Settings

ⓕ font-size

  • -2
  • -1
  • 0
  • +1
  • +2

INTERVIEWFormer Maoist writes for China's democracy

  • Facebook share button
  • Twitter share button
  • Kakao share button
  • Mail share button
  • Link share button
Chinese dissident Wu Zhenrong prays at the Seoul Chinese Church in Daelim-dong, Seoul, last Thursday. / Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul
Chinese dissident Wu Zhenrong prays at the Seoul Chinese Church in Daelim-dong, Seoul, last Thursday. / Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul

Chinese dissident in exile releases memoir on his 'double life' as a Red Guard and rebel

By Kang Hyun-kyung

Chinese dissident Wu Zhenrong, 71, has been in a lonely fight for a free, democratic China― a daunting goal for the foreseeable future.

To make his voice heard, instead of organizing rallies or taking to the street, he writes tirelessly from his home in Seoul to keep issues like democracy in China and the fallacies spread by the Communist Party at the focus of public discourse. His writing mission for China's democracy has continued for five decades against all odds.

The past 18 years of his life as the first Chinese to have earned refugee status in South Korea has been rocky.

Before he moved to his current place in Guro-dong, Seoul, Wu had lived in a tiny single-room house in an urban slum near Garibong-dong. The neighborhood was dangerous and unsanitary. His mentor Rev. Choe Hwang-gyu called Wu's place "a dog pit," saying he was sorry to let the Chinese dissident live in such a destitute neighborhood.

Almost every night, Wu was terrified because of his violent Korean Chinese neighbor who suffered from a mental illness. Once while drunk, his neighbor banged on the door of Wu's tiny room, threatening to kill him with a knife.

Economic hardship is a pressing issue that has caused trouble for Wu since his arrival in Seoul in 2002 as an asylum seeker.

"I didn't expect my life-in-exile overseas to be so tough," he said through an interpreter during a recent Korea Times interview at his tiny single-room house in Seoul. "In addition to financial difficulty, I have lived in isolation without my family for the last 18 years. It has been tough. But I have no regrets about my decision to leave China. Though poor and financially strapped, I am free. I can write and present my opinion freely without having to worry that it could cost me my life."

Due to the combination of old age and a poor diet, his health is declining.

His ears ring. His vision is getting worse, and so is the arthritis in his knees. His knees are sore whenever he walks up and down the stairs connecting the first and second floor of the multi-room housing in Gurodong, Seoul, near South Korea's largest Chinatown which spans the neighborhoods of Garibong-dong and Daelim-dong. People call the housing complex a "beehive" because of the way the small tiny rooms are tightly packed into the two-story brick building. Each floor has 10 rooms. His room is on the second floor.

The beehive is a remnant of South Korea's industrial past. During the 1960s and 1970s, girls in the countryside flocked to Seoul for manufacturing jobs once they graduated from elementary or middle school. They shared the tiny rooms to cut living expenses and send more money to support their families in rural areas.

Wu said the worst part of living in the beehive is the toilet. There are two shared toilets outside his room_ one for men and another for women. Every morning, he has to wait in a queue to meet his basic human needs.

He said his heart "wrenches" whenever he thinks about the family he left behind in China. His wife, their two adult children_ a son and a daughter_ and his grandchildren all live in China. They suffered the consequences when the Chinese authorities were informed of his defecting to South Korea.

He is still haunted by mixed feelings of sadness and guilt for letting his family suffer because of him.

Wu poses in front of the door to his home, in a two-story brick housing complex, known as
Wu poses in front of the door to his home, in a two-story brick housing complex, known as "beehive housing" with 20 tiny rooms packed side by side, in Guro-dong, southwestern Seoul, last Thursday. / Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul

In South Korea, Wu has walked a tightrope. He was a guest uninvited. His presence has been unwelcomed by South Korean politicians, Chinese nationals and even local human rights groups.

Rev. Choe met several democracy fighters-turned-lawmakers to ask their help for the Chinese dissident. All of them turned Choe's requests down.

Choe said both conservative and liberal politicians have felt pressure against helping the Chinese dissident because of the Chinese government. They deemed the Chinese dissident a stumbling block to South Korea-China relations. Some even refused to meet the pastor as they knew what he was going to speak about.

Korean activists and human rights groups were reluctant to help Wu, too, for a similar reason. Human rights groups' turning a blind eye to the plight of the Chinese dissident also shows that South Korean civil society is politicized.

Their help is selective, based on their political orientation, and some activists stay mum on the violations of human rights if the victims are from the opposite side of the aisle.

The Chinese community is not willing to help the Chinese dissident, either.

According to Statistics Korea, there are over 1 million Chinese nationals in Korea as of August 2019_ nearly 40 percent of them are Han Chinese, mostly collegians on student visas, and the rest are Korean Chinese called "joseonjok" who came to South Korea on work visas.

Wu is Han Chinese. But he is not accepted by the Chinese community because fellow Han Chinese consider him a traitor who betrayed his country.

An ethnic tension between Han Chinese and Korean Chinese make it tough for him to get help from ethnic Koreans in the community.

Wu was once a hardcore Maoist responsible for brainwashing Chinese soldiers with Mao Zedong Thought and the supremacy of communist theories over any other political ideologies during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).

He was the Red Guard leader of a middle school in his hometown Xingpingshi, Shaanxi Province. The communist youth group gained notoriety for their various brutal activities, including the persecution, torturing and killing of millions of "class enemies" during the Cultural Revolution. Between August and September of 1966, for example, over 1,700 people were killed in Beijing in the name of the removal of class enemies.

It was a decade of insanity.

In the early stage of the Cultural Revolution, educators became the target group and many of them were removed from their jobs, punished and humiliated by their students.

Books were burned. The Red Guards destroyed temples and churches and encouraged people to attack any facilities related to capitalism or the feudal system. Schools, including universities, were closed with college entrance exams cancelled.

Wu was one of the frenzied Red Guards who met Mao Zedong in Tiananmen Square, Beijing in 1966 summer.

Inside the Red Guards, according to Wu, there were two factions_ one consisted of radicals who were puppets of Mao who tried to use the nationwide propaganda to remove his political enemies and stay in power, the other were teen idealists naive enough to believe that a utopian society beneficial to the Chinese grassroots movement would be established. Wu was part of the latter faction.

The radicals gained dominance after infighting. Fearing that his life was at stake, Wu left the Red Guards and joined the People's Liberation Army in 1968 as a private soldier. He was 19. His excellence in writing and public speaking distinguished him among the soldiers and he was promoted to political officer where he was responsible for indoctrinating soldiers and military personnel with Mao Zedong Thought and the supremacy of communism.

Wu points to a draft of his hand-written article about the Cultural Revolution of China (1966-76). The article explains how he became a Red Guard leader at his middle school and became part of Mao Zedong's frenzied campaign to remove his political enemies to stay in power. Wu said the highlighted part in red will be revised. / Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul
Wu points to a draft of his hand-written article about the Cultural Revolution of China (1966-76). The article explains how he became a Red Guard leader at his middle school and became part of Mao Zedong's frenzied campaign to remove his political enemies to stay in power. Wu said the highlighted part in red will be revised. / Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul

A double life

He led a "double life" since 1974, when he was 25, until 2002 when he left China for South Korea in a hurry.

By day, he was a political officer loyal to the Communist Party and People's Liberation Army, but at night he was a rebel. He was a harsh critic of Mao, as well as the Communist Party, and secretly wrote articles about their fraudulent tactics.

As a political officer, he was given his own office. Without distractions, he was able to focus entirely on reading, writing and researching issues that interested him. He even had access to libraries with books written by Western thinkers.

He was intrigued by French thinkers such as Francois-Marie Arouet (better known by his pen name Voltaire) and Charles-Louis de Montesquire.

Back then, those books were banned and off-limits to the Chinese public.

Wu, however, was allowed to read them because of his job.

He was an avid reader of books about the French Revolution and British history.
His free access to books, particularly Western publications, made him aware of what was going on outside China. He began to question the Communist Party and its Chairman Mao regarding their motives behind the push to revolutionize the nation.

His knowledge liberated him. He came to dream about living in France as a Chinese dissident writing books and articles critical of the Communist Party and promoting China's democracy.

Already a dissident, Wu had no choice but to leave China. He had planned for a life-in-exile for decades since the 1980s.

But the day came abruptly in the summer of 2002.

He sent an email to a publishing house in Hong Kong attached with his manuscripts about the Cultural Revolution of China. Introducing himself under the pen name Jin Anmen, he asked if the publisher was willing to publish his manuscript, which was his critical review of the Cultural Revolution.

He was anxiously waiting for an answer from the Hong Kong-based publisher. Three weeks later, he realized his activity had been discovered by the Chinese security agency. He was on the wanted list. His pen name had saved his life.
But he knew it was only a matter of time before the security agents discovered he was the sender.

Terrified, he hastily fled China and flew into South Korea.

After arriving in South Korea, he tried to apply for a refugee status in France at the French Embassy in Seoul. His attempt, however, was in vain because of "the country of first-entry rule" which stipulates asylum seekers must apply for refugee status in the country they first arrived.

In November 2008, six years after his arrival, he was eventually granted refugee status in South Korea. The South Korean Ministry of Justice initially rejected his applications. But with the help of his mentor Rev. Choe Hwang-gyu, the Chinese dissident hired a human rights lawyer who filed a lawsuit against the justice minister's decision on behalf of the Chinese dissenter.

Wu eventually won the prolonged legal battle.

He became the first Chinese national to become a refugee in South Korea.
Unlike in China where freedom of expression is limited, Wu is able to write freely about any topics in South Korea. During weekdays, he writes all day long for China's democracy.

Wu is a prolific writer. In China, however, he was an author of ill-fortune.
He had written manuscripts with which more than 30 books could have been published. Because of their anti-communist nature, however, his books couldn't make publication in China.

His doomed fate as a political commentator and writer, however, changed upon his arrival in Seoul. About 500 columns and op-eds he wrote about Mao Zedong and his political ideology, China's communist party and its human rights violations were published on internet media outlets run by U.S.-based Chinese democracy fighters.

Recently he had something to celebrate.


His memoir, "Fugitive: An Outcry for Democracy and Freedom in China," was published on June 4, the 31st anniversary of China's pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989. It is his first book published in Korean. His book was written in Chinese which was translated into Korean. The Korean edition is a shortened version. The Korean publishing house "no book" removed parts about Wu's analysis of political ideologies in the Korean edition and focused on his personal story about his upbringing to entertain Korean readers. The original
Chinese edition is available on Amazon.

Wu said the publication was possible because he lives in South Korea.

His memoir begins with his experiences of South Korea's immigration service in 2002 and then narrates his childhood, young adulthood and what he had gone through during political turmoil in China.

In the memoir, Wu called the Tiananmen Square protests the "June 4 massacre," stating the Chinese communist party's declaration of martial law and the troops' brutal crackdown on the crowds took thousands of innocent lives.

"Chinese people's conscience was attacked brutally and their dignity was endangered. Their souls were fooled by the oppressor," he said. "The Chinese communists were trying hard to turn the clock back to reverse the democracy movement. I warned they would face the consequences and the Chinese public would lose faith in their government, and turn their back on it."

The Tiananmen Square protests were a weeks-long student-led democracy movement starting in April, 1989 following the death of a former Chinese communist party leader Hu Yaobang who planned to introduce democratic reform in China.

As the protests continued, the Chinese communist party declared martial law and sent troops to crack down on the protestors. The pro-democracy movement came to a tragic end once the troops started firing live rounds into the crowds. No accurate casualty numbers were reported. But the Chinese government claimed some 200 civilians and several dozen security personnel died.

However, a diplomatic cable from then British Ambassador to China Alan Donald, which was disclosed in 2017 in a British document, claimed the death toll was as many as 10,000.

Wu works on his writing in his tiny home in Seoul, Thursday. He became the first Chinese national to have earned refugee status in South Korea in 2008. / Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul
Wu works on his writing in his tiny home in Seoul, Thursday. He became the first Chinese national to have earned refugee status in South Korea in 2008. / Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul

Wu is critical of President Moon Jae-in for his foreign policy which prioritizes China and North Korea at the expense of South Korea's ties with the United States and Japan.

"I am not against President Moon's endeavor to maintain a close relationship with China," he said. "I think the problem is that his worldview lacks a deeper understanding of geopolitics and the diplomatic landscape surrounding South Korea, and his vision seems to be shortsighted."

According to the Chinese dissident, President Moon's foreign policy is leaning toward China while not paying due attention to the United States, a country he said helped Korea rise from the ashes of the Korean War to become an economic power today.

"I'm afraid that President Moon knows little about the Chinese communist party," he said. "I think his understanding of China is naive at best and his worldview is as narrow as one seen by a frog in a well."

Wu encouraged President Moon to break his silence and clarify his position on pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.

"He was a democracy fighter, wasn't he? Then why is he keeping silence on the tragedy and tears in Hong Kong?" he asked. "South Korea became an economic power within decades after the Korean War. The country rose dramatically from a war-torn, poor nation to a country of wealth. It is a great Asian country that achieved both democracy and economic growth. I hope that the South Korean government puts an end to its flattering diplomacy toward China. If it does that, China will take South Korea seriously."

Wu said "a free, democratic China" should be a common goal that both the Chinese public and South Korea need to work together to achieve.

He said democracy in China is a prerequisite for the reunification of Korea, noting that as long as China remains a patron of North Korea, a unified Korea will be a distant dream.

Wu said he is neither a famed writer nor a high-profile thinker. Compared with renowned Chinese dissidents-in-exile overseas, he said his background is rather humble.

But he knows there is a role he can do for democracy in China_ educating the Chinese public to challenge the long-held belief that the Communist Party is their savior.

Once the Chinese are awakened, he says, democracy in China will be unavoidable.


Kang Hyun-kyung hkang@koreatimes.co.kr


X
CLOSE

Top 10 Stories

go top LETTER