AUG. 18, 2014
BEIJING — In the summer of 2000, a colleague gave me a sealed folder containing my personal file. He told me that our employer, a state-owned company that traded in automobiles and machine parts, had gone bust and that I should deliver it to the local Human Resource Exchange and Service Center, which is one of many repositories that hold the secret personal files Beijing has kept on hundreds of millions of Chinese since the 1950s.
At the time, the files were divided into four categories: those on cadres, students, employees, and military personnel. The system was designed to control citizens by linking them to work units, which were charged with managing the files. For decades, these files played an important role in people’s lives. They were essential for things like changing jobs, gaining promotion, joining the Communist Party, relocating to other cities, and even receiving housing allocations.
I was forbidden to open the envelope; if I did, there would be “legal consequences.” Only government officials or authorized personnel (mainly Communist Party members) have the power to examine people’s personal files. But like many secret weapons of the totalitarian state, the effectiveness of the personal file system is diminishing. The files are supposed to be maintained by state-owned enterprises and government agencies, but now not all companies are state-owned. There are thousands of abandoned or outdated files, yet the system continues to function as a means of control. The files are most often filled with lies that can have a profound effect on a person’s future.
In 2000, the annual fee to manage my personal file was 120 yuan, or about $15. I did not want to pay, nor did I care about the legal consequences. I opened the envelope as soon as I got home and perused every piece of paper in it.
The earliest document, dated May 26, 1989, was my application to join the Communist Youth League. I was then a high school student in a remote mountain town in northeast China. At the time, thousands of university students were gathering on Tiananmen Square in Beijing to protest government corruption and dictatorship — but my application had nothing to do with those protests and it was accepted. Ever since then my file has shadowed me from that remote township to Beijing, and on to Chengdu in the west. It’s hard for me to imagine even today the forces behind my file, about which I knew nothing, traversing the length and breadth of China.
I am responsible for some of the lies in my file. I can vaguely recall making up wild untruths, even though several of the forms I filled out over the years included a reminder that they must be completed honestly, “with a faithful and truthful attitude toward the Party.” I claimed that both my mother and sister were Communist Party members. (They were not, but it’s always good to have a few party members in the family.) In one form, I claimed that I had won prizes in writing and speech competitions. I did not win those prizes. No one ever spoke to me about the lies. I suspect no one had ever carefully examined my file.
Some lies came courtesy of my teachers and classmates. Our teachers taught us to love the Communist Party and the government, but they knew that whatever they said about us would follow us for the rest of our lives, so in private they tried to put in a good word for us, even though it meant taking a few risks.
In one evaluation, my teachers wrote that I was in charge of organization and publicity for the school’s branch of the Communist Youth League, and that I was an after-hours tutor at a primary school. Not true. I don’t even know if that school existed. The truth is that though I did well in my studies, I often skipped classes and was frequently involved in schoolyard brawls.
