Chinese Cultural Vandalism and Popular Unrest

It was during the reign of Emperor Zhenzong of Song, so the story goes, that a maiden from Hangzhou, a certain Lady Li, elegant and lithesome with her dark eyebrows lightly curved like the leaves of a weeping willow, ventured to the capital city of Bianjing, where she entered into the service of the favorite imperial concubine, Virtuous Consort Liu. One day, while strolling through the grounds of the Dragon Palace, Lady Li attracted the attention of the Son of Heaven himself, and was soon in a delicate condition. The childless Consort Liu, threatened by a younger and more fertile rival, and not nearly so virtuous as advertised, enlisted the support of the eunuch Guo Hai, and when Lady Li gave birth to a baby boy, the newborn was secretly spirited away, and replaced with the skinned and bloody corpse of a civet cat. 

Horrified by this apparently monstrous birth, Emperor Zhenzong stripped Consort Li of her rank and had her imprisoned in the Forbidden Palace. Consort Liu, her veins still coursing with the poison of deadly jealousy, ordered her maid, Kou Zhu, to smother the infant and dispose of the body. Thankfully, Kou Zhu did not murder the prince, instead delivering him to the home of the sympathetic Eighth Prince. Consort Liu had her compassionate maidservant tortured to death, but when she convinced the emperor to execute Lady Li in similarly cruel fashion, the court eunuch Yu Zhong nobly offered himself up in her place, while another eunuch, Qin Feng, escorted the unfortunate former consort to a distant village, where she lived out her days in blindness and destitution. 

Many years later, the renowned magistrate Bao Zheng was passing through that same village, and he encountered that same old woman who was claiming to be, of all things, the mother of Emperor Renzong. The intervening period had seen Lady Li’s child rescued from the Dragon Palace intrigues and even adopted by the scheming Consort Liu (after her temper had quite cooled). Emperor Zhenzong of Song, the third of his line, died in 1022, and thus Lady Li’s son Renzong, who had been replaced at birth with a civet cat, now sat upon the Dragon Throne. Convinced by the blind woman’s seemingly improbable tale, Bao Zheng set out for the capital to investigate the matter. Dressing himself up in the guise of Yama, the Lord of Hell, and accompanied by an actress playing the role of Kou Zhu’s hungry, vengeful, white-robed ghost, Bao Zheng confronted the wicked eunuch Guo Hai. The judge extracted a confession, and the eunuch was put to death on the night of the following full moon, while Consort Liu, her villainy exposed, retired to her bedchamber, refused food and drink, and wasted away.  (READ MORE from Matthew Omolesky: The Vanishing Point of International Law: Genocide and the ‘Labels Argument’)

When the investigating magistrate presented Emperor Renzong with incontrovertible evidence of Consort Liu’s and Guo Hai’s wrongdoing, the monarch stubbornly remained unwilling to acknowledge Lady Li as his mother. Appalled by the emperor’s utter lack of xiao, or filial piety, Bao Zheng sentenced the Son of Heaven to be beaten. Aware that this sentence of corporal punishment might be considered lèse-majesté, Bao Zheng amended his sentence so that the emperor’s dragon robes, rather than his person, were lashed with canes — an extraordinary penalty all the same. Duly chastened, Renzong welcomed Lady Li back into the Dragon Palace, and regarded her as the true empress dowager, making for a relatively happy ending under the circumstances. And so it was that 

A palace plot has come undone, 

A mighty judge the truth has won, 

An inglorious end the wicked met, 

A dynasty, its course is set.

The rightful king all subjects hail,

Evil deeds will not prevail.

“The Civet Cat Exchanged for a Crown Prince [狸貓換太子]” is but one of dozens of stories that tell of Bao Zheng’s cunning, probity, and scrupulously even-handed administration of justice. Go to the Memorial Temple of Lord Bao, located on the banks of Lord Bao Lake in Kaifeng (formerly Bianjing), and you will find seven courtyards connecting numerous memorial halls, each devoted to the famous Song Dynasty magistrate, and containing various artifacts associated with his life. Of particular note are three guillotines — really more like oversized hinged-blade paper cutters — used to administer the traditional, and exquisitely painful, method of execution known as yāo zhǎn, or “waist chop.” The first guillotine is in the form of a dog, the second a tiger, the third a dragon. Commoners would be laid across the dog and sliced in half. Corrupt officials would meet their excruciating end atop the more presentable tiger. And corrupt members of the royal family would be afforded the honor of being carved into pieces while draped over a majestic, gleaming, roaring dragon. It is said that the heartless Prince Consort Chen Shimei, who plotted to kill his wife and children in order to marry an imperial princess, met such an end at Bao Zheng’s command, despite the royal family’s attempts to intervene in the case. All were equal in the calm, unblinking eyes of the law, from the lowliest serf to the Son of Heaven, so long as Bao Zheng was the one dispensing justice.

It is easy to see why Bao Zheng became such a popular hero, afforded the honorific title Bāo qīngtiān, or Justice Bao, and considered an incarnation of the Astral God of Civil Arts, and also of Guan Yu, the “Holy Great Emperor; God of War Manifesting Benevolence, Bravery and Prestige; Protector of the Country and Defender of the People; Proud and Honest Supporter of Peace and Reconciliation; Promoter of Morality, Loyalty and Righteousness.” Bao Zheng died in 1062, leaving a warning that “any of my descendants who commits bribery as an official shall not be allowed back home nor buried in the family burial site. He who shares not my values is not my descendant.”

The magistrate was buried in Hefei Bao Gong Park in Hefei, Anhui, a site that, like his memorial temple and his mansion in Kaifeng, became a place of Bao Zheng worship. During the Cultural Revolution, temples dedicated to Bao Zheng were looted, statues of Bao Zheng were torn down, portraits of Bao Zheng were tossed into bonfires, but at the last possible moment his bones were dug up by his descendants in a remarkable display of filial piety, and hidden until the insane paroxysm of cultural destruction had subsided. The Bao Gong Cemetery was re-inaugurated in 1987, but the magistrate’s distant relatives kept the precise location of their illustrious forebear’s remaining bone fragments a closely-guarded secret, just in case.

II

On March 10, 2024, a recording of a crying woman, kneeling in front of an altar at Bao Zheng’s Kaifeng Mansion as she begged for divine relief from an unfair court judgement, began to go viral on social media platforms including Weibo, Douyin, Bilibili, and Xiaohongshu. Rumors spread that pilgrimages sites associated with Justice Bao were to be conveniently “closed for restoration” as a consequence, although ultimately access was only restricted to the Hefei Bao Gong Park in Hefei. This does not mean that the communist regime ignored the outburst. According to Bitter Winter’s Wang Yichi, in the weeks that followed “both plainclothes and uniformed police officers keep the area under surveillance and identify those who pray loudly or cry. Folk devotions are generally tolerated in China, but not when they become connected with popular protest.”

Bao Zheng, a universally-beloved historical figure who attained positively mythological status, and has starred in countless gong’an (crime-case) novels, plays, mangas, television shows, and video games, should not be seen merely as a sort of Song-era Sherlock Holmes, although when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s mysteries arrived in Qing China, they were marketed as featuring the “English Judge Bao.” His unbiased judgments, and his willingness to hold wrongdoers accountable no matter their status, even if they occupied the Dragon Throne itself, made him the very embodiment of righteousness and the rule of law. Justice Bao, the “Iron-Faced Judge [鐵面判官]” whose smile was a rarer sight, it was said, than clear water in the Yellow River, remains a thorn in the side of tyrants nine hundred and sixty-two years after his death. Mao’s Red Guard tried to destroy his legacy, and Xi Jinping’s Ministry of State Security may be inclined to do likewise, but Bao Zheng is now firmly associated in the collective Chinese consciousness with popular unrest and dissatisfaction with communist corruption.

Two weeks after the recording of the Kaifeng Mansion petitioner went viral, on the eve of the Qingming Festival (also known as Ancestors’ Day or Tomb-Sweeping Day), the Nantong Municipal Civil Affairs Bureau promulgated a regulation prohibiting the burning of spirit money or joss paper. “In order to further promote  funeral reform in our city, abandon the vulgar customs of mourning, advocate civilized sacrifices, and purify the urban environment,” the notice declared, “it is forbidden for any unit or individual to manufacture and sell feudal superstitious funeral supplies such as underworld coins, spirit money, and ancestor money in the city.” Bafflingly enough, the regulation was issued in accordance not just with the “Regulations on the Administration of Funerals in Jiangsu,” but also with the “Law of the People’s Republic of China on the Prevention and Control of Air Pollution,” as if the 12.7 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, the hundreds of millions of tons of waste, and the invaluable levels of industrial pollution belched up by China on an annual basis, more than all developed nations in the world combined, might be somehow attributed to burning a bit of incense. The people of Nantong, instead of passively obeying these absurd regulations, instead strenuously protested the funeral reform measures. State-controlled China Central Television reported on the controversy, and even admitted that the measures were “mechanical, unrealistic, and inhumane” — an accurate description of communist China and leftist collectivism in general — and the Qingming Festival was observed as it has been for millennia, with all the appurtenances of those age-old “vulgar customs of mourning” plainly visible.

Elsewhere in China this spring, thousands of villagers in Suizhou, in Hubei Province, came out in force to demonstrate their opposition to a cemetery reform policy known as the “Three One Hundred Percents” — all burials will be uniform, all burials will involve cremation, and all cremains will be buried in public welfare cemeteries. Previously, the Chinese government has been trying to overturn centuries of Chinese burial practices by promoting sea burials, tree burials, more efficient tomb-sharing, or vertical burials, but efforts have been stepped up in recent years, with officials even going door-to-door appropriating unused coffins. Ancestral halls and family cemeteries would be effectively outlawed under the new regulations, and ancestor worship made increasingly difficult. Article 7 of the regulations, as the pseudonymous Chinese journalist Wu Guoxuan has pointed out, is particularly cruel: “If one spouse died and has been buried, and a tomb has been reserved for the other spouse, if the other spouse dies after 0:00 on March 20, 2024, s/he cannot be buried with the spouse who was previously buried. S/he must be cremated, and the ashes must be buried in the public welfare cemetery.” It is little wonder that thousands of villagers took to the streets during the May Day holidays in a desperate bid to preserve their most deeply-rooted cultural traditions, an occasion of public unrest that was also widely circulated through social media channels. 

Meanwhile, in the villages of Shuiwei and Huanggang near Shenzhen, some four thousand villagers were confronting authorities after an ancestral hall was torn down to make way for a real estate development. Holding a banner stating their intention to “Resolutely oppose the demolition of the ancestral hall, defend the authentic ancestral hall, and never give up,” the protesters warned their local government that “the forced demolition of the ancestral hall” will “not [be] tolerated by Heaven.” These are isolated incidents, perhaps, but they demonstrate an increasing willingness on the part of the Chinese populace, when faced with the systematic destruction of their traditional culture, to go beyond the age-old practice of petitioning the central authorities in the desperate hope of achieving justice, and to engage instead in more direct action in defense of their ancestral way of life.

Lacking the scale of the Tiananmen Square, Hong Kong, or anti-lockdown protests, the aforementioned demonstrations are unlikely to do much in the way of destabilizing the regime, although we should keep in mind the old adage that gutta cavat lapidem, non vi sed saepe cadendo (“the drop of rain maketh a hole in the stone, not by violence, but by oft falling”). Aside from their political implications, these traditionalist protests have their own intrinsic value. In her 1965 essay “The Unforgivable,” the arch-Catholic writer Cristina Camp recounted an incident that occurred in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion:

In an era of purely horizontal progress, in which the human group seems more and more to resemble that line of Chinese men on their way to the guillotine mentioned in chronicles of the Boxer Rebellion, the only non frivolous attitude seems to be that of the man in line who is reading a book. We are astonished to see the others beating another to a bloody pulp while they wait their turn, trying to curry favor with the executioners at work on the platform. We admire the two or three heroes who keep charging headlong at one or another executioner impartially (since it’s well understood there’s only one executioner, even if the masks do alternate.) As for the man who is reading: he at least shows good judgement and a love of life.

For Campo, the greatest hero of all is the man who, when asked why he was still clinging to his trusty book even as his execution drew nigh, responded that “I know that every line read is a gain.” In the face of tyranny, of injustice, of death, every line is indeed a gain. So, too, is every tomb swept, every traditional burial undertaken, every incense stick and joss paper burnt, every rite conducted at even the most dilapidated ancestral hall.

The Chinese villagers, marching in the streets to protest the regime’s assault on their ancient religious traditions and burial customs, have one key advantage over their tormentors. They are fighting to preserve fundamental aspects of Chinese culture, and can hardly be accused, like the Tiananmen protesters of 1989, the Hong Kong protesters of 2019-2020, or the anti-COVID 19 lockdown protesters of 2022, of acting under the “powerful influence from foreign forces,” as the communist government likes to cast any democratic resistance to their totalitarian rule, however inaccurately. It is easier for the jackbooted thugs of the Communist Party to crack down on pro-democracy movements, or non-traditional religious communities, than it is to imprison and beat villagers simply for trying to observe the Qingming Festival, or conduct a rite in an ancestral hall that predates the CCP by many hundreds of years.

III

We often hear Xi Jinping speak of “China’s excellent traditional culture.” The paramount leader regularly sprinkles his speeches with Confucian aphorisms, appeals to generalized concepts like “Chinese civilization” and “cultural traditions,” and his government has criminalized speech that could be perceived as “undermining the dignity” of China, or “denying the deeds” of China’s historical heroes. Liu Yunshan, a leading CCP Politburo member until his retirement in 2017, maintained in his January 2014 speech “Strive to Foster and Practice the Socialist Core Value View” that

To foster and practice the Socialist core value view, we must absolutely derive spiritual and moral nourishment from China’s excellent traditional culture, extend and elucidate it in integration with the demands of the times, to ensure that the most fundamental genes of the Chinese nation are suited to contemporary culture and are coordinated with contemporary society, as well as to let the tree of the Socialist core value system have deep roots in the soil of China’s excellent traditional culture.

Yet on the ground, in places like Nantong, Suizhou, Shuiwei, and Huanggang, that same “excellent traditional culture” is actually being torn up root and branch, over the strenuous objections of the common people supposedly served by the Party. 

According to Xi, what is being created in China is a “new form of human civilization [人类文明新形态].” The China Media Project’s David Bandurski, in his perceptive analysis of “Xi Jinping’s Cathedral of Pretense,” noted that the “Nine Adheres” (the Marxist formulas can be so tiresome) of “Xi Jinping Thought on Culture” are curiously devoid of any actual cultural content:

Read through the ‘Nine Adheres’ and you will be hard-pressed to find anything whatsoever related to culture or civilization outside the guardrails of political power. There is nothing to do with the arts or artists, with cinema or filmmakers, with publishing or writers, with choreography or dancers. There is nothing to do with music or melodies — save for references to the ‘main melody(主旋律)’, a phrase about the imperative of ensuring the CCP’s voice is dominant. 

Bandurski concludes that we should not “read too much into the elaborate discourse of civilization, and imagine China under the CCP is tipping toward a cultural renaissance, or trying to empower one, rather than cynically leveraging culture to legitimize a one-party authoritarian dictatorship under an emerging cult of personality.” Xi may bloviate about how “traditional Chinese culture is fundamental to China’s status in the surge of world’s cultures,” but the smoldering wreckage of ancestral halls and folk religion temples throughout mainland China tell a very different story. (READ MORE: The Human Disappearing Act: Why Are We Not Reproducing?)

Communist Chinese rhetoric about the prevailing “main melody” is unintentionally revealing. In a 2001 article in the Guangming Daily newspaper, published by China’s Central Propaganda Department, readers were informed that the point of the “Five-in-One Project” (again with the slogans) was to integrate the cultural and political spheres by “tightly focus[ing] on the overall situation of the work of the entire Party, correctly speaking politics throughout, and adhering throughout to correct research orientations and public opinion guidance.” This is a profoundly un-Confucian notion. Consider the traditional Chinese socio-political principal of hé ér bùtóng [和而不同], usually translated as “harmony in diversity” or “harmony but not uniformity.” For Confucius, “a man of virtue pursues harmony but does not seek uniformity; a petty man seeks uniformity but does not pursue harmony.” Harmony (he), we are told in the ancient Discourses on Governance of the States, “begets new things; while uniformity does not lead to continuation … a single note does not compose a melodious tune; a single color does not form a beautiful pattern; a single flavor does not make a delicious meal; and a single thing has nothing to compare with.”

Try as Xi might, there is no way to graft the soulless death cult of communism onto the superabundant tree of traditional Chinese culture. The “mechanical, unrealistic, and inhumane” nature of Mao Zedong Thought, and Xi Jinping Thought, is incompatible with the rites and observances and beautiful patterns on display in the ancestral halls and Tomb-Sweeping ceremonies that were attacked during the Cultural Revolution, and today are branded “vulgar customs.” In truth, there is nothing more vulgar than Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for the New Era with its totalitarian “Nine Adheres.”

IV

When the magistrate Bao Zheng’s tenure as prefect of Duanzhou (now Zhaoqing) ended in 1043, it was said that he left his post without a single ink-stone in his possession. Duanzhou  was renowned for the quality of the ink-stones manufactured by its craftsmen, and Bao’s predecessors had made a tidy profit by receiving regular gifts, or bribes, of those precious objects. Judge Bao, unlike the apparatchiks of modern-day China, who will gladly tear down a centuries-old ancestral hall in pursuit of filthy lucre, was contemptuous of even the most venial instances of venality. In a poem written before his departure, “Inscribed on the Wall of a Study in Duanzhou County [書端州郡齋壁],” the magistrate warned his successors against the temptations of graft and corruption:

清心为治本，直道是身谋。

秀干终成栋，精钢不作钩。

仓充鼠雀喜，草尽兔狐愁。

史册有遗训，毋贻来者羞。

[The foundation of government is a pure heart,

And the best strategy for life is to follow a straight path.

An elegant trunk will one day be a roof-beam,

Refined steel cannot be bent into a hook.

Mice and sparrows rejoice when the granary is full,

While rabbits and foxes fret when the grassland dies.

History books are filled with lessons left behind,

So you mustn’t bring shame on those who follow.]

There is a reason that Xi Jinping’s vision of history is devoid of any details, representing little more than an assembly of platitudes, a cavernous, but vacant, “cathedral of pretense.” The cultural, architectural, literary, religious, and philosophical legacies of the Chinese past, made up of all the many melodies and patterns that produced “China’s excellent traditional culture,” must be scrupulously avoided, and destroyed when possible, since nothing about them would lend support to the discordant melodies and brutal nature of Marxism — Leninism — Maoism. The communist regime seeks to eradicate those ancient traces of the past, utterly oblivious to the fact that “uniformity does not lead to continuation,” and that a single ancestral rite, or a single one of Bao Zheng’s poems, stories, artifacts, statues — or his handy copper guillotines — is of more lasting consequence than all the ludicrously propagandistic sloganeering of Xi Jinping’s ersatz “xivilization” put together.   

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