The River at the Centre of the World

by Simon Winchester

  Hai, who worked for the Board of Revenue, had sent a minute to the Emperor, accusing him of extravagance, banditry and corruption – all of which was evidently true. The Emperor was duly outraged, sacked and fettered Hai – and then suddenly died himself. Hai was released, and then went and did more or less the same thing twice more in his chequered life – he was impeached and dismissed by the governor of Suzhou, whom he had similarly accused, and then he was censured for calling for the introduction of the death penalty for corruption. Hai was too righteous for his own good, perhaps – a prophet without honour in his own time.

  Wu Han had been studying Hai Rui, and had already published one article about Hai's decision to stand up for right against the Ming Emperor. This had appeared in the People's Daily on the eve of the Lushan meeting, and it is more than possible that Peng read it. He may even have been inspired by it. But the more important article came after Peng had been sacked. It was a lengthy essay about the sacking of Hai in which he was called ‘a man of courage for all times’, someone who refused to be intimidated. The Emperor, on the other hand, was ‘self-opinionated and unreceptive to criticism’, a man ‘craving vainly for immortality’. To any Chinese skilled in reading between the lines of ideographs, the allusion was clear: yet another good man had been sacked for standing up for right, and a tyrant was in power, behaving as a classical demagogue.

  Two years later Wu developed the theme of this now celebrated article into a full-length play, The Dismissal of Hai Rui from Office. It was staged in a Communist Party theatre in Beijing, and it was also published in book form. The idea, lèse-majesté that it obviously was, was being broadcast far and wide. But – was it real criticism, thinly veiled? Was it a red herring? Why was Wu himself not arrested and humiliated for daring to speak out? Scholars still wrestle with such matters: theses tumble from the presses, their authors poring over the bones of the Lushan encounter and all that stemmed from it.

  They do so because the echoes of Lushan and the allusive saga of Hai Rui reverberated down the years, most strongly in 1965. It was then that Mao moved to secure absolute control over the PL A, and in the same year Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, had her colleague Yao Wenyuan attack Wu Han's by now infamous play. Yao, Mao's wife and Mao himself were at long last saying: thus far and no further. Those who dared to compare Mao's energetic running of China with the behaviour of a vain and corrupt Ming emperor were, in essence, the new enemy. China must be purged of them, and of all who dared to think like them. Those foolish people who agreed with Wu Han were people who would have agreed with Peng Dehuai; those who condemned Peng and stood alongside Mao would be safe. For the remainder – who knew?

  This, then, was the very beginning of what would swiftly become the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a ten-year nightmare that changed the face of the country, horribly and terrifyingly, for ever. Tender and elegant though the essays of the seven-year interregnum may have been, they hid the realities of a mighty power struggle that had been going on ever since the Lushan meeting, and which penetrated to the very core of the new China. As usual what took place in the Middle Kingdom was hidden, at least at first, by the obsequies and curlicues of history and literature. What began with a brief display of plays and poems ended with the deaths of millions in thousands of prisons, and in limitless acres of mud and dirt.

  It also saw the end of Peng Dehuai's life. He was arrested by Red Guards at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, fell ill in prison, was denied any treatment for his ailments. He died in pain eight years later, but four years would pass before his family was told. His victimization, which began at Lushan, continued with all the special bitterness that a revolution can employ only when it chooses that to further its ideals it must consume its own children.*

  It was early evening and growing cool by the time we were back down from the hills. Mr Wen, the manager of the hotel, was waiting for us in his cavernous marble lobby. Good to his word, he had two tickets for the night steamer to Wuhan, and he now gave us a ride down to the riverside. He asked us again to join him on his drive to the city – the road journey would take five hours, while we would have to be aboard the ship for twelve. But he seemed to understand when I said we wanted to go on the ship.

  ‘You come to love the river after a while,’ he said. ‘Whenever I do this drive and I go round a curve and there the river is – I feel that I'm back with a friend. It grips your mind somehow. it is always there in the background. It is part of our lives. So I'll think of you when I am driving. In fact I'll envy you, I think.’

  He stood on the quay as men lifted the hawsers from the oily bollards and he waved to us. The ship boomed her own three blasts of farewell and edged out into the fairway. The setting sun glimmered its watery way down behind the hills ahead, and within moments Jiujiang was just a smoky smudge astern, its lights swallowed up in the gathering gloom. Somewhere below a karaoke session had begun.

  Dark came upon us swiftly. I stood on the deck as we washed steadily through the seamless blackness and listened to the news on the BBC – reception in the Yangtze valley is clear as crystal. They were reporting the Chinese floods, using words like ‘devastating' and ‘catastrophe’. But here the channel buoys winked, the radars swept the unseen banks, the ship moved steadily upstream, this night as every night. The Yangtze seemed her late-springtime self, fast, full and deep.

  8

  Swimming

  I was awakened the next morning at first light by the noise of passengers chattering excitedly out on deck, calling to one another to come and see something in the river. When I emerged sleepily from my cabin I could see them pointing into the middle distance. Some had cameras and binoculars – we had private cabins once again, so our neighbours were fairly well-to-do – and were busily snapping away.

  At first I assumed that it was a body. We had already spotted four of them, two on the journey from Nanjing, floating with the stream. Pigs, I had at first supposed, except that on closer inspection they soon turned out to be the carcasses of children, and of those whose sex I could judge, girls. It was a particularly distressing sight, and I wasn't very eager to gawk at yet another floating testament to the tyranny of the country's birth-control policy, certainly not this early in the morning. But then Lily put on her spectacles, spotted what it was that everyone was looking at and called to me to come.

  ‘Swimmers!’ she cried. ‘People – swimming across the river.’

  Were this almost any other country in the world, and almost any other river, the fact would barely raise an eyebrow. Dawn on a late spring Sunday might seem a generally eccentric time to go for a dip, but the simple fact of river swimming – across the Mississippi, say, or the Volga – would hardly bring slumbering passengers tearing up from their beds. But this, here, was something different.

  The Chinese can by nature be an incurious and in many ways a barely competitive people. The fact that one lives beside a great river, for example, would not seem to the average Chinese a good reason for immersing oneself in it and thrashing across to the far side. What, this average Chinese would say, is the point?

  And then too, not only would the exercise here be pointless, it would be very dangerous as well. The Yangtze is a peculiarly treacherous river in which to swim for almost all of its 3964 miles. It is very wide, very deep, and its currents are very fast. It is a viciously capricious, freakish stream – even in these middle reaches, where the banks are flat and covered with violets. The ragged patterns of violent upwellings and depth-plumbing vortices that are known to ship-masters as flower water and chow-chow water can render the most powerful swimmer powerless. There are also water snakes of an uncommonly poisonous kind, and in the vicinity of Wuhan, where these morning swimmers appeared, the waters are known to be afflicted by snails that carry schistosomes, wormy parasites that can wreak havoc in the human bloodstream.* Farmers working on the banks keep well away from the water or wear heavy boots. So why should anyone be out swimming?

  Through the gloom I could s
ee dozens of them, arranged in groups. A small armada of little boats led the way – one boat, sometimes two, leading each group of swimmers. Each craft had a red flag fluttering from a tall bamboo spar and one or two young men sitting in the stern, who were shouting exhortations to those splashing through the waters behind. Swim faster! Head this way! Watch out for this eddy! Steer clear of that baulk of lumber!

  One group, larger than most, passed close to our steamer. It was led by a pair of boats from which rose a celebration arch made of red balloons. There were twenty swimmers in the formation, most young men, perhaps three women. They swam steadily downstream, their arms shovelling the brown waters in near unison. The current swept them along fast, and as their stake-boats evidently guided them past the more treacherous stretches, it looked as though it could have been rather good fun. Like Olympic synchronized swimmers, the men and women wore expressions mixing determination and rapture with fixed smiles and gritted teeth, but with the hint of amazing and powerful things going on underwater, out of sight.

  As the lead boat passed by, a young man held up a banner for us to read: ‘Hankou Number 16 Iron Foundry. To the Eternal Glory of Comrade Mao.’ Now the reason for the swim became instantly clear: it all had to do with politics, and with reminiscence and the symbolism and sanctity of ancient deeds. And, more important still, it was because the three cities that make up the gigantic conurbation of Wuhan can rightly be said to be, in a historical sense, the most significant in modern China.

  For Mao Zedong had swum this river and, precisely because of Wuhan's historical uniqueness, at this very place. One of the ship's bridge officers promptly realized what was going on, and announced over the public address system that today's swim was in commemoration of Mao's. The loyal Wuhan people, he said, performed this act of fealty each midsummer. What was going on today was a dress rehearsal for the real thing, due to take place in a month or so, when men and women who worked in factories and offices all around would come to the Yangtze to race in teams, to see who might come closest to the natatory ideals set by the late Great Helmsman.

  Mao loved to swim: he saw it as an elemental kind of sport, where man's energy and wiles could be pitted against the brute strength of nature. It was June 1956 when the Chairman embarked on his first swimming expedition on the Yangtze: he did so to pit himself, symbolically, against brute strengths of quite another variety. He swam to demonstrate, as publicly as he could, his personal frustration and protest.

  The People's Republic that he had fashioned was at the time less than seven years old, but already was running into all manner of trouble. Mao's reforms, as he saw things, were being slowed by the turgid pace of the bureaucracy, there were signs of real opposition to him in some of the cities,* the party elders were squabbling openly and were not always giving Mao the credit for the revolution that he had so keenly engineered.

  Some of the mistakes were clearly his own. Mao had made a grave error, for instance, by so naïvely permitting a sudden measure of intellectual freedom – the movement that grew up in the wake of his repeated declarations to ‘let a hundred flowers bloom’. It had rapidly got out of hand – and it had to be summarily put down, as it was, with Stalinist robustness.

  But the revolution also seemed to have lost its head of steam for vaguer and more puzzling reasons. The nation's enthusiasm needed to be rekindled, Mao thought. There should be some demonstration, some potent reminder that the making of the People's Republic had been a brave and physical thing – that it had been born not out of textbooks and theorizing, as in Russia, but out of the physical heroism of the Long March, out of long-fought battles and well-deserved victories over Chiang Kai-shek's corrupt armies. To remind the people of the nobility of origins like these, and to galvanize them – and to galvanize the bureaucracy, the cadres and the party elders as well – Mao decided he needed to make a physical display of his own leadership and fearlessness.

  This in itself was nothing new. Chinese emperors had a long tradition of showing off their prowess to the citizenry – by painting, by calligraphy, or by very publicly performing noble deeds. Precisely why Mao chose to show off his swimming was never made clear – except that it was something that, as a young Hunanese farm boy, he had learned to do very well, and perhaps because of his own belief in the importance of the sport. Probably, considering China's peculiar intimacy with her vast hydraulics – and in Hunan, like Jiangxi and Anhui and faraway Jiangsu, the ‘land of fish and rice’, that intimacy ran even deeper – he thought a demonstration of a series of grand swims, in all the swimmable streams of the Empire, would put him in touch with his people in a way that a more intellectual distinction such as calligraphy (at which he was also very good) would not.

  Besides, it would also show he was strong and fit and capable and fearless – all estimable qualities of leadership. And if nothing else it would reinforce both his and China's undeniable uniqueness. Which American president or British prime minister or even Soviet secretary-general would ever dare indulge in such a vulgar and proletarian display?

  He took his first swim in the spring of 1956 in the Pearl River, near Canton – a modest but very dirty river, choked with chemical waste. Thirty guards floated downstream with him, as well as a political entourage – all of whom had to swim in their underwear, so precipitate was Mao's decision to go. The exercise seemed to do him no harm: he floated on his back like a great pink bear, as though he were sitting on a sofa. During his two hours of floating he taught Yang Shankun – who went on to be China's president, the man who accompanied Queen Elizabeth to Shanghai thirty years later – how to swim in his own relaxed and confident way. And when he emerged from waters that his doctor had seen were thick with human waste, he chided those who were aghast, who had recoiled from the idea of the Chairman swimming amid all the filth. ‘If you put a fish in distilled water,’ he asked, ‘how long do you think it will live?’

  Mao was none too sure, however, that it was entirely wise to swim in the Yangtze: ‘If I'm trapped there, they say, no one will be able to rescue me.’ He sent two of his guards up to Wuhan to swim in the river themselves and they returned full of tales of the treacherous whirlpools and nematode-carrying snails. But neither dared tell Mao, and there is a painful story of the two men stammering and shivering their way through an interview with the Chairman, one of them eventually telling him, in as roundabout a way as only a Chinese knows how, that the river was indeed not suitable for swimming. Mao exploded with rage at the news, prompting the guard's colleague to change his own story on the spot, and tell Mao that the river was, in fact, an ideal place for a leisurely crawl.*

  And so Mao travelled north – passing through his old homeland of Hunan, where he swam in the Xiang River for practice. One of his guards was bitten by a water snake, which didn't augur well. But finally Mao's special train chugged north again to Wuhan, his small steamer The East Is Red Number One was pressed into service for the convenience and privacy of the great swimmer, and with a flotilla of eight security boats and four longer-range speedboats in attendance, the expedition edged into midriver.

  At a point where today's groups of swimmers were rehearsing for their annual ritual of homage, Mao and forty guards and an even larger entourage of secretaries, doctors, Party secretaries, courtiers and sycophants got down into the water. The general commanding the Wuhan Military Region was frightened and had to be rescued – but the others drifted downstream with the genial and, after two hours of effortless amusement, thoroughly vindicated Chairman Mao. The party touched the far bank, symbolically.

  They reboarded the steamer for lunch and for a celebratory glass or two of mao-tai. Mao was brimming with pride in his achievement and looked about him for confirmation. Yang Shangkun began the encomiums: ‘No one can match the strength of the Chairman,’ he declared. ‘No other world leader looks down with such disdain on great mountains and powerful rivers. But our Chairman can. No one in history can match him.’

  There was more of the same, much more. And Mao h
ad proved his point: he was strong, spirited, irrepressible and uncontainable. He had defied the received wisdom, he had turned his back on caution and deliberate care. His swimming was a symbol, and he had meant it to be: he had now invested himself with renewed authority to run the country as he wished, with bravura. He had shown to those around him, and to the people, that he could dare and win.

  The victory over the river – which Party legend suggests, improbably, may well never have been swum before by anyone – had given Mao both the necessary adulation from within his circle and the necessary self-confidence from within himself to renew his attack on the slow pace of the revolution, and to look for victory there. It led, as adulation and overconfidence do, to hubris, and then to Nemesis. It led to excess and insanity: for within two years China had accelerated her radicalism under Mao's personal ministrations, and had given birth to the lunacies – well-intentioned, but lunacies nonetheless – of the Great Leap Forward. The 1956 swim in the Yangtze presaged disaster for China, though no one then had the faintest clue that it might.

  Nor had they ten years later, when Mao did the same thing once again. This time he had a far more serious agenda once the swim was done. The swimmers who were threshing alongside us on this particular morning were actually commemorating that 1966 swim, and not the first attempt in 1956. What was taking place today was a rehearsal for a race to be held on 16 July, the date chosen every year to memorialize what is still regarded as ‘Mao's legendary swim' or ‘Mao's celebrated swim' in the Yangtze. The first swim was simply the first; he would do another in 1958. But the one that he accomplished on 16 July 1966 – when he was seventy-three years old and, as it happened, even more frustrated with his country's progress than he had been ten years before – that was a truly great event, a swim seen round the world.