Life and Death in Shanghai

by Nien Cheng

Imperial Chemical Industries, Hong Kong–Shanghai Banking Corporation, and Jardines—

Imperial Chemical Industries, Hong Kong–Shanghai Banking Corporation, and Jardines—

Since then, I had come to realize that the junior officers of the Party often used the exaggerated gesture of rudeness to cover up their feeling of inferiority.

The real difficulty was, of course, that a state-controlled economy stifled productivity, and economic planning from Beijing ignored local conditions and killed incentive.

dunce cap made of white paper with “cow’s demon and snake spirit” written

former landlords denounced in the Land Reform Movement of 1950–52; rich

peasants denounced in the Formation of Rural Cooperatives Movement of 1955; counterrevolutionaries denounced in the Suppression of Counterrevolutionaries Campaign of 1950 and Elimination of Counterrevolutionaries Campaign of 1955; “bad elements” arrested from time to time since the Communist Party came to power; rightists denounced in the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957; traitors (Party officials suspected of having betrayed Party secrets during imprisonment by the Kuomintang); spies (men and women with foreign connections); “capitalist-roaders” (Party officials not following the strict leftist policy of Mao but taking the “capitalist road”); and intellectuals with bourgeois family origins.

The Chinese people had learned by experience that the Party trusted them more and liked them better if they didn’t think for themselves but just repeated what the Party told them.

The Party officials remained in the background while the activists carried out their orders. When there was excessive cruelty that resulted in death, the officials would disclaim responsibility for an “accident” resulting from “mass enthusiasm.”

Most of these men were liberal idealists. They were impressed by the austerity, discipline, and singleness of purpose of the Communist leaders, but they did not have a deep understanding of either the character of these men or the philosophy that motivated them.

The Party secretaries in every organization, and even Mao himself, urged the people to offer frank and constructive criticism of the Communist Party.

He labeled all those who had offered criticism “Rightists.”

Lin Feng-mian,

its place was formed not an egalitarian society in which everyone enjoyed equal opportunity and status but a new system of discrimination against children like herself and their families. In each stage of her young life, she had been handicapped by her family background. For instance, to be admitted into a good middle school, she had to pass the entrance examination with marks of 80 percent, while children of workers and peasants got in with a pass mark of 60.

‘Learn to swim from swimming.’

Though I thought it rather astonishing in a country pledged to materialistic Marxism that a slogan should be based entirely on the importance of genetics,

“cowshed” the victims spent their time writing confessions and self-criticisms over and over again in an effort to purge themselves of heretical thinking contrary to Mao Zedong Thought.

cowshed

the Chinese people suffered such a traumatic awakening that they sank into shame and self-reproach, only to emerge with an eagerness to jettison everything Chinese in order to become thoroughly “civilized.”

Eventually, Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Wang Hongwen, and the well-known left-wing writer Yao Wen-yuan were to form a tightly knit political faction, the notorious “Gang of Four.”

During the Cultural Revolution, all intellectuals, whether Party members or not, were denounced as “the stinking ninth category.” The eight other categories of enemies were landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, rightists, traitors, foreign agents, and “capitalist-roaders.” The ninth category, the intellectuals, included not only people with degrees working as professors or research fellows but also schoolteachers, technicians, and white-collar office workers.

Mao’s own garden in the former imperial palace, Zhongnanhai, only apple trees and sunflowers were grown since they had practical economic value.

Mao had said that the more knowledge a man had, the more reactionary he would become, unless he purged himself through arduous physical labor.

Mao Zedong had said, “We must learn swimming from swimming,”

Lin Biao

Lin Biao sent Lin Liguo beautiful girls from all over China to form his “three thousand beauties in the inner palace,” in imitation of the selection of concubines for the emperor’s heir in the old days.

Liu Shaoqi.

“jet position,”

If a man had made an important scientific or artistic contribution to China’s cultural life before the Communist Party came to power, he was supposed to have served not China but the Kuomintang regime.

One of the most ugly aspects of life in Communist China during the Mao Zedong era was the Party’s demand that people inform on each other routinely and denounce each other during political campaigns. This practice had a profoundly destructive effect on human relationships. Husbands and wives became guarded with each other, and parents were alienated from their children. The practice inhibited all forms of human contact, so that people no longer wanted to have friends. It also encouraged secretiveness and hypocrisy. To protect himself, a man had to keep his thoughts to himself. When he was compelled to speak, often lying was the only way to protect himself and his family.

I went out to Arizona to see my brother again in March 1984, when he came to the Thunderbird Campus of the American Graduate School of International Management as an exchange professor from the Institute of Foreign Trade in Beijing.

Lin Biao

The Cultural Revolution had merely created a new set of circumstances to which at least the young workers were adjusting with cynicism and audacity.

he was “waiting for employment”—an expression used by the People’s Government for “unemployment,” which was not supposed to exist in a socialist state.

Nantao was the walled city of Shanghai.

Yu Yuan,

Yixing teapots

Changbaishan ginseng.

Lao Li

During 1975, the campaigns of denunciation in the press were like the tidal waves of the sea. When one subject was exhausted, another subject was introduced with a deafening roar. When the people’s indignation against the ancient sage Confucius was deemed to have waned, other topics of denunciation were presented to stimulate their interest. In this way, the Maoists built up what they called “revolutionary momentum” and kept the pot boiling.

Hitherto

Hua Guofeng

Zhang Yufeng (Jade Phoenix), whom he placed on Mao’s special train. She became Mao’s concubine and was given the official title “secretary in charge of daily life.”

The Chinese people knew but never dared to talk about the fact that their “Great Leader” was a womanizer. In his dotage, the self-styled successor of Marx and Lenin, and the symbol of progress and enlightenment, believed, as some Chinese emperors had believed, that sexual liaisons with young virgins enhanced longevity in an old man.

In Communist China, there was no law independent of Party policy.

Dehua Guanyin,

Xuande blue-and-white

Yongzheng

Zhengde

Xuande blue-and-white plate