China Witness

by Xinran Xue

  XINRAN: Were there a lot of people with learning or from a high-class background in prison?

  JINGGUAN: Yes, especially among the counter-revolutionary prisoners.

  XINRAN: So how were cases investigated and decided if law enforcement officers were so uneducated?

  JINGGUAN: Our leaders divided it up into several different stages, didn't they?

  The first stage was the 1950 consolidation period, when the focus was on bandits, tyrants, key GMD counter-revolutionaries and Chiang Kaishek's spy network.

  The second stage was 1956, defined as the "army, officials, police and the law" stage. In the GMD Army there was no criminal activity: most of the senior officers hadn't committed any crime.

  Here's an example of a serious crime: someone came to Anyang to arrest a suspect on the run from his village. The suspect had killed the chairman of the village council, disembowelled him, dug his heart out and eaten it. Then he had killed the Women's Federation leader, then a dozen other people, and then he had fled. The person from Anyang contacted our local police station and our household registration officers went to the home of a relative of the suspect and were told that he was at the Dongguan Airport construction site. Anyang county PSB rushed off there, but another family member had tipped the suspect off and he'd gone again. But a dozen of us surrounded the relative's house and hid out for a few days, and eventually caught him.

  XINRAN: What do you think was the most "leftist" period in China?

  JINGGUAN: Most "leftist"? That was the Cultural Revolution!

  XINRAN: Where were you during the Cultural Revolution?

  JINGGUAN: I was Chief Justice at the Central Plains Regional Courts. There were just eight of us, and I was the only one who was "struggled against".

  XINRAN: How long did that go on for?

  JINGGUAN: Altogether, two months and twenty-nine days. Twice I had to stand up for more than four hours. I had no enemies – whenever people saw me they just said, "Take a bit of a rest," and no one was really brutal to me. The Cultural Revolution was a complete nonsense.

  XINRAN: Why do you say that?

  JINGGUAN: Haven't you heard? Liu Shaoqi's Party file describes how he was arrested in Shenyang in 1931. You didn't know, I didn't know, only Mao Zedong and Lin Biao's Special Cases Group saw the file and sent investigators to Shenyang. They swore they would prove he was a traitor. [23] There was a Mr Yang in the Shenyang GMD branch which had arrested Liu Shaoqi and after Liberation this man was given a commuted death sentence. He was in a Reform through Labour camp, and the Special Cases Group went and asked him about the Liu Shaoqi business. He couldn't remember it at first, but after a week he said they had arrested a Liu Weihuang for selling salt without a permit but there was no case to answer and they let him go. He didn't know if that was Liu Shaoqi. Liu's file recorded that name, it was one his grandfather had given him. The Special Cases Group person said to him: "How come you haven't confessed that you only released him after he had turned traitor. Liu Shaoqi's admitted it, so why are you still shielding him? I can see you don't want to go on living. If you carry on lying, tomorrow we'll take you out and shoot you." Yang cried all night, and thought to himself: I'm not happy about lying, but if they shoot me, I'll be dead. That was the first idea that occurred to him, and so he made his "confession" accordingly, and he was released. But then he reconsidered: It doesn't matter if they shoot me, but I can't frame the State Chairman! So he withdrew his statement and wrote numerous documents telling the truth, but no one dared take any notice of it.

  XINRAN: I suppose you know that China's first State Chairman died in custody in Henan?

  JINGGUAN: I didn't know it then.

  XINRAN: When did you find out?

  JINGGUAN: In 1979. A plane came from Beijing to pick up his ashes because the government was organising a memorial service for him. Before that, the Special Cases Group people came to Henan and looked everywhere for them but couldn't find them. Finally, they were found in Kaifeng – they got hold of a Mr Niu who used to be in charge of the crematorium. He said, oh yes, definitely, they had the ashes of a Liu Weihuang. He had had the feeling this man had been a top cadre, but no old army comrades or family had turned up for the cremation. The army had sent the body for cremation, but no one came to pick up the ashes. It was only ten years later that they found out that this was Liu Shaoqi.

  XINRAN: So you also didn't hear about Liu's sad end in Henan?

  JINGGUAN: At that time, all we heard was that Liu Shaoqi had been using the war to make a name for himself. Plus a lot of old cadres were transferred away from Beijing in disgrace. Liu Shaoqi became a "class enemy". He fell ill and they refused him medical treatment. He was in very low spirits. It was cold in Henan and there was no heating. I heard that the Special Cases Group were very cruel to him.

  XINRAN: When he died, was it from illness, or starvation, or ill-treatment, do you know?

  JINGGUAN: I reckon it must have been illness, because he was seventy-one then, and if he didn't die from illness then it must have been from the ill-treatment and humiliation.

  XINRAN: You didn't know the details even in the PSB?

  JINGGUAN: Right from the start, we were told he had died of illness.

  XINRAN: Were there rumours going around within your organisation?

  JINGGUAN: Yes there were, but we didn't believe them. Things like Tao Zhu [24] dying in Anhui on 22 November 1969, and we were also told that General Xu Haidong [25] had died from an illness. I saw a film which was among some classified material of the struggle sessions against Liu Shaoqi and his wife, Wang Guang-mei, in Zhongnanhai in 1968. They were dragged into the assembly room, by strapping great toughs, and they were beating him up, forcing him into the "flying aeroplane" position, grabbing him by his wisps of white hair and forcing his head up to face the camera. Then the pair of them were taken to a corner of the room, had their heads forced down and were made to kowtow to a couple of cartoons of Red Guards. Finally, Liu Shaoqi hobbled away, his face badly battered. He had obviously taken quite a beating.

  XINRAN: I heard a story about Liu Shaoqi's last days, from someone who had worked in 301 Military Hospital in Henan. Liu Shaoqi had diabetes, and had a feeding tube in his nose. Before he was sent to Henan in October 1969, his nurse wanted to warn Liu Shaoqi, so she dipped a cotton bud in gentian violet and wrote in big characters on a piece of newspaper: "The Central Committee has decided to transfer you to somewhere else."

  When he was being transferred, he was dirty and smelly, because he couldn't look after himself any more. The nurses gingerly stripped off his clothes, and wrapped him in a pink satin quilt which they covered with a white sheet. About seven in the evening, under the supervision of the Special Cases Group, and accompanied by the nurses and Liu's bodyguard, Liu Shaoqi was put on a stretcher, placed in the rear cabin of the plane and flown to Kaifeng.

  Apparently, martial law was suddenly imposed on Kaifeng Airport and the staff had no idea what was happening. Everyone was very tense. A military aircraft touched down on the runway, and two nurses in white uniforms carried a stretcher out. The person on the stretcher was stick-thin, and all that showed was a bony face buried in an unkempt mass of hair and beard. A blanket covered the white-sheeted figure, and the stench coming from under it was enough to make you retch…

  Liu Shaoqi's naked body was too frail to withstand the freezing conditions on the flight and he caught acute pneumonia when he arrived in Kaifeng. Soon afterwards, on 13 November, his bodyguard came to his bedside in the underground cell in the early morning and found he'd stopped breathing.

  At dead of night on 14 November 1969, Liu's remains, tightly bound in cotton cloth, were loaded into a Model 69 jeep. The back of the jeep was too short, and Liu Shaoqi's feet were visible, sticking out at the back.

  On the cremation certificate was written: "Names: LIU Weihuang; Profession: none; Cause of death: illness." It was signed by Liu's son, Liu Yuan. His ashes remained in the crematorium for ten years without anyone knowing.<
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  JINGGUAN: So the State Chairman, so proclaimed in black and white in the 4 January 1965 People's Daily, became a "jobless vagrant" without ordinary people being told anything about it! When eventually his widow, Wang Guangmei, and children received his ashes in Number 1 Conference Room of the Henan Province People's Congress Hall in Zhengzhou, the staff on duty said that the grief-stricken woman clutched the bag of ashes and buried her face in them for a long time – it was enough to make the onlookers weep! [26]

  XINRAN: Your information mostly came from files kept by the law enforcement agencies, is that right? Was this information kept afterwards?

  JINGGUAN: No, it was a real mess. First of all, the people in charge of it were uneducated, and they had the files stacked up like so many discarded bits of equipment. Those with any education looked after crime data, and they never had enough time, so how could we send them off to be archivists? Document storage was given to people who couldn't do anything else. Secondly, when officials left, retired or whatever, they cleared out all the files. Those who were well meaning but ignorant did it to clear things out for the next person in the post; those with something to hide simply burned stuff, to avoid leaving the proof in other people's hands. Besides, so many of the political movements relied on old information to punish people. Who dared to leave anything written down? Who knew if the next official might be a relative of someone you'd arrested? Anything written down was proof, and so many people had lost their lives because of characters on paper that we were all afraid. So anything that could be destroyed was destroyed, and the only things that were left were broad statements of principle and other documents that had nothing to do with one's own work. That's why, if people wanted to redress miscarriages of justice, they couldn't find the original material. If you were a good man, you had to go and prove you didn't kill someone, that's all there was to it.

  ***

  The lack of original material is a disaster for modern Chinese historical records. As Mr Jingguan put it, it is not only a clearing-out when there is a regime change, it is also a by-product of the fear of taking responsibility because no one wants to assume lifelong responsibility for everything they did while in office. In the Chinese system of government and administration there is no such legal concept as "official actions entail lifelong responsibility". As a result, no matter how corrupt you are as an official, so long as you're not caught while in office, after leaving it you can rest easy and enjoy the privileges you have won for yourself.

  ***

  XINRAN: After the Cultural Revolution, you were transferred to be manager of the Sanguanmiao office. Why were you sent there?

  JINGGUAN: I'd done forty years of law enforcement work, and I felt very low and didn't want to do it any more. The more I did, the worse I felt and the more fearful too. Well, that's life. At the beginning of the year, I didn't want to go on, and the next month I went out into the streets and saw a new lot of big character posters. It was the anti-crime and anti-reactionaries campaign. Most of my cadre colleagues had been sent to work in communes, and the constables had been sent to work in factories. That left just ten cadres and ten constables. I thought of the cases I was handling and [holding up the thumb of his right hand] I was this one, and the other nine were no good, and I thought if I don't go back to work, there'll be even more miscarriages of justice in this district, so I went back and dealt with 174 cases that year. I relied on facts and proof. Basically I stopped at that point; the sentence was determined by my seniors in uniform, I didn't have anything to do with that.

  I left the PSB after more than forty years. If I'd gone on any longer, my life would have been a few years shorter. Why? Because the work was too hard. I left the courts after more than twenty years, and if I'd stayed there longer, my life would also have been a few years shorter. Why? Because there were too many cock-ups, and these cases all involved human lives and required the greatest care.

  When I gave in my notice, I was disciplined for it. You want to leave? Then you'll be demoted! I said, OK, that's fine by me. I'll leave this place that gives me sleepless nights, and have a bit of a rest, why shouldn't I?

  XINRAN: Why did forty-odd years of law enforcement work give you so much pain?

  JINGGUAN: No one believes you. There's a stream of political movements that punish people in law enforcement first. Every day you want to arrest bad people but you're worried about being arrested as a bad person yourself. You don't know what political wind will blow tomorrow. Tell me where else it's like this to be a policeman. People like you don't know, all you see is either the police swaggering around or the bad people we've caught, but the police in China don't have an easy life!

  XINRAN: Do you think China has a healthy legal system?

  JINGGUAN: What legal system? The law hardly exists. The law is the expression on your chief 's face. The law is what your bosses say. Even in 1958, at the first Chinese conference on law and politics, the head of the PSB, a man called Luo Ruiqing, said on behalf of the Central Committee that Chairman Mao had said from then on there would be no amending the law or the constitution, the law was what the Party Central Committee maintained and what the People's Daily wrote. That was what he said.

  I'm an old man now, and as far as crime is concerned, I say what I know, and what I've told you is the truth about all those people's lives.

  XINRAN: Do you have regrets about the life you've led?

  JINGGUAN:… [He looks up at the ceiling, the corners of his mouth working in a great effort, exhaling a long breath through his nostrils. His body language clearly expresses the pain in his heart.] None at all! Wouldn't regret mean I'd done something wrong? I haven't done anything wrong. I couldn't determine the time when I was going to come into this world.

  XINRAN: If you were born again, would you work in law enforcement in China?

  JINGGUAN: Never! In every dynasty, working in law enforcement in China has always been like living in the eye of the storm, and that's hard. And it doesn't matter which dynasty, see? Everyone knows in China that when the dynasty changes, all the ministers change too. What does that mean? Well, where do the ministers from the previous regime go? If they're not demoted, they retire or they're killed! Who kills them? The emperor! "The emperor kills wrongdoers, but the ministers get the blame."

  XINRAN: There's been a big increase in students studying law and law enforcement at university level, sir. So is law enforcement in a better position than it was before the reforms of the 1980s?

  JINGGUAN: There's more awareness of the law and regulations than there used to be, but now that people know more, there are new problems. Central government makes policy, but the grass roots carries it out. Every time the policy is improved, it comes up against an ignorant, reckless response at the grass roots, and that's the end of it. The law is enforced by people. Take, for example, people who used to run the courts, basically us senior cadres. In 1982, at the 12th Congress of the CCP, Deng Xiaoping instigated the policy of appointing younger cadres. This policy began to work its way through the layers of government: generally speaking, the age of departmental heads in central government was not to exceed sixty-five, for deputy heads it was sixty, and central government committee members should not in principle be older than seventy. By the first half of 1983, the policy had reached provincial governments, and by the end of that year, municipal governments. By 1984, the policy had reached the regions, and affected cadres of fifty and over, and without diplomas. Most of them were demoted. Back then, most didn't have diplomas, as they hadn't completed lower or upper middle school, let alone university. Also, they had no specialist training. Court officers nowadays are basically all university graduates, starting from the 5,000 constables recruited by the PSB, all with university diplomas – and 40,000 applied, all with these diplomas, but even a university diploma doesn't necessarily get you the job – people don't exist in a vacuum, though, they come in all shapes and sizes, so how does it work? Today's courts may look on the surface as if they're run according to the l
aw, but actually it's according to who's got power, and even more, according to who's got money. Young cadres today are pretty daring, one of them stashed away up to 200,000 yuan in bribes in a year or so, and was sentenced to eighteen years.

  XINRAN: Do you think there's any hope for the law enforcement agencies in this province?

  JINGGUAN: There are still problems in public security, and the calibre of the officers is very uneven. Court officers at all levels are university graduates, so they should be higher calibre.

  XINRAN: So there should be some hope, then.

  JINGGUAN: That depends on what you mean! At the Spring Festival 2007, I saw a film on TV about the last Qing dynasty emperor. From the first emperor, Nurhaci, to the last, Aisin-Gioro Pu Yi, there were constant violent revolts. Now China's changed too rapidly, it's too extreme.

  XINRAN: You've experienced life both before and after Liberation, you were in Zhengzhou's first cohort of police officers, and you've seen how public security in China has changed. What has made you happy or sad in all those years in public security? Can you tell me three of the happiest and saddest things?

  JINGGUAN: The saddest? I've cried three times in my life, and shed a tear or two another three times. The first time I cried was in November 1942. It was so many days until the Spring Festival, and there was not a grain to eat. The family had split up and there was no one to look after us. We had nothing to eat or drink and I was young, and I cried. The second time I cried was when my father died before the New Year, at only thirty-eight. We had no adult male in my family, and I cried for the whole night! Another time was when the Japanese reached Zhengzhou in 1944, and we had nothing to eat for days. Then I went to be a coolie for the Japanese, and worked from first light until dark. Those Japanese were bad people and I'm a good person, but I had no money to keep us alive, all I could do was work for the Japanese. When I thought about this, I cried, I really cried… then when my mother died, I didn't cry so hard.