China Behind the Headlines: Xu Zhiyong

A few days ago we suggested readings about the disappearance of legal scholar and activist Xu Zhiyong in Beijing. There has been more news on the subject here and here. China Beat contributor Susan Jakes, who has known Xu since 2004, contributed the following comment.

By Susan Jakes

Earlier this year, a graduate of his country’s most prestigious law school with an impressive record of public service, a comfortable academic post at a major university, and a political office he’d won in a trailblazing election summarized his life’s mission for a local newspaper. “I strive to be a worthy citizen, a member of a group of people who promote the progress of the nation,” he told the reporter. “I want to make people believe in ideals and in justice and help them see that there is hope for change.”

Like a more well-known community organizer, Xu Zhiyong has made a career of breaching barriers and raising hopes. But, as we were reminded, painfully, last week, this kind of project looks different in the cavernous plazas and narrow lanes of Beijing than it does on the streets of Chicago. The victories are harder to see, the defeats loom larger.

In the week since Xu was detained at his apartment on July 29, much has been written about the reasons for his disappearance, what they may augur, how much worse things may get. Most stories have mentioned at least a few of Xu’s long list of achievements. But none has quite captured the remarkable breadth of his activities and the distinctive approach he brings to his work.

I’ve known Xu for five years. I met him in my capacity as a journalist and got to know him better through his work with my husband who works at Yale’s China Law Center. As was the case for many people in China, I first heard Xu’s name in June of 2003. A young graphic designer in Shenzhen named Sun Zhigang had been beaten to death in detention after being picked up by police for not carrying his household registration ID. In part because of Xu’s involvement, the case had become a national news event and I was covering the story for TIME. Others protested the brutality of the beating and the way the police had mishandled Sun’s arrest or complained about the notorious corruption of Custody and Repatriation, the system of extra-judicial jails for “vagrants” to which Sun had fallen prey.

But Xu, just 30 at the time, took a different tack. In addition to offering legal advice to Sun’s family, he and two of his law school classmates wrote a petition to the National People’s Congress, demanding that Custody and Repatriation be abolished on the grounds that it was unconstitutional. In a matter of weeks, China’s Sate Council ordered an end to Custody and Repatriation. And although none of the official statements made reference to Xu or to the constitution, the prospects for both seemed, momentarily, to brighten.

Xu’s advocacy in the Sun Zhigang case displayed what would become the hallmark of his career: the decision to base his calls for political change and social justice in China’s existing laws and political institutions. Rather than just shouting from the sidelines—the only available options for a previous generation of Chinese political critics—Xu has made a point of investigating and trying to improve troubled political institutions from the inside. This approach is evident in the way he handles his advocacy on behalf of death row inmates—Xu conducts exhaustive, Innocence Project-like interviews with prosecutors, witnesses and judges before he takes on the case. It’s evident in the research he put into his calls for reform of China’s petitioning system—he lived for several months among petitioners in their make-shift “village” on the outskirts of Beijing before circulating his findings. When Gongmeng—an outgrowth of the organization he founded along with Teng Biao and Yu Jiang, the other two legal scholars who co-wrote the Sun Zhigang petition—issues an opinion, it’s a safe bet that careful, thorough research has gone into it. This is part of what makes the group’s recent report on Tibet so powerful and so unusual.

Xu has a knack for seeing what’s possible where others see only futility. In 2003 and again in 2006 he ran as one of China’s handful of independent—that is, not CCP pre-approved—candidates in an election for his district People’s Congress. He not only won by a landslide, but in both of his terms in office has sought to prove through his actions—by providing constituent services, demanding budget reviews, preventing the relocation of the Beijing Zoo and lobbying on behalf of aggrieved dog owners—that the congress was not the parody of a political institution it sometimes seemed to be. “Actually,” he explained, “the People’s Congress has real power. It’s just that people don’t take it seriously.” I interviewed Xu shortly after his first election. When I asked him how he decided to run, he looked at me evenly for a moment before replying. “I ran,” he said, “because the law allows me to.”

Of course, Xu has never been naïve about the degree to which his work takes him into sensitive territory. Over the years following his election I tended to see or hear from Xu when things the law allowed him to do put him at odds with officials nominally in charge of law enforcement. In 2005 we had lunch together after his sojourn in the petitioners’ village. He’d been beaten repeatedly in the process, but he was in good spirits, talking about gradual change and talking with quiet conviction about his faith in “step by step progress.”

In 2006 we talked on the phone a few minutes after he’d been released from a night in detention that had also involved a beating; a group of hired thugs had dragged him off the road to keep him from going to court to defend Chen Guangcheng, a blind activist who himself had studied law and tried to use it to defend the rights of victims of forced abortion. Xu swiftly deflected my questions about his night in jail and reminded me that what he’d been through was nothing compared to the ordeal of his client, who was on his way to four years in jail after an absurd trail in which he was convicted of disrupting traffic.

Not everyone is cut out for this kind of work. But Xu, who happens to have been born in Minquan Xian—literally “Civil Rights County”—in Henan Province and was raised in a Christian family, has a temperament that suits the path he’s chosen. He has an impressive capacity for empathy. As he explained in a recent blog post, he feels “anguished” when he’s unable to help clients, but he channels those feelings into focused hard work. He is also—despite the Ph.D., the official title, the international reputation—self-effacing. When he lived in the petitioners’ village, he was often mistaken for a migrant. Mayling Birney, a political scientist and expert on local elections at Princeton who has followed Xu’s career remembers watching him sit down to talk to a group of peasants who’d traveled days to come to Beijing seeking legal aid. “His respect and humility were so clear I could just see these people’s spirits were fortified,” she recalls, “Xu is among the most talented and inspiring public servants I’ve ever met, and I say this having worked in the U.S. Senate for Bill Bradley.”

Xu’s mission was never going to be an easy one. But he’s been a brave and patriotic contributor to the progress China’s leaders say they embrace and he deserves far better than the attacks he’s had to endure in the past few weeks. He often closes his public speeches by telling people he’s an optimist, that the darkest aspects of life in China are brightening and that there’s good reason to jump into the fray, “to do something.” I believe him every time I hear him say that. And I’m hopeful he’ll be back to work making more people believe it very soon.

China’s Water Woes: Past, Present, and Future

The Chinese droughts have just begun to move onto the front pages of the world's newspapers, but the droughts are just the latest sign of much more dire warnings of water woes in China. Some China experts are talking about this (see, for instance, today's event at the Wilson Center on "Temperatures Rising: Climate Change, Water, and the Himalayas"), but, in China Beat fashion, we're hoping to encourage many more people to do a little more reading and talking about it too, so we invited Ken Pomeranz to reflect on the present news and suggest a few further readings for those who are interested.

By Ken Pomeranz

Water is back in the China-related news lately – and that’s almost always a bad sign. Most recently, we have had stories about the grinding North China drought; this may be the worst since the late 50s drought that exacerbated the Great Leap Forward famine. A bit earlier, we had the report of credible (though unproven) research suggesting that last May’s catastrophic Sichuan earthquake may have been triggered by pressure from the water stored behind Zipingpu Dam. (See here for an early report, and then the slightly later piece, with more about the key Chinese scientist involved, by Evan Osnos of the New Yorker). Late in January, Jiang Gaoming of the Chinese Academy of Sciences released a sobering piece (China Dialogue, January 22, 2009) about how accelerating the construction of dams in China’s Southwest – part of the P.R.C.’s ambitious stimulus package to fight the global recession – is worsening the already considerable environmental and social risks involved, with some projects beginning before any Environmental Impact Assessments have been completed. Such a confluence of events is enough to make a historian think back…to about six weeks ago.

When the China Beat crew decided to put together our book China in 2008, I drew what you could consider either the long or the short straw, depending on your tastes: light editorial duties in return for writing an “end of the year wrap-up” piece to go at the end of the book. (Most of the copy had to go to the press by November 1, and a book with the sub-title “10 months out of a year of great significance” somehow didn’t seem right.) And as the last days of the year ticked off and I tried to figure out what things about 2008 to emphasize, water kept winding up at the center. Here’s an excerpt:

“The Olympics briefly focused attention on China’s serious air pollution problems…But China’s water woes are at least equally pressing, and it may be easier to see what effects they will have. Two little-noted news items from near the end of the year may illuminate that – after we review some background.

Water has always been a problem in China, and effective control of it has been associated with both personal heroism and legitimate sovereignty for as far back as our records go…. But water scarcity is probably an even greater problem than excesses, especially in the modern period. Surface and near-surface water per capita in China today is roughly ¼ of the global average, and worse yet, it is distributed very unevenly. The North and Northwest, with over half the country’s arable land, have about 7 percent of its surface water; the North China Plain, in particular, has 10 to12 percent of the per capita supply for the country as a whole, or less than 3 percent of the global average. China also has unusually violent seasonal fluctuations in water supply; both rainfall and river levels change much more over the course of the year than in either Europe or North America. While the most famous of China’s roughly 85,000 dams are associated with hydro-power (about which more in a minute), a great many exist mostly to store water during the peak flow of rivers for use at other times of year.

The People’s Republic has made enormous efforts to address these problems – and achieved impressive short-term successes that are now extremely vulnerable. Irrigated acreage has more than tripled since 1950, with the vast majority of those gains coming in the North and Northwest; this has turned the notorious “land of famine” of the 1850-1950 period into a crucial grain surplus area, and contributed mightily to improving per capita food supplies for a national population that has more than doubled. Much of that, however, has come through the massive use of deep wells bringing up underground water far faster than it can be replaced; and a great deal of water is wasted, especially in agriculture, where costs to farmers are kept artificially low. (Chinese agriculture is not necessarily more wasteful in this regard than agriculture in many other places – and certainly the deviations from market prices are no worse than in the supposedly market-driven United States – but its limited supplies make waste a much more immediate problem.) Water tables are now dropping rapidly in much of North China, and water shortages are a frequent fact of life for most urban residents. (Beijing suffers fewer water shortages, but only because it can commandeer the water resources of a large surrounding rural area included in the municipality.) Various technologies that would reduce water waste exist, but most are expensive. More realistic pricing of irrigation water would help – but probably at the price of driving millions of marginal farmers to the wall, and greatly accelerating the already rapid rush of people to the cities. Consequently, adoption of both of these palliatives is likely to remain slow.

Instead, the state has chosen a massive three-pronged effort to move water from South to North China – by far the biggest construction project in history, if it is completed. Part of the Eastern section began operating this year, and the Central section is also underway (though the December 31 Wall Street Journal reported a delay due to environmental concerns). The big story in the long run, however is the Western line, which will tap the enormous water resources of China’s far Southwest – Tibet alone has over 30 percent of China’s fresh water supply, most of it coming from the annual run-off of some water from Himalayan glaciers. (This is an aspect of the Tibet question one rarely hears about, but rest assured that all the engineers in China’s leadership, including Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, are very much aware of it. Tibetans, meanwhile, not only see a precious resource going elsewhere when their water is tapped: they regard many of the lakes and rivers to be dammed as sacred.) The engineering challenges in this mountainous region are enormous, but so are the potential rewards, both in water supply and in hydropower – the electricity water can generate is directly proportional to how far it falls into the turbines, and the Yangzi, for instance, completes 90 percent of its drop to the sea before it even enters China proper. The risks, as our two stories make clear, are social and political as well as environmental…

Call the two news stories the “double glacier shock.” On December 9, Asia Times Online reported that China was planning to go ahead with a major hydroelectric dam and water diversion scheme on the great bend of the Yarlong Tsangpo River in Tibet. The hydro project is planned to generate 40,000 megawatts – almost twice as much as Three Gorges. But the water which this dam would impound and turn northwards currently flows south into Assam to form the Brahmaputra, which in turn joins the Ganges to form the world’s largest river delta, supplying much of the water to a basin with over 300 million inhabitants. While South Asians have worried for some time that China might divert this river, the Chinese government had denied any such intentions, reportedly doing so again when Hu Jintao visited New Delhi in 2006. But when Indian Prime Minister Singh raised the issue again during his January, 2008 visit to Beijing, the tone had changed, with Wen Jiabao supposedly replying that water scarcity is a threat to the “very survival of the Chinese nation,” and providing no assurances. And so it is – not only for China, but for its neighbors. Most of Asia’s major rivers – the Yellow, the Yangzi, the Mekong, Salween, Irrawaddy, Brahmaputra, Ganges, Sutlej, and Indus – draw on the glaciers of the Himalayas, and all of these except the Ganges have their source on the Chinese side of the border. Forty-seven percent of the world’s people, from Karachi to Tianjin, draw on those rivers.

In short the possible damage to China’s neighbors from this approach to its water and energy needs is staggeringly large – and the potential to raise political tensions is commensurate. Previous water diversion projects affecting the source of the Mekong have already drawn protests from Vietnam (and from environmental groups), and a project on the Nu River (which becomes the Salween in Thailand and Burma) was suspended in 2004. But this project has vastly larger implications for both Chinese and foreigners. If, as some people think, the twenty-first century will be the century of conflicts over water, Tibet may well be ground zero.

Of course, China is hardly the only country that has ever appropriated water (not to mention other resources) that others see as theirs; I am writing in Southern California, made much more livable by denying Mexico Colorado River water it is theoretically guaranteed by treaty. And there is also something to be said, environmentally, for anything that provides China with lots of electricity and isn’t coal…

But that’s where the second glacier shock of 2008 comes in – news that this crucial water source is disappearing faster than anyone had previously realized. A report published in Geophysical Research Letters on November 22 noted that recent samples taken from Himalayan glaciers were missing two markers that are usually easy to find, reflecting open air nuclear tests in 1951-2 and 1962-3. The reason: the glacier apparently had lost any ice built up since the mid-1940s…And since the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that the Himalayan highlands will warm at about twice the average global rate over the next century, there is every reason to think the situation will get worse. One estimate has 1/3 of the Himalayan glaciers disappearing by 2050, and 2/3 by 2100. If that scenario is right, then even if all the engineering challenges of South-North water diversion can be solved, and even if China undertakes and gets away with taking water away from hundreds of millions of people in South and Southeast Asia, the resulting fix might not last very long…”

Strangely, these stories have attracted very little press coverage. There is, however, an excellent video at the Asia Society website. And there is a fair amount of stuff that’s worth reading about China’s water problems in general. If you are interested in learning more, here are a few things I would recommend:

1. James Nickum has a nice, short, summary of the South-North water transfer project available online. His December 1998 essay in China Quarterly, “Is China Living on the Water Margin?” (#156, 880-898) seems to me to have held up very nicely for a 10-year old overview of this rapidly changing set of problems (and as regular readers of this blog know, we give extra points for punning titles).

2. Another useful overview from several years ago (more technical than Nickum’s) is Olli Varis and Pertti Vakkilainen “China’s 8 challenges to water resources management in the first quarter of the 21st Century,” Geomorphology 41:2/3 pp. 93-104 (November 15, 2001). If you’re at a place where you can access the web version (i.e., a library with a subscription), you’ll find lots of useful further links to click on. (Here is one link for those with a subscription through ScienceDirect.)

3. Elizabeth Economy’s The River Runs Black seems to me to overstate the problems at some times (and since I don’t have a sanguine view, that should give an idea how, umm, black, her take is), but it’s a very good introduction to some of the relevant policy-making agencies and processes.

4. Dai Qing’s various essays on Three Gorges and other hydro projects are very useful, as is the collection Mega-Project (which included both official and unofficial views of the project).

5. Probe International often has good material, as does the International Rivers project.

6. And since plugging oneself is OK on a blog, I have a long-ish essay on the history of Chinese water management in a forthcoming collection of essays on environmental history: Burke, Edmund III, and Kenneth Pomeranz, editors The Environment and World History (UC Press, forthcoming March, 2009).

"Big Pants" Unveiled

Alex Pasternak has written a couple pieces for China Beat in the past (such as "Beijing's Olympic Forecast"), and so we were interested in his piece published a few weeks ago at The National, "Strange Loop: Is Rem Koolhaas's gravity-defying Beijing monument the world's most important building?"

Here is a snippet from the article, well worth reading in full:

It was only after the design emerged in public that the nicknames surfaced, and they were starkly devoid of any references to traditional Chinese culture. At the beginning, wei fang, meaning condemned building, was one oft-heard option. Later, “twisted doughnut”, “drunken towers”, and “big shorts” became the most popular sobriquets in Beijing. The latter, a reference to the building’s two rising towers, had special appeal to many online critics, young urbanites who despise CCTV: the word for “shorts” can also be translated as “underpants”.

“Our building is no longer a single square,” a young CCTV employee told me. “I don’t know what it symbolises. Desire? Ambition? Stupidity?” Later, he said plainly: “it’s a big hole in terms of content, and twisted in terms of fact.” I asked Chen Shuyu, an architect in Beijing, about the building. “Big mouth,” she said, “big lie.” The building’s central hole has inspired more vulgar suggestions. 

Concerned that one of these monikers could stick, CCTV recently asked employees to vote for a more positive one, like “Harmonious Gate” or “New Angle”. According to one Shanghai newspaper, “Knowledge Window”, another option, quickly became a favourite among internet critics, largely because the Chinese name, zhichuang, is a homophone for “haemorrhoids”.

Koolhaas is a fierce admirer of contradictions, and it’s easy to imagine that the only complaint he would have with the catalogue of monikers is that they are too obvious. Scheeren insists this “history of names” is actually a sign of the building’s greatest strength, its ambiguity. “It really undermines all characteristics of the traditional icon,” he says. 

At once forcibly futuristic and demode, spectacular and brooding on the outside, the CCTV headquarters will remain truly untested as an office building until employees move in next December. But many are reluctant to do so. One told me that the building’s size and maze of 75 elevators are a widespread source of concern, threatening to turn the building into the setting for a Kafka story. “We’ll spend half the day getting to the top,” he said. “What we need is a new building that is larger and practical, not an extravaganza.”

The Past and Present of the CCP First Congress Memorial, Shanghai

2009 is a year of anniversaries for China, with the 90th birthday of the May 4th Movement coming in the spring and the 60th of the PRC arriving in the fall. With this in mind, we've asked Samuel Liang of the University of Manchester, a specialist in Shanghai's built environment, to provide our readers with background on a locale that has special significance for both of the just-mentioned anniversaries. Namely, the building where an early meeting of the Communist Party was held in 1921, which stands near the recently built shopping and entertainment district known as Xintiandi.

This structure, often treated as a sacred revolutionary shrine, has a complex history, as readers will see. It is tied to the May 4th Movement because many of those who attended the Party Congress held within its wall, including Mao Zedong, had been active in those 1919 protests and the general "New Culture" intellectual fermentation of the time, and as a birthplace of the Communist Party it is tied to the founding of the PRC in even more obvious ways.

By Samuel Y. Liang

In the late nineteenth century, foreign landowners and Chinese builders jointly created lilong compounds for Chinese residents in the foreign settlements of Shanghai. Somewhere between enclosed compounds and open alleyways, the lilong houses opened up traditional walled domains, generated fluid spaces between houses, neighborhoods, and streets, and accommodated a wide range of commercial and residential functions and people from all walks of life.

Toward the end of the Qing dynasty, traditionally-trained scholars sojourning in Shanghai were influenced by modern nationalism, thanks to the print media introduced into the city from the West, and they often disseminated revolutionary ideas of overthrowing the Manchu empire when meeting in courtesan houses in the lilong neighborhoods near Fuzhou Road. It was in such obscure spaces that the first group of radical, progressive intellectuals emerged from the community of self-pitying and discontented literati at the turn of the century.

After the May Fourth Movement in 1919, a new generation of Chinese intellectuals embraced the Western ideals of democracy and science and enjoyed the city’s new, Western-style public spaces, such as coffee houses, cinemas, and public parks. Yet the living quarters of the new intellectuals were still in unassuming lilong neighborhoods of mixed functions, which had mushroomed in the new urban areas as the city expanded rapidly in the 1920s and 30s.

When communism was first introduced to China, it also flowered in the milieu of Shanghai lilong. The most radical thinkers and activists of China used the lilong’s inclusive and obscure spaces as their covert bases to promulgate revolutionary and iconoclastic ideas. In July 1921, thirteen delegates, including Mao, from around the country and two representatives of the Communist International gathered in the small living room of an unassuming lilong house in the newly urbanized Taipingqiao area of the French Concession and held a secret meeting to found the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The meeting is now considered to be the First Congress of the CCP. The house, 106-108 Wangzhi Road, was at that time the sojourn residence of the Wuhan-based official Li Shucheng and his brother Li Hanjun. The latter hosted the meeting but soon left the party because of his different political viewpoints. In the next year, the Second Congress of CCP was held in another lilong house a few blocks away, which was then the home of Li Da. Around that time, the residences of the party leaders, such as Chen Duxiu and Li Da, were in fact the Party’s undercover offices.

Born in the lower strata of the urban environment, the Party had never succeeded in coming to power through urban revolutions. Though a small number of its agents continued to carry out “underground works” in the city, the Party achieved its final victory through successful managements of its rural bases. When the Party’s peasant army finally took over Shanghai in May 1949, the city as the Party’s birthplace was hardly known.

Rediscovery and Restoration
In September 1950, the Propaganda Department of CCP Shanghai Committee set out to search for the site of the First Congress. Assisted by Yang Shuhui, the wife of the Congress delegate Zhou Fohai, the Department rediscovered the former Li residence in April 1951; its new address was 76-78 Xingye Road, which, renamed in 1943, had turned into a busy street quite different from the former Wangzhi Road next to a vegetable field thirty years ago. The house was then used as a small noodle workshop and store, which had a traditional shop façade featuring a dark stone portal on a white plastered wall.

76-78 Xingye Road in 1951 when it was rediscovered as the CCP First Congress site (source: Lu and Zhang 2001).

Inside the CCP First Congress Memorial, 1951 (source: Lu and Zhang 2001).
The Party committee immediately rented the house from the private landlord and, after consulting the Congress delegate Li Da, recreated the Congress meeting room on the second floor of 78 Xingye Road; in the room were displayed the portraits of Marx and Lenin and Mao’s handwritten script: “Little sparks spread into a prairie fire.” On July 1, 1952, the city’s official newspaper Jiafang Daily announced that the Shanghai Revolution History Memorial had been preliminarily completed after one year’s repair and renovation, featuring an article lauding the city as the original site where sparks of revolution fire first spread out. The key city officials visited the site on the same day.

Shortly after, the chief of National Relic Bureau visited the memorial from Beijing; he considered the memorial’s current outlook and layout as not genuinely reflecting the original condition of the Congress site. In June 1953, the white-washed walls of the memorial building were restored to their “original” brickwork and the commercial signs of the noodle workshop and the next-door pickle store were also removed.

The partially restored CCP First Congress Memorial, 1953 (source: Lu and Zhang 2001).
In the restoration process, the memorial officials interviewed the landlord Madam Chen and her tenants for a history of the neighborhood. In 1920 Chen built a small lilong compound called Shudeli, which consisted of two rows of houses. The front row facing Xingye Road had five units (100-108 Wangzhi Road); each unit was one-bay wide and two-story high and had a small courtyard behind the front entrance. The Li brothers rented two units right after the compound was built. They moved out about three years later and then Chen let the whole front row to a merchant, who extensively rebuilt the complex into two bigger units: 100-104 became a three-bay house and 106-108 a two-bay house. The courtyards of 104 and 106 were rebuilt into the houses’ two new wings. The merchant then opened a soy sauce and pickle store in 106-108 and sublet 100-104.

In October 1957, following Beijing’s further direction on faithful restoration of revolution heritage sites, the memorial restored the complex’s the five stone portals and courtyards. And the Congress’s meeting venue was now set in the downstairs living room of 76 Xingye Road, which was then meticulously furnished for its original appearance in the 1920s, and in which no portraits or handwritten scripts of the leaders were displayed again. Now the memorial complex was given a monumental façade of grey brick walls, red arched portals, and dark wooden doors.

Revolution and Museum
Seeking to recreate the original form of the Congress venue, the restoration project in fact produced a monument free from any traces of the lively lilong neighborhood of mixed functions and inclusive spaces. It was a purification process against the locale’s combined commercial and residential contents. The result was a uniform façade and dead (or monumental) space rather than the original unassuming neighborhood where the secret meeting took place. By erasing the locale’s natural and evolving history through the decades that had bred rebellious potentials, the regime installed a hegemonic power structure, which the memorial symbolized, to prevent any future revolutions. As soon as the revolutionary process turns into a monumental space, its beautiful soul gets lost. The monument is then an empty shell that attempts to eternalize a reinvented past by terminating the place’s living, natural history.

After the restoration, the Revolution Memorial was open internally to the Party cadres. In March 1961, the memorial was designated as a “Key National Cultural Heritage Site.” During the Cultural Revolution, the rebels/red guards filled the memorial with posters and slogans, turning it into a stage of their revolutionary activities. In 1968, it was formally renamed the CCP First Congress Memorial and opened to the public. To accommodate the increasing amount of visitors, in 1973 the memorial incorporated the four housing units in the back row of Shudeli as auxiliary spaces. In 1984, Deng Xiaoping handwrote a title plate for the memorial.

The CCP First Congress Memorial during the Cultural Revolution (source: Lu and Zhang 2001).
The history of the memorial has been reconstructed by the memorial’s officers and researchers since the 1990s, coinciding with Shanghai’s rapid development. Before this time, the memorial was mainly regarded as a local base for revolutionary education, not a national monument of revolutionary history (probably because the Party still considered Shanghai a stronghold of the “bourgeois lifestyle”). From Mao’s perspective, the Chinese revolution started in remote rural areas. For decades, as featured in primary-school textbooks, the iconic birthplace of the CCP had been a tour boat in the South Lake at Jiaxing, about sixty miles from Shanghai; the boat is a remade copy of the one on which the Congress delegates held the last day’s meeting after their secret meeting venue on Wangzhi Road was discovered by the French Concession police. As the last refuge of the secret meeting, the tour boat and its idyllic setting better represented, and indeed anticipated, the late course of the Chinese revolution history.

In the meantime, the Maoist regime continued the revolution legacy by mobilizing the masses in a series of political campaigns—an ongoing violent, destructive process rather than peaceful commemoration of the revolutionary past. Turning that legacy into static monuments would be against the true spirit of revolution, and similar to the revisionist approach of the Party’s bureaucrats, against whom Mao launched the infamous Cultural Revolution. For Mao, revolution had be powered by endless class struggle, as he wrote when organizing Hunan peasant revolts in the 1920s: “A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous…” Neither is revolution, I might add for Mao, a peaceful pilgrimage to a revolution museum.

Expansion in the New Age
In the late 1990s when Shanghai reemerged as a global city, the First Congress Memorial acquired a new title, “National Model Base for Patriotic Education,” and attracted an increasing number of visitors each year. The old complex of about 900 square meters became inadequate and overcrowded, with visitors often queued up on the street. In 1996, the CCP Shanghai Committee decided to build a new wing for the memorial. Funded by private donations and assisted with volunteer labor, the construction project started in June 1998 and was completed just before the fiftieth anniversary of the “liberation” of Shanghai in May 1999.

Located to the west of the original Congress site, the expansion adds 2,316 square meters to the memorial. While the new wing’s façade simulates the rusticated appearance of lilong houses, the new wing is a space of modern simulacra. Passing through the old-style stone portal, visitors enter a grand and shiny hall that encompasses almost the entire ground floor. At the end of this rather empty hall hangs a huge Party flag in front of which initiation ceremonies for new Party members are held on some key dates, such as July 1(the CCP’s Birthday) and October 1 (National Day). The exhibition gallery upstairs displays a pictorial narrative of the Chinese revolution, including a group of wax figures forming a reconstructed scene of the Congress. A visitor wrote: “In the wax figures, I saw realistic and vivid human characters and their pensive faces showing confidence in China’s future.”

Indeed, the memorial is now a training ground for the Party’s future cadres and bureaucrats (urban economic development) and has probably superseded the Jiaxing tour boat as the icon of the CCP birthplace. It indeed symbolizes a new turn in China’s red course—a new urban revolution of demolition and rebuilding rather than the Maoist (anti-urban) revolution of class struggle. This new development is turning the whole city into a gentrified, museum-like space of visual display.

The entrance hall of the new extension of the CCP memorial, 2006 © Samuel Y. Liang

The memorial’s new extension (on the right) and the entrance to Xintiandi (on the left) on Xingye Road, 2007 © Samuel Y. Liang

An Urban Revolution
In 2001, the two urban blocks surrounding the CCP Congress Memorial were developed by the Hong Kong-based Shui On Group into a trendy place of leisure and consumption, known as Xintiandi. Because the city’s planning code stipulates that the memorial be preserved and new buildings around it be of limited height, Shui On innovatively combined historic preservation and commercial development, making lilong architecture the theme of the project. Like the Congress memorial, the commercial spaces in this new development are sites of modern simulacra—be they of political propaganda or of consumerist persuasion. Here, indeed, the work of the architect and developer is comparable to that of the Party in rebuilding the memorial. While the latter retrospectively invents the revolution history as an ideological structure of the ruling class, the former re-manufactures the colonial and socialist neighborhood into a consumer paradise for the new elite class.

Now global capitalists such as Shui On cooperate with the local government to carry out an urban “revolution” in Shanghai—one of space and architecture. This revolution targets the decayed lilong neighborhoods and entails the relocation of the residents (socialist workers from the Maoist era) from the decaying urban core, which is then reclaimed or, rather, re-colonized by the transnational elite.

The Congress memorial and the Xintiandi now co-exist quietly at Xingye Road; they not only symbolize the two distinct stages of China’s revolutionary/modernization course but also reveal the paradoxical continuity between them. Indeed, the current rebirth of the Congress memorial seems an architectural restatement of Elizabeth Perry’s assessment that “For better and worse, China has not yet bid farewell to revolution.”


Further readings:
For the history of the CCP First Congress Memorial published in Chinese, see
Lu Miqiang. 2002. “Yida huizhi jianguan 50 nian lishi zhi huigu.” Shanghai dangshi yu dangjian, 2002.9: 28-30.
Lu Miqiang and Zhang Jianwei. 1999. “Fengyu Xingye lu.” Shanghai dangan, 1999.1: 23-27
----. 2001. “Zhonggong yida huizhi xiushan fuyuan jishi.” Shiji, 2001.2: 8-11.
Ye Yonglie. 1991. Hongse de qidian. Shanghai: Shanghai renmin

For the expansion of the memorial in the late 1990s and how the memorial is currently received, see
Ni Xingxiang. 1999. “Xiangei Shanghai jiefang 50 zhounian: zhonggong yida huizhi jinian guan kuojian gongcheng xunli.” Dangzheng luntan, 1999.6: 20-22.
Zhao Zhengyong. 2001. “Zhanyang ‘taiyang’ shengqi de defang: Ji canguan zhonggong ‘yida’ huizhi jinianguan.” Zhibu jianshe, 2001.8: 42-43.

For a spatial and symbolic reading of the memorial in relation to the Xintiandi project, see
Liang, Samuel Y. 2008. “Amnesiac Monument, Nostalgic Fashion: Shanghai’s New Heaven and Earth,” Wasafiri, 23.3: 47-55

For an assessment of the CCP’s governance strategy and contemporary Chinese politics, see.
Perry, Elizabeth J. 2007. “Studying Chinese Politics: Farewell to Revolution?” The China Journal, 57: 1-25.

China Celebrates Human Rights

This year, Human Rights Day (December 10) had a special meaning, since it came as the 60th anniversary of the most famous United Nations document on the subject was being marked. With this in mind, we asked Jeremy Paltiel, a political scientist at Carlton University, to offer his thoughts on the meaning and marking of the anniversary in China. Here's what Paltiel, the author of The Empire's New Clothes: Cultural Particularism and Universal Values in China's Quest for Global Status and a contributor to the edited volume Confucianism and Human Rights, wrote in response on December 12:


By Jeremy Paltiel

Today, December 12, 2008 Xinhua reports that China’s President and the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China Hu Jintao sent a letter to a symposium held by the China Association for the Study of Human Rights to commemorate International Human Rights Day, the 60th Anniversary of the passage by the UN General Assembly of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In his letter, Hu avers that since the founding of New China in 1949 China has made steady progress in the protection of human rights according to China’s “national situation” culminating in the solemn enshrinement of the principle of respect and protection of human rights in the Constitution of the Communist Party of China and the state constitution of the PRC. The letter was read out by the Vice-Director of Party’s “Publicity Department” a.k.a. Propaganda Department concurrently the head of the Central Committee’s office for foreign propaganda and the State Council Information Office Wang Chen.

This symposium and Hu’s letter took place against the background of “Charter 2008.” This document, (modeled on the Charter 77 movement of led by the dissident Czech playwright and later president Vaclav Havel in 1977) was signed by 303 well-known intellectuals, legal practitioners and human rights activists, from the length and breadth of China. Both documents were written in the shadow of the thirtieth anniversary of China’s opening under Deng Xiaoping that the Communist Party is celebrating this month. The Charter by contrast, gives credit to “Democracy Wall” the popular movement that accompanied and promoted the Party’s reform thirty years ago until it was shut down on the orders of Deng.

Unlike Hu’s letter, the Charter specifies doleful human rights events under Communist party rule – the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957, the Great Leap Forward, The Cultural Revolution, 6.4 (1989) and the continuing repression of popular religious observance.

The Charter sets out ideals that they wish to see promoted : freedom, equality, republicanism, democracy and constitutionalism setting forth nineteen recommendations beginning with constitutional revision, checks and balances, democratic legislation, judicial independence, public control of public institutions including the placement of the armed forces under the authority of the state (as opposed to the Party); human rights protection and guarantees; public election for public office; equal status for urban and rural residents; freedom of association; freedom of assembly; freedom of speech; freedom of religion; civic (as opposed to ideological) education; protection of property; fiscal reform to ensure fair and responsible taxation; social welfare protection; environmental protection; federalism; transitional justice – compensation for past abuse.

Already some of the signatories have disappeared from public view and presumed to have been placed under arrest. It is worth examining Charter 08 in relation to China’s most recent human rights White Paper –“China's Efforts and Achievements in Promoting the Rule of Law (2008.02)” This document claims that

The rule of law signifies that a political civilization has developed to a certain historic stage. As the crystallization of human wisdom, it is desired and pursued by people of all countries.

The Chinese people have made protracted and unremitting struggles for democracy, freedom, equality and the building of a country under the rule of law. They know well the significance and value of the rule of law, and thus cherish the fruits they have achieved in building China into a country under the rule of law.

The rule of law in a country is determined by and conforms to its national conditions and social system. To govern the country according to law and build a socialist country under the rule of law is the Chinese people's demand, pursuit and practice.

The Communist Party of China (CPC) has led the Chinese people in successfully opening up the road of socialism with Chinese characteristics. Along this road, China, in line with the objective requirements arising in the course of continuous economic, political, cultural and social development, has upheld the organic unity of the CPC's leadership, the position of the people as masters of the country and law-based governance, stuck to the principle of people first, advocated the spirit of the rule of law, fostered the idea of democracy and rule of law, freedom and equality, fairness and justice, developed and improved the socialist legal system with Chinese characteristics, promoted the exercise of administrative functions in accordance with the law in all respects, deepened the reform of the judicial system, perfected the mechanism of restraint of and supervision over the use of power, guaranteed the citizens' lawful rights and interests, maintained social harmony and stability, and continuously promoted institutionalization of all work.

There is no contradiction allowed here between the security of the rule of law and the paternalism of Party leadership. Nothing requires contestation because everything is already guaranteed.

Havel’s Charter was directed as much at his complacent countrymen as it was at the Communist regime of Gustav Husak. The policies of “normalization” had distributed middle class comforts like automobiles and country homes in return for conformity. Czechoslovakia had practiced distribution at the expense of the long-term growth of the economy. China’s communist authorities by contrast have promoted growth above all else, pushing high speed growth to the exclusion of practically everything, including the environment and public health. In the process however, tens of millions have been lifted from poverty and millions now enjoy a middle-class lifestyle unimaginable at the onset of reform. The crisis of faith that afflicted the legitimacy of the Communist Party at the beginning of the 1980s has given way to public demonstrations of loyalty to the Party and nation, whether it be through spontaneous campaigns against foreign support for the Dalai Lama or altruistic mobilization on behalf of earthquake victims.

It isn’t as though Chinese are unaware of the venality and outright corruption of communist party officials, nor do they relish the heavy-handed paternalism of the state. Most are acutely aware of the deep fissures in Chinese society and are cognizant of the pervasive injustice that surrounds a bifurcated labor market for rural and urban residents. Two factors mitigate against the perception of unfairness that could motivate widespread dissatisfaction and public sympathy with China’s scattered and largely ignored human rights activists. One is the optimism born of successful striving, rewarded by the demonstrable trappings of material success, second is the pessimism born of the deep fear of the fragility of the current social edifice. The two faces of this ambivalence were demonstrated most clearly in the successful mounting of the Beijing Olympics and the tainted milk crisis that immediately followed. More than anyone gives them credit, Chinese are acutely aware of who is on their heels and how jealously they must guard the fruits of their striving.

Absent a social safety net, and absent a reliable system of the rule of law, they have no choice but to put their faith in the constituted authority of the Communist Party. It is precisely because they are aware of the profoundly uneven distribution of the benefits of reform that the Chinese middle class is hostile to foreign efforts to denigrate the achievements of the Chinese state and condemn its shortcomings. The Communist Party constantly reminds them of the miraculous transformation of their lives and urges them to protect the fruits of their striving by showing loyalty. By contrast, the critics, dissidents and foreign naysayers seem to suggest that all the fruits of their labor are born in sin. Looking at the unwashed masses at their doorstep, the claims of human rights activists have the whiff of revolution about them. “Been there, done that” the elders might say, while the young and college educated beat the drum chanting “China number 1.” In many ways the debate between China’s cheer-leaders and its foreign and domestic critics, lies along two kinds of awareness about the distance traveled and a consciousness about what remains to be done. It is a relationship between pride and anxiety. In many ways the Party pumps up the pride in order to assuage the thinly-veiled and profound anxieties that afflict China’s middle classes.

Both the Party and its loyal urban support base know the flimsy premise of their mutual support, but both are anxious to maintain the basis of their reciprocity. That is why in the midst of a global crisis the Party is desperate to extend the trend of high speed growth. Only the constant promise of striving for a better future links China’s “haves” with its “have-nots.” In today’s China universal striving displaces universal rights. So long as loyalty is rewarded with an open license to participate in the culture of universal striving then individual claims on the state have little purchase on the public consciousness. So far the bargain that Deng Xiaoping struck between the Party and the Chinese public with his Southern Tour of 1992 still holds: by opening the private economy, individual enterprise was diverted from public concerns to private affairs. The Party manages the market and the market, not the Party, provides the yardstick of individual failure and success. Success brings its own reward. Opportunity is public, responsibility is individual.

Hence, when the Party leader proclaims his desire for cooperation and dialogue in the area of human rights maintaining as the most basic principle the notion that material life should continue to improve and spread throughout China and the world in a spirit of harmony, he is neither cynical nor disingenuous. Just as individuals in China vie for economic success, so do various nations participate in a global playing field which should not discriminate on the basis of values or culture. However, we should not be surprised that Hu’s letter to the China Association for the Study of Human Rights makes no specific reference to any of the thirty articles in the Universal Declaration. Instead General Secretary Hu stated that China “will base its human rights development on the basic situation of the country while acknowledging the universal value of human rights” and place priority on the right to subsistence (shengcun quan) and the right to development. Instead of the normal understanding of rights as claims, the program of universal human rights has been assimilated to the general discourse of striving.

Yet today, the underlying basis of the spectacular growth of the Chinese economy is under global stress. China’s exports have dropped precipitously and it is unclear whether the Chinese state has the wherewithal to reinflate the economy quickly and promote the growth of domestic consumption to replace shrinking export sales. Without the universal discourse of development through striving and effort there is no legitimacy. Moreover the careful management of an economic open door with ideological filters and “special characteristics” is likely to be strained. The very fact that Hu has emphasized the universality of human rights discourse and international cooperation and dialogue means that he is aware that China cannot escape interdependence, nor can the discourse of striving permanently overlay the language of rights claims when the government cannot fulfil the basic guarantee of subsistence. Even if his letter was intended to distract international attention from the signatories of Charter 08, the marking of the anniversary of the Universal Declaration is not without significance. Should the prosperity and security of China’s emergent middle class be threatened, the loyalty which has sustained Communist Party rule is likely to be questioned. Whether this will be enough to make common cause with precarious rural migrants in favour of universal rights remains to be seen. All that we know for certain is that rights discourse is out there, available, even endorsed by the publicity department of the Communist Party of China, and waiting to be deployed

In the short run, Charter 2008 is likely to attract more attention from international media than it does domestically, with international attention prompting the usual harsh denunciations from Chinese officials. The recent cancellation of the EU-China summit as a result of French President Sarkozy’s meeting with the Dalai Lama is a demonstration of the uncompromising mood of the Party towards unsolicited foreign advice. In the current climate, fear of uncertainty is not likely to embolden anyone to go much further to support “the usual suspects” that constitute the signatories of this Charter. Instead, we should watch in the coming months what happens when the largest cohort of university graduates in Chinese history attempts to find work in a shrinking labor market. Millions of parents sacrificed to put their children through college, while students sublimated their desires in the effort to move ahead through education. Long inured to politics, families are hoping to reap the rewards of a secure middle-class life. Sometime soon, the ideology of striving will meet the harsh reality of market economics.

Dead Man Talking

China is reducing death sentences but problems remain

By Zhang Lijia

On July 1 this year, a masked man named Yang Jia forced his way into the Zhabei police bureau in Shanghai, armed with a knife. In a killing rampage, he left six policemen dead and four injured. Last Wednesday, the 28-year-old unemployed man from Beijing was executed by lethal injection after the Supreme People’s Court decided to uphold the death sentence.

There was little surprise for the fate of a cop-murderer in a country where more people are thought to be killed by the capital punishment than the rest of the world combined. Yet the accused seems to have become an unlikely hero. At the second hearing hundreds gathered outside a Shanghai court, some holding signs that read “Long live the hero with a knife!”

In October 2007, Yang was questioned by a policeman in Zhabei district for riding an unregistered bike and was later detained for six hours. Claiming to have been beaten and mistreated by the police, he filed multiple complaints, demanding a formal apology and 10,000 yuan compensation for psychological damage.

Ever since the bloody July day, the Yang Jia saga has weighed on the Internet. Now his execution has sparked more discussions. One man wrote that the whole Yang Jia fiasco was an insult to the Chinese people. Another blogger urged people to mourn him for three days by not eating meat. Yang’s humiliation at the hands of policemen and his effort in seeking justice resonated with a public sick of the security force abusing its power and easily getting away with it.

The death penalty has always been used by the Chinese Communists as a harsh tool to maintain social security and political order and to curb crime. Partly because top Chinese leaders feel uncomfortable with the accusation that China applies capital punishment too readily, partly because the international community has pressured China persistently, reforming capital punishment has been made a priority within the Party-run judiciary system. There’s been heated debate among academics as to how to reform. One of the suggestions is precisely to restrict the power of police, to the displeasure of hard-liners.

“Ever since January 2007 when the Supreme Court took back the sole authority in reviewing the death penalty, I have noticed a substantial decrease in issuing death sentences, especially cases of immediate execution,” said professor Chen Weidong, a top expert on death penalty from Renmin University. “Killing fewer and killing with extreme caution is also the guidance from central government.”

The precise number of executions is a state secret in China. Amnesty International reported that last year 1,860 were given death sentences and at least 470 were executed, a remarkable reduction from 2006’s 1010, or 2005’s 1770, but still 80 percent of the world total, though the real numbers are believed much higher.

Despite progress, there’s still widespread fear that death sentences are passed without proper procedure and innocent people are convicted.

“There will always be problems when cases are handled with this behind-the-curtains judiciary style,” said human rights lawyer Li Jinsong in Beijing. Li, a tiny, soft-spoken man, explained that he became outraged as he followed the unfolding drama: Yang’s mother inexplicably “disappeared.” Yet Xie Youming, one of two lawyers appointed by the court as Yang’s defense lawyer and also a counsel for Zhabei district government, a potential conflict of interest, was able to contact her.

“Yang killed people, which should be condemned. But he deserved a fair trial,” Li said. A well-known lawyer and a winner of the French government’s “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” award, he managed to persuade Yang’s father to retain him. Li went to Shanghai several times but failed to meet Yang Jia on the ground that Yang had made statement that he would only accept lawyers appointed by his mother. In the company’s website, Li has written a detailed account of his involvement and raised many questions: Why did the court try to cover up Yang’s real motives of crime? Did Yang have adequate legal presentation?

Li’s biggest question is Yang’s mental state. The lawyer was present at the second trial. (the first trial was closed) When asked if he regretted what he did, Yang replied flatly: “No!”

“See, Yang didn’t even try to rouse any sympathy,” Li said. “He struck me as mentally unsound.” But the evaluation of his mental competence was performed by a research institute under the Department of Justice, which lacks the judicial testimony qualifications required according to Chinese law.

There was another bizarre twist. Four months after her “disappearance,” Yang Jia’s mother Wang Jinmei was recently found at Ankang Mental Hospital in Beijing, Southern Metropolis News reported. No one seems to have any access to her. Li suspects that she was detained by Beijing authority in cooperation with Shanghai police because she is the only person who knows the whole story of Yang’s dealings with the police in the lead up to his brutal killing.

“The real problem with China's legal system is that it's under the Communist party's control,” said Danny Gittings, an academic who specializes in the Chinese legal system at the University of Hong Kong. “The procuratorate, public security and judiciary are separate organizations but all under the control of the same arm of the Party – the political-legal committees which exist at every level of the state. And there's still no sign of any willingness to address the fundamental problem – the lack of a legal system independent from the state.”

Yang Jia’s case also shows how little protecting mechanism there is for the convicted murderer in a legal system built for conviction.

Zhu Zhanping, a lawyer from Xian, strongly advocates for the abolishment of capital punishment altogether, and as soon as possible. “It’s too easy to convict an innocent person to death and too difficult to overturn once the verdict is passed,” he said.

In 2001, Zhu tried to defend another defendant facing death. Dong Wei was a young migrant who got into a fight at a cinema with a man who insulted his girlfriend. In his self-defense, Zhu believed, Dong accidentally killed that man. “Dong probably over-reacted a little but absolutely didn’t deserve to die.” Zhu discovered that the sole evidence the judge relied on was full of contradictions. Shortly before Dong’s scheduled execution, Zhu, in desperation, rushed to Beijing to turn to the Supreme Court’s for help – an unprecedented act. Having agreed there were too many unanswered questions, the Court ordered to halt the execution. But only for 130 days. In the end, the provincial Higher Court upheld the original verdict.

“Being a Chinese, I was brought up with the belief: to replace a teeth with a teeth and to repay blood with blood. After witnesssing the pain endured by Dong and his family, I changed my mind. No human should put another human to die. It won’t achieve anything.” Zhu has been writing articles advocating his belief. The vast majority of Chinese support capital punishment, not a surprising fact for a cultural tradition that places less importance on individual life than does the Western ‘humanist’ tradition.

In recent years, there have been a lot of reports of innocent people being sentenced to death. In one case, a farmer was given the death sentence for killing his mentally disturbed wife, who then after eleven years, returned home. Luckily, the farmer had not been executed yet.

Professor Chen Weidong doesn’t think it is the time to abolish capital punishment yet. “China is going through drastic social and economic changes, which has led to rising crimes, including violent and serious crimes. And there’s no religious or moral obligations. To abolish it now, the crime rate will soar and it may cause social instability.” What the experts are trying to do, Chen said, is to reduce the number of offences punishable by death, to reduce the number of death sentences, and to set up detailed and precise guidance for when a death sentence can be issued.

Currently China uses capital punishment for 68 crimes, including non-violent crimes such as tax evasion, drug trafficking and panda-poaching. Two days after Yang Jia’s execution, another high-profiled defendant, medical scientist Wo Weihan, was executed as well, triggering worldwide condemnation. Wo’s family wasn’t even given the opportunity to say goodbye.

Professor Chen, who has been following Yang Jia’s case, believes the overall handling was more or less fair.

The claim pains Yang Jia’s father, Yang Fusheng. “The trail wasn’t fair! I sort of expected this might happen but I still found it hard to accept,” he said in a telephone interview in Beijing. He doesn’t wish to meet any journalist, fearing being monitored. He described his son as quiet and law-abiding, living with his mother since the couple’s divorce. He said he will follow his son’s path – fighting for justice but without violence, and trying to bring every one of those who wronged his son to court. He previously tried to sue one of the court appointed lawyers.

“Now my only child is dead. I hope that people can learn lessons from it and improve the rule of law in China,” said Yang Fusheng.

The Last General of the Red Army

Xiao Ke: Chinese revolutionary who fell foul of both Chairman Mao and Deng Xiaoping

By Ed Jocelyn

General Xiao Ke, who died last month in Beijing at aged 101, was the last surviving commander of the Chinese Red Army that made the legendary Long March. Only 27 when he led his troops out of their Communist base in south China, Xiao never reached the career heights promised by his youth and ability. Instead, his later life became notable for a commitment to principle that put him at odds with political reality.

Xiao Ke was born in Hunan Province to a scholarly family that had fallen on hard times. Three of his eight brothers and sisters died in infancy, yet by rural Chinese standards the Xiao family was still relatively well off. They possessed a small landholding that in the early 1920s was regularly raided by warlord soldiers and local militia – during this era, Chinese armed forces of all descriptions commonly supported themselves by looting. In his memoirs, Xiao recalled that his brother and cousin blamed at least some of this thievery on men who worked for a powerful local landlord, with whom they began a bitter dispute. In 1923, wrote Xiao, his brother and cousin were tricked into visiting this landlord’s estate, where they were seized and taken to the county government for summary execution.

The persecution of his family encouraged the young Xiao Ke to think about a military career. With soldiers at his command, he could punish the guilty and protect his own. He was further inspired by the example of another brother, who moved to Guangzhou in 1925 to enter military school. The following year, Xiao also moved to Guangzhou, where he studied for four months at the Central Military Committee Military Police Academy. After graduation, he entered the Guomindang’s National Revolutionary Army, taking part in the Northern Expedition that began in July 1926.

The Northern Expedition’s aim was to defeat the warlords of central, eastern and northern China and unite the country under Guomindang rule. Xiao Ke, however, fell under the influence of Communist officers in his regiment, which was led by the Communist Ye Ting. Xiao was already losing faith in Guomindang leader Chiang Kai-shek; this disillusionment was confirmed by Chiang’s massacre of Communists in Shanghai in April 1927. Xiao Ke joined the Party in June 1927.

One month later, his regiment was on its way to Nanchang, capital of Jiangxi Province. Ye Ting had committed his men to participating in the Communists’ first armed revolt on August 1. The uprising was a disaster. Although the Communists took control of the city easily, they lacked the means to hold onto it. After four days, the 20,000-strong rebel army marched south, aiming to establish a revolutionary base in Guangdong Province. But while the Communists had plenty of officers, they had few adherents among the rank and file. Within a fortnight, more than half the soldiers had deserted. On October 3, the remainder were scattered in battle. Xiao Ke was captured and imprisoned shortly afterwards.

Under interrogation, Xiao denied being a Communist and he was released after a few days. He returned home, where he was reunited with his brother and discovered that the elder Xiao had also joined the Party and been a soldier in the Northern Expedition. Not knowing where else to turn, the brothers decided to re-start the revolution themselves.

Having organized the few local Communists into a Party cell, they soon learned that a Communist army under Zhu De was inciting revolt around the southern Hunan town of Yizhang. This army was the sole fighting force to remain intact after the Nanchang Uprising. Around Spring Festival 1928, Xiao Ke and his comrades resolved to find and join Zhu De, the future commander-in-chief of the Red Army.

Instead, they met a group of Communist peasant rebels in Qishi, close to Yizhang, whose leader Peng Xi had been appointed by Zhu De. They formed an “Independent Armed Peasant Battalion,” with Peng Xi as commander and Xiao Ke as his deputy. From around one hundred men, this unit quickly swelled to more than six hundred, but it also came under severe pressure from enemy troops. Learning that another Communist force under Mao Zedong was nearby, Xiao Ke and his peasant army crossed the intervening mountain range and in April 1928 united with Mao’s “Red Army” at Longxidong.

Mao had temporarily left his base in Jinggangshan in Jiangxi in order to aid Zhu De, whose army was in trouble. Having repelled the enemy, Mao and Zhu De retreated together to Jinggangshan. Xiao Ke and his men went with them. In May, the combined Communist forces were grouped into the Fourth Workers’ and Peasants’ Revolutionary Army, soon afterwards rechristened the Fourth Red Army. Xiao Ke became a company commander in the 29th Regiment.

In Jinggangshan, Xiao Ke revealed one of his lifelong talents: that of choosing the wrong side. Party propaganda tells of unity and the creation of the “Zhu-Mao Army,” the vanguard force of the Chinese revolution. In fact, Mao and Zhu De quickly fell out. Particular difficulty arose over Mao’s view of the Red Army. Mao was adamant that the army should serve the Communist Party - “the Party should control the gun,” as Mao put it. Zhu De disagreed, believing that in military matters, the views of military men should take precedence over those of politicians. The 21-year-old Xiao Ke took Zhu De’s side. But Mao’s view prevailed: first and foremost, the Red Army would be the Party’s army. More than sixty years later, Xiao Ke would once again take the losing side in a similar debate, this time with Deng Xiaoping over the army’s role in dealing with the Tian’anmen Square demonstrations.

There was little time to dwell on such disputes in 1928. The Communists were quickly forced out of Jinggangshan, from where they moved into the area around Ruijin, a small town in southern Jiangxi. Here, they established a base that survived repeated attack by Chiang Kai-shek in the early 1930s. Xiao rose swiftly through the ranks, becoming commander of the Red Sixth Army Group.



In July 1934, Xiao received orders to take his troops out of the Communist base area and move west. The Long March was about to begin. Under intense pressure from Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang forces, the entire Red Army and Communist Party leadership was to abandon the base in southern Jiangxi and transfer to a new, safer location. Xiao Ke’s task was to identify that location.

He failed. After being harried through Jiangxi, Guangxi and Hunan, the 6th Army was almost destroyed at Ganxi in northeast Guizhou Province. On October 7, 1934, they were trapped by a three-pronged attack that wiped out around two thirds of the 9,000-strong army. Xiao himself escaped thanks to a local hunter named Liu Guangrong, who guided Xiao and several other officers up the heavily forested mountain above Ganxi. The battle was hardly mentioned in post-Revolutionary histories of the Long March, but in later years Xiao hung a large painting of Ganxi in his home, a permanent reminder of the place where up to 6,000 of his men died.

Shortly after Ganxi, what was left of the Sixth Army met another small Communist army led by He Long, future Marshal of the People’s Republic of China. In its ranks was a 19-year-old woman named Jian Xianfo; she and Xiao Ke married in December 1934, a union broken only by Xiao’s death.

The two armies joined forces and established a base in northwest Hunan, before making their own 5,500-kilometer Long March to northwest China between November 1935 and October 1936, arriving twelve months after the main force under Mao Zedong. Already pregnant when the march began, Jian Xianfo gave birth to a boy in the Tibetan grasslands of northwest Sichuan Province. The child finished the Long March, but was later sent to live with his grandmother near Changde in Hunan. He is thought to have died in the Japanese germ attack on Changde in 1941.

Xiao Ke’s army was accompanied by an unwilling witness, a captive British missionary named Alfred Bosshardt. After his release in April 1935, Bosshardt wrote of the young commander:

“It was soon obvious to me that he was a cultured, educated man and born leader. I could not help but admire him, though we came from such different backgrounds.”

The night before releasing him, Xiao invited Bosshardt to dinner. When the conversation turned to religion, wrote Bosshardt, Xiao said, “I cannot understand how one educated abroad as you have been, can possibly believe in God. Surely you know we came from monkeys. I supposed that anyone with any brains at all knew that evolution is a fact.”

Xiao’s political acumen failed him once again during the Long March. In June, his and He Long’s forces united with the Red Fourth Front Army, led by Mao’s greatest rival, Zhang Guotao. Zhang had split from Mao the previous year and established a rival “Party Centre” with himself as leader. His Fourth Front Army was by far the largest of the Communist forces; if he could persuade He Long and Xiao Ke to support him, he seems to have believed he could march to Mao’s new base in the northwest and take full control of the Communist Party.

He Long was unequivocal. He is said to have publicly threatened to shoot Zhang if he did not toe the Party line. Xiao Ke, however, was swayed. The details of what passed between him and Zhang Guotao remain obscure. Xiao wrote nothing about it; in his own memoirs, written in exile, Zhang glossed over their meeting, knowing that candor could cost Xiao his life – Zhang’s political commissar, Chen Changhao, is said to have committed suicide in 1967 after being attacked as “Zhang Guotao’s running dog.” But it was accepted in the Party that Xiao had supported Zhang, who appointed him commander of the Fourth Front Army’s 31st Division. And Mao had a long, long memory for those who had slighted or opposed him – as Xiao had now done twice over.

After failing in his struggle with Mao, Zhang Guotao abandoned the Communist Party in 1938 and handed himself over to Chiang Kai-shek. As past relationships with Zhang proved a death sentence for many, Xiao Ke could be said to have fared well. After the Long March, his career merely stalled. He was sent to the front line in the Anti-Japanese War as deputy commander of the 120th Regiment, led by He Long. This was a typical Maoist manoeuvre: Mao knew Xiao and He Long had a poor relationship, despite (or more likely because of) their years of close cooperation. Xiao ended the civil war in 1949 as Chief of Staff to the Fourth Field Army led by Lin Biao, one year his junior and a still more precocious talent – as well as a supporter of Chairman Mao in Jinggangshan in 1928. After the establishment of Communist power in Beijing, Xiao was assigned to the Military Academy in Beijing, a backwater for those who did not want or were not allowed to pursue an active military or political role. When military ranks were established in the People’s Liberation Army in 1955, he was listed first among the 55 generals (previously, there had been no formal distinction between officers and enlisted men). Above him, however, were a number of senior generals and marshals who, many felt, lacked his background and abilities. This was taken as a deliberate slight by Chairman Mao, but it was a minor blow compared to what was around the corner.

In 1958, Xiao Ke and several colleagues came under political attack. Their crime was to be in favor of learning from the Soviet Army in order to “regularize and modernize” the People’s Liberation Army. In fact, such modernization had been official policy since the early 1950s, but Minister of Defense Peng Dehuai now declared that it represented mistaken “dogmatism’ because it lacked “political content.” At an expanded meeting of the Military Affairs Commission, Xiao was branded a “representative of the bourgeois military line.” Peng accused him of “military revisionism,” while Mao himself weighed in, declaring Xiao a “bad person, a member of the bourgeois team.” After the meeting, Xiao was subjected to “struggle sessions,” some of which went on all night. After one such session, he began coughing up blood; the doctor who treated him was criticized for “sympathizing with an anti-Party element.”

Xiao could not have been naïve about the Party’s capacity for vicious internal upheaval. He had participated in the bloody purge of the (fictitious) AB tuan in Jiangxi in the early 1930s, an episode he described thus:

“Our division had killed sixty [of its own] people… Then one night in our Divisional Party Committee, it was decided to kill sixty more. Next morning, I went to report… But at the Fourth Army Military Committee, [they] said, ‘You’re killing too many. If they are from worker and peasant backgrounds, you can just let them confess…’ After that, I went back at once. The prisoners had already been taken to the execution ground. I said, ‘Don’t kill them. The Divisional Party Committee must discuss this again.’ Afterwards, they decided to release more than thirty of them. But more than twenty were still killed. Altogether in the Fourth Army, 1,300 or 1,400 out of 7,000 men were struck down.”

But in 1958, Xiao was shocked and distressed to find himself the object of attack. Defiant at first, after four months of criticism and “struggle” he decided to give in and make a “confession” to satisfy his persecutors. He wrote later: “I had been in the Party more than thirty years…had taken part in the Northern Expedition, the Nanchang Uprising, the Southern Hunan Uprising, the Struggle in Jinggangshan, the Long March… The man can be struck down, but his history will stand.”

The official verdict on Xiao Ke’s “bourgeois military line and anti-Party activity” was handed down in May 1959. He retained his Party membership and was not imprisoned, but his career went into limbo. At the end of 1969, he was exiled to rural Jiangxi, where he took up carpentry and endured further interrogations. An accomplished poet since his early years, he recorded his feelings in verse:

“The yellow blooms long withered on the old battlefields
As the bitter west wind howls in deep winter
At Yunshan I write these verses of return
An old steed in his stable still longs to gallop.”

Just two months after the verdict on Xiao Ke, Peng Dehuai himself was struck down for “opposing Chairman Mao” and conducting “anti-Party activity.” Years later during the Cultural Revolution, Peng sent his nephew to apologize on his behalf to Xiao and the others persecuted in 1958. Xiao wrote in his memoirs that he had, in fact, long since stopped being angry with Peng because, “through the experience of the Cultural Revolution, I had acquired a greater understanding of internal Party struggle.” In other words, he didn’t blame Peng because he felt Peng’s actions were dictated by the political context of the time – a context set by just one man, Chairman Mao.

In 1972, Xiao’s fortunes began to improve. Back in Beijing, he was restored to a senior position in the Military Academy and appointed deputy Minister for Defense, a less elevated position than the title suggests as the Ministry’s most important responsibilities had been transferred to other departments after Peng Dehuai’s fall. After Mao’s death and the end of the Cultural Revolution, the verdict on Xiao’s “bourgeois military line and anti-Party activity” was overturned. He was appointed in 1980 as a vice chairman of the Fifth National Political Consultative Committee, and from 1982 sat on the Central Consultative Committee, a highly influential body composed exclusively of Party members with at least 50 years of service behind them.



The events of 1989 shook Xiao and many of his old comrades in the Central Consultative Committee. As the crisis over the Tiananmen Square demonstrations intensified, Deng Xiaoping decided to call the army into Beijing. Xiao Ke adamantly opposed this move. Together with former Minister of Defense Zhang Aiping, another veteran of the Long March, he composed a letter to Deng, which was signed by five other generals. They told Deng that if the army entered the city and opened fire, “the common people will curse us for 10,000 years.” Inspired by this example, more than one hundred other retired generals and Party leaders, mostly also members of the Central Consultative Committee, signed and sent a similar letter.

Gravely concerned at such opposition, Deng dispatched two of his most senior supporters, Yang Shangkun and Wang Zhen (political commissar to Xiao Ke’s Sixth Army Group during the Long March) to see Xiao Ke and the other six original signatories. They demanded retraction of the letter, arguing that such influential men could not be seen to oppose the Party leadership. None of them retracted, but their call went unheeded.

After the Tiananmen massacre, Deng dealt with his high-ranking opponents by trying to eliminate their political influence. As most of them were already retired, Deng contented himself with denying them official resources and forums to express their opinions. The Central Consultative Committee was abolished in 1992.

Cast out, Xiao Ke devoted his last active years to scholarship and literature. He and Zhang Aiping were among the founders of the Yanhuang Cultural Study Association, which in 1991 launched the magazine Yanhuang Chunqiu, which continues to rank among the most progressive publications on the Chinese mainland. Editor Du Daozheng recalled how there was trouble over the very first issue, which contained an essay by Li Rui, Chairman Mao’s former secretary and a man considered representative of the “dissidents” of 1989. Du went to see Xiao Ke, who told him, “Just publish it! If someone has an issue afterwards, you just reply: ‘This essay was reviewed and approved by Xiao Ke. If you have a problem, please call Xiao Ke. I can give you Xiao Ke’s telephone number right now.’”

Xiao became particularly concerned about history and its truthful telling. During the 1980s, he remembered the British missionary Alfred Bosshardt and asked Chinese embassy officials to see if they could find out what happened to him. It turned out that Bosshardt was still alive and well, and the two men shared a brief correspondence. When Bosshardt’s account of his Long March captivity, The Guiding Hand, was translated and published in China in 1989, Xiao Ke wrote in a foreword: “Historical facts are the best authority… We did make some mistakes after the establishment of the Communist Party. We do not want to talk about them, but it is not right to prevent others from doing so. Those who criticize may have their own standpoints and we must see whether this is the truth. In his book Mr Bosshardt could not praise us… It will not harm those already dead to reveal past mistakes, and could be educational in the present.”

He returned to this theme in his foreword to a monumental, two-volume history of the Long March, whose preparation and publication he oversaw in 1996. Flying in the face of Party orthodoxy, he insisted that where there were different accounts of any given event, all should be included. That same year, during a meeting commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Long March he lost patience with the endless speeches in praise of Mao. He rose and spoke impromptu: “The real Long March [was achieved through] the efforts of every single Red Army soldier. We should not, as we did in the past, make a cult of personality.”

Sixty years earlier, Alfred Bosshardt wrote of his thoughts on first meeting Xiao Ke: “Why, I wondered, did this man, who could have enjoyed a life of ease and pleasure, throw in his lot with those who were striving to bring justice to the poor, oppressed peasants?” Xiao wrote little about specific motivations, but he expressed his feelings eloquently. In his foreword to Bosshardt’s book, he considered how people with very different backgrounds and beliefs could still become friends, but his words could just as well apply to his revolutionary ideal. He wrote: “Mencius said, ‘Everyone is compassionate.’ Indeed, this must be the common concern of all mankind.”



Xiao Ke spent the final years of his life in No.301 Hospital in Beijing, which he entered in April 1999. He is survived by his wife, Jian Xianfo, and son, Xiao Xinghua.

Xiao Ke, revolutionary, born July 14 1907, died October 24 2008.

Ed Jocelyn holds a Ph.D in history from the University of Bradford in the UK. In 2002 Jocelyn launched the New Long March project with Andrew McEwen. Together, they set out to retrace the Long March of the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, on foot. In the following five years, Jocelyn trekked 8,000 miles through remote parts of China. The story is told in The Long March, published in five languages in 2006-7. Jocelyn's current research explores the history of the revolutionary era in Kham, focusing particularly on the Tibetan rebellion in Zhongdian, and he also runs the Red Rock Trek and Expedition Company with fellow adventurer Yang Xiao.

Coal Miner’s Daughter

One of the most recent targets of China’s self-appointed net detectives—practitioners of the pernicious phenomenon known as the “human flesh search” (ren rou sou sou)—is not an unfaithful husband, a kitten killer, or a Tibet-friendly Chinese student. Instead she is someone who is, supposedly, a comely young woman whose father owns a coal mine and who recently immigrated to Seattle, cash, flashy cars, and Louis Vuitton luggage in hand. Definitely not from Butcher Holler. And, as it turns out, a fake.

The human flesh searchers, who mete out internet justice and facilitate the harassment of those who fail their moral and political tests, have been active this year. Though some bloggers have traced the practice as far back as 2001, it has come under greater scrutiny this year as the first human flesh search case winds its way through the courts. The case has been brought by that unfaithful husband, Wang Fei, whose wife threw herself off their 24th floor Beijing balcony after posting to her blog about her husband’s cheating ways. In search of vengeance, netizens tracked down Wang’s information, harrying him with threatening emails, phone calls, and even a net-organized posse who showed up on his doorstep. In the Western media, human flesh searching gained increased attention after Grace Wang, a Chinese student at Duke University, received death threats (and her family in China was forced into hiding) after she was captured on film attempting to mediate between pro-Tibet and pro-China protestors on campus. In both cases, searchers first discovered their target’s identity and then published their personal information on the web. Virtual and physical harassment followed.

In early September, the video of the coal mine boss’s daughter started to make the rounds. In it, a young woman in bug-eyed sunglasses issues a proclamation, written in bubbly characters, that cuts to the heart of current Chinese anxieties over increasing economic inequality and the shallowness of rampant consumerism:

“Recently spreading on the Internet have been a lot of domestic Chinese girls showing off their wealth…These domestic Chinese wealthy girls normally revel in vulgar tastes…This kind of nouveau riche showing off, I completely do not take seriously, and to compete with them would be lowering myself to their level. I post these pictures not to show off anything, but only to let those girls see clearly that the most important thing is having high tastes.” (translation from chinaSMACK)

The response from netizens was immediate. By mid-September, the video had garnered tens of thousands of comments. Commentators made comparisons between the coal mine boss’s daughter’s lifestyle and that of the coal miners themselves. With 70 percent of Chinese energy from coal, the industry is a national staple, but is also one of the most dangerous with thousands of deaths per year. And Shanxi, China’s West Virginia, has been ravaged by the extractive industry. For many viewers, the glossy pictures and self-satisfied tone confirmed fears that a new generation of wealthy twenty-something Chinese, pampered by their hard-working parents, would simply take their money and run from the poverty and environmental degradation that are the cornerstones of their wealth.

The video, which supposedly showed images of the woman’s Seattle house, cars, designer handbag collection, stacks of US currency, even her sneaker collection, was ripped apart by searchers who sensed that the video was a fake. One net detective proved that the photos of her Seattle mansion were actually pictures of Yao Ming’s pad. Another found the stills of “her” BMW on another website.

Eventually, searchers traced the video back to its original source. Roland Soong at EastSouthWestNorth reprinted (and translated) the account, originally from Shanxi News Net, in which the reporter notes that:

“On September 6, the netizen ‘Huanweichen’ was identified as the first one to post the video. Through the clues provided by the netizens, this reporter was able to contact here via QQ. She is a 22-year-old girl who claims to be a student at a certain university in Beijing. She is also the planner for a DV club. Concerning the many condemnations, she said indifferently: ‘How much is real on the Internet? Isn't it more fun to have real and fake stuff? If you believe it, then it is real!’ She said that she uploads videos almost weekly for video websites. So far she had made almost 2,000 videos. Most of them are re-posts from elsewhere but some of them are her own creations. She does so for fun as well as the training experience in video production.” (for the original story, see 6park)

The duper Huanweichen’s response at being found out—“If you believe it, then it is real!”—embodies an increasing blurring between reality and fiction. In asking whether the distinction even matters Huanweichen not only engages a debate that has raged elsewhere on the internet—as it did in the US two years ago when the doe-eyed teen vlogger (video blogger) “Lonelygirl15” turned out to be a twenty-something graduate of the New York Film Academy—but she also questions the very desire that drives the human flesh searchers to such extreme ends.

In his book on the moral conundrums of another moment of unprecedented wealth in Chinese history, Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China, Timothy Brook writes that “as the prospect of wealth fueled avarice, the moral order that had held society together gave way” (2). Brook makes the connection between today and the late Ming, when the economy grew at a staggering pace, the silver trade drew China into global exchange, and elite culture was increasingly distinct from that of the peasants. The human flesh searchers insist that they will hold the line against the avarice they perceive has resulted from today's massive social transformation and dislocation; Huanweichen, on the other hand, asks why we should bother at all, since in the Internet fantasy world we can all be the coal mine boss’s daughter.