China Witness (50 page)

In 2001, Mr Jingguan,
centre front
, with his wife (in wheelchair), their children and grandchildren.

M
R
J
INGGUAN
, aged seventy-five, a policeman with the same length career as the PRC,
interviewed in
Zhengzhou, capital of Henan province in central
China, near the Yellow River. He became a policeman in 1948 and was a
sergeant at seventeen. He is the Henan police history's voice recorder and has
an amazing memory; he remembers most cases since 1948. But he quit the
police in the 1980s, aged fifty-eight, because he couldn't bear the ignorance and
corruption that surrounded him. He lives in a two-room flat with his sick
wife, whom he cares for with the help of two daughters.

On 6 September, we arrived in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan, a central province. At the last census, Henan had 97 million people, making it China's most populous province. Up until 1990, Zhengzhou was Asia's biggest rail transport hub, while Henan was one of China's poorest provinces. In terms of public security, it set records too – for modern China's biggest bank robbery, the earliest case of a foreign contract killer, the most brutal murder . . .

I began my career as a journalist here, although before 2003 I could not be as candid about it as I am now, for fear of incurring suspicions that I was "betraying my country".

Soon after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, a 150kW "United Front Jamming Station" was set up in Zhengzhou. This transmitted meaningless radio interference to prevent people in mainland China and neighbouring areas from listening to "enemy stations" such as Voice of America, the BBC, and Hong Kong and Taiwan radio.

In 1988, the reforms which opened up China reached the national
media, or rather the interfering signals no longer had the power to prevent people, aided by modern technology, from accessing information freely. The decision was taken to turn the Jamming Station into a cultural and economic channel, and create a new model for the Chinese media. The first radio station to begin direct broadcasting for its main programming blocks was
Pearl River Radio in south China, but it was small and covered only a limited area. The Zhengzhou one would be a major channel, and to ensure that, post-reforms, it would continue to be the mouthpiece of the CCP, as all the other strictly controlled provincial radio stations were,
Henan People's Radio Station had the job of recruiting programme anchors from all over China to conduct an "experiment in direct broadcasting" under the "instruction and guidance" of old radio hands. From the thirty or forty
thousand applicants, the Central Broadcasting selection committee chose seven men and seven women under thirty to be the reform team.

Before this, there were radio stations only at provincial and city level, and these were under the management of the Central Government Propaganda Department. Television did not become part of the mass media until the end of the eighties, when most people had a TV set.

A radio programme went through at least four processes: it had to be read and approved in draft, after which not a single word could be added or changed; then the tape had to be approved again, and the background music added, before final approval was given. In addition, no one's broadcasting voice was permitted the slightest trace of individuality. As we said in the business, there were only two broadcasting voices – one male and one female. This meant that Chinese radio broadcasting was one giant media machine, almost military in its management.

I was one of the fourteen chosen to form the
Direct Broadcast Reform Team, and the exception, in that I was over thirty. I still remember how swiftly our initial excitement was replaced by dread induced by the "news discipline" and the "list of rules" which hit us in the face. When we learned that all our direct-broadcast programmes would be monitored and assessed, in order to prevent them from "going down the wrong road" and misleading public opinion, we felt as if we were on the high wire of media reforms with politics the abyss beneath our feet.

We tended to play it safe in the setting up and structure of our broadcasts, since none of us had experience of or training in the "free media", in fact none of us knew how to broadcast without reading from a script. Also, none of us wanted to tackle the explosive issue of "freedom of speech" head on.

Probably because I was the oldest, and also because of all the fourteen "guinea pigs", only I had worked for twelve years in a military academy, and was therefore supposed to have a better awareness of "discipline" than the rest, I was assigned an unscripted night-time chat programme, called
Words on the Night Breeze
. What were we to talk about? How? What was safe talk? No one told me, but I very soon realised from the large numbers of readers' letters that the resources for my programme lay in the highways and byways outside the office, in the villages where I had never been, in life as it did not appear in the books I read, in the stories told by those women who reared their children and transmitted the Chinese way of life to future generations.

It was the Henan police who helped me to reach these true media sources in safety. They not only gave me police support, they even taught me how to open the minds of these unschooled peasants, in ways which they could understand, so that they could improve their lives and protect the rights which were properly theirs.

One incident I shall never forget. In 1990, someone wrote to me asking why people in certain places on the banks of the Yellow River in Henan had for generations suffered from eye disease. On investigation, we discovered that the cottages of the inhabitants, with their wood-burning stoves, had no chimneys, so that the women who worked indoors every day and the babies they carried on their backs spent their time in a smoke-laden atmosphere. As a result, the locals developed eye disease from an early age, and many were blind by forty.
^*18

A group of us set out to try to resolve this age-old problem. With me were a doctor, a civil engineer and two policemen, one local to the area and one sent from the provincial capital. We set off down the Yellow River to mobilise the peasants to fit some kind of chimney to their houses, but two days and four villages later, not only was no one accepting the truth of our arguments, they were coming back with their own question: if they opened up the roof, and the souls of those who lived there were sucked away during the night, who would look after them?

On the way to the fifth village, the doctor, the engineer and I were alarmed and angry. We had reached an impasse. Then the local policeman, a taciturn man who hitherto had just been our driver, put a cautious question: could he try something for us? "Of course, of course!" we cried. "What are you going to do?" we asked, but he said diffidently: "Just let me try first. You bosses watch what happens, and then I'll say more. OK?"

As we got to the fifth village, the policeman saw a village cadre coming towards him, slammed on the brakes, stuck his head out and said: "A new instruction from Chairman Mao!"

"Chairman Mao? But surely he's passed away?" responded the cadre in surprise.

"They've just discovered it. He left an instruction that 'The Yellow River waters, and the eye disease of the villagers, must both be brought
under control'." The policeman was so earnest that we stared at him openmouthed.

"Control it how?" The village cadre was obviously taking this seriously.

"Put 'heavenly eyes' on your houses. All Chairman Mao's top cadres live in houses with 'heavenly eyes'!" The policeman continued confidently: "You call a meeting and pass on Chairman Mao's instructions, and in two days, we'll be back to check up."

And with this, he put his foot on the accelerator, and we drove off.

"What are you playing at?" the civil engineer couldn't help asking.

"Wait and see," the Zhengzhou policeman answered on behalf of his colleague, and then added: "Haven't you heard the expression, 'the mighty dragon can't keep a ground snake down'? Local people have local ways!"

Hearing this, there was nothing we "civilised" city folk could say, except follow the policemen and "spread Mao Zedong's instruction". But none of us believed that it would work. Privately, we even thought: "It's us city folk they're making fun of!"

We were dumbfounded, however, when two days later we went back to the village where the policeman had left word. To our amazement, there were chimneys on the rooftops! Chimneys of all shapes and sizes, to be sure, and most of them fixed on in a very unscientific way, but the people had listened to Chairman Mao! They had obeyed someone who had been a god to them, but who had long been dismissed by city folk as a tyrant now dead and gone.

I asked the local policeman how he knew to use Chairman Mao to "civilise" these peasants. He answered quietly: "They're peasants. They only believe in the gods that work for them."

The peasants only believe in the gods that work for them? They certainly did not believe us. From this point on, the Henan police became my teachers. They taught me the difference between town and countryside, opened my eyes to aspects of human culture which had passed me by, and made it possible for me to understand the peasants.

Now, some years later, on my return to Henan, I wanted to interview an old policeman, Mr Jingguan, who had been with the People's Republic of China
Public Security Bureau (PSB) from its inception to the present day. I'd heard he had an amazing memory, so was one of the people who were writing the history of the PSB in Henan.

When we were on our way to his house in the Central Plains Region
Law Enforcement Agencies family housing complex, a policewoman who had done some prior investigation for us said: "He wants to be called 'policeman', not 'judge', even though he worked for years in the courts and even rose to be chief justice. When you mention the courts, he gets indignant. And he hasn't been out of the house for years, because his wife went into a coma, and has become a 'vegetable', and he doesn't want her to wake up one day and find him gone."

I was moved by this man's loyalty and sense of responsibility to his wife – it was a million miles away from men who "keep a mistress", "have a love nest" or "play away"!

At the same time, I became anxious. Could someone who hadn't been out of doors for years cope with questioning by strangers? If he'd had no contact with the outside world for so long, would he identify with our values and understand the significance of this interview? How were we to win his understanding, and get down to the kind of topics which I wanted to know about, in a natural way? I thought it would probably be best to start with recent events which he was most familiar with and which he most wanted people to know about – his family situation.

What we were confronted with when we were taken into his home was, once again, almost unbelievable: this man, noted for his outstanding contribution to the establishment and development of Henan's public security system, lived almost on the poverty line, in a tiny housing unit in a low-cost, five-storey block, one of those hurriedly thrown up after the reforms at the beginning of the eighties. His flat consisted of just two rooms with no entrance hall; the ceiling was not even the regulation 2.3 metres high and the whole area no more than a cramped 25 square metres. Facilities such as kitchen and toilet were squeezed in somehow, and there was no communal area or washroom. The light was so poor that it was almost impossible to read during the day without electric light. The paint on doors and windows was faded, and the walls were flaking. The floor was of rough concrete. The only furniture to be seen was a bed, a dining table and chairs, and two battered old wardrobes, each in one corner of the room. There was a small bedroom which doubled as the food-preparation area, with a shelf which held a chopping board, a vegetable knife, two spring onions and a piece of ginger root. A rusty, old-fashioned washing machine was squeezed into the space by the doorway; there was no fridge, nor was there even the sort of air-conditioning unit that most people had, just a decrepit, noisy, vibrating old electric fan doing battle against the stifling heat. But
the flat was very clean and there was none of that smell which often hangs around the bedridden elderly.

Looking at all this, I even began to doubt whether this really was the honoured old official. Had no one enquired why his living conditions were so poor? After all, he was one of the first cohort of PRC police in 1948! From what I knew of national policy to support the elderly, special care was given to senior cadres who had worked for the revolution in the Communist Party before 1949: the army had Retirement Institutes, regional governments had Retired Cadre Villages. Unless he had committed a serious offence at some point . . . but then someone who had committed such an offence would not have been permitted to write the history of the Public Security Bureau.

Once more, I was nonplussed.

Still astonished at this scene of poverty, I first went to greet Jingguan's wife, who lay in a comatose state in a reclining chair. I put my hand gently on her forehead, and said, "Hello, Auntie."

*

JINGGUAN:
It's no use talking to her. She's not conscious, and can't do anything.

XINRAN:
Yes, I can see that, but I believe it's right to say hello to her, and maybe, somehow, my respect for her will get through. [As a Chinese person, I know I must ask first about her condition, to show that I care in a Chinese way – though Western readers may think my questions intrusive.] Does she seem to react to light? Is it possible she may gradually wake up?

JINGGUAN:
She can't do anything, even if you wave your hand across her open eyes she doesn't react.

XINRAN:
You look after her very well.

JINGGUAN:
Thirty years ago she had high blood pressure, and twenty years ago she got a cerebral thrombosis. Ten years ago she became paralysed, and eight years ago she became doubly incontinent and lost the power of speech . . . the children help me look after their mother.

*

I can see from his body language that he is worried about what my reaction will be to his circumstances and the surroundings.

*

XINRAN:
What a good thing you've got children to help. You're lucky in that respect. Your house is so clean, and there's absolutely none of that smell that so many old people's houses have.

JINGGUAN:
That's the most difficult thing to deal with. Sometimes in the night, I get up at two or three o'clock to relieve myself, and she's wet through and groaning to herself. When I've changed her and cleaned her up, she stops groaning.

XINRAN:
So she has a certain amount of feeling?

JINGGUAN:
I think she does, but of course she can't say anything.