Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (47 page)

Next, Mao moved in on the media, primarily the People's Daily, which carried the most authority as it was the official Party newspaper and the population had become accustomed to it being the voice of the regime.  He appointed Chen Boda to take it over on 3I May, thus securing a channel through which he could speak directly to hundreds of millions of Chinese.

Starting in June 1966, the People's Daily showered the country with one strident editorial after another, calling for 'establishing Chairman Mao's absolute authority," 'sweeping away all the ox devils and snake demons' (class enemies), and exhorting people to follow Mao and join the vast, unprecedented undertaking of a Cultural Revolution.

In my school, teaching stopped completely from the beginning of June, though we had to continue to go there.

Loudspeakers blasted out People's Daily editorials, and the front page of the newspaper, which we had to study every day, was frequently taken up entirely by a full-page portrait of Mao.  There was a daily column of Mao's quotations.  I still remember the slogans in bold type, which, through reading in class over and over again, were engraved into the deepest folds of my brain:

"Chairman Mao is the red sun in our hearts!"

"Mao Zedong Thought is our lifeline!"

"We will smash whoever opposes Chairman Mao!"

"People all over the world love our Great Leader Chairman Mao!"

There were pages of worshipping comments from foreigners, and pictures of European crowds trying to grab Mao's works.  Chinese national pride was being mobilized to enhance his cult.

The daily newspaper reading soon gave way to the recitation and memorizing of The Quotations of Chairman Mao, which were collected together in a pocket-size book with a red plastic cover, known as "The Little Red Book."  Everyone was given a copy and told to cherish it 'like our eyes."

Every day we chanted passages from it over and over again in unison.  I still remember many verbatim.

One day, we read in the People's Daily that an old peasant had stuck thirty-two portraits of Mao on his bedroom walls, 'so that he can see Chairman Mao's face as soon as he opens his eyes, whatever direction he looks in."  So we covered the walls of our classroom with pictures of Mao's face beaming his most benign smile.  But we soon had to take them down, and quickly, too.  Word circulated that the peasant had really used the pictures as wallpaper, because Mao's portraits were printed on the best-quality paper and were free.  Rumour had it that the reporter who had written up the story had been found to be a class enemy for advocating 'abuse of Chairman Mao."  For the first time, fear of Chairman Mao entered my subconscious.

Like "Ox Market," my school had a work team stationed in it.  The team had half heartedly branded several of the school's best teachers as “reactionary bourgeois authorities," but had kept this from the pupils. In June 1966, however, panicked at the tide of the" Cultural Revolution and feeling the need to create some victims, the work team suddenly announced the names of the accused to the whole school.

The work team organized pupils and the teachers who had not been accused to write denunciation posters and slogans, which soon covered the grounds.  Teachers became active for a variety of reasons: conformity, loyalty to the Party's orders, envy of the prestige and privileges of other teachers and fear.

Among the victims was my Chinese language and literature teacher, Mr. Chi, whom I adored.  According to one of the wall posters, he had said in the early 1960s: "Shouting "Long live the Great Leap Forward!"  will not fill our stomachs, will it?"  Having no idea that the Great Leap had caused the famine, I did not understand his alleged remark, although I could catch its irreverent tone.

There was something about Mr.  Chi which set him apart.

At the time I could not put my finger on it, but now I think it was that he had an air of irony about him.  He had a way of making dry, short half-cough, half-laughs which suggested he had kept something unsaid.  He once made this noise in response to a question I asked him. One lesson in our textbook was an extract from the memoirs of Lu Dingyi, the then head of Central Public Affairs, about his experience on the Long March.  Mr.  Chi drew our attention to a vivid description of the troops marching along a zigzagging mountain path, the whole procession lit up by pine torches carried by the marchers, the flames glowing against a moonless black sky.  When they reached their night's destination, they all 'rushed to grab a bowlful of food to pour down their stomachs."  This puzzled me profoundly, as Red Army soldiers had always been described as offering their last mouthful to their comrades and going starving themselves.  It was impossible to imagine them 'grabbing."  I went to Mr.  Chi for an answer.  He cough laughed said I did not know what being hungry meant, and quickly changed the subject. I was unconvinced.

In spite of this, I felt the greatest respect for Mr.  Chi.  It broke my heart to see him, and other teachers I admired, being wildly condemned and called ugly names.  I hated it when the work team asked everyone in the school to write wall posters 'exposing and denouncing' them.

I was fourteen at the time, instinctively averse to all militant activities, and I did not know what to write.  I was frightened of the wall posters' overwhelming black ink on giant white sheets of paper, and the outlandish and violent language, such as "Smash So-and-so's dog's head' and "Annihilate So-and-so if he does not surrender."  I began to play truant and stay at home.  For this I was constantly criticized for 'putting family first' at the endless meetings that now made up almost our entire school life.  I dreaded these meetings.  A sense of unpredictable danger haunted me.

One day my deputy headmaster, Mr.  Kan, a jolly, energetic man, was accused of being a capitalist-roader and of protecting the condemned teachers.  Everything he had done in the school over the years was said to be 'capitalist," even studying Mao's works as fewer hours had been devoted to this than to academic studies.

I was equally shocked to see the cheerful secretary of the Communist Youth League in the school, Mr.  Shan, being accused of being 'anti-Chairman Mao."  He was a dashing-looking young man whose attention I had been eager to attract, as he might help me join the Youth League when I reached the minimum age, fifteen.

He had been teaching a course on Marxist philosophy to the sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds, and had given them some essay-writing assignments. He had underlined bits of the essays which he thought were particularly well written.  Now these disconnected parts were joined together by his pupils to form an obviously nonsensical passage which the wall posters claimed was anti-Mao.  I learned years later that this method of concocting an accusation through the arbitrary linking of unconnected sentences had started as early as 1955, the year my mother suffered her first detention under the Communists, when some writers had used it to attack their fellow writers.

Mr.  Shan told me years later that the real reason he and the deputy headmaster were picked out as victims was that they were not around at the time they had been absent as members of another work team which made them convenient scapegoats.  The fact that they did not get on with the headmaster, who had stayed behind, made things worse.

"If we'd been there and he'd been away, that son of a turtle wouldn't have been able to pull his pants up, he would have had so much shit on his arse," Mr.  Shan told me ruefully.

The deputy headmaster, Mr.  Kan, had been devoted to the Party, and felt terribly wronged.  One evening he wrote a suicide note and then slashed his throat with a razor.  He was rushed to hospital by his wife, who had come home earlier than usual.  The work team hushed up his suicide attempt.  For a Party member like Mr.  Kan to commit suicide was regarded as a betrayal.  It was seen as a loss of faith in the Party and an attempt at blackmail.  Therefore, no mercy should be shown to the unfortunate person.  But the work team was nervous.  They knew very well that they had been inventing victims without the slightest justification.

When my mother was told about Mr.  Kan she cried.  She liked him very much, and knew that as he was a man of immense optimism he must have been under inhuman pressure to have acted in this way.

In her own school, my mother refused to be swept into any panic victimizing.  But the teenagers in the school, stirred up by the articles in the People's Daily, began to move against their teachers. The People's Daily called for 'smashing up' the examination system which 'treated pupils like enemies' (quoting Mao) and was part of the vicious designs of the 'bourgeois intellectuals," meaning the majority of the teachers (again quoting Mao).  The paper also denounced 'bourgeois intellectuals' for poisoning the minds of the young with capitalist rubbish in preparation for a Kuomintang comeback.

"We cannot allow bourgeois intellectuals to dominate our schools anymore!"  said Mao.

One day my mother bicycled to the school to find that the pupils had rounded up the headmaster, the academic supervisor, the graded teachers, whom they understood from the official press to be 'reactionary bourgeois authorities," and any other teachers they disliked.  They had shut them all up in a classroom and put a notice on the door saying 'demons' class."  The teachers had let them do it because the Cultural Revolution had thrown them into bewilderment.  The pupils now seemed to have some sort of authorization, undefined but nonetheless real.  The grounds were covered with giant slogans, mostly headlines from the People's Daily.

As my mother was shown to the classroom now turned 'prison," she passed through a crowd of pupils.  Some looked fierce, some ashamed, some worried, and others uncertain.  More pupils had been following her from the moment she arrived.  As the leader of the work team, she had supreme authority, and was identified with the Part)'.

The pupils looked to her for orders.  Having set up the 'prison," they had no idea what to do next.

My mother announced forcefully that the 'demons' class' was dismissed. There was a stir among the pupils, but nobody challenged her order.  A few boys muttered to one another, but lapsed into silence when my mother asked them to speak out.  She went on to tell them that it was illegal to detain anyone without authorization, and that they should not ill-treat their teachers, who deserved their gratitude and respect. The door to the classroom was opened and the 'prisoners' set free.

My mother was very brave to go against the tide.  Many other work teams engaged in victimizing completely innocent people to save their own skins.  In fact, she had more cause than most to worry.  The provincial authorities had already punished several scapegoats, and my father had a strong presentiment that he was going to be the next in line.  A couple of his colleagues had told him discreetly that the word was going around in some organizations under him that they should turn their suspicion on him.

My parents never said anything to me or my siblings.

The restraints which had kept them silent about politics before still prevented them from opening their minds to us.  Now it was even less possible for them to speak.  The situation was so complex and confusing that they could not understand it themselves.  What could they possibly say to us that would make us understand?  And what use would it have been anyway?  There was nothing anyone could do.

What was more, knowledge itself was dangerous.  As a result, my siblings and I were totally unprepared for the Cultural Revolution, although we had a vague feeling of impending catastrophe.

In this atmosphere, August came.  All of a sudden, like a storm sweeping across China, millions of Red Guards emerged.

16.  "Soar to Heaven, and Pierce the Earth'– Mao's Red Guards (June-August 1966)

Under Mao a generation of teenagers grew up expecting to fight class enemies, and the vague calls in the press for a Cultural Revolution had stoked the feeling that a 'war' was imminent.  Some politically well-attuned youngsters sensed that their idol, Mao, was directly involved, and their indoctrination gave them no alternative but to take his side.

By the beginning of June a few activists from a middle school attached to one of China's most renowned universities, qmghua in Peking, had got together several times to discuss their strategies for the forthcoming battle and had decided to call themselves 'the Red Guards of Chairman Mao."  They adopted a quotation by Mao that had appeared in the People's Daily, "Rebellion is justified," as their motto.

These early Red Guards were 'high officials' children."

Only they could feel sufficiently secure to engage in activities of this kind.  In addition, they had been brought up in a political environment, and were more interested in political intrigues than most Chinese.  Mme Mao noticed them, and gave them an audience in July.  On x August, Mao made the unusual gesture of writing them an open letter to offer his 'most warm and fiery support."  In the letter he subtly modified his earlier saying to "Rebellion against reactionaries is justified."  To the teenage zealots, this was like being addressed by God.  After this, Red Guard groups sprang up all over Peking, and then throughout China.

Mao wanted the Red Guards to be his shock troops.  He could see that the people were not responding to his repeated calls to attack the capitalist-roaders.  The Communist Party had a sizable constituency, and, moreover, the lesson of 1957 was also still fresh in people's minds.

Then, too, Mao had called on the population to criticize Party officials, but those who had taken up his invitation had ended up being labeled as rightists and had been damned.  Most people suspected the same tactic again 'enticing the snake out of its haunt in order to cut off its head."