Yuan Jing

Yuan Jing says that her father behaved fairly well during his reform through labor, so the authorities allowed him to marry, and that she was born in 1959; her father could usually come home one day a week, but not when the political situation was tense.⁠[1]

The 2016 Huanqiu Renwu article states that when the Cultural Revolution began Yuan Jiaji was still in custody and that Yuan Jing’s mother, Liu Aifang, was repeatedly subjected to struggle sessions, Red Guards constantly demanding to know why she had married a grandson of Yuan Shikai and why she had not divorced him.⁠[1]

Yuan Jing started primary school in 1967. She recalls that once, when the school required a form to be filled in, the box for class background troubled her parents: that night, after she and her younger brother had gone to bed, she heard them whispering together, her mother saying that filling it in that way would ruin the child; in the end they described the family’s class background as that of a warlord, and the next morning they put the form in an envelope for her to hand to the teacher, because they were afraid she would see it.⁠[1]

She recalls that in her third or fourth year, when a history lesson reached the 1911 Revolution, the teacher named her directly and said that there were descendants of reactionaries and traitors in the class; after the lesson a crowd of girls chased her all the way to her door, shouting abuse, and someone stuck out a leg to trip her as she went in; she burst into tears at home and from then on skipped history lessons. She says that when she saw other children wearing the badge of the Little Red Guards she envied them and felt very small.⁠[1]

The article states that Yuan Hongyu, the eldest grandson of Yuan Shikai’s sixth son, Yuan KehuanYuan KehuanYuan Kehuan was the sixth son of Yuan Shikai; he went to Europe in 1913 and attended Cheltenham College in England. His son-in-law Bai Junhe says in an oral account that he entered industry in North China in 1926, served as assistant manager and then general manager of Qixin Yanghui Gongsi (the Qixin cement company), and died in 1956.Open the full entry, was born in 1950, nine years before Yuan Jing, and that the two had much the same feelings as children.⁠[1]

The Huanqiu Renwu article states that in 1973 Luke Chia-Liu YuanLuke Chia-Liu YuanLuke Chia-Liu Yuan (1912–2003) was a Chinese-born American experimental physicist and the husband of the physicist Chien-Shiung Wu; he worked mainly at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where he was a senior physicist. He was elected an academician of Academia Sinica in 1959 and chaired the steering committee of Taiwan’s Synchrotron Radiation Research Center from 1983 to 2002.Open the full entry and his wife, Chien-Shiung WuChien-Shiung WuChien-Shiung Wu (1912–1997) was a Chinese-born American experimental physicist who spent most of her career at Columbia University and worked on the Manhattan Project. Her cobalt-60 beta-decay experiment of 1956–1957, carried out with collaborators, provided the first experimental proof that parity is not conserved in weak interactions.Open the full entry, came back to China to visit family for more than seven weeks, and that Zhou Enlai described Yuan Shikai as a statesman and received the couple at a relatively high level of protocol, which in the article’s view directly improved the fortunes of the Yuan family. Yuan Jing says that her father regained his freedom, later worked at a vehicle repair works under the Tianjin municipal transport bureau and became a member of the Tianjin committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.⁠[1]

The August 2016 Huanqiu Renwu article states that Yuan Jing had just retired from her post as a division head of the Tianjin overseas Chinese affairs office and was still a member for the women’s sector of the Tianjin committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference; the article describes her as fashionably dressed and composed, the storms of the years seeming to have left few traces on her face.⁠[1]

Yuan Jiaji was the youngest son of Yuan Kewen and a younger paternal half-brother of Luke Chia-Liu Yuan.⁠[1]

The article states that when Yuan Jiaji was at middle school the Japanese-sponsored authorities imposed an education designed to make pupils submissive; he resisted learning Japanese and led his classmates in teasing the Japanese teacher, who denounced him to the Japanese military police, and one night someone from the school ran to his elder sister’s home to warn him to flee. That year the navy of the Wang Jingwei regime was recruiting in Tianjin and his sister signed him up; after more than a year of training at Weihai in Shandong he could no longer bear the monotony and ran away. After Japan surrendered he served on a warship given by the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry to the Nationalist government and went with that government to Taiwan; the article says that he did not like life in Taiwan and soon used a chance to go to Hong Kong to get back to Tianjin, where, then in his twenties, he often went dancing in the dance halls and was an outstanding dancer. After the campaign to suppress counter-revolutionaries began in 1950 he was arrested, suspected of being an agent because on his return to Tianjin he had said to companions that he would go back to Hong Kong if he could not find work; he spent three years in prison and then underwent reform through labor in factories and on farms, twenty-odd years passing in this way.⁠[1]

An article by Zhang Xiong published in Nandu Zhoukan on June 10, 2011 and excerpted in Renmin Wenzhai in August of that year gives a different account of Yuan Jiaji’s life: he arrived back in Tianjin by ship from Hong Kong on May 25, 1950, was detained for investigation in April 1951 and sentenced to three years on three charges, counter-revolution, impersonating a public security officer and spreading rumors, and after serving his sentence worked as a retained worker in factories under the public security system; in December 1975 the president of the Tianjin court asked him what he wanted, he asked only to have his name cleared and to be given work, and he was then assigned to the No. 6 Vehicle Repair Works under the transport bureau, gaining his first regular job at the age of 50.⁠[2]

Yuan Jing says that after her great-grandfather, Yuan Shikai, died, her grandfather, Yuan Kewen, also moved to Tianjin but often went to Shanghai, because he loved singing opera and calligraphy and had many fellow amateur performers and literary friends there, and that he was a big brother of the Green Gang in Shanghai.⁠[1]

The article states that Yuan Jing has attended several symposia in Beijing and was gratified to hear some researchers’ assessments of Yuan Shikai’s achievements in his early years; she says she believes history will give her great-grandfather a thorough assessment. For decades she has gone to a temple to offer incense at the Qingming festival and on memorial days, which she calls a simple gesture of her feeling for the old man.⁠[1]