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“I don’t understand the Cultural Revolution. But I am certain that what is happening is terribly wrong. This revolution cannot be justified by any Marxist or Communist principles. People have lost their basic rights and protection. This is unspeakable. I am a Communist, and I have a duty to stop a worse disaster. I must write to the Party leadership, to Chairman Mao.”
Like many Chinese, I was incapable of rational thinking in those days. We were so cowed and contorted by fear and indoctrination that to deviate from the path laid down by Mao would have been inconceivable. Besides, we had been overwhelmed by deceptive rhetoric, disinformation, and hypocrisy, which made it virtually impossible to see through the situation and to form an intelligent judgment.
No one challenged this medieval concept of shame, which might have been a target of a genuine cultural revolution. But it was never one of Mao’s concerns, and was not among the “olds” which the Red Guards were encouraged to destroy.
Although he was the president, he did not mean anything to my generation. We had grown up imbued with the cult of Mao alone. And if Liu was against Mao, it seemed to us natural that he should go.
Liu and his colleagues may have helped deify Mao in order to appease him, thinking that he would be satisfied with abstract glory and leave them to get on with the mundane work, but Mao wanted absolute power both on earth and in heaven.
“Ten thousand years, another ten thousand years, and yet another ten thousand years to our Great Teacher, Great Leader, Great Commander, and Great Helmsman Chairman Mao!” Each time the three “ten thousand”s and four “great”s were shouted out, everyone raised their Little Red Books in unison. My father would not do this. He said that the “ten thousand years” was how emperors used to be addressed, and it was unfitting for Chairman Mao, a Communist.
My father was to be beaten up repeatedly. But he stuck to his guns. He was the only person in the compound to behave like this, indeed the only one I knew of at all, and many people, including Rebels, secretly admired him. Every now and then a complete stranger passing us in the street would murmur stealthily how my father had impressed them. Some boys told my brothers they wanted to have bones as strong as my father’s.
He told her that he now knew what the Cultural Revolution was really about, and the realization had shattered his whole world. He could see clearly that it had nothing to do with democratization, or with giving ordinary people more say. It was a bloody purge to increase Mao’s personal power.
After a charged pause, my father went on: “This cannot be a revolution in any sense of the term. To secure personal power at such cost to the country and the people has to be wrong. In fact, I think it is criminal.”
He died in the famine, although his job should have meant he had a better opportunity to fill his stomach than most. The autopsy showed there was only straw in his stomach. He had remained an honest man to his death.
When I bumped into them in the mornings, they always gave me a very kind smile which told me they were happy. I realized then that when people are happy they become kind.
What had turned people into monsters? What was the reason for all this pointless brutality? It was in this period that my devotion to Mao began to wane. Before when people had been persecuted I could not be absolutely sure of their innocence; but I knew my parents. Doubts about Mao’s infallibility crept into my mind, but at that stage, like many people, I mainly blamed his wife and the Cultural Revolution Authority. Mao himself, the godlike Emperor, was still beyond questioning.
But Yan and Yong spoke up for him, as did a few others. “It is rare to see a character like him,” said Yong. “It is not right to punish him. He would not bend even if he were beaten to death. And to torture him is to bring shame on us all. Here is a man of principle!”
The families of Plumpie, Ching-ching, and some others were not hit. And they remained my friends. They were not harassed by my parents’ persecutors, who could not extend their power to that degree. But they still ran risks by not swimming with the tide. My friends were among the millions who held sacred the traditional Chinese code of loyalty—“giving charcoal in snow.”
Mme. Mao had been insisting on women doing the same kind of work as men, and one of the slogans of the day was Mao’s saying “Women can hold up half the sky.” But women knew that when they were given the privilege of this equality they were in for hard physical labor.
The moral of this legend was that to conquer a people, one must conquer their hearts and minds—a strategy to which Mao and the Communists subscribed.
There was another, more immediate factor in her death: she was denied proper medical care—and could not be looked after, or even seen, by her daughter when she was fatally ill. Because of the Cultural Revolution. How could the revolution be good, I asked myself, when it brought such human destruction, for nothing? Over and over again, I told myself I hated the Cultural Revolution, and I felt even worse because there was nothing I could do.
After a long pause, Father said, “If I die like this, don’t believe in the Communist Party anymore.”
It was in this period that I started to realize that it was Mao who was really responsible for the Cultural Revolution. But I still did not condemn him explicitly, even in my own mind. It was so difficult to destroy a god! But, psychologically, I was ripe for his name to be spelled out for me.
It said that Mme. Mao was Mao’s “eyes, ears, and voice.” Up till that moment, I had never allowed myself to contemplate the obvious connection between Mme. Mao’s deeds and her husband. But now Mao’s name was spelled out for me. My blurred perceptions surrounding his image came sharply into focus. It was Mao who had been behind the destruction and suffering. Without him, Mme. Mao and her second-rate coterie could not have lasted a single day. I experienced the thrill of challenging Mao openly in my mind for the first time.
I was extremely irritated by this self-styled superiority. What had we got to be superior about? Our population? Our size? In Zhanjiang, I saw that the third world sailors, with their flashy watches, cameras, and drinks—none of which we had ever seen before—were immeasurably better off, and incomparably freer, than all but a very few Chinese.
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. Mao had managed to turn the people into the ultimate weapon of dictatorship.
The other hallmark of Maoism, it seemed to me, was the reign of ignorance. Because of his calculation that the cultured class were an easy target for a population that was largely illiterate, because of his own deep resentment of formal education and the educated, because of his megalomania, which led to his scorn for the great figures of Chinese culture, and because of his contempt for the areas of Chinese civilization that he did not understand, such as architecture, art, and music, Mao destroyed much of the country’s cultural heritage. He left behind not only a brutalized nation, but also
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My mother’s file was thick with suspicion about her teenage connections with the Kuomintang. Now all the damning words went up in flames. In their place was a two-page verdict dated 20 December 1978, which said in unambiguous terms that the accusations against her were false. As a bonus, it redefined her family background: rather than the undesirable “warlord,” it now became the more innocuous “doctor.”
