Category Archives: China

Arts, Books, China, Communism, History

Book Review: No Wall Too High

REVIEW

No Wall Too High

No Wall Too High: One Man’s Extraordinary Escape from Mao’s Infamous Labour Camps

Synopsis: Life in Mao’s labour camps was so brutal, its inmates longed for death. One captive broke free – to tell his heart-stopping story.

HIS arms lashed lightly behind his back, squeezed between two soldiers and prodded mercilessly with rifle butts, he was paraded through the streets and into the square where more than 10,000 hate-filled faces were screaming abuse and obscenities at him.

Xu Hongci was experiencing the sharpest edge of the terrible witch-hunts that masqueraded as justice in the China of mad revolutionary Chairman Mao.

He was hauled up onto a table, his slumping head grabbed by the hair and forced upwards to face the baying mob. Quotations from Mao’s Little Red Book echoed from loudspeakers as he was denounced as a counter-revolutionary, an imperialist, and a criminal. He was sentenced to . . .

Xu fully expected the next word to be ‘death’, and he welcomed the prospect. He had been a prisoner for 12 years, serving the hardest time imaginable in the laogai, China’s chain of brutal slave-labour camps for those considered enemies of the state.

Virtually with his bare hands, he’d built dams, dug mines, quarried mountains, worked in paddy fields for 19 hours a day, all on starvation rations of gruel and husks. He’d been shackled in irons, whipped, beaten and humiliated.

To be pinned to the ground and finished off with a bullet in the back of the neck – as he had seen done to countless others – would be a release.

Instead, the voice on the loudspeaker pronounced “20 years’ imprisonment”.

Xu’s extraordinary tale of endurance – handwritten by him 20 years ago, and published for the first time in the West – is a rarity. Historians numbered the butchered and starved-to-death casualties of Mao’s 30-year regime at 60 million, outstripping Hitler (30 million) and Stalin (40 million) as the worst murderer in history.

 

BUT while there have been notable victim’s accounts of Nazi and Soviet atrocities, there has largely been silence from those who suffered at first hand the worst of Red China’s astounding inhumanity to its own people.

And that’s what makes Xu’s moving account a must-read. His is a story that must not be buried, but confronted.

The irony for Xu, born in Shanghai in 1933, is that he was a fervent Communist and a revolutionary, who as a teenager worshipped Mao. As a student activist, he rose up through the party ranks.

Then he made the mistake of taking Mao at his word. In 1957, as the Communist world fretted over developments in the Soviet Union, the Great Leader invited constructive criticism of his regime. “Let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend,” he declared.

At the college where he was studying medicine, Xu offered his ideas to make the Communist party more democratic and less dictatorial, only for Mao to spring his trap.

Xu had outed himself. He was denounced as a “Rightist” and disgraced, along with millions of others who had dared speak their mind. Even his girlfriend turned against him.

He was exiled to a remote labour camp for “re-education”. With Orwellian irony, this hell on earth went by the name of the Eternal Happiness Farm. He was worked to within an inch of his life. Twice he escaped, but surveillance was so tight in Mao’s police state that he was caught and hauled back.

That he survived at all is probably down to the fact his medical training gave him a valued position in what passed for hospitals in the prison farms and penal labour colonies.

Not that life on the outside of Mao’s gulag was much better. The Great Leader ordered a Great Leap Forward and pretty well overnight millions of peasants were forced off the land to work in factories. With no rice to sustain them, those millions starved to death.

Through all this, Xu bided his time in captivity, hoping for release. And it seemed near – until another of Mao’s initiatives, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, unleashed a further round of bloody persecution.

With his record of dissent and refusal to kowtow, Xu was an obvious target, hence his humiliating appearance in front of the howling mob and his new sentence to another 20 years.

This time he would be properly behind bars, in a seemingly impregnable high-security prison surrounded by a high wall and an electric fence, with guards and their dogs on constant patrol, a communist Colditz.

But just as the inmates of the German prison were determined to find a way out, so Xu began to plan his escape – the thrilling climax of this book and as gripping as any World War II prisoner-of-war epic.

Over the next three years, he made his preparations. In the prison factory, which made agricultural tools, he secretly carved wooden blocks for the stamps he would need on the travel documents he was forging.

He explored the prison for weak spots, a point out of sight of the spotlights and the sentries in their towers where he could climb the wall.

He hoarded parcels of food. He plotted his route once outside. He made and hid the components of a ladder. He also prepared a phial of poison from nicotine in cigarettes.

If his attempt failed, he would put an end to his misery.

In August 1972, he got his chance. Blackouts were common, but on this day the electricity went out at 10am and, the convicts were told, would not come back on until the next morning.

After roll-call that night, he hid in the prison yard, then climbed up and over the wall, into the factory, out through a window, with a final heave across the dead electric fence. His luck held. He had six hours until his absence would be discovered.

Xu headed up into the mountains, keeping on the move for 40 hours before daring to rest. He took trains when he could – those travel documents passed muster – before ending up in the Gobi Desert. Thirty days after escaping, he crossed the border into Mongolia.

As far as anyone knows, he is the only person to escape from Mao’s deadly labour camps and live to tell the tale. After Mao’s death, Xu returned to Shanghai in 1984, two years after his case was reviewed and his convictions quashed, anxious to see his mother again.

He brought his wife, whom he’d married in Mongolia, and their three children. He worked as a management instructor for a petrochemical company until his retirement in 1993, when he began to write this extraordinary and powerful memoir. He died in 2008, aged 75.

He left a warning. Mao’s problem he says was that, steeped in the mentality of ancient China, he was unable to listen to dissenting opinions. It’s a thought that today’s rulers in Beijing, with their authoritarian approach to human rights, would do well to keep in mind.

–     No Wall Too High by Xu Hongci is published by Rider for £20

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China, Donald Trump, Europe, Military, Poland, Russia, United Nations, United States

The United States and other global risks

UNITED STATES

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Poland and the Baltic states feel threatened by Russia’s recent deployment of nuclear-capable Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad, the Russian territory wedged between Poland and Lithuania. The U.S. has responded by sending troops and reinforcements to Poland.

Intro: We need to turn away from Donald Trump’s Twitter feed and concentrate on some of the more worrying developments that the United States are involved in.

Much of the attention in the United States over the past week has been on Donald Trump and what the Russians may or may not have got on embarrassing material about his business and private life. The revelations have been fascinating, the risk of Mr Trump being held for blackmail on any hidden agenda with Russia lurid, but, nevertheless, it is no wonder such news has dominated the headlines.

Beneath all of this, however, there has been much more serious global developments with US involvement, eclipsed by the shenanigans and salacious disclosures of the incoming president’s behaviour. But it is best that they do not go unnoticed.

The first was the biggest deployment of U.S. troops in Europe since the end of the cold war. Some one thousand troops (of a promised four thousand) were deployed to Poland, part of President Barack Obama’s response to the nervousness of central European states in the face of Russian aggression. Agitated concerns have been expressed in many European states ever since Russia’s belligerence and actions in Ukraine and the Crimea. Notably, this is the first-time U.S. troops have been permanently stationed along Russia’s western border.

More than 80 main battle tanks and hundreds of armoured vehicles have already arrived in Germany and are being moved into eastern Europe by road and rail.

The Kremlin has been angered by the deployment, branding the arrival of tanks and reinforcements as a threat to Russia’s security.

Last October Russia sent nuclear-adaptable Iskander missiles to the Polish border and in December deployed Bastion anti-ship missile launchers to the Baltic. America has now responded to that threat given its commitment to peace in Europe. An old-fashioned arms build-up is now taking shape.

This is not the only part of the world where Russia and the U.S. are squaring up to each other. In another scenario, Russia has a powerful partner – China. The Asian economic powerhouse has also said U.S. actions in the region, namely in the South China Sea, are a threat to its national security.

In recent days China has sent its only aircraft carrier into the Taiwan Strait, largely seen as a provocative move amid ongoing tensions between Beijing and Taiwan. China claims that Taiwan is its rightful province.

China is also deeply resentful about a joint plan between the U.S. and South Korea to deploy an advanced missile defence system, ostensibly a defence system against any missiles fired from North Korea. China is North Korea’s only ally.

It is understood that representatives from Beijing and Moscow met last week and that they had agreed to take ‘further counter-measures’ in response to the U.S.-South Korea plan. It is not known what those counter-measures will be but it is likely that will be from a range of economic, military and diplomatic relations they have at their disposal.

Mr Trump is already heightening tensions in the region, first with his earlier decision to break diplomatic protocol and call Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-Wen, and then his secretary of state nominee Rex Tillerson saying the U.S. should deny Beijing access to new islands it has built in the heavily disputed waters of the South China Sea. Many in China, reinforced by editorials in Chinese newspapers, believe such U.S. action could result in war.

Rather than being obsessed and preoccupied with Mr Trump’s Twitter feed we should be concentrating instead on the bigger, more pressing, issues.

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Arts, Asia, Books, China, Economic, Government, Politics, Society, United States

Book Review – Easternisation: War and Peace in the Asian Century

THE EMERGING NEW SUPERPOWERS

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Easternisation: War and Peace in the Asian Century by Gideon Rachman is published by Bodley Head (£20)

Intro: As eyes look East, can Gideon Rachman’s new book predict what will happen next? By the year 2025, some two-thirds of the world’s population will be living in Asia.

THIS summer’s Olympic Games in Rio surprised many when the UK pipped China to second place in the overall medal table. That aside, we should be under no illusions as to who the big players are when it comes to global affairs. The British Government’s decision under prime minister Theresa May to review its plans for the Hinckley Point C nuclear power plant suggests that Mrs May has erred more on the side of caution when it comes to dealing with China than David Cameron and George Osborne. Mrs May’s initial prevarication was met by a warning from the Chinese state news agency that her apparent ‘suspicion towards Chinese investment’ threatened the arrival of the ‘China-UK golden era’ that President Xi Jinping declared on his trip to London last year. On her first trip to China as Prime Minister earlier this month, our American friends would have been watching closely. The U.S. was left frustrated last year when the UK announced it was to join the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.

In 2014, the IMF announced that China had become the world’s largest economy in terms of purchasing power. There are, though, many indices by which the United States remains way out in front: mineral wealth, oil and other energy sources, and its geopolitical neighbourhood is far more secure and stable.

At the end of this insightful book which focusses largely on the ‘Asian century’ that lies ahead, Gideon Rachman makes the point that the current position of the West is supported by certain inbuilt advantages, such as its representative institutions and open (albeit increasingly fractious) societies.

The reader is enlightened to the well-grounded assertions that the tectonic plates of global influence is changing. By 2025, some two-thirds of the world’s population will be living in Asia, with 5 per cent in the United States and 7 per cent in Europe. Even the US National Intelligence Council warns that the era of Pax Americana is ‘fast winding down’. Despite Barack Obama’s announcement in 2011 of America’s ‘pivot’ towards Asia, however, such policies are yet to assume a tangible form. Washington’s approaches to Asia remain torn, ranging from ‘primacy’ to ‘offshore balancing’ and from ‘containment’ to ‘accommodation’. Better political fluidity is needed rather than a bumper-sticker approach.

For the UK, the rise of China is likely to trigger a harbinger of dilemmas. Hinkley Point and the collapse of the British steel industry are just the mere tip of an economic revolution that will become far reaching. For example, to what extent will Britain seek to synchronise its approach with the next US administration (especially given its stated position of seeking a bespoke trade deal and strong defensive alliance with Washington)? The irreconcilable should not be overlooked. Instructive in the argument here is the experience of Australia, which also lives under the US security umbrella but is umbilically tied to Asian markets. In July of this year, when an international tribunal at The Hague ruled against China’s territorial claims to sovereignty over most of the South China Sea, Australia joined the U.S. and the Japanese in calling for the Chinese to respect the verdict. Australia has now become a source of major Western irritation for Beijing. Like many other countries, Australia has become increasingly wary of Chinese investment in its energy infrastructure.

Earlier this year in Washington, the Australian prime minister, Malcolm Turnball, gave a speech and expressed concern about the ‘Thucydides Trap’. Named after the classical Greek historian, this notional concept is a creation of the Harvard political scientist Graham Allison. He determined that in 12 of the 16 cases in which a rising power has confronted a status quo power over the last 500 years, war has always prevailed. Former and past iterations of Chinese strategy under Xi’s predecessors, Deng Xiaoping and Hu Jintao, spoke in terms of China’s “peaceful rise”, its amenability to international rules and its apparent willingness to fit in with the existing order. But the period of “hide and bide” may now have passed. Fu Ying, a former Chinese ambassador to the UK, has said that the US-led world order is a suit that no longer fits for China and the emerging Asian markets. Close observers and analysts of Chinese reform even suggest that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is exerting a growing influence on decision-making, and that the Communist Party has sought to shore up its legitimacy by riding on the back of nationalist sentiment.

Politically, both Washington and Beijing have very long-term and all-encompassing definitions of what their peripheries and first line of defences are. War games, for example, often scope out a series of alarming scenarios. The Pentagon views Chinese defensive strategy as “anti-access and area denial” and has developed its own “air-sea battle” doctrine in response. And, concurrently, China’s “belt and road” strategy, by which it aims to reconstitute a Silk Road through the Eurasian landmass, can be explained partly by historical fears of Western blockades of Chinese ports or incursions into its territorial waters.

The historical enmities and divisions in Asia are marred with flashpoints that could ignite a larger conflagration on land or sea. There are territorial disputes in the South China Sea over a series of uninhabited islands – those such as the aptly named Fiery Cross and Mischief Reefs – which, according to Beijing, fall within the “nine-dash line” by which China’s territorial waters are defined. There are large numbers of ethnic Chinese in places such as Malaysia and Indonesia for whom Beijing feels some responsibility. Meanwhile, however, Japan, under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, has assumed a much more offensive posture in response to Chinese claims to the uninhabited Senkaku Islands (as the Japanese call them) in the East China Sea. South Korea has endeavoured to reach an understanding with Beijing but Vietnam has looked to the US for protection as relations with China have soured.

 

In Easternisation, Rachman calls for a rapid improvement in the West’s situational awareness. The book is a welcome rebuttal of the tendency to view Asia through the prism of the markets alone. Although it has become fashionable and customary to speak of the “Pacific century”, the author suggests that an “Indo-Pacific” lens might be a more helpful way of viewing Asian geopolitics from the West. For instance, the development of the relationship between China and India – which share a contested land border and are highly suspicious of each other – is worthy of focus and attention.

India has already emerged as a global powerhouse in its own right. It has a similar size population to China, but a much healthier demographic balance and more established and experienced military.

Whilst still something of a geopolitical outsider, with India having no seat on the UN Security Council, there is gathering consensus that it could become a “swing state” and be harnessed to form part of a newly constituted democratic alliance. For the new superpowers in the East, the learning curve for tilting global powers in its favour might still be steep and perilous, though the West does appear to have tacitly accepted that the certainties of the past are passing. The US “pivot” towards Asia is a clear acknowledgement of this shift.

 

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