Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (39 page)

Zhang Lin with his grandfather, outside the adobe cottage where he grew up in Anhui province.
Photo: Jan Wong/
Globe and Mail

T
he guns at Tiananmen Square killed my last illusions about China. Long after I stopped being a Maoist, I had tried to make allowances. China was, after all, a developing country struggling to come to grips with enormous problems of poverty and overpopulation. But my disillusionment had been an inexorable process, ever since my fifth day in China, in 1972, when Guide Bai berated the hapless auto mechanic on the steps of the Overseas Chinese Hotel.

Like the Chinese themselves, I misjudged how hard-line the regime really was. In 1988, when I arrived back as a reporter, I had tried giving the benefit of the doubt to Deng Xiaoping’s unique combination — an iron fist ruling a capitalist-style economy. I had thought that because so many other things had changed, the Communist leaders must have changed, too. Many Chinese reinforced this sense, especially young people, who had been mere babies during the Cultural Revolution. Like the post-Vietnam War generation in the States, young Chinese had no sense of history. Millions of ordinary citizens also miscalculated the risks. Caught up in the euphoria of the first anti-government demonstrations in Chinese Communist history, they believed they could make a difference. How innocently we had all stuffed hankies in our pockets before going to the square.

In a single hot June night, that innocence was lost. When Chinese realized those next to them were falling in a bloody heap, they were shocked to the core. For them, and for me, the Chinese Communist Party had forfeited its Mandate of Heaven, its moral right to rule. In future, I knew that people would expect nothing more from the Party. The next time they battled in the streets, they would not go undisguised or unarmed. They were no longer naive, and neither was I.

For a full year and four months, I found it impossible to write a story that wasn’t related in some way to Tiananmen. It wasn’t just that I was obsessed. The reality was that no important aspect of life in China had been untouched by the tragedy. In 1970, when four student protesters were shot dead at Kent State University, the intense American reaction helped end the Vietnam War. In China, so many, many more had died. Every key university in Beijing had become a Kent State, with four, five or seven of its students shot dead that night. Tiananmen affected economics, politics, education, science, the arts, foreign relations and, of course, the military.

I had grossly misjudged the importance of dissent. In the 1970s, I had been startled by the first protest posters at Democracy Wall, but I considered them an isolated phenomenon. By 1988, I had been dismissive, almost condescending, toward activists like Ren Wanding. I thought their time had passed. They seemed like relics from a bygone era, ignored even by the government they were trying to subvert. After doing a few stories on dissidents, I had left them to my American colleagues, many of whom seemed fixated on cold war politics. But after the Tiananmen Massacre when Ren was sentenced to seven years in prison on charges of counter-revolutionary propaganda and incitement, I felt I had made a huge mistake. And when authorities sentenced one of the ink throwers to life in prison –
life
, for lobbing a bag of ink at a Mao portrait — I knew I had to start paying attention.

By 1993 I was paying so much attention that when Wei Jingsheng was released after serving fourteen and a half years of a fifteen-year sentence, I invited him to my home. “Guess who’s coming to dinner?” I told the staff. They were in a tizzy. Despite a domestic-news blackout, they had all heard of the man who had
dared call Deng a fascist dictator. I had no idea what to feed someone who had spent one-third of his life in the gulag. Most Chinese were revolted by bloody slices of beef and considered raw lettuce an invitation to dysentery. But I figured Wei Jingsheng wasn’t an average Chinese. I suggested to Mu Xiangheng, the
Globe’s
chef, that he make rare filet of beef, french fries and a green salad.

Wei arrived dressed against the November chill in a bulky sweater, a black leather vest, baggy pants and tan construction boots. His hair, which he cropped short, had not gone white, as some early reports had said. But his face was puffy, and he had lost more than half his teeth, replaced by an unnervingly beautiful false set. His hand was soft and cool when I shook it. I had invited several foreign friends who spoke Chinese because Wei, who was forty-three, spoke no English. I introduced Cook Mu as he passed around platters of beef.

“This is Wei Jingsheng,” I said. “This is Cook Mu. He’s a Communist Party member.” Wei jumped to his feet and pumped Cook Mu’s free hand.

“We’re all one big family,” Wei said warmly. “I nearly became a Party member myself at one point.”

“Yes, I heard that,” said Cook Mu, clearly dazzled. Here was a law-abiding Party member greeting China’s most prominent dissident like he was a rock star. If this was how people at the grassroots felt, Deng Xiaoping was in trouble.

I asked Wei about his puffy face.

“I suspect authorities added hormones to my rice. They wanted me to gain weight because they were planning to release me in early 1989. Then Fang Lizhi [the dissident astrophysicist] and others got wind of it, and started a petition so they could claim credit for my release. The demonstrations that spring, and later the Tiananmen crackdown, sealed my fate. I had already been transferred to a salt farm as a transition, but I had to spend four years more there.”

Wei staged six hunger strikes in jail. “I wanted newspapers, pen and paper, a radio, better food for political prisoners,” he said. One strike lasted a hundred days. “I took only water,” he said. When he was down to skin and bones, authorities gave in to all his demands,
except for a radio. “They were afraid I’d tune in to the enemy stations” — the BBC and the Voice of America. During another prolonged hunger strike, his jailers held him down and stuffed a feeding tube up his nose. “The guard deliberately raked it back and forth. It was excruciating,” said Wei. It was strange to be talking about such things over dinner, but the discussion didn’t dampen his appetite.

Wei Jingsheng was the eldest of four children of a senior Communist Party official in Beijing. At twelve, his father made him memorize a page of Mao’s works each day or go without dinner. An excellent student, Wei entered the prestigious middle school attached to People’s University, graduating at the start of the Cultural Revolution. In 1966, at age sixteen, he joined millions oí other Red Guards tramping around the country, “planting the seeds of revolution.” Until then, Wei Jingsheng, whose name meant Born in the Capital, had led a sheltered existence in Beijing. At one rural train station, he was shocked to see a naked woman, smeared with mud and soot, begging for food. It was a revelation, the first time he realized that China was not a socialist utopia.

Wei spent several years laboring in the countryside in his ancestral village in Anhui province, one of China’s poorest. Later, like many children of elite Communist Party officials, he was able to escape a life of unremitting toil by joining the army, at the time considered a prestigious assignment. After he was demobilized, Wei was given a state job as an electrician at the Beijing Zoo. He often failed to show up for his shift, and instead spent his time discussing politics with his friends.

I remembered how fearless he had seemed at Democracy Wall in 1979. In one of his Big Character posters, he called Marxism-Leninism Mao Zedong Thought “an even more brilliant piece oí quackery than any of the old itinerant pox doctors’ panaceas.” Wei was not naive about the horrors awaiting him. Among the daring articles he published in
Explorations
, his samidzat, was an Amnesty International report on the treatment of Chinese prisoners. Had he been afraid back then? I asked.

“I called a meeting of all the activists,” he recalled, “and drew my finger across my throat. I told them that they must realize their
activities could mean they would die. I said that if they weren’t prepared for it, or if they had to think about their parents or their wives or their children, they should back off. By the end of the meeting, there were just three people left.” He smiled wryly. “All three of us served time in prison.”

At his trial, the prosecutor accused Wei of leaking military secrets, including telling a foreign journalist the name of China’s commander-in-chief during its 1979 war with Vietnam. “Whoever has heard of a victory being won because the commander-in-chief’s name was not revealed?” Wei mocked, speaking in his own defense because no Chinese lawyer would offer an innocent plea on his behalf. “Conversely, whoever has heard of defeat being suffered simply because the enemy knew the name of one’s own commander-in-chief?”

Back then, when he first opposed the government at Democracy Wall, few Chinese even knew how to say dissident, clumsily rendered in six characters –
chi bu tong zhengjian zhe
, or one who holds differing political views. The government decided to make an example of its first prominent dissident, a classic technique of killing the chicken to scare the monkeys.

Instead, like a reverse domino effect, Wei’s arrest, trial and harsh sentence created more heroes. A fellow dissident who refused to testify against him was punished with a six-year jail term. Someone else who published a transcript of Wei’s secret trial was arrested and spent more than ten years behind bars. That same person’s younger brother became an activist, too. When still another person protested all their arrests,
he
was sentenced to fifteen years in prison.

Through his network of elite friends, Wei subsequently learned how his sentence had been decided. “The Politburo met. Some wanted to execute me. Others argued it was not necessary. Deng Xiaoping sat there grimly,” said Wei. “Finally, Vice-Premier Li Xiannian came up with a compromise. ‘Don’t execute him, but give him a heavy sentence.’ The order was handed down to the Beijing Communist Party secretary in charge of law and order. He scratched his head. ‘I know what
don’t execute
means, but what does
heavy sentence
mean?’ He ordered an aide to find out, but the aide said, ‘That’s not necessary. You know what
heavy sentence
means.’
The Party secretary said, ‘Fifteen years?’ His assistant nodded. And that’s how I got fifteen years,” said Wei.

He was first sent to death row at the Beijing Lock-up. In a densely populated country, space, or the lack thereof, was used to reward and punish people. Sun Yat-sen’s widow, who supported the Communists, had a bathroom the size of a small garage. But prisoners were sometimes shut away in windowless cells so small they couldn’t lie down or stand up. “I was in a punishment cell about the size of this,” he said, pointing to our dining table. After eight months, he was transferred from the Lock-up to the Beijing Number One Prison, a forbidding maze of barbed wire and gray walls on the southwest edge of the city. In 1983, he was shipped to Tanggemu, a notorious labor camp in the Qinghai gulag. In late 1988, he was sent to his last camp, the Nanpu New Life Salt Farm, near Tangshan.

His summary conviction and harsh sentence were eclipsed by an avalanche of stories about China’s economic boom. In a Politburo meeting eight years later, Deng gloated over the world’s inattention. “We put Wei Jingsheng in jail, didn’t we? Did that damage China’s reputation? We haven’t released him, but China’s image has not been tarnished by that. Our reputation improves day by day.” Deng gloated too soon. Wei’s refusal to recant eventually made him the symbol of human rights repression in China.

As Cook Mu poured coffee and served his mouth-puckering lemon tart, someone asked if Wei had ever been beaten or tortured. “The guards never beat me. They sent in other convicts to beat me instead.” He stirred three spoonfuls of sugar into his coffee. “And it depends what you mean by torture,” he continued. “To never be allowed out for air and sunshine is a form of torture. My gums swelled up and my teeth fell out. That is a form of torture. Fourteen and a half years in solitary is a form of torture.”

“Is it true that you had a mental breakdown in prison?” I asked.

He smiled and said, “Do I look like I had a mental breakdown? I tried to keep my mind active. I did math puzzles. I even tried to figure a way to tow icebergs from Antarctica to the Middle East as a fresh-water supply. I wrote to the Chinese Academy of Sciences with my idea, but they never answered me. I never kept a diary. I
knew they’d take it from me. I relied on this,” he said, tapping his head. Wei was in solitary so long that he forgot how to talk. But at Tanggemu he was allowed to watch television. He forced himself to talk back to it, cursing the news, debating the propaganda shows and bantering with pop singers. Maybe that’s how the rumors of his mental breakdown started.

As Wei lit up his tenth Marlboro of the evening, one of my guests, Bill Hinton, the brother of Joan Hinton, could contain himself no longer. “You people want democracy for China, but you smoke
American
cigarettes. You’re poisoning yourself with
American
cigarettes,” he sputtered. At six foot two inches tall with a booming voice, blue eyes and a thatch of pure white hair, Bill was a seventy-five-year-old unreconstructed Maoist. The author of several classics on China, he had worked there in the 1940s for the Communists. He returned to the States in the 1950s and turned to farming after he was hounded from his mechanic’s job for union organizing and the State Department confiscated his passport and his book notes. At one point, he allowed the Black Panthers to use his Pennsylvania farm for target practice.

“I take whatever is the best from each culture,” said Wei, unruffled. “Marlboros are the best cigarettes. I don’t drink red wine. I drink Shaoxing rice wine. It’s the best wine.”

“Well, you survived prison, but those cigarettes will kill you,” said Bill, shaking his head.

“At least I have the freedom to choose what I want,” replied Wei.

At the word
freedom
, Bill gagged. “You think that bourgeois democracy is going to solve China’s ills? It won’t. You’ll just get fascism. The only solution for China is the collective road.”