BEIJING — In a hotel room in the Yangtze River port of Wuhan, a dozen elderly Chinese men fight back tears to sing a song written almost 50 years ago in a U.S. prisoner-of-war camp in South Korea. At the end of the song, their tears flow freely, for friends lost in the conflict and for their own harsh treatment by the country that sent them to war.
At the place beyond the reach of sunlight, during those hard days, Your blood dyed red the foreign land; To pursue the truth, you'd rather die than submit. People from the motherland will never forget your courage.
Veteran Zhang Zeshi wrote those words for a friend killed in the camp. Five decades later, he concedes that the Chinese people did forget. "All of us who returned to China had fought bravely, but we were all forgotten," he says. "Worse still, we were treated as traitors rather than heroes." Their crime: failure to die for the motherland in battle against the U.S. aggressors.