COMMENTARY

A 'Moral Monitor' Suffers in China

By KYNA RUBIN

Of the three intellectuals said to have lost their party membership in the wake of the pro-democracy student demonstrations in China, Wang Ruowang, a Shanghai writer, is the least known to the outside world.

Fang Lizhi, the former vice president of the prestigious Chinese University of Science and Technology, is accused of inciting his students to think independently and critically of everything around them. Lin Binyan, a writer best known courageously for exposing party corruption, has

been attacked for inspiring students to protest. Both have been to the U.S. and are no strangers to the American scientists and. writers with whom they worked while here.

But Mr.'Wang, though invited to the U.S, has never been permitted such travel by the Chinese authorities. Now, Mr. Wang is reposed by the Chinese press to have been expelled from the Chinese Communist Party for his espousal of "bourgeois liberalization," for "advocating the capitalist road," and for encouraging university students to demonstrate for democratic freedom.

Strengthened Nation

Mr. Wang is anything but an unknown quantity within China. He is a prominent social critic and literary figure whose writing consistently warns against the negative inheritance of China's bureaucratic tradition. He calls for any break from the past that will strengthen China as a nation, for

that is his genuine and overriding concern. Mr. Wang's most controversial articles have been those that warn intellectuals to be vigilant against the-ever-present remnants of conservative Cultural Revolution forces. Such "leftists," he believes, still threaten the gains made by intellectuals since 1978.

Mr. Wang, Mr. Liu and other intellectuals are hardly alone now or throughout Chinese history in their desire to strengthen China by speaking out publicly on social problems. Mr. Wang prides himself on his self-appointed, traditional Confucian role as moral monitor of injudicious decisions and behavior on the part of some party officials. He considers himself a defender of truth and what is right for the common Chinese citizen.

Mr. Wang was raised and molded in a Communist revolutionary tradition that succeeded in 1949 precisely because it dared to question the status quo. By employing this revolutionary tradition for the causes that have always appeared ethically correct to him, at times he has had to criticize the very system for which he fought and went to prison, both before and alter 1949.

Mr. Wang has daringly voiced his maverick views since an early age. He began his career as an anti-authority figure soon after graduating from elementary school. After half a year at a teacher's training school in Nanjing, he was expelled for participating in a student movement. By the age of 15 he was writing satires of Chiang Kai-shek and at 16 he was jailed by the Nationalist government for organizing underground Communist Party activities in a Shanghai factory.

Mr. Wang went to the Communist Party's wartime capital at Yenan, where in 1937 he joined the party. He was criticized by the party as early as 1942 during its first "rectification campaign." He was exiled to Shandong province for, among other things, his role in a so-called "anti-party” wall newspaper that criticized Yenan leaders and life at the base.

After his postwar rehabilitation, he served in a variety of literary posts. In 1957, he was attacked as a "rightist" and purged for a brave series of essays articulating the frustrations of intellectuals. Intellectuals, he said, were obstructed from meaningful participation in the inner circles of the party by “a sometimes invisible wall made not of brick, stone, or cement, but of a product of the mind, like conceit, arrogance, and mutual suspicion....” The more the party used solely political criteria to label people, he wrote, “the more the party will alienate itself from the masses.”

Having had his "rightist" cap removed in 1962, he wasted no time in writing a short story scathingly critical of the Great Leap Forward. This brought renewed attacks against him and hastened the death of his wife, who had suffered a series of mental breakdowns after his 1957 purge. Mr. Wang spent the Cultural Revolution in prison as a "counterrevolutionary."

Since being allowed to resume his career in 1979, Mr. Wang has produced more essays, short stories and reviews than during his three decades of productivity between 1933 and 1962.

His writing---done for "catharsis" and "to speak out for those who cannot because they're dead or dare not because they're tired and afraid"---has been published in a wide variety of national newspapers and journals as well as provincial magazines. It is a mixture of exposes of present-day party injustices against the common man; politically innocuous, though progressive, observations of family life and values, and the arts; and ruminations on the new economic reforms, which he feels are central to China's progress. His articles in the popular journal, Democracy and Law, have espoused the creation of a legal system independent from any one faction in power, one that provides safeguards to protect intellectuals from censure for their ideas.

'Equal Comrades'

In 1980 he raised to leaders the bold notion of “governing through inaction” (borrowed from a Taoist concept), suggesting that the government allow writers to flourish on their own, "to cross the street without Auntie's help." Writers, he said, require only the sunshine of party "concern" and a stable political state in which to grow. At the same time he utilized the Marxist concept of superstructure to identify politics and literature as "equal comrades-in-arms." Politics and literature both make up part of the superstructure, he said contending that "literature is not subordinate to politics."

In 1981 it was suggested to Mr. Wang that he retire from his post as coeditor of Shanghai Literature when he was implicated in the anti-Bai Hua affair. Bai Hua was a fellow writer criticized for a story that portrayed the tragedy of a patriotic intellectual betrayed by the party he loved. Mr. Wang was granted a comfortable retirement awarded to veteran party revolutionaries.

In I985 He was singled out by the by highest leadership as a "dissident" undeserving of party membership. The only way this affected his life was by a six month ban on the publication of his works. To that, he responded by continuing work at home on his autobiography, parts of which havealready been published---a project to which he may retreat once again after losing his party membership.

Holding to Principles

Has .Mr. Wang, in all these years of analyzing and satirizing political and social trends, overstepped the bounds of the acceptable? The answer to that is probably yes.

Has he transgressed party principles or advocated the abolition of the Communist Party and its replacement by a Western form of government? The answer here seems to be no. For despite the biting satire Mr. Wang uses against his targets, his works nonetheless contain construction and balanced calls for change. They are written by a loyal party believer who advocates a socialist system for China. Nowhere does he indict the party per se or the principles for which it and he stand. Rather, what incurs his wrath are the incompetent and at 'times immoral decisions of individual party bureaucrats.

Once asked whether there should be party control of literature, he wrote: "Of course. The point is we no longer want the type of leadership that arrogantly rides high over us and attacks us… We don't wish to eliminate party leadership but to soundly change the party's style of leadership."

Like Mr. Liu, Mr. Wang is greatly respected by young people and writers for his audacious views. But it must be remembered that he speaks with the backing of a Confucian ethic that always “sought truth from facts,” and a more contemporary Yanan creed of idealism and honesty.

The Communist Party has chosen to single him out as a warning to other intellectuals and young people seeking political reforms on top of economic reforms. Indeed, considering his popularity among youth, selecting him for party expulsion will send a strong warning signal to the Chinese people. The fact that he is an old revolutionary with much service to the party and a victim of the 1957 "anti-rightist' campaign will strengthen the message.

In interviews last spring, Mr. Wang was guardedly optimistic about long-term creative freedom for writers in China. He said he has learned from experience that "every one to two years another movement comes along, always focused against intellectual, writers in particular, accusing us of being bourgeois liberals." Thus Mr. Wang surely wasn't unprepared for the latest attack, though one assumes he isn’t immune to feeling the irony of forced separation from the very party for which he and many others sacrificed so much.

It is doubtful Mr. Wang will be jailed or exiled, as was common in 1957 or during the Cultural Revolution. This fact alone Mr. Wang himself has acknowledged, set.-the current leadership apart from previous groups in power. One hopes that the uncertainty surrounding leadership changes now taking place in China doesn't affect the considerable progress that has been made in this regard. Only last spring Mr. Wang said, "There is an atmosphere o freedom to write, of freedom not to worry to relax: there is a less tense atmosphere. But only the future will tell."

Kyna Rubin is a professional associate at the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China at the National Academy of Sciences. The views in this article reflect those of the author and not those of the CSCPRC, its sponsors or the National Research Council Mr. Rubin’s article, "Keeper of the Flame: Wang Ruowang as Moral Critic of the State," will appear in "China's Intellectuals and the State," a book being published this year by Harvard University Press.