The LongBow Papers

Liberal-oriented columns, commentary and archived articles on national and international news, politics, and the communication arts--with emphasis on China--by Joseph Bosco, author, journalist, director and actor; Professor of Drama and Communications at Beijing Foreign Studies University.

Monday, December 27, 2004

A Blue Christmas but Maybe a White New Years

10:18 PM

To say that all of my Christmases are blue is not an exaggeration, far to the contrary. You see, in 56 years of a tumultuous life, the worst thing that ever happened to me by far happened the day after Christmas, 1975. 29 years ago today a train struck my father's automobile on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, killing him instantly. I was a full-grown man of 27-years, a husband and a father, but it devastated me, truly laying me low for months that too soon became years.

I did come out of the black hole that was my life eventually and have added many chapters to the collective books of my life. But still I miss him every hour of every day of every week of my life--and at Christmas time every year it overwhelms me; for various personal reasons, this year was the worst in a decade. In a life unusually full of meeting or reporting on impressive people, famous and not so famous, I can still say that the most impressive man I ever knew was Frank A. Bosco, my father. By no measure was he a perfect man; but by all of the important ones he was a great man.

There are many detractors of my life, the public one and the private one, who would sharply argue with the notion that much of anything good has come of it. But for those who would disagree with that blanket condemnation of my life, particularly the publishing or broadcasting efforts of my life, I offer that any and all degrees of quality found in any of it is directly attributable to his mind and his seemingly effortless teaching of what was or wasn't yet in that marvelous mind.

Having been given so much from that great man, why was I so pathologically afraid of living in a world without him in it? Why even now do I quietly weep for him more often than people even close to me know? Because I am selfish; because there was so much more he had to teach me.

Instantly upon hearing the soul-killing words, "Your father is dead," on the phone in the middle of the night, I knew that in one very big part of my life I was irrevocably alone, and I absolutely knew that the very best I could ever be was suddenly only half of what it could have been. I know it still: If only that goddamned negligent train had allowed him to become the 85-year-old man of gentle wisdom, instruction and foresight in my life that he would have been...today.

However, I still have that half to work with; I am not done yet. This weekend it will be New Years; my father especially liked New Years. For some reason my Christmas blues mostly fade to a poignant tint by New Years and hope comes again in my life. That is what happens to me every December. For days on end I feel or sense no hope, irrationally, to be sure; but I feel completely without hope all the same. Without hope, there can be no art; because, there can be no life.

I believe this New Year will be white. Therefore, I am now posting the Holiday greeting card my lovely wife Ellen created for us and has been displaying for quite some time on The Crackpot Chronicles.

If you would, please drop by WOW, there are a number of new posts up.

Also check back here; I have some ideas about a somewhat different direction, or perhaps more accurately, a different format The LongBow Papers might undertake in the near future.

10:18 PM / Editor / permalink 0 comments

Wednesday, December 01, 2004

A Journalist Who Truly Does Love China...

9:48 PM

As a journalist, as a teacher of journalism at the Beijing Foreign Studies University, as a member of PEN, I would not be able to face the mirror and shave in the morning if I did not reproduce in its entirety Nicholas Kristof's column in today's The New York Times. If for nothing else than as a permanent record in these pages, but more importantly I do it so that I can face those 20 year-old Chinese journalists of tomorrow I teach.

Mr. Kristof's words need no commentary from me. The column is titled, "China's Donkey Droppings":

For the last century, the title of "most important place in the world" has belonged to the United States, but that role seems likely to shift in this century to China.

So what are China's new leaders, Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, really like? Are they visionaries who are presiding over the greatest explosion of wealth the world has ever known? Or are they ruthless thugs who persecute Christians, Falun Gong adherents, labor leaders and journalists in a desperate attempt to maintain their dictatorship?

There's some evidence for both propositions, and they are probably both true to some degree.

When Mr. Hu and Mr. Wen rose to the helm of the Communist Party two years ago, many Chinese hoped they would bring a new openness to a nation that is dynamic economically but stagnant intellectually. Instead, China has become more repressive.

The repression has now engulfed a member of The New York Times's family. Zhao Yan, a researcher for the Beijing bureau of The Times, has been detained by the authorities since September and is not allowed to communicate with his family or lawyers.

Mr. Zhao is accused of leaking state secrets, a very serious charge that could lead to a decade in prison. China's government may believe that he was behind the September scoop by The Times's Beijing bureau chief, Joseph Kahn, that China's former leader, Jiang Zemin, was about to retire from his last formal position.

While The Times's policy is, wisely, never to comment on the sources of articles, my own private digging indicates that Mr. Zhao was not the source for that scoop. He is innocent of everything except being a fine journalist who, before joining The Times, wrote important articles in the Chinese press about corruption.

(In fairness, sending journalists to prison for doing their job is not an exclusively Chinese phenomenon. Several American journalists - Jim Taricani of NBC, Judith Miller of this newspaper and Matthew Cooper of Time - may be sent to U.S. prisons in the next month or two for refusing to reveal their sources.)

Mr. Zhao's case is depressingly similar to that of another Chinese journalist, Jiang Weiping. He is serving a six-year sentence for "revealing state secrets," even though his real crime was exposing corruption.

"China has changed so much economically, but not politically," Jiang Weiping's wife, Li Yanling, told me. "It's a puzzle to me."

The authorities ordered Ms. Li to keep quiet about her husband's arrest, and detained her when she didn't. The couple's daughter, now 15, was traumatized at losing first her father and then her mother to the Chinese prison system. When Ms. Li was finally released, the daughter called her constantly from school to make sure that she had not been arrested again.

Mr. Zhao's arrest is just the latest in a broad crackdown in China. The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that 42 journalists are now in prison in China, more than in any other country.

"There was a period of openness, a period of hope, when the new leaders first came to power," said Jiao Guobiao, a journalism professor at Beijing University. "But now they've consolidated power, and everything has closed up again."

Mr. Jiao should know. He wrote an essay this year denouncing censorship, and it was immediately censored. Now the government has banned Mr. Jiao from teaching.

I've felt this cooling as well. I was planning to visit China this month, but the government has declined to give me a visa. It's the first time I've been refused, and the State Security Ministry may have worried that I would write a column about its unjust imprisonment of Mr. Zhao.

I love China, and I share its officials' distaste for those who harm it. That's why I'm angry that hard-liners in Beijing are presenting China to the world as repressive, fragile, tyrannical and backward. They are also undermining China's long-term prospects by gagging its people.

China now dazzles visitors with luxury skyscrapers, five-star hotels and modern freeways. This boom is real and spectacular, but for China to be an advanced nation it needs not only spaceships, but also freedom.

Otherwise, all that dazzle is just a mirage. The Chinese leaders might recall an old peasant expression, "Lu fen dan'r, biaomian'r guang." It means, "On the outside, even donkey droppings gleam."