Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (85 page)

By now the eighty-one-year-old Mao had begun to give them his full backing, having had enough of the pragmatic approach of Zhou Enlai and then of Deng Xiaoping, who had been running the day-to-day work of the government since January 1975, when Zhou had gone into a hospital with cancer.  The Gang's endless and pointless mini-campaigns had driven the population to the end of their tether, and people had started circulating rumors privately, as almost the only outlet for their intense frustration.

Highly charged speculation was particularly directed against Mine Mao. Since she was frequently seen together with one particular opera actor, one ping-pong player, and one ballet dancer, each of whom had been promoted by her to head their fields, and since they all happened to be handsome young men, people said she had taken them as 'male concubines," something she had openly and airily said women should do. But everyone knew this did not apply to the general public.  In fact, it was under Mme Mao in the Cultural Revolution that the Chinese suffered extreme sexual repression.  With her controlling the media and the arts for nearly ten years, any reference to love was deleted from the hearing and sight of the population.  When a Vietnamese army song-and-dance troupe came to China, those few who were lucky enough to see it were told by the announcer that a song which mentioned love 'is about the comradely affection between two comrades."  In the few European films which were allowed mainly from Albania and Romania all scenes of men and women standing close to each other, let alone kissing, were cut out.

Frequently in crowded buses, trains, and shops I would hear women yelling abuse at men and slapping their faces.

Sometimes the man would shout a denial and an exchange of insults would ensue.  I experienced many attempted molestations.  When it happened, I would just sneak away from the trembling hands or knees.  I felt sorry for these men.

They lived in a world where there could be no outlet for their sexuality unless they were lucky enough to have a happy marriage, the chances of which were slim.  The deputy Party secretary of my university, an elderly man, was caught in a department store with sperm oozing through his trousers.  The crowds had pressed him against a woman in front of him.  He was taken to the police station, and subsequently expelled from the Party.  Women had just as tough a time. In every organization, one or two of them would be condemned as 'worn-out shoes' for having had extramarital affairs.

These standards were not applied to the rulers.  The octogenarian Mao surrounded himself with pretty young women.  Although the stories about him were whispered and cautious, those about his wife and her cronies, the Gang of Four, were open and uninhibited.  By the end of 1975, China was boiling with incensed rumors.  In the mini-campaign called "Our Socialist Motherland Is Paradise," many openly hinted at the question which I had asked myself for the first time eight years before: "If this is paradise, what then is hell?"

On 8 January 1976, Premier Zhou Enlai died.  To me and many other Chinese, Zhou had represented a comparatively sane and liberal government that believed in making the country work.  In the dark years of the Cultural Revolution, Zhou was our meager hope.  I was Grief stricken at his death, as were all my friends.  Our mourning for him and our loathing of the Cultural Revolution and of Mao and his coterie became inseparably interwoven.

But Zhou had collaborated with Mao in the Cultural Revolution.  It was he who delivered the denunciation of Liu Shaoqi as an "American spy." He met almost daily with the Red Guards and the Rebels and issued orders to them.

When a majority of the Politburo and the country's marsh Ms tried to put a halt to the Cultural Revolution in February 1967 Zhou did not give them his support.  He was Mao's faithful servant.  But perhaps he had acted as he did in order to prevent an even more horrendous disaster, like a civil war, which an open challenge to Mao could have brought on.  By keeping China running, he made it possible for Mao to wreak havoc on it, but probably also saved the country from total collapse.  He protected a number of people as far as he judged safe, including, for a time, my father, as well as some of China's most important cultural monuments.

It seemed that he had been caught up in an insoluble moral dilemma, although this does not exclude the possibility that survival was his priority.  He must have known that if he had tried to stand up to Mao, he would have been crushed.

The campus became a spectacular sea of white paper wreaths and mourning posters and couplets.  Everyone wore a black arm band a white paper flower on their chest, and a sorrowful expression.  The mourning was partly spontaneous and partly organized.  Because it was generally known that at the time of his death Zhou had been under attack from the Gang of Four, and because the Gang had ordered the mourning for him to be played down, showing grief at his death was a way for both the general public and the local authorities to show their disapproval of the Gang.

But there were many who mourned Zhou for very different reasons.  Ming and other student officials from my course extolled Zhou's alleged contribution to 'suppressing the counter revolutionary Hungarian uprising in 1956," his hand in establishing Mao's prestige as a world leader, and his absolute loyalty to Mao.

Outside the campus, there were more encouraging sparks of dissent.  In the streets of Chengdu, graffiti appeared on the margins of the wall posters and large crowds gathered, craning their necks to read the tiny handwriting.  One poster read,

The sky is now dark, A great star is fallen... Scribbled in the margin were the words: "How could the sky be dark: what about "the red, red sun"?"  (meaning Mao).  Another graffito appeared on a wall slogan reading "Deep-fry the persecutors of Premier Zhou!"  It said: "Your monthly ration of cooking oil is only two liang [3.2 ounces].  What would you use to fry these persecutors with?"  For the first time in ten years, I saw irony and humor publicly displayed, which sent my spirits soaring.

Mao appointed an ineffectual nobody called Hua Guofeng to succeed Zhou, and launched a campaign to 'denounce Deng and hit back against a right-wing comeback."  The Gang of Four published Deng Xiaoping's speeches as targets for denunciation.  In one speech in 1975, Deng had admitted that peasants in Yan'an were worse off than when the Communists first arrived there after the Long March forty years before. In another, he had said that a Party boss should say to the professionals, "I follow, you lead."  In yet another, he had outlined his plans for improving living standards, for allowing more freedom, and for ending political victimization.  Comparing these documents to the Gang of Four's actions made Deng a folk hero and brought people's loathing of the Gang to the boiling point.  I thought incredulously: they seem to hold the Chinese population in such contempt that they assume we will hate Deng rather than admire him after reading these speeches, and what is more, that we will love them!

In the university, we were ordered to denounce Deng in endless mass meetings.  But most people showed passive resistance, and wandered around the auditorium, or chatted, knitted, read, or even slept during the ritual theatrics.

The speakers read their prepared scripts in flat, expressionless, almost inaudible voices.

Because Deng came from Sichuan, there were numerous rumors about him having been sent back to Chengdu for exile.  I often saw crowds lining the streets because they had heard he was about to pass by.  On some occasions the crowds numbered tens of thousands.

At the same time, there was more and more public animosity toward the Gang of Four, also known as the Gang from Shanghai.  Suddenly bicycles and other goods made in Shanghai stopped selling.  When the Shanghai football team came to Chengdu they were booed all the way through the game.  Crowds gathered outside the stadium and shouted abuse at them as they went in and came out.

Acts of protest broke out all over China, and reached their peak during the Tomb-Sweeping Festival in spring 1976, when the Chinese traditionally pay their respects to the dead.  In Peking, hundreds of thousands of citizens gathered for days on end in Tiananmen Square to mourn Zhou with specially crafted weaths, passionate poetry readings, and speeches.  In symbolism and language which, though coded, everyone understood, they poured out their hatred of the Gang of Four, and even of Mao.  The protest was crushed on the night of 5 April, when the police attacked the crowds, arresting hundreds.  Mao and the Gang of Four called this a "Hungarian-type counter revolutionary rebellion." Deng Xiaoping, who was being held incommunicado, was accused of stage-managing the demonstrations, and was labeled "China's Nagy' (Nagy was the Hungarian prime minister in 1956).  Mao officially fired Deng, and intensified the campaign against him.

The demonstration may have been suppressed and ritually condemned in the media, but the fact that it had taken place at all changed the mood of China.  This was the first large-scale open challenge to the regime since it was founded in 1949.

In June 1976 my class was packed off for a month to a factory in the mountains to 'learn from the workers."  When the month was up, I went with some friends to climb the lovely Mount Emei, "Beauty's Eyebrow," to the west of Chengdu.  On our way down the mountain, on 28 July, we heard a loud transistor radio which a tourist was carrying.

I had always felt intensely annoyed by some people's insatiable love for this propaganda machine.  And in a scenic spot!  As though our cars had not suffered enough with all the blaring nonsense from the ever-present loudspeakers.  But this time something caught my attention.

There had been an earthquake at a coal-mining city near Peking called Tangshan.  I realized it must be an unprecedented disaster, because the media normally did not report bad news.  The official figure was 242,000 dead and 164,000 badly injured.

Although they filled the press with propaganda about their concern for the victims, the Gang of Four warned that the nation must not be diverted by the earthquake and forget the priority: to 'denounce Deng." Mme Mao said publicly, "There were merely several hundred thousand deaths.  So what?  Denouncing Deng Xiaoping concerns eight hundred million people."  Even from Mine Mao, this sounded too outrageous to be true, but it was officially relayed to us.

There were numerous earthquake alerts in the Chengdu area, and when I returned from Mount Emei I went with my mother and Xiao-fang to Chongqing, which was considered safer.  My sister, who remained in Chengdu, slept under a massive thick oak table covered in blankets and quilts.  Officials organized people to erect makeshift shelters, and detailed teams to keep a round-the-clock watch on the behavior of various animals which were thought to possess earthquake-predicting powers.  But followers of the Gang of Four put up wall slogans barking "Be alert to Deng Xiaoping's criminal attempt to exploit earthquake phobia to suppress revolution!"  and held a rally to 'solemnly condemn the capitalist-roaders who use the fear of an earthquake to sabotage the denunciation of Deng."  The rally was a flop.

I returned to Chengdu at the beginning of September, by which time the earthquake scare was subsiding.  On the afternoon of 9 September 1976 I was attending an English class.  At about 2:40 we were told that there would be an important broadcast at three o'clock that we were all to assemble in the courtyard to listen.  We had had to do such things before, and I walked outside in a state of irritation.

It was a typically cloudy autumn Chengdu day.  I heard the rustling of bamboo leaves along the walls.  Just before three, while the loudspeaker was making scratching noises as it tuned up, the Party secretary of our department took up a position in front of the assembly.

She looked at us sadly, and in a low, halting voice, choked out the words: "Our Great Leader Chairman Mao, His Venerable Reverence [ta-lao-ren-jia] has..."

Suddenly, I realized that Mao was dead.

28.  Fighting to Take Wing (1976-1978)

The news filled me with such euphoria that for an instant I was numb. My ingrained self-censorship immediately started working: I registered the fact that there was an orgy of weeping going on around me, and that I had to come up with some suitable performance.  There seemed nowhere to hide my lack of correct emotion except the shoulder of the woman in front of me, one of the student officials, who was apparently heartbroken.  I swiftly buried my head in her shoulder and heaved appropriately.  As so often in China, a bit of ritual did the trick. Sniveling heartily she made a movement as though she was going to turn around and embrace me I pressed my whole weight on her from behind to keep her in her place, hoping to give the impression that I was in a state of abandoned grief.

In the days after Mao's death, I did a lot of thinking.  I knew he was considered a philosopher, and I tried to think what his 'philosophy' really was.  It seemed to me that its central principle was the need or the desire?  for perpetual conflict.  The core of his thinking seemed to be that human struggles were the motivating force of history and that in order to make history 'class enemies' had to be continuously created en masse.  I wondered whether there were any other philosophers whose theories had led to the suffering and death of so many.  I thought of the terror and misery to which the Chinese population had been subjected.  For what?

But Mao's theory might just be the extension of his personality.  He was, it seemed to me, really a restless fight promoter by nature, and good at it.  He understood ugly human instincts such as envy and resentment, and knew how to mobilize them for his ends.  He ruled by getting people to hate each other.  In doing so, he got ordinary Chinese to carry out many of the tasks undertaken in other dictatorships by professional elites.  Mao had managed to turn the people into the ultimate weapon of dictatorship.