Finally, I want to thank my husband John Brennan, my pathfinder in China who has shared my fascination with the country from the beginning. This book started with a conversation between us one night in Beijing, and it grew through countless conversations after, on long walks, and over dinner, via Skype, text, FaceTime, and in real time. From the first word of this book to the last (save these) he has been with me, the most incisive of interlocutors, the most sensitive and critical of readers, a supporter whose enthusiasm has never flagged. The Phoenix Years is a better book because of him.
This book is dedicated to John with all my love, and to my late brother Hugh, who I will miss every day of my life.
Sydney, June 2016
NOTES
There are two main primary sources for The Phoenix Years: my interviews and conversations with the nine key voices in the book, spanning many years; and my notes, recollections and writings from my three decades of reporting on contemporary China.
The nine voices whose lives and work form the backbone of this book are all Chinese contemporary artists. They are (in alphabetical order): Aniwar, Cao Fei, Gonkar Gyatso, Guo Jian, Huang Rui, Jia Aili, Pei Li, Sheng Qi and Zhang Xiaogang. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations from these artists come from my interviews with them.
For the general historical narrative of contemporary China I have relied throughout on Professor Jonathan D Spence’s magisterial work The Search for Modern China (Third Edition) as published by WW Norton & Company in 2013. The range of additional secondary sources I have drawn on are listed chapter by chapter below.
CHAPTER ONE
BEIJING 1986
This chapter is based largely on my experiences as a journalist in China. Other sources are as follows.
Great Leap Forward—death toll
Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The history of China’s most devastating catastrophe, 1958–62 (chapter 37), Bloomsbury, London, 2010; Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine 1958–1962, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2012.
China’s per capita GDP
World Bank, ‘GDP Per Capita’,
Story of Today magazine and Huang Rui
Author interviews with Huang Rui; Huang Rui, The Stars Period, 1977–1984, Asia One Books, Hong Kong, 2012.
CHAPTER TWO
I DO NOT BELIEVE!
Huang Rui
The story of Huang Rui is based largely on my interviews with him. Additional detail comes from his book The Stars Period, 1977–1984.
Democracy Wall
Main sources: author interviews. Other sources: Andrew J Nathan, Chinese Democracy (chapters 1, 2 & 4), IB Tauris & Co Ltd, London, 1986; Richard Thwaites, Real Life China (chapter 8), Collins, Sydney, 1986.
Wei Jingsheng
For the text of Wei’s ‘The Fifth Modernisation’ I have used the translation in Wei’s book, The Courage to Stand Alone: Letters from prison and other writings, edited and translated by Kristina M Torgeson, Penguin Books, New York, 1998; For his story in this and subsequent chapters, I have relied on his essay ‘From Maoist fanatic to political dissident: an autobiographical essay’, written in 1979 and reprinted in The Courage to Stand Alone, and also on the essay by Sophia Woodman, ‘Wei Jingsheng’s lifelong battle for democracy’, which is included in the same book. I have also drawn on chapter 9 of Thwaites, Real Life China.
Underground literary scene in the late 1970s
Bonnie S. McDougall, ‘Breaking through: literature and the arts in China, 1976–1986’, Copenhagen Papers in East and Southeast Asian Studies, 1, 1988
Today magazine
Main sources: author interviews and Huang Rui, The Stars Period. Other sources: Bei Dao, lecture to Stanford University, January 1998, (trans) Perry Link,
Bei Dao
Bei Dao, ‘The Answer’, The August Sleepwalker, (trans) Bonnie S. McDougall, New Directions Publishing Corp, New York, 1988, p. 33; Hu Ming, ‘Shao Fei: an intimate friend’, in Works of Contemporary Chinese Painter Shao Fei, People’s Fine Arts Publishing House, Beijing, 2006. (The artist Shao Fei was married to Bei Dao for a number of years. This essay, by her old friend and fellow artist, Hu Ming, provides background on Bei Dao, Huang Rui, the Stars group, and the artistic and cultural scene of the late ’70s and early ’80s); Steven Ratiner, ‘Reclaiming the word: a conversation with Bei Dao’, AGNI Online, vol. 54, 2001
Mang Ke
My portrait of Mang Ke is based primarily on conversations over our long friendship. Other sources: Kang-i Sun Chang & Stephen Owen (eds), The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature, vol. II, chapter 7, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010; Mang Ke, Qiao, zhexie ren! (Gifted Generation!), Time Literature and Art Publishing House, Beijing, 2003; The lines quoted from Mang Ke’s poem, ‘I am a poet’, first published in Jintian (Today) magazine, issue no. 1, 1978, translated by Bruce Gordon Doar.
Red Guards and ‘sent down youth’
‘The routinization of liminality: the persistence of activism among China’s Red Guard generation’ in Jeffrey Broadbent and Vicky Brockman (eds), East Asian Social Movements: Power, protest, and change in a dynamic region, Springer, New York, 2010.
CHAPTER THREE
THE STARS
Deng Xiaoping, his visit to the United States, and the decision to go to war with Vietnam
Terry McCarthy, ‘A Nervous China Invades Vietnam’, Time, 27 September 1999
Unofficial publications at Democracy Wall
Nathan, Chinese Democracy, chapters 1 & 2.
‘Beijing in 1979 is an eternal spring in our memory . . .’
Hu Ming’s description of 1979 in Beijing comes from her essay ‘Shao Fei: an intimate friend’, as previously cited, p. 190. Her recollections in that essay were supplemented by interviews with the author.
Crackdown on Democracy Wall and arrest of Wei Jingsheng
Merle Goldman, From Comrade to Citizen: the struggle for political rights in China, chapter 1, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2005; Nathan, Chinese Democracy, chapter 2; Thwaites, Real Life China, chapters 8 & 9.
The Stars exhibition and demonstration for freedom of expression
The description of the formation of the Stars group, the Stars exhibition, and subsequent events is drawn primarily from my interviews with Huang Rui and his book The Stars Period; The excerpt from the Stars group manifesto comes from Lü Peng, A History of Art in 20th Century China, (trans) Bruce Gordon Doar, Somogy Art Publishers, 2013, p. 497; Other sources: Andrew Cohen, ‘Eternal spring—Ma Desheng’, ArtAsiaPacific, issue 87, March/April 2014
Wall and China’s Enlightenment’, in Perry Link, Tienchi Martin-Liao and Lu Xia (eds), No Enemies, No Hatred, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2012; Lü Peng, (trans) Bruce Gordon Doar, ‘Huang Rui: the linguistic context of the art of the Stars’, in Artists in Art History: Case studies of artists in art history and art criticism (1), Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House, 2008; Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary documents, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010.
The trial of Wei Jingsheng
Quotations from Wei’s defence at his trial are drawn from Wei’s The Courage to Stand Alone; For Hu Yaobang’s attitude to the Wei case, see Hu Jiwei, ‘Hu Yaobang and the Xidan Democracy Wall’, Chen Ming, April, 2004, (trans) Andrew Chubb
Guo Jian
The story of Guo Jian in this and subsequent chapters is based entirely on my interviews with him.
Liu Qing
The story of Liu Qing, editor of April Fifth Forum, is drawn primarily from chapter 1 of Goldman, From Comrade to Citizen, and chapter 2 of Nathan, Chinese Democracy; Other sources: Liu Qing, ‘Notes from prison’, Geremie Barmé and John Minford (eds), Seeds of Fire, Far Eastern Economic Review, Hong Kong, 1986; Interview with Liu Nianchun (Liu Qing’s brother) by Wang Yu, China Rights Forum, no. 3, 2003
‘Deng Lijun’s songs took a generation of Chinese youth by storm . . .’
The quotation from Liu Xiaobo is from his essay ‘Xidan Democracy Wall and China’s Enlightenment’, as previously cited.
CHAPTER FOUR
VERY HEAVEN
This chapter is based largely on my interviews with the artists Aniwar, Gonkar Gyatso, Guo Jian, Huang Rui and Sheng Qi, as well as my own experiences of the time. Secondary sources are listed below by topic.
The Great Leap Forward and Great Famine in Anhui
Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, chapter 35.
Rural reforms and China’s economic reform in the 1980s
Aside from my own journalism from this period, I have relied on the exceptional scholarship of Yasheng Huang’s Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: entrepreneurship and the state, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010; For the story of the Xiaogang farmers, see also ‘The Secret Document that Transformed China’, National Public Radio, January 20 2012
Xinjiang
James A Millward, Eurasian Crossroads: A history of Xinjiang, Hurst & Company, London, 2007; S Frederick Starr (ed.), Xinjiang: China’s Muslim borderland, ME Sharpe, New York, 2004.
Anti-spiritual pollution campaign and crime crackdown
Geremie Barmé, ‘Spiritual pollution 30 years on’, The China Story Journal, Australian Centre on China in the World, November 17 2013
CHAPTER FIVE
A TERRIBLE BEAUTY
My narrative of the Tiananmen student protests of 1989 is based on extensive interviews with participants, including Guo Jian and Sheng Qi. Other sources: ‘Quarterly chronicle and documentation’, The China Quarterly, vol. 119, 1989, pp. 666–734; Timothy Brook, Quelling the People: The military suppression of the Beijing Democracy Movement, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1998; Mike Chinoy, China Live: two decades in the heart of the dragon, chapters 7–9, Turner Publishing Inc., Atlanta, 1997; Richard Gordon & Carma Hinton (directors), Gate of Heavenly Peace, Independent Television Service (ITVS), 1995
River Elegy
Geremie Barmé & Linda Jaivin (eds), New Ghosts, Old Dreams: Chinese rebel voices, Times Books, New York, 1992; Jin Guantao, From Youthful Manuscripts to River Elegy: The Chinese popular cultural movement and political transformation 1979–1989, Chinese University Press, Hong Kong, 1997; David Moser, ‘Thoughts on River Elegy, June 1988–June 2011’, China Beat, July 14 2011
‘China/Avant-Garde’ exhibition
Wu Hung (ed), Contemporary Chinese Art, Primary Documents; Liau Shu Juan, ‘Redefining art in the China/Avant-Garde Exhibition’, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, February 27 2012
Civilian casualties
Timothy Brook, Quelling the People, pp. 151–69; ‘the son-in-law of a senior official of the National People’s Congress . . .’, see The Tiananmen Papers, p. 437 and listing of his death on the website of the Tiananmen Mothers
Military casualties
Historian Wu Renhua summarised his research into military casualties at a panel discussion organised by Amnesty International UK on June 3 2014, see
CHAPTER SIX
NOTHING TO MY NAME
This chapter is based primarily on my interviews with Cao Fei, Jia Aili and Zhang Xiaogang, as well as Gonkar Gyatso, Guo Jian and Sheng Qi, complemented by my journalism in China during the early 1990s. My description of the ‘China’s New Art, Post-1989’ exhibition is based on an interview I conducted with Johnson Chang in Hong Kong on December 3 2010; Other sources: Brook, Quelling the People; Jonathan Fineberg & Gary G. Xu, Zhang Xiaogang, Disquieting Memories, Phaedon Press, London, 2015; Ching Kwan Lee, Against the Law: Labor protests in China’s rustbelt and sunbelt, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2007; Sally Neighbour (reporter) & Madeleine O’Dea (producer), ‘Shanghai’, Foreign Correspondent, ABC Television, October 5 1993; Madeleine O’Dea, ‘Artist Dossier: Zhang Xiaogang’, Art + Auction, March 2011; ‘Voices from Tiananmen’, South China Morning Post multimedia, as previously cited; Yasheng Huang, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics.
CHAPTER SEVEN
WHOSE UTOPIA?
This chapter is based largely on my journalism in China in the 1990s and interviews with Aniwar, Cao Fei, Guo Jian, Jia Aili and Zhang Xiaogang. Other sources: David Bandurski, Dragons in Diamond VillageandOtherTalesfromtheBackAlleysofUrbanisingChina, Viking, 2015; Bao Tong, ‘How Deng Xiaoping helped create a corrupt China’, The New York Times, June 3 2015
na’s floating population’, Foreign Correspondent, ABC Television, February 2 1996; Ching Kwan Lee, Against the Law; Sally Neighbour and Madeleine O’Dea, ‘China after Deng Xiaoping,’ Foreign Correspondent, ABC Television, February 14 1995; Sally Neighbour, Madeleine O’Dea and Mick O’Donnell (co-producer), ‘Deng’s Dynasty’, 4 Corners, ABC Television, 26 June 1995; Geoff Raby, interview with author, 23 April 2015, Beijing; Yasheng Huang, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics; Zhang Huan, ‘A personal account of 65 KG (1994/2000)’ in Wu Hung (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary documents, pp. 185–87; Zhang Huan, commentary on his performance piece To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond, Beijing, 1997, on zhanghuan.com
CHAPTER EIGHT
BEIJING WELCOMES YOU!
This chapter is largely based on my personal experiences in China during the early 2000s, as well as interviews with Gonkar Gyatso, Guo Jian, Huang Rui and Sheng Qi. Other sources: Fu Hualing and Richard Cullen, ‘Weiquan (rights protection) lawyering in an authoritarian state: toward critical lawyering’, The China Journal, vol. 111, 2008
CHAPTER NINE
ISN’T SOMETHING MISSING?
This chapter is based primarily on my own experiences in China in the late 2000s and on interviews with Aniwar, Cao Fei, Guo Jian, Huang Rui, Jia Aili, Pei Li, Sheng Qi and Zhang Xiaogang.
The Phoenix Years Page 33
