by Scott Tong
It was also very confusing to Mildred and the children in Hong Kong. In June 1952 she wrote: “I got the definite information three weeks ago about Carleton’s custody in Shanghai. More than a year ago he lost his freedom. That’s why I could not get his letter.
“For the sake of the children this is really a great shock to me. The last time when he was here, I persuaded him to stay. He refused and urged us to go back with him. If I did go back, I am sure I will be put in prison too. It is very easy for anyone to lose one’s freedom or to commit suicide.”
The question is, who turned in Carleton Sun? During our trip in 2013, my mother and I found the chief suspect in a document found at the police local station. The household registration book lists the various tenants of Alley 431 South Xiangyang Road over time:
Property head: Zhao Zhizhen, Hai Guang (Light of the Sea) Primary School.
My grandmother’s name, Zhao Zhizhen, is crossed out, replaced by: “Principal Zhang Qiong.” The former dean and underground party member.
“Zhang Qiong!” My mother whispers. “I bet she turned in my father.” Later, Aunt Lily surmises this is “probably true.”
In the next column, also crossed out:
Sun Yi (Carleton), male, born 1905, Mianyang, Hubei, post-secondary.
And below, these handwritten words in blue ink:
Moved out 52.3.26.
Counterrevolutionary
Tilanqiao prison
Two other Shanghai relatives implicated Zhang Qiong, who would have had a motive: nudging Carleton Sun out of the way would have given her control of the property and its revenues. She later went on to become a celebrated cadre in the Shanghai city education department, gaining membership into an elite party consultative conference. She died in 1981. A memorial plaque for her is on display at a Shanghai primary school. The woman is immortalized, even as her former partners at the Light of the Sea School have literally been crossed out of the public record.
At the outset, I would spit out Zhang Qiong’s name when I mentioned her. It took me awhile, though, to step back and think: like my grandfather, she too gambled on the outcome of wartime China at a time when the outcome was highly uncertain. It turns out Zhang herself was interrogated by Guomindang authorities in the 1930s.
“She was forced to sit on a laohu deng,” or tiger bench, my mother’s cousin Cai Su told me. Under this particular torture, you sit along a bench lengthwise, with your hands tied behind you. Your knees are tied down in front of you, and then they put a brick under your feet, and then another as your feet are forced higher and higher up. The point is to induce unbearable pain and dislocate the prisoner’s knee joints before she passes out.
Chapter Ten
FROM PRISON TO MAO’S GULAG
I have written all these things because I have a responsibility to history. But the political situation has changed.
—Carleton Sun
It was known as the Alcatraz of the Orient. Two years before Carleton Sun’s birth in 1905, the British built the Ward Road Gaol in the International Settlement. It stood on the street named for Frederick Townsend Ward, a Massachusetts sailor who led an imperial Chinese army—the Ever Victorious Army—against the Taiping Rebellion. Being named for its street address seemed a bland description for the world’s largest prison at the time. Its state-of-the-art execution chamber hanged prisoners with a trapdoor directly over the morgue. The design was imported, inspired by penitentiaries in Singapore and Canada.
Later it became known as Tilanqiao Prison, located in the northeastern Hongkou section of town. During my assignment in Shanghai, I hardly knew anything about Tilanqiao and its role in city history.
The first time I visit, in 2010, I notice the black metal gate surrounded by high concrete walls, perhaps three stories high. A plaque next to the gate denotes the building’s “heritage architecture”:
Designed by Shanghai Municipal Council. Brick-and-concrete composite structure and reinforced concrete structure. Built in 1901–1935.
When Carleton Sun was a prisoner there, he was in his midforties, the age I am now. One visitor came regularly: his elderly mother. She was illiterate and had bound feet, making it hard to walk. Yet she was a feisty woman who made the trip requiring two city bus transfers. Often she went bearing hard-boiled eggs. The rest of Carleton’s family stayed away, having “drawn clear boundary lines” to insulate themselves from his crimes.
Reconstructing this part of his life turns out to be challenging, which shouldn’t have surprised me. The prison system is one of the most opaque features of Chinese society. What’s more, Carleton Sun was imprisoned early on in a new regime just starting its recordkeeping system. I manage to track down one surviving prisoner from roughly the same period in the early 1950s. He tells me inmates then were required to stay silent all the time, or risk electric shock punishment. Prison cells were packed at the time, as the new regime arrested so many people it had nowhere to put them.
Carleton Sun was transferred to the burgeoning laogai “reform through labor” prison labor camp system. First he was sent to a gulag at Dafeng city in northern Jiangsu province, then transferred to a labor camp in the remote northwest, to the Siberia of China: Qinghai province on the Tibetan Plateau of the far northwest. At that point his trail goes missing, at least to us.
The French historian Alain Besançon argues that the twentieth century was the “century of concentration camps.” During that time, the British put Boer women and children in South African internment camps. Japan imprisoned captives in Southeast Asia. The United States forced Japanese Americans into internment camps on the West Coast. And then there is Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot. But at the turn of the twenty-first century, only one world power entered it with a thriving concentration camp system: China. This is according to Philip Williams and Yenna Wu, authors of The Great Wall of Confinement.
Estimates vary, but somewhere between 1.3 and 8 million Chinese prisoners were sent to the gulag. The Chinese system—which the government of the People’s Republic says it abolished in 2014—forced inmates to work. This was a long-inherited practice: the building of the Great Wall required forced conscripts; an estimated one million died doing the work. The dredging of the Grand Canal exacted similar casualties. Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang National Revolutionary Army in the 1930s and ’40s forced peasants to fight its wars and construct rail lines and roads.
The idea of a labor camp system was one imported by Mao from Stalin’s Soviet Union. But the Chinese system added a twist. Williams and Wu write that what whereas the Soviet system focused on work and production, the Chinese gulag sought to reform prisoners’ thinking—to convert convicts into socialist disciples. Thus the term laogai: “reform through labor.” Inmates attended “struggle sessions,” where they confessed to their own moral errors and accused others of sinning. They were rewarded for informing on one another, undermining inmate solidarity.
“If you inform on other people, you get advancement. Something good comes to you,” says former Qinghai inmate Wei Xiezhong. He is one of three men from Qinghai’s original labor camp in the 1950s (my grandfather’s era) who agree to tell me their stories. Wei now lives in Nanjing but has met my father and me in Shanghai.
“It makes you not trust people. The camps turn you into an animal, like a dog. Today I don’t even trust those around me, even my spouse. When it comes to making people inhumane, there’s Hitler, Lenin, Stalin. None compare with Mao.”
Wei hosts us in his daughter’s apartment in Shanghai. He is tall and strong for an eighty-year-old, wearing a white Nike Air Jordan golf shirt that somewhat covers a bulging belly. We’re joined by another labor camp survivor, named Zhang Shouchang, a smaller, frailer man. Time is running out for China’s generation of labor camp survivors to tell their story, and Wei understands this. “We are all sufferers,” he says on meeting us. “Let’s ditch the formalities.”
First we watch a video—Wei’s amateur recording from a recent trip back to Qinghai’s Delingha c
ity, where his labor camp once stood. The camp has since shut down, and now the place is a paved city with a vast plaza. Wei slaps Zhang on the back. “That wasn’t there back then, was it?” I’m curious why he would return to this place of bad memories, but it may not be too different from war veterans returning to the scene of battle.
Wei and Zhang were arrested and sent to Qinghai in 1957, perhaps three or four years after my grandfather arrived there. The two men were college students, rounded up with thousands of others as “Rightists.” They’d joined a series of campus campaigns a year prior, known as the Hundred Flowers Campaign. At the time, Chairman Mao encouraged students and intellectuals to freely express their opinions about the new socialist regime. But quickly, the student denunciations of the Soviet-style education system and failures of the economy got out of hand for Beijing. The regime changed course. The flowers and the freedom shriveled up, and a crackdown known as the Anti-Rightist Campaign ensued.
Wei knocks his head softly with his fist, to dislodge old memories. During the crackdown, Wei went south to Shenzhen to get to Hong Kong, but was arrested by border police. “I received a five-year sentence, including three years of no political rights.” An estimated half a million intellectuals were jailed or killed. Wei was sent off to the first of two labor camps, in all spending twenty-three years in the gulag. Wei points his finger at me. “You can’t comprehend this.”
Prisoners were sent out west on freight trains. Zhang recalls the trip lasted four days or so. “We sat on the floor of a cattle car. Maybe a thousand prisoners in all.”
“Did you know where you were headed?” I ask. “Did they tell you?”
“No. The guards didn’t tell us. And we didn’t dare ask.”
Zhang’s group got off the train in Gansu and boarded the backs of large, open trucks. There were no rail tracks to Qinghai at the time, and hardly any roads—the literal end of the line. So prisoners built the roads. Along the way, the men built their own houses and dug irrigation trenches. In the days before houses, prisoners slept in earthen caves dug into hillsides.
“Your grandfather probably did that,” Wei says, adding that he and Carleton Sun likely were sent to the same gulag—the Delingha Reform through Labor farm. This was the first of many camps built in the 1950s. Traditional jails were bursting at the seams, and prisoners needed to be sent somewhere. The mass incarcerations in the early Mao years went hand in hand with the building of a new socialist state: secure the border; consolidate authority; define enemies and punish them. The simpler the narrative, the better.
Wei and Zhang start talking rapid-fire, their recollections gaining momentum like a boulder rolling downhill. Qinghai was so dry that the ground never got soaked when it rained. Temperatures in the winter fell to 20 below. Prisoners who broke the rules risked extended sentences, solitary confinement, or execution.
During struggle sessions at night, prisoners had to criticize themselves or someone else in the room. Often a session would focus on a single culprit and turn into a full-blown violent attack on that person. The inmate would bow his head contritely and confess guilt, Zhang says.
“That was more powerful than torture. You couldn’t be silent, or else others would attack you.”
At the Delingha camp, the food rations were reasonable in 1957 and 1958, until the famine of the Great Leap Forward. At that point, each prisoner received just two steamed rolls and a bowl of rice gruel, twice a day. Starvation became the most common cause of death. Wei takes a long pause. I look up from my notebook and realize tears have formed in his eyes.
“Whenever I have a nightmare, it’s about this time period.”
***
I don’t have time to take the exact same slow-moving rail trip to Delingha that Carleton Sun presumably did. Instead, with my father I fly west, first to Dujiangyan in Sichuan, where another labor camp veteran lives. He has written lengthy blog entries about the labor camps under an Internet pseudonym. I’ll call him Sichuan Man.
“This is my responsibility to history,” he says, taking a seat in our hotel room. Sichuan Man was also deemed a Rightist: during the Hundred Flowers Campaign, he criticized a party member who fell in love with a high school classmate and then abruptly dumped her. “She went crazy in college,” Sichuan Man says. “I thought, ‘You can’t have sex with someone and throw her away and drive her crazy.’ Our generation had to hold people responsible.”
Along with ten other classmates, Sichuan Man wrote a “large character poster” denouncing this party member. For this misdeed he was deemed a Rightist and transferred to remote Qinghai to finish college. He was assigned a job as an agricultural worker at the Delingha camp, and gained access to labor camp information files.
Sichuan Man proceeds to draw a map of all the main camps, each one represented by a triangle surrounding massive Qinghai Lake. Jotting every point he makes as if this is his school chalkboard, he explains Delingha was the first camp, built in 1954. Prisoners from Carleton Sun’s era were sent there, initially to dig irrigation and build roads, he says. “Build a mile, walk a mile.” Just about every prisoner was a counterrevolutionary, a broad category that included rich landowners, GMD soldiers and military police officers, spies, thieves, robbers, Rightists.
Early on, the prison terms handed down were arbitrary, he says. “Back then, they could just decide you got fucking five years.”
“Could you appeal?” I ask.
“Little Tong, you don’t understand. There was no system or procedure. Back then, they could just execute people.”
I ask if prisoners were treated better or worse based on their presumed crimes. He shakes his head. Any rewards went to the men who produced more. While some camps produced clothing or work tools, Delingha was a farm that grew barley, rapeseed, and potatoes. It was too cold and dry to grow rice or corn or cotton. The camps needed as many workers as possible, so there was hardly a possibility of early release.
“Almost all the camps shut down in the 1980s,” he says. “They lost money.” Young, healthy prisoners from the 1950s had aged or died out. The revenue from inmate production no longer covered costs.
I start to wonder if I’ll get to see anything useful in Delingha. Sichuan Man tells me the camp was one of the first to shut down and convert into a state-owned farm. The way he describes it, the gravesites are likely plowed over, and who knows where any documents are. “You can’t find it,” he says. “No way.”
Then he issues a warning: there are hucksters at the camps, purporting to have prisoners’ remains and ashes to sell to family members. “They will cheat you. They will give you just a pile of dirt. Or horse or cow ashes.”
At this point my father and I commit a tactical error. We suggest that Sichuan Man publish all this information, perhaps abroad in the United States if it’s too sensitive for Chinese censors. Suspicion crosses his face. “If you want me to publish this, then it’s a problem. I have children and grandchildren who have to be protected.”
After all this time, is this prison camp information still so sensitive? Sichuan Man is convinced: “It doesn’t matter what happens to me, I’m already old. But the political situation has changed.” He is referring to the regime of Xi Jinping and its increasing intolerance of any internal criticism.
We suggest a lunch break, and Sichuan Man initially agrees. But then, after a bathroom break, he returns and abruptly changes course. “I have to go. My tongue is not well and I should go home to eat. This is all I have to say.” He walks out. We have spooked him. It starts to dawn on me how taboo China’s prison labor camp history may still be. Either that, or the experience has instilled in these men a paranoia that never goes away.
My dad and I split up for a few days. He takes the train to nearby Chongqing, the old treaty port where he was born. I fly to Qinghai’s capital, Xining. On the plane, the overhead video monitors play a series of slapstick comedy videos—the usual fare. During our Marketplace assignment in Shanghai, our children’s favorite segments were those of the Br
itish buffoon character Mr. Bean, the tweed-suited child of a man with a knack for getting a turkey stuck on his head.
Upon landing in a city at high altitude, I realize I’ve forgotten two things: lubricating eye drops and sunglasses. It is dusty, bone dry at 7,500 feet. The sun simply beats that much brighter. At a street peddler selling shades, I choose a conservative metal-rimmed pair over the seller’s recommendation of a flashier model. “They make you look more yang xing.” More Western character. Here I was, researching a grandfather who “dressed too Western” for his own relatives in Shanghai, now encouraged to be more Western character.
This frontier of China has no shortage of diversity. I hear all manner of accents, see pedestrians in Tibetan garb and women in head coverings. A significant population of Chinese Muslims lives here, which may explain two things: a wealth of mutton restaurant options (mutton chops, stewed mutton, mutton kebabs, mutton noodle soup, and my favorite—mutton soup with bean threads and unleavened bread chunks) and a striking scarcity of cold beer.
The manager of the travel agency/hotel where I’m staying is ethnic Tibetan. The prison labor camps “remain a sensitive topic,” he says. Many camps are three hundred or four hundred miles west by train. “But I don’t think foreigners are allowed into some of those areas.”
“Why not? Because of the labor camps?”
“No. Weapons testing.”
I later learn Delingha is smack in the middle of the Los Alamos of China.
That evening, I take a long walk to get dinner (mutton soup, bread chunks) but move slowly as I adapt to the altitude. For a break, I step into a convenience store to buy some room-temperature beer and a bottle of “iced” tea. Reaching into my khaki shorts pocket, I groan: I’ve left my small bills in another pair of pants, so I pull out a hundred-yuan bill (about $15). China can be a tolerant society, but not when it comes to big bills.