by James Palmer
By 1976, much of the glamour of revolution had rubbed off. What politics meant much of the time was a constant low-level stream of mind-numbing activities and the stifling boredom of routine meetings in which the expected ideological genuflections had to be made before work could be done. In 1974, for instance, protests had been organised across the country against the supposedly unfavourable portrayal of China in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Chung Kuo, Cina. Hundreds of thousands of people protested against a film they were not allowed to see, for an audience of other people who couldn’t see it either.
One of the reasons why people sought comfort and ritual in political life was the eradication of everything else. The things that made life good for Chinese in the past had been relentlessly targeted as anti-revolutionary. Some of these habits, like gambling, drinking and ‘loose’ sexual conduct, were singled out for puritanical reasons. Legends accumulated around Li Chi, a semi-mythical trickster artist; he evaded politics, taught workers in ‘proletarian art’ classes to play secret gambling games with the pictures, and slept with the buxom daughters of Party leaders.
Other traditions, like village songs, dances, games and rituals to celebrate harvests or provide spiritual sustenance through a long winter, were debunked as ‘superstitious’ and ‘backward’. In the city, the social clubs that had once been a vital part of Chinese civic society, gathering to discuss politics, literature and poetry, play music and chess, or study philosophy, had been broken up as potential hubs of bourgeois thought and counter-revolutionary activity.
Politics in Tangshan, then, was entertaining, ceremonial, routine, tedious – and murderous. Like almost everywhere else, Tangshan had suffered from the paranoia of the last decade. Factions fought in the streets, and a brutal wave of persecutions had been sparked off in 1967 by Chen Boda, at the time a major political figure.
Moscow-educated, Chen was one of the Party’s leading theorists, and a frequent speechwriter for Mao. He had been instrumental in kicking off the Cultural Revolution, out of his own conviction of the need for ceaseless struggle and because he was acting as a proxy for Mao. A nervous, stuttering man, he’d nevertheless been a political fixer without any qualms, disposing of inconvenient figures like Peng Zhen, the mayor of Beijing, in order to lay the ‘blasting fuse’ of the Cultural Revolution.
He published a famous editorial in People’s Daily on 1 June 1966. Titled ‘Sweep Away All Cow-Demons and Snake-Spirits’, it gave the Cultural Revolution one of its great metaphors, drawn from folktales about exorcists; enemies of the revolution were demons and monsters in disguise, but they could be revealed with the ‘demon-repelling mirror’ of Mao Zedong thought.
Chen brought the quest for demons to Tangshan the next year, when he came on an inspection visit in late December. At a meeting of the Party, the army, and various ‘mass organisations’, he told them:
East Hebei is a very complicated area, a strange situation. There are still British and Japanese agents here. And the local Party . . . maybe it’s being operated by the Communist Party and the Nationalists at the same time, or maybe it’s just being run by the Nationalists.
You miners are trying to get Fang Fei [a local Party figure] on your side, but he has admitted that he used to be part of the Nationalist county committee. Is he a Nationalist or a Communist? Is he Chinese or Japanese? Look into it carefully, don’t be fooled! And the mayor in Tangshan, Bai Yun, I know her husband is a manor owner. He even built a garden with his own money after Liberation!
He moved on to more specific accusations:
Tangshan has always been the centre of the East Hebei Party. The former leaders were rebels! Actually, they were led by Liu Shaoqi and Peng Zhen. So what we suspect we have here is an organised group of rebels which has infiltrated our Party, government and army.
Interrogated about the speech later, Chen had little to say for himself. ‘I didn’t have any evidence. I made it all up.’ Pushed on his claims of Japanese, British and Nationalist agents, he stammered, ‘Maybe it was possible in some areas, in some parts of the Party, maybe,’ and then admitted, ‘Yes, you’re quite right. Impossible.’ Later, interviewed by the famous writer Ye Yonglie, he was blunt: ‘I’m a criminal, and did a lot of stupid things in the Cultural Revolution. It was a crazy time, and I was a crazy man.’
His words set off a furious witch-hunt inside Tangshan. A special group to manage the ‘East Hebei Spy Case’ was established, made up of local ideologues and opportunists, mostly lower-ranking Party members or leaders from other organisations. Within a few weeks they had exposed their former bosses as members of the ‘Yang and Bai Anti-Party Group’, named after the Tangshan Party secretary, Yang Yuan, and the mayor, Bai Yun.
The group was secretly working for the ‘traitor, spy and renegade’ Liu Shaoqi to ‘viciously attack Chairman Mao and the Great Cultural Revolution, falsify the Party’s policies, and seize opportunities to swing to the right’. Their houses were ransacked for evidence of their crimes, and big-character posters5 plastered all over the city, while they were interrogated in ‘struggle sessions’ where accusations were screamed at them for hours, punctuated by blows and kicks.
Determined to be thorough, the special group was expanded from twenty to over 280 members by February 1968. They formed plans to ‘dig deep’ and uncover the full extent of the conspiracies and networks of saboteurs by sending teams to over a dozen other local towns. They coined the slogan ‘One point, two lines’, meaning that the central point of the conspiracy had been the East Hebei Party Committee, but that the lines of treachery ran through both the Tangshan social department and the industrial department.
The social department, they determined, was a ‘nest of spies and rebels’. So, perhaps unsurprisingly, was the industrial department. They interrogated 1,604 Party cadres, determining that 737 of them were rebels, spies or Nationalists. They went deep into the past, examining the case files of 362 underground members of the Communist Party in the region between 1922 and 1949, men and women who had suffered vicious persecution at the hands of both the Nationalists and the Japanese. It turned out that 282 of them, no less, had been traitors, including over 80 per cent of the former heads of the East Hebei Party Committee.
Clearer minds might have wondered how the Communist Party ever got anywhere, given that so large a proportion of its membership had, apparently, been working to betray it all along. But espionage paranoia had permeated the People’s Republic from its foundation. Spies were the villains of films, books and ‘true story’ magazines. At first, the main targets were Nationalist agents, supposedly left behind to sabotage the new regime. Later, the focus turned to ‘wreckers and saboteurs’, acting out of an ill-defined mixture of personal evil and nebulous backing from higher-level political deviants or foreign powers.
For the members of the Special Group, however, the exposure of the plot confirmed the reality of the media tale they’d been absorbing since they were young. It was evidence of both the constant need for alertness and the triumph of true Maoism. And the exposure of these spies and traitors left openings in the upper ranks that could be filled by the politically pure.
Having dealt with the leaders, the persecutors turned to civilians. They called it ‘catching worms and bugs’. Torture was one way of exposing hidden spies, including driving nails under fingernails, water-boarding and forcing people to hold a painful fixed position for hours. Retired leaders were imprisoned or killed after being denounced as long-term agents and counter-revolutionaries. The dead were not free from suspicion: forty out of the 238 revolutionary martyrs buried in a local cemetery were found to have been ‘rebels and spies’ all along.
Not everyone accepted this madness blithely. In Tianjin, an hour or so from Tangshan, a local artist and teacher, Feng Jicai, had started recording stories of suffering after a friend, half-dead from torture, arrived at his house at the dead of night in 1967 and asked, ‘Who will live to tell the real stories of our generation? Will we suffer for nothing?’6 Feng wrote
on small pieces of paper, changed names and dates and signed the stories with the names of foreign authors so that, if they were found, he could claim they were copied from nineteenth-century works. As an extra precaution, he hid the stories inside the cracks of his house, and covered them with revolutionary posters or pictures of Mao, a concealment technique inspired by stories of Confucian scholars hiding their works from the literary persecutions of the First Emperor.
Officially, the final total of suffering caused by Chen’s remarks alone was 84,000 persecutions, 2,955 deaths, and 763 people left permanently disabled by torture. The Special Group exchanged information and conspiracy theories with similar groups elsewhere, tying the supposed spy networks back to higher-level leaders and eventually forming a picture of a counter-revolutionary ‘conspiracy’ that involved 24 government departments and 29 provinces. The ripples went through the country, but the sharp point of this particular persecution, one of hundreds nationwide, was concentrated around Tangshan. An almost-offhand speech had helped destroy tens of thousands of lives.
But the little persecutions could be as painful as the big campaigns. One of the defining features of Communist rule was chickenshit. Chickenshit, as originally informally defined within the US military in WWII, is ‘petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige; sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline; a constant “paying off of old scores”; and insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances. Chickenshit is so called – instead of horse- or bull- or elephant shit – because it is small-minded and ignoble and takes the trivial seriously.’7
When we think about authoritarian regimes and social catastrophes, we tend, understandably, to think about the big things: murder, torture, imprisonment, suicides, blindings, rapes. But the small things mattered too: the endless routine of political obeisance and cliché, the frustration at having free time filled up with tedious meetings, incompetent ways of doing things at work that couldn’t be changed because they’d been put in place by someone with an acceptable political record or ties to higher-level leaders.
The amount of chickenshit depended on the village commune or work unit involved. There were villages where leaders pulled people together and did their best to mollify the insanities coming from above, and there were villages where the leadership was a brew of resentments, intrigues and petty sadism. Everything was worse for those labelled as ‘black’, of course, who became open targets for every piece of bullying and humiliation others wanted to heap upon them.
Politics affected every part of daily life, from farming to schooling to entertainment. But deep beneath the earth, massive elemental forces were building that cared nothing for red or black, reactionary or revolutionary.
Even a government as inept and self-tortured as China’s in 1976 had to care about earthquakes. They had concerned successive Chinese authorities for over two and a half thousand years. One of the main tests for the survival of any Chinese imperial dynasty was how well it coped with natural disasters. The end of each regime was often marked by a succession of calamities that caused famine, flight, and eventually revolts that either overthrew the old order or weakened it to a point where foreign invaders could take easy advantage of this vulnerability.
Flooding was one of the most frequent disasters. Extensive waterways permeated large parts of eastern China, where a complicated system of levees and dams checked the great rivers and lakes that gave many provinces, like Hebei (‘Northern River’), their names. The system required constant maintenance, usually carried out with forced labour, and when it failed, the results were calamitous.
Facing invasion from the north by Manchu horsemen in 1644, a desperate Ming dynasty had deliberately broken the levees on the Yellow River, causing mass flooding in an attempt to hold back the enemy, a tactic repeated 400 years later by the Nationalist government against the Japanese. Both times it killed hundreds of thousands of people, and barely slowed down the invaders.
In August 1975, the Communist government had discovered how fearsome China’s waters could be when Typhoon Nina caused rivers in Henan to flood, leading to the destruction of one of China’s largest hydropower projects, the Banqiao dam. There had been major dam or reservoir collapses in 1960, 1963 and 1971, each killing hundreds of people, but they were nothing compared to the Banqiao disaster. As much as 600 million cubic metres of water was released when the dam burst, and the whole of the local countryside disappeared under surging waves, like an inland tsunami.
Poor communications and disorganised local government meant that warnings to evacuate didn’t reach most of the villages in time, leading to 26,000 deaths by drowning, and nearly 150,000 deaths in the subsequent famines and epidemics. The extent of the famine underscores how chaotic the country still was, and how close to starvation most people lived.
Maoist arrogance contributed to the Banqiao disaster. Mao was determined to prove that ‘man could conquer nature’, and gigantic hydrological projects such as at Banqiao were one way of demonstrating Communist mastery of the landscape. China’s 80,000 dams and reservoirs were put up hastily, and without adequate safety measures – by 1981, 3,200 of them had collapsed. Western-educated hydrologist Chen Xing had repeatedly warned that the Banqiao dam was unsafe, but had been attacked for his lack of faith as a ‘right deviationist’ and purged, once in 1958 and again, after being brought back to work on the project, in 1961 for opposing the Great Leap Forward.
The disaster was swiftly hushed up, receiving almost no coverage in the news; even now, most Chinese have never heard of it. To get a sense of how strange this is, imagine that a natural disaster had killed, adjusting for population, 12,000 people in the UK in 1975 – and then imagine that almost nobody knew about it today.8
But earth could be worse than water, though the disasters fed into each other, as the shaking ground cracked dams and broke levees. In an earthquake, the government could do little to prevent the initial harm. It was how it coped with the chaotic aftermath that mattered, whether troops could be brought in to herd refugees to safety, or food moved from elsewhere in the nation to the afflicted areas and the power of the state reasserted. Without good government, disaster left power gaps that were rapidly filled by bandits. Chinese political thought was very clear on this; Ming officials wrote that ‘hunger and cold make bandits’ and ‘civilians who refuse to die of starvation will inevitably become bandits’.9
The difference between bandits and rebels, as the rulers well knew, was thin; all it took was a charismatic leader, a national or ethnic cause, or a millennial impulse. In the famines of the Great Leap Forward, some of the Communist Party’s top officials had been worried that a mass revolt in the countryside could topple the government, and Chiang Kai-Shek, the exiled Nationalist leader in Taiwan, had been barely dissuaded from reinvading the country in the expectation that the peasants would welcome liberation from famine.
To rebel, after all, was glorious. One of the oldest concepts of government in China was the ‘Mandate of Heaven’ (tianming), the idea that an emperor’s legitimacy depended on heaven sanctioning his just and fair rule. When a ruler became corrupt or unjust, this mandate was revoked by the gods, and rebellion was not only legitimate but presumed to be divinely sanctioned. In popular thought, among the chief consequences of this idea were natural calamities, which demonstrated that the ruling dynasty had lost the favour of the gods.
The legitimacy of the Mandate of Heaven was not judged by the mere occurrence of natural disasters, which were inevitably frequent in as huge a country as China. The disasters themselves didn’t show that the rulers were doomed; the failure to manage or anticipate floods or earthquakes did. One of the most critical factors was tax relief; a government that kept trying to squeeze revenues or labour out of a devastated area showed not only a lack of justice but also a lack of sense and doomed itself to rebellion. Any large-scale disaster was, in effect, a challenge to the government to prove what it was there for.
&nb
sp; Earthquakes offered some of the most critical of such challenges. China is one of the most seismically active countries. On average, an earthquake of magnitude 7 or higher, powerful enough to crack the ground and shake, or even raze buildings over hundreds of square miles, hits the country every year. Fortunately, the most frequently hit areas were in the sparsely populated west, but the country had still been racked by numerous disastrous quakes throughout history. The worst was the colossal Shaanxi earthquake of 1556, which may have killed as many as 800,000 people.
For Europeans, earthquakes were a theological and philosophical challenge. They were the ultimate example of nature’s amorality, killing without regard to innocence or guilt, hard to accept for any believer in a just God. After the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which struck on All Saints’ Day and killed 40,000 people, many of them in church at the time, Voltaire was prompted to write, in a poem:
Will you say, ‘It is the effect of everlasting laws
Which necessitates this choice by a free and good God’?
Will you say, seeing this heap of victims:
‘God is avenged, their death is the payment of their crimes’?
What crimes, what bad things have been committed by these children,
Lying on the breasts of their mothers, flattened and bloody?
Lisbon, which is a city no longer, had it more vices
Than London, than Paris, given to doubtful delights?
The Chinese intelligentsia was not greatly concerned with such theodical conundrums. Explanations for earthquakes looked to practical matters. Earthquakes were not the will of an angry God, but the product of a cosmological imbalance, or of the movement of air underneath the earth. The court mathematician Zhang Heng devised the world’s first seismograph in AD 132, a bronze bowl with dragons on each of the eight cardinal points. When a shock was felt, they spat balls into the mouths of toads underneath, reportedly detecting tremors up to 800 km away.
