Out of Mao's Shadow

by Philip P. Pan

  Chongqing wasn’t the only city in China to experience such armed warfare in the summer of 1967. Similar spasms of violence occurred in almost every major city in the country. One news bulletin in Beijing reported twenty to thirty armed clashes in the provinces every day in August. But the fighting in Chongqing was perhaps more intense and deadly than anywhere else, because of its concentration of munitions factories. Some of Mao’s lieutenants traveled to Chongqing and urged an end to the violence, but the message from the top was muddled. Mao made clear he was not worried about Red Guards obtaining weapons, and called on the military to “arm the left,” a phrase that became a slogan across the country. “Why can’t we arm the workers and students?” he asked. “I say we should arm them!” Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, endorsed another slogan: Attack with reason, defend with force. “You cannot be so innocent and naive,” she told a group of Red Guards in Henan Province. “When a pinch of people provoke violence, when they attack you with weapons, the revolutionary masses can take up weapons and defend themselves.” The editor of a Red Guard newspaper in Chongqing read her remarks and distributed them to his colleagues. “I only said one thing: ‘Since even the center doesn’t want to control the situation, what are we waiting for?’” he recalled. “Everybody said, then let’s fight!”

  As the clashes got worse, Xi and his family split up and left their apartment for safer quarters. His three youngest siblings were sent to stay with relatives, while his parents took him and his brother Qingchuan to the distribution center of the bookstore where they worked. They crowded into an office on the ground floor with twenty to thirty others, sleeping on the wood floors and keeping the lights off at night so as not to draw fire. But during the third week of August, a battle erupted that put them in the middle of the crossfire. August 15 forces on a hill to one side of their building were trying to seize control of a mountain held by the Rebels on the other side. Xi watched from the building as tanks and antiaircraft guns began firing at the Rebel position. He could see the shells landing and exploding on the mountain, and the Rebels taking cover. The August 15 fighters climbed slowly up the mountain, occasionally exchanging gunfire with the Rebels. From the distance, they looked like insects making their way up an anthill. Xi watched as they seized the first of the Rebel trenches, but then something happened and they were suddenly scurrying down the mountain, retreating much faster than they had advanced. Rebel reinforcements had arrived with machine guns.

  The August 15 forces pulled back to prepare for a Rebel counterattack, and Xi’s father, who had done reconnaissance in the battle, went with them. The next morning, Xi’s mother decided it would be safer to take her boys to join her other children at a cousin’s home. It was Qingchuan’s thirteenth birthday, so she prepared a special breakfast of noodles with pickled cabbage for him. Then, they each packed a bag of clothes—Qingchuan packed his pet chicken, too—and headed out on foot, wearing white t-shirts to signal they were unarmed civilians and taking back roads through hilly fields. It was a hot summer morning, and after two hours they stopped at a farmhouse for rest and water. Sitting in the shade, Xi’s brother started crying. He was tired of walking, and he didn’t want to go any farther. But their mother was anxious to keep moving. She told him they were almost there. Just a few more miles, she said, and they would be reunited with their younger siblings. She stood to leave and Xi got up, too. Qingchuan reluctantly followed, wiping away tears.

  They took a road between sorghum and vegetable fields, Xi in front, his mother behind him, and Qingchuan trailing behind, still half crying. Just minutes after they left the farmhouse, a shot rang out. Xi thought he felt the bullet fly over his head, and he hit the ground. Then there was another shot, and he heard his mother cry out. He knew it was bad even before he turned and saw her on the ground, bleeding from her chest. He scrambled toward her.

  “I didn’t know what to do. I just tore off my shirt and applied it to the wound, but I couldn’t stop the bleeding…. I was holding her head in my arms, and she was looking at me. I cried out to her. Her eyes were fixed on me, and at that moment, I knew she was clearheaded. Her eyes were fixed firmly on me, and then they rolled backward. I was frantic, and just kept shouting. I shouted out, ‘Don’t shoot! We’re ordinary people!’ And then they started firing at us with a machine gun.”

  Xi got down again. He spotted his brother cowering amid the vegetables. They were both yelling now. “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” The gunfire was coming from a ridge to their left, and then they heard shots from another direction as well. As the bullets kicked up dirt from the ground, the boys tugged at their mother’s body, trying to pull her to safety. Then they heard a man’s voice, and saw a peasant beckoning to them from the house where they had just been resting. “Hurry!” he shouted. “Over here!” The boys ran toward him, leaving their dead mother behind, and taking cover inside.

  After a while, the shooting stopped. Xi, just fifteen years old, sat dazed, his heart pounding. “The sky seemed to change,” he recalled. “It was blue with a few clouds, but it looked pitch-dark to me.” Eventually, he mustered the will to crawl back to his mother’s body, retrieve her bag, and then take his brother to look for their father. They walked along a highway, dirty and shirtless, passing a checkpoint into August 15 territory and a column of trucks carrying armed men in helmets. Before dusk, they reached their cousin’s home, but it was shot up with bullet holes and abandoned. They kept walking, wandering the streets looking for people they recognized. They stopped at a noodle shop, but lost their appetite after a few bites. Then they spotted one of their father’s coworkers in a barbershop, and when they rushed over, they found their father inside, too. For the first time since his mother’s death, Xi began to cry.

  The gunfire had come from the direction of an August 15 position, and it didn’t take long for Xi’s father to find out who killed his wife. Several people witnessed the incident, and told him the name of the Red Guard responsible, a steelworker in his thirties who had been discharged from the military. The other people on duty had told him not to open fire, because it was obvious the targets were civilians. But the man said that he was going to be leaving the post soon and he wanted to finish his ammunition. No one was firing on him. He just saw some people on the road and wanted to see if he could hit them. Xi’s father was furious, and he and his coworkers brandished guns and demanded the man be turned over to them. But it was too late. He had already fled.

  That night, the boys accompanied their father and a detachment of fifty armed men to retrieve their mother’s body. The next day, it was taken to Chongqing University, where a makeshift morgue had been set up outside the campus stadium. There were dozens of other corpses there, lined up neatly on the ground, and Rebel prisoners captured by the August 15 faction were preparing them for burial. Xi and his brother looked on as the haggard prisoners washed their mother’s body, then wrapped it in white silk, covered it with a military uniform, and placed it in a casket. Students and teachers of the university were buried on campus, but most of the other August 15 members were taken to a cemetery located in nearby Shapingba Park. The boys and their father rode there in an armed convoy, then waited as the prisoners dug a grave and lowered the casket. As they covered it with soil and the Red Guards fired their guns into the air in a military-style salute, Xi noticed the cemetery was full of fresh graves, hundreds of them.

  XI TOOK A drag on his cigarette and showed me the spot near the edge of the cemetery where his mother was first buried. A year after her death, he said, his father arranged to move her grave to the center of the cemetery, because he thought it might be better protected there. Xi and his brother built the tomb over the course of a month with the help of laborers from the bookstore where his parents worked. The pillar they erected originally described her as a “martyr” of the bookstore’s “combat team” under the command of the “Chongqing Municipal Revolutionary Rebel Headquarters.” Three decades later, the family decided she deserved a warmer epitaph, and covered the origi
nal inscription with the marble panel dedicated “with filial piety.”

  Xi and his siblings gather at the cemetery twice a year, on the tomb-sweeping holiday in April and the anniversary of their mother’s death in August. He realizes they are fortunate to still have somewhere to go to remember her. He knows other cemeteries from the Cultural Revolution have been bulldozed and covered with highways and buildings and, in the case of the one at Chongqing University, with a fountain in front of a campus hotel. In the mid-1980s, the government built a stone wall around the Shapinga Park cemetery in an attempt to keep the public out. But that didn’t stop Xi from visiting his mother’s grave. He would just wait until no one was looking, and climb over.

  A few years later, Xi learned the government was planning to raze the cemetery to build a theme park featuring replicas of world landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty. Officials signed a deal with investors from Hong Kong, and construction started in other parts of Shapingba Park. The cemetery, Xi heard, was going to be demolished to make way for cable cars. He was furious, but there were few channels through which to protest. He was just a worker at a state electronics factory, and a letter of complaint might have caused trouble and perhaps cost him his job. So he began making anonymous threats, calling park officials from public phones and telling them that if they touched the graveyard, he would exact revenge.

  “I never gave my name. I just told them that I was a relative of one of the dead. I said the Communist Party would be going too far if it left these people without a proper graveyard. I said whoever did this, he and his family would be wiped from the earth. They told me it was wrong for me to talk like that, and then I said I’ll kill your entire family. I said you’re out in the open and I’m hidden…. I used different voices, and made a lot of phone calls like that.”

  He grew more upset when park officials began charging an admission fee for people to visit the cemetery. It was only five yuan, about sixty cents, but Xi and his siblings refused to pay. They confronted security guards and demanded to speak to park officials. “We just told them one thing. If you destroy our ancestor’s tomb, we’ll take your heads in return,” Xi recalled. Other families objected, too, joining Xi and his siblings in protests outside the cemetery gate. Once, they nearly came to blows with the park employees. But the park eventually backed down, and the theme park project was abandoned. Xi never learned if the decision had anything to do with his anonymous phone calls and the protests, or if the investors just ran out of money. In the years since, he said, there have been occasional rumors about the cemetery being bulldozed for development, but no one has dared touch it yet.

  Sometimes Xi brings a video camera to the cemetery and interviews other people visiting the dead, so there will be a record of the place and of those to whom it meant something. As the years have passed, though, fewer people have been coming, and he rarely sees younger visitors in the graveyard, unless they have stumbled upon it by accident. They remind him of ignorant tourists, because they know so little about the Cultural Revolution. “It’s pathetic,” Xi said. “These people died meaningless deaths, but they are even more meaningless if society never reflects upon it. Many people refuse to think about it, and the party wants to erase people’s memories. But the whole nation should think about what happened. Remembering is painful, but it is also a kind of responsibility. We have to remember, so the next generation doesn’t suffer such pain again.”

  A FEW WEEKS AFTER Xi’s mother was killed, the central government brokered a cease-fire between the two Red Guard factions in Chongqing. But the political violence in the city and in the rest of China continued as new ruling officials sought to reassert control and organized one campaign after another to intimidate the public, settle scores, and eliminate rivals. In the summer of 1968, Mao finally disbanded the Red Guards, sending millions of urban youths to live and work in the countryside. Xi was sent to a rural village in 1969, and it was there that he began to reconsider his loyalty to the Chairman. Seeing the poverty of the countryside firsthand led him—and countless others of his generation—to question the party and its lies. Xi’s disillusionment was complete in 1971, when Mao’s prominent right-hand man, Lin Biao, died in a plane crash fleeing China, and the party suddenly declared that he had been a traitor from the beginning. As the media rewrote history and heaped abuse on Mao’s latest enemy, Xi found himself agreeing with some of the criminal’s statements, including a memorable remark suggesting that sending young people to the countryside was a labor sentence in disguise. When Mao died in 1976, Xi was secretly overjoyed.

  After Deng Xiaoping took power in 1978 and repudiated the Cultural Revolution, the government set out to rehabilitate those who had been persecuted and punish those who had committed the worst crimes. But Deng’s priority was the survival of the Communist Party, so there would be no exhaustive investigation into the events of the past decade, no public debate over degrees of guilt and innocence, no national process of reconciliation. Soul-searching might be good for a society and a nation, but it could have destroyed the party. And so the country was told to get over it and move on. People returned to work alongside those who had tormented them, and the police paid only lip service to justice, punishing killers and torturers in some cases, but looking the other way in others, without ever explaining why. Those who went to prison never had a chance to explain their actions in public, while those who remained free never had to answer for what they had done.

  In 1973, even before the end of the Cultural Revolution, the police in Chongqing opened an investigation into the death of Xi’s mother, and later informed the family that they had arrested the culprit. But they never told the family whether the arrest was related to her murder, whether the man was ever tried or convicted of any crime, and what kind of sentence he received, if any. After the Cultural Revolution, when the party claimed to be punishing those responsible for the crimes of the past decade, no one contacted Xi’s family, and when Xi’s father made inquiries, he never received a response. Then one day Xi heard that his mother’s killer had been released from prison on medical parole and was receiving treatment in a local hospital. The thought of the man going free infuriated him. He wanted to confront the killer, to force him to face the boys he had tried to shoot that day, and to make him pay for taking their mother away. If the party wouldn’t do it, Xi decided, then he would mete out justice himself.

  He stole a car, and a policeman’s uniform, and he prepared a garrote from steel wire. With his brother Qingchuan, he hatched a plan. Qingchuan would drive him to the hospital at half past eleven, when most of the doctors and nurses would be in the cafeteria eating lunch. Dressed in the uniform, Xi would go inside, introduce himself as an officer conducting an investigation, and ask the man to accompany him to the car. The killer would sit in the front passenger seat, and he would get in the back. They would knock him out, then drive hours into the mountains, along a route Xi mapped out. If the man came to, they would tell him that he murdered a woman many years ago. They would tell him they were her sons come to seek revenge. And then Xi would strangle him. They would dump the body in the Wu River, and then drive back to Chongqing. Xi and his brother were no longer boys, but men in their late twenties and they were serious. They knelt before their father and told him what they were going to do. Everything was set. Xi even bought extra gasoline, so they wouldn’t run out. The next day, Qingchuan drove to the hospital as planned, and Xi went inside to find their mother’s killer. But his bed was empty. The doctors said he had been released just a half hour earlier.

  Later, Xi wondered if his father had tipped off the authorities and arranged for the man to be transferred from the hospital. “I think he felt this kind of revenge would destroy his two sons, but he never admitted it,” Xi told me. “If my father didn’t inform on us, then it was just Heaven’s will.”

  Xi said he and his brother tried for years to find the man again, but they never did. I asked him if he still wanted to kill him. “These are differe
nt times, and the way I think has also changed,” he replied. The killer, he said, “was a victim, too. It’s the system we should take revenge against.” But when the subject came up again later, Xi said his anger toward his mother’s killer had not entirely dissipated, and he was not willing to absolve him of all responsibility. “He brought pain to my family that words cannot describe,” Xi said. “If I didn’t kill him, I’d beat him up. He would be an old man by now, but he would still deserve the beating.”

  We were alone in the cemetery, standing by his mother’s tomb. It was nearly noon, but the the sun was still hidden in the thick fog. Xi lit another cigarette, and walked over to the pillar marking the grave next to his mother’s. Someone had scratched a few words on the side with a rock. “History is here. They died unjustly.” I asked him another question. Was there anything he did during the Cultural Revolution that he particularly regretted? Xi paused a moment before answering.

  “After my mother died, I took it out on society. I beat some people. No one cared what I did, and I wanted others to feel the pain I felt.”

  He said he joined the Red Guards again, and his father couldn’t stop him. He was given a gun, and he fired it in several battles. He said he didn’t know if he ever hit anyone, but he confessed that he eagerly participated in the violence before he was sent down to the countryside. I asked Xi what the worst thing he did during those years was. He said he tortured prisoners from the other faction, and old men who had been detained because they had bad class backgrounds. “They were held in a small room, and if I was even slightly upset, I would hit them,” he said. “We had no humanity. We were young and ignorant, and we would abuse them, and whip them.”