July 22, 2010
A Grim Chapter in History Kept Closed
By DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW
BEIJING — On a day in late March, Zhang Dazhong, one of China’s richest men, struggled to speak through tears as he addressed his assembled guests.
“My mother died 40 years ago this year, but I never held a decent memorial for her,” Mr. Zhang said. On the stage about him, in the red-carpeted hall of a luxury hotel, were flowers and a large portrait of a woman in a white shirt, her hair in pigtails.
“To this day, I don’t know where she is buried,” he said, voice cracking. “As her son, this troubles my conscience very much.”
With the extraordinary ceremony on March 27, Mr. Zhang, founder of the Dazhong Electronics appliance stores, and his younger sister, Zhang Kexin, did something very few relatives of the nearly two million people killed from 1966 to 1976 during the Cultural Revolution dare to do to this day: publicly honor an ordinary victim of Maoist terror.
Their mother, Wang Peiying, a widow with seven children, was a worker at the Ministry of Railways. The famine precipitated by the Great Leap Forward, which killed perhaps 30 million people by the early 1960s, had horrified her, and as political turmoil began again only a few years later, she publicly called on China’s leader, Mao Zedong, to take responsibility for his mistakes and resign.
Ms. Wang was sent to a psychiatric hospital and drugged. Released and paraded around the capital, she refused to recant. Instead, she repeated her accusations. Her jaw was broken to stop her from talking. After a mass trial at the Workers’ Stadium on Jan. 27, 1970, she was executed.
“She was a kindhearted woman who was unflinching in the face of evil,” said Mr. Zhang, a man of medium height with coal-black hair and a slightly jowly face, dressed in a black suit, white shirt and black tie. “Her brave stance, her unvarying faith, were completely correct. She symbolizes truth and justice.”
Criticism of Mao flowed freely among speakers at the event. Mao Yushi, a prominent economist, said the violence and subsequent cover-up lingered. “Chinese society is not normal enough,” he said.
Also on display was an electrifying new documentary by an independent filmmaker, Hu Jie, called “My Mother Wang Peiying.”
Like Mr. Zhang’s memorial, the film challenges the government’s deliberate forgetting about the era, said Zhou Xun, a historian at Hong Kong University who is finishing a book about the Great Leap Forward famine.
“In the case of China’s recent history, we are not talking about the truth, because the public has never been informed about the complexity of the whole period. There is not even any room for discussion and debate,” Ms. Zhou said.
Not far from the hotel where Mr. Zhang, 62, conducted his memorial, Wang Jingyao, 89, keeps a shrine to his late wife, Bian Zhongyun, in the study of his modest apartment.
He has also refused to forget.
The day after students at an elite Beijing girls’ school beat Ms. Bian to death with nail-studded planks on Aug. 5, 1966, he did something deeply audacious. Grieving but clearheaded, Mr. Wang took a bus to the Xidan shopping district and bought a camera — a Shanghai brand, model 202.
He returned to the Post Office Hospital, opposite the Beijing Normal University High School, where Ms. Bian had been vice principal, and began photographing her naked and bruised body.
The pictures are unflinching, well- composed, hard to look at. Mr. Wang had worked as a photographer and journalist before the 1949 revolution, for the Americans and the Chinese Communists. “History must be recorded,” he said.
For years, Mr. Wang said, he tried to sue the people involved in his wife’s killing, but courts rejected the cases. Today, he assembles evidence — her wristwatch, smashed during the final beating, a bloodstained shirt, documents. “They avoid me,” he said of the former Red Guards involved. Some are now wealthy, or in positions of influence.
How has it been, living with this sad truth for 44 years? “Two words,” he said, eyes glittering. “Bitter. Struggle.”
Wang Youqin was a student at the Beijing Normal University High School when Ms. Bian was killed. Inspired by reading a classified copy of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel of life in the Soviet gulag, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” she began collecting information about victims in the 1970s, after the violence subsided. She published a book listing 659 names; her “Chinese Holocaust Memorial” Web site details nearly 200 more.
The site is blocked in China. Ms. Wang, who teaches Chinese at the University of Chicago, is writing a new book with more names, from hundreds of interviews across the country.
While the Cultural Revolution is not a taboo subject per se, to this day research and writings are strictly controlled. One or two individuals have opened private museums, such as Peng Qian, in the southern city of Shantou, where he was formerly deputy mayor. The content is carefully calibrated. Ms. Wang says the government has identified only senior officials who were killed, plus a few “celebrities,” while ordinary people are ignored. She finds that deeply offensive. “It should be all about the victims,” she said.
The government has conceded that Mao committed “errors,” but his reputation in China is still officially sacred. Wary of challenges to the man whose body lies on display in Tiananmen Square, publishers of writings about the era submit to a three-tier censorship process: at the government’s General Administration of Press and Publication, the Party History Research Office and the Party Literature Research Office, according to Ding Dong, a historian.
Since the mid-1990s, “very little has been published about the Cultural Revolution, and even less of any significance,” Mr. Ding recently told an audience at Sanwei Bookstore in Beijing.
As time passes, historians increasingly worry about how to preserve the truth, with people dying before they can tell their stories.
“For decades, the truth has been living in the dark, but now it’s dying in the dark,” Ms. Zhou said. “Then one might ask, what is truth? What is justice? What is history?”
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