Archive | January, 2005

When liberal writers Liu Xiaobo and Yu Jie were recently (and briefly) detained by Chinese police, there was a world wide chorus of denunciation. The liberal writers’ endorsement of the U.S. aggression in Iraq made them even more heroic in the eyes of the Murdoch-dominated press. Not surprisingly, there has been no coverage whatsoever of a more egregious case of crackdown on dissent—because it is dissent from the left. On December 21, 2004, four Maoists were tried in Zhengzhou for having handed out leaflets that denounced the restoration of capitalism in China and called for a return to the “socialist road.” The leaflets had been distributed in a public park in the City of Zhengzhou on the occasion of the 28th anniversary of the death of Chairman Mao Zedong. Two of the defendants, Zhang Zhengyao, 56, and Zhang Ruquan, 69, were both found guilty of libel, and each given a three-year prison sentence on December 24, 2004. The case has since generated a lot of expressions of solidarity in leftist circles within China. Postings to a leading leftist website in China in the last few days have set out an abridged translation of the incriminating leaflet, the commemorative piece titled “Mao Zedong forever our leader,” plus a commentary whose author went to Zhengzhou to show solidarity on the day of the trial on December 21. These pieces have been translated by our comrades at the China Study Group, who have asked that we post them here at the MR website. We are glad to do so, believing that a strong case can be made that the story of the left opposition inside China is the most important and least covered in the world