Mr. Xu had been interrogated many times before, like in 2005, when he was beat up in the city of Linyi for visiting the blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng. But this time, his interrogators tried a different tactic.

As soon as I sat down in the interrogation room, a new face, a man in his thirties, unleashed a torrent of invective and abuse.

Who do you think you are? Scum, bastard, degenerate … he exhausted almost all of the insulting words there are in the Chinese language. He paced back and forth, waving his arms, stomping his feet, twisting out his cigarette butts, making threatening gestures and monstrously screaming. It seemed that he was about to tear me to pieces and gobble me up. Both my hands were shackled to the iron chair, and I sat quietly. This went on for about an hour. Then he stopped. The room became quiet.

I raised my head, and looking into his eyes, asked him, “Are you done performing?”

I was genuinely concerned for this person. Who is he? What did he just do? For whom? How could he utter those words if he had the slightest sense of right and wrong? Unless he is mentally ill — he is not, he is putting on a show.

It was like watching from high above as a little marionette shook and screamed loudly on the blue earth. He looked so pathetic that I had to show my concern.

He suddenly fell apart. He said, in a succession of quick utterances, “Alas, I am really sorry; I was indeed performing; oh dear, I really can’t do this job! Why are they asking me to do this?”

He had completely forgotten about his colleagues around him, as well as the watching eyes supervising them in another room. Later, we chatted for a while. He was a graduate of Renmin University. He repeatedly apologized, saying that he shouldn’t have cursed and insulted me, and that he had failed.

If I had any fear, or felt humiliated, they would have won. Whatever worked on you, they would use it against you. For me, beating would only inspire me. In Linyi, Shandong Province, at the entrance of the black jail in the youth hostel, brutal violence did not make me submit. Nor did insults have any use.

In a post-totalitarian society, ideology is dead. There is no more class hatred. Beating people is just a job, a role to play.