We Have Been Harmonised

by Kai Strittmatter

  The massacre of 1989 has not driven everyone into silence. For many in the small band of people who might be called China’s conscience today – lawyers, civil rights activists, intellectuals, authors – that night was the trigger for their activism. But overall, the propaganda campaign has been a resounding success. ‘Nobody below the age of fifty has any real idea about the things that happened under Mao,’ says the journalist and author Yang Jisheng. ‘They think he was great and good, because that’s what television and books tell them.’

  Yang Jisheng used to be a journalist for the state news agency Xinhua, and he used his status to gain access to archives all over the country. After many years of research, he wrote the book Tombstone, in which he revealed previously unknown details of the ‘Great Leap Forward’.59 Yang presents evidence that cannibalism took place in many parts of the country, and estimates the number of deaths at 36 million; other historians such as Frank Dikötter put the figure at up to 45 million.60

  Sometimes selective acts of remembering are allowed, as with the Cultural Revolution: years later, isolated books and films were permitted to describe, on the level of personal experience, the chaos and cruelty of those years – though at all times, the question of why remained taboo. How could this happen? Who was responsible? What role did the Party play? A Party which had brought forth Mao in the first place, and whose apparatus enabled his brutal power game to take place, at the cost of an entire nation.

  The Cultural Revolution flowed into a cruel campaign to eradicate the ‘Four Olds’: old thinking, old culture, old habits and old customs. In the end, it managed to destroy everything the old Chinese culture had accomplished – preserving for the new age only the old evil of Chinese despotism. Ironically, today’s Party leadership exploits the memory of the deadly turmoil of those times (memories that it has at other times been at pains to suppress and distort): ‘Chaos must never reign again!’ cries the propaganda machine, knowing that in this at least it can count on the agreement of its traumatised citizens. And in the next breath: ‘Stand united behind the leader and do not doubt him!’ Its mantra is ‘stability’. Repression of every kind comes under the heading of weiwen, ‘maintaining stability’.

  Unlike the Cultural Revolution, the ‘Great Leap Forward’ has been completely forgotten – despite all the human lives it cost. If the Party ever mentions that period, it speaks coyly of the ‘difficult years’. The Party prescribes historical amnesia to the people over and over again; otherwise it would have to face up to its crimes.

  The hatred of Japan, and the endless repetition of Japan’s crimes against the Chinese people, is one of the central themes of its nationalistic propaganda. What might happen if the nation realised that the CCP under Mao Zedong, according to US sinologist Perry Link’s estimate, probably ‘killed about eight to 10 times more Chinese people than the Japanese did’?62 ‘One might say that the Japanese were crueller, with their head-lopping contests and live burials during the Nanjing massacre in 1937,’ Link writes, ‘but who can say whether that was crueller than the gouging of eyes during the Cultural Revolution or, in Guangxi in 1969, the ritual eating of livers of slain class enemies?’

  If the CCP learned one lesson from the fall of the Soviet Union – judges Liu Tong, a professor of history in Shanghai – it was that the Party can never surrender its control over how history is written. ‘The destruction of history,’ says the professor – by which he means the officially dictated version of history – ‘would be the first step towards the destruction of the Party. It would shake the faith of the people.’63

  The acts of cannibalism referred to by Perry Link were revealed in Zheng Yi’s 1993 work Scarlet Memorial.64 That book, and the ground-breaking Tombstone by journalist Yang Jisheng were published in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and both are read in the USA and Europe. In China itself, they’re banned.

  Yang Jisheng worked for the remarkable magazine Yanhuang Chunqiu. This was no dissident publication; on the contrary, it was founded in 1991 by old Party veterans, though they had learned their lessons from Mao’s tyranny. The editors were almost all CCP members, whose aim was, as Deng Xiaoping once instructed his people, simply to ‘seek truth from facts’. The things the magazine brought to light exposed some of the CCP propaganda’s favourite stories as fairy tales. It is just this kind of genuine truth-seeking that Xi Jinping calls ‘historical nihilism’: it shakes the faith that is the privilege of the blind and the deaf.

  Yanhuang Chunqiu was another victim of Xi’s campaign against any attempt to revisit the past, and in 2017 propaganda officials took possession of the magazine in a hostile takeover. Du Daozheng, the ageing founder and editor-in-chief, had just been taken to hospital. From his sickbed, the 92-year-old condemned the takeover as an act ‘from the days of the Cultural Revolution’. Earlier, in 2011, Du Daozheng had compared the situation in China to a pressure cooker: ‘The tighter you screw the vent, the higher the pressure grows inside, and one day the whole thing will explode.’ The following year, Xi Jinping took over the Party leadership, and since then the vent has been screwed one turn tighter every day.

  The amnesia machine doesn’t just erase the Party’s great historical lies and crimes; it also works tirelessly on a small scale, day after day, month after month, year after year, burying all the small and medium-sized missteps, slip-ups, accidents and catastrophes that collectively might make people wonder if there could be something rotten in the system. Events on which reflection and analysis might find a foothold simply evaporate, become things that never happened. Spaces in which connections and patterns might become visible are closed off. Often, all that remains is a quiet echo: was there something there? What memory the people still have is populated by shadows and outlines.

  The AIDS villages in Henan Province are one example. Unscrupulous Party cadres and businesspeople worked hand in hand to build up lucrative blood-donation networks in rural areas. Thanks to the operators’ greed and negligence, these were run so unhygienically and with such scant regard for medical protocols that eventually whole villages caught HIV and waited for death together.

  Or the explosion of a storage facility for toxic chemicals in Tianjin in August 2015. Towards midnight, a column of fire taller than a skyscraper shot up just a few hundred metres from an expensive residential area. An inferno raged in the heart of one of China’s wealthiest and most modern cities, two hours’ drive from the capital. And all because of an illegal warehouse for dangerous substances, containing deadly chemicals the authorities had known nothing about. A clueless local authority, corrupt officials, hopeless leaders who dispatched dozens of firefighters to certain death from the poisons and the flames. The devastating result: 200 dead and missing in the blaze; a crater in the middle of the city; contaminated ground and buildings. The people were shocked. But they only learned what had happened from the early images of this ‘hell on earth’ that circulated on social media. For the first few days, the Party apparatus seemed to be paralysed.

  Not long after the disaster, I got a call from an advertising executive friend of mine. He and his wife had decided to emigrate. ‘We’ve had enough,’ he said. ‘It was only coincidence that we heard about Tianjin this time, coincidence that everything came to light this time: how corrupt they are, how they hush everything up, how they cover for each other, how little value they place on human lives. But how many equally terrible things do you think are going on around us right now, about which we’ll never hear anything?’ He told me they were now looking for schools in Europe for their seven-year-old son. ‘What a country this China is. You’re never safe, and there’s no hope. You know, we Chinese can swallow anything. That’s the way we are. But we have to get our son out of this country, at least, and make another life possible for him.’

  The Party knew what was at stake. They knew that this accident could be traced back to the system’s lack of transparency, corruption and incompetence. Censorship and propaganda struggled back to their feet. Their first job was to turn stories of
sadness and mourning into news of heroic deeds and celebration of all the brave soldiers, firefighters and nurses sacrificing themselves in the service of the Party and the people. And then very quickly – in the space of just a few weeks – Tianjin vanished from the news altogether and was never mentioned again.

  In the UK, such an event – one thinks of Hillsborough in 1989 or Grenfell Tower in 2017 – would have prompted years of analysis, research into its causes, mourning and annual remembrance; but in China, it melted away into nothing. With the devastating earthquake in Sichuan on 12 May 2008, the government attempted an even more spectacular conjuring trick. 69,000 people lost their lives in that earthquake, including 5,000 schoolchildren buried under the rubble of their schools. The schools had clearly been thrown together using low-quality materials – meaning that many of those children were as much victims of corruption as of natural disaster. It was impossible to cover up this fact, and initially it caused outrage across the country.

  Yet in 2018, the Wenchuan regional government declared that the tenth anniversary of the earthquake should not be a day of memorialising – instead, it advertised it as a ‘day of gratitude’. On this day, a euphoric article in the state press proclaimed, the earthquake victims would be feeling ‘bubbling springs of gratitude’ for all the ‘beautiful, clean’ new buildings and the ‘great love’ that country and Party had shown them following the catastrophe.65 Not a word about all the suffering, the bitterness and the accusations from parents who had lost their children, some of whom protested so long and so loud about the lies and cover-ups in 2008 that they were eventually arrested and silenced.

  ‘Gradually we become accustomed to amnesia and we question people who ask questions,’ writes Yan Lianke. ‘Gradually we lose our memories of what happened to our nation in the past, then we lose the sense of what’s happening in our nation at present, and, finally, we run the risk of losing memories about ourselves, about our childhood, our love, our happiness and pain.’ And so China is silent about those who starved to death during the Great Leap Forward, and silent about the roots of the Cultural Revolution, and silent about the massacre of its children in 1989 in the heart of its capital. But beneath this leaden silence, a rancid brew of pain, guilt and bitterness is fermenting, sending poisonous bubbles rising to the surface of today’s China. One of the most toxic of these is a kind of nostalgia without memory, and thus without truth. A nostalgia dreaming the monster of the past into a thing of beauty – and wanting it back.

  In summer 2012, there was another row with Japan over the Diaoyutai islands in the East China Sea. Something unheard of under the CCP took shape in the capital: a demonstration with tens of thousands of participants. The demonstrators were bussed in to give free expression to the people’s anger with Japan. And for the first time since the end of the Cultural Revolution, the mob that moved through the streets of Beijing was not merely wishing an ugly death on its enemies (some of the placards said ‘Wipe out Tokyo!’) – alongside the hate-filled slogans, people were once again brandishing Mao placards. ‘Come back, Mao,’ they said.

  The year before, Bo Xilai, charismatic governor of Chongqing, had tapped into the same nostalgic spirit for the 90th anniversary celebrations of the birth of the CCP. Attracting admiration across the country, the maverick party boss – who would soon be deposed by his arch-rival, Xi Jinping – had got crowds in his city’s parks singing the ‘Red Songs’ from the Mao era again: ‘The love for mother and father does not compare to the love for Mao Zedong.’ The clique of intellectual New Left members and neo-Maoists, who had given Bo Xilai their enthusiastic approval and hailed him as China’s great hope, is still one of the noisiest movements on China’s internet – and many of them have now transferred their hopes to Xi Jinping. These are people who say that the millions who starved to death during the Great Leap Forward were a myth invented by the CIA.

  A few steadfast souls remain horrified by the amnesia. Among them is the former Red Guard soldier Zhang Hongbing (see chapter one), now a lawyer, whom I interviewed at his home in Guzhen, a small county in the southern province of Anhui. He is convinced that ‘power [must be] caged,’ and the truth brought out into the light. This is a battle to save the children, he says: the children of China, who are once again so naïve, so easy to lead astray. Zhang Hongbing was sixteen when he handed his mother over to the executioners. Just because, at dinner one night, she had said she’d rather see someone other than Mao as head of state.

  ‘But child,’ she said in response to his outraged protests, ‘you have no idea about class struggle.’

  The son leaped up. ‘Who is your child here?’ he cried. ‘We are the Red Guard of Mao Zedong. If you go on spewing poison, I’ll smash your dog skull!’

  When his mother also lost her temper and said fine, then she was going to rip the picture of the great Mao down off the wall, his father chimed in against his wife: ‘Fang Zhongmou! You are an irredeemable counter-revolutionary and from now on, you are not a member of this family. You are the enemy. We will fight you!’ The son denounced his mother to the Revolutionary Committee, writing that his mother deserved the death penalty. A few weeks later the revolutionaries fulfilled his wish and executed her.

  China’s schools, according to Zhang Hongbing, bore a great responsibility for what happened in those times. ‘They are still turning out devoted subjects today,’ he says. ‘Slaves. Children raised by wolves.’ People like Zhang not only receive regular ‘invitations for tea’ from concerned police officers, they also receive angry letters from the general public. ‘What’s your game?’ ‘Our lives are so good today. Why go dragging up the past?’ ‘Do we not live in a “harmonious society” today? You’re trying to destroy the harmony!’ Zhang sighs: ‘Why do the sons and daughters of the Chinese people understand so little?’

  The Party is so good at erasing history that it sometimes trips itself up. In 2007, a civil rights activist in Chengdu called Chen Yunfei succeeded in placing a small ad in the paper as a ‘tribute to the strong mothers of the victims of 4 June’. When the young editor asked what that 4 June date signified, she replied: ‘A mining accident,’ and he was quite satisfied. Afterwards, he and two colleagues were fired – although their ignorance was merely evidence of how successful the efforts of state censorship had been.

  I was reminded of this when I went to see a modern dance production in the heart of Beijing, given by the Taiwanese Cloud Gate Dance Theatre at China’s National Theatre, and using the ‘Nine Songs’ of the poet Qu Yuan written more than 2,000 years ago. The choreographer Lin Hwaimin had transposed the ‘Nine Songs’ to Taiwan, and in the process brought some of them into the modern era.

  Even so, I was unprepared for the final scene. The stage was dark. Very slowly, the shadow of a tank emerged from the back of the stage. Dancers stood up, just a few at first, then more and more; they came together to form an army of upright shadows, marching silently and solemnly towards the tank. Then suddenly: machine-gun fire. The dancers stumbled, twitched, fell to the floor.

  Lin Hwai-min had created the scene as an homage to the victims of the dictator Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975) and his White Terror; for him, it was an homage to the victims of the massacre that took place in Taiwan on 28 February 1947. But how many of the audience in Beijing knew that? And how was it possible, at this moment, in this place, just 200 metres as the crow flies from Tiananmen Square, not to see the images as an allegory of 4 June 1989? I sat there for a while, thunderstruck.

  How on earth had this slipped past the censor? Opened in 2007, the National Theatre is a silver half-globe floating on water, devised as an architectural statement that China is part of the modern world. Had all memories of 1989 been obliterated from the heads of those responsible, even here? It was a bitter irony that only the Party’s brainwashing had allowed the victims of 1989 to be commemorated just a stone’s throw from Tiananmen Square. Their shadows returned, if only for an evening.

  Eventually, the shadows were all mown down and lay on t
he stage. Silence. From the wings, out of the darkness, other dancers entered, carrying little lights, which they placed on the stage one after another until in the end, they formed a sea of stars.

  ** The Premier of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China, sometimes also referred to informally as the “Prime Minister”, is the Leader of the State Council of China (constitutionally synonymous with the “Central People’s Government” since 1954), who is the head of government and holds the highest rank (Level 1) in the Civil Service.

  THE MANDATE FROM HEAVEN

  How the Party Chose Itself an Emperor

  ‘One-party dictatorship always leads into perdition.’

  Xinhua Daily, mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party (then in opposition), in 1946, writing about the dictatorship of the nationalist Kuomintang

  China has a government, just like we do. Except in China, the government doesn’t govern. Only the Communist Party governs. Ministers and ministries exist to carry out decisions made in the upper echelons of the Party. Sometimes not even that; they’re mere decoration. And yes, of course we can talk about ‘President Xi Jinping’, but that is Xi’s least important title. It isn’t the office of president that gives him his power; it’s the office of General Secretary of the CCP.

  The CCP was founded in 1921, by a dozen secret communists who had fled from Shanghai to continue their meeting on a tourist boat, on South Lake in Jiaxing. Today, the Party has 89 million members, more than the whole population of Germany. Even after it seized power in 1949, it never entirely stopped acting like an underground organisation. To this day, the words of the sinologist Simon Leys remain valid: he once described the daily task of the Party-watcher as ‘the art of interpreting non-existent inscriptions written in invisible ink on a blank page’.66 And when Richard MacGregor’s The Party (a standard work on China’s Communist Party) came out in 2010, its subtitle was: ‘The secret world of China’s communist rulers’. The most memorable quote in the book came from a professor at the People’s University in Beijing: ‘The Party is like God. He is everywhere. You just can’t see him.’67