为什么好莱坞不出反共的电影？！
Hollywood's Missing Movies

Why American films have ignored life under communism.

Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley | June 2000 Print Edition

Every so often someone in Hollywood uses his power to break the movie colony's rules. Consider this year's Total Eclipse. Odd as it may seem, this is the first serious American film set against the background of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact, the deal that allied Europe's two totalitarian powers against the West and helped plunge the world into war. With an ally on the eastern front, Hitler sent his Panzers west while Stalin helped himself to the Baltic states and invaded Finland. A film like this could easily have turned out as big a didactic dud as the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's 1982 bomb, Inchon, with Laurence Olivier as Gen. Douglas MacArthur. But this time the verisimilitude of the script, carried by some outstanding performances, is the source of the film's dramatic power.

Dustin Hoffman's persuasive portrayal of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin obviously emerges from his close study of how power and perversity converged in the dictator. Likewise, Jurgen Prochnow sparkles as Hitler's foreign minister, Joachim Von Ribbentrop, and so does Robert Duvall as Vyacheslav Molotov, his Soviet counterpart. Duvall's delivery of Molotov's line that "fascism is a matter of taste" is a key moment, and deserves at least as much admiration as Duvall's famous quip from Apocalypse Now about the smell of napalm in the morning. The Molotov speech has drawn some objections for being over the top, but it was not invented by screenwriter William Goldman (Marathon Man); it's an actual quote.

The sheer unexpectedness of the film is almost as shocking as its content. In one of the film's more chilling sequences, the Soviets hand over a number of German Communists, Jews who had taken refuge in Moscow, to the Gestapo. Modern audiences may find this surprising, but that incident too is taken from the historical record. Indeed, former KGB officials are credited as advisers on the film, whose cast also includes some of their actual victims.

There has simply been nothing like it on the screen in six decades. It has taken that long for moviegoers to see Soviet forces invading Poland and meeting their Nazi counterparts. Audiences would likely be similarly surprised by cinematic treatments of Cuban prisons, the Khmer Rouge genocide, and the bloody campaigns of Ethiopia's Stalinist Col. Mengistu, all still awaiting attention from Hollywood.

Total Eclipse is rated PG-13 for violence, particularly graphic in some of the mass murder scenes, images of starving infants from Stalin's 1932 forced famine in the Ukraine, and the torture of dissidents. Director Steven Spielberg (Schindler's List) deftly cuts from the Moscow trials to the torture chambers of the Lubyanka. More controversial are the portrayals of American communists during the period of the Pact. They are shown here picketing the White House, calling President Roosevelt a warmonger, and demanding that America stay out of the "capitalist war" in Europe. Harvey Keitel turns in a powerful performance as American Communist boss Earl Browder, and Linda Hunt brings depth to Lillian Hellman, who, when Hitler attacks the USSR in September of 1939, actually did cry out, "The motherland has been invaded."

Painstakingly accurate and filled with historical surprises, this film is so refreshing, so remarkable, that even at 162 minutes it seems too short.

Never heard of Total Eclipse? It hasn't been produced or even written. In all likelihood, such a film has never even been contemplated, at least in Hollywood. Indeed, in the decade since the Berlin Wall fell, or even the decade before that, no Hollywood film has addressed the actual history of communism, the agony of the millions whose lives were poisoned by it, and the century of international deceit that obscured communist reality. The simple but startling truth is that the major conflict of our time, democracy versus Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism--what The New York Times recently called "the holy war of the 20th century"--is almost entirely missing from American cinema. It is as though since 1945, Hollywood had produced little or nothing about the victory of the Allies and the crimes of National Socialism. This void is all the stranger since the major conflict of our time would seem to be a natural draw for Hollywood.

Though of global dimension, the conflict encompasses millions of dramatic personal stories played out on a grand tapestry of history: courageous Solidarity unionists against a Communist military junta; teenagers facing down tanks in the streets of Budapest and Prague; Cuban gays oppressed by a macho-Marxist dictatorship; writers and artists resisting the kitsch of obscurantist materialism; families fleeing brutal persecution, risking their lives to find freedom.

Furthermore, great villains make for great drama, and communism's central casting department is crowded: Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hönecker, Ceaucescu, Pol Pot, Col. Mengistu--all of cosmic megalomania--along with their squads of hacks, sycophants, and stooges, foreign and domestic.

A few English-language films have drawn on this remarkable material, especially book-into-film projects based on highly publicized works, among them One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (a 1971 British-Norwegian production) and, of course, Doctor Zhivago (1965). But many other natural book-to-film projects remain untouched, from the story of Stalin's daughter Svetlana (who left Russia for the West) to works by such high-ranking defectors as Polish Ambassador Romuald Spasowski (The Liberation of One), KGB agent Arkady Schevchenko (Breaking With Moscow), and persecuted Cuban poets Armando Valladares (Against All Hope) and Heberto Padilla (Heroes Are Grazing in My Garden). In light of the most recent revelations concerning the espionage of Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers' Witness is another obvious candidate.

The reason this ample supply of stories remains unfilmed is not ignorance. Though its films may not often reflect it, Hollywood is filled with knowledgeable writers and producers. The reasons lie elsewhere, especially in Hollywood's own convoluted political history, a history that has passed through many stages. Perhaps the most pertinent of those stages involves the "back story" of communism's own largely uncharted offensive in the studios.

The cinema's great potential for persuasion excited Stalin and his wholly-owned American subsidiary, the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), which lived off Soviet cash until it criticized Gorbachev's reforms as "old social democratic thinking class collaboration." Correspondence between American communists and their Soviet bosses can now be perused in The Soviet World of American Communism (1998). Editors John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Kyrill Anderson gathered newly declassified material from the Moscow-based archives of the Communist International (Comintern), the Soviet organization that controlled national communist parties. Members of the CPUSA made some documentary films in the 1930s, but nothing that could compete with the American commercial cinema, which the party set out to co-opt.

"One of the most pressing tasks confronting the Communist Party in the field of propaganda," wrote the indefatigable Comintern agent Willi Muenzenberg in a 1925 Daily Worker article, "is the conquest of this supremely important propaganda unit, until now the monopoly of the ruling class. We must wrest it from them and turn it against them." It was an ambitious task, but conditions would soon turn to the party's advantage.

The Depression convinced many that capitalism was on its last legs and that socialism was the wave of the future. In the days of the Popular Front of the mid-'30s, communists found it easy to make common cause with liberals against Hitler and Spain's Franco. In 1935, V.J. Jerome, the CPUSA's cultural commissar, set up a Hollywood branch of the party. This highly secretive unit enjoyed great success, recruiting members, organizing entire unions, raising money from unwitting Hollywood liberals, and using those funds to support Soviet causes through front groups such as the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. "We had our own sly arithmetic, we could find fronts and make two become one," remembered screenwriter Walter Bernstein (Fail Safe, The Front, The House on Carroll Street) in his 1996 autobiography, Inside Out.

During the period of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, for example, actor Melvyn Douglas (Ninotchka) and screenwriter-director Philip Dunne (Wild in the Country) proposed that the Motion Picture Democratic Committee, a conclave of industry Democrats, condemn Stalin's invasion of Finland in late 1939. But the group was actually secretly dominated by Communists, and it rejected the resolution. As Dunne later described it in his 1980 memoir, Take Two: A Life in Movies and Politics, "All over town the industrious communist tail wagged the lazy liberal dog."

"There was never an organized, articulate, and effective liberal or left-wing opposition to the communists in Hollywood," concluded John Cogley, a socialist, in his 1956 Report on Blacklisting. As former party member Budd Schulberg (On the Waterfront) put it, the party was "the only game in town." But even though the Communists were strongest in the Screen Writers Guild, influencing the content of movies was a trickier matter.

Communist cultural doctrine cast writers as "artists in uniform," producing works whose function was to transmit political messages and raise the consciousness of their audiences. Otherwise, movies were mere bourgeois decadence, a tool of capitalist distraction, and therefore subjugation. Party bosses V.J. Jerome and John Howard Lawson (a co-founder of the Screen Writers Guild and screenwriter of Algiers and Action in the North Atlantic) enforced this art-is-a-weapon creed in Hollywood, as they had done earlier among New York dramatists. Albert Maltz (Destination Tokyo) was to challenge the doctrine in a 1946 New Masses article, arguing that doctrinaire politics often resulted in poor writing. Responding to the notion that "art is a weapon," Maltz suggested, "An artist can be a great artist without being an integrated or logical or a progressive thinker on all matters."

As a result of such heresy, the party dragged him through a series of humiliating inquisitions and forced him to publish a retraction. Maltz trashed his original article as "a one-sided, nondialectical treatment of complex issues" that was "distinguished for its omissions" and which "succeeded in merging my comments with the unprincipled attacks upon the left that I have always repudiated and combated." Maltz was to defend that retraction until he died in 1985.

Dalton Trumbo (Kitty Foyle), a Communist Party member and for a time the highest-paid screenwriter in town, described the screenwriting trade as "literary guerrilla warfare." The studio system, in which projects were closely supervised, made the insertion of propaganda difficult if not impossible. Hollywood did not become a bastion of Stalinist propaganda, except as part of the war effort, when Russia was celebrated as an ally. Ayn Rand, then a Hollywood screenwriter and one of the few in the movie community who had actually lived under communism, was to point out that, in their zeal to provide artistic lend-lease, American Communist screenwriters went to extraordinary and absurd lengths. In such wartime movies as North Star and Song of Russia (both 1943), they portrayed the USSR as a land of joyous, well-fed workers who loved their masters. Mission to Moscow (also 1943), starring Walter Huston, went so far as to whitewash Stalin's murderous show trials of the 1930s.

But if Comintern fantasies of a Soviet Hollywood were never realized, party functionaries nevertheless played a significant role: They were sometimes able to prevent the production of movies they opposed. The party had not only helped organize the Screen Writers Guild, it had organized the Story Analysts Guild as well. Story analysts judge scripts and film treatments early in the decision making process. A dismissive report often means that a studio will pass on a proposed production. The party was thus well positioned to quash scripts and treatments with anti-Soviet content, along with stories that portrayed business and religion in a favorable light. In The Worker, Dalton Trumbo openly bragged that the following works had not reached the screen: Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon and The Yogi and the Commissar; Victor Kravchenko's I Chose Freedom; and Bernard Clare by James T. Farrell, also author of Studs Lonigan and vilified by party enforcer Mike Gold as "a vicious, voluble Trotskyite."

Even talent agents sometimes answered to Moscow. Party organizer Robert Weber landed with the William Morris agency, where he represented Communist writers and directors such as Ring Lardner Jr. and Bernard Gordon. Weber carried considerable clout regarding who worked and who didn't. So did George Willner, a Communist agent representing screenwriters, who sold out his noncommunist clients by deliberately neglecting to shop their stories. On a wider scale, the party launched smear campaigns and blacklists against noncommunists, targeting such figures as Barbara Stanwyck, Lana Turner, and Bette Davis.

These were among the many actors defying the party-backed labor group, the Conference of Studio Unions. The CSU, which was trying to shut down the industry and force through jurisdictional concessions that would give it supremacy in studio labor, clashed with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) and its allies, who were trying to keep the studios going. Katharine Hepburn stumped for the CSU, reading speeches written by Dalton Trumbo, while Ronald Reagan, then a liberal Democrat, headed the anti-communists in the talent guilds.

These were the true front lines of the communist offensive, and bloody warfare broke out in the streets outside every studio. The prospect of communist influence in Hollywood got Washington snooping, but in classic style, the politicians got it backward.

The first head of what eventually became the House Committee on Un-American Activities was New York Democrat Samuel Dickstein. As the recently declassified "Venona" documents (decrypts of Soviet cables) reveal, Dickstein moonlighted for Soviet intelligence--not out of ideology but for money. Initially concerned with pro-fascist groups in the late 1930s, the committee after the war was dominated by right-wing Republicans, though its most loathsome figure was Mississippi Democrat John Rankin, a sulfuric anti-Semite.

In 1947, while investigating Comintern agent Gerhart Eisler, whose brother Hanns was a composer in Hollywood, the committee found movie people coming forth with stories of Communist Party intrigue and decided that there was enough to justify hearings. They selected fewer than 50 witnesses of various job descriptions and political profiles, including party heavyweights John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo.

Eager to exploit Hollywood for publicity, the committee stupidly made film content the issue, ignoring the party's vast organizing campaigns in the back lots despite convincing testimony from, among others, Walt Disney. More important, the committee ignored the reality that it wasn't what the party put into North Star and Song of Russia that really mattered but the anti-communist, anti-Soviet material it kept out.

While the committee welcomed the publicity, the beleaguered film industry circled the wagons. Studio bosses, although adamantly anti-communist, asserted defiantly that no congressman could tell them how to run their business. A celebrity support group, including such figures as Humphrey Bogart and Danny Kaye, journeyed to Washington to defend their own.

The hearings featured a series of angry harangues by Stalinist writers who came to be known as the Hollywood Ten. Dalton Trumbo, who joined the party during the Nazi-Soviet Pact and even wrote a novel, The Remarkable Andrew, to support the Pact, bellowed, "This is the beginning of the American concentration camp."

Such performances shocked the studio bosses and the celebrity supporters, who had been expecting an eloquent constitutional defense of freedom of expression. Party membership itself was not illegal, and members could have alluded to the wartime alliance with the Soviets. Many wanted to testify, a phenomenon Norman Mailer dubbed "subpoena envy." As director John Huston (The Maltese Falcon), who organized the celebrity support group, later learned to his dismay, CPUSA lawyers had decided on the confrontational strategy, largely to protect enforcer John Howard Lawson and others who had already testified to a California committee that they were not communists.

After another series of hearings in the early 1950s, studios produced a string of now largely forgotten, mostly low-budget anti-communist films, among them Big Jim McClain and My Son John, in which Helen Hayes informs to the government on her son, Robert Walker. These dealt with communism as a kind of domestic political mafia but left actual conditions under communist regimes largely unexplored. More important was Hollywood's internal reaction.

Studio bosses, fearful of bad publicity, announced that they would indeed fire communists, which they had previously refused to do. This was the beginning of the blacklist, Hollywood's version of the conflict of our time, enshrined in such films as The Front (1976), starring Woody Allen and Zero Mostel and written by Walter Bernstein, and the star-studded but bland Guilty by Suspicion (1991). Viewers of such fare could easily conclude that communism scarcely existed except as a source of boundless optimism in the hearts of the country's most creative writers. Much the same message emerged from Julia, the 1977 Jane Fonda vehicle based on an autohagiographical memoir by Lillian Hellman.

Over the years, a number of book-length accounts have taken up the cause, some written by relatives of the blacklisted, invoking "inquisition" and "red scare" in their titles and bristling with terms such as witch-hunt and McCarthyite. The senator from Wisconsin, it should be noted, played no role in Hollywood, whose anti-communists, mostly liberal Democrats, found him an impediment to their cause.

As it plays out in the movies, the blacklist story is vintage Hollywood: black hats vs. white hats. The evil government committee rides into town and, for no apparent reason, makes life miserable for a group of noble artists. In one subplot, the victims survive by selling scripts under fake names. The story carries considerable appeal, though it misses the irony that those who thought capitalism evil continued to take advantage of the kind of market that did not exist in the socialist regimes they extolled. Albert Maltz championed East Germany, while fellow Hollywood Ten alumnus Lester Cole favored that bastion of artistic freedom, North Korea.

By the 1960s the blacklist was over; Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger restored the names of blacklisted writers to the credits of the films they actually wrote. The Hollywood Ten and other communist writers were on their way, as Philip Dunne put it, to being "virtually deified." Dunne had been through it all and found the revisionist accounts so distorted that, he said, "I could almost believe that I was reading the chronicle of some mythical kingdom."

The legend of the blacklist, sanitized of all references to Stalin or to the Communist Party's actual record in the studios, became a continuing influence on Hollywood's political life. Hollywood had entered its period of anti-anti-communism, a well-known phenomenon in American cultural and intellectual life. Those motivated by this ideology have vilified such critics of the Soviet Union as Robert Conquest and Sidney Hook, while venerating such paleo-leftists as journalist I.F. Stone, whose 1952 Hidden History of the Korean War parroted the party line that South Korea invaded the North. Anti-anti-communism demonizes anti-communists, however truthful their revelations, as paranoid and on the wrong side of history, while praising apologists of totalitarianism as well-meaning idealists, however mendacious and servile their record. Such a vision is not likely to promote a meaningful cinematic treatment of communism.

Witness the longstanding campaign to prevent director Elia Kazan (On the Waterfront, East of Eden, A Streetcar Named Desire) from receiving a lifetime achievement award from the Motion Picture Academy. Kazan, a former communist, cooperated with HUAC and defended his position in a New York Times advertisement that called on liberals to take a stand against communism. Since Kazan's cinematic achievements are undeniable, his career violates a significant aspect of the Hollywood Ten legend: that those who defied the committee were brilliant artists and noble idealists, while those who cooperated were vile mediocrities who could build their careers only by destroying others.

Kazan finally received his award at last year's Oscars, but amid renewed controversy over whether he should receive any applause at the event. (Abraham Polonsky [I Can Get It for You Wholesale], a leading Hollywood Communist who led the assault on Albert Maltz, hoped in print that Kazan would be assassinated.) But though Kazan finally received his due from Hollywood, Stalin never has.

According to Hollywood, American anti-communism derived not from any deficiencies of socialism or threat from the USSR but from paranoia, xenophobia, and the nefarious influence of Nazis who entered the United States after the war. That was the theme of Walter Bernstein's 1988 The House on Carroll Street, which featured a score more appropriate for a '50s monster movie. Bernstein, incidentally, shows up in the Venona decrypts, which reveal that he was a willing collaborator with the KGB. If nothing else, such a revelation gives new meaning to the Hollywood phrase, "Have your agent call my agent."

On the rare occasion when life under communism is portrayed, its characteristic brutality is virtually never actually represented. Consider, for instance, Warren Beatty's Oscar-winning Reds (1981), a psalm to Lenin acolyte John Reed. In that film a character concedes that the Soviet regime "violates human rights" but none of these violations appears on the screen. Likewise, audiences don't see the Khmer Rouge murdering any of their nearly 2 million victims in The Killing Fields (1984). Indeed, the real villains in that tragedy, we learn, are Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and U.S. foreign policy.

A similar theme runs through Missing (1982), with Jack Lemmon, directed by Constantine Costa-Gavras, a man of the left who, unlike his Hollywood colleagues, is sometimes willing to address communist themes honestly. Costa-Gavras' 1970 film The Confession deals with the 1952 anti-Semitic show trials in Czechoslovakia that resulted in 11 executions. After hanging, the victims' bodies were incinerated; the film shows a policeman scattering their ashes on frozen roads around Prague, which was what actually happened. For Yves Montand, who played Czech Foreign Minister Artur London, The Confession was "a farewell to the generous sentimentality of the Left, a Left that had been blind to its own crimes and cultivates a messianic pose, proposing to bring happiness to human beings, even if it means slaughtering them."

But Hollywood has yet to show itself capable of portraying what The Black Book of Communism, a recent scholarly assessment of communist crimes, calls "politically correct mass slaughter." In Eleni (1985), John Malkovich hunts down a Greek communist responsible for the death of his mother, but much of the hostile action takes place off screen. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), while generally anti-communist in tone, includes only fleeting glimpses of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Odd as it may seem, one of the few Hollywood movies that does depict violence in communist countries on screen is a Disney film. The 1983 Night Crossing shows a daring escape from East Germany, Albert Maltz's version of the good society. Viewers see German border guards, whom John Hurt calls "pigs," gunning down those who flee. Material abounds for this type of film. Soviet Bloc archives are yielding their revelations about the Katyn Forest murders of Polish officers by Soviet forces, KGB assassination campaigns in the West, and the identity of Stalinist agents in Western governments. Vitaly Shentalinsky's 1996 book, Arrested Voices, documented Stalin's campaigns against writers and artists, whose victims included Itzak Feffer and Solomon Mikaels, both of whom had been showcased in Hollywood by Communists as evidence that anti-Semitism did not exist in the Soviet Union.

Films from former communist countries, the 1999 Thief among them, show that even the Russians are coming to terms with the communist legacy. But the circus surrounding Kazan's Oscar and other recent events suggest that Hollywood probably will not follow suit. The blacklist mythography casts too long a shadow, one in which a fuller appreciation of the epic battle between communism and democracy remains in the dark. "Hollywood Remembers the Blacklist," staged at the Motion Picture Academy's theater on the 50th anniversary of the 1947 hearings, featured Billy Crystal and Kevin Spacey in dramatic roles. Also appearing were Hollywood Ten veteran Ring Lardner Jr. and fellow party member and Song of Russia co-writer Paul Jarrico, who compared the Hollywood Ten's performance with the stand that Jefferson took against the Alien and Sedition Act. Actress Marsha Hunt said that "for over a decade, this was no longer the land of the free, nor the home of the brave."

This event was a colorized, multimedia version of Philip Dunne's "mythical kingdom," but for the anti-anti-communist Hollywood crowd, it proved the feel-good hit of the fall. Such events pass on the myths to younger filmmakers who see themselves not just as entertainers but teachers.

For instance, Tim Robbins' Cradle Will Rock, released last fall, takes its title from an agitprop musical written by Marc Blitztein, a doctrinaire Stalinist. The original work was welcomed by the 1930s Federal Theater Project, a group dominated by communists, precisely because of its Soviet-inspired Socialist Realism. The progressive Works Progress Administration (WPA) closed down the show out of budgetary considerations, though Robbins attempts to blame it on an axis of HUAC and capitalists allied with Mussolini and Hitler. The fascist-capitalist bosses, headed by Nelson Rockefeller, raking in the dough selling goods to Hitler, are also out to get muralist Diego Rivera, played by Ruben Blades. Audiences predictably stayed away from this film, but in Hollywood, the mythology of the left remains powerful enough to see such a project through production.

Late last year, the University of Southern California, whose film school is a kind of Hollywood employment agency, unveiled a sculpture garden honoring the Hollywood Ten as victims of the Cold War and champions of the First Amendment. The mythology has become a monument, a kind of museum of anti-anti-communism in a town that welcomed Daniel Ortega of the Sandinista junta but never took up the cause of a single Soviet or Eastern European dissident. The specter that once haunted Europe is gone, yet it still seems to hang over the palms of Southern California, an ideological smog that obscures the view for millions of filmgoers.

奴才，精神卖淫与自我阉割－－王治郅的自我形象与独白
A Eunuslawhore

作者:陈凯 By Kai Chen
2006-10-24 19:59:14

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A SLAVE, AN EUNUCH, A PROSTITUTE

Wang Zhizhi: a twisted combination of images

一个自由人与一个奴宦娼的自白： （Contrast a free man to a slave, a whore and an eunuch) [/size]

我宁可去做一个饥饿的苍蝇，冒着生命危险满天飞，去寻找食物与快乐；也不愿做一个蠕动在他人粪便里的蛆虫，饱食终日，苟且偷生。 --- 一个自由人的自白

I'd rather be a hungry housefly, risking my life, flying around looking for food and joy, than be a worming maggot inside others' feces, never having to worry about where and who I am and where my next meal comes from. --- The self-confession of a Free Man.

我明白了没有祖国的支持做后盾，没有组织，领导的关心和爱护，个人将一事无成；我明白了个人的价值，只有在为国争光的奋斗中，才能得到真正的体现。 --- 王治郅的检讨

I now understand that without our Motherland's support, without the Communist Party organization, without our leaders' care and love, an individual is nothing and will achieve nothing. I now understand my personal worth and values will only be realized in our struggle for Motherland. --- Wang Zhizhi.

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Now you understand what I mean by "Slavery is a insidious codependency of the slave owners and the slaves themselves, not just slave owners oppressing the slaves". To rid off evil slavery, one must deal with this evil from both ends, from both supply and demand, from oppression and fear, from nihilistic institutions and meaningless individuals....

I don't usually call a person names, though I am very good at it and often did it when I played basketball. But today I permit myself to give a few derogatory names to one of my fellow sportsmen and his likes. The old habit dies hard.

Wang's self confession has raised the specter of the Chinese slave mentality. In his statement, he repeatedly claims that it is the nation, the party, the leaders that raised, supported, and reared him, and without these entities, he as an individual is nothing. Shamelessness is only too mild to describe this evil twist of truth: Who has raised whom?

In a Chinese mind, with its most poisonous aspect, somehow it always is the nation, the motherland, the emperor, the collective that raise and protect individuals, giving them their livelihood and meaning of their lives. But a clear-thinking mind would easily reach the opposite conclusion: It is the individuals who create and produce, not the collective. It is the individuals who support and raise the government and emperors, not the opposite. It is the individuals who give meaning to the collective, to the nation, to the motherland, not the opposite.

But why does the upside-down falsehood dominate the Chinese mindset? Addressing these two entirely opposite orientation of human values/anti-values are the purpose of forming my forum. To clear up/clean up the Chinese mindset from thousands of years of force-fed narcotic addiction takes a long time and great deal of effort. But one must start now and must start from each and every Chinese individual. Only this bottom-up reformation of mindset can allow the antidote to take effect toward the first step of moral and spiritual rebirth/health, toward a Cultural Renaissance, toward intellectual honesty, toward getting rid of codependency between a slave collective and the slaves themselves.

In Wang's vulgar and shameless self-confession, moral and spiritual degradation oozes from every pore of his being. To shield himself from humiliation, insult, self-loathing and the ultimate defeat as a professional athlete, he has no qualm in using his parents, his wife, his infant child to hide his own ugly self, his own fear. To protect his decaying self, he is willing to use any others, to use America, to use China, to use the Party, to use the Army, to use his own family, regardless of the destruction of his own soul and conscience, as long as using these will somehow alleviate the pain and suffering from the very deep recess of his mind and heart. [b]Wang is without doubt, like many Chinese, a USER. Using other human beings, using his own profession, using his own dignity, using anything in sight for his nihilistic, ugly and meaningless end is the only concern of his life.

Wang's only self-worth, as the Confucian ethics dictates, is in others' eyes. He is entirely void of self-awareness, self reflection, self respect and self-judging. For there has been no such thing in Chinese moral teachings as God and Conscience deep inside oneself. Being judged by others and especially by the power elite is the only criterion for one's own meaning of existence. Humans are simply not humans in Chinese tradition, they are only masses composed of flesh and blood. Each individual by himself has no meaning and no inner voices and values. All the voices of moral judgement are coming from above never from within, from motherland, from emperors, from fathers, from elders, from the collective, from everything but the person himself.

Wang as you can see, is a pathetic creature, created not by God, but by the Chinese party-state, Chinese tradition, Chinese cultural environment and the omnipotent/omnipresent collective. This is a stark contrast to the American value in which each individual is created by his creator and has inalienable rights and ability to understand his own conscience, his own meaning of life, his own actions and their consequences. Thus humans are born free and meaningful themselves, regardless others and the collective, no matter how old/ancient they are, how strong they are or how many they are.

If by now you still don't get my drift about the contrast in Chinese anti-values and American values, you are in deep voodoo.

Do you really think even after Wang made the self-demeaning confession, the Chinese people and authorities will truly respect/love him? No such thing. They are only using him, just as he is using them. They all know too well about this game of Users. In this game there is no respect, esteem, and dignity. Everybody is a whore. Everybody is a self-castrating Eunuch. Everybody is a slave to serve the omnipresent and omnipotent collective that represents absolute NOTHINGNESS. This nothingness of this "blackhole" has swallowed millions of innocent lives and continued to do so, as long as we as individuals refuse to understand its nature and origin, as long as we are still immersed/addicted in its poisonous smog.

The sports authorities in China of course will praise Wang for his destruction of 'self" to please the motherland, via this complete dehumanizing confession. But behind Wang's back, they look down on him, they talk down on him about his failure in America, about his lack of personal dignity. One word, they absolutely loath him, as much as they loath themselves. They know in this nothingness game, everyone comes out a loser, having sold their souls to the devil, having castrated themselves to serve the emperor, having little by little sunk into the deep of the collective quick sand. They absolutely loath their own state of existence, yet they wholeheartedly work for the master of the game - the nothingness, to have become a part of the Blackhole to castrate others, to swallow others, to demean others, until everyone becomes just like themselves - a soulless zombie.

This is the portrait of a Eunuch culture, a slave mentality, a prostitute's existence. This is what is called "Chinese Motherland".

2006-05-02

今天就是地狱/做好人倒霉
Hell is not Tomorrow, Hell is Today

每日一语：

被害者害人，害人者被害，所有人倒霉，每个人腐败。 这就是今天的中国。 --- 陈凯

Victims are perpetrators; perpetrators are victims; everyone loses; everyone is corrupt. This is the reality in China. --- Kai Chen

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Dear Visitors:

I now paste today's LA Times' article about China's corruption here. I hope you can see the reality. This is exactly the reason I have launched a series movements, from Mao's portrait protest in 2007, Alhambra, to Rose Parade protest over the Chinese Olympic float, to the Olympic Freedom T-shirt Global Movement, to the recent Mao's Kitchen protest....

I aim to "Awaken Your Dormant Conscience". Unless and until you start a dialogue with your own conscience, China will remain in hell, corrupt to its very core. Conscience requires two essential elements as prerequisites:

First is a strong faith in Truth, Justice, Liberty and Human Dignity. These are the eternal values God instills in us. These values cannot be seen. Nor can they be scientifically proven. Yet they indeed exist and they are the fundamentals in being human. Losing them we will become animals, or something lower than animals.

Second is a strong individual identity. Only when you have dismantled that spiritual Great Wall the Chinese tyranny has built between your physical being and your soul/spiritual being, you can start a good, constructive, up-swing cycle in your life.

To re-ignite this spark requires strong will, courage and ability.

I often said that Christianity plus Ayn Rand (Faith + Individuality) composes the basic fabric in American spirituality. China lacks both of these elements. I am hopeful and optimistic about the prospect of re-igniting that spark dormant inside everyone's soul in China, for I did it myself.

I hope you start that process by making this moral decision: re-ignite that spark hidden in the dark corner of your soul as well. The time is now, right at this moment. The process will be long and painful, but the moment of change has to be drastic, has to be right now at this second.

Best. Kai Chen 陈凯

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[size=24]Corruption taints every facet of life in China[/size]

Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times

Liao Zusheng and Chen Guoying's 15-year-old son, Liao Mengjun, was killed at his public school in Foshan the day he was to collect his junior high diploma in July 2006. They believe teachers enraged over the complaints they had made about illegal fees and other corruption were responsible. Seeking justice, they have come to Beijing.

From admission in primary school to setting up a business, bribes grease the wheels of Chinese enterprise. Some citizens dare to speak out against corrupt officials, but sometimes pay a heavy price.

By Mark Magnier
10:18 PM PST, December 28, 2008

Reporting from Foshan, China -- The last time his parents saw Liao Mengjun alive, he was heading to school to pick up his junior high school diploma.

A few hours later, they were called to the morgue. They found that their lanky 15-year-old son's forehead had been bashed in. His right knee jutted through the skin. Both his arms had been broken. He had several stab wounds, internal injuries and a swollen foot.

Photos: Corruption plagues every...His index finger was slashed, suggesting his tormentors had tried to make him write something in his own blood.

As if things could be worse, writer Liao Zusheng and his wife, Chen Guoying, concluded that they knew who had killed their son: his teachers. And they believed they knew why: because of their bitter, public complaints about unauthorized fees and systemic corruption in schools and across Chinese society.

Corruption is an everyday experience for millions of Chinese that taints not just schools, but relations in business, on farms and in factories, and potentially any contact citizens have with officialdom. Foshan appears no more corrupt than any other city in China, experts say. It is noteworthy only as an example of a pervasive problem that threatens China's stability and political system.

Senior Communist Party officials know that decades of remarkable economic progress are at risk if graft and bribery stretch the chasm between the haves and have-nots too wide. But they have limited room to maneuver. Any meaningful effort to crack down endangers the party's monopoly on power.

The system depends on legions of police, local party and government officials to enforce Beijing's policies and quash dissent. All too often, critics say, local officials regard their position as a license to steal.

Throughout the country, the prodigious rate of economic growth has created a gold rush mentality. Absent both the strictures and the social safety network of Mao Tse-tung's rigid system, millions of people are seeking ways to prosper -- legally or illegally.

Corruption accounts for an estimated 3% to 15% of a $7-trillion economy, and party membership can be an invitation to solicit bribes or cut illegal land deals. Membership hit 74 million at the end of 2007, a 10% jump from 2002, as moneymaking opportunities increasingly trumped ideology.

Nearly 5,000 officials at the county level or above were punished for corruption over the last year, state media reported Friday.

"Of course everyone hates corruption," said Qiao Zhanxiang, a Beijing lawyer who took on the Ministry of Railways for alleged price gouging and lost. "But everyone also wants to be a part of it."

The result is a growing divide between those who benefit from corruption and their victims. It is at the grass-roots level where this chasm is most harshly felt, among those abused by the system, like Liao and Chen, or others who have simply been left behind.

"Common Chinese people are in hell," said Ai Xiaoming, a documentary film producer and professor at Zhongshan University in the neighboring city of Guangzhou. "Hell is not some future. It's right now."

Foshan

Foshan, or "Buddha Mountain," is the ancestral home of martial arts star Bruce Lee, the place where severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, was first observed, and the source of some of the worst air pollution in the Pearl River delta industrial heartland.

Factories produce ceramics, furniture, toys and household appliances, including items sold by Wal-Mart, Kmart, Avon and Home Depot.

But if you spend time in Foshan, a city of 5.9 million residents and 2.3 million migrant workers, you find it's also a place where bridges and houses collapse; where half- finished skyscrapers sit empty and tilting dangerously.

It's a place where counterfeit currency shows up in ATMs and pay packets.

It's a place where factory workers from inland provinces can be shaken down, beaten -- and allegedly sometimes even killed by brutal auxiliary police.

It's a place where a cash-stuffed "red envelope" can ensure that doctors do their best in the operating room, or that you'll pass your driving test even if you never leave the parking lot.

In China, it's also unremarkable, said Ren Jianming, vice director of the Clean Government Research Center at Beijing's Qinghua University: "What you observed in Foshan can be seen to a certain extent everywhere."

To play -- or not

Photos: Corruption plagues every...Liao, a former soldier and a longtime Communist Party member, and his wife say officials at Huangqi Middle School turned against them after he spoke out against a $3,900 "selection fee" the school tried to charge without a receipt.

He also posted several essays on the Internet on corruption and waste in China.

Frustrated by what they said was systemic police harassment and stonewalling, including refusal to release their son's autopsy report, Chen and Liao decided to investigate the death themselves.

They said the information they gathered before witnesses were intimidated by police convinced them that the dean of Mengjun's class, two teachers and a guard attacked him that evening two years ago.

It is difficult to verify the parents' account because witnesses often stay quiet for fear of reprisals. There is no independent police, courts or media.

Foshan's propaganda ministry said Mengjun was caught stealing, attacked his teachers and committed suicide. Police and the head of a government team dealing with the case declined to comment. One of the teachers, Liang Xibo, said he was in his office that day but didn't see or hear anything.

But local officials offered the couple large amounts of money to end their quest for justice. First it was $20,000. Then $50,000, if they destroyed all the evidence and stopped talking about the case. Finally, it rose to $70,000, several years' income for the family.

They also urged Chen, 42, and Liao, 38, to have a "replacement" child under China's strict one-child policy to "ease their grief."

Liao isn't interested. "It's blood money," he said.

But many others decide early on to play the game.

Like most parents, Lily, a 40-something Foshan stay-at-home mother, wanted the best for her only son -- and that meant giving bribes. Sipping a cup of tea, Lily explained that bribery is something of an art form and described how she went about it:

Nine years ago, when her son was ready for primary school, she found a friend who knew a senior local education official. Lily, who asked that her family name not be used, went to the man's office with about $370, didn't say much and left the money. Her son was accepted.

A couple of years ago, he was ready for junior high school, but didn't do well on his entrance exams. Several friends were enlisted to wine and dine key people, she said, seeding the ground for her to distribute $1,200 among education officials and make a $1,600 "donation" to the institution.

Recently, Lily's son entered senior high school. Despite spending thousands of dollars on gratuities, her connections weren't strong enough and she had to settle for a less prestigious school.

Lily said she still considers it money well spent, even though any parent knows that getting in is only the first step.

Families face unauthorized demands for book, uniform and lunch "fees." With all sides complicit, most go unchecked, including the pressure to deliver red envelopes, particularly to teachers whose subjects feature prominently on college entrance exams. "If there are 50 students and 40 give gifts, you definitely don't try very hard with the other 10," said one education industry official, who is also a parent. "Unfortunately, that's our system."

'Numb'

Tao Jun says he has seen the same process play out in a new arena of wealth and opportunity: private business.

Executives say government and party officials demand payments and abuse their power to award contracts or issue permits. Companies that lowball or otherwise anger officials learn quickly that the most routine inspection can turn into a nightmare.

"Even if you lease a building for 50 years, they can take it back tomorrow," said one Foshan businesswoman, who like others interviewed declined to be identified or discuss details for fear of repercussions.

Photos: Corruption plagues every...Though cash is straightforward, executives said gifts of department store and restaurant vouchers are more difficult to trace, as are artwork and stock, paid "study" trips, prostitutes or paying overseas tuition for officials' children.

High tax rates exert further pressure, said Tao, an activist who once worked as a general manager of an Internet company in Foshan. The company handed out $140 in bribes each month to avoid $1,400 in taxes, he recalled.

"I know because I signed the vouchers," Tao said. "It's hard to be a good person in China. The system makes you numb to what's right and wrong."

Companies bribe each other, passing on the cost to customers, and use payoffs to cut corners, accelerate growth or box out competitors.

Occasionally, scandals become public, suggesting how much money is at stake. In one high-profile case here in recent years, industrialist Feng Mingchang was implicated in a $1.2-billion loan scandal in which he reportedly bribed 223 bankers and government officials.He was sentenced to life in prison, and one of his bankers received the death penalty.

But sometimes, business executives can turn the tables on corrupt officials.

Lin Ze, a law professor at the Central Party School in Beijing, said businessmen would treat officials to lavish meals, foot massages, saunas and other entertainment, and secretly tape it. "Then once you don't do things according to their plan, they turn you in."

'Corruption tour'

In Lichong, a village incorporated into greater Foshan, residents lead a visitor on what they call a "corruption tour."

They point out a five-story pink-and-white mansion. And a two-story house nestled behind a large gate. And a villa with closed-circuit cameras and palm trees in a gated community. And a couple of prominent businesses.

All of those, they say, belong to local Communist Party Secretary Chen Quanxi, whose official salary they estimate at $450 a month.

Chen Liujuan, a member of the village's party committee, has three houses and one commercial property, they say. One of them is a three-story residence with Greek columns and cascading terraces.

In the Communist-run nation, land still is collectively owned, with proceeds going to village coffers. In practice, however, officials and their inner circle have enormous opportunities to enrich themselves.

The Lichong officials declined to respond to accusations of corruption. And as in so many other corners of China, a lack of public records makes verification of villagers' claims difficult. But although it's illegal for them to make copies, some residents report having seen party records. Documents seen by The Times show an internal party investigation into the alleged diversion of funds involving dubious accounts by Lichong officials.

Villagers say they doubt that much of anything can check the power of their local officials. In almost any showdown, here or elsewhere in China, police will support local authorities, in part because a riot could weaken the party's political position.

"Even if the central government wanted to see justice carried out at the village level, it is afraid of losing the support of local officials," said Tang Jingling, an activist based in Guangzhou. "They need them to control society since they're scared to death of any sort of unrest. And to do that, they must let them run their fiefdoms." In the past, officials have acknowledged that many land protests turn violent.

A survey last year of 90 cities found that 22% to 80% of new land projects were illegal, according to the official New China News Agency.

In Lichong, villagers say, the gold rush began in 1988, when officials built seven porcelain factories. They promised jobs to displaced farmers, but the factories lost money, were stripped of value and were sold back to the government.

As Foshan has expanded, the value of land has skyrocketed. By law, the proceeds should be distributed among Lichong's 2,300 resident-shareholders.

The main cooperative project is a complex of apartment buildings up to 23 stories high near a planned subway stop that will link the area with Guangzhou. Villagers say their share of the profits was arbitrarily cut to about 35%. Even then, they should be doing well. But local party officials say the cooperative is almost broke and give them each no more than $107 a month.

Photos: Corruption plagues every...Later it became clear where at least some of the money had gone. Officials had deposited more than $1.5 million in a postal bank, pocketing portions of the interest and principal. However, the bank allegedly operated a Ponzi scheme that siphoned off as much as $240 million. Farmers have fought back in several villages. They say several of their leaders have been beaten and imprisoned on trumped-up charges. One farmer from nearby Sanshan died in custody.

A few continue to work the land among the factories, bulldozers and housing projects.

Chen Qixi, 38, raises ducks on a few acres of flooded land beneath an elevated highway. As he tended his flock recently, unemployed villagers looked on. Chen Rutian, 65, said his ancestors had worked this land for 23 generations. "We've seen emperors come and go," he said. "Now these local officials are driving us off a cliff."

Old age

Bare feet, shabby clothing and communal cooking pots sully the marble floors, chandeliers and wood paneling of the five-story office building in Foshan's Xiantang village.

According to Chinese tradition, old age should be a time of respect and security. But in an act of defiance, dozens of neighbors, most of them elderly, stormed the building in July 2007.

Their anger was sparked by a demand that they move their shops from land they collectively own to a private market where they would have to pay rent. The new market was part of a five-story condo development on land the village of 3,700 people had recently sold to a developer.

At the same time, villagers say officials dole out just $8 a month to most residents, an amount that has remained constant since the early 1980s.

"I want to get my money back," said toothless, 91-year-old Cui Neng.

Other protesters guarded 11 boxes of documents bound with tape and locked in a disabled van near a picture of Mao. The boxes contain evidence, they believe, that officials embezzled more than $5 million over the last decade.

It's illegal for them to examine the documents, they said, so they wait and hope that the central government will send someone to investigate.

This past July, a year after the protest started, village elections were held. But villagers said the new party leader just bought the position from his predecessor.

For months, tattered red protest banners fluttered listlessly outside the village hall. One read: "Officials should go and collect pig manure if they won't work for the people."

Though the banners have come down, the protest continues. Some say it's the longest sustained act of civil disobedience in the history of Communist China.

mark.magnier@latimes.com

Words from Kai Chen 陈凯一语:

It is not a surprise to me that Yi faked his age. He, as well as Yao Ming, is not a free man. They are still being enslaved/encaged by a slavery culture. They have yet to make a single decision in their lives based on their individual conscience.

"China, or Chinese" is a despotic and enslaving term that has contributed mightily to build a "Spiritual Great Wall" between an individual and his/her conscience. A split (or schizophrenic) character is the necessary result. Integrity, as we understand in the West, is out of the window. Everyone is a fake, or a hypocrite. No one is real. And people don't believe there is truth of reality anyway. They are more comfortable living in a lie or an illusion.

What a screwed mindset! What a dangerous mindset! People in China can snap in any direction any time. Chaos with insecurity is the inescapable state of living. All of this is because the Chinese always want to give up their freedom/liberty for a morsel of food, or a moment of peace.

Brace yourself for a gigantic storm ahead. Best. Kai Chen

易建联年龄造假事件很快在美国引起轰动

作为曾经跟踪采访过阿联的《密尔沃基哨兵报》专栏作家加德纳在听到这则消息后发表言论：依照NBA的规定，篮网随时能以此为由终止阿联的合同……

　　中国的记者朋友告诉我，中国的SI杂志现在找到了易建联真实年龄的证据，证明易建联的出生年份是1984年，而不是他自己宣称的1987年。我曾经登陆过亚洲篮球协会的网站，在亚洲青年锦标赛的名单中查找过易建联的年龄。当时易建联的出生年份就是1984年。相关推荐：易建联年龄水落石出 学籍表毕业照暴露秘密

　　其实，我曾经采访过保罗-哈姆的许多次世界体操锦标赛，早就听说过中国女子体操运动员修改年龄的事情。这次易建联的年龄事件曝光，进一步证明中国竞技体育还是延续东欧国家的竞技体育体制，就是为了获得奥运会金牌，可以不择手段。

现在中国的SI杂志再一次找到了易建联真实年龄的证据，我相信，美国的SI母刊也很快获得这个证据，而且很快就会刊登出来。到时候，易建联年龄造假的事情就会放大。

易建联年龄造假的事件，使我联想到奥运会开幕式上发生的假唱事件，都是令人匪夷所思的事情。

　　我很庆幸密尔沃基雄鹿队，已经和易建联摆脱了合同关系。现在轮到新泽西篮网面对这件事情了。如果依照易建联出生在1984年的证据，那么，易建联参加2007年选秀的时候，已经是23岁了。按照NBA资方和球员工会达成的一揽子协议(CBA)，易建联当时已经没有参加NBA选秀的资格了，他进入NBA的身份应当是自由球员。如果这样，他的工资标准要比第六号新秀的标准低很多。

相关推荐：易建联年龄水落石出 学籍表毕业照暴露秘密

年龄作假在美国是一件很严重的舞弊事件。现在既然有易建联年龄造假的直接证据，新泽西篮网掌握有绝对的主动权，随时都可以终止和易建联之间的劳资合同，因为CBA也是在球员年龄真实的基础上保护球员的利益。既然球员的年龄都不是真实的，球员的劳资合同也是得不到保证的。 (本文来源：网易体育 )

海外中文学校的教材 - 中共渗透腐败罪证
Communist Infiltration in America

陈凯：

一点材料，供你参考。

我所教的中文学校的教材背面印着：此教材系中华人民共和国国务院侨务办公室为推展海外华文教育免费赠送。

不过，我的学生们告诉我，他们用的这套教材都是他们父母出钱从所在中文学校买的。这套意在暗渡陈仓的免费教材居然被中文学校的开办者用来渔利，可见有些人多么唯利是图，廉耻全无。

一个有良知的人

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[size=18]其中，九年级教材第四课的内容全文如下：[/size]

[size=24]家庭音乐会[/size]

今天是十月一日——中国的国庆节，又是周末，晚上姑姑和姑父带着我表哥来我们家做客。这个周末怎么过呢？我早就想好了，开个家庭音乐会。因为姑姑一家都爱唱歌，加上爸爸最近新买了一套高级音响，也应该好好利用一下。 爸爸、妈妈欣然同意。姐姐更是拍手叫绝，连爷爷都高兴地说："好！ 我赞成！ 我赞成！"

吃过晚饭，我拿出了早就准备好的花生、开心果等小吃；姐姐打开了音响；爸爸、妈妈请爷爷和姑姑一家入座。等大家做好后，我和姐姐手拿话筒，学者节目主持人的样子，一起说："庆祝国庆，家庭卡拉OK音乐会现在开始！"我们刚一说完，大家就鼓起掌来。

"第一个节目，《我的中国心》，请姑父演唱。"姐姐说完，就把话筒递给了姑父。姑父是个艺术学院的高才生，演唱这首歌最拿手。他大大方方地站起来，清了清嗓子，认真地唱起来。啊！他唱得多么深情！

姑姑也是一个歌迷。姑父一唱完，她就迫不及待地抢过话筒，点了一首《东方之珠》。接着，妈妈也不示弱。点唱了一首《春天的故事》（注：这是一首歌颂中共领导人邓小平改革开放的歌曲）。他们的演唱都受到了热烈的欢迎。这时，爷爷也兴奋得坐不住了。爷爷是个京剧迷。他要过话筒，唱起了京剧，他虽然快七十岁了，但声音还是那么洪亮。爷爷刚一唱完，就赢得了一阵喝彩声。

最后轮到表哥了。在大家的提议下，表哥和姐姐一起唱了一首《大中国》，这首歌旋律欢快，气势非凡，把这次家庭音乐会推向了高潮。一家三代同堂演唱，大家都沉浸在节日的欢乐之中。

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22210

08 宪章英文版
Charter 08 in English

Charter 08

Translated from the Chinese by Perry Link

The following text of Charter 08, signed by hundreds of Chinese intellectuals and translated and introduced by Perry Link, Professor of Chinese Literature at the University of California, Riverside, will be published in the issue of The New York Review dated January 15, which goes on sale on January 2.

—The Editors

The document below, signed by over three hundred prominent Chinese citizens, was conceived and written in conscious admiration of the founding of Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, where, in January 1977, more than two hundred Czech and Slovak intellectuals formed a loose, informal, and open association of people... united by the will to strive individually and collectively for respect for human and civil rights in our country and throughout the world.

I. Foreword

A hundred years have passed since the writing of China’s first constitution. 2008 also marks the sixtieth anniversary of the promulgation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the thirtieth anniversary of the appearance of Democracy Wall in Beijing, and the tenth of China’s signing of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. We are approaching the twentieth anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre of pro-democracy student protesters. The Chinese people, who have endured human rights disasters and uncountable struggles across these same years, now include many who see clearly that freedom, equality, and human rights are universal values of humankind and that democracy and constitutional government are the fundamental framework for protecting these values.

By departing from these values, the Chinese government’s approach to “modernization” has proven disastrous. It has stripped people of their rights, destroyed their dignity, and corrupted normal human intercourse. So we ask: Where is China headed in the twenty-first century? Will it continue with “modernization” under authoritarian rule, or will it embrace universal human values, join the mainstream of civilized nations, and build a democratic system? There can be no avoiding these questions.

The shock of the Western impact upon China in the nineteenth century laid bare a decadent authoritarian system and marked the beginning of what is often called “the greatest changes in thousands of years” for China. A “self-strengthening movement” followed, but this aimed simply at appropriating the technology to build gunboats and other Western material objects. China’s humiliating naval defeat at the hands of Japan in 1895 only confirmed the obsolescence of China’s system of government. The first attempts at modern political change came with the ill-fated summer of reforms in 1898, but these were cruelly crushed by ultraconservatives at China’s imperial court. With the revolution of 1911, which inaugurated Asia’s first republic, the authoritarian imperial system that had lasted for centuries was finally supposed to have been laid to rest. But social conflict inside our country and external pressures were to prevent it; China fell into a patchwork of warlord fiefdoms and the new republic became a fleeting dream.

The failure of both “self-strengthening” and political renovation caused many of our forebears to reflect deeply on whether a “cultural illness” was afflicting our country. This mood gave rise, during the May Fourth Movement of the late 1910s, to the championing of “science and democracy.” Yet that effort, too, foundered as warlord chaos persisted and the Japanese invasion [beginning in Manchuria in 1931] brought national crisis.

Victory over Japan in 1945 offered one more chance for China to move toward modern government, but the Communist defeat of the Nationalists in the civil war thrust the nation into the abyss of totalitarianism. The “new China” that emerged in 1949 proclaimed that “the people are sovereign” but in fact set up a system in which “the Party is all-powerful.” The Communist Party of China seized control of all organs of the state and all political, economic, and social resources, and, using these, has produced a long trail of human rights disasters, including, among many others, the Anti-Rightist Campaign (1957), the Great Leap Forward (1958–1960), the Cultural Revolution (1966–1969), the June Fourth (Tiananmen Square) Massacre (1989), and the current repression of all unauthorized religions and the suppression of the weiquan rights movement [a movement that aims to defend citizens’ rights promulgated in the Chinese Constitution and to fight for human rights recognized by international conventions that the Chinese government has signed]. During all this, the Chinese people have paid a gargantuan price. Tens of millions have lost their lives, and several generations have seen their freedom, their happiness, and their human dignity cruelly trampled.

During the last two decades of the twentieth century the government policy of “Reform and Opening” gave the Chinese people relief from the pervasive poverty and totalitarianism of the Mao Zedong era and brought substantial increases in the wealth and living standards of many Chinese as well as a partial restoration of economic freedom and economic rights. Civil society began to grow, and popular calls for more rights and more political freedom have grown apace. As the ruling elite itself moved toward private ownership and the market economy, it began to shift from an outright rejection of “rights” to a partial acknowledgment of them.

In 1998 the Chinese government signed two important international human rights conventions; in 2004 it amended its constitution to include the phrase “respect and protect human rights”; and this year, 2008, it has promised to promote a “national human rights action plan.” Unfortunately most of this political progress has extended no further than the paper on which it is written. The political reality, which is plain for anyone to see, is that China has many laws but no rule of law; it has a constitution but no constitutional government. The ruling elite continues to cling to its authoritarian power and fights off any move toward political change.

The stultifying results are endemic official corruption, an undermining of the rule of law, weak human rights, decay in public ethics, crony capitalism, growing inequality between the wealthy and the poor, pillage of the natural environment as well as of the human and historical environments, and the exacerbation of a long list of social conflicts, especially, in recent times, a sharpening animosity between officials and ordinary people.

As these conflicts and crises grow ever more intense, and as the ruling elite continues with impunity to crush and to strip away the rights of citizens to freedom, to property, and to the pursuit of happiness, we see the powerless in our society—the vulnerable groups, the people who have been suppressed and monitored, who have suffered cruelty and even torture, and who have had no adequate avenues for their protests, no courts to hear their pleas—becoming more militant and raising the possibility of a violent conflict of disastrous proportions. The decline of the current system has reached the point where change is no longer optional.

II. Our Fundamental Principles

This is a historic moment for China, and our future hangs in the balance. In reviewing the political modernization process of the past hundred years or more, we reiterate and endorse basic universal values as follows:

Freedom. Freedom is at the core of universal human values. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, freedom in where to live, and the freedoms to strike, to demonstrate, and to protest, among others, are the forms that freedom takes. Without freedom, China will always remain far from civilized ideals.

Human rights. Human rights are not bestowed by a state. Every person is born with inherent rights to dignity and freedom. The government exists for the protection of the human rights of its citizens. The exercise of state power must be authorized by the people. The succession of political disasters in China’s recent history is a direct consequence of the ruling regime’s disregard for human rights.

Equality. The integrity, dignity, and freedom of every person—regardless of social station, occupation, sex, economic condition, ethnicity, skin color, religion, or political belief—are the same as those of any other. Principles of equality before the law and equality of social, economic, cultural, civil, and political rights must be upheld.

Republicanism. Republicanism, which holds that power should be balanced among different branches of government and competing interests should be served, resembles the traditional Chinese political ideal of “fairness in all under heaven.” It allows different interest groups and social assemblies, and people with a variety of cultures and beliefs, to exercise democratic self-government and to deliberate in order to reach peaceful resolution of public questions on a basis of equal access to government and free and fair competition.

Democracy. The most fundamental principles of democracy are that the people are sovereign and the people select their government. Democracy has these characteristics: (1) Political power begins with the people and the legitimacy of a regime derives from the people. (2) Political power is exercised through choices that the people make. (3) The holders of major official posts in government at all levels are determined through periodic competitive elections. (4) While honoring the will of the majority, the fundamental dignity, freedom, and human rights of minorities are protected. In short, democracy is a modern means for achieving government truly “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

Constitutional rule. Constitutional rule is rule through a legal system and legal regulations to implement principles that are spelled out in a constitution. It means protecting the freedom and the rights of citizens, limiting and defining the scope of legitimate government power, and providing the administrative apparatus necessary to serve these ends.

III. What We Advocate

Authoritarianism is in general decline throughout the world; in China, too, the era of emperors and overlords is on the way out. The time is arriving everywhere for citizens to be masters of states. For China the path that leads out of our current predicament is to divest ourselves of the authoritarian notion of reliance on an “enlightened overlord” or an “honest official” and to turn instead toward a system of liberties, democracy, and the rule of law, and toward fostering the consciousness of modern citizens who see rights as fundamental and participation as a duty. Accordingly, and in a spirit of this duty as responsible and constructive citizens, we offer the following recommendations on national governance, citizens’ rights, and social development:

1. A New Constitution. We should recast our present constitution, rescinding its provisions that contradict the principle that sovereignty resides with the people and turning it into a document that genuinely guarantees human rights, authorizes the exercise of public power, and serves as the legal underpinning of China’s democratization. The constitution must be the highest law in the land, beyond violation by any individual, group, or political party.

2. Separation of powers. We should construct a modern government in which the separation of legislative, judicial, and executive power is guaranteed. We need an Administrative Law that defines the scope of government responsibility and prevents abuse of administrative power. Government should be responsible to taxpayers. Division of power between provincial governments and the central government should adhere to the principle that central powers are only those specifically granted by the constitution and all other powers belong to the local governments.

3. Legislative democracy. Members of legislative bodies at all levels should be chosen by direct election, and legislative democracy should observe just and impartial principles.

4. An Independent Judiciary. The rule of law must be above the interests of any particular political party and judges must be independent. We need to establish a constitutional supreme court and institute procedures for constitutional review. As soon as possible, we should abolish all of the Committees on Political and Legal Affairs that now allow Communist Party officials at every level to decide politically-sensitive cases in advance and out of court. We should strictly forbid the use of public offices for private purposes.

5. Public Control of Public Servants. The military should be made answerable to the national government, not to a political party, and should be made more professional. Military personnel should swear allegiance to the constitution and remain nonpartisan. Political party organizations shall be prohibited in the military. All public officials including police should serve as nonpartisans, and the current practice of favoring one political party in the hiring of public servants must end.

6. Guarantee of Human Rights. There shall be strict guarantees of human rights and respect for human dignity. There should be a Human Rights Committee, responsible to the highest legislative body, that will prevent the government from abusing public power in violation of human rights. A democratic and constitutional China especially must guarantee the personal freedom of citizens. No one shall suffer illegal arrest, detention, arraignment, interrogation, or punishment. The system of “Reeducation through Labor” must be abolished.

7. Election of Public Officials. There shall be a comprehensive system of democratic elections based on “one person, one vote.” The direct election of administrative heads at the levels of county, city, province, and nation should be systematically implemented. The rights to hold periodic free elections and to participate in them as a citizen are inalienable.

8. Rural–Urban Equality. The two-tier household registry system must be abolished. This system favors urban residents and harms rural residents. We should establish instead a system that gives every citizen the same constitutional rights and the same freedom to choose where to live.

9. Freedom to Form Groups. The right of citizens to form groups must be guaranteed. The current system for registering nongovernment groups, which requires a group to be “approved,” should be replaced by a system in which a group simply registers itself. The formation of political parties should be governed by the constitution and the laws, which means that we must abolish the special privilege of one party to monopolize power and must guarantee principles of free and fair competition among political parties.

10. Freedom to Assemble. The constitution provides that peaceful assembly, demonstration, protest, and freedom of expression are fundamental rights of a citizen. The ruling party and the government must not be permitted to subject these to illegal interference or unconstitutional obstruction.

11. Freedom of Expression. We should make freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and academic freedom universal, thereby guaranteeing that citizens can be informed and can exercise their right of political supervision. These freedoms should be upheld by a Press Law that abolishes political restrictions on the press. The provision in the current Criminal Law that refers to “the crime of incitement to subvert state power” must be abolished. We should end the practice of viewing words as crimes.

12. Freedom of Religion. We must guarantee freedom of religion and belief and institute a separation of religion and state. There must be no governmental interference in peaceful religious activities. We should abolish any laws, regulations, or local rules that limit or suppress the religious freedom of citizens. We should abolish the current system that requires religious groups (and their places of worship) to get official approval in advance and substitute for it a system in which registry is optional and, for those who choose to register, automatic.

13. Civic Education. In our schools we should abolish political curriculums and examinations that are designed to indoctrinate students in state ideology and to instill support for the rule of one party. We should replace them with civic education that advances universal values and citizens’ rights, fosters civic consciousness, and promotes civic virtues that serve society.

14. Protection of Private Property. We should establish and protect the right to private property and promote an economic system of free and fair markets. We should do away with government monopolies in commerce and industry and guarantee the freedom to start new enterprises. We should establish a Committee on State-Owned Property, reporting to the national legislature, that will monitor the transfer of state-owned enterprises to private ownership in a fair, competitive, and orderly manner. We should institute a land reform that promotes private ownership of land, guarantees the right to buy and sell land, and allows the true value of private property to be adequately reflected in the market.

15. Financial and Tax Reform. We should establish a democratically regulated and accountable system of public finance that ensures the protection of taxpayer rights and that operates through legal procedures. We need a system by which public revenues that belong to a certain level of government—central, provincial, county or local—are controlled at that level. We need major tax reform that will abolish any unfair taxes, simplify the tax system, and spread the tax burden fairly. Government officials should not be able to raise taxes, or institute new ones, without public deliberation and the approval of a democratic assembly. We should reform the ownership system in order to encourage competition among a wider variety of market participants.

16. Social Security. We should establish a fair and adequate social security system that covers all citizens and ensures basic access to education, health care, retirement security, and employment.

17. Protection of the Environment. We need to protect the natural environment and to promote development in a way that is sustainable and responsible to our descendents and to the rest of humanity. This means insisting that the state and its officials at all levels not only do what they must do to achieve these goals, but also accept the supervision and participation of non-governmental organizations.

18. A Federated Republic. A democratic China should seek to act as a responsible major power contributing toward peace and development in the Asian Pacific region by approaching others in a spirit of equality and fairness. In Hong Kong and Macao, we should support the freedoms that already exist. With respect to Taiwan, we should declare our commitment to the principles of freedom and democracy and then, negotiating as equals, and ready to compromise, seek a formula for peaceful unification. We should approach disputes in the national-minority areas of China with an open mind, seeking ways to find a workable framework within which all ethnic and religious groups can flourish. We should aim ultimately at a federation of democratic communities of China.

19. Truth in Reconciliation. We should restore the reputations of all people, including their family members, who suffered political stigma in the political campaigns of the past or who have been labeled as criminals because of their thought, speech, or faith. The state should pay reparations to these people. All political prisoners and prisoners of conscience must be released. There should be a Truth Investigation Commission charged with finding the facts about past injustices and atrocities, determining responsibility for them, upholding justice, and, on these bases, seeking social reconciliation.

China, as a major nation of the world, as one of five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, and as a member of the UN Council on Human Rights, should be contributing to peace for humankind and progress toward human rights. Unfortunately, we stand today as the only country among the major nations that remains mired in authoritarian politics. Our political system continues to produce human rights disasters and social crises, thereby not only constricting China’s own development but also limiting the progress of all of human civilization. This must change, truly it must. The democratization of Chinese politics can be put off no longer.

Accordingly, we dare to put civic spirit into practice by announcing Charter 08. We hope that our fellow citizens who feel a similar sense of crisis, responsibility, and mission, whether they are inside the government or not, and regardless of their social status, will set aside small differences to embrace the broad goals of this citizens’ movement. Together we can work for major changes in Chinese society and for the rapid establishment of a free, democratic, and constitutional country. We can bring to reality the goals and ideals that our people have incessantly been seeking for more than a hundred years, and can bring a brilliant new chapter to Chinese civilization.

—translated from the Chinese by Perry Link

vs.
个体 vs. 群体

vs.
林昭 vs. 穆铁柱

精神的人 vs. 物质的人
Spiritual Beings vs. Physical Beings

每日一语：

人是精神的存在去感受着、创造着物质的世界。 人绝不是物质的存活去体验着、虚拟着精神的幻觉。 自由人属于前者。 专制者与奴隶们则属于后者。 --- 陈凯

Human beings are spiritual existence experiencing, creating a physical world. Human beings are not physical beings merely breathing to deceive themselves in a spiritual illusion. A free man belongs to the former. The despots and slaves belong to the latter. --- Kai Chen

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Dear Visitors:

The stark contrast between a free being in the Western world and a slave in China can be described as "a spiritual being vs. a material/physical being".

When a Chinese comments on another person, thin or fat, clothing, looks, rich or poor, education, fame, power are usually the subjects and the only content. When I was an athlete in China, people and the party-state only saw and cared about my physical existence and athletic performance. I was much like a race-horse, nothing more, nothing less. No one cared about who I was, what I thought, how I felt and my spiritual yearning for meaning in my life. Today the Chinese athletes are still experiencing the same as I was. They are tools and pictures to be used, maintained, enslaved, abused and abandoned.

Unfortunately, most of us athletes in China also treat ourselves with indignity and view ourselves as sub-human. The very fact that the Chinese athletes often marry to each other demonstrates my point. The very fact that people like Yao Ming and Wang Zhizhi came into being shows you that the Chinese athletes have very little choice, due to their isolation and lack of knowledge about the outside world, in how they live and how they form families. The appearances, wealth, education, family background, etc. often determine how a person chooses a mate. Values, belief, personality, integrity, intelligence often are not in the Chinese people's language. The tall needs to be matched with the tall. The good looking needs to be matched with the good-looking. The fat needs to be matched with the fat. The small needs to be matched with the small..., etc. etc... Everything is for looks from the majority's point of view. Everything is physical and material. Everything is for the collective's tastes and interests. Individuals disappear. Moral character of a person disappears. True love disappears. Thus Yao Ming. Thus Wang Zhizhi.... No wonder they are taller than others: Their parents had not much choice anyway in China, being athletes themselves.

I dream that one day China can truly be free and the Chinese athletes can truly be free. They will no longer be some caged animals knowing only their trade under the total control of the party-state. They will be free to choose not only their sports (or no sports at all), but their mates, their places of living, their future.... I know it is difficult to be free from the enslaving Chinese sports culture and establishment. But indeed it is possible. I, as one, indeed freed myself from the dehumanizing and suffocating sports environment in China. And I sincerely hope all the Chinese athletes will be free one day as well.

Best to you all in this Thanksgiving Day, 2008.

Kai Chen 陈凯

观众对“我的路”的来信反响
Audience Response to "My Way"

Dear Visitors:

I will paste the audience response to "My Way" here. I hope you will be inspired by the positive comments and uplifting sentiment reflected by these powerful messages.

Best wishes to you all. Kai Chen 陈凯

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陈凯先生：

昨晚，收到了顾先生带来的你的故事<My Way> ，既兴奋又感动。

今天清早，我就打开播放器，观看,看着看着，不禁落泪。如同《林昭》的故事，你追求个人幸福故事是那么的真实，那么催人泪下。

你的故事让我回想一些画面。在奥运场上，每当五星旗升起，中国的观众以及中国运动员们，他们在迷幻中歌唱祖国母亲，在激动中拥抱那个不真实的群体--党和人民，甚至为此落下矫情泪水.

于此截然不同的是，美国的运动员，比如游泳健将菲里普斯在摘得冠军后，穿过包围的媒体和人群，径直走向观众席中自己的母亲，他拥抱她，感谢她。美国人获奖总是感谢代表爱的上帝和亲人朋友。可是中国人上台领奖时，似乎母亲不存在，家人总是缺席于现场，欢呼的是喊着"中国加油"的观众，微笑的是代表国家的教练，而她首先要感谢的却是抽象概念的党和人民，不是感谢给他天赋，帮他创造奇迹的上帝，更不是给他一生关爱的父母，也不敢说一切都是他自我的奋斗的结果。

可是你的故事，却还原了人真实的一面，虽然讲述的是你自己的奋斗，争取自由和尊严。但如同在讲我，如同在讲述每一个有精神有灵魂，追求完整幸福的个体的人，虽然这个我只有一个，但他绝不孤独。

虽然在物质上，在肉体上，个体的我，人单势微，自我呐喊，争取自由和突破的声音已会被群体的齐声喧嚣淹没，但是在精神上，属于个体的我是自然，属于个体我是真实；我有我存在的理由，上帝造我就是一个奇迹，我有我的价值和使命。

虽然曾在黑暗里，曾在牢笼中，伴随的是锁链，走过的是荆棘，但是上帝给了你和我的心灵之光以及对自由的盼望，这种精神不灭的顽强力量终将把黑暗驱走，把牢笼冲破，实现幸福的理想。

你的故事让我更看到了这种希望，走向真实的希望，从虚无的万众中独立的出来，从一堆堆渺小的牺牲品站出来的希望。个体要寻找属于自己的路，寻找真理和幸福的路，每一个个体都应该回到那条属于自然，有生命的，有尊严和价值，追求完整幸福的自我道路中来。片中说："强大不代表伟大。一个伟大的个体胜过数亿群体的虚无。"非常震撼人心！感谢上帝。感谢陈凯。

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Dear Luke:

Your message moved me deeply. I feel our hearts and souls are intimately connected. I want to thank you for taking the time to write this message.

Your observation on how the Chinese athletes react after they win is right to the point. And it is exactly how I felt when I saw the Chinese athletes won the gold medals in the Beijing Olympics. They have been extracted from their own families when they were very young, for the sake of legitimizing and stabilizing a criminal communist regime. Their relations with their own families are warped and distorted. It is much like the Stockholm Syndrome. The victims start to identify themselves with the kidnappers, internalizing a perverted, criminal mindset in the process after some period of time of captivity. The Chinese people now are exactly in that kind of mindset.

Mao's Kitchen (three restaurants) in Los Angeles is only one such an example of the Stockholm Syndrome. I plan to have a demonstration in December to bring this issue to the forefront of American people's consciousness. And I hope the Chinese people also learn something about their own sickness and perversion.

My forum - Kai Chen Forum has been moved out from Youpai.org to a new location: www.kaichenforum.com. I welcome you to visit my forum and post your comment on my forum. I want to thank you again for being my comrade in our fight for freedom and human dignity.

Best wishes to you and your family. Sincerely yours. Kai Chen