Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (38 page)

"The good thing," the governor said, 'is that you only voiced your doubts to the Party, and not to the public."  He warned my father he could get into serious trouble if he insisted on raising these concerns, as could his family and 'others," clearly meaning himself, my father's friend.  My father did not insist.  He was half convinced by the argument, and the stakes were too high.  He had reached a stage where he was not insusceptible to compromise.

But my father and the people working in the departments of Public Affairs collected a great number of complaints, as part of their jobs, and forwarded them to Peking.

There was general discontent among the people and officials alike.  In fact, the Great Leap Forward triggered off the most serious split in the leadership since the Communists had taken power a decade before. Mao had to step down from the less important of his two main posts, president of the state, in favor of Liu Shaoqi.  Liu became the number-two man in China, but his prestige was only a fraction of that of Mao, who kept his key post as chairman of the Party.

The voices of dissent grew so strong that the Party had to convene a special conference, which was held at the end of June 1959 in the mountain resort of Lushan, in central China.  At the conference the defense minister, Marshal Peng Dehual, wrote a letter to Mao criticizing what had happened in the Great Leap Forward and recommending a realistic approach to the economy.  The letter was actually rather restrained, and ended on the obligatory note of optimism (in this case, catching up with Britain in four years).

But although Peng was one of Mao's oldest comrades, and one of the people closest to him, Mao could not take even this slight criticism, particularly at a time when he was on the defensive, because he knew he was wrong.  Using the aggrieved language of which he was enamored, Mao called the letter 'a bombardment intended to level Lushan."  He dug in his heels and dragged the conference out for over a month, fiercely attacking Marshal Peng.  Peng and the few who openly supported him were branded 'rightist opportunists."  Peng was dismissed as defense minister, placed under house arrest, and later sent into premature retirement in Sichuan, where he was assigued a lowly post.

Mao had had to scheme hard to preserve his power.

In this he was a supreme master.  His favorite reading, which he recommended to other Party leaders, was a classic multi-volume collection about court power and intrigues.  In fact, Mao's rule was best understood in terms of a medieval court, in which he exercised spellbinding power over his courtiers and subjects.  He was also a maestro at 'divide and rule," and at manipulating men's inclination to throw others to the wolves.  In the end, few top officials stood up for Marshal Peng, in spite of their private disenchantment with Mao's policies.  The only one who avoided having to show his hand was the general secretary of the Party, Deng Xiaoping, who had broken his leg. Deng's stepmother had been grumbling at home, "I was a farmer all my life and I have never heard of such a nonsensical way of farming?  When Mao heard how Deng had broken his leg playing billiards he commented, "How very convenient."

Commissar Li, the Sichuan first secretary, returned to Chengdu from the conference with a document containing the remarks Peng had made at Lushan.  This was distributed to officials of Grade 17 and above; they were asked to state formally whether they agreed with it.

My father had heard something about the Lushan dispute from the governor of Sichuan.  At his 'exam' meeting my father made some vague remarks about Peng's letter.

Then he did something he had never done before: he warned my mother that it was a trap.  She was greatly moved.  This was the first time he had ever put her interests before the rules of the Party.

She was surprised to see that a lot of other people seemed to have been tipped off as well.  At her collective 'exam," half of her colleagues showed flaming indignation against Peng’s letter, and claimed the criticisms in it were 'totally untrue."  Others looked as though they had lost their ability to speak, and mumbled something evasive.  One man managed to straddle the fence, saying, "I am not in a position to agree or disagree because I do not know whether the evidence given by Marshal Peng is factual or not.  If it is, I would support him.  Of course, I would not if it were not true."

The chief of the grain bureau for Chengdu and the chief of the Chengdu post office were Red Army veterans who had fought under Marshal Peng. They both said they agreed with what their old and much-revered commander had said, adding their own experiences in the countryside to back up Peng's observations.  My mother wondered whether these old soldiers knew about the trap.  If so, the way they spoke their minds was heroic.

She wished she had their courage.  But she thought of her children what would happen to them?  She was no longer the free spirit she had been as a student.  When her turn came she said, "The views in the letter are not in keeping with the policies of the Party over the last couple of years."

She was told by her boss, Mr.  Guo, that her remarks were thoroughly unsatisfactory because she had failed to state her attitude.  For days she lived in a state of acute anxiety.  The Red Army veterans who had supported Peng were denounced as 'rightist opportunists," sacked, and sent to do manual labor.  My mother was called to a meeting to have her 'right-wing tendencies' criticized.  At the meeting, Mr.  Guo described another of her 'serious errors."  In 1959 a sort of black market had sprung up in Chengdu selling chickens and eggs.  Because the communes had taken over chickens from individual peasants, and were incapable of raising them, chickens and eggs had disappeared from the shops, which were state owned.  A few peasants had somehow managed to keep one or two chickens at home under their beds, and were now surreptitiously selling them and their eggs in the back alleys at about twenty times their previous price.  Officials were sent out every day to try to catch the peasants.  Once, when my mother was asked by Mr.  Guo to go on one of these raids, she said, "What's wrong with supplying things people need?  If there is demand, there should be supply."  Because of this remark, my mother was given a warning about her 'right-wing tendencies."

The purge of 'rightist opportunists' rocked the Party once again, as a great many officials agreed with Peng.  The lesson was that Mao's authority was un challengeable even though he was clearly in the wrong. Officials could see that no matter how high up you were Peng, after all, was the defense minister and no matter what your standing - Peng had reputedly been Mao's favorite if you offended Mao you would fall into disgrace.  They also knew that you could not speak your mind and resign, or even resign quietly: resignation was seen as an unacceptable protest.  There was no opting out.  The mouths of the Party as well as the people were now tightly sealed.  After this, the Great Leap Forward went into further, madder excesses.  More impossible economic goals were imposed from on high.

More peasants were mobilized to make steel.  And more arbitrary orders rained down, causing chaos in the countryside.

At the end of 1958, at the height of the Great Leap Forward, a massive construction project was begun: ten great buildings in the capital, Peking, to be completed in ten months to mark the tenth anniversary, x October 1959, of the founding of the People's Republic.

One of the ten buildings was the Great Hall of the People, a Soviet-style columned edifice on the west side of Tiananmen Square. Its marbled front was a good quarter of a mile long, and its chandeliered main banqueting hall could seat several thousand people. This was where important meetings were to be held and the leaders were to receive foreign visitors.  The rooms, all to be on a grand scale, were named after the provinces of China.  My father was put in charge of the decoration of the Sichuan Room, and when the work was completed he invited Party leaders who had been connected with Sichuan to inspect it.  Deng Xiao ping, who was from Sichuan, came, as did Marshal Ho Lung, a famous Robin Hood figure who had been one of the founders of the Red Army, and was a close friend of Deng's.

At one point my father was called away, leaving these two and another old colleague of theirs, actually Deng's brother, chatting among themselves.  As he came back into the room he heard Marshal Ho saying to Deng's brother, while pointing at Deng: "It really should be him on the throne."  At that moment they spotted my father and immediately stopped talking.

My father was in a state of intense apprehension after this.  He knew he had accidentally overheard hints of disagreements at the top of the regime.  Any conceivable action, or inaction, could get him into deadly trouble.  In fact, nothing happened to him, but when he told me about the incident almost ten years later he said he had lived with the fear of disaster ever since.

"Just to have heard that amounts to treason," he said, using a phrase which means 'a crime bringing decapitation."

What he had overheard was nothing but an indication of some disenchantment with Mao.  This sentiment was shared by many top leaders, not least by the new president, Liu Shaoqi.

In autumn 1959 Liu came to Chengdu to inspect a commune called "Red Splendor."  The previous year, Mao had been highly enthusiastic about the astronomical rice output there.  Before Liu arrived the local officials rounded up anyone they thought might expose them, and locked them up in a temple.  But Liu had a 'mole," and as he was walking past the temple he stopped and asked to have a look inside.  The officials made various excuses, even claiming that the temple was about to collapse, but Liu refused to take no for an answer.  Eventually the big, rusty lock was clicked open, and a group of shabby peasants stumbled out into the daylight.  The embarrassed local officials tried to explain to Liu that these were 'troublemakers' who had been locked up because they might harm the distinguished visitor.  The peasants themselves were silent.  Commune officials, though completely impotent regarding policies, held awesome power over people's lives.  If they wanted to punish someone, they could give him the worst job to do, the least food, and invent an excuse to have him harassed, denounced, even arrested.

President Liu asked some questions, but the peasants just smiled and mumbled.  From their point of view it was better to offend the president than the local bosses.  The president would be leaving for Peking in a few minutes, but the commune bosses would be with them for the rest of their lives.

Shortly afterward another senior leader also came to Chengdu Marshal Zhu De accompanied by one of Mao's private secretaries.  Zhu De was from Sichuan and had been the commander of the Red Army, and military architect of the Communists' victory.  Since 1949 he had kept a low profile.  He visited several communes near Chengdu, and afterward, as he strolled by the Silk River looking at the pavilions, bamboo groves, and willow embraced teahouses along the riverbank, he waxed emotional: "Sichuan is indeed a heavenly place .... He spoke the words in the style of a line of poetry.  Mao's secretary added the matching line, in the traditional poets' fashion:

"Pity that damning gales of lie telling and false communism are destroying it!"  My mother was with them, and thought to herself: I agree wholeheartedly.

Suspicious of his colleagues, and still angry about being attacked at Lushan, Mao obstinately stuck to his crazy economic policies.  Although he was not unaware of the disasters they had been causing, and was discreetly allowing some of the most impracticable ones to be revised, his 'face' would not allow him to give up completely.  Meanwhile, as the sixties began, a great famine spread across the whole of China.

In Chengdu, the monthly food ration for each adult was reduced to 19 pounds of rice, 3.5 ounces of cooking oil, and 3-5 ounces of meat, when there was any.

Scarcely anything else was available, not even cabbage.

Many people were afflicted by edema, a condition in which fluid accumulates under the skin because of malnutrition.

The patient turns yellow and swells up.  The most popular remedy was eating chlorella, which was supposed to be rich in protein.  Chlorella fed on human urine, so people stopped going to the toilet and peed into spittoons instead, then dropped the chlorella seeds in; they grew into something looking like green fish roe in a couple of days, and were scooped out of the urine, washed, and cooked with rice.  They were truly disgusting to eat, but did reduce the swelling.

Like everybody else, my father was entitled only to a limited food ration.  But as a senior official he had some privileges.  In our compound there were two canteens, a small one for departmental directors and their wives and children, and a big one for everyone else, which included my grandmother, my aunt Jun-ying, and the maid. Most of the time we collected our food at the canteens and took it home to eat.  There was more food in the canteens than on the streets.  The provincial government had its own farm, and there were also 'presents' from county governments.  These valuable supplies were divided between the canteens, and the small one got preferential treatment.

As Party officials, my parents also had special food coupons.  I used to go with my grandmother to a special store outside the compound to buy food with them.  My mother's coupons were blue.  She was entitled to five eggs, almost an ounce of soybeans, and the same amount of sugar per month.  My father's coupons were yellow.  He was entitled to twice as much as my mother because of his higher rank.

My family pooled the food from the canteens and the other sources and ate together.  The adults always gave the children more, so I did not go hungry.  But the adults all suffered from malnutrition, and my grandmother developed slight edema.  She grew chlorella at home, and I was aware that the adults were eating it, although they would not tell me what it was for.  Once I tried a little, and immediately spat it out as it tasted revolting.  I never had it again.