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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.
Because it was so sudden, none of the municipal nurseries could take more than one of us, so we had to be split up among four different institutions.
As the years went by and Mao launched one witch-hunt after another, the number of victims snow-balled, and each victim
brought down many others, including, first and foremost, his or her immediate family.
to the revolution, and was supposed to be spent working. Anything that was regarded as not to do with the revolution, like carrying your children in your arms, had to be dispatched with as speedily as possible.
and some of the ungraded teachers complained that my mother placed too much importance on professional merit rather than “class background.”
In this talk, Mao said that “rightists” had gone on a rampage attacking the Communist Party and China’s socialist system. He said these rightists made up between 1 percent and 10 percent of all intellectuals—and that they must be smashed. To simplify things, a figure of 5 percent, halfway between Mao’s two extremes, had been established as the quota for the number of rightists who had to be caught. To meet it, my mother was expected to find over a hundred rightists in the organizations under her.
But in her schools and hospitals, there were no such grand calls. Where on earth could she find the rightists?
But the cost of saving herself and her family was the well-being of more than a hundred innocent people and their families.
My mother was not forgiven for her lack of initiative. Mr. Ying put her name down for further investigation as a rightist suspect. But before he could do anything, he was condemned as a rightist himself.
Many officials used the campaign to settle personal scores.
When the campaign ended after a year, at least 550,000 people had been labeled as rightists—students, teachers, writers, artists, scientists, and other professionals.
after the Anti-Rightist Campaign no one opens their mouth.”
“You are a good Communist, but a rotten husband!” My father nodded. He said he knew.
Every day on my way to and from school, I screwed up my eyes to search every inch of ground for broken nails, rusty cogs, and any other metal objects that had been trodden into the
mud between the cobbles. These were for feeding into furnaces to produce steel, which was my major occupation. 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.
The country’s economic development was reduced to the simplistic question of how many tons of steel could be produced, and the entire nation was thrown into this single act. It was officially estimated that nearly 100 million peasants were pulled out of agricultural work and into steel production. They had been the labor force producing much of the country’s food. Mountains were stripped bare of trees for fuel.
This absurd situation reflected not only Mao’s ignorance of how an economy worked, but also an almost metaphysical disregard for reality, which might have been interesting in a poet, but in a political leader with absolute power was quite another matter.
Mao’s fixation on steel went largely unquestioned, as did his other obsessions.
It was in Chengdu that he outlined his “Great Leap Forward.”
It was easy to start ignoring reality and simply put one’s faith in Mao.
Most who saw the absurdity of the situation were too frightened to speak their minds, particularly after the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957.
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.
With no incentive to work, they just went to the fields and had a good snooze.
At the end of 1958 he wrote a letter to the Central Committee in Peking stating that producing steel like this was pointless and a waste of resources; the peasants were exhausted, their labor was being squandered, and there was a food shortage. He appealed for urgent action. He gave the letter to the governor to pass on. The governor, Lee Da-zhang, was the number-two man in the province. He had given my father his first job when he had come to Chengdu from Yibin, and treated him like a friend.
The only one who avoided having to show his hand was the general secretary of the Party, Deng Xiaoping, who had broken his leg.
Once, when my mother was asked by Mr. Guo to go on one of these raids, she said, “What’s wrong with supplying things people need? If there is demand, there should be supply.” Because of this remark, my mother was given a warning about her “right-wing tendencies.”
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.
Throughout history Chinese scholars and mandarins had traditionally taken up fishing when they were disillusioned with what the emperor was doing. Fishing suggested a retreat to nature, an escape
“Think of all the starving children in the capitalist world!”
“Think of all the children in the capitalist world—they can’t even think of owning an umbrella!”
His number-five concubine was said to have eaten thirty ducks a day—not the meat, only the feet, which were considered a great delicacy.
In reality, Mao turned China back to the days of the Middle Kingdom and, with the help of the United States, to isolation from the world.
Many parents encouraged their children to grow up as conformists, as this would be safest for their future.
Such self-examination and self-criticism were a feature of Mao’s China. You would become a new and better person, we were told. But all this introspection was really designed to serve no other purpose than to create a people who had no thoughts of their own.
Mao’s purpose in getting the article published was to involve the population in the witch-hunt. Now he found he was cut off from his subjects by the Party system, which had been the intermediary between himself and the people. He had, in effect, lost control.
works. Chinese national pride was being mobilized to enhance his cult.
They raided people’s houses, smashed their antiques, tore up paintings and works of calligraphy. Bonfires were lit to consume books. Very soon nearly all treasures in private collections were destroyed. Many writers and artists committed suicide after being cruelly beaten and humiliated, and being forced to witness their work being burned to ashes. Museums were raided. Palaces, temples, ancient tombs, statues, pagodas, city walls—anything “old” was pillaged.
On 18 August, at the first of the eight gigantic rallies which altogether were attended by thirteen million people,
“The Fragrance of Sweet Wind” had its plaque broken to
bits. It was renamed “The Whiff of Gunpowder.”
In the summer of 1966 I learned to suppress my sense of reason. Most Chinese had been doing that for a long time.
In 1985 I went back there with a British friend. We sat under the scholar tree. An old waitress came to fill our cups with a kettle from two feet away. Around us, people were playing chess. It was one of the happiest moments of that trip back.
By then “denunciation meetings” were becoming a major feature of the Cultural Revolution.
Still, Jin-ming was punished: he was ordered to pull out grass alongside the “blacks” and “grays.” Mao’s instruction to exterminate grass had led to a constant demand for manpower because of the grass’s obstinate nature. This fortuitously offered a form of punishment for the newly created “class enemies.”
Zhou Enlai,
All songs except these and a few in praise of Mao were banned, like all other forms of entertainment, and remained so for the ten years of the Cultural Revolution.
Perhaps the boy on that winter platform had shown more humanity than the hypocritical pillars of society.
So our Great Leader’s parents had been rich peasants! But rich peasants were class enemies! Why were Chairman Mao’s parents heroes when other class enemies were objects of hate? The question frightened me so much that I immediately suppressed it.
We were met by some air force officers, who said they had been sent by Chairman Mao to look after us and give us military training. We all felt very moved by the concern Chairman Mao showed us.
