Out of Mao's Shadow

by Philip P. Pan

  “A few days ago in town, the ‘May 1’ team executed more than ten people,” Lin Zhao wrote in another letter. “Among them was a traitorous, despotic landlord whom I was responsible for. From collecting materials, to organizing the denunciation, all the way to applying for a public trial, I had worked to decide his fate. After the execution, some people didn’t have the courage to look, but I did. One by one, I looked at each of those enemies who had been shot, especially that local despot. Seeing them die this way, I felt as proud and happy as the people who had directly suffered under them.”

  Despite her dedication to the party, Lin Zhao’s comrades sometimes criticized her for being “petit bourgeois,” because of the books she read, or the poems she wrote, or most often, because of the blunt way she pointed out the faults of others. Though she had condemned her parents, and had not seen them for three years, her privileged background and her father’s service in the Nationalist government made her an easy target. Once, when her parents wrote to her, she was moved to reply in a letter that they should confess their “misconduct and guilt.” But even that was not enough for the party. “I was naive in the way I read my parents’ recent letter, which didn’t sound as backward as in the past and seemed quite progressive,” she wrote to Ni. “Just because of that, I was sure that they were not counterrevolutionaries. But with my comrades’ help and teaching, I realized that to perform duties for the illegitimate government was a crime in itself. I also realized that my political consciousness and class awareness are far below the party’s standards.” Her loyalty to the party was total, and as the government built up Mao’s cult of personality, Lin Zhao began referring to him as Father. “My feelings for my family have lessened a great deal. I have only a red star in my heart now,” she wrote to Ni. “I know I am here, and he is in Beijing or Moscow. Whenever I think of him, I feel so excited.”

  Hu did not find Lin Zhao’s devotion unusual. He knew such faith in Mao was common in the early days of the party’s rule. He himself had waved a little red book of the Chairman’s sayings as a child during the Cultural Revolution. Even the ugly violence of the land reform campaign did not surprise him, because he could understand the need for extreme measures to topple such an entrenched and unjust economic system. But as Hu listened to Ni Jinxiong’s stories and read Lin Zhao’s letters, what perplexed him was how such a fervent believer in Mao and his rule found herself just a decade later in prison, and then facing execution. Hu and Ni visited a retired professor who described for them how he, Lin Zhao, and several others were arrested in 1960 for publishing an underground magazine. But the professor couldn’t answer the most pressing question on Hu’s mind: Why did Lin Zhao turn against the party she loved? Or was it the party that turned against her?

  After the trip, Hu accompanied Ni back to Shanghai, where she was living in retirement, and where Lin Zhao had spent the last years of her life in prison. Ni introduced him to several other people there who knew Lin Zhao, and she took him to see an old building where Lin Zhao’s family had once lived in a second-floor apartment. Hu had been waiting to film the place, because it had figured prominently in a story told by Lin Zhao’s sister that Ni had shared with him. The date was May 1, 1968, and Lin Zhao had been incarcerated in Shanghai for several years. Their father had committed suicide, and the sister was living with their mother in the apartment. That afternoon, they heard a commotion below their window, and a man’s voice asking for relatives of Lin Zhao. Then there was a knock on the door. When they answered it, a police officer was standing outside.

  “Who is Xu Xianmin?” he asked.

  “I am,” Lin’s mother replied.

  “You are Lin Zhao’s mother? Your daughter has been suppressed. Pay the five-fen bullet fee.”

  The older woman was confused. The police officer spoke again, his voice rising: “Hurry and pay the five-fen bullet fee. Your daughter has been executed by gunshot.”

  As her mother stood stunned in the doorway, Lin’s sister rushed into another room, fumbled through a drawer for five fen—the equivalent of less than a penny—then returned and gave it to the officer. It was not until the man left that her mother realized what had just transpired. Suddenly, she collapsed on the floor in grief, sobbing and crying that if she had been an ordinary housewife, her daughter never would have had such a life of suffering. At the time of her execution, Lin Zhao was thirty-six.

  HU’S RESEARCH PROCEEDED quickly at first. Almost every week, Ni would track down a classmate or another acquaintance of Lin Zhao’s and call Hu, and he would get on a train and meet her in Shanghai. She would introduce him and persuade people to speak to him on camera. Everything was going smoothly, and Hu was certain he would be able to finish the documentary within a year. After a few months, though, the calls from Ni became less frequent, and then they stopped altogether. She was running out of leads, yet Hu was far from understanding what had happened to Lin Zhao.

  There was another problem, too. He was out of money. Since losing his job, Hu had depleted his savings to fund the project, to pay for the videotapes, train tickets, and other expenses. His wife was still working at a bank, but they had agreed he would spend only his own money on the documentary. They needed her modest salary to cover their household expenses, and to raise their son. They had also agreed he would never borrow money from her for the film. Maybe the rules could be bent, but Hu knew the Lin Zhao movie had already put a strain on his marriage. He had met his wife when he was still in the military, and she had been patient with him through his various career changes over the years. She stood by him when he quit the boring civil service job that the air force had arranged for him after he was demobilized, and she supported him when he tried painting, and also when he switched to documentaries. But getting fired by Xinhua was different. She had pressured him to find that job, part of a push for him to settle down and take greater responsibility for supporting his family. Now that he had left Xinhua, she worried he was backsliding on his promises to her, that he was putting his family second again. She complained that he felt he owed more to society than to his own wife and son, and that it would be difficult for them to make ends meet on her wages alone.

  So they agreed that if Hu needed money to make a trip for an interview, he would have to earn it first. Usually he did it by hiring himself out as a wedding videographer. It was exhausting and often tedious work, a full day and night on his feet filming a couple getting married, and another day editing the material into a movie. Hu tried to make the most of it, treating each wedding like a documentary subject and taking care to edit each movie differently, often experimenting with different techniques and styles. For all his efforts, though, he could earn only two hundred yuan per wedding, or about twenty-five dollars. His wife sometimes needled him, joking that he was getting cheated by being paid so little for the best wedding films in China.

  As the calls from Ni grew scarce, Hu broadened his search for information. But he couldn’t just go to a library and read about this period in history. Even when he was at Xinhua, he didn’t have access to party archives on the era. The only way for him to find out what happened to Lin Zhao was to locate people who knew her. After graduating from the journalism academy, Lin Zhao was assigned to work at a party newspaper in the city of Changzhou, on the southern bank of the Yangtze between Nanjing and Shanghai. Then she took the national college entrance exam in 1954 and, after receiving the highest score in Jiangsu Province, she was admitted to the prestigious Chinese literature department at Peking University. Whatever caused the falling-out between her and the party, it happened while she was a student there. So Hu turned the focus of his research north and called everyone he knew in Beijing, where he had been stationed with the air force for several years and where he had lived in the artists’ commune. He also went back to Ni and the people he had met through her, and asked them to help him locate Lin Zhao’s classmates in Beijing.

  He took the train on his trips to and from Beijing, sitting for fourteen hours each way in the
cheap hard-seat cars, and he usually stayed with his sister, a photographer who had an apartment on the city’s east side. Slowly, he began locating and interviewing people who knew Lin Zhao, and as he did, he started to form a picture of her as a student at Peking University, commonly known by its abbreviated Chinese name, Beida. Lin Zhao was one of the youngest members of her class, he learned, and one of the most popular. The young men on campus, especially, took an interest in her, not because she was the prettiest or the smartest of their classmates, but because she seemed different from the other women. She was a bit more stylish in the way she dressed, and a bit more daring in her behavior. She had a delicate constitution and often suffered bouts of illness, as she did in childhood, but she liked to drink and dance, and she more than held her own in witty back-and-forth with others. She could be blunt and even cutting in arguments about literature and politics, because she never toned down her comments to conform to some traditional Chinese notion of femininity. She was also an excellent student, one of the faculty’s favorites. As a sophomore, she became editor of a campus poetry journal, and the next year she was named poetry editor of the university literary magazine.

  Early on, Hu tracked down one of several men he heard had courted Lin Zhao at Beida. As a student, Zhang Yuanxun worked alongside her as an editor at the literary magazine. Now he was a scholar of Chinese literature in Qufu, the city in eastern China known as the birthplace of the philosopher Confucius. Zhang had every reason to refuse to speak to Hu. As a professor at the local university, and also a successful businessman—he owned the supermarket on campus—he had much to lose and little to gain by discussing a past that the authorities had sought to erase. He was intimately familiar with the potential consequences of crossing the party. After the Anti-Rightist Campaign, he spent more than two decades in the labor camps. Hu knew this because a well-known newspaper in Guangzhou, Southern Weekend, managed to circumvent the censors in 1998 and publish an interview with Zhang that broached the taboo subject. The article included a brief section about Lin Zhao, and it had spread quickly among her old classmates. It referred to Lin Zhao as “a hero who 40 years ago insisted on the truth without fear of those with power,” and Hu found it heartening. Here was proof he was not alone in his efforts to preserve this piece of history. It was perhaps the first time Lin Zhao’s name had been mentioned in a Chinese newspaper in almost two decades, and Hu knew it couldn’t have been easy for the editors at Southern Weekend to slip it in. He was encouraged by the article for another reason, too. If Zhang had agreed to risk an interview about his experiences with Southern Weekend, perhaps he would also help Hu with his documentary.

  So with the meager profit from another wedding film, Hu bought a train ticket to Qufu. He didn’t make an appointment or call ahead, he just went to see Zhang unannounced, because he didn’t want to give him a chance to say no. In the end, there was no need for concern. Of all the people Hu had interviewed thus far, Zhang was the most immediately forthcoming. He was a feisty old man, with a thick shock of gray hair and large, thick-rimmed glasses. He exuded confidence, and he spoke without fear or hesitation, often gesturing excitedly with his hands. At first Hu thought the reason Zhang was unafraid was that he had survived so much already, and so there was little more the party could do to intimidate him. But as he listened to him speak, Hu realized there was more to it than that. He noticed a sadness about the older man, and he realized that Zhang was speaking to him out of a sense of personal duty, too. Zhang eventually told him he had made a promise to Lin Zhao, and he intended to keep it.

  His story began in the spring of 1957. The Communist Party had consolidated its control of the nation, establishing its dominance over the cities with mass political campaigns as violent as land reform had been in the countryside. Its drive to build a socialist economy was nearly complete, with almost all private businesses nationalized and the farmland that had been distributed to peasants taken back and organized into cooperatives. After decades of war, China was at peace, having fought the United States to a stalemate on the Korean peninsula. But from his perch inside a walled estate on the grounds of the old Forbidden City, Mao was not satisfied. The party’s tight grip on almost all aspects of life had alienated and stifled the nation’s most educated citizens, and he knew it would be difficult to modernize China without the help of its scientists, scholars, and thinkers. Perhaps even more troubling, the party seemed to be drifting away from the masses and had begun to calcify into a privileged elite not unlike the one it had overthrown. Uprisings in Poland and Hungary in 1956 had shown what could happen when Communists lost touch with the people. Mao’s solution, at least the one he put forward in public, was a bold invitation to intellectuals and others outside the party to criticize Communist rule and offer suggestions for improvements. “Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools contend,” he declared. Though his colleagues in the leadership were nervous about opening the party up to attack, Mao seemed confident the public had been won over and predicted its criticisms would be like a “gentle breeze or mild rain” that would help keep the party in line.

  The Hundred Flowers Movement began slowly at first, as local cadres dragged their feet and intellectuals conditioned by the party’s violent record hesitated to stick their necks out. Then in the spring of 1957, Mao embarked on a tour of eastern China to jump-start the movement with assurances he was serious about letting people vent their dissatisfaction with the regime. By mid-April, scholars, writers, artists, businessmen, members of the minor political parties allied with the Communists, and others mustered their courage and began to speak out, often after being persuaded to do so by party officials under pressure to make sure the movement was a success. The “mild rain” that Mao had forecast quickly became a typhoon as long-suppressed frustrations with the party were suddenly unleashed. By mid-May, the storm had spread to Peking University, and Zhang was standing at the center of it.

  For weeks, party authorities on campus had been holding meetings of teachers and professors, encouraging them to join the campaign. But it was not until May 19 that the “blooming and contending” began in full at Beida. At dusk that day, Zhang and another classmate, Shen Zeyi, wrote a poem in large black characters on a sheet of red poster paper and affixed it to a wall outside the main student cafeteria. “It Is Time!” they declared, urging their classmates to answer the party’s call for criticism and advice.

  It is time, young people, to free our throats and sing,

  To write of both our pain and love on paper.

  Do not suffer in private, do not be indignant in private, do not grieve in private,

  Reveal the joys and sorrows inside our hearts, expose them to the daylight,

  For even if criticism and censure fall upon our heads like a sudden and heavy rain,

  Fresh sprouts have never feared the light of the sun.

  “At the time, this was very shocking speech,” Zhang told Hu. “In our China, no one said anything like this. We all said the same thing, that the Communist Party was good. Good, good, good. Yes, yes, yes. Then suddenly this other sound came out, so it got people’s attention.”

  News of the poster spread quickly and a crowd of students soon gathered around, reading it by flashlight. Some copied the poem into their notebooks, and others snapped photos of it. Zhang noticed more lamps burning in the dormitories than usual that evening, as students gathered in small groups, debating the party’s shortcomings late into the night. When he returned to the cafeteria the next morning, his poster was surrounded by dozens of others. Over the following week, thousands more went up on the “Democracy Wall,” and on buildings across campus. One of the first posters criticized the party’s interference in university affairs, and urged party officials to withdraw from campus and allow Beida to be run more democratically. Many of the posters complained that opportunities to study abroad, teaching posts, and the best jobs after graduation were given to party members or other students deemed “ideologically reliable” rather than to those
with the best grades. Several ridiculed the Soviet teaching materials used on campus, including texts in literature classes that ignored Western authors and science books that claimed all major discoveries were made by Russians. Others demanded that the party’s secret personnel files on students be destroyed, and an end to the tedious, mandatory lessons in political ideology. But students didn’t limit their criticism to education issues. Echoing opinions expressed by intellectuals across the country, they also attacked the arrogance of party officials and the privileges they enjoyed, and called for democratic reforms and sweeping guarantees of freedom of speech, press, assembly, and association. There were also calls for a review of the abuses committed by the party and its security forces during earlier political campaigns, and at least one student questioned Mao’s cult of personality. Even Khrushchev’s secret speech exposing Stalin’s crimes was translated from a text in an English-language newspaper and distributed, undercutting the party’s version of Soviet history and, by extension, raising questions about Mao’s fallibility.

  For every poster that found fault with the Communists, though, there were others that voiced support for the party and attacked its critics. As the debate gained intensity, students began delivering speeches in a plaza on campus near their dormitories, often addressing crowds of thousands and engaging in debate with audience members. Standing on a dais erected there, a young woman from nearby People’s University who called herself Lin Xiling gained national attention by condemning socialism in China as a sham because it was undemocratic. Students held secret meetings and established new organizations, and they began making connections with their compatriots at other universities across the country. Zhang joined one particularly outspoken group at Beida, the Hundred Flowers Society, and was elected chief editor of its magazine, Public Square. Shen Zeyi, his friend and poster coauthor, was named deputy editor.