From: xu@hydra.maths.unsw.oz.au ()
Subject: CND Books and Journals Review, January 10, 1993
Organization: school of Mathematics UNSW
Distribution: aus
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 1993 06:42:55 GMT


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            |  \/___| |/    China News Digest     | |/__/  |/
             \_______/  (Books & Journals Review) |_______/
                            
                            January 10, 1993

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1. "Claws of the Dragon"  --
    Kang Sheng, Mao's Hit Man, Reveals Again  .......................... 28

2. "State Organized Terror"  by P. Bushnell et al  ..................... 17

3. Taiwan Series (1) --
   "A Farewell: A Collection of Short Stories" by Bo Yang .............. 54

4. "Cannibalism in China"  by Key Ray Chong ............................ 20

5. Grisly Tales Emerge of Cannibalism in 1960s China .................. 105
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Editor's Note:  We welcome all CND readers to contribute to this column. If 
                you encounter any China-related books  or journals that you
                would like to share with  other CND readers, please send in  
                comments, newspaper reviews, journal articles, and excerpts
                etc to  cnd-editor@Sdsc.edu   Thank you.

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1. "Claws of the Dragon"  --
    Kang Sheng, Mao's Hit Man, Reveals Again  .......................... 28
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Forwarded by: Gu Zhen (june@bu-pub.bu.edu)
Source: The New York Times Book Review

The New York Times Book Review recently published BU professor Merle
Goldman's review of a new book about Kang Sheng's history, written by John
Byron (a foreign diplomat under a pen name) and Robert Pack (an
investigative reporter). The book, entitled "The Claws of the Dragon," is a
life story of Kang Sheng, the former chief of China's Public Security, and
the head of Mao's secret police.

The book reveals once again the chilling details of Kang Sheng as Mao's hit
man: Even before the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949, Kang was
using terror against dissents. As Mao's security chief in the early 1940's,
he copied the methods of the Stalinist show trials that he had witnessed
first hand in Moscow during the 30's. Viewed in this historical context,
China's Cultural Revolution (66-76) was not surprising at all. For over half
a century, Kang Sheng helped operate China's Gulag (labor camp), a system in
which countless intellectuals, officials, and ordinary people were
imprisoned, tortured, forced to labor and executed. Kang Sheng died in 1975
but his legacy of repression has survived.

BU Professor Goldman attributed Kang's legacy of repression not to Chinese
cultural heritage, but to the Russian influence: The Leninist state's
centralization of power, cult of personality and persecution of dissenters
give the top political leader and his secret policeman unchallenged power to
eliminate any opposition to their will. Thus, large scale unchecked
repression.

Byron and Pack's book also reveals that Kang Sheng used Mao's policy to
wreak personal vengeance on his own enemies, exposing complicated personal
relationships within the top party leadership.

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2. "State Organized Terror"  by P. Bushnell et al  ..................... 17
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Forwarded by: Jian
Source: Choice Book Review
Reviewer: B. Schechterman

"State Organized Terror: the Case of Violent
Internal Repression"   by P. Timothy Bushell et al.
312p  Westview 1991.  ISBN 0-8133-8307-2 sc,  US$49.95

A product of an international conference and part of the "Series on State
Violence, State Terrorism, & Human Rights, " this book is extremely valuable
for several reasons.  It identifies a critical aspect of terrorism (the
state-organized terror of the title), especially the role of the state's
"dark side. "  It succeeds reasonably well in a comparative approach to the
phenomenon, sorely lacking in scholarly research and literature.  It
attempts to specify and in some cases refine the critical concepts
associated with state terrorism e.g., genocide, domination, repression,
terrorism. Finally, it provides a significant including in Part 2
("Structural Sources of State Organized Terror ") studies of economic
(class), security-oriented, ethnic identity, factional, and ideological
groups.  Part 3 focuses on obvious past examples: Argentina, Hitler's
Germany, Cambodia, Stalin's Russia, Mao's China.  Part 4,  "The Social and
Political Psychology of State Terror, " presents some insightful materials
on lesser-known motivational aspects.  In a paradoxical world, despite the
successes of the human spirit, the demon of state terrorism is here to stay.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
3. Taiwan Series (1) --
   "A Farewell: A Collection of Short Stories" by Bo Yang .............. 54
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Edited and forwarded by: Gu Zhen (june@bu-pub.bu.edu)
Source: The New York Review of Books 10/22/92
Review written by: Jonathan Spence

"A Farewell: A Collection of Short Stories" by Bo Yang.
Translated by Robert Reynolds;
Joint Publishing Company (Hong Kong), HK$42.00

How far Taiwan was from being any kind of economic miracle during the 1950s
is powerfully conveyed in the recently published short stories from that
period by Bo Yang, himself a refugee from northern China, who joined the
exodus to Taiwan in 1949, and wrote a series of searing short stories on the
plight of the mainlanders. The harsh realism and almost unrelieved pessimism
of these tales were in part the reason for the arrest of Bo Yang by the
Kuomintang in 1968 on the grounds that he "undermined the affection between
the people and the government."

After serving nine years of a twelve-year sentence, Bo Yang was released,
and amply had his revenge in his 1984 essay "The Ugly Chinaman," which
circulated widely in the West, and eventually in both Taiwan and the
People's Republic of China. In his essay, Bo Yang relentlessly attacked the
stupidity, the greed, the obscenity, the hypocrisy, the cruelty, and above
all, the ugliness of Chinese character.

In one of the finest of Bo Yang's earlier stories, "On a Train," two
mainlanders who knew each other long before in China meet when traveling by
rail in Taiwan. One has just been to see a former friend, now in desperate
trouble with the authorities - the other is escorting a madman to a mental
hospital in Taipei. Asked why the man he is taking to the hospital first
went mad, the escort replies that he has no idea. He used to care about such
things, but now he no longer does so:

"I remember when I first started working at the hospital, I always wanted to
find out why the lunatics got sick, and when I found out I couldn't help
crying for them. As time went by, I slowly stopped caring and became
indifferent. Why should I try to find out why they were like that? What does
that have to do with me?"

In an equally sad story, "Narrow Roads," two other mainland refugees
reminisce over a dead friend. They conclude that he died because "he'd read
too many books, and they led him into a dead-end street. They taught him too
many principles: that a man should have spirit, should be fair, should
refuse to bow down in the face of power, should hold to his principles even
in poverty, and so on and so on." Whereas in reality the only truth that
refugee life on Taiwan had to offer was the simple one that when people
"need to be lied to, or when lying to them makes them happy, you should lie
to them, and lie without mercy."

The recurrent theme of insanity in Bo Yang's short stories vividly describes
the pains and predicaments of the mainland refugees' struggle for survival
in the utter darkness of political, economic, and social reality of 1950s,
in which madness offered an easy escape. One of Bo Yang's fictional mainland
refugees expressed the pain of this predicament with enigmatic vigor:
"Illusions vanish when a man wakes up. But lunatics never wake up. Their
eyes see a beautiful vision that never ends, fulfillment of all their
wishful thinking that never stops. The people who are really pitiful are the
ones who aren't crazy, like us."

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4. "Cannibalism in China"  by Key Ray Chong ............................ 20
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Forwarded by: Jian
Source: Choice Book Reviews
Reviewed by: Frank Bessac

"Cannibalism in China"  by Chong, Key Ray
200 pages 1991 Publisher: Longwood Academic
ISBN: 0-89341-618-5  US$36.00

The chimera of cannibalism has received renewed interest in anthropology
(Marvin Harris's Cannibals and Kings:  The Origins of Cultures, CH, Mar'78;
Michael Harner's paper on the ecological basis for Aztec sacrifice published
in a 1977 issue of American Ethnologist; and the theme of a popular 1990
film, The Silence of the Lambs).  But, as W. Arens points out in The
Man-Eating Myth, Anthropology and Anthropophagy (CH, Jul'79), there are many
stories about same criticism can be leveled against Key Ray Chong's as yet
unpublished "The Preliminary Draft of Qing History" (he even has a chapter
on recipes).  Can we really credit such tales of filial piety as "Li
Sheng-shan of Lo-Yhen, Fukien province, is said to have cut out his own
liver (Kan) for his sick mother to eat" (p. 116)?   Or are we dealing here
with older exhortatory stories that are presented as models, much as are the
present stories of superhero, self-sacrificing Communist Chinese cadres?  It
is not clear for whom this book is intended.  The print is attractive; index
and extensive references are provided.

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5. Grisly Tales Emerge of Cannibalism in 1960s China .................. 105
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Forwarded by: Henry Robertson (robohen@ocf.Berkeley.EDU) and C. Mok
Source: New York Times 1/6/93
By: Nicholas D. Krisof, via the San Francisco Chronicle and
the San Jose Mercury News

Beijing -- Newly disclosed confidential government documents suggest that
the Cultural Revolution plumbed previously unreported depths of savagery.

The documents, prepared by local government offices in the 1980s, two
decades after the events they describe, seem to offer a meticulous record of
how Red Guards and Communist officials in one province not only tortured
their victims to death but also ate their flesh.

Copies of the documents have been struggled out of China by Zheng Yi, a
prominent writer wanted by the Chinese authorities for his work for the
democracy movement at Tiananmen Square in 1989.  After 3 1/2 years as a
fugitive, Zheng and his wife, Bei Ming, also a dissident, are to arrive in
New York today.

School Principles on Hooks

At some high schools, students killed their principals in the school
courtyard and then cooked and ate their bodies to celebrate a triumph over
"counter-revolutionaries," the documents report.  Government-run cafeterias
are said to have displayed bodies dangling on meat hooks and to have served
human flesh to employees.

"There are many varieties of cannibalism," declares one report, "and among
them are these: killing someone and making a late dinner of it, slicing off
meat and having a big party, dividing up the flesh so each person takes a
large chunk home to boil, roasting the liver and eating it for medicinal
properties, and so on."

The documents suggest that at least 138 people, and probably hundreds more,
were eaten in Guangxi Province in southern China in the late 1960s.  In most
cases, many people ate the flesh of one corpse, so the number of cannibals
may have numbered in the thousands.

Story Suppressed

The cannibalism was apparently confined to parts of Guangxi Province, a
relatively remote area, and was subsequently kept quiet.  There is no
evidence that anyone in the national Communist Party leadership endorsed it
or even knew of it.

The documents are stamped with official seals, and there is no indication of
any tampering.  A spokesman for the Guangxi Region Foreign Affairs Office
said he could not comment on whether there had been cannibalism and could
not allow a reporter to visit the area and investigate directly.

The incidents reported from Guangxi were apparently the most extensive
episodes of cannibalism in the world in the last century.  They were also
different from any others in that those who took part were not motivated by
hunger or psychopathic disease.

Ideological Appetite

Rather, the actions appear to have been ideological: The cannibalism, which
took place in public, was often organized by local Communist Party
officials, and people apparently took part together to prove their
revolutionary ardor.

In an interview after he left China and was waiting for his U.S. visa, Zheng
cited one example from his own research in Guangxi: The first person to
strip meat from the body of one school principal was the former girlfriend
of the man's son; she wanted to show that she had no sympathy for him and
was just as "red" as anybody else.

"These are the most gruesome and shocking revelations to date on the
Cultural Revolution," said Robin Munro, an Asia Watch specialist on China
and one of the few people who have examined the documents. "The evidence
reveals horrors from the Cultural Revolution that rival in character, if not
in scope, the worst excesses of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia."

Punishment for Wife

Zheng said he secretly photographed documents on trips to Guangxi Province
in 1986 and 1988, using a false letter of introduction to win cooperation
from the authorities.

Even by the standards of the period, the horrors reported from Guangxi
extend into previously unknown territory.  Zheng cites an example from the
documents of a woman who was forced to identify and denounce the mutilated
corpse of her husband, who had been killed, stripped of his flesh and mostly
eaten.  As punishment for having loved a "counterrevolutionary," she was
then forced to sleep with his head beside her.

Some of those reportedly involved in the cannibalism received minor
punishments when the Cultural Revolution ended after Mao's death in 1976.

Wuxuan County expelled 91 people from the Communist Party for having eaten
human flesh, and it demoted or cut the wages of 39 nonmembers of the party,
but apparently no one faced criminal prosecution.

Zheng (whose name is pronounced Jhung Ee) was made the target of a
nationwide search 3 1/2 years ago.  He had been a leader of the Tiananmen
Square democracy movement, and the government had branded him a "most
wanted" outlaw and distributed posters with his picture and description.

Escaped Police

But in an odyssey that speaks volume about the loosening of controls in
China in the 1990s, Zheng, 45, ran circles around the police and finally
escaped the country.  He is to arrive in New York today, on a plane from a
secret location outside China where he had been hiding.

Zheng's feat would probably have been impossible in Maoist era, and it
reflects the emergence of a more mobile and pluralistic society in which
Chinese repression is often impotent.  Try as it might, China is no longer
very successful at being a police state.

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