by Cheng Nien
At the time the Maoists were retreating after the failure of the Great Leap Forward Campaign and the ensuing acute economic crisis. Generally at times of real difficulty like this, the Party made some concessions to the intellectuals. The ministry took the unprecedented step of asking my brother what he wanted to do. My brother requested a job as an English teacher and was assigned to the English Language Department of the Foreign Trade Institute as a professor. He gave his new field of work the same serious attention he gave everything else he had undertaken. At the time of the Cultural Revolution he had already become a recognized authority on English language teaching and was conducting training classes for young teachers. He had also published books and articles on the subject.
Later, after my release from prison, I tried to get in touch with my brother. He refused to correspond with me, saying that my former contacts with the Western world made me a “dangerous person.” It was not until the winter of 1976, after Mao died and the Gang of Four had been arrested, that my brother invited me to visit him in Beijing. I found him completely shattered by the cruel treatment he had received as a professor during the Cultural Revolution. He and his wife also spent several years doing physical labor in a Cadre School where living conditions were extremely hard. I did not have the heart to ask him what made him say that we had been to the Sun Yatsen Memorial to have our photograph taken in front of a Kuomintang flag. I did not want him to think I blamed him for succumbing to pressure. He had suffered too much for too long.
After being closed for several years, the Foreign Trade Institute was reopening. He was busily engaged with other professors in putting the English Language Department together again. He seemed content to be doing something worthwhile after so long. His small apartment was always full of people coming to talk to him. I did not want to remind him of the Cultural Revolution. However, just before my departure, he suddenly mentioned the subject himself.
He said, “You did send the photograph to me in 1962, didn’t you?”
“I sent you a photograph of Mother that I had enlarged at Wan Xiang, the photographic studio in Shanghai,” I told him. “That was the only photograph I sent you in 1962.”
“Was it simply a photograph of Mother? I remembered receiving a photograph from you. The Revolutionaries insisted it was a photograph we had taken at the Sun Yatsen Memorial in front of a Kuomintang flag. They seemed very sure and were able to tell me exactly what we did. I couldn’t remember a thing. But as they repeated it over and over again, I got a picture in my mind. Finally, it seemed to me that what they described did happen.”
“No,” I said angrily, “it did not happen. We never went to the Sun Yatsen Memorial at all. The Revolutionaries were liars. They wanted to incriminate us. They wanted to prove we were loyal to the Kuomintang so that they could punish us.”
He laid a hand on my arm and said calmly, with resignation, “Don’t get excited and angry. It’s useless to get angry with them. They have the last word always. If they say something happened, it happened. It’s useless to resist. I’ve learned this from my personal experience. I’m sure you learned all that too during your imprisonment.”
“Not at all. I haven’t learned a thing. What’s more, I do not intend to learn.”
“You will learn to accept. We all have to. I have seen it happen to so many. And it happened to me. It will happen to you too.”
“I won’t let it happen to me.”
“I’m sorry to hear you say that. Deeply sorry. You’ll get hurt, badly hurt, I’m afraid.”
My sister-in-law came into the room then to tell me that my taxi to the airport was waiting. When I said goodbye to my brother, I was trembling. I did not know whether it was because I was angry at the terrible system under which we had to live or because I was sad that we could not do anything more effective than blindly resist to maintain our dignity. From inside the taxi, I turned to wave to my brother; he had already gone in. I somehow thought he was disappointed in me. I had not behaved like wise Chinese who “bend with the wind to survive the hurricane.”
I went out to Arizona to see my brother again in March 1984, when he came to the Thunderbird Campus of the American Graduate School of International Management as an exchange professor from the Institute of Foreign Trade in Beijing. I found that he was now an old man suffering from emphysema, looking a good ten years older than his age. But the twinkle of humor returned to his eyes when he told me that at last he had been reinstated as a professor of economics and had come to the United States to lecture on China’s new economic policy. When I asked him what would happen when the Party’s policy swung left again, as it had done from left to right and right to left like a pendulum for over thirty years, he took a deep breath and sighed. After a while, he said, “I’m a very sick man. Each cycle of change takes a number of years to complete. Let’s hope that when the time comes for another change, I won’t be around to see it.”
11
A Kind of Torture
AFTER THE EPISODE INVOLVING my brother, the interrogator continued with his inquiry about all my relatives and friends. This series of interrogations lasted nearly seven months, until the end of 1969. Then I was no longer called to the interrogation room. I waited and waited. A month passed, and then another. When there was still no sign of the interrogation being resumed, I spoke to the guard and requested to see the interrogator.
“What do you want to say to the interrogator?”
“I want to ask him when he is going to clarify my case.”
“He can’t clarify your case for you. He just asks the questions and assembles the material. The government will make the decision about your case.”
“When is the government going to do that? I’ve been here such a long time already. I’m not well, I need medical attention,” I said.
“You are all right. We give you medicine and special food.”
“I’m not all right. My condition gets worse every day. I have had several more hemorrhages recently, and my gums are very painful. The sulfa drug I am obliged to take is bad for my kidney. I have only one kidney, you know. When I had my operation, the doctor warned me not to take too much sulfa.”
The guard did not speak for a moment. Then she said, “The difficulty about your case is really your own doing. You have to stay here because you won’t confess.”
“I haven’t done anything wrong. What am I supposed to confess? The interrogator has examined my whole life and my contacts with all my relatives and friends. By now the government should know all about me. How can anyone still think I am guilty of anything?” Frustration and disappointment made me raise my voice. But the guard merely closed the window and walked away.
During the past few months and the many sessions of interrogation, I had formed a distinct impression that when my life and activities had been examined, I would be released. Now I could not understand what was holding things up. The guard had said that it was up to the government to make the decision. This made sense to me because it was the usual working method of the Communist Party. What I did not know was on which level of authority my case was to be decided, and why it was taking so long. If my hopes had not been raised, perhaps my disappointment would not have been so great. As it was, I was plunged into renewed despair.
The misery of my life in the winter of 1969-70 was beyond imagination. Looking back on those months of heavy snowstorms, intense cold, and constant physical pain, I marvel that I could have lived through it all.
One day when I asked the guard to buy soap, I was given something that did not lather. The guard told me that soap was rationed and each person was allowed only one cake per month. When I requested permission to buy a little more because I had to wash my underclothes more frequently, the guard became annoyed and shouted, “When are you going to get rid of your capitalistic way of wanting more than other people? You are lucky to be allowed one cake per month. In many places the people are only allowed one cake per family.”
The toilet paper made of proce
ssed rice straw was replaced by something even coarser, made with old newspaper, string, and old cloth; bits of these were clearly visible on the rough gray sheets, stiff as a board. This substitute for toilet paper was rationed also. The cod-liver oil and vitamin pills I was allowed to purchase were often not available. A small lump of fat rather than meat often appeared with my rice. The severe shortages seemed to affect the guards as well. Several of them lost a good deal of weight, and even the militant guards who used to stride in and out energetically now looked rather subdued and peaked. It was all too apparent that the country was going through another period of economic crisis that invariably followed each political upheaval.
The newspaper printed reports of peasants “voluntarily” reducing their already meager rations and rural Party secretaries offering to increase the quota of grain the communes sent to government purchasing agencies. This was a repetition of the hunger and shortages of the early sixties, immediately after the failure of the Great Leap Forward Campaign. In such times of hardship, there were daily stories in the newspaper about heroes who increased production output and decreased their consumption of food and other commodities. However, half a sheet of the Shanghai Liberation Daily was still given over to criticism of the “capitalist-roaders,” who were also called “revisionists.” The subject of contention now was Mao Zedong’s military theory of the People’s War versus the capitalistic concept of the importance of military skill and modern weapons. Two ousted and disgraced military leaders, former defense minister Peng Dehuai and former chief of staff Luo Ruiqing, were the main culprits. Daily newspaper articles read to us over the broadcasting system accused these two of believing that advanced weapons rather than men armed with Mao Zedong Thought were the most important factor in deciding the outcome of war. Since both men had been removed from office several years earlier and handed over to the Red Guards and the Revolutionaries for persecution, the continued campaign of criticism could only mean that their viewpoint was shared by others in the Party and military leadership.
Prolonged hardship and privation were eroding my mental powers in a frightening way. The stalling of my investigation produced in me a deep feeling of despondency. Not being able to keep clean because of insufficient soap and toilet paper was demoralizing. Even the evidence in the newspaper of differences of opinion, or perhaps fierce debate, in the Party and military leadership failed to rouse me from lethargy. Every day I sat on the wooden bed, leaning against my rolled-up bedding, too tired and too ill to move.
In early spring, I again became ill with pneumonia and was taken to the prison hospital. There I made a slow recovery. When I returned to the No. 1 Detention House, just before May First, the weather had become warmer. Even though conditions continued to be extremely hard, the milder weather made life easier to endure. I felt I had somehow survived another crisis and been mysteriously brought back to life from the brink of death. When I was allowed outdoor exercise on a warm and sunny day and saw the young leaves unfolding on the plane tree over the wall, I thanked God for the miracle of life and the timely renewal of my own.
Since the conclusion of the Ninth Party Congress and the formation of Party Secretariats in each province and municipality, the Party’s tight control of every aspect of life had been reestablished. It became much harder than before to find out what was going on outside the prison walls through reading the newspaper. In the turbulent years of the height of the Cultural Revolution, vehement denunciations of the “capitalist-roaders” often revealed internal struggles in the Party leadership. In explaining Mao’s “correct” policy, the revolutionary writers, often non-Party men, would sometimes inadvertently state facts kept from the Chinese people. Now articles like that had disappeared altogether from the Shanghai Liberation Daily. Denunciations continued to appear, but I could tell that they were now written by professional Party propagandists. They were using the same stale language and timeworn quotations that were the stock-in-trade of Party men anxious to say the right thing but even more anxious not to say it in any way that might bring criticism on themselves.
I had my first inkling of another round of power struggles at the top when I saw in the newspaper a list of members of the standing committee of the Politburo. Missing was the name of Chen Boda, one of the radical leaders who had charted the course of the Cultural Revolution from its very beginning. Soon articles of criticism, without mentioning his name, were denouncing a “fake Marxist” who had declared himself a “humble commoner.” The sudden omission of a prominent man’s name without explanation almost always meant he was in disgrace. The criticism of a “fake Marxist” seemed to me to point to someone renowned as a theorist of Marxism. Chen Boda was just such a man.
I was greatly puzzled by this unexpected development because Chen Boda was known to the Chinese people as a faithful follower of Mao and his longtime confidential secretary. In fact, it was often whispered in China that many essays purportedly written by Mao Zedong were actually from the pen of Chen Boda. Though he did not seek the limelight like other radical leaders such as Jiang Qing or Lin Biao, the Chinese people knew him to have been one of the small elite group of Marxist theorists Mao relied upon.
After my release from the No. 1 Detention House a good deal later, I questioned several friends and acquaintances about the downfall of Chen Boda. It seemed that at the second plenary session of the Ninth Central Committee held at Lushan at the end of August 1970, the new Constitution of the Chinese People’s Republic was discussed. An important issue was whether to abolish the post of chairman of the Chinese People’s Republic, left vacant by the downfall of Liu Shaoqi. Chen Boda proposed that the post be maintained and nominated Lin Biao as the new chairman. Already alarmed by the rapid expansion of Lin Biao’s power since the Ninth Party Congress only a year and four months earlier, Mao was not keen to give Lin Biao added power and position. He declared that he favored the abolition of the post of chairman of the People’s Republic and suggested giving the ceremonial function of the head of state to the chairman of the Standing Committee of the People’s Congress. In a heated debate, Mao denounced Chen Boda’s proposal as a counterrevolutionary move designed to reestablish pre-Cultural Revolution conditions.
Another subject under discussion at the Central Committee meeting was China’s relations with the United States after President Nixon expressed, through third-country intermediaries, the desire for a rapprochement with Beijing. Premier Zhou Enlai had convinced Mao that if the United States could be induced to recognize the Chinese People’s Republic rather than the Kuomintang government in Taiwan, Communist China would receive recognition from most other countries in the United Nations. This would not only enable Communist China to take China’s seat at the United Nations, but it would make the eventual liberation of Taiwan much easier and less costly. Both Lin Biao and Chen Boda expressed opposition to any move for a rapprochement with the United States. They argued that as the leader of the capitalist world, the United States was inherently socialist China’s main enemy.
But all my informants agreed that the downfall of Chen Boda was really Mao’s warning to Lin Biao. It was not lost on the military man, who correctly concluded that the days of his own usefulness to Mao were numbered. This eventually led to Lin Biao’s unsuccessful attempt to wrest power from Mao. In any case, later developments proved that the second plenary session of the Ninth Central Committee was an important one. It ended the brief Lin Biao era and marked a drastic deterioration in Lin Biao’s power position relative to that of Prime Minister Zhou Enlai.
In 1970, when I was still in my cell in the detention house, I recognized the downfall of Chen Boda as something important, and I watched for events that might throw some light on the situation. In the autumn of that year, the newspaper published a photograph of the American writer Edgar Snow standing beside Mao on the balcony above the Gate of Heavenly Peace, Tiananmen, on China’s National Day. Though Mao had often stood there with other prominent visitors to China, this was the first time an American
had been given such an honor. Snow was an old friend of the Communist Party and Mao Zedong. His book Red Star over China, published in the thirties, did much to legitimize the Chinese Communist Party in the eyes of the world. Since I had learned that everything Mao did or said had meaning, often a subtle one, I pondered the significance of his having an American with him on the balcony of the Gate of Heavenly Peace on China’s National Day while he reviewed tens of thousands of enthusiastic men and women carrying his portraits, shouting his slogans, and chanting his quotations.
Soon after National Day, the newspaper reported that Beijing had reached an agreement with Canada to establish full diplomatic relations based on the following five principles: mutual respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty, nonaggression, noninterference in each other’s internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence. Canada undertook to sever diplomatic relations with the Kuomintang government on Taiwan and to recognize Beijing as the sole legitimate government of China.
I thought Mao was using the case of Canada to say something to the United States. I believed his message was that he was ready to be friends if the United States would agree to abandon Taiwan. The establishment of diplomatic relations with Canada was the opportunity for him to declare his conditions for a similar arrangement with the United States. I became quietly excited and hopeful. That Communist China might move closer to the West seemed too good to be true.
