Chai Ling, the former Tiananmen student leader, has opened a can of worms and made herself a public enemy. The 45-year-old owner of a computer design firm, who is also a Christian, called for “forgiveness” for Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng, Chinese leaders often called “butchers” for sending tanks to crush the student protests in 1989. “I believe that if we forgive Deng and Li, God will rise from His throne one day to do us justice,” claimed Chai in her controversial open letter released on the eve of the June 4 anniversary this year, raising concerns over whether the former Tiananmen heroine is extending an olive branch to Beijing as a ploy to open the China market for her business.
Then a war of words broke out between Chai and her critics. Her opponents maintain that a criminal should show some degree of remorse before pleading for leniency, and there is no sign that Deng and Li felt regretful about their military decision. A convicted murderer facing execution is granted pardon by his priest after he makes a tearful confession, rather than flipping the middle finger and contemptuously shouting abuse at the bible-toting man-in-robes as he steps into the cell. In the case of Deng Xiaoping, the old man died with his middle finger stiffly raised to the whole world from his coffin on its way to a Beijing crematorium. He would have cursed Chai for being patronizing.
“But repentance is not a condition for forgiveness,” refuted the former dissident, who now has a US passport and an American husband. She quoted the words of Christ from the cross asking forgiveness for those who put him to death: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
The problem with this is Deng knew crystal-clear what he was doing, vowing to “kill as many as 200,000 Chinese civilians in exchange for 20 years’ peace,” a zero-tolerance iron-fisted policy that would make current Syrian president Bashar al-Assad blush like a timid kindergarten child. Knowledge of the Bible could be a problem, though, for any Chinese person whose religious learning has been limited to the hereditary worship of Wong Tai Sin and the goddess of Tin Hau. In Chai’s case, to preach pure theology is doubly difficult because of her former indoctrination by the Little Red Book, combined with an inkling of greed for the 1.4-billion-strong market and a touch of Stockholm syndrome. It seems Chai’s western husband has saved his Chinese wife from poverty and tyranny, but has yet to help her integrate into the west—with fewer Biblical references and perhaps a little more common sense.
Chip Tsao is a best-selling author, columnist and a former producer for the BBC. His columns have also appeared in Apple Daily, Next Magazine and CUP Magazine, among others.