ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
Philip P. Pan: title page, Chapter 3, Chapter 10
Courtesy of Hu Jie: Chapter 2
Ji Guoqiang/ImagineChina: Chapter 6
Gao Zhan: Chapter 8(both photos), Chapter 9, Chapter 10
Taozi: Chapter 7
He Longsheng: Chapter 10
Simon & Schuster
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Copyright © 2008 by Philip P. Pan
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pan, Philip P.
Out of Mao’s shadow/Philip P. Pan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. China—Social conditions—1976–2000. 2. China—Social conditions—2000–3. China—History—1949– I. Title.
HN733.5.P36 2008
306.20951'09045—dc22 2008011550
ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-7989-2
ISBN-10: 1-4165-7989-3
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http://www.SimonSays.com
For Sarah and Mookie,
and for my parents
CONTENTS
Introduction
Part I
REMEMBERING
1. The Public Funeral
2. Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul
3. Blood and Love
4. The Cemetery
Part II
NO BETTER THAN THIEVES
5. Arise, Slaves, Arise!
6. The Rich Lady
7. The Party Boss
Part III
STRUGGLE SESSIONS
8. The Honest Doctor
9. The Newspaperman
10. The People’s Trial
11. Blind Justice
Epilogue
Note on Sources
Acknowledgments
Out of Mao’s Shadow
INTRODUCTION
On a warm Friday night in the summer of 2001, I stood amid hundreds of thousands of young Chinese pouring into Tiananmen Square in a joyous and largely spontaneous celebration of Beijing’s successful bid to host the Summer Olympics in 2008. As fireworks lit the sky and blasts from car horns echoed across the city, the exultant crowd pushed through lines of riot police, filling the square and its surrounding boulevards. “Beijing! Beijing!” the revelers chanted, many of them waving little red Chinese flags. “Long live the motherland! Long live the motherland!” University students shimmied up traffic lamps, singing the national anthem and patriotic hymns such as “Without the Communist Party, There Would Be No New China.” Shirtless young men ran laps around the square, trailing red and green banners and shouting obscenities in jubilation. Bicycles, motorbikes, pedicabs, and cars packed the streets, the giddy people on board flashing victory signs. From atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace, where Mao Zedong proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 and where his portrait still hangs, the men at the helm of the Communist Party looked out on the masses and basked in the outpouring of national pride.
I had arrived in Beijing only months earlier, a new China correspondent for the Washington Post, and the collective outburst of joy in the political heart of the nation took me by surprise. Not since the prodemocracy demonstrations in 1989 had so many people converged on Tiananmen, and the contrast was inescapable and jarring. Back then, the multitudes of young people who filled the square were protesting the corruption of the Communist government and calling for democratic reform. The army crushed those protests, and in the early 1990s, when I was studying Mandarin in Beijing, the memory of the massacre still darkened university campuses. But now people seemed to have forgotten the party’s violent suppression of the democracy movement, and the crowds in Tiananmen were cheering the government. What had happened to the demands for political change? How had the party regained its footing? And how long could it hold on to power?
Over the next seven years, I searched for answers to these questions, a quest that took me to cities, towns, and villages across China. What I found was a government engaged in the largest and perhaps most successful experiment in authoritarianism in the world. The West has assumed that capitalism must lead to democracy, that free markets inevitably result in free societies. But by embracing market reforms while continuing to restrict political freedom, China’s Communist leaders have presided over an economic revolution without surrendering power. Prosperity allowed the government to reinvent itself, to win friends and buy allies, and to forestall demands for democratic change. It was a remarkable feat, all the more so because the regime had inflicted so much misery on the nation over the past half century. But as I examined the party’s success, I also saw something else extraordinary—a people recovering from the trauma of Communist rule, asserting themselves against the state and demanding greater control of their lives. They are survivors, whose families endured one of the world’s deadliest famines during the Great Leap Forward, whose idealism was exploited during the madness of the Cultural Revolution, and whose values have been tested by the booming economy and the rush to get rich. The young men and women who filled Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989 saw their hopes for a democratic China crushed in a massacre, but as older, more pragmatic adults, many continue to pursue political change in different ways.
In the three decades since Mao Zedong’s death, China has undergone a dizzying transformation. A backwater economy has become a powerhouse of manufacturing and trade, with growth rates that are the envy of the world. Skyscrapers have sprouted from rice paddies, gleaming cities from fishing villages. Infant mortality is down, and incomes and life expectancy are up. With economic change has come political progress, too. The terror campaigns that Mao favored, the mass denunciation meetings, the frenzied crowds of youngsters waving little red books—they are all things of the past. People enjoy greater prosperity but also greater personal freedom and access to information than ever before under Communist rule. By almost any measure, the country’s last twenty-five years have been the best in its five-thousand-year history. But the Chinese people have not yet escaped Mao’s shadow. A momentous struggle is under way for the soul of the world’s most populous nation. On one side is the venal party-state, an entrenched elite fighting to preserve the country’s authoritarian political system and its privileged place within it. On the other is a ragtag collection of lawyers, journalists, entrepreneurs, artists, hustlers, and dreamers striving to build a more tolerant, open, and democratic China.
The outcome of this struggle is important not only because half of the planet’s population without basic political freedoms lives in China, or because other governments around the world are already copying the Chinese model to curb demands for democratic change by their own peoples. It is also important because what kind of country China becomes—democracy, dictatorship, or something in between—will help answer one of the pressing questions of our time: How will the rise of China affect the rest of the world? In other words, the future of the Chinese political system could define how China behaves as an emerging global power, how it interacts with its neighbors in Asia and with that nation watching it so closely on the other side of the globe, the United States.
This book is an attempt to describe the battle for China’s future through the eyes of a handful of men and women. I begin in Part I with the efforts of individuals to unearth and preserve the nation’s tragic recent history. The party’s ability to rewrite the pa
st is critical to its grip on the present and the future, and it has tried to maintain a sanitized account of events that serves to justify its rule. But, from the violent beginnings of Chinese communism to the Tiananmen Square massacre, society is beginning to recover the truth. Part II explores how the party evolved after Mao’s death and adapted to survive. The totalitarian, socialist state that Mao built is no more. In its place is a more cynical, stable, and nimble bureaucracy, one that values self-preservation above all else and relies on an often corrupt and predatory form of capitalism to survive. This section tells the stories of miners and factory workers left behind and the apparatchiks and tycoons who thrived. I conclude in Part III with four ordinary people who tried to push the limits of what is permissible in China just as a new party leadership raised hopes of democratic progress. Thrust into the national spotlight, they are forced to make difficult decisions about when to fight and when to back down, and to weigh the consequences of their choices for their families and their nation.
Having tasted freedom, having learned something about the rule of law, having seen on television and in the movies and on the Internet how other societies elect their own leaders, the Chinese people are pushing every day for a more responsive and just political system. The party has struggled to adapt and sometimes retreated in the face of such popular pressure, but it has not yet surrendered, not even close. Its leaders, and its millions of functionaries and beneficiaries, continue to cling to power, marshalling their considerable resources in a determined and often obsessive effort to maintain control over an increasingly vibrant society. Many people who care about China tell themselves that democratization is inevitable, that the people will eventually prevail and the one-party state will fail. I certainly hope so. But I have seen that there is nothing automatic about political change. It is a difficult, messy, and often heartbreaking process, and it happens—when it happens at all—because of imperfect individuals who fight, take risks, and sacrifice for it. They can be noble, courageous, selfless, stubborn, vain, naive, calculating, and reckless, and I was fortunate to meet so many of them during my time in China. Their stories inspired this book.
Part I
REMEMBERING
1
THE PUBLIC FUNERAL
They came from the walled compounds of the Communist Party elite and the shantytowns of the disgruntled and dispossessed, from universities and office towers, from booming cities and dirt-poor villages across China. They came by the thousands, citizens of a nation on the rise, defying the lessons drilled into them by state propaganda and the caution taught them by a century of bitter experience. On a cold January morning, in sleek sedans and battered taxicabs, on bicycle and on foot, they made their way past security checkpoints, refusing to turn back even when police snapped photos and recorded their names for the state’s secret files. Slowly, they converged on a vast cemetery on the western outskirts of Beijing. There, in a small memorial hall, on a dais surrounded by evergreen leaves, lay the man whose death they had come to mourn, a man the party had told them to forget.
They last saw him more than fifteen years ago, with a bullhorn in his hands and tears in his eyes, standing in Tiananmen Square amid the students who were demanding democratic reform in the spring of 1989. Zhao Ziyang was general secretary of the Communist Party then, only the third man to hold the party’s top post after Mao’s death, so it was a surprise when he suddenly appeared before dawn that May morning and waded into the crowd of young protesters. He was a grandfatherly figure in a gray tunic suit, already seventy years old with white hair and large round glasses. As the television cameras rolled, he told the students he sympathized with their cause and accepted their criticism, and he urged them to go home. But his voice trembled with emotion, and there was a hint of the tragedy to come in his words. “We have come too late, too late,” he said, choking up, his face drawn with exhaustion. And then he was gone. It was not until much later, after the tanks had entered the capital and the soldiers opened fire, killing hundreds, perhaps thousands, that the world learned Zhao had been ousted by party elders just before coming to the square. He had sided with the students, refusing to order the military to crush the demonstrations.
The party put Zhao under house arrest and set about erasing him from public memory. He was airbrushed from photographs, deleted from textbooks, and any mention of his name in the media was forbidden. It was as if the Communist leader who came closer than anyone else to bringing democratic change to the country simply ceased to exist. As he languished in custody, the state spun its own version of history: The bloodshed in Tiananmen was necessary to restore order. China was too big, too poor, too uneducated for democracy, which would lead to chaos and civil war. Only one-party rule could ensure stability in the world’s most populous nation, and only stability could guarantee the economic growth needed to make the country strong. The propagandists promoted these arguments tirelessly, and the censors buried competing views. With repetition and the passage of time—and the help of an economy that soared—many Chinese came to accept this view of their nation, and the world welcomed China back into the ranks of respectable powers. But all the while, the party continued to confine Zhao to his traditional courtyard home in Beijing. He was a symbol of another vision for China, one that still resonated with the public despite the party’s efforts to wipe it out. The men who held power knew this, and they were afraid.
When Zhao died on January 17, 2005, after suffering a series of strokes at the age of eighty-five, the party’s leaders convened a series of emergency meetings to prepare a response that would prevent his death from triggering a new debate about the Tiananmen massacre or fresh demonstrations for democratic reform. Though Zhao had served as premier for seven years and party chief for three, pioneering the market reforms in the 1980s that would transform the Chinese economy, his successors ordered state television and radio not to announce his death. The very few granted permission to report the story were told to use a one-sentence dispatch that referred to him only as “comrade” and to make no mention of his past leadership posts. The Beijing Evening News buried the item on page sixteen, under a brief about the Golden Globe awards ceremony in the United States.
But the party’s control of information had weakened in the years since Tiananmen. Word of Comrade Zhao’s death spread quickly across the nation he once led via home satellite dishes and cell phones, e-mail and instant messaging. Within hours, citizens posted thousands of notes of sorrow and remembrance on Internet bulletin boards, then watched as the censors tried to delete them. “Can’t we grieve when someone has died?” wrote one user in frustration on the Web site of the People’s Daily, the party’s flagship newspaper. In the following days, as it became clear the leadership had decided to deny Zhao the honor of a state funeral, people began sending flowers to his home; soon there were enough to fill several rooms. Then mourners started showing up at the house. Hundreds came to pay their respects, and when police tried to stop them, they waited outside in the cold. Some refused to leave and were dragged away.
Zhao’s death revealed a scar on the nation’s conscience. For years, people had tried to put Tiananmen behind them. Friends avoided the subject, and parents told their children not to ask about it. Many of those who had been part of the democracy movement threw themselves into making money, claiming they no longer cared about their country’s political fate. The pain of remembering, the guilt of giving up and moving on—for many, it was too much to bear, and looking away seemed the only way to live. But when Zhao died, people allowed themselves a moment to reflect again on those young men and women killed in 1989, and to ask whether their sacrifice had meant anything. They examined what had become of their country in the years since the massacre, and let themselves wonder what might have been had the students moderated their demands and prevailed. They considered the failings of the party’s marriage of authoritarian politics with capitalist economics. Yes, China had grown more prosperous and gained international prestige. But the boom had
also left many behind, and the nation’s troubles were obvious to anyone willing to see: the stifling limits on political and religious freedoms, the abuse of power by privileged officials, the sweatshop conditions in the factories, the persistent poverty in the countryside, the degradation of the environment, the moral drift of a cynical society.
Zhao had been a party activist since he was a teenager, but when Politburo hard-liners pressured him to crush the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, he refused. And when the nation’s paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, ordered troops into the capital, he tendered his resignation. Years later, when Deng offered to reinstate him if only he would admit he was wrong and endorse the crackdown, Zhao again said no. Zhao made it clear that there was a line he would not cross. How many others could say the same? How many had signed statements repeating the party’s lies about Tiananmen to save themselves in the crackdown that followed? How many continued to curry favor with the party to further their careers or gain an edge in business? How many could really say their hands were clean?
WANG JUNXIU HAD just arrived in his Beijing office, and was bypassing the government’s Internet controls and checking the news on overseas Web sites. As he clicked, he spotted the item: Zhao Ziyang, former Chinese Communist Party chief, dead at eighty-five. So it really happened, he thought. The old man finally passed away.
A stocky fellow in his mid-thirties with a rough, pudgy face, Wang was the cofounder and chief executive officer of China’s most popular blog-hosting Web site, Bokee.com. For weeks government censors had been warning him to prevent rumors about Zhao’s failing health from being posted on the site. Zhao could die at any moment, they said, and if he did, they didn’t want Wang’s five million users reading about it or discussing it. As usual, Wang assured them he would comply. But he also knew there was really no need for the warning. His company had long ago programmed its software to block people from mentioning Zhao’s name in their blogs.
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