Kang Wanhua Biography

Kang Wanhua was born in 1944 to an average Beijing family. Since childhood he showed an interest in painting, and in 1960 he enrolled in an art school for party cadres to study painting. In this after-school program he learned basic painting techniques and theory. Once he grew up, he was assigned to a post that was considered pretty good at the time, working in an electronics factory. Because he showed aptitude as a painter, he was later transferred to No. 179 Middle School to serve as an art instructor.

The young Kang Wanhua yearned for a free and uninhibited life. He nourished radical impulses and, drawing on in uences from art and literature, gradually extrapolated them to society and reality. By this time he was already married and living away from his parents with his wife. He and a few other young people would gather together to secretly listen to music, look at catalogs, and so on. During that time the true peak of the collectivization movement was underway in China, and if you were discovered and reported playing the guitar, you could be accused of having bourgeois tendencies—suf cient grounds for arrest and being locked up for two or three years. Conse- quently, Kang and his other disgruntled friends were extraor- dinarily cautious. They took care of every detail to avoid being seen or heard by neighbors. But Kang was reluctant to restrict himself, often casually discussing the circumstances of the time, speaking bluntly and freely about his dissatisfaction. His wife thought he was too much of a rebel, and after trying many times to persuade him to be more discreet to absolutely no avail, she eventually reported him to the authorities. Her intention was for him to receive a warning, so that he might tone down his rhetoric; she did not anticipate that the political situation was in such a critically tense period. The Ministry of Public Order carried out an investigation and an interrogation of Kang, the result of which was that they discovered that he had even once used a swath of newspaper with a likeness of Chairman Mao on it to wipe his ass. Recalling this incident, Kang says that it was purely coincidental, that at the time he had paid absolutely no attention to what was on the paper. But it made no difference. Under the circumstances, they took this kind of behavior as ex- treme disrespect toward the leader.With a record of such poor behavior combined with his wife's report, Kang Wanhua was deemed a political offender and sent to prison. During his four years of prison life, he was forced to not only undergo ideological re-education but also to do forced hard manual labor to "reform" him. But because Kang got along well with the camp's doctors and nurses, he was