China's Great Wall of Silence: Beijing, November 2008. Part IV

During the cab ride back to the hotel after my first meeting with Mr. Wang I wondered out loud to Carmen that I couldn’t understand how someone could let a loved one be harmed, or killed, without intervening in some way. The more I talked the more incomprehensible it seemed. “I don’t care how oppressive the society I wouldn’t have let my wife go. I would have fought back.” (I was building up a good head of steam) “These were GIRLS for Christ's sake! Teenage girls beat Bian to death! A few men could have gone over there and sent those dainties squealing back to their classrooms and prevented this!” (The prosecutor had convinced his jury: himself).

Wearily, Carmen responded that that’s not the way it is in a country like China, to a lesser extent that is not the way it was in her home country, Cuba. I had no way of understanding that, she said, because I had been spoiled living all my life in America. I huffed with typical American male indignation.

I spoke to an American woman on the plane back to the U.S. (She said that she had enjoyed her stay in China but, unprompted, stated, “Our hotel was so stuffy and there was no air conditioning!”) She had been in a city south of Beijing where her daughter went to school. She told me that her daughter had been out walking when she saw a man beating his wife. He knocked her to the ground. Several people were standing around watching, not stepping between them, not saying anything. The young American woman instinctively ran to the man’s wife and shielded her. The wife was bleeding profusely and several of her teeth had been knocked out. She shouted, in Chinese, “Why aren’t you doing anything? Call the police!” No one in the crowd said anything. The young woman called the police herself.

All human behavior exists on a continuum between the poles of the ideal and the taboo.

A society's choice of the ideal and the taboo establishes its value system. Bian Zhongyun’s murder is of historical importance. It was at the very beginning of the Cultural Revolution and the “Red Terror” violence of August 1966. It is also historically significant because the leader of the school at the time of the murder, Song Binbin, became famous thirteen days later when she pinned a Red Guard armband onto Mao Zedong, thus signifying Mao’s approval of the Red Terror.

But the importance of the murder is only partly historical. The murder continues to haunt that generation of Chinese, especially women, because it broke taboos. Teachers hold a special place of reverence for Chinese. The Girls' Middle School was a preparatory school for those who wished to become teachers. Yet it was a teacher, the principal of the school, who was murdered. And it was an elite school: the children of some of the highest-ranking officials in the Chinese Communist Party attended, Deng Xiaoping’s daughter and Liu Shaoqi’s daughter most prominently. “Daughters”: girls had committed this murder, “good” girls.

Throughout his reign Mao Zedong attempted to change the ancient Chinese value system. In breaking taboos, he attempted to break the most fundamental societal ties that create taboos. During the Great Leap Forward he attempted to replace the nuclear family with the commune. Loyalty to the party was decreed the highest loyalty, over the loyalty of parent to child, husband to wife, pupil to teacher. He attempted to replace personal names with numbers. As the cult of Mao developed, love for Mao became the highest form of love.

Mao once sanguinely contemplated a world after a full-scale nuclear war with the comment that if one-third of mankind would be killed, the other two-thirds would be socialist. He attempted to redefine the value of individual human life.

The decisions of the party were right because the party made the decisions. He attempted to redefine right and wrong.

When we got back to the hotel we had a message from Ye Youyi that Mr. Wang wanted to meet with me again. I was very excited. However Carmen was not. She pointed out that I had gotten absolutely no information from five hours of conversation that day with Mr. Wang on the identities of those involved in Bian's murder. I was deflated but she was right. She thought that Mr. Wang wanted to chit-chat, not provide information.

At 9:30 Ye called again. I answered and she told me that Mr. Wang wanted to meet again because "has something to tell you." We agreed on a date and time. I got off the phone and was elated. What could that mean except that he was now willing to name names? Carmen didn't believe it. There would just be more chit-chat. If Mr. Wang knew anything, he was not going to tell me. "They don't care about it," she said, referring to Chinese generally. "If they don't care about it, why do you?" I felt foolish, but again it was a valid point.

After forty-two years if Mr. Wang truly did not know the identies of even one of the several people who had actually struck Bian, it seemed foolish to believe that I, a foreigner, could learn their identifies. And if Mr. Wang did know, he hadn't told me after five hours of conversation.

As Carmen and I were talking I remembered something else that Mr. Wang had said. Song Binbin and Liu Jin had come to Mr. Wang's flat to give him the official document on Bian's "death." I had asked him if he had ever, then or since, asked who had done what to his wife. He said that he hadn't asked. That reinforced all that Carmen had said (but of course I didn't tell her that).