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 In China all
history is political
By Kent Ewing
Zhu Ling's account of peasant activist Yao Lifa's long struggle to
bring fair, democratic elections to a local legislature in Hubei
province, to Hu Fayun's This Is How It Goes@SARS.com, the story of a
woman whose obsession with the Internet during the SARS (severe acute
respiratory syndrome) crisis jeopardizes her relationship with a
local politician.
This week the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television took
the crusade for political correctness even further, ordering
satellite television networks to show only "ethically inspiring
dramas" during prime time. The order, which affects 48 national
channels, will be in force for eight months, starting in February. It
prohibits prime-time airing of imported cartoons and dramas, programs
involving crime, sex, divorce or legal cases, and dramas in local
dialects or even local accents.
With the censors' ambit spreading so far and wide, analysts point to
one clear message: Chinese leaders want to see nothing in the media
that could undermine President Hu Jintao's vision of a "harmonious
society" in the run-up to the CCP's 17th congress this autumn. The
congress is the first to be chaired by Hu, and no one is allowed to
spoil the party.
Hu took over the presidency from Jiang Zemin in 2003 and is also the
party's general secretary and head of the army. The congress, which
will witness substantial changes in leadership posts and set the
course for the country's development over the next five years, is
expected to be a crowning moment for him.
Ironically, when Hu assumed the presidency touted as a reformer,
there was hope of a new openness toward the media. Indeed, in tandem
with his call for better economic management, the new president
encouraged journalists to play a more aggressive watchdog role in
society by reporting on the epidemic of corruption and fraud that has
become a defining characteristic of Chinese bureaucracy.
But the new attitude was short-lived. According to the New York-based
Committee to Protect Journalists, Hu has presided over "a major
crackdown on the media".
That crackdown attracted international condemnation last year with
the jailing of New York Times researcher Zhao Yan and the chief China
correspondent for Singapore's Straits Times, Ching Cheong. Zhao was
sentenced to three years in prison on what was widely considered a
trumped-up charge of fraud, and Ching was jailed for five years for
selling state secrets to Taiwan in a verdict that was met with
disbelief by many of his fellow journalists.
Beijing's clampdown on editorial staff who work for local media has
attracted less attention but is no less real. Last year, editors were
sacked from three newspapers that dared to defy the censors' dictates
- the Beijing News, the Southern Metropolis News and the Public
Interest Times - and party propagandists also temporarily closed
Bingdian, a lively four-page weekly supplement to the state-run China
Youth Daily, because of its coverage of controversial issues.
In addition, the popular Beijing-based weekly newsmagazine Lifeweek
received a reprimand from the Propaganda Department for "defiance" of
the party mandate not to cover politically sensitive events. While
the department did not specify which event Lifeweek was "guilty" of
covering, it's a fair bet the censure was related to the magazine's
October 30 cover story on the 30th anniversary of the Cultural
Revolution, which featured a front-page photo of Jiang Qing, Mao's
wife and one of the notorious Gang of Four who led the long and
bloody purge.
Authorities have also shut down Internet blogs and chat forums that
have crossed the censors' line.
It's no surprise that Reporters Without Borders ranked China 159th
out of 167 countries in its world press-freedom index last year. And
while the country has promised to grant foreign journalists
unprecedented freedom of travel and coverage when China hosts the
Summer Olympic Games in 2008, that promise means nothing to Chinese
journalists, bloggers and authors who continue to be muzzled.
For a country that likes to lecture Japan and other nations about
facing up to their history, China still has a deep aversion to
reckoning with its own.
Kent Ewing is a teacher and writer at Hong Kong International School.
He can be reached at kewing@hkis.edu.hk .
(Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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