Opinion |  Lessons and Reflections on Eight Years in the Chinese Gulag

Marius Balo Marius Balo, profesorul care a petrecut 8 ani de închisoare în China a ajuns acasa, Observator News
Marius Balo Marius Balo, profesorul care a petrecut 8 ani de închisoare în China a ajuns acasa, Observator News

I have made it my mission to expose China’s judicial and penal abuse and the wider horrors and dangers of the Chinese Communist Party system.

 

After a graduating in divinity in New York I was on a path to enter the priesthood. I returned to Romania and took a job as a program coordinator for the Peace Action Training and Research Institute of Romania (PATRIR) and later was a talk show host with Napoca Cable Network.

 

But in the summer of 2010 a whim took hold of me and I decided to explore opportunities in China and took up a job as an English teacher, first in a kindergarten, then at a language centre for businesspeople, and finally at People’s University of Beijing, where I taught for a year. I never imagined that this path would end in March 2014 with my detainment and eight years in China’s jails as a victim of wrongful imprisonment.

 

Alongside teaching, a fellow-Romanian who was working in a Chinese financial company persuaded me to take a small part-time job. They were mainly providing loans to businesses. In 2014 the police arrested everyone at the company, including me. I was placed in a detention centre where I stayed for two years, three months and seven days. I was totally removed from the real world. I could not contact anyone, I could not call anyone, I could not write to anyone.

 

At the end of that detention period I was sentenced to eight years in prison, charged with „complicity to contract fraud”. Later I learned what the problem was. Evaluation fees and legal fees worth a few hundred US dollars per loan application were not returned to the firm’s clients who had been refused loans. It did not matter that I did not know any of this. Some aggrieved clients and the Chinese authorities decided everyone in the company, guilty or not, must pay the price for the firm’s alleged offences. As a result I ended up in Shanghai’s notorious Qingpu Prison where I served the remainder of an eight year term. I was released and returned to Romania in April 2022, where I have been contemplating the lessons I learned in China’s “Gulag” as well as completing a 100-day pilgrimage across Romania to celebrate my salvation.

From the first day of my arrest in a pre-trial detention centre, I was subjected to constant psychological torture and physical constraints of various kinds aimed at forcing me to confess a „crime” that I had not committed. I was kept locked in a cell the whole time, together with 10 Chinese detainees who did not speak English. Occasionally I met other foreign prisoners, including a Turk.

I slept on the rough wooden floor of the detention centre for the entire time that I was there, in the bitter cold of winter and scorching heat of summer with my bedding limited to a pink blanket soiled with blood, vomit and urine, testimony to the countless others that had to use it before me. There was not a single piece of furniture in that cell. The toilet was a hole in the corner where you had to empty your bowels while cellmates watched.

 

I witnessed a Turk die because warders denied him access to medical treatment. (Later I would also witness two foreign prisoners die from cancer in Qingpu prison.) I saw suicide attempts. I met a man whose wife and little girl had been arrested alongside him in order to extort a confession from him. No evidence was ever necessary. A simple coerced confession sufficed.

 

After I was falsely convicted, I did not appeal because I could not bear the thought of having to stay in that same detention centre cage for another one or two years pending an appeal outcome. It is well known that 99.9 % of appeals in China are rejected anyway. So I was sent to Shanghai’s Qingpu Prison. Here I was forced under threats and duress into manufacturing labour work, from morning to evening. We worked on promotional materials, gift bags, clothing tags for western brands, American, British, European, and some Chinese. I was able to smuggle out some samples of said work which I am planning to deploy to help in a campaign against forced prison labour.

 

I hold no ill-will towards anyone. Now that I look back on it all, I can confidently say this was a period of enlightenment, or an epiphany, even if it was terrible. Why? Well, a Chinese prison is the only place where a foreigner can observe and learn about the Chinese Communist system from within, its strengths and weaknesses. Learn from the inside out how it works and why it works that way.

I had lived for four happy years in China before I was arrested, but I had no idea about any of this. In fact I did not pay much attention to the system at all before my ordeal. I was happy to enjoy the opportunities and benefits that arose from being in China in that period without questioning the system. But my ordeal opened my eyes.

 

I realised that the injustices, torture, forced labour, organ harvesting, viruses and all the other evils that the system unleashed, and which I read about in the media, were merely symptoms. We must try to understand the root causes.

 

Remember how the mass protests in China a couple of months ago against draconian “zero-Covid” controls suddenly quietened down? People felt it was a victory of some sort, but it was not. It was just that the freedoms they had enjoyed such as their passports and the ability to carry out business, had all been taken away from them for three years of “lockdowns”, and now suddenly these freedoms were returned to them, so they fell back into line. But it was with an obvious trade-off: they had accepted an additional and highly irregular five years of Chinese Communist (CCP) Party dictator Xi Jinping, who was re-appointed by a Party Congress in October after already serving two five-year terms. The same tactic was deployed against us in prison, which was a microcosm of the larger China outside our walls

 

And now, after Xi has accomplished that coup, Beijing is starting to talk to the world about a thaw in relations. It is an illusion. If that man was willing to take his 1.4 billion people hostage for three years just to give him an extra term in office, he will stop at nothing. Autocracy corrupts. When you have absolute power, why should you care about justice?

 

And absolute power corrupts absolutely. Keep that in mind and add the fact that such people do not believe in an afterlife as we believe. If this single lifetime is all there is, then you may very easily become willing to do anything in order to become master of the world. At any cost, even at the cost of destroying the world itself.

 

We cannot expect such people to be ethical. There are no ethics inside that system because there are no principles and there are no principles because there is no love. This is the bad news. They will never stop. Once they get the upper hand, there will be no limit to how evil they will allow themselves to be. In one sense they will become invincible, because we will not be able to reciprocate, due to our values. We will not be able to fight their poison with the same poison.

On the day when I was taken, when they shoved me inside my cell, I noticed something scribbled on a cell wall. It said „No Humanity”. I did not quite understand it, apart from the obvious meaning, until I recently read an article in The Economist. It said China has the highest wealth disparity in the world (measured by the GINI coefficient), but the lowest culture of giving. Mercy is neither granted nor expected.

 

I think our biggest mistake is to assume the people of mainland China living under CCP rule think like us. They do not. They in turn make the same mistake, too. They think that we think like them. We do not, and that is perhaps our biggest asset. They will never be able to understand us, understand our thought process. They are not equipped for that. We, however, can arrive, in due course, at a point where we can understand them.

 

I was born in Communist-ruled Romania in the last years of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who was executed in our Christmas revolution of 1989. The hammering and forging process of attempted brainwashing began in school and was resisted by the family. In China it starts from day one and is enforced by the family itself. They have done this for countless generations. This stunts the soul.

 

The features of soul – curiosity, imagination, attributes of gender – are severely twisted. A 30-year-old woman has the sexuality of a six-year-old. Same with men – they become adults who think like kids.

 

This is the paradox. Such people are not mindless, although they can look totally mindless. They are highly intelligent and persistent. They are not mindless, but they are soulless.

 

We in the West, we are not afraid. We do not grow up in fear. But go and live in China, and you will soon become afraid. And then, whoever you fear becomes like your god. The French call it „fait accompli”; we call it “learned helplessness”. It is like a disease. All those people living in China have it. But think about India’s Mahatma Gandhi and China’s Chairman Mao. They were both dictators. They wanted to do things by force. Their methods, however, differed. Gandhi suffered himself, dictated to himself; he did not change others by force but changed himself.

 

There is a lesson in all of this: they will never, on their own, change the system. It may one day happen in Iran, or it may even happen in Russia. But it will never happen in China. The system will continue to get richer and stronger by playing on and feeding from our greed.

 

This is why I feel that something must be done now to stop this trend before we cannot any longer. So-called decoupling will not work. Now they talk about de-risking. That will also fail. A wayward cell, while multiplying and expanding, does not care that it will eventually kill the organism that it is part of.

 

We must change the unit of measurement: how we measure ourselves, how we measure success, how we measure progress. We must revert to our principles. It is what made the West great. So in that sense I’m a “principle’ist” rather than a democrat or a republican, if “principle’ist” is even a word.

 

Many people may concur that we have no historical equivalent to this situation. We simply do not know what will happen. We can only see the numbers and the numbers do not lie. Thus, the trade deficit with China in December 2021 was $94.5 billion. Every month the world is giving China this amount. Only two decades ago, in the year 2000, the world was still sending the bulk of its iron and copper and other commodities to the industrial West (Europe, US and Japan) and the West was still giving the world the final products. Now we send it all to China and China gives us the final products.

 

I am not an economist, I am a theologian. But this is just what I see with my eyes. I see that we must find courage to endure the short-term pain of renouncing our greed and actively seek ways to reverse this trend. It is sad and dispiriting to see our European leaders competing with each other over who goes to China first to kiss the ring. We must be good or die. We must love one another or die.

 

I know some of this may sound strange. It would sound strange to me too, if I was you. But I lived on the inside of China in the most revealing circumstances. I saw it with my own eyes and felt it in my bones for eight full years as an innocent behind bars. It is very dangerous. The times are very dangerous. We must raise awareness now, while we still can.

Even when I compare Romania’s communist regime with China’s, the differences are vast. In Romania people would not give up, even though hard-pressed, because they had their deeply-rooted faith as a rope to grab on to and the Church as a pillar to lean on. Although severely bruised and scarred, it helped most of us pull through. In China people do not really have a spiritual life. The closest they get is meditation and the Tai Chi exercise system, and that leaves them exposed to a cult like Communism to take them over and kill their spirit or mould it according to its doctrine.

 

The worst evil of communist rule, in my opinion, is that it does not recognise and celebrate the sanctity of individuality. We are all precious and unique and that uniqueness is the fuel of progress. Take that away and what you get ultimately is an army of hoof-men, robotic zombies that cannot think for themselves and ultimately do not even want to, because it is too hard. Learned helplessness, a herdish mentality and relativisation (i.e. I am happy and content still to be alive, as opposed to the man next to me who is getting killed today) is what you get instead of soulfulness, instead of curiosity and imagination.

 

Upon being able to see these truths, I feel that my wrongful imprisonment was perversely a blessing in disguise. It was the most important learning period for me ever and it was an alone-time when I got to truly start to know myself and to atone for any sins that I may have committed in my earlier life. I see it as part of God’s well-thought-out plan, a plan beyond my understanding. Perhaps the real blessing of it all is yet to unfold. I do not know what is to come but I have an inexplicable sense of assurance that it will be great, and I am truly excited.

 

Some people expect me to hate the people of China. But I have great affection for them. I lived in China for four years before my incarceration, and I mostly met sincerity and kindness. From very early on, both children and adults see a light in a foreigner’s eyes and become curious about it. That curiosity, that realisation, is their soul fighting to set itself free. I believe God’s plan for humanity includes them at its very core and that all their sufferings have not been in vain but were designed to prepare them for a mission of some kind. They have given the world saints and martyrs for millennia and these saints are praying incessantly for us all.

 

So I cannot say my ordeal was totally negative, it was mostly positive. It was hard being confined to a cell for years, totally removed from the world, living with the uncertainty of not knowing whether I would be released or executed the next day. But such extreme hardships can help to cultivate virtues and good habits. Patience, self-control, prayer, fasting, became my personal regimen. My salvation, if I can call it that, came from the fact that I never witnessed any real violence in there, as opposed to what we see in the cinema about prison life, and also from the fact that I was able to read so much. In the prison library and among the other inmates, I found nearly 3,000 books in there and I read hungrily, whatever I could set my hands upon. Through this, at the end of the day I felt I had gained this time and not wasted it.

 

I have realised that I want to begin to put down roots again. I have been uprooted for as long as I can remember and I always felt bare, or even barren. True peace and comfort comes, I believe, from our ability to nurture. Raising a family is the most important thing in life and the one place where we are meant to achieve our highest potential. As a microcosm it represents society at large, the big family, where we ought to function and contribute according to our vision and ability.

 

I am exploring my future. In China as a teacher for four years and then in jail for another eight, I have learned that it comes naturally to me to speak to people. During this time I have taught all sorts, ranging from kindergarten children to prison inmates, and everything in between. I see myself using that experience to continue to teach, in one form or another. Deep in my heart, I always wanted to become a priest. I hold a Masters of Divinity degree from St Vladimir’s Seminary in Yonkers, New York, and I hope to be able to dedicate myself to serving God and His people in whatever capacity may be asked of me.

 

I am using my time to study and to write. I am working on a novel about the 2,922 days that I spent in Chinese prisons, which should be released this Spring. This process has opened up a new vista in my mind, like a view over a fresh plot of land which I did not know I owned, let alone tried to sow and harvest. I must plant, and then wait patiently for the seeds to yield. The wait will be worth it. Eight years of waiting have taught me to appreciate and be grateful for even a lowly slice of bread. How precious it is when you do not have it!

 

Marius Balo is Romanian citizen, teacher and theologian, wrongfully imprisoned in China for eight years from 2014 to 2022.

Reflections of a former prisoner in China on a 100-day pilgrimage for freedom in Romania

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