Posted By Feng Gao on April 30, 2011

Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 3)

ongoing, third part posted on Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest, dated March 29, 2011

(full article here)

 

Synopsis:

(Continued from Part 2)

Part 3, "when violence and motive are subtle and pervasive", begins with a brief introduction of Guangzhou No. 6 Middle School Feng Gao attended during the second half of Cultural Revolution, 1972-76. A unique character of this school besides having once been affiliated with Sun Yat-sen University, is its original status as the affiliated school of Whampoa Military Academy and its founding by Chiang Kai-shek, founding president of the Academy and a Chinese strongman from 1920s to 1949 and Taiwanese strongman afterwards.

Starting with middle school incidents involving violence that was minor but nonetheless significant, Feng reconstructs a thread of activities with violence in the vicinity of his environments, going through various stages of life to mid-1990s when he had become engaged in open political activism as a Canadian university faculty member and in opposition to the leadership conduct of then Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, and his activities were suppressed by authorities.

In the junior years at middle school, the verbal teasing Feng had received from elementary school buddy "Ling" (his first name) was substituted by physical hassling from "Ling"’s new seatmate "Chen" (his family name). Eventually the hassling led to permanent injury to Feng’s left little finger.

But it was the beating of Feng’s seatmate "Fang" (his family name) by senior student members of middle school security that started a rather rare event in the city’s middle schools at the time, when the four of them wrote and posted a "Big-character Poster" to protest and demand an apology.

School security was unrepentant, unyielding and intimidating in its responding poster, and Feng was also worried that his buddy "Ling"’s trickery leaving Feng’s handwriting and signature most noticeable on their poster could put Feng in a risky situation. "Ling" had done something like it before in elementary school, instigating Feng to say something in disagreement with quotations from Vice Chairman Lin Biao – then deputy Communist leader under Chairman Mao — and then informing their head teacher "Teacher Luo" about what Feng had said.

This time in middle school their head teacher was again a "Teacher Luo", who also had school security and administration ambitions. Ironically but fortunately, Lin Biao had died after a failed coup against Mao, there was now a national political campaign denouncing him bundled with Confucius, and among over 100 middle schools in the city the No. 6 Middle School was one of a few that during this campaign had an "Investigation Unit" onsite from the city, this one headed by Mr. Wang — Feng’s mother’s former boss at the affiliated middle school of South China Teacher’s College.

Feng was interviewed by a member of the "Investigation Unit", and soon the school administration publicly acknowledged that school security had beaten a student and it should not have happened.

After that, "Ling"’s career at the middle school took off, including as a leader of the revamped school security and after graduation a job in the school, while in contrast Feng’s declined in the senior years.

After graduation "Fang" got into a sex scandal that also involved the youngest son of university official "Auntie Zeng" living upstairs from Feng’s family, and was enlisted in the army by his former-officer father to learn discipline. Soon it was the 1979 war with Vietnam and "Fang" won official merit for killing an enemy soldier, although the rumor mill had it that the enemy in hiding he ambushed may have been unarmed. He later became captain of the university’s firefighters.

Middle school’s "Teacher Luo" is today a Model Principal in Guangdong and an Educational Inspector of the provincial government, while the "Investigation Unit" leader Mr. Wang later was provincial Vice Governor overseeing education in the 1980s.

"Ling"’s father, the very well-known Prof. Yuan Weishi, a colleague of Feng’s late father, has studied diaries of Chiang Kai-shek at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, but publication of his new book on the subject has been put on hold due to the political climate in China.

That got Feng into some thoughts about "Ling"’s successful career and connections at their old middle school, which today is again using Whampoa Military Academy’s official motto and official song as school motto and school song — the motto though approved by Sun Yat-sen was originally proposed by Chiang Kai-shek.

After middle school, Feng worked as an apprentice in the city’s corded telephone factory, and in 1977 when university admission became based on standardized entrance exam rather than political selection Feng got the chance to enter university.

At the factory Feng’s apprentice partner, again a "Chen", had half of a finger top peeled off by a lathe in an industrial accident during graveyard shift. Waiting for then taking a bus, Feng and others rushed "Chen" to the hospital, where "Chen" was asked to wait in the hallway until he was treated — over 2 hours after the accident.

At university in the dorm-room arrangement , the tall but skinny Feng was surrounded by physically strong young men, including "Wang", at 16 the youngest in their Computational Math class and already a martial-arts expert, leaping forward from senior years at the affiliated middle school of South China Teacher’s College.

There was a link to some earlier history: "Wang" later did his undergraduate research and also a master’s degree under "Teacher Hou", who had been the youngest, at 14 or 15, of a group of 1960s students going to study in the Soviet Union, with"Auntie Zeng"’s eldest son among them; there, "Hou" and "Auntie Zeng"’s son were beaten by Soviet police in an anti-Vietnam War protest and then evicted from hospital during Chinese Ambassador’s visit with them – an incident marked by an official complaint by the Ambassador and a report in Chinese media.

Feng’s undergraduate thesis adviser "Professor Li" wanted Feng to go for graduate study at Army Math Research Center at University of Wisconsin at Madison, but Feng chose University of California, Berkeley instead.

The biggest U.S. domestic bombing prior to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was the 1970 "Sterling Hall Bombing" at the Army Math Research Center. It destroyed much of the Physics laboratories and killed a post-doctoral researcher. An accused, university rowing athlete Leo Frederick Burt, escaped to Canada and remains one of America’s Most Wanted.

The "Unabomber" bombings by former Berkeley Math professor Theodore Kaczynski, typically wounding victims’ hands in the early times, started in 1978 shortly after Feng’s entrance to university in China, hit a Berkeley professor before Feng’s arrival in 1982, and in 1985 severed fingers and the arm of a graduate student who was a U.S. Air Force pilot — the professor hit in 1982 happened to be nearby and helped handle the bleeding.

Local deadly events also included: murder of Taiwanese author Henry Liu near Stanford, by a gang linked to Taiwanese military intelligence under son of Chiang Kai-shek, then Taiwanese president, about whom Liu had recently written an unauthorized biography; and bludgeoning death of a UC Berkeley Asian American female student from Boston, by her white fraternity student boyfriend.

Overshadowing these were serial killings by former U.S. Marines Leonard Lake and Charles Ng. Lake then committed suicide; Ng, who was originally from Hong Kong, fled to Canada where his sisters lived, taking along a pistol.

At Berkeley Feng was roommates with senior Math grad student "Li", connected through a middle-school alumnus of undergraduate roommate "Wang" to a former roommate of “Li”’s. After “Li” Feng was roommates with grad student David (Ngi) Chin who was born in Hong Kong, from Boston and studying Artificial Intelligence in Computer Science.

On behalf of a Taiwanese visiting professor who was about to go to teach at Beijing University, "Li" delivered a new book to author Henry Liu not long before Liu’s assassination.

Via Texas, "Ling" came to do research at the University of California medical school in San Francisco.

In 1988 Feng accepted a teaching job at University of British Columbia’s Computer Science Department offered by the acting Department Head, who had once been with Army Math Research Center in Wisconsin.

Soon it was the spring of 1989 and mass protests on Tiananmen Square in Beijing was one of the major news headline stories. John Demco, UBC Computer Science Department’s assistant computer systems manager, particularly liked to hear Feng’s introduction and opinions on Chinese politics.

On December 28, 1989, Demco’s superior, computer systems manager Frederick (Rick) Sample was found murdered in his home. Rick was a tall and athletic young man and martial-arts expert, whom Feng had very positive impression of and whose wife Linda was a former UBC rowing athlete.

Soon the Royal Canadian Mounted Police determined the suspect to be Barry James Evans, friend and former roommate of Rick’s from UBC Computer Science student days, who had some sort of "love" relationship with Linda. Police found that Evans flied from Calgary to Vancouver and back to Calgary on the day of the murder, and that a pistol he had recently purchased killed Rick, but Evans claimed he had come to Vancouver to show Linda how to shoot and left the gun in her car.

Barry Evans’s defense lawyer Noel O’Brien was a Calgary law-firm partner of Don MacLeod, Charles Ng’s lawyer fighting against extradition to U.S. where he faced the death penalty. Back in July 1985 Charles Ng was caught in a Calgary department store, and during the struggle his pistol shot wounded the hand of one of the security guards.

The Evans trial in British Columbia Supreme Court began on February 20, 1991. The next day, February 21, it heard testimony from Evans’s boyhood friend Jim Hutchison while on the same day Ng’s final appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada began with Don MacLeod’s opening argument.

There was another incidental connection: Charles Ng was taking an online course on counseling women at Simon Fraser University in the Vancouver region, while Barry Evans claimed that on the day Rick Sample died he met with Linda Sample at that university campus to show her how to shoot .

In March 1991 the jury acquitted Evans of first-degree murder: they were not convinced of Linda’s innocence and wondered if she had voluntarily given police the name of Barry Evans. the prosecution offered to have her testify again about it, but the judge refused.

In subsequent prosecution appeal, the B.C. Court of Appeal ruled that the judge had made an error, and ordered a new trial.

Evans’s defense appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada, and in March 1993 Canada’s top court ruled in favor of Barry Evans, stating that although the trial judge erred the jury verdict could not have been affected because the police testimony already said that Linda Sample had given police the name of Barry Evans during the investigation.

Feng Gao notes a number of interesting facts: Barry Evans happened to be son of a former RCMP officer; by the time of his appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada in March 1993, former Calgary lawyer John Major had become a Supreme Court justice, appointed by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney on November 13, 1992; back in February 1991 at the time of the Charles Ng appeal at the Supreme Court of Canada and the Barry Evans trial in British Columbia, John Major was still a Calgary lawyer in a Canadian law firm headed by Mulroney’s tax lawyer and financial trustee Bruce Verchere; and, coincidentally Feng’s father and Justice Major shared the February 20 birthday.

Feng notes that by March 1993 Feng himself had become involved in political activism against the leadership conduct of Mulroney, and that Mulroney announced his intent to retire on February 24.

When Mulroney stepped down on June 25 he had made a number of last-minute patronage appointments the day before, including that of Bruce Verchere as Chairman of Atomic Energy Canada Limited.

On August 11, a UBC computer science programmer who had been president of his Computer Science student class, was clubbed to death with a baseball bat over his head.

On August 28, Bruce Verchere died of a gunshot wound to his head in his Montreal home in what police ruled a suicide. Someone there from outside of the family was Greg Williams, live-in boyfriend of Bruce’s son David and a McGill University rowing athlete, who showed police where the guns were stored in the house.

(Continuing to Part 4)

 

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