After his arrest, newspaperman Cheng Yizhong concludes the media cannot reform China's communist rulers. (amazon.com)
In the last decade, men and women are emerging in China who are not calling for the party’s overthrow (although they may secretly harbor such desires) or free elections. Rather they seek simple justice. Similarly, others seek ‘truth’ regarding China’s horrific past—the Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Square Massacre—or from relatively recent, such as the truth about SARS. The justice/truth seekers know that their pursuits will encounter opposition that could very well land them in jail, lose their jobs, or physically beaten up and even tortured. In Philip P. Pan’s Out of Mao’s Shadow: The Struggle For the Soul of a New China, the lives and struggles of justice and truth seekers is told with skill and empathy.
An elderly surgeon fights against a government cover-up of the SARS epidemic; a newspaperman exposes the beating to death by police of a young man from the countryside, a graphic artist, traveling to Guangzhou; workers fight for their pensions and wages stolen from them; a filmmaker investigates the execution of a young woman during the Cultural Revolution; a blind attorney fights against illegal forced abortions and sterilization in the countryside.
These are some of Pan’s moving stories that share one commonality: courageous people defying the will of the party, gauging the risks of losing their jobs and their freedom, and conquering their own fear of what might happen to them if they don’t give in to the injustice and lies. In the background is always the memory of the Tiananmen Massacre, and the willingness of the party to crush dissent. Pan, who has been a Washington Post reporter for seven years and is fluent in Mandarin, was able to elude police, get into places and interview people that are normally out-of-reach for Western reporters.
The book begins with a story about some veterans of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest and massacre. They are determined to attend Zhao Ziyang’s funeral despite the state’s desire to suppress the memory of the former communist party secretary. Normally a man of Zhao Ziyang’s stature would be deserving of a state funeral, but the Party wanted the nation to forget Zhao. This was the individual who through his economic reforms was most responsible for the great economic powerhouse that China has become in the last 20 years.
Zhao was a hero to the former protesters because he resigned rather than order the army and tanks to crush the protesters in 1989. Zhao favored democratic reforms of the party and stood up to the hardliners who resisted democratic and economic reform.
Beginning the book with Zhao’s funeral was a stroke of genius on Pan’s part. The event encapsulated the tensions between the CCP and the people. These funeral attendees are the hope of a new China, taking up the cause of democracy and freedom where it left off at Tiananmen Square, says Pan.
But as one reads this fascinating collection of stories of ordinary people struggling against a system of corruption, indifference, and brutality, one can’t help noticing that the two opponents, the People vs. the Party, are wholly mismatched.
For example, in one story Pan explains how the CCP system makes it almost impossible for workers to get fairness: “Without a free press or independent courts, workers had no where to take complaints against employers who refused to pay them…Without elections, they had no way to remove who colluded with businesses instead of enforcing labor regulations.”
One side wields most of the power, and controls the legal system and the media. Reforming the party is going to be far more difficult than Pan and the justice/truth seekers had hoped.
This issue of reform goes to the heart of the book and is visited again and again. In one story about a trial, I was thinking: what is the point of going to court to make authorities obey the law? Everyone knows that the party is above the law and can do whatever it wants. Pan knows this too: “[The trial] was a charade, of course,” says Pan.
But the party cannot so easily interfere, explains Pan. It has a reputation to protect that it claims to be governed by the rule of law. The lawyer explains that if he makes a good case and the party overrules the court, they would have to drop the charade. The party would pay a price, namely, damage to its image, and it may decide it’s not worth the price.
“The charade could become a reality—the [Party] could be constrained by its own sham laws,” says Pan.
Cheng Yizhong, the newspaperman mentioned above, led a crusade in Guangdong’s Southern Metropolis Daily against the notorious shourong system, where police in cities around the country would pick up lost people, run-aways, vagrants and anyone that was somehow vulnerable and extort huge fees for their release. As a result of the paper’s expose, Wen Jiabao, China’s new premier, ordered an end to the shourong regulations and a closing down of the nation’s 700 detention centers. This was a tremendous victory as the shourong system was very lucrative for the police and as many as two million persons were being detained annually. However, not long after this victory, the Guangzhou party boss set in motion, the arrest and imprisonment of Cheng and two of the top editors on fabricated evidence of financial corruption of the paper.
A public outcry got Cheng released after five months, but not before he was tortured—not as severe as the Falun Gong practitioners—but sleep deprivation, cold water poured on his body, withholding of food and enormous pressure to “confess.” One of the other executives at the Daily is presumably still serving out the four years of a reduced prison sentence. We learn that Cheng is now banned from the Daily and has an inconsequential job.
After experiencing prison, Cheng concludes that exposes by journalists will not reform the party and that he considers the party’s rule “irredeemably corrupt” and that he had “lost all hope in the system,” writes Pan.
After reading this story and the others like it, most readers will conclude like the newspaperman. There is no hope here for reform. Something much more fundamental will have to enter into the consciousness of the Chinese people to take China on a new road. It’s unfortunate that Pan passed over the millions of Chinese who do not make careful assessments of risk before challenging the Party. The Falun Gong practitioners, Christians from the home church movement, and lawyers like Gao Zisheng decide what to do out their consciences and then do what is right regardless of the consequences. Perhaps these fearless individuals hold the key for real change in China.
