【10.1.19 New York Times】Chinese Openings

和解团结

【原文链接】http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/19/opinion/19iht-edcohen.html
【作者】ROGER COHEN

【原文】
CHONGQING, CHINA — The tombstones loomed in the dusk, some of them rising more than 25 feet, each telling a forgotten story of China’s troubled history. I had come to find them because, for the first time, China has sanctioned the preservation here of a site commemorating the numberless victims of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution.

That’s a hopeful sign. I spent too long covering the bloody wars in the Balkans not to believe that history denied can devour you.

But until now, the Communist rulers of China have been relentless in suppressing the history of their worst errors, not least the frenzied attempt of Mao Zedong in the decade before his death to revitalize his rule by spreading terror.

So the decision, made last month by authorities in this gritty central Chinese city, to designate a cemetery containing the remains of 573 people slaughtered during the Cultural Revolution as an official relic worthy of maintenance is a significant opening.

That, it seems to me, is modern China: two steps forward, one back. For every new repression there is some relaxation, for every new abuse some advance.

Few things have made the capitalist-communist overseers of China’s frenzied thrust for modernity as nervous as history. On the one hand, it’s a source of pride. On the other, it’s a fount of fear.

When an American working in China met a Communist Party cadre recently, he was greeted by a backhanded compliment: “With our 5,000 years of history, we in China think you Americans are doing pretty well for your brief history of about 230 years.”

To which the American, alluding to the six decades of the People’s Republic, responded: “Well, we in the United States think China’s not doing badly for its mere 60 years of history!”

The remark did not do a lot for Chinese-American relations, but it has to be said that history is a malleable thing here. China finds comfort in a past whose immensity contains many dynasties that lasted longer than all U.S. history. Posters exalting the Communist Party show the Great Wall, the better to link its rule with immovable authority and nationalist grandeur.

At the same time, China’s modern rulers like nothing so much as reducing history to a blank sheet. Everywhere the past — temples, ancient walls, sinuous alleys — is being swept away. Disastrous periods of Mao’s rule, including the famine of 1959-61 and the Cultural Revolution, have been airbrushed from history. Like “June 4” — shorthand for the crushing of the Tiananmen uprising in 1989 — they are taboo.

Here in Chongqing, the Cultural Revolution took particularly devastating form as rival factions bent on demonstrating their devotion to Mao’s wild anti-capitalist, anti-rightist, anti-cadre purge battled each other. The local arms industry fed the frenzy: mass murder in the name of a personality cult.

Outside the walled cemetery in Shaping Park, as I waited for hours to be admitted into the overgrown sanctuary with its whispering of these terrible deeds, a man approached me: “Everyone was shooting in 1967 to protect Mao! I don’t know why. Even now I don’t know why. I just followed my school with a gun.”

He shook his head. “We’re not interested in any of that now. All we do is talk of development.”

But a few people, like a scholar named Chen Xiaowen, were interested. Now 54, Chen became concerned over the fate of the cemetery in the 1980s and has since campaigned to block the ever-ready bulldozers of real estate developers.

He was part of a group of scholars who submitted a petition to the Chongqing authorities requesting the safeguarding of the cemetery as a “cultural preservation site.” On Dec. 25, 2009, the request was approved, allowing the eventual devotion of city funds to restoration. “It’s progress!” Chen said.

The cemetery, with its 131 graves containing multiple victims, many of them young Red Guards, is a place of hushed mystery. A faded photograph of a young man, his features blurred, is propped against one tombstone. Ferns grow from the stones, weeds advance. Chinese characters peel away. “We can be beaten, struggled against, but we will never bow our revolutionary heads,” says one inscription. Another lists the ages of the dead: 49, 29, 45, 26, 51, 26.

I asked Chen why this past still haunts a party that has hoisted China from destructive folly. “It’s a form of rule based on results, efficacy, not on democratic legitimacy,” he said. “So if you dig too deeply into the mistakes of the past, you make yourself vulnerable.”

Still, here in Chongqing, China has taken a small step toward a genuine history, an honest accounting, and away from history as merely a vehicle for the consolidation of power. I applaud that. The Chinese people, their wounds assuaged by time, are ready for more openness.

In the fading light old men come out with their birds, hang the cages on trees, and let the birds sing to each other as they gossip. Some say history is for the birds. I say it needs to be aired or it will turn on you.

連長

下次记得附上全文截图