but he doesn’t want to be responsible

for what

will be written in the monthly Freedom

by bearded men

of faint imagination

he accepts an inferior role

he won’t inhabit history



The criticism is a little hard on old Kropotkin. But it is easy to see why a Polish dissident would wish to be liberated from even the most libertarian of revolutionary utopias. So the poet draws a clarifying distinction between Kropotkin’s escape, which he dreams of reenacting, and Kropotkin’s isms, which he finds stultifying. And the clarification improves the story.

CHEN GUANGCHENG, the blind, Chinese “barefoot” lawyer, entertains a modest, instead of a utopian, idea of human rights. He attracted attention originally by defending the right of women in China to make their own decisions about childbearing, instead of taking orders from the state; and then he was obliged to defend his own rights as a Chinese citizen. If he has drawn up a more sweeping program for transforming the whole of life, as in Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread, the program has not come to light. The Polish poet would approve. In other respects, though, the Kropotkin-like details of Chen’s escape—as reported by Andrew Jacobs of The New York Times and others—are uncanny.

Chen underwent his house arrest in a village in Shandong Province, instead of undergoing imprisonment in a city jail, as Kropotkin did. Chen was well-guarded, though. He feigned illness. One of the guards may have sympathized with him. Then Chen jumped over several walls, helped by his wife. He broke his foot. His wife stayed behind to distract the guards, and Chen, blind and injured, made his way through the night. He brazened it out by crossing a guarded bridge, where the sentinels may have been asleep. He arrived at a prearranged meeting point, and someone from his circle of dissident conspirators—a teacher of English—showed up in a car. Instead of driving him to Nevsky Prospekt, the teacher drove him to Beijing, where he appears to have spent a few days, shuttling from apartment to apartment.

He made his way not to the Union Jack but to the Stars and Stripes—to the U.S. Embassy, where the diplomats arranged to put him on a plane to New York City, together with his wife and two children. The repression fell upon other people, though. His entire village is said to have been placed under surveillance. The police arrested and beat his older brother. The brother’s son, who is said to have resisted, has been charged with attempted murder. The English teacher has been put under surveillance.

Then the brother made his own escape to Beijing, in quest of a lawyer for his son—a sensational escape on top of the original sensational escape—only to return to the village, in plain indication that here is a story with many chapters to go. And, to anyone who recalls the classics of Russian literature, the echoes are undeniable.

It should be remembered that, in the mid-twentieth century, seismic tremors from the heroic Russian revolutionary past shook the Chinese more passionately than any other people on Earth. The most influential of the Chinese novelists in those years was Ba Jin, the author of Family and other lachrymose and sentimental novels—who, until his death in 2005, at the age of 100, was occasionally mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize. And Ba Jin was precisely the man who transmitted the old Russian myths and emotions to the Chinese intellectual class.

He did this by enlisting in the international anarchist movement, back in the days when anarchists around the world formed a large and more-or-less organized revolutionary current. Ba Jin corresponded with Bartolomeo Vanzetti in his Massachusetts prison. He looked upon Emma Goldman as his “spiritual mother.” Family, with its portraits of earnest young women struggling for personal freedom against their repressive parents, has got to be the most Emma-Goldmanesque novel ever written. And it was Ba Jin who translated Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist into Chinese, together with Kropotkin’s Ethics.

The very name Ba Jin is a nom de plume that pays homage to the Russian revolutionary tradition, with the first syllable drawn from Mikhail Bakunin (Kropotkin’s predecessor in the Russian anarchist movement) and the second from Kropotkin. After 1949, when the Chinese Communists established their own dictatorship, Ba Jin joined the Communist tide, and he allowed his writings to be published in expurgated versions, with the anarchist references erased. He gamely denied that Ba referred to Bakunin. He was a good Communist; he denounced himself. And yet, even then, with the multivolume editions of his writings pouring from the Communist presses, he sheepishly continued to acknowledge that “Jin” did refer to Kropotkin.

Surely in China today, there have got to be a few elderly stalwarts who are fondling their tattered copies of Ba Jin’s translations and ruminating over Chen, the blind lawyer—surely there have got to be a few such people thinking thoughts, as the Polish poet did, about the right ways and wrong ways to rebel. The Russian imprint on the Chinese imagination was too deep and powerful in the past to have entirely disappeared in our own time. A hint of nineteenth-century myth touches every part of the story of Chen and his wife and his brother and nephew and the walls and the bridge and the waiting car. Here is a bell from old Russia that is right now tolling in modern China, as if it has been tolling all along. Freedom, that fleeting thing, goes loping around the corner, and the heart pounds and the soul exults.

Paul Berman is a contributing editor for The New Republic. This article appeared in the June 28, 2012 issue of the magazine.