Volume 48, Number 20 · December 20, 2001
Inside the Whale
By Jonathan Mirsky
Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing
by Ian Buruma
Random House, 367 pp., $27.95
Ian Buruma is a powerful storyteller and much of his story about Chinese rebels is very sad. This sadness persists throughout his long journey, starting in the United States, where he met most of the well-known dissident Chinese exiles, and ending in Lhasa, and he stopped frequently to meet more of them in Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and finally China itself. Just over the border from Hong Kong, in Longgang, near Shenzhen, Mr. Buruma found Zhou Litai. Short, stocky, with a 'bad haircut' and 'dressed only in shorts and plastic sandals,' Zhou was surrounded in his small apartment by seventeen men with missing limbs or hands, or with terrible burn scars. Some, 'barely out of their teens, were sleeping snugly together, like puppies in a basket.' Zhou is the only lawyer in Shenzhen, and one of the few in all China to take up the cases of people injured in industrial accidents, of whom there are 20,000 in the Shenzhen area every year. Zhou is not a political activist, Buruma makes clear; he just believes in the rule of law.
Review, 4266 words
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