Voices from Underground
2011年12月10日 00:00
Jesse Wong
《我的父親羅孚–一個報人、「間諜」和作家的故事》
羅海雷 著
天地圖書, 2011, 480頁, HK$145
《中共在香港(上冊) [1921-1949] 》
江關生著
天地圖書, 2011, 472頁, HK$120
“As I have said many times before, I am not a member of the (Chinese) Communist Party…. ”
– Leung Chung-ying (梁振英), an aspirant for the post of Hong Kong chief executive, in a recent magazine interview.
It should be no surprise that the masses reflexively reach for the TV remote control to get away from news about the Hong Kong chief executive election. Starting with the early screening of potential candidates, the central government in Beijing is firmly in charge. The rubber-stamp electorate is also carefully selected: Only 1,200, out of a population of seven million, get to vote. When they do so next March, the preordained outcome will have become obvious to even the most clueless.
Elections that set out by excluding independent minds aren’t likely to yield effective leaders. Perhaps Beijing truly would like to have it both ways. In reality, feeble political leadership has been a hallmark of Hong Kong in its post-colonial incarnation as a Special Administrative Region of China. So much so that central government bigwigs were reduced to very public hand-wringing on a few occasions. But don’t trash the contest just because the rules are rigged, the winner is fixed, and the ultimate consequences please almost no one.
The SAR ruling class is protected from the public it serves by muscular security, fenced compounds and, above all, a weak culture of accountability. The protective layers get peeled back a bit around election time so chief-executive hopefuls can get close to the people, grasping hands and courting the media as if millions of votes were at stake. Cynics scorn such theatrics as sham democracy desperate for legitimacy, and they have a point. All the same, when publicity is invited, awkward questions follow. They have the effect, sometimes, of letting glimmers of light into hidden corners of the Hong Kong soul.
Not every hidden truth revealed carries equal weight. A lot of journalistic talent was deployed to decode the mealy-mouthed admission of philandering by Henry Tang Ying-yen (唐英年), a scion of textiles barons and an enduring, yet forgettable, presence at the highest levels of SAR officialdom. Now that we know he’s less dull than he appears, we still aren’t sure why he’s the smart-money pick for next chief executive. Meanwhile, a mystery far more intriguing than “Who Was (Were) the Girlfriend(s)?” is playing on a second stage.
The whispering about Leung Chun-ying, who heads the Asian arm of an international real-estate services firm, began quite some time ago. He responded with an emphatic denial. Yet it didn’t go away, and swelled into a crescendo as his desire to be chief executive became ever more apparent. One reputable newspaper columnist was joined by another. Then an elder statesman in local politics spoke up, followed by another, and another. All were convinced that he is a closet member of the Chinese Communist Party. Repeated denials were to no avail.
Newcomers to Hong Kong might feel puzzled. Whichever way one turns, a Five Star Red Flag or some other symbol of Chinese sovereignty isn’t far away. Why should membership in the national ruling party sound like a dirty secret?
To answer the question, it helps to remember that Chinese Communism once considered the imperialist West its bitterest enemy. Hence the veil of secrecy over its activities – “underground work” in Communist usage — as long as Hong Kong was in enemy hands. Embedded within the Xinhua News Agency, the party oversaw a small circle of leftist organizations and state-owned firms’ branch offices. (Xinhua also did consular duty and intelligence work, besides reporting the news.) The British closely monitored suspected Communists, expelling troublesome ones from time to time.
Those old antagonisms were receding even before the last British governor sailed away for good some 14 years ago. Strangely, while the world has changed, the underground still isn’t seeing the light of day. A Liaison Office, now fronting for the party in Xinhua’s place, bustles behind the scenes pulling political strings. Members, as in Cold War days, are under strict orders to deny the status if asked.
Gamely playing along, a burgeoning nostalgia industry draws crowds with heritage tours, movies, museum exhibitions and much more. Typically, they offer pleasant walks down memory lane that tiptoe around the C word. Such diversions make it easy to forget the more trying aspects of life in the party’s shadow – bombs and rioting in the streets; spurts of anxiety-driven outward migration; fortunes lost or made in the midst of financial panic; and draconian police powers ushered in by colonial administrators with the Communist menace on their minds.
In theory, the party had a fairly consistent line on Hong Kong predating the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. Party leaders ordered the troops to stop short of the border with the colony on the verge of civil-war victory over the ruling Kuomintang. Although fervently nationalistic, they recognized that their country would need much from the outside, from hard currency to foreign intelligence to Western science to the support of overseas Chinese. Left under British rule, the enclave could serve as a strategic opening in their Communist bamboo curtain through which very limited external links would be maintained.
The grand strategy wasn’t so readily comprehensible down the party ranks. Frequent power struggles in Beijing further obscured the main message. As a result, contradictions buffeted the Hong Kong policy through most of the Mao Zedong (毛澤東) years (ending with his death in 1976). Leaders who counseled accommodation in private spouted fiery anti-Western rhetoric in public. The tail sometimes wagged the dog as apparatchiks on the ground provoked confrontations that sucked in the center.
Beijing’s policy in the post-Mao years went from letting the British stay to getting them to leave. The new actually resembled the old insofar as the SAR would continue as a capitalist enclave, albeit under a Chinese flag. But turmoil in China cast a pall over the transition. As the country moved toward reform and greater openness, stirring popular expectations, fissures opened in the top leadership over how far to go. Two successive party general secretaries got sacked. The Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests were crushed. In Hong Kong, Xu Jiatun (許家屯), Xinhua director and Communist-in-chief, fled to the U.S. after falling out with his bosses in Beijing.
Thanks to his memoirs, which he wrote in exile in the early 1990s, we know that membership, a secret even to most party insiders, totaled about 6,000 when he took up the Xinhua posting in 1983. Fewer than half were expatriates like him who were assigned from the mainland. The rest were local recruits from Hong Kong and Portuguese-run Macao, who formed the core of the underground, officially called the Hong Kong and Macao Work Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.
His memoirs were followed by those of Jin Yauru (金堯如), a former chief editor of Wen Wei Po, the Communist mouthpiece newspaper in Hong Kong, who quit the party in disgust over the Tiananmen Square crackdown. Their work has contributed enormously to outside understanding of Beijing’s pre-1997 thinking on Hong Kong. In the new biography of yet another disaffected ex-Communist, we have a personal account at last of life with the underground.
If Lo Fu (羅孚) had not been a Communist, he would still be worthy of a biography. He is a man of letters, a rare breed in crassly commercial Hong Kong, churning out newspaper columns in his modest apartment even as he coaxes words out of others for literary collections he edits. As a newspaper editor, he had the idea of serializing kung fu romances and one of his writers, Louis Cha (查良鏞), went on to become grand master of the genre and best-selling Chinese author alive. His circle of friends includes many top Chinese writers, painters and calligraphers and he also has a keen eye for Chinese art. A local museum once acquired a work by landscape master Huang Binhong (黃賓虹) from him for HK$1 million. He had paid HK$300 for it years earlier.
He had been born in 1921 in Guilin. From his youth, he had aspired to follow in the footsteps of Lu Xun (魯迅), a 20th century Chinese literary giant admired as much for his writing as for his independent mind. In 1948, while working in his hometown for the Da Gong Bao newspaper, he was sent to work at its Hong Kong edition, known locally as Ta Kung Pao. Among the few possessions that accompanied him on his journey was a set of “Lu Xun’s Complete Works.”
In the biography, we learn he joined the party soon after arriving in Hong Kong. We also learn he rose quickly at the newspaper, by then a mouthpiece for the Chinese government. For many years, he doubled as its deputy chief editor and chief editor of a sister publication, Xin Wan Bao. We learn many other interesting facts, including his secret assignment to win sympathy and friends among overseas Chinese and foreign governments. Unfortunately, we never get close enough to him to experience his intellectual journey from Lu Xun devotee to party hack. Nor do we get much of a sense of internal conflict in this man of extraordinary refinement who also seems capable of extraordinary callousness.
Being in Hong Kong, he was a bystander as friends and onetime newspaper colleagues fell victim one after another on the mainland to Mao’s ruthless purges of intellectuals. He shrugged, thinking maybe they had done something to deserve it.
During China’s Great Leap Forward, the worst man-made famine in history, his writing blithely echoed party lies about abundant harvests. Some 40 kilometers to the north of his newspaper office, emaciated refugees were rushing at barbed wire fencing in broad daylight in hopes of entering Hong Kong.
And then there was the turmoil of 1967, still a cause of bitterness between the underground and society’s mainstream. Believing wrongly that Beijing was about to boot out the British for good, Hong Kong party bosses orchestrated rioting, violence against perceived enemies and indiscriminate planting of bombs fake and lethal. His contribution, among other things: the planting of a fake bomb near a girls’ secondary school with two teenage sons and a couple of other youngsters in tow.
His break with the party occurred rather late in life. In 1982, he was arrested in Beijing on charges of passing state secrets to U.S. intelligence. He pleaded guilty (but has since indicated that he did so under duress) and spent 10 years under lightly guarded house arrest. In an unrelated development, misfortune also befell his oldest son. A China trade executive based in Hong Kong, Lo Hoi Sing (羅海星) was arrested in Guangzhou in 1989 and spent two years in prison for trying to spirit Tiananmen Square activists out of China. When it was all over, the former party hack was free to write anything for any newspaper of his choosing, and the Lu Xun devotee found his voice again.
Lo Hoi Lui (羅海雷), the biographer, is the youngest son in a family of four brothers and one sister. (He wasn’t in the phony bomb brigade.) A British-educated engineer, he is now 53 years old and runs his own software consulting firm. Although his book contains little about the father-son relationship except for one shouting match, one senses between the lines fondness for the father and pride in his achievements. One also senses a curious absence of participation by the father.
In the foreword for the biography, Mr. Lo expresses enthusiasm for his son’s endeavor. However, the book contains no direct quotations of any substance from him and his thoughts are paraphrased in just a few places – a hint, perhaps, of residual loyalty to the underground.
If it is hard for a son to get an ex-Communist father to open up, what hope might an outsider have of finding the key to the secret underground? Very little, it seems, as the party’s on-the-ground activities are very lightly covered in the better-regarded Hong Kong histories. A former local journalist, Jiang Guansheng (江關生), is taking on the challenge anyway in his two-volume set on the party’s history in Hong Kong.
Just one volume has been published so far. It covers the 1921-1949 years, from the party’s birth to that of the People’s Republic. The party has been much more open about its affairs in Hong Kong of this period than those of the subsequent years. As a result, volume one is mostly about separating the wheat from the chaff in bundles of memoirs, diaries, party histories and archives scattered around libraries in Hong Kong and China. Sometimes, the chaff gets in the way, as the author tries too hard to point out minute inconsistencies in people’s recollection of events.
Although it comes to 472 pages, the volume is lighter than it feels. Fully one third is taken up by an appendix consisting of essays by the author, not all of them very relevant. The main text doesn’t always provide sufficient context to help the reader keep up with the names and events speeding across the page. But it is a painstaking piece of research, and it fills a big gap in everyday knowledge about Hong Kong’s past. Readers should be looking forward to volume two.