by Jianying Zha
In early 1998, the atmosphere in China was unusually relaxed—the government was negotiating for membership in the World Trade Organization, President Clinton was coming to visit—and small groups of dissidents in different cities decided to take advantage of the new mood, moving to form an opposition party. They settled on the name China Democracy Party. Xu assumed the title of the chairman of the CDP’s Beijing branch, Jianguo that of the vice chairman, the two reclaiming their business titles for a loftier cause. With peculiar daring, or naïveté, the officers of the CDP decided to do everything openly: they tried to register the party at the Civil Affairs Bureau, they posted statements and articles on the Internet, they talked to foreign reporters. For a few months, the government allowed these activities, but, shortly after Clinton’s visit, in June, a crackdown began, and a first wave of arrests and trials took place. Xu Wenli, among others, received a thirteen-year sentence. Jianguo remained free but was followed by four security agents every day. He assumed the title of the party’s executive chairman and carried on: he called meetings and urged the few CDP members who came to stand firm; he posted new statements on the Internet, expressing his political views and demanding the release of Xu Wenli and his other jailed comrades. When the police finally arrested Jianguo, in June 1999, he had long been ready for them. He had even taken to carrying around a toothbrush.
“Heroic deeds are not appropriate to everyday life,” the Czech dissident Ludvik Vaculik wrote in the 1970s. “Heroism is acceptable in exceptional situations, but these must not last too long.” Another Czech writer, Jirina Siklova, explained why: “Heroism frightened people, and it provided them with the excuse that they were not fit for it and preferred constructive activity. The point was to preserve the nation, not to sacrifice it.” Those words were borne out by the tenor of post-Tiananmen Beijing. Over time, a semblance of normalcy returned. Throughout the 1990s, while new market reforms were launched and people’s energies were directed toward the pursuit of wealth, the Party established clear guidelines about which topics could be publicly discussed and which topics could not (such as the infamous “three Ts”: Tiananmen, Taiwan, and Tibet). As the economy boomed, the ranks of the educated elite splintered: some plunged into commerce and some—notably the economists and the applied scientists—built careers selling their expertise to the government and to corporations. Artists and scholars scrambled to adapt to the marketplace.
Gradually, a tacit consensus emerged, which was captured in the title of a book published in the late 1990s: Gaobie Gemi (“Farewell, Revolution”). The book was written by two of the star intellectuals of the previous decade, Li Zehou, a philosopher and historian, and Liu Zaifu, a literary critic. Both men had been hugely influential figures during the movements that led up to Tiananmen. Both became involved with the Tiananmen demonstrations, and ended up living in the United States. Yet their book was a scathing critique of the radicals and the revolutionaries. Looking back upon the past century of Chinese history, Li and Liu observed that attempts to bring about radical change had always resulted either in disaster or in tyranny. China was too big, its problems too numerous and complex, for any quick fix. Incremental reform, not revolution, was the right approach. In a separate article, Li also laid out four successive phases of development—economic progress, personal freedom, social justice, political democracy—that stood between China and full modernity. In other words, achieving real democracy wasn’t a matter of throwing a switch.
These were the arguments of two smart, reasonable Chinese with liberal-democratic sympathies. And they struck a chord with other smart, reasonable Chinese who were equally sympathetic toward liberalism but increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of radical change. Though the book was published in Hong Kong, it gave voice to a subtle reconfiguration in the attitude of Mainland elites during the 1990s.
The new consensus was shaped by a curious combination of trends. Outside China, the exiled prodemocracy movement had foundered, beset by factionalism. Inside China, the tone for public life was Deng Xiaoping’s mantra, “no debate”—that is, forget ideological deliberation and focus on economic development. While the technocrats moved to the politburo and pushed market reforms, the ideologues stayed in the propaganda ministry and tried to muffle voices of criticism. Meanwhile, the economy kept growing at breakneck speed. As China integrated into the international marketplace, 400 million Chinese were lifted out of poverty. A new affluent class began to emerge in the cities and coastal areas, where the younger generation, reared on the pop culture of consumerism, shied away from politics. As beneficiaries of the boom, they were generally “pro-China”; nationalist sentiments were growing. But “pro-democracy”? It’s unclear whether these young people cared enough to give it much thought.
So when Jianguo and his comrades formed the China Democracy Party in 1998, they not only failed to grasp the limits of the government’s tolerance, they failed to take the measure of the national mood. For the most part, they lacked deep roots in any particular community; they weren’t well educated or connected to the country’s elites; and they had little contact with other liberals and reformers. A few, like Xu Wenli, were marginalized because of their former prison records and their continued refusal to recant or compromise. They had the courage of their convictions, and not much else. Some, like Jianguo, had tried to do something “constructive,” and join the entrepreneurial ferment, but got nowhere. They had, in short, lost their way in the new era.
When I first started visiting Jianguo in jail, I could tell, despite his disavowals, how much he cared about the outside world’s response to what he’d done and to what had been done to him. So I tried to tell him every piece of “positive news” I could find. His eyes would light up, or he’d assume a look of solemn resolve. My task got harder as the CDP faded from the news. In late 2002, Xu Wenli, the star dissident, was released on medical parole and was flown to the United States on Christmas Eve. Afterward, coverage of the other jailed CDP members largely ceased.
Once, I had a sobering conversation with a woman while waiting for the prison interview. She was visiting her younger brother, who had killed another man in a quarrel and had been sentenced to twenty years. “He was in the restaurant business and the guy owed him money,” she explained. “He was young, too rash.” She asked me what my brother had done. When I told her, she was flabbergasted. “Organizing a party?” she said, and blinked as though I were speaking in tongues. “I didn’t know our country still had political prisoners. I thought everyone here got in trouble because of something to do with money.”
Another time I was having dinner with a German friend and his Hong Kong wife, a manager at the Shangri-la Hotel in Beijing. When the German friend inquired about Jianguo’s case, his wife turned to me and asked in an innocent tone, “So is your brother a redneck?” For a brief moment her husband, one of the most entrenched bourgeois leftists I’ve known, looked very uncomfortable in his chair.
The last time I saw the CDP mentioned in a major publication was in March 2002, in a profile in the New York Times Magazine. The subject of the article was my friend John Kamm, a former American businessman who became a full-time campaigner for Chinese prisoners of conscience. The article dismissed the CDP as “a toothless group of a few hundred members writing essays mainly for one another.” The line made me wince. The CDP men could take pride in their status as “subverters” of a totalitarian state. And they could forgive their countrymen for not rising up with them: they are heroic precisely because most other people are not. But how could they face this verdict—of laughable irrelevance—from the Times, a symbol of the freedom and democracy for which they’d sacrificed everything? Toothless men writing for one another: the words were heartless. They were also true. And perhaps it didn’t much matter that these men were toothless because their powerful opponent had rendered them so, or that they were writing only for each other because in China a message like theirs was not allowed to spread further. I felt like weeping. But I wasn’t sure whe
ther it was because I was sorry for Jianguo or angry at him—for being such a fool. While he sat in his tiny cell, day after day, year after year, the world has moved on.
“You can’t say the world has forgotten about him,” John Kamm insisted when we spoke in 2007. “I haven’t! I care about what happens to your brother!” We were drinking coffee in the lobby café of a Beijing hotel where John was staying during one of his trips to China.
John is, by his own description, “a human-rights salesman.” Formerly the chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong, he had a lucrative business career, with a chauffeured Mercedes, maids, and a condo in a prime location. Then, in the mid-1990s he gave all that up to become an advocate for political prisoners in China. Shuttling frequently between Beijing and Washington, D.C., and meeting with high-ranking officials on both sides, John uses everything in his power—hard data, personal connections, cajoling, name-dropping, bargaining—to make sure that the issue of Chinese political prisoners doesn’t go away.
He’s a big man with a sonorous voice, earthy humor, and gregarious charm. He’s also a devout Catholic with a missionary fervor, and his conversation glistens with biblical cadences. (“Justice will flow down like a river and righteousness a mighty stream.”) He has been my main advisor on all questions concerning Jianguo and my prison visits, and if Jianguo has been treated better than some political detainees it’s probably because of John’s efforts. But he acknowledges that Jianguo’s name has fallen off the annual list of political prisoners compiled by various Western governments and watchdog groups. I once asked John what he would do if he were in Jianguo’s position. John thought for a moment and told me a story about what had happened in the late 1940s when Bertolt Brecht, then living in the United States, was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. He agreed to testify, assured the committee that he had no sympathy for communism, and was thanked for cooperating. Then he flew to Europe, and ended up in East Berlin, where he doesn’t seem to have given a second thought to anything he might have professed on the stand. “If I was arrested, I’d do exactly what Brecht did,” John told me. “I’d lie to save my ass. Then I’d have a life!”
I sighed. I consider John, who abandoned his career to devote himself to the plight of strangers in someone else’s country, to be an American hero. So, if even a man like him would do what was necessary to stay out of jail, why must my brother be so stubborn? Doesn’t it make more sense to chip at a wall, little by little, than to bash your head against it?
The harshest comments I have heard about Jianguo come from his own mother. “It’s not bravery,” she once told me. “It’s arrogance and stupidity. He’s had a hero complex from childhood. The problem is, he’s not a hero. He is a foot soldier who wants to be a general, but without the talent and the skills of a general.”
Aunt Zhong was a beautiful woman when she was young. Purged as a “rightist” in 1957, she lost her job and labored in a camp for years. She is now a little white-haired woman in her seventies, with a kind smile and swollen, aching legs. She has no illusions about the Communist Party, but thinks that change can occur only slowly. In her view, the CDP was “banging an egg against a rock.” She had tried to talk Jianguo out of his involvement in the CDP, by reminding him of his responsibilities to his own family. Jianguo had replied with a classical saying: “Zhong xiao bu neng liang quan” (忠孝不能两全)—“One must choose between loyalty and filial devotion.” Upset by Jianguo’s obstinacy, she did not visit him for two years after his arrest.
Her exasperation is reciprocated. Aunt Zhong and I once went to visit Jianguo together. During the interview, we took turns speaking with him by phone. At one point, Aunt Zhong started talking about how China was too big a country to change quickly, how the situation was gradually improving and many things were getting better. I watched Jianguo’s face darken steadily, until he said something and Aunt Zhong handed the phone to me. As soon as I got on, Jianguo said in a voice shaking with emotion, “I don’t want to listen to her! She only makes me angry!”
After the visit, I told Aunt Zhong about a conversation I’d had with Han Dongfang, a workers’-union activist who had been jailed after Tiananmen. When we met, Han had been living in Hong Kong for many years, hosting a radio call-in show on Chinese labor problems. His credentials as a dissident were impeccable: during his two years in jail, he was tortured, got violently sick, and nearly died. Refusing to yield, he staged a hunger strike. Unlike many Chinese dissidents, though, Han is decidedly urbane (stylish clothes, fluent English, polite manners) and reflective about his past and his personal weaknesses. He was critical of Chinese dissidents on the whole, including himself. “Please don’t get me started on that topic,” Han told me. “I don’t have anything nice to say about the lot.” He believed that many Chinese dissidents were afflicted with an inflated self-regard. “It’s a sickness so many of us are not aware of,” he said. But, Han said, one should not discuss these things with a dissident in prison. “Because to get through prison you need to mobilize all your strength, to be self-righteous and believe that you are a hero,” he said. “You need that kind of mental arrogance to prop up your spirit. You cannot afford self-doubt.”
Aunt Zhong listened to what Han had told me and accepted the point. She promised not to discuss politics again with Jianguo. “I just hope he will get through his term and come out in good health,” she said, shaking her head. “After that, maybe we can all have a good talk with him. I hope he will change his way of thinking and not get back in jail again.”
The political landscape in China has grown more complex since the days of the CDP crackdown. After years of rapid growth, China was by 2007 the fourth-largest economy in the world, poised to surpass Germany and Japan before long, and widely expected to catch up with the United States in around 2050. It has the highest foreign-currency reserve in the world. The transformation, however, has been accompanied by endemic corruption, environmental destruction, a widening income gap, and unraveling social services. The policies of President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao have tempered some of these problems by eliminating the agricultural tax, paying more attention to the “weaker communities,” and taking measures to curb graft. But there’s a growing sense that deeper accommodations must be made: on the one side is a swelling mass of disadvantaged people who bear the brunt of social inequity and want more reform and fairness; on the other is a large body of midand high-level bureaucrats and Party elites who are in a mercenary alliance with business interests and resist any structural change. Everyone knows that, in the political realm, something will eventually have to give.
Agitation for political reform has, in recent years, grown more assertive while taking on more varied and artful forms: instead of using the fraught term ren quan (人权, human rights), for example, people talk about fa zhi (法治, the rule of law) and wei quan (维权, defending civil rights) to discuss consumer rights or migrant-labor rights or private-property rights. Each year, there are more cases in which journalists expose corruption, lawyers take up civil-rights suits in court, scholars investigate the “blank spots” of history (the Sino-Japanese War, the great famine of 1959-62, the Cultural Revolution), publishers defy taboos and print “sensitive” books. From time to time, a statement or a petition is signed by a group of people, though they usually take pains to present themselves as an assortment of individuals rather than as an organization. Acts of this nature tend to be sporadic and spontaneous, although—with the rapid expansion of the Internet and international communication—news travels fast, and the task of controlling information becomes more daunting. On the Chinese Internet, the voices of criticism are so diverse that censors face the equivalent of a guerrilla war with a thousand fronts. For every offender who gets caught and punished, a hundred get away. These critics can’t be easily located, isolated, and destroyed the way the CDP was.
Meanwhile, globalization has made the government and the leaders more mindful of their own image. The official t
alk of “peaceful rising” and “building a harmonious society” in recent years reflects a softer approach in both international and domestic politics. On the whole, the political atmosphere in China really has eased, and people are a little less afraid. In private and in public, Chinese discussions of political reform are getting louder.
So Aunt Zhong had a point when she told Jianguo that the situation in China is improving. And not everyone has forgotten the CDP incident. Several of my liberal Chinese friends have told me that, thanks to men like Jianguo, who tested “the baseline” with their lives, others now know exactly how far they can push. As one of them, Cui Weiping, put it, “The officials think of us as moderates because of them. They are the reason we are not in prison. For this alone we are grateful.” Cui, a literary and film critic, has translated Havel’s essays into Chinese. She writes publicly about the need to build civil society in order to battle totalitarian culture. She respects men like Jianguo but says that “real change will come from small, ignoble places. Social movements, not the elite or lone heroes, are going to make history.”
Another prominent liberal figure, Xu Youyu, a philosopher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and a forceful advocate of political reform, told me that he would never make “foolish decisions” such as those made by the CDP founders. “It was stupid in terms of political strategy,” he said. Xu, who is well-versed in Western analytical philosophy and liberal theory, emphasizes the importance of “rational analysis” before taking any action. “Perhaps they were eager to set a record—to be the first to openly form an opposition party in Communist China,” Xu said. “If that’s what motivated them, it’s the sort of human weakness I could forgive.” Like Jianguo, Xu had been a Red Guard, and he has written a candid and moving memoir about the Cultural Revolution, with soul-searching reflections on his own youthful delusions. He signed a copy for Jianguo and asked me to bring it to him. Not surprisingly, the censor at the prison book desk rejected it.
