China Witness

by Xinran Xue

  It sounds like you're giving me advance warning that I'll mind you being "old and skinny". Honestly, you don't need to worry. Everyone gets old, that's a law of nature. If you go by appearances, the signs of ageing can only increase. These biological changes are natural. You can see through them, and they don't matter. Take me, for example: my hair's going whiter all the time and I'm getting more wrinkles and liver spots. Of course, I can make myself look nice when I want, but really, I'm not that interested. I believe the most important thing is inner youthfulness – we're both good at that, and we should keep it up. If we're psychologically youthful, we'll never feel old. And once past the aged exterior, the you which is in me is ever-youthful, and always irresistible, really! I await the arrival of the man of my heart.

  With best wishes,

  Phoebe

  159.

  Afternoon of 5 September 1993

  Dear Phoebe,

  I hope you are well. You and I may have created a phenomenon with our exchange of letters which, at least in terms of numbers, has outdone Lu Xun's famous love letters. It is so interesting to think back over the scores we have sent each other, which have united two once lonely and shattered hearts, brought a new glow of youth to them and planted in them constant tenderness. There is one thing which marks our letters out particularly, and that is clarity. I remember the first letter I wrote to you last year, how I racked my brains and struggled with it… But later, writing felt much more natural, and we wrote more and more just as we liked. The words on the page flowed as freely as if we were having a conversation. The content of our letters has always been completely real, with sometimes a bit of description, a bit of embellishment, but always revealing our true feelings. And right here in these letters is the proof of how we value and put into practice your tenet that "the truth must be told"!

  Your going fishing reminded me of fishing for shrimps near my home when I was small. We were fleeing from the Japanese bombardment, and at one point had taken refuge in a village. When we had nothing to do, my brothers and I used to go out fishing for shrimps. We would attach an earthworm to the line at the end of a bamboo pole, and throw it into the river. In a little while, the shrimps would come and nibble the worm. I would gently lift the bamboo rod while with the other hand I slowly slid a net under the shrimps, and then quickly caught them in the net. It was certainly easy, but always seemed a lot duller than real fishing.

  I've booked my ticket for the 15th on the number 14 train, and would love it if you came to meet me. We've already agreed the guiding principles for this trip, so I won't say any more about that. But I'd like to make three practical points: one, I don't want my presence to change or get in the way of your daily routine in any way at all. Just stick to the way you've always done things. Two, we'll eat just the sort of meals that you do now, or as the local expression in my home town went, "just add more chopsticks, but not more dishes". Be sure not to go adding anything extra. Third, don't buy anything especially for me, just do everything as usual. OK?

  This morning I went to say goodbye to my two brothers, and they were very happy for me. And thanks to your summons to "come a bit sooner" and "stay a little longer", my heart has already flown to Beijing. It's incredible to think that two people nearly in their seventies can be fired up like a pair of teenagers, and such fun! The rest can wait until we meet.

  With very best wishes,

  Louis

  PS I've just been to post this and found your letter of the 1st in my mailbox, so had to open the envelope and add a sentence or two: I was moved to tears at the trouble you have gone to, even down to the soy milk powder and my "tipple". How did I come to be so lucky? I am greatly moved.

  I always feel how lucky I am as a Chinese person to live in this historic moment of change, as China moves forwards what sometimes feels like five hundred years. I have seen how the old China lived through those "ancient lives" in the poor countryside, and how the future China lives in our modern cities. People are between such different life styles and capabilities. Before the 1990s, 90% of the Chinese population was made up of peasants and farmers who had very little education. Life for them means food in your stomach, warm clothes in the cold winter and a simple place to sleep; reading and writing must seem like a myth. When you move on from these romantic love letters to Chapter 10, you will see the huge difference between Chinese people of the same age and at the same point in this nation's history. If there is a wall between different cultures and beliefs, then they might so easily have had war between the classes over the last one hundred years in China.

  On the Road, Interlude 4: Reflections Between the Lines

  Having got this far with my second draft of this book, I awoke with a start early on the morning of 30 December 2006. Outside the window, there was driving wind and rain, and the previous night the BBC had warned of storms to usher in the New Year. Switching on the light, I saw it was ten past three. I remembered the words of General Phoebe, that amid the disasters of Mao Zedong's regime, they were "a fortunate generation, because they had witnessed war and peace", and my head was suddenly flooded with a strange idea: this was the good fortune that only survivors of war could have, and only they could truly comprehend what peace meant.

  Do people who have grown up watching American action movies really know what the reek of blood is like? I don't know. Nor can I imagine whether children brought up on a diet of killer games understand the results of war. Are wars and killings necessary for the creation of heroes amid the peace of contemporary life? In what way is this different from the class struggle which Mao Zedong needed? How is struggle possible when there is no enemy? We surely cannot use antagonisms between social classes to bring us together in bonds of friendship?

  As I turned this over and over in my mind, I felt, though I didn't know why, that I should watch BBC News 24. But first I wanted to begin the day's writing. I needed to write down as quickly as possible the thoughts that had been surging through me since the last interview. Ugo Betti says: "Memories are like stones; time and distance erode them like acid." I did not want time and distance to wear away the emotions of love and hate which filled me.

  At about 6.30 a.m. the urge to watch the news flooded over me again. I thought I might as well brew myself a cup of Biluochun, a Chinese green tea, and sit down in front of the TV. No sooner was I settled than big red news headlines made me jump up again: Saddam Hussein had been executed four hours previously.

  On the BBC, a debate raged between two contending sides: on the one hand, there was satisfaction that justice had been done; on the other, condemnation of an unfair sentence. Everyone was concerned, too, about the chaos caused by fighting among the peoples and religions of Iraq. I could not help engaging in a dialogue with those being interviewed in the TV studio: do those developed nations who bestowed freedom and democracy onto Iraq by force of arms really understand the stage that Iraqi religious cultures and national beliefs have reached? How can there be such different interpretations of war and death carried out in the names of Bush and Saddam? Can human society really progress to democratic republicanism from religious commandments? Can humankind share the same definition of civilisation if its members do not perceive things in the same way?

  In just the same way as the century which China had just passed through, here we have the saviours of the world "fighting for the truth", and liberating others by forcing a "just freedom" on them. There is reckless "planned development", people are punished and honoured as a unity of moral values is imposed on everyone, and all this has even become a "one size fits all" sort of fashion. And this is what we acclaim as "a fortunate era", this is what we unquestioningly call "correct leadership", this is the passion into which we have thrown ourselves without regard for personal safety. Our passion is doubtless ignorant and foolish, but it certainly won't be military might which awakes us from this fanaticism.

  10 The Policeman: A Cop who Entered the Police Force as the People's Republic was Founded

  Family phot
o, Zhengzhou, 1960s: Mr Jingguan, second from right , and his wife, back, third from right .

  In 2001, Mr Jingguan, centre front , with his wife (in wheelchair), their children and grandchildren.

  MR JINGGUAN, aged seventy-five, a policeman with the same length career as the PRC, interviewed in Zhengzhou, capital of Henan province in central China, near the Yellow River. He became a policeman in 1948 and was a sergeant at seventeen. He is the Henan police history's voice recorder and has an amazing memory; he remembers most cases since 1948. But he quit the police in the 1980s, aged fifty-eight, because he couldn't bear the ignorance and corruption that surrounded him. He lives in a two-room flat with his sick wife, whom he cares for with the help of two daughters.

  On 6 September, we arrived in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan, a central province. At the last census, Henan had 97 million people, making it China's most populous province. Up until 1990, Zhengzhou was Asia's biggest rail transport hub, while Henan was one of China's poorest provinces. In terms of public security, it set records too – for modern China's biggest bank robbery, the earliest case of a foreign contract killer, the most brutal murder…

  I began my career as a journalist here, although before 2003 I could not be as candid about it as I am now, for fear of incurring suspicions that I was "betraying my country".

  Soon after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, a 150kW "United Front Jamming Station" was set up in Zhengzhou. This transmitted meaningless radio interference to prevent people in mainland China and neighbouring areas from listening to "enemy stations" such as Voice of America, the BBC, and Hong Kong and Taiwan radio.

  In 1988, the reforms which opened up China reached the national media, or rather the interfering signals no longer had the power to prevent people, aided by modern technology, from accessing information freely. The decision was taken to turn the Jamming Station into a cultural and economic channel, and create a new model for the Chinese media. The first radio station to begin direct broadcasting for its main programming blocks was Pearl River Radio in south China, but it was small and covered only a limited area. The Zhengzhou one would be a major channel, and to ensure that, post-reforms, it would continue to be the mouthpiece of the CCP, as all the other strictly controlled provincial radio stations were, Henan People's Radio Station had the job of recruiting programme anchors from all over China to conduct an "experiment in direct broadcasting" under the "instruction and guidance" of old radio hands. From the thirty or forty thousand applicants, the Central Broadcasting selection committee chose seven men and seven women under thirty to be the reform team.

  Before this, there were radio stations only at provincial and city level, and these were under the management of the Central Government Propaganda Department. Television did not become part of the mass media until the end of the eighties, when most people had a TV set.

  A radio programme went through at least four processes: it had to be read and approved in draft, after which not a single word could be added or changed; then the tape had to be approved again, and the background music added, before final approval was given. In addition, no one's broadcasting voice was permitted the slightest trace of individuality. As we said in the business, there were only two broadcasting voices – one male and one female. This meant that Chinese radio broadcasting was one giant media machine, almost military in its management.

  I was one of the fourteen chosen to form the Direct Broadcast Reform Team, and the exception, in that I was over thirty. I still remember how swiftly our initial excitement was replaced by dread induced by the "news discipline" and the "list of rules" which hit us in the face. When we learned that all our direct-broadcast programmes would be monitored and assessed, in order to prevent them from "going down the wrong road" and misleading public opinion, we felt as if we were on the high wire of media reforms with politics the abyss beneath our feet.

  We tended to play it safe in the setting up and structure of our broadcasts, since none of us had experience of or training in the "free media", in fact none of us knew how to broadcast without reading from a script. Also, none of us wanted to tackle the explosive issue of "freedom of speech" head on.

  Probably because I was the oldest, and also because of all the fourteen "guinea pigs", only I had worked for twelve years in a military academy, and was therefore supposed to have a better awareness of "discipline" than the rest, I was assigned an unscripted night-time chat programme, called Words on the Night Breeze. What were we to talk about? How? What was safe talk? No one told me, but I very soon realised from the large numbers of readers' letters that the resources for my programme lay in the highways and byways outside the office, in the villages where I had never been, in life as it did not appear in the books I read, in the stories told by those women who reared their children and transmitted the Chinese way of life to future generations.

  It was the Henan police who helped me to reach these true media sources in safety. They not only gave me police support, they even taught me how to open the minds of these unschooled peasants, in ways which they could understand, so that they could improve their lives and protect the rights which were properly theirs.

  One incident I shall never forget. In 1990, someone wrote to me asking why people in certain places on the banks of the Yellow River in Henan had for generations suffered from eye disease. On investigation, we discovered that the cottages of the inhabitants, with their wood-burning stoves, had no chimneys, so that the women who worked indoors every day and the babies they carried on their backs spent their time in a smoke-laden atmosphere. As a result, the locals developed eye disease from an early age, and many were blind by forty. [20]

  A group of us set out to try to resolve this age-old problem. With me were a doctor, a civil engineer and two policemen, one local to the area and one sent from the provincial capital. We set off down the Yellow River to mobilise the peasants to fit some kind of chimney to their houses, but two days and four villages later, not only was no one accepting the truth of our arguments, they were coming back with their own question: if they opened up the roof, and the souls of those who lived there were sucked away during the night, who would look after them?

  On the way to the fifth village, the doctor, the engineer and I were alarmed and angry. We had reached an impasse. Then the local policeman, a taciturn man who hitherto had just been our driver, put a cautious question: could he try something for us? "Of course, of course!" we cried. "What are you going to do?" we asked, but he said diffidently: "Just let me try first. You bosses watch what happens, and then I'll say more. OK?"

  As we got to the fifth village, the policeman saw a village cadre coming towards him, slammed on the brakes, stuck his head out and said: "A new instruction from Chairman Mao!"

  "Chairman Mao? But surely he's passed away?" responded the cadre in surprise.

  "They've just discovered it. He left an instruction that 'The Yellow River waters, and the eye disease of the villagers, must both be brought under control'." The policeman was so earnest that we stared at him openmouthed.

  "Control it how?" The village cadre was obviously taking this seriously.

  "Put 'heavenly eyes' on your houses. All Chairman Mao's top cadres live in houses with 'heavenly eyes'!" The policeman continued confidently: "You call a meeting and pass on Chairman Mao's instructions, and in two days, we'll be back to check up."

  And with this, he put his foot on the accelerator, and we drove off.

  "What are you playing at?" the civil engineer couldn't help asking.

  "Wait and see," the Zhengzhou policeman answered on behalf of his colleague, and then added: "Haven't you heard the expression, 'the mighty dragon can't keep a ground snake down'? Local people have local ways!"

  Hearing this, there was nothing we "civilised" city folk could say, except follow the policemen and "spread Mao Zedong's instruction". But none of us believed that it would work. Privately, we even thought: "It's us city folk they're making fun of!"

  We were d
umbfounded, however, when two days later we went back to the village where the policeman had left word. To our amazement, there were chimneys on the rooftops! Chimneys of all shapes and sizes, to be sure, and most of them fixed on in a very unscientific way, but the people had listened to Chairman Mao! They had obeyed someone who had been a god to them, but who had long been dismissed by city folk as a tyrant now dead and gone.

  I asked the local policeman how he knew to use Chairman Mao to "civilise" these peasants. He answered quietly: "They're peasants. They only believe in the gods that work for them."

  The peasants only believe in the gods that work for them? They certainly did not believe us. From this point on, the Henan police became my teachers. They taught me the difference between town and countryside, opened my eyes to aspects of human culture which had passed me by, and made it possible for me to understand the peasants.

  Now, some years later, on my return to Henan, I wanted to interview an old policeman, Mr Jingguan, who had been with the People's Republic of China Public Security Bureau (PSB) from its inception to the present day. I'd heard he had an amazing memory, so was one of the people who were writing the history of the PSB in Henan.

  When we were on our way to his house in the Central Plains Region Law Enforcement Agencies family housing complex, a policewoman who had done some prior investigation for us said: "He wants to be called 'policeman', not 'judge', even though he worked for years in the courts and even rose to be chief justice. When you mention the courts, he gets indignant. And he hasn't been out of the house for years, because his wife went into a coma, and has become a 'vegetable', and he doesn't want her to wake up one day and find him gone."