Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium
坦蕩怡天壽
Bao Tong (鮑彤, 1932-2022), former Director of the Office of Political Reform of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (hereafter, CCP) and the highest-ranked party member of the CCP to be imprisoned after the June Fourth Massacre of 1989, died on 9 November 2022, at the age of ninety.
This biographical essay by his son Bao Pu 鮑樸, a publisher and veteran human rights advocate, was completed on 14 November 2022, and was published in Yibao 議報 on 17 November 2022; this translation is of a revised version of the essay.
A serviceable translation of Bao’s text by Sonia Song was published in the English-language version of Yibao on 23 December 2022. This second translation is perhaps justified by the extent to which the occasional annotations — all of which are those of the translator — might assist readers to understand both the particular trajectory as well as the wider context of Bao Tong’s brave and remarkable life.
I thank both Bao Pu for his gracious permission to translate this finely crafted essay into English, and Geremie Barmé for bringing it to my attention and encouraging me to attempt this translation of it. My thanks also to Geremie for his suggestions.
This translation of Bao Pu’s essay is published three years to the day since the original was completed. It appears here in China Heritage in three parts, of which this is the first.
— Duncan M. Campbell
14 November 2025
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Related Material:
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A Portrait of a Good Man — My Father Bao Tong
Part I
坦蕩怡天壽——我的父親鮑彤
Bao Pu 鮑樸
Translated and annotated by Duncan M. Campbell
By virtue of the fact that anyone related to the subject will find it difficult to treat them with a true measure of objectivity or impartiality, from time immemorial it has been rarely the case that a biography composed for the deceased by a family member would be taken at all seriously.
Since at least the time of the great Han-dynasty historian Sima Qian 司馬遷 (ca. 145-ca.86 BCE), the Chinese tradition of biographical writing has focused on the character of the biographee and, in so doing, it has been weighted in favour of offering an account of the subject’s behaviour, disposition and beliefs. In the context of modern life — a far more complex era — a distinction is often made between the “public” and the “private” domains of an individual’s life. The asymmetry between what can be known about these often two very different domains means that the biographer must immediately and inescapably confront a particular dilemma if they are to attempt to capture the true character of their subject: if a biography written by a family member tends to lack objectivity, that written by someone an outsider may well lack the appropriate levels of insight and knowledge of the subject’s private world.
In braving these pitfalls as I crafted the following biographical essay about my father, my intention has been not so much to replace, or indeed replicate, what others have written about him but rather simply to fill in some lacunae in their accounts. In the process, I do not seek to re-litigate issues that have already been much debated publicly. In the hope of maintaining a degree both of objectivity and of impartiality, I adopt here a simple device: that is I make it a priority to cite a range of primary source material — personal correspondence, oral history recordings, audio-visual tapes and an unpublished memoir (hereafter referred to as “Autobiography”) — without adding much in the way of commentary on my part.
Bao Tong’s Family Background
[Bao Pu: As spring gave way to summer one day in 1928 — the exact date remains lost to time — my grandfather, Bao Peiren 鮑佩人, then a clerk in the Yifeng Enamel Factory 益豐搪瓷廠 in Shanghai, married my grandmother, Wu Heng 吳珩, from Haining, at the West Lake Hotel in Hangzhou. The couple were to have five children, my father being their third. He was born on 5 November 1932 and my parents and older siblings took to calling him “Three Three” (三三).]
Rising from the high plateaus of Tibet and Qinghai, the Yangtze River flows all the way to Shanghai where it empties into the Pacific Ocean. That terminus constituted the entirety of the world of my youth. My ancestral affiliations were with Suzhou but I had been born in Xiashi Township 硤石鎮 in Haining County. To escape the bombing raids of the invading Japanese army, our family fled and settled in the French Concession in Shanghai. It was there that I began my schooling. (From Bao Tong’s autobiography)
In the autumn of 1937, the Marco Polo Bridge Incident 盧溝橋事變 took place in Beijing,[1] and on 13 August, the Japanese bombed Shanghai and turned their attentions to Xiashi. The railway line connecting Shanghai and Xiashi, which travelled by way of Hangzhou, was blown up and Haining itself was no longer safe. As a first step in trying to escape the warfare, my mother took us to Caojiawei 曹家圩, the place where my mother’s ancestral tombs were located and where tenants of both my maternal grandfather and my maternal uncle still lived. Although the Japanese occupied both Shanghai and Xiashi, only very seldom did they venture into the countryside. Whenever they did happen to show up, the farmers would immediately pass on word to us that they had arrived, and we would flee to hide in a haystack. (From an edited “Interview with Bao Tong,” recorded 2018-2020)
[Note 1: Also known as the “July 7 Incident” 七七事變, this skirmish between Chinese troops and those of the Imperial Japanese army is often considered to be the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War.]
Once the autumn of 1937 had passed, and during the depths of winter, my father paid us a visit in Caojiawei. During the following spring, he wrote to my mother suggesting that we relocate to Shanghai and we made the move as the season gave way to summer. The whole family crowded into a tiny two-roomed garret of some twenty square metres at 337 Rue Amiral Bayle (now, Huangpi South Road 黃陂南路) in the French Concession.
In the autumn of 1938, I started attending the neighbouring People’s Livelihood Primary School 民生小學. It proved to be far too elementary for me and starting from the second term of Grade Two, my mother had me transfer to the Esteem for the Real Primary School 崇實小學, which was also nearby. The rigorous standards of the school made it popular with parents and so I found it to be quite crowded. I continued there until the end of Grade Six, at which point I moved across the road to attend its partner institution, the Esteem for the Real Middle School 崇實中學, where I pursued my studies for three years, from the summer of 1943 until the summer of 1946. (Same source as above)
Upon my graduation from Lower Middle School, I transferred to Southern Seas Middle School 南洋中學.
(The principal of the Esteem for the Real Middle School was a graduate of Southern Ocean Middle School and he had an agreement with his alma mater whereby the best student who graduated from the Lower Middle School was granted admission to the Upper Middle School. And so it was that in the autumn of 1946 I was granted admission to Southern Ocean Middle School, graduating from that school in April, 1949. Same source as above)
The summer holidays of 1946 proved to be an exceptionally busy time for my family. My sister, Linghua 令華, then not yet three, was sent to live with our maternal uncle Wu Qichang [吳其昌, 1904-1944] in Wuhan; after he fell ill and died in 1944, she was finally able to return home when the Second Sino-Japanese War ended. (Autobiography)
[Note 2: Wu Qichang was an eminent historian and graduate of Tsinghua University, where he had been a student of both the philologist Wang Guowei (王國維, 1877-1927) and the historian and philosopher Liang Qichao (梁啟超, 1873-1929). At the time of his death, Wu was Head of the Department of History of Wuhan University. The Second Sino-Japanese War was fought between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan between 1937 and 1945. In Communist Party historiography, it called the “War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression”. The First Sino-Japanese War, known in Chinese as the “Jiawu War” 甲午戰爭, was a conflict between the Qing dynasty and the Empire of Japan in 1894-1895.]
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Study & Self-Cultivation
During the summer holidays of 1942, my father had guided my reading of Mencius [a Confucian classic], thereby introducing me to the humanistic realm of traditional China. Reading Mencius helped me appreciate that one’s own humanity was a reflection of how you treated others; to fail this meant that one was unworthy. As Mencius argued:
Everyone is born with a heart that is empathetic and which cannot stand to witness the suffering of others … not to have a heart capable of empathy is not to be human; not to have a heart capable of shame is not to be human. (Mencius, III.vi).
Mencius also emphasised the priority of ordinary people, one that was followed by the importance of state, with the emperor hardly worth mentioning:
The people are the most important matter of state, followed by the altars to the gods of the soil and of grain. The ruler is the least of matters. (Mencius, XIV.xiv).
In the summer of 1946, my youngest maternal uncle, Wu Shichang [吳世昌, 1908-1986],[3] a professor at National Central University 中央大學, came to Shanghai to visit his good friend Chu Anping [儲安平, 1909-1966].[4] Wu Shichang was the most politically engaged member of my extended family. With the shift of the centre of politics to Shanghai that followed the end of the war, Chu Anping in the process of closing down Objectivity 客觀, the journal he had edited in Chongqing [the wartime capital of the Kuomintang government], and preparing a new journal titled Observer 觀察 in Shanghai. Wu Shichang had first been involved in editing Objectivity and helped Chu close it down. He would go on to be a contributing writer to Observer. (Autobiography)
[Note 3: An eminent ‘Redologist’ 紅學家, or scholar of the eighteenth century masterpiece The Dream of the Red Chamber/Story of the Stone 紅樓夢/石頭記, Wu Shichang would later write an important study of the novel, On the Red Chamber Dream: A Critical Study of Two Annotated Manuscripts of the XVIII Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961).]
[Note 4: Chu Anping was one of the leading liberal journalists of the late-Republican era. In 1957, he was criticised by Mao Zedong (毛澤東, 1893-1976) for his essay Party Empire 黨天下, which was originally a speech that he wrote at the behest of Zhou Enlai as his contribution to the Hundred Flowers Campaign of 1956. The text of the speech was published in Enlightenment Daily 光明日報, which Chu was then editing. Soon thereafter, Chu was labelled as being ‘Anti-Party, Anti-People, Anti-Socialist, Bourgeois Rightist’. He disappeared in 1966, at the start of the Cultural Revolution, and is presumed to have committed suicide.]
One day, Chu Anping turned up at our home unannounced and my mother entertained him with some boiled pumpkin. At the table, Wu Shichang pointed at me and said: “This here is Bao Tong. He loves reading.” Chu Anping took note both of my name and of our address. Subsequently, a set of the journal turned up. From its inaugural issue until it was shut down by the Kuomintang government, Observer was the source of much of my knowledge about contemporary affairs. My parents even took this old run of the journal with them when they moved to Beijing in 1966. Sadly, it was confiscated by the Red Guards when they raided our home in the early Cultural Revolution. (Autobiography)
In 1947, my cousin Xu Xuan 徐璇 was admitted to Washington University in St. Louis. When he left China, he gave me his copy of Problems of Leninism, attributed to Josef Stalin and published in Chinese in Moscow [in 1940, by the Foreign Languages Press of the Soviet Union]. I found it uniquely clear and easy to understand, as well as being immensely appealing. (“Interview with Bao Tong,” recorded 2018-2020, edited) It was a work of political propaganda introducing the theory of Leninism that was obviously composed by a writing group working for the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
(How did a man like my father whose knowledge encompassed the Confucian — the Four Books and the Five Classics — as well as all the various ideologies that the currents of new thought had swept into China respond to such a work? “Up until then I couldn’t make any sense of Chinese translations of Lenin’s works,” he said. “But in Problems of Leninism I found things simple and clearly stated. It lent us the confidence that our mission was not simply one that was just, but also one that was scientific in its foundations.”)
During the latter half of 1948, I would often find myself chatting with my classmate (and fellow hostel mate) Zhu Yulin (朱育琳, 1928-1968).[5] We discussed everything from literature to philosophy. He had a copy of A Complete Course in Dialectics 辯證法全程, translated from Russian, and, for my part, I had a copy of Wu Enyu’s (吳恩裕, 1909-1979) The Quintessence of the Historical Materialist Perspective 唯物史觀精義, only recently published by the Observer. We swopped books. (Autobiography)
[Note 5: Poet and scholar, and noted translator of, amongst others, Charles Baudelaire, Zhu Yulin studied foreign languages at Peking University with the aesthetician Zhu Guangqian 朱光潛 (1897-1986). Labelled a Rightist while still a student, he transferred to the Department of Architecture of Tongji University in Shanghai and, upon graduation, he was exiled to work in distant Xinjiang. Ill-health soon saw him return to Shanghai. In the summer of 1968, accused of being the Abettor 教唆犯 of a Small Counter-revolutionary Group 小反革命集團, Zhu was beaten to death by Red Guards.]
In 1953, when my colleague Song Yuanliang (宋元良, 1920-2006), Secretary of the Organisation Section of the Organisation Department of the East China Bureau of the Chinese Communist Party (hereafter, CCP), caught me reading a novel he recommended that I should focus on Stalin’s History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course. “This is far better than any novel,” he told me. The Chinese translation of this book, too, had been published in Moscow by the Foreign Languages Press of the Soviet Union, in 1953. And, as a result of having read these two books attentively, it meant that my “Marxist-Leninist Level” was somewhat superior to that of my fellow Communist Party members. One advantage of this was that much later on, during my debates with Hu Qiaomu 胡喬木 (1912-1992)[6] in the 1980s, I always had the upper hand. (From an edited “Interview with Bao Tong,” recorded 2018-2020)
[Note 6:Hu Qiaomu, a hard-line ideologue, served as Mao Zedong’s secretary both during the Yan’an years of the 1940s and again up to 1965. Following Mao’s death in 1976, Hu played a central role in drafting the “Resolution on Certain Questions in Our Party’s History”, a work that squared the circle of China’s post-1949 history, and he repeatedly cautioned Deng Xiaoping and his colleagues against ideological laxity during the first decade of the Reform era. Stalin’s Short Course, a Communist catechism, was a guide to the Chinese party for decades and it still helps frame the country’s pop Marxism-Leninism.]
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I never heard my father express a negative critique of Marx or Engels. I remember once, when he was discussing Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, he said: “The subtitle of this book is Written in Response to the Research Conclusions Arrived at by Lewis Henry Morgan. It’s a reference to Morgan’s book Ancient Society, which had been a very influential work at the time. Nowadays, Morgan’s work has long been dispatched to the ash-heap of history.” He then threw his eyes up in characteristic manner that indicated that our conversation had strayed form the topic at hand. After a period of silence, he concluded: “But of course, I’ve never looked into Morgan’s work.”
In his youth, Bao Tong was a stout defender of Leninism. But his reading of Stalin’s Short Course in no way undermined his love for fiction, and there was no novel, ancient or modern, Chinese or foreign, that he would not find time for.
“Drop me a line whenever you have a free moment. Don’t forget. The Decameron is a great read, both interesting and amusing. I read an episode every evening and it really makes it a lot easier to get to sleep.”
— letter from Jiang Zongcao 蔣宗曹, Bao Tong’s wife, unspecified date in 1959
“I borrowed a copy of Golden Lotus 金瓶梅[7] today. The library just acquired this twenty-one volume edition. You’ll be able to read it once you’re back. It’s printed in largish characters and is full of quite unseemly illustrations. I wouldn’t have borrowed it but for you. Best to read it simply as a way of adding to one’s knowledge; I really don’t think it suitable for any other purpose. I’ll only have it on loan for a few more days, so do you think that’ll give you enough time to read? (At present it’s safely stashed away here at home, and we can discuss this once you have returned.)
— letter from Jiang Zongcao, dated 12 December, 1959
[Note 7: Golden Lotus is a remarkable, albeit highly pornographic Ming-dynasty novel. A recent complete and copiously annotated translation in five volumes by David Todd Roy was published under the title The Plum in the Golden Vase.]
Apart from the novelists Mao Dun [茅盾, 1896-1981] and Ba Jin [巴金, 1904-2005],[8] modern Chinese history and martial arts fiction were two of my father’s favourite genres. His love for Gao Yang [高陽, 1922-1992] was on a par with his obsession with Louis Cha Leung-yung 查良鏞 [aka Jin Yong 金庸, 1924-2018].[9] He was given to saying: “Reading Xu Yanpian 許晏駢 adds to one’s understanding of society and reading Louis Cha helps cultivate one’s disposition.”
[Note 8: Mao Dun was a left-wing realist novelist, literary critic and, between 1949-1965, Minister of Culture. His most famous work, Midnight 子夜, published in 1933, was set in the financial maelstrom of contemporary Shanghai. Ba Jin was a novelist and translator whose most famous work was The Family 家, which was also published in 1933, examined the impact of modernity on traditional Chinese family relationships. Late in his life, Ba Jin advocated, unsuccessfully, for a museum of the Cultural Revolution. See Geremie R. Barmé, Still Dissenting from Ba Jin.]
[Note 9: Gao Yang was a famous Taiwanese historical novelist and Jin Yong was a celebrated master of martial arts fiction and co-founder of the Hong Kong daily paper Ming Pao 明報. He was famously critical of the Mao era, although he was later politically seduced by Deng Xiaoping.]
Jin Yong had famously composed a poetic couplet using the first word of each of the titles of fourteen of his novels. It read:
Snow swirls day after day and the white deer is felled, with a smile
I write of supernatural heroes in the company of azure mandarin ducks
飛雪連天射白鹿
笑書神俠倚碧鴛
In the summer of 1992, shortly after he had been sentenced to seven years imprisonment, my father recast this couplet in a fashion that greatly pleased him:
Azure ducks as company as the white knight scribbles away day after day
The snow swirls and the condor is felled, I mockingly defy Heaven
碧鴛白俠劍書連
飛雪射雕笑鼎天
He also composed a poem as a comment on the couplet:
Romantic love offering us painterly poems,
Imperial aspirations all end in tears and ashes.
Summoning forth both metaphor and great wisdom,
Bringing illumination to even the darkest places.
Like the roaring Qiantang tide is this benevolent man’s pen,
Writing not of immortals and spirits, but of humankind.
兒女性情詩有畫，霸王事業燼余煙。
拈來百喻真般若，指到無明亦粲然；
潮湧錢唐仁者筆，仙靈不寫寫人間。
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In 1993, my mother sent two novels by Gao Yang to my father who was then languishing in prison: The Complete Biography of The Empress Dowager 慈禧全傳 and Hu Xueyan 胡雪巖. Upon finishing them he wrote:
Officialdom, the marketplace, the entertainment quarters,
Hear endless stories told, each entertaining in its own way.
Orthodoxy, heterodoxy, the world of the wandering free spirit,
Each with their own Way; each Way worthy of admiration.
官場商場風月場，娓娓開場，場場有戲
正道奇道江湖道，頭頭是道，道道可觀
His long incarceration in Qincheng Prison gave my father unprecedented time to read fiction. On my way to visit my family in 1994, I happened to pick up a copy of The Tale of the Body Thief popular novel at the time at New York airport. I thought that this book, the fourth volume in Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles, would help me while away the hours on the flight back to China. I unexpectedly fell into a deep sleep as soon as I took my seat and made absolutely no headway with the novel at all. Soon after I had returned to America, I was surprised to learn from my mother that my father had requested all of Anne Rice’s novels. Even more startling was the fact that in 1996 after my father was “Granted Release Having Served his Sentence,” he showed me the “Family Tree of the Vampire Family” that he had painstakingly compiled, and recorded in his minute hand, from having read those novels. The Vampire Chronicles had not only helped him pass the long days of his imprisonment, it had also allowed him to revive English-language reading ability that he had left off after his middle school years.
My father also much admired Ying-shih Yü [余英時, 1930-2021],[10] so much so that he even exchanged a few letters with the scholar. Yü’s Exegesis of the Poems and Essays written by Chen Yinque in his Later Years 陳寅恪晚年詩文釋證 had first enraptured my father. “I hadn’t myself understood the critique of the Party contained in Chen Yinque’s late writings as explicated here by Yü. Obviously, his insight is far superior to mine.”
[Note 10: The Princeton University historian and Sinologist. Yü was a trenchant critic of intellectual trends in the People’s Republic of China. The party ideologue Hu Qiaomu was so incensed by Yü’s analysis of Chen Yinque’s poems, first serialised in a Hong Kong magazine in the late 1980s, that he commissioned a lengthy quasi-academic rebuttal. As for Ying-Shih Yü, he notably observed that Beijing’s state-sponsored revival of Confucianism was a “kiss of death”. Yü’s books were banned in the PRC in 2014.]
Over the last twenty years of my father’s life, I managed to spend Spring Festival with him in Beijing just about every year. As the years passed, the piles of Chinese classics got larger. For a while, his research focussed on Buddhism and he loved discussing his insights with me. Since I was completely ignorant about the subject I failed to take note of any of it. Fortunately, he did write the following note:
Throughout Chinese history, a great many eminent intellectuals have loved reading Buddhist sutras, something true of such figures as disparate as the Song-dynasty scholar Su Shi [蘇軾, 1037-1101] and Tan Sitong [譚嗣同, 1865-1898], Kang Youwei [康有為, 1858-1927] and Liang Qichao [梁啟超, 1873-1919] of the late Qing. Was this because they yearned to become Bodhisattvas and ascend to Sukhavati, the Western Heaven? Overall, I’d say no. To grasp the core of their beliefs one must understand two things:
- First, they were inspired by a powerful sense of compassion, a burning desire to help those who were suffering or experiencing difficulties; and,
- Secondly, they understood the impermanence and evanescence of all things.
The first of these motivated their engagement with the world around them and it underpinned the principles by which they distinguished between good and evil, right and wrong. The second allowed them also to remove themselves from worldly affairs and it granted them the ability to retreat in times of danger. To my mind, this is how one can best understand this crucially important aspect of Chinese intellectual history: the confluence of Confucianism and Buddhism. (Transcribed from a previously unpublished piece of calligraphy in Bao Tong’s hand)
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Calligraphy is another thing that I have paid even less heed to over the years, and my father would only very occasionally discuss it with me, though I do remember him remarking that:
The essence of calligraphy is found in its spontaneity, in the freedom it allows one to express one’s own personality. Wang Xizhi’s ‘Preface to the Orchid Pavilion Collection’ was written in a single burst of afflatus and the fact that it contains three mis-written characters in no way detracts from its status as an immortal masterpiece of the art.[11]
[Note 11: The immortal “Preface to the Orchid Pavilion Collection” 蘭亭詩集序 was reputedly composed by and written in the hand of Wang Xizhi (王羲之, 309-ca. 365) in the late spring of the Ninth Year of the Everlasting Harmony reign period of the Eastern Jin dynasty 東晉永和九年, or 353 CE. After a day of revelry with forty-one of his friends and relatives in the countryside, Wang wrote this lapidary essay as an introduction to the thirty-seven poems composed on that occasion. See Duncan M. Campbell, Orchid Pavilion: An Anthology of Literary Representations, China Heritage Quarterly, No. 17, March 2009.]
As my father grew older and his eyesight deteriorated he had me load his favourite books on to a tablet to make reading easier. The books I uploaded included Lectures on the History of the Ming and Qing Dynasties 明清史講義, Master Zhuang — annotated and translated into Modern Chinese 莊子今注今譯, A Correct Understanding of the Analects 論語正義, The Book of Rites — annotated and translated into Modern Chinese 禮記今註今譯, Mencius — annotated and translated into Modern Chinese 孟子譯注, and so on. We can see that when it came to Chinese classics, he was particularly drawn to Confucius, Mencius and Zhuangzi.
From around the age of eighty or so, my father collected some seven or eight editions of The Bible, in both Chinese and English. And, in recent years, he had me hunt down various audio book versions that could be downloaded on to his iPad. For a while, my father also participated in various Bible research activities in Beijing and many people hoped to persuade him to be baptised. However, judging from what he said to me at various points about Christianity, I suspect that the motive behind his research into the Bible was his search for belief. On one occasion, for instance, he said: “Maxim Gorky’s education as a child had led him to believe that there were two Gods: the bad-tempered God of the Old Testament who struck fear into everyone, and the kind-hearted and affable God of the New Testament who was like a loving father. I have the same impression.” On another occasion he said: “Jesus was a social reformer,” to which I replied: “What sort of Christian revisionism is this?” He rolled his eyes at me, disapprovingly. I, too, had two fathers: one who was irascible, overbearing, and stubborn, and another who was both loving and wise.
End of Part I
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Source:
- 鮑樸，坦蕩怡天壽——我的父親鮑彤，《議報》，2022年11月17日