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the beginning of 1968, a new, fourth stage of the Cultural Revolution had started. Phase One had been the teenage Red Guards; then came the Rebels and the attacks on capitalist-roaders; the third phase had been the factional wars among the Rebels. Mao now decided to halt the factional fighting. To bring about obedience, he spread terror to show that no one was immune.
“Clean Up the Class Ranks,”
In those days, beauty was so despised that my family was sent to this lovely house as a punishment.
the autumn of 1968 a new type of team came to take over my school; they were called “Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams.” Made up of soldiers or workers who had not been involved in factional fighting, their task was to restore order.
According to Mao’s rhetoric, we were sent to the countryside “to be reformed.”
They were called “cadres’ schools,” but apart from the fact that they were not schools, they were not just for officials either. Writers, scholars, scientists, teachers, doctors, and actors who had become “useless” in Mao’s know-nothing new order were also dispatched there.
The “cadres’ schools” were not concentration camps or gulags, but they were isolated places of detention where the inmates had restricted freedom and had to do hard labor under strict supervision.
Altogether, some fifteen million young people were sent to the country in what was one of the largest population movements in history.
Death caused in this way came to have a special term in Chinese: po-hai zhisi—“persecuted to death.” Mao was fully aware of what was happening, and would encourage the perpetrators by giving his “silent consent” (mo-xu).
Grotesque forms of worshipping Mao had been part of our lives for some time—chanting, wearing Mao badges, waving the Little Red Book. But the idolatry had escalated when the Revolutionary Committees were formally established nationwide by late 1968.
Jin-ming often made skeptical comments like this which kept us laughing. This was unusual in those days, when humor was dangerous. Mao, hypocritically calling for “rebellion,” wanted no genuine inquiry or skepticism. To be able to think in a skeptical way was my first step toward enlightenment.
Like most class enemies, he was not put in prison but kept “under surveillance” by his fellow villagers. This was Mao’s way: to keep “enemy” figures among the people so they always had someone visible and at hand to hate.
On 26 June 1965 he made the remark which became a guideline for health and education: “The more books you read, the more stupid you become.” I went to work with absolutely no training.
Saving precious food for others has always been a major way of expressing love and concern in China.
streets and restaurants lost the militant names that had been imposed on them at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution by the Red Guards.
In Chengdu, although it was not visited by Nixon, the restaurant The Whiff of Gunpowder switched back to its old name, The Fragrance of Sweet Wind.
There was to be an entrance exam, Zhou Enlai had decided, although he had to change the term “exam” (kao-shi) to “an investigation into the candidates’ situation of handling some basic knowledge, and their ability to analyze and solve concrete problems,” a criterion based on another Mao quote. Mao did not like exams. The new procedure was that first one had to be recommended by one’s work unit, then came entrance examinations, then the enrollment authorities weighed the exam results and the applicant’s “political behavior.”
Education became the front line of the sabotage by Mme. Mao and her cabal, because it was not immediately vital to the economy and because every attempt at learning and teaching involved a reversal of the glorified ignorance of the Cultural Revolution. When I entered the university, I found myself in a battlefield.
English was my subject, but there was almost no way to learn it. There were no native English speakers around, indeed no foreigners at all. The whole of Sichuan was closed to foreigners.
We could be put into prison for listening to the BBC or the Voice of America. No foreign publications were available except The Worker, the paper of the minuscule Maoist Communist Party of Britain,
Our textbooks were ridiculous propaganda. The first English sentence we learned was “Long live Chairman Mao!” But no one dared to explain the sentence grammatically.
In the mad logic of the day, being good at one’s profession (“expert”) was automatically equated with being politically unreliable (“white”).
The best transport facilities, shops, restaurants, guesthouses, and scenic spots were reserved for them, with signs reading “For Foreign Guests Only.” Mao-tai, the most sought-after liquor, was totally unavailable to ordinary Chinese, but freely available to foreigners.
Mao’s Cultural Revolution had destroyed both Party discipline and civic morality.
There was no place for him in Mao’s China, because he had tried to be an honest man.
Wherever we went as we traveled down the Yangtze we saw the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution: temples smashed, statues toppled, and old towns wrecked. Little evidence remained of China’s ancient civilization. But the loss went even deeper than this. Not only had China destroyed most of its beautiful things, it had lost its appreciation of them, and was unable to make new ones. Except for the much-scarred but still stunning landscape, China had become an ugly country.
By the end of 1975, China was boiling with incensed rumors. In the minicampaign called “Our Socialist Motherland Is Paradise,” many openly hinted at the question which I had asked myself for the first time eight years before: “If this is paradise, what then is hell?”
the first time in ten years, I saw irony and humor publicly displayed, which sent my spirits soaring.
It seemed to me that its central principle was the need—or the desire?—for perpetual conflict.
He ruled by getting people to hate each other. In doing so, he got ordinary Chinese to carry out many of the tasks undertaken in other dictatorships by professional elites.
