Life and Death in Shanghai

by Cheng Nien

My curiosity increased by the minute. What could this place be? The layout was like that of a university compound. But the clean buildings and trim lawns seemed to indicate this was no ordinary institution of higher education. The men who came with me were walking a few steps ahead of me. They had an air of restraint and caution. I decided, in spite of the absence of armed sentries at the gate, that the place was either the site of a government department of some importance or a military installation. Chinese people usually tread gingerly in the vicinity of power and firearms.

  We entered a meeting hall where about a hundred people were assembled, sitting in two sections facing each other. In the space between, against the wall, was a raised platform. A number of people in civilian clothes were seated there in a semicircle behind a table. The men from No. 1 Detention House joined them. On the walls were the usual Cultural Revolution slogans written in white paint on red cloth. They proclaimed the victory of the Maoists and the utter destruction of the “capitalist-roaders” in the Party. The “historical” meeting of the Ninth Party Congress was declared a great success for the promotion of Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong Thought. I noticed that the portrait of Lin Biao, the official successor to Mao, appeared beside the official portrait of Mao.

  Everything in the room was neat and clean, indicating that the building belonged to an organization with a generous budget and a high degree of discipline. That could only mean the military. I looked at the audience. The people seemed to me rather better dressed than the usual crowd on the streets. There were many jackets and trousers made of wool or Dacron, not the sea of faded blue cotton at an ordinary Shanghai meeting.

  The women deposited me in front of a microphone opposite the platform. One of them pushed my head down so that I was forced to look at the floor. Within my view were some tangled wires leading from the microphone. One of the wires must lead to an electric outlet, I thought. Where did the others lead? Was it possible that men in another room were listening in on the struggle meeting? Who could they be? Why should they behave in such a mysterious manner? Perhaps they did not want me to see them? Apart from my local policeman and the young woman in charge of the section dealing with foreign firms at the Shanghai Industry and Commerce Department, I knew few government officials by sight. At diplomatic receptions of the few Western missions in Shanghai to which I had been invited, I had seen one of the vice-mayors and some officials of the Foreign Affairs Department. Surely they must have become victims of the Cultural Revolution when the Shanghai municipal government was overthrown. The only possible explanation was that Lin Biao’s men had taken over my investigation. The men listening to the struggle meeting were men in uniform. What they did not want me to see was not their faces but their military apparel.

  The audience was shouting slogans and waving Little Red Books in the air. After the “Long live our Great Leader Chairman Mao” came “Good health to our Vice-Supreme Commander Lin, always good health!” This seemed to me not only a reflection of the elevated position of Lin Biao after the Ninth Party Congress but also testimony to the fact that those who had organized this meeting were his intimates, anxious to promote Lin Biao’s personality cult.

  Two legs came into my limited field of vision. A man’s voice spoke in front of me. He introduced me to the audience by giving an account of my family background and personal life. I had noticed already that each time my life story was recounted by the Revolutionaries I became richer and my way of life became more decadent and luxurious. Now the farce reached fantastic proportions. Since I had promised not to answer back but to remain mute, I was much more relaxed and detached than at the previous struggle meeting in 1966. However, the audience jumped up from their seats when the speaker told them I was a spy for the imperialists. They expressed their anger and indignation by crowding around me to shout abuse.

  To be so maligned was intolerable. Instinctively I raised my head to respond. The women suddenly jerked up my handcuffs. Such sharp pain tore at my shoulder joints that I had to bend forward with my head well down to ease the agony. They kept me in this position during the rest of the man’s denunciation of me. Only when the people were again shouting slogans did they allow my arms to drop back. I was to learn later that I had been subjected to the so-called jet position invented by the Revolutionaries to torment their more recalcitrant victims and to force them to bow their heads in servile submission.

  Another man took over. He spoke about what he called my “disobedience” to the command of the Revolutionaries, who represented the Communist Party, to confess. I realized for the first time that my failure to provide a confession of guilt was interpreted as an act of defiance against the Party. The audience was now even more angry. Perhaps disobeying the Party was a more serious offense than being a spy? I did not have time to decide on an answer before I was pushed and fell to the floor. However, the female giants by my side pulled me up with their strong arms, and I was restored to my previous position behind the microphone.

  A third man spoke. He denounced my defense of Liu Shaoqi. After the Central Committee resolution against him and the amount of propaganda that “proved beyond doubt” that Liu was everything the resolution named him to be, the subject of Liu Shaoqi became one that demanded a strong display of anger from anyone who did not want to get into political trouble. When one tries to show emotion one does not genuinely feel, one tends to exaggerate. This audience was no exception. The women were always prompt and ready to pull me up again. Once or twice they even raised an arm to ward off a blow aimed at me.

  The people in the audience soon worked themselves into a state of hysteria. Their shouts drowned out the voice of the speaker. Someone pushed me hard from behind. I stumbled and knocked over the microphone. One of the women tried to pick it up, tripped over the wires, and fell, dragging me with her. Because my arms were pinned behind me by the handcuffs, I fell in an awkward position. My face was pressed on the floor; many others fell on top of us in the confusion. Everybody seemed to be yelling. There was pandemonium. Several minutes passed. Finally I was pulled up again.

  Utterly exhausted, I longed for the meeting to end. But the speeches continued. It seemed everyone sitting around the table on the platform wanted to make a contribution. They had ceased to denounce me; instead they were competing with each other to sing the praises of Lin Biao in the most extravagant flattery the rich Chinese language could provide. Their efforts to register their devotion to Lin Biao could be explained, I thought, only by the probable presence of Lin Biao’s loyal lieutenants listening in an adjacent room.

  Suddenly the door behind me opened. A man’s voice shouted, “Zuo-la!” This meant that somebody had departed. The two simple words produced an electric effect. The speaker stopped in mid-sentence. Since the important person or persons listening in another room had gone, there was no more need to go on with the performance. Some of the audience were already on their feet, while others were collecting their bags and jackets. Hastily the speaker led them to shout slogans. He was largely ignored. Only a few responded while walking out of the room. It seemed the people were no longer angry with me; though they did not smile, the glances directed at me were indifferent. I was just one of the many victims at whose struggle meetings they had been present. They had done what was required of them. Now it was over. Once when a man brushed against me, someone behind him even stretched out a hand to steady me.

  The room cleared in a moment. I could hear members of the departing audience chatting as they left the building. “Getting rather chilly, isn’t it?” “Where are you going for supper?” “Not raining, is it?” etc., etc. They sounded no different from an audience departing after a show in a cinema or theater.

  The tense atmosphere dissipated like the escaping air from a burst balloon. The two women led me to the waiting car. This time they allowed me to walk by myself. For them also the show was over.

  The “celebration” of the Ninth Party Congress went on for several weeks. Every few days I was taken to a different struggle meet
ing, sometimes less well organized than the first one. When the audience was very violent, I suffered much. Afterwards, I would be called for an interview in the interrogation room and asked whether I was ready to confess. I would either say, “I have nothing to confess” or “I’m not guilty,” or simply remain silent. Then I would be taken to yet another struggle meeting. This exposure to one struggle meeting after another, called “rotating struggle,” was a mind-numbing experience. Day after day, my ears were filled with the sound of angry, accusing voices, my eyes were blurred by images of hostile faces, and my body ached from rough handling and physical abuse. I no longer felt like a human being, just an inanimate object. Sometimes my spirit seemed to leave my body to look on the scene with detachment. Though I stopped thinking or observing what went on and withdrew into myself after a time, I was never really confused or frightened.

  My personal experience of “rotating struggle,” painful though it was at the time, was a comparatively mild one. After Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, people became vocal about their experiences in the Cultural Revolution. I met one wizened old man who talked about his experience with a great sense of humor. He told me that he had been struggled against “more than a hundred times,” frequently with a heavy iron chain around his neck, used to punish victims who refused to bow their heads voluntarily. Only when he told me some of his friends and colleagues had died during the struggle meetings did he display emotion. I asked him about the “jet position,” which inflicted so much pain on the victims. He lightly brushed it aside, saying that it was used on everyone.

  10

  My Brother’s Confession

  WHEN THE SERIES OF ROTATING struggle meetings was over, summer was upon us. Before the humid heat of July started in earnest, Shanghai had a month of rain that the weathermen called the huangmei, named after the yellow plum that ripened in June. Dampness filled the cell and blackened the cement floor. After a particularly heavy downpour, water overflowed from the drain to seep through the base of the walls, forming murky puddles in the corners of the room. The pervading odor of mustiness and decay made each breath an unpleasant experience. Green mold formed on my stored winter jacket, padded trousers, and even the shoes I left overnight on the damp floor.

  While I always welcomed the warmer weather with eagerness because I no longer had to shiver in the cold and huddle into all my clothes, I was dismayed to find the dampness causing me pain in the joints, which became red and swollen. When cool winds accompanied rainfall, my joints became so stiff that I had difficulty getting out of bed in the morning. At the same time, the inflammation of my gums became much worse. They bled all the time, not just when I brushed my teeth. I had to rub the gums, press out the blood with a finger, and rinse my mouth before eating any food. Even then, the contact of salty food with the inflamed gums sent shivers of pain through my body. I had to wash the vegetables with cold water in an effort to get rid of the salt. When the pain of my gums became too severe, the young doctor gave me sulfa drugs to reduce inflammation. But he told me that there was no dental department at the prison hospital.

  My already difficult existence became a constant struggle to keep one step ahead of my body’s steady deterioration. Life had never been so demanding or so meaningless. However, despite the physical pain and discomfort, I was in a calmer mood than I had been for some time. This was because I was going through a series of interrogations that again led me to hope for the eventual clarification of my case. Every few days I was called to the interrogation room, where the interrogator of the Workers’ Propaganda Team questioned me about my relatives and friends, one by one. Between interrogations, I was asked to write lengthy accounts about each one of them and to describe all our contacts. I knew that what I wrote would be checked against the accounts of my friends and relatives about me, our contacts, what they had said to me, what I had said to them, etc. The interrogator and his fellow workers would compare what we had written to find discrepancies that might be used to cast doubt on my honesty. Therefore it was important to write accurately, giving all facts but not elaborating on them, in case I contradicted what others had said. Sometimes the interrogation sessions were stormy, with the interrogator voicing threats and dissatisfaction with what I had written or said. At other times, I would be urged to provide incriminating evidence against this one or that one of my relatives and friends. Then I knew the person in question was in serious trouble.

  On the whole, to answer questions about my relatives and friends and to write about them gave me the opportunity to speak on their behalf. From what I knew of the nature of their occupations and their past lives, I could generally guess the sort of problems confronting them during the Cultural Revolution. I searched my memory for what they had done and said that might help to improve their standing in the eyes of the Revolutionaries. And I put what I had to say in language familiar and acceptable to the Maoists.

  One of the outstanding characteristics of educated Chinese of my generation was our keen sense of patriotism, born of our knowledge and experience of the outside world and our concern for China’s comparative backwardness. We were acutely conscious of the fact that China’s recent history was the record of a great civilization that had been in steady decline for a century. In fact, it was the naive belief that the Communist Revolution might provide China with the impetus for progress that led so many of us to remain in, or go back to, China around 1949. So in my accounts I could truthfully speak of my friends’ and relatives’ deep love for China and their service to the country. But all of it fell on deaf ears. Determined to find fault, the Revolutionaries refused to see virtue. Furthermore, the Maoists confused the concepts of nation, which means “people having common descent,” and state, which means “an organized political community under one government.” If a man had made an important scientific or artistic contribution to China’s cultural life before the Communist Party came to power, he was supposed to have served not China but the Kuomintang regime. Therefore, he was guilty of helping to sustain the rule of the enemy. This point of view was so narrow-minded and absurd that I engaged in frequent arguments with the interrogator about it. However, I soon discovered that I was dealing not with the prejudice of the few Maoists in charge of my case but with the accepted view of the Communist Party.

  The interrogation sessions started in the rainy season. Often I arrived in the interrogation room with a wet face, wet, matted hair, and soaked socks and shoes. I had no raincoat, but fortunately it was still cool enough for me to wear several layers of clothing so that I was not drenched through. The interrogations went on into the hot summer months, when dampness and rain gave way to oppressive heat and mosquitoes. Sometimes other men, obviously from organizations dealing with the persons I had been asked to provide material on, joined my interrogator to question me. Then I would know that my friends or relatives were also undergoing investigation, just as I was. I would worry about them and watch closely the language and attitude of the strangers. If they looked fairly mild and seemed reasonable, I would be relieved; if they looked particularly stupid and menacing, I would be apprehensive.

  In the autumn, I had a grueling time when a member of the Military Control Commission of the People’s Art Theater came to question me about their director, Huang Zuolin. Huang and his wife, Danni, a beautiful and talented actress, were old friends of my husband’s and mine from our student days in London. When the Communist army took over Shanghai, Huang was already a well-known and successful film director. It was believed that the couple had been invited to remain in China by the Communist Party underground in Shanghai. Both of them were accepted by the new regime at once; when the People’s Art Theater was formed, Huang was named its director and became a Party member. Their careers flourished; together they put on the Shanghai stage many first-rate plays, including translations of Shakespeare’s comedies and other works by contemporary European and American writers that satirized the capitalist system. It was largely through the efforts of these two that the Chinese audience
was made aware of the fact that playwrights of other lands were allowed to present their own societies in a critical light. Huang was considered a first-rate director by the public and the Party leaders in charge of cultural affairs. It was also obvious that he was different from those who followed closely the Maoist line of “art serving politics” and “art for the glorification of the workers, the peasants, and the soldiers.”

  Before this particular interrogation, I had already read numerous articles in the newspaper criticizing Huang’s film Fighting for Shanghai, made in the early fifties to eulogize the Communist takeover of the city. The film was a very successful propaganda effort carried out with skill; at the time it came out, it was hailed as a great achievement. Now the newspaper devoted several days and many columns to criticizing the film, alleging that Huang had made the Kuomintang defenders of the city “heroic,” thereby slighting the Communist soldiers. The critics also claimed that when he depicted the destruction of the city and the sufferings of the people, he exposed himself as a man opposed to armed struggle in general and the War of Liberation by the Communist Party in particular. It was clear from the avalanche of criticism directed against him in the press that he had been singled out as a victim.

  Why had a man like Huang Zuolin, who had served the Communist regime effectively and well, become the target of severe attack? Like many others, he was a victim of the internal power struggle within the Communist Party leadership. The men who gave him his positions and Party membership were old enemies of Jiang Qing in the thirties in Shanghai. At that time, she was a minor film actress struggling for recognition, while they were the leaders of the Left-Wing Cultural Movement, which was the rallying point of China’s left-wing writers and artists and a part of the Chinese Communist Party underground directed by Liu Shaoqi. Apparently these left-wing intellectuals largely ignored her, thinking of her as a woman of easy virtue and little talent. Jiang Qing had nursed her resentment throughout the years. When she gained power over the Cultural Department of the Party during the Cultural Revolution, she had all these men arrested and denounced as members of the Liu Shaoqi faction. Since patronage was a part of Chinese political life, the downfall of any official always brought about the downfall of his subordinates.