At the extravagant lunch, it was all pats on the back and rounds of rice wine with the police in attendance, and talk of "our good American friend." Then we parted, with the police taking the check and waving us on the way in their limo.
Afterwards, I told my friend I did not want to make the trip to the countryside. I said going would be putting him and his family at risk, as the police were clearly uptight about it, and I didn't want to be responsible for any trouble for him. He insisted he knew what he was doing and that everything was fine. He did note that they'd taken his passport, but assured me that it would be returned to him when we came back as promised from our run-out to the village the next day.
He finally convinced me and we went, and spent a very enlightening and enjoyable day with a family he had lived with for a year during the Cultural Revolution, when his cadre parents had been attacked by Red Guards as "rightists."
The following day, after our trip, I left for Nanjing and then went on by train to Shanghai, where I visited with friends. When I returned to my home in Hong Kong, a week later, I called this friend to see how he was. I got his wife on the phone, who told me he was in the hospital, recovering from serious injuries caused by a police beating. It seems as soon as I had left, he was arrested, beaten by several thug cops who broke his cheekbones and caused massive bruising around his groin from kicking him repeatedly. He was also fired from his post at the radio station.
Eventually, he left China, earned a US law degree, and then later returned, after using his Chinese law school connections to have his case "rectified". But he told me while he was meeting with a high-ranking security official in Beijing who had been a law-school classmate, he was shown my file, which included, apparently, virtually every article I had written about China over perhaps five years' time.
He also learned that I had been surreptitiously tailed after my visit to him, all through Nanjing and Shanghai, so that every person I met, including former students I had taught in Shanghai, was identified.
It was a truly daunting realization that if I visited China, whether as a tourist or as a journalist, even without an official "handler," I would be potentially putting everyone I spoke with or met with at risk, or at least in the cross-hairs of the police state.
It never occurred to me back then in the 1990s that such a state of affairs could exist in my own country, and yet it appears, on the basis of the latest Times report, put together with what we know now about the extent of NSA monitoring of all our communications, that it does exist. There is every reason to believe that the US Post Office is monitoring our mail, that the NSA is monitoring our phone calls and our internet usage, and even that local police are keeping tabs on our comings and goings. And even if they are not, we have to operate as if they were, because they can and could be.
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