Posted on 07/31/2002 11:48:38 PM PDT by maui_hawaii
Earlier this year, freelance journalist Jiang Xueqin was deported from China after filming worker protests. Here, he reflects on his arrest, his videotaped 'confession,' and on the Communist Party's continuing deep suspicion of the media
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ON JUNE 3, I was arrested while secretly filming a worker protest in the northern Chinese oil city of Daqing. For 48 hours I was held in a neat, tidy hotel somewhere in the vast countryside outside the city. The police would not release me until I had made my videotaped confession.
"Because I am young and stupid, I broke China's very important national laws meant to protect the sensitive secrets of the Chinese people," I said before the camera, reading from my confession. "I have betrayed my own blood, and hope the ever-generous and tolerant Chinese people can forgive me."
"You were also reporting in China without accreditation," the police chief said.
"Yes," I said, nodding my head.
"Say it," he ordered. I did.
Earlier that day, a clunky train had taken me into Daqing, a Stalinist metropolis of gleaming skyscrapers and wide avenues. I was there to help make a documentary for American television about the huge worker protests that the city has witnessed this year. Back in March, a reported 50,000 workers gathered in the large park outside the tall, white headquarters of PetroChina.
"It's over now, and we've lost. Only about 1,000 workers come now," Yang Haiping, a laid-off worker, told me as we sat near a fountain in the park. "The officials said they had no money, but they're corrupt," continued Yang, who spent two weeks in jail for his involvement in the March protests. "We workers can't pay the doctor. We can't send our kid to school. And they take our retirement money and build empty skyscrapers and new roads."
I walked over to a group of middle-aged men in boots, jeans, and baseball caps who had come to protest. I tried talking to them but they didn't reply. I walked down the clean street lined with trees, and saw a frail old man sitting on the pavement. I asked him a few questions.
"I don't know anything but go over there," the old man said, pointing his finger at a group of people. I walked over and before I knew it three large men had jumped on me from behind, twisting both my wrists. I tried to resist. Two of them punched me. One ran to hail a taxi, which they bundled me into. I continued to kick and punch as they held me under the back seat, easing up only when we reached a large white police van. Five more policemen jumped out of it. Hoping to prevent another beating, I told them I had a Canadian passport. "We policemen don't beat up people," one of them told me.
As the van made its way into the countryside, past peasants cutting rice stalks, it struck me that the old man must have been a police spy (a suspicion later confirmed by junior police officers). I reflected also on how the policemen had arrested me: Even in Tiananmen Square, where the police are on high Falun Gong alert, they asked to look at my identification first. But the game is hardball in this desolate northeastern region so far away from Western eyes. Only a year ago officials used sweet promises to lure protesting workers from the streets. But now the police have been let loose, jumping on anyone suspicious or anyone who dares to speak in public, like Yang Haiping. With a prodigious supply of hungry young thugs and police informants, it seems that the Communist Party believes that only brute force can quell rising discontent.
"So how much did the CIA pay you to spy?" asked one of the policemen in the van, a young man with dark sunglasses and a large grin. It's a typical question in China, where people are often led to believe that all Western journalists work for the Central Intelligence Agency, and talking to one is a betrayal of China.
The provincial police from Harbin drove into town to interrogate me at the hotel. Queasy from lack of sleep and hungry, I sat on a large oval table in the hotel's conference room. A lanky man came in with a stern face and deep voice. "You're Overseas Chinese, so we'll be nice but you'd better tell us the truth," he said, shaking his finger at me. "Why did you do it?"
"What's wrong with letting the world know about these Daqing workers?" I replied.
"Don't you know that these workers got generous packages?" he said. "If they have complaints they can write letters, that's their legal right. But they don't have the right to go and block traffic, break into offices and disrupt work. These workers are lazy, and in the past did nothing but expected everything. Now the world's changed, and society only rewards those who contribute to its economic development. Isn't that only fair?"
His arsenal of rhetoric led me to think that he must be the leader. "You're Chinese in blood, and you betrayed the Motherland," he told me. "You came here to take footage so Americans can mock our economic development. What would your parents think if they knew what you did?"
Then I had heard shouting in the next room: "How could you talk to a Canadian!" I then realized that they had arrested the worker Yang, and were interrogating him. I felt guilty for involving him, because I knew that one way the police deal with Western journalists is by harassing the Chinese they interview. Knowing the game was up, I agreed to confess.
At around 2 o'clock in the morning, the police were finally satisfied, and they permitted me to sleep on the floor. On June 5, the police put me in a black Audi and sent me with escorts to Harbin airport. The leader waved me off with a final message: We will keep at Yang. On the plane to Beijing, I was afraid that police in the capital would repeat the interrogation I'd already been through. Instead, upon arrival three police sedans escorted me to a Boeing 747.
I was leaving China.
On the Air China flight to Vancouver, I tapped my knee and thought about how my time in China had come to such an abrupt end. Three years earlier, I had returned to China for the first time since my family emigrated when I was still a child. After teaching for a year, I had decided to become a journalist, hoping to report on how this seemingly dynamic country was remaking itself. But instead of dynamism, I found only tales of corruption. In Beijing, I interviewed tenants who told me about how they had been forcibly evicted by police to make room for the city's soaring new skyscrapers. My well-off Chinese friends were unimpressed: "They're lying scoundrels, always trying to get more money than they deserve," they reassured me. "The government wouldn't throw people out on the streets like that."
My faith shaken, I decided to travel into China's heartland. On one of my trips, I spent a month in Zhengzhou, the industrial-wasteland capital of central Henan province. The department stores with their red "50% off" sales signs were virtually empty, and the sidewalks at night were packed with vendors trying to hawk trinkets. "There are more people selling than buying things," they told me.
Just outside city hall, a small crowd of angry protesters faced a disciplined line of police officers. "Return our blood and sweat," shouted the elderly protesters, victims of a pyramid scheme sponsored by the provincial government that came crashing down in 1999.
Walking around Zhengzhou's factory district I spoke to unemployed workers playing cards under the shadow of their dilapidated apartments. "The managers are stealing the factory," the workers said indifferently. "They strip the factory clean, and then pocket the proceeds." It was the same in the countryside around Zhengzhou, where I spent a week bicycling around, talking to peasants whose land--and livelihood--was confiscated by corrupt officials. (I wrote about some of these issues for the REVIEW.)
Wherever I travelled the stories were the same, and I became disillusioned and angry with China's upwardly mobile for turning a blind eye. "Do you really believe China is growing at 8% a year when there's so much unemployment, corruption and poverty in this country?" I once said to some Chinese friends over dinner at a restaurant. "Before, Chinese intellectuals stood for the truth, and now they're participating in a lie."
"Let's change topics," said a director friend.
But then it came to my turn . . . When the Daqing interrogators directed that camera at me, and asked me to make my confession I took a deep breath. This masquerade was only a bad Chinese counterfeit of Stalin's show trials, I thought to myself. And I read the script, and contributed to the masquerade. Even though I never felt that I was in real danger (unlike Yang), still the Chinese genetic flaw of fatalism flowed through me: "Why bother? I can't do anything."
I believe we make such rationalizations because the party dangles a choice in our faces: A Chinese reporter can go to news conferences and receive red envelopes to pay for his mortgage, or he can risk his job by writing about the peasant who has just lost his land. A Western reporter can stay in his air-conditioned luxury apartment, cull the Chinese newspapers for stories and attend a cocktail with China's bold and beautiful in the evening, or he can venture out on dirt roads into villages where peasants--fearful of retribution--will keep their door closed and their mouth shut.
And then, of course, there are always the state's tried and trusted ultimate sanctions: When I arrived home in Toronto I immediately called my wife in China, who is a Chinese national. She was crying because the police wanted to interrogate her. When I called her the next day she told me that the police had interrogated her for five hours, and would call her again for another interrogation. The police were sending a signal to me. It came across the ocean, loud and clear.
Jiang Xueqin has been an occasional contributor to the REVIEW since 2000. He is currently based in Toronto, where he is working on a book about his experiences in China.
No, you're ignorant because you know nothing about China, diplomacy or international relations. I have no idea why you can't speak English. No doubt a shining example of our public "skools."
"Do you always throw such unwarrented [sic] insults at everyone who hold differing view points [sic] than you?"
Nope. All my insults are warranted.
"Hey that'd be great if your [C]ommunist [C]hinese freinds [sic] would too."
They do.
This is as leat his third go-round here.
I forget his other names. Soccer8 above mentioned one of them.
The best evidence you and I or anyone else can present to prove our respective cases is what actually is going on in the real world. If it were true that democracy was the way to go for Third World nations with majority-poor populations and no middle-classes, I would have no argument at all with what you say. But one has to simply ask oneself, "If democracy is so great and conducive to capitalism and general societal progress, then why are all of today's Third World democracies such dysfunctional jokes?"
Historically, modern Western democracy only came into being after the "enlightened despots" of the 1700's used their authoritarian power to codify the laws and make other country-wide capitalist reforms, which allowed capitalism to flourish and a middle-class to develop. A middle-class is what set the stage for the American and French Revolutions and the introduction of modern democracy. The American middle-class and its "bourgeoisie" counterpart in France led these respective revolutions. They were particularly disturbed by high taxation on their commercial activities, which helped make them middle-class in the first place.
Similarly, the E. Asian one-party governments in Korea, Taiwan, etc. over the past 50 years pushed through economic reforms that allowed those countries to achieve First World status in a generation. Then, it was only after middle-classes had developed did they adopt democracy.
If you just put a democratic political structure on a developing Third World country, what do you get? You get corrupt Russia! Russia is democratic but in name only. People are still accustomed to disregarding completely whatever laws the Duma passes. Same with India.
But it's a middle-class culture which starts to convince people that following the laws is in their own interest. The laws were created to protect the interests of the growing middle-class anyway, especially their commercial activities (contract law, property rights, etc.) Regarding today's Third World democracies, even if you impose a democratic political structure on them, their peoples have not started to act like typical law-abiding, middle-class Americans!
The liberal intelligentsia is just infatuated with the idea that democracy is the one-size-fits-all panacea for every country in the world, regardless of its stage of development. Consequently, many Third World countries have been harangues into adopting democracy prematurely to their own detriment. Their majority-poor populations inevitably elect socialistic politicians who oppose capitalist reforms and want to maintain their big-government, socialist welfare state forever.
All this has just resulted in more and more foreign investors pouring less money into today's Third World democracies and more money into China. If you're a foreign investor, why in the world would you want to invest in a place like India when after 50 years of democracy, their gridlock-plagued legislature still hasn't enacted even the most basic of labor, land, and tariff capitalist reforms?
No?
Don't you wonder why I didn't use the term? Ever wonder why people on the forum here seldom use the term? Ever wonder why the term appears in the Chinese constitution but not in the US constitution?
Are you aware that the US is not a democracy, never has been, and was never intended to be a democracy, although God knows people keep trying to shove us in that direction?
Evidently not, but you're not alone- even the folks who demonstrated in Tianamen square didn't 'get it,' a fact which was obvious when they toted out the 'goddess of democracy,' a Statue of Liberty knock off. Liberty is not democracy nor is democracy liberty. Even US politicians get that one screwed up, and throw the term democracy around as if it is a good thing of which no one can get enough. That bad habit of misusing the term has everyone befuddled, and it has gotten to the point now that the word's meaning has become so arbitrary it may as well mean nothing.
Checks and balances - which I did refer to, are diametrically opposed to 'democracy,' which is one of the reasons they were created. You're in error when you assumed that checks and balances were synonymous with 'democracy,' and then paraded on with trying to equate totally different forms of government with ours under the broad heading of 'democracy,' as if this country fits under that label, which it does not.
You said something else which is quite disturbing, but I will address it later. Let's see if someone else notices what it was.
Now, back to the actual topic of the thread. Go back and read the article at the top of the thread, and realize that laying off workers isn't the central theme and is not what the author of the article was taking issue with. I am assuming you are Chinese because you seemed to be missing everything in the article which would be obvious to an American, whether liberal or conservative. You're Chinese, are you not? That's perfectly OK, I just want to clear the air so I know where you're coming from.
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