Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (19 page)

After a short spell at a Party school, my father applied to join one of the Party's most prestigious institutions, the Academy of Marxist-Leninist Studies.  The entrance exam was quite stiff, but he took first place, as a result of his reading deep into the night in the loft of the bookshop in Yibin.  His fellow candidates were amazed. Most of them had come from the big cities like Shanghai, and had looked down on him as a bit of a yokel.  My father became the youngest research fellow in the Academy.

My father loved Yan'an.  He found the people there full of enthusiasm, optimism, and purpose.  The Party leaders lived simply, like everyone else, in striking contrast with Kuomintang officials.  Yan'an was no democracy, but compared with where he had come from it seemed to be a paradise of fairness.

In 1942 Mao started a "Rectfication' campaign, and invited criticisms about the way things were being run in Yan'an.  A group of young research fellows from the Academy, led by Wang Shi-wei and including my father, put up wall posters criticizing their leaders and demanding more freedom and the right to greater individual expression.  Their action caused a storm, and Mao himself came to read the posters.

Mao did not like what he saw, and turned his campaign into a witch-hunt.  Wang Shi-wei was accused of being a Trotskyite and a spy. My father, as the youngest person in the Academy, was said by Ai Si-qi, the chief exponent of Marxism in China and one of the leaders of the Academy, to have 'committed a very naive mistake."  Earlier, Ai Si-qi had often praised my father as a 'brilliant and sharp mind."

My father and his friends were subjected to relentless criticisms and obliged to undertake self-criticisms at intensive meetings for months. They were told that they had caused chaos in Yan'an and weakened the Party's unity and discipline, which could damage the great cause of saving China from the Japanese and from poverty and injustice.  Over and over again, the Party leaders inculcated into them the absolute necessity for complete submission to the Party, for the good of the cause.

The Academy was shut down, and my father was sent to teach ancient Chinese history to semi-literate peasants turned-officials at the Central Party School.  But the ordeal had turned him into a convert. Like so many other young people, he had invested his life and faith in Yan'an.  He could not let himself be easily disappointed.  He regarded his harsh treatment as not only justified, but even a noble experience soul-cleansing for the mission to save China.

He believed that the only way this could be done was through disciplined, perhaps drastic, measures, including immense personal sacrifice and the total subordination of the self.

There were less demanding activities as well.  He toured the surrounding areas collecting folk poetry, and learned to be a graceful and elegant dancer in Western-style ballroom dancing, which was very popular in Yan'an many of the Communist leaders, including the future prime minister, Zhou Enlai, enjoyed it.  At the foot of the dry, dusty hills was the meandering, dark-yellow, silt-filled Yan River, one of the scores which join the majestic Yellow River, and here my father often went swimming; he loved to do the backstroke while looking up at the simple solid pagoda.

Life in Yan'an was hard but exhilarating.  In 1942, Chiang Kai-shek tightened his blockade.  Supplies of food, clothing, and other necessities became drastically curtailed.

Mao called on everyone to take up hoes and spinning wheels and produce essential goods themselves.  My father became an excellent spinner.

He stayed in Yan'an for the whole of the war.  In spite of the blockade, the Communists strengthened their control over large areas, particularly in northern China, behind the Japanese lines.  Mao had calculated well: the Communists had won vital breathing space.  By the end of the war they claimed some sort of control over ninety-five million people, about 20 percent of the population, in eighteen 'base areas."  Equally important, they gained experience at running a government and an economy under tough conditions.  This stood them in good stead: their organizational ability and their system of control were always phenomenal.

On 9 August 1945, Soviet troops swept into northeast China.  Two days later the Chinese Communists offered them military cooperation against the Japanese, but they were turned down: Stalin was supporting Chiang Kaishek.  That same day the Chinese Communists started to order armed units and political advisers into Manchuria, which everyone realized was going to be of critical importance.

A month after the Japanese surrender my father was ordered to leave Yan'an and head for a place called Chaoyang in southwest Manchuria, about 700 miles to the east, near the border with Inner Mongolia.

In November, after walking for two months, my father and his small group reached Chaoyang.  Most of the territory was barren hills and mountains, almost as poor as Yan'an.  The area had been part of Manchukuo until three months before.  A small group of local Communists had proclaimed its own 'government."  The Kuomintang underground then did the same.  Communist troops came racing over from Jinzhou, about fifty miles away, arrested the Kuomintang governor, and executed him for 'conspiring to overthrow the Communist government."

My father's group took over, with the authority of Yan'an, and within a month a proper administration began to function for the whole area of Chaoyang, which had a population of about 100,000.  My father became its deputy chief.  One of the first acts of the new government was to put up posters announcing its policies: the release of all prisoners; the closure of all pawnshops pawned goods could be recovered free of charge; brothels were to be closed and prostitutes given six months' living allowance by their owners; all grain stores were to be opened and the grain distributed to those most in need; all property belonging to Japanese and collaborators was to be confiscated; and Chinese-owned industry and commerce was to be protected.

These policies were enormously popular.  They benefited the poor, who formed the vast majority of the population.  Chaoyang had never known even moderately good government; it had been ransacked by different armies in the warlord period, and then occupied and bled white by the Japanese for over a decade.

A few weeks after my father had started his new job, Mao issued an order to his forces to withdraw from all vulnerable cities and major communication routes and to pull back into the countryside 'leaving the high road alone and seizing the land on both sides' and 'surrounding the cities from the countryside."  My father's unit withdrew from Chaoyang into the mountains.  It was an area almost devoid of vegetation, except for wild grass and the occasional hazelnut tree and wild fruits.  The temperatures fell at night to around minus 30 F with icy gales.  Anyone caught outside at night without cover froze to death.  There was practically no food.  From the exhilaration of seeing Japan's defeat and their own sudden expansion into large tracts of the northeast, the Communists' apparent victory was seemingly turning to ashes within weeks.  As my father and his men hunkered down in caves and poor peasant huts, they were in a somber mood.

The Communists and the Kuomintang were both maneuvering for advantage in preparation for a resumption of full-scale civil war.  Chiang Kai-shek had moved his capital back to Nanjing, and with American help, had transported large numbers of troops to North China, issuing secret orders for them to occupy all strategic places as fast as possible. The Americans sent a leading general, George Marshall, to China to try to persuade Chiang to form a coalition government with the Communists as junior partners.  A truce was signed on 10 January 1946, to go into effect on 13 January.  On the 14th the Kuomintang entered Chaoyang and immediately started setting up a large armed police force and an intelligence network and arming local landlords' squads.  Altogether, they put together a force of over 4,000 men to annihilate the Communists in the area.

By February my father and his unit were on the run, retreating deeper and deeper into more and more inhospitable terrain.

Most of the time they had to hide with the poorest peasants.  By April there was nowhere left to run, and they had to break up into smaller groups.  Guerrilla warfare was the only way to survive.  Eventually my father set up his base at a place called Six Household Village, in hilly country where the Xiaoling River starts, about sixty five miles west of Jinzhou.

The guerrillas had very few arms; they had to obtain most of their guns from the local police or 'borrow' them from landlord forces.  The other main source was former members of the Manchukuo army and police, to whom the Communists made a particular pitch because of their weapons and fighting experience.  In my father's area, the main thrust of the Communists' policy was to reduce the rent and interest on loans the peasants had to pay to the landlords.  They also confiscated grain and clothing from landlords and distributed them to the poor peasants.

At first progress was slow, but by July, when the sorghum had grown to its full height ready for harvesting, and was high enough to conceal them, the different guerrilla units were able to come together for a meeting in Six Household Village, under a huge tree which stood guard over the temple.  My father opened by referring to the Chinese Robin Hood story, The Water Margin: "This is our "Hall of Justice."  We are here to discuss how to "rid the people of evil and uphold justice on behalf of Heaven."

At this point my father's guerrillas were fighting mainly westward, and the areas they took included many villages inhabited by Mongolians.  In November 1946, as winter closed in, the Kuomintang stepped up their attacks.  One day my father was almost captured in an ambush.  After a fierce firefight, he just managed to break out.  His clothes were torn to shreds and his penis was dangling out of his trousers, to the amusement of his comrades.

They rarely slept in the same place two nights running, and often had to move several times in one night.  They could never take their clothes off to sleep, and their life was an uninterrupted succession of ambushes, encirclements, and breakouts.  There were a number of women in the unit, and my father decided to move them and the wounded and unfit to a more secure area to the south, near the Great Wall.  This involved a long and hazardous journey through Kuomintang-held areas. Any noise might be fatal, so my father ordered all babies to be left behind with local peasants.  One woman could not bring herself to abandon her child, and in the end my father told her she would have to choose between leaving the baby behind or being court-martialed.  She left the baby.

In the following months, my father's unit moved eastward toward Jinzhou and the key railway line from Manchuria to China proper.  They fought in the hills west of Jinzhou before the regular Communist army arrived. The Kuomintang launched a number of unsuccessful 'annihilation campaigns' against them.  The unit's actions began to have an impact. My father, now twenty-five, was so well known that there was a price on his head and "Wanted' notices up all over the Jinzhou area.  My mother saw these notices, and began to hear a lot about him and his guerrillas from her relatives in Kuomintang intelligence.

When my father's unit was forced to withdraw, Kuomintang forces returned and took back from the peasants the food and clothing which the Communists had confiscated from the landlords.  In many cases peasants were tortured, and some were killed, particularly those who had eaten the food which they had often done because they were starving and could not now hand it back.

In SIX Household Village the man who had owned the most land, one Jin Ting-quan, had also been the police chief, and had brutally raped many local women.  He had run away with the Kuomintang and my father's unit had presided over the meeting which opened his house and his grain store.  When Jin came back with the Kuomintang the peasants were made to grovel in front of him and return all the goods they had been given by the Communists.

Those who had eaten the food were tortured and their homes smashed. One man who refused to kowtow or return the food was slowly burned to death.

In spring 1947 the tide began to turn, and in March my father's group was able to retake the town of Chaoyang.

Soon the whole surrounding area was in their hands.  To celebrate their victory, there was a feast followed by entertainment.  My father was brilliant at inventing riddles out of people's names, which made him a great hit with his comrades.

The Communists carried out a land reform, confiscating land which had hitherto been owned by a small number of landlords and redistributing it equally among the peasants.

In Six Household Village the peasants at first refused to take Jin Ting-quan's land, even though he had now been arrested.  Although he was under guard, they bowed and scraped to him.  My father visited many peasant families, and gradually learned the horrible truth about him. The Chaoyang government sentenced Jin to death by shooting, but the family of the man who had been burned to death, with the support of the families of other victims, determined to kill him the same way.  As the flames began to lick around his body Jin clenched his teeth, and did not utter even a moan until the moment the fire surrounded his heart. The Communist officials sent to carry out the execution did not prevent the villagers from doing this.

Although the Communists were opposed to torture in theory and on principle, officials were told that they should not intervene if the peasants wished to vent their anger in passionate acts of revenge.

People such as Jin were not just wealthy owners of land, but had wielded absolute and arbitrary power, which they indulged willfully, over the lives of the local population.