by James Palmer
The toll of spending fourteen hours a day translating told on him when, one Spring Festival, after being plied with drink by his girlfriend’s relatives, he woke up and began translating the conversation into English as if I were present, with explanatory cultural notes, and continued undeterred by my absence, for a good half hour before falling asleep again.
The people of Tangshan were warm, welcoming, and generous with their time. I owe particular thanks to Chang Qing, Yang Zhikai, Yuan Wuyi, Zhang Wenzhong, Zhang Youlu, Zhu Yinlai, He Jianguo and Yu Xuebing. The Tangshan Publicity Bureau was both open and helpful.
I owe a huge debt to the pioneering 1980s work of Qian Gang, and, in my understanding of Cultural Revolution politics, to the books of Roderick MacFarquhar, Michael Schoenhals, Frederick Teiwes and Warren Sun.
Neil Belton’s detailed and thoughtful editing was invaluable, as was the careful work of Donald Sommerville. Many thanks also to Kate Murray-Browne at Faber, Lara Heimert at Basic Books and my agent, Gillon Aitken. Much gratitude to Shastri Ramachandaran, who read and gave detailed comments on the entire manuscript.
My mother, Sandra Palmer, gave me the same support and love she always has. My father, Martin Palmer, and his wife, Victoria Finlay, read and commented on the initial drafts of the book, as well as providing a countryside refuge in the UK. Many thanks also to my aunts Yan Chi and Sheila, as well as my uncle Nigel. In London, Colin Thubron gave both encouragement and hospitality, as did Alice Cairns and her family.
My Australian relatives, particularly my beloved grandmother Janet and my aunts Lindi and Sue, embraced my fiancée as one of the family during her studies in Australia, while I was working on the book in China, as did Rebecca and Rachel Jee. My cousin Jane Gleeson-White also arranged a highly entertaining visit to the Sydney Literary Festival. From Hungary, I received the encouragement of my grandfather Rudi, his wife Dagmar and my aunts Roxi and Ralou.
My colleagues at the late Bilingual Time, especially Tina, Nicole and Cynthia, were exceptionally helpful and tolerant of occasional absences. My co-workers at Global Times make working for the Party surprisingly pleasant; particular thanks to the indefatigable Jingxian and Chen Ping.
Online, a big shout-out to all my colleagues Backstage, and to the schlachtbummlers at Blood and Treasure.
Many thanks too to Jeremiah Jenne, Nick Cyr, Liz Licata, Nick Vogt, John Jamie Kenny, Bill Joseph, Isaac Stone-Fish, John Garnault, Tom McGrenery, Jeff Becker, Graham Earnshaw, Justin Mitchell, Nancy Pellegrini, Isabel Hilton, Robert Foyle Hunwick, Logan Wright, James Tiscione, Frank Dikotter, Paul French, Richard Burger, John Pretty, John Churcher, and most especially to my brother in cheese and Cultural Revolution trivia, Michele Scrimenti.
I have forgotten the names of some people who should be here; in particular the Brazilian seismologist who pointed me to the British mining surveys, and whose name, shamefully, completely eludes my best efforts at searching both my memory and my inbox.
My friend Ian Sherman died in 2009. He was much loved, though he would have derided it as un-English for any of us to tell him so.
Finally, this book is dedicated to my partner Claudia He, whose beauty, intelligence, and determination in argument are, as ever, the great sustaining grace of my life.
Notes
Chapter 1 Who will protect us now? (pages 5 – 42)
1 Brother and sister in Chinese refer to any relative of the same generation, both siblings and cousins, as well as frequently being used about best friends, classmates, etc. It seemed uncouth for me to ask for biological details when talking to people, and so the terms are used in that sense in this book.
2 The standard unit of currency in China at the time was the RMB (renminbi yuan, people’s currency). Ten mao made up one yuan, ten fen made up one mao. The average salary in 1976 was around 10 RMB or less a month.
3 Gao Wenqian, Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary (New York, 1997), p. 181.
4 Ibid, p. 289.
5 This was not at all a new development; the first Ming emperor, formerly a wandering monk, banned the use of any written characters that resembled monk or bald, and executed scholars for what he read as coded references to his past.
6 Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), p. 112.
7 Lu Xing, Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Columbia, 2004) p. 23.
8 Wang Youqin, ‘Student Attacks against Teachers: the Revolution of 1966’, Issues and Studies 37 (March – April 2001).
9 Yang Su, ‘Mass Killings in the Cultural Revolution’, in The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History, ed. Joseph W. Esherick, Paul Pickowicz and Andrew Walder (Stanford, 2006), p. 99.
10 MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, pp. 204 – 5.
11 Ralph Thaxton, Catastrophe and Contention in Rural China (Cambridge, Mass., 2008), p. 148.
12 Thaxton, p. 196, quoting Jia Yanmin, Dayuejin Shiqi Xiangcun Zhengzhide Dianxing, pp. 221 – 7, 230 – 1.
13 Frank Dikotter, Mao’s Great Famine (London, 2010), p. 100.
14 R. J. Rummel, China’s Bloody Century, (New Brunswick, 1991), pp. 241 – 2.
15 Richard Aldrich, ed., The Faraway War: Personal Diaries of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific (London, 2006), p. 663.
16 Gao Yuan, Born Red: A Chronicle of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Stanford, 1997), p. 25.
17 China’s school grades correspond to those used in the USA. ‘Second grade’ is therefore roughly equivalent to the British Year 3.
18 Lin Jing, The Red Guards’ Path to Violence: Political, Education, and Psychological Factors (New York, 1991), pp. 88 – 91.
19 Sang Ye, Beijing’s Red August, available at http://www.danwei.org/scholarship_and_education/beijings_bloody_august_by_gere.php.
20 MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, p. 334.
21 Yan Jiaqi and Gao Gao, trans. Daniel Kwok, Turbulent Decade: A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Honolulu, 1996), p. 431.
22 Yan and Gao, p. 437.
23 Dikotter, p. 134.
24 So-called because they (probably) originally migrated from central or northern China to the south-west. It has never been clear whether Deng actually had any Hakka ancestry or not, but he certainly didn’t speak Hakka or consider himself a member of the minority.
25 This seems to have been coined by government officials in rural areas struggling to keep people alive during the Great Leap Forward.
26 Yan and Gao, p. 483.
27 Like most of these titles, it sounds snappier in Chinese.
Chapter 2 Living in coal country (pages 43 – 70)
1 Matthew Connolly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (Cambridge, Mass., 2008), p. 179.
2 Ironically, North Korea in the 1960s and 1970s had far higher living standards than China, and North Koreans would frequently congratulate themselves on not having fallen into the chaos and backwardness of their giant neighbour. It was only in the early nineties, with the end of Russian and Chinese subsidies, that the North Korean economy collapsed.
3 Anita Chan, Richard Madsen and Jonathan Unger, Chen Village: Revolution to Globalization (Berkeley, 2009), p. 253.
4 Chan, Madsen and Unger, p. 254.
5 Big character posters (dazhibao) were handwritten posters using oversized Chinese characters, normally intended as messages of political protest or to display support for one faction or another. They have a long history in Chinese political protest, but became particularly common in the twentieth century, and especially during the Cultural Revolution.
6 Feng Jicai, Ten Years of Madness: Oral Histories of China’s Cultural Revolution (San Francisco, 1996), p. 2.
7 Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (Oxford, 1990), p. 80.
8 For a point of comparison, the Aberfan mining disaster killed 144 people in Wales in 1966, and I, born in 1978, had at least a vague idea of what had happened by the time I was a teenager.
9 James Tong, Collective Viol
ence in the Ming Dynasty (Stanford, 1991), p. 83.
10 Qian Gang, trans. Nicola Ellis and Cathy Silber, The Great Chinese Earthquake (Beijing, 1989), p. 285.
11 Central Party Document 69, issued 29 June 1974.
12 Qian, p. 160.
Chapter 3 Tomb-Sweeping Day (pages 71 – 113)
1 I watched the funeral on youku, a Chinese video-sharing website, where the scenes of weeping crowds were slightly undercut by the large bouncing breasts on the right advertising a plastic surgery hospital.
2 Famously achieved in part through ‘ping-pong diplomacy’, where the Chinese team reached out to their US counterparts at an international tournament. They had to do so, however, without the guidance of China’s former table tennis world champion, Rong Guotuan, who had been accused of being a foreign agent, attacked by the Red Guards, and hanged himself in 1968 with a note in his pocket saying ‘I am not a spy.’ Two other members of the national team were also driven to suicide around the same time.
3 He was heartbroken when, after the conservatories reopened in 1978, he was told that at thirteen, he had come to the instrument too late. But while he was there, they said, why not see if he could sing? He went on to become one of China’s great operatic performers. Like the rest of the material on music and ballet during the Cultural Revolution, I owe this story to Nancy Pellegrini, who, when she gets around to it, will write a fantastic book on the topic.
4 The modified version used in the immediate aftermath of the Cultural Revolution is hilarious in its political correctness. It begins ‘March on! People of all heroic nationalities!’ (a sop to the idea of China’s ‘56 peoples’) and reminds everyone that ‘The Great Communist Party leads us in continuing the Long March’. The chorus tells us that the Chinese people will ‘for generations, raise Mao Zedong’s banner’. It was abandoned in 1982.
5 Frederick Teiwes and Warren Sun, The End of the Maoist Era (Armonk, 2007), p. 439.
6 MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, p. 417.
7 Benjamin Yang, Deng: A Political Biography (Armonk, 1998), p. 193.
8 Chang Jung and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story (London, 2005), p. 318.
9 Ye Yonglie, The Rise and Fall of the Gang of Four (Beijing, 2009), p. 1157.
10 My father-in-law, also from Hunan, looked like Hua when he was young too, but as far as I know is no relation to Mao Zedong.
11 Teiwes and Sun, p. 519.
12 Genny and Kam Louie, ‘The Role of Nanjing University in the Nanjing Incident’, The China Quarterly (No. 86, June 1981), p. 335.
13 People’s Daily, 10 April 1976.
14 Edward Friedman, Paul Pickowicz, and Mark Selden, Revolution, Resistance, and Reform in Village China (New Haven, 2007), p. 2.
15 Several people told me, too, that their parents or grandparents retained strong memories of the ideas of American liberty they’d learnt from foreign media or teachers in the 1930s or 1940s, and passed them on to their children.
16 ‘The Fengster’, as he is affectionately known, was a young soldier who spent his spare time studying Mao’s works and helping old ladies across roads, kittens down from trees, and such, before dying in 1962, aged twenty-two, after a telephone pole fell on top of him when he accidentally directed a truck into it. Rather oddly, this made him a martyr of the revolution. His diary was found (and probably suitably embellished) and he was promoted as a national hero and role model for children.
17 Zhu Di Xiao, Thirty Years in a Red House: A Memoir of Childhood and Youth in Communist China (Boston, 1999), p. 166.
18 Sebastian Heilmann, Turning Away From the Cultural Revolution: Political Grassroots Activism in the Mid-Seventies (Stockholm, 1996), p. 33.
19 Ye Yonglie, p. 1190.
20 Roger Garside, Coming Alive: China after Mao (London, 1981), p. 256.
21 Yan and Gao, p. 493.
22 MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, p. 423.
23 Teiwes and Sun, p. 473.
24 Yan and Gao, p. 494.
25 Heilmann, Turning Away, p. 29.
26 Heilmann, Turning Away, p. 33.
27 MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, p. 526.
28 Ye Qing, Deng Xiaoping zai 1976 (3 vols, Beijing, 1993), Vol. 1, p. 197.
29 Li Zhisui, The Private Life of Chairman Mao (London, 1996), p. 612.
30 MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, p. 430.
31 Teiwes and Sun, p. 493.
32 Sebastian Heilmann, Sozialer Protest in der VR China. Die Bewegung vom 5 April 1976 und die Gegen-Kulturrevolution der siebziger Jahre [‘Social protest in the PRC: The April 5th Movement and the Counter-Cultural Revolution Movement of the 1970s’] (Hamburg, 1994), p. 47.
33 Zheng Yi, Scarlet Memorial : Tales of Cannibalism in Modern China (Boulder, 1998), p. 167.
Chapter 4 Four hundred Hiroshimas (pages 114 – 143)
1 Qian, p. 301.
2 Ibid, p. 313.
3 Buried (2009), dir. Wang Libo, viewable at http://dgeneratefilms.com/critical-essays/controversial-earthquake-documentary-now-on-youtube/.
4 Zhang Qingzhou, ‘A Record of Warning from Tangshan (Tangshan Jingshilu)’, Reportage (Baogao Wenxue), Vol. 65, 2005, p. 70.
5 Ibid, p. 75.
6 Li Zhisui, p. 620.
7 Qian, p. 31.
8 Today it’s a local government headquarters, carefully and tenderly maintained by a staff aware of its historical importance. The only damage it suffered, as buildings collapsed all around it, was shaken tiles.
9 This wasn’t a spontaneous quotation; we were in a church and I had to call a friend to Google the lines when neither of us could remember how it went, then we found it in her Bible.
10 Qian, p. 52.
11 Qian, p. 44.
12 A practice that continues today to punish families who have more than one child, or who go against village bullies.
13 Qian, p. 54.
14 Li Zhisui, p. 622.
15 After US shock comic Gilbert Gottfried made similar jokes about the Sendai earthquake in March 2011, he lost a lucrative advertising deal.
16 Qian, p. 57.
17 Qian, p. 61.
Chapter 5 Everybody saved me (pages 144 – 172)
1 Mencius, II.A.6.
2 I am pathetically unable to tell the age of rural Chinese over 35 or so, because even by 45 they’re often so weathered, toothless and worn as to look decades older than their real age by Western standards. I was convinced that a beloved auntie in one compound I lived in was at least 60 until I discovered she was 47, and I once met a Daoist hermit who looked about 102 and turned out to be barely 50. Meanwhile the sprightliness of my 83-year-old grandmother when she visited me in Beijing slightly amazed my colleagues. But I was pleased to discover that this inability to judge accurately the rural aged is shared by many young urban Chinese, which in its own way is an indicator of better times.
3 The officer responsible, Amakesu Masahiko, was sentenced to ten years, served three, and was then put in charge of police repression and propaganda in Manchuria, where he helped create the culture of brutality that led to a vast swell in support for the Communists. There would have been survivors of interrogation by his secret police force among the Tangshan victims. If you drew a diagram of East Asian horrors in the twentieth century and how they connect to each other, Amakesu and others like him would be thick threads in a very tangled web.
4 Qian, pp. 206 – 7.
5 Most Chinese institutions had swimming pools, thanks in part to Mao’s own enthusiasm for a dip.
6 Chinese are far more likely to know their own blood type than Westerners, and believe it to be linked to personality, which originates from a piece of quackery conducted by the Japanese military in testing soldiers for its puppet armies in China.
7 Qian, p. 91.
8 And still are. I once saw a children’s playground with a wall mural showing, in English and Chinese, such perennial favourites as ‘Truck’, ‘Car’, ‘Bicycle’, ‘Tank’, ‘Attack Helicopter’ and ‘Armoured Personnel Carrier’. All of the vehicles had smiley face
s.
9 Qian, p. 232.
10 Qian, pp. 127 – 8. If it was possible, I would quote the whole of the marvellous testimony she gives, full of life and vigour and courage. Qian Gang interviewed her in 1985; I tried to find her again twenty-four years later but, alas, she seems to have died some time in the 1990s.
11 Feng, p. 3.
12 Qian, p. 214.
13 Feng, p. 97.
14 Qian, p. 143.
Chapter 6 You die, I live (pages 173 – 210)
1 Ross Terrill, Madam Mao: The White-Boned Demon (Stanford, 2000), p. 321.
2 Li, p. 7.
3 Ye Qing, Vol. 2, p. 5.
4 Li, p. 13.
5 Zhu, p. 170.
6 Jerrold Schecter, ‘Last Respects for Chairman Mao’, Time, 27 September 1976.
7 Teiwes and Sun, p. 595.
8 Terrill, p. 393.
9 Yan and Gao, p. 517.
10 MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, p. 419.
11 Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich : Memoirs (New York, 1970), p. 291.
12 Yan and Gao, p. 514.
13 Liu Huixian, ed., The Great Tangshan Earthquake of 1976 (Pasadena, 2002), Vol 3.6, p. 754.
14 People’s Daily, 17 December 1976.
15 Teiwes and Sun, p. 565.
16 Li, p. 635 .
17 MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, p. 448.
18 Yan and Gao, p. 527.
19 Andres Onate, ‘Hua Guofeng and the Fall of the Gang of Four’, The China Quarterly (No. 75, September 1978), pp. 540 – 1.
20 Zhu, p. 170.
21 Zheng, p. 155.
22 So keen a supporter that he was ousted in the early 1980s, which is why we have such a clear record of this case. Many others like it were hushed up.
Chapter 7 Aftershocks (pages 211 – 249)
1 Beijing Review, 24 May 1977.
2 http://www.southcn.com/news/community/shzt/party/first/200206271778.htm.
3 A collection of the cartoons is in Ralph Crozier, ‘The Crimes of the Gang of Four: A Chinese Artist’s Version’, Pacific Affairs, Vol. 54, No. 2 (Summer, 1981), pp. 311 – 22. Some of Liao’s cartoons can also be found at ‘The Life and Times of Liao Bingxiong’, http://www.zonaeuropa.com/culture/c20061003_1.htm.