The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers (37 page)

Li Rui’s party pedigree has always given him greater licence to speak out, but the authorities’ tolerance does not extend to news outlets which carry his words. In 2002, Li was interviewed by the
21st-Century World Herald
in Guangzhou, at the time a bastion of relative openness in the media. Li criticized the party’s falsification of history and the absence of any independent check on its power. Worse, he called the enduring deification of Mao a ‘cult’ that was ‘evil in the extreme’, equating it with the outlawed religious sect, Falun Gong. The propaganda department did not just censure the editor of the paper for publishing Li’s comments. They closed it down altogether. The same fate awaited other editors and journalists who confronted the Party on history, even on events that long pre-dated their rise to power.

The Party’s decision in 2001 to extend its historical remit back to 1840, well before the collapse of China’s final dynasty in 1911 and its civil war with the Nationalists in the 1930s and 1940s, enlarged the formal battlefield in the history wars. For the propaganda department, it provided extra internal leverage to discipline errant editors whom they had long been waiting to bring into line. Near the top of the blacklist for years had been Li Datong, at the
China Youth Daily
.

In person, Li was very much the old-style, sleeves-rolled-up newspaper editor, someone who sounded as if he was used to giving orders and having them acted on. Impatient and to the point, each short, sharp sentence was delivered as a definitive opinion as much as a response to any question. Often, he seemed to bark rather than speak. But if he had an editor’s personality, he also had an editor’s instincts. He was tough, brave and outspoken, and constantly on the lookout for issues he could use to challenge the authorities.

The early years of Li’s working life had been spent herding sheep on the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, where he was sent for his re-education in the Cultural Revolution. He got his first job as a journalist in 1979, at the provincial office of the
China Youth Daily
, and gradually worked his way into a senior position in Beijing. He only just survived the post-1989 crackdown on liberal journalists, spending five years doing penance at the paper’s research institute for his support of the protests, before returning to the paper full-time. By the early years of the new century, he had risen to edit the paper’s controversial weekly supplement,
Freezing Point
. The
China Youth Daily
, with its relatively liberal culture and impeccable political standing, gave Li a lot of room for movement. The paper’s sponsor was the Communist Youth League, the party body which had been the power base of Hu Yaobang and, later, of Hu Jintao himself. It didn’t take long, however, for the political protection the paper rendered him to crumble.

Like any Chinese journalists worth their salt, Li despised the weekly guidelines issued by the propaganda department on how to handle news. The department’s instructions varied–they would dictate the content on some issues and give broad guidance on others, depending on the issue’s sensitivity. For day-to-day events, the department dispenses directions by phone or, more recently, text message. The department’s word is final. ‘There was no debate. They would just tell you,’ said one senior editor. ‘They would never go too deeply into the reasons. Such things are not to be discussed with outsiders, for a start, but it is also because the reasons themselves are sensitive. They represent the influence exerted by all sorts of different interest groups.’ The system mainly relies on self-censorship, or, to use the Party’s parlance, ‘self-discipline’. There are no censors sitting in the newsrooms running their red pens through stories, as in the former Soviet Union. ‘Editors right down to people at the bottom of the newsroom don’t need to be told,’ the editor said. ‘There is a red line in their head.’

Li, who had often stumbled across that red line, had put himself in the cross-hairs of the propaganda department well before he went to war over history. When the paper’s new editor-in-chief tried in 2005 to grade reporters’ work according to how it was judged by government officials–their pay would be docked by poor notices and given bonuses for good ones–Li led a revolt which killed the plan. He had also published an article about the apology offered by the leader of the Nationalists in Taiwan for the ‘White Terror’ unleashed when the party took over the island in the early fifties. The contrast with the Party’s handling of its own history of repression in China was unstated, but unmistakable. Even after publishing the Taiwan article, Li remained fixated on the topic of political education. ‘Politics lessons are all about drumming information into people’s brains about the Party, but this was too sensitive for us, so we wondered, where do we start? And we thought of history,’ Li said. Leafing through a magazine in late 2005 which had been sent to him by a friend, Li stumbled across an essay by an elderly academic that was just what he had in mind.

Yuan Weishi, a retired professor of Chinese philosophy at Zhongshan University in Guangzhou, had had similar thoughts about political education. In 2001, he had begun to gather Chinese high school textbooks to compare how they handled the seventy-year period following the opium war to the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911 with those produced in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Yuan said he was horrified. In mainland texts, constant patriotic exhortations to ‘uphold’ traditional Chinese culture and protect the country swamped any rational assessment of China’s own weaknesses. The logic of the textbooks was that Chinese culture was ‘superior and unmatched’ and that any kind of dictatorship or mob violence could be used to erase ‘outside evils’ to protect it. He described the education as akin to growing up ‘drinking the wolf’s milk’. After going through the textbooks, Yuan said, ‘I was stunned to find our youth are continuing to drink this wolf’s milk today!’

Yuan focused on the textbook’s handling of the Boxer rebellion in 1899–1900, an event that ended in humiliation for the Qing court when the siege of the old legation quarter in Beijing was eventually lifted by foreign armies. The Boxers were Taliban-like bands of peasants, known for their elaborate, superstitious martial arts rituals, which they believed made them immune to bullets, and their visceral hatred of foreign intruders into China. The mainland textbooks, Yuan said, had rightly chronicled the overseas armies’ murders and looting in victory, but had ignored the Boxers’ indiscriminate violence against foreigners in return. ‘The Boxers cut down telegraph lines, destroyed schools, demolished railway tracks, burned foreign merchandise, murdered foreigners and any Chinese with connections to them,’ Yuan wrote. ‘Any person or thing with a foreign flavour had to be totally annihilated…yet our children’s textbooks will not speak about it!’

Yuan’s article was published in a small-circulation, underground journal in southern China in 2002. It had little impact and sank without trace, until someone sent Li Datong a copy at the end of 2005. Reading it he was thrilled and promptly reprinted the article in full in
Freezing Point
in early 2006, nearly four years after its initial publication. He knew he was taking a risk, but overrode opposition within the paper. ‘[My colleagues] collectively thought we should not publish this article, as this would become a challenge to the power of the Party,’ he said. At most, Li expected a slap on the wrist from the reading-and-evaluation team of retired cadres who pored over the paper for the propaganda department. He pointed out that CCTV, the state broadcaster at the heart of the media establishment, had just run a forty-episode series based on a wholesale reinterpretation of the late Qing dynasty. That programme had been reviewed by historians, and then gone all the way to Hu Jintao for a ruling, before being approved. Yuan’s article, Li said, was about events a century ago as well, when ‘China had no Marxism, no socialism and no Communist Party’.

Unbeknown to Li, the propaganda department was already lying in wait for him. The chief editors of the
China Youth Daily
had been called into the youth league headquarters a few weeks earlier and told ‘that pressure from higher up about
Freezing Point
was becoming too much to bear’. Yuan’s article was just the excuse that the paper’s assembled enemies were looking for. The essay was subject to a flurry of attacks in cyberspace. Yuan himself was personally targeted as a ‘traitor’ for ‘subverting’ modern history education. ‘The Politburo had already decided to deal with us,’ said Li. ‘Previously, the propaganda department had monitored the reactions of the netizens to our articles. When there was applause around, they did not do anything, because they were afraid of angering too many people. But when the reaction was bad, they felt the time had come.’ A few days after the essay appeared,
Freezing Point
was suspended.

Li went down screaming, determined, he said, ‘to leave a mark of protest in history’. He wrote an open letter challenging the decision and launched a protest through party channels, saying the order to close the paper was ‘illegal’. ‘We didn’t want to be like the last generation of news workers who were the obedient tools and “mouths and tongues” of the Party,’ he said. ‘All the media organizations were accomplices in a series of disasters in history, such as the anti-rightist movement, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.’ Li’s letter only angered the propaganda department even further. Two weeks later he was formally sacked and assigned back to the newspaper research institute, where he had spent five years after 1989. ‘It was my second trip to the “warehouse”,’ he joked, as he strode around his apartment on the outskirts of Beijing, riffling through his files for information. In a final, quixotic gesture, Li and a longtime colleague removed with him issued a lengthy open letter raging against the crushing of the paper. ‘State officials can set fires but civilians are not allowed to light a lantern!’ they wrote. ‘Their brains have no hint of any notion of civil rights.’

The decision to close
Freezing Point
was popular with the conservative ranks of the Party. ‘It’s not difficult to understand,’ said Xia Chuntao, the historian from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. ‘It is an official newspaper under the youth league. It is certainly not allowed to publish voices at odds with the Party’s guidelines and policies. I would have closed it too.’ The problem, according to Xia, is that there were too many amateur historians talking about things they were not qualified to discuss. ‘Yuan’s major is not Chinese history,’ he said. ‘It does not mean he should not express his opinion about the Boxers, but what he said must be according to history, without basic mistakes.’

Talking to him three years after his removal, Li seemed more thrilled than chastened by the episode, and not just because, like many newspaper editors, he enjoys a good fight. His attacks on the propaganda department had been widely circulated on the internet. He had released a detailed book chronicling the whole affair, with the backing of publishers in Japan. He also maintained an active blog, giving him a permanent platform to comment on freedom of speech issues. Compared to the oppressive political atmosphere after 1989, the response of the state was positively enlightened. ‘This time around, individuals have paid less of a price than before,’ Li said. ‘People have recognized that they can fight for their rights.’

In Guangzhou, Yuan expressed similar sentiments. He had heard that the Guangdong provincial government had approached the university to complain after his article had been republished in
Freezing Point
. But the university had fobbed them off. ‘No one came to talk to me. My apartment was very quiet,’ he said, sitting at his home in the university grounds. ‘More than forty journalists interviewed me later. The first question was always: “Were you harassed?” I said no, no. And I think that was the best propaganda of all for the Communist Party.’

At about the same time that Li was being pushed out of
Freezing Point
, Yang Jisheng was nearing completion of
Tombstone
. Yang, like Li, had always been a journalistic bomb-thrower, with one major difference. While Li had positioned himself as an outsider, Yang’s projectiles had always been launched from within the heart of the system itself.

Yang spent his entire professional life at Xinhua, the official state news agency, starting in 1967 and retiring in 2002. Yang’s job at Xinhua gave him journalistic privileges that are very different from those afforded by the media in democracies. Successful journalists in the west trade on their ability to uncover scandals or lift the visibility of public policy issues with such vigour that the government must respond. The power Yang wielded as a journalist in Xinhua, however, played out backstage, out of sight of the public. When I asked Yang which of his stories had had a major impact on policy and politics in his three-decade-plus career, he didn’t name anything that he had written as an ordinary Xinhua economics reporter. His news stories and commentaries churned out for the public wire service had been cleared and sanitized by the propaganda system. The presentation of these stories was aimed at supporting the government, not shaking it up.

Yang was more proud of his dispatches for Xinhua’s secret internal news service, written exclusively for senior party officials. Two of his stories attained the status of cabinet documents once they were adopted by the top leadership. In 1972, he filed a story saying the military had forcibly taken over schools, hospitals and houses in Tianjin, the port city near Beijing where Yang was stationed for nineteen years. Yang’s account of this episode landed on the desks of Mao and Zhou Enlai, who promptly ordered the troops to vacate the buildings. Another story, also filed while the Cultural Revolution was still raging, detailed the collapse of industrial production in the city. ‘Mao read that one too,’ he said. In 1987, he wrote a four-part series about the decline of Tianjin as an economic centre, which was leaked to the Hong Kong press, causing great embarrassment to the city’s leaders. Li Ruihan, the then mayor and later a Politburo member, had him investigated, but took no action. ‘He is just a bookworm,’ Li remarked later, of Yang, ‘so I let him go.’