China Witness

by Xinran Xue

  Apart from the kind of face-to-face interview which we are doing now, I have also conducted a series of telephone interviews, where I called people from London. One of them was a violin-maker called Wu, who was in his second year at university fifty years ago when he said something wrong and was clapped in prison right up until the Cultural Revolution. Two days before he was due to be released, he was in a group reciting the quotations of Chairman Mao and he made another mistake, and instead of saying "We should support those who oppose our enemy", he turned it into the opposite, "We should oppose those who oppose our enemy", so he was condemned to another fifteen years and didn't get out until 1985. He had completely and absolutely lost his entire youth. He went to Hong Kong in the end.

  I met him in London, and I asked him one question: "Do you have regrets?" He said: "No, none." I asked him why not, and he said: "For an era to become an era, people have to endure it." And he went on to say that he had become a witness to a part of a particular era. "Through me, people will see one aspect of this era." I found Wu's self-evaluation very moving.

  GENERAL PHOEBE: A man of noble spirit.

  XINRAN: I did another telephone interview with a senior cadre who had never had any setbacks because he was a worker-peasant cadre, son of a Red Army soldier. I asked him: "Do you have any regrets about your life?" and he said: "I regret the fact that my father achieved nothing of value in his life, apart from his good name; not a thing in a whole lifetime, and I was a loyal and filial son to him." I really didn't understand that at all. I thought his answer was going to be the opposite because he had profited from his father's status, his house, his work and everyone's admiration of his family. Don't you think? I would have thought that Mr Wu might have said his life had not been worthwhile, but actually he thought it turned out fine!

  GENERAL PHOEBE: In the past, the dominant things in our lives were controlled within society, but now we can't have complete control over things. Because changes have happened so fast, society fragments into many different viewpoints. It's all so complex and quite out of the ordinary, and that's a product of our age.

  We old people see things a little more clearly because we are on the margins of society, not at its centre at all. We have been through a lot and have thought about it a lot. Many uneducated cadres have been through a lot too, but haven't been enlightened by education, so they can't think it through rationally.

  We should take a calm look at things and put everyone back in that time, because Chairman Mao was not a god, he was an ordinary human being, and people allowed him to assume great powers. He put terrible pressure on people then, and that wasn't good, but all of that developed completely naturally. Power has always been tyranny over enemies and opponents, because it is born out of the struggle to subdue enemies and opponents, and the greater the power, the greater the number of people subdued. It's always been like this from ancient times. One can't see Mao Zedong as an unnatural phenomenon.

  XINRAN: There are Westerners who think that Mao was the biggest murderer of the last century, a worse tyrant than Stalin and Hitler. Personally, I hate Mao Zedong. I was only a child during the Cultural Revolution, but I suffered a lot because my mother and father were attacked. If you accept that this was the work of Mao, then I was also one of his victims.

  But if you go to Chinese villages and ask many ordinary people, peasants who have lived on the lowest rung of society, for their opinion, then you get a completely different point of view. At the very least, they feel that Mao Zedong did something for the peasants and the poor that no emperor had ever done, which was to burn the landlords' title deeds, redistribute the land and give everyone a livelihood. And he made housing, education and medical treatment free in the cities.

  So we still see Mao's portrait hanging on the walls of peasant homes, and they still do their devotions to his statue as if he were a god. Some of them wept and shouted at us: "When Chairman Mao was here, there were never land snatches by the government or the kind of cadre corruption that there is now!" If 78 per cent of Chinese still make a living from the land, and they still have this kind of faith in Mao Zedong, then should we consider and respect the people's aspirations when we pass judgement on figures from our past, or not? Historically speaking, it isn't a simple issue of love and hate, it's about how we, the younger generation, define our forebears, and how we understand today's society. Why did families like yours return to China during the war?

  GENERAL PHOEBE: In my generation, the intelligentsia looked at China and felt hope. That was the strength that knowledge brought them. Knowledge can make people love their country, and educated people can feel their country's pain, they're not at all bothered about their standard of living, they understand life but they're not living just in order to live. Many intellectuals say: "If my life's not that great, it doesn't matter, but to see China becoming powerful, that makes me happy, it's worth almost any degree of hardship." Many intellectuals, if they're real intellectuals, have this kind of response.

  Millions of Chinese are educated now, but they're not intellectuals by my definition; their enjoyment doesn't come from seeking knowledge, it comes from the number of houses or fine clothes they have. Real intellectuals' greatest enjoyment comes from having an environment conducive to their studies, by means of which their country can make progress.

  In fact, a prosperous lifestyle is appropriate for today's China, because China has just stepped over the threshold of the reforms which are opening up the economy, and needs a settled period of transition. This will provide those intellectuals who have the ability to make adjustments in the mechanism of Chinese society with an environment in which they can reflect and study. Prosperity means having a simple and easy spiritual and cultural life, and no fights and worries about great wealth or great poverty, still less painful entanglement in human affairs.

  China today is witnessing an explosion of materialism, and consumerism is rife. When you open the newspaper, it's frightening how there are more and more ads for luxury homes, and anyone who doesn't have one is seemingly a non-person. If everyone wanted to live in a luxury home, where would we find the space? If our entire population of 1.3 billion people all wanted a luxury home, would there be enough? Of course not. In which case we'd have to move to the moon, and then that wouldn't be enough either. And after you've moved into your luxury home, you will inevitably have a whole lot of new desires, and it's never-ending…

  XINRAN: What do you feel about the reforms in education which followed the economic reforms of the 1980s?

  GENERAL PHOEBE: Education is the biggest failure of the economic reforms! I absolutely detest modern methods of English teaching, they're destroying people, and young people will never learn to love the English language. Whenever they get to year six in primary school, they have to cover the topics for the middle school entrance exams, so the way they teach foreign languages is just to teach them a few idioms and tips. It's not teaching them to understand, speak, read and write, it's just spending time on memorising grammatical structure in order to get through the exams. It's the reason why our English teaching is so poor. When our English majors go abroad, they can't speak enough to get around. This is a "sorry situation". [And here she drops into English.] We didn't use to teach like this, and we didn't study like this before Liberation. After Liberation, we followed Soviet methods, and learned nothing at all. Have you seen what kind of students we turn out? It's such a waste of people, materials and lives!

  XINRAN: Is it because the whole educational system was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, and the educational level of the first cohort of teachers in 1977 was inadequate, and classroom education after that suffered from the economic upsurge of the 1980s, which had a serious impact on people's respect for academic study?

  GENERAL PHOEBE: Chinese worker and peasant cadres have a popular saying which goes: the lowly are the cleverest, posh people are the daftest. The more you know, the stupider you are, and the greater your knowledge, the more reactionary it is. By th
e end of the Cultural Revolution, intellectuals were one of the Stinking Nine categories of society – they had really hit rock bottom.

  The reforms of the 1980s came, created new respect for knowledge and talent again. So how did they show you this respect? Well, you got fantastic treatment, both in terms of material goods and your reputation. Then there was a reaction against this, but after that, there was another reaction against the reaction. Things change so rapidly. Now we're overwhelmed with a respect for material things, and knowledge has once again been devalued. How senior does a PhD make you nowadays? There are so many of them, doctorates aren't worth anything. Worse than that, there are lots of people with heaven knows what kind of doctorate, plagiarised or bought, and the academic world and society has absolutely no respect for that kind of thing. Only real study and real talent brings you real, unshakeable respect. Writing superficial work to get that PhD certificate makes people lose faith and then doctorates lose all credibility!

  XINRAN: What do you think can be done to put that right?

  GENERAL PHOEBE: The pendulum needs to swing back.

  XINRAN: Isn't that like letting the market rule?

  GENERAL PHOEBE: It's not the market. It's the country that needs to consider if it should be training people in this manner.

  XINRAN: Why is this happening in China? In a lot of other countries, for instance developed countries in Europe and America, it has taken them nearly 250 years to go from control by religion to democratic republican systems. China has spent the last hundred years struggling towards the same goal, don't you think?

  GENERAL PHOEBE: We've gone too fast. We were afraid of not catching up, and we really haven't caught up. Our thinking has lagged behind reality.

  XINRAN: Do you think this is related to beliefs and culture?

  GENERAL PHOEBE: Where do human beliefs come from? Why do humans create gods? All of us believe in a higher authority. But now the higher authority is the American dollar, and the dollar empire uses the dollar to realise its supremacy. And why is it so arrogant? Because it has plenty of money, it's perfectly natural. Humanity has not yet advanced past money worship to a spiritual civilisation.

  XINRAN: Do you think China will emerge from dollar worship?

  GENERAL PHOEBE: Yes, because more and more Chinese people are looking into very profound matters like the ones we are talking about now. Where is our society going? Our priority must be to allow personal enmities to fade so that we can believe in China's future.

  XINRAN: Are there many others in this Officers' Village who are as reflective as you are? Is the government aware of your wealth of experience, and does it make use of it?

  GENERAL PHOEBE: This care organisation is very big. We are all highranking, and it's hard for the management services department, they are all overworked. You see, our average age here is seventy-nine, there's a lot of dementia, and many of us can hardly walk, and are in wheelchairs. Everyone's going deaf, and when we gather together no one can hear anyone else. All these are problems specific to old age. The management's main duty is to keep us safe, and to do their best to take care of us in a general way. There's hardly any of that sending of retired people into different domains to change people's thinking and consciousness, like in American institutions.

  However, society seems to be increasingly aware of our worth, and a lot of old cadres act as consultants, which of course also fills a need for social contact.

  This place offers everything you could need. It's like a small country. There's a hospital, a bank, shops, a cinema, an activities hall with card-playing, ball games, music and entertainment. There's everything. The dining hall is not like a restaurant, the food is all home-cooked. All the old ladies and gents have their main meals with their friends, and getting snacks is very convenient too. You can pop downstairs to eat or, upstairs, there are small private dining rooms where you can order special meals. Our dining hall can seat a thousand. At the weekend, people take their children and grandchildren there for a meal, and then they don't need to cook. To be quite honest, when we lived in a cowshed during the Cultural Revolution, I never dreamed that we would enjoy the degree of comfort and respect that I do today.

  XINRAN: What's your view of the current Chinese leadership?

  GENERAL PHOEBE: Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao? They're better than the old ones. They're new people, and they're hands-on. There's no personality cult.

  XINRAN: I am very interested in their policies on giving aid to the west of China, developing rural education and tax relief for peasants in poor areas. These are the first leaders in a hundred years, with the exception of Mao Zedong, who have really thought about the peasants. They suffer great hardships and the tax burden on them is appalling.

  GENERAL PHOEBE: And it's been like that since ancient times.

  XINRAN: When we visited Anhui to do interviews, the peasants north of the Huai River told us that they had never dared to dream of tax relief. They said that there had never been a time when you tilled the land without paying the Emperor's Grain Tax. Never, since earliest time. Then there's the funds to develop education in the west. I see that as incredibly important. You can't develop the west of China and let education there lag behind.

  GENERAL PHOEBE: Yes, we've begun a strategic opening-up of the west. In some areas, the infrastructure is quite good, like the Qinghai-Tibet railway, and the new Xinjiang-Gansu highway. I think that the leadership are investigating the situation. China is so big, the population so unevenly distributed. There's a great disparity between east and west, between town and country, and it's very hard to administer.

  XINRAN: I have another question, I don't know if I can ask it, and that is about your second marriage. I know that it's the Chinese custom that one shouldn't ask questions about, one, changes within a family, and, two, about the private lives of the elderly. But I have heard that you had a very romantic courtship in your old age. Can you tell me about it?

  GENERAL PHOEBE: I've known you since you were a child, you can ask me anything you like, and I'll answer anything that I can, and if I can't, I'll tell you. It's true, ours is an extraordinary story of love and marriage. We put our letters together in a book, called 160 Roses. But I suggest you listen to my husband tell the story.

  ***

  General Phoebe's husband looked like a scholar who had walked straight out of the pages of traditional Chinese literature – a very cultured man, still glowing with the vitality of the elderly academic. I had only heard of him through friends and family, and had not met him before. During this visit, I was observing his role in this marriage. Was he a realist who depended on her? Many marriages among those of advanced years were born of convenience. Was he just attracted by her reputation? General Phoebe's abilities combined with her moral integrity had been a magnet to many men. Or was he a romantic who had happened on her by chance? A lot of elderly Chinese were only liberated from political marriages and their parents' matchmaking in their later years…

  Our interview would fulfil a long-held desire: I had always wanted very much to talk to a couple whose lives had harmoniously encompassed the culture of both China and the West.

  ***

  XINRAN: You say you came from a traditional Chinese family. What kind of family was it?

  LOUIS: I was born in Shaoxing in 1925. Our forebears were all salt merchants, who moved from Anhui province to Shaoxing in Zhejiang province during the Qianlong period, towards the end of the eighteenth century. Before the Anti-Japanese War we were well off, an extended family with four generations under one roof. As a boy, my first schooling was in the Three Character Classic. I received my primary education from a private tutor at home, then I went to a lower middle school in Shaoxing.

  The salt market collapsed when the Anti-Japanese War broke out. Our family fell on hard times because our livelihood had gone. Then my father became a bank manager and in 1941 the whole family moved to Shanghai. I had gone from being the child of wealthy salt merchants to being the son of a bank employee. It changed
our lives dramatically. I had been the "Little Master", now I was just an ordinary kid. In Shaoxing we had had a large house and courtyard, and everyone had their own room, but when we got to Shanghai, the seven of us were squeezed into two rooms, so our standard of living had plummeted.

  XINRAN: Do you have any memories of his work in the bank?

  LOUIS: He was in a merchant bank, a very small bank. I only went there once, and it didn't make much impression on me.

  XINRAN: What happened to the bank's employees after Liberation?

  LOUIS: In 1952, many small banks collapsed, and my father's later years were quite hard. I've always had a guilty conscience about that. After Liberation the Party wanted us to "make a clean break" with any capitalists we knew. In principle, my father's class origin was top-level white-collar, but I didn't understand the political categories, and I told them he was a big landlord. Top-level white-collar workers were at most "petty bourgeois", but a big landlord wasn't the same thing at all, and as a result my family got put into the "black" categories. After Liberation, my parents lived on their own in Shanghai, and my brothers and sisters and I didn't see much of them. We just gave them a bit of money to live on every month. I hardly ever saw him, especially after the Cultural Revolution began. Firstly, because I had been sent to do labour in the countryside for six years, and secondly, because of something very painful which happened.

  When the Cultural Revolution began, my father was still a bank manager, and he helped the son of my wet nurse by getting him a job as an office boy in the bank. When the bank closed down, the boy went back to Shaoxing and joined the Red Guards, then he came back to Shanghai along with other rebels. He said that when the bank closed, the guards had given a firearm to my father. Keeping a private firearm was very serious indeed. He went to my father's house and said: "Will you confess, or shall I report it to the Shanghai Red Guards?" When I heard this, I said: "We'll deal with it. I and my rebel brothers and sisters will confront my father." This must have been the end of 1966 or the beginning of 1967. My father knew nothing about the whole business, so he said he really didn't have a handgun. I took my politics pretty seriously in those days, and I wanted to "make a clean break" with him. It was like the public struggle sessions but in the family. This hurt my father deeply, and it's one of the things that has caused me the most sorrow in my whole life.