Party Elder Still Jousts With China’s Censors

October 17, 2009

Party Elder Still Jousts With China’s Censors

By SHARON LaFRANIERE and JONATHAN ANSFIELD
BEIJING

FOR nearly two decades, the Communist Party strove to wipe out the national memory of Zhao Ziyang, the reform-minded party secretary who opposed the use of force against pro-democracy protesters in 1989.

So when a former aide of Mr. Zhao’s, Du Daozheng, disclosed in May that he had helped secretly record Mr. Zhao’s memoir for posthumous publication, Mr. Du’s daughter refused to let him walk outside alone for fear of possible repercussions.

She need not have worried. On June 25, a top official in charge of propaganda showed up at Mr. Du’s western Beijing apartment with a reassuring message from Zhongnanhai, the headquarters of the Communist Party and the government. Mr. Du said he was told that, as an old friend of Mr. Zhao’s, “Zhongnanhai and party central can understand why you did this.”

Mr. Du used to be among those who delivered such judgments. Until he was ousted in 1989 with Mr. Zhao, he served as head of the government’s press and publications administration, an agency that helps enforce censors’ orders.

Now he spends his days jousting with such officials, trying to foist unmentionable topics like Mr. Zhao’s career into the public domain. Helping with Mr. Zhao’s memoir — a rare look at the party’s inner conflicts that was published this May outside China — was a particularly daring thrust.

But strategic ventures into forbidden territory are characteristic of his monthly scholarly journal, Yanhuang Chunqiu. In 2005, he published articles on Hu Yaobang, the former party leader whose death helped set off the Tiananmen protests. Infuriated authorities threatened to reduce copies of the magazine to pulp, according to Mr. Du’s daughter, Du Mingming.

After a string of journal articles last year touched on Mr. Zhao’s accomplishments, party authorities issued an internal regulation so precisely focused that it could have been named after Mr. Du. The order forbids retired government or party officials to serve as publication directors.

Party sources say Jiang Zemin, the now-retired leader who replaced Mr. Zhao, was irritated by the articles and instigated the pressure on Mr. Du to step down. Sitting in the magazine’s musty offices, Mr. Du said he dealt with the order by reshuffling titles.

“I just ignore it,” he said. “I am old enough and tough enough that if there is any pressure from the government, I can hold on here.”

MR. Du survives such skirmishes because he is 86, wily and quietly supported by certain party luminaries. He says as many as 100 former party officials back his magazine’s attempts to draw lessons from the party’s buried past and nudge it toward democratic reforms. Some current officials also sympathize with the effort, he suggests. “Nobody dares close it,” he said, lest that provoke a reaction from “old cadres.” Last year supporters promised him, “If the magazine closes, we will take to the streets,” he said.

They said: “We are old. We are in our 80s. We have heart problems. We will probably die in the streets.”

“So the conservatives don’t take any action,” Mr. Du said, “because they are afraid of that responsibility.”

Others suggest the party can afford to be tolerant. Russell Leigh Moses, a Beijing-based analyst of China politics, said that Mr. Du and other liberal-minded party “elders” posed no particular threat to today’s Communist Party, so slaps on the wrists sufficed.

“I admire the courage and the conviction, but the conservatives really won this battle some time ago,” he said. “I really see him as a tragic figure, still holding the flag after most of the armies have left the field.

“He is fighting a struggle against the political tenor of the times, as well as against time itself,” Mr. Moses said.

Mr. Du is not, however, fighting with himself. He sees his modest magazine, printed on newsprint-quality paper and distributed to some 100,000 subscribers for about a dollar a copy, as “the best thing he has done in his life,” his daughter said.

The struggle between truth and propaganda has been a constant theme in Mr. Du’s life. He was an early Communist Party loyalist, dropping out of middle school at age 14 to join the battle against Japanese invaders. After the Communists rose to power in 1949, he dutifully — and falsely — reported the party’s claims of record harvests and free food as a reporter for Xinhua, the state-run news agency.

But by April 1959, he could no longer reconcile the discrepancy with reality. In a 4,900-word letter to a superior, he documented widespread famine and disease in the countryside.

Within two months, his letter was turned against him during the campaign against antiparty “rightists.” He was publicly condemned 17 times — once before an auditorium filled with 6,000 people — and dismissed from his job and party post.

He escaped even worse punishment, as many did, by betraying others to his government tormentors. The four people he named “suffered greatly,” he said. One refused until his dying day to forgive him.

Mr. Du was persecuted anew during the Cultural Revolution. “It was as though I was sent to hell and back,” he wrote in his magazine in January.

Once rehabilitated, he rose quickly in the ranks of the state-run media. He held a vice ministerial position during the 1989 pro-democracy protests.

Mr. Du tried to marshal support for Mr. Zhao’s position that the crisis should be resolved peacefully. In a letter signed by some 30 other government officials, Mr. Du urged party leaders not to use force against the demonstrators, according to his daughter.

When the troops opened fire on the night of June 3, he, his wife and some friends “cried from our hearts” in his living room, Mr. Du said.

“We all shared one feeling,” he said. “The Communist Party is over.”

IT was three years before he could discuss the tragedy with Mr. Zhao, who was removed as party secretary and placed under house arrest. Mr. Du, who was also ousted, said he urged Mr. Zhao to record his version of events for history’s sake.

In the ensuing years, Mr. Du said, he filled two notebooks with Mr. Zhao’s words, then switched to a tape recorder. Four other former officials also pitched in. Mr. Du hid his copies of the tapes in his daughter’s underwear drawer and later she transported the copies to Hong Kong. After Mr. Zhao, still under house arrest, died in 2005, Bao Pu, the son of Mr. Zhao’s top aide, began transcribing and translating other copies of the recordings.

Ever the strategist, Mr. Du recommended that the memoir be published only after the 20th anniversary of the crackdown in June. But with the support of Mr. Zhao’s family, in May Mr. Bao arranged publication of a Chinese version in Hong Kong and an English version, titled “Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang.”

Hong Kong bookshops have reportedly sold 100,000 copies. “I have not seen such excitement about a book in years,” said Lam Mingkei, owner of Causeway Bay Bookstore, a prominent bookseller in Hong Kong.

Mr. Du said he believed that the democratic ideals expressed in Mr. Zhao’s book and in the pages of his beloved journal would eventually take hold, though not, he predicted, under the current leaders. “If the Communist Party refuses to take political reform, then there must be some other force that rises up to carry it out,” he said.

In the meantime, he says, he will defend his journal’s role as a liberal windsock. Said his daughter: “My father knows how to fight.”

Jing Zhang contributed research from Beijing, and Hilda Wang from Hong Kong.