Beijing

by Linda Jaivin

  Though famine hit Beijing later than other parts of China, by June 1960 its granaries held only seven days’ supply for its 6.7 million people. Starving citizens stripped the bark from the city’s trees. A coalition of alarmed party leaders including Deng Xiaoping forced Mao to dismantle many of the Great Leap Forward policies.

  Mao, unrepentant, transformed Diaoyutai into the headquarters of a camarilla of extreme-left revolutionaries who included his wife Jiang Qing and ‘closest-comrade-in-arms’ Lin Biao. The Cultural Revolution began in 1966 with Mao’s call for the people to attack his enemies in the leadership: ‘Bombard the headquarters!’ A group of students from the elite middle school attached to Tsinghua University met in late May at the Yuanmingyuan, vowing to protect Mao and the revolution, calling themselves Red Guards.

  Affirming the youths’ ‘right to rebel’, Mao urged them to attack the ‘class enemies’ and ‘revisionists’ among their teachers and school administrators. The Red Guard movement snowballed. Mao whipped up the ideological hysteria at eight Red Guard rallies held in Tiananmen Square between August and November 1966, each attended by 1 million people from around the country. Mao charged the Red Guards with defending the revolution against bourgeois thinking, Soviet-style ‘revisionism’ and the enemies within.

  Mao greeting Red Guards at a rally in Tiananmen: ‘Bombard the Headquarters!’

  Red Guards demanded that Beijing be called Hongjing (Red Capital) and that its traffic lights be rewired so that red signalled ‘go’. Beijing remained Beijing and traffic continued to flow on green, but the city’s streets and hutong were renamed yet again, until over 100 hutong had the word ‘red’ in their names – there was also Xue Maozhu (Study Mao’s Collected Works) Hutong and Hui Zi (Destroy Capitalism) Hutong.

  Red Guards committed their first murder in August, of a vice-principal, Bian Zhongyun, whom they beat to death. (In 2006 the independent film-maker Hu Jie made a documentary about her murder, Though I Am Gone; it is banned in China.) During what became known as ‘Bloody August’, Red Guards murdered or drove to suicide 2,000 people in Beijing and tortured, maimed and traumatized countless others. On 27 August alone, 228 people met violent deaths in the capital. On a wall near the palace, students wrote ‘Long Live the Red Terror’ in their teachers’ blood.

  Cultural Revolution ‘struggle session’: a volatile blend of violence and public humiliation.

  Red Guards ransacked the home of the Peking Opera star Mei Lanfang (who died in 1961) and attacked his widow. One day, they assaulted and abused 29 famous scholars, opera stars and writers at the Pavilion of Exalted Literature at Guozijian, the old imperial college next to the Lama Temple. Among them was the 67-year-old author Lao She. The following day, Lao She’s body was fished out of Taipinghu (Tranquillity Lake) near Shichahai. It is unclear whether his death was suicide or murder. Red Guards called Liang Sicheng a ‘contemptible pile of dogshit’; he was so ill from tuberculosis that they had to prop him up to beat him.

  FAREWELL MY HISTORY

  In 1993 two films tackled the city’s gnarly post-1949 history. Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine follows the fortunes of two Peking Opera actors from childhood in the 1930s through the Cultural Revolution. Banned and unbanned twice at home, it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Tian Zhuangzhuang’s Blue Kite tells the story of one ordinary Beijing family as it experiences successive political campaigns, from the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957 to the Cultural Revolution. Blue Kite also took prizes abroad. At home, not only was it banned, but Tian was told he’d never make a film again. (He has.)

  Even the history museums only obliquely address the excesses and violence of the Maoist era, including the horrors of the three-year famine, as well as such events of the post-Mao era as what happened in 1989. Many of the Chinese-language works on Beijing history consulted for this book solved the problem of politically inconvenient history by concluding their narrative with 1949’s ‘liberation’.

  If the official archives on the Maoist period in Beijing are guarded for now, there are plenty of historical sources available outside of China, including in Hong Kong. These include photographs, documents, memoirs and oral histories, as well as documentaries such as Hu Jie’s Though I am Gone; Morning Sun (2003) by Boston’s Long Bow Group, about the Cultural Revolution; and The Gate of Heavenly Peace (1995), on the events of 1989. Like Australian director Bruce Beresford’s feature film of the ballet virtuoso-turned-defector Li Cunxin’s memoir Mao’s Last Dancer (2010), they circulate in bootleg editions in China, one of the only places in the world with a thriving black market for its own history.

  A still from Farewell My Concubine: facing up to a bloody past.

  One morning that August, Nancy and David Milton, teachers at the Beijing Foreign Language Institute, noticed students walking with tins of petrol and ‘the happily expectant air of summer picnickers’, on their way to burn down the British embassy. The mob beat the diplomats fleeing the flames, and sexually assaulted the women, before People’s Liberation Army soldiers whisked the Britons to safety.

  The Workers Stadium hosted 10,000-strong ‘struggle sessions’ of prominent victims such as deputy mayor Wu Han, who died in 1969 after a brutal beating in prison. In The City of Heavenly Tranquillity Jasper Becker quotes Eric Gordon, a British journalist put under house arrest in the old city from 1967–9, as describing the constant ‘roar’ of the struggle sessions as ‘like the moaning of a gigantic animal crouching over the city’.

  Mao urged the youth to eradicate the Four Olds: old thinking, culture, customs and habits. According to Michael Meyer, of 6,843 catalogued relics in Beijing, ‘4,922 were smashed to dust, along with thirty of the eighty remaining historical sites.’ Many people burned precious artworks and books in their personal collections rather than see them destroyed by Red Guards and be beaten for having them as well. Students and teachers furthered the Japanese project of planting crops in the Yuanmingyuan, filling in some of the remaining lakes to do so. Later a factory occupied the palace’s last intact structure, the Zhengjue Temple.

  The Red Guards didn’t spare the dead, either. They vandalized the tombs of Matteo Ricci and Yelu Chucai, dug up the grave of the Jiajing emperor’s cat Snow Brow on Jingshan and desecrated the Ming Tombs, attacking Wanli’s corpse.

  At the northern entrance to the Forbidden City, which had itself narrowly escaped being razed to the ground, Red Guards hung a sign reading ‘Palace of Blood and Tears’. Installing a massive revolutionary sculpture called The Rent Collection Courtyard in the Hall for Worshipping Ancestors (the site of today’s imperial clock exhibition), they forced the museum’s scholarly deputy director, Shan Shiyuan, to stand next to it. As Barmé recounts, the thousands of daily visitors to the exhibition abused Shan, slapped and spat on him; a gang of provincial Red Guards beat him into near-total blindness.

  Premier Zhou Enlai closed the Palace Museum to the public on 16 August 1966, two days before the first Red Guard rally at Tiananmen. When Red Guards from Tianjin tried to ram their way in with a truck, Zhou ordered in the army to protect it. The only leader with the authority and will to do so, Zhou also put Beihai Park, the Lama Temple, the Temple of Heaven and other key heritage sites in Beijing and elsewhere off-bounds to Red Guards.

  The Red Guards eventually turned on one another. Between April and September 1967, rival factions fought hundreds of battles on Beijing’s streets and campuses with weapons including machine guns obtained from backers in the army. According to Stephen G. Haw’s Beijing: A Concise History, a single battle at Xidan in mid-August involved 3,000 armed combatants and hundreds of casualties. For 100 days, students, soldiers and workers fought at Tsinghua University with spears, guns, Molotov cocktails, grenades, slingshots, mines and even tanks; as William Hinton chillingly relates in Hundred Day War, ‘corpses [lay] rotting in the cellar of the Science Building’.

  By 1968 Mao’s factional enemies were dead, imprisoned or silenced. He ordered the nation’s youth to the countryside to ‘learn from the peasa
nts’. Many Beijing students ended up in Inner Mongolia or the bitterly cold ‘Great Northern Wilderness’ of the Manchu homelands. Surviving intellectuals and officials were dispatched to ‘cadre schools’ for re-education as well. The army under Lin Biao took charge, barracking in, among other places, the eighth-century Daoist Baiyunguan (White Cloud Temple).

  Beijing once more became a front line. The threat was nuclear, and came from the Soviet ‘revisionists’. In 1962, during a previous scare, the party mobilized the citizenry to dig underground shelters. In 1969 a second mass mobilization saw the people of Beijing, armed with picks and shovels, dig 85 sq. km of tunnels and shelters capable of holding 300,000 people 8–12 m below the surface. The underground city had drinking wells, schools, cinemas, military facilities and hospitals. Its construction swallowed up the last remaining bricks from the city walls and stones from the Yuanmingyuan.

  The old gate tower at Xizhimen, c. 1924: death by a thousand cuts.

  By then, the only bits of Ming wall left were the gate and arrow towers of Qianmen, Deshengmen just west of the Drum and Bell Towers, the Ancient Observatory Tower at Jianguomen, the corner watchtower of Dongbianmen and Xizhimen in the western wall. As workers pulled down Xizhimen, Liang Sicheng observed the remains of a Yuan dynasty gate emerge from the rubble. Liang died in 1972, forced even on his deathbed to confess to political crimes.

  In 1969 a shroud dropped over Tiananmen. Workers replaced termite-infested beams with wood from the old eastern gate of Dongzhimen. Kilns fired 10,000 new golden glazed tiles for the roof, replacing the imperial dragon motif with that of the sunflower, the symbol of the masses’ devotion to Mao, their Great Red Sun. The rostrum was redecorated in the style of imperial audience halls.

  The sinologist Pierre Ryckmans (pen name Simon Leys) lived in Beijing in the early 1970s as the Belgian cultural attaché. He writes in Chinese Shadows that ‘Once, Peking managed the paradox of being a northern city with a [meridional] liveliness.’ Now

  the streets and markets have been shorn of their colours and spectacles; the noble city walls and gates have been pulled down; all the pailous, which gave rhythm and graceful fancy to the streets, have disappeared . . . The jugglers, booksellers, storytellers, puppeteers, the thousands of craftsmen, the inns, the little shops and pubs, the antique dealers and calligraphy shops . . . in short, all that gave Peking its lovely, diverse, and wonderful face, all that made it into an incredibly civilized city, all that made the ordinary Pekingese – with their truculence, their verve, their quick and subtle mind, their art of living – a natural aristocracy within the nation, all this has gone, disappeared forever.

  In 1971 Lin Biao died in a plane crash over Mongolia after he was discovered plotting to assassinate Mao. In February the following year, the American president Richard Nixon arrived in Beijing, his visit marking the first thaw in the Cold War. China’s carefully calibrated welcome included no red carpet at Beijing’s airport and the untranslated slogan, visible behind the honour guard, Dadao meidiguozhuyi!: ‘Down with American Imperialism!’

  Nixon met with Mao in the Lake Palaces. He toured the Forbidden City, bored and unaware of the frantic repair work that preceded his visit. He rode the new No. 1 subway line, ascending to the Chinese Military Museum by Beijing’s only escalator, and visited the Great Wall at Badaling, ‘spontaneously’ encountering high school students who’d been coached to receive him in a manner ‘neither subservient nor arrogant’. He pronounced the ancient defences ‘a great wall . . . built by a great people’.

  Richard and Pat Nixon on the Great Wall in 1972: ‘a great wall . . . built by a great people’.

  That year, the People’s Republic took the UN’s China seat from Taiwan, and Japan and Australia resumed formal ties with Beijing. With more foreigners visiting or taking up residence in Beijing and even the Italian film-maker Michelangelo Antonioni in town, the government spruced up the main streets and calmed down some of the signage: Anti-Revisionism Hospital became Friendship Hospital and Anti-Imperialism Road in the old Legation Quarter reverted to its old name, Dongjiaominxiang.

  One of the architects of the Great Hall of the People designed a new, seventeen-storey east wing for the two older buildings of the Peking Hotel. As the thirteenth storey was going up, it occurred to Zhou Enlai that Westerners staying there could spy on or even assassinate Chairman Mao from on high. Two storeys came off the blueprints. The fifteenth storey was quarantined for ‘utilities’ (allegedly including facilities for bugging guest rooms). A new 26.5-m-structure rose atop the Forbidden City’s eastern wall to block sightlines into Zhongnanhai and, according to The Forbidden City, as an extra precaution, the windows on the hotel’s western side were sealed shut.

  Beijing’s Xinhua Bookstore on Wangfujing offered up the first English-language textbooks in many years (Lesson one: ‘Long live Chairman Mao!’). Beijing residents bought 600,000 in October 1972 alone. Queues formed too for the newly reprinted Dream of the Red Chamber. Soldiers returned to barracks, students to schools, cadres to offices. Jiang Wen’s film In the Heat of the Sun (1994) captures the uncertain, restless mood of the capital in those revolutionary between-times.

  Premier Zhou died on 8 January 1976. Tens of thousands of mourners lined the streets for the procession to Babaoshan. Qingming Jie, the traditional day for sweeping ancestral graves, fell on 4 April. People streamed on to Tiananmen Square, wearing white flowers of mourning and bearing tributes of wreaths and poems dedicated to Zhou, which they lay at the steps of the Monument to the People’s Heroes. Among these were scarcely veiled attacks on Jiang Qing and the Cultural Revolution: ‘I weep while wolves and jackals laugh’. On 5 April, security forces moved in. There were beatings and arrests. The Party denounced the ‘Tiananmen Incident’ as a counter-revolutionary riot.

  Chairman Mao Memorial Hall, the resting place of Tiananmen Square’s sole legal occupant.

  On 28 July a deadly earthquake ripped through nearby Tangshan. Beijing trembled. Frightened residents camped in the streets and Tiananmen Square. As when lightning struck the Forbidden City in the Ming, and the Temple of Heaven in the Qing, people whispered that the government had lost the Mandate of Heaven. Mao died on 9 September and, a month later, party leaders arrested Jiang Qing and her ‘Gang of Four’ cronies. Mao had wanted to be cremated. Instead, in 1977, his body was installed in a Lincoln Memorial-inspired Mausoleum on Tiananmen Square, in the centre of the historic north–south axis.

  7 Reform: The First Decades (1976–2007)

  Following Mao’s death and the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976, Beijing’s ‘sent-down’ youth, ‘Rightists’ and other survivors of 30 years of Maoist purges and campaigns straggled back into the shabby, architecturally denuded city. Behind the walls of Zhongnanhai, party leaders engaged in a struggle over China’s future direction. In the hutong, the people whispered and waited.

  In October 1978 the Hunanese poet Huang Xiang arrived in the capital to paste an epic poem of lament and a lacerating critique of Mao on to a wall near Wangfujing. Thousands of people came to witness this extraordinary event. Then, in November, the party announced that the Tiananmen Incident of 1976 was not ‘counter-revolutionary’ but ‘completely revolutionary’. These two events detonated an explosion of free political expression known as the Beijing Spring. At another patch of wall at Xidan, nicknamed ‘Democracy Wall’, tens of thousands of people posted or read poems, manifestos, demands for justice and expressions of hope.

  Among them were a number of talented young Beijing men and women who would go on to play major roles in the culture of the post-Mao era. Some were associated with the samizdat literary journal Today, whose first issues appeared on Democracy Wall, and The Stars art collective (see p. 211). They included the poet Bei Dao (‘Let me tell you, world, / I – do – not – believe!’), the future film-maker Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine), and the poet Ai Qing’s son, the future artist-provocateur Ai Weiwei.

  The popular ferment spread to other cities. It bolstered Deng Xiaop
ing’s argument for economic reform, modernization and an ‘open door’ to the outside world. Once he consolidated power, Deng shut down dissent. Huang Xiang and Wei Jingsheng, a Beijing Zoo electrician who had declared that the modernization China needed most was democracy, were among those arrested and imprisoned, Wei for a shocking fifteen years. By the end of 1979 Democracy Wall was no more.

  Caricature of Jiang Qing on Democracy Wall.

  In November 1980 Jiang Qing, now 66, and other surviving leaders of the Cultural Revolution went on trial at central police headquarters on Zhengyi (Justice) Road in the old Legation Quarter. Jiang was unrepentant: ‘I was Chairman Mao’s dog. I bit whoever he asked me to bite.’ The court sentenced her to death, later commuting the sentence to life imprisonment (she hanged herself ten years later). In 1981 the party conceded that Mao had been wrong ‘30 per cent’ of the time and ‘rehabilitated’ a number of his victims, including Ai Qing. It restored the posthumous reputations of Deputy Mayor Wu Han, the architect Liang Sicheng and the writer Lao She, among others. The past dispensed with, the party ordered the people to xiang qian kan, ‘look to the future’, an incidental homophone for ‘look to money’.