Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [132]
It was then that I was abducted at the railway station and taken to do slave labor in an illegal brick kiln in Shanxi Province: This part of Zhang Dou’s story is based on the 2007 Chinese slave-labor scandal, also known as the Shanxi Black Brick Kiln Incident, in which it was revealed that thousands of Chinese, children included, had been forced to work in illegal brick kilns, where they were tortured. Local Party officials were complicit in this activity.
“harmonized” off the net by the Web police: A reference to Hu Jintao’s idea that China is a “harmonious society.” It has become a verb with a satirical meaning—as here, to suppress—on the Internet.
the SS Study Group: “SS” has obvious Nazi overtones for English readers, and Wei Guo’s group certainly has fascist tendencies of the kind many older Chinese establishment intellectuals warned against in 2010. “SS” probably stands for Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, two Western thinkers from whom youthful ultranationalists derive antiliberal and statist ideas.
state tutors: An archaic term from the days of imperial rule, referring to the emperor’s tutors. Here it is used ironically to indicate the similarities between Chinese Communist Party rule and imperial rule.
the New Whampoa Academy: Whampoa, or Huangpu, is a district in Guangzhou where the Nationalist Party (KMT/Kuomintang) and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) military officers were trained from June 1924 to 1928, before the academy was shifted to Nanjing.
politics is the art of distinguishing between the enemy and ourselves: In Mao Zedong’s 1957 speech “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People,” Mao distinguished between two social contradictions: “between the enemy and us” and “among the people.” This kind of Maoist thought is still part of the Chinese Communist Party’s thought and practice.
the politics of the ancient Confucian Gongyang School: The Gongyang Zhuan places particular emphasis on the thinking of respected rulers of the period, promoting the “One Great Unity” and “Bringing Order out of Chaos” points of view. To criticize this school of ancient thought could be seen as criticizing the Communist Party dictatorship.
appreciated by the government: in Chinese, guojia means either “the nation,” “the state,” or “the government.” China is a Communist Party state in which the Communist Party is both the government and the state.
we must identify our enemies and let our hatred rise against them: This way of thinking fits in with China’s increasingly aggressive posture, for example, in claiming the South China Sea as their “core interest” and initiating conflict with Japan (September 2010) over the Senkaku islands. This mind-set resembles that of Hitler’s Germany from 1933 to 1945—with Hitler’s goon squads and stormtroopers—and Japan’s ultranationalist bushido spirit from the 1930s to 1945.
PS: The “SS” in the SS Study Group refers to two Germans: Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt, as mentioned in the note to p. 64. Strauss was Jewish and Schmitt was anti-Semitic and antiliberal.
White areas: As opposed to Communist Red areas, these were under the Nationalist (Kuomintang) government at the time.
wanted to write only about new people and new things: “new people and new things” is a Cultural Revolution phrase referring to the Maoist Communist utopian idea of remolding human nature to produce a new type of human being.
the complete works of Jin Yong, Zhang Ailing, and Lu Xun: Jin Yong is the pen name of Louis Cha (b. 1924), GBM, OBE, the most famous writer of martial arts fiction, many of whose works are available in English translation. He was a cofounder of the Hong Kong daily Mingbao.
Zhang