by Weijian Shan
Well, those remarks were pleasing to the ears of impressionable students swept up in conversations of revolution, not to mention those who do not like to study for exams.
Even though Mao’s remarks had been made a couple of years earlier, the decision was made in 1966 that the college entrance exams would be scrapped, to be replaced by a new system of recommendations yet to be worked out. Consequently, the college entrance date was postponed—at first for half a year, then indefinitely. There would be no more entrance exams for middle schools either.
I was a little disappointed that I would not have the opportunity to go to the best middle school of my choice. I had no idea that I would never attend middle school.
Soon after this trip by my classmates to city hall, the Cultural Revolution came to our campus in earnest. The oldest of us were 13 years old, but we felt quite grown-up. We were filled with revolutionary energy and zeal. The exciting times gave us adult authority before we were even mature enough to develop our independent viewpoints to understand what was happening around us.
A few teachers were said by their colleagues to be “bad elements.” They were criticized and humiliated in public mass meetings attended by both teachers and students. We were happy to see some unpopular teachers in trouble. Huang Liqun, the director of student affairs, who had earlier given me a demerit, was among the most unpopular teachers. He wore a severe expression on his face and he would stare at you with his slightly bulging eyes behind a pair of thick glasses that looked like the bottom of a beer bottle. His glare could scare the wits out of you. I thought he resembled a toad. His surname, Huang, means “yellow” in Chinese, so we nicknamed him “Yellow Toad.” We learned that he had some dirt in his personal history. We wanted to find him to confront him. He got wind of it and vanished. I posted a “Most Wanted” note on the school’s door naming Yellow Toad a fugitive. But we never bothered to find him. He remains at large to this day, and I hope he has forgiven me, as I have him.
Some popular teachers were also in trouble. We did not quite understand what problems they had. Overnight, someone might become a bad person. A cook in our dining service was said to be a “bad element.” His crime was possessing a set of playing cards, brought back from overseas when he worked as a chef at a Chinese embassy, with pictures of naked women.
Soon the school was in chaos. Not one day passed without some teacher being “dug out” by his or her colleagues or students as a bad element. So-called big-character posters appeared on walls all over the campus, written by the students and by teachers themselves to target and attack some person or another. We learned that many of our respected teachers were suddenly considered bad people. The school nurse, whom we all loved, was found to have worked as a nurse in the Nationalist army during the civil war. Therefore, she was a class enemy.
The movement was sweeping elementary schools, middle schools, and universities all over the city. Middle-school students formed Red Guard squads. Many teachers became targets. They were paraded in dunce caps and even tortured by Red Guards in front of students for crimes ranging from being “historical counterrevolutionaries” to “bourgeois reactionary academic authorities.”
We were not content with watching all the action around us. We wanted to join the revolution as well.
A group of us broke into the dormitory room of a young art teacher, Teacher Cai. Good-looking and young, in her twenties, Teacher Cai was a popular teacher. Students loved her and what she taught. She had graduated from an art college. But she had, we knew, a small statue of a half-naked woman on the table in her room. (Now I know it was a replica of the Venus de Milo.) That had to be a capitalist object.
We stormed into her room and broke the Venus statue. She dared not utter a word of objection, in spite of her usual authority as a teacher. Times had changed. We were revolutionaries. We all felt excited and proud. But I also felt a pang of sympathy for Teacher Cai when I saw the tears in her eyes.
* * *
On August 18, 1966, Mao reviewed masses of Red Guards assembled in Tiananmen Square from atop Tiananmen Gate, waving to over a million of them below. The Red Guards responded with loud cries of “long live Chairman Mao” while jumping up and down, laughing and crying.
A teenage girl named Song Binbin put a red armband around Mao’s left arm. Her name, Binbin, meant “courteous” in Chinese. After asking her for her name, Mao remarked in his quick-witted way that “militant” would suit her better. She became an instant nationwide celebrity and changed her name to Yaowu, meaning to “be militant.” In 2014, 48 years later, Song would publicly admit to, and apologize for participating in, a Red Guard torture session that resulted in the death of the principal of her school.
Between August and November 1966, Mao reviewed Red Guards in Tiananmen Square eight times. According to official reports, a total of 13 million Red Guards participated in these events. Red Guards were heroes, endorsed by the Great Leader. Mao famously said, “To rebel is justified.” Whatever the Red Guards did was justified.
The streets of Beijing that summer were swamped with Red Guards day and night. It was such a glorious thing to be a Red Guard that almost every young student put on a red armband with “Red Guard” printed on it. It became fashionable to wear red armbands, and green army caps and uniforms. The students unable to obtain green uniforms made do with dark-blue uniforms, known overseas as Mao suits. It was also cool to wear oversized armbands, so they were made bigger and bigger until some reached almost from the shoulder to the elbow.
The Red Guards had turned the city upside down. Teenagers in armbands would walk into a store and demand that random merchandise—perfume, for instance, or a toy bus that looked like the double-decker ones in British-controlled Hong Kong—be removed from the counter, because these were not things of consequence or importance for the proletariat. Anything that was deemed one of the “Four Olds” opposed by Mao—old thoughts, old culture, old traditions, and old customs—was smashed and destroyed. Beijing’s main shopping thoroughfare, Wangfujing, a more crowded version of New York’s Fifth Avenue, was about a block away from our home. Many revolutionary actions took place there. The signboards of century-old shops were pulled down because they too represented “Four Olds.” I watched as people pulled down with a thick rope the signboard of Hengdeli Time Pieces Store, a brand name almost synonymous with watches and clocks in Beijing. As the board shook under the force of the pull, many people joined in to help. I did, too. Finally, it collapsed from its perch atop the building with an explosive sound. Everyone cheered, for having accomplished a great deed of revolution.
By the end of the summer, the entire judicial and law enforcement system in the 800-year-old city had ceased functioning. Policemen disappeared from traffic stands; pedestrians, as well as cyclists, cars, buses, and other vehicles could move freely, without anyone directing traffic. There was a serious proposal to change the traffic light system entirely. Why should people stop at a red light, the symbol of revolution? No. Red should signal go and green should signal stop. Some Red Guards went out to enforce this new, revolutionary system. Premier Zhou Enlai, the only sensible person in the leadership who had not yet had his authority challenged, had to personally intervene to stop the madness.
Zhou now was No. 2 in the top leadership, second only to Mao, after Liu Shaoqi was effectively removed from his position as the country’s president. Zhou was pragmatic and careful in carrying out Mao’s wishes without appearing to disobey them, even while minimizing their excesses. It was a great balancing act, and he, as a political survivor, was probably uniquely able and positioned to do it.
Meanwhile, no one dared challenge the ever-revolutionary acts of the Red Guards, no matter what they did. There were so many deaths in those months. Rumor had it that the city crematorium running at full capacity still could not handle the truckloads of bodies that continued to arrive, and the situation was so chaotic that it seemed nobody kept a count or record of how many people died in the violence unleashed by the
Red Guards.
One day on Wangfujing, the busiest shopping street in Beijing, I saw a man and his wife paraded by a group of Red Guards through a crowd of onlookers. The man had blood all over his head, which was bent so low that it was impossible to see his face. The wife was in even worse shape. Her hair was gone, apparently cut with scissors. They were being beaten continuously, and forced to mutter, in faint voices: “I am a cow-ghost-snake-devil,” a term used in the newspapers to label all class enemies. Nearby was their home. Two scrolls of characters hung on either side of the door. One scroll read: “Temple was small but devil spirit big”; and the other side read: “Pond was shallow but turtles many.” Across the top of the door were the words: “A nest of bad eggs.” In Chinese, turtle and bad egg are both curse words.
I doubted the couple survived the day.
Later that summer, a few friends and I went to the nearby No. 13 Girls Middle School to watch a mass meeting known as a “struggle session.” Such meetings were held everywhere in Beijing every day, in almost all the middle schools, colleges, and other institutions, and conducted by student Red Guards or by a group called the Rebels. The purpose of these meetings was to haul the identified counterrevolutionaries, including school administrators and teachers, onto the stage to force them to confess their crimes and to publicly denounce them. There were also mass gatherings organized typically by college students on a much larger scale, sometimes involving tens of thousands of participants. In those meetings, the class enemies kneeling or bent low on the stage to be “struggled against” included such figures as Peng Dehuai, the former defense minister, Peng Zhen, the former mayor of Beijing, Luo Ruiqing, the former minister of public security, and other former prominent Communist Party leaders. Violence against the targets was commonplace. Often, after a long struggle session, these class enemies—wearing tall dunce hats, and with large cardboard plaques that listed their crimes hanging down from their necks— were paraded in open trucks with loudspeakers blaring their offenses through the streets of Beijing.
Beijing No. 13 Girls School was reputed to be a top-tier school. All schools were public schools, but their perceived qualities varied. Only the best and brightest students were chosen through exams to attend the top-ranked schools, and their teachers were presumed to be the best and brightest as well. As elementary school kids, we could wander into almost any mass meeting anywhere in the city to watch the proceedings.
The meeting was somewhat entertaining at first, when the Red Guards, with a serious look of justice on their young faces, hauled the “bad elements” up on stage. The bad elements included both men and women, some apparently senile. They had tall white paper dunce hats on their heads and wore heavy plaques around their necks. On the plaques were their names and alleged crimes written in big black-inked characters, with their names crossed out in red ink. The bad elements were forced to hold the “jet fighter” position, with their heads bent to their knees and their arms twisted high in the air behind their backs by Red Guards on each side. The crowd shouted slogans. The bad elements were all teachers and administrators of the school. One after another, students or rebelling teachers marched onto the stage, to make speeches shouting out and denouncing their crimes.
Before long, the action settled into a monotonous pattern and could no longer hold the attention of teenagers like myself. My friends and I snuck out of the crowd and walked around the campus. Night had fallen. It was dark, with just a few lightbulbs providing illumination here and there. In a corner of the sports field, there was an amorphous lump with cover on it. We were told that it was the body of the school’s principal. Red Guards, in this case teenage schoolgirls (as this was a girls’ school), had beaten her to death earlier in the day. The angry crowd was simply too busy to dispose of the corpse. We decided to leave the campus.
As we were passing by the gatekeeper’s room, we heard shouts and commotion. Curious, we peeked through the window.
The room was dimly lit. Four or five teenage girls were standing in a circle, each swinging a heavy leather belt. In the center of the circle knelt an old woman who appeared to be in her sixties. Her head and body were covered in blood. She was moaning and crying in a weak voice, in great pain. The girls continued to beat her relentlessly with their belts, shouting all the while.
I knew the girls were Red Guards. They were supposed to be the good guys. I also knew that the old woman was a “class enemy.” But, somehow, the whole thing looked to me so grotesque that I felt sick to my stomach. My friends and I quickly left. Later, I learned that the woman was the school’s vice principal. She died later that night.
Nobody could stop or even stand in the way of the Red Guards. After all, they were answering the call of Chairman Mao to rise up against the “counterrevolutionary revisionists” who, Mao said, had infiltrated schools, universities, and the Communist Party itself. Almost all the “counterrevolutionary revisionists” were high-ranking government officials who were Communist Party members. Many of them were Mao’s comrades in arms since the Red Army days. Like Russia’s Joseph Stalin a few decades earlier, Mao now wanted to identify and purge the enemies of the people from within the Party, the government, and other establishments throughout the country.
Across the country, Red Guards sprang up to support Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution against anyone perceived to oppose him and his “proletariat headquarters.” Red Guards were all students. The groups called the Revolutionary Rebels (hereafter I’ll just call them “Rebels”) arose outside the school system, in places like factories or offices. Just as there were organizations and factions of Red Guards, there were also organizations and factions of the Rebels.
Like Red Guards, Rebels also began to scour their villages, factories, and work units for potential revisionists and rightists. Anyone suspected of being a capitalist or from a bad family background (landlords, rich farmers, the bourgeoisie) was purged, imprisoned, or worse. There were numerous stories about well-known figures, high-ranking officials, ministers, artists, and intellectuals being beaten up or tortured to death. Many committed suicide.
Officials of any rank were in danger. In our neighborhood, someone was “exposed” almost every day as a “capitalist roader,” or a spy, or a traitor, or a historical counterrevolutionary. Once declared a class enemy, these people became untouchables and were severely punished. Their homes were broken into and ransacked, and their property confiscated. Some were forced to leave their homes to live in so-called cattle stables, simple shelters that functioned like concentration camps. They were made to confess their crimes in front of Mao’s portrait every morning and evening and to do the most menial labor, such as cleaning public toilets and sweeping the streets.
* * *
At the compound where we lived, the situation was chaotic as well. Any books not authored by the great leader himself, or by Marx, Engels, Lenin, or Stalin, could be considered poisonous weeds. Every family dumped all the books they owned. They were brought to a great bonfire built in the center of our courtyard and burned. I saved some of the books from the bonfire and brought them home to read. It was a big risk because I would be in serious trouble if caught.
At the time, the most difficult books to come by were European classics, including Russian ones. I don’t quite remember when and where I picked up the titles and don’t remember them all, but my reading included Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Maxim Gorky’s The Song of the Stormy Petrel, Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered, Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales, Victor Hugo’s Ninety-Three and Les Misérables, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, novels by Charles Dickens, and books by Jules Verne, such as Around the World in 80 Days and Journey to the Center of the Earth, now considered precursors to science fiction.
People threw away anything considered to represent the “Four Olds.” Since nobody knew precisely what one of the Four Olds might look like, and nobody wanted to risk being caught in possession of anything off
ensive, people just threw away or burned everything they were not sure of.
Many employees of the Ministry of Foreign Trade had been abroad and had brought home souvenirs from overseas. Now these had to be thrown away or destroyed. I saw Western-style clothing— including high-heeled shoes with the heels sawed off, and other articles that might indicate a bourgeois lifestyle—stuffed in the trash container.
My own family did not possess anything so bourgeois. My father only threw out some books. My mother forced me to get rid of my goldfish, which in their lazy and leisurely ways looked anything but proletarian.
The entire law enforcement system was paralyzed. Nobody dared to interfere with the revolution. The violence went on unabated. The Red Guards started a campaign to search and ransack homes. They stormed into the homes of those they considered or suspected of being class enemies, to search for evidence and to confiscate the inhabitants’ property. Often, they beat up the owners. They were free to commandeer any vehicle on the streets of Beijing. They took away books, manuscripts, and documents, and household items from jewelry to furniture or anything else that caught their eye. Some people lost all their belongings and were kicked out of their own homes.
There was a Catholic church called St. Michael’s located in our neighborhood. The French built it in 1901 for the foreigners who lived here. But all religious practices had stopped. The church was now used as a warehouse where the Red Guards stored their loot. I visited the church with my friends to see what was going on. Loaded carts and trucks were constantly arriving in front of the church’s Gothic facade. Crowds helped unload confiscated articles from the vehicles and carried them into the nave, stacking up tables, desks, chairs, sofas, and all kinds of household items and valuables. When I got there, the big church was already half full. Someone pointed to a radio and said it was a wireless receiver that had belonged to a Nationalist spy. He said the radio was used to receive instructions and to transmit intelligence. Well, the radio looked quite innocuous to me, not much different from the vacuum-tube models found in any home. There was also a fruit knife placed on top of the radio. I was told that its owner tried to stab a Red Guard with it when his home was raided. I could only imagine what happened to the owner.