by Weijian Shan
One day I went with friends to the residential compound for the employees of the Beijing municipal government. There was a big crowd gathered there. We watched as a man was being harangued, or “struggled against,” on a balcony in front of the crowd. The man was Hu Yaobang, the secretary general of the Communist Youth League, an important training ground for young Communist Party members. He had been a “red kid,” still a teenager during the Red Army’s Long March, who had risen through the ranks to become one of the Communist Party’s leaders. Hu would survive the Cultural Revolution and become the Communist Party’s general secretary, the highest position in China’s leadership, in the mid-1980s. In 1987 he would be purged again; his death in 1989 provided the spark for the nationwide protests that year that ended with the Tiananmen crackdown. All that was still decades away, however; that day, he was just a slight, middle-aged man submissively being yelled at by teenagers wearing armbands before being led off the balcony.
After the struggle session, the crowd was shown the decadent and capitalistic lifestyle of Hu Yaobang. We filed into his home, a three- or four-bedroom apartment probably on the second floor of the building. The apartment was not spacious so the crowd had to walk in single file. I noticed a notebook on top of an upright piano. I opened it. It was a diary, probably kept by his young daughter. I read a couple of pages. One of the entries read: “Papa told us to always listen and follow Chairman Mao . . .” I remember thinking to myself that these did not look like the words of a counterrevolutionary.
* * *
The beating on the door was gentle but rapid and persistent. It finally yanked me out of my dream. For a moment, I thought the noise came from a raging rainstorm outside, as thunderstorms occurred often in Beijing’s summer. It took me a few seconds to realize someone was knocking on the door. It was only about 5 o’clock in the morning and my part of the room, which was separated by a curtain from my 13-year-old sister’s bed, was still dark. I heard her getting up to open the front door of our parents’ two-room home and let someone in. Then I heard some muffled chattering.
I got out of my bed and opened the partition curtain while rubbing my eyes to see what was going on. By the windowed door stood a girl, whom I recognized to be Hou Erman, a sixth-grade classmate of mine. Our parents both worked for the Ministry of Foreign Trade. Even though she was a good friend of ours, I was surprised to see her visiting so early. When she saw me, she stopped whispering.
“What happened?” I asked. Erman diverted her eyes away from me to look at my sister. Then she returned her gaze to me and said in a barely audible low voice, “My father is dead.”
I was 12 years old in 1966 and had little experience with death, much less it happening to people I actually knew. I was shocked both by the news and by how calmly and unemotionally Erman uttered those words. It was as if she was wearing an emotionless mask. She was talking about her own father, and yet I felt she was talking about a distant stranger.
I quickly put on my clothes and ran out into the yard of our residential compound. Our home was in a flat building that housed dozens of families. Erman’s family lived around the corner in the nicer, light gray building reserved for senior cadres; her father held the rank of bureau chief. There was a small crowd of people gathered in front of the door to the apartment building’s staircase, and there was an ambulance. I arrived just as a stretcher, on it a body covered with a sheet, was being brought down the stairs. I knew it was her father.
Erman stayed with my sister at our home and did not come out as her father’s body was taken away.
Kang Li, Erman’s father, had been accused of being a traitor by some of his own colleagues, I later learned, piecing together the story from Erman and my parents. Unable to clear his name, he chose to kill himself. He had gently kissed his children before they went to bed that night. The family woke up to find him in the bathroom, hanging from a rope. Fearing that any sign of sorrow would implicate other members of the family, her mother instructed the children to “draw a line” with their father. It was remarkable, as I think about it today, that a 12-year-old girl could remain so calm at the death of her father. But thank God she did not show any sign of emotion, or else she could have been in trouble herself for having feelings for a man who had betrayed the revolution. It became known later that some Red Guards beat a young girl to death for desecrating Mao’s Little Red Book, because she had sat on it. They even forced her mother to join in the beating to prove her mother’s own innocence.
* * *
Not everyone could become a Red Guard. To qualify, even as a student, one had to come from a “proletariat” family background, which included “revolutionary cadres,” factory workers, or poor peasants. If one’s parents did not belong to any of those “red categories,” one was unlikely to be accepted. Many Red Guard leaders, especially at the middle school level, were children of high-ranking cadres. They had a strong sense of entitlement because their parents had taken part in the revolution. Ironically, during the Cultural Revolution, many of their parents would be labeled as capitalist roaders, and their children would become known as “children of the black gang.” That label, however, didn’t prevent many of them from continuing to wage revolution.
If the children of high-ranking cadres were often the most self- righteous and self-entitled members of the Red Guard, they could also be the most ferocious and brutal. What was most inexplicable to me was the cruelty of middle school students, both boys and girls, which I witnessed repeatedly. These youngsters usually dressed in yellowish green military uniforms, secured, infamously, by a leather belt with a big steel buckle. I had seen these belts in action. They could be used as a whip to flog their victims. The worst would use the buckle end of the belt to kill, as I had witnessed in the girls’ middle school in 1966.
* * *
He Yuzhou was four years older than me. He was the big brother in our neighborhood, a good student and well read. I had just finished elementary school, but he had finished the first year of senior middle school at Beijing No. 5 Middle School, one of the best in the city. Bespectacled, tall, and athletic—it seemed there was no sport he did not excel in—Yuzhou was also good with his hands. While I struggled to assemble a diode radio, he could build an eight-transistor one. In my eyes, he was like an adult. I respected him and looked up to him as a role model and as our leader.
He Yuzhou invited me, along with some of my classmates, to move to Jingxinzhai, or Peaceful Heart Garden, within Beihai Park, where he and his Red Guard friends had taken up residence. I packed my sleeping quilt, a washbasin, and a few other essentials, and joined them.
I don’t remember any particular purpose for our moving in there, other than that it was available and was a nice place. Jingxinzhai was indeed a large garden, about the size of a football field, on the north bank of Beihai Lake, a short walk from the science camp. The garden was built in 1757 as a place for the crown prince to read. Immediately beyond the garden gate, there was a large rectangle-shaped pond with a white marble walkway and railings around it. A few lotuses dotted the pond, although they were withering from lack of tending.
Behind the pond on each side was another gate. Inside there was a row of empty rooms with large windows under one roof. From the windows, one could see another large pond with man-made rock hills around it. The rocks were in many strange shapes with holes in them. They were shipped to Beijing from the southern part of China ages ago by the emperors. I remember one piece of the rock sticking out over the pond, an ideal place to fish. On the rocky hills was a small covered walkway that zigzagged to the top of the hill. There was a row of pavilion-type houses that we turned into our sleeping quarters.
This area had been the site of the Research Center for Culture and History, established by Mao in 1951 and led by Mao’s former teacher Fu Dingyi. Mao’s vision was for the center to provide a place for prominent “leftovers” from the old regimes to gather, study, and write—mostly memoirs, given that they had witnessed the making of China’s
modern history. Premier Zhou himself appointed all the members, as a reflection of their prominence and the center’s importance; they included former officials and socialites of the Qing dynasty and the Nationalist regime. I had read many of these memoirs, including The First Half of My Life by Puyi, the last emperor of the Qing dynasty, who was born in 1906 and ascended to the throne in 1908, just before he turned three. Puyi was dethroned just about two years later, however, after the Revolution of 1911, although the formal abdication took place in 1912. Beginning in 1935 he was declared the puppet emperor of Manchukuo (a Japanese-occupied territory in northeast China) until Japan surrendered in 1945. I thought it was a fascinating story of how he lived.
By the time we moved in, the center had been completely vacated, and the garden was quiet and peaceful, indeed a perfect place to study. With so many attractions, we could wander around for a long time without getting bored. I found the whole time exhilarating, an endless camping trip inside the beautiful park. During the day, when it was open to the public, we did little except enjoy our freedom. When it closed at night, we would scour the park with flashlights, flushing out lovers and stragglers from its many caves and corners.
For us, living this way was a carefree adventure, away from the visitors inside the park and turmoil outside it. We did not want to go home other than for an occasional meal. I felt I could happily stay there for a very long time. In some very real sense, I was one of many boys living in an ideal bubble.
But not for long.
Chapter 4
Turmoil Under Heaven
The first fires of the Cultural Revolution were lit in Beijing in 1966. But when Yao Wenyuan’s critique of The Firing of Hai Rui was published in Shanghai, it caused a sensation; none of Beijing’s state-controlled papers would run it. For one thing, the city leaders thought it inappropriate to elevate a discussion of a literary work to the level of politics. For another, Wu Han, the author of the opera, was a vice mayor of Beijing. For this and other reasons, Mao became angry with the city government and called it “an independent kingdom that needles can’t penetrate and water can’t seep through,” meaning that it was beyond his control as it would not follow his orders. The city government itself was now in his line of fire.
On May 16, 1966, the Communist Party Central Committee, under Mao’s direction, issued a call for a nationwide “Cultural Revolution,” although few understood what this revolution specifically involved. In late June 1966, the Party announced that it had discovered within its ranks a counterrevolutionary, anti-Party clique consisting of Peng Zhen, the mayor of Beijing; Luo Ruiqing, China’s minister of public security; Lu Dingyi, the Party’s propaganda chief; and Yang Shangkun, Mao’s former chief of staff. All of them had been in the top echelon of the leadership and were stalwart members of the Party, having fought alongside Mao since the founding of the Red Army. Accused of plotting a coup d’état, among other charges, they were stripped of their positions and freedom. Those regarded as followers of the four, Wu Han among them, were fired from their jobs or thrown into jail.
The fires of revolution spread. Students and some faculty members in Beijing’s colleges had risen up against school authorities, following Mao’s call for a Cultural Revolution. They verbally, and often physically, attacked university presidents, administrators, professors, and prominent academics, forcing them to submit to “struggle sessions” to confess their crimes against the Party and condemning them in “big-character posters” for allegedly following a capitalist or revisionist line. Classes were suspended and schools were shut. Confusion and chaos reigned.
While this was happening in the early summer of 1966, Mao was traveling outside Beijing. Liu Shaoqi was in charge of running the country on a day-to-day basis, along with Deng Xiaoping, the general secretary of the Party. Liu dispatched “work teams,” which consisted of officials from various government agencies, to bring the situation at the colleges under control, or to “put out the fire,” as he instructed them. Under orders to “rely on the Party leadership,” the work teams would join forces with the schools’ administration and restore order, calming or quashing the rebellious radical student groups.
When Mao returned to Beijing on July 18, 1966, he was furious. Liu and Deng had suppressed a revolution and a student movement, a treacherous move more befitting of the reactionary Nationalist government of the old regime. He published an open letter titled “Firing at the Command Center—My Big Character Poster,” in which he identified, without mentioning any names, a “capitalist headquarters” within the Party. Obviously, he was referring to the leadership of Liu and Deng.
Praising the students for their revolutionary deeds, Mao ordered the withdrawal of all government-dispatched work teams. Liu and Deng were forced to admit their mistakes and their misunderstanding of the purpose of the Cultural Revolution.
Mao’s words and actions strongly appealed to the students, especially those who had been suppressed at the hands of Liu and Deng’s work teams. From that point on, the Red Guard movement began in earnest and soon spread to all the colleges and middle schools in Beijing.
Mao’s encouragement of the Red Guards had its intended effect. The personal cult of Mao had reached its zenith. Students were mad with happiness just to get a glimpse of him in the mass rallies. They worshipped him like a god and they followed his every word. They attacked whatever they considered to represent the Four Olds (old thought, old culture, old tradition, and old customs). The flames of the Cultural Revolution consumed Beijing.
The Cultural Revolution was slow to take hold in other parts of China’s vast land. So Beijing’s Red Guards took upon themselves a new mission: to bring the news of the Cultural Revolution to the country. They began, around August 1966, a Great Networking movement, traveling in great numbers to all parts of China to spread the revolution. Meanwhile Red Guards and Rebels from other cities and provinces journeyed to the capital to experience the revolutionary fervor for themselves, and to learn Beijing’s revolutionary ways.
The Great Networking movement spread the Cultural Revolution like a wildfire and would soon touch the lives of all Chinese. The Red Guards and the Rebels attacked and “knocked down” the leadership at every level of government throughout the country. Anarchy reigned.
Mao was exuberant. “Everything under the heaven is in great turmoil; the situation is excellent,” he declared. He watched with satisfaction as the Rebels blew the old order and his own government to pieces with revolutionary zeal. “The great chaos will lead to great rule,” he predicted confidently.
In January 1967, the Rebels in Shanghai seized power and established a new city government, called the Revolutionary Committee. The action was sanctioned and supported by Mao and was hailed by the People’s Daily as the “January Storm.” This touched off a nationwide wave of disruption as Rebels seized power and established revolutionary committees throughout the country. In some places, some semblance of order was restored under the new regime; in others, the fighting between different factions of the Rebels only intensified. Mao’s vision of “great chaos leading to great rule” was leading to ever-greater chaos.
* * *
Outside Beihai Park, events were becoming even more surreal. The central government announced on September 5, 1966, that “revolutionary little generals,” or Red Guards, could travel and lodge anywhere in the country without having to pay for the purpose of spreading the revolution and of connecting with Red Guards elsewhere in the country. The movement soon became known as da chuan lian, or the “Great Networking.” The all-consuming wildfire of the Cultural Revolution was now spreading rapidly to other parts of China.
He Yuzhou decided we should join the Great Networking to see the country. We were 12 or 13 years old and Yuzhou was about 17. My elementary-school friends Chen Jiamin and Qin Zhiqiang also joined us on the trip. So did several of my classmates, including my neighbor Hou Erman, who must have been still secretly mourning her father’s suicide, although she was careful never to show it.<
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My parents did not stop me. My mother gave me 20 yuan for spending money. I don’t know how they felt at the time, but I suppose they did not want to appear to oppose the revolution. I cannot imagine today letting my own kids do such a thing at a similar age, without knowing where they would go, with whom they would stay, or how they would find food. But in 1966 in China, so many kids were doing it. We embarked on our journey in such a hurry that I did not have time to go back to Jingxinzhai to collect my belongings. For a long time, I regretted it because my mother lived so frugally that she would have been upset with my waste.
We left Beijing by train for Shanghai in late September 1966. It was the first time I had ever left the city and it was my first long train ride. Our train was so crowded with students that there was not much room to wiggle. Young students were packed in everywhere. Some stood on the backs of the seats, others slept under the seats.
Since I was quite small at the time, I climbed onto the baggage rack and sat there. The train was overcrowded and overloaded, and it moved at a snail’s pace. Normally it took 24 hours to travel from Beijing to Shanghai. Our journey took three days. When our train crossed the Yangtze River in Nanjing, it moved particularly slowly, apparently because the engineer was worried that the bridge might collapse under so much weight. We were never hungry because all of us were provided by the kitchen of the train with lunchboxes for every meal, free. The challenge was going to the bathroom. I had to walk on the backs of seats to get there.
By the time we got to Shanghai, my feet had become swollen because I had sat with my legs hanging down from the baggage rack for too long. I could not walk. Yuzhou found a three-wheeler to wheel me to our destination while others in our group walked. Our lodging was the classroom of a school. The people from that school gave us bedding, and we pulled some desks together to make our beds.