up the novels she read and left behind on the desk: they were in the old style of publication where the words were printed vertically and the columns ordered from right to left, as in all ancient Chinese literatures. Her novels were usually about girls and women of various dynasties in Imperial China involving love affairs and family chores. As a primary school boy I could only roughly understand some of the contents, and half-guessed the rest from the accompanying pictures; one of them depicted a maid stripped naked, tied up to a tree trunk and being beaten in punishment, which frightened me while also making me have some excited feelings about women. Grandma initially wrote letters with calligraphy brushes which she had apparently been using for many years, but later switched to the fountain pen like everybody else, probably because that was much easier to get than calligraphy brushes and ink. When she was residing in her hometown of FuZhou, my mother would regularly ask my brother and I to write letters to Grandma, or NaiNaiin in Chinese (奶奶grandma from father's side), and to my mother's parents whom I called WaiGongWaiPo (外公外婆grandpa/grandma from mother's side). She would emphasise particularly that we should write their names and addresses on the envelopes. After writing those addresses so many times, I can remember them so well that even today, more than fifty years later, they are still etched in my mind while the physical addresses themselves have long disappeared from FuZhou city.
In the late 1940s, soon after my parents got married in Shanghai, my grandma helped my father(her younger son)with money and contacts to go to America to study a graduate course, and he later received a Master’s degree in Agriculture Economics from the Texas Institute of Technology. In the 1970s, at the bedside of my cancer-stricken mother, my father told me that while in the USA he had arranged for my mother to leave China to join him. He had even bought the ship ticket for her, but "she was too scared to go", my father said to me, which I'm not quite sure was the only reason he eventually came back to China in 1950.
When she was not with us in Beijing, Grandma would always send over some native hometown snacks, usually through my uncle, a cousin of my father 10 years his junior, whom my parents and grandma nicknamed "the kid" in FuZhou dialect which had a slightly joking tone of intimacy and contempt. This was probably because this uncle was a humorous fellow, and his studies and professional trainings as an aircraft engineer had been financially supported by my Grandma. Since he was working in Beijing’s Capital Airport at the time, Grandma would often ask him to carry foods either personally or via colleagues to Beijing. My favourite among them were the marinated sweet and sour olives that were rare in the northern Chinese cities, which I have been chewing throughout my life as a snack, and they have probably contributed to the healthy state of my teeth without any gum disease.
While in Beijing, Grandma travelled around the city by hiring tricycles, where the driver rode in front and the passengers in the back, usually covered by a foldable canvas canopy. Unlike most women of a similar age living in and around the Textile Industry Ministry Dormitory, Grandma was not financially dependent on her government-employed son: she had a regular income of business stock dividends which although greatly reduced in their original values, were still partially allowed by the communist regime after their 1949 takeover. Of course, those shares were bought long before 1949. I remember glimpsing Grandma's money drawer opening with stacks of notes piled high. Her long distance travels between Beijing and FuZhou must have been self-financed, which was definitely not cheap even by today's standard.
Although Grandma seldom laughed loudly, she didn't scold us naughty grandsons, and I can’t even remember her ever raising her voice at us, nor with my parents. When my brother and I impudently uttered childish nonsense, she was always leniently smiling never showing signs of being disturbed. She got along extremely well with her daughter-in-law, my mum, and when together they seemed to engage in endless chatter in the FuZhou dialect.
In early 1964, when I was 9, my mother took me back to FuZhou to pay visit to our old hometown relatives. We travelled via passenger train which seemed like an extremely long journey to me. From FuZhou train station, we took a tricycle to go to Grandma's house in the CangQianShan district (仓前山区) at No. 8 of MaiYuanDingJuAnLi (麦圆顶居安里: literally "safe residence alley at round wheat top") which was again a long journey. When we finally arrived at the huge mansion property, I was totally fascinated by the magnitude of the estate, which occupied an area of at least a hectare or more. The estate was encircled by stone and mortar walls, and a gently sloping flight of stone stairs led to a central entrance door with stone poles by its sides. Inside and on the right, about 50 metres away from the entrance, stood a three-storey, dark red brick building that was the main residence of my grandma and her daughter, my father's elder sister. A wide open-air timber balcony with rails emerged from the middle level. About 30 metres in front and facing square to the building stood a huge longan tree at least 10 metres tall. A stone well was by the tree’s side with a pulley, rope and timber bucket for pulling up the daily water for the household, as the residence had no running water or taps. Further away in front of the main building, as well as to the left hand side of the entrance to the courtyard, there were rows of bungalows in which some relatives of our family lived, and in earlier years I guessed they were for nannies and servants as well. Fruit and ornamental trees were abundantly scattered around, in particular the multiple thick bamboos over 6 metres tall that grew behind the main building. These were surrounded by numerous short and pointed green bamboo shoots that popped up from the ground, and these amazed me constantly since as a northern city boy, I had never seen green bamboos and their fresh shoots in winter, nor had experienced being on private land with trees. Later I learned from older relatives that the place had actually been only one of several properties that my grandparents owned. However, in the years of the Communist Party’s rule, all the other properties were confiscated by the government, and later even this property was gradually eroded and taken away.
This photo was taken in the late 1930s inside Grandma's house, when a photographer was invited in to do a shoot. Grandma was surrounded by her three children and first granddaughter (my aunt’s daughter). Grandma must have been a beauty at her young age:
Nowadays, all of those old buildings have been pulled down or destroyed after years of turmoil and reconstruction of Fuzhou city, to be replaced by several ugly multi-storey residential buildings strewn randomly over the land. Regrettably, in those days nobody in the family had a camera to photograph Grandma's grand old house and yard. The only thing that could remind us of the old scenes is a recent pencil sketch of the main building and its nearby surroundings drawn from memory by my cousin's son, who (being only 3 years younger than me) was my fellow playmate in those days.
In the main building, Grandma lived on the top floor by herself, and my aunt lived on the middle level with the youngest of her granddaughters. The ground floor was mainly used for the kitchen, laundry, sitting rooms and receiving visitors. My mother and I were arranged to live on the middle level during our month long stay there: because my mother's parents had their own houses confiscated by the communist regime after 1949 and were living in a crammed house with their daughter's family --- before that year, my mother’s father was the managing director of the MinJiang(闽江 River Min which runs through FuZhou city) ferry company and helped protect the company's assets from being detonated by the withdrawing Nationalist army, only to be stripped of all titles and left penniless after the communist army took over FuZhou city, which was called its "liberation". Ever since then, my mother’s parents lived as no-income retirees with their daughter (my mother's sister) while counting themselves lucky to be alive, since many other similar managers and officials under the Nationalist government who helped the advance and "liberation" of the communist army during the 1946~1949 civil war were sentenced to death after the communists secured their power. They were persecuted with the crime of being "historical counter-revolutionaries", which meant having previously been employed by the Nationalist government.
High above the main entrance door of the main building, a delicately decorated timber plaque was fixed with the characters "Honourable Revolutionary Martyr Family"(光荣烈士家属). This was to the credit of my elder uncle on my father’s side, who had been the then-underground communist party's committee secretary in FuZhou city in the 1940s. He was killed during the communist party's internal purging in 1948 and then posthumously awarded as the party's martyr. It is said that after my uncle and his comrades were wrongly accused of some fabricated crimes, they were shot by machine guns in a secret remote guerrilla base, and their main prosecutor responsible for organising their demise was never punished by the party. This kind of bloody purging inside the Chinese Communist Party had been a wide-spread phenomenon at the time, and constituted a significant portion of its activities ever since the party's founding in the 1920's under the orders and financial support of the Soviet Union and the Communist International. Upon my uncle’s high school graduation, my grandma actually advised him to go to America to study, much like she later did with my father, but under the communist party's instructions he declined to go and instead remained in FuZhou to participate in underground "revolutionary activities", which eventually led to his execution by his own party comrades. In the 1940s, with my uncle's efforts, my grandma’s magnificent mansion was repeatedly used to host the FuZhou City's underground communist party meetings, and also as a hiding place for its senior leaders to avoid being arrested by the Nationalist government. When the communist army occupied the city and most of my uncle's comrades were resurfacing from their secret underground status as triumphant liberators, my grandma's great sorrow and pain after learning that her elder son was already killed was beyond imagination.
In the Chinese tradition, surnames come before given names. My grandma has a formal name Yang Zhao Bi(杨赵壁), in which Yang is our family name and Zhao was her maiden surname, so before her marriage her maiden name was ZhaoBi. My senior uncle's name is Yang Shen Sheng(杨申生), which is still listed in his high school today with his photo captioned as "revolutionary martyr".
My Grandpa, Grandma's husband, Yang Di Zhong(杨砥中) was born in 1890 and attended Navy school in early age. He became a navy brigadier general in the early twentieth century after participating in the 1911 revolution that toppled the Qing dynasty as a young navy officer, and was also the organiser of China's first marine brigade in FuZhou in the early 1920s. He was killed by navy rivals in 1925 while attending a warlord's birthday party in Shanghai, which dealt a deadly blow to my grandma and the entire family. When Grandpa was killed, his properties were also confiscated. Grandma was 32 that year. She managed to travel to Beijing, the capital of the then Northern government, to personally plead her case to the prime minister of the time. With Grandma's efforts, Grandpa was posthumously reinstated and his properties returned to the family, and a sumptuous tomb was built for him in FuZhou suburb, which existed until the late 1960s when the so-called "Cultural Revolution" took hold of the country and the fanatically rampaging "red guards" smashed the tomb as a "feudalist, capitalist and revisionist" relic. This photo of my Grandpa was taken in the garden of one of our family's other properties in FuZhou:
Grandma was actually Grandpa’s third wife, so most relatives called her "Madam the Third"(三姨太). The first two wives passed away without leaving any children. Not long before his death, and despite his parents' disapproval, Grandpa married a fourth wife – namely a “Junior Wife”(小老婆), which was quite a common practice among relatively rich families at that time. This no. 4 little wife was sent back to her own home after Grandpa's death.
For some mysterious and divine reason beyond human comprehension, my Grandpa and his elder son suffered a similar fate. Since my uncle only left behind a daughter, after my birth my parents and Grandma made me into an adopted son for my late uncle, so that the family would have a first male heir. I bet my Grandma had secret prayers that her first grandson wouldn't suffer his ancestors' fates and die prematurely, although I did have a near miss to some degree in my twenties, after I participated in Beijing’s Xi Dan Democracy Wall Movement from 1978~1979 challenging the communist regime and narrowly avoided a formal jail sentence. Of course, this happened years after Grandma had passed away.
The crazy Cultural Revolution that started in 1966 saw many families' houses ransacked by red guards and other "revolutionary organizations" which were actually political mobs, but luckily, my Grandma's mansion was spared because when the approaching mobs saw the plaque for my uncle, they somehow all balked and left the premises.
In FuZhou, my mother took me to visit her parents and many relatives, and we mostly travelled around the city on tricycles, often together with Grandma. Grandma and my aunt managed the cooking of various local meals for us, including hand-smashed peanut porridges. Sometimes when I fell ill from eating too much, Grandma and aunt would boil burnt wood charcoals in sugar water for me to drink so that the digestion problem could go away. The FuZhou cuisine that Grandma, aunt and my parents made tended to taste sweet because they used a fair amount of sugar. They also used some unique seasonings like red wine dregs for meat and seafood, and we would often have customs like eating long noodles for birthday celebrations to symbolize longevity.
My Mum and I left FuZhou heading back to Beijing in the spring, with my mind full with memories of Grandma, her house, fruit trees and bamboos and our other relatives. All the relatives I had met there and in Beijing showed obvious respect to grandma, probably because many of them were financed by her generosity during the days before the communist’s rule. Grandma had been an emotionally strong lady, seldom showing sad emotions in front of her younger generations, or at least, as a little boy I didn't notice any sadness or complaints about life from her. Only in my adult years, by reflecting back long and hard, have I eventually come to appreciate how difficult it must have been for Grandma to control her emotions and pull herself together after suffering so many painful blows in her life: she had to act as the matriarch of the family and manage its daily affairs after losing her husband and eldest son in her mid-life.
Two years after our trip to FuZhou, the country was thrown into the turmoil of the so-called “Cultural Revolution”, where all previous order and normal life was abruptly turned upside down, and madness ruled the land. Grandma's stocks and share dividends were scrapped so she had no income to survive, and my father had to send money from his monthly salary to her, in addition to what he had been sending to my mother's parents since the early 1950s.
In 1969 my mother who stopped working soon after giving birth to my younger brother due to ovary cancer, took me and my brother to go to remote countryside area in HuBei province to join my father, who had been there labouring in the paddy field one year earlier with most of his Textile Industry Ministry colleagues, in the "May 7th Carder School" that was set up for exiling government workers from big cities as a mad invention of the crazy communist leader Mao ZeDong to "re-educate" city intellectuals.
My mother's ovary cancer relapsed in the harsh countryside environment. While my father was busy looking after his bed-bound wife, Grandma was similarly falling ill with ovary cancer in FuZhou. My father didn't have the chance nor money to go back to see his dying mother, since my mother's illness made our life in the excruciating "Carder School" extremely miserable, and he was completely battered in those months when my mother was bedridden. Grandma eventually passed away in September 1971, followed by my mother's death in November of that same year.
Ever since the start of the Cultural Revolution in the year of 1966, Grandma’s life definitely became more difficult. Even though her house was spared from ransacking, she and my aunt were both still terrified as this was an even more devastating and frightening period than the previous communist takeover, since it meant now that every aspect of people's lives were thrown into complete anarchy and disaster. She passed away with my aunt at her bedside. My fond memories of Grandma will stay with me forever. I wish Grandma's soul rest well in heaven, and that she will always be remembered by all her descendants across the Chinese land and across the oceans.
中国大陆生活回忆(1955~1985年)
我在大陆30年的生活记录,家庭背景,自身经历,北京,湖北安陆,福建福州
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Monday 16 May 2022
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1955~1985 年中国大陆生活回忆
Life in Mainland China: 1955~1985
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Friday 16 August 2019
Challenge The Communist Regime
Guang Yang, May 2018
Late 1970's in Mainland China. In the final years of the Cultural Revolution turmoil,
the ruling Chinese Communist Regime made a
series of reforms reverting the previous radical policies, including the restoration of the university matriculation exam
system that had been abolished since 1966, the year the Cultural
Revolution began. Working as a high school
physics teacher at age 22, I took part in and passed the first such exam held in the later days of 1977, and entered the Peking
Poly-Technical University as a first-year student for Theoretical Physics in
early 1978.
In late October 1978, as I was travelling between
the university campus in the eastern Beijing
suburb near DaBeiYao (Big North Cave大北窑) and my
home situated in the western city district on most weekends, I noticed from the glass windows of the No. 1 bus I usually took
along Chan'An street (Beijing City's major east-west thoroughfare), some big character
posters along the Xi'Dan(西单) street west of
the City Centre, posted on the walls of the Bus No. 37's depot, and the
surrounding pedestrian readers braving the
bitter and chilly Autumn wind. Big-Character
Posters(大字报) --- usually large papers displaying big characters written with Chinese Calligraphy
brushes, stuck on walls, poles, trees etc to attract readers --- had been quite
common ever since the chaotic Cultural Revolution years, but fewer and fewer were seen as the political movement wound down and the government increasingly
shifted their propaganda focus from generic
political slogans towards the economy.
One day, out of curiosity, I jumped out of the No.1 bus at the Xi Dan stop, walked over towards
the Big Poster area, and joined those readers. Except
for some appeals
for help based on personal or family injustices
caused by the state and the local authority's political
persecutions, the contents of the posters were mainly politically oriented,
concentrating on state policies, in particular sensitive issues such as the
official evaluation of late paramount party leader Mao Ze Dong and other major
communist leaders, most of them (except Mao himself) having
been denunciated during the previous radical years and some of them having just been reinstated, or were in the process of becoming reinstated.
As a young student, like most intellectuals
in the harshly oppressive communist country, I had naturally
been harbouring in my heart a strong dislike
towards the communist government's various
extreme and radical policies aimed at controlling
every aspect of our lives. I had found no
obvious and convenient mechanism to openly express these feelings safely: many
people had been persecuted and killed on ridiculously fabricated crimes such as
accidentally sitting or stepping on Mao Ze Dong's photo printed on newspapers or books, let alone openly questioning
the state's policies. The big character posters on the Xi'Dan walls, mostly along the No. 37 bus' depot area that later was called
the Democratic Wall, piqued my strong curiosity and impulse to just express personal
feelings against this stupid and absurd country and its even more stupid and
absurd rulers, probably very similar to the feelings of most of the big
character poster writers or even the readers along the Xi'Dan wall.
Most of readers were
men wearing serious and solemn
expressions as they read and ambled around. I spent several
weekends wandering along the Xi'Dan big character
poster wall area reading and observing the surrounding people who might not all be innocent pedestrians, since this
kind of unauthorized situation would usually attract
plain clothes policemen
mixed in with the ordinary people, like predatory
animals observing their prey.
Out of pure strong discontent against the
ruling communist regime, I put down my denunciating words towards the late sacred communist
regime founder Mao ----- who had been worshipped as a god throughout the country ever since the communist
regime seized power in
1949 ---- into a hand-written small-character poster, since I was in a hurry and couldn't
find a convenient way to produce a big character poster which would require a brush, ink and large papers. I used ordinary
exercise book pages and a fountain pen to write a rather lengthy article blaming all the
disasters and problems the country was facing on the
ridiculous policies and decisions made by Mao Ze Dong and his senior protégés, proclaiming
Mao as a non-god responsible for the previous 29
years' problems, who must be comprehensively criticized and whose erroneous policies should be corrected and
reversed. Knowing these strong words would arouse state police attention and hostility, I chose a time late
one evening after darkness had fallen on the
street. I sat on the back of a bicycle being ridden by one of my close friends, and as we rode towards the poster walls, we first made sure from our
gut-feelings that no suspicious plain-clothes
police were around, then
quickly splashed some glue on the back of
my posters and stuck them onto some uncluttered wall
space at reading height then quickly snuck away. We later rode the bike back towards the wall area and
found several dozen readers around my poster. Under
the dim street lamp light a woman was in the centre
of the audience loudly reading out my poster's contents, because its small words
were not easily read by
people at the back of the group. Surprised by
the strong interests, we rode back home
with a kind of adventurous satisfaction.
Afterwards, I
visited the wall area again,
sometimes even during university lecture intervals. Apart from enjoying the scene where my own poster had
attracted a fair amount of readers and even
discussions, I noticed that, like myself, almost
none of the writers left their real name at the end of their postings, the prevalent fear being the potential
persecution by the state authority. One
day, however, I found some small character posters similar to mine that did have a signed name at the end: Jin Sheng (金生) and there was even a telephone
number there! The content of this post also
strongly denounced the communist regime
policies. What a brave man, I marveled. No
ordinary household at that time had a private
telephone, except if you were in a very
high-level bureaucratic family. I decided to ring this brave writer, so one night I used the public street phone booth to dial the number on his poster. The other phone was
obviously another non-private one since someone asked me to wait and went to
get the person I wanted to talk to. After initial questions
and mutual introductions,
"JinSheng" and I decided to meet at his place, which actually was not
far from where I was living (my father's home): it was the Economic Planning
Commission dormitory(国家计委宿舍) near the FuWai
Street(阜外大街), approximately 1.5KM from my home.
One day, I finally met the man who wrote under the pen name "JinSheng" , and
learned that his real name was Wei JingSheng(魏京生).
Wei was an ordinary young
Beijing man who was 28 years old that
year, 5 years older than me. He was of a medium but solid build, and had a round face with
a pair of shining eyes that smiled from
time to time when he talked. We discussed the Xi'Dan posters and various other political issues, as these
were hotly debated topics amongst many young and middle-aged
men in Beijing. After initial
contact, we gradually ended up meeting a
few more times, eventually being joined by two
other people who were also attracted by Wei's
poster’s contact details: Lu Lin(陆林), a factory worker the same age as me, and Liu JingSheng(刘京生), a bus driver one year older than me. As per
Chinese honorific custom, we referred to Wei JingSheng as
"Old Wei"(老魏) since he was the eldest, and he addressed us as
"Xiao Yang" (小杨), "Xiao
Lu" (小陆), and "Xiao Liu"(小刘) respectively, where “Xiao” simply means
younger. At that time, Wei JingSheng was
working as an electrician in the Beijing Zoo near the Bai Shi Qiao(白石桥) area northwest of our homes. He had far more social experience than all of us
three youngsters combined: he had been actively involved with the Red Guard during
the Cultural Revolution, in particular the
Western City Picket Organization (西纠红卫兵) which was composed of children from medium to senior Communist
Party officials’ families. The organization was in
opposition to Mao's wife Jiang Qing, who
was extremely powerful in the state politics throughout the late 1960's to 1970's,
then was later persecuted by the communist
authorities, together with her closest radical allies.
Wei JingSheng later joined the army as a soldier, as many communist veteran
bureaucrats' children did ---- joining the army was an honor and a privilege during those years. Wei's father was a
medium-level party bureaucrat, a stern old man who seldom smiled. I met
him a few times during my visits to his home, which was an apartment in a building belonging
to his father's working unit, an old dull-coloured 1950's
built Soviet-style
4-storey building similar to all other state
ministries' dormitories. On the building’s top level, Wei's
family had a separate room inside another apartment where another family was
living --- probably allocated to his family as an extra extension to their main
residence. This top-storey separate room was the
place Wei JingSheng used to meet visitors and friends of his; the four of us had many meetings within the first few weeks of
knowing each other, where we discussed the
country's political situation and the Xi'Dan Wall activities. Wei and I wrote a few more articles to put out onto the wall, including his famous essay "The
Fifth Modernization", which was posted by myself and
a few friends, after I first asked one of my school friends to copy the
entire article onto Big Poster papers using a Chinese
Calligraphy brush, since my school mates Sun and Mei were excellent calligraphers --- and a
big character poster written in beautiful calligraphy usually
attracted more readers.
Wei JingSheng suggested we set up a
publication -- such as a magazine -- to formally declare our intention to question the
communist government's policies and the prevalent Marxist-Leninist theory. As
young men born and bred in a society completely
sealed off from the outside world, we had been
subject to constant and relentless brain washing during
our entire lives, without knowledge of anything contrary to the communist
state's propaganda. So-called Marxism-Leninism
was touted by the regime as the only universal truth,
and was always used to justify state policies no matter how disastrous they could be. The reason we felt
so sick of the regime's policies was more because they were so absurd
and contrary to everyday human common sense, rather than because we knew much
about the theories the regime was touting as the
foundations of their policies.
Wei JingSheng suggested the magazine to use
the name "Exploration"(探索), as this would best represent what we wished to do: explore ways to criticize government
policies and discuss better ways to replace these constant absurdities. He also
suggested using his article "The Fifth
Modernization" as part of the contents of our new
magazine, as it was
a well-written political essay. So to publish and
distribute a magazine of political essays became our common objective. However, this could not simply be hand-written
like the big character posters, and we had no physical tools to print words onto papers as
a magazine. We realized that we would at
least need some kind of printing
mechanism and accessories to publish multiple small-sized magazines, as
Wei JinSheng and his Red Guard friends did during the
Cultural Revolution, which probably served as
inspiration for his new magazine idea. I
suggested to try asking my old primary school
friend Mei, a girl who was teaching a high
school in the SanLiTun(三里屯) area near my old
ChaoYang district (朝阳区) home dormitory.
Mei agreed to let us use her school's typewriter
to type up an article, and led Wei JinSheng and I to her school's
typewriting office. We tried
to type out a short foundation page for the new magazine
but the amount of people coming and going in and
out of the office greatly disturbed us. One article's
typing was such difficult let alone continuously typing all magazine contents,
which we were trying to keep somehow secret to avoid negative effect on
my friend Mei, so we eventually abandoned the idea of using Mei's school typewriter.
Using someone’s
office typewriter proved to be too risky, so we
started looking at other possibilities. Using publishing houses and factories seemed to be even more difficult because they were always under
strict government control, and we had no immediate acquaintances who could help us sneak into any of these facilities
to use their equipment. I then thought of a
mimeograph in my university's office that belonged to
our grade’s Communist Youth League branch. One of my classmates Zhang had the key to this room
since he was the branch secretary of the Youth League ----- I was an
ordinary Youth League member. I had borrowed
his key a few times to use the telephone inside. The mimeograph sat at the top of a filing cabinet
and seemed to be seldom used. I decided to steal
that machine. My classmate Zhang didn't have any suspicions
when I asked to borrow his key again, and one afternoon I smuggled the mimeograph out in some cloth wrappings without too much hassle
with no one taking notice of my actions.
During those
weeks, the Democratic Wall at Xi Dan experienced several mass meetings, public speeches, gatherings
and open discussions. In the later days of 1978, around November 25th, there was a rumour
in the streets that the newly reinstated
state strongman Deng Xiao Ping had praised the
Xi Dan Democratic Wall during an interview with an American
journalist. This rumour fanned the passion of
those who were seeking state sanction and recognition of the activities around the Democratic
Wall. In the evening of the supposed interview’s conclusion, there was someone standing around the
Xi Dan Wall claiming that Deng had praised the Xi Dan Democratic Wall as good, or at least
tolerable, paraphrasing that the "mass was
exercising their democratic right". Upon hearing this news the people surrounding the self-claimed street
reporter cheered and held an impromptu kind of
street celebration, then as a continuation started walking towards Tian An Men Square(天安门广场), the epic centre
of Beijing city that had been viewed for centuries as
the state’s power centre regardless of who was in power. Many
excited discussions had been randomly going
on amongst the participants of the celebration and
marching, where topics were certainly politically oriented,
concentrating on state and government policies while
intertwining with political philosophical theories, in particular the so-called
Marxism-Leninism and Maoism theories, although nobody really knew or understood
much of what these so-called "theories"
were. Street rumors, gossip, fake, real or half-real and half-fake news
was constantly being exchanged,
especially regarding the senior state leaders who had been persecuted during the radical Cultural Revolution
years, and the possibility of them re-emerging as state power holders.
Several of the spontaneous
meetings I participated in were held in a young
man's home not too far from the Xi Dan Posters Wall. One of my university
classmates, Hu Xiao Dong(胡小东), had been coming
with me to join in on these spontaneous
discussions and poster readings. Hu had a rather
round face and slightly dark skin, wore a pair of
nearsighted glasses and was one year younger than me. We sat side by side in class at the same wooden desk. He was enthusiastic about discussing
political topics with an unorthodox flavour. His
father had been a medium-level
bureaucrat in the state broadcasting bureau, and
committed suicide by jumping to his death from a high
building during the Cultural Revolution. Hu and I
were close friends in university and aside from politics, we were both
enthusiastic about theoretical physics,
dreaming to become theoretical physicists one day.
Hu in particular liked the fashionable terminologies
and hot topics in physics.
When some of the
young people in the discussion group suggested we publish a magazine compiling
the Democratic Wall articles, Hu and I actively participated. The stolen mimeograph machine
was put to use for printing the small magazine,
which we fittingly named "The Democratic
Wall", and Hu wrote an article
summarizing the up-to-date activities in and around the Wall, using pen-name "quark" as this was a hot topic in academic
physics at the time regarding some basic physics
particles. I was named editor-in-chief of
this Democratic Wall magazine with my name printed on the cover page, most likely also with my article
denouncing Mao Ze Dong included in the compiled article excerpts
summarized from the Xi Dan poster wall. It was late 1978,
and this would turn out to be the very
first mimeographed publication appearing in and around the Xi Dan Democratic
Wall, which we distributed freely by hand to the readers and bystanders around the Wall. However, this magazine was only published once, largely because the initial bond among the young men gathered around the wall at night was never
tight and we gradually lost contact, even though
the Democratic Wall activities continued well into the beginning of 1979.
In and around the Xi Dan Wall area there
were some foreign people, mostly Western news reporters,
embassy diplomats, students studying in Chinese universities, and some curious tourists. For
the Chinese locals, it was dangerous to speak to
foreigners on the street, as for this reason alone many people ended up in jail
charged as spies or state enemies. One of the
foreigners around the Wall was United Kingdom newspaper The Daily
Telegraph’s Beijing reporter, Nigel Wade, whom I
met during the big poster reading time. Nigel was a
tall, middle aged man with a serious demeanour. Although Wade couldn't
speak Chinese, I knew some English, so we managed to communicate
and became rather acquainted. I would usually explain the Wall
activities and poster contents to him. It was
clear that Wade was excited to know some locals who could not only speak
English, but also did not fear talking to foreigners. Being a foreigner and battling Beijing’s chilly
Autumn wind day after day around the Xi Dan Wall whilst trying to understand the
things happening there proved his dedication to
his profession. We eventually had many talks and learned a lot from each other.
Wade told me he was reporting on the Xi Dan Wall events on to his newspaper, and was
eager to know the reasons behind these activities. Through him, I learned that the
outside world was paying attention to what was happening
here at the Xi Dan Wall. As he showed great interest in knowing why we
were participating in the Wall, one day I
invited him to my home to have a long chat. Wade had a telephone in his
residence and gave me his number, so that every time we wanted to meet I could call him first to arrange a mutually agreed time
and location. This was why I had used my University’s Communist League Branch office phone several times after borrowing my classmate Zhang's key to the room,
despite passing students' curious glances at overhearing
a fellow student speaking
English on a phone. On the evening Nigel
Wade came to my home opposite the Yue Tan Park(月坛公园), I walked him past the open air
garbage bin right next to our building and climbed up
the murky concrete staircase. Similar to Wei
Jing Sheng's family, our apartment was allocated
to my father by the Light
Industry Ministry where he worked as an engineer.
We had two big rooms and a smaller half-sized side room that I
usually slept and stayed in. My father thought Nigel
was my university schoolmate so didn't ask much about him. I poured a cup of hot malt drink for my guest, then sat with him in my small narrow room to
answer his many question, which included interest in my opinion on topics such as my studies, family, past experiences and
the communist state and its policies. While we talked, Nigel busily jotted things down in his
paper notebook.
After several such meetings, I introduced Nigel to
Wei Jing Sheng and sometimes the three of us would meet together.
Nigel had a small sedan that the Government had probably
allocated to him as a standard for western
journalists, and he would
occasionally drive Wei and I to a previously agreed spot to
meet and talk. One of these
places even included Nigel's residence in the Eastern
suburb of Chao Yang, where most foreign
embassies and diplomatic facilities were located. Nigel introduced several
western journalists and diplomats to us, including the
British Embassy’s First
Secretary Roger Garside, a younger secondary secretary, the American
Embassy’s First Secretary Smanski, and a French
journalist named Dillon,
whom Wei Jing Sheng seemed to also have encountered
separately. Roger Garside of the UK eventually also
led Wei and I to his residence inside the
foreigners' residential compound. These residences were places ordinary Chinese people were
forbidden to enter, and the gates were manned by armed
Chinese guards who would always stop Chinese
faces from even looking in. On each of our clandestine
visits, Nigel and Roger drove us straight past the
guards to park directly in front of their
residences.
Roger Garside was a married middle age man
with two lovely baby daughters, while Nigel Wade appeared
to be single, or at least had no accompanying partner in China. Nigel had become quite
acquainted with us over a relatively long time, in comparison to the other westerners he introduced us
to – including Roger Garside, whom I found to be less
easygoing than Nigel. Roger held a kind of arrogance
in his attitude and delicate expressions whilst talking
to us. One time, when Wei, Nigel and I were
leaving Roger's home, he abruptly stopped in
front of his bookshelf and gave me one of the volumes as a gift making me feel like I was accepting some kind of alms that I didn't
ask for. During our conversations Wei and I had mentioned to
them that the youth of Chins didn’t have a chance to read Western publications –
in particular those that held different views
from the Chinese Communists’ – and this probably
caused Roger and Nigel to think that they were
doing us a favour by gifting
us texts published outside the Chinese mainland. Later,
Roger also gave us some other documents, along with a
thick English publication bound in a green cover about China’s
human rights status as compiled
by Amnesty International.
Although most of the westerners we encountered did not speak Chinese, like Nigel, some
of them could speak relatively well, including the Frenchman Dillon and the
American Smanski. In those years, the Chinese Communist
regime was very vigilant in cracking down on any citizens who tried to
contact foreigners (Westerners in particular), so our contact with these people was quite adventurous. Apart from causing doubtful glances from ordinary
people on the street, we were constantly under
police surveillance whenever publicly in the
foreigners’ company. Sometimes police cars could be spotted following
Nigel’s or Roger's car when we were inside
riding with them. In previous years we would have been arrested straight away from simply contacting
these foreigners without authorization, but
because of that special period of time that saw a political
power struggle inside the ruling Communist echelon,
the entire country was in an unusual transformative state of
opening up, causing police power and
control over ordinary people to be relatively
weak. Due to this, the appearance of the Xi Dan big poster wall was not forbidden and
street gatherings with political themes were tolerated, as was the rare contact of locals with
foreigners.
Back in Wei Jing Sheng's single room on the top floor, four of us – Wei, Lu Lin, Liu Jing
Sheng and I – started preparing our "Exploration"
Magazine. Encouraged by my experience with the
single issue "Democratic Wall" Magazine,
we decided to use the mimeograph I stole from the University and pool our money to buy the rest of the necessary items from stationery
shops. We also enlisted another young man from around the Xi Dan Wall named Ma Wen Du(马文都) for his superior calligraphy.
Printing with a mimeograph
firstly requires using a steel pen to write on a
special wax-plated
negative: the pen pierces through the wax-coated paper so that the portions where the written strokes appear lose their wax, creating
a custom template that is then pressed against clean paper and scrolled over
with black ink. We called this process "etching the steel plate"(刻钢板), so Ma Wen Du was actually our plate etcher.
Ma Wen Du was one year older than me, and lived by himself in a small, dilapidated room inside a courtyard near Xi Dan, not far from the Democratic Wall area. He seemed to hold
a big grudge against the Communist regime due to
his personal or family experiences but never mentioned his
current family or job; perhaps he didn't have
any. To my astonishment he often led some young women to stay overnight in his
room, some of whom he claimed to have met on the street only
hours ago. He would also often say how much he liked literature, books and poems, which struck a
chord with me because I had admired writers and poets ever since
childhood; one of the main reasons I went to the Xi Dan Poster Wall was so I could write about people's activities in fighting against this unreasonable regime, and record the lives of us ordinary people who had
to live under it. Although Ma Wen Du frequently joined the four of us in the business of publishing the magazine, he never formally claimed to be one of the
Exploration magazine editorial team, which throughout the following months only
consisted Wei, Lu, Liu and I. Although during these months there were a few others who came to Wei's small room (i.e.
the magazine's editorial office) to discuss,
debate with or spy on us,
no other person explicitly wanted to join us.
With Ma Wen Du's help, we compiled the first edition of Exploration and manually printed a few hundred copies. Wei Jing
Sheng wrote the first editorial in which we claimed that
“This magazine does not hold Marxist-Leninist Theories as our foundation, as these theories and all others are
equally put under our examination, discussion and criticism, as the magazine name
suggests.” This single theme laid down the radical tone of the
magazine, because at the time all the people in mainland China, as
individuals or organizations, claimed or
had to claim that they were under the sacred
guidance of these Marxist-Leninist theories since which were the
supposed foundations of the ruling Communist
regime. By openly questioning this very de facto and
universal truth, we seemed to have challenged
the entire legitimacy of the Communist regime: how
could someone dare to express suspicion towards the
regime's founding theory? This would have caused
immediate arrests, jail or even death sentences if it were just a few years or months prior – but since it was right at the height of the Xi
Dan Democratic Wall period and the regime's top officials were too busy dealing with their internal power struggles, a relatively safe political vacuum floated within society, so some completely unorthodox hand-made
publications were tolerated by the
police force – at least temporarily.
The first edition of our magazine included
Wei Jing Sheng's lengthy article "The Fifth Modernization", which I had previously asked my old schoolmate to copy
calligraphically onto a Big Poster and posted on the Xi Dan Wall. The article was
highly valued by himself,
us and the many poster-readers around the Xi Dan Wall, since many people
mentioned and discussed it with us. Even the
Communist Regime paid great attention to it in their
own special way: one night, they managed to throw
human excrement onto this Big Poster ---- very few political posters accepted
such honourable treatment from the government. Many
poster-readers and Xi Dan Wall activists were
quite vigilant at catching offenders who destroyed or tore off posters at the Wall; those who
did so were called police running dogs and, once caught,
were physically roughed up on spot, although not
all of them were really working for the regime since
some poor guys were probably just trying to clear off wall space for their own
posters. However, the regime’s shit-hurling on Wei’s
article was stealthily accomplished at night so nobody could identify the
offenders. The excrement-smeared poster
probably reminded Wei Jing Sheng that simply
putting up posters would
not be enough to spread good ideas and opinions, so he was eager to organize a proper printed
magazine, as the Red Guards had done in previous years. For me, no matter how poorly printed it might be, the idea of publishing
a magazine free of the regime's censorship was an
exciting practice.
I wrote an article about
the Chinese people's insensible worship of the late party leader Mao Ze Dong, sharply criticizing this blind
following as primitive, uncivilized and medieval
in its collective impulse. Lu Lin wrote a short poem satirizing Mao's mausoleum as an emperor’s tomb facing the Forbidden City palace. Overall, the entire edition was an unstructured and roughly printed booklet with
"Exploration" written in big red
characters on the cover page. During the printing
process, each piece of wax paper could
only be roller-pressed a
limited number of times before becoming
broken or torn, and our
efforts rewarded us with roughly a hundred or so hand-printed booklets.
We didn't make much fanfare around distributing
and selling copies: we sold some of them around
the Xi Dan Wall area, others went to our foreign contacts (including
Nigel Wade, Roger Garside, the American Smanski and Frenchman Dillon), and the
rest were sold to the new visitors who came
to Wei Jing Sheng's small room (our magazine
office) by tracing the address
he had left on his big posters, much like I had done a few weeks earlier.
Each copy was sold
for around one Yuan(元), which was an exorbitant price tag, considering the average
working man’s monthly wage was a few dozen Yuan. Before I started my tertiary studies, I was earning
42 Yuan per month teaching High School. Likewise, while
we were working on the magazine, Wei, Liu and Lu all earned around 40-50 Yuan
per month each.
Although the sale
of our first edition was a lukewarm success financially, our second
edition sale was exceptional success. Several reasons caused
this: a degree of fame via word-of-mouth earned through the first edition, our
improved printing and selling techniques, and the increased number of copies: this time, we created roughly 300 copies altogether by
making at least 2 pre-processed wax negatives for each page.
We also organized
a full day of sales activity at the Xi Dan Wall, where we sat outside the 37th bus route atop the
half-dilapidated low walls, shouting and
haggling with anyone passing by on Chang
An boulevard, while waving magazine copies in
our hands, much like a bunch of desperate professional salesmen.
Lu Lin had been named by Wei Jing Sheng as
our treasurer, or ‘Finance
Minister’ as Wei called him. That day, Lu Lin was carrying an old satchel
bag to hold the money we collected from our magazine sales. While we had kept the same labelled
price of around 1 Yuan or so, most eager buyers we
encountered would simply throw over a bill exceeding the price, accept the magazine
then quickly walk away without waiting for change. This was partly to avoid unwanted
attention from the plain-clothes policemen who were certainly watching this all unfold, and
partly to express appreciation of our courage to so
openly sell regime-unauthorized publications in broad daylight. Many foreigners joined the local buyers in handing over
high face-value bills
without waiting for change, usually 10 Yuan notes,
which was probably the largest face-value RenMinBi(人民币) bill at those years. We spent the whole
day on the low brick wall haggling and
selling our magazine like real newspaper boys, and by the end of the day Lu
Lin's bag was bulging with money overflowing the brim.
With the usual private sales to the foreigners and some other days of street sales along Chan An boulevard and Wang Fu
Jing (王府井) shopping area(Beijing's busiest
shopping street), we collected over four thousand Yuan for our sales: an enormous amount for any of us. Among the articles included in
this edition was Wei Jing Sheng's excellent "20th Century Bastille
Prison", which for the first time exposed
the Regime's secret political prison Qin Cheng(秦城监狱) Located in the
suburban area of Beijing, which housed many
persecuted governmental officials who were
jailed and tortured, including the father of Wei’s girl
friend Ping Ni(平妮) who was a senior Communist leader in the Tibetan Autonomous Area. Ping Ni's father's experiences would have contributed greatly to Wei’s article, the personal details
making the article quite intriguing and convincing. For this edition
we also included some lengthy abstracts from the
Human Rights Report by Amnesty International which we had received
from Roger Garside. Nigel Wade and some of the other westerners we knew later also
contributed payment for Explorer, quite often
paying us with high face-value notes saying they
wanted long term subscription to the magazine.
After we started selling our magazines,
many readers wrote letters to Wei Jing Sheng's home address as that was the contact address we printed on the
magazine. One day, however, Wei told us that
most of the hundreds or more letters written to
us had been confiscated by his dormitory’s janitor
because the guy was suspicious of why so many
letters had flooded in – this was exemplary of the vigilant and
thoroughly brainwashed communist resident who would automatically defend
the State whenever he smelt a hint of political subversion. Wei Jing Sheng managed to steal back only
a dozen or so of those confiscated letters, some of them with attached money bills requesting subscription
to our future editions. Some others still came
directly to Wei's small apartment to meet us or just to
chat about the magazine. All of our visitors were men, either
young or middle aged. In those days, I would often walked
into the apartment to
find some complete strangers sitting there discussing and debating the political
issues with Wei Jing Sheng.
Around the end of 1978 and the beginning of 1979, several other spontaneously
organized and unauthorized publications like ours appeared around the Xi Dan
Wall. These included the "April 5th Forum"(四五论坛), "Human Rights Alliance"(人权联盟), "Enlightenment" and "Today".
These were mostly
political publications, except for "Enlightenment"(启蒙社) and "Today" (今天), which were
literature and poem-based.
Most of these grass-roots magazines were
published using mimeographs similar to ours. However, apart from Exploration, none of them had
non-Marxist declaration,
they actually repeatedly claimed their loyalty to Communism and
Marxism-Leninism and were only too eager to show their admiration of these –isms, which led me to wonder why they had popped into existence in
the first place, since the regime already had years of propaganda overflowing on these –isms,
praising, spreading and injecting them deep into every Chinese man, woman and child's
blood stream. A reluctant answer to this seemed to be these regime-loyal publications were there
to correct the mal-practiced or misunderstood –isms, as
they claimed the government were a bunch of stray Communists.
Anyway, since we were all there publishing unauthorized
magazines, we were the enemies of the State, no
matter how we claimed our loyalties. All of these unofficial publications were later
labelled non-State-sanctioned folk publications (民刊).
The "April 5th Forum"(四五论坛) was organized by Xu
Wen Li(徐文立),
Liu Qing(刘青), and a
few others including Zhao Nan (赵南). Xu was a middle-aged factory worker living with his wife and daughter
in an alley south of Chang An Street; he spoke and acted rather slowly
in comparison to his close associate Liu Qing (who was said to be a factory technician somewhere
outside Beijing) who was quicker on the uptake and more easily got excited.
During those months I visited Xu's small, dim and crowded apartment many times to liaise with him and his associates. Xu and Liu
were much less radical than Wei Jing Sheng in their criticisms of the regime and its theoretical foundation of
Marxism-Leninism. The whole time we were in contact around and away from
the Xi Dan Wall area, they had been repeatedly cautioning Wei Jing Sheng and I against the radical overtones
of our Exploration publication, sometimes to a hysterical degree, probably
fearing that our outspoken
views would lead to a more imminent and severe government crackdown
on all the fork publications.
The "Human Rights Alliance"(人权同盟) was another organization that popped up
around the wall. It was headed by Ren Wan Ding(任畹町), a bespectacled middle-aged man who was quite
emotional in his speech and actions. His
followers included Chen Lu(陈吕) and Zhao Xing(赵兴), both were living in HuTong(胡同) alleyways, along with some other young men, none of whom seemed to
be intellectuals. As I remember, Ren's organization didn't have a regular
mimeograph-printed work but
instead regularly stuck their big posters on the
Xi Dan Wall as their publications, and these
concentrated more on reporting people's personal
grievances and cases of injustice, which we all
knew were in the millions, even in today's mainland China. Ren seemed to be one of the earliest people to constantly
denounce and decry human rights abuses in
China. Although Ren's Human Rights Alliance didn't publish mimeograph-based magazines (as
not everyone can easily steal one), they were
very actively involved in the activities
around the Xi Dan Wall, and their members were quite friendly and sympathetic
towards us in the Exploration magazine. Both Ren and Xu's organizations had
their own contacts with
other Western reporters and diplomats.
Another organization was headed by a man
named Xia Xun Jian(夏训建), a middle-aged scholar, who claimed to
be a graduate student of Beijing
University. Xia wore heavy glasses and spoke with an obvious
southern provincial accent. A self-proclaimed Marxist, Xia was a very conservative allegiant to the regime and viewed all other organizations' stances as radical. His
organization’s participation in the Democratic Wall was not as active as Ren's Human
Rights Alliance and they didn't seem to have a regular
mimeograph-based publication either. Xia would often expressed
opinions that showed clear symptoms of the regime’s brainwashing programs;
even the name of his organization, XX Combat Team (战斗队), was redolent of the Red Guard era
in the recent radical years, and Xia's stubbornly
pro-regime attitude quite often provoked laughter and sneers from the audience and
fellow folk-publication organizers.
In and around the Xi Dan Wall, all these grass-roots organizations
not only published various big posters and mimeographed magazines together,
we also organized political activities. Ever since the appearance of the
printed magazines, rumours abounded regarding
the regime's tolerance towards these unauthorized publications
and organizations. Out of concern for our magazines' very existence, editors organized regular joint
meetings in which strategies were discussed, opinions exchanged, and new pieces of information examined. One important
joint meeting was held in a small courtyard residence
in North Dong Si (东四北) in the middle of the city, the home of “April 5th Forum” co-founder, Liu
Qing. The crucial point of that meeting was to
meet a mysterious messenger from the regime, a young
man in his early 30s who named himself Tang
Xin(唐新) which we all knew was a fake one. Everyone around the Wall had heard ominous rumours,
and we were eager to know from this self-claimed
regime personnel what attitude the government had. In
preparation for the meeting, Wei Jing Sheng had asked
me to bring the cassette voice recorder he’d
received from the French reporter Dillon, a bulky machine that we usually had limited use for. The meeting was in
the evening, and about
20 or so members of various folk magazines had crowded into Liu’s small
room. Tang Xin, the self-proclaimed regime representative,
dodged most of the straightforward questions
regarding the regime's attitude towards unofficial magazines and organizations,
bragged about his connections with the authorities and commented
on our activities in bureaucratic tones unsuitable for his age and typical of the regime. His
cunning expression and sly wordage belied his
professional training as a public security officer-type
personnel. I had no confidence in anything he promised
or commented on, and
thought the entire night was a waste of time. However,
other participants of the meeting particularly
those like Xia, who held greater expectations of the authorities to
legalize the unofficial magazines in some way – seemed to have much
stronger interests in finding positive meanings from Tang’s words. During the meeting,
Wei and I had been fiddling with Dillon’s machine underneath the desk,
stealthily trying to record the discussion. However when we later played it back, we found the recording result to be quite unsatisfactory, probably due to the heavy wooden
desk that had prevented much of the audio from ever reaching
the recorder.
At one of the other
regular joint meetings among magazine groups, it was decided
that we should all assemble in an area in Xi Dan to promote our magazines and deliver
some political speeches. We advertised the public meeting
with posters on the Xi Dan Wall, and it indeed eventuated
one fine day on a street corner near the
Wall. The initial theme of the speeches was to introduce each magazine and its specific editorial policy. Xu Wen Li (of the “April 5th Forum”) and Wei Jing
Sheng were not present at this public meeting,
Liu Qing and I were there instead, along with several others, to represent our
magazines respectively. Apart from introducing his magazine’s policies, Liu Qing delivered some emotional speech addressing
the government's possible crackdown, proclaiming
that any bloodshed was not feared etc. It was a pretty impressive proclamation,
and even some foreign reporters who attended
the meeting later mentioned his speech to us. When it
came to be my turn, I spoke about our Exploration
Magazine's policy, and emphasized our editorial
theme: every theory, including
Marxism-Leninism, was our critical and
explorative target and we at Exploration did not hold any of these theories to be universal truth,
therefore, contrary to the communist state's brainwashing and
propaganda, we did not
claim to be their disciples.
We also made use of the public meeting to distribute some of our unsold magazines, which seemed to be popular among the attendees. No uniformed
police were there, and although there must have been some plain-clothed officers in the crowd, no jeers
or objections were voiced. It was a successful
public political gathering unsanctioned by the communist authorities and lacking in the usual swearing loyalty to the regime, which was
not seen ever since in the following dozens of years. It was a sunny
winter day, with around two hundred or so people
standing around listening, including several westerners.
I later heard from Nigel Wade that this public
meeting was reported in his newspaper and other forms
of the Western media.
Another joint political
activity undertaken by the unauthorized magazines was the Fu Yue Hua(付月华) case. Fu was a young female worker who was raped by a powerful local government cadre. When she and her family tried
to report the crime to the police, instead
of investigating the details
of the case, the police arrested Fu
herself. Public power abuses and personal injustices such
as Fu’s were widespread in communist China, and her
case was definitely not even
the most miserable one; everyday new posters
would appear on the Democratic Wall detailing similar
accounts of personal injustices inflicted by the regime.
Wei Jing Sheng and several other editors felt
Fu's story could be used as a case against the authorities
by these magazines’ united effort, so one day
several representatives including members of the April
5th Forum, Human Rights Alliance and Wei and I
formed a self-proclaimed journalist group and
went to interview Fu Yue Hua's family in her residence,
a shabby house in a southern suburb of Beijing. Her father, a timid and unsteady old man, answered the door and led us inside the
house. We asked the old man about the
details of his daughter's trauma, and he wept the whole time.
Armed with Fu's father’s request for justice to be served, we marched into the suburb's public security bureau (Xuanwu
宣武district police branch) at Hu Fang Qiao(虎坊桥), announcing we wanted to see the
officer in charge. The puzzled guards on duty called their
senior officer to come out and meet us, having clearly never witnessed
a group of people walk into a police station without pre-arranged approval from
the authority. When Wei Jing Sheng told the incoming senior officer of 40-odd years, that we were "journalists", the officer was quite startled and repeatedly asked
us which organizations we were from and if we had our "reporter
certificates", it
was obvious that he never expected any reporter to
pop up in his office, let alone people from unofficial publications without government
approval. After realizing that we were deadly
serious and determined to get an interview in regards to Fu’s case, the man agreed to answer some of our questions and led us into a meeting room. We set up Dillon’s cassette
voice recorder again, this time in the policeman’s full view, which despite our
unkempt dress and appearance drew us closer in resemblance to professional
reporters. The policeman insisted that Fu’s arrest was due to her disturbance to the public order and evaded
questions on why the police did not investigate and pursue Fu's claim of rape against
her perpetrator. Wei Jing Sheng kept asking sharp questions that the senior
policeman had to constantly fend off in embarrassment and annoyance. We received neither concrete nor satisfactory
answers from the police on Fu's arrest, but everyone from our cohort felt that the
interview was a success in that it united us as
a political group, and showed the collaborative strength of
all our magazines. Wei Jing
Sheng's calm and skilful performance during the
entire encounter impressed me very much.
Back to our own place we
transcribed the police officer’s answers from the tape recorder, then put some big posters detailing the events on the Xi Dan Democratic Wall.
Wei Jing Sheng and I also put up a big cloth-made posters
square in front of the Forbidden City facing Tian An Man Square(天安门广场), where millions of people streamed past
daily. Again, as with around the Xi-Dan Wall, no
one came over to interfere nor to ask what the poster meant:
which simply bore a
slogan stating "Strong Protest Against
Fu Yue Hua’s Police Arrest". Forty years on, however, this kind of
freedom has become absolutely unthinkable in that
anyone who today dared to put up any poster in that square would
immediately be dragged away into police car by a dozen armed policemen.
Among all the unofficial magazines
published on and around the Xi Dan Democratic Wall, the literature and poem ones like Fertile
Soil(沃土) and Today(今天) mostly did not participate in our political activities. The
founders of Today, MangKe (芒克) and Bei Dao (北岛), did however attend some of our initial joint
meetings. I
remember having some casual meetings in front of the Xi
Dan Wall with these two later famous poets;
their tall statures and artistic temperaments
impressed me, in stark contrast to the political activists, who
often looked wretched and miserable. MangKe (芒克) and Bei Dao (北岛) seemed calm and spoke less radically in
comparison to the people publishing more politically
oriented magazines. Another prominent literature figure around the Wall was Huang Xiang (黄翔) who was also quite active in
posting his works and organizing his literature magazine, but again didn't participate
in any of our political meetings and activities.
These literature-oriented
magazine organizers were nonetheless sympathetic
to our cause and we met and cooperated rather friendly because
we knew all too well that in the eyes of the
communist authorities, we were all rebelling against their authority and when the time came could be the same target of a forceful crackdown.
In early 1979, Beijing Spring Magazine (北京之春) made a relatively late appearance and was
different in that it was the only one around the
Wall that was published using typographic printing. Like the literary publications, the young people behind it also
kept themselves at a distance from the political
magazines. It was said that they consisted of
previous Communist League leaders of the Beijing Municipality and had political
connections through their families and relatives, which
explained why their articles were moderate in terms of commenting on the state and its communist
theories, instead devoting much space to concerns such as how and when the denounced
senior government leaders would be reinstated. I only met some of their
editorial members once in front of the Xi Dan Wall area when we were mutually
introduced by a third party, followed by a diplomatic handshake. Their attitude towards the other unofficial magazines was
lukewarm at best and contemptuous at worst. Beijing Spring later lasted
slightly longer than the rest of the folk magazines, and unlike the fate of the other
political magazine editors, there was no news
of their organizers being arrested and ended up
in jail.
Of all the
political articles published in the various
magazines on the Democratic Wall during those months,
several written by Wei Jing Sheng would become the most influential and leave
a lasting echo in modern Chinese history. "The Fifth
Modernization" big poster and its reprint in
our Exploration magazine was probably the most
influential political essay of that period, in that his
call for change to democratize the Chinese
political system was a real wake up call to all politically conscientious
Chinese people. His essay voiced an opinion that
the brutal and dictatorial communist system that had
existed since 1949 was not a modern and reasonable entity and therefore needed to
be "democratized", which was specifically set to
be against the communist regime's red-hot
propaganda slogan of the Four Modernization policy(Agriculture,
Industry, Military and Science, and Technology). Wei's article "20th
Century Bastille"(二十世纪的巴士底狱), which we published in
Exploration, gave firsthand accounts of the
government’s political jail system that were likely influenced by Wei’s
girlfriend’s father’s experiences as the former leader of the Tibet Communist
Party Committee. As a result of internal fighting, he was persecuted by his own
comrades and locked up by the government; the conditions of the jail were comparable
to the Soviet Union’s Gulags. The descriptive exposure of the article was
not only a shock to Chinese readers, but also had
a massive influence outside the country in the Western world, thanks to the reporting and writing
by Nigel Wade of the British Daily Telegraph and other Western
reporters sympathetic to Xi Dan Democratic Wall movement.
Wei Jing Sheng's articles were written
concisely in a sharp,
direct to the point style. This contrasted
greatly with most of the other political writers around the Xi Dan Wall,
who typically always first piled up mountains
of praise and allegiance-swearing
towards the communist state before timidly raising up
some mild suggestions or doubts as to the
state's policies and practices. The April 5th Forum magazine was quite typical
in this regard, in that each time we posted one of Wei
Jing Sheng's articles on the Wall they usually managed to quickly post a "Discussion"
(商榷) counterpart next to it which tried to
water down Wei’s sharp political points and radical overtones. However, in daily dealings
between members of our two magazines, ties were close and the atmosphere was quite friendly; we exchanged ideas, shared rumours and consulted each other on joint activities. We all knew that if and when the government crackdown came, we would all be
targeted indiscriminately regardless of the political attitudes and tones we
ever held in our unofficial publications.
As we entered February and March of 1979, the atmosphere
around the Xi Dan Wall was getting tenser and
many people were nervously talking about how the government's tolerance and patience towards the Wall and its unofficial
magazines was running out. The plain-clothes policemen who continually tailed our
meetings with the Westerners became more obvious;
several times while walking in the street, we
had to suddenly turn around to face them and tell them to back off, although they always seemed unfazed and denied
that they were following us. They were always
unremarkably dressed young to middle-aged
men, but they couldn't fool us since the Beijing
streets were just as familiar to us as to them, and so
any unusual tailings were quite obvious and
alarming for us native Beijing boys.
Wei Jing Sheng seemed to be calmer and more confident than most of the other magazine organizers, probably due to his experiences in the
army and as a Red Guard. He often assured us
three younger Exploration
members that even in the face of the potential government crackdown,
we still had much time to improve and perfect
our publication. For some time we had been eager
to find a better printing mechanism than our poor mimeograph-based duplication
technique and Beijing Spring’s typographic
capabilities invoked great envy and admiration in us, although we did not know where the hell they
managed to achieve it, our best guess was that they
had some kind of support from the government and thus
access to a state-controlled publishing
house. Once, we wrote a letter to a reporter named Qin Jia Cong (秦家聪) who often signed his name on articles in the Far East Economic Review, which appeared
in the government's internally distributed "Reference News"(参考消息) that was the only alternative news channel from the
West for ordinary citizens to counterbalance the usual state media propaganda. In the posted letter, we asked if Qin could help us purchase printing press equipment
but received no reply.
Armed with thousands of Yuan in profit from our magazine sales,
we wanted to update to more modern
equipment for the publication but weren't quite sure
how to proceed.
In the midst of our
activities in the Democratic Wall movement, were the ordinary citizens of Beijing
who watched us with a sceptical eye. Their scornful attitudes usually manifested in admonitions such as, “Don't waste your time,
young men” and “Go
back to work or study which is better for your
future”. Dozens of years under the Communist regime's harsh oppression had caused an overwhelmingly common attitude of obedience
and obsequiousness amongst the people, for good reason; the Communist
rulers' past and present persecution and brutal
suppression of even the slightest
opposition to their regime had turned the entire nation into a
silent jail where challenges were viewed as abnormal
and futile, and people had to discipline
themselves not to reveal even a hint of their true
thoughts in order to simply survive. This sheer
fear of persecution was particularly
prevalent among middle-aged and senior intellectuals, who had been suffering extremely hard in one specifically targeted political movement after another, as they were the
group most capable of nurturing opposition towards the regime through their examination of alternative theories and ideas. Often, these intellectuals also
had families to raise and the communist regime enjoyed persecuting the offenders' family members
so as to bring them to total collapse and surrender. Many young intellectuals at the
time were also just finding a promising way for
their careers through the newly restored
university matriculation system, so their
interests in the Democratic Wall Movement were limited.
From the winter of 1978 to the spring of 1979,
I was the only enrolled university student directly involved in any unofficial
magazine publication. My university
classmate Hu Xiao Dong (胡小东)came to join me and participated in some of the Democratic Wall
activities and Exploration, but he was not considered an
active member of the magazine. We once found a student
from the Beijing University of Finance and Economics who showed interest in our
magazine and left a contact name and address in his dormitory for us, but when we went there we found that the address was fake. I had a feeling that young
intellectuals from relatively perfect families tended
to have more conservative attitudes. Among
the four members of Exploration, three of us had already lost either a mother(Wei
and I) or father (Lu) so we did not have intact family
lives. The other two young men who were frequently involved in our magazine’s activities, Ma Wen Du and Hu Xiao Dong, had also each lost at
least one parent.
Girls and women
were seldom involved in our activities, and when there were any they were
usually activists' girlfriends or companions,
like mine, or Wei Jing Shen's girlfriend Ping
Ni(平妮). Ping Ni was of
medium height and around the same age as me, with a slightly darker
skin, and a pair of shining black eyes that looked pretty much like Wei’s. Unlike most Chinese
people who were of
Han Nationality, she was Tibetan. Her father had held a senior party position in the Tibetan Self-Autonomous
Region after the Chinese communist regime defeated the
Da Lai Lama's uprising in 1959 and started full occupation and rule over that area. Ping Ni obviously
grew up in Beijing, as she spoke fluent
Mandarin like everyone else around the Wall. She often
accompanied Wei and frequently appeared in his small
apartment room that we used as Exploration’s
office. The rest of us didn’t realize her worries and
fears about the authority's possible crackdown on us until Wei laughed about them in front of us. He liked to boast about his
self-confidence and skill at handling dangerous
situations when Ping Ni was present, often saying "As I said before, nothing is happening so no worries" , before bursting out a series of laughs. One night in
the editing office, Ping Ni ordered Beijing
Roast ducks with the accompanying thin pancakes and we all ate them together for dinner; that was
the first time I ever ate the famous Beijing Roasted Duck, which I couldn't say was my favourite. Wei told us all several times that
if we were to be arrested by the regime, we should just confess that all
our activities were master-minded by himself so as to lessen the possibility of our harsh
treatment by the regime, and Ping Ni showed no objection
to this advice as if she had heard it before. While the
rest of us were still naive about the regime's future crackdown on our
magazines, Wei Jing Sheng seemed to have a full expectation of what would eventually
come.
In February and March of 1979 there came
more stern warnings from the authorities. The
paramount leader Deng Xiao Ping was recently triumphant from crashing radical oppositions within the
Party's top leadership, and
despite his previously softer stance on the Democratic Wall, was rumoured that
after his consolidation of power he had made some
serious and threatening speeches against tolerating the Wall and any kind of street protest. In answer to this threat of
a crackdown, Wei Jing Sheng wrote a new editorial for Exploration
titled, "Democracy or New Dictatorship?"(要民主还是要新的独裁?) Ma Wen Du copied it onto a Big Poster in
his neat calligraphic hand and we put it onto the Xi Dan Democratic Wall.
This article directly challenged Deng Xiao Ping’s
intentions as to whether he would maintain
current tolerance of the Democratic Wall, or forcefully squelch it to renew a dictatorship. The
radical tone of this big poster and its direct naming of the paramount leader
Deng Xiao Ping scared and frightened quite a few people,
including the editors of April 5th Forum, Xu Wen Li and Liu Qing. As a quick
remedy they immediately put out a "discussing"(商榷) counterpart poster right next to ours on the Wall in an effort to water down the radical atmosphere around its contents,
although in my eyes their poster or any other posters was unnecessary as to influence the regime’s attitude
on possible crackdown. However, we later learned of rumours that this specific
article written by Wei Jing Sheng and put out as our magazine's
editorial poster did have caused Deng Xiao Ping's personal anger and indignation
which eventually led to the arrest of Wei.
During March 1979 we had been busy
preparing our new edition of Exploration that was to include Wei's article
"Democracy or New Dictatorship?" among others,
and other activists around the Wall also presented their articles posters, and magazines. Ren Wan Ding and his Human Rights
Alliance were mostly interested in denouncing
the communist regime's dirty human rights records and published a letter to
President Carter in a big poster asking the new US administration to interfere.
Some other obscure organization even invented some calls to Taiwan's president Jiang Jing Guo (蒋经国) to start unification negotiations
with the mainland's communist regime, and the fellow who came up with this scheme bragged his idea to me one
night in Xi Dan with an air of gleaming
satisfaction, most likely because no one else
had popped up with ideas like this. Other
strange ideas and expressions were abundant around the
Xi Dan Wall area. The April 5th Forum people pumped up their posters and magazine articles with discussions on what genuine Marxism-Leninism was, which they believed the
Chinese regime had been deviating from. It became
custom amongst the magazine editors to exchange new publications, but when they
sent their new editions to us, the lengthy articles usually made me lose interest before finishing
them. In fact throughout the entire Democratic Wall Movement, apart from several of Wei
Jing Sheng's brilliant articles, very few
political articles were truly impressive. A Guang
Zhou trio pen-named "Li Yi Zhe"(李一哲) had their lengthy theoretical dissertation "On The Socialist
Democracy and Law Rule"《關於社會主義民主與法制》republished on the Xi Dan Wall, but the tone and theme still fell within the communist regime's predefined scheme and terminology, without a clear
break from the party line. The only typographic
based magazine, Beijing Spring, had an even milder attitude towards the government’s theories
and practices, so even though their printing
quality was enviable, their articles were of even less
interest to those of us interested in initiating real change.
While the Xi
Dan Democratic Wall's influence spread slowly
amongst people in Beijing city, other cities
around the country started joining in. There was news that similar
activities and organizations – even mimeograph-based publications – were
popping up in Si Chuan (四川) province,
Shanghai (上海), Nan Jing (南京) and Wu Han (武汉). Tian Jing (天津), the closest metropolitan city to Beijing, was also said to have some posters and it was only about 120 kilometres
away from Beijing. Liu Jing Sheng for some reason had access to a truck, which he initially
said we could use to
transport papers to print our magazine, so one
day Wei Jing Sheng, Liu Jing Sheng, Lu Lin and I
decided to set off to Tian Jing to see how their magazine and poster activities were going. Three of us cramped into
the front seat and one man was left to sit in the truck’s open back. Liu was
a professional bus driver so drove very smoothly. We stopped somewhere
along the road to take a rest, and then Wei Jing Sheng claimed he could also drive since he had done so in
the army. He took over from Liu and started some
rather turbulent and bumpy driving for quite a
long distance with several dangerous near-misses
with obstacles and bicyclists among our screams. We
somehow arrived in Tian Jing city in one piece. After
driving around for a while we found a smaller-scale
Democratic Wall
lookalike, upon which big posters were scattered
just like ours in
Xi Dan, although the contents were more concentrated on
personal injustices and sufferings. We
distributed some of our magazines and talked to
passersby only receiving some lukewarm responses, but regrettably
did not manage to find
any political enthusiasts around, probably because it was
a weekday and most people were at work. We drove back to Beijing in the evening.
During preparations for our new edition of the magazine, we moved the mimeograph equipment
to Ma Wen Du's small room in Xi Dan so he could easily create the wax paper
negatives. On the evening of March 29, my girlfriend and I went to see Wei Jing Sheng in
his small apartment where he was expecting us. We
climbed to the top floor of the building and crossed
the threshold of the apartment's main entrance to
find the door of Wei's small room open, and
inside the room there was every sign of having just being ransacked,
with furniture upturned and pieces of papers
scattered around. Nobody was there. We stood there for
a moment, surprised and puzzled as to what had happened.
Then, the next door neighbour came over. He was a tall young male who used to nod
to us when we went there and once claimed that he was Wei's
childhood friend. He said that "Lao Wei was arrested by the police!" We were really shocked and naturally asked questions, but he
refused to tell us any more details. His attitude became rather rough after that, and he nastily told us that we should get
out of there and never come back.
We
left in disbelief and shock, and managed to ring
Lu Lin at home from a public street phone. We met with him and
discussed if the tall neighbour's news was true and the
main question was: what should we do
next? We all gathered in
Ma Wen Du's small room, and then came Ping Ni's confirmation through phone conversation that Lao Wei was indeed
arrested by the police. she had seen the
so-called arrest warrant from the police, and he
was now detained in the western
district police bureau. Ping Ni had been asked
to send in some clothes and daily necessities for him.
This was a real shock
to all of us involved with the Exploration Magazine.
I realized that I had been naive ever since Lao
Wei had told us to push
any criminal accusations towards him if any one of us were to be
detained as a way to mitigate our troubles, if any. I had heard his
words as a precaution but now it seemed that something
really was coming to get
us, and Lao Wei, the most experienced and
matured soul among us, was in the police's
hands. A cold
shiver went down my spine as I wasn't a boy who was used to getting
in trouble with the police. However, this was
not a time to reflect and regret – we had to react and plan to deal with the reality. I rang
Nigel Wade of the Daily Telegraph whom I had
been keeping in contact with and told him Lao
Wei had been arrested, to
which he asked what the charge was. According
to Ping Ni, the warrant stated
that it was "Counter Revolution"(反革命) which was the most serious crime that the
regime had been using to punish anyone who dared oppose
them; people accused of this had been handed
long term jail and even death sentences. Then as
Lu Lin and I had discussed, I told Nigel that in the
name of the Exploration Magazine we denounce Wei’s
brutal arrest in the strongest terms, and
insist on our editorial declaration that our magazine was not a disciple of the
regime's Marxist-Leninist theory and we maintain our rights to continue to explore and shed doubts on the regime and their
theories. I expressed our wish that Nigel could let
the world know through his report that Wei was
arrested simply because we had been publishing a magazine (however simple in
its physical form) that shed disbelief and doubt
on the regime’s claims of so-called socialism, and he did just that. In the evenings following, Nigel and I secretly met
again and he showed me his report that had been sent out to London, telling me that the Daily
Telegraph and many other western new agencies had reported the news of Lao Wei’s arrest along with a written statement
I wrote in the name of the Exploration Magazine. I still remembered the
surprise expression Wade showed towards the anti-communism wording when I first
read the statement to him.
In the following days we decided to
continue on with publishing the next edition of Exploration, feeling lucky that
our mimeograph was at Ma Wen Du's place the night Lao Wei was taken away. We wanted to include our new editorial denouncing Lao Wei’s arrest, as well as Lao
Wei's "Democracy and New Dictatorship" and some other articles. As
days passed by, it seemed that the government could come and take the rest of us at any time. The
police started to ask about me around my family’s dormitory.
I rarely went to university in the early months of 1979,
but kept in contact with my classmate Hu Xiao
Dong who gave me news that the police were looking
for me there, too. I avoided
appearing both at home and the university dormitory, sometimes spending my nights at the train
station in Dong Dan(东单) where I would present my previous work ID (工作证) as a high school teacher and improvised excuses when the patrolling guards checked travellers' IDs. However, dodging the police wasn't a long term
solution for me. A fellow named Yu Ping(于平) had been hanging around with us in the recent months before Lao
Wei’s arrest, and he suggested we go to the
southern cities to have a look, as there were
also democratic walls, unofficial magazine
publishers. Yu Ping was a middle aged man from the north-eastern city of Dan Dong(丹东) and had been working as a salesman for some unverifiable entities,
which I understood to be small and secret
private enterprises since private business was a dangerous and illegal cause at the time. People involved with private business
were usually in the remote countryside dealing with rural economies, as city-dwellers were
more timid and did not dare to disobey the
government's banning of these activities ----
almost every city-dweller at working age
belonged to some kind of work unit and had a work
unit-issued ID(工作证) that was proof of one’s legal status in a city. Yu Ping certainly wasn't one of these
timid city-dwellers, and
he seemed to know a lot about private
economic dealings and people in the countryside.
He had been helping us with the magazine’s publishing chores both in Lao Wei's small apartment
and Ma Wen Du's small courtyard room. He wasn't an intellectual, but showed strong support for our Democratic Wall
activities. After discussing Yu Ping's
suggestion to look further afield, Lu Lin and I
decided it was not a bad idea to take a trip to
the southern cities to seek some support and possibly meet
other democracy sympathizers. We also had several thousand
Yuan in profit from the magazine sales and could afford the cost
of a trip. We hadn't
been in contact with Liu Jing Sheng since Lao Wei's arrest as we didn’t have his address and he did not have a telephone
at his home. Lu Lin's home had a shared public
phone in the alley so every
time we called he would be notified by
the phone-keeper. Lu Lin's elder sister Lu Fang
was also sympathetic towards us and she often
relayed our messages to Lu Lin when he was away.
Since we still had the mimeograph and the
unfinished wax paper for the next edition of Exploration, we decided to bring the mimeograph and its accessories so we could
continue organizing the next edition along the way.
It was in the spring
chill of April 1979 when the four of us started on our trip to the south: Lu Lin, Ma Wen Du, Yu Ping
and I. We bought train tickets to Nan Jing city first, since we had previously received a
letter from a foreign student at Nan Jing
University named Luo Bin (罗宾) who expressed support and interest in our magazine and
told us there were also similar big posters there. After saying farewell to close friends, we took the train to Nan Jing. Upon arrival we went straight to Nan Jing University, but nobody seemed to know a person by the name of Luo Bin nor was there any sign
of big poster activities around the campus. Disappointed, we stayed only briefly in Nan Jing and then
took a train to Shanghai where we had heard there were more
unofficial magazine and big poster activities. Shanghai didn't disappoint us:
we successfully met with several local
activists, saw their democratic wall area around the People's Square(人民广场)in the city central, and read some of the big posters there, a significant
proportion of which concentrated on generic politics and criticisms of the communist government's problems rather than
complaints about individual mistreatment and
suffering. An uncomfortable chill hung over the city and we were still wearing our winter clothes from Beijing as we spoke to the locals and read their posters. They only
learned about Wei Jing Sheng's arrest and our magazine when we told them. We ended up following some of the demonstrations they held near the city’s
government building in The Bund area, which was quite well organized and proceeded
peacefully with no obvious police interference. The
only mimeograph-printed booklet we saw in Shanghai was not widely distributed
let alone publicly on sale; the limited copies were mainly distributed
privately. The editor of the booklet was a middle-aged worker who went by the
surname Yang and invited us to his home, a crowded attic inside a small
building he was sharing with other families situated in narrow and messy alley called
Li Nong(里弄), similar
to Beijing's Hu Tong alleys(胡同). In his attic we
met with his fellow activists and discussed many political
issues. Although there had been no arrests made yet, the Shanghai activists had always been
harassed and monitored by the local police so they were
more cautious than we had been in the past several
months in Beijing, and Lao Wei’s arrest could
only worsen their situation. Nevertheless, we
were glad to have finally met some like-minded political enthusiasts who were taking the
same political action against the regime; the only regret was that we
hadn't known each other
sooner. I noticed that the Shanghai activists were also mainly young and middle-aged workers with no obvious
intellectuals, much like Beijing's situation. I
had two intellectual uncles from my mother's side living in Shanghai but did
not try to contact them.
The four of us booked a cheap hotel, and visited the local public bathhouse, the kind of which was widely available during those
years at low cost in mainland China. We stayed
in Shanghai for several days, some of which were
spent in the home of a local resident's home
whom Yu Ping claimed to know. During this time, we
managed to use our mimeograph to produce copies of the statement I had written for Exploration
denouncing the government after Lao Wei’s
arrest. We passed some of these on to the
local activists, and carried the rest with us to Qing Dao (青岛), a coastal city north of Shanghai in the Shandong Province. When
saying farewell to the Shanghai activists, we
agreed to write
each other and keep in contact. The four of us then set
off to Qing Dao via passenger ship. The open sea trip was my first such experience,
and like many others on board I felt quite seasick. While
succeeding in suppressing the desire to
vomit, I still felt
uncomfortable for a quite while even after
setting foot onshore at the seaside city of Qing Dao.
In Qing Dao we didn't find much democratic
wall activity, nor any obvious sign of big posters. At night, we threw our magazine editorial statement over the
walls of several big yards that lined the main roads which
looked to us like governmental organizations. In the statement,
apart from denouncing the regime's crackdown, I called for the overthrowing of the communist government.
We walked along the seaside beaches, slept in cheap
hotels, then boarded a train bound for
Shang Dong Province's capital city Ji Nan(济南). We found Ji Nan also lacking in any kind of Democratic Wall activities and empathetic
activists. Ma Wen Du and I visited some famous
parks like the Bao Tu Spring(趵突泉) , where we sighed at the time and fate while facing the rippling
lake, exchanged and improvised some ancient-style poems, then left the city in search
of some countryside villages where Yu Ping claimed to have acquaintances. We
stayed only briefly in these remote
villages, visiting households Yu Ping claimed belonged to his friends --- the wooden front doors of which he dismantled when the host wasn't at home --- and chatting to the local
farmers who clearly had no
idea or interest in the events happening
in the remote capital city. Disappointed once again, we decided to head back home to Beijing, first by long distance bus and then by train.
Upon our arrival back to Beijing, I heard that the police were still looking for me at
both my home and university dormitories. Over the past few weeks, my foot had developed a large
blister which made it difficult to move around, so I firstly decided to stay at Lu Lin's home in Chao Yang district with our mimeograph and
accessories, pondering where to go from there.
One evening while Lu Lin was out of home, the
police suddenly swarmed into his bungalow, where
we were caught by surprise since there had been no
sign that Lu Lin was wanted by the authorities. They asked Lu
Lin's family if Yang Guang had been here, apparently not knowing what I looked like – one of them even mistakenly asked me, “You are Lu Lin's brother?” Surely I said yes, and Lu Lin's
mother and elder sister didn't deny it either. With a feeling
of lucky unease, I watched the police ransack
the luggage Lu Lin and I had brought back from our travels. The police
confiscated our mimeograph and its accessories,
including the leftover printouts and unfinished
wax paper. They warned Lu's family to report my
whereabouts if they ever learned of them, and
left without knowing I was standing alongside Lu's family watching them the whole time. In the early morning, Lu Lin's elder sister accompanied me as I left their home and we said goodbye in a narrow
street nearby. I haven’t seen Lu Lin and his family since, but will forever feel great
gratitude to their generosity and sympathy towards me
and our practice. After my arrest by the police I
learned they were repeatedly harassed by the
local police for keeping me in their home that night without
telling the authorities.
I limped on my
blistered foot out onto the streets near Lu Lin's home, wondering where to go. I
decided to head to my father's cousin's
home in the Eastern Gate area (东直门) near the Capital Airport, where my
uncle, who was 10 years my father’s junior, worked as
an aircraft engineer. Back in my family’s Southern hometown,
Fu Zhou (福州), he came from a rather poor family background and accepted a lot of financial help from my father's mother before the
communists took power. This uncle was my closest
relative in Beijing and he had shown great respect towards
my grandma and father. I arrived at my uncle’s home and
was greeted warmly; however, upon learning that I was not only
involved in the Xi Dan Democratic Wall but also wanted
by the authorities, my uncle's normal humour disappeared and was
replaced by real worry and fear. His indirect
hint that I should leave as soon as possible made it clear that I couldn't stay there, despite the warm words and welcoming smiles
of my aunt and their young sons whom I had been
playing with since at young age. Disappointed, but also thinking it is better
not to cause them
any undue trouble, I
left my uncle’s home in the Airport Dormitory, and took pains to head
back to the inner city. Buses between the remote Airport area and
the inner city were scarce, and along the way I found myself limping alongside some
farmland dirt ridges for quite a distance.
After arriving back in
Beijing, I contacted
some old school friends and secretly stayed in some of their
homes to nurture my foot problem in the hope that it
would heal quickly.
I took the time to reflect on our Exploration magazine
and Democratic Wall
activities in the past months and wrote an article summarizing our
lessons and achievements,
roughly titled
"The Xi Dan Democratic Wall Movement and the Exploration Magazine: What they explored"(西单民主墙运动与探索杂志:他们探索了什么?). I hadn’t returned home since Lao Wei was
arrested, and when I could eventually
walk properly again I went to see Lao Wei's girlfriend
Ping Ni at her apartment in Hai Dian(海淀) district. Without any pre-contact Pin Ni
was surprised and obviously happy to see me, and I asked her to return the
cassette voice recorder to the Frenchman Dillon,
and also ask him to help have my article published in the Western
media. After reading my
article she asked about some
words she didn't know, then told me there was
little news from Lao Wei except that he was still
in police custody and
there had been some more requests for daily essentials like toothpaste and clothes, which she had gathered and sent to the
police station. Her calm manner while talking
about the situation impressed me. When I left Ping Ni’s home
it was the last
time I saw her. The last news I heard about her was from Dr. Wang Bing Zhang(王秉章)in around 1988 who told me that she
went to West Germany and married a German man there.
My article passed to Pin Ni was indeed eventually
published in the Western media, as I discovered years later in the late 1980's when a schoolmate in my Canadian university told me he read it in the US Congress Library.
In the article,
I strongly denounced the Chinese Communist
Regime as a dictatorial entity that used brute force
to suppress free speech. It was – and still is – my
understanding that the regime, with its deep
roots stemming from thousands of years of
ancient feudal dynasties, can never be talked
out of its dictatorial political structure peacefully;
it needs to be forcefully overthrown so that a
modern, democratic and
civilized China can eventually integrate into global
society. The 1978 Democratic Wall Movement was the first self-initiated anti-communist
movement originating from a generation born and raised
during the regime’s established hold on power; that is, its participants were educated and
brainwashed since birth, but rebelled out of
their own consciences and understanding of a civilized human society. Although we had lived our lives under the
censorship of Western political, economic, historical and cultural
information and theory, the Chinese youth of the
movement still called for the Communist Regime to be changed in order for a modern and reasonable
new society to be established in China, with Democratization
being the essential first step. I lamented Xi
Dan Democratic Wall Movement was mostly comprised of
the ilk of factory workers and lacked more matured and influential
intellectuals. Apart from Wei Jing Sheng, almost
none of them possessed much artistic talent for
political activity. More than political wisdom, it was
courage, boldness, recklessness, curiosity, confusion and adrenaline rushes that drove the majority of the participants.
After
having luckily avoided being taken in by the
police I kept changing the places I stayed in,
rotating among the homes
of old friends, schoolmates, and people Ma Wen
Du introduced to me while nurturing my festering foot. The police didn't have a clue where I
was, even though one of the old classmate's home I
stayed was inside the Light Industry Ministry Dormitory courtyard where
my Father's home was. When I could walk relatively well
again, I managed to ring Nigel Wade from a public phone booth, asking
him if I could seek refuge in the British or
American embassies. Nigel said he would ask
embassy officials for me, and then in the
evening he told me over the phone that yes, the US embassy would allow me to go in. We then agreed to meet the next evening at the front
door of the US Embassy in the eastern Chao Yang
District, so that he could take me inside. I understood that
this was an extremely dangerous act, if the
Communist Regime found out about it I would
certainly be tried for treason, like many unsuccessful predecessors who were found out, arrested
and eventually sentenced to death. Despite the danger, I had no hesitation in acting because by then I felt that this regime was forever
my enemy and I needed to escape from its clutches.
Luckily later on even though I wasn't
successful in going into the embassy the regime never knew this arrangement and
nobody involved ever revealed this process, until now. I am always grateful with Nigel Wade, his American
Embassy friends (the Mandarin-speaking young US first secretary Smanski was most
likely involved) and those limited close friends of mine helping me with this.
After telling my close friends and girlfriend
about my decision, I decided to wander around
the shops in Xi Dan(西单) during the day to buy some
essential items to prepare for the night time meeting with Nigel and the
US officials. At around lunchtime, when I was walking in a relatively quiet street to
the south of the Xi Dan shopping area, a middle-aged
man suddenly appeared by my side calling my name as a question, "Yang Guang?" Unexpected I automatically
turned and answered yes, and then he immediately grabbed my arms while rapidly repeating, "Let's have a talk let's have
a talk..." while a few other plain clothes
policemen simultaneously popped up out of nowhere and surrounded me, and together they quickly dragged and pushed me
towards their van that was already parked at the
curb. My brain flashed over with the words arrest
and abduction but I didn't struggle too forcefully as they pushed me in, knowing that that it wouldn’t be very useful.
Although being
caught by surprise, I had been more or
less expecting something of the sort to occur since Lao
Wei’s arrest two months prior. To this day I remained puzzled as to how the authorities
found me that afternoon in
late May 1979: obviously they didn't know I was going to the US Embassy that evening and that was never been raised by anybody
thereafter, and if they did, it won't be possible for them to eventually
release me from the detention centre without formal jail sentence half year
later. In the van while driving to detention centre I
asked the young plainclothes policemen "how did you find me" and they
kept silence without answering.
The police van drove towards the Western
City Police Bureau(西城分局) and I was led
out of the car to emerge in a courtyard. The policemen who arrested me stepped aside as a
middle-aged officer with a pair of angry eagle eyes appeared. He
ordered me to stand aside too, then moved me to the detention house of the bureau(看守所). There was no explanation or paperwork on what crime I was charged
with or the reason
for my arrest. I was put into a big jail cell
with around a dozen other guys, mostly young men under 30 years old, their
accused crimes mostly comprising
of theft, robbery or street fighting. Judging
by my manner of dress and speech, they immediately sensed that I was not a street hooligan like themselves and so their attitude towards me was not rough but
rather friendly. They asked why I was there and upon
realizing I was a political prisoner, they showed some sympathy mixed
with respect. Most of the young men were really just
boys under or around 20 years old, who were
complaining about the authorities in various ways, so my appearance seemed to have strengthened
their theory that the state was no good, even arresting people
just for writing articles. I was not in high
spirits and did not join in on their cursing and discrediting of the
state, so to kill time I
used a pen left over in my inner shirt pocket to recite some ancient
poems on clean piece of toilet paper. When my fellow
prisoners saw me writing they got even more excited and sighed a lot as I recited the poems (although I doubted they really
knew them), one of which was the long Tang
Dynasty poet Zhang Ruo Xu's “Spring River Night Flower
Under the Moon”(春江花月夜).
I was not interrogated during my short stay in the Western
City detention centre. On the second or third
day, I was led into one of their offices and shown a formal arrest warrant stating that my crime was for being a
“Counter Revolutionary” (反革命罪), the same accusation used against Lao
Wei two months ago. They asked me to sign the paper to acknowledge my understanding of it,
and thinking that it didn’t make much sense to refuse, I did. I was then handcuffed,
led into a police van once more and driven
towards the Ban Bu Qiao (Half Step Bridge半步桥) detention centre situated in the southern Xuan Wu District(宣武区), which is still there to this day,
functioning the same way and most likely still
under the Beijing City Police Bureau’s administration.
Once inside the Half Step Bridge detention
centre, I had to surrender all personal belongings as was
the requirement for every prisoner, then received a haircut that rendered me fully bald. Initially I was led into
a crowded cell as a normal detainee where there were about a dozen
others; thankfully, no drama happened during the
day I was there. Jail management then seemed to realize
that I was a supposedly sensitive
political prisoner, so I was moved to a smaller and specially dedicated cell for only
three people. The other two guys were specifically selected from other normal prison cells
to accompany me: the older one in his late 30's introduced
himself as Wen Yang(文洋), while the
younger one was around the same age as me, from
Hong Kong with the surname Chen(陈). Wen Yang told me how to control the
fleas I had probably brought over from the
Western District centre by stripping off all my
clothes and putting
them into a metal basin with a porcelain surface
which the prisoners used to wash their faces and clothes with, then
spraying the clothes with enough detergent and pouring water so as to completely permeate the clothes
fully thus to kill the fleas overnight. This was an excellent flea-control
mechanism, resulting in my entire six month stay
in the detention centre being flea-free. Another problem in the jail cell were the bedbugs(臭虫) that hid in the gaps of the timber bed and came out at night to bite
and suck human blood, inciting my skin into a strong
allergic reaction with the appearance of many extremely itchy bumps: although the regime had sent me to work with farmers for 2
years following my high school graduation, this was
the first time I had encountered bedbugs and their biting was
unbearable, so to avoid them I sat on the tiny wooden table-like structure next to our timber bed
that night. As a rule the cell's electric bulb
was left on all night, so when the night guard peeked in
through the watching hole he shouted at
me, but Wen Yang and Chen helped me beg for an exception
until daytime so I could avoid getting further skin
reactions from the bedbugs. After seeing my red and swollen skin, the guard
did give me lenience and didn’t insist any further on my
return to the bug-ridden timber bed. The next day we asked the guards to bring
over plenty of boiling
water to pour through the gaps and cracks on the
timber bed so that the hidden bedbugs could be
eliminated. This had a
significant effect, and I didn’t experience any more bedbug bites after that.
Wen Yang told me he had been a songwriter in the state's
Naval Political Department of the Song and Dance
Troupe(海政文工团) before
being accused of adultery by his superior, and
the whole time we were in the cell together he continued to claim his innocence. In those
radical years, military and civil officials
often accused their subordinates or colleagues of
adultery as a handy trick to persecute those they disliked; the accused could easily end up in jail, be sentenced for many years of hard labour and have the added punishment of being morally denounced
and shunned by everyone around
them. Wen Yang had an intellectual's face,
bright eyes, tender white hands, and spoke slowly and clearly, even when angrily denouncing his persecutors.
After learning that I was involved with a current sensitive political movement he became convinced that I would one
day walk out of the prison long before himself, so he secretly wrote his own appeal letters and asked me to mail them when I did get out. Six
months later I eventually did so, although without any way
of knowing the result.
The only reading material
allowed for prisoners was the official People's Daily, which was distributed every
morning.
Being a typical intellectual, Wen
Yang would read some of the paper and deliberately skip over other parts so as to have something to read in the afternoon to kill
time. He had lived part of his life before the communists took power so was not
completely brainwashed by
the regime as most of the younger
generation were. He was therefore
extremely sympathetic towards my political activities, and
everyday we talked about our common interests.
He told me the detention centre had people who had been
held there for ages, some even from the time when the communists
initially took power in 1949. One day he
introduced me to a bespectacled
middle-aged man in the opposite window
across from our building, who had been a student in the Beijing University, then arrested during the Cultural Revolution for a political crime and
subsequently left in the centre without
trial for the past ten years.
The buildings in the
Half Step Bridge detention centre were constructed
in a letter K shape (K字楼), with the centre of the letter housing administration offices and
the rest of the structure forming adjacent sub-buildings.
As these did not face each other in parallel, it made it difficult for prisoners across the way to talk properly across
windows.
Together with Wen Yang and I in the cell was the Hong Kong youth Chen whom we called Little Hong Kong(小香港). Chen was short-built and spoke Mandarin Chinese with
a strong Hong Kong accent. He was actually born in Malaysia to a wealthy Chinese merchant family. In the heydays
of the Great Leap Forward (1958~1962), his grandfather was enthralled by the Chinese Communist
Regime's propaganda and dreamed of China as a
super power that would bring prosperity to all ethnic Chinese around the
globe, and so sent Chen's family back to the mainland so that they wouldn't miss the great opportunity. This was quite a common practice among the South
East Asian Chinese population at that time, and I had met schoolmates
who were from similarly extreme patriotic
families as well. Little Hong Kong obviously didn’t understand
these political fantasies as a young boy, and despite his grandfather’s expectations his family members weren't
treated like heroes either once they were stuck inside the turmoil of mainland China's
human hell. His grandpa finally realized his mistake on
his deathbed, as the oldman's last words to his son's family were "Come back as soon as possible...". After the radical
years when the regime agreed to let Chen's
family to leave he stayed in Hong Kong and had being working there. He was detained
recently in the centre, accused of being passing
of state secrets
to people in Hong Kong, although he claimed to have only passed on
some newspapers called " The
Reference News"(参考消息) to some Hong Kong journalists who promised to pay for them.
He seemed rather naïve in his understanding of the
mainland’s political affairs, and during the
time I knew him he was eagerly cooperating with the police in the hopes of an early release. The mainland communists were extremely
paranoid about anything coming from or relating
to the territories outside of their control and in their
eyes anything foreign fell into the spy
category. Their main suspicion of Little Hong
Kong would have been
whether or not he was a foreign agent (特务嫌疑), which of course he vehemently denied.
As a prisoner from outside the country, he was given special treatment by the jail authorities and had his southern-flavoured
meals with rice specially cooked in a small
kitchen (小灶), while all the
other prisoners survived on rough northern-flavoured rations such
as corn flour buns(窝头) that were tougher
to swallow than cooked rice. Little Hong Kong would often
share his special food ration with us behind the guards’ backs. He
had been to the Xi Dan Democratic Wall several times, so we had some common
experiences and conversation topics. Like Wen Yang he was sympathetic towards
me, so the three of us had quite an amicable living atmosphere.
I was interrogated from time to time in the centre. There were
usually two interrogators, one a lanky and swarthy senior officer around
forty years old with the surname Liu, the other a younger scribe who would present his
papers recording the conversation to me at the
end of each session for verification. The duration
of each interrogation wasn't fixed but would usually
take between 1 to 3 hours. Their main aim was to get me to admit that our activities around the Democratic Wall and publication of Exploration
was a crime. I refused to do so for
quite a few weeks, with the feeling that the
authority had decided to persecute us, so whatever they accused us of wasn't that important. My main preoccupation
was with how I could leave the
detention centre and regain my freedom. The senior
officer Liu seemed to be an experienced interrogator. His methodology
was to induce me to say that what I had been
doing since the end of last year constituted anti-government criminal activities against state’s
interests. From his questions, I felt the
authorities were mainly trying to find out what exactly the publishers of our unofficial magazines had
been doing that could be counted as organized opposition against the state
which, ironically, was what the communists themselves
had been doing before grabbing state power in
1949 ---- their biggest fear was if anybody rose up in the
same way against them.
Another thing they were trying to uncover was the extent of our
Western support, a paranoia that all dictators
share. the Chinese Communists were forever suspicious of foreign money, weaponry and
personalities aiding the internal opposition against their oppressive
regime, and so their subsequent crushing of rebels was
thus justified by a nationalist creed. When the police harassed
and interrogated political prisoners and
dissidents, their over-excitement at having discovered a
"foreign agent" in their midst was often due to extreme ignorance towards anything outside of
the regime’s authorized boundaries. Associating targets with
"foreign" factors not only satisfied the officer’s curiosity
towards these unknowns, it
also boosted the importance of their case,
and could even earn them
a reward or promotion from their superior,
who in turn was in a similar state of ignorance and curiosity
towards anything outside
of China.
For me, anything I had done since becoming involved
in the Xi Dan Democratic Wall Movement was perfectly open and
clear, without being criminal at all. As for
foreign involvement, there were only some reporters’ and
embassy officials' personal support in reporting our
activities, buying our magazines and publishing our articles, none of
them being related to Western
government activities. For several weeks I kept on refuting
the interrogators' accusations. While they
seemed annoyed, I did not suffer any physical
abuses and in fact had not
even been handcuffed since being brought into
the Centre, but I certainly hated to be jailed
here for political reasons: I wished to get back my freedom.
Meanwhile, my two
cell companions
had been rotated several times. The guards treated the small
cell like a privileged place in comparison to the crowded common cell that held a dozen prisoners, and
it was used as an opportunity to reward the two prisoners they considered to be the most well-behaved and cooperative at any given time.
Wen Yang and Little Hong Kong Chen had been rotated out of after several weeks; before their departure,
Wen Yang carefully asked me to hide his appeal letter and mail it out for him once
I managed to leave the jail.
My new cellmates were two middle-aged men. One was a tanned and solidly
built farmer, much like Yu Ping from Dan Dong, he
had been doing sales work for some country
based collective enterprises that were limited by the
regime in what kind of trade they could do. The
regulations on what was permitted and what was not were usually very
vague, so depending on who was checking up on them on
behalf of the authorities, the salesmen for these businesses could easily be categorized as doing either legal
or illegal work. The farmer salesman was probably
unluckily encountered some
ill-tempered government officials and ended up in jail for reasons he himself didn't
understand. He was frightened to serve a long jail term and kept
telling me how he was begging the prison
authorities to release him back to the village
to do hard labour as
he was a farmer anyway. "I would never dare
to do these sales anymore," he often repeated when we chatted, bending his back as if
he was still in front of the interrogators. He was friendly to me and expressed his sympathy after learning that
I was a political prisoner, although he couldn't fully understand what I
had done to end up in jail. His companion prisoner was a short, stout middle-aged man
with a wrinkled face and a relatively more sophisticated
mind. His accused crime was
child molestation or something similar, and as this was a huge loss
of face he was often depressed and reluctant to talk. While
quiet, he did give me one piece of useful
advice, which was to cover the belly with
clothes even on hot days so as to avoid catching a cold.
Neither of my two new cellmates were intellectuals
so their understanding of political affairs was limited,
and instead they would often
argue about trivial topics such as whether a professor or an academic’s Ph. D. title was higher in social ranking, after
reading official newspapers, as in their view everybody should have a social rank like the state leaders. They were quite obedient to the jail guards, but I had no difficulty in maintaining a good relationship with them.
After several weeks of a cold stalemate with the
police interrogators, I figured that bending down and showing a remorseful attitude could lead to leniency on my punishment. I sensed from the older interrogator's words that
they could punish Lao Wei harshly as a lesson to
all of the Democratic Wall participants – in particular the unofficial magazine publishers – but could be relatively lenient to others like me if
we showed remorse and cooperated with the police. I also sensed that these prosecutors were quite curious about the West and my family's intellectual
background, as my father had studied in the USA in the late 1940's: it was quite unusual and exotic, arousing curiosity in
their poor minds that were otherwise bombarded daily
by the regime’s meaningless and boring ideological
propaganda. I gradually started talking about how I would acknowledge my mistakes, which the lanky Liu would quickly correct as to
"your criminal activities". I wrote a lengthy
confession tracing the origin of my "crime" back to my admiration of the Western lifestyle
and ideology gleaned from reading books and my father's overseas studies, since this
kind of tracing back was unusual and few, or more likely none
of the democratic wall activists and unofficial magazine publishers had similar family background. My
explanation seemed to be a plausible argument as
the police interrogators accepted it and
encouraged my confession to continue in this direction. While I was using remorse to obtain a favourable consideration from the officers so that I could
hopefully get lenient treatment from the authorities,
I was also facing an experienced police
interrogator, in particular the senior Liu. His sly and well-camouflaged
manner of speaking seduced me at times into forgetting the severity of the
environment and the potential consequences for the people
around me in the days leading up to my arrest. I
exposed Lu Lin's family while explaining the near
miss with the police at this home, as well as my secret stays
in old classmates' homes, and even casual
contact with my university classmate Hu Xiao Dong's family. This eventually led
to Lu Lin's family, my classmates Lao Sun and Guo Lin, and even Hu Xiao Dong's
sister and mother being harassed by police and their
corresponding working units' political extremists, who were
party officials and political activists eager to show their allegiance to the authority, and so harassing their
suffering colleagues became their daily adrenaline
rush, entertainment and achievement. My classmate
Lao Sun was teaching in the No. 77 middle school when
his connection to me was exposed and investigated by the police, and he
was then harassed for a long time by a senior colleague
Xie Cheng Ju(谢成举). The police
visited Lu Lin and Hu Xiao Dong's families several times insisting on obtaining more information regarding
their contact with me, as if there were so many
more secrets we were all trying to hide. My classmate Guo Lin whose home was in the same courtyard as my father's, told the police he flushed the documents I left behind while staying in his home down the toilet, and luckily they
didn't insist on pressing any charges against
him. I deeply regret leaking information to the police that led to my friends being troubled
by the state authority, and although I was too
young to deal with the sophisticated police interrogator, I could have covered up more details so that fewer people
were eventually chased down. To be a political dissident in communist China means that it
is not only yourself that will suffer, but the people around you will suffer
too, so it is crucial to conceal as much information about your connections as
possible. In the end I was not formally
sentenced and so nobody else around me received any more
severe political trouble, but what they had
helped me with and suffered from because of me to this
day evokes my deepest gratitude and lingering feelings
of regret and guilt.
Outside of
interrogations, my fellow prisoners and I were allotted daily outdoor exercise time(放风时间). I saw Lao Wei once during this
time, when he and his group of cellmates walked
past me and mine;
we nodded and smiled at each other, but didn't
talk as the guards were right behind us. The
prison authorities were
extremely nervous about prisoners in the same
case (同案犯) talking to each other in case they somehow ended up conspiring against the
authority charging them(串供), so it was forbidden for these prisoners to even know the whereabouts of each other's cells. However, after that brief encounter in the prison yard a neighbouring prisoner passed the message to me that "Lao
Wei asked you to try to get out". We had no more contact during my staying
there.
In October 1979 I was told by the interrogator that
Lao Wei would be formally tried for a counter-revolutionary crime.
I was to attend the court to read a witness
statement admitting that what I had done with him constituted criminal
activity against the government, and apparently this
would be my opportunity to show that I had
enough remorse to avoid a similar trial. I wrote
my witness statement admitting how my
participation in the Democratic Wall movement and publishing Exploration were against the communist
state and violated
state law etc. On the court trial day I was
hand-cuffed and led into a prisoner van flanked by several policemen, then driven to the Beijing Intermediately Court to
the east of Qian Men (前门)in the middle of
the city. Once there I saw Lao Wei again, this time in his defendant stand; both of us wore prisoner
shirts and had the standard bald haircut. Lao
Wei had several pages of self defence paper in his upper shirt pocket and was
calm while giving me encouraging eye contact as I
stepped up to the witness
stand, read my statement and answered simple questions from the "judge", about
who I was and how I got to know Lao Wei. After finishing my witness reading the
"Judge" asked Lao Wei what he had to say on my statement and Lao Wei
answered "Basically true". I
was not clear on what Lao Wei would be sentenced to until several days later during my next interrogation session,
when the interrogator Liu told me he was sentenced to a long 15 year jail term. At
the time I thought that they had sentenced him
for our publication of Exploration and organizing the unofficial
magazine publishers' meetings, but in actuality they
charged Lao Wei for selling military secrets to Western
journalists
--- I only learned of this ridiculously
fabricated charge after I was released out of the prison the following month in November. It seemed that the authorities
couldn't justify their charges and sentences on our publication of unofficial magazines alone, at least it wasn't convincing enough. As
Liu told me Lao Wei's sentence, he also tried to console
me by saying that my
confession was good and deeply convincing enough
so as to guarantee my lighter
treatment. I later learned that my father
had spent a lot of time
and effort asking around his work place for
testimonials to try and lessen my crime
and get as much leniency as possible from the
authorities. My eventual release from the prison
without a formal jail sentence was probably due to many factors in the end, including my decision
to express remorse, my confession, the efforts of people
like my father outside the prison, as well as the authorities’ plan to punish the dissident leader (Lao Wei)
heavily while treating his less important
followers less harshly to set an example for
other potential dissidents in the future.
During my last days in jail,
the rotation of my cellmates
continued. Two youths
involved in the murder of
a girlfriend came, as well as a young guy named
Zhao who happened to know one of my neighbours back in my father's dormitory who
was a well-known neighbourhood troublemaker. The
two murder suspects were from a family of senior
communist state officials and they often sneered
at each other while claiming the other guy would eventually be sentenced to death for their murderous
crime. The other guy Zhao was a street hooligan
type with a mild attitude, who taught me how to sew papers into the inner layers of my cotton quilt. On my release day, the
prison guards inspecting my personal belongings
only did a symbolic check of the quilt without really feeling its inner cotton layers, so I successfully smuggled out Wen Yang's letter.
I was released from the Half Step Detention
Centre in late November 1979 after being held there for half a year, in the
name of "Release on Education"(教育释放)meaning that I was released without
formal charge with rebuke. The prisoner slang
for this kind of release was "Dry Up"(干上), referring to being released without getting wet(charged), and it was the best fate that
all the prisoners in the centre were hoping for, even though most of them wouldn't
get it. Upon my return
home several schoolmates who lived nearby came
to visit me, as did a reporter from the
government’s Beijing
Daily newspaper who asked me what thoughts I
had about the release, to
which I said none yet. However, the next
day in their newspaper I
found that the reporter had fabricated a response for me, where I expressed endless gratitude to the government for releasing
me. Such lie-manufacturing was and still is commonly practiced by the communist
media.
The government keeps a
file on every citizen as a major mechanism for checking their loyalty and
legitimacy throughout their lifetime. Although I
avoided being formally charged and jailed, I had
been expelled from the Communist Youth League in the university, lost my
university student status and had a
political criminal stain on my personal file(人事档案)under "Released on Police Education".
The stigma of once being a political prisoner had followed me wherever I went, from studying to
working. When I was applying to participate in my graduate studies in Canada in the Autumn of 1985,
the staff at the Beijing Public Security Bureau in charge of checking and issuing passport applications
found my past prisoner record and questioned my eligibility to leave the
country as a person with a "political
problem". Coincidentally, that evening one of the staff members present in the discussions about this matter mentioned it to her husband Mr. Mo Yan Song(墨炎松)who was a part-time consultant in the private IT company where I
had been working for over a year in the Zhong
Guan Cun (中关村) High Tech area. Mr. Mo was a scientist in the High Energy Physics
Institute of the Chinese Science Academy whose director Mr. Chen Chun Xian(陈春先)pioneered
the high tech private enterprise where I was working. Mr.
Mo knew me personally and we chatted from time
to time. Upon learning from his wife that my passport application could
possibly be rejected, Mr. Mo immediately asked her
to persuade her colleagues to issue my passport:
please manage to let Yang Guang go, said he to his wife. I only learned of this
near miss afterwards from Mr. Mo and couldn't thank him enough.
Since then I have
not proceeded any further with being a political dissident in communist mainland
China, because as I understand it, democratic
modernization in such a thoroughly oppressive society cannot be achieved
through any non-violent processes ---- these
will achieve no substantial progress because
they will always be brutally crushed by the government. The only way for mainland China to become
a modern democratic and civilized society is to
forcibly overthrow the communist regime completely, most likely through a military coup in which the top level
communist leadership is completely wiped out personally;
thus the entire country would be temporarily under
military control to prevent any dictatorship-restoring rebellion,
before a democratic constitution can be drafted and a national
democratic election can be held.
When Lao Wei was eventually
released to the United States in the late 1990s' and visited Australia in 1999, he came to meet me in my home
and we chatted several times. I declined his kind invitation
to join his and other overseas Chinese democratic organization activities. I had and will always hold extremely high respect for Lao Wei personally,
but feel disappointed at the entire Chinese democratic movement inside and
outside of mainland China, because they have not addressed the crucial point of the Chinese Democratization progress: namely to forcibly overthrow this brutal and oppressive regime comprised
of people who have never hesitated to use
bloody force to crack down on any peaceful
opposition movement. Faced with such an absolutely
nonsensical regime,
any peaceful argument or protest is insignificant in achieving democratic goals,
and a peaceful transition from this dictatorial regime into a democratic political
system remains a far-off mirage. I am not a
politically-oriented person nor do I have
strong interests in participating in politics, but growing up in
communist China and personally dealing with the regime's numerous personnel at various levels has taught me one fundamental lesson: this regime
cannot be peacefully persuaded into giving up its brutality and taking up a
democratic process by itself. To democratize mainland China, a military coup
d'état is needed to overthrow the Chinese communist
government. If in the 1970's, faced with communist brutality, absurdity and an almost complete iron curtain that sealed off cultural
information from the outside world, the local civilian youth could still spontaneously formulate their anti-regime
impulses into organized political
activities, then the 21st century Chinese
military professionals (especially officers with
a tertiary education and a global perspective) would
certainly have a natural responsibility for democratizing the country. When this responsibility and understanding reaches a certain
maturity, a military takeover from the communist
ruling elite will happen. The best effort that the
civilian democratic movement could contribute to modernize China is to promote and help such a military action to
come sooner.
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