Ba Jin and the New Freedom of Speech in China
The famous Chinese Ba Jin recently passed away at the age of 100. The following is a translation of an excerpt from Yu Qiuyu (余秋雨)'s book <<Lend Me A Life (借我一生)>>. This excerpt is about Ba Jin as well as Yu Qiuyu. The two writers are celebrities, and that makes them the targets of criticisms, rightly or wrongly so.
Slandering me is no big deal, but a truly landmark case was the massive slandering campaign directed against the 100-year-old Ba Jin once again.
As for me, I read Ba Jin's <<Family>>, <<Spring>> and <<Autumn>> during my childhood in the study room back in my home village. Later on, I was a classmate of Ba Jin's daughter, and I witnessed the most difficult period of his life. I can still read about that experience in his literary memoirs. If the history of Ba Jin should ever become soiled, then all our own personal memories would be shred to pieces as well.
Above all, Ba Jin is the sole surviving representative of the May 4th period. He has always been a humanist writer and he was the first to denounce the character of the calamity known as the Cultural Revolution. The motive for slandering Ba Jin is therefore quite obvious.
But the slanders occurred openly on a grand scale.
...
The person who attacked Ba Jin for "always being a faithless servant who served two masters and got two salaries" was a man named Zhu in Shenzhen. I had no idea that his kind of talk had such a huge influence in Hong Kong and overseas. So I asked my friends to look up his essays on the subject for me.
When I read it, I was shocked. So I must spend some time to tell you about this Zhu person, who is otherwise not worth a mention. To speak of Zhu now is actually to speak of the Cultural Revolution, the art of slandering, the historical catastrope, Ba Jin and us.
He said that Ba Jin "served two dynasties" and that obviously referred to the fact that Ba Jin lived before and after 1949, being a writer whose works were popular all the time. This is identical to the manner by which the Shanghai gang criticized Ba Jin during the Cultural Revolution, while simultaneously attacking Bingshen, Mao Tun, Cai Yu, Qiang Zhongshu, Ye Shengtao and other precursor writers. But Zhu hated Ba Jin most of all because he lived too long: "He used his loyalty to the powers to trade for the luxury high-class healthcare given to senior cadres in order to live a hundred years."
So growing to one hundred years is a crime nowadays. That such an accusation can be published overseas is an appalling disgrace to the Chinese people.
As everybody knew, the perennially ill Ba Jin had donated all his income and royalties to the Chinese Contemporary Literature Museum as well as disaster victims all around China. But Zhu persisted in condemning him for "collecting his royalties day after day." The old man had made a moving confession about his lack of resolve during the Wu Feng incident and the Cultural Revolution, to the point where even Taiwan's highly critical commentator Li Ao praised the "greatness" of Ba Jin. But Zhu used the content of Ba Jin's confession and accused him of being "only pretending to confess," "speaking out in order to cover up and being totally hypocritical," "is this a confession? 100% cunning and hypocrital," "lying to the world to gain fame," "unbelievably cruel and shameless" ...
To tell the truth, this went far beyond what the rebels did to Ba Jin during the Cultural Revolution. They had been criticizing a 60-something-year-old writer back then whereas Zhu was insulting a 100-year-old man now.
Furthermore, Zhu fabricated crimes such as "sending his friends to death," "ruling over everyone," "setting up the Temple of Ba Jin," and "raiding national assets" in a full-scale slander campaign on Ba Jin.
The most incredible part was that Zhang Chunqiao's verdict "for Ba Jin -- not shooting him was already a practical policy decision" had caused tremendous problems for Ba Jin during the Cultural Revolution, but Zhu called it proof that "it was a personal conflict with Zhang Chunqiao."
At this point, I must cite some historical facts to refute.
Zhang Chunqiao had no personal ties with Ba Jin. So why did he render such a verdict against Ba Jin? All Ba Jin research specialists know that on May 9, 1962, Ba Jin gave a talk titled "The Courage and Responsibility of Writers" in front of the Shanghai Cultural Representatives Meeting. During this speech, Ba Jin said:
I am somewhat afraid of those people who hold a frame in one hand and a stick in the other hand while looking for problems everywhere. Although I would not withdraw when I see the sticks, if you get hit too often with the sticks, you can get a concussion. If you run into them, there can be a lot of trouble. I am not joking. There are such people in our society, maybe not a lot. You don't usually see them and you don't know what they are up to. But if you open your mouth or pick up your pen, they will show up.
They like to make some simple frames and they are happy with the frames that they make. They are willing to put everyone inside those frames.
If someone refuses to go inside the frames, even though there are more flowers in someone else's garden or there are more birds chirping on the trees in front of the windows, they will be angered when they hear the fresh songs and read the unfamiliar essays. They will then raise their sticks and beat you in the head ...
Although they are few, they make a lot of noise, they write essays to create public opinion, they speak everywhere, they write everyone, they find fault with people, they give people labels and they swing their sticks everywhere, so that the writers become worried and lose their ambitions.
Those words were enough to make the veteran critics such as Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan hopping mad. Unexpectedly, Associated Press issued a release on May 25 from Hong Kong, and Yao Wenyuan and others saw it:
At the Second Meeting of Representatives of the Shanghai Municipal Literary Artists on May 9, Ba Jin said: "The absence of freedom of speech is strangling the development of Chinese literature."
He said: "Fear of criticism and self-admonition" have made many Chinese writers, including himself, to become idlers. Their main concern now is "to avoid making mistakes."
Ba Jin used to be a prolific writer. The novels that he wrote before the Communists conquered China are still extremely popular in China and among the Chinese in Southeast Asia. But he has not written anything that gained any attention during the past 13 years ...
This writer said that no one knows who "the people with the frames and sticks" come from, "but as soon as you open your mouth or pick up your pen, they will show up."
He said: "These people have created fear among the writers."
This writer asked both himself and the other writers to gather the courage to shake off their fears and write things that are creative.
The Associated Press especially emphasized that the Beijing leaders obviously did not approve of Ba Jin's speech. The proof was that none of the national literary magazines published or reported on this speech.
This Associated Press report turned Ba Jin into "the person who offered the ammunition to the imperialists to use against China." This was how Zhang Chunqiao came to have the "shooting"/"not shooting" opinion when the Cultural Revolution came. As to why the new generation of critics want to turn the absolute contrast in positions between Ba Jin and Zhang Chunqiao into "a matter of personal conflict," we only need to read Ba Jin's speech carefully to find out. Ba Jin had uncovered what the teachers of these critics did, and all his words traveled across time to fall on the students forty years later. They are afraid that contemporary readers might read Ba Jin's speech and figure out their origins, and so they have to muddy the waters.
...
At the time, there was a rumor in Beijing that I had received a "luxury villa" in Shenzhen. I was sure that if I pursued this rumor, I would find Zhu. The source of the rumor was the editor of a literary magazine in Beijing. Previously, this person had claimed that I had a "luxury villa" in Hong Kong too. At about this time, a Beijing official was sentenced severely on account of having a "luxury villa," so someone wrote in a Tianjian literary magazine that I should be put to justice too. I thought that this would an easy lawsuit that would end the "dark era" from that "dark person."
So I asked a lawyer to file suit in the People's Court in Dongcheng district, Beijing. Before the first trial began, the defendant was ordered to proceed to Shenzhen to obtain evidence that I had received a luxury villa. There was no news for quite some time. When the trial began, the question of whether there was a "luxury villa" suddenly became whether "such a rumor was heard." A person out of nowhere showed up as the defendant's witness and said that he had heard it before. So the defendant won the case. The other explanation was that the complainant is a "public figure" and so he has lesser protection under the law. Although the verdict was strange, it did not bother me. My greatest regret was that the "witness" was not Zhu of Shenzhen, as I was not able to get him to come out from the darkness.
The appeal then went to the Beijing Middle Level People's Court, and the "sole witness" finally appeared in court. He testified that he "heard" about this "rumor" in Shenzhen. Therefore, the original verdict was upheld. I lost and the defendant won. The verdict sheet stated the name, occupation and work unit of this "sole witness": "A reporter named Zhu employed by Guangzhou's New Economy magazine."
That was him. Zhu of Shenzhen had come out! But how did he end up in Guangzhou?
A veteran news reporter in Guangzhou Dong Xiaomin read the news and went to inquire at New Economy magazine. The operations general manager said: "We have no such reporter here."
You see, I still don't know who he is.
Many newspapers on mainland China reported my loss in the lawsuit. But not a single newspaper or reporter bothered to invesigate: where were those luxury villas?
After a few days, the Beijing newspapers used big headlines to declare that the defendant wanted to countersue me, because I had said that the claim of "luxury villa" was inaccurate. He believes that I cannot even say he was "inaccurate" because he "did not have the ability to verify, and the inability to verify does not represent that he was unwilling to verify." Thus, he wanted to countersue because I did not appreciate that he was a busy person. I wish he would indeed countersue. Of course, he will probably win.
From now on, the Chinese people had better watch what they say. You cannot accuse people of counterfeiting wine or medicine, but you must respectfully say that those people "did not have the ability not to counterfeit, and the inability not to counterfeit does not imply an unwillingness not to counterfeit." You cannot accuse someone of violating intellectual copyrights, but you must carefully only say that people "did not have the ability to produce originals, but the inability to produce originals does not imply the unwillingness not to produce originals." You cannot accuse someone of being bad, but you can only say that they "do not have the ability to be good, and the inability to be good does not mean that they don't want to be good." They are too busy, and they can't do everything.
...
I consulted two Beijing legal scholars: I said that I have never received any luxury villas but they repeatedly defamed me in official media inside China and in the overseas media. In the end, I lost and they won the lawsuit. How does the law work in China?
One legal scholar said: "There may have been a procedural error. You are famous, but you are a cultural figure going into an unfamiliar Beijing court to file a lawsuit against a public servant within a government organization. You were out of your depth ..."
The other legal scholar interrupted him: "This may also be a legal point of view. Certain Chinese judges follow a fashionable idea that Chinese celebrities are immature and therefore the courts ought to tolerate certain defamations to help the celebrities grow up ..."
I asked: "Is a 100-year-old man mature enough?"
They were taken aback, and then they smiled wispfully.
I then got serious and said: "Chinese celebrities are certainly not mature enough, but they are definitely more mature than Chinese law. At a time when the celebrities were being persecuted, the law was nowhere in sight. When the law learned to get on its feet and walk again, it was after the reforms began. Of course, that group of people are more mature than either the celebrities or the law today."
Someone said, "No matter whether is for Ba Jin or ourselves, we don't have to rebut them."
...
I said: "They are not up to our league as cultural competitors. But they are in our living space."
Professor Jiang Yujie said: "Living space? Have you heard that we have all moved into virtual space? Fake wine, fake medicine, fake diploma, fake reporters, they are everywhere. Intellectual copyright violators can publicly criticize anti-piracy. Rumormongers can show up on television as rumormongers and expound at length with a smile. The people are accustomed to them. We can't defeat them. Maybe they will publish an essay to say that your uncle did not perish during the Cultural Revolution, but he is alive and living in your other luxury villa in Greenland ..."
"It is more troublesome for old man Ba Jin," I followed up. "In a few years, someone may call him the leader of the Cultural Revolution, for why else would he propose to establish a museum in memory of the Cultural Revolution?"
We shook our heads as we spoke. Yes, by that time, the true history will be buried silently in the ground. Meanwhile these people are the "sole witnesses" in court, and the words from the "media public figures" will be worth gold.
This sounds sad, but there is nothing new here. They are just catching up after time lost during those crazy years. From George Bernard Shaw: "I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it." And the pig becomes famous for getting you all dirty.