The NAUA Lawsuit that “Crossed into the New Millennium”
Article 2:《英雄旧部告省长‘露营之歌’起纷争》赵岩作 《法律与生活》1.2000
I’ve come across a few things written by Zhao Yan. He claims to have been part of the media contingent present at the original hearing, so I surmise that he’s a journalist. This particular article is important because it was written right after the case came to light. Plus it gives a rundown of the important events that led to the lawsuit. Basically, the issue goes back to the 1980s, although a 2009 article argues that the problem of Li Zhaolin being credited as the sole author of “The Encampment Song” began in 1967. In the article I discuss below, the Cultural Revolution is mentioned many times as well, so we can’t discount the fact that people’s reputations were at stake and that the 1980s became a time of rehabilitation. (Li Min’s note in the 1991 NAUA songbook describes how she and other former NAUA members had been denounced as spies during the Cultural Revolution, so restoring her reputation may have been one possible reason for her to spearhead the song compilations and her husband’s case as one of “Encampment’s” authors.)
I mention Li Min because Zhao Yan traces the events leading to the court hearing back to an article that Li Min wrote for the《伊春日报》on March 1, 1980, when she happened to be the chair of the Ethnic Affairs Commission (民委）in Heilongjiang. Li Min’s government position is significant not only because of her place in the Korean minority community but also because, at the time, Li Min’s husband Chen Lei, who had also been in the NAUA, was the governor of Heilongjiang province. In the article, she describes the circumstances wherein “The Encampment Song” was written, a picturesque story featuring Chen Lei writing tune near Li Zhaolin, who was working atop a boulder. Li Min’s article angered her former comrades. She allegedly sent a copy to Jin Bowen in Beijing, who was not pleased with Li Min’s depictions and claims. Jin didn’t do anything, however, until other former soldiers wrote to her asking why she was keeping silent on the matter.
What Zhao Yan emphasizes throughout this piece is how, time and again, former NAUA members rejected and contradicted Li Min’s and Chen Lei’s claims. There is little to be said of any former members who were on the fence or on Chen Lei's side. In fact, the one story about someone who agreed with Chen Lei is shown to have been falsified. Zhao Yan paints a picture of a community standing up to corrupt officials – former NAUA soldiers turned bad.
Zhao Yan states that for those comrades who expressed their discontent to Jin Bowen, it was a matter of “whether the spirit and policies of ‘truth-seeking’ (实事求是) that had been restored to the CCP in the three plenary meetings of 1978 following the Cultural Revolution would be followed through and implemented,” (27). It was also a matter of whether “us NAUA soldiers were a true or false face of history for future generations.” Significantly, the authorship of “Encampment” represented the reinstating of the NAUA’s good name and the restoration of pre-Cultural Revolution patriotism. Such a line of reason demonstrates that the songs and their composers represented discourses that solidified the importance of the NAUA in post-war nation-building.
To continue with the story of the lawsuit, Jin Bowen finished her memoir in 1982 and then sent it to the office of Heilongjiang Provincial Party History. They refuse to publish it unless she changes her anecdote about Li Zhaolin teaching everyone “The Encampment Song” between April and May of 1938. But it turns out that Chen Lei was also publishing his memoir and poetry collection in 1982, wherein he claimed to have written “Encampment.” The plot thickens!
One of the most interesting pieces of evidence Zhao Yan discusses is the accounts of Li Dongguang and Li Yazhou (not related). Li Dongguang claims to remember singing the song (along with “Internationale”) at Li Zhaolin and Jin Bowen’s wedding in July 1937. In February of 1938, Li Dongguang was then captured by the Japanese while on a mission to the Soviet border. He ended up at a POW camp for eight years and only returned to China in February 1946. Similarly, Li Yazhou was imprisoned in March 1938. She says that she sang the song throughout her time in jail, therefore it couldn’t have been written in May of that year. Underlying these stories is the idea that imprisonment froze time. Not only did prison cement a political and social identity for Li Dongguang and Li Yazhou that resulted in persecution during the Cultural Revolution, but the song also connects them to their NAUA comrades despite their time apart. The experience, for all intents and purposes concerning the song’s origins, erases anything that could have corrupted these soldiers’ memories between 1946 and 1982-83. It places the song and, in turn, the NAUA into a higher place in their emotional lives. It makes me think that without such an emotional affinity for each other and the songs, it might have been difficult for the soldiers to trust any other conceptualization of the Chinese nation. And in a big way, I think these restoration projects are a way to fight for their hardwon emotional community because, to the former NAUA members, the army formed the basis for their national sentiment and/or political identity. This point hits home if we think about how Li Zhaolin was assassinated by the KMT in 1946, (27).
To complete Zhao Yan’s missives towards Chen Lei, he describes an investigation and report by the office of Heilongjiang Provincial Party History in 1987. Zhao Yan implies that this investigation had been for show because that office was controlled by Chen Lei. Former NAUA soldiers saw many untruths in it, and it seemed to them to repeat Li Min’s story verbatim. It also insinuated that other witnesses, namely Li Dongguang, were lying. Dongguang responds by saying that, despite the offices he had held after he returned to China, he still suffered during the political campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s. He could have risen again with Chen Lei’s help—after all, the latter often visited him and almost always wanted to discuss “Encampment.” But to show his moral high ground, Dongguang insists that because Li Zhaolin had been such a positive influence on him when he was young, he could never go to such lengths for political gain. These dramatic claims of corruption and unethical behavior set Chen Lei at complete odds with the unsullied hero, Li Zhaolin.
This brings me to Article 3:《哈尔滨中院院长王克伦枉法不让抗日名将李兆麟将军的灵魂安息》 赵岩作 2010年9月4日
The first thing to note is that this article is also written by Zhao Yan but 10 years after the previous article. The date is important for two reasons. One is that a second lawsuit was filed in 2008 in the name of Yu Tianfang regarding his contributions to “Encampment’s” fourth verse. Unfortunately, I have not found any information about how either case was ruled in the end, but perhaps Zhao Yan’s thoughts in this later article may shed some light on the matter. The second reason to mention the date is that Zhao Yan begins by noting that, breaking with the protocol of previous years, the 2010 celebrations of the 65th anniversary of the victory against Japan were delayed by 19 days in order to coincide with Taiwan’s celebrations. This point becomes significant towards the end of the article.
It is in this piece that Zhao Yan places himself along with other reporters at the court hearings in 1999. And this is where things get interesting because, according to Zhao, at least two of those reporters were demoted afterward, presumably at the behest of Chen Lei. Then, in 2002, as the hearings in Beijing seemed to be coming to a close, the vice-chair of the Heilongjiang provincial court, Wang Kelun, transferred the case to the Harbin intermediate court. (Zhao Yan again indicates that it was a for Chen Lei and Li Min.) “It was like throwing a peach and calling it a plum.” At this point, Li Min was the former chairperson of the Heilongjiang provincial section of the CPPCC Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (中国人民政治协商会议). No sooner had he made the transfer than Wang Kelun became the head of the Harbin Intermediate People's Court.
In 2008, after repeated appeals from Li Zhaolin’s daughter, Zhang Zhuoya, and a famous intellectual property rights lawyer, Pang Zhengzhong 庞正中, the Harbin court finally heard the case again. Zhao Yan says that he and the same reporters from nine years before attended the hearing again, but Wang Kelun had the bailiff send them out of the courtroom. While this information is damning to be sure, I can’t help but wonder why Zhao Yan doesn’t mention the Yu Tianfang case of the same year.
Zhao Yan points out that The People’s Daily extolled Wang Kelun for lawfully presiding over the case and for “directing public opinion” (舆论监督). The “funny thing” according to Zhao Yan was that the People’s Daily reporter didn’t seem to know that Wang Kelun’s court “hadn’t ruled on any long-standing cases in over three years.” And, he continues, the reporter “probably didn’t know about Harbin's history of occupation.” Here Zhao Yan relates the story of Li Zhaolin’s assassination by a KMT spy in 1946. When an investigation was called, the KMT gave up Harbin, perhaps the last of its strongholds, to the CCP. “LZL used his life and blood to return Harbin to the CCP,” Zhao Yan states. Thus we can understand Zhao’s disgruntlement about the 65th-anniversary victory celebrations being planned to coincide with Taiwan’s.
It would seem that, to Zhao Yan, a heterogeneous Chinese nationalism founded on the actions of both the KMT and the CCP against the Japanese fails to some extent. Zhao Yan implicitly expresses disappointment that Chen Lei’s status and position superseded the camaraderie and honor of the NAUA community. The way Chen Lei is described as “illegitimately inscribing his name all over the city” lies in direct contrast to Zhao Yan’s veneration of Li Zhaolin’s role in liberating Harbin from the KMT. Not only should loyalty to a place have been more important, Zhao Yan implies, fidelity to the resistance movement should never be squandered. To cement his argument, Zhao Yan reminds readers that, due to an error by Chen Lei during the war, over 100 NAUA soldiers were killed. Li Zhaolin purportedly had had the option to kick him out but didn’t. Yet Chen Lei “forgot about his former leader once he gained power, even to the point of reappropriating heroes’ stories as his own.”
Judging by the opinion pieces I’ve come across, the lawsuit became something larger than a song and who wrote it. The case showed a teleological turn in the way that the Chinese public viewed cultural products from the war. The legal concept of intellectual property rights highlights a question in current-day Chinese nationalism: how can there be a unified sense of national identity while also allowing for individual achievements that may or may not align with national values? Li Zhuoya (Li’s and Jin’s daughter) says of Li Zhaolin’s songwriting: “if we can’t even defend our father’s courage and ability with regards to his intellectual property, then it’s a disservice to all former soldiers, the people who bled and died for us, and the history of this country.” What is the line between exploiting a government office to show your accomplishments and posthumously being deemed an intellectual hero of the people?
The only conclusion about the lawsuit that I’ve come to expect is Zhao Yan’s statement: “No one disputes the importance of ‘The Encampment Song’ to history, but its ownership is still contested by both sides and there is not a clear answer.” While his position is clear, in the next post I will discuss another article with a counterargument.