The Cowshed

by Ji Xianlin

  At this time the political situation was very unstable. Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang had dropped all pretense of good governance and was showing its true colors. Corrupt tax officials lined their own pockets, buying houses, cars, and mistresses. Currency inflation was rampant, and even a professor could barely eke out a living. Your paycheck would begin to lose its value within hours after you received it. We all converted our pay immediately into silver or American dollars, and only converted it back into Chinese currency just before spending it. Feeling the weight of a handful of coins in my palm always gave me a sense of security.

  The students themselves were bitterly divided. The Kuomintang was struggling, and the Communist students were pressing their advantage fiercely. It was said that there were two places in Beijing that had already been liberated by the Communists: the Democracy Square of Peking University, and the Tsinghua campus. Where I lived, in the Red Building on the old campus, we were sometimes threatened by gangs of thugs in the employ of the Kuomintang. At night, we would board up the area with tables and chairs against the invaders. This was unbearable but also quite absurd.

  It is a natural law that an organism rotting from within will eventually die. In the spring of 1949, Beijing was finally liberated.

  During those three years, the reflection on my heart’s mirror was of darkness before the break of dawn.

  I often conceive of my life as being divided into two halves, the first consisting of the thirty-eight years in which I lived in the old China, and the second consisting of the unknown number of years in which I will have lived in the new China—since I have no intention of dying soon, I don’t yet know exactly how many years that will be.

  I describe 1949 as a personal turning point for me because there was such a great difference between living under Kuomintang and Communist rule. Like many of the older intellectuals who had not fled overseas or retreated with the Kuomintang to Taiwan, I knew very little about the Communists and wasn’t attracted to Communism. But our experience of the Kuomintang made us enthusiastic in welcoming the People’s Liberation Army into Beijing. In the early years of Communist rule, the new government was energetic and untainted by corruption, and its policies were popular with the masses. Much of the dirt of the old society was wrung out and washed away. We all had high hopes for a prosperous new society.

  It took us some time to adjust to the Communists’ new practices. I don’t know how other older intellectuals felt, but I was forty at the time, in early middle age, and balked at Communist ways. At political rallies, the cries of “Long live . . .” stuck in my throat. It even took me a while to get used to wearing a modern Mao suit instead of traditional Chinese dress.

  But before long, I was a changed person. I got used to the new way of doing things. The skies seemed bluer and the grass greener, with flowers blooming everywhere. I felt ten years younger, and I had endless faith in the future of the Chinese people. At meetings and rallies, I shouted slogans as loudly and passionately as anyone else. In retrospect, that was the happiest time of my life.

  Yet I was ashamed to think that I was enjoying the fruits of my fellow countrymen’s labor and sacrifice without having contributed anything myself. The Chinese people finally had a society we could be proud of, and I had done nothing to help achieve it. It was true that I hadn’t joined the Kuomintang or capitulated to German fascists. But while other young people my age were fighting and dying for a new society, I had been pursuing my own ambitions in distant Germany. There could be nothing more despicable than this. Even my so-called scholarly learning was abhorrent to me.

  I was convinced of my own guilt and, by extension, of the guilt of intellectuals as a class. This almost Christian feeling of guilt remained with me for many years.

  I fantasized about turning the clock back and having a chance to prove myself in the war. I knew I would have been willing to sacrifice my life for my country and for the revolution. I even imagined that I would have volunteered to die protecting the Great Leader, if given the chance.

  In my self-hatred, I worshipped three kinds of people: old cadres, soldiers, and workers. They were perfect, and I would never catch up even if I spent the rest of my life trying to emulate them.

  My deep-seated belief in my own guilt made me ready to root out the capitalist impulses in my own thinking and to adopt the proletariat mind-set (even though I still can’t say what that mind-set entails, apart from being selfless). In any case, I was prepared to remake myself in the image required by the new society. Thirty eventful years have passed since then.

  The first great political campaigns after Liberation were the Three-Antis, Five-Antis, and Thought Reform Campaigns. I participated in them all as a sincere believer. I had never been corrupt, so the Three-Antis and Five-Antis Campaigns didn’t affect me. But I myself believed that I urgently needed to reform my capitalist thinking. First, before Liberation my experience of the Kuomintang had led me to assume that politics was always dirty and to want nothing to do with it; second, I used to believe that Outer Mongolia had been stolen from China by the Soviet Union, and that the Chinese Communist Party was under Soviet control. I denounced these two former beliefs of mine in thought reform meetings. At the time, there were small, medium, and large “tubs,” venues of different sizes for public self-criticism. As the department chair, I was required to “bathe in a medium-size tub,” or make a speech at a department meeting. Fortunately, since my speech did not arouse the anger of the masses, I wasn’t required to self-criticize at a meeting of all students.

  Even the water in the medium-size tub was hot enough as it was. Debate was heated, some of it sincere and the rest less so. I had never experienced anything like it in my life. Each comment felt like an arrow aimed straight at me. But because my sense of my own guilt was so strong, I almost enjoyed the experience of being criticized. It made me break out in a sweat like in a Turkish hot bath. When the assembly finally allowed me to pass, I was so moved that I wept, feeling cleansed of my capitalist thinking.

  There were many true believers like myself, but there were also others whose sole aim was to pass. One particular professor had bathed countless times in small- and medium-size tubs, but the masses had never voted to let him pass, and he eventually graduated to the big tub. He must have made up his mind to pass once and for all. He made a stirring speech, abusing both himself and his capitalist father and mother. The crowds were touched. But then the chair of that meeting noticed that he had noted “Cry here!” in red ink at several places in his notes and would begin sobbing at those predetermined points. As soon as the chair announced this to the crowd, it caused a great stir. Needless to say, he didn’t pass.

  We criticized the movie The Life of Wu Xun for depicting the Qing dynasty educational reformer whom the Communists considered bourgeois. Then we criticized the movie Spring in February for glorifying bourgeois romance. We criticized Hu Shi and Hu Pingbo, as well as Hu Feng’s “counterrevolutionary conspiracy,” Hu Feng being defined as an enemy of socialism. Many other prominent figures in the art and academic worlds were enmeshed in the campaign against Hu Feng. The campaigns began to dig up its victims’ counterrevolutionary histories, and several of them committed suicide. One driver at Peking University told me that he was extra careful whenever he drove at night, because at any moment someone might leap out of the shadows and throw themselves under the wheels.

  The political campaigns reached their first climax in 1957. That year’s campaigns were larger, more threatening, and more extensive than any previous campaigns.

  At first we were told this was simply an Internal Party campaign in which everyone was invited to voice their opinions: “Nothing you know isn’t worth saying, and nothing you say isn’t worth saying in full” was the slogan. People still believed unquestioningly in the Party, and many naïvely loyal people voiced their criticism. Some of them were soon categorized as “rightists.” It was proclaimed that rightism was “a form of enemy conflict treated as a form of internal conflict,�
� and that rightists would never be rehabilitated.

  Some of the rightists pointed out that this conspiracy against them was unfair, that they had been promised the freedom to voice their opinions without being attacked. The official answer came from Chairman Mao himself: Yes, this is indeed a conspiracy, but it is a conspiracy in broad daylight! Many rightists were denounced, though not persecuted as “enemies of the people,” and several had grown old by the time they were rehabilitated twenty years later. Nonetheless, their rehabilitation demonstrates that the Party is both strong enough and confident enough to admit its mistakes.

  I don’t know how many people were wrongly categorized as rightists at the time. Apparently there was a quota, and a given number of people had to be declared rightists in order to meet it. In some cases, this was utterly absurd. I began to realize that this campaign, like so many others, was an excuse to persecute intellectuals. But even so, I supported it out of my own sense of guilt.

  In 1958, the Anti-Rightist Movement drew to a close. But the masses’ tremendous momentum was immediately plowed into a new push to liberate the factors of production and eradicate capitalist thinking. Capitalist thinking was to be eradicated in an operation called Uprooting White Flags, which would replace university professors and members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences who were considered backward, capitalist, and “white” with revolutionary, forward-thinking “red flags.”

  The liberation of factors of production took the form of smelting steel in backyard furnaces. This was a disaster. There’s nothing wrong with collecting scrap iron and melting it down. But when people ran out of scrap metal, they began to melt down useful objects like cooking pots. The proliferation of tiny furnaces all over China must have been visible from space, like so many stars. All they produced were useless lumps of pig iron. As for the people’s commune, it was considered an innovation in both production and ideology. The slogan of the time was: “If Communism is heaven, the people’s commune is a bridge to heaven.”

  Everyone wants to get to heaven, and people’s communes spread like wildfire across the country. That year’s harvest happened to be good, and people ate their fill. Stoves in private homes fell into disuse as everyone ate in the mess halls. Grain rotted in the fields because no one went out to reap. The power of the masses had been overestimated, as had the power of human beings to conquer nature. Sparrows had been defined as one of the four pests, and people bent all their energies toward destroying sparrow nests and shooting sparrows down.[1] Production figures were also exaggerated to incredible proportions: Fields that had previously produced several hundred pounds of grain were now said to be producing tens of thousands of pounds. For that to have been the case, the fields would have had to be carpeted in a thick layer of grain.

  I was about forty-seven years old at the time. I was a grown man, college educated, and had even studied abroad—yet I believed every last word of the agricultural reports. In the words of the slogan, I believed that “the fields are as fertile as the farmers are bold.” I despised skeptics whose minds had not yet been liberated, now that I was more Marxist and more revolutionary than they were.

  Three years of famine followed. It’s clear in retrospect that the Great Famine wasn’t primarily a natural disaster and that the suffering was worsened by human error. In any case, the whole country starved. Having already survived five years of hunger in Germany, I was an old hand at hunger and didn’t have any complaints.

  The country had clearly taken an overly leftist turn, and the task at hand was to correct excessive leftism. That was apparently what the central government originally planned to do. But then at the Lushan Conference, Peng Dehuai wrote Mao a private letter full of forthright criticism. Little did he know that this would swing the Party’s focus from anti-leftism to anti-rightism. Peng’s letter was widely circulated, and he was accused of forming a clique of Party opponents and ostracized. To this day, of all the Communist pioneers who contributed to liberating China, I have the greatest respect for General Peng, a courageous man whose willingness to speak up was an instance of characteristically Chinese integrity.

  Since we had been directed to oppose the rightists, we did. After more than a decade of continuous political struggle, the intellectuals knew the drill. We all took turns persecuting each other. This went on until the Socialist Education Movement, which, in my view, was a precursor to the Cultural Revolution. I will now discuss those two movements.

  Peking University was one of the earliest sites of the Socialist Education Movement. It split the school into two camps: the persecutors and the persecuted. Without quite knowing what I was doing, I joined the ranks of the persecutors. For the first time since Liberation, I began to question the Party. The Communists asserted that “the intellectuals were in power,” even though the university administration was clearly run by experienced Party cadres rather than professors. I couldn’t help wondering why Party leaders kept repeating that slogan when it was obviously wrong.

  Eventually the Municipal Party Committee intervened in the movement on campus, rehabilitating the university administrators who had been denounced at the International Hotel Conference. This would eventually become the impetus for the Cultural Revolution.

  In the autumn of 1965, after the International Hotel Conference, I was sent to Nankou Village in the suburbs of Beijing, to help take the Socialist Education Movement out to the villages. Here the intellectuals were in power. We were given all financial, administrative, and Party authority. We were also subject to strict rules: We were not permitted to cook for ourselves, we would eat on a rotation in the village, and we were not allowed meat, fish, or eggs. It was forbidden to mention your title or salary. Since the villagers were mostly making thirty or forty cents a day, whereas I was on a salary of four or five hundred a month, we thought they would be stunned if they realized how much we made. Nowadays, we wouldn’t tell villagers how much we are paid because they would only laugh at us. How the times have changed!

  In the winter of 1965, Yao Wenyuan’s essay “On the New Historical Play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office” signaled the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. I said openly in Nankou that I knew all three co-authors of the controversial column “Notes from a Three-Family Village.” One of my students became known during the Cultural Revolution for odd behavior such as signing political banners with his own name. He remembered these words, and would later use them as evidence to label me “a hanger-on of the Three-Family Village.”

  On June 4, 1966, I was summoned back to campus to take part in the Cultural Revolution, the first stage of which consisted in persecuting “capitalist academic authorities.” This movement was clearly an excuse to molest the intellectuals, and I was one of its targets. I might have admitted to being a capitalist, though I wouldn’t dare call myself an academic authority. But somehow the masses left me alone.

  A revolutionary committee was later established at Peking University, headed by the author of the first Marxist-Leninist big-character poster. This woman had powerful backing. It was said that she even had a direct line to heaven and was a close associate of Jiang Qing. She was an ignorant person who often made mistakes when she spoke, but that didn’t stop her from being imperious and arrogant. Now she was famous, and tens of thousands of tourists flocked to Peking University every day, like the legendary monks who had journeyed to India in search of Buddhist scriptures. The campus was in chaos.

  As the movement developed, Peking University split into different factions. The one backed by this woman, the Empress Dowager, had the upper hand. It was called the New Peking University Commune, or New Beida, and it was able to bully its opponent, Jinggangshan. But both groups were equally unruly, beating their victims up, stealing, and destroying things. The authorities had decreed “There is no crime in revolution, it is reasonable to revolt!” That was the only law these students recognized.

  Having survived the first wave of storms, I remained happily neutral for some time. If I had stayed out of the fray,
I would probably have been safe. I was in the position of the legendary general Wu Zixu: I had escaped past Zhaoguan, the last pass before the state of Wu, to safety. But although I am normally a fainthearted, cowardly person, I decided to do something abnormally bold. Only on very few occasions over the course of my lifetime have I been so bold, and now that I think back to these abnormal occasions, I consider them the best things I have ever done.

  The Cultural Revolution was one such occasion. While the Empress Dowager was exploiting her political connections to do whatever she wanted, the movement on campus became increasingly violent and savage. The Red Guards were raiding homes, beating up and screaming at their victims, hanging wooden boards around their necks and putting tall hats on their heads, humiliating them, spreading false rumors about them, and in some cases murdering them. In my opinion, their brutality contravened the revolutionary people’s line. I knowingly chose to risk my position of relative safety by joining the fray. In my diary, I wrote that “I would die to protect the direction of the Great Leader’s revolution!” These words were heartfelt.

  I was also confident that I had no flaws or secrets in my past that could be used against me. I had never belonged to the Kuomintang or any other counterrevolutionary organization, and I had never been on the side of the landowners and capitalists. I was risking my neck, but I thought I might survive unharmed. I made a deliberate choice to openly defy the Empress Dowager.

  Little did I know—or perhaps deep down, I did know—that this choice would land me in the cowshed. I had some influence among the students, and the Empress Dowager was furious to learn that I opposed her. She would not rest until I was defeated. My house was raided, and I was struggled against, beaten up, and bruised all over. When humiliated, I’m not the sort of person who can just let things go. I was so devastated by the struggle sessions that I decided to commit suicide. Once I had made the decision, I became extraordinarily calm. I put a stash of sleeping pills and medicines in my pocket, and took one last look at my aunt and wife, who had suffered alongside me. I was about to step out the door, climb over the wall, and escape, when there was a violent knocking at the door, and New Beida’s Red Guards came to escort me to the cafeteria for another struggle session. I had had the narrowest of escapes! This struggle session was exceptionally violent, and I was punched and kicked so savagely I could barely get up. But it made me realize that the human capacity to endure pain is limitless. I decided that I would survive. I would not die—I would live.