Life and Death in Shanghai

by Cheng Nien

  “Don’t you realize conditions in China have changed?” He was getting impatient and excited. He raised his voice to a high pitch when he said, “The government won’t do a thing if you don’t make arrangements privately with an official.”

  I looked at the open door and gestured to him to lower his voice. Then I said, “I have confidence in the People’s Government. That can’t be wrong, can it?”

  “If you are sincere, you are a fool!”

  He stormed out of my room, walking quickly down the stairs and banging my front door as he went out. He was plainly disappointed and annoyed that my refusal prevented him from getting his cut of the deal. I thought his offer was a straightforward case of corruption, but I could not rule out entirely that it was a trap to get me to take part in “attempting to reverse the verdict of the Cultural Revolution” so I could be found guilty of counterrevolution.

  When Da De came a few days later, I said to him, “It’s ages since I took you to a restaurant.”

  “We mustn’t go to a restaurant now. In any case, all the good dishes have been taken off the menu. They are to be served only to visitors from abroad,” he told me.

  “It’s too bad we only have cabbage and noodles today. Otherwise I would ask you to stay for lunch.” I knew Da De’s aversion to cabbage and noodles, which he had daily when he lived in poverty as a child.

  “Would you like me to cook you a dinner?” he asked.

  “There is hardly anything at the market,” I said.

  “I’ll get the food through my friends. What would you like to eat?”

  “Just get what you like,” I told him and handed him three 10-yuan notes, more than two weeks’ wages for a worker.

  At five o’clock the following evening, Da De came with fish, shrimp, and a chicken, as well as a bottle of Shaoxing wine and two bottles of beer. I had asked A-yi to stay and help him. Between them they produced a really good dinner of several delicious dishes. Da De drank the Shaoxing wine with his meal and started on the beer while relaxing in my only easy chair.

  Lazily he said, “Don’t you think I’m a pretty good cook?”

  “You are an excellent cook. I congratulate you! Now that you have been fed, may I ask you a few questions?” I said.

  “Ah, I must pay for my dinner! Glad to tell you anything, as you know,” Da De drawled.

  “I need to be educated about the present situation. You needn’t tell me anything you shouldn’t. But I’d like to hear your analysis of the situation.”

  “I’ve told you already the struggle has reached a crucial stage. It concerns the future course of the Communist Party and the government. Are we going to preserve the fruit of the Cultural Revolution and proceed from there, or are we to go back to Liu Shaoqi’s policies without Liu Shaoqi?”

  “What are Liu Shaoqi’s policies without Liu Shaoqi?”

  “What Deng Xiaoping is doing.”

  “I thought the propaganda attack was aimed at Premier Zhou.”

  “Deng Xiaoping is acting on behalf of Premier Zhou, who is ill, as you know. The point of contention is who is to succeed Premier Zhou. Is it going to be Deng Xiaoping, or is it going to be Zhang Chunqiao? The premier himself and the old leaders like Chen Yun and Ye Jianying want Deng Xiaoping to succeed Premier Zhou. The present campaign is to impress upon the nation that if Deng Xiaoping becomes premier, he will reverse the verdict of the Cultural Revolution,” Da De told me.

  “What about Vice-Chairman Wang Hongwen? Is he going to succeed Chairman Mao?”

  “Oh, no! He is just keeping the seat warm for Comrade Jiang Qing. She can’t very well be appointed vice-chairman while Chairman Mao is still living. But she will become his successor when he dies. What Comrade Jiang Qing wants is to be the chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and Zhang Chunqiao to be the prime minister.”

  I thought, Good God, don’t let that happen! But to Da De I could not express such an opinion. Instead I told him about the offer made to me by Mrs. Zhu’s son.

  “Have you agreed to it?” Da De asked me, sitting up.

  “No. It’s illegal to bribe officials,” I told him.

  “If you have agreed to it, you won’t see your money again and you won’t get an exit visa for Hong Kong either. A lot of people have fallen into their trap already,” Da De said and took another sip of his beer.

  “What about the victims? Don’t they complain?”

  “It’s a case of ‘a mute swallowing bitter herbs.’ He can’t speak out. They are already guilty of bribery.” Da De laughed heartily and drained his glass. He took the second bottle and opened it.

  “It’s a shame such things are going on,” I said.

  “Don’t be a puritan! As long as money can buy the things people need, they will always want to get money. Of course, leaders in high positions are exempt from punishment. Xin bu shang da fu—punishment does not reach senior officials. That’s China’s tradition. You know that!”

  “Shouldn’t a socialist government have changed that?”

  “Who would do the changing? The senior officials themselves? What a hope!”

  Silently Da De drank the second bottle of beer. When he had finished it, he stood up to bid me good night and lumbered to the door.

  However, he stopped suddenly and said casually, “I suppose you know Premier Zhou is dying of cancer in the Beijing Hospital?”

  “Is it really true?”

  “Yes, it’s true. Since he will be removed from the struggle by dying, a lot of cases … such as the one about a conspiracy of foreign firms and government departments in Shanghai, you know what I mean? Somebody mentioned it to you, perhaps? And others, of course, there are others … In any case”—he waved his arm in the air—“all will be shelved!”

  “Why only shelved and not clarified?” I asked him anxiously.

  Da De seemed to sober up and pull himself together when he said, quite clearly, “Once an accusation is made by a senior source, it can never be clarified, only shelved. You don’t expect the senior source to admit he made a false accusation or a mistake, do you?” He did not wait for my answer but sauntered out the door and down the stairs.

  I stood there staring at his retreating figure, momentarily stunned by his message. Perhaps I should have felt relief that the so-called conspiracy of foreign firms and government departments in Shanghai in which I had become so unjustly involved was to be shelved. It could mean the end of my harassment and the beginning of normal existence. But all I was conscious of was a feeling of emptiness. I thought of the wasted years of my life and the senseless murder of my daughter. At the same time, my determination to leave China for good one day was strengthened by what Da De had said. I knew that when a case was “shelved” and not clarified, it could always be revived again when the political climate demanded it. Just because a senior Maoist Party official had made a false accusation and refused to admit he was mistaken, an innocent person like myself would have to live the rest of her life under a shadow.

  The year 1975 drew to a close amidst rumors impossible to verify. I heard from one person that Mao Zedong had visited Zhou Enlai in the hospital. My informant said that when Zhou suggested that Deng Xiaoping be appointed prime minister to succeed him, Mao pretended not to hear Zhou’s weakened voice. Another person told me that both Mao and Zhou were dying. Jiang Qing and her associates hoped Zhou would die first, so they withheld medical treatment to hasten his death. Yet another person said that Jiang Qing and Mao’s nephew Mao Yuanxin had completely isolated the dying Mao Zedong from all Politburo members wishing to see him. All messages were transmitted through them, the story went, including directives to the Politburo that might or might not have originated from Mao.

  In January 1976, Zhou Enlai died after serving as prime minister of the People’s Republic of China since its inception in 1949. An enigmatic man, Zhou was a Communist leader with a difference. To the Chinese people, he resembled those few traditional prime ministers immortalized in history and legend becaus
e of their high moral caliber. Even Zhou’s consistent efforts to mitigate the ill effects of, rather than to oppose openly, Mao’s disastrous political campaigns, such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, were considered “wise” by the long-suffering Chinese people. They were only too glad that Zhou Enlai was there to pick up the pieces afterwards. Because Zhou appeared reasonable rather than intransigent, subtle rather than bombastic, many people who had met him thought him less than a firm believer in Marxism. In actual fact, a close examination of his life and views, as reflected in the decisions he made and in his published speeches and writings, reveals that Zhou Enlai never wavered from the commitment he made to realize Communism in China when he joined the Party as a young man. He differed from the radicals only in his belief that foreign capital and intellectuals trained abroad could be utilized to achieve his ultimate aim.

  In China, news traveled faster by word of mouth than through the newspapers, where the simplest fact could not be published without the approval of several bureaucrats. It was the sudden return of a heart specialist urgently called to the bedside of the prime minister, the gathering of local officials at an unusual hour, the cancellation of a major event, and a telephone conversation overheard by a subordinate that told the Chinese people that Zhou Enlai had died. When the Shanghai Liberation Daily finally came out with the news, in the afternoon, the people read it to learn not what had happened but how the newspaper presented the news, which they knew reflected Beijing’s attitude toward the event.

  A-yi came breathlessly up the stairs and into my room with a basket of vegetables still in her hand. “Prime Minister Zhou has died!” she exclaimed.

  She handed me a piece of black cotton cloth and continued, “I got this for our armbands of mourning. It’s already nearly sold out at the cloth shop at the marketplace. There is a rumor that the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee will not supply extra black cloth for armbands because they do not want the people to wear mourning for Premier Zhou. As soon as the people heard this, they abandoned shopping and mobbed the cloth shops.”

  At the demand of Party members living in our district, our Residents’ Committee organized a memorial meeting for Prime Minister Zhou. The room was decorated with wreaths made by the residents. The flowers on the wreaths were made of colored handkerchiefs because crepe paper had been sold out in the shops and the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee refused to sanction additional supplies. Lu Ying’s son made a frame of dried rice straw for the wreath presented by our small unit, and Mrs. Zhu and I provided the green leaves from the evergreen ilex hedge in our garden.

  The memorial meeting was well attended. A bedridden woman was carried in on a chair, and several old men were assisted by their grandchildren. The people came spontaneously, and I thought their emotion was genuine. Many were weeping openly, and the words of tribute spoken with trembling voices were sincere. It was a simple but moving ceremony. For the first time, I had attended a meeting where everybody was himself and not acting the part that was expected of him.

  Meiping’s friend Kong called on me in the evening to tell me how the news of Premier Zhou’s death had been received at the film studio. He said that someone close to the radicals had just returned from Beijing in the morning. This man said that upon being informed of Zhou Enlai’s death, Jiang Qing had exclaimed, “Hitherto I was locked in a cage. Now I can come out to speak!”

  “I thought she had been speaking all the time ever since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. What do you make of such a remark by Jiang Qing?” I asked him.

  “God knows what more she wants to say, unless it’s to declare her ambition to become the chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party,” Kong said. “The country is seething with rumors already, ranging from a plot to assassinate Deng Xiaoping to civil war.”

  “I suppose a successor to Prime Minister Zhou will be announced soon?” I asked him.

  “The delay in making an announcement can only mean the struggle is still going on. There is a move in Shanghai to send a delegation to the Politburo to demand the appointment of Zhang Chunqiao. I heard that those close to Zhang Chunqiao are already preparing slogans and banners to be brought out the moment his appointment is announced. They seem to expect to win.”

  “What about Deng Xiaoping? At the moment he is the first vice-premier,” I said.

  “The old leaders are all for him, of course,” Kong said.

  “Isn’t the army an important factor in the struggle?”

  “Yes. Ye Jianying is the head of the Military Commission. But I hear a few of the area commanders are leaning towards Jiang Qing and her group.”

  On subsequent days, apart from reporting the Central Committee’s memorial meeting for Zhou Enlai, the Shanghai Liberation Daily, controlled by the radicals, cut to the minimum the space devoted to his death. It wasn’t until a documentary film of his funeral reached the city’s cinemas that the Shanghai people saw the long lines in the capital waiting to pay their last respects outside the Beijing hospital where Zhou’s body lay in state. And one million people braved the bitter January wind of North China to stand for hours along the route on which his body was taken to be cremated. Close-up shots showed men and women of all ages, some with toddlers in arms, weeping, watching intently, and murmuring words the camera did not record.

  The people of Beijing defied more than the weather when they stood in the cold waiting for Zhou Enlai’s cortege to pass; they were sending a message of defiance to the radicals, who, they thought, had treated Zhou shabbily. The film ended with a shot of a plane flying over the country. From that the people of Shanghai learned that Zhou Enlai had willed that his ashes be scattered over China’s rivers and mountains. Zhou’s wish not to be buried in an elaborate tomb at the Eight Precious Hill Cemetery reserved for top Party leaders gave rise to a host of rumors about a radical plot to desecrate his grave, Zhou’s aversion to sharing the same ground with Kang Sheng and Xie Fuzhi, both collaborators of Jiang Qing, etc.

  After Zhou Enlai’s death, Jiang Qing became even more active and was constantly in the public eye. While denunciations of the attempt by the “capitalist-roaders” to “reverse the verdict of the Cultural Revolution” continued, more and more articles appeared in the radical-controlled press praising China’s few female rulers in history. Attention was concentrated on Empress Lu (241–180 B.C.) of the Han dynasty and Empress Wu (A.D. 624–705) of the Tang dynasty, both of whom succeeded their husbands upon the men’s death. The reigns of these women were described as prosperous and propitious to prove the virtue of female rulers. The Chinese people watched with dismay Jiang Qing’s maneuvers to prepare public opinion for her acceptance as Mao’s successor. They showed their contempt by circulating stories about her promiscuity and self-indulgence that defied the most fertile imagination. Once at our Residents’ Committee meeting, a police official addressed us and told us that we must not pass on rumors about our leaders and must report to the police if we heard any. Although the man did not mention any leader’s name, everybody knew that some of the rumors had gotten back to Jiang Qing and that she was trying to stop their circulation.

  The festival of Qing Ming (“Bright and Clear”) in March of the lunar calendar generally took place in early April. The Chinese people traditionally visited the graves of their ancestors to pay their respects. After the Communist Party took over the country in 1949, Qing Ming was designated as Martyrs’ Day, when schoolchildren were organized to present wreaths at the tombs of the revolutionary martyrs. A couple of days before Qing Ming in 1976, people came to the Monument of Revolutionary Heroes in the center of Tiananmen Square in Beijing to place wreaths and floral tributes to Zhou Enlai. Children tied single white paper flowers on the branches of the evergreen hedge around the monument, with endearing messages addressed to “Grandpa Zhou.”

  Zhou Enlai was childless, in China considered the greatest misfortune. It was said and generally believed by the Chinese people that when advised to take a younger wife
so that he could have an heir, Zhou had refused and said, “All Chinese children are my children.” For this the Chinese people admired him as a man of impeccable moral principle, the more outstanding because many other Communist Party leaders were discarding their older wives in favor of young women in the cities they had conquered.

  The wreaths accumulated. They came by the thousands from factories and people’s communes in and around Beijing, carried by workers and peasants in mourning in a solemn procession and laid down in a ceremony, with the men and women taking an oath of loyalty to the deceased premier. Soon the steps and the area surrounding the monument were covered. Those who brought the wreaths lingered, and others made special trips to watch the scene. The men and women read, sometimes with homemade loudspeakers, the poems and pledges they had written for Zhou Enlai while others listened and copied down the poems and messages attached to the wreaths and flowers. So many children had tied single white flowers on the hedge that it was entirely covered. It was estimated that by the day of Qing Ming several hundred thousand people had visited the monument and taken part in one form of ceremony or another, swearing allegiance to Zhou Enlai and what he stood for. The young people pledged emotionally to accomplish Zhou Enlai’s unfinished task of rebuilding China through his Four Modernizations Program. By now, the wreaths had overflowed to cover the stands around the square. Increasingly, the poems for Zhou went beyond simple epitaphs of praise. Many of them compared the radical leaders unfavorably with the deceased prime minister and expressed concern about China’s destiny falling into their hands.