by Cheng Nien
As news of this astonishing activity spread to other cities, trains departing for the capital carried contributions of wreaths and poetry to Beijing. The more militant opponents of the radicals chalked slogans and put up posters against them outside the carriages. The train attendants did not wipe off the slogans but kept them fresh, so that each train that arrived at the Beijing railway station was a living protest against the radical leaders.
This mass display of sentiment for Zhou Enlai very quickly developed into a mass demonstration of resentment against the radicals, including Mao Zedong himself. No names were mentioned. But veiled comparisons were made to the first Qin emperor (259–210 B.C.), generally regarded by Chinese historians as a cruel ruler who persecuted scholars and destroyed books, setting back China’s cultural development. The wording of the poems became less ambiguous, and the sarcasm against Jiang Qing and her associates became bolder. To go to Tiananmen Square became a must for the young people of Beijing. They not only copied poems down and listened to the writers’ recitations but laughed heartily at the radicals and made speeches against them.
Such behavior was unheard of in Communist China, where every demonstration was organized by the government to express support for government policies. On the few occasions when Chinese people supposedly demonstrated outside foreign embassies, activists had always been there among them to direct everything. During the Cultural Revolution, except for the short time when things got out of hand, the Red Guards were controlled by Maoist Party activists. The radical leaders watched the scene at Tiananmen Square with increasing alarm and decided to take action. On the fatal night of April 5, the mayor of Beijing, a Jiang Qing collaborator, ordered the militia to surround the area. The police and the militia, both controlled by Jiang Qing and her associates, went in with clubs and pistols to drive the people away from the monument. As the people dispersed, the militia opened fire. Thousands of unarmed demonstrators were killed or wounded. Those found with poems were taken to the Security Bureau, condemned as counterrevolutionaries, and shot without trial. Tiananmen Square was cordoned off. It took the cleaners of Beijing two days to hose away the blood and remove everything including the corpses.
I was told long afterwards that Mao Zedong, terminally ill at home, heard only the version of the Tiananmen affair given him by Jiang Qing and Mao Yuanxin, who acted as his liaison with the Politburo. They alleged that Deng Xiaoping was behind the Tiananmen affair, designed to discredit Mao and to repudiate the Cultural Revolution. It was the “capitalist-roaders,” they claimed, hitting back at the Proletarian Revolutionaries. In a fit of temper, Mao dictated a directive to a hastily called Politburo meeting, asking its members to pass a resolution to remove Deng Xiaoping from the position of vice-premier and to appoint Hua Guofeng, a relatively junior member of the Politburo, as acting prime minister and first vice-chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. In effect, Mao Zedong had designated Hua Guofeng as his successor. Though an aged and dying man, Mao was astute enough to know that if he had appointed Zhang Chunqiao as premier, there would have been civil war in the country and the Communist Party would have been irrevocably split.
Hua Guofeng had joined the Communist Party as a guerrilla fighter during the Sino-Japanese War in his native province, Shanxi. He was relatively unknown to the Chinese people, and his career was undistinguished. Just before the Cultural Revolution, he was appointed Party secretary of Mao’s native province, Hunan. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, he was denounced as a “capitalist-roader” but was soon rehabilitated when it was found that he had perpetuated Mao’s personality cult and was in the process of building an irrigation system for the county where Mao’s relatives lived. Hua was not a controversial personality and seemed to be acceptable both to the radical leaders and to the old guard. He was a compromise choice. Evidently Mao believed that with Hua in charge, his own position in Chinese history would be secure.
The Politburo resolution was quickly broadcast by the Shanghai Broadcasting Station and appeared in the newspaper the next day. The people were also notified through their Residents’ Committee study group meetings. The Tiananmen affair was officially declared a counterrevolutionary attempt to create disturbance. After that no further mention of it was made in the official press. But horrifying details of the massacre spread fast by word of mouth all over the country. Those who had escaped from Tiananmen Square on the day of the massacre secretly wrote down the poems from memory. Soon handwritten copies were circulating surreptitiously among the people.
The appointment of Hua Guofeng to the supreme position of leadership both in the government and in the Party created a temporary lull in the published rhetoric, but the struggle for power and position went on nonetheless. Public interest in Deng Xiaoping was kept alive by rumors of plots to assassinate him. Though his whereabouts were unknown, several people told me that he had been seen in Guangzhou living under the protection of the army.
“It seems so strange that interest in the fate of Deng Xiaoping has not flagged since his removal from office,” I said to Da De one day when he was chatting to me about Hua Guofeng.
“People expect him to bounce back again, just as he did before,” my student told me.
“Is it likely?” I asked him.
“Who knows?” Da De said.
My student seemed much more subdued since the Tiananmen affair. Though usually forthcoming with comments and information, he never talked to me about what had happened on April 5 at Tiananmen. Also, the appointment of Hua Guofeng seemed to have disconcerted him. While he gave me the facts of Hua Guofeng’s personal background, he refused to be drawn into a discussion of the appointment itself. His half-smile and air of nonchalance disappeared. In its place was often a thoughtful, if not worried, expression.
We had long ago exhausted the book on etiquette and had gone back to a volume of short stories. As I opened the book, Da De suddenly brightened up and said to me, “Would you like to meet my girlfriend?”
“Have you got a girlfriend? Why haven’t you told me before?” I exclaimed in surprise.
“I thought I should wait until we were engaged.”
“Are you engaged now?”
“More or less. Her father still opposes our marriage. I suppose he thinks I’m too poor,” Da De said, looking dejected.
“Is he someone important? Is he a senior official?”
“No, he is an ex-capitalist,” Da De said, looking me straight in the eye as if he dared me to say something unpleasant. In fact, I was so surprised that I was quite speechless.
“Well, as you know, I didn’t go to Beijing after all. They selected two people from Shanghai; both had connections with someone senior in Beijing. These two don’t even know any foreign languages. I think the best course for me is to become an English teacher in a middle school, get married, and settle down in Shanghai. My mother thinks it’s best too.” Being bypassed seemed to have given him a jolt. I thought he was beginning to wonder whether he really had a future with the radicals.
“It would be nice to have you remain in Shanghai. You must love the girl very much to accept the handicap of being united with a capitalist family in marriage,” I said.
“It isn’t such a handicap. The Politburo has already passed a resolution to return with interest all private bank accounts frozen by the Red Guards ten years ago. Her father will recover quite a large sum of money. He has told the children that he will distribute his fortune to them as soon as he gets it back, and not wait until he dies. Of course, I’m not marrying her for her money, though her father seems to think so.”
A few days later Da De brought his girlfriend to visit me. She was twenty-eight, two years older than Da De, not very bright or very beautiful, but quiet and self-assured, obviously in love with Da De, whose sharp intellect and vibrant personality must have seemed exciting to her. I congratulated her and asked when she was going to invite me to her wedding feast. She blushed and said, “That’s rather uncertain. At the moment,
my father refuses to give permission for me to marry Da De. It’s not because he doesn’t have money. It’s because he is a Revolutionary.”
Da De said quickly, “I’m going to become a teacher. The Foreign Language Institute is conducting a test to recruit English teachers for the middle schools. My mother has already put my name down for it.”
In July, an earthquake registering 8 on the Richter scale hit Tangshan, an industrial and mining city in North China. There was no warning because the State Bureau of Seismology was embroiled in a new round of power struggles and its work was completely paralyzed. The city was 80 percent destroyed, and over a million inhabitants died or were severely wounded. The quake area included both Beijing and Tianjin, where, though casualties were not heavy, houses collapsed and thousands were rendered homeless. As the news of the earthquake spread all over the country, rumors of government ineptitude spread with it. At the same time, based upon intensive observation of animal and insect behavior, new and worse earthquakes in many parts of China were predicted. Frantically, the people in cities built temporary shelters, covering every inch of available space with makeshift huts of every shade and description. Everybody lived in a state of hysteria while waiting helplessly for disaster. In Shanghai, the Residents’ Committee organized earthquake drills, and everybody was told to sleep with their doors open. There were false alarms when I stood with the Zhus in the garden in my pajamas waiting for earthquakes that never came. It was while the nation was thus preoccupied that Mao Zedong died in September.
Da De had, in the meantime, passed the test for middle school English teachers and had been assigned to teach twelve-year-olds in a school not far from where I lived. After the excitement of being a Red Guard and a Revolutionary, Da De found his new life tedious and dull. Although our regular lessons had ceased, he continued to drop in for a chat. He found in me a willing listener, and he knew that since I knew no one of political consequence, his words would not get back to Party men who mattered to him politically. Soon after Mao died he came to see me.
That afternoon, a memorial meeting for Mao was held at Tiananmen Square, attended by half a million representatives of workers, peasants, and soldiers. From the platform Hua Guofeng, in his capacity as the first vice-chairman of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, read the memorial speech. Beside him were Vice-Chairman Wang Hongwen in military uniform and Jiang Qing in dramatic black mourning clothes that covered her from head to toe. Our Residents’ Committee organized people to view the proceedings at the homes of those with television sets. I was told to join the Zhus downstairs.
After the TV program from Beijing, we watched the Shanghai memorial meeting for Mao conducted by Ma Tianshui, who was a deputy of Zhang Chunqiao, the official head of the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee. Before the Cultural Revolution, Ma was a junior vice-mayor of Shanghai. He joined the radicals after the so-called January Revolution when the Red Guards and the Revolutionaries toppled the old Shanghai municipal government and Party Secretariat. Over the years, Ma Tianshui became a trusted servant of the radical leaders, taking over the day-today administration of Shanghai while Zhang Chunqiao remained in Beijing. The Shanghai memorial meeting was held at the People’s Square and timed to follow the Beijing meeting.
Mrs. Zhu’s television set was tiny, but she turned up the sound so that everybody in the room could at least hear the speeches. Normally, according to Communist Party tradition, Ma Tianshui’s speech should have been similar to the speech given by Hua Guofeng, if not a complete repetition word by word. Therefore, I was surprised to notice that Ma Tianshui’s speech differed from the one made by Hua Guofeng in two important aspects. First, Ma said, “We must carry on with Chairman Mao’s already decided policy,” while Hua Guofeng made no mention of any “already decided policy.” Second, Hua Guofeng quoted a well-known statement Mao had made during the Cultural Revolution: “We want Marxism, not revisionism. We want unity, not dissension. We want to be open and aboveboard, not scheming and intriguing.” Ma Tianshui had not mentioned it.
When the program was over, I thanked Mrs. Zhu and went upstairs. Soon afterwards, Da De came. He had watched the TV program at his school.
“Why didn’t Ma Tianshui make a speech exactly the same as Chairman Hua’s?” I asked him. “What did Ma Tianshui mean by ‘already decided policy’?”
“The ‘already decided policy’ is for Comrade Jiang Qing to become Chairman Mao’s successor, of course,” Da De said.
“Do you mean to say that Chairman Mao decided that before he died?”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“If Chairman Mao wanted his wife to succeed him, why did he give Hua Guofeng the note that said, ‘With you in charge, my mind is at ease’?” I asked him.
“Did any of us actually see the note?”
“It was reproduced in the newspaper,” I reminded him.
“Can you say for sure it was written by Chairman Mao? Can you say for sure there are no other notes?” Da De asked me.
“It can’t be a forgery, surely,” I said, remembering the hard-to-decipher script, obviously written by a shaky hand.
“Towards the end of his life Chairman Mao lost the power of speech. He scribbled many notes, you know,” Da De said.
“Goodness! So nothing is really settled,” I exclaimed.
“Thanks to my future father-in-law’s insistence that I cease to be a Revolutionary, I am out of all of it,” Da De said.
“I have been told you are a captain in the militia. Are you still with that organization?” I asked him.
Da De was surprised by my question. For a moment I thought he was going to deny it. But he quickly recovered and said with an embarrassed smirk, “I suppose the Zhus told you. As a teacher, I’m now an intellectual. I don’t qualify for the militia anymore.”
“How did you qualify when you were an unemployed youth?”
“Well, I wasn’t exactly an unemployed youth.”
“You told me you were.”
“It was a lie. I was told to lie to you.”
“Did you have a job with a government organization?”
“Sort of. I was only a messenger. Temporary messenger, you might call it. Didn’t you once tell me that unimportant people in unimportant jobs are often called small potatoes? Well, I was just a very small potato.”
“Were you a small potato with the group dealing with the case of the so-called conspiracy of foreign firms and government departments?”
He nodded.
“Did you really believe there was a conspiracy?”
“At first.” Da De looked at me beseechingly and said, “Don’t you understand? I was told so by people I trusted. They claimed they had evidence against you and the foreign companies. But as time went on and I got to know you, I realized the whole thing was really a plot. You became a victim of the power struggle within the Communist Party, like so many other people, including me. I missed going to college and wasted all these years of my life. I became a sort of tool of those who had power over me.”
“Now you are out of it all. The case is shelved and you have become a teacher.”
“Correct.”
“Did they let you go with good grace? Were they not annoyed that you wanted to marry a girl from a capitalist family?”
Da De laughed and said, “You haven’t a clue what those people are like. They are only too glad that they don’t have to find a job for me. My usefulness is over. They were pleased to get rid of me. And some of them actually envy me because I am marrying a girl with the prospect of getting a large sum of money. Why do you think people want to get involved in political struggles? To get better jobs, of course. And better jobs mean better living conditions and more pay. There is no way one can get ahead in China except through taking part in political struggles.”
“Please tell me how my daughter died and who killed her. Did they do it for money?” I tried to keep bitterness out of my voice.
He hesitated for a moment and then said, “Have
n’t you been told that she committed suicide?”
“I don’t believe it. Do you think I should believe it?”
“Her death was not intended. They overdid it, I was told. It was really an accident,” Da De said. After a few minutes, he added, “I’m sorry. Please believe me, I’m terribly sorry it happened.”
“Do you mean to say the men who abducted her weren’t ordered to kill her but they did? Isn’t that what you are saying?”
Da De nodded.
“Why was she abducted?”
Da De was reluctant to tell me at first. But after a long hesitation, he said, “It’s the usual formula. Someone thought she should be made to denounce you since you were so stubborn at the detention house and refused to confess.”
“What has happened to her murderers?”
“They are around.”
“Are they in senior government positions?”
“I can’t tell you any more. I have already said too much.”
“I’m going to write a petition to the People’s Court to request an investigation of my daughter’s death. I want those men brought to justice.”
“It’s no use. They will be protected. You’ll be ignored. It’s really worse than useless. If you should write a petition now, they would know you do not believe the official version of suicide,” he told me.
“Would they suspect you of having told me things you shouldn’t?”
“They might.”
“I think you should stop coming to see me.”
“Yes, you are right. Perhaps I should not come anymore now that …” Da De did not finish his sentence, but I knew what he was thinking about. Hitherto he had come to see me as a part of his job. Once the case was shelved, he really should have stopped coming.
“I have several eggs. Will you stay for supper? I could make some scrambled eggs.”
