Translated by Richard Chen
Our previous article on China (see link below this letter) explains the background to this open letter.
I am one of the four young people who are in hiding because of the Zhang Yunfan reading group incident.
After graduation, I lived and worked in [Guangzhou’s] university district. Once, when I was jogging at the Guangdong University of Technology (GDUT), I met a group of middle-aged women (阿姨) dancing together with students in the plaza.
They reminded me of my mother – women workers at the bottom rungs of society.
They were from the countryside. Their work [as campus general staff] was hard, and they made meagre wages.
It’s really that simple: I started dancing with them, playing games with them, and doing as much as I could to help them.
They lived packed in tiny rooms, more than ten people together in each. Some of those rooms even had couples living together in them. These women would have eagerly assimilated into society, but nobody even notices their existence. They joke that even the stray cats on campus are noticed more than they are. They’ve worked on campus many years now, but some of them have never even taken the subway.
For the sake of their children, they live this harsh life. Seeing them was like seeing my mother again, and the hard life she lived every day and night.
My mother worked in a sweatshop for many years. Whenever she dragged her dried-out, exhausted body back to the village, all she could remember was the name of the factory, and that the factory was in Guangdong. She did not even know that the brilliant, glamorous Shenzhen she saw on television was where she worked.
Every year, she would bring all of her savings and my new clothes home, pick me up, secretly wipe away her tears and say:
You must study hard. Don’t be like me, without any learning. I get pushed around at work, I’m always tired and I never earn enough, and everybody looks down on me…
The way she said these words is the same way these other women speak.
I’m sure you can understand why it is that I drifted in with them and wanted to help them. The other volunteers and I gradually grew to know each other and began to feel like we had the same goals.
The “fat boy” over there dancing with them was Zhang Yunfan, who was later imprisoned for forty-four days. The girl who was enthusiastically trying to maintain the rhythm was Gu Jiayue, who is now also in hiding.
They are wonderful people
I can say that they have been the best young people I’ve met in my life. I’m sure the women at GDUT would also say that they are wonderful people. One of them said:
This is the first time I’ve been dancing in my life. Normally only the families of professors get to dance, and you have to pay. You are wonderful students. You don’t think we’re stupid, and you patiently teach us.
If my mother had met such young people in the factory, even if her life was hard, she could have been a little happier!
If my father had met such young people, when he was doing construction work on tunnels, maybe he wouldn’t have had to leave work and go on strike.
So these women are like my mother, and Zhang Yunfan and the rest are like my brothers and sisters. As the old Maoist saying goes, the depth of your intimacy is decided by your class!
I regret that, because of conflicts with my work, I did not participate in the reading group. But if I could turn back time, I would have gone for sure!
Just because of intimidation from the Xiaoguwei police, I am not going to disown these women and my connections with these other students, or deny that I am a leftist, or that I believe in Mao Zedong!
Why were my mother and those women working at GDUT condemned to a life of hardship?
Some people say that they don’t work enough, and that you have to endure hardship in order to advance in society. Others say that’s just the way life is.
The people who say these things are either stupid or evil.
I was instinctively disgusted with the people who said these things, but had no way to refute them until I went to college. There, in the classes of my teacher Zeng Peng, I first found the key to understanding the world.
Marx’s Capital explained to me the meaning of surplus-value and exploitation. It explained to me why you can never become rich by selling your labor-power, and how capital devours the youth of all those who work.
And the Selected Works of Mao Zedong explained to me that the people are the motive force of history, that we should become the masters of our own house and fight for our own interests.
I have never worshipped Mao Zedong. It is reality and the conditions of the workers that forced me to believe.
It is because of discussing the miserable situation of working people and their struggle to defend their interests, and because of propagating Marxism and Mao Zedong Thought, that the reading group was labelled an “anti-CCP, anti-society organization,” and that Zhang Yunfan was detained.
What is ridiculous about this is that the police say not only that the reading group was subversive, but that dancing in the plaza had “ulterior motives.” But if the police say this was a “political activity” and that we were “organizing workers to defend their rights” – well, isn’t that an admission by the state that the workers’ rights had already been violated in the first place?
Police do not defend workers’ rights
And now just because I helped organize these dances, I too have become a suspect of “secretly plotting the defense of rights” (密谋维权). With charges like that, of course I went into hiding!
Not only do the Xiaoguwei police not help the workers to defend their rights, but the moment they smell anything that actually seems like “defending worker’s rights,” they hunt it down and try to destroy it!
When I learned of the experiences of Zhang Yunfan and others over the past month, I became so angry, I couldn’t bear it anymore! Especially what happened to Sun Tingting, that would make anybody furious! It is completely clear that she, a woman who cares about the public welfare, who makes a meager salary, who, just because of her association with the reading group, had her door broken down by the Panyu Police, was dragged away by force and subjected to criminal detention, based on completely fabricated charges!
Xiaoguwei police, how can you claim to be “the People’s Police, Serving the People” with a straight face?
Well, since you are hunting me down, then I will announce to the world:
If believing in Mao Zedong Thought is “extreme ideology,” then yes, I have an “extreme ideology”!
If organizing campus workers to dance in the plaza is “disrupting social order,” then yes, I am indeed “disrupting social order”!
Let the people themselves decide whether I’m guilty!
I don’t care how long you imprison me or how you treat me. What is this little incident, compared to what the revolutionaries of the 20th century endured?
Chop off my head, I don’t care,
You’ll never slay the ideals I bear.
Even if you kill Xia Minghan today,
The masses will still follow his way!
Whether it’s my past, present or future, I don’t believe that I am wrong. No matter how many police you have, how many charges you bring, or how many internet posts you censor, you will never blind the eyes of the people.
As Mao said, the Chinese people are not afraid of ghosts!
August 31, 2018
