The Memoirs of Jin Luxian: Learning and Relearning 1916-1982

Introduction

They must often change who would be constant in happiness or wisdom. —Confucius During my most recent visit with Bishop Jin Luxian I gave him several rare photographs of himself and other Jesuits in Shanghai before his arrest in 1955. I had not yet read his memoirs, and only after reading them did I realise why he was so moved by this gift; he had not seen images of these ‘old beloved friends’ since the 1950s, six decades ago. At 96, Jin is one of the last remaining persons to have witnessed the turbulence of China’s Republican Era (1911–49), the capriciousness of the Maoist era (1949–76) and the precipitous rise of China in the Deng Xiaoping era (1980–present). Few people today can retrospectively recount personal encounters with so many historical people and events that altered the trajectory of China’s modern history. Jin Luxian has lived through China’s war with Japan (1930s); the violent conflicts between his own countrymen as the Nationalist and Communist forces vied for China’s future (1920s–1949); the Maoist victory in 1949; the Hundred Flowers Movement (1956) and the subsequent Anti-Rightist Campaign (1957–58); the Great Leap Forward along with the bitter famines that followed (1958–61); the chaos of the Cultural Revolution and the Red Guard attacks on the ‘Four Olds’ (1966–76); the ‘Lin Biao Incident’ (1971); the fall of the Gang of Four (1976) and the post-Mao period of reconstruction (1989–present). He experienced much of this tempestuous history, however, while serving a jail sentence as a ‘dangerous counter-revolutionary’, imprisoned because of his alliance with an ‘imperialist power’, the Roman Catholic Church. And I still have not mentioned the upheavals and reforms that transpired in the Catholic Church during Jin’s lifetime, such as the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) and the sweeping reforms that changed the landscape of Catholic Christianity. Introduction By Anthony E. Clark xvi Introduction In short, Jin’s autobiography provides historians an extraordinary personal glance into one of the world’s most extraordinary periods of transformation. Jin Luxian’s memoirs are as complex as Jin Luxian himself; they reveal a life of remarkable experiences that were also survived remarkably, and any wellinformed historian who is honest to his or her sources cannot help but wonder at the enigmatic nature of Jin’s choices, alliances and remarkable longevity. In turn he has been accepted and rejected by the Communist party, his friends and family and his order, the Society of Jesus. He has been labelled a dangerous political element by his government and a traitor by his Jesuit confreres, only to be later embraced by both as a model member of each. Despite the multiplicities of Jin’s character, the constant strand in his life, woven through his entire memoirs, is his personal identity as a member of the Catholic Church and the Jesuit Order. In one of our meetings he exclaimed: “I am both a serpent and a dove. The government thinks I’m too close to the Vatican, and the Vatican thinks I’m too close to the government. I’m a slippery fish squashed between government control and Vatican demands.” No matter what one’s opinion of Jin is, he has been and remains one of China’s most powerful Catholic bishops, and has lifted the Catholic Church in China out of ruins and into a growing religious community. History In both academic and ecclesial circles, Bishop Jin Luxian is known for his arrest and long imprisonment by the Communist party, and his later rise to prominence as China’s leading Catholic prelate. It might thus be disappointing to some that his memoirs comment more on the people involved in the arrests of 8 September 1955, than on the circumstances of the arrests. Despite the fact that fewer than 1% of Shanghai’s population was Catholic at that time—around 110,000 out of six million people—the news of State–Catholic conflicts in 1950s Shanghai and reports of widespread arrests of the Catholic faithful reached a global audience. Jean Lefeuvre’s account of these conflicts, Shanghaï: les enfants dans la ville, chronique de la vie chretienne a Shanghai 1949–1955, became a bestseller when it was published in France in 1956. Once Premier Zhou Enlai had become aware of Lefeuvre’s derisive criticism of the party’s behaviour in Shanghai, he invited Simone de Beauvoir to China to write a more flattering view of the Chinese Communist...