by Rob Schmitz
On this New Year’s Day, we were seated in Xuhui. When I sat beside him, he seemed unsurprised, as if he expected my arrival. The sun was low above the skyscrapers to the west of us, and a frigid gust blew down the street. I sat upwind from him to avoid being blinded by his hair.
“Where’s your family?” I asked.
“My wife’s at home on the farm in Henan, and my sons and grandchildren are in Guangdong, working,” he said. “It’s been twelve years since I spent New Year’s with them.”
His hometown was nearly five hundred miles away. He leaned back and smiled, resting his elbows on three boxes of oranges, holiday donations from folks in the neighborhood. “It’s a good day to be a lonely old man,” he said.
After paying rent for a stairwell closet across town and buying a couple meals each day, Zhang said he cleared more than a hundred dollars each month from begging on this corner. That was likely more than he’d make working in his home village. Zhang grew up near the city of Zhoukou, one of China’s earliest inhabited regions. The ancient philosopher Laozi—Taoism’s founder—was thought to have been born there, and Zhang’s flowing white hair and wispy beard conjured up the old philosopher.
Zhang lived solo in Shanghai for part of the year, and wandered home to Henan during summers to escape city rain and heat. He shared another similarity with the great sage: Whether Zhang knew it or not, he was practicing the old Taoist principle of Wei Wu Wei: action without action. Taoism is China’s only indigenous religion, but its central philosophy seemed to be at odds with everything China had become. Yet here was its stubborn missionary—like Laozi, an old long-haired hermit from Zhoukou—alone and homeless on the streets of China’s wealthiest city on the most sacred Chinese holiday, begging for change.
“You must miss your family,” I said, realizing after the words slipped from my mouth how insensitive it must have sounded.
“Nah, I don’t miss them,” he said matter-of-factly. “I’m so old that I’m nearly dead as it is! What use would it be to miss them?”
Each year his three sons urged Zhang to come back home for the holiday, but he found the mess of relatives to be too much of a hassle. “My grandsons are naughty, my daughters-in-law would reprimand them, and I’d probably get so angry I’d smack the little brats,” he told me. “That would create a scene. Why go home?”
More important, he admitted, there wasn’t enough food. “According to Chinese tradition, the elder generation must be served rice first,” he said. “My sons wouldn’t let my grandchildren eat very much if I were there. I couldn’t find it in my heart to do that to them.”
Plus, he said, he didn’t want to miss out on the time of year when the penny-pinchers of Shanghai were most likely to give.
I gathered there were other reasons for Zhang’s self-imposed exile at a time when the rest of China migrated home. But it was getting dark, and the distant blasts of fireworks were beginning to interrupt us.
I stood up and bid him a happy new year.
He did the same, collecting his belongings on a portable two-wheeled dolly, rolling his three boxes of oranges down the Street of Eternal Happiness and past the lane where the box of letters had originated, a sky of exploding fireworks lighting his way.
A WEEK LATER IN MY OFFICE, I opened the box of letters again.
Lei Lei had sent them home with me. I wanted to know who wrote them, where they were from, and what they could tell me about the street and its past. In a country where entire swaths of history had been erased from the public record, these letters were rare—unblemished artifacts free from any manipulation of the State.
The lunar calendar we were studying on New Year’s Eve was still on top. I looked at the date: 1958.
I unfolded the rice paper. It was written in the meticulous, classical handwriting of China’s educated class. A name was scrawled in the corner: Wang Ming.
Nearly all the letters were addressed to Wang. About half were written to him by his wife. The remainder were penned by extended family: Wang’s older sister, his twin brother, his father, and a smattering of friends in Shanghai. Wang himself wrote only three letters. I had in my hands, I estimated, only one half of the correspondence between Wang and his family. Where did the rest go? Had they been left behind at the antiques store, or had they been thrown away?
I turned my attention to the aged, crumbling papers in front of me, starting with the calendar.
China’s lunar calendar is divided into twenty-four periods of approximately fifteen days each called “solar terms,” named after gradual changes in the season. Wang’s calendar had listed them all, beginning with Chinese New Year, or Spring Begins. After this came:
FEBRUARY 21—GRAIN RAIN
MARCH 8—THE WAKING OF INSECTS
MARCH 23—VERNAL EQUINOX
According to the letters, Wang had been arrested in mid-November of 1957, during Winter Begins, and had been transported two thousand miles from the Street of Eternal Happiness to a labor camp in Qinghai province the following September, in the middle of White Dew. He traveled across China for weeks, and arrived at the camp during Autumnal Equinox. He began hard labor during Hoar Frost Falls, and spent his first months toiling through Light Snow, Heavy Snow, Slight Cold, and Great Cold. There was never a good solar term to be sent to a labor camp in Qinghai province, but these were the worst. The province is a Texas-sized scrubland atop the arid northern Tibetan Plateau. Qinghai winters are among the coldest in China. If you wanted to get rid of someone, you sent him to Qinghai.
Wang was sent there for being a capitalist. He had owned a small factory on the outskirts of Shanghai that recycled silicon steel. He purchased scraps from electrical machinery companies and then melted them down in his factory to build the cores of electrical transformers. He sold them back to the same companies at a profit.
Up until the Communists took control of China in 1949, Shanghai was fueled by capitalism. Wang was one of many who got rich off the city’s growth. At a time when China was largely a rural country, Shanghai handled 60 percent of the country’s trade with the rest of the world, 80 percent of China’s foreign capital, and nearly all the country’s international financial transactions. Shanghai alone accounted for more than half of China’s industrial output, employing half the country’s factory workers.
Wang’s success afforded him a three-story cream-colored stucco house tucked into one of the many lanes that branched off of the Street of Eternal Happiness. By 1956, his wife Liu Shuyun had given birth to six children.
I picked up another letter, this one dated 1957. Mother Liu became pregnant with their seventh child that year, and Wang’s fortunes began to change for the worse. China’s Communist government had worked for years to eliminate private capital, and they had finally seized control of Shanghai’s private factories. Two classes—landlords and capitalists—were singled out. Eight hundred thousand landlords were executed, and many others fled to Taiwan or Hong Kong. Wang had tried to hide his class background for years, anxiously standing by as campaign after campaign continued to target men like him.
According to the letter, in 1956, Wang had been forced into a joint venture with a state-owned factory. It was a government takeover of the business he’d spent his entire career building. The Party appointed inexperienced managers to run Wang’s factory, and Wang was assigned a job in the supply and marketing department and given a salary of ¥170 a month. It was a fraction of his earnings as a factory owner, but it was still a better wage than most managers under the new Communist regime received. Six months later, Wang’s new employer transferred him to another public-private partnership named Mingyun, a company Wang used to supply.
Like many other companies in Shanghai, Mingyun was scrambling to reconstruct its supply chain since the Party’s abrupt takeover. It was rapidly losing clients and it teetered near bankruptcy. Wang was enlisted to fix the problem.
Among the letters I found was a two-page essay of self-criticism written in careful script:
Ho
w I made mistakes at the public-private partnership of Mingyun Electronic Equipment Factory from 1956 to 1957.
In the essay, Wang explains that his new state-appointed boss had no idea how to source recycled steel and had pressured Wang to find it by any means necessary. “He spoke to me about the difficulties and urged me to solve the problem, mentioning that if the material was of good quality with a normal price, it didn’t matter what kind of factory made it, even if it was a private factory,” Wang wrote.
Sourcing material from private factories was illegal. But, wrote Wang, he and other employees—all former factory owners—had been forced to sit by and watch supply chains they’d built over years completely unravel during their work shifts. It was too much to bear, and many of them did exactly what Wang had done: reverted to an economic system that worked. “We were in a difficult situation, so I found several private factories to supply us,” wrote Wang. “All of them sold the material to us at low prices and we were able to fulfill our clients’ orders. I had solved the problem. My managers were satisfied.”
It was clear from the letters that he’d sourced the emergency material from the type of private factories that he himself had once owned, and in the months that followed, Mingyun, armed with a new supply chain of Wang’s making, became profitable: too profitable. Local authorities paid a visit.
In November 1957, they arrested Wang and his partners for practicing capitalism and labeled them “Rightists,” enemies of the people. In Shanghai, one of every ten teachers at Fudan University, the city’s top college, was declared a Rightist, along with one of every twenty of the city’s industrialists and merchants. Nationwide, half a million businessmen and intellectuals suffered the same fate.
The Shanghai News Daily reported in its December 12, 1957, edition that hundreds of Rightists had been “uncovered” in just a few weeks. These Rightists were “well-versed at deploying all kinds of means and fake masks to deceive the people.”
The Daily outlined the “rectification” plan that awaited each Rightist:
Rightists will become dutiful, accept the supervision from the proletariat, learn from the working class, know how to distinguish the difference between the private and public sectors so that they can accept the leadership from the Party along the socialist path; how to temper oneself through labor, and how to overcome capitalist thoughts and give up the wasteful capitalist lifestyle.
According to court documents, Wang and his bosses were charged with “fraudulently purchasing state-controlled commodities” and “making money in an illegal way.”
In another letter I read that Wang had written to a friend, he described what happened to him and his colleagues after their arrest:
We were placed into a prison on Sinan Road in Shanghai. On September 9, 1958, the court called up the others in our industry who had also committed this crime and read us its verdict. There were dozens of men. We had all done business with each other for years. Many of us were good friends. We looked at each other in silence, nervous about what was going to happen. We were all found guilty. Most of us were sentenced to labor camps in Qinghai province, me included.
Wang Ming was sent away to a reform-through-labor camp so that his capitalist thoughts could be eradicated. He was thirty-five years old. He left his wife and seven children, including a newborn boy, in Shanghai—three blocks from where I read his letters.
DELINGHA FARM was the first labor camp established in Qinghai province. It was one of the largest forced labor farms in China. Before the camp was built, it was a desert oasis on a 9,000-foot-high plateau, sparsely populated by Tibetan nomads. By the time Wang arrived in 1958, the camp had more than 10,000 prisoners who spent their days tilling hundreds of acres of wheat and barley.
To the north were the 18,000-foot-high peaks of the Qilian mountain range. To the south stretched hundreds of miles of desert of the Qaidam Basin. Ancient Chinese considered Qinghai Lake—an azure body of salt water that is China’s largest—to be the western border of their kingdom, marking the edge of civilization. Delingha was built two hundred miles beyond that.
There was no need to build a wall around the prison. Those who made a run for it in any direction would die of dehydration, their bodies picked apart by vultures.
Camp managers divided prisoners into battalions of approximately a thousand, then further into companies of one hundred, and finally into working groups of ten. Two prisoners from each group were selected to be leaders. The Production Leader was in charge of tracking whether each prisoner met his work quota each day, and the Study Leader monitored prisoners’ socialist thought progression. Essentially, the Study Leader was charged with ensuring prisoners displayed appropriate knowledge and enthusiasm for Party campaigns, and with organizing self-criticism sessions where inmates could identify areas for self-improvement.
The daily regimen was ruthless. Prisoners worked seven days a week, resting only during blizzards or on one of five days issued each year for national holidays. Each morning, prisoners woke up, downed a bowl of gruel, and marched outside. A few guards armed with rifles kept watch over each company, placing red flags in four corners of a field, delineating the day’s work area. Prisoners were told whoever strayed outside the invisible boundary would be shot.
Harry Wu, a former inmate who runs a museum in Washington, DC, detailing China’s labor camp system, told me a day’s orders might be “Remove weeds,” and each person would be given a target. “When the day was through, Production Leaders would record your work to determine what you got for dinner that night: Good labor, good food; Less labor, less food; No labor, no food.”
Nearly all the letters addressed to Wang Ming were sent to his cell at Delingha camp. I wondered what he had endured way out there, past the edge of civilization. In 2013, I tracked down a fellow inmate of Wang’s. Professor Wei Xiezhong had been sentenced to five years in a labor camp in 1957 after trying to escape China by swimming to Hong Kong. He later got another ten for keeping a secret diary about his time at the camp. In all, he’d spent twenty-three years imprisoned in Qinghai labor camps, fifteen of them at Delingha. Professor Wei didn’t know Wang Ming, but their lives tracked similar paths.
Now seventy-nine, Wei was a balding, retired professor living in the Yangtze Delta city of Nanjing. He was around the same age as Wang. When I met him, I was struck by his quickness. Unlike many men his age, he moved with a certain agility, seeming to escape the deceleration of old age. His mind was sharp, too: he’d authored several books about his experiences in labor camp, but he was careful to label the works fiction. He wrote under a pen name—he had no intention of serving another sentence.
Professor Wei had arrived in Qinghai a few years after Wang had, in the middle of the famine that followed Mao’s Great Leap Forward. Tens of millions were dying in the countryside, and now he was, too.
Prisoners at the time were allocated 250 grams of raw wheat if they completed their daily work quota, but they rarely received that. The only way to survive, he recalled, was to swipe food and quickly eat it before you were caught and shot.
“I stole from the field. Others stole from the warehouse, and some from the kitchen. When we harvested the wheat, we would steal some and bury it underneath the ground.”
The squirreling strategy was the only way they would live through the winter. Not all were as lucky as he had been: “I remember one prisoner going out in the morning to bask in the sunlight, leaning on the barracks wall. When the sun went down that day, we found him, dead. That sort of thing happened a lot.”
Many new arrivals died within weeks, said Professor Wei. “Our guards were starving, too. After the wheat harvest, I remember men crouching down to eat the remaining grains, but they were hard to digest. So we would sift through our own feces to eat the undigested wheat.”
At a camp 150 miles north of Delingha, a little more than 500 of 3,000 inmates survived after subsisting on worms, rats, animal waste, and at the height of the famine, organs from dead inmates. By the end of
the famine, Wei estimates a third of the prisoners in his company at Delingha had starved to death. According to the letters, it was clear Wang Ming suffered, too, but by the end of the famine, he had survived.
China had experienced the deadliest famine in recorded history: An estimated 36 million people had died of hunger within the span of just four years—more than the total number of people who had been killed in World War I.
“Westerners don’t understand why we Chinese greet each other by asking ‘Have you eaten?’ ” Professor Wei told me, half-joking.
As the country climbed out of famine in the mid-1960s, tens of thousands more inmates arrived at Delingha, more than restoring the ranks lost to starvation. The camp added several departments to absorb the influx, each handling a different industry: livestock, fisheries, farming, even a coal mine.
Wang Ming was assigned to the camp’s foundry, forging cast iron and steel. Professor Wei worked in its construction team, responsible for building a hydropower dam on a nearby river. During the 1960s, Professor Wei said, there was a renewed focus on study sessions and self-criticisms, particularly during the frozen winter months when work slowed. I had visited Qinghai in the winter for a reporting trip once, and I could imagine how isolated the prisoners must have felt.
“During ‘Winter Training,’ we had to offer suggestions for self-improvement and make speeches praising life at the camp,” Professor Wei told me, smirking. “We would shout, ‘The situation is overwhelmingly good! The economic conditions are great! What can’t we afford to buy? We have everything!’ ”