DaveR
03-20-2008, 06:26 PM
http://www.sportfocus.com/newsimage/msyed.jpg
Matthew Syed won the award for Sports Feature Writer of the Year at the "Oscars of Sports Journalism", otherwise known as the SJA awards ceremony in London, for articles including his remarkable interview with Zhuang Zedong, the Chinese table tennis hero who was exiled after finding himself at the forefront of the Cultural Revolution, and his examination of the sanitising revisionism surrounding Muhammad Ali.
Syed, who also holds three Commonwealth gold medals for men's singles table tennis, was praised for producing articles that did not conform to the mainstream. “His highly original, investigative journalism throws much new light on world sport, the major players and the ever increasing involvement of high politics and commerce,” one judge said.
On of the great interviews in question is below.................
In October 1976, one month after the death of Chairman Mao, Zhuang Zedong was seized from his home and escorted by armed guards to an anonymous building in rural China. There the greatest sportsman in China’s history was cast into a cramped room containing a single bed and a small reading lamp. For the next four years his only contact with the outside world would be at the hands of his interrogators from the Communist Party.
Such was the speed and secrecy of Zhuang’s arrest that to this day he does not know the location of the building or whether it still exists. He was confined to his room except for hour-long bouts of regimented exercise and had no contact with other “residents”. For more than two years his wife and two young children, who suffered terrible persecution because of their association with him, lived in the belief that he had been executed.
The only nod the party gave to Zhuang’s illustrious sporting past was the privilege of being able to read books, which he devoured like a starving man. He credits Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo as having sustained his sanity and his life. “It is a beautiful book,” he told me. “Incarceration coupled with interrogation can play cruel tricks on the mind and many are driven to suicide. The book taught me to hope when I was living at my mental limits.”
How had it come to this? Just 11 years earlier, Zhuang had won an unprecedented third successive table tennis world singles title, establishing his reputation as the most successful player in the sport’s history. He had been eulogised by the political elite, revered by the masses and held up as an icon of revolutionary virtue by Mao Zedong.
The rollercoaster ride of the next decade, culminating in detention and exile, symbolises the brutal capriciousness of the Cultural Revolution. But was Zhuang just another innocent victim of that perplexing era, or a political criminal who got the punishment he deserved? Opinion in China, drawn from the labyrinth of rumour and innuendo constructed around its infamous past, is sharply divided. Here his extraordinary story is revealed in full for the first time.
I met Zhuang in a café at the Poly Plaza Hotel in an eastern suburb of Beijing and was immediately struck by his youthfulness. His boyish face and muscular upper body belied his 66 years and provided no visible manifestation of the incalculable trauma he has endured. His animated body language and ferocious assertiveness commanded attention, but his words would have enraptured an audience had they been spoken in a whisper.
“Everything changed in the spring of 1966 [the year after he had won his third world title] when we heard the shocking news,” he said. “One day we were training at the national team headquarters without a care in the world, the next we received a letter from the Ministry telling us that sporting institutions were a bastion of antiMaoist revisionism and were to be dismantled. China did not take part in international table tennis for the next five years.” The madness had started.
The official justification for the Cultural Revolution was to re-radicalise a society that was slipping into old capitalist habits. In reality, it was a naked attempt by Mao to eliminate all threats to his unbridled power. It began with a propaganda programme designed to create mass paranoia — pupils were incited to denounce their teachers and officials to condemn their superiors. It unleashed an epidemic of mutual suspicion that quickly gave way to a nationwide orgy of unspeakable brutality.
In the previously benign world of table tennis, the terror was just beginning. As rival groups vied for supremacy, Fu Qifang, Zhuang’s coach, and Jiang Yongning, another member of the national team, were placed under house arrest by Red Guards, a radical student group. They were soon joined by Rong Guotuan, the first Chinese to win a world title in any sport — at the World Table Tennis Championships in 1959 — and one of the country’s most celebrated figures.
They were each condemned on trumped-up charges of spying and subjected to torture and public humiliation. Thrown into solitary confinement, they were forced to confess to imaginary crimes and to reeducate themselves by studying the supposedly infallible teachings of Mao. Slowly but surely, they began to lose their minds. In what is regarded as the greatest sporting tragedy of the Cultural Revolution, Fu hanged himself on April 16, 1968; Jiang took the same dreadful step one month later.
Rong, who had followed his distinguished playing career with an inspirational period as team leader and coach, was the last to break. A gentle and deeply principled man who had been revered by teammates and officials, he hanged himself on June 20. In his final letter he wrote: “I am not a spy. Please do not suspect me. I am sorry to you all. I love my honour more than my life.” Although there is no evidence to suggest that Zhuang was implicated in the violence against his teammates, his attitude provides a vivid insight into the mind control exerted by Mao’s propaganda.
“At the time I felt miserable because I was close friends with those who were tortured to death,” he said. “But on the other hand I had complete trust in Chairman Mao. It was him who started this campaign and I feel my belief in Chairman Mao is bigger than my feeling towards my friends. I still believe that Chairman Mao had the interests of China at heart.”
Zhuang has a habit of placing his hand on one’s upper arm when he is saying something of deep meaning.
His enduring faith in the wisdom of Mao is absolute, conveyed as much by the childlike appeal in his eyes as his words. When I confronted him with Mao’s atrocities, his response was instant. “There is no such thing as a perfect man, but there are great men,” he said. The former chairman could not have scripted it any better.
Zhuang’s spectacular promotion after his seminal role in the “ping-pong diplomacy” in 1971 took him into even closer proximity with his beloved leader. He retired from table tennis after being made sports minister and gaining elevation to the Central Committee, the innermost sanctum of the Communist Party and the font of political power in China. It set the stage for arguably the most catastrophic fall from grace in sporting history.
“It was a huge honour to be a member of the Central Committee, but it carried huge risks,” Zhuang said. “It was like being taken to the top of a mountain only to find a steep precipice at your feet [I later discovered that his wife had begged him not to take the position]. If one was going to survive, one had to form an alliance that would please the Chairman and offer oneself protection.”
Given Zhuang’s impeccable Maoist credentials it was, perhaps, inevitable that he would gravitate towards the Gang of Four, the fanatical grouping led by Jiang Qing (Mao’s third wife), who had been masterminding the Cultural Revolution on the Chairman’s behalf. By giving them public and political support, Zhuang implicated himself in some of the worst excesses of the era.
Such was the closeness of his relationship with Jiang that rumours soon began to surface of an affair. Although Zhuang admitted to having been granted dozens of private audiences with Mao’s wife, he denied that their relationship was anything more than political. “She was like a mother to me,” he said. “She lived a clean and elegant life and has been unfairly scapegoated for her role in the Cultural Revolution.”
But Zhuang was more than a mere cheerleader for his political overlords. He soon set about organising mass-denunciation meetings in which perceived political opponents were beaten around the head, forced to utter self-criticisms and had their hair shaved off. He also ruthlessly disposed of opponents within the table tennis community. Xu Yinsheng, the man with whom he had won the world doubles title in 1965, was publicly humiliated and exiled from Beijing.
Zhuang repeatedly refused to talk in detail about his crimes. His former assertiveness was replaced by lengthy pauses as his eyes drifted into the middle distance. For the first time, the years seemed to lie heavily on his powerful shoulders. “I was on the wrong side,” he said at last, his face registering the kind of bewilderment only seen on fanatics coming to terms with their errors. “I did many dreadful things that I now regret.” But his reign of terror was not to last.
In the power struggle that followed Mao’s death in 1976, the Gang of Four was arrested and Zhuang soon felt the dread hand of the state investigators on his shoulder. Of his four years in captivity, he said simply: “I understand why they wanted to ask me questions. I had been a top political figure so I was a good source of information for the Government.” His equanimity was shocking but sincere; he was thinking of the interests of the party even as he was being persecuted by it.
In the 27 years since his release, Zhuang has endured the ignominy of being implicated in one of the most infamous atrocities of modern times. His name and reputation are familiar to virtually every citizen in the People’s Republic. He spent the first few years after his release in exile in Shanxi province but for the past two decades he has been in Beijing, involved in low-key table tennis coaching. Only in the past few years has he received official invitations to sporting events, including the 35-year anniversary of “ping-pong diplomacy” in 2006. It is unlikely that he will be fully rehabilitated in his lifetime.
But how will he be judged by history? The more one immerses oneself in the moral confusion of the Cultural Revolution, the less one is inclined to issue absolute judgments. Villain or victim? The answer is strange but simple and applies to many of those who put their faith in the monster that was Mao Zedong. He was both
Matthew Syed won the award for Sports Feature Writer of the Year at the "Oscars of Sports Journalism", otherwise known as the SJA awards ceremony in London, for articles including his remarkable interview with Zhuang Zedong, the Chinese table tennis hero who was exiled after finding himself at the forefront of the Cultural Revolution, and his examination of the sanitising revisionism surrounding Muhammad Ali.
Syed, who also holds three Commonwealth gold medals for men's singles table tennis, was praised for producing articles that did not conform to the mainstream. “His highly original, investigative journalism throws much new light on world sport, the major players and the ever increasing involvement of high politics and commerce,” one judge said.
On of the great interviews in question is below.................
In October 1976, one month after the death of Chairman Mao, Zhuang Zedong was seized from his home and escorted by armed guards to an anonymous building in rural China. There the greatest sportsman in China’s history was cast into a cramped room containing a single bed and a small reading lamp. For the next four years his only contact with the outside world would be at the hands of his interrogators from the Communist Party.
Such was the speed and secrecy of Zhuang’s arrest that to this day he does not know the location of the building or whether it still exists. He was confined to his room except for hour-long bouts of regimented exercise and had no contact with other “residents”. For more than two years his wife and two young children, who suffered terrible persecution because of their association with him, lived in the belief that he had been executed.
The only nod the party gave to Zhuang’s illustrious sporting past was the privilege of being able to read books, which he devoured like a starving man. He credits Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo as having sustained his sanity and his life. “It is a beautiful book,” he told me. “Incarceration coupled with interrogation can play cruel tricks on the mind and many are driven to suicide. The book taught me to hope when I was living at my mental limits.”
How had it come to this? Just 11 years earlier, Zhuang had won an unprecedented third successive table tennis world singles title, establishing his reputation as the most successful player in the sport’s history. He had been eulogised by the political elite, revered by the masses and held up as an icon of revolutionary virtue by Mao Zedong.
The rollercoaster ride of the next decade, culminating in detention and exile, symbolises the brutal capriciousness of the Cultural Revolution. But was Zhuang just another innocent victim of that perplexing era, or a political criminal who got the punishment he deserved? Opinion in China, drawn from the labyrinth of rumour and innuendo constructed around its infamous past, is sharply divided. Here his extraordinary story is revealed in full for the first time.
I met Zhuang in a café at the Poly Plaza Hotel in an eastern suburb of Beijing and was immediately struck by his youthfulness. His boyish face and muscular upper body belied his 66 years and provided no visible manifestation of the incalculable trauma he has endured. His animated body language and ferocious assertiveness commanded attention, but his words would have enraptured an audience had they been spoken in a whisper.
“Everything changed in the spring of 1966 [the year after he had won his third world title] when we heard the shocking news,” he said. “One day we were training at the national team headquarters without a care in the world, the next we received a letter from the Ministry telling us that sporting institutions were a bastion of antiMaoist revisionism and were to be dismantled. China did not take part in international table tennis for the next five years.” The madness had started.
The official justification for the Cultural Revolution was to re-radicalise a society that was slipping into old capitalist habits. In reality, it was a naked attempt by Mao to eliminate all threats to his unbridled power. It began with a propaganda programme designed to create mass paranoia — pupils were incited to denounce their teachers and officials to condemn their superiors. It unleashed an epidemic of mutual suspicion that quickly gave way to a nationwide orgy of unspeakable brutality.
In the previously benign world of table tennis, the terror was just beginning. As rival groups vied for supremacy, Fu Qifang, Zhuang’s coach, and Jiang Yongning, another member of the national team, were placed under house arrest by Red Guards, a radical student group. They were soon joined by Rong Guotuan, the first Chinese to win a world title in any sport — at the World Table Tennis Championships in 1959 — and one of the country’s most celebrated figures.
They were each condemned on trumped-up charges of spying and subjected to torture and public humiliation. Thrown into solitary confinement, they were forced to confess to imaginary crimes and to reeducate themselves by studying the supposedly infallible teachings of Mao. Slowly but surely, they began to lose their minds. In what is regarded as the greatest sporting tragedy of the Cultural Revolution, Fu hanged himself on April 16, 1968; Jiang took the same dreadful step one month later.
Rong, who had followed his distinguished playing career with an inspirational period as team leader and coach, was the last to break. A gentle and deeply principled man who had been revered by teammates and officials, he hanged himself on June 20. In his final letter he wrote: “I am not a spy. Please do not suspect me. I am sorry to you all. I love my honour more than my life.” Although there is no evidence to suggest that Zhuang was implicated in the violence against his teammates, his attitude provides a vivid insight into the mind control exerted by Mao’s propaganda.
“At the time I felt miserable because I was close friends with those who were tortured to death,” he said. “But on the other hand I had complete trust in Chairman Mao. It was him who started this campaign and I feel my belief in Chairman Mao is bigger than my feeling towards my friends. I still believe that Chairman Mao had the interests of China at heart.”
Zhuang has a habit of placing his hand on one’s upper arm when he is saying something of deep meaning.
His enduring faith in the wisdom of Mao is absolute, conveyed as much by the childlike appeal in his eyes as his words. When I confronted him with Mao’s atrocities, his response was instant. “There is no such thing as a perfect man, but there are great men,” he said. The former chairman could not have scripted it any better.
Zhuang’s spectacular promotion after his seminal role in the “ping-pong diplomacy” in 1971 took him into even closer proximity with his beloved leader. He retired from table tennis after being made sports minister and gaining elevation to the Central Committee, the innermost sanctum of the Communist Party and the font of political power in China. It set the stage for arguably the most catastrophic fall from grace in sporting history.
“It was a huge honour to be a member of the Central Committee, but it carried huge risks,” Zhuang said. “It was like being taken to the top of a mountain only to find a steep precipice at your feet [I later discovered that his wife had begged him not to take the position]. If one was going to survive, one had to form an alliance that would please the Chairman and offer oneself protection.”
Given Zhuang’s impeccable Maoist credentials it was, perhaps, inevitable that he would gravitate towards the Gang of Four, the fanatical grouping led by Jiang Qing (Mao’s third wife), who had been masterminding the Cultural Revolution on the Chairman’s behalf. By giving them public and political support, Zhuang implicated himself in some of the worst excesses of the era.
Such was the closeness of his relationship with Jiang that rumours soon began to surface of an affair. Although Zhuang admitted to having been granted dozens of private audiences with Mao’s wife, he denied that their relationship was anything more than political. “She was like a mother to me,” he said. “She lived a clean and elegant life and has been unfairly scapegoated for her role in the Cultural Revolution.”
But Zhuang was more than a mere cheerleader for his political overlords. He soon set about organising mass-denunciation meetings in which perceived political opponents were beaten around the head, forced to utter self-criticisms and had their hair shaved off. He also ruthlessly disposed of opponents within the table tennis community. Xu Yinsheng, the man with whom he had won the world doubles title in 1965, was publicly humiliated and exiled from Beijing.
Zhuang repeatedly refused to talk in detail about his crimes. His former assertiveness was replaced by lengthy pauses as his eyes drifted into the middle distance. For the first time, the years seemed to lie heavily on his powerful shoulders. “I was on the wrong side,” he said at last, his face registering the kind of bewilderment only seen on fanatics coming to terms with their errors. “I did many dreadful things that I now regret.” But his reign of terror was not to last.
In the power struggle that followed Mao’s death in 1976, the Gang of Four was arrested and Zhuang soon felt the dread hand of the state investigators on his shoulder. Of his four years in captivity, he said simply: “I understand why they wanted to ask me questions. I had been a top political figure so I was a good source of information for the Government.” His equanimity was shocking but sincere; he was thinking of the interests of the party even as he was being persecuted by it.
In the 27 years since his release, Zhuang has endured the ignominy of being implicated in one of the most infamous atrocities of modern times. His name and reputation are familiar to virtually every citizen in the People’s Republic. He spent the first few years after his release in exile in Shanxi province but for the past two decades he has been in Beijing, involved in low-key table tennis coaching. Only in the past few years has he received official invitations to sporting events, including the 35-year anniversary of “ping-pong diplomacy” in 2006. It is unlikely that he will be fully rehabilitated in his lifetime.
But how will he be judged by history? The more one immerses oneself in the moral confusion of the Cultural Revolution, the less one is inclined to issue absolute judgments. Villain or victim? The answer is strange but simple and applies to many of those who put their faith in the monster that was Mao Zedong. He was both