by Cheng Nien
“Do you know Huang Zuolin, the comprador?” the Military Control representative from the People’s Art Theater, seated beside my interrogator, asked me as soon as I sat down in the prisoner’s chair after reading one of Mao’s quotations.
I gathered from his question that since they had failed to find anything wrong in Huang’s personal behavior, they were digging into his background.
A comprador was a man who acted as liaison between foreign firms and Chinese officials. The system had been invented by the Qing dynasty at the end of the last century in order to control foreign traders. With the advent of modern business methods, the system died out gradually in the thirties. But big firms like Shell did not fire their compradors. They simply stopped appointing new ones after the old ones died. The Chinese Communist regime regarded former compradors as the most reactionary members of the bourgeois class. After the Communist army took over Shanghai, those classified as members of the “comprador-bourgeois class” all suffered imprisonment or heavy fines. Huang’s father had been Shell’s comprador in Tian-jin; he died during the Sino-Japanese war.
“I know Huang Zuolin, the well-known director of films and plays,” I answered.
“He was also a comprador of Shell!” said the uniformed man from the People’s Art Theater. “We know all about you. You are a diehard reactionary and a spy of the imperialists. We are not surprised you try to evade my questions.
“Huang Zuolin is in serious trouble. He is a class enemy who wormed his way into the Party. If you try to shield him, the consequences will be extremely serious. Your own position will become much worse. If you are clearheaded and cooperative, it will count in your favor as a contribution to the Cultural Revolution,” my interrogator said.
“I’ll speak the truth,” I said.
“If you speak the truth, you will say he was a comprador of Shell,” the military man said.
“It was his father who was a comprador of Shell. Huang Zuolin has an unfortunate family origin,” I said.
“He took over the job when his father died,” the man insisted.
“The position of comprador was abolished long ago. When his father died, it had ceased to exist,” I told him.
“Then what is this?” The man threw a document on the table. The interrogator handed it to me. It was the deed for a piece of land in Tianjin bearing Huang Zuolin’s seal as the owner. I saw the serial number on it and recognized it as a document taken from a Shell office file.
“That’s an old document,” I said.
“Old or new, it shows that Huang Zuolin was a Shell comprador, a fact he hid from the Party.”
“I can tell you the whole story, if you will listen,” I said.
“Go ahead,” said my interrogator.
“I don’t know the date, but long before the war the Kuomintang government proclaimed a new regulation forbidding foreign ownership of land in China. All the foreign firms owning land transferred their deeds to their compradors’ names. Shell did the same. When Huang’s father passed away, Huang inherited the family’s property holdings. This took place during the war; Tianjin was under Japanese occupation, and Huang Zuolin was not there. Shell was not there either. It had ceased operation after Pearl Harbor. I suppose whoever was Huang Zuolin’s agent just put his seal on the deeds of all his father’s properties, including this piece of land belonging to Shell. That doesn’t mean Huang Zuolin was ever employed by Shell as its comprador.”
“He was paid by Shell for his services,” said the military man from the People’s Art Theater.
“I know nothing about that,” I answered.
“Your husband actually made the payment as Shell’s general manager.”
“He did not mention the matter to me.” I decided it was best to deny knowledge of the transaction so that they would think I could not help them to incriminate Huang and would leave me alone. Actually my husband did tell me that Shell wanted to give Huang a sum of money to show the company’s appreciation of what his father had done for Shell, even though the land was confiscated by the Communist government during the Land Reform Movement of 1950. Such a generous gesture did not fit the image of foreign exploitation projected by Communist Party propaganda.
“You are lying. Your servants said you and your husband talked about everything together.”
“He did not mention this matter to me. Perhaps he did not consider it important,” I said. “Certainly we did not discuss everything that took place in his office.”
“We don’t believe you.”
“That’s as you please. I know nothing about any payment. But that doesn’t mean you can’t find out. You can look at our office files, or you can ask our accounts department.”
“We have already done that. Do you think we would overlook anything like that? I have all the proof that he was paid by your husband.”
“In that case, the fact that I do not know anything makes no difference.”
“We want you to admit that Huang Zuolin was a comprador of Shell. He was paid for his services. You are the most senior of Shell’s Chinese staff. You can confirm what we know already. Huang Zuolin belongs to the comprador-bourgeois class. The comprador-bourgeois class is the most reactionary of all. He will be expelled from the Party. You and your husband were friends of his. You know him well. You could provide valuable information against him,” the military man said.
To be expelled from the Communist Party was the worst possible fate for a Party member. He could not again become one of the masses. His position in society would be little better than that of a counterrevolutionary; he would be discriminated against at all times. And his family, including his children and their children, would have to suffer with him. For me, it was tragic and unjust that such a future awaited Huang Zuolin, who had devoted his life and talents to the Communist cause. The whole situation made me angry. I said firmly, “As far as I know, Huang Zuolin was a loyal member of the Communist Party. He was never a comprador. When his father died, Shell no longer had any comprador in Tianjin.”
“You are uncooperative,” said my interrogator. “Don’t you want to earn a merit point for yourself?”
“I have to adhere to the truth,” I said.
They became angry. The representative of the Military Control Commission of the People’s Art Theater went red in the face and stared at me with disappointment and disgust. My interrogator said, “We want you to write an account of Huang Zuolin, the comprador. Put down everything you know about him. If you try to cover up for him, the consequences will be extremely serious for you. If you provide information that is useful, you will make a contribution to the Cultural Revolution. And you’ll get a merit point. Try to remember everything he said to you and your husband, and put down what you know of his life and his views. He’s a class enemy. You should expose him and denounce him. This is your opportunity to declare your standpoint. If you expose him effectively, we will think you have made an improvement in your own reform.”
“If you want to earn a merit point for yourself, denounce Huang Zuolin,” added the military man from the People’s Art Theater.
What they said was an insult to my integrity. But it was the standard pronouncement made to encourage lying to suit the political campaign of the moment. How many people succumbed to such pressure I did not know. In the present instance, it only strengthened my resolve to speak the truth.
When I had written down everything I knew and remembered of Huang Zuolin’s life and views, including his firm belief that the Chinese Communist Party represented progress and enlightenment for China, they threw the account back to me and threatened me with severe punishment because I had failed to state that Huang was a Shell comprador in Tianjin. I was threatened and warned in stormy sessions, and had to write the account over and over again. But I stuck to my story and refused to accede to their demands. After a few weeks the matter was dropped, and the man from the People’s Art Theater disappeared just as suddenly as he had appeared.
Later, after my r
elease from the detention house, I learned that the Revolutionaries never succeeded in classifying Huang Zuolin as a member of the comprador-bourgeois class and expelling him from the Party. Huang was merely denounced as a member of the Liu Shaoqi camp. He and his wife spent the years of Cultural Revolution being struggled against at numerous meetings and working at various tasks of heavy physical labor, including carrying loads of earth and bricks at a building site in severe winter weather and scorching summer heat. Huang’s health was damaged, and his beautiful wife became an old woman.
After Mao’s death and the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976, the political situation changed in China. Both Huang Zuolin and his wife were rehabilitated.
One of the most ugly aspects of life in Communist China during the Mao Zedong era was the Party’s demand that people inform on each other routinely and denounce each other during political campaigns. This practice had a profoundly destructive effect on human relationships. Husbands and wives became guarded with each other, and parents were alienated from their children. The practice inhibited all forms of human contact, so that people no longer wanted to have friends. It also encouraged secretiveness and hypocrisy. To protect himself, a man had to keep his thoughts to himself. When he was compelled to speak, often lying was the only way to protect himself and his family.
While I was being pressured and urged to provide incriminating material against others, those others were at the same time being pressured and urged to provide incriminating material against me. I could usually guess what my relatives and friends had said or written about me from the questions the interrogator asked. It was not difficult to discern whether a certain person was still cool-headed and holding his own or had become panicky and confused. Towards the end of 1969, I went through a rather difficult time because of a “confession” made by my brother in Beijing. It illustrated once again how a perfectly intelligent and well-educated person could break down under pressure so that he no longer knew the demarcation line between fact and fiction.
Amid fanfare and celebration, Mao had made another new pronouncement. It appeared in red print in the newspaper and was elaborated in a lead article by the joint editors of the People’s Daily and the Red Flag magazine, both Party organs, and the editors of the Liberation Army Daily. Mao had declared, “The Proletarian Cultural Revolution is a great political revolution of the proletarian class against the capitalist class. It is the continuation of the class struggle by the proletarian class against the capitalist class. It is also the continuation of the class struggle by the Communist Party against the Kuomintang.”
After the publication of this piece of wisdom, a campaign was initiated to “root out the dregs of the Kuomintang.” Daily, the newspaper reported the exposure of undercover Kuomintang agents, hidden Kuomintang military personnel, and sympathizers of the Kuomintang regime in Taiwan. So many enemies were unearthed in such a short time that it seemed that China was suddenly full of men and women secretly longing for the Kuomintang. The years of Communist propaganda against the former government seemed a wasted effort. A tense atmosphere of extreme nervousness had been deliberately created. It provided the excuse for another round of witch-hunts and legitimized the escalation of class struggle to create fear in the general public. The only way for a man to prove his innocence was to display exaggerated support for Mao and the Party, to shout slogans louder, to work harder in a spirit of self-sacrifice for no material reward, and to be extra cruel to the class enemies. The newspaper urged members of the proletariat to be vigilant and to watch for unusual activities and strange behavior among their neighbors and fellow workers. They were also to increase surveillance of class enemies not incarcerated in prisons.
The next call for interrogation came as no surprise to me. My persecutor could not afford to leave me out of another round of class struggle if he wished to appear to be following Mao’s directives closely. After all, I was the widow of a Kuomintang government official.
The interrogator told me to read the latest directive of Mao as soon as I entered the interrogation room and had bowed to his portrait. When I had finished reading it, he told me to read it again. Then the interrogator said, “We are to expose the dregs of the Kuomintang. You are one of them.”
Two other men were in the room. Suddenly the younger of them shouted, “Confess!”
“To what?” I asked.
“Don’t pretend to be calm and innocent. Confess your relationship with the Kuomintang!”
“I have no relationship with the Kuomintang.”
“You are a loyal supporter of the Kuomintang.”
“I doubt very much the Kuomintang would agree with you,” I said. While I was speaking I observed the two men. From their clothes and their short hairstyle, I thought they were from North China. All Chinese are supposed to speak Mandarin, the national spoken language based on the Beijing dialect. However, natives of Beijing like the young man who had just spoken often retained certain recognizable intonations of their original dialect. I wondered why two men from Beijing were taking part in my interrogation. In the earlier stage of this series of interrogations, when I was going through the members of my family, I had already written about my brother and sister-in-law in Beijing, and provided the interrogator with an account of our contacts throughout the years.
“You are a loyal supporter of the Kuomintang. It’s useless to deny it.”
“Please prove your accusations,” I said.
“Of course we have proof, otherwise we wouldn’t have come such a long way to question you,” said the older of the two men, who seemed to be senior in position. He looked and spoke like an industrial worker with little education, a true member of the proletariat. The younger man looked like a student.
“Have you ever had your photograph taken in front of a Kuomintang flag?” asked my interrogator.
“Maybe I have. I can’t remember for sure,” I answered. I thought he was asking me about the days during the Second World War, long before the Communist Party came to power in China, when my late husband was a diplomat at the Chinese embassy in Canberra, Australia.
“How could you not remember! You can’t get out of your difficulty by simply claiming loss of memory,” said the young man from Beijing.
“It was so long ago,” I said. “If there was a photograph, the Red Guards who came to my house should have it. They took all my photographs.”
“You must have destroyed the photograph. It’s not there,” the older man said.
“Why should I destroy a photograph like that? Everybody knows my late husband was a diplomatic officer of the Kuomintang government when we lived in Australia.”
“What are you talking about? Who is asking you about those days?” the interrogator said with impatience.
“Aren’t you asking me about the time when we lived in Australia?”
“Nonsense. We are asking you about the present time, after Liberation. Have you had a photograph taken in front of a Kuomintang flag since Liberation? Answer truthfully. Confess everything!” the young man from Beijing leaned forward and said to me.
I was astonished that they thought it possible for anyone in China to have had a photograph taken in front of a Kuomintang flag since the Communist Party came to power. I asked, “How could there be any Kuomintang flag in China after Liberation? Where is it?”
“Never mind about the flag. Just confess why you did it. Was it to show your loyalty to the Kuomintang?” the interrogator asked.
“I never had a photograph taken in front of a Kuomintang flag after Liberation,” I stated categorically, deciding to end this absurd conversation once and for all.
“Now, don’t be so sure. You will regret it. You’ll miss the opportunity to earn lenient treatment,” the older man from Beijing said.
“You had better assume a serious attitude. Someone else has already confessed, so we know what we are talking about. We are determined to expose all Kuomintang supporters. There is no escape for you,” said the younger man from Beijing.
“I don’t know what you are talking about. I’m not a supporter of the Kuomintang. If I were, wouldn’t I be in Taiwan now?” I asked them.
My interrogator whispered something to the two men and then said to me, “You had better return to your cell now and think about the whole matter. You have been here long enough to know the policy of the People’s Government. You should know it’s quite useless to deny something that can be proved.”
I was taken back to my cell, where I continued to puzzle over this extraordinary affair. The men seemed so serious. They must have something on which to base their accusation. Was it someone’s malicious plot to incriminate me? I had already been accused of being a spy for the imperialists. Why this sudden diversion?
Three days later, I was called again. I was again pressed to confess; I gave the same answers as I had the first time. Then I was sent back to the cell and told to think it all over again. For three weeks, I went back and forth to the interrogation room every two or three days. The atmosphere became very tense in the interrogation room, but I was quite unable to guess what they had in mind.
During this time, to add pressure, the guards refused to give me the sulfa drug so necessary for keeping the inflammation of my gums in check. The condition rapidly deteriorated. Not only the gums but the lining of my mouth were so inflamed that I could no longer eat the food given to me. I requested liquid rice so that without chewing I could still get some nourishment into my body to keep alive. My gums were now so painful that I was completely preoccupied with them. When I was in the interrogation room, I had difficulty concentrating on the proceedings. I could understand how some prisoners gave in under such conditions simply because physical suffering had weakened their willpower. I warned myself to keep a clear head in spite of the pain.