Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (8 page)

He saw her in May 1966, two years before her execution. He had sneaked away to Shanghai during one of his trips home, and now he was waiting in the visiting room at the Tilanqiao Prison. Two dozen armed guards and other prison officials entered the room first, then Lin Zhao finally shuffled in with the help of a woman in a medical coat. Lin Zhao’s face was pale and gaunt, her clothes worn and ragged, and much of her hair had turned gray. Tied around her forehead was a white cloth on which she had scrawled a large character in fresh blood:
Injustice
. But she smiled when she saw her old friend. To Zhang, it was as if the stylish young woman with pigtails tied with white silk ribbons was standing there again. The prison officers were surprised; later, they said they had never seen her smile before.

The officers remained in the room for the meeting, but Lin Zhao didn’t care. She told Zhang she was being tortured, that the prison encouraged the other inmates to beat her every day in “struggle sessions,” that she feared she would be raped. One of the officials interjected, telling Zhang not to believe her because she had mental problems. But Lin Zhao challenged him: “What kind of country treats the words of a mentally ill person as a crime? When you convicted me of counterrevolution, why didn’t you say I was mentally ill then?” Zhang tried to change the subject, urging Lin Zhao to cooperate so she could be released. But she replied that the authorities had already decided to execute her. She coughed as she spoke, spitting blood into tissues that she crumpled up and tossed on the floor. “I could be killed at any moment, but I’m sure history will bring a day when people will speak of today’s suffering,” she told Zhang. “I hope you will tell people in the future about this suffering.” She asked him to gather her poems, essays, and letters and publish them, and to look after her mother and her younger siblings after her death. And then she wept. The room was quiet. The prison officers said they had never seen her cry before, either.

Later, Lin Zhao reminded Zhang of what she had said long ago during the Hundred Flowers Movement about feeling deceived by him. “What I hate most is deception,” she told him now. “I finally understood later, we really were deceived. Hundreds of thousands of people were deceived.”

They were almost out of time. Lin Zhao asked Zhang to come closer, and he walked around the table and sat at her side. She said she had a gift for him, and she reached into a cloth bundle she had with her, and dug around for a moment. Zhang was curious what it could be. Lin Zhao pulled something small out, and he couldn’t see what it was at first. Then she placed it in his open palm: a tiny sailboat, folded from a cellophane candy wrapper.

Lin Zhao

H
u Jie stared at the small boat in his hand. It was a fragile wisp of a thing. For more than thirty years, Zhang had kept it safe, guarding it like a secret treasure, and now he was giving it to the filmmaker. He said he was getting old, and was worried it would be lost when he passed away.

Zhang never saw Lin Zhao again after that prison visit. Instead, the officials at his labor camp put him in solitary confinement. His tiny cell was an oppressive, mosquito-infested room without windows or light, and they let him out only for interrogation by officers who suspected his meeting with Lin Zhao was part of some plot against the party. It was during one of these sessions, in the summer of 1968, that he was told Lin Zhao had been executed. “What’s your opinion?” the reeducation officer snapped. Utterly defeated, Zhang replied, “I have no opinion.” He remained in the cell for 138 days, then spent a decade toiling in prison farms and coal mines. During the terror of the Cultural Revolution, he and his family destroyed almost everything that could be used against them—old letters, magazines, photographs. But he held on to Lin Zhao’s little sailboat, wrapping it in paper and hiding it away, for who would suspect it was more than just a scrap of folded cellophane?

Now he wanted Hu to take it. He wanted to pass it on to someone who knew what it was, who understood where it came from and what it meant to him. Hu accepted the gift quietly, and said he would look after it. He felt as if he were also accepting Zhang’s burden, that he was agreeing to preserve Lin Zhao’s memory and tell her story, fulfilling the promise that Zhang made to her during that prison visit so many years ago.

The two men had been talking for five days straight, sometimes on camera, sometimes off camera, taking breaks when they were tired or hungry. Zhang was a terrific storyteller, and Hu was mesmerized by his tale, almost all of which was new to him. He had only the vaguest impression of the Anti-Rightist Campaign before. He knew it was something bad, and that it was somehow associated with Mao, but until Zhang explained it to him, he didn’t know exactly what had happened. Now he could see the scale and significance of the event. It was a turning point in Chinese history, he thought, the moment when the party reneged on its promise to allow a more democratic political process, a promise that had helped it win support and take power. It was the moment when it became clear the government would not tolerate even loyal dissent. Hu was surprised by the scope and fervor of the Hundred Flowers Movement, and by the ruthlessness of the Anti-Rightist Campaign. But what he found most astonishing was that it had all been erased so completely from the public’s memory. How could events of such magnitude, he wondered, have been forgotten so quickly? What did it mean for a nation to know more about emperors and dynasties hundreds of years in its past than about people and events a few decades ago? It wasn’t normal or healthy for a society to go through a cataclysm like the Anti-Rightist Campaign and never discuss it, Hu decided. He wondered if the absence of historical knowledge hindered social progress, if this ignorance of the past had prevented people from building on the experiences and arguments of Lin Zhao and her classmates. How might the Tiananmen Square democracy movement have been different if the students had been familiar with the ideas of their predecessors in the Hundred Flowers Movement, for example? Something else bothered him, too. If he and others his age were unaware of events as momentous as these, how would the knowledge be passed to the next generation?

On the train back to Nanjing, Hu decided to change the focus of his film. He couldn’t just build the documentary around Ni. The story was too big for that. He needed a broader framework, one that would let him explore Lin Zhao’s life but also convey the drama of the times she lived in. He wanted to force people to reconsider their understanding of the past and the lessons it held for the present. Like many people his age, Hu had concluded long ago that communism was a failure, and it was obvious to him that the party, despite its rhetoric, had embraced capitalism as the path to a brighter future. But listening to Zhang gave Hu a new perspective on China’s experience with communism. It was not just a mistaken ideology or economic theory, he realized, but also an extraordinary event in the development of mankind, an attempt to build a perfect society that inspired a nation but resulted in cruelty on an almost unimaginable scale. It was a great experiment in human affairs that ended in great human tragedy, and Hu marveled at how absurd it all seemed in retrospect. How could it have happened? How could people follow Mao through something like the Anti-Rightist Campaign, and then into a disaster like the Cultural Revolution? And how could the party remain in power through it all? He wanted to make a documentary that raised such questions by putting Lin Zhao’s life in historical context, and he couldn’t do that by following someone else around. He would have to abandon the observational style of his earlier films and take a more active role, becoming the central character of the film himself. He wanted to find and interview more people who knew Lin Zhao, as well as others who had lived through the era. It meant more research, more time, and more money, but Hu was convinced it would be worth the effort. He assured his worried wife that the result would be something special, his best film yet.

It was slow and difficult work. One after another, Hu tracked down interview subjects and tried to persuade them to speak with him about Lin Zhao. Again and again, they rebuffed him. Some people were rude, others apologetic, but if there was a common theme to their responses, it was fear. Hu could hear it in their voices when he called, and see it in their eyes and body language when he showed up at their doors unannounced and explained what he was doing. One couple Hu visited was so traumatized by the Cultural Revolution that they still kept everything in their home wrapped in newspaper, to make it easier to pack up and flee. Many of those Hu wanted to interview were former Rightists, and their tragic experiences had taught them caution. They had been “rehabilitated” and given new jobs after Mao’s death, but the party that persecuted them was still in power, and the labor camps they toiled in were still open. They understood there could be consequences to speaking out, and Hu understood their reluctance to talk. They had lost so much of their lives already, and they wanted to enjoy the rest of their years in peace. It was not that they had forgotten the past. It was that they remembered too well.

But for every person who declined to be interviewed, there were others who opened up. Most were wary at first. They too had suffered, and they were also afraid. But once they overcame that initial hesitation and started talking, they often couldn’t stop. They had been through so much, and they had bottled up their feelings and suppressed their memories for so long, that when they began talking about Lin Zhao, it was like opening a floodgate. The past came rushing back, and they would talk for hours without interruption. At times it seemed as if they were using the interviews as a form of therapy, and Hu often left the sessions drained and exhausted. Many of these people had never shared their experiences with anyone else before, not even with their own families. Several asked to be interviewed away from home, so their children wouldn’t learn of the misery they had endured. They told Hu they were speaking out for Lin Zhao, but he sensed they were also doing it for themselves. They had taken part in historic events that the party had buried, and because the party denied what they had been through, it was as if the fact of their existence were being erased, too. The country was moving on, looking forward, and no one seemed interested in what had happened to them. Neither journalists nor historians came to interview them, and they never saw anything about their experiences in books or magazines or on television, except occasionally in a publication or video smuggled in from overseas. As they got older, they wondered what, if anything, people would remember of the Hundred Flowers Movement and the Anti-Rightist Campaign after they died. Then, out of nowhere, a filmmaker showed up, and asked to hear their stories and record their memories. The urge to bear witness suddenly triumphed over the instinct to stay silent. By talking to Hu, they were refusing to let history forget them.

One man broke down in tears as soon as he opened his door to Hu. Lu Fuwei was seventy, a retired reporter for Xinhua, but once he had been Lin Zhao’s party branch secretary at Peking University, a classmate in the literature department who had gone along with the decision to label her a Rightist. He sat on his sofa sobbing for several minutes before collecting himself and speaking to Hu. “What Lin Zhao said at the time was just common sense. It wasn’t that she saw things others didn’t, it was just common sense,” he said. “But because we were at a low point in history, common sense was counterrevolutionary.” After Mao’s death, Lu managed to slip in a sentence about Lin Zhao’s execution in an essay about the Cultural Revolution, and he helped organize a quiet memorial service for her. Next to her photograph at the ceremony were red ribbons on which Lu had written just two characters instead of a traditional elegiac couplet. One was a question mark, and the other an exclamation point.

In each interview, Hu gathered more information about Lin Zhao. He learned that after being labeled a Rightist, she was supposed to undergo labor reform at a coal mine, but a professor concerned about her health intervened and arranged for her to carry out her sentence at an orchard on campus instead. There she had a brief romance with Tan Tianrong, the most prominent student Rightist at Beida and one of the founders of the Hundred Flowers Society. Hu tracked him down in the port city of Qingdao, where he had been appointed a college professor after being released from the labor camps. Tan refused to be interviewed at first, even after Hu pleaded with him in a letter and sent him a photo of Lin Zhao. Later, Hu traveled to Qingdao to see him in person. Standing inside the doorway to his apartment, Tan demurred again, but Hu wouldn’t let him shut the door. He kept saying how important it was to record this part of history, and argued that the least he could do was talk to him off camera. After almost forty minutes, Tan finally relented. “If you hadn’t come so far for Lin Zhao,” he said, “I wouldn’t have let you in.” After a while, he agreed to speak on camera, too. He described the short time he and Lin Zhao enjoyed together before he was sent to a labor camp, and recalled a conversation they had in the summer of 1958 after spending a day on campus trying to kill mosquitoes on the party’s orders. “She said to me, ‘I was laughing in my heart the whole time, laughing at the party’s insanity,’” he recalled. “Back then, I only felt suffering. I wasn’t like her. It never occurred to me the party had gone insane.”

Near the end of 1959, Lin Zhao was allowed to return home on medical parole. Her parents had separated by then; her mother was living in Shanghai and her father in Suzhou. She reconciled with both of them, and apologized for her denunciations of them as a teenager enthralled by the party. A year later, after she was arrested, her anguished father committed suicide.

During his first trip with Ni Jinxiong, Hu had interviewed a retired professor who told him Lin Zhao was arrested in 1960 for helping publish an underground magazine critical of the party. Now Hu could put her participation in the magazine in perspective. She had escaped with a relatively light sentence in the Anti-Rightist Campaign, and she had been allowed to go home for medical treatment. If she had refrained from further political activity, that might have been the worst of it for her. But instead of lying low, she made contact with a group of graduate students in physics at a university a thousand miles away in the frontier city of Lanzhou, in Gansu Province. Many of them had attended college in Beijing and some were natives of Shanghai, but the party had sent them west to be closer to the remote labs and test sites where the army was trying to build an atomic bomb. They were some of the brightest young minds in China, but because they were outsiders in Gansu, local cadres targeted them during the Anti-Rightist Campaign and sent them to labor in the countryside. A few of the students happened to meet Lin Zhao during a visit home, and she was quickly drawn into their plans to publish a magazine criticizing the party’s policies. They managed to print only one issue on a mimeograph machine before the authorities caught them. In September 1960, police arrested about forty students and teachers in Lanzhou in connection with the publication, as well as a local party chief and dozens of local residents who sympathized with them. A few weeks later, police in Suzhou arrested Lin Zhao, too.

Hu searched for a copy of the magazine, and for people who could explain what might have driven Lin Zhao to participate in such a risky endeavor. Eventually, he found the answer in another hidden chapter of the party’s history. Hu had heard stories of a famine that swept the nation between 1958 and 1961, but he had always accepted the explanation that it had been limited in scale and the result of “three difficult years” of natural disasters. Now, as his research into Lin Zhao’s life deepened, he learned the truth. There was indeed a famine, but it was neither limited nor caused by natural disasters. In reality, some thirty million people—and perhaps as many as fifty million—starved to death in a catastrophe that was the direct result of party policies, specifically a campaign known as the Great Leap Forward. Launched in 1958, the Leap was Mao’s attempt to catapult China into a state of utopian communism by mobilizing the public into a frenzy of accelerated economic production. Across the countryside, huge communes were set up in which peasants were forced to pool their land and possessions, meals were served in mass dining halls, and wages were replaced with “work points.” At the same time, the party announced a series of absurdly ambitious economic targets as Mao vowed to overtake Britain and the United States in steel production within fifteen years. Millions of people were diverted from the fields for worthless industrial schemes, the most notable of which were “backyard furnaces,” primitive smelters in which villagers tried to turn all their metal belongings—cookware, bicycles, tools—into steel. Peasants were told to spend less time in the fields and more time on such foolish projects, and encouraged to eat more in the new dining halls, because the Great Leap Forward was supposed to be a success. As officials sent in false reports of bumper crops to flatter Mao and protect their jobs, the stage was set for the deadliest man-made disaster ever visited upon China.