Every argument he brought forward was something she'd already thoroughly considered on her own.  Nobody else was willing to speak up; perhaps, in the beginning, they were content to let one of their own look like a fool, but the longer Xiaoxing spoke, the more systemic her condemnations became.  Insinuation of corruption from the West was rebuffed by citations from the Analects.  Insistence that the Party was right to perform as it did was picked apart by selections from Taoist texts that she quoted, verbatim, from memory.<br/><br/>They could lock her up, they could throw away the key, they could threaten her family, they could do anything they wanted to her.  But they had to know what they were doing was wrong; if they didn't know now, then she would<em>make them see</em>, and maybe-- just maybe-- they would be a bit kinder for the next soul.<br/><br/>At length, she realized she was now standing as she spoke, and that they hadn't interrupted her yet.  "If you cannot justify yourself to a loyal daughter of China," she said finally, sitting back down, "you -all- have forgotten what it means to be Chinese.  We are one people.  What you do to one another, you do to yourselves.  Be kind: it's the only thing the Masters wanted for us."