Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (57 page)

As an indication of the terror of the day, no one dared to burn or throw away any newspapers.  Every front page carried Mao's portrait, and every few lines featured Mao's quotations.  These papers had to be treasured and it would bring disaster if anyone saw you disposing of them.  Keeping them was also a problem: mice might gnaw into Mao's portrait, or the papers might simply rot either of these would be interpreted as a crime against Mao.  Indeed, the first large-scale factional fighting in Chengdu was triggered by some Red Guards accidentally sitting on old newspapers which had Mao's face on them.  A schoolfriend of my mother's was hounded to suicide because she wrote "Heartily love Chairman Mao' on a wall poster with one brush stroke inadvertently shorter, making the character 'heartily' look like the one meaning 'sadly."

One day in February 1967, in the depths of this overwhelming terror, my parents had a long conversation which I only came to know about years later.  My mother was sitting on the edge of their bed, and my father was in a wicker chair opposite.  He told her that he now knew what the Cultural Revolution was really about, and the realization had shattered his whole world.  He could see clearly that it had nothing to do with democratization, or with giving ordinary people more say.  It was a bloody purge to increase Mao's personal power.

My father talked slowly and deliberately, choosing his words carefully.

"But Chairman Mao has always been so magnanimous," my mother said.

"He even spared Pu Yi.

Why can't he tolerate his comrades-in-arms who fought for a new China with him?  How can he be so harsh on them?"

My father said quietly, but intensely, "What was Pu Yi?

He was a war criminal, with no support from the people.

He couldn't do anything.  But..."  He fell into a meaningful silence. My mother understood him: Mao would not tolerate any possible challenge.  Then she asked, "But why all of us, who after all only carry out orders?  And why incriminate all these innocent people?  And so much destruction and suffering?"

My father replied, "Maybe Chairman Mao feels he could not achieve his goal without turning the whole place upside down.  He has always been thorough and he has never been faint hearted about casualties."

After a charged pause, my father went on: "This cannot be a revolution in any sense of the term.  To secure personal power at such cost to the country and the people has to be wrong.  In fact, I think it is criminal."

My mother scented disaster.  After reasoning like this, her husband had to act.  As she expected, he said, "I am going to write a letter to Chairman Mao."

My mother dropped her head into her hands.

"What's the use?"  she burst out.

"How could you possibly imagine Chairman Mao would listen to you?  Why do you want to destroy yourself- and for nothing?  Don't count on me to take it to Peking this time!"

My father leaned over and kissed her.

"I wasn't thinking about your delivering it.  I'm going to post it." Then he lifted her head and looked into her eyes.  In a tone of despair he said, 'what else can I do?  what alternatives do I have?  I must speak up.  It might help.  And I must do it even if just for my conscience."

"Why is your conscience so important?"  my mother said.

"More than your children?  Do you want them to become "blacks"?"

There was a long pause.  Then my father said hesitantly, "I suppose you must divorce me and bring up the children your way."  Silence fell between them again, making her think that perhaps he had not made up his mind about writing the letter, because he was aware of its consequences.  It would surely be catastrophic.

Days passed.  In late February, an airplane flew low over Chengdu spreading thousands of sparkling sheets which floated down out of the leaden sky.  On them was printed a copy of a letter dated 17 February and signed by the Central Military Committee, the top body of senior army men.  The letter told the Rebels to desist from their violent actions.  Although it did not condemn the Cultural Revolution directly, it was obviously trying to halt it.  A colleague showed the leaflet to my mother.  My parents had a surge of hope.  Perhaps China's old and much-respected marshals were going to intervene.  There was a big demonstration through the streets of central Chengdu in support of the marshals' call.

The leaflets were the result of upheavals behind closed doors in Peking.  In late January Mao had for the first time called on the army to support the Rebels.  Most of the top military leaders except Defense Minister Lin Biao were furious.  On 14 and 16 February, they held two long meetings with political leaders.  Mao himself stayed away, as did Lin Biao, his deputy.  Zhou Enlai presided.  The marshals joined forces with Politburo members who had not yet been purged.  These marshals had been the commanders of the Communist army, veterans of the Long March, and heroes of the revolution.  They condemned the Cultural Revolution for persecuting innocent people and destabilizing the country.  One of the vice-premiers, Tan Zhenlin, burst out in a fury, "I've followed Chairman Mao all my life.  Now I'm not following him anymore!" Immediately after these meetings the marshals began to take steps to try to stop the violence.  Because it was particularly bad in Sichuan, they issued the letter of 17 February especially for the province.

Zhou Enlai declined to throw his weight behind the majority, and stuck with Mao.  The personality cult had endowed Mao with demonic power.

Retribution against the opposition was swift.  Mao stage-managed mob attacks on the dissident Politburo members and military commanders, who were subjected to house raids and brutal denunciation meetings.  When Mao gave the word to punish the marshals, the army did not make a move to support them.

This single feeble attempt to stand up to Mao and his Cultural Revolution was termed the "February Adverse Current."  The regime released a selective account of it to generate more intense violence against the capitalist roaders.

The February meetings were a turning point for Mao.

He saw that virtually everyone opposed his policies.  This led to the total discarding in all but name of the Party.

The Politburo was effectively replaced by the Cultural Revolution Authority.  Lin Biao soon began to purge commanders loyal to the marshals, and the role of the Central Military Committee was taken over by his personal office, which he controlled through his wife.  Mao's cabal now was like a medieval court, structured around wives, cousins, and fawning courtiers.  Mao sent delegates to the provinces to organize "Revolutionary Committees," which were to be the new instruments of his personal power, replacing the Party system all the way down to the grass roots.

In Sichuan, Mao's delegates turned out to be my parents' old acquaintances, the Tings.  After my family had left Yibin, the Tings had practically taken control of the region.  Mr.  Ting had become its Party secretary; Mrs.  Ting was Party chief of the city of Yibin, the capital.

The Tings had used their positions to engage in endless persecutions and personal vendettas.  One involved a man who had been Mrs.  Ting's bodyguard in the early 1950s.

She had tried to seduce him several times, and one day she complained about having stomach trouble and got the young man to massage her abdomen.  Then she guided his hand down to her private parts.  The bodyguard immediately pulled his hand back and walked away.  Mrs.  Ting accused him of trying to rape her and had him sentenced to three years in a labor camp.

An anonymous letter exposing the whole affair reached the Sichuan Party Committee, which ordered an investigation.  Being the defendants, the Tings were not supposed to see this letter, but a crony of theirs showed it to them.

They got every member of the Yibin government to write a report on some issue or other in order to check their handwriting.  They were never able to identify the author, but the investigation came to nothing.

In Yibin, officials and ordinary people alike were terrified of the Tings.  The recurrent political campaigns and the quota system provided ideal opportunities for them to engage in victimization.

In 1959 the Tings got rid of the governor of Yibin, the man who had succeeded my father in 1953.  He was a veteran of the Long March, and was very popular, which made the Tings' envious.  He was called "Straw Sandal Li' because he always wore peasant's sandals a sign that he wanted to keep close to his roots in the soil.  Indeed, during the Great Leap Forward, he showed little alacrity in forcing the peasants to produce steel, and in 1959 he spoke up about the famine.  The Tings denounced him as a 'rightist opportunist' and had him demoted to purchasing agent for the canteen of a brewery.  He died in the famine, although his job should have meant he had a better opportunity to fill his stomach than most.  The autopsy showed there was only straw in his stomach.  He had remained an honest man to his death.

Another case, also in 1959, involved a doctor whom the Tings condemned as a class enemy because he made a truthful diagnosis of hunger victims and the famine was officially unmentionable.

There were scores of cases like these so many that people risked their lives to write to the provincial authorities to denounce the Tings.  In 1962, when the moderates had the upper hand in the central government, they launched a nationwide investigation into the previous campaigns and rehabilitated many of the victims.  A team was formed by the Sichuan government to investigate the Tings, who were found guilty of gross abuse of power.

They were sacked and detained, and in 1965 General Secretary Deng Xiaoping signed an order expelling them from the Party.

When the Cultural Revolution started, the Tings somehow escaped and got to Peking, where they appealed to the Cultural Revolution Authority. They presented themselves as heroes upholding 'class struggle," for which, they claimed, they had been persecuted by the old Party authorities.  My mother actually bumped into them once at the grievance office.  They asked her warmly for her address in Peking.  She declined to give it to them.

The Tings were picked up by Chen Boda, one of the leaders of the Cultural Revolution Authority, and my father's old boss in Yan'an. Through him, Mme Mao received them, and immediately recognized them as kindred spirits.  Mme Mao's motivation for the Cultural Revolution had much less to do with policy than with set fling personal scores some of the pettiest kind.  She had a hand in the persecution of Mme Liu Shaoqi because, as she herself told the Red Guards, she was furious about Mme Liu's overseas trips with her husband, the president.  Mao only went abroad twice, both times to Russia, and both times without Mme Mao. What was worse, on her trips abroad Mme Liu was seen wearing smart clothes and jewelry that no one could wear in Mao's austere China.

Mme Liu was accused of being a CIA agent and thrown into prison, barely escaping death.

Back in the 1930s, before she had met Mao, Mme Mao had been a minor actress in Shanghai, and had felt cold-shouldered by the lite raft there.  Some of them were Communist underground leaders, who after 1949 became leading figures in the Central Department of Public Affairs. Partly to avenge her real or imagined humiliation in

Shanghai thirty years before, Mme Mao went to extreme lengths to find 'anti-Chairman Mao, anti-socialist' elements in their work.  As Mao went into retreat during the famine, she managed to get closer to him and whispered much venomous pillow talk in his ear.  In order to bring her foes down, she condemned the entire system under them, which meant the departments of Public Affairs all over the country.

She also took revenge on actors and actresses from the Shanghai period who had aroused her jealousy.  An actress called Wang Ying had played a role which Mme Mao had coveted.  Thirty years later, in 1966, Mme Mao had her and her husband imprisoned for life.  Wang Ying committed suicide in prison in 1974.

Another well-known actress, Sun Wei-shi, had once appeared decades before with Mine Mao in a play in Yan'an in front of Mao.  Sun's performance was apparently more of a hit than Mme Mao's, and she became a very popular figure among the top leaders, including Mao.

Being Zhou Enlai's adopted daughter, she did not feel the need to butter up Mme Mao.  In 1968, Mme Mao had her and her brother arrested and tortured to death.  Even Zhou Enlai's power could not protect her.

Mme Mao's vendettas gradually became known to the general public by word of mouth; her character also revealed itself in her speeches, which were reproduced on wall posters.  She was to become almost universally hated, but at the beginning of 1967 her evils were still little known.

Mme Mao and the Tings belonged to the same breed, who had a name in Mao's China -zheng-ren, people persecuting officials."  The tirelessness and single mindedness with which they engaged in persecution, and the bloodthirsty methods they used, were on a truly horrific scale.  In March 1967, a document signed by Mao announced that the Tings had been rehabilitated and empowered to organize the Sichuan Revolutionary Committee.

A transitional authority called the Sichuan Preparatory Revolutionary Committee was set up.  It was composed of two generals the chief political commissar and the commander of the Chengdu Military Region (one of China's eight military regions) and the Tings.  Mao had decreed that every Revolutionary Committee should have three components: the local army, representatives of the Rebels, and 'revolutionary officials."  The latter were to be chosen from among former officials, and this was at the discretion of the Tings, who were in effect running the committee.