No Enemies, No Hatred

by Liu Xiaobo

  back then, Jesus

  you hadn’t been born yet

  Between the rural manger and God’s cross

  a destitute infant

  turned a wrathful God into the embodiment of love

  continuous repentance and infinite atonement

  love

  no boundary, no leeway

  like the darkness before history

  December 26, 1998

  Translated by Nick Admussen

  ELEGY TO LIN ZHAO, LONE VOICE OF CHINESE FREEDOM

  Lin Zhao, originally named Peng Lingzhao, was born in 1932 to a prominent family in Suzhou. In her teens she ran away from home to join the Communist movement, and with its victory in 1949 threw herself into the Party’s land reform campaign. To her, in those years, Mao Zedong was “a red star in my heart.” In 1954 she entered the prestigious Chinese Department at Peking University, where she became known for her literary flair, critical views, and spunky personality. Labeled a “rightist” in Mao Zedong’s 1957 Anti-Rightist Campaign, she nonetheless remained unrepentant, continued her critical writing, and was imprisoned in 1960. While in prison she continued to write, using her own blood as ink during times when ink was denied her. In 1965 her sentence was fixed at twenty years, but later, in 1968, was revised to a sentence of death. She was shot in Shanghai on April 29, 1968, following which police presented her family with a bill for five cents to cover the cost of the bullet.

  Her story came to light in 2006 primarily through the efforts of a filmmaker named Hu Jie. For more on Hu Jie and Lin Zhao, see Philip Pan, Out of Mao’s Shadow (Simon and Schuster, 2008), chapters 2 and 3.

  Ding Zilin, who is mentioned at the beginning of this piece, lost her only son in the 1989 Beijing massacre and later founded the “Tiananmen Mothers,” whose mission was to tell the truth of the massacre and to help the families of other victims. (See “Listen Carefully to the Voices of the Tiananmen Mothers”).

  This elegy was written on the evening of the Qingming Festival, when the spirits of the dead are honored.—Ed.

  Dear Lin Zhao,

  My friend Professor Ding Zilin told me about how, one year, she sought out your grave in Suzhou, your hometown, on the day of the Qingming Festival. As a token of respect, she composed a belated eulogy and left you an offering of flowers.

  But was that really your grave? No one knows. In our land of more than three and a half million square miles, where lie your remains? And how many of the 1.3 billion Chinese people are able to commune with your departed spirit?

  At the time of your execution, our entire land was a killing ground. This included your acclaimed alma mater, Peking University, where Mao Zedong, the despot who murdered you, had been an assistant librarian during his youth. Later, posing as China’s savior, he reigned over this seat of higher learning, relying on the adulation of its fawning celebrities—men like the renowned poet Guo Moruo and the eminent philosopher Feng Youlan—to bleach away the bloodstains on the fleshy white hands that he used to scribble both lyric poetry and execution orders. After shooting a bullet into the back of your head, his regime saw fit only to extract the “bullet fee” from your mother.

  Lin Zhao, even though I’ve spoken out against the madness of that era and the ignominious toadies who knelt down to kiss the executioner’s hand, I am just a nobody. Allow me to fantasize for a moment: If I’d been in your class at school back then, I might have had a crush on you, might have sent you letters filled with pledges of eternal love. But could the bullet of evil that blotted out your passion for freedom also have extinguished my ardor?

  Lin Zhao, you died so young. I hear the answer to my questions coming out of your empty grave.

  Power and money reign supreme in our nation today. Universities count for nothing, and scholarship and ideas count for even less. Love, truth, and sacrifice are meaningless concepts, while betrayal and collective amnesia are taken as a matter of course.

  Gasping for breath in this vacuum, I gaze at your lovely face and timidly reach out to remove the cotton plug from your mouth. Your lips feel soft to the touch of my icy, stiff fingers. Your blood is the only spark in the impenetrable darkness, cauterizing my soul—if, comparing myself to you, I can claim to have a soul.

  The cold spring rain stings like needles from the heavens as I sit in solitary meditation on this bleak Qingming Festival. Humbled by nature’s lament, I feel unworthy to mourn you.

  Any tomb, any offering seems too vulgar for a martyr to freedom such as you. Tonight’s shower may moisten the parched earth, but it cannot soothe your departed spirit, nor can the stars in the dark rainy sky bring back your beauty.

  Your nobility was extraordinary in the China of your day.

  From your distant vantage point, this world must seem more absurd than that of Kafka. When cups were raised in toasts to Peking University’s hundredth anniversary [in 1998—Ed.], the endless brouhaha about founding a first-rate, world-class university must have elicited a derisive laugh from you. By expelling you, this, the leading educational institution in China, banished itself from academe and reduced itself to a place where court eunuchs convey imperial edicts.

  Our motherland is steeped in blood. Wipe! Scrub! Wash! This is real blood! Who can eradicate the blood of a martyr to freedom?

  Lin Zhao, you wrote prison poetry in your own blood, but our motherland, which sucked the life from you, has yet to see the buds of freedom.

  This disgraceful country that trampled on your devotion and betrayed your sacrifice does not deserve your noble beauty, your blood, or your tears.

  Lin Zhao, I choke on the cotton plug from your lips, as if it were a piece of bone stuck in my own throat. I qualify only to listen to your message in dumbstruck silence: your last words, literally written in your lifeblood, are a lone voice of freedom from the China of your day.

  At home in Beijing, April 4, 2004

  Originally published in Guancha (Observe China), May 3, 2004

  Translated by Susan Wilf

  BA JIN

  The Limp White Flag

  ON OCTOBER 17, 2005, the distinguished Chinese writer Ba Jin, renowned for his “conscience” and for having lived a full hundred years in this world, finally found his release from it. He took with him his mission, never fully realized, to “tell the truth” about the Cultural Revolution; also his spiritual malaise, which he could never fully dispel, over his own involvement; and finally his proposal for a “Cultural Revolution Museum,” which never reached fruition.

  On the afternoon of October 24 there was a funeral for Ba Jin at the Longhua Funeral Home in Shanghai. President Hu Jintao and other high-ranking Communist officials sent wreaths. Jia Qinglin, chair of the People’s Political Consultative Conference, visited in person to pay his respects. The official media brimmed with high praise for Ba Jin from cultural luminaries.

  Given the way language is used in China, the best way to respect the departed soul of this man of the century is neither to blame and disparage him, on the one hand, nor to accord him high praise, on the other. People who have enjoyed his writings will want to grieve, and should; people who have warmed to his calls for “truth-telling,” “repentance,” and the building of a museum should not only grieve but try to do something about his dying wishes. Where he showed cowardice and blind spots, we should extend our understanding and our sympathy. We must not expect everyone who faces tyranny to be a model of virtue like Professor Ma Yinchu, who spoke out against Mao Zedong’s population policy in the late 1950s, and still less can we ask people to be martyrs to principle such as Lin Zhao [see preceding essay—Ed.]. In our society, to criticize someone too much can mean “beating him to death,” but pouring on too much praise can also mean “praising him to death.” We should do neither to Ba Jin.

  The official memorial occasions for Ba Jin were hardly more than performances by the Communist Party to show how the regime “cares” for an eminent literary figure. Calling him a “writer of the people” and a “literary giant,” the authorities inst
ructed the Xinhua News Agency to give wide circulation to an article called “Comrade Ba Jin’s Remains Are Cremated in Shanghai, Jia Qinglin and Others Visit the Funeral Home to Pay Respects.” The report contained 1,126 Chinese characters, and Xinhua’s separate account of Ba Jin’s burial contained only 222 characters. Neither report said anything about the persecution that Ba Jin suffered during the Cultural Revolution, and neither mentioned his pleas for truth, repentance, or a museum. Instead, the reports used a total of 889 characters to describe the “sympathetic concern” of the regime. Of those 889 characters, fully 583 were the names of high officials.

  Meanwhile the glitterati of the cultural world have been praising Ba Jin so highly as almost to deify him. The kudos are nearly unanimous for his “truth-telling” and his “spirit of personal repentance.” Wang Meng, a fellow writer and former Minister of Culture, puts him on a big pedestal with terms like “high-flying banner” and “conscience of the century.” No one seems interested in things Ba Jin himself had called for: telling the truth and repenting.

  The writer Yu Qiuyu says that Ba Jin’s call for truth-telling is “most important” and that it constitutes “advice for the century.” Shu Yi, the son of Lao She, Ba Jin’s fellow writer in the 1930s, says that Ba Jin’s little book called Random Thoughts, which reflects on the horror of the Cultural Revolution, is “a monument.” But we have to note that Yu Qiuyu to this day has expressed no regret for his own “performances” during the Cultural Revolution, and Shu Yi has shown not the slightest sign of repentance for having denounced his own father for the sake of an ideology—to say nothing of “telling the truth” more broadly. Yet these two notables are quite ready to spew fine words for Ba Jin. Praise of this kind is nothing but cynical performance of a kind that by now has become regrettably normal in China.

  In my view, to compare modern Chinese literature with modern literature elsewhere in the world is to see clearly that China has no “literary giants.” Ba Jin’s literary work qualifies him as an influential writer but hardly a giant. College students of my generation who majored in Chinese all know the pantheon of the “six great modern writers”—Lu Xun, Guo Moruo, Mao Dun, Ba Jin, Lao She, and Cao Yu. These six, always listed in that order, squeezed almost every other writer out of the curricula. The list, though, is political. Its dual purposes are to establish the official Communist version of literary history and, secondarily, to attract popular opinion to the Communist “mainstream” by bringing well-known writers into the fold.

  Ba Jin’s main weakness as a writer is that his language lacks creativity. His contributions to Chinese literature pale next to those of Lu Xun, Shen Congwen, Lao She, and Cao Yu, to say nothing of Eileen Chang and Xiao Hong. Some of Ba Jin’s works are simply bad. He wrote several long novels, but only one, Family, is worth much note, and that is because of its impact on society, not its literary value. The other novels are long-winded, bloated, and pretentious. They lack authorial control, and their language lacks beauty. When they were assigned in college, I, for one, couldn’t finish reading them.

  Ba Jin’s one hundred years in this world put him in first place among the “six model authors” in longevity. But if we measure the six by literary standards or standards of integrity, it is Lu Xun, who was the first of the six to die, who looks best. By dying in 1936 Lu Xun did not have to turn into a literary vegetable after 1949. There was no way the Communists could push him into the quagmire of “thought reform” and force him to write humiliating self-criticisms, no way they could parade him through the streets in a dunce cap, or confine him in a “cowshed” [in the Cultural Revolution, a makeshift detention room for “cow ghosts and snake spirits”—Ed.], or throw him into a prison or have him beaten to death or shower him with insults until he was driven to suicide. In brief, the early demise of Lu Xun’s corporeal self allowed longevity for his spiritual self. It is true that Emperor Mao anointed him as the “stiffest backbone,” and true, too, that political hacks used this label as a stick to beat up on others. But that was not the fault of Lu Xun; it was a crime of the autocratic regime.

  What about the other five “models”? Guo Moruo, a romantic poet in the 1920s whom people then called a “genius + hooligan,” turned into a shameless sycophant after 1949. Mao Dun, formerly a “left-leaning petty bourgeois,” turned into a slippery, mediocre survivor within the literary bureaucracy. Cao Yu transformed himself from a genius of drama into a craven bit-playing partner of the regime. Lao She, that master of Beijing brogue, was a “writer of the people” for a few years after 1949 but later, pinched between a cruel regime on one side and an unsympathetic family on the other, surrendered himself as fish food in Taiping Lake. And Ba Jin, the one who lived the longest and who received the most favors from the regime, changed from a prolific writer into a quasi vegetable.

  In early the 1950s, when the sensitive Shen Congwen was persecuted to the point of attempting suicide, his old friend Ba Jin watched and said nothing. When Shen then chose to abandon writing and simply to remain silent, Ba Jin busied himself in extolling “the new era” and piling on when the regime attacked the liberal-minded writer Hu Feng. As Hu Feng and his associates were facing prison for their writings, Ba Jin found it in himself to express his “indignation” at them and to write articles crying “I accuse …!” in the People’s Daily and the Wenhui Daily in Shanghai. He described Hu Feng’s smile as “contemptuous” and compared Hu and his group to “pus” that makes a person retch. In a piece in the Wenhui Daily entitled “Their Crimes Must Be Punished Severely” (May 27, 1955), Ba Jin wrote that “we should turn their own methods of all-out attack against them; they are pus, and must be drained!” In the Anti-Rightist Campaign that followed two years later, many of Ba Jin’s friends and acquaintances met with disaster while Ba Jin somehow emerged unscathed. This led him to redouble his expressions of fealty to the regime. During the 1959 celebrations of the tenth anniversary the Communist accession to power, he wrote articles, seven of them, with titles like “We Want to Build a Heaven on Earth,” “Welcoming the New Light,” and “Unsurpassed Glory.”

  But in the end his genuflecting did not inoculate him from persecution. The Cultural Revolution that arrived in 1966, sweeping all before it, swept into Ba Jin’s family, too. We have already noted how it claimed the life of Lao She; for Ba Jin, it brought the first personal experience of what persecution feels like. Marauding Red Guards climbed over the wall at Ba Jin’s residence in Shanghai and ordered the entire family out into the courtyard. Then they locked Ba Jin, his two sisters, and his daughter, Li Xiaolin, in a bathroom. Ba Jin’s wife, Xiao Shan, was able to sneak away to the police station for help, but the police dared not intervene. Later Ba Jin was detained in a “cowshed” and repeatedly denounced. At a May Seventh Cadre School [a “thought-reform-through-labor” camp for officials and intellectuals—Ed.] he wrote a confession in which he excoriated himself and denounced colleagues as well. His wife died during the Cultural Revolution, and Ba Jin could not be with her at the end.

  When the Cultural Revolution was over, Ba Jin wrote a series of essays that he published in a little book called Random Thoughts. In it he made pleas to “tell the truth” and for a “spirit of repentance.” He wrote a self-dissection on “how a person can turn into a beast.” Around the same time Hu Feng, whom Ba Jin had cruelly attacked two decades earlier, was given an official exoneration. Ba Jin was too embarrassed to visit Hu in person, but did write of his feelings of repentance toward the Hu Feng group in Random Thoughts. It was there, too, that he issued his call for a Museum of the Cultural Revolution whose purposes would be to look squarely at history’s lessons and to avoid a repeat of disasters.

  Appearing, as it did, within a flood of post-Mao “scar” literature whose main theme was to blame someone else—various perpetrators of Maoist violence and oppression—Ba Jin’s willingness to be self-critical stood out as a rare display of conscience. It led readers to recall the hazy image of a Ba Jin in the pre-1949 years. But it is important to note
how he always kept his truth-telling and his repentance carefully within the scope allowed by the Communist regime. He spoke only of events during 1966–1976, which the regime had officially declared to be “ten years of catastrophe.” He held his tongue on the Hu Feng affair, which happened in 1954 and 1955, and then broke his silence after the regime announced its “reversal of verdict” on Hu Feng. Later, when the post-Mao regime’s own ideological campaigns came along—the campaigns to criticize Bai Hua’s “Unrequited Love” (1981), to “Eliminate Spiritual Pollution” (1983), and to “Oppose Bourgeois Liberalism” (1987)—Ba Jin no longer saw fit to “tell the truth.” After the Tiananmen Massacre of 1989, and throughout the stultifying 1990s, when China was most in need of some truth-telling, and when it would have been especially appropriate for a big name like Ba Jin to speak out, he opted for golden silence. The noted scholar Zhu Xueqin was right to issue this challenge to Ba Jin a few years before he died: “He says that just three words have helped him to survive the last ten years: tell the truth. But there are plenty of truths waiting to be told. How about giving us some? It doesn’t have to be a hundred sentences. Can’t you give us just one? What could they do to you if you gave us just one?”

  In sum, during the second half of Ba Jin’s life, his cowardice outweighed his conscience and he uttered more falsity than truth. If we say that the pre-1949 Ba Jin was an independent writer who cried “I accuse!” and became the spokesperson for a generation of idealistic youth, then we should say that after 1949 the independent writer Ba Jin died and what remained was nothing more than a hired gun for the regime and a political flower vase.

  From 1999 until the day he died, Ba Jin, the sole surviving “dean” of twentieth-century Chinese letters, lay in a ward inside the famous East China Hospital in Shanghai. (Only after he died did authorities reveal which hospital he was in.) Guards were posted on his floor and at the doors to the elevator that led to it. No one could see him without special permission. The “people’s writer” could not talk, recognize people, move his hands, raise his feet, eat, or control his bladder or bowels. Basically in a vegetative state, he may not have been able to feel pain, either. Yet the media carried stories of how Ba Jin smiled and nodded his head in appreciation when high-ranking Communist officials came to wish him a happy birthday. It is rumored that Ba Jin’s hospital care cost nearly 30,000 yuan a day, but if so, that would have been a pittance within the booming economy of greater Shanghai. So long as it gave the autocratic Party an opportunity to show off its “advanced culture,” this was a small price to pay.