Jottings from the Granite Studio

There is an evocative and very moving article in this week’s New Yorker written by Zha Jianying about her brother Zha Jianguo, a democracy activist serving a nine-year prison sentence at Beijing’s Number 2 Prison. (“Enemy of the State: The Complicated Life of an Idealist,” The New Yorker, 4/23/07) Zha Jianguo’s crime? Being one of the two organizers of the C.D.P. (China Democracy Party) and then trying to openly register and then run an opposition party against the ruling CCP.

But this is not the usual cliched story of heroic activist standing up to the brutal state with heavy overtones of Good versus Evil and echoes of David and Goliath. It is a sister’s story and her gift for the telling detail gives Jianguo’s tale a complexity not often found in English-language writing on political dissent in the PRC. Zha Jianying is immensely proud of her older brother’s dedication even as she laments the choices he has made throughout his life.

Jianguo was a thoughtful student raised in the home of academics. The GPCR brought tough times for the family but Jianguo–perhaps unsurprisingly given his age and the times–became a proud Red Guard. Answering Mao’s call, he moved to the countryside to continue revolution. Highly intelligent but committed to making life better for China’s peasants, Jianguo remained in a small village in Inner Mongolia for nearly twenty years, living as a farmer and part-time village cadre long after many of China’s GPCR generation had returned home. Finally moving back to Beijing, a failure at revolution and without marketable skills, Jianguo was a peasant outcast in his own home city. (At a pro-democracy student meeting in 1989, he was turned away at the door because he didn’t fit the organizers elitist ideas of “democratization.” No Dogs or Peasants Allowed, apparently.)

In the 1990s, Jianguo stuggled financially and personally. He was a failure at business, twice divorced, living in his dead brother’s apartment and relying on his daughter’s salary as a hotel receptionist for money. Even so, he never lost his sense of youthful idealism. A chance meeting with a veteran of the 1979 Democracy Wall movement proved fateful. Troubled by the direction of Chinese society and the autocratic rule of the CCP, the two formed a party to challenge the status quo. For his trouble, Zha Jianguo was arrested and sentenced to nine years in prison. When he was finally seized by the PSB, Zha Jianguo was hardly suprised, he had taken to carrying his toothbrush around with him…just in case.

His sister describes Jianguo as idealistic but out of touch. China had changed, Jianguo had not. The new post-Mao generation loved China, but for this new generation of mall-hoppers and man-purse slingers, loving China meant participating in a consumer economy without voicing the kind of dissent that might lead to destabilizing chaos. Jianguo watched those around him drink the Kool Aid, but he himself had always been a baijiu man. He paid a price for his choices. As his sister writes:

“Jianguo seems a mulish simpleton, a man with a black-and-white vision of politics, oblivious of all shades of gray, not to mention the rainbow of hues that you’d need to paint a semblance of Chinese life today. In other moods, I would think of Confucius’ remark about one of his disciples, Zilu: ‘He has daring, but little else.’”

Despite this characterization, his sister writes lovingly about a Jianguo who is revered by human rights activists but ridiculed by his own mother. (Jianying quotes her as saying: “It’s arrogance and stupidity. He’s had a hero complex from childhood. The problem is, he’s not a hero. He is a foot soldier who wants to be a general, but without the talent and the skills of a general.”)

Going beyond her brother’s plight though, Zha Jianying’s crafts a beautifully written narrative with an assortment of characters that would do Lewis Carroll proud. Down the rabbit hole of the New Beijing we find baby-faced comedians as prison guards, cookie-loving “spies,” activist aunties, and a Beijing cabbie planning armed rebellion against the CCP while driving past Mao’s portrait.

And what of the CCP? Zha Jianying quotes a friend of hers, somebody we would clearly call part of China’s new urban elite:

Of course, those who locked [Jianguo] up are on the wrong side of history. Liu Ge, a friend who is a partner at an illustrious Beijing law firm, likes to remind me of this. “All the countries that have succeeded in modernization have a multiparty system, while those sticking to one-party rule are losers,” Liu said. “Democracy makes a country win and dictatorship makes a country lose. The rulers today want to make China better, and they have done a lot of things well, but they cannot face their ugly past, how they turned China into a place with a hundred holes and a thousand wounds, the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, and so on. So they are not confident enough to take radical critics like your brother.”

Perhaps there wasn’t quite enough Kool Aid to go around. A wonderful piece and an absolute MUST-READ.