Anthony Grey

by Peking- A Novel of China's Revolution- 1921-1978 (epub)

“That’s the trouble — I’m not sure what I do mean. And for a long time all this has made me very unhappy. But I want to tell you now that I’ve made up my mind not to let it bother me any longer. After coming to China with you, I’m resigned to it, at last, It makes me sad, but for my own good I realize it would be wiser to put it all behind me and concentrate on the future.”

  In Abigail’s lovely young face Jakob saw a calm resolution that was clearly the result of careful reflection. She had the advantage of having considered her words while he was flustered and unprepared, but although he wanted more than ever to show her the love she craved, how could he explain to her what he could scarcely understand himself? How could he speak of the overwhelming passion for Mei-ling that had filled his dreams long before he asked Felicity to marry him? How could he explain that the guilt he felt about Felicity was inextricably linked with the love he had shared with Mei-ling so soon after her death? [low could he give voice to the suspicion which had nagged at him over the years that he had never really loved Felicity but had married her out of a mistaken and overzealous sense of duty? Worst of all, how could he tell her of the momentous discovery made only days before that he had a son — a half-brother to her — who had been born to Mei-ling? In bringing her to China he had hoped to find some way of confiding in her, some way of breaking the emotional barriers that had grown up between them. But now events seemed to have conspired to make an already painful task impossible. Through no fault of her own, Abigail had become a living reminder of his own past regrets and confusions.

  You’ve given me the chance to catch a glimpse of my own roots and I’m very grateful for that,” Abigail was saying, her voice matter-of-fact. “But I think coming to China’s given me something even more important.”

  “What’s that?” asked Jakob warily.

  “I’m not sure how to define it — but I think it started when I saw your own excitement at being back here after more than twenty years. I began to understand the spell that China had cast on you when you were my age. It’s something about the landscape, the people, the tantalizing fragments of the imperial past still visible here and there. I’m not sure when it started to happen — perhaps it was at the Temple of Heaven. But somehow I began to fall under the same spell.”

  “But there’ve been so many changes in the China I knew,” protested Jakob, feeling a faint sense of alarm begin to grow inside him without knowing why.

  “The Communists have tried to throw a blanket over the past but in a way that makes it all the more intriguing to the outsider.” Abigail straightened in her seat, becoming more animated. “And I was moved by the way austerity seems to inspire the people here to greater efforts. Those students we met seemed to have a great belief in the future. They’re so obviously dedicated to something greater than themselves and their own selfish needs. That student who gave the final speech was outstanding. He just radiated zeal and optimism . . in fact, all the students had an enviable sense of purpose. That’s something I missed — and I think some of it has rubbed off on me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I want to come back,” said Abigail simply.

  Jakob stared hard at her. “To do what?”

  “Don’t worry. I haven’t caught the Communist bug. It’s not the politics that attracts me.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “I think it’s simply the people.”

  Jakob took another sip of wine. Beyond the window ragged clouds were beginning to envelop the aircraft and he gazed downward until the last trace of land was obscured. Then he turned to look at his daughter again, his expression strained. “Are you sure of what you’re saying?”

  “Yes, my mind’s made up,” said Abigail in a calm voice. “I’m determined to come back and work in China.”

  PART SIX

  The Marchers Break Ranks

  1966

  The explosion of anti-Communist criticism set off by Mao Tse-tung’s Hundred Flowers movement of 1957 marked a historic watershed in China’s revolution. In effect, it undermined his authority for the first time since he took control of the Communist Party on the Long March. In the “rectification campaign” that followed, some four hundred thousand “rightists” are believed to have been seized, and many of them remained in labor camps for the next twenty years. From that moment onward Mao and the nation’s intelligentsia became deeply distrustful of one another, and Mao abandoned his efforts to involve intellectuals in China’s economic transformation. Instead he put his faith in the forces that in his view were pure and uncorrupted — first the nation’s half a billion peasants and later school-age and student Red Guards.

  By temperament Mao was impatient and romantic; bolstered by his experiences on the Long March, he believed fervently that sheer determination and the human will could conquer seemingly impossible obstacles. This led him to introduce the catastrophic Great Leap Forward the following year, in 1958. Under this new campaign, which had no precedent anywhere in the Communist world, China’s entire rural population was reorganized very rapidly into massive People’s Communes, where many lived under semi military conditions, sleeping in large barracks and eating in communal mess halls. Husbands and wives were often segregated, and their children were cared for in impersonal crèches. In contrast to the small agricultural cooperatives that previously embraced about a thousand people, each of the new People’s Communes had a population of around thirty thousand. The communes were designed to catapult China toward utopian Communism and put her on a par with Western industrialized nations within a decade or two by combining in each self-sufficient community the functions of agriculture, rural industries, education, defense, and health. Similar commune structures were set up in some cities, and peasants and town dwellers were exhorted to work all day and through the night to produce iron and steel in absurd miniature blast furnaces set up in their backyards. At first a euphoria swept the country as the peasants and town workers endeavored to respond to Mao’s inspirational exhortations. “Let the achievements of a single night surpass those of several millennia!” he urged them — but events proved, as they had in the wake of the Hundred Flowers, that Mao had gravely miscalculated. The economy collapsed and grain production fell; three successive years of calamitous drought and floods in 1959-61 brought terrible famine back to China and twenty million people are believed to have died of starvation.

  Mao refused to accept responsibility for his policy failures, saying rural cadres had failed to execute his orders correctly, but he had launched both campaigns against the wishes of the more pragmatic leaders around him, and in 1959, under pressure from them, he stood down as head of state, to be replaced by Liu Shao-chi, the Party vice chairman. Mao remained chairman of the Communist Party, but as the deeply disillusioned nation recovered from the disastrous effects of his Great Leap, he faded into the background, taking no further direct role in the day-today running of the country. The Party’s united leadership, which had been strained by the Hundred Flowers, this time began to fragment. One of the heroic generals of the Long March, Defense Minister Peng Teh-huai, attacked Mao openly for his rashness, but Mao managed to rally enough support to sack him, and for a time the widening cracks among the leaders were papered over. In the early years of the 1960s, President Liu, Party general secretary Teng Hsiao-ping, and Premier Chou En-lai put China back on a more rational course; the communes were reduced to smaller units, private plots were restored, and life became normal again for most Chinese.

  Unbeknown to them and the Party leadership, however, in a golden-roofed pavilion where he lived beside the Forbidden City, Mao was brooding behind the scenes. The outside world did not realize then how completely he had been eclipsed, but it later became clear that he had spent several years intriguing and plotting to regain control of China from President Liu, Teng Hsiao-ping, and the supporters who helped them pick up the pieces after the Great Leap Forward. His political differences with them in reality were slight; all shared the same fundamental beliefs, but Mao’s d
esire to stamp his own personal image on a rapidly transformed nation had not diminished during his enforced idleness. On the contrary, as he aged and his health faltered, a paranoid apprehension of being reviled by his successors, as Stalin had been, haunted him. His legendary ability to lead and inspire deteriorated into a fearsome megalomania, and in late 1965 the first traces of what was to be Communist China’s most cataclysmic political campaign began to appear in newspapers in the form of complex literary attacks on some writers and their works. They baffled ordinary Chinese and foreign China watchers alike for many months but were eventually seen to be aimed at prominent Party leaders responsible for governing Peking.

  In the summer of 1966 Mao reemerged suddenly and spectacularly from obscurity to plunge into the Yangtze River and apparently swim several miles downstream with the fast-flowing current. Propaganda photographs of this surprise feat were circulated to the world’s press from Peking, and much later it was discovered that Mao had already laid meticulous plans in secret. He had quietly gained military control of the capital through his loyal henchman Marshal Lin Piao, the replacement defense minister, and he had used this military strength to take charge of the all- important Party propaganda machine and the national mass media. With his new “guerrilla base” at China’s heart secure, Mao developed a unique new force of Red Guards with which to launch a nationwide assault on the majority of Party cadres loyal to men he saw as his deadly enemies. To help him organize this force of radical students, he formed his own Cultural Revolution Group of second-rank cadres, in the same way that China’s emperors of old had set up inner councils to intrigue against their mandarins. His wife, Chiang Ch’ing, was prominent among them, and in August 1966, Mao called a plenary meeting of the Communist Party’s Central Committee in the intimidating presence of a mass of Red Guards to give a veneer of Party legitimacy to his plans to “change the mental outlook of society” and “overthrow people in authority taking the capitalist road.” It was the first Central Committee plenum since 1962, and armed troops patrolled the aisles inside the hail to underline the military stranglehold Mao and his supporters had achieved in Peking.

  A few days later the mysterious movement, tantalizingly named the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, burst into the open. A million-strong army of high school and university students, dressed in khaki uniforms, appeared out of nowhere, marching joyfully in step past the Gate of Heavenly Peace, in the center of Peking. They carried little red booklets of quotations from Mao’s writings and lifted them in salute toward the balcony of the gate, where a corpulent, seventy-three-year-old Mao Tse-tung, dressed for the first time in many years in the olive green uniform of the People’s Liberation Army, stood waving and smiling benignly. Wearing crimson arm bands labeled with the characters Hung Wei Ping — “Red Guard” — similar throngs of youths flocked to the capital from every province in China’s vast hinterland. After traveling free on trains and buses to march in a dozen review parades, these multitudes broke up into jeering, anarchistic mobs that ran amok in all the major cities of China, screaming a single quotation from Mao’s writings: “Rebellion is justified!” They seized private citizens and Communist Party officials and paraded them through the streets, forcing them to wear tall dunce caps and signs that condemned them as “anti-Party ghosts and monsters”; they yelled slogans vowing to destroy the Four Olds — old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas; and handwritten wall posters, which would become emblems of the Cultural Revolution, began to appear in every urban street, railing against “the black gang of capitalist roaders” who allegedly opposed Mao Tse-tung. These were the opening shots in a furious internal revolution that would smash the twenty-million-member Communist Party, disable the government, and drag the whole of China into what Mao’s successors would eventually term “ten calamitous years.” Sympathetic outsiders at first saw these early events as Mao’s greatest and most noble attempt to transform human nature on a grand scale; others less favorably disposed viewed it more pragmatically as an unusually complex Communist power struggle. But whatever they thought of it, the Cultural Revolution intrigued people of all political persuasions, and in the late summer of 1966 the world watched it unfold daily with bewildered fascination.

  1

  Drifting with the dense, excited Chinese crowds through People’s Square in the heart of Shanghai, Abigail Kellner craned her neck constantly and sometimes stood on tiptoe to scan above the heads of the people pressing around her. The thud of drums and the discordant clash of cymbals and gongs filled the hot August night, and in the fading light the tall red flags and giant colored portraits of Mao Tse-tung borne by countless marching groups of Red Guards lent a dramatic, theatrical atmosphere to the center of China’s greatest industrial city. All the Red Guards wore crimson cotton Hung Wei Ping arm bands and carried little red plastic-covered books of quotations from Mao’s writings, which they flourished exultantly above their heads. Each marching column was followed by a small open truck or platformed pedicab carrying a noisy percussion group, but the Red Guards beating the drums and gongs always allowed the sound of their instruments to die away while slogans were being chanted. All the demonstrators, Abigail noticed, took their cues from student supervisors, who strode along the flanks of the marchers, consulting sheets of paper in their hands. Everybody shouted dutiful, identical versions of the same slogans, which appeared to have been written out for them by a higher authority, and none varied the wording or the order in which the chants were delivered.

  “Defend Chairman Mao!” yelled the cheerleaders.

  “Defend Chairman Mao!” chorused the marching groups.

  “We will defend Chairman Mao with our lives!” shouted the leaders.

  “We will defend Chairman Mao with our lives!” echoed the marchers.

  “Drag down all anti-Party ghosts and monsters!” screamed the leaders.

  “Drag down all anti-Party ghosts and monsters!-” roared their followers in response.

  In side streets through which she had walked on the way to People’s Square, Abigail had passed parked trucks piled high with Four Olds booty ransacked from nearby homes. Bolts of brocade, lacquered screens, bronze incense burners, statues, and clothing were jumbled together on the trucks or piled in scattered heaps on the pavements; big-character wall posters pasted on the houses by Red Guards denounced their occupants as “black elements.” Above some courtyard walls spirals of smoke were visible, rising from bonfires of books, and in the windows of craft shops, emptied of all goods, identical portraits of Mao Tse-tung had been hung, giving the streets an eerie, uniform appearance. In the square itself, nonstop revolutionary songs with titles like “Rebellion Is Justified!” and “Mao Tse-tung’s Thought Glitters with Golden Light!” blared from street- corner loudspeakers, adding to the din. Other Red Guards, standing on temporary platforms set up around the square, yelled raucous demands for the city’s population to “join in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.”

  At one platform Abigail saw a group of male Red Guards lifting girls bodily from the crowd to slash off their braids with garden shears. Others were ripping open the tight-legged Western trousers worn by girls and male youths and tugging off their pointed shoes. Most of the girls screamed and wept, protesting that they were “workers,” not “class enemies,” but the jeering Red Guards ignored their protests, flinging their torn Western-style garments after them as they scurried back into the crowds.

  “Why do you copy the bourgeois Westerners?” roared one Red Guard through a bullhorn. “Why wear tapered trousers and pointed shoes? The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution has been launched to liberate you from the Four Olds — old bourgeois habits and customs, old bourgeois culture, and old ways of thought!”

  Abigail turned her back on the speaker and moved on without haste, taking care not to draw undue attention to herself. I-laying seen Red Guards begin attacking Chinese people who wore Western clothes the previous day, she had deliberately dressed in a pair of dark blue baggy c
otton slacks, a loose jacket-blouse, and a cone shaped local sun hat of rice straw. Ever since coming to Shanghai to teach at the city’s Foreign Languages Institute five years earlier, she had been in the habit of wearing her blond hair in a neat chignon in public, and beneath the sun hat it was scarcely visible. While she knew that she could not hope to disguise her pale, foreign skin under close scrutiny, her choice of clothes, she knew from experience, would spare her the discomfort of constant stares among Chinese crowds and make her generally less conspicuous.

  In the week that had elapsed since Mao reviewed the first parade of a million Red Guards in Peking, many Red Guard groups had sprung into existence in Shanghai and they were taking to the streets daily in increasing numbers. As a result Abigail had spent more and more time each day walking in the city, trying to understand what was happening. She had mastered written and spoken Chinese during a three-year course at London University before coming to live and work in Shanghai, but the sudden proliferation of slogans and wall posters plastered on public buildings around the city provided a fascinating new challenge to her knowledge of the language. During her stay in Shanghai she had discovered, like many outsiders before her, that much of China’s internal life remained tantalizingly inaccessible to foreign eyes, and the sudden visible upsurge of political activity hour by hour on the streets was so rare and compelling that she had given little thought to any personal danger she might be facing.

  When she thought about it at all, she had comforted herself with the reflection that as foreign residents she and her fellow teachers at the institute stood outside the conflict, whatever its real basis might be. Furthermore, although the Red Guard groups were haranguing and molesting Chinese passersby, there seemed to be a strong suggestion of theatricality in everything they were doing. She recognized the traditional Chinese liking for powerful symbolism in the vast red flags and colored portraits of Mao carried by the marching Red Guards, and from the whispered comments of ordinary working Chinese that she had overheard in the crowds around her, she knew that she was not alone in wondering whether the scenes of youthful rebelliousness were anything more than unusually elaborate propaganda exercises.