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2 In China all history is
political By Kent Ewing
HONG KONG - Last year, China marked the 30th
anniversary of Mao Zedong's death with great fetes
of veneration and tribute. But there was no official
mention of the millions who lost their lives
as a result of the Great Helmsman's famine-producing
industrial policies, brutal Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) purges or the 10-year exercise in
persecution known as the Cultural Revolution. On
Mao's dark side, the state media were silent.
More of the same can be expected this year
as Chinese
intellectuals gear up to mark
the 50th anniversary of the anti-rightist movement
that led to the death or banishment of a
half-million people for speaking out against
misguided Mao polices such as the Great Leap
Forward.
And this year, the party has an
additional reason to tighten control on the media.
Its 17th CCP Congress is to be convened in
the autumn, and it is essential to maintain
political and social stability. And for the
Communist Party, control on the media is a must
for stability.
In a preemptive strike, the
publicity department of the party's Central
Committee has warned state media off covering
significant historical events without first
obtaining permission. This comes on top of last
year's advisory that the media should restrict
coverage of such events to official notices issued
by the state-run Xinhua News Agency.
Moreover, citing anonymous sources, the
South China Morning Post reported that the General
Administration of Press and Publications (GAPP)
has banned the distribution or sale of eight books
by prominent writers and intellectuals and
threatened publishers who defy the ban with tough
financial penalties. Tellingly, one of the banned
books, Past Stories of Peking Opera Stars,
was written by Zhang Yihe, daughter of former
transport minister Zhang Bojun, who was one of the
chief targets of the anti-rightist campaign.
The ideological crackdown against Zhang
Bojun and other intellectuals came in reaction to
the so-called Hundred Flowers Blooming Movement in
1956-57, a period during which Mao invited
criticism of the government with the ostensible
aim of improving policymaking. The name of the
movement was inspired by a poem that read: "Let a
hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of
thought contend."
Historians debate
whether the movement was a trap or simply went
beyond what Mao had bargained for. Whatever the
case, the purges that followed saw many
intellectuals who had criticized the party labeled
"rightists" and sentenced to re-education through
labor or, in some cases, death.
Zhang
Bojun, dubbed the "No 1 rightist" at the time for
advocating a more democratic socialist system,
died in 1969. Unlike some other famous victims of
the purge - for example, former premier Zhu Rongji
- he did not outlive Mao and was never
rehabilitated into public life. But his
author-daughter has taken up his legacy in a
number of popular books she has written.
For her efforts, Zhang Yihe was given the
Freedom to Write Award in 2004 by the Independent
Chinese PEN Center for her book The Past Is Not
Like Smoke, a memoir explicitly about her
father and other intellectuals, such as Luo
Longji, who were persecuted during the
anti-rightist campaign. The PEN selection
committee said of Zhang's book: "This kind of
writing is not only an indictment of the age of
darkness, but it is also an affirmation of the
indefatigable human dignity and a negation of all
attempts to destroy that dignity."
The
book, even in its heavily edited form, was soon
banned in China, but an unexpurgated version,
titled The Last Nobles, was published with
great success in Hong Kong, and pirated copies
flourished on the mainland. Zhang's A Memoir of
Ma Lianliang was also banned on the mainland
because of its political content.
In a
speech accepting the PEN award, Zhang said that
while life for intellectuals is much better in
China today than during her father's time, the
country's breakneck economic growth poses a new
threat to its people: "The situation now is very
different. Intellectuals are living better, and
they can express their own voices up to a point.
"But there is now another situation - many
people are more interested in pursuing material
[wealth] rather than dispassionately understanding
the depth of humanity and the truth of life ... We
seem to have come out from one kind of
totalitarianism, and we turned off and walked
right under another form of domination."
In a rare show of outrage for a Chinese
author, Zhang issued a 1,000-word attack on the
GAPP after the ban of her most recent book, an
account of seven Peking opera stars who were
friends of her family. She told the Post that the
ban "infringed my personal rights" of freedom of
expression and publication.
The other most
recently banned titles represent an interesting
cross-section of China's bureaucratic paranoia -
from I Object: The Road to Politics by a
People's Congress Member, journalist
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