China in Ten Words Read Free

mothers with babies in their arms—greeted the speakers with respect, nodding repeatedly and applauding warmly, however immature the students’ faces or naive their views.
    There were comical moments, too. One afternoon I took my place in a dimly lit conference room in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences for a meeting of the Capital Intellectual Coalition, a newly formed association of liberal intellectuals in Beijing. As we awaited the arrival of a prominent political scientist named Yan Jiaqi I noticed that some people were taking a newspaper editor to task. His paper had just published a statement by the coalition, and these people were unhappy because their names were low on the list of signatories, beneath the names of less well-known individuals. Why had these nobodies been given a higher ranking? The hapless editor said it wasn’t his fault but apologized anyway, nevertheless failing to mollify his critics. This farcical episode came to an end only with the arrival of Yan Jiaqi.
    I remember the moment clearly; it was the first and last time I saw him. This distinguished scholar—a close associate of Zhao Ziyang, the general secretary of the Communist Party, who favored a conciliatory line toward the demonstrators—walked in with a somber expression on his face. People quieted down as he delivered a piece of bad news. “Ziyang is in the hospital,” he said in a low voice.
    In the political context of 1989, for a government leader to be hospitalized could mean only that he had lost power or that he had gone into hiding. Everyone immediately understood the implications. Some began to slip away quietly, and soon they had scattered far and wide, like falling leaves in an autumn gale.
    After Tiananmen Zhao Ziyang disappeared from view, and nothing more was heard of him until his death in 2005. Only then did the New China News Agency issue a brief statement: “Comrade Zhao had long suffered from multiple diseases affecting his respiratory and cardiovascular systems, and had been hospitalized for medical treatment on multiple occasions. In recent days his condition deteriorated, and efforts to revive him proved unsuccessful. He died in Beijing on January 17, aged 85.”
    In China, even if it’s just a retired minister who dies, the official announcement will usually be a lot more detailed than this. The statement said nothing about the career of a man who had once been leader of the party and the nation, nor did it mention the date of his memorial service. But word leaked out to a group of petitioners—or “judicial refugees,” as they have come to be known—who lived in Beijing South Station. I have no idea through what channels these most disadvantaged of all “people” in China got hold of this information, but they organized themselves and went off to pay their final respects to Zhao Ziyang. They were not authorized to attend, so the police naturally blocked them from entering, but they unfurled a commemorative inscription all the same.
    These petitioners had sought legal redress for injustice and oppression in their home districts, only to find themselves stymied at every turn by bias and corruption in the judicial system. China’s extralegal appeals procedure—a remnant of its hallowed tradition of humane government—offers a slender hope that some honest official might dispense justice where law has failed. Petitioners exhaust all their resources as they roam from place to place in search of a fair-minded administrator, and ultimately they make their way to Beijing in the hope that someone in the central government will respond to their pleas. In 2004 the official total of such cases reached 10 million. Their desperate plight almost defies imagination: fighting hunger, they sleep in the streets, only to be harried by the police, driven like beggars hither and yon, and written off by some well-heeled intellectuals as mentally deranged. It was precisely such “people” who went to bid farewell to