by Weijian Shan
Liling wrote to her parents about the commander’s attack. They were so worried that they told her to get away. This was risky. Many deserters were caught and brought back. A deserter was often condemned to the hardest of all jobs, without any hope for a better future. But Liling got away and took a train back to Beijing without incident. In fact, at the time I had been surprised that there was not much discussion of her desertion by the commander in the company meetings afterward. Now I knew why.
By coincidence, Liling’s father had been exonerated and had assumed his senior position in the military just before she arrived home. He immediately sent a letter to the Beijing Military Regional Command, enclosing the commander’s love letter to his daughter.
This did Old Idiot in.
He was urgently summoned to the regiment headquarters. He never returned. The timing couldn’t have been worse for Old Idiot. In addition to his offenses and the letter from the Beijing Military Region, a document signed by Premier Zhou Enlai was at this time being circulated to all the country’s Construction Army Corps. The document dealt with a case involving a regiment commander of the Northeast Construction Army Corps who had sexually exploited hundreds of young women under his command. The premier ordered a thorough investigation of all similar cases. Old Idiot immediately became a prime target for our leaders, who could now report the effectiveness of their work in carrying out Zhou Enlai’s order.
At the time, my friends and I did not realize that Old Idiot was not an isolated case. It turned out that he was just one of thousands of officers around the country who were preying on young women. The number of revelations that poured out was shocking. Within a few months, several commanders and political instructors in our division were arrested for their “lifestyle problems.” The political instructor of Eighth Company was arrested for having slept with practically every young woman under his command. One of the young women who had earned her way to college in his bed turned him in after she got back to Beijing. In many cases, it emerged, the young women had gotten something in return: Youth League or Party memberships, the opportunity to go to college, or work at a factory in the city. But who could blame them? After all, these were innocent young women whose fate was entirely in the hands of their commanding officers. And some of those officers were out of control.
According to official documents, in the Yunnan Construction Corps, a battalion commander raped more than 20 young women. A political instructor, Zhang Guoliang, raped dozens of educated youth. In Heilongjiang, the regiment commanders and chief of staff raped 50. In Inner Mongolia, where we were, there were reports that 209 officers raped 299 women. Arrests of officers in the Construction Corps were made in Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Guangzhou, and Yunnan.
We were ecstatic when Old Idiot was taken in and hoped he would receive a harsh sentence. But when his case was decided months later, all he got was dismissal from military service. He went back to his home village. We were all disappointed and were not quite sure if it was a punishment at all.
It was good to get rid of those bad eggs. But who knew how many others were never caught? After all, their power enabled these officers to do what they did. Those who remained still had absolute control over our fate and future.
Chapter 17
Desert Dreams of College
Liu Bang was the founding emperor of the Han dynasty, one of China’s most significant periods. The Han dynasty lasted 426 years, from 206 BC to AD 220, and is widely viewed as one of the pinnacles of ancient Chinese culture.
Liu Bang himself, however, made for an unlikely patriarch. A former rebel leader from a peasant family, he despised intellectuals, especially the followers of the great sage Confucius. He was known to urinate into the hats of Confucian scholars to show his contempt. One day during one of his military campaigns, he was sitting on his bed in his tent having his feet washed by two young women of his court. When it was reported to him that an old scholarly looking man was outside waiting to see him, he flew into a rage and said, “Tell him I am busy with the big affairs of the country and have no time for Confucian scholars.”
When Li Yiji, the visitor, heard this reply, he put his hand on his sword, angrily stared at the reporting guard, and yelled, “Go back to tell him, I am a drunkard from Gaoyang, not an intellectual!”
Upon hearing this, Liu Bang immediately stood up in his bare feet and asked Li to be invited in. From that point on, Li became Liu Bang’s trusted advisor. Once Liu ascended to the throne, one of his first official acts was to pay homage at the temple of Confucius in the sage’s hometown, setting a precedent for dynasties of Chinese emperors to follow for the next 2,000 years.
Formal education and learning had a long and revered history in China. The Chinese word for university is da xue (da means big and xue means studies), which originated from tai xue, meaning imperial college. Imperial schools, intended solely for the purpose of training government officials, dated back 3,000 years. The system was formalized about 2,000 years ago by Liu Bang’s descendants in the Han dynasty and had continued with little change throughout the centuries.
The first modern national university in China was the Imperial University of Peking, founded in 1898 as a successor to and replacement for the imperial college. The name was later changed to Peking University. Mao Zedong was a librarian there at one time. Equal in fame and stature with Peking University today is Tsinghua University, which was founded in 1911, the last year of the Qing dynasty, thanks in part to an initiative by the United States.
The United States was one of the eight foreign powers that had crushed the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. The Qing government was required to pay indemnities. In 1909, President Theodore Roosevelt obtained congressional approval to return the overpaid part of these funds on the condition that it would be used to secure scholarships for Chinese students to study in the United States. Tsinghua College was established in 1911 to serve as a preparatory school for these students. The YMCA in the United States recruited faculty members for sciences, and the college’s graduates transferred directly to US schools as juniors upon graduation.
Like the first emperor of the Han dynasty, Mao also held intellectuals in contempt, even though he was an astonishingly well-read man. He detested the formal education system that he thought indoctrinated young souls with old ideas against the revolution. Yet eventually and grudgingly he conceded that the country still needed formal education. “Universities are still needed,” he admitted. “Here I mainly refer to those teaching science and engineering. But the terms need to be shortened and education needs to be revolutionized.”
* * *
The room was dark, illuminated only by a flickering burning wick dipped in a small bottle of kerosene, and it was quiet, except for the faint and breaking voice coming out of a radio. Three of us huddled together on a kang, listening intently and trying to catch the words drifting out of the radio mixed with the noise of static. We were listening to the Chinese program of the Voice of America (VOA).
Suddenly, there was a loud voice: “Aha! I have caught you listening to the enemy station!”
We all turned around and froze. Instructor Zhang stood by the door. We had been so absorbed in the broadcast that none of us noticed him quietly sneaking into our room. Listening to American imperialist propaganda was a serious offense. We were in deep trouble.
I could see the sly smile on his face even in the dim light. He was clearly very pleased with himself for having caught us red-handed.
Someone immediately turned off the radio. But it was too late. Then there were a few seconds of dead silence, as nobody knew what to say or do.
Finally, I broke the silence. “So what?” I said. “If you put us in jail, the food there will be better than here and we wouldn’t have to work so hard.”
None of us had ever been in jail or knew what it was like. But that was the only thing I could think of to bluff him.
He seemed to be surprised by my words. He thought for a few seconds and then said in a nasty
tone, “That’s true. I can’t let you little kits of a rabbit get off easy.”
“Little kits of a rabbit” was what he fondly called us, a term similar to “turtle egg” or the equally “endearing” English expression “son of a bitch.”
Then he walked over and sat down on the kang. Leaning forward, he asked in a low voice, almost whispering, “What were you listening to?”
Incredibly, he seemed to be suggesting he wanted to join our little conspiracy. I supposed he could not suppress his curiosity.
We were in fact still trying to sort out the meaning of a major piece of news heard from “enemy stations.” In spite of its almost total ban on foreign publications, China never banned shortwave radios. That was probably because the country was so large that a vast majority of the rural population would not have been able to receive news and propaganda from Beijing without them. I had a shortwave radio my mother had given to me, whose reception was good enough to allow me to listen to foreign stations including VOA, the BBC, and Radio Moscow, all of which had frequencies that broadcast in Chinese. Of these, VOA was the most interesting, because of the variety of its programs. Radio Moscow was the most boring, as its propaganda was no more entertaining than Radio Beijing.
It was the first week of October 1971. I had heard various foreign broadcasts over the past few days speculating about something big happening in the Chinese capital, although nobody seemed to be able to confirm what it actually was. All anyone knew was that Beijing had canceled the annual military parade in Tiananmen Square on National Day, October 1. This had never happened since the founding of the PRC in 1949. But there was no official explanation given, prompting a frenzy of speculation among foreign observers about what had happened behind the scenes.
Radio Moscow reported that the cancellation had something to do with Marshal Lin Biao, Mao’s designated successor and second in command in the Chinese leadership. But it offered no more than rumors or hearsay.
Those among my closest friends who cared about matters like this had become more and more anxious to find out what was going on in Beijing. Foreign radio stations were the only source of such sensitive information. Now that we were caught and cornered by the political instructor, we had to tell him what we had heard.
“Really?” He was very intrigued and told us to turn on the radio. We immediately obliged, eager to draw him into our crime. Now that Instructor Zhang was compromised, we were able to relax and turn our attention to the radio. But we did not hear any new information that night.
It was not until early November that we learned the true story. On an unusually sunny day for November, our platoon joined the rest of our company in an assembly to hear an important proclamation from the central command. We all sat on the ground in formation, making a kind of outdoor auditorium facing the sidewall of a row of mudbrick houses, which shone brightly in the winter sun. Soon Xuan, the political commissar of the regiment, strolled to the front to read an official document. We knew we could expect some surprising news. The last time he was here, a few months earlier, he had announced that Henry Kissinger, a representative of China’s mortal enemy, the American imperialists, had secretly visited Zhou Enlai and that Mao himself had invited President Richard Nixon to visit Beijing. What could it possibly be now?
Through rumors and our foreign radio stations, some of us already had an inkling that something major had happened in Beijing, and that it could possibly be related to Mao’s successor, Lin Biao. Still, the news shocked all of us.
Lin Biao had plotted to assassinate Chairman Mao, Commissar Xuan declared. But the attempt had failed because the great leader, who was ever wise and farsighted, had foiled his plot. Consequently, on the night of September 13, 1971, Lin had scrambled onto a French-made Trident aircraft together with his wife and son to flee the country, in an attempt to defect to the Soviet Union. His plane had run out of fuel shortly after crossing the Mongolian border and crashed in the desert near the town of Undurkhaan, a few hundred kilometers north of where we were.
It was an astonishing turn of events. More than just about anyone else in the leadership, Lin Biao was the one who had carried the banner of the Cultural Revolution for Mao. He had created and promoted the Little Red Book of Mao’s quotations and he had waved it in his hand wherever he had gone, setting an example for the rest of the country. Now he had wanted to kill Mao?
* * *
Mao was devastated by the defection of Lin Biao and fell gravely ill for a period of time. With Lin out of the way and Mao utterly drained of his vigor by the event, Zhou, the premier, began to bring some order back to the country. Some purged officials were brought back to power and some prominent scholars had their names cleared.
In late 1971, official newspapers printed another one of Mao’s highest edicts: “Universities are still needed. . . . Students should be selected from among workers and peasants who have had practical experiences.” In fact, he had made those remarks in 1968. But as Zhou moved to undo some of the Cultural Revolution’s excesses, the central authorities chose this moment to publicize it.
I had always wanted to go to college. But in the Gobi, this increasingly felt like a pipe dream. It was going to take a miracle for me to get out of the place. To comfort myself, I would tell myself to keep reading. If I did not have a chance to go to school, I could still educate myself, and that kept up my motivation to learn. But how nice it would be if I did get the chance.
With the publication of Mao’s remarks, many colleges reopened. Professors, who had been targets of persecution and sent to the countryside, were now being summoned back to teach.
It had been six years since China’s entire system of higher education had been shut down. Most of us had spent the last few years laboring in the countryside. People of college age, like me—18 or 19 years old—had never attended middle school. But there was no need for academic qualification. There would be no exams. Instead, a “revolutionary” process of student selection was devised. Students would be chosen from the ranks of those having had at least two years of work experience among peasants, workers, and soldiers, through a system of “recommendation by the masses,” meaning election by one’s peers. They also had to meet political criteria, like good work performance and a working-class family background.
This, I realized, could be the miracle I had been hoping for. I was certain that I met the basic qualifications: I was a hard worker and was perceived as such. I had never been in a relationship with a girl or done anything else that would keep me out of contention. People were fair-minded, I thought. A good worker deserved to be considered.
And as our tenure in the Gobi had lengthened, good workers had become harder and harder to come by. Most people had long ago stopped working in the fields on a regular basis. Out of 150 boys, probably no more than 20 or so still cared to go to work every day. I was one of them. I was by no means physically strong, but I proved I could tough it out.
The catch was that I was not on good terms with the company leaders.
In September 1972, the leadership selected three people to go to college. One of them was a friend of ours, Wang Yingfan. He was to go to the Beijing Institute of Foreign Languages to study Polish. Counter to the stated rules of the selection process, the decision was made in secret, without any input at all from the masses, who were officially supposed to recommend candidates. All of us were excited, nonetheless, that he had been given the opportunity to go.
We celebrated. This was a big event in our lives and we were letting off steam. We talked and talked, about the past, the present, and the future, for it seemed as if a future were suddenly possible.
We were delirious with excitement. At one point, referring to our friend’s study of a foreign language, I remarked, “Perhaps someday all of us will meet up in Paris or London.”
Someone else chimed in, “Or maybe New York.”
We all laughed at this joke, which also embodied so many hopes and dreams that had been repressed for so long. None of us really th
ought this might come true. We said it lightly, carried away by our joy of the moment.
Someone reported the conversation to the company leaders. The next thing I knew, I was the target of a public criticism against my bourgeois outlook on life, because of what I had said about Paris and London.
Despite its absurdity, the charge was a serious blow to my college chances. According to my critics, my remarks revealed that I aspired to a “capitalist lifestyle.” My accusers suggested the reason I was always reading was that I wanted to become somebody someday, which, by definition in the dictionary of the working class, was bad. A number of different squads and platoons, including, surprisingly, women’s platoons, put up posters that criticized me. I supposed it was easy for them to write such denunciations in accordance with the wishes of the leaders, since they did not know me personally.
I felt hurt, and also concerned about my future. But I held up, despite my anguish at being singled out as a target of attack by so many. I hated the snitch who had informed on me, and I could not understand how people could sink so low as to please the leaders by stepping on other people’s heads.
But the criticism also made me think about how others saw me. Why were so many people joining in with accusations? They did not know me, or my friends, at all, and I realized that our tight circle could be perceived as elitist and exclusive to those on the outside. We spent our free time reading books, and we passed around everything we could get our hands on, from Chinese histories to Russian novels. Most people spent their leisure time playing poker and chess. I thought myself to be above such useless pursuits or wastes of time. And maybe that was my problem: people did not like people who were too different.