A Million Drops of Blood: "Outside the Spotlights," by Yiyun Zhou

You have so many interesting stories, you have to write them down,” my friends often say. I always answer them, “No, these stories are too Chinese and not Chinese enough at the same time.”
My answer is not just an excuse for my laziness, which I am.
Due to the fact that (ethnic) Chinese, communists or otherwise, who could write in English and got published were more or less from the same background, these stories have been told so many times: a big family of several generations, whose members are generals, politicians, scholars, revolutionaries, artists, etc. Though play different roles, they endured the same events in the 20th. Century China: the Revolution ending two-thousand-year-old Imperial era in 1911, the “May 4th. Movement” led to individualism and women’s emancipation, the Japanese invasion and the War of Resistance, the Chinese part of WWII from 1937 to 1945, the civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists. Then it was the establishment of the People’s Republic, The Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and so on and so forth. My family and friends could barely escape all these; they are, though probably not under the spot lights, but after all actors against these backgrounds. There was no need for me to tell such a family saga once more.
Yet my stories are not Chinese enough, to some western readers at least. Neither of my grandmothers, maternal or paternal grandmother had bound-feet, nor was either of them concubine. Both of them had names to be registered, i.e., official identities, instead of “girl no. X” before getting married and “Mrs. so and so” afterwards. Neither of them was old-fashioned enough to marry my grandfather solely by parents’ arrangement, and they were not modern enough to do so by “free love”. Their marriages were arranged by their parents, who could not do it without their consensus. Both my grandmothers could read newspapers and novels and write a little. Against the marital troubles they suffered, they could blame neither the Age nor social conditions but themselves. They were not interested in study to become independent women, so that they had no choice but dependence on their husbands, who were not always loyal. In short, they found themselves in a transition status.
Everything changed in the summer of 2007. I went to Wuhan, a metropolis in mid China, to celebrate my aunt, my father’s sister’s 80th. birthday. My cousin Hong came from Japan to the same purpose. We shared the same hotel room, and she told me many things I never knew, for example, our great grandmother was a concubine, and presumably had bound feet. My aunt was a great story-teller too. I helped her with typing some family stories into the computer, so I got known even more.
Now, let’s begin with the big family of generations.
I.
At the southeast coast of China, there was a small town called Xiamen in Fujian province. This was a transcription of northern pronunciation; in old days this city was known as Amoy, closer to the local dialect. Amoy was a small town, but for centuries it was a place loved by merchants, poets, heroes, monks, and foreigners. Thanks to the pressure from the nomads in the North, the center of Chinese civilization kept moving down to the South. There were at least three major waves of migration to the South (ca. 310, 755, 1126 AD), and Fujian was one of the places favored by them. Jianzhen (687-763), the monk contributed great to the development of Buddhism in Japan, set off from Amoy. Shortly after Islam came to the world, the Persian and Arabian traders arrived at the city, and settled down here. In The Treaty of Wanghia signed on 3 July 1844 between the Qing Empire and the United States, Amoy was one of the five treaty ports with fixed tariffs and permission to erect churches and hospitals.
In 1897, great news arrived at the Zhou family in the city: two brothers successfully passed the imperial examination at the provincial level and became candidates! The Zhous were an old family that came from central China five hundred years ago. They cause of their migration was unclear, probably was to escape from the turmoil caused by war, but obviously not one of the three major waves. Now they grew up into a big family with several generations under the same roof. They were not rich, but they had a small fortune that was just enough for them to keep being “cultivated”. Hearing the happy news, the whole family, from grandparents to grandchildren, from masters and mistress to servants, were in great joy. The local authority sent them a board with horizontal inscription of “Same family, same year” to congratulate them, commending their appropriation of educating children. To some extent this inscription betokened the Zhous’ destiny; many members of this big family were educators, from university professors to middle school teachers, including me.

My great grandfather
Courtesy to http://www.xmculture.com
Zhou Dianxun (1876-1929), one of the two brothers, was one of the forerunners in this “family of educators”, as the authority today puts it. He was a handsome young man distinguished with extremely bright eyes. As a child he was often teased,”you may hold a contest with the lantern to race that who is brighter; and you will surely win, for your eyes are so bright that can blow it out.”
Before reaching twenty, he was pointed a leader in charge of administration at Yuping School in 1885. From 1904 he began to engage in charity works, while teaching at a middle school (since 1908).
13 years after his success with examination at the provincial level, he passed it at the highest level in the Forbidden City. As a first class candidate he was appointed a position of section chief in the Board of Civil Office, one of the Six Boards whose tradition can be traced back to the Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD).
Although he was not particularly late-developed, his real success came a bit too late. One year after his appointment, the Emperor was overthrown by the Revolution in 1911. The two-thousand- year history of the Six Boards came to an end; they were, so to speak, reorganized into ministries, and hundreds of thousands revolutionaries were waiting for the positions in them. Although enlightenment minded, he himself was more a classic scholar than modern and he could hardly compete with the students coming back from Europe, America, and Japan. Perhaps he also kept in mind the traditional moral principle that a gentleman does not serve two regimes; when the Emperor was gone, he could not work for the next, no matter the title changed into President, Chairman, or General Commissar. So he quit his position and went back to his hometown Amoy, picked up his career as a teacher, and went on till the end of his day.
At home, there were a wife, two concubines, and four children from three mothers waiting for him. The wife was his second. The first one was from a well-off background and married him with two servant girls as parts of her dowager. One of the servant girls became concubine when turned fifteen. In 1900, she gave birth to a son, my grandfather, Zhou Shouxi (Youmo, 1900-80). In the same year, the wife also gave birth to a daughter, and died shortly afterwards.
As there were more granduncles and grandaunts on their way, I have to give an explanation of the Chinese seniority system. There were two ways of seniority of siblings: the major and the minor, and both numbered boys and girls separately. The minor was closer to the modern way, i.e., to number the children from the same father in success of their birth, though boys and girls were numbered separately. The major would put all the brothers’ children together to number them in success of their birth. The Zhou family used the major. My great grandfather was Nr.5 among his brothers, who already had 9 sons and 7 daughters, so his eldest son and daughter were numbered 10 and 8 respectively.
My great grandmother took care of the wife’s daughter, my Nr.8 grandaunt as her own, and gave birth to a second son in 1906, my Nr.14 granduncle, Zhou Shoukai (Youyan, 1906-70). As a well behaved mother of two sons, she might have a hazy hope deep in her heart: one day she would become the wife. To her great disappointment, my great grandfather married a young lady from nice family, and she was passed off.
She fell seriously ill. On her deathbed, she called my grandfather in, and took a little bag from beneath pillow. There were several hundred copper coins in the bag. She handed the bag to my grandfather, saying, “This is my private saving, and I don’t have much to give you. Take good care of your brother. He is so young and will become motherless.” “Yes, mom,” my grandfather said, with tears in his eyes, “I’ll surely take good care of my little brother.”
The young woman died, left two boys of eight and two, and the copper coins become their funds. She was twenty-seven or twenty-eight. Nobody knew her precise age. She had a name, though. Her name was Xiang, meaning fragrance, my great grandmother.
II.
My great grandfather perhaps made a right decision, after all. He married a lady, instead of raising a former servant girl, my (biological) great grandmother to the status of wife. His second wife was as elegant as her name, Qiongyao, meaning a kind of jade. This way of indicating jade was an allusion from The Book of Songs, the oldest surviving collection of poems, attributed to Confucius’ selection and complement. Qionyao gave birth to a boy who did not survive his infancy, and never had any child ever since. However, she was regarded the Mother of my grandfather and granduncles and grandaunts, the grandmother of my father’s generation, as well as the great grandmother of mine.
From contemporary point of view, it was a violation of mother’s rights from the concubines’ part, but tradition had its balance. The deprivation of mother’s right was made up with equal right of children, regardless their biological mothers’ status. In contrast the European tradition of primogeniture, the Chinese one was that every (male) child was entitled to an equal share of inheritance. This balance derived, in part at least, from the wife’s monopoly of mother’s rights.
Viewing from the up growth of my grandfather and his siblings, the Mother must have been a wise woman. If their beautiful calligraphy, literature cultivation could attributed to their father, their warm kindness, the will to help, and so on, were definitely from their Mother. As the Harvard Professor Tu Wei-ming once said, in classic China, it was the mother, who was in charge of carrying on the moral tradition.
My grandfather was a brilliant student at school, and did every subject well. When he was about to graduate, an American teacher offered him the opportunity to study at the University of Chicago. He hurried home in excitement to tell his father this great news, expecting appreciation. To his disappointment, his father showed no sign of happiness. “I have no money to support such a project,” my great grandfather said.
“There is no need for money,” my grandfather said, still in hope, “my teacher will apply for a scholarship, and everything will be paid when it’s done.”
“True enough,” my great grandfather said, “but in that case you will not be able to make money for several years. You will soon turn twenty, and you have to take responsibility for your younger brothers and sisters.”
Everyone could see this urgency: the family kept growing. Besides my (biological) great grandmother, my great grandfather had two concubines, who gave birth to my granduncles Nr. 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 and grandaunts Nr. 11, 12, 13, plus grandaunt Nr. 8 from the first wife, my grandfather (Nr.10) and his brother (Nr. 14), eleven in all!
“Yes, dad,” my grandfather said. He was an obedient young man. The oldest son in China had far more responsibilities, no privilege.
So my grandfather gave up any hope of higher education, and started working after finishing schooling.
Probably because of his earlier experience, my grandfather was somehow reluctant to support his children’s interests outside school. He turned down, in turn, the request of my father for buying radio parts, of my aunt for piano class, and my uncle for singing class. (They later became engineer, economic historian, and biologist respectively.) “I promise you, all of you, to support your university education,” he said, “that’s good enough. Don’t ask for too much.”
To be fair to my grandfather, his sacrifice was not a little one. He was a brilliant student; he could become a distinguished scholar, as several brothers did. Every granduncle or grandaunt I met said to me among first things, “Your grandpa sacrificed himself for us younger brothers and sisters’ sake.” This sacrifice meant more after 1949.
As for his work itself, my grandfather did well. As mentioned above Amoy was an old trade port with a long tradition of migration, both in and out, and people remained at home had countless connections with outside world, mostly southeastern Asia. My grandfather found jobs with ease in Indonesia and the Philippines at banks owned by ethnic Chinese.
My great grandfather’s economic burden was soon released, but not solely thanks to the money made by my grandfather.

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

Open Magazine of Hong Kong will be publishing the series of articles written under the above heading in its May issue. I thank the editors of Open. The publication is due entirely to the efforts of Youqin Wang, Rongfen Wang, and Bei Su Nei. All three took it upon themselves to translate the articles into Chinese. Youqin and Rongfen successfully lobbied the editors of Open for publication. Bei Su Nei, who I did not know previously, read the articles on duping. net and took it upon herself to aid in the translation.

I have written here previously of Youqin and Rongfen. They are, and have been all of their lives, giants in the struggle for China's history. It is embarrassing to me that such as they have helped me. I think it was Newton who paid tribute to his Youqin and Rongfen by saying that he stood on the shoulders of giants. I cannot think of how to express my gratitude in original terms and so adopt his.

A Million Drops of Blood: "Our Days in Red Terror," by Ye Weiyou

My Paternal Grandparents

My paternal grandfather Ye Chong-Zhi （alternative name Ye Wenqiao）,with his ancestors in Anhui Province (the mid-south of China),lived in the late Qing Dynasty (1644-1908,the last feudal dynasty in China), having experienced two tiles of emperor's reign: Guangxu and Xuantong. Grandpa came from a 4-line of officials, the highest being like a state governor of the U.S.Fearing the terrible persecution (chopping head) even to those who just sympathized with the reformists in imperial court,Grandfather found an excuse and quit his official position:head of the Public Security Bureau of Hebei Province.Soon he started to run industries with a position in his two banks, chairman of the board.

Grandfather married three women. His first parent-arranged bound-foot wife #1 grandmother Cang was of equal socioeconomic status with her hometown in Jinan, the capital of Shangdong Province. While flying a kite, Cang had an abortion and became barren ever since. In feudal society of China a doctrine was among the three unfilial things having no offspring is number one. A young girl Liu came from a poor family in Henan Province. After a severe flood, Liu was sold to a rich family in Tianjin as a maid (Tianjin is a port city near Beijing). The lady in the rich family happened to be my great-grandmother's friend. #1 grandmother Cang often accompanied my great-grandma to the lady's for mahjong(a game of Chinese origin played with tiles resembling dominoes)One day, while playing the game, Great-grandma found Liu there and asked about her background. The adoptive mother told everything true about the girl except her age: she was then 14 but was said 16.Great-grandmother often saw her there and came to like the girl. Then she decided to buy Liu for my grandfather as a concubine to continue the family tree.

#2 Grandma Liu soon was pregnant but did not show any sign in a month. Soon, on a business trip in Henan Province, Grandpa got to know a pretty Beijing Opera actress Chen who played a male's role in the opera. After hearing about Chen's poor life experience, Grandpa sympathized and fell in love with her. Having made sure that Chen was selling just her singing not body, Grandpa decided to marry Chen as a second concubine but dared not bring her home for the poor social status--actresses, particularly poor ones, were just above prostitutes. Fortunately, a month after living together, hen conceived a child and this made Grandpa very happy and bold enough to write home immediately.

Great-grandma agreed to accept Chen and allowed his son to bring her home at once though by then Liu also proved in a family.#3 Grandma Chen was about two years older than Liu.Interesting enough, the two women's first five kids were born in the same year and of the same sex with their first baby being both female. Thus the two humble-origin women produced for the family 14 offspring in all, each of them had five boys and two girls. The ten boys and four girls were ranked by sex in two groups. Chen was my grandma, #3 grandmother.
#2 Grandmother Liu's first girl was a couple of months older than my grandmother’s first girl. She was adopted by Cang and became the family's treasure. When she died at the age of three, Great-grandmother attempted a suicide by striking her head to the wall! The two concubines’ second child were both boys.#1 uncle was Liu's while #2 uncle was my grandmother Chen's. Her first daughter, my poor #2 Aunt was disdained by great-grandmother as she suspected the girl's blood lineage

As the 2nd boy in Ye ancestors' families tended to live short, when 2# uncle reached the age of 6 or 7,he was rearranged to number 8 after the newly born #7 Uncle. Unfortunately, the reranked boy (#2 uncle) couldn’t avoid an early death either. He died at the age 7---another grief storm in the family...My father, ranked #3,is Chen's second boy, and #6,#7 and #9 (originally ranked 8) were all her sons. My grandma’s first daughter, my poor #2 Aunt died young as a result of being bullied by her husband, a landlord's son. He forced her to watch while making love with a maid. Grandma’s second daughter my #3 aunt died of stroke in 1980.Her husband was not good either: taking opium. All Liu's children died except her youngest girl, my #5 Aunt, 87 years old, in Shanghai. Her kind husband, a famous translator lived to see Mao's death, predicting a great change in China. Concubines' children in a feudal Chinese family had to call their own mother aunt, while call their father's first wife mother. The same unfair rule in my grandfather's family.

With her low position in the family, my grandma was sort of discriminated. Her brother was not allowed to talk with her inside the house but just at the gate, so her father never came. And her children were also treated less well than #2 grandmother Liu's. My grandma tried to tolerate all this but occasionally vented her grievances on Father and asked him to take her out of the family after he graduated from Yanjing University (the predecessor of today's Beijing University, a missionary school run by the last American ambassador before 1950) Father had great pity on his mother and, while tapping her legs to relieve her pain, he once again promised to make her dream come true.

Family Ye was then very famous in Hebei Province, especially in the city of Tianjin, for their achievements in industries and great generosity to their servants, friends and particularly the poor around. At the peak of the family, there were about forty servants in the large house including wet nurses for each grandchild’s birth. Grandpa never demanded any receipt for a loan. Whenever there was a natural disaster, he and his mother/our great-grandma would give out grain and relief fund to the needed. Grandpa died quickly of stroke at the age of 58 as a result of his carriage accident. Then Father was still in Tianjin Nankai High School, one of the very few top missionary schools in China. About a month after Grandpa’s death, my father received admission notice from both Yanjing and Qinghua University(in comparison to Oxford and Cambridge in Britain)Yangjing admitted Father due to recommendation by his high school for his excellence in his studies while Qinghua admitted him after an examination. When Grandpa’s safe was unlocked after his death, instead of a great fortune they supposed to find, there were quite a few receipts since he never pressed for repayment of debts. No wonder Grandpa Ye Wen-qiao was known as philanthropist in Tianjin. Since early childhood all the boys had been imbued by Grandparents with the spirit of self-achievement: never rely on family properties. And Grandpa encouraged them to study natural sciences, thinking only this could save China.

While paying great attention to his sons' education, Grandpa didn't let his daughters go to school as he believed in another feudal doctrine: having little talent and learning is a female's virtue. So except #5 Aunt, the youngest girl in the family, all the other four girls had little literacy as Grandpa just let the half-illiterate sewing women servants teach them. In Grandpa's eyes, it was good enough for a woman to be able to write a simple letter reporting her safety to her husband when she got married. A female in a feudal eastern society was always dependent: obeying her father before marriage, then her husband and finally her oldest son after her husband died. When living with my #3 Aunt in the same Chinese house (a compound with houses around a courtyard), my mother often taught her Chinese characters.

After Grandfather's sudden death in 1920s, with limited wealth, the family began to decline, which made Father, his full brothers and two half brothers, #1 and #5 uncles, work even harder at school with a determination to have a good future for themselves and for their disaster-ridden nation. Number Three Aunt, my Grandma Chen's second daughter, fell ill with TB, which was almost incurable in those years. One day, when combing hair for that favorite girl, Grandma prayed to deity with the words to a crow in a tree Oh, god, let me catch the disease and save my daughter. If you hear me, please make the crow cry three times. At this, she heard the crow wa,wa,wa. Coincidentally, Grandma soon caught TB and got worse and worse while my #3 Aunt fully recovered. In the momentary recovery of consciousness just before death, Grandma struggled
to kneel on her bed and asked the supreme lady Cang what she was allowed to wear after death. Number One
Grandma Cang, with some mercy, said that she could wear red skirt since she made some contribution to the family by having produced and brought up both girls and boys. Red skirt in the old days of feudal China was a symbol of a first wife, not a concubine. Hearing this, Grandmother was touched to tears and said with a faint smile: Thank you, Madame and left the world sort of satisfied.

My father grieved so much over his mother's death that he, in order to invite her soul return,
according to a superstitious saying, fasted three days with his eyes closed and his mind deeply meditating. But nothing happened. That painful trying in vain may have reinforced his atheism. My poor grandmother didn't live to see Father's graduation and failed to wait for the day: being taken out of the house of humiliation and staying with her favorite son in another place.#1 Grandmother Cang died second of I don't know what disease.#2 Grandmother Liu was shocked to death in 1966,the start of the Cultural Revolution, by the Red Guards who rooted her apartment and forced her to kneel in front of the household building, shouting with angry and insulting words...Except #2 Uncle who died too young, none of our grandmother Chen's other four sons,Father,#6,#7 and #9 uncles, failed to live up to her expectations--winning honour for her when they grew up. All of them, though having suffered in different way with the nation's lot, have done pretty well either in social or in natural sciences, and all have a long and respected life. My father and #6 Uncle died in 2004 and 2005 after several years of hemiplegia.#7 & #9 Uncles are still alive today though the latter,#9 Uncle also caught the disease of hemiplegia two years ago, in 2006.

A Million Drops of Blood; Individual Chinese Histories Under Mao : Poem by Ye Weiyou

Introduction

Maoist China produced an ocean of blood. That ocean is comprised of a million drops of blood, each with a name and a face. If Maoist China and its successor regimes have their way that ocean will remain anonymous. But there are those, like Youqin Wang, Xu Weixin, and Hu Jie, who will give name to each of those million drops of blood.

This series presents the stories of some of those million drops, of those who are gone, and those who survived to tell their own stories.

-BH

MOURNING OF BROTHER YE WEI-ZUO


( I )


Is it a nightmare?
Far from a nightmare.
Brother is still swimming there
In the big lake he loves
Having no fatigue and fear.
He's swimming in every style
Without any danger.

Is it a nightmare?
By no means a nightmare.
Brother is flying high over there.
The righteous man is saved by the Lord
Having been baptized in the lake water.
He is staying with kind angels
Under God's care.

Is it a nightmare?
Not in the least a nightmare.
Brother is speaking to me in the air:
“Please stop grieving and smile,
For I am so happy in Paradise here.
You'll come and join me someday
In the near future"



( II )


It is like a dream,but not a dream,
Down my cheeks warm tears stream.
The good grief is sure to pass clean,
On Brother's salvation I will beam.

For my nation and my faith I'll fight,
By working hard from morning till night.
When I have some time to relax,
Reminiscing Brotherly love brings me delight.

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

A person’s mentality is of central importance in the criminal law. It is important as applied to victims, witnesses, and perpetrators. Many rape cases turn on the mentality of the victim: did she consent to sex? A witness’s credibility is undermined if (s)he has a bias (a mental state) toward one side or the other.

For this reason the characterizations of mentality made by those who I interviewed in Beijing, and of others in books and articles, have been of particular significance because the Great Wall of Silence concerns a crime, the murder of Bian Zhongyun.

As important as it is as applied to victims and witnesses, the mentality of the perpetrator is the fulcrum of criminal responsibility under law. Previous articles have examined the mentality of the victim and witnesses in Teacher Bian’s murder. This article examines the mentality of the perpetrators, which is called mens rea, from the Latin.

A particular mens rea can vitiate culpability entirely. For example, a toddler who picks up his father’s gun and shoots a playmate is not held criminally responsible. There is an irrebuttable legal presumption that one so young does not know the nature and consequences of his actions.

The mens rea is also what differentiates degrees of seriousness of the same crime. The mens rea for First-degree murder is “premeditation.” If premeditation is not proved then a lesser degree of unlawful homicide, with a different mens rea, may exist, but the mens rea for the crime charged must be proven before a person can be convicted of that crime. However, as the example of the toddler above was meant to illustrate, the mental capacity of the perpetrator to commit any crime is sometimes in question.

Mr. Wang said that Chinese under Mao had a “slavish mentality.” Others have used the same, or similar, terminology. Dr. Li Zhisui described Zhou Enlai as Mao’s “slave” (1) and “dog” (2). Jung Chang has written that Chinese were “programmed” by Mao. (3) An “obedient” mentality and a “please” mentality are terms that others and I have thought about. “Crazy,” and “insane” are terms that have been used to describe the general mentality during the Cultural Revolution and of individuals, such as Mao. (4)

Ma Jisen’s characterizations were particularly intriguing because the words she used have specific meaning in criminal law:

[Mao’s various purges and campaigns] had carried with them the reversal of what many believed to be right or wrong. (5)
Thus all those taking part in the work [against the “May 16 Clique”] must give up any inclination to think for themselves and restrict themselves to obeying the leadership. (6)
From the very start of the Cultural Revolution, ideas of right and wrong were turned upside down (7)

Right and wrong during Mao's time was totally distorted. (8)

Mao's idea of right and wrong was different from that of the universal value and common sense. (9)

During the CR, all the right and wrong were messed up. (10)

You may say these persons, Red Guards, rebels, or other revolutionaries, didn't know what they did was wrong. On the contrary, they thought and were thought by some others to be doing revolutionary deeds. They were not torturing human being, but class enemy. (11)

People were educated to be kind to people of revolutionary classes, while be ruthless to class enemies. (12)
The Gang [of Four], like Mao himself, might not kill or torture anyone by their own hands, but they were the sources of the crime by their ideas, speeches, orders...(13)
Before proceeding further, it is critical to note two things: One, these characterizations are those of “normal” people (i.e. non-lawyers) in normal intercourse, i.e. general conversation or non-legal books. Second, these characterizations are general: they are of the Chinese people, not of a particular individual. Criminal law, whether international or national, applies to individuals. Jiang Qing was on trial in 1980, not the Chinese people. It was her mental state (“just following orders”) that was at issue, not that of Chinese. Adolph Eichmann was on trial in 1962, not the German people. It was Eichmann’s mental state (“just following orders”) that was at issue, not the mentality of Germans.

This is not a criminal trial but an article on an historic event that was a crime and which historic event is being examined from the perspective of the criminal law. The specific mental characteristics of an individual Red Guard cannot be presented as they would in an actual trial. For this article, characterizations like those above, and those below, will be used to construct a generic mens rea of “Red Guard.”

The characterizations above implicate two legal defenses only one of which, that below, applies to murder:

Red Guard is not guilty if she can prove by clear and convincing evidence that:
1. She had a mental infirmity, disease, or defect, and
2. Because of this condition:
A. She did not know what she was doing or its consequences, or
B. She did not know that it was wrong.

Even if Red Guard believed that what she was doing was morally right she is still guilty if she knew that what she was doing violated societal standards or was against the law.

All persons are presumed to know what they are doing and its consequences and all are presumed to know right from wrong. Red Guard must prove by clear and convincing evidence that she did not know what she was doing or its consequences or did not know that it was wrong.
Unrestrained passion or ungovernable temper is not a defense under law, even though the normal judgment of the person is overcome by passion or temper.

1. Dr. Li Zhisui. The Private Life of Chairman Mao. 2582. Ibid. 470.3. Jung Chang. Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China. 6334. A good reference work of the scholarly literature on a “Chinese mentality” is Guo Wu’s “Injured Self-Image: Rethinking the Critique of Chinese National Character as an Intellectual Discourse,” in The Chinese Historical Review, 14, no. 2, (Fall 2007): 266.
5. Ma Jisen. The Cultural Revolution in the Foreign Ministry of China (hereinafter “Foreign Ministry”). p.166. Ibid. 2727. Ibid. 4058. Ma Jisen. Personal communication with author.
9. Ibid.10. Ibid.11. Ibid.12. Ibid.13. Ibid.

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

Mr. Wang’s family had vigorously objected to him meeting with me at all. “Do not let him get involved in your personal dispute!” was what I was told they had said to him. At one point, after I had made my airline reservations, they had succeeded in getting him to cancel the meeting. Now on the afternoon of the 28th I was meeting with him for the third time. Ye Weiyou again was our translator.


Mr. Wang told me that the call the previous night was from one of the Red Guard students at the school at the time. He said that the caller told him the last name of one of the girls who had participated in the beating. Mr. Wang told me that he had suspected this girl and tried to confirm the identity by her first name, but the caller denied that the girl was the one Mr. Wang had suspected.


Mr. Wang had brought some photographs with him to show me. The photographs had been taken a few years ago when he had hosted Weili Ye and Liu Jin in his apartment. As I looked at the photographs I asked Mr. Wang why they had wanted to meet with him, but what I really wanted to know was why he would want to meet with them.


Liu Jin had been one of the leaders of the Red Guards who had murdered Mr. Wang’s wife, one of those who had presented Mr. Wang with the “official” document on Bian’s “death.” She was the one who had informed the students the next day over the loud speaker,


“Bian Zhongyun is dead. That’s it. There’s no reason to talk about it.”


In the conversation that followed Mr. Wang said, “In China, human relationships are more important than human life.”

As foreign as that was to this foreigner personally, I told Mr. Wang that I understood the sentiment. I was thinking of something similar that I had heard a number of times in my job.


A lot of murders are committed in families or among friends. The victim, the perpetrator, and the witnesses all know each other and are close. When the murder occurs, they call the police of course. But after their loved one or friend has been in jail for a while awaiting trial, the mentality develops, “So-and-so is gone, we can’t bring him back. We have to look after the living now.” That is what I had thought about when I told Mr. Wang that I understood his statement.


When I got back to the States I pondered Mr. Wang’s statement further. He was not related to Weili or Liu. I found it utterly implausible that they had become friends over the years. And Mr. Wang had not used the word “friends,” that was my interpretation of what he meant. He had used the word “relationships.”


I tried to fit every variety of “human relationships” that I could think of into his statement but still couldn’t make sense of it.


Finally, I went back to the source. What Mr. Wang had meant was that “common Chinese” know that they have to keep up good relations with the privileged classes, or at least not offend them. He also felt that this mentality was why witnesses to Bian’s murder would not come forward.


It was the “slavish mentality” again, and the “please mentality” variant in the third meeting and Mr. Wang’s wish to provide me with information that he knew I wanted.


This was my last meeting with him and in the back of my mind I still wondered if he had something important to tell me. Perhaps he hadn’t told me in the first meeting because he was nervous or afraid, and then afterwards regretted it and asked for the second meeting, and the cycle then repeated itself. So I decided to ask an open-ended question with a wistful beginning.


“Mr. Wang this is the last time that I will ever see you. You and I aren’t getting any younger. Is there anything else that you want to tell me?” Ms. Ye translated.


“Benjamin, do you think that I am going to die soon?”


We all laughed. I asked the question different ways a couple of more times but he didn’t tell me anything more. So we just chatted as friends. He said that he wanted the two of us to write a book together. I was touched but I couldn’t help but think that maybe in part this was what he and everyone else had in mind when they asked me, “Why are you doing this?” Because I wanted to write a book, or make a movie, become famous, make money. I told him I’d be happy to.


Mr. Wang saw us to the door. We shook hands, and I embraced him. This is the last time that I will see this extraordinary man, I thought to myself. We were on the fourth floor of a walkup. I took my leave of him and walked down the first flight of stairs. I stepped onto the third floor landing.


“Benjamin.” I turned around and looked up at him. He was smiling just as broadly as he was the first day I met him in Ms. Ma’s apartment.


“Benjamin, see you again.”

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

The next day, November 28, was my last full day in Beijing. I had no meetings scheduled, but hoped to acquire one, with Song Binbin. That night Ye Weiyou called again. Mr. Wang wanted to meet with me again. I enjoyed spending time with Mr. Wang immensely and always learned something. We arranged to meet in the afternoon, after my attempted rendezvous with Song.

I went incognito. Before leaving on the trip, I had gone to a costume shop in Washington and picked out a disguise: a fake mustache, big round black-rimmed glasses, a fedora, and a cane to hobble about on. I wore my hair un-gelled to further alter my appearance. I certainly had succeeded in that, but instead of the distinguished, older, enfeebled, gentleman I had envisioned invoking a moment's sympathy in Song and giving me my opening, I looked like a guy who had gone to a costume shop.

My un-gelled hair was too long for the fedora and curled beneath the rim. The glasses were unnaturally big. The mustache glue gave a little every time I moved my facial muscles. I was afraid it was going to drop and hang from one end in the manner of a character in a slap-stick comedy.

Song's office was in Beijing, my hotel was in Beijing, so with no thought whatsoever to the distance between the two I hopped into a cab. The distance was great. It was about 9 am, morning rush hour. We crawled along the highways, the minutes passed, and the meter kept running, and I had to go to the bathroom. Nervous perspiration beaded on my forehead and upper lip, loosening the mustache glue. We kept driving. The cab driver got lost. Twice. And had to stop to ask for directions. "Tibet, Next Exit," the thought flashed through my mind. Did I have enough yuan to get from wherever I ended up and back to the hotel?

At 11 am, two hours after I had left the hotel, I finally alighted that cab in front of Song Binbin's building with a stiff back, a thin wallet, a mustache of uncertain adhesion, and a full bladder.

I went into a nearby restaurant to use the facilities. The restaurant was not quite open but the hostess showed me to a table. I ordered a pot of green tea. And went to the men's room.

I returned to my table and began drinking the tea. The steam was having a deleterious effect on the mustache glue so I took out Ma Lisen's book and read while the tea cooled.

As I was reading, the manager called out something in a loud voice. The staff came scurrying. They gathered round and the manager addressed them, giving them some sort of instructions it was clear. At one point the staff responded in unison. I looked and caught the eye of one young staff member who looked away sheepishly. I remembered seeing the same thing once at the hotel. A little later there was a second response in unison.

The staff didn't sit while the manager addressed them, they stood. They stood, not exactly in military formation, but in an orderliness and with body language that was "regimental."

It seemed to me (I don't know for certain because I do not understand Chinese) that the meeting was part inspirational and that the unified response was group affirmance of the ideal expounded, something like,

Manager: "THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT!"
Staff: "THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT!"

The purpose of the meeting was not, I am quite sure, limited to informing staff of the daily specials. To an American observer the regimented nature of these sessions was unusual (American manager: "THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT!" American staff: "ONLY WHEN HE'S A BIG TIPPER!"), and I think the staff member whose eye I had caught knew that I thought it was unusual.

I finished my tea, paid the check, and went to the men's room for one last mustache adjustment.

Song's building was just around the corner, the omnipresent manned guard station at the entrance. Emboldened by the experience that Carmen and I had with the guards at Bian's school, I confidently walked up to the guard in my clown outfit and showed him the piece of paper with the address. He pointed to the building entrance.

The doors were the standard double-glass and entered into the linoleum-tiled elevator waiting area. There were two elevators with standard metal doors. It was a standard building in every respect.

The elevators delivered me directly to the waiting area of Song's office. It had the look of a front, not a real office. There was no one in the waiting area and no one behind the drab linoleum desk when I first entered. Within moments a receptionist came from around the corner. I showed her my Public Occurrences business card and told her that I was here to see Song Binbin. She picked up the phone.

"No, Song's not going to come walking around the corner, is she? It can't be this easy," I thought to myself. The receptionist spoke into the phone, there was brief conversation, and then she gave the phone to me. A young man identified himself as Ms. Song's Assistant in the pleasant voice appropriate to Assistants.

I identified myself and explained that I was there to interview Song for Public Occurrences. He said that she was not in. I asked him where she was. I asked in a tone of slight annoyance that I thought he would find authentic for an American in the situation. He replied, in the tone of solicitous concern that I had expected, that he would call her.

He picked up another phone and tried to reach Song. After several seconds He got back on the phone with me and said that she was not answering. "Where is she, I have an appointment to interview her?" "I'm sorry, Mr. Harris, she may be at her apartment in downtown Beijing. I will give you her cell phone number."

"No, he's not going to give me her cell phone number," I thought, but he did. He asked me if I had an appointment with her and, stupidly, I said that I did, for 11:00am. Song then called back. "That is her now, Mr. Harris, one moment please."

Assistant: "...(unintelligible Chinese)...Benjamin Harris..."

Song: "Benjamin who?" (gleaned from context)

Assistant: "Harris...(unintelligible Chinese)"

Song: "What does he want?"(gleaned from context)

Assistant: "He says he has an appointment with you." (gleaned from context)

Song: "I don't have an appointment with anyone at 11."

Assistant: "Mr. Harris, she says she didn't have an appointment with you."

Me: (in appropriately annoyed tone of American but realizing I had blundered in claiming that I had an appointment). "I emailed her from the States and set up this time for the interview with her," continuing my blunder.

The assistant and Song spoke.

Assistant: "She says that she had no appointment with you Mr. Harris. She is currently at the hospital with her mother."

Me: (seeing a way out of my blunder on the appointment). "Well, if she's at the hospital with her mother I can understand how she could have forgotten about the appointment. That's understandable. If it is all right I will leave my business card here at the front desk and we can reschedule."

Assistant: "Yes sir, please do. What was it that you wanted to interview her about, Mr. Harris?"

Me: "I'm doing a story on the Girls Middle School that she attended. It is one of the best schools in China, as I am sure you are aware. The school has named Song a distinguished alumnus and I wanted to interview her about one of her teachers, Bian Zhongyun."

Assistant: "What was the name again, Mr. Harris?"

Me: "BIAN ZHONGYUN." (authoritative tone).

Assistant and Song then talked.

Assistant: "Ms. Song will not talk to you about that Mr. Harris."

Me: "Why?"

Assistant: "She does not wish to speak to you, Mr. Harris."

I gave the receptionist my business card and left, satisfied, that I had at least made Song Binbin know that I knew where she was and wouldn't give up investigating Bian's murder.

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

I asked Mr. Gao what he thought when he heard that Mao had died.

“An era ended."

In context I understood Mr. Gao to mean that madness and violence was finally over. Others have expressed similar views. Ms. Ma told me that “the root cause [of the violence] lay with Mao’s CR ideas and policy,” and she and others saw the beginning of a new, bright era,

The disaster of the CR taught the Chinese people the importance of universal values like human rights, democracy, freedom and equality.

We took Kitty back to Renmin with us in our cab. Her boyfriend at university had come from the countryside and had grown up very poor. She was very proud of how far he had come.

I asked her what she thought of China’s future. “I am very proud of my country,” she said in her soft voice. She then spoke at length and with great knowledge of the inequality between city and countryside, of how workers come from the countryside, do the same work as city dwellers, but are paid less by the government. The discrimination against country folk is well-known and of ancient practice in China. I asked her why she thought her government would do that. Her response indicated that the communist government of China had adopted a tactic of exploitative capitalists. “People in the country are so poor, and the wages that the government does pay are so much greater than what they can make in the country, that the government can get away with paying them less.”

One of the most memorable exchanges I had with anyone in Beijing occurred with Kitty in that cab. I asked her what the Chinese people thought of the election of Barack Obama as president. Kitty was sitting to my left. There was a brief pause and then she turned and looked at me with her big eyes and said, “It is a miracle.”

She said that it had been inconceivable to Chinese that a black man could ever be elected president given America’s history of slavery and racial discrimination. She told me that Chinese students are taught in middle school to memorize Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech.

Kitty had made me proud of my own country.

The night of the 26th was when Ye Youyi called me to say that Mr. Wang wanted to meet again because he “has something to tell you.”

Carmen was right, there was no naming of names, but I learned more about whey there was no naming of names. I think I also learned much more.

The venue for the second interview of Mr. Wang had to be changed because of a logistical snafu. The surreal alternative setting was the waiting area of a Bally’s fitness center. Tape-recording this session was hampered by the pump-you-up background music so I took notes as a backup.

After my first interview with Mr. Wang I made it a point to ask others for their thoughts on individual responsibility. I asked indirect and open-ended questions to guard against being told what people thought I wanted to hear. Mr. Wang and I were talking about Mao’s responsibility for the Cultural Revolution violence and the effect on individual Chinese. He said to me that Chinese have a “slavish mentality." I started at the phrase because I had read others using similar phraseology. (1) I had once begun to write an article on it, my formulation was "slave's mentality." Mr. Wang also said that he thought that the slavish mentality was changing.

I do not think that Mr. Wang spoke literally, that all Chinese have a slavish mentality. We speak more simplistically than we really mean.

Human beings are complex things. Societies are more complex. The earliest of our species recognized the utility of simplifying the complex in order to understand. We continue to utilize the tool of simplification but most of us realize that its powerful attraction can pull us far off the path of understanding and onto that of misunderstanding.

Simplifying and simplistic both have the same root.

But neither imprecise speech nor the pitfalls of simplification should deter us from using a construct that truly does contribute to understanding.

Maoist China had characteristics of a slave state. Literal slavery did exist. Mao’s regime may have been the most totalitarian regime in human history. The extraordinary oppressiveness and the constant attempts at thought control help to explain how one could walk to the gallows without protest, or watch one’s wife walk to her death without intervening.

However, simplifying Maoist China by calling it a slave state is simplistic. The control of the master over the slave is more personal, the danger of disobedience more immediate; the slave has even less freedom, and no opportunity for advancement out of his position.

There was a subtle but significant distinction between the two formulations of the idea. My word was “slave;” Mr. Wang’s was “slavish,” “slave-like.” His was much better.

The effects of oppression are not uniform. A victim (Bian) is affected one way, the loved one of a victim (Mr. Wang) another. Perpetrators (Red Guards), uninvolved witnesses to violence, the state, and the general populace are all affected differently.

The first time that I went to Beijing in 2006 I was astonished at how western the city looked and how western was the behavior of the residents. Deng Xiaoping had said “To be rich is glorious,” and by God Beijingers sure seemed fully committed to the glory of getting rich.

How could this be in a country that had been arch-communist under Mao, where even Russian communism was considered “revisionist?” How could people so suddenly and completely shift from hatred of capitalists to being uber capitalists? Because the leading authority figure in the country had said so. A “slavish mentality” produces obedience. This, I suggest, helps explain the abrupt one hundred eighty degree turn.

A key corollary follows: If Mao was obeyed because he was the leading authority figure in the country and Deng was obeyed because he was the leading authority figure in the country then Beijingers were communists then and are capitalists now out of obedience, not out of commitment to the ideals of communism or the benefits of capitalism.

Ye Youyi once said to me with disappointment and disapproval, “Chinese don’t think for themselves, Ben.”

Where there is oppression one would also expect to find passivity and passive-aggressiveness. An author has made the observation that Chinese are neither confrontational nor argumentative. I would offer up the behavior of urban motorists as an excellent index of aggression among a people.

New York City taxi cab drivers will cut you off, honk their horns obnoxiously to get you to move (when there’s no place for you to move), and will get out of their cars and scream at you if you want to argue. “Road rage” is well known among ordinary drivers in the U.S. Many people have been murdered for the offense of cutting another driver off in traffic.

Beijing taxi drivers are as aggressive as their Manhattan brethren. However, they rarely honk their horns. I have thought on many occasions that a collision with another vehicle or a pedestrian was imminent but the Beijing drivers seem to have some secret Chinese anti-collision device planted somewhere. If there is such a device it is not connected to the ocular nerves however. They don’t look at each other, classic body language of the passive. Drivers don’t look at other drivers or pedestrians and pedestrians don’t look at drivers. But somehow, and often at the last possible opportunity, doom is averted. And the result of these near misses is never road rage.

Chinese have a reputation for being polite and my experience is consistent with that. I have communicated with a good number of Chinese in the Great Wall of Silence project. No one has ever been argumentative. All of this would seem to be good: no road rage, no traffic accidents, no arguments.

However there are downsides. I read somewhere that one has to be careful when interviewing Chinese people because they are so conditioned to say whatever they think their interviewer wants to hear. Agreement negates confrontation, which precludes punishment. Agreement of this kind requires no thought.

I would suggest a “please mentality” as the term to apply to those conditioned by oppression to agree or please. I think that Mr. Wang said he wanted to tell me something because he knew that it would please me.

During the American civil rights movement northern white volunteers went into the Deep South to register African-Americans to vote. The former slaves or descendants of slaves would unfailingly accept the registration forms enthusiastically and promise to fill them out and mail them in. Civil rights workers were therefore astonished when few new eligible voters showed up on the registration rolls. The oppression of Jim Crow conditioned them to avoid anything that could lead to a confrontation with white people. They followed up on the avoidance with the passive-aggressive behavior of not registering to vote to avoid confrontation with Southern whites.

Wouldn't a please mentality also be consistent with the Chinese government's actions vis a vis the Beijing Olympics? The government badly wanted the imprimatur of world approval that conferring the games on Beijing symbolized. They remade the city, bull-dozed the hutongs and replaced them with modern buildings. They had artifically reduced air pollution by shutting down factories and restricting the driving of ordinary Beijingers. They instructed Beijingers to smile, not expectorate, and taught them this amount of English (while smiling): "Welcome to Beijing."

The Chinese government did all of this to please, to please the International Olympic Committee, and foreign visitors.

These are all gross generalizations. One can not talk or write seriously about a Chinese mentality. However, I would suggest that there is a sense in which one can seriously talk or write about an American mentality; or an English, Japanese, French, or Indian mentality because those societies freely choose their leaders. The results of an election are at least a meaningfuly snapshot of the mentality of a society. A span of elections over a century or more does, I suggest, enable meaningful generalization about the mentality of a people, their hopes, values, ideals, and taboos.

Chinese don't have the freedom to choose the kind of government that they want. If they ever get that freedom the choice that they make, and its chances for permanent success, will require political freedom of thought. Chinese don't have that freedom either. What will that free election show the hopes, values, ideals, and taboos of Chinese to be?

In the second interview with Mr. Wang I saw that there is still fear. I had been concerned about using the Bally’s waiting area for the interview as soon as we sat down. Here were two Chinese people talking to two foreigners, the foreign man in the suit asking all the questions and the foreign woman holding a microphone. However I didn’t voice my concern since Mr. Wang and Ye Youyi, or interpreter, had chosen the site. Still, I paid attention to other people in our vicinity.

Mr. Wang spoke freely at first. People walked by but didn’t seem to pay us any mind. After about an hour a man sat down in our vicinity. He was to my right but directly in Mr. Wang’s line of vision. I turned to check him out. Mr. Wang paused and with squinted eyes looked carefully at the man. We continued to talk for a little while but Mr. Wang was no longer at ease and we finished up and left.

Fear produces false agreement. Fear also produces silence. One would expect false agreement and silence to be most pronounced in people of Mr. Wang’s generation, who lived through all of the brutality of Mao. The Great Wall of Silence surrounding the murder of Bian Zhongyun is a consequence in part of present fear and residual fear from the past.

There is also evidence to support the second part of Mr. Wang’s statement that the slavish mentality is changing. There was no evidence of a slavish mentality in the protests of Spring 1989. Those were bold, courageous, and widespread in participation and public support. The protesters of 1989 had the mentality of those willing to rebel against oppression, just as their forefathers had in 1644, 1911, and 1949. The June 4 massacre showed that Deng Xiaoping's regime still had a "slavish mentality," that is the mentality of the slave's master. The problems that the current regime has had in the countryside demonstrate that some Chinese still have the will to rebel.

However, there seems insufficient evidence for Ma Lisen’s positive assessment of the change. China is free only in the economic realm. Precisely the values that Ms. Ma mentioned--human rights, democracy, freedom, equality--are those that are still missing. China remains a civic communist state.

Human rights is a misnomer in a sense. A people have to demand them. Human rights cannot be gained by pleasing those who deny them.

(1) This and the other footnotes in the next post on this subject are in no way intended to be comprehensive. Dr. Li Zhisui, in The Private Life of Chairman Mao, uses it in a variety of contexts, as it is used in this post also: On the general public: " 'The people' were nothing but a vast multitude of faceless, helpless slaves [to the C.C.P.]" (355); On Zhou Enlai: "Suddenly, I realized that Zhou Enlai was Mao's slave..." (258);” 'We shouldn't do everything according to the books, slavishly copying every word,' “quoting Mao.”He traced the party's slave mentality to China's Confucian past." (234)

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

Ma Jisen.

Kitty, don't look.

Dictators: Harris in foreground; Hitler, Hussein,
Pol Pot, et al in background.



The next day, November 26, I interviewed Ma Jisen in the morning and Mr. Gao in the afternoon. Ms. Ma was an unexpected bonus on this trip. She had hosted the first interview with Mr. Wang and had translated for us, but has lived an extraordinary life in her own right and is now writing about it. Her late husband Ran Longbo is the author of Zhou Enlai: A Political Life.

Ms. Ma worked in the Western European Department of the Chinese Foreign Service during the Cultural Revolution and had recently written the first book ever written by someone inside that agency, which was thrown into such chaos during the period.

Ms. Ma is a true intellectual and her book, The Foreign Ministry During the Cultural Revolution is an important work. Crucially, it corrects much of what has been written elsewhere about the Foreign Ministry at the time. With the same generosity extended to me by everyone that I met in Beijing, Ms. Ma gave me the only English copy of the book that she had. Unfortunately I only had time to skim it before my interview with her.

With the diplomat’s caution, Ms. Ma declined to have the interview tape-recorded, stating tactfully that she did not find it “necessary.” I had noticed some interesting things in Ms. Ma’s book and we briefly talked about them. However it was not until I got back home and read the book that I had a chance to follow-up in more depth. Fortunately for me, Ms. Ma and I have continued our conversation via email. That conversation is ongoing and this account will be supplemented at a later time.

Ma’s book touches on the issue of how the Cultural Revolution affected the moral system of the Chinese people. For example, she wrote that Mao’s various political campaigns,

…had carried with them the reversal of what many believed to be right or wrong. (16)

From the very start of the Cultural Revolution, ideas of right and wrong were turned upside down. (405)

These statements are very important to a western trained lawyer because “right and wrong” are legal terms of art that go to the very heart of criminal law and individual responsibility. In my conversations with Ms. Ma I am trying to determine if the meaning that she attributes to these terms has any significance to international legal principles.

A person cannot be held responsible for any crime, even murder, if he did not know the difference between right and wrong. For example, a child who picks up a loaded firearm thinking it a toy cannot be prosecuted for murder if he shoots his playmate. The example illustrates the rare class of cases to which it applies. If the mind is disarranged in whatever way, through trauma, chemical imbalance, or external forces, the effect must be so profound as to obliterate the most fundamental distinction that we are taught as human beings, that it is wrong to hurt someone.

Frederich Nietzsche once wrote “Madness is the exception in individuals and the rule in groups.” However, Nietzsche was no lawyer (he was mad, though). The madness of mob behavior is not the madness that excuses criminal behavior. It seems to me that the madness of Red August was the madness of the mob, not legal madness. But I wasn’t there. It was Mao Zedong’s intent to redefine right and wrong. If Mao succeeded in affecting a “reversal of what many believed to be right or wrong,” if Ms. Ma’s words are true in the legal sense, then those affected could not be held responsible for their crimes.

We took a cab from Ms. Ma’s flat to Renmin University where we picked up Kitty. Of course, I had told the cab driver just to take us to the university without specifying what part of the campus. I called Kitty when we arrived. Of course (because of me), we had gotten dropped off at the precise point the furthest away from where Kitty was as possible. I felt horribly and told Kitty on the phone that we would walk to where she was. She of course said, no, no she would come to us. I was cranky that morning for some reason and already feeling guilty and while on the phone a campus policeman right in front of me decided to test his car siren. Although I am a law enforcement official and work with police officers daily I have this need to buck authority. At inopportune times. The police siren sent my temper from 0-60 mph in one second. Furious, I lowered my cell phone down to my side. I took two...slow...steps toward the policeman, caught his eye, and glared in open-mouthed rage.

Now, in America what would have happened next is the policeman, reading me correctly, would have walked toward me quickly and menacingly, and would have shouted "WHAT THE F!@# ARE YOU LOOKING AT!" He would have pushed me or even just touched me. We then would have gotten into a fight, I would have taken the silver medal to his nightstick and gotten hauled away to jail.

The Chinese police officer turned off his siren. And I felt more guilty.

Carmen had walked away in Latin fury at me, cursing in Spanish, which like Chinese I also do not understand. I apologized to her and she began speaking in English again.

It was a blustery day and in the 40's Fahrenheit. I had on a sports jacket and slacks and was comfortable. However Carmen's comfortable temperature range is no lower than 72 and no higher than 75. She was dressed as for the Arctic.

Kitty came walking around the corner of a building to meet us, her eyes watering from the wind. She is such a waif that I feared she might be blown away.

We drove to 798, the art district on the outskirts of Beijing. Kitty knocked on the door to the Gao Brothers studio and Mr. Gao opened it. His, and his brothers, work started right inside the door. When I looked at the first piece I said, as in awe, “Wow,” but what I thought was “Holy Shit!” I thought we were going to be arrested. To the right of the door was a white life-size statue of Mao pointing a rifle with fixed bayonet right at me. Further inside were a number of busts of Mao, with busts, women’s breasts. Mao’s face was rendered in malevolent madness.

Were the state art police on lunch break? Might they come back to work soon? It was the only time on the trip that I felt security-conscious. I had never expected to see attacks like this on Mao in Beijing. I had known that the art police had raided a Gao Brothers exhibition at 798 the previous year and confiscated some art, one of them the moving “Swimming Mao.” What Mr. Gao had on display inside his studio was much more hard-hitting than “Swimming Mao.”

I asked Mr. Gao, “The police don’t confiscate your work?” He replied that he kept it in his studio and didn’t exhibit it publicly. That was not a direct answer to the question. People don’t grow marijuana in their backyards in the U.S. either. They grow it inside their houses in hydroponic labs. So, the police get a search warrant, break down the door, seize the plants, and arrest the occupants.

There was a blue sculpture of a woman with her legs spread open, her genitalia realistically depicted. I think Mao’s face had been substituted for the woman’s but I glanced away. I wanted to cover Kitty’s eyes with my hands.

I have seen art like this in exhibitions in America many times (just substitute George Bush’s face for Mao’s) but graphic nudity does make me a little uncomfortable in the presence of women and I was differently discomfited that I was in the presence of this graphic nudity with Mao Zedong’s face superimposed in the damn People’s Republic of China!

There was one painting that I particularly liked. It was a group of people. On the face of each person was superimposed that of a notorious dictator. Mr. Gao was impressed that I recognized Pol Pot.

My skittishness at being jet-planed subsided, as did my concern for Kitty’s sensibilities and we sat on a couch and I began to interview Mr. Gao. I asked him The Question. He replied that he wants to “de-idolize” Mao. I asked him why he portrayed Mao with female anatomy. He said that Mao called himself the mother of the country so he wanted to give him the equipment for the role.

I then began asking about individual responsibility.

I fear that I was rude to Mr. Gao. I had been interviewing people for several days getting similar answers to questions or similar quizzical looks, I hadn't had time for detached contemplation, I was cranky and I think I let my impatience show with Mr. Gao. I was more blunt in asking him questions than I had been with others but I think I was too prosecutorial, I think I made him feel cross-examined and besieged. In the photographs taken during the session his arms are folded, a classic sign of defensiveness.

I started by making a statement, as the point seemed too obvious to pose as a question:

“You hold Mao responsible for the crimes committed during his time.”

“Yes.”

“Do you hold anyone else responsible?”

(Quizzical look)

“Did you personally suffer during the Cultural Revolution?”

“Yes, my father was kidnapped and killed.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. What about the person who actually, physically laid hands on your father, does he, in your opinion, have any responsibility?”

“The communists caused him to do it.”

I then gave the example of Adolph Eichmann to illustrate the point that underlings have responsibility too but Kitty didn’t know who Eichmann was and I had to explain and when Kitty re-asked the question Mr. Gao seemed not to understand and didn’t answer and I got impatient.
So I switched from inquiring about the personal responsibility of perpetrators to that of onlookers. I told him about Mr. Wang watching Bian walking off to her death. It was an unhappy switch because the last time I talked about it I had huffed in typical American male fashion and I was in an even less understanding frame of mind now.

He replied that the communists had caused that non-intervention mindset too.

“Let’s say that you are about to attack Kitty (No, that's insulting)…Let’s say that a person is about to attack Kitty (This made Kitty feel uncomfortable and she laughed nervously). I see the person grab her; I hear her scream. I’m going to come to her defense! Do you think that people should defend innocent people from being harmed?”

“Yes.”

“Was it ever important to you or your brother to find out who had physically laid hands on your father?”

“We found him.”

“You did? How did you find him?”

“We asked around and with our contacts we found out the man’s name. He still lived in our neighborhood.”

“What did you do?”

“We went up to his house and knocked on his door. As soon as he saw our faces he knew, and he started shaking with fear.”

I was very impressed with this and softened my tone. I told Mr. Gao that I wasn’t making the case for vigilante justice but that I was glad that he had gotten the satisfaction of identifying the man and seeing him scared.

“We didn’t harm him. We thought that living with what he had done and knowing that we knew was punishment enough.”

I told him that that was a kind of justice and I was trying to do justice for Mr. Wang. I immediately felt that that was an incorrect statement but I didn’t know why at first. When I thought about it, I realized: Mr. Wang had never asked me to do justice for him; he had never even told me that he wanted the kind of justice that I was talking about—where the perpetrators in Bian’s murder are identified—from anyone.

“They don’t care about it. If they don’t care about it, why do you?”

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

Professor Xu Weixin in his studio.

"It all began at Beida." A somber visit to Peking University.

The entrance to the school, and its new name

The hospital across the street.

Wanting only the best for Harris Binbin.

A happy dad and his daughter's future fellow students.

Air conditioning installed.

I interviewed two brave, bold artists in Beijing, Xu Weixin and Gao Qiang. I owe thanks to Dr. Rongfen Wang for putting me in touch with Professor Xu, I owe thanks to Professor Xu for putting me in touch with Mr. Gao, and I owe thanks to Yuan Yuan, known as “Kitty,” Professor Xu’s student and assistant, for translating for both.

I didn’t interview Professor Xu and Mr. Gao because they had any information about the murder of Bian Zhongyun. They didn’t. I took the opportunity of interviewing two artists to get other opinions on the concept of individual responsibility that had been uppermost in my mind since my first interview with Mr. Wang.

Professor Xu’s oeuvre is the victims of the Cultural Revolution. Mr. Gao’s oeuvre is the perpetrators. Their work is consistent with the approach of other Chinese. Dr. Youqin Wang has devoted herself to keeping the memory of the victims alive. She has painstakingly recreated as much about their lives and how and where they died as she can. Professor Xu has created a remarkable series of paintings of the victims based on photographs from the period. Symbolically, he has enlarged them to the size of Mao’s portrait that hangs at the entry to the Forbidden City. Among those he has memorialized is Bian Zhongyun.

Mr. Gao identifies the same perpetrator in his work as did Mr. Wang and the Chinese government, Mao.

Professor Xu is vice dean of the Renmin University School of Arts. We met in his studio. He had just returned from an exhibition of his work in New York. His studio could have been that of a New York based artist. Large and spacious to accommodate the size of his paintings the studio was well appointed with a modern desk, chair and computer, and a comfortable black sofa. The floors were blonde wood, natural light pored in through the windows and the artificial lighting maximized the ability to paint and see.

Professor Xu is a man of dignity and courage. He is charismatic and energetic. He is also a philosophical man. As an artist he undoubtedly has been asked the question, “Why are you doing this?” more than I ever will, and we each asked the other. Professor Xu explained that five or six years prior he had begun to interpret his thought on the individual. He had chosen individuals from the Cultural Revolution as subjects because he wanted to “transfer individual memory to collective memory.” This is consistent with Dr. Youqin Wang’s motivation in creating her website “The Cultural Revolution Memorial.” I asked Professor Xu how he had chosen the particular individuals that he had. He said that he first chosen those who had suffered.

At lunch he asked me The Question. My answer was, “Justice” and I briefly explained the importance that identifying and punishing the perpetrators has in American and international jurisprudence. Professor Xu vigorously nodded his head and pointed at me in agreement. I felt very comfortable talking with Professor Xu about the “meaning” of what I do and the meaning of his work, and felt that he understood better than most.

In mid-afternoon I went to Peking University. So much had happened there in the twentieth century. The May Fourth movement, an intense period of self-examination, began there. The Spring 1989 protests for democracy began there and many of the university's students were murdered in the culmination of the protests on June 4th. And I had always remembered a sentence from Mao’s Last Revolution, that whatever the causes of the Cultural Revolution, “It all began at Beida.”

When I get interested in a piece of art, or in a particular artist, sometimes I will read all that I can about the subject before I go to the museum so that I can better understand. But sometimes I deliberately go without reading beforehand. Art can be “felt,” perhaps more than it can be understood. I went to Beida without a guide or a map, I hadn’t read anything beforehand, I had no idea where I was going; I just walked around and felt.

The campus was deathly quiet. There was plenty of green space around a pond but no one was enjoying the tranquility. Indeed, rather than tranquility, there seemed an air of abandonment. The flora at water’s edge grew wild; it had not been trimmed in a long time. The water was dead still, its surface neither rippled by fish beneath or fowl above. The pathways were careworn, the buildings looked as unused as those in the Forbidden City, and much more in need of a coat of paint. I had never been on a university campus so devoid of energy, of life. Maybe the students were on break; maybe I had stumbled onto a part of the campus that was going to be rebuilt, but it was a somber place and my thoughts of what had happened here were somber and I walked around feeling somber.

We then took a taxi to the school. The former Girls School Attached to Beijing Normal University is shoehorned into a neighborhood not far from The Forbidden City. The school abuts a tree-lined street whose leaves and branches shelter it protectively. The school has been renamed; it is now the Experimental School Attached to Beijing Normal University. The hospital where the murderers had wheeled Bian Zhongyun’s lifeless body in a basket, was right across the street, just as Hu Jie dramatically showed it in Though I am Gone.

I wanted to go onto the grounds but the school was gated with a manned guard station. Reacting rather than thinking we decided to just go up to the guard station and ask where the admissions office was. The guard pointed the way and let us pass. I no longer felt somber. Although I was on a murder scene I felt the adrenalin rush of being sneaky. But Carmen and I now had to come up with something to say when we got to the admissions office and we had only the time it took for us to cross the basketball court to come up with it. Inevitably we bumbled.

I had hoped to meet the principal, a Song Binbin supporter, but only got as far as the vice-principal. We walked into the office and were greeted by a surprised receptionist. We made her understand that we wanted admissions information. She summoned the vice-principal to help with communication. We told the vice-principal that we were American lawyers and our law firm was transferring us to Beijing. No, we were in-house lawyers for an American corporation that was transferring us to their Beijing office. We said that we had a fifteen, no, a thirteen year-old daughter who would be in need of a good school and we had heard a lot about this school.

The vice principal explained that they couldn’t accommodate students who didn’t speak Chinese but we quickly assured her that Harris Binbin spoke fluent Chinese. With a quizzical look she asked us if she had been born in China. Yes, I said, we had adopted her. When she was ten years old, interjected Carmen helpfully, thus enabling little Binbin to have learned Chinese as a youngster. Anyway, we really had to run, did they have some literature that we could look over and take back to show our daughter? They did and gave us two impressive brochures. I leafed through one and saw a photograph of Bian in a section that I gathered was on the different principals who had served the school. The vice-principal invited us to come back in December with Binbin so that everyone could meet everyone. We said that we would.

We asked if it would be all right if we took a few pictures around campus to show our daughter. “Take as many as you want,” the vice principal said. We shook hands and thanked them and I gave the vice principal my Public Occurrences business card.

Back at the hotel I told Carmen to go up to our room without me; I was going to stop in the business center briefly to check email. When I got up to the room Carmen told me that the air-conditioning had been fixed. Such good news, the engineer had fixed it. She then told me to come around the side of the bed. There was a plastic wastebasket filled with melting ice. One on the other side of the bed too.

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

Ye Youyi and Long Yue Yuan outside a restaurant
after dinner.

I couldn't meet again with Mr Wang until November 27 because I had already booked up earlier days other interviews and activities.

I interviewed Ye Youyi on November 22 in her apartment and on November 24 in her ex-husband's apartment. I learned that Ms. Ye is the cousin of Weili Ye, an American academic and friend of Song Binbin and Liu Jin. Weili appeared in Morning Sun, has written a personal memoir and an article entitled The Death of Bian Zhongyun for a scholarly journal.

Ms. Ye had a fundamental goodness about her that was apparent at first meeting. She felt morality at a visceral level. Right and wrong were clear moral values to her, not intellectually complex concepts, as they were to her cousin and the Red Guards and the Chinese government. Ms. Ye has written movingly of how she once loved and idolized Mao, and of how she came to be disenchanted. Her account has been reprinted here.

One exchange with Ms. Ye particularly touched me. She asked about divorce law in America. I explained that most states had what are called "no-fault" laws, meaning that there does not have to be an allegation of wrong-doing by one party of the other. A simple declaration of "irreconcilable differences" suffices. With a sincerity on her face that was so natural with her, she asked, "Ben, is that law available to all classes in America?"

I explained that the laws in America applied to everyone equally. What I thought, but didn't say because I didn't want to get off on an entirely different topic, was "She thinks there are classes in America."

The following paragraph is a combination of personal opinion and fact, labeled as such. The personal opinions are vigorously disputed by others.

There are classes in America, of course, but not in the way that Ms. Ye used the term. (opinion) The observations of Tocqueville down to present day survey research have uncovered the American's belief in class fluidity. (fact) That is, "Today's pauper can be tomorrow's millionaire;" "Anyone can grow up to be president." (fact as to the belief; opinion as to the reality) Americans do not believe that the classes in America are immutable. (fact) Most Americans, do not resent the rich, for tomorrow, or in the next generation, one or one's offspring could be the rich. (fact as to the belief) For this reason, class appeals are not often successful in American politics. (fact) The rich are admired for their achievements, not resented for their privilege (as a very general statement, fact). The American's belief in opportunity could not be sustained if there were laws, de jure or de facto, that applied to different classes, as Ms. Ye thought. (opinion; many argue that the laws are de facto different for different classes or interests)

Ye's personal story of devotion and disenchantment is consistent with that of many other memoirs that have been published. Mao was loved by many ordinary Chinese. His policies were supported by many ordinary Chinese. That love and support were drummed into the people daily. To express even tepid enthusiasm for Mao was dangerous. But there was still genuine love, personally felt, admixed with that fostered by state coercion.

The perpetrators of Red Terror violence were not forced to beat and murder. Mao created the Cultural Revolution, he encouraged revolution in the schools, he validated it after it had begun, but he and the state did not force the students to be violent. The Red Guards were created by the students themselves, not by the state. The students as individuals, and self-led groups of individuals, committed violent acts that they, individually and in self-led groups, chose of their own free will.

The government, the aging Red Guards who committed violence, and their supporters, exonerate the perpetrators as having no individual responsibility because the Cultural Revolution was a mass movement; the perpetrators did not have the free will to act otherwise.

Many, many students never committed any acts of violence, however. Rongfen Wang did not commit any violent acts, Youqin Wang did not commit any violent acts. Jang Chung did not commit any violent acts. Contrary to what Song Binbin said in Morning Sun, her presence on the rostrum of the Forbidden City on August 18 was not happenstance. She had chosen to become a Red Guard, she proudly wore its armband and ecstatically fastened a Red Guard armband onto Mao.

The government, the former Red Guards, and their supporters do not claim that the violence was right, they claim that the wrongs are not the responsibility of individuals.

This is a crucial point because it acknowledges that the perpetrators still knew the difference between right and wrong. In societies governed by laws a person cannot be held responsible for a crime if he or she did not know the difference between right and wrong. The Red Guards knew that hurting and killing people was wrong. Still, they made the personal choice to hurt and kill.

In societies governed by laws participating in a violent mass movement is called a riot; it is not a defense to individual acts of violence. Nor does state coercion exonerate an individual who has committed violent acts. The Nazis defense at Nuremberg, of having "just followed orders" was rejected. The Chinese government rejected this defense in the "Gang of Four" trial. Jiang Qing defended herself as having just followed orders: "I was Chairman Mao's dog. I bit whoever he told me to bite."

On the day between the two interviews of Ye Youyi we went to the Forbidden City. In the Imperial Garden two smiling Chinese women approached us with a camera. Of course we would take their picture. But their actions indicated that there was some misunderstanding. After several seconds of hand-gesture communication we understood that they wanted to take a picture of us. They wanted a picture of the foreigners as a memento and to show their friends.

I remembered that a similar thing had occurred in Tienanmen Square when I visited in 2006. We noticed a woman taking a picture of these unusual looking foreigners, the tall man and the blonde woman. We smiled at her and she smiled back, a little sheepishly.

Perhaps they were not unsophisticated Chinese photographing the exotic. Perhaps they were undercover state security officials who were photographing any and all foreigners.

However it was, the idea of The Foreigner has always been prominent in China's relationship with the rest of the world. Non-Chinese indeed would have been a startling sight worth documenting inside the Forbidden City in imperial times. China was a walled country, Beijing a walled city, the Imperial compound a walled section of that city.

All of those physical walls have come down now but there are still psychological walls. China's Great Wall of Silence refers to these barriers. I remember a conversation with a Chinese emigre who was reluctant to speak with me. He said that he had casually told an American colleague of the Red Guard background of a fellow Chinese, also living and teaching in the U.S. Word had gotten back to the former Red Guard and he had warned against saying such things in the future to "white people."

On the morning of the 25th, we tried again with the air conditioning. The hotel had assigned a personal representative to us. Whenever we needed anything we had our own contact person. We called Summer. She came up to our room. She spoke perfect English. We explained to Summer that we needed a little winter. She asked us if we were leaving and if so when we were coming back because she was going to have an engineer look into the problem. We had a full day planned and told her the room would be empty. Summer said it would be taken care of by the time we returned.