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Dragons and Dungeons

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

Orville Schell
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Type
Review Essays
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The China Quarterly , Volume 139 , September 1994 , pp. 783 - 793
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1994

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References

1. Works like Dutton's, MichaelPolicing and Punishment in China: From Patriarchy to the People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Wu's, Harry HongdaLaogai: The Chinese Gulag (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992)Google Scholar, and (with Carolyn Wakeman), Bitter Winds: A Memoir of My Years in China's Gulag (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1994); and reports by Asia Watch (now Human Rights Watch Asia) such as Anthems of Defeat: Crackdown in Hunan Province 1989–92; Amnesty International; and the Lawyers Committee on Hunan Rights, have done much to illuminate China's police, criminal justice and penal system.

2. For a more complete explanation of the various degrees of damnation in China's penal colony, see Wu, Laogai.

3. See, for example, the cases of Larry Wu-tai Chin (Jin Wudai), who was unearthed as amole in the CIA in 1982, and Bin Wu, who had been hired by the FBI to provide information on Chinese espionage activities, but was in 1992 revealed to be a double agent sending secret hi-tech components (such as tubes for image intensifiers used in night vision scopes) back to his other employer, the Ministry of State Security in Beijing.

4. John Byron is reportedly a sinologist, author and Australian diplomat and intelligence officer who studied in Taiwan and Hong Kong and was posted to the Australian Embassy in Beijing during the early 1980s as an operative for the ASIO (Australian Security and Intelligence Organization).

5. Kang Sheng Pingzhuan was published in 1982 in a neibu (inernal circulation) edition. This 437-page work was by “Zhong Kan,” which turned out to be a composite pseudonym for two authors, Ma Zhongyang, deputy editor of Red Flag, and Li Kan, a senior Party historian who had written several unflattering essays about Mao Zedong. A Chinese contact “loaned” the book to Byron in 1983 for a single night for copying, although other copies also found their way to the United States and Britain during 1983–84. Since Party-sponsored biographies dedicated to exposing the crimes of a major leader have been rare, one surmises that this work was part of the whole effort to “reverse the verdict” on Kang as Deng and other reformers regained power in 1978. Besides this unusual biography, Byron and Pack also examined hundreds of U.S. Department of State, Military Intelligence, Office of Strategic Services and War Department documents.

6. See also Timothy Cheek's “The fading of Wild Lilies: Wang Shiwei and Mao Zedong's Yan'an talks in the first CPC rectification movement,“ Australian Journal of Asian Affairs, January 1984; Dai Qing's “Wang Shiwei and ‘Wild Lilies’”; and Geremie Barmé's “Using the past to save the present: Dai Qing's historiographic dissent,” East Asian History, No. 1, June 1991.

7. It was during this period that the notion of “thought reform” as a tool for saving the revolution from subversion, and individuals with errant ideological views from their own heresy by turning them into “new socialist men,” was bom. “We have discovered so many spies that all comrades must be on guard,” argued Kang at the time. “Now you [Party cadres] must increase your vigilance …and help those who wish to confess to the Party to repent and save them from the trap of the enemy's fifth column.”

8. According to Faligot and Kauffer, some Chinese even whispered “Bupa yanwang, zhipa Kang Laoban” or “Fearless before the King of Hell, but fearful before Boss Kang.”

9. According to Byron and Pack, records from the mid-1960s reveal that Kang personally certified “as criminals” 33 “national leaders,” meaning officials above the rank of minister, and 210 ministers, provincial chiefs and army commanders, and implicated almost 600 others from the “upper echelon.”

10. “On coalition government,” 24 April 1945, Selected Works, Vol. Ill, pp. 316–17.

11. Binyan, Liu, A Higher Kind of Loyalty (New York: Pantheon, 1990), p. 85.Google Scholar

12. Ibid. p. 96.

13. “The post Communist nightmare,” New York Review of Books, 17 February 1994, p. 28.

14. Liu Binyuan, “A higher kind of loyalty,” p. 95.

15. Kafka, Franz, The Trial (New York: Schocken Books, 1964), p. 108.Google Scholar

16. One very perceptive work on this subject which has been buried by the flood of more recent China scholarship is Lifton's, Robert JayThought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China (London: Gollancz, 1961).Google Scholar

17. See Kundera, Milan, The Art of the Novel (New York: Grove Press, 1986), pp. 99–117.Google Scholar Here Kundera draws fascinating parallels between Kafka's heroes and the later experiences of intellectuals living under Communist regimes. See also my own article, “The silence of Chinese intellectuals,” in the Yale-China Association's China Update, Vol. II, No. 1 (Spring 1991), which explores through the writing of Kafka, Kundera and Havel the syndrome of submission which totalitarian states in general, and Mao's China in particular, have succeeded in effecting as a control mechanism over intellectuals.

18. Variously translated as “pilgrimage to the South” or “Southern expedition,” this term has interesting historical connotations. During the imperial era, whenever the emperor left the capital, he was said to xunxing or “to bring heavenly fortune” to those local people along his route. By adopting such a name, Deng was doubtless trying to rub a little imperial lustre on his peregrination south.

19. For an interesting journalistic account of how People's Liberation Army and Public Security Bureau officials have been making inroads into nightlife by acquiring interests in karaoke bars, nightclubs, brothels, massage parlours and gambling and extortion rings, see Angelina Malhotra's “Shanghai's dark side,” Asia Inc., February 1994. It is also widely known that the Kunlun Hotel in Beijing is one of the MPS's many joint venture projects, and that the PLA's General Staff has a major interest in the Palace Hotel.

20. See also the 4 April 1994 Wall Street Journal, that quotes the retired Deputy Chief of the FBI's counter-intelligence division, Henry Brandon, as having recently said: “A lot of people are using their intelligence agents to collect [information] in the economic areas, but this is something the Chinese do to a fare-thee-well.” According to Brandon, they sometimes even succeed in “acquiring U.S. technology before it comes on the market.” In an older but celebrated case during the 1970s, French military security reportedly caught members of a visiting Chinese trade delegation dipping the tips of their ties into trays of Agfa photographic chemical, presumably to slice them off later and post them back to Beijing for chemical analysis.