My personal view of China

I don't know China. No one truly does. China is vast in both space and history, so I can talk about her only from my own limited perspective.

But it is important to share my perspectives, no matter how limited it is. At this time when politicians are wasting no time to polarize people to sow hatred for their personal gains, the only effective way against the polarization is to open our hearts to let people see who we are, how we might have misunderstood each other, and how others might have misunderstood us.

I was born in 1959 in Jiangxi province, when communist dictatorship had become fully entrenched in China, and when the Great Leap-Forward had just started, with the consequence of large-scale famine gripping China for the next three years.

The two people who came into my life and donated me their DNA were already struggling in the turbulent political waters.

My father was attending high school in the City of Shangrao when People's Liberation Army drove south into the city against the retreating nationalist army in 1949. My father joined Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as did most youths who were yearning for a new world with freedom and democracy. The country and the people had been oppressed and looted for too long. Communism rode into cities, towns and villages with songs, dances, and firecrackers. The nation was jubilant and full of hopes. People momentarily forgot the truth that human history represents a repeated pattern of a corrupt government replaced by a new government that would soon go corrupt as well.

CCP inherited the poverty of China. After the ill-fated Korean war, Premier Zhou Enlai wanted to open China to the external world, but it was very difficult when Dulles brothers were in charges of US politics. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was obviously a very snobbish politician. At the beginning of the 1954 Geneva Convention, Dulles was handshaking, greeting and mingling happily with the Soviet delegation headed by Vyacheslav Mikhaylovich Molotov. When Dulles finally said good-bye and turned around, he found himself facing Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai. Zhou smiled and extended his hand, but Dulles simply turned around and walked away. Not only that, Dulles also strictly ordered that none of the US delegation should shake hands with Zhou. Just like Joseph McCarthy, Dulles implemented his own policy of "positive loyalty" and demanded that his officers be loyal to him and to the State Department at all costs [1].

The arrogance and self-righteousness of Dulles got him alienated from his allies and foes in the 1954 Geneva Convention. For this reason, he left the Geneva Convention in less than a week, leaving the nearly three-month negotiation to the Undersecretary of State Walter Smith (who was the #2 in the State Department because the position of Deputy Secretary of State was created much later).

Walter Smith apparently did not share the arrogance of Dulles. However, he did not want to break the rule set by Dulles. To overcome this difficulty, he held a cup of coffee in his right hand, approached Zhou and used his left hand to shake Zhou's right arm a few times. In the end, however, US was the only western power that did not sign the agreements.

The poverty of China was highlighted next year in the Bandung Conference in Indonesia in 1955. Mainland China did not have a plane that could fly abroad, and subsequently charted the Kashmir Princess (Air India Flight 300). It was said that Allen Dulles (brother of Secretary Dulles and the director of CIA) plotted the assassination of Zhou, but President Dwight D. Eisenhower dismissed such dirty dealings [2]. The task of assassination was then given to the Taiwan government. The Chinese delegation was supposed to board the plane in Hong Kong on April 11. However, Burmese Prime Minister U Nu invited Zhou to Rangoon to meet Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru before the Bandung meeting on April 14. It was known to CIA, Taiwan and the international community that Zhou consequently would not take the Kashmir Princess on April 11. Only a group of Chinese and international journalists would take the plane. However, someone in a certain high office still decided to blow up the Kashmir Princess on April 11. During the one-hour period when the plane was in transit in Hong Kong, a time bomb with an American-made MK-7 detonator was placed in the plane. The purpose of blowing up the plane was obviously to scare Chinese government and to prevent its outreaching to the external world. It is because of this senseless killing of innocent civilians that the Kashmir Princess explosion was legally deemed a terrorist attack instead of an assassination plot. The direct US involvement was partially revealed in 1967 when American defector in Moscow, John Discoe Smith, claimed that he had delivered a suitcase containing an explosive mechanism to a Chinese nationalist in Hong Kong [2].

Chinese and Western media featured one prominent difference. Western media claimed that CCP created an iron curtain for self-isolation. Chinese media claimed that US, especially the Dulles brothers, built an iron curtain and placed it around Chinese borders.

(Allen Dulles was fired by President Kennedy for failing the attempt to overthrow the Cuba government by the Dulles-orchestrated Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961. In my view, Joseph McCarthy was simply a foot soldier of the force represented by Dulles brothers.)

At the time of liberation in 1949, most communists were illiterate or semi-illiterate. My father with a high-school education was considered an intellectual and a talented member of CCP. My mother, in spite of the feudalist tradition in China, attended private schools and learned how to read and write. Consequently, my parents had winds on their sails for several year, until the communists settled down and decided to perform class cleansing. The class cleansing is partly because of the ignorance in the CCP leadership blinded by ideological lens and partly because of hostile agents blowing up national infrastructures everywhere in the country.

The class cleansing came in two major waves. The first was the Anti-Rightest Movement from 1957 to 1959 against liberal intellectuals both within and without CCP, and the second and much larger wave was the notorious Cultural Revolution lasting from 1966 to 1976.

My parents were not from the proletariat class and had to bear the brunt of the two class-cleansing waves. My father escaped the first wave, but my mother was blacklisted partly because of her family background and partly because her three siblings were already condemned as the rightest and sent away to reform camps. My mother was forced to resign from government in 1962.

Deng Xiaoping championed the Anti-Rightist Movement, and was responsible for numerous ruined families. However, he redeemed himself later in his life by reforming the country and opening the country to the West. Most Chinese people are forgiving and consider Deng as a good politician with a conscience.

The monster of the Great Cultural Revolution engulfed my father in 1968. My father, in spite of all his firm loyalty to CCP, was labeled a counter-revolutionary and capitalist-roader, and tortured to death. I was 9 years old, and he was 37. His only personal possession as a capitalist-roader consisted of three souvenirs that he had treasured from his high-school years: a Parker pen, a horseshow magnet, and a harmonica.

Two years before my father's death, he was locked away, the rest of the family were barred from entering our home. Two long paper seals were cross-glued to the door to our home. The fatherless family gathered in the front door but did not know what to do. The villagers from a nearby region where my father worked in land-reform heard of this from some sources. They came and transported our family to their village and provided us with food and lodging for nearly three years, under great pressure from red guards accusing them of being sympathizers of counterrevolutionaries. The uncle and auntie who housed us had a son in the People's Liberation Army, so they were more immune than others to the accusations from the red guards. In the darkest days of the red terror, rice was no longer rationed to my family, and villagers had to leave food by our door at the deep of the night.

I attended school early and managed to finish grades 1 and 2 just before the Cultural Revolution was in full swing.

It is not until 1971 that CPP implemented a new Let-them-live (给出路) policy which means that the families of the former landlords, capitalists, counterrevolutionaries, criminals and rightists (the Black Five) should be allowed to live. My family was sent to a government farm where we were again given food rations. My mother was assigned to feed pigs, and my older sister and brother, aged 15 and 14, respectively, were assigned to work in agricultural farms.

Western people, even today's Chinese people, would not have imagined how pigs were farmed at that time. Farm leaders would find a small hill, get people to dig a series of shallow holes, build a small bamboo gate at the entrance of each hole, place some straw on the floor, and put the pigs inside. When it rained, water leaked down, and the floor was all muddy and wet. The sow would shift the little partially dry straw here and there in a futile effort to keep the piglets dry. My mother was a capable woman, but did not know what to do under such circumstances. She often cried watching the pigs suffer.

The government farm had a small school, offering grade two and grade five, with alternating classes in the same classroom. The single teacher in the school, Teacher Xu, asked me if I wanted to join grade 2 or grade 5 class. I chose grade 5 because I had already taken grade 2. The school did not have a bench or stool for pupils to sit down. My mother found me a small stool to carry to the school at the beginning of the term and to carry back home at the end of the term.

The farm witnessed a lot of ups and downs of the country as well as of my family. Each up and down could have taken many pages to write. To make a long story short, I would just say that I managed to go beyond the farm, entered the town middle school and eventually graduated from high school in 1975.

Knowledge sometimes could be a bad thing. When you have finished your high school and learned a few things, when you looked around and seem to understand what was going on, you would develop a desire to do something substantial. When the reality dictates to you that your life would be forever on this farm spreading manure to the rice paddies and fighting with nearby villagers for irrigation water, you became restless and began to voice your objections to the system. Then you get singled out and criticized for failing to reform yourself.

Children of the Black Five experienced this treatment frequently during the Great Cultural Revolution. In good times, we would just be lectured upon, to learn that we could not choose our own birth, but we could choose the path ahead.

There were other spiritual and emotional torments. Once I went into town to collect household manure with two manure buckets on a shoulder pole, I saw one of my classmates whom I was very fond of when we both attended the town middle school. I believed that she was fond of me, too. She was talking to her neighbors right in the middle of the street. My heart beats accelerated when I approached them, unaware of the stinky manure buckets on my shoulder. She might not have recognized me, but she turned away with a facial expression of disgust. CCP has been calling upon people to respect those with dirty hands, dirty feet and smell of manure, but it had never worked. People saw the hypocrisy because cadres of CCP generally did not let their children to have dirty hands, dirty feet and smell of manure.

Then 1976 came. I heard from loudspeakers, which were installed almost everywhere in China as a channel of information from the upper echelon, that Chairman Mao died on September 9, 1976. I was watering a vegetable garden. Another farmer passed by. He stopped by me, with a grave expression, and asked me if I heard the news. I asked him what news. His face was instantly flushing red, but he obviously dared not utter the words that Chairman Mao was dead. It could be a capital crime for one to say that Chairman was dead because Chairman Mao would never die. We stared at each other, both trying and waiting to get confirmation from the other. Finally, the loudspeaker was on again, broadcasting the news and the funeral music.

We again looked at each other. His face remained red. Neither of us could really appreciate the implication of this event, but we both knew that major changes would be forthcoming.

My mother began to write appeals for my father's rehabilitation. She fed pigs during the day and wrote the appeals at night. The whole family had only one room, so we often woke up to see mother writing and crying deep into the night.

Changes did come. The most significant change to me is the reintroduction of the national university entrance exam which had been suspended since 1966. Almost everyone in the country could take the entrance exam and get a chance to enter a university, unless you were a child of a counterrevolutionary who directly questioned the absolute power of CCP and Chairman Mao.

I registered myself for the exam quietly, keeping it a secret for fearing that someone might report on me, although my parents had never challenged CCP or Chairman Mao. Almost no one knew that I took the exam until I received an admission offer from Jiangxi University.

The second change significant to me is that my father was rehabilitated to be "an excellent revolutionary comrade". The university received a document certifying this rehabilitation in my sophomore year, and the news was relayed to me. I had mixed feelings, because I was no longer sure whether it was a compliment or an insult.

Then my mother was also rehabilitated, and given partial salary compensation for all those years she could have earned. My siblings had all gradually gained positions in the government. It was ironic to me. The system was trying to crash them to death, but now they had become part of the system.

But the system itself did change. Deng Xiaoping was a practical man, at least during most of his later life. He told Chinese people honestly that he did not know where the country was to proceed, in contrast to Chairman Mao who was such a rare genius, knew everything domestic and international, and could see far into the future. Deng said that he had consulted with many people, and no one seemed to have any idea about where the country should be heading to. He said that we have to "cross the river by feeling the stones" (摸着石头过河). He was wise enough to say that, because none of us knew the best way to cross the river, why don't we let all people try their own ways? People were liberated, tried their own ways, and found many ways to cross the river successfully.

I did not know how my parents felt when communist armies came to liberate people in 1949. I suspect that it might be the same as how I experienced right after the fall of the Gang of Four. The whole nation was dizzy. I felt liberated, so did all my classmates. Our new idols were President Lincoln and his Secretary of State William Seward. Many of us were driven to tears when listening to speeches by President Ronald Regan. Those university students with reasonable financial status, to which I now belonged, could afford to buy a used radio, and glue our ears to the broadcast of VOA (Voice of America). Some new power was flowing within and around us, unifying the country. Some years later I read the Chronicles of Narnia. The description of Narnia upon the spell of the White Witch and the subsequent thawing of the land reminded me of the Great Cultural Revolution and the subsequent liberation following its ending.

My classmates and I all gained confidence and strength, with the conviction that our generation would be custodians of the new China. We would never let Chairman Mao came back alive, not just for us, but for our next generation and their next generation.

We were all in a bliss, too giddy to think of anything else, let alone to realize that people who are abused by dictatorship tend to be dictators themselves later in life. It was many years after this did I witness how some of my former classmates in China evolved into small and big dictators themselves. I myself later degraded into a tyrannical fish in a small pond until love and friendship rescued me. However, we knew none of these then. We were just happy, we were free, and we as people seemed to be collectively in control.

Then I came to Canada as a graduate student at Western in 1984. I admired achievements by Canadians, but I was also proud of the rapid progresses made in China. Science had been dead for hundreds of years as the country was torn apart by wars and infighting. There were hardly any researchers in the vast country except a few working in the military institutions. Yet in just a few years, scientists, engineers and medical doctors sprout out like bamboo shoots in spring.

(In hindsight, Chinese researchers with similar financial freedom as western scientists remain relatively few even today, most likely are fewer than those in UK or Germany.)

But the world has been full of unexpected twists and turns. What is definitely beautiful could suddenly turn ugly.

The June 4th crackdown of the student democratic movement in 1989 shattered my bliss. I and almost all my fellow Chinese students and scholars at Western were busy in raising funds and organizing rallies in support of the student movement. I was invited to several radio stations to explain to people why the democratic movement should be supported both within China and abroad.

I was close to my thesis writing before the June 4th crackdown, and wrote to Jiangxi University that I wished to go back to my alma mater to teach after graduation. My letter arrived at the university in the middle of the student movement. The university administration was kind and considerate in not replying to my letter to offer me a position, as an effort to protect me. I could get myself in troubles if I did go back.

I was grateful to Canadian government in helping Chinese students and scholars in Canada to gain permanent residence status after the June 4th movement. I had experienced hunger and homelessness before. I am glad to have been offered a new home in Canada.

The tragic moment of June 4th, however, was soon forgotten by most people, especially those within mainland China. The newly introduced socialist market economy created opportunities, and most people were busy in taking advantage of the opportunities for short-term gains instead of seeking political reforms for long-term benefits.

As the former Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao prophesied in 2012, without political reform, the ghost of the Great Cultural Revolution would come back whenever the global environment changed in its favor, and the country would lose all fruits of social, cultural and economic reform. Ordinary people did not heed his warning. Everyone was enjoying the fruits of reform. The two most powerful people, the CCP Secretary General and the Premier, were both reform-minded. How could it be possible for the reform to be sabotaged? How could the global environment change and disrupt the reform within China?

The global environment did change, not becoming warmer or cooler, but becoming polarized. The polarization was enabled by the greatest power of the world, the United States of America. This once great country has become so factionalized, and the two parties have built up so much destructive force against each other, that an external vent had to be found to alleviate the tremendous pressure.

All throughout US history, there has always been political disagreements and debates, but the opposing parties had remained civil and did not accuse the other party of being very bad people or criminals. In general, the leaders would acknowledge the moral integrity of each other and refrain from personal attacks. The debate was mostly limited to which policy was better for US than its alternatives, not on which candidate was more corrupt than others. The leaders would unanimously accept the fundamental Christian faith that all people were sinners, half good and half bad. The good half can be used to serve the people, but the bad half needed to be monitored and checked constantly. We should all be conscious of a line within us dividing the good and the bad. We should all aim to reform ourselves, to shift to line to increase the good and reduce the bad. This "all being sinners" judgement was applied to all people, both in US and abroad. It is likely for this reason that John Quincy Adams stated that US "goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy". We judge ourselves instead of passing the judgement that others are monsters. We should not designate good nations or bad nations because each nation is populated by people who are partly good and partly bad.

The articulation of "You are either with us or against us" by President Bush after the 911 terrorist attack sounded reasonable at that time. However, the phrase was soon abused. You are either with Russia or against Russia. You are either with China or against China. Everything good is American and everything ?bad is un-American. A line partitioning the good from the bad is now drawn not within each of us, but between nations and countries.

The simple-minded leaders of both US and China are trying their best to persuade the people into believing that their opponents are immutably evil. The only solution to an immutably evil monster is then obviously to destroy it at all costs. Now you have to take side. It is again "us versus them".

The revival of McCarthyism in US in recent years coincided with the revival of Maoism in China. The two fed into each other and the two countries are both racing towards evil. The pro-West voice in China, which had grown louder and louder after the death of Chairman Mao, turned out to be very fragile, and was quickly, efficiently, and seemingly effortlessly silenced in the other side of the Pacific. Similarly, any pro-China voice in US (and Canada) was silenced just as quickly, efficiently, and seemingly effortlessly on this side of the Pacific.

I am amazed that, in spite of all history lessons on Hitler's Nazism, Stalin's Great Purge and China's Great Cultural Revolution, people are still so easily brainwashed to turn against each other, powers so easily abused, and the world so easily pushed to the edge of self-destruction.

The polarization demands not only countries to take side, but also Chinese diaspora in North America to take side. You are either with China or against China.

An academic friend of mine, who had been sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, told me that incessant criticism of Israel would eventually and necessarily take the form of antisemitism, which he had personally experienced. Similarly, incessant demonization of China would eventually and necessarily lead to anti-China and anti-Chinese. With a wry smile, he said that he was lucky because he at least looked similar to other Whites. It is much easier to tell a Chinese apart. This reminded me of the incarceration of Japanese Americans after the Pearl Harbor. The same was not done to German Americans most likely because it would be too hard to separate Germans from the other Whites, especially after the extensive intermarriage.

Hate crimes against Asian Americans, especially Chinese Americans, have increase in frequency dramatically in recent years. The China Initiative in US targets Chinese American scientists. Are you with China or against China?

I have many Chinese, Japanese, Russian and Ukrainian friends. They are American citizens and proud to be American citizens. They would have no problems to pledge loyalty to USA, just as I have no problem to pledge loyalty to Canada. I love Canada, and I admire my late graduate supervisor, Jack Millar. Jack was a typical Canadian, kind, considerate, forgiving, and hardworking, but never aggressive in seeking limelight. Much of vegetables on my dining table was from his garden, and he never blamed or criticized me for making unintentional mistakes, which I made many. Jack had a close colleague, Dave Ankney, who became a member of my advisory committee. Whenever I submitted anything in writing, often in broken English, he would return it with numerous constructive suggestions and comments, together with a few hand-draw darts that seemed to drip blood. He was famous for his "poison-dart reviews" which were the best reviews I had ever received. When I told him that I applied for permanent resident status, he gave me a big bearhug.

I wish to be like Jack and Dave, to have much good and little bad in me. I wish to imitate Dave's poison-dart review on my students' writings, but my reviews were perhaps often more poisonous than constructive.

I used to have two most trusted friends, Ron and Helga, in London, Ontario. They were German immigrants and served jointly as angels to save my soul. I would be morally rotten without them.

Both Jack and Dave have now passed away, so have Ron and Helga, but I have neighbors who are like them. When I came back to Canada in 2002, my neighbors came knocking at our door the third day, asking if our children needed to have some toys to play with, because our own household items had not yet been shipped to us. We felt instantly at home with such friendly neighbors. Several times during the cold Ottawa winter, when we woke up in the morning after a night of snowstorm, we often found our driveway clean – someone had blown away the snow when we were still sleeping.

I felt relaxed. Canada was still the same Canada I knew of. She was the mother of Jack and Dave, Ron and Helga, and friendly neighbors. She had been a champion for peace. She does not launch unnecessary confrontations and does not force her children to take sides in opposite trenches.

But things have changed recently. Canada as a nation seems to have been usurped by an evil entity that is cold-heartedly pitting people against each other. The entity has polarized people. It is forcing Chinese Canadians to take side.

I am a Chinese Canadian. I do not want to take side and do not agree with the practise of politicians polarizing the nation and the people for their personal political gain. I am from a land where my father and my mother were buried. I remember those uncles and aunties who took great risks in sheltering me and my family during the dark days of the country. I wish them prosperous, and they deserve prosperity. I am against all immoral efforts to deny them "certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness".

This mentality of mine unfortunately confounds anti-dictatorship with anti-China. CCP leadership, in spite of all past evils associated with it, does wish Chinese people to live a better life as long as this does not threaten its firm grip of power. CCP wanted to join WTO, so did Chinese people. Before that, CCP wanted China treated by US as the "most favored nation" in trade, so did Chinese people. One cannot deny the fact that CCP and Chinese people share common interests. After all, CCP has about 100 million party members. They are almost all Chinese. It is often impractical to separate CCP from the rest of Chinese population. To put this into more concrete terms, two of my three brothers are CCP members. They cried the same way as I did when my mother died. They have tried to financially support the uncles and aunties who housed and fed us when we were homeless. They were saddened the same way as I was when social injustice was imposed on the weak and poor. They are in me and I in them.

My brothers admire many Presidents including Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, the two Bushes, and Bill Clinton, although I respect President Carter much more than the rest. Under the leadership of these US presidents, the liberal and democratic force in China gained strength progressively. Of course, the progress had never been smooth. The NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade on May 7, 1999, and the Hainan Island incident on April 1, 2001, in which an American EP-3 spy plane collided with a Chinese J-8 fighter over Hainan Island of China, both sparked anti-West demonstrations in China and momentarily disrupted US-China bilateral relationships. However, through the wisdom of political leaders, the crises were diffused, and China restored the trend of developing towards a society based on the rule of law.

The trend was reversed until Hilary Clinton became the Secretary of State and promoted her high-pitched anti-China rhetoric. Such rhetoric was corroborated by Obama's interviews and speeches. It became quite clear that the dominant US policy was to contain China, especially her economic development. The CCP fundamentalists seized such anti-China rhetoric to attack the pro-West faction and gradually gained an upper hand. It was in this context that the former Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao gravely expressed his views in 2012 that I have briefly mentioned before: "Without the success of political reform, economic reform can only be shallow, we could lose what we have gained, many new social problems cannot be solved at their source, and the historical tragedy of the Great Cultural Revolution may repeat itself in China. Every party member and leader should continue the reform with the utmost urgency (没有政治体制改革的成功，经济体制改革不可能进行到底，已经取得的成果还有可能得而复失，社会上新产生的问题，也不能从根本上得到解决，文化大革命这样的历史悲剧还有可能重新发生。每个有责任的党员和领导干部都应该有紧迫感)[3].

But it was already too late. As scientists have often pointed out, anything that changes can be traced to intrinsic and extrinsic causes. China was intrinsically ready for political reforms, but the joint effort of Obama, Trump and Biden destroyed the extrinsic environment. Both reform-minded top leaders, Premier Wen Jiabao and the CCP Secretary General Hu Jintao, have now been belittled and humiliated into oblivion in China.

This reminded me of Mikhail Gorbachev, a reform-minded Russian politician and former General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He was also treated badly by the West, whose leaders eagerly took all the credits for the collapse of USSR and attributed all the folly to the poor guy.

"To be an enemy of the US is dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal". Henry Kissinger was probably right.

We live in this incomprehensible world. I hope that readers can gain understanding from my misunderstanding.

How I wish to get Dave's poison-dart review to enlighten me!

[1] https://adst.org/2020/11/the-state-department-under-the-red-scare-mccarthys-campaign/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashmir_Princess

[3] https://www.mj.org.cn/mjzt/2012nzt/2012lh/2012lhdhxw/201203/t20120314_137354.htm