Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [39]
Fang Caodi, original name Fang Lijun. Later on, when an artist with the same name suddenly became famous abroad, the Fang Lijun I knew changed his name to Fang Caodi.
I first came to know Fang Caodi when I was an editor at Hong Kong’s Mingbao and frequently received letters from an American reader signed “Old Fang.” Sometimes he corrected facts or evidence given in an article, but more often he would be offering us a great deal of related material, most of which was too detailed to print. I came to know that Old Fang understood a great many unofficial and secret aspects of contemporary China. Once I put a notice in the readers’ section asking him to give his real name and address, and he did. I even wrote back to thank him.
He paid particular attention to my articles, and he could even spot the ones I’d written under a nom de plume for the China page of Mingbao. To use a modern expression, he was my “fan.”
We first met in the summer of 1989 in Hong Kong, when he was on his way back to the mainland. I was surprised that he wanted to enter China at a time when so many others were trying to get out. He asked me if I was familiar with the organization that was rescuing leaders of the Tiananmen democracy movement. I told him there was a Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Democratic Movements in China, but at that time I didn’t know there was also a secret organization spiriting people out of China.
I realized that his life experiences were quite unusual, so I invited him to meet me again the next day, and then I made these notes.
Fang Lijun’s or (Fang Caodi’s) ancestors came from Shandong. He was born in what was then known as Beiping in 1947. His father had joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in Xinjiang, the restive northwestern province, together with the Xinjiang warlord Sheng Shicai. Later he went over to the Nationalist Party. In 1949, just before the People’s Liberation Army entered Beiping, he boarded a plane to Qingdao, and then took a ship to Taiwan, leaving behind his young third wife and his youngest child—Fang Lijun.
Sheng Shicai’s branch of the Communist Party was a quite different affair from the Communist Party of Zhu De and Mao Zedong. The former had once actually advocated that Xinjiang, with almost half its population being Muslim, become independent from China. Fang Lijun’s father not only betrayed the Communist Party, however, he was also closely involved with criminal gangs in the Northwest and was responsible for training people with “special skills” for them. Fang Lijun was born in a historic old Daoist temple on the east side of Beijing. After liberation, this temple was taken over by the Ministry of National Security—that shows how vigilant the Chinese communists were about Daoist supernatural techniques.
After they took power across the entire country, the Chinese communists started a Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries. From 1950 to 1953, they cracked down severely on clandestine nationalist agents, organized crime, and members of religious organizations and secret societies. Anyone possessing Daoist-style “special skills” was liable to be considered part of a counterrevolutionary secret society. Mao Zedong suggested that one out of every thousand Chinese fitted these counter-revolutionary categories, and that the Party should first execute half that number. Large numbers of people who had worked for the nationalist government but then had surrendered, and even people who had worked underground for the Communist Party in the White areas, were also executed at this time. They included the writer Jin Yong’s father, Zha Shuqing, and the essayist Zhu Ziqing’s son, Zhu Maixian.
After the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, the criminal gangs and religious secret societies went into hiding and their voices were silenced throughout the land for quite some time. The leaders who had escaped most promptly went to Taiwan or Hong Kong.