-The film Morning Sun provided an “exculpation” of Song Binbin’s involvement in any Cultural Revolution violence.
-Morning Sun also exculpated Song of volitional change of her surname from Binbin, meaning “gentle and refined” to Yaowu, “be militant.”
-“Outrage” by Chinese toward Song after Morning Sun is due to her violation of expected Chinese gender roles (submissiveness and repentance).
-It is Song “the symbol and not the person” that is responsible for her demonization.
-Song is “a scapegoat and victim” of the Cultural Revolution.
Jie Li is highly intelligent, extremely articulate, Chinese-American, female, and scholar. As these are all valuable qualifications for discussion of the topic let it be said that this writer is only minimally equipped with some and is entirely lacking in the equipment of others.
The following assertions made by Jie Li, Ph.D candidate at Harvard University, are untrue:
-Morning Sun provided an “exculpation”* for Song Binbin’s involvement in any Cultural Revolution violence.
-Morning Sun exculpated Song of volitional change of her surname from Binbin, meaning “gentle and refined” to Yaowu, “be militant.”
-“Outrage” by Chinese toward Song after Morning Sun is due to her violation of expected Chinese gender roles (submissiveness and repentance).
-It is Song “the symbol and not the person” that is responsible for her demonetization.
-Song is “a scapegoat and victim” of the Cultural Revolution.
One does not have to be schooled in Western criminal jurisprudence to recognize the sweep of Ms. Li's assertions: Song Binbin is innocent, which is an entirely different matter than being not guilty.
Further, according to Ms. Li, there is positive evidence of Song's innocence, as there often is in instances of actual innocence.
Ms. Li asserted that that evidence is to be found in Morning Sun, in fact it is the sum of the evidence of actual innocence asserted by Ms. Li. This is a verbatim transcription of the entirety of Song Binbin's statements onMorning Sun. They begin with her appearance on the rostrum with Mao Zedong on August 18, 1966:
"The Red Guards were all excited. They went around putting armbands on party leaders. Someone said 'Binbin why not give one to Chairman Mao.' So I went up to him."
"I was very naive and took it to be a casual remark [i.e. Mao's suggestion that she change her name]. But an article soon appeared in the newspaper with the title 'I put a Red Guard armband on Chairman Mao.' It was written in the first person and signed Song Yaowu with my name Song Binbin in brackets. I couldn't believe the press would fabricate a new name for me and put words in my mouth for their propaganda purposes."
"My name didn't belong to me anymore. I had to change it so my friends helped me find a new single-syllable name by randomly picking a word out of a dictionary."
"I didn't take part in smashing the Four Olds or the house searches but rumors were everywhere: 'Song Be-Militant, the one who put the Red Guard armband on Mao, who brutally beat people up.' I was very upset because I had been always against violence."
"Red Guards from other schools would come to check me out. 'You're the one? You're not what we expected.' I didn't fit their idea of a Revolutionary. My name and my image were hijacked. I had lost control of my identity. I was furious but I was also sad that people suffered because of what that name stood for."
"When I first joined the Cultural Revolution I thought we were going to repudiate bourgeois policies in education but it turned into something altogether different."
"Rumors about me reached the village [during the Great Link-Up] before I arrived. 'Song Be-Militant is coming to settle here, the one who burns, loots and rapes.' Th
e villagers were afraid and they didn't want me there but by working hard with them I was able to gain their acceptance and they came to treat me with great kindness."
"My father named me Binbin because he wanted a daughter who was gentle and refined and I was indeed like that. If my name hadn't meant "gentle" Mao wouldn't have said 'better to be militant' and there wouldn't have been all these rumors. The name Song Be-Militant is totally against my beliefs. It's sad how history could have played such a bad joke."
The reaction among Chinese to these statements, accurately characterized by Ms. Li as outrage, had nothing to do with with "expected Chinese gender roles" but rather with expected human intelligence. Song's statements are an insult to this latter.
Even at a facial level of credibility Song's statements are suspicious.
One need know nothing about the merits of her guilt or innocence to read the transcript and think "Hmm, that is a little too total a denial." In fact that was the reaction of many.
Second, and again without even getting to the merits yet, there is the specific denial of specifics. An actually innocent person is innocent generally and will enter a general denial. So for example we would expect an actually innocent person accused of armed robbery to say "I didn't do any robbery!"
If on the other hand, he (or she) says "I did not hold a 9mm Beretta semi-automatic to that person's head!" a dispassionate auditor would wonder (1) Who said anything about a semi-automatic, as opposed to a revolver, or (2)Who said anything about a 9mm Beretta as opposed to a Ruger or Smith & Wesson?, or (3) Who said anything about a firearm at all, as opposed to a knife?, or (4) Who said anything about holding whatever weapon it was to the person's head as opposed to the neck or heart? If Song had begun and ended her denial with paragraph four above she would not have run afoul of this common sense rule for judging credibility. But she didn't.
There's another problem with the specific denial of specifics: the unexpected. And here, I will use an anecdote--absolutely true--from my experience. A jailer friend of mine told me--this was in the past year or two--that he had become curious about why an older Latin inmate was constantly being picked on by the other inmates. So finally the jailer asked him. The inmate's response was, "I did not leek that turtle, I did not fock that turtle." My friend's reaction was, "YOU DIDN'T FUCK WHAT?!!"
As it is possible for men to have sex with turtles it is possible for a woman to rape a person, but it is not expected. My reaction when I heard Song's denial was: "RAPE?!!" To this day this is the first and only time I ever heard mention of that specific accusation against her.
With just a little familiarity with the period Song's statement further dissolves. She makes this statement:
"Someone said, 'Binbin,' why not give [a Red Guard armband] to Chairman Mao."
Maybe some PBS viewers took that statement at face value but probably not many. I think Mao Zedong, like Adolph Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Fidel Castro, is known generally not to have been "a people person," unless those people were dead. One did not just "go up to him" then (as one can now, now that he is dead), much less do something physical, like pin an armband onto him.
Song speaks uninterrupted in Morning Sun, a point addressed previously in Publocc and again below, so she didn't get "tripped up" by some Mike Wallace-like bulldog of an interviewer. It is in this light that the following statement should be judged:
"When I first joined the Cultural Revolution..."
I would bet most PBS viewers didn't find that statement strange. People joined the American Revolution, right? And the French, Russian, and Sexual Revolutions, too. However, it is strange. It is strange because one did not join the Cultural Revolution like those others. The Cultural Revolution was inflicted on Chinese, quite unsuspecting Chinese in fact, by Mao Zedong and Mao Zedong alone. Even his closest Party colleagues didn't "join" the Cultural Revolution.
Song Binbin knew exactly what she was saying here and Carma Hinton knew exactly what Song was saying: Song is saying she didn't join the Red Guards... without saying she didn't join the Red Guards. Throughout her Morning Sun statement Song uses words, as here, that subtly distance herself from the Red Guards. In the first paragraph she says, "The Red Guards were all excited." "The Red Guards"-those other people-"were all excited," implicitly not Song.
Song makes the Cultural Revolution sound like a school textbook fight:
"I thought we were going to repudiate bourgeois policies in education..."
Evolution Out! Creationism In! No, that wasn't what the Cultural Revolution was like.
As one goes deeper into the history of the C.R. and of Song personally there is more:
"My name didn't belong to me anymore. I had to change it so my friends helped me find a new single-syllable name byrandomly picking a word out of a dictionary."
The oddity of this statement was not apparent when Morning Sun was released. As when she denied a rape that on one had accused her of, this is an instance of Song giving away a detail that few knew anything about.
Song immigrated to the United States after the Cultural Revolution. She got her Ph.D in geology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The name on her diploma reads "Yan Song." Yan is the single-syllable name Song is referring to; it means "rock" in Chinese.
*We think it not inappropriate to add that between 2009 and 2015 Song
apologized for the violence that led to the murder of Bian Zhongyun, thus rendering obsolete any further attempts at "exculpation," whether from her or her friends. Chinese do not argue well.
1. Jie Li, presenter of “China’s Salvation through Women’s Soul? Reception of Documentary Images of Lin Zhao, Chia Ling, and Song Binbin,” N.A.A.S., Brown University. Ms. Li was sent a link to this post and invited to respond.
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