[Alex Linder]

Internal dissenters, or those deemed to be traitors and revisionists, were subjected to brutal treatment by the state media -- literally trial-by-media -- especially where the victim was a high profile member of the party. Thus, in a report of the Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee, Liu Shao-Chi, who had disagreed with Mao, was referred to as a 'renegade', 'traitor' and 'scab' (Documents, 1971, 243). Lesser figures would be attacked at local level and those deemed to be guilty of serious deviations from the party line could face the dreadful pressure of a struggl session in which they were subjeted to prolonged physical and psychological abuse often in front of large audiences and were called upon to repent their crimes (Chang, 1993, Lifton, 1961, Lin, 1991, Saunders, 1996, Thurston, 1988, Wu, 1994). Other methods were rectification campaigns designed to correct 'bad thoughts', and a variation on the struggle session known as unity-criticism-unity, which involved breaking the victim down, "deconstructing" him, as it were, and then putting him back together again.

Worse still was the thought reform, si xiang gai zao, that was practised in the Chinese concentration camp system, the laogai, or 'Auschwitz of the mind' in Harry Wu's startling expression (Saunders, 1996, 73). 'For the Chinese communist', notes Wu, 'the aim is not to destroy him [the prisoner], a hostile element, physically through violence, but to destroy him mentally and ideologically, while threatening him with violence' (Saunders, 1996, vii).[20] Certain forms of physical abuse are used in conjunction with thought reform, as in the degrading ritual of bai lao men ('paying respects to the cell-god'), which involves a new prisoner's being made to suck up excrement from a bucket through straws and then say that the excrement tasted delicious (Saunders, 1996, 41).

Compelling prisoners to act out their roles in what to the Westerner appears to be a theatre of the absurd plays a major role in breaking the prisoner's mental resistance. The more grotesquely at odds with the truth, the more blatant the distortion and accusation, the more powerful the intellectual violence done to the victim. Agreeing to some blatant fabrication, the victim damages and eventually destroys his ability to think for himself, which is consistent with the Maoist view that: "Self" is the origin of all evil' (Union Research Service, 1968, 225). His inner self destroyed or broken, the victim ceases, finally, to be an independent thinking human being.

[onto page 72, more wednesday]