Photo: Voice of America, January 2016
Lee Bo, one of the Hong Kong Publishing Five whose disappearances last year have been widely reported, now says he will never publish banned books again.
Let’s try to look at the possible bright side to the PRC’s recent successful attempts to insult our intelligence and challenge our credulity. One of the more idealistic aspects of the Bolshevik Revolution was the honest aspiration of Lenin’s first Minister of Justice to create a new, truly revolutionary system of punishment that would transform criminals into “new socialist men”. Chairman Mao’s first decade in national power prominently featured a similar goal, one that gradually, almost imperceptibly, yielded to the reality that it is easier for governments to kill people than transform them.
But is it now possible that Xi Jinping has outdone his much-admired Helmsman by miraculously transforming, in jig time, the Hong Kong Publishing Five and other alleged offenders who have recently confessed their sins in public, even without being prosecuted, not to mention convicted? By the time we mark the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution next year, will there be further evidence that it has belatedly achieved one of its most ambitious goals?