When Tyranny Takes Hold - Xu Hongcis experiences in China show that autocracy demands collaborators

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http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/12/19/when-tyranny-takes-hold

By Evan Osnos

What is the precise moment, in the life of a country, when tyranny takes hold? It rarely happens in an instant; it arrives like twilight, and, at first, the eyes adjust.

Xu Hongci had been drawn to politics by the promise of dignity. Growing up in Shanghai during the Second World War, part of a downwardly mobile middle-class family, he resented the Japanese occupation and the Chinese leaders who failed to prevent it. “Japanese soldiers would fish in our pond, swaggering off with the biggest carp without paying a single penny,” Xu recalled, in a memoir he wrote years later. “Our nation’s tragedy awakened my political consciousness at a young age.”

He dreamed of making China strong again, of erasing “injustice and darkness.” At the age of fourteen, he placed his faith in the radical change envisioned by Mao Zedong, joining the Communist Party before it came to power, in 1949. The first time Xu noticed cracks in Mao’s project, he rationalized them as the by-products of bold reform. Xu and his classmates had been ordered to identify “counterrevolutionaries” in their ranks, but they could find none. They fingered an innocent boy who, Xu conceded, “would have to suffice as a target for a round of criticism.”

For a time, autocracy rewards the true believer, and Xu received a coveted place at Shanghai No. 1 Medical College, to study medicine. Violence was spreading, but Xu found ways to justify the lists in the newspaper of men and women executed in the Campaign to Suppress Counter-Revolutionary Activities. He was only a “bystander,” he told himself.

Mao told his people to watch their neighbors, to ferret out threats from within and from without. Xu played his part, until he, too, became suspect. In 1957, Mao repeated his call to “let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend.” Xu voiced his dissatisfaction with the Soviet Union, and he spoke favorably of the Hungarian uprising against Moscow’s control. It was a trap. The president of Xu’s college labelled him a “traitor to the party.” Now the victim, Xu realized that the accusations he had parroted about others “were nothing but lies.”

. . . more. So worth the read.

[bettyellen]

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[bettyellen]

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