by Ji Xianlin
Yanyuan had descended into a state of chaos officially said to “confuse the enemy,” but we hardly knew who our enemies were. Eventually, two bigger factions formed across China, in Beijing the Sky Faction and elsewhere the Earth Faction. Both insisted that they were the only true revolutionaries, and troops sent to support the leftists couldn’t decide who the leftists were. Soon even the army itself split into factions in some places. We declared that chaos confuses the enemy, but we were confusing no one but ourselves; if any enemies were watching, they would have sat back and smiled.
I myself would have to stay out of the fray and remain neutral if I wanted to preserve my freedom. That way I could also avoid having to worry about getting involved in politics and making passionate speeches. Since classes had been canceled, I didn’t need to teach nor do any research. I could stroll around reading posters and listening to debates.
But utopias don’t exist, and Yanyuan certainly wasn’t one. I couldn’t ignore what was happening around me; I had to react. As the saying goes, a tall tree is swayed by the wind. For the past twenty years, I had served as the head of my department and held other political offices, such as that of Beijing deputy to the National People’s Congress, and although I wasn’t the tallest tree around, I could feel the effect of the political winds. I also had a keenly developed sense of justice, and I was very stubborn. Even with a safe haven in sight, I would rather sail out into a storm.
I began to realize that I disagreed with Nie Yuanzi. I felt that her actions were contrary to the direction of the revolution. I may not have known where the revolution was heading, but I had spent more than a decade studying Marxism-Leninism and knew that “serving the people” was a crucial measure of good Communist leadership. It could not be said of the Empress Dowager that she served the people. She enjoyed her privileges too much, loved giving orders, and often made life difficult for people who disagreed with her by firing them or withholding their pay. She called for people to be struggled against, allowing them to be tortured and killed. She had already been responsible for a few deaths, such as that of the secondary-school student I have mentioned above. New Beida, the organization she headed, was the most powerful organization on campus. Later, when revolutionary committees were established according to Party guidelines, she gained power officially as the chairperson of Peking University’s revolutionary committee. All these honors only made her more arrogant; the more I watched her have her way, the less able I was to hold my peace. But I also knew that it would be dangerous to make an enemy of her, so I remained neutral.
At this time, a mob burned down the Chinese embassy in Jakarta, sparking large-scale protests at the Indonesian embassy in Beijing. Both factions seized this opportunity to show off and rented several dozen cars that idled along the road leading to the south gate of campus, waiting to take protesters to the embassy. Since I didn’t belong to either faction, I didn’t have a ride, and both factions invited me to ride with them. I would have accepted an invitation from a woman in Jinggangshan, but I still had reservations about aligning myself with the opposition and didn’t want to act rashly. Instead I got into a New Beida car. The roads were packed with people waving red flags. We got to the embassy, chanted slogans for a while, and went back to campus.
I also followed the crowds to the home of a high-ranking army general to make revolution. I wasn’t sure why he was being targeted, but I tagged along anyway. It wasn’t that the Red Guards ever needed a good reason, but they usually did have the implicit approval of someone powerful. His house was near campus, by Jade Spring Hill, so most people walked there, and I rode my bike, “going it alone”[2] in a horde of cyclists that could have belonged to either faction, glad not to have to choose between the two factions again. At Green Dragon Bridge, I saw people headed toward West Mountain and decided to follow them. It wasn’t until we reached Wan An Cemetery, behind Jade Spring Hill, that I realized we must have overshot the turn. By the time we got back to the bridge, someone in the crowd was shouting that we had already successfully made revolution, so I followed the crowds back to Yanyuan without so much as having seen the doors of the general’s house. This, I realized, must be what most people’s experience of making revolution was like.
Both factions organized political classes for cadres as a means of competing for their allegiance. Even cadres who had previously been labeled capitalist-roaders or removed from their posts were being targeted, and I was among them. Again I hesitated to join a Jinggangshan class since New Beida was in power. They had many more members and a vindictive leader, and I knew what would happen if I offended them by being seen at Jinggangshan. The classes were identical: both extolled the Great Leader and professed a startling degree of devotion toward Madame Mao, who was praised in big-character posters and adored like the Virgin Mary. Although I had heard some criticism of her by then, I was naïve enough to continue supporting her.
But since I wasn’t good at keeping my opinions to myself, people gradually got to know what I thought of the two factions, which caused problems for me. Students from each group took turns recruiting me to their side, playing good cop/bad cop. The New Beida students came to my home and office (now that I think about it, it seems strange that I should still have had an office, but I distinctly recall seeing them there). The polite ones merely warned me not to join Jinggangshan, while the less polite said things like “Don’t join them if you value your life!” They phoned me at home to cajole me into joining them. I realized that I was in the same situation as the elderly professor I mentioned earlier. I was troubled by the New Beida’s supporters, and the more cornered I felt, the less I felt like having anything to do with them. Eventually I decided to take the plunge and join Jinggangshan, even though I was well aware of how dangerous it was. I wrote in my diary: “I would die to protect the direction of the Great Leader’s revolution!”
The Jinggangshan students were delighted. Unusually, they decided to appoint me an orderly of their Ninth Brigade (comprising members of my department). I was glad I had decided to join them, but one unfortunate consequence of the decision was that I too became caught up in partisan fever since I no longer had to hide my opinions. Along with other Jinggangshan students, I started writing big-character posters and making speeches attacking New Beida. I must admit that we weren’t always well mannered and not everything we said was true.
I still cherished hopes that I might be one of the lucky few who would escape. I reasoned that although I used to be apolitical and knew little about the Communist Party, I had never been in the Kuomintang or any other counterrevolutionary organization. There would be nothing for my enemies to attack because I had nothing to hide.
But I also knew that Nie Yuanzi was especially hostile toward me. She had always been a vengeful person, and she was now at the height of her political career as an alternate member of the Central Party Committee and deputy chair of the Beijing Revolutionary Committee. She never put up with any opposition. At the time, getting one word wrong would suffice to brand you a counterrevolutionary—for instance, if you happened to have stored the words “socialist” and “capitalist” in the same mental card file, using one when you meant the other could prove a fatal error. Your opponents would immediately seize on the slip of your tongue and fabricate arbitrary metaphysical misreadings of your words. And yet the Empress Dowager herself often made such mistakes.
I was aware that I was walking a fine line. Throughout the summer and autumn months of 1967, it was rumored that I was next, that my home would be raided. I wanted to ignore the rumors but couldn’t help overhearing them. Every week I wrote in my diary: “There’s a storm brewing above my head.” Eventually, I knew, the storm was going to crush me. All the lecturers who dared to oppose New Beida were feeling this way. Throughout that sultry summer and dreary autumn, I felt uneasy.
A HOUSE RAID
DESPITE THE RUMORS, I kept hoping that my luck would hold. I told myself that I had no “pigtails” or weaknesses that could easily be at
tacked. I was wrong.
On the night of November 30, 1967, I had taken a sleeping pill and was fast asleep when a car pulled up outside. I heard an impatient rapping at the door and opened it to find six men holding wooden cudgels. They were all Nie Yuanzi’s disciples and students in my department, their faces arrogant and frosty. I had long expected this, so I wasn’t surprised. As the proverb goes, “The hero knows when not to resist.” I am no hero, but I refused to give these men a reason to use their cudgels by resisting their entrance. Chairman Mao had proclaimed: “There is no crime in revolution, it is reasonable to revolt!” People chanted this slogan every day without thinking about what “revolution” or “revolt” actually meant. All kinds of crimes could be committed in broad daylight in the name of revolution. Although I had tried my best to protect the direction of the Great Leader’s revolution, the revolution itself had now decided I would be struggled against next. Even then, however, I was too loyal to question it.
I was hustled into the kitchen before I could get dressed. My wife and elderly aunt were being held there already. We shivered in the piercing draft. I couldn’t tell what they were thinking because the men were waving cudgels in our faces, and we weren’t allowed to speak. My mind was clear. I knew that any gesture of kindness had long been branded “revisionist.” Chinese philosophy had debated whether human nature is intrinsically good or evil for millennia, and until then, I would have sided with the notion of innate goodness. But when my house was raided, I changed my mind. Could you believe that these people were innately good? Could you deny that they were acting like beasts? Anyone with a conscience should be concerned by the ethical decline of Chinese society today, and yet we seldom ask how it began.
Of course, some of these thoughts only occurred to me later. At the time I was determined neither to grovel to the Red Guards nor to resist them. There is no use reasoning with beasts. So I crouched on the dusty kitchen floor, watching and listening. I wondered why they had sent such a large team to the home of three unarmed elderly people. Of the two men guarding the kitchen, one was a student of mine called Gu. He had been a student of Korean language and history in my department, but now we were enemies. Red Guards were never prosecuted for any deaths they caused, and their cudgels and spears were the law.
Chinese robbers traditionally blindfolded their victims and poured cooking oil in their ears. Fortunately we had not covered these customs in class, so even though I couldn’t see what was happening outside, I could hear it. The Red Guards were making such a clatter that the tiles trembled on the roof. If I had the Buddhist power of seeing through walls, I would find our visitors peering under mattresses, opening boxes, and ransacking cupboards. They smashed and destroyed as they saw fit, and they didn’t need keys when they could hack both wood and metal open with their axes. I had lived frugally for years and saved enough to buy a few antiques on occasion. They were destroyed right away. These hooligans were experts at house raiding, and the Cultural Revolution had given them ample opportunity to hone their skills.
One man named Wang, who was studying Thai, asked me for the keys to the bike storage. Having been to my home before, he knew that all my books were kept downstairs. The administrators of the staff quarters had been worried that they would be too heavy for the floors in my apartment and persuaded me to move them to the bike storage on the ground floor. The bike storage space would have sufficed for our building if we had only a few bikes among us, but since there were far too many bikes to fit in such a small space, it had fallen into disuse and lay empty. I had my neighbors’ permission to move my books there instead. The Red Guards had already made a thorough search of the apartment, and when Wang stretched out his hand for the key to the bike storage, I could tell he was an expert. Again, I felt as though I could see and hear through walls, as though I were watching the destruction of my beloved library.
The Red Guards may not have been exceptional students, but they would have been familiar with the imperial practice of “obliterating the nine branches of the family,” slaughtering anyone who had a connection with the accused. In any case, they made me hand over the little address book in which I had recorded all my friends’ names. I feared for my innocent friends and relatives who were unlucky enough to be in my book. My heart was bleeding.
I cowered in the kitchen, my thoughts churning. I was distressed and outraged, terrified and then instantly calm. Our lives lay entirely in the hands of these men. We were like ants beneath their fingertips, and heaven could not hear our cries. The world seemed to be ruled not by men but by ghouls or beasts. I thought of Shakuntala in the classical Indian play, whose goddess mother swoops down from the heavens to rescue her when she has nowhere to go. In a world without gods, who would rescue me?
Time is indifferent to human joys and sadnesses. The night passed, the house grew quiet, and our guards disappeared. The car roared away, and soon the night was as still as though nothing had ever happened. We were left to survey the battlefield.
The rooms were a mess. All the tables and chairs had been overturned. Anything that could be broken was broken, including all the antiques and other decorations. My bed had been thoroughly searched, and someone had stepped on the sturdy hot water bottle under the covers, thoroughly soaking the bed. Despite having been up all night, we were wide awake, but numb, speechless, paralyzed.
A popular saying came to mind: A misunderstanding is when a good man strikes a good man; an ordeal is when a bad man strikes a good man; a comeuppance is when a good man strikes a bad man; and a squabble is when a bad man strikes a bad man. Despite my many shortcomings, I believe I am a good man. I am considerate, I care about those around me, and unlike the legendary general Cao Cao, I would never claim that I would “rather wrong all men than have all men wrong me.” I think I fit the general definition of a good person. There may have been some good people led astray among the hooligans who raided my home. But many of the others were psychopaths indulging their sadistic instincts under the cover of revolutionary instructions. I had previously worshipped the notion of making revolution, but now I see it as nothing but the most ignorant, the most unprincipled form of metaphysical sophistry. Unfortunately hundreds of thousands of young people were infected by this fever, and many have now reached middle age. The Red Guards have done well for themselves: some have made millions, others have married into wealth, and yet others have successfully scaled the slippery slope of the Party bureaucracy. And yet, strangely, none of them appear to regret their deeds! Are they all profoundly forgetful or have they no conscience?
It had been the longest night of my life, but dawn finally came. At daybreak I got on my bike and pedaled to Jinggangshan headquarters, naïvely hoping that my own faction would take up my cause. All the loudspeakers in Peking University were blaring my name and broadcasting my crimes. I can’t be worth their going to all this trouble, I thought. It made me feel tiny, riding my bike alone through campus while the loudspeakers cried, “Down with Ji Xianlin!” Even today, that scene strikes me as being both ridiculous and pitiable. I was now a legitimate target.
When I got to the headquarters, I found that Jinggangshan’s leaders already knew of the raid. In fact, they were sending a photographer to my home to record the carnage. I would later learn that they were already preparing to investigate my record so that they could toss me overboard and denounce me when the time came. While I was loyal to them, they were doing their best to get rid of me. When I left the building, I found that my bicycle had been locked to a tree trunk, probably by someone from New Beida. I had to say farewell to the bike that had accompanied me everywhere for more than twenty years, and return home on foot.
There I found the Jinggangshan photographer looking through my garbage. I knew that he had political rather than aesthetic motivations. He wanted to see whether New Beida had made any errors in the course of the raid. Had they stepped on a piece of newspaper with the Great Leader’s photograph on it? Had they torn or stained any images of the Great Leader? These
were all severe offenses, and if he found any evidence of them, the photographs could be used against New Beida in the future. But the Red Guards were expert house-raiders, and the disappointed photographer had to leave empty-handed.
The Jinggangshan leaders appeared to be sympathetic to me after the raid, and I began to think that I should stay at the headquarters for safety. Later I realized that would have put me in even greater danger. But at the time, I was afraid that New Beida would send someone to arrest me at night and hold me in a secret location, which had happened to other victims. Jinggangshan was at least heavily guarded. But then again, although I didn’t know yet that my own faction was planning to investigate me, I knew that they had investigated N., the elderly professor from my department, whose background was considered complicated because he had lived overseas. I reasoned that there was nothing to stop them from investigating me. Now that New Beida had struck me down, I was dead weight, which meant they would do anything to get rid of me. It was true I had done nothing wrong, but I knew that factionalism can drive people to do treacherous things. Instead of facing the potentially embarrassing scenario of being kicked out by my own faction, I decided to go home and wait for the ax to fall. The catastrophe I had feared all year had finally hit. There seemed to be no place anywhere in the whole wide world for me. Upon his execution, the seventeenth-century writer Jin Shengtan is said to have exclaimed, “Being beheaded is the most painful thing that can possibly happen to someone, and here I have achieved it with little effort—isn’t that something?” I, too, had achieved my infamy with scant effort, but I could hardly bring myself to take pleasure in that fact.