Chinese put up a marriage ban

Press, 4 December 1981, Page 14

Chinese put up a marriage ban

By

JONATHAN MIRSKY

from Tokyo

China has effectively banned its people from marrying foreigners, although it denies that such a ban is in existence. Last month, Peking furiously rejected criticism that a two-year sentence to “reeducation through labour” on a 24-year-old woman living with a French diplomat was an anti-foreign act. “We are never opposed to things foreign," an official statement said. However, reports from Peking disclose that one day before the woman’s arrest on September 9 by security men waiting in front of the diplomat’s residence, processing stopped of applications for marriage between Chinese and foreigners. These official delaying tactics amount to a ban, according to diplomatic and Chinese sources in Peking. The Chinese are angry about what they term a “big fuss over a trifle” and note that not since the 1964 establishment of diplomatic relations with Paris has French propaganda reached such heights. In fact, a diplomatic incident was only narrowly averted. When the French Trade Minister. Michel Jobert, returned from a technical mission to Peking, where he had

unsuccessfully raised the matter with Deng Xiaoping, he remarked: “Had I been better informed I would not have come.” The Chinese have counterattacked by accusing the diplomat, Emmanuel Bellefroid, who is no longer in China, of hiding his fiancee in his flat for two months, thereby misusing his diplomatic status. Although the crime of the convicted woman, an artist, Li Shuang, has not been made clear, some Chinese are said to regard her as a whore, selling herself for Western luxuries. The Peking report says; “There are obviously a few people in China who have no regard for national dignity and who forfeit national character and their own moral integrity and stoop to selling their souls.” As for xenophobia, which the Chinese resolutely deny, for centuries contact between foreign men and Chinese women has wounded national pride, and such contacts seem more conspicuous now that prostitution is rare. African men, in particular,

are deeply suspect, and ugly incidents have occurred in recent years, including at least one murder of a black rumoured to have insulted a Chinese woman student. The Chinese maintain that “legitimate” cross-national marriages are not objectionable and have been at pains in the recent dispute to point out that another member of the French Embassy and a Chinese woman were recently married. The Chinese say they especially resent Bellefroid’s use of the word “ruthless” to describe Li Shuang's two year sentence. Many international jurists have visited centres for re-education through labour, it is claimed, and all observe the humanitarian spirit in which delinquents are transformed into useful citizens. Still more jarring to Chinese sensibilities is Bellefroid’s charge that Li Shuang’s detention represents a crack-down on intellectuals. This is no business of foreigners, the Chinese insist. It is a simple case of a “guilty young female." It may not be so simple. Li Shuang’s grandfather was

murdered by Red Guards in 1966 for being a capitalist, and her parents, both professors, were continuously “smashed” in every campaign from 1957 to the end of the Cultural Revolution. Li Shuang herself had once exhibited some of her paintings at Peking’s now closed Democracy Wall and had met Bellefroid at an exhibition of her work. The Chinese in turn charge Bellefroid with covering up his own activities. Premier Zhao Ziyang had earlier accused the diplomat of “financing, aiding, and serving as a intermediary between Chinese dissident circles and abroad.” This is a particularly serious matter in China these days, where foreign journalists have already been officially threatened" with grave consequences if they continue to report sympathetically on the dissidents, always described by the Chinese as simultaneously “infinitely small” in number and “very dangerous” to the Communist system. Although Bellefroid says that he and Li Shuang had obtained Chinese approval for their marriage, Peking has labelled this “a pure fabrication.” Copyright — London Observer Service.