The Other China - Book Five: Interviews and Profiles of Chinese Who Seek Change

By accident I was pulled out of my working mother cocoon in the fall of 2011 to co-blog at the now-defunct seeingredinchina.com. The only problem was that I didn’t know much about China, having left twenty years before. I began to read about it, unaware at the time that I was taking the first steps of a new journey. Among the first articles I read was “Dark Night, Dark Hood and Kidnapping by Dark Mafia”: lawyer Gao Zhisheng’s account of being beaten, having his genitals pierced with toothpicks, and urinated on in a Beijing basement — punishment for his daring to speak out on behalf Falun Gong practitioners who had suffered similar tortures. Reading about Gao shook me to the core.Though my initial reaction to Gao’s story was that of disbelief, it was not long before I became intimately familiar with such accounts of state-perpetrated viciousness.

One of the early essays I wrote was a piece titled “The Other China.” In it, I expressed my initial encounter with the country I had left behind, and the guilt I felt for not knowing what was going on in those nondescript basements and
“guesthouses” scattered throughout the land. It was a China I was completely sealed off from, all while I enjoyed good food and shopping excursions in the company of friends and family, marveling like a model tourist at the sparkling new highways and towering new buildings during my infrequent return trips. My ignorance was inexcusable. Since the launch of ChinaChange.org on June 4, 2013, we have interviewed and profiled rights defense activists, human rights lawyers, journalists, pastors, feminists, dissidents, intellectuals, and more. It didn’t take long for me to begin to
see the contours of the Other China through the stories of divergent individuals: Chinese with a new sense of freedom and power in a unprecedented era of economic expansion pursue their aspirations from their stations in life, work diligently, succeed, are met with repression, get beaten up or shut down, and see their careers cut short, if not ending up in prison. Some pay with their lives.
Book Five features an interview with Yu Zhijian (余志坚) who was one of the three young men who vandalized Mao Zedong’s portrait with ink during the Tiananmen protest in 1989, calling for an end to five-thousand-years of repressive
culture in China; a profile of Li Baiguang (李柏光), a constitutional scholar and a lawyer who spearheaded the rights defense movement; a labor activist’s “Notes From Prison”; and a group of human rights lawyers’ reflections on their careers and the struggles they face. Of special interest in this book is an interview with Elliot Sperling, an American academic of Tibet studies whose unlikely journey began in the 1970s when the young college graduate’s wanderings accidentally led him to Dharamshala, India.
Sometime last year, I came upon an article by Professor Qian Liqun (钱理群). After retirement from Peking University, Prof. Qian took up research on the political and intellectual thoughts and movements outside the Communist Party’s
official narrative from the 1950s to the present. He concluded, “We have actually two Chinas. One is the China that has been magnified by the historical narrative and the Party's propaganda, the China that has been extolled and paraded. But
there is another China that's been ravished, obliterated, stamped out in the dark. There are these two Chinas and two histories, and their clash and interaction has formed the real and complete history of contemporary China. If we only set our
eyes on the China above the ground, the China that's sanctioned by the authorities, but ignore the underground China and the obliterated China, we will not have a complete understanding of China.
As we continue our interviews and profiles, we at China Change have decided to republish them in an eBook series. What we hope to offer is a mural of the Other China.
Yaxue Cao, director of China Change
February 16, 2020