August 16, 2016
BEIJING — In a tale taught to generations of Chinese schoolchildren and celebrated in film, theater and paintings, five Communist soldiers who had fought off the Japanese invaders in World War II, killing dozens, chose to leap off Langya Mountain, shouting “Long live the Chinese Communist Party!” rather than surrender.
But Hong Zhenkuai, a historian, challenged the story of the “five heroes of Langya Mountain.” In two articles published in 2013, he questioned how many Japanese soldiers were actually killed and whether the five men — three died but two survived the fall — slipped rather than jumped off the cliff.
In June, a Beijing court ruled that Mr. Hong, a former executive editor of the history journal Yanhuang Chunqiu, had defamed the heroes and ordered him to post a public apology on websites and in news outlets. He appealed, and on Monday, the Beijing Second Intermediate People’s Court, in a final decision, upheld the ruling against him.
“I certainly will not apologize,” Mr. Hong said in an interview on Monday. “This is basic academic freedom and I need to maintain my dignity as an intellectual.”
Mr. Hong, who called the trial “political,” has said that he was trying to determine the truth through careful research and that the plaintiffs, sons of two of the “five heroes” who filed the suit last August, had not provided any evidence that disproved his findings.
A lawyer for Mr. Hong, Zhou Ze, called the ruling a “malign precedent” in which ideological considerations overrode law and justice. “A particular ideology is upheld by a ruling,” said Mr. Zhou, a partner at Zebo, a law firm in Beijing. “People cannot decide for themselves what to believe, and they can’t think freely.”
Mr. Zhou said that, because Mr. Hong has refused to apologize, the court would most likely publish the text of its verdict in the news media and would order Mr. Hong to pay the publication costs.
Zhao Xiaolu, the lawyer for the plaintiffs, declined to comment. In July, one plaintiff, Ge Changsheng, said in an interview with Road Sign, an online news outlet, that Mr. Hong’s articles constituted “historical nihilism” — negating the Communist Party’s history and heroes.
Since President Xi Jinping came to power in late 2012, he has taken a firm stand against political dissent and challenges to the Communist Party’s official historical narrative. In a speech he delivered in early 2013, Mr. Xi said that in recent years, “hostile forces” at home and abroad in recent years had “attacked, vilified and defamed” China’s modern history, with the aim of overthrowing the Communist Party and the country’s socialist system. He attributed the Soviet Union’s collapse in part to “historical nihilism.”
“The top leader made clear his stand, so the leftists feel they are catering to the top rulers,” Mr. Hong said. “They feel they have an incentive to attack those who study history.”
In early July, at a conference of the State Council, Zhang Shujun, deputy director of the Party History Research Center, noted that Mr. Hong had lost the first round of his court case and that the Communist Party was firmly opposed to “historical nihilism.”
In July, after losing the initial hearing and filing his appeal, Mr. Hong traveled to Langya Mountain, about 180 miles southwest of Beijing.
The mountain’s Little Lotus Peak, officially recognized as the point from which the five men jumped, can be reached by a trail. Led by a villager from Wuyong (literally “five heroes”), Mr. Hong scrambled up the steep route for two and a half hours. Near the peak is a plaque that reads “jumping site of the five heroes.”
Mr. Hong said he doubted the accuracy of a detail in the official narrative — that villagers cultivated radishes in the area — given the steepness of the mountain.
As for the claim, first published in a Communist Party newspaper in 1941, that the five men had killed many Japanese soldiers before they jumped, he noted that Jiang Keshi, a professor at Okayama University in Japan, found in a search of Japanese military records that no soldiers had died in their encounter with the five on Langya.
In his final statement to the Beijing court this month, Mr. Hong asserted that China’s war of resistance against Japan was part of its larger struggle against fascism and for freedom. That being the case, he said, “Any action that tries to deprive the public of its freedom and rights is a betrayal of our martyrs.”
