by Cheng Nien
I heard urgent footsteps. Another guard had come to join her. The second guard said, “You are committing a crime at this moment by creating a disturbance.”
“Our Great Leader Chairman Mao taught us, ‘Lay out the facts; speak with reason.’ I’m merely following his instructions. I’m innocent. I have not committed a crime. I should say so,” I argued in a loud voice.
“Come out!”
The guard would unlock the door of the cell and lead me into a room in a remote corner of the prison compound where we could continue to shout at each other without being heard by the other prisoners. I would give in and stop talking when I became utterly exhausted. Sometimes my endurance outlasted the guards’ patience. When that happened, they resorted to physical violence to silence me, either hitting my body or kicking my legs. They called me a “hysterical old woman” and often deplored my “mad fits,” but they never knew my real purpose in provoking them. During my six and a half years of solitary confinement, I deliberately caused scenes such as this many times. Whenever deep depression overwhelmed me to the extent that I could no longer sleep or swallow food, I would intentionally seek an encounter with the guards.
Though my arms became bruised and my legs bear to this day scars inflicted by their heavy leather boots, I always enjoyed a period of good humor and calm spirits after fighting with the guards. Then tension would gradually build up in me again. I believed that what I needed was human contact; even encounters with the guards were better than complete isolation. Besides, fighting was a positive action, much more encouraging to the human spirit than merely enduring hardship with patience, known as a virtue of the Chinese race. Many of my friends and acquaintances survived their ordeal during the Cultural Revolution by that virtue. But for me, only the positive stimulant of fighting buoyed up my spirits.
On August 6, a particularly stifling summer’s day, the newspaper came very late. I overheard the male guard who brought copies of the newspaper to the women’s prison saying to the female guard on duty, “Very important news!” I wondered what it was. But I had to wait until nearly bedtime for the newspaper to reach my cell.
On the front page in large characters, with banner headlines printed in red, was a news item. The day before, Mao Zedong had sent a basket of mangoes to the workers and peasants engaged in indoctrinating the students at the famous Qinghua University in Beijing. The mangoes had originally been a gift to Mao from Pakistan’s foreign minister when he came for an official visit. The newspaper reported the jubilation and excitement of the workers when Mao’s gift was brought to them. According to the report, the workers and peasants cheered with joy and wept with gratitude. Chanting Mao’s quotations, they pledged their loyalty to the Leader.
Although I did not know that Mao had disowned the Red Guards a few days before, when he had called together their leaders in Beijing and criticized their violence, I recognized immediately that his well-publicized action had important political significance. Undoubtedly the workers and peasants had been sent to Qinghua, one of China’s leading universities, where the Red Guard had been especially militant and unruly, to restrain the young revolutionaries. To make a present to the workers and peasants there was a clear and eloquent warning to the Qinghua Red Guards not to resist the disciplinary actions of those sent to tame them.
For the next few days, the newspaper reported the organization of “Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams” all over the country. Photographs of these men marching into universities and schools appeared daily. Although named “Workers’ and Peasants’ Propaganda Teams for Mao Zedong Thought,” the teams included no peasants and few workers. They were composed mainly of military men in civilian clothes and Party officials considered loyal by the Maoist leaders, such as Mao’s wife Jiang Qing and Defense Minister Lin Biao.
Although Communist totalitarianism in China was in essence military dictatorship, from the inception of its power in 1949 the Chinese Communist Party was always careful to keep the gun in the background and to create an impression of civilian rule by persuasion. Political indoctrination was the preferred method used to bend the will of the populace. Only in extreme cases of mass armed uprising in remote areas inhabited by minority races had troops been called out. To use the Workers’ and Peasants’ Propaganda Teams to overcome the resistance of the Red Guards and restore order by nonmilitary means rather than the speedier method of sending in contingents of soldiers illustrated once more how anxious Mao was to preserve this carefully cultivated image of a benign government.
While the Red Guards were being dealt with, the Maoist leadership in Beijing continued its efforts to organize provincial and municipal Revolutionary Committees (a new name for the provincial and municipal governments) and new Party Secretariats. The newspaper frequently published lead articles expressing the hope that this process would be speeded up so that conditions would be felicitous for the convening of the Ninth Party Congress. I concluded that the Maoists who had seized power were anxious to give themselves official status by being elected to the Party Central Committee and the Politburo, and to have the old officials they had ousted from office expelled from the Party so as to remove any possible future threat to their own power.
Time dragged on, and it was again autumn. With each rainy day, the temperature dropped a few degrees. I thought that by adhering to a regimen of mental and physical exercise I had stalled the rapid deterioration of my health. So it was quite a shock when something new and alarming happened. I had been losing an unusually large amount of blood at each menstrual period. When I began hemorrhaging every ten days or so, for several days at a time, I became very frightened. Yet remembering my experience with the untrained orderly, I did not dare to ask for medical attention. Depression once again overtook me; I often had nightmares from which I would waken sweating and panting for breath.
One night in October, while I was still struggling with my own physical problems, the guard went again from cell to cell to order the prisoners to sit quietly and listen to a broadcast. A man’s voice came through the loudspeaker to make the startling announcement that at a Central Committee meeting presided over by Mao, a resolution was passed to expel Liu Shaoqi, the chairman of the Chinese People’s Republic, from the Chinese Communist Party and to strip him of all his official positions.
Liu Shaoqi, a longtime Communist Party leader, was second only to Mao Zedong in the Party hierarchy. When Mao was leading the armed struggle from the Chinese soviet in Jinggangshan in the early thirties, Liu was directing the Communist underground in Kuomintang-held areas. After 1949, when Mao occupied the twin positions of chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and chairman of the Chinese People’s Republic, Liu Shaoqi was the general secretary of the Communist Party. The two men worked in close collaboration, and there was no sign that Liu was trying to usurp Mao’s power. Indeed, the term “Mao Zedong Thought” was coined by Liu Shaoqi in his report as Party secretary at the Seventh Party Congress in 1945. However, in 1960, after Mao’s Great Leap Forward Campaign pushed China’s fragile economy to the brink of ruin, Mao Zedong relinquished the position of chairman of the People’s Republic in favor of Liu Shaoqi. The rumor that reached the Chinese people was that there had been fierce debates within the Party leadership and Mao had been obliged to make a humiliating gesture of self-criticism in front of a meeting of seven thousand leading Party officials.
Liu Shaoqi immediately adopted a series of policy reversals to save the rapidly deteriorating economic situation. When his economic policy succeeded where Mao’s had failed and Liu Shaoqi became increasingly popular with Party members and the Chinese people, eclipsing Mao Zedong in influence and importance, Mao became alarmed. He carefully plotted to destroy the man who threatened his position, for he feared losing not only everything he had believed in and worked for but also his place in history.
While the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was different things to different people, this gigantic struggle lasting ten full years was essentially a cont
est between two conflicting Party policies personified by Mao Zedong and Liu Shaoqi. The irony is that although Mao Zedong had Liu Shaoqi persecuted to death and seemed to have won during the Cultural Revolution, after his own death, Deng Xiaoping led China along the route of economic liberalization pioneered by Liu Shaoqi twenty years earlier, and went much further than anybody in China or the rest of the world could possibly have imagined during the days of the Cultural Revolution.
In the resolution passed by the Central Committee, Liu was declared “a traitor, a hidden agent, and a scab.” However, no evidence was offered to substantiate the accusation, and, as was customary in Communist China, the victim was not allowed to defend himself. Furthermore, Liu’s expulsion by the Central Committee rather than the Party Congress was not strictly legal. But at the zenith of his power, Mao could afford to ignore this fine point.
After the announcement of the Central Committee resolution against Liu Shaoqi, the nation’s propaganda machinery was mobilized to denounce him. Day after day, the newspaper was filled with articles listing Liu Shaoqi’s “crimes,” the foremost of which always seemed to be that he “opposed the policies of the Great Leader.” The newspaper also described mass meetings held all over the country for the people to voice their “strong and unanimous support” for the resolution and their deep hatred of Liu. I concluded that the primary objective of the radical-controlled press was to frighten those who might sympathize with Liu Shaoqi and to silence them. Therefore, while the newspaper gave the impression that the whole nation hated Liu Shaoqi, I knew it was not true, because long ago I had learned how to read the Communist press, like so many of my compatriots. Having lived in China since the Communist Party assumed power, I knew that probably most non-Party members were indifferent because they had no special feelings for either Mao Zedong or Liu Shaoqi, while Party members, except for a small group of Maoists, were doubtless embarrassed by this development because it exposed the ugly nature of Party politics.
When the cold wind again swept down from the north and frosty nights left the iron bars on the window glistening with moisture in the mornings, a “Workers’ and Peasants’ Propaganda Team for Mao Zedong Thought” came to the No. 1 Detention House to assist the Military Control Commission in conducting the Cultural Revolution. There was no formal announcement of their arrival on the loudspeaker, as there had been when the detention house was placed under military control. However, when the prisoners were given outdoor exercise, I saw strips of colored paper with slogans of welcome pasted on the walls of the prison compound. “The working class must exercise leadership in everything”—a Marxist slogan used by every organization to herald the arrival of a Workers’ and Peasants’ Propaganda Team—was in prominent display.
A few weeks later, interrogations began again. With hope and expectation I heard the familiar clanging of heavy bolts as prisoners were taken back and forth from their cells. I asked the guard’s permission to write a letter to the Workers’ and Peasants’ Propaganda Team for Mao Zedong Thought, half expecting her to refuse. But to my surprise she handed me a sheet of paper, a pen, and a bottle of ink. I wrote a polite letter requesting investigation of my case, using quotations from Mao’s Little Red Book, now the usual practice to demonstrate a writer’s correct political standpoint. Every article in the newspaper was sprinkled with them. After I had handed the letter to the guard, I waited for the resumption of my long-interrupted interrogation.
One day, I had another hemorrhage that stained my underclothes. I was washing them when a female guard came to the peephole.
She opened the small window and said to me, “What’s happened to you? How did your trousers get stained with blood?”
“It’s just my period.”
“There’s such a lot of blood. Is this normal?” She unlocked the door and came into the cell. The toilet was full of bloody toilet paper I was going to wash down with the water I was using to wash my underclothes.
“Why did you not report your condition?” She stood there staring at me for a while before leaving the cell and locking the door behind her.
Later, she brought the young doctor, who seemed to have got his job back again.
After asking me my age, the doctor said, “You are probably having your menopause. But you might also have a growth. You should be examined by a gynecologist, but there isn’t one at the prison hospital. I’ll give you some injections to stop the bleeding.”
The injections he gave me were effective. But I was left with the nagging fear that I might have a growth and that the growth might be malignant. More than ever, I was anxious to leave the No. 1 Detention House.
It was a bitterly cold January day in 1969, over two years after my last interrogation at the end of 1966, when things finally started moving for me again.
I was seated on the bed in my usual posture with a volume of Mao’s works on my lap when the door of the cell was unlocked and two Labor Reform girls came in. Behind them, the militant female guard who had searched my cell positioned herself in the open doorway, with her hands on her wide hips, watching. Another guard was hovering behind her in the shadows. The Labor Reform girls removed my things from the top of the two stacked beds I was using as a table and placed them on the floor. Then they carried the top bed to the window.
“Pick up your things! Do you think your old servants will come here to pick them up for you?” the militant female guard shouted sarcastically.
While I was putting my things back on the remaining bed, the Labor Reform girls brought in a bedroll and a washbasin. A female prisoner in her early thirties followed them into the cell. She walked in slowly with her head bowed in the manner required of all prisoners, carrying in her hands a few articles of clothing.
The Labor Reform girls withdrew from the cell, and the guard locked the door.
After living in isolation for so long, I was as thirsty for human contact and companionship as a man lost in the desert is thirsty for water. My first reaction to the arrival of another prisoner in my cell was a lightening of spirit and a readiness to show her welcome. But my awareness of the Maoists’ fondness for devious practices warned me not to accept the situation at its face value. I returned to my seat and again bent my head over my book while I tried to assess this rather unexpected development. Since military control had been imposed and the Cultural Revolution had entered a new phase, the work of the detention house seemed to have slackened. There was no large influx of new prisoners. In fact, I detected a thinning down of the prison population when I noticed fewer footsteps in the cell overhead during exercise periods. The arrival of another prisoner in my cell did not appear to be due to overcrowding. I waited for events to enlighten me.
The new arrival was arranging her things on the bed, but from time to time she stole glances in my direction, as if hoping to catch my eye.
“How long have you been here already? Is it very bad? Do they beat people?” Finally she came over to sit beside me while she whispered.
I was surprised at the implication of her remarks. She did not look like a newly arrested person fresh from freedom and a full rice bowl. Her face had that unhealthy pallor tinged with gray peculiar to prisoners who have been locked up for quite some time. Her hair was thin, brownish, and dry as straw from lack of protein in her diet, and her clothing hung on her starved body in the same way as mine did. She looked at me with lackluster eyes that were desperate and frightened.
“We mustn’t talk. It’s not allowed,” I told her. I shot a glance at the peephole and caught sight of a black eye before it hastily disappeared from view. It was strange that the guard did not open the small window to scold her when she moved over to sit beside me on my bed, I thought.
When we were given our evening meal, she ate her portion of sweet potatoes very quickly. Seeing that I took only a few pieces to put into my mug to eat, she grabbed the container and tipped the rest into her own. While she was eating, she muttered, “We mustn’t waste food.”
While I did not object to
her having what was left of my portion of sweet potatoes, the episode proved to me beyond doubt that she had been lying when she implied by her initial question that she had just been arrested. She was much too hungry.
If I had been familiar with prison practice, I would have suspected her role immediately. But it was years later that I learned it was a rule of the Security Bureau never to put two prisoners in one cell. The minimum number for multiple cells was three because the prison authorities believed that it was more difficult for three prisoners to conspire together than for two.
I sat on my bed waiting to see what she was going to do next. But apart from using my soap and toilet paper, she made no further attempt to speak to me.
Next morning, after the news broadcasts, she again came to sit next to me.
“I just hate this terrible Cultural Revolution, don’t you? My home was looted by the detestable Red Guard. Was your home looted too?”
I had heard frequently from the loudspeaker that people were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment just for criticizing the Cultural Revolution and the actions of the Red Guards. I knew such criticism was regarded as an extremely serious offense. It was extraordinary for her to express her feelings so freely, unless, of course, she had been told to do so by the guards as a means of prompting me to agree with her. So I just answered, “You shouldn’t complain. Why don’t you read Chairman Mao’s books rather than just sitting here chatting? If the guard sees us talking to each other, we will be punished.”
I looked around the cell and discovered that though she had her own clothes and bedding, she did not have a set of Mao’s books. Since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s books had become an essential part of every Chinese, as important as his shirt or trousers and just as necessary, because having or not having Mao’s books was taken as a test of political reliability. Besides, I remembered that one of the prison rules I had been told to read aloud when I arrived at the detention house stipulated that every prisoner must study Mao’s books. How could she have been brought to prison without them? The only explanation seemed to be that she had been removed from another cell rather hastily into mine. There hadn’t been time to gather up all her things. That was probably why she had been obliged to use my soap and toilet paper the night before.