— EPILOGUE —
TRANSITIONS
Peace is at once the mother and the nurse of all that is good for man; war, on a sudden and at one stroke, overwhelms, extinguishes, abolishes, whatever is cheerful, whatever is happy and beautiful, and pours a foul torrent of disasters on the life of mortals. Peace shines upon human affairs like the vernal sun. The fields are cultivated, the gardens bloom, the cattle are fed upon a thousand hills, new buildings arise, riches flow, pleasures smile, humanity and charity increase, arts and manufactures feel the genial warmth of encouragement, and the gains of the poor are more plentiful.
Erasmus, ‘Antipolemus, or, the Plea of Reason, Religion, and Humanity against War’ (1515)
In the People’s Republic, the new order meant not a return to ordinary times but a society hellbent on revolution, as Mao Zedong abandoned his pre-1949 caution and began to rush history. Many joined this world with enthusiasm. The Communists were the embodiment of hope, not just in China, but in the rest of Asia, in the Middle East and Africa, and even in the West, although more so in Europe than in the USA. Communist China represented an alternative to militarised Cold War American capitalism and appeared to offer cures for the ills of atomised, urban-centred, industrialised modernity. Thousands of overseas Chinese returned to China to offer their talents as engineers, scientists, economists, doctors, nurses and teachers to assist the Communists in giving birth to their New China. The vast majority of those who had the means and the money to make their way to Taiwan, Hong Kong, Australia, the USA, or Europe – including writers, journalists, bankers, film-makers, businessmen, teachers and students – decided not to do so. The Nationalists were the past; the Communists were the future.
Few knew then that the suppression of counter-revolutionaries in China’s cities and land revolution in its villages in the 1950s had cost hundreds of thousands, probably millions of lives; many of those who did know probably thought that this was a price worth paying for a new future. None could know in the 1950s, as we do now, that the 1958–61 famine resulting from the Great Leap Forward, when the Communists reorganised China into communes, would result in 18 to 45 million deaths.1 Real successes in the 1950s bolstered hopes that a new dawn had broken. The Communists brought inflation under control, cleansed China’s cities of prostitution and opium-smoking, restarted rural production and pushed ahead with industrialisation. If what we now know takes the shine off these achievements, it is important to remember the early optimism, the new mood of hope, which the Communists brought to China.
Qian Liqun, today one of China’s most eminent scholars of Chinese literature, was among the stay-behinders. His father, who had been educated at Cornell University and was the vice head of the Nationalist Ministry of Agriculture, did opt to go to Taiwan, but his mother, his maternal grandfather and ‘uncles who worked in banks’ all rejected that choice. Qian Liqun witnessed the arrival of the Communist troops in Shanghai on 23 June 1949, as a ten-year-old boy. ‘So as not to be a burden to the people, they slept on the streets … in contrast to wounded Nationalist soldiers who molested everybody.’2 That impressed him. Qian became an enthusiastic Maoist and joined the Cultural Revolution as a Red Guard when it began in 1966. In a series of lectures given in Taiwan in 2009, he explained why intellectuals like him became Maoists, drawing his audience into the moments, such as the arrival of the Communist troops in Shanghai, that attracted him to Maoism. He remained a believer until the Cultural Revolution sowed disenchantment in his mind and the dangers of falling foul of the authorities were brought home to him and his family, with his mother doing everything possible to shield her children from what was unfolding.3
We lack the kinds of diaries and memoirs of people like Chen Kewen and Chi Pang-yuan to help us understand how ordinary people in mainland China experienced the beginning of this new phase in China’s history. During the Cultural Revolution, many consigned their writings to the fire for fear of repercussions if they fell into the wrong hands. Important archives remain firmly closed as well. But an emphasis on the human toll of the Communist consolidation of power risks missing the point that while the Communists were undoubtedly tough enforcers of a new order, they were not mindless. For one thing, if Mao Zedong was convinced that power came out of the barrel of a gun, he also insisted that ‘the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party’.4
To begin with, the People’s Republic was divided into military regions, with the army in total control, but in the meantime Party organisation and government offices were built up, banditry was suppressed and weapons were taken out of civil society. Then, after three years, the generals who had headed up the military regions were recalled to Beijing and civilian authorities took over. The armed forces returned to barracks and were kept separate from civil society, to the extent that they did not even share the same telephone network. In 1955, twelve People’s Liberation Army generals, including General Lin Biao, were given the grand title of Marshal, but none was allowed to hold a major political office and the title was never granted again. The fate of demobilised soldiers was often an unhappy one. Whole units were despatched to China’s frontier regions to bring new areas under cultivation, lay railway lines or develop oil fields. The majority were sent back to their original home regions, where many received little assistance in finding a job or in reintegrating into civilian life.5 The Communists were deadly serious about demilitarising Chinese society.
A second major policy was the introduction of a household registration system. Public security organs began registering urban households and all their members in 1950. In 1953, when the first population census was conducted, rural households were also registered. The system allowed the authorities to stop people moving around the country, and especially to prevent rural householders from moving to urban areas, which became virtually impossible after 1958. A raft of official approvals would become necessary for anyone, even in cities, to move from one place to another. Soon sharp differences emerged between rural and non-rural citizens as the People’s Republic used rural production to finance rapid urbanisation in the cities. Urban work units provided their staff with apartments, health care and educational facilities, as well as food and textile rations. The countryside was deprived of such beneficence. During the Great Leap Forward of 1958–62, the aim of which was the rapid industrialisation of China, food was scarce in the cities but famine raged through the countryside. Village China had made revolution possible, but it profited little from that revolution. In recent decades, village residents have moved to cities in their tens or even hundreds of millions in search of a better life. They have usually ended up in low-end jobs in retail and hospitality, on construction sites or in factories.
For Chi Pang-yuan, the transition to a new life in Taiwan was difficult and eventful but in many ways fortunate. Twenty-five years old in 1947, she was now Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Literature at Taiwan University in Taipei. The conditions were primitive and she felt desperately lonely in a city in which she knew nobody and where everything was strange, from the food to the floor coverings (which were Japanese tatami mats). But small comforts such as a Thermos and a washbasin, small kindnesses such as being invited by family friends to share a meal, and signs of human normality such as the crying of a baby in a neighbouring room helped her bear up.
At a meeting of Wuhan University graduates in Taiwan, Pang-yuan met a young man called Luo Zhenyu, who had studied electronics and telecommunications but had decided to apply for a posting with the railways rather than for a more lucrative job with the electricity company. ‘When in Sichuan he had been ridiculed by students from elsewhere because he had never seen a train.’6 Zhenyu gave Pang-yuan a radio he had made himself, and in the even ings ‘I listened to classical music recordings left by the Japanese as well as Japanese songs.’ This made her realise that the Japanese were human, too. ‘The several million of Japanese who died invading China, although they are hated enemies, they too have families w
aiting for their return in the cold night.’ In Taipei, Japanese soldiers awaiting repatriation sold their belongings on street stalls. ‘I felt no real sympathy for them, but I also became aware that they should not be the object of our vengeance.’7
However, Chi Pang-yuan was reluctant to develop her relationship with Luo Zhenyu further because her family faced rough times in mainland China. One day he wrote to her saying that he had broken down in tears after watching the 1943 film Madame Curie, which tells the story of how Marie Curie, while in exile in Paris from her native Poland, toiled together with her husband for years in the discovery of radium. The film convinced him, he said, that he needed to dedicate his energies to achieve his life’s goals, even if times were difficult and it meant ‘reducing meaningless social interactions to a minimum’.8 Impressed by his determination and reassured by friends that Luo Zhenyu was a good man, she married him. Together they would work for a better future.
Chi Pang-yuan’s mother, father, sisters and brother all came to Taipei, her father catching the last plane out of Chongqing on 28 November 1949. Pang-yuan soon became pregnant, and so the couple decided to move to Taizhong, a city in the middle of Taiwan, where Luo Zhenyu became chief of the Taizhong railway bureau. Although the job was a move sidewards, a demotion even, Taizhong was a better place to raise a family than Taipei: their house was larger and came with a tree-shaded courtyard. More importantly, ‘we were worried about the political complexities Taiwan faced’, which would affect life in Taipei more than in Taizhong.9 For the next seventeen years the couple lived in Taizhong, raising their children as Luo Zhenyu put the rail network in the Taizhong region in order, an achievement from which they both derived enormous pride. Chi Pang-yuan taught at the local school and later built a career as a scholar of Chinese and English literature, writer and translator – eventually doing that for which she had been prepared during the War of Resistance: promoting human values and upholding civilisation.
Chi Pang-yuan and Luo Zhenyu were right. After the Korean War broke out, in order to firm up the Chiang family’s control of Taiwan, Chiang Kaishek and his son, Ching-kuo, began a crackdown on suspected Communists and spies. Chi Pang-yuan’s father, Chi Shiying, had continued to publish Time and Tide, the journal he had been editing; had spoken up for human rights and freedom; and had denounced increases in the military budget in the Legislative Branch. He was expelled from the KMT, put under surveillance and was not allowed to work. High-level protection spared him from jail. ‘Nothing shows better the muddle-headedness of their dictatorship than that the KMT could not accommodate a Central Committee member who had been so loyal for twenty years,’ Chi Pang-yuan commented in an uncharacteristically angry passage of her memoir.10
Guilt about the fate of Manchurian resistance workers left behind on mainland China haunted Chi Pang-yuan’s father for the rest of his life. Before all postal communications with mainland China were cut, he received a letter stating: ‘We braved untold dangers. You encouraged us. Now you have abandoned us. Can you be at peace with yourself?’ After surgery to remove a lung tumour shortly after his arrival in Taiwan, he had a nightmare in which ‘a head dripping blood hung from a city wall opened its mouth and asked “Who is looking after our women and children?”’11 The Cold War peace came with many costs.
Chen Kewen had a ringside seat at the disintegration of the Nationalists in mainland China. He remained loyal almost to the end. In April 1947, he decided to compete for a seat in the Legislative Branch.12 Given the context of civil war, hyperinflation, rice riots, student demonstrations, collapsing morale, labour strikes, secret service round-ups and unrest in the military, the conditions for a successful transition to democracy could hardly have been less favourable. The attempt to do so now smacked of desperation. One of Chen’s friends commented that ‘the situation our country faces is not dissimilar to that in France and Russia before their revolutions’.13 But Chen Kewen believed it his duty to do his best to make democracy work.14 He was elected and became one of the legislators. He and Chi Pang-yuan’s father therefore may have met; if they did, they would have found that they shared much in common.
Disappointments piled up quickly. Chen Kewen’s diary entry for 27 May 1948 records that ‘Chiang Kaishek made a very impolite speech’ to legislators he had invited to a banquet. In the speech Chiang made clear that he would quit as president if the legislators demanded, as was their right, that his nominees for certain posts were summoned to the Legislative Branch to set out their views.15
The Legislative Branch defied Chiang, with the result that a tug of war between the two paralysed the Nationalist government at the worst possible moment.16 ‘We are really immature when it comes to parliamentary government. We all lack experience. We must study harder,’ was Chen Kewen’s conclusion.17
The political infighting did not improve. Legislators squabbled about their entitlements, vied for the best appointments and turned deliberations into increasingly badly attended ‘speech contests’.18 Chiang Kaishek found it difficult to live with the rowdy realities of democracy, stating at one meeting that ‘everybody has become drunk with democracy, believing that it does not need the guidance of the party. This is a serious mistake.’19 He soon began simply bypassing the Legislative Branch altogether.20
When the Nationalists moved to Canton in April 1949, after the Communists seized Nanjing, Chen went with them. There he supported an attempt to organise a new party. ‘These days many people have lost faith in the Nationalists and oppose the Communists,’21 he said at a preparatory meeting. ‘They hope for a party committed to democracy and freedom to take charge.’ However, with no money and no senior figure in the country willing to assume its leadership, the idea proved stillborn. When the Nationalists next moved, to Chongqing on 15 April, Chen Kewen resigned his post of Chief Secretary of the Legislative Branch and moved to Hong Kong.
Hong Kong was the destination of choice for many wealthy Nationalists, especially southerners who had been connected with the Wang Jingwei faction. Chen Kewen first bought a small property at Shek O, on the southern shore of Hong Kong island, and then a larger one in the nearby town of Stanley. In both he enjoyed the ocean views, the beaches – and the calm. For the first few years after he arrived in Hong Kong, Chen Kewen sought to make a living as an investor and businessman, putting money into real estate projects, managing office and apartment buildings and trading with mainland China in kerosene and cotton. But he was not a natural businessman and, after his funds dwindled, he became a schoolteacher. He remained so for the next twenty-six years, ending his career as he had begun it while editing Free Men in his spare time.22 He had given up any hope that the Nationalists might realise his May Fourth idealism, but not the idealism itself.
Guo Moruo, the author of ‘1644’, was among those intellectuals who decided to stay on in China – unsurprisingly, given his close association with the Communist Party. He became President of the Academy of Sciences, was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize in 1951 and lived in a splendid traditional home in the heart of Beijing – although he was among the first to be criticised during the Cultural Revolution, during which two sons of his died. Today he is generally regarded as having gone a little too far in toadying up to Mao. Deng Tuo, the man who wrote about famine in Chinese history, also stayed. He became the editor of the People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s main mouthpiece. In the early 1960s, together with some colleagues, he wrote a series of satirical pieces with titles such as ‘Big Empty Words’, which criticised the agricultural collectivisation of the Great Leap Forward that led to mass starvation. Thus he remained true to his concern for China’s peasantry. Attacked as a member of an anti-Party clique in May 1966 at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Deng took his own life with an overdose of sleeping pills.23
A year before Guo Moruo published ‘1644’ about the collapse of the Ming Dynasty, historian Wu Han published a biography of its founder, Zhu Yuanzhang. Zhu had been born into a poor farming household and lived as a beggar and a
monk before leading his armies to victory over the Mongols and seizing the emperorship. Central to Wu Han’s biography was the conflict between the imperative to truthfulness of the historian and the compromises that might have to be made by those who wished to serve their society in an autocratic age. Wu Han became a leading figure in the China Democratic League, a political party founded in 1941 committed to steering China towards a democratic future. After 1949, he stayed in China to serve the new government and even went so far as to criticise other scholars when the Communists demanded that.
But in 1961 he published Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, a play about an honest local official who works for the good of his local community but is dismissed by the Emperor after he remonstrates against the dishonesty and abuse of power by other local officials. The play was a success. Coming in the wake of the Great Leap Forward, however, Mao understood its message only too well. The Cultural Revolution began when Mao ordered the play and its author to be criticised. Wu Han had been a deputy mayor of Beijing, but was purged and in 1969 he died in prison. Any hope that the moral voice of intellectuals, so important in Chinese history, might continue to have a role in the New China proved largely illusory.24
But not totally. The historian Chen Yinke’s response to the dilemmas of his time was unique.25 Chen was from an esteemed scholarly establishment family. Born in 1890 in the same province as Mao Zedong, Hunan, and roughly the same age as him, he did not seek his future in the Chinese countryside but travelled the world, studying at its great universities, including Tokyo Gakuin, Harvard, Berlin, Zurich and the Institute d’Etudes Politiques in Paris. He amassed an astonishing range of languages – Mongolian, Japanese, Manchu, Tangut, French, Sanskrit, Pali, and others – and acquired wide knowledge of fields such as philology, history, art history and literature. Before the War of Resistance, he wrote stunning pieces of scholarship that reconstructed the social and political history of the Tang Dynasty. He showed that the greatness of the Tang Dynasty did not result from the recovery of a quintessential Chinese-ness from the corruption of Buddhism, a foreign religion, but from the cosmopolitan mingling of Central Asian and Chinese elites in which women played a prominent role.
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