–Publisher’s Afterword
From Wang Shiwei to Liu Xiaobo: Prisoners of Literary Inquisition under Communist Rule in China
This shocking book of life and death depicts a floating world of personal tragedy, conscience gone adrift, the loss of reason, a people’s shame and a nation’s fall.
Over the past 60 years, China’s best and brightest have been sacrificed on a man-made altar of absurdity and lies. This book makes heavy reading; what is hardest to bear is that the victims are our friends, colleagues or admired members of an earlier generation, and that this folly continues unabated to this day, openly but more splendidly packaged.
Literary inquisition has been carried from ancient times to the present and in every corner of the world, but China is distinguished by the brutality of the punishment it has meted out to its men and women of letters. In the West, early victims of literary inquisition include Ovid (43 BC – 17 AD), whose poem Ars Amatoria violated the moral code of his time and cause him to be sent into exile by Caesar Augustus. Although Ovid had written many poems, such as Tristia, for Augustus, he still fell out of favor and died in a foreign land. Subsequent instances of literary inquisition in Europe typically involved religion, and from the eleventh century onward, it became a tool of religious hegemony, often involving vicious torture. Even so, it pales in comparison to what has occurred in China, where even today, in the Internet age, Chinese are convicted of “inciting subversion of state power” and imprisoned for ten years or even more merely for posting a poem or essay on the Internet.
The compiler of this book, Zhang Yu, has served for many years as Secretary-general of the Independent Chinese PEN Center, and as Coordinator of its Writers in Prison Committee, he has devotedly followed the cases of individuals persecuted for their writings. Even so, it has been hard for him to come to terms with this record of modern literary inquisition, the result of years of effort beginning in 2010.
The difficulty of this process lay in the sheer number of victims of China’s literary inquisition. During the 1957 Anti-Rightist Campaign alone, more than half a million people were persecuted as Rightists, most of them intellectuals; which ones should be chosen as emblematic cases? The decision to adopt a framework of one person per year necessarily excludes the vast majority of victims, as the compiler states with regret. But this is only the first volume; the compiler has rigorously and meticulously sifted through data to produce concise and sober accounts in hopes that readers will appreciate his prodigious effort and anxiously await the next installment.
The first case in this book occurred in 1947, just before CPC took power, when it took the law in to its own hands by secretly executing the great writer Wang Shiwei, who was being held in a CPC military camp. As the compiler states in his Preface, during the Yan’an era, the CPC launched a Rectification Movement that effectively declared war on free thought and the spirit of criticism. Wang Shiwei’s was only the first blood to be shed, symbolizing the scarlet splendor of the flag that would soon rise over the new republic. Even more horrifying is that other Leftist writers looked on in a complicity of cruelty, ignorance, blind allegiance or cowardice. Eventually they followed in Wang Shiwei’s tragic footsteps, descending into disgrace and humiliation and ending their days as withered husks of their former selves.
As the new regime enacted its “new government” in the 1950s, criticism became anathema, and the government repeatedly meddled in cultural matters, smothering free thought through its criticism of the film The Life of Wu Xun and research on the classic Dream of the Red Chamber, its purging of Hu Shih and its “One Hundred Flowers” campaign. The most far-reaching campaign arose when Mao Zedong published three “editorial comments” in People’s Daily indicting a “Hu Feng Counterrevolutionary Clique”, resulting in the persecution of more than 1,000 innocent people. Some survived banishment and torture to see themselves “rehabilitated” under the new leadership in 1979. Scholarly and refined as ever, the poet Lü Yuan and another “Hu Feng element”, Niu Han, wrote in the preface to their poetry collection Hundred Flowers, “The writers wish to use this title of simplicity and purity in remembrance of what we encountered in the past: we suffered for our poetry, yet we were innocent!” This almost excessive magnanimity is irrelevant to the spirit of forgiveness, and makes one wonder if fear had eaten away the very marrow of these tormented victims.
In the 1960s, an alternate Politburo member and vice-chair of the Central Cultural and Education Committee, Kang Sheng, passed a slip of paper to Mao on which was written, “Using a novel to launch anti-Party activities is a great discovery”. The comment was aimed at Li Jiantong’s novel Liu Zhidan, which was considered an attempt to vindicate the purged official Gao Gang; eventually even vice-premier Xi Zhongxun (the father of China’s current president, Xi Jinping) was implicated. This was a prelude to criticism of the play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, the author of which, Wu Han, became the first writer to be purged in the Cultural Revolution. Wu was soon tortured to death, and his wife and daughter also died of unnatural causes, the obliteration of entire families unfortunately becoming all too common in the tempestuous decade that followed.
The victims of literary inquisition suffered not only mental torment, but also physical annihilation. A 29-year-old worker named Liu Wenhui who wrote a long memorial refuting the principles of the Cultural Revolution was executed by firing squad in 1967. Lin Zhao, labeled a “Rightist” while a university student, was executed in 1968. Yu Luoke, the writer of “On Family Background”, was only 27 at the time of his execution. Even more astonishing is the case of 27-year-old university student Wang Shenyou, who during the last gasp of the Cultural Revolution, after Mao was dead, was executed for a “reactionary love letter”. This was just as dawn was beginning to break at the end of the 1970s. First came the April Fifth Movement, then Xidan Democracy Wall and Wei Jingshen’s “The Fifth Modernization” burst into the limelight. Yet even in the 1980s, known as the era of Reform and Opening, the literary inquisition’s Sword of Damocles continued to hang over China’s writers. Wei Jingsheng and Xu Wenli were imprisoned, and even a popular writer of literary reportage, Liu Binyan, was ejected from the CPC, along with Wang Ruowang and Fang Lizhi; all three eventually died in exile.
Many Chinese went into exile after 1989, while those who remained in China organizing political parties and writing articles found themselves in prison. Over the past ten years, Internet writers have become favored targets of literary inquisition, from website administrators Huang Qi and Ouyang Yi to the four men of the New Youth Study Society, while journalists Shi Tao, Zhao Yan and Cheng Yizhong, scholar Xu Zerong, lawyers Yang Maodong and Li Boguang, and rights defenders Wang Lihong and Zheng Yichun have also ended up behind bars. As indicated by its subtitle, this book culminates with the former president of the Independent Chinese PEN Center, the poet, commentator and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo. Repeating the past, this government’s contest with freedom is like a circle, the starting point of which can also be the ending point. In his last statement before he went to prison, Liu Xiaobo said he hoped he would be modern China’s last victim of literary inquisition, but his wish has unfortunately not been granted. Since Xiaobo was imprisoned in 2008, many other idealists have been handed harsh sentences: Liu Xianbin, Chen Wei, Chen Xi, Zhu Yufu, Li Bifeng… not to mention a succession of Mongolian, Uyghur and Tibetan writers, and the writer Li Hong, who was persecuted to death… Looking back on all this is heartbreaking, but writing is our emotional and spiritual refuge. We can only keep walking down this bramble-infested road, extending a hand to friends and fellow-wayfarers who have fallen along the way, believing that the ending point is a starting point, and the starting point is an ending point; this rule also applies to all regimes.
Translated by Stacy Mosher