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

"Mao." Mr. Wang had rendered the same verdict in his wife's murder as had the Chinese government: individual actors were not responsible.

Mr. Wang seemed to enjoy our conversation also and at his suggestion we met on two other occasions. The length and ease of our conversations allowed me to learn more about the concept of individual responsibility in Bian’s murder. By talking with Mr. Wang I could examine the concept as it applied to the perpetrators and the things they did and didn't do, and also as applied to Bian and Mr. Wang, and what each of them did and did not do.

In the war against the Japanese the Chinese communists were renowned for fighting when captured. Handcuffed, they would kick. Fully restrained, they would spit and curse. Even when being led to their execution they would resist however they could. Bian Zhongyun went to school on August 5, 1966 knowing that she was going to be killed. The Chinese soldiers resisted the invader to the death but Bian was facing execution by her own people and passively obeyed their judgment.

I knew what Mr. Wang did and did not do that summer as the danger to Bian escalated from my reading and especially from Hu Jie’s film Though I am Gone. However I wanted to see and hear Mr. Wang tell it because I wanted the horrific facts to be in his mind when I asked the next series of questions: why he had done certain things and not others. What follows is what he said in narrative form but he did not narrate. I asked specific questions and he gave specific answers.

Mr. Wang told me that Bian was first “struggled” against on June 23, 1966. Posters had been put up on the walls and doors of the flat where he and Bian and their children lived. These posters contained crude insults and threats of violence. He showed me the photographs. Bian was beaten again on August 4. He told me she took a bath that night because she wanted her body to be clean when she was killed. He said that the next morning they said goodbye to each other by shaking hands. He told me that he watched Bian walk to the school until she disappeared from sight. In the evening he was informed that she had been killed. He showed me a picture of the body.

This is what Mr. Wang had told Hu Jie also. In Though I am Gone, Hu Jie filmed Mr. Wang standing in the spot where he stood and watched Bian walk away and the corner she turned when he saw her saw her for the last time. As I watched this painful segment the question paramount in my mind, then and ever since, was why he had let her go.

It’s an insensitive question and I would have felt badly if Mr. Wang had been offended. But I asked it, in many ways, because it was crucial.

I asked why the family hadn’t moved away after Bian had been beaten on June 23. Mr. Wang told me that that was impossible because the government controlled who could go where, which was consistent with what I had learned elsewhere.

I asked what would have happened if he had gone to the school with Bian, he said that he would not have been permitted to accompany her.

I asked him directly why he hadn’t fought back, he said because he, his children and his relatives might have been killed. That was also consistent with what I had read.

Mr. Wang had not been offended and answered with no apparent shame. I think now that guilt or shame could not have occurred in Maoist China in 1966 because of the degree of state coercion and brainwashing. I think I think that now but I am not sure, but I did not think that after this first meeting with Mr. Wang.