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In 1964, Mao had denounced cultivating flowers and grass as “feudal” and “bourgeois,” and ordered, “Get rid of most gardeners.”
Becoming a mandarin was the only way the child of a non-noble family could escape this cycle of injustice and fear.
The powerlessness of women, the barbarity of the age-old customs, cloaked in “tradition” and even “morality,” enraged her.
The revolution, the Communists said, was all about giving them land. The soldiers were given a choice: either they could go home, in which case they would be given their fare, or they could stay with the Communists to help wipe out the Kuomintang so that nobody would ever take their land away again.
Mao had learned from ancient Chinese warfare that the most effective way of conquering the people was to conquer their hearts and minds. The policy toward prisoners proved enormously successful.
Policy toward prisoners was an intricate combination of political calculation and humanitarian consideration, and this was one of the crucial factors in the Communists’ victory. Their
Every time she went home she found herself being criticized. She was accused of being “too attached to her family,” which was condemned as a “bourgeois habit,” and had to see less and less of her own mother.
The need to obtain authorization for an unspecified “anything” was to become a fundamental element in Chinese Communist rule. It also meant that people learned not to take any action on their own initiative.
Throughout Chinese history, it had been a rule that officials were stationed away from their hometowns to avoid problems of nepotism.
He told her that she must be strong, and that as a young student “joining the revolution” she needed to “go through the five mountain passes”—which meant adopting a completely new attitude to family, profession, love, life-style, and manual labor, through embracing hardship and trauma. The Party’s theory was that educated people like her needed to stop being “bourgeois” and become closer to the peasants, who formed over 80 percent of the population.
mother was not yet aware that there was an unbreakable ban on opting out of the system, because, typically, it was unwritten. But she caught the tone of extreme urgency in his voice. Once you were “with the revolution” you could never leave.
The dishes had exotic names which my mother loved: “tiger fights the dragon,” “imperial concubine chicken,” “hot saucy duck,” “suckling golden cock crows to the dawn.”
In old China one of the major vices was that anyone with power was above the rules, and an important component of the Communist revolution was that officials, like everyone else, should be subject to rules.
“Corruption always starts with little things like this. This is the sort of thing that will erode our revolution.”
In the guerrillas, men and women used to compete to see who had the most “revolutionary insects” (lice). Cleanliness was regarded as unproletarian.
Party’s all-around intrusion into people’s lives was the very point of the process known as “thought reform.” Mao wanted not only external discipline, but the total subjection of all thoughts, large or small. Every week a meeting for “thought examination” was held for those “in the revolution.” Everyone had both to criticize themselves for incorrect thoughts and be subjected to the criticism of others.
Meetings were an important means of Communist control. They left people no free time, and eliminated the private sphere.
pettiness was a fundamental characteristic of a revolution in which intrusiveness and ignorance were celebrated, and envy was incorporated into the system of control.
Officials were supposed to work from 8 A.M. until 11 P.M., seven days a week,
This was a key invention of Mao’s—to involve the entire population in the machinery of control. Few wrongdoers, according to the regime’s criteria, could escape the watchful eyes of the people, especially in a society with an age-old concierge mentality. But the “efficiency” was acquired at a tremendous price: because the campaigns operated on very vague criteria, and because of personal vendettas, and even gossip, many innocent people were condemned.
For the first time she vaguely reflected on the fact that, as the revolution was made by human beings, it was burdened with their failings.
All government employees, even senior officials, lived at their office. They were not allowed to cook at home, and all ate in canteens. The canteen was also where everyone got their boiled water, which was fetched in thermos flasks.
This signaled the beginning of the end of individual expression in China. All the media had been taken over by the Party when the Communists came to power. From now on it was the minds of the entire nation that were placed under ever tighter control.
Compiling detailed files on people’s backgrounds had been a crucial part of the Communists’ system of control even before they came to power.
Mao had accelerated his attempt to change the face of China. In July 1955 he had called for a speeding up of collective farming, and in November he abruptly announced that all industry and commerce, which had so far remained in private hands, were to be nationalized.
Party had attached a stigmatic label to her—kong-zhi shi-yong, which meant “employed but under control and surveillance.”
The value placed on Dr. Xia’s shop was ridiculously low, but there was an advantage to this for my grandmother: it meant that she was classified only as a “minor capitalist,”
Throughout Chinese history, when one person was condemned sometimes the entire clan—men, women, and children, even newborn babies—was executed. Execution could extend to cousins nine times removed (zhu-lian jiu-zu).
after 1955 family origins became increasingly important.
In spite of these personal tragedies, or perhaps partly because of the steely control, China was more stable in 1956 than at any time this century.
We would be safe if we followed the old Chinese rule for children, ting-hua (“heeding the words,” being obedient).
the early 1950s, a Communist was supposed to give herself so completely to the revolution and the people that any demonstration of affection for her children was frowned on as a sign of divided loyalties.
The Communists had instituted a system under which everyone had to register their place of residence (hu-kou). Only those registered as urban dwellers were entitled to food rations.
My father was a member of a special category known as gao-gan, “high officials,” a term applied to people of Grade 13 and above,
In the spring of 1956 Mao announced a policy known as the Hundred Flowers, from the phrase “let a hundred flowers bloom” (baihua qi-fang), which in theory meant greater freedom for the arts, literature, and scientific research.
Anybody with any education at all was referred to as an “intellectual.”
Mao had always distrusted intellectuals.
some of the ungraded teachers complained that my mother placed too much importance on professional merit rather than “class background.”
my mother was expected to find over a hundred rightists in the organizations under her.
This was the dilemma facing my mother. If she was labeled a rightist, she would either have to renounce her children or ruin their future.
“You are a good Communist, but a rotten husband!”
Yes, at the age of six, I was involved in steel production, and had to compete with my schoolmates at handing in the most scrap iron.
No private cooking was allowed now, and everybody had to eat in the canteen.
At this parade a slogan was put forward, “Capable women can make a meal without food,” a reversal of a pragmatic ancient Chinese saying, “No matter how capable, a woman cannot make a meal without food.” Exaggerated rhetoric had become concrete demands. Impossible fantasies were supposed to become reality.
Peasants moved crops from several plots of land to one plot to show Party officials that they had produced a miracle harvest. Similar “Potemkin fields” were shown off to gullible—or self-blinded—agricultural scientists, reporters, visitors from other regions, and foreigners.
“Self-deception while deceiving others” (zi-qi-qi-ren) gripped the nation.
The whole nation slid into doublespeak. Words became divorced from reality, responsibility, and people’s real thoughts. Lies were told with ease because words had lost their meanings—and had ceased to be taken seriously by others.
In 1989 an official who had been working in famine relief told me that he believed that the total number of people who had died in Sichuan was seven million. This would be 10 percent of the entire population of a rich province. An accepted estimate for the death toll for the whole country is around thirty million.
At a conference for 7,000 top-ranking officials at the beginning of 1962, Mao said that the famine was caused 70 percent by natural disasters and 30 percent by human error.
The famine was worse than anything under the Kuomintang, but it looked different: in the Kuomintang days, starvation took place alongside blatant unchecked extravagance.
