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| Wu Zhenrong, a Chinese dissident, prays at a church in Daerim-dong in Seoul that became his first home when he escaped from China in 2002. Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul |
By Jack Lau
Wu Zhenrong begins every morning by folding his futon into the corner of his room, just below the window that provided a view half blocked by a brick wall. Before he spends his day writing on his computer his musings on Chinese politics, he would walk hunchbacked to an alley floored in uneven concrete and roofed with wooden planks that he calls his kitchen, to boil a kettle of water for his sugar-filled morning instant coffee.
Wu had never had coffee, at least not until he was forced to leave his home in China to settle in the Korean capital of Seoul. He has written more than 13 books, totaling some eight million Chinese characters, including one he wrote secretly as a Chinese soldier reflecting on the Cultural Revolution. His wish to publish it, however, had attracted the attention of the national security police, leaving him exiled for 21 years in a country he had never before visited.
Wu, who became one of the first Chinese nationals to gain refugee status in 2008 after Korea struck formal ties with China in 1992, spends most of his time on a computer in his 16-square-meter apartment writing pro-democracy essays critical of the Chinese Communist Party that few could read because of state censorship. Unlike the big names among exiled Chinese democracy activists who rubbed shoulders with heads of state and earned a decent living being professors, Wu, now 73, says he faces the prospect of dying alone.
"There are times I felt particularly lonely," he said, sitting on the lumpy plastic flooring of his home. "I keep busy writing, talking to friends, researching about China and reading, but once I sit down alone, sometimes I feel especially lonely. This world ― this life ― felt so cold."
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| Wu sits on the floor of his 16-square-meter apartment as he sips a cup of coffee, a habit he took up since coming to Korea. Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul |
Two years before, he moved with his wife from his native Shaanxi Province to the southern Chinese metropolis of Shenzhen, where his daughter was getting married. Unlike most of the Chinese cities, Shenzhen was filled with towering skyscrapers and bustling business districts as the first test site for China's economic liberalization in the 1980s.
He had retired and worked part-time behind the counter at his daughter's internet cafe keeping logs of who used a computer and when.
Witnessing how Shenzhen had become a showcase for affluence, he wrote a letter in 2002 to the Commercial Press, one of Hong Kong's biggest publishers, to pitch his book called "Treatise on the '66 Movement" ― a memoir about his young adulthood during the Cultural Revolution. He later said he handwrote the letter while being under the illusion of Shenzhen's reforms and was mistaken that there was greater room for political speech than the rest of China.
"I believe that the Commercial Press in Hong Kong is a free publishing house," Wu said, reciting a part of his letter. He used his daughter's internet cafe as a return address and signed the letter off under a pseudonym: Chen Anmin.
A little more than a month later, national security police showed up at the internet cafe, asking for a person named Chen Anmin. They told Wu, who was sitting at the front counter, to get them the manager. Police talked to Wu's son-in-law for half an hour and left.
"What was the problem?" Wu asked at the time.
His son-in-law said, "Nothing dad, they were here to find one Chen Anmin."
Wu knew immediately that he was in trouble, but since no one knew or suspected it was Wu who wrote the letter. "If I had written Wu Zhenrong in that letter, I would have been arrested on the spot."
But the police returned a few hours later holding sheets of paper on which each Chinese character from Wu's letter was printed. They asked Wu's daughter and son-in-law to recognize the handwriting, but they could not do so. After two hours of interrogation, the police left. Wu's daughter came to him and told Wu those looked like his handwriting.
Wu could hide the truth no longer. "It was really me who wrote the letter."
Tears fell immediately for his daughter. His son-in-law cried and yelled at Wu, blaming him for ruining the only rice bowl for the family.
First thing the next morning, Wu bought a train ticket and left alone for the city of Xianyang in Shaanxi.
Wu called Deng Yunbi, his friend from Xianyang, and told him to let him stay at his home. "I was afraid the police investigation would lead them to me. I was afraid police would go to my house."
After staying 10 days at Deng's, the two decided that they would leave China for their political activism. "But when I stepped into the free world, things were different than what I imagined," Wu said. "We didn't understand the world outside, and it was my first time out of China."
The 50,000 yuan (9.45 million won) of cash prepared by Wu for their trip had been spent in the few months in Korea. They had to live in the Seoul Chinese Church that was created for the Chinese diaspora in Seoul as they sought asylum.
"When I was in China, I was retired and was part of a middle-class family. However when I got to Korea, every resource had become scarce and there was no source of income. It was trying times, but I had already taken on this path."
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| Wu stands behind a pane of glass on the door to his apartment that leads to a concrete alleyway that he uses as a kitchen and shower. Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul |
While living at the church, Wu made multiple appointments with the Korean Ministry of Justice, which was responsible for approving refugee statuses. Officials hurled questions at him, asking for evidence that he was subject to political persecution in China.
The persuasive evidence, Wu said, was still in China. Before Wu and Deng went to Korea, they had buried handwritten drafts of three books written by Wu during his days in the People's Liberation Army in the village home of Deng's in Shaanxi. Using money Deng earned from working in Korea, the pair spent 700,000 won to hire a woman from Shanghai to fetch those writings.
"I brought the handwritten drafts to the Ministry of Justice," Wu said. "The officials had a look, and only then did they believe in my story."
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| Wu's apartment is placed under a flight route, where planes come and go every few minutes. Even when he removes his hearing aid, Wu says the planes create considerable noise. Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul |
His path to being recognized as a refugee was not smooth. In 2005, three years after arriving in Korea, the government refused his application for refugee status because the evidence for Wu's "anti-government activities" did not amount to a "well-founded fear of being persecuted," according to a refusal notice.
His appeal a year later also failed, which was followed by a "written advice to exit" Korea. It was only in November 2008 that the Korean Supreme Court ruled in favor of Wu and Deng, recognizing that repatriating them to China would risk further persecution.
Wu is no stranger to turmoil.
When Wu was born in March 1949, Communist troops were fighting in northwest China during the Chinese Civil War, to seize control from the military of the ruling Kuomintang party. Tens of thousands were injured or died in the theatre, and six months later, Mao Zedong and his revolutionaries declared victory and established the People's Republic in October. Wu felt none of the gunfire and turmoil, however, because of the seclusion of his birthplace, the remote agrarian village of Xiaonan in Shaanxi province in central China.
"Life was extremely hard, but it seems that I stayed quite positive," he said, chuckling. "We were kids! We lived in a world of innocence."
Xiaonan had no childcare centers. Wu, like many children living in China's impoverished countryside, had no school to stop him from living his carefree days playing with friends. He only started to go to school at 8. Villagers had torn down a temple worshipping the ancient Chinese general Guan Yu and repurposed it as a school. He wrote on wooden planks serving as tables and brought his own stool.
"I remembered the winters when I was small to be especially cold. Ninety-nine percent of my hand was frostbitten, and you could see blood from the lesions here," he said, pushing his eyebrows together and pointing to the back of his hand.
The Communist Party's propaganda had shielded him from feeling the hardship China faced, Wu said. In 1958, Mao launched the disastrous Great Leap Forward movement that aimed to push the Chinese economy to overtake Britain's and catch up with the United States in steel and food production, only to result in the death of at least 15 million people from widespread famine.
Wu first saw Mao in person on Nov. 11, 1966, when he was 17. The Chinese leader stood on Tiananmen and waved to a sea of young devotees who had traveled to Beijing from every corner of China.
The Red Guards held high their Little Red Books of Mao's sayings and rocked them to the tune of "The East is Red" while chanting "long live Chairman Mao." Wu's friends from school, who had only seen Mao in portraits and paintings, were reduced to tears when they saw the leader in person.
"It was fanatical," he said.
Wu and other Red Guards returned to their homes after being instructed by Mao to go on one mission: to rebel against the local Communist Party establishment.
"We toppled Communist Party committees at every level," he said.
Starting with the party branch of his secondary school, Wu took down seven Communist Party authorities, including the bureau in the party's central committee in Beijing overseeing issues in China's northwestern region and its first secretary Liu Lantao.
Wu joined his first "struggle session," against his school principal Guo Huanxian, who had attempted to kill himself after pupils began to denounce figures of authority on posters plastered in public. While Guo was not targeted, he was frightened.
In the middle of the night, someone yelled, "The principal had killed himself," Wu said. Wu got out of bed and ran towards Guo's office, finding him with an axe sunk into his head, with the pale skin of his scalp loose. Half his face was covered in blood.
Guo was hospitalized and survived his suicide attempt. But before he could remove the gauze wrapped around his head, he was surrounded by his students in struggle sessions and publicly denounced as a "counterrevolutionary."
"That left an indelible mark in my memory," Wu said.
Mao launched his Cultural Revolution in May 1966, convinced that the top echelon of the party and military had been compromised by capitalists, corrupt cadres and what he called "revisionists" ― betrayers of the 1949 communist revolution that swept the party to power. It did not help that then-Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had been denouncing and dismantling the personality cult of his iron-fisted predecessor Joseph Stalin, whom Mao modeled himself upon.
A revolution was therefore needed, Mao thought, for the proletariat to seize power from Communist Party officials across China.
"To us, this political movement united the people and was a grand liberation," Wu said. "To us, it was a revolution of human rights."
"After the struggle, at least in our province, we had a 'direct line' to Mao Zedong. After my generation was liberated, Mao Zedong created a relationship that was religious, not political. Our rebellion had ended the political relationship."
Each faction of the Red Guard called itself the rebellious side and disparaged rival sects by labeling them the reactionaries. Wu's group of Red Guards lost out to the competition.
"Our faction was on the weaker side and so we were kicked out of the school. I felt I had been cornered," he said.
Left with no options, he joined the Chinese military, the People's Liberation Army, in February 1968. By day, he worked as a political officer promoting Mao Thought at an asbestos mine in Shaanxi. Secretly, he wrote criticisms of Chinese politics, in particular the Cultural Revolution and the official narrative surrounding Mao.
His access as a political officer to a Communist Party school library allowed him to get a rare glimpse into the works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Immanuel Kant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other Western philosophers. Every-day people could only study Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
The handwritten drafts of Wu's books are still stacked in his small cubicle of a home in Seoul, hidden behind a wooden door and bagged in Manila envelopes.
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| Half of Wu's view is obscured by a wall of the nearby building. What is left provides him a good view of the neighborhood church. Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul |
The four walls that enclose Wu Zhenrong have not changed in years. Above his wooden desk hung a clock and a calendar that was empty except for the date circled for the interview.
As early as 2003, a year after coming to Korea, Wu had attended pro-democracy protests outside the Chinese Embassy in Seoul, including ones commemorating those who died in the Tiananmen Square crackdown on June 4, 1989. He often joined adherents to the spiritual movement Falun Gong which is banned in mainland China as a cult.
While his writing and participation in protests seldom reach mainland China, Wu said his essays were read online by the intelligentsia there ― until Chinese President Xi Jinping took power in 2012. Under Xi, many websites that allowed limited political dissent were shut down, including blogs and forums that discussed the Cultural Revolution.
"The Communist Party hopes to chase out democracy activists inside China," he said at his home. "In the liberal environment of foreign countries, they lose the stage for their performance."
As he grew older, he spent more time on his computer writing essays published on blogs popular among Chinese dissidents. A man in his 60s who lived next to Wu died alone early last year in his flat. No one knew until Wu found his door ajar and nobody came home for most of the day.
"I thought, I could end up like my neighbor," Wu said. "That thought flashed through my mind."
Wu rarely keeps in touch with his family in China anymore, especially since his son's death in 2020 when he was in his 40s. He and his wife barely talked on the WeChat messaging app for two years, in fear that conversations would awaken memories of their son.
"There are always good times and bad times in life. In China, I could not write or speak freely. I could not talk to journalists. I had to become a commoner in China, suppressing myself. But in Korea, I found freedom," Wu said.
"Sometimes I think, being lonely is painful, but my thoughts were also created in the state of lonesomeness. It's not all bad," he added.
Jack Lau is a reporter with the South China Morning Post. He is currently based in Seoul, writing for both The Korea Times and the South China Morning Post under an exchange program.
