Anthony Grey

by Peking- A Novel of China's Revolution- 1921-1978 (epub)

  All normal communications at the highest Party and army levels had long since broken down, and suspicion and unease had gradually paralyzed Chiao’s own relations with men who had been friends and comrades for three decades. In shadowing Mao and Lin Piao ceaselessly back and forth along the gallery, Chou En-lai still seemed to be playing his customary moderating role, but Chiao could not even be certain of that. Chou was waving his red book above his head as frequently as Lin Piao, and the premier addressed the Red Guards often through the loudspeakers, calling them “t’ung chih men” — “comrades” — as he urged them good-humoredly to keep in step and hurry past the stand. Chou, he knew, would normally want above all else to protect the government apparatus and limit the disruption to the economy that the Red Guard takeover of the

  rudimentary railway system was already causing. But in the atmosphere of growing tension and distrust, Chou, who had always been an intimate friend, was scarcely acknowledging him and nobody knew for certain what the premier really thought, since he was confiding his views to nobody.

  Chiao’s own greatest fear was that the People’s Liberation Army might be drawn into the chaos that had spread like wildfire through the country in recent weeks. His military role was to ensure that the armed forces were always in an efficient state of readiness to meet any threat posed by America’s escalation of its anti-Communist war beyond China’s southern borders, in Vietnam. A different and more pressing threat existed in the presence of the half-million Soviet troops stationed along China’s northern border, and Chiao resolved silently to always keep these prime factors uppermost in his mind, no matter what might happen in the coming days and weeks. This inner affirmation of his intent and the refreshment of body and mind which his brief moments of meditation had brought him helped lift his spirits, and he squared his shoulders resolutely as he continued to watch the parade. He would meet whatever challenges confronted him as boldly as possible; his conscience was clear and he promised himself he would make no public self-criticism just to satisfy the young radicals if he was subjected to wall-poster attacks. Some Party cadres who had already been maligned as “capitalist roaders” had tried to rehabilitate themselves with the Red Guard groups by immediately making public admissions o wrongdoing, but instead of accepting these attempts to regain favor, the Red Guards had demanded more and more abject confessions and the victims had brought down greater anguish and humiliation on themselves.

  These uncompromising mental decisions to stand firm helped Chiao feel more optimistic, and placing his hands behind his back, he sauntered along the gallery, watching Mao idly from beneath the brim of his peaked cap. As he approached, he saw the Party chairman turn suddenly from the crowd and pass a hand across his face in a gesture of weariness. Instantly his ever-alert nurse darted forward from inside the pavilion, and Chiao saw her press something small into his hand. Mao slipped it quickly into his mouth; then, after a short rest, he set off again, walking almost as briskly as before toward the eastern corner of the gallery. As he passed Chiao, he continued to gaze straight ahead; his rheumy eyes were focused in the middle distance and with a start Chiao noticed that his stare was glassy, almost vacant. When Mao gave no sign that he had recognized or even seen him, Chiao felt a new fist of apprehension tighten slowly inside him. At the same moment he caught sight of a familiar face in the shadows of the pavilion and moved inside to greet his nephew, Chen Kao.

  Kao was conversing in an undertone with the chairman’s wife, Chiang Ch’ing, who, like her husband, was dressed in khaki PLA fatigues with a Red Guard arm band fixed around her left sleeve.

  After leaving Pei-Ta University, Kao had become an outstanding cadre in the Third Investigative Research Office of the State Council’s Security Bureau, and his zeal and efficiency in that post had brought him promotion after four years to a junior position in the offices of the Party Secretariat. He had quickly impressed senior Party figures with his ability and enthusiasm, and during his five years as a Secretariat cadre, he had astutely avoided forming any obvious personal attachments among the leadership. But since the onset of the Cultural Revolution, Chiao had noticed Kao becoming an increasingly close confidant of members of the Cultural Revolution Group, so finding him conversing intimately with Madame Mao came as no surprise. As usual, Kao’s navy blue cadre suit was immaculately pressed and he radiated his customary air of confidence; but like everyone else on the gate that morning his eyes too were wary, and as Chiao approached, he pointedly ceased his murmured conversation with the chairman’s wife.

  “That’s a fine sight down in the square,” said Chiao, smiling formally at Madame Mao. “It’s wonderful to see how quickly our young people respond to discipline.”

  Chiang Ch’ing nodded only perfunctorily in greeting. She made no pretense of cordiality and behind her half-rimmed glasses her small eyes glittered unpleasantly. “It’s a scene, Comrade Marshal,” she said coldly, “that should strike terror into the hearts of all those Party persons in authority taking the capitalist road!”

  Chiao continued to smile, deliberately ignoring the ominous implication behind Chiang Ch’ing’s words. “I agree. Any real followers of the capitalist road would be frightened half to death just looking into the square today.”

  Without waiting for a reply, Chiao turned to his nephew. Normally they enjoyed a friendly relationship that reflected Chiao’s deep affection for his sister, but to Chiao’s surprise, Kao was avoiding his gaze and his handsome face remained blank and unresponsive. “What have you been doing recently, Comrade Nephew?” asked Chiao lightly. “Did you have a hand in organizing today’s festivities?”

  “Comrade Chen has been doing very important work in Shanghai,” said Chiang Ch’ing shortly. “And he will be returning there tomorrow to ensure that the Red Guards in the city follow the new orientation correctly.” The chairman’s wife swung rudely on her heel and walked away, leaving Kao looking uncomfortably at his uncle.

  “So you’ve been in Shanghai,” said Chiao in an undertone when she had gone. “Were you able to go to the Conservatory of Music to see your mother?”

  “No.” Kao shook his head and glanced guardedly along the gallery, checking that they were not directly overheard.

  “Have the conservatory students set up their own Red Guard groups like all the other colleges?” asked Chiao quietly.

  “Of course,” replied Kao, “but I haven’t had time to visit them yet.”

  Chiao’s expression stiffened. “Has your mother been subjected to ‘struggle’?”

  “All the teachers and professors at the conservatory with suspect class backgrounds have been ‘struggled’ just as they have elsewhere,” said Kao, speaking quickly and quietly as though embarrassed by what he had to say. “You must know that very well. Since she was condemned as a rightist in 1957, she’s automatically suspect. She can’t be exempted or given special treatment. She’s facing investigation — but for her sake and for mine it’s best to let it run its course.”

  Chiao stared hard at his nephew, feeling the nagging sense

  anxiety return. “I hope you’ll do everything necessary to see that she’s protected,” he said in a fierce whisper. “You have a duty to your family as well as the Party, remember.”

  “There’s no need to remind me of such things,” replied Kao in an almost inaudible voice. “I’ll see to it — but please don’t raise personal matters in public at times like this. It could be dangerous for both of us.”

  In his turn Kao hurried away in the wake of Madame Mao, leaving Chiao staring after him. The cacophony of slogan chanting and strident music was still rising deafeningly from the square below and as he stood alone amid the noise, Chiao wondered anxiously what criticisms the new Red Guard groups might have leveled at Mei-ling, in the Shanghai Conservatory of Music.

  When at last they marched into sight of the Gate of Heavenly Peace just before eleven o’clock, Liang Kung and his sister, Ai-lien, like all those Red Guards around them, were in a dizzy state of near hysteria.
The morning had become very hot and in the great crush of moving bodies some of their comrades from Changsha had already fainted and dropped out. The sight of their friends stumbling and falling had introduced the first feelings of alarm into the carnival atmosphere, and Kung and his sister had struggled to stay close to one another as the massive throng around them gradually increased its momentum. The tempo of the march was accelerating in time with the chanting of the slogans, sweeping them rapidly toward the square, and with part of their minds they were aware that their cries, mingled with those of hundreds of thousands of others, were becoming frenzied and strained.

  Looking at his sister, who was half walking, half running beside him, Kung saw that her face had turned pale. Like him she was experiencing a mixture of elation and apprehension as the artfully induced waves of mass emotion boiled up all around them, swamping their senses and engulfing their individual identities. What had begun as an exhilarating game in the familiar schools and streets of their home city had turned now into something unimaginably vast and vaguely alarming — but it never occurred to him that he, his sister, and countless others like them were being cynically manipulated by the legendary figure they revered. They seemed to be living through a dream and their vague fears evaporated in an instant when at last the Gate of Heavenly Peace came in sight. Its imperial yellow roof tiles were sparkling like gold, making the monument look like a palace of their fantasy, and the vision reduced them both momentarily to silence; then, as they drew nearer, Ai-lien shrieked aloud at the top of her voice.

  “There he is! I see him! I can see Chairman Mao!”

  Ai-lien pointed to the unmistakable upright figure with one raised arm who was gazing out over their heads. In front of them other girls were already shouting and sobbing and Ai-lien felt tears spurt down her own cheeks. By chance Mao was standing on the gallery directly above his giant colored portrait, and as Kung caught sight of both the vast image and the tiny reality above it, he felt a mysterious surge of pleasure rise up in him.

  “Chairman Mao! You’re the reddest of red suns deep in my heart!” he yelled at the top of his lungs, trying vainly to make his voice heard over the roar of the music and the slogans. “You’re the red, red sun in all our hearts!”

  To his astonishment, Kung felt tears of joy course down his face too and he realized vaguely that around him others were weeping. “We love you, Chairman Mao,” screamed other Red Guards. “We all love the red sun in our hearts.” A new round of “Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman, Making Revolution Depends on Mao Tse-tung’s Thought” was bursting from the loudspeakers; above it Kung could hear Premier Chou En-lai’s voice urging everyone to keep moving.

  “There’s Premier Chou!” yelled Kung. “And our great leader’s close comrade in arms Marshal Lin Piao.”

  Pushed from behind, they stumbled forward again, trying all the while to gaze back over their shoulders at the red-walled gate. But the wave of carefully engineered delirium sweeping the parade seemed to catch them up and bear them forward irresistibly, tossing and tumbling them against one another. Some fell and were trampled on, others linked arms and helped each other along. Ahead of them cheerleaders were setting up a new chant of “Bombard the headquarters! Bombard the headquarters!” and as they dashed on, blinking away the tears that misted their eyes, Kung and Ai-lien and the other Changsha Red Guards began to join in, repeating over and over again in shrill, hysteria-filled voices: “Bombard the headquarters! Bombard the headquarters! Bombard the headquarters!”

  4

  As they raced through Peking’s narrow, high-walled hut’ungs later that night under the cover of darkness, Kung and Ai-lien were still in the grip of the fierce euphoria they had experienced in front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace. They grasped heavy wooden staves in their right hands, running silently among an “armed force” of more than two hundred Red Guards. Others around them were carrying axes, hammers, crowbars, and whips, as well as pots of paste and black paint, brushes, rolls of prewritten wall posters, portraits of Mao Tse-tung, and a tall dunce cap labeled in thick black characters “Cow Demon and Snake Spirit!” Their cotton-soled slippers made little noise in the dust of the unpaved lanes that lay beyond the eastern battlements of the Forbidden City, and because the hut’ung walls were as high as the eaves of the single-story houses they enclosed, no lights showed and the fast-moving raiding party was able to pass almost unnoticed through the deserted alleyways.

  The group was led by burly senior students from Pei-Ta University and the higher-education institutes of geology, aviation, and architecture. Among them were two authoritative, older men wearing Hung Wei Ping arm bands who Kung thought might have been teachers. Although they had not made any attempt to give orders directly at any stage, Kung noticed that the Red Guard leaders deferred to them. The fifty or so Changaha Red Guards taking part had been told nothing about their destination or the nature of the action, but before their departure one of the Peking students, who carried a long stockwhip, had taken Kung and Ai-lien aside and told them brusquely they would have ‘a special role” to play when the time came. The whole group had chanted several Mao quotations before leaving the school yard where they had gathered and the last one repeated itself constantly inside Kung’s head as he plunged on through the darkness: “When the enemies with guns are annihilated, the enemies without guns will remain. We must not underestimate these enemies!”

  In his mind’s eye Kung kept trying to picture what the mysterious “enemy without a gun” would look like and he hoped fervently that he and his sister would prove equal to their special role, whatever it turned out to be. At last, outside a double gate in a high wall, the leaders halted and those following crowded eagerly forward. Among them Kung watched goggle-eyed as the Red Guards with axes, hammers, and mattocks hacked vigorously at the wooden planks of the gate until it splintered and fell inward with a crash.

  “We are Chairman Mao’s loyal Red Guards!” yelled the Peking leaders at the tops of their voices, swarming across a small courtyard inside the gate. “We have come to take revolutionary action against you!”

  The dwelling was an old courtier’s house consisting of single- storied studios built around a central courtyard. After 1949 such houses had been divided up to provide homes for several families, and the Red Guard leaders stormed toward the southward-facing studio, overturning potted shrubs and yelling bloodcurdlingly over and over again, “Rebellion is justified!” The axe carriers shattered the flimsy front door with a few massive blows and inside lights immediately went on. Kung, with Ai-lien at his shoulder, was pushed bodily forward as the chanting mob poured into the house, lashing out indiscriminately to smash windows, mirrors, and crockery with their staves and hammers. The Red Guards toting paint pots immediately began to daub jagged, big-character slogans on walls, curtains, and furniture, and others slapped paste on every blank surface before sticking up big colored portraits of Mao. Pictures and ornaments were being flung to the floor, books were being scattered, and Kung saw half a dozen Red Guards corner a terrified cat and bind a thin rope tightly around the neck of the squealing animal.

  Above the din Kung heard loud yells of “Bow your head, cow demon! Bow your head!” and he fought his way through the crowd into the largest room to find the shouting Red Guard leaders confronting a trembling Chinese in his mid-sixties. Shocked and white- faced, having been woken suddenly from sleep, the balding man wore crumpled pajamas of cheap cotton, and wisps of his thin gray hair hung over his face. He was staring fixedly at the yelling mob, his shoulders hunched, his mouth wide open, like a hunted animal finding itself hopelessly at bay before a pack of rabid hounds. At first Kung saw only a badly frightened, aging man, struggling to recover his nerve; behind his shoulder the terrified face of a gray- headed woman in nightclothes was visible, watching from what seemed to be a bedroom doorway. She was merely a blur, an incidental detail in the dramatic scene, until Kung looked more closely — then as she came into focus a shock like a charge of electricity ran throug
h his body. He recognized her familiar features! Looking back at the old man, Kung realized that he knew his contorted, ashen face as well. Normally smiling and affectionate when he had seen it during New Year visits to Changsha, it was the face of his own grandfather!

  “Bow before the masses!” yelled the Red Guard with the stock- whip, cracking it viciously close to the face of the man who thirty- three years earlier had worked briefly as a cook boy to a foreign missionary in Chentai. “Your crimes against Chairman Mao stink to the highest heaven! You have always followed the orders of China’s Khrushchev without question. Our investigations show you have a long record of deceit and treachery!”

  He made a signal and immediately a youth carrying a bucket and a large brush lunged forward and sloshed glistening black paint all over Liang. Two others darted behind him and seized his arms, forcing his head forward, and a third jammed the tall dunce hat bearing the denunciation “Cow Demon and Snake Spirit!” onto his head. Other hands draped a white stringed placard around Liang’s neck on which black characters announced “A member of the filthy black gang taking the capitalist road.” Two more Red Guards smeared paste thickly over his shoulders and stuck a large pink wall poster on his back. When they spun him around, Kung was able to see from the rear of the crowd that its heading read “Ta Tao Liang Tsa Chung!” — “Down with the bastard Liang!”

  A photographer stepped forward, lifting his camera, and two or three times a flashgun bathed Liang in a glow of white light. All around him the mob of Red Guards set up a deafening chant of “Ta Tao Liang Tsa C’hung!” and Kung turned to find his sister standing at his shoulder; her normally rosy cheeks drained of color, she was staring openmouthed at the bedraggled, hatted figure. Kung could see from his sister’s expression that the conflict between her natural love for her grandfather and her devotion to Chairman Mao and the Cultural Revolution was causing an acute inner agony. He too was wrestling with similar feelings; but all around them their comrades, led by the Peking Red Guards, were beginning a new, frenzied chanting of the slogan about “enemies without guns” and with each shout a forest of fists was being shaken angrily in their grandfather’s direction. The sight close before them of one of the real “bourgeois revisionist enemies” of Chairman Mao, identified so emotionally only hours before from the Gate of Heavenly Peace, was arousing a great wave of genuine anger and indignation which rose rapidly around Kung and Ai-lien like a flood. Still dazed and exhausted from the day’s events and a near-sleepless night in t- open, Kung again felt the same frightening ocean of hysteria engulf him. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that one of the Peking Red Guard leaders was clambering up onto a table to survey the crowd. In that instant Kung involuntarily lifted his right fist above his h ad and shouted with all his strength, “Down with the bastard Liang! Down with the bastard Liang!”