Chinese Leaders Are Scared of Their Country’s History

Late one night in 1958, a man named Liu Bingshu whispered to his wife, the mother of their four young children, “There is no escape. I could be taken away … If I can come back, we will see each other again.” Liu would soon be the victim of a massive policy change by the Communist leader of China, Mao Zedong. Just a year earlier, Mao had famously demanded that “a hundred flowers bloom,” actively inviting criticism and suggestions from the public. But those who spoke up were soon labeled “rightist” enemies; the party estimated that they amounted to 5 percent of the population. Some half a million intellectuals, including Liu, were ordered to undergo “reeducation.” Thousands were dispatched to three labor camps in the northwestern Chinese province of Gansu. The deadliest of them was Jiabiangou, where less than half of the inmates are reported to have survived. Liu’s family never saw him again.

This intimate and devastating nighttime discussion between Liu and his wife has been preserved because Liu’s oldest son, 12-year-old Liu Tianyou, woke up and overheard it, and decades later, in his modest apartment in Gansu, the documentary filmmaker Ai Xiaoming recorded.