Celebrating New Sinology

謝巴公

On 17 October 2025 it will be twenty years since Ba Jin (巴金, the pen name of Li Yaotang 李堯棠, 1904-2005) died at the age of 100.

As a reader and as his translator, I enjoyed a ten-year relationship with Ba Gong 巴公, ‘the Venerable Ba Jin’, as we all called him. Then, from 1987 up until his death in 2005 we were alienated; I often thought of him, though I believe I was soon forgotten after he received the letter I wrote to him in early 1987.

Below, I reprint an essay written in memoriam. Published following Ba Jin’s death, it is about our friendship and subsequent estrangement. Appended to that reminiscence is a translation of the public appeal that Ba Jin issued in August 1986 calling for China to establish a ‘Cultural Revolution Museum’. Ironically, it is what precipitated my disaffection from one of modern China’s literary giants (see also Memory Holes, old & new).

We conclude with a comment on Ba Jin by Liu Xiaobo 劉曉波.

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The Chinese rubric of this chapter in Celebrating New Sinology is 謝巴公 xiè Bā gōng, ‘turning away from the Venerable Ba Jin’. Here 謝 xiè, ‘to disavow, abjure’, is also a reference to 謝本師 xiè běnshī, a famous two-generation literary falling-out that involved Yu Yue 俞樾, Zhang Taiyan 章太炎 and Zhou Zuoren 周作人. As Zhou wrote when he broke with Zhang Taiyan, his mentor, in the summer of 1926:

先生現在似乎已將四十餘年來所主張的光復大義拋諸腦後了。我相信我的師不當這樣，這樣也就不是我的師。先生昔日曾作《謝本師》一文，對於俞曲園先生表示脫離，不意我現今亦不得不謝先生 …

Of course, 謝巴公 xiè Bā gōng can also be taken to mean ‘grateful to Ba Jin’, which I am.

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My thanks to Lois Conner for her kind permission to reprint a photograph made during one of our many stays at Wang Villa on West Lake.

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
23 September 2025

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Dissenting from Ba Jin

Geremie R. Barmé

30 October 2005

 

I suppose you could say that Ba Jin and I agreed to disagree. In the end, he was disappointed in me; and I wasn’t too impressed by him. I became, and have remained, a Ba Jin dissident.

It started in 1978, when we shared column space in Ta Kung Pao 大公報, the Hong Kong-based but Communist Party run daily newspaper. The Cultural Revolution was over, and Pan Jijiong 潘際坰, the pre-1966 Ta Kung Pao correspondent in Beijing had been sent to Hong Kong to take over the paper’s cultural pages. He was there to add some heft to the pro-mainland cultural scene in Hong Kong. A mild, sophisticated and highly literate man Lao Pan was, at best, a patriotic fellow traveller of the party.

Jijiong and I met in 1978 through Fan Yong 范用 (the publisher of Sanlian Books and founder of Dushu 讀書 magazine in Beijing) and my close friends Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang. Over the objections of more ‘politically correct’ (residual Maoist) editors, from mid 1979 Jijiong commissioned me to write regular pieces for ‘Dagong Yuan’ 大公園, the cultural page of the paper, which he edited.

Pan Jijiong was also an old friend of Ba Jin’s and, from 1978, he started publishing a series of memoirs and essays by the Shanghai-based writer under the title ‘Random Thoughts’ 隨想錄. My essays (rather jejune cultural satires and observations on Hong Kong and mainland life that Pan Jijiong indulgently edited) appeared in the same space as Ba Jin’s ‘Random Thoughts’ in ‘Dagong Yuan’ on alternate weeks.

After years of studying and living in China, though now based as an editor in a Chinese-language magazine (The Seventies Monthly 七十年代月刊) in Hong Kong, I was avidly following the cultural changes on the mainland. I was fascinated by the hints of new writing that appeared there, and the tentative depictions of the Cultural Revolution and the years that preceded it in various cultural forms (fiction, film, poetry). In particular, I became interested in literary works related to confession and redemption in 20th century China, and post-1976 mainland China.

It was at this time that I translated with my friend Bennett Lee The Wounded (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing Books, 1979), a collection of post-CR stories. I also followed closely Ba Jin’s meditations on his own past, and public remorse at his culpability and compliance during the Maoist years. Eventually, with his encouragement, I translated the first volume of Random Thoughts (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing Book, 1984).

Through the good offices of our editor, Pan Jijiong, Ba Jin and I met in Shanghai and we became friendly. We corresponded as I worked my way through Random Thoughts; Ba Jin providing me with fascinating cultural details and information so that I could fully footnote my translation.

Ba Jin also paid me the compliment of mentioning one of my own Chinese essays in his ‘Random Thoughts’ a number of times. That essay was one of a series of public comments I wrote on post-1976 cultural repression. The ‘Beijing Spring’ of 1978-79 had been abruptly brought to an end by the party authorities and Wei Jingsheng 魏京生 (along with others) had been arrested. A number of important new non-official publications were also interdicted.

Like so many others whose lives had become enmeshed with friends, the culture and the intellectual life of the mainland, I felt despair as the cautious relaxation of the previous period came to an end. I expressed my sentiments in a number of veiled, though fairly obvious essays. One of these, published in Dagong bao in January 1980, was entitled ‘The Heterodox as Normality’ 異樣也是常態.

In that essay, I made pointed use of the word ‘seeking’ or ‘experiment’, 探索, a term that was well known at the time as also being the name of one of the recently banned publications of the Beijing Spring. Among other things I wrote that, “To achieve truly advanced or innovative things [in China], people have to be allowed to experiment.” [要是想真正搞出一些尖端性的或有創新意義的東西來，非得讓人家探索不可。]

Ba Jin liked the essay, so much so that he referred to it and the need for ‘experimentation’ in four of his ‘Random Thoughts’ columns (see 隨想錄, nos. 36-40). Later, when we met in Shanghai he would indicate that he knew that in both this and other essays I had been referring to the repression of the Beijing Spring, the closing of journals and the arrest of dissenting innocents.

While he would write a number of moving pieces castigating his personal cowardice and mendacity during the 1950s and 60s, when he was a celebrated artist and enthusiastic fellow-traveller of the party, Ba Jin was far more reluctant to be critical of the post-CR cultural scene and the frequent repressions authored by the party, of which the Beijing Spring crackdown was only the first. In his 1980s’ essays he would write, frequently and touchingly, about the need to be outspoken and honest; he was adamant that China, and Chinese writers, should not repeat the mistakes of the past.

However, as time went on—and the repressions (the arrests, bannings, censorship, harassment and debasement of cultural figures and intellectuals) continued—his circumspection was nothing less than egregious.

When John Minford and I produced Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience (Hong Kong 1986; 2nd ed., New York 1988), a volume of cultural and historical works related to dissent and the struggle for freedom of speech and democracy in China, we made overt reference to Wei Jingsheng and many other people of conscience. The book appeared shortly before the student protests of 1986 and the ouster of Hu Yaobang in 1987. In the second expanded edition of Seeds of Fire, we included the first English-language translation of Ba Jin’s important essay ‘On a CultRev Museum’ (“文革”博物館, see below), which had been published in Shanghai in August 1986. In an editorial introduction to our translation, we noted that Ba Jin had ‘remained conspicuously silent throughout the 1987 purge.’

As the repression of leading political and cultural figures was unfolding in early 1987, I wrote Ba Jin a letter. It was a personal appeal. I thought the further silencing of people of principle was an ominous development—and I was particularly aggrieved at the way that the courageous playwright and essayist Wu Zuguang 吳祖光 (who was a man I had the privilege to know and become close to from 1977) was treated. So I wrote to Ba Jin, also a friend of Zuguang’s, China’s leading elder writer and an avowed champion of cultural honesty and outspokenness.

In my letter I said that I was an admirer of his essay on the need to establish a Cultural Revolution Museum, and I added that John Minford and I had translated it for the second edition of our book. But I also suggested that perhaps it was premature merely to put the cultural practices and political oppression of the past on display in a museum for, it seemed to me, that the spirit (and practices) that animated the horrors of the past was still abroad. As his translator, and an admirer of his stance on honesty and his pledge not to repeat the mistakes of his past, I thought that the purge of 1987 was surely a time for him to speak out. After having been in contact for nearly a decade, this time I received no reply.

Ba Jin’s public silence then, and subsequently, was plangent. Indeed, during the numerous post-1976 cultural purges (you can count them, for there has been one virtually every two years for nigh on three decades now, some mild and risible, others vicious and momentarily effective), the banning of books and the harassment of writers, during these long years of soft and hard terror, Ba Jin’s voice was not to be heard. He did not speak up on behalf of his fellow writers or editors, men and women who might have found some solace in the support of an untouchable literary giant.

When I was next in Shanghai and Nanjing, I met up with mutual friends of Ba Jin and mine. They told me that my letter had caused the grand old man quite some discomfort. I was criticized for my temerity in addressing our old friend in such an unseemly fashion. I, in turn, remarked that the writer was timorous.

From that time, I have been a Ba Jin dissenter.*

But now that Ba Gong 巴公, the name by which I knew him, has passed, and amid the adulatory readings of his life, I too must pause to reflect. Ba Jin was sincere when he wrote of his embarrassment over his long years of boosterism for a system that showered him with largesse. He was profoundly moving when he remembered his wife, Xiao Shan 蕭珊, and her death; and he was wise when he called for the establishment of a Cultural Revolution Museum.

Perhaps I am wrong to have hoped he would speak up directly for those harried, stymied and oppressed cultural figures in the post-Mao era. Perhaps I should appreciate that, after 1978, while many sought to gain greater freedom of expression, often at great personal cost, for some writers like Ba Jin just as precious was the right to remain silent.

[*I should note that Ba Jin did add his voice to the massive wave of public support and clamour in favour of the student protesters of 1989. He wrote a short letter about the students on 18 May 1989 (see New Ghosts, Old Dreams: Chinese Rebel Voices, edited by Linda Jaivin and myself, New York, 1992, p.64.) However, when it was no longer politic to speak out, he fell silent once more.]

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Source:

• This essay was originally published under the title ‘A Dissenting View on Ba Jin’, Far Eastern Economic Review, November 2005, vol.168, no.10, pp.53-55, and subsequently reprinted online as Dissenting from Ba Jin, Danwei, 11 November 2005. Chinese characters and links have been added. My translation of selected essays from Ba Jin’s Random Thoughts is available via Internet Archive.

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Ba Jin: A Cultrev Museum

Translated by Geremie Barmé

In one of my Random Thoughts essays written some time ago I recorded a conversation with a friend. In it I suggested that they should build a Cultural Revolution Museum. Now, I have no well thought-out plan or detailed proposal for such a building, but I do firmly believe it is something we should do, something for which every Chinese should take responsibility.

That’s all I want to say; I’ll leave the details to others. I’m sure few of those who were baptised in the blood and fire of the Cultural Revolution will wish to remain silent. Everyone has his own story to tell. One thing is certain: no one will make out that the “cow sheds” [makeshift jails for intellectuals and cadres] were “heaven” , or say that the violent and ruthless murders that took place were really part of a “Great Proletarian Revolution”. People may have differences of
opinion, but I’m sure we are of the same basic mind: none of us wish to see another Cultural Revolution in China. Another disaster like that would mean the destruction of our nation.

I don’t think I’m being alarmist when I say this. Everything that happened twenty years ago is still clearly before my mind’s eye. Those endlessly long and painful days, the degradation and torture that so many were put through, the distortions, deceptions, confusion of good and bad, true and false, and all the frame-ups, the endless injustices. You cannot tell me we should forget all about it, or forbid people to talk about it? That would only make it possible for another Cultural Revolution to take place in twenty years time. By then people would somehow think it was something new.

“Another Cultural Revolution? Impossible!” I can already hear voices raised in protest. But is it really so unimaginable? I’ve given the matter a lot of thought over the last few years, in the hope of finding a clear answer to this question. Without an answer I shall never be able to sleep soundly at night. But no one can give me any assurances. I shall never be able to sleep in peace, I shall be forever in danger of tumbling out of my bed, waving my arms in the grip of some new nightmare.

It’s not that I don’t want to forget; it’s simply that the gory spectre of the past has me in its grip and won’t let me go. How I let myself be disarmed, how the disaster crept up on me, just how that tragedy unfolded, and the hateful role that I played in it all, walking step by step towards an abyss. It is as though it were all only yesterday. But I survived, even though I was left a shell of a man. How many talented people were destroyed in front of my very eyes! How many dear friends were torn from my side!

“It will never be repeated. Dry your tears and look to the future,” my friends urge, soothe me. But I remain only half convinced, and think to myself: we must wait and see. And I did wait, right up to the time they started calling for “the elimination of Spiritual Pollution”.

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I was in hospital at the time. It was my second stay in hospital, for treatment of Parkinson’s disease. I was in the neurology ward. My left leg, which I’d broken the year before, was better, though three millimetres shorter than it used to be. I was out of traction and could walk with the help of a stick. It was a great effort for me to read, so I’d got into the habit of listening to the morning news on the radio, and watching the television news at night in the lounge room. I was allowed visitors after three in the afternoon, and they often brought all types of strange news with them. I’d only been in hospital a few days when things started getting tense. Every day the radio would broadcast speeches by various provincial leaders denouncing “Spiritual Pollution”. At night, artists and writers would appear on television and pledge themselves to the fight to wipe out Spiritual Pollution. On the surface I remained calm and collected, but when I returned to my room each night I was haunted by visions of those early days of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. I couldn’t help feeling that another tempest was brewing, another disaster was stalking us. I wasn’t scared for myself: what do I have to fear at my age? I simply couldn’t understand why they had to start another Cultural Revolution and cast us once more into that abyss. Still there was no one to answer my question.

Rumours abounded. It was as though I could see a giant broom sweeping back and forth in front of me [one of the early slogans of the early Cultural Revolution was “sweep away all cow demons and snake spirits”]. I counted the days and waited. What a long and painful wait that was! I could see the dark storm clouds gathering, the war drums thundered closer all the time. But this time I kept clear-headed, I was able to make a comparison between the last Cultural Revolution and the details of this campaign as it unfolded. I heard no cries of “Long Live”, no one was “taking the right stand” or capitulating in the face of the onslaught. But somehow the process continued to unfold, the thunder could be heard in the distance and the first drops of rain were just beginning to fall. And then, within one month of it all starting, someone [Hu Yaobang, the Party General Secretary who was subsequently purged] spoke out, and their brooms were unable to get at “the dust”. I don’t know where all the storm clouds were blown to, but those bellicose drummers had no choice but to fall silent. We had been spared another holocaust.

I was invited to attend the forty-seventh International P.E.N. Conference in Tokyo in May 1984, and wrote my speech in hospital. I spent another peaceful six months in the hospital [after that]. I had a stream of visitors, and they always brought with them new rumours, the reliability of which they left to me to sort out.

I should be thankful to the people who have kept their memories of the Cultural Revolution alive for the fact that I was left undisturbed in my hospital room. They had refused to let their blood be used to nourish the “buds” of another Cultural Revolution. Such attractive buds, but oh so poisonous once they blossom! All it would have needed would have been one new flower and I would have been dragged out of my hospital bed and denied treatment.

After a year of reflection and analysis I came to realize that neither the soil nor the climate existed for a second Cultural Revolution. It was quite the opposite, however much everything seemed to be in place for such a thing to happen. And yet if that “one month” I spoke of above had been a little longer, say two months, or four months, then things might have reached the point of no return. Because there are a lot of people around who are capable of manipulating a Cultural Revolution to their own advantage ….

I’ve said more than enough. I received many letters from friends and readers; the papers printed articles in approval. They spoke in a far deeper, more thorough and forceful manner. They have even more intense recollections than I have, they suffered more. They have made themselves heard: “Never again will we allow that dark and evil period of history to repeat itself!”

The building of a Cultural Revolution Museum is not the responsibility of one person. Everyone owes it to their children and the future to leave a monument to the harrowing lessons of the past.
“Don’t let history repeat itself” should not be an empty statement. Everyone must be made to see clearly, to remember fully. That’s why it would be best to build a museum, one in which concrete and real things could be collected, emblems of the terrifying events of the Cultural Revolution, displayed so that people can see what actually happened here in China twenty years ago. Let people be confronted with the whole process and meditate on what we Chinese did throughout that decade. Force people to take off their masks, to show their conscience and to face themselves as they really are. Let them repay the debts of the past. Those who aren’t selfish will not be scared of being deceived, those who dare speak the truth will not easily fall for lies. Only by remaining mindful of the Cultural Revolution will people be able to prevent history replaying itself.

It is extremely important that we build this Museum, for only by remembering the “past” can we be masters of the “future”

August 1986

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Source:

• Geremie Barmé & John Minford, Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience (New York: Hill & Wang, 1988, 2nd ed, pp.381-385. The portrait of Ba Jin by Ding Cong has been added.

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Door-handle fashioned after Ba Jin’s hand, National Museum of Modern Chinese Literature 中國現代文學博物館, established in 1985 under the aegis of Ba Jin, Beijing

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