Anthony Grey
Page 67
Never before during the thirty intervening years had Mei-ling recalled those fleeting moments with such vividness, and a soft cry escaped her lips. Clasping her arms tightly about her own body, she rocked gently back and forth on the edge of the cot, invaded suddenly by a deep sense of remorse. It was in the pure light of that Kansu dawn, she realized now, that she had made her tragically mistaken choice. In her imagination she saw Jakob waiting in the same agony of expectation as she splashed through the shallow stream toward him, leading the pack mule with his baby on its back. During the entire jolting journey through the weird loess mountains she had been fighting and refighting a desperate emotional battle with herself; by then she sensed intuitively that she might be carrying a spark of new life within her, but although she had often been overwhelmed by the strength of her feelings for Jakob in the difficult weeks following the crossing of the Great Snow Mountains, she had never been able to rid herself of the conviction that her first duty was to her country and its revolution. Right up until the moment when they spoke and Jakob had declared his love for her, she had wrestled with her indecision — then abruptly, against the urging of her heart, she had closed her mind and deliberately turned her back on the fierce and tender passion they had shared. As her mule stepped back into the stream, Mei-ling saw now, she had set out along the path that had led her through much mental agony to the ultimate depravity of imprisonment in the barricaded instrument room. With blinding clarity she understood how she had helped shape her own fate and in the sheer vividness of the recollections she felt a powerful sense of retribution: from a lack of courage she had spurned Jakob’s love, stifled her own deepest emotions, and as a result had suffered greatly. If she had obeyed her instincts on that morning in Kansu, her whole life would have changed; all the pain and horror of the confrontation with Kao and Jakob would have been avoided and Abigail would never have suffered. Suddenly her mind filled with the vision of Abigail gazing numbly at the furious Kao in her apartment while Jakob looked on helpless and white-faced. She tried to dismiss it but the scene expanded frighteningly inside her head, enveloping her totally until she felt as though part of herself were merging into the tortured expressions of all the people around her. Then something snapped and the images faded, giving way to an immense and overpowering sadness.
At that instant the door of the storeroom was flung open with a crash and Mei-ling opened her eyes to find herself looking into the angry faces of her monster control team. In her lap, her still-bleeding hand had soaked the bandage with crimson blood and she realized that an hour had passed, although she didn’t know whether she had slept or not while she sat on her cot.
“You have disobeyed our instructions to write a new confession!” yelled the Peking Red Guard; “Why?”
“I was too tired,” replied Mei-ling in an exhausted whisper.
“Then watch this!”
Mei-ling saw that the Red Guard carried in her hand two or three slim books. From the covers she recognized the volume of Long March recollections to which she had contributed, a book of her own short stories from the thirties, and a novel of the Yenan period she had written in Shensi. The Peking girl was shredding pages with both hands, and producing a box of matches from her pocket, she knelt and set fire to a little pyramid of crumpled paper on the dirty concrete floor. Working quickly., she tore up pages and covers to feed the fire until flames two feet high were leaping from the burning books.
“It isn’t enough lust to criticize and repudiate vile representatives of the reactionary bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the Party, the army, and all spheres of culture,” sneered the Red Guard girl, adding more torn pages. “We must physically burn them and sweep them away!”
Other female Red Guards crowding the corridor beyond the open doorway clapped and cheered while the flames reached higher, and some began chanting “Sweep away bourgeois vampire Lu!” Mei-ling stared, mesmerized, at the fire, and even when the final pages of the books had been added and the flames burned low, she continued to gaze blankly at the pile of black ashes in the center of the floor. After chanting more slogans at her, the Red Guards withdrew, banging the door loudly behind them, and Mei-ling listened numbly to the sounds of their voices as a heated discussion developed outside the storeroom.
“Why is it necessary to be so severe on her?” asked one of her former students in a whisper. “Is she so important?”
“Her brother, Marshal Lu Chiao, was subjected to public ‘struggle’ before thousands of Red Guards in Peking,” snapped their leader. “It was our duty to take strong action against the bourgeois vampire since she lives among us. I informed Peking of our intentions and the answer came back at once saying ‘No objections.’ “
The voices grew fainter as Mei-ling’s tormentors moved away down the corridor and for a long time she sat motionless on her cot, staring in front of her — the words she had heard repeated themselves over and over inside her head and suddenly she rose and crossed the room to pick up the box of matches which the Red Guard leader had dropped accidentally on the floor. Opening the box, she saw it was almost full and at once she removed the metal clip from her hair. Turning her back to the door so that her body would conceal her actions if the observation flap was opened, she knelt by the chair and scraped the sulfur carefully from the head of each match. When she had finished, she crushed the little pile of chips with the bottom of her drinking mug, then brushed the heap of finely powdered sulfur into her left palm. With one quick movement of her hand she tossed the powder into her mouth and began swallowing hard, but while she was doing this, the observation flap swung open and a member of the monster control team peered in. A moment later the door flew back on its hinges and three female Red Guards dashed into the cell and began trying to wrench Mei-ling’s hand away from her mouth.
“Stop her,” screeched one of the Red Guards. “She’s trying to kill herself.”
They struggled fiercely with her and each girl in turn tried to tear away the hand which Mei-ling had clamped to her mouth. But she resisted with all her fading strength, and when at last they did succeed in freeing the hand, it was empty save for a few grains of pink powder. In the same moment Mei-ling became still, sagging unconscious in their arms, and the three Red Guards stared at one another in dismay.
“We must take her to the hospital,” shouted their leader. “She has confessed her guilt by her actions and must not be allowed to escape punishment.
Dragging Mei-Iing’s limp body between them, they rushed out of the room
PART SEVEN
The Long March Ends
1976
The violence and confusion that marked the early stages of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 intensified as the movement spread to factories, mines, and rural areas. Hundreds of millions of workers and peasants were drawn into the fray, spreading chaos to all parts of the country. Hard-line Red Guards from Peking, acting on the instructions of Mao and his wife’s Cultural Revolution Group, spearheaded campaigns that overthrew virtually every Party secretary in each of China’s twenty-nine far-flung provinces. The People’s Liberation Army and police continued to stand aside, on Peking’s orders, while provincial Party headquarters were ransacked and officials were humiliated, tortured, and sometimes killed. The Communist Party administration was crippled nationwide, but because Mao had devised no alternative power structures, local Military Control commissions and “Revolutionary Committees,” dominated by the People’s Liberation Army, eventually had to take over in almost every province. These organizations, however, only heightened the confusion; the regional military rulers set up their own new Red Guard groups, and endless disputes broke out among the innumerable factions that had been created. This led to great loss of life, and in some cities workers and Red Guards broke open military armories and fought pitched street battles with mortars and machine guns. Eventually the army had to crush the unrest by force, with the result that most regions of China came under the direct rule of the local military commander — a shadowy remin
der of warlord days.
In the spring of 1969 a Communist Party congress appointed a new Central Committee and Politburo dominated by military leaders, and these same soldiers took control of the provincial Party administrations. As all Red Guard organizations were disbanded, tens of millions of young, urban Chinese were dispatched to remote rural areas to “learn from the peasants,” which meant living in straw huts and caves while doing backbreaking agricultural work. In these harsh surroundings a deep sense of disenchantment set in among the former Red Guards, and this was heightened by the discovery that most peasants no longer felt any affection for the Communist leadership anyway in the wake of the Great Leap Forward disasters. Many of the exiled youths began sneaking back to the towns to live in hiding, and what had once been a regimented, well -ordered nation became deeply demoralized: crime mushroomed, corruption flourished, and back-door bribery and black markets unheard of since 1949 again became commonplace.
Externally China had become more isolated than ever during the frenzied phases of the Cultural Revolution. American support for Taiwan and Chiang Kai-shek had until then kept mainland China Out of the United Nations and deprived her of diplomatic recognition by many of Washington’s allies — but a series of wild incidents involving Chinese students, diplomats, and overseas Chinese in a dozen foreign countries in 1967 touched off massive demonstrations in Peking that turned China into an international pariah. The embassies of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, France, Italy, India, Burma, Indonesia, Mongolia, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia all suffered defacement; many diplomats and their families were physically abused and driven out of China. When Communists in Hong Kong began mounting violent demonstrations in support of the Cultural Revolution, they triggered a train of events that ended with the burning down of the British embassy in August 1967. This welter of xenophobia reached its climax in 1969 with a flurry of armed clashes along China’s northern border with the Soviet Union, which left many dead on both sides. The conflict perhaps demonstrated how easily a devastating war might break out and helped bring China’s leaders to their senses.
A change of direction toward stability and rationality was supervised by the country’s pragmatic premier, Chou En-lai, who had survived the Cultural Revolution and preserved his position by dint of his legendary diplomatic talents. Although he had been closely associated with those policies condemned by Mao as revisionist, Chou also managed to protect some other moderate leaders, and most important among them was Teng Hsiao-ping, the former Party general secretary whom the Red Guards had singled out and vilified, along with President Liu Shao-chi, above all others. President Liu died of maltreatment in a prison cell, the Cultural Revolution’s most prominent victim, but after succeeding almost single-handedly in restoring sanity to China’s highest counsels, Chou rehabilitated Teng Hsiao-ping and in 1973 made him a vice premier, earmarking him for the succession.
Teng’s dramatic comeback was made possible by events of high melodrama involving Mao’s previously designated successor, Defense Minister Lin Piao. The famous Long March general who had given Mao vital military support during his early Cultural Revolution maneuverings apparently became a victim of the Party chairman’s obsessive paranoia in September 1971. In that month a Chinese military airliner flying toward the Soviet Union crashed in Mongolia, killing and burning all its passengers beyond recognition, and after a long silence Peking announced that Lin Piao had been on board with his wife and supporters, fleeing to Moscow. It was said officially that Lin had tried to assassinate Mao before escaping, and although this is open to doubt, it seems certain that Lin died or was assassinated around this time for reasons that may never be fully known. Subsequently, Marshal Lin’s supporters were removed from power in the Party and army, but although this massive purge loosened the military stranglehold on the country, China’s fragile stability was once more undermined. With Parkinson’s disease taking an increasing toll of his mental and physical energies, Mao from that time onward played an am bivalent role in ruling China. In turn and without much apparent logic he encouraged both the moderate policies of Premier Chou and the radical extremism of his wife’s group, which would later be condemned as the Gang of Four. Yet despite these internal conflicts, Peking’s new diplomacy began to bear fruit. Entry into the United Nations was secured at last in the autumn of 1971, and a rapprochement with the arch-imperialist American enemy began. President Richard Nixon was invited to Peking in 1972, and the United States, along with such other Western nations as Canada, Australia, and West Germany, belatedly extended diplomatic recognition to the People’s Republic of China more than two decades after it came into being. Unfortunately for China, Chou En-Iai became ill with cancer, and as his condition worsened, Teng Hsiao-ping became the nation’s effective premier. The deterioration in Mao’s health, meanwhile, had accelerated, and visiting statesmen whom he insisted on receiving encountered an increasingly pathetic, slack-jawed figure surrounded by nurses. But so long as he breathed, on the strength of his legendary past he remained the supreme ruler of eight hundred million people, and while his life ebbed away, rival factions for the succession plotted and intrigued in the pavilions bordering the Forbidden City as China’s imperial courtiers had done so often in the past a the fall of a great dynasty.
Events were further complicated in January 1976 by the death of Chou En-lai; it had long been assumed that Chou, who was seventy-eight, would survive and succeed the eighty-two-year-old Mao, but his untimely death threw the question of succession wide open. Mao’s wife, Chiang Ch’ing, and her radical group seized the opportunity to launch strident new press attacks against “unrepentant capitalist roaders” in the Party, and these broadsides in effect plunged China into a new, mini-Cultural Revolution. Mao once again showered the weary population with vague inspirational exhortations, urging them “to clasp the moon in the Ninth Heaven and seize turtles deep down in the Five Seas,” and Teng Hsiao-ping’s dominant position was further undermined in February when a little-known second-rank leader, Hua Kuo-feng, was appointed acting premier on Mao’s instructions. Because Teng’s continuation of Chou En-lai’s pragmatic policies had been winning widespread popular approval after the years of turmoil, tension began to mount again across the nation, and in early April it exploded into the frill view of the world in the Square of Heavenly Peace. In the days leading up to Ch’ing Ming, the Chinese spring festival for commemorating the dead, millions of people went to the square to lay wreaths at the Monument to the People’s Heroes in honor of Chou En-lai. Many of the wreaths also carried veiled attacks against Madame Chiang Ch’ing and her radical supporters, and this conflict sparked off the first truly spontaneous political riots in Peking since 1949.
The revolution thus entered a cataclysmic six-month period, and before 1976 ended China was to suffer a wave of death, destruction, and political upheaval as dramatic as the Gotterdammerung of European mythology — the twilight of the gods
1
It’s almost as if the great spirits of our ancestors have suddenly become impatient with us all,” said Marshal Lu Chiao, gazing grimly up at the mellow gold tiles and red columns of the Gate of Heavenly Peace. “Why else should the nation’s three greatest heroes have been struck down at the same time? Premier Chou En-lai has already passed away, Marshal Chu Teh is on the verge of death in his ninetieth year, and Chairman Mao himself is sinking slowly in one of those old imperial pavilions over there.”
Chiao nodded in the direction of the curved roofs visible above the walls that enclosed the Forbidden City, and at his side Jakob studied the lined face of the aging Chinese marshal. Since their last brief meeting, at Pei-Ta University, his hair had turned completely white and his face now had a sallow, unhealthy pallor. Dressed in a civilian cap and a wadded overcoat of blue cotton, Chiao looked no different from the thousands of other Peking residents thronging the center of the capital; but in the timber of his voice and the dullness of his eyes Jakob could detect something of the toll that the events of the past decade had taken on
his energy and optimism.
“Your system of government doesn’t allow for graceful retirement,” said Jakob gently. “Premier Chou was seventy-eight, after all. And Chairman Mao’s eighty-two.”
“In feudal days mandarins and army generals all came to this spot on important occasions,” said Chiao, ignoring Jakob and speaking in the same grim voice. “They were made to kneel here, facing the Golden Water River. Courtiers lowered the emperor’s edict from the top of the gate — in the mouth of a golden phoenix carved from wood. A Board of Rites mandarin collected it on a tray ornamented with clouds and his officials copied it onto pieces of yellow paper for imperial messengers to deliver to all parts of the country