But most of all, thanks to relentless campaigns of thought reform, people themselves were careful to select reading material that was politically correct. Nobody wanted to run the risk of being infected with bourgeois poison when dreaded struggle sessions were bound to follow. Maria Yen, a student at Peking University, wrote:
Translations of the modern Soviet novelists were safe, of course; we could buy the works of such popular writers as Fadeyev and Simonov. Older masters who had influenced a whole generation of Chinese writers – Turgenev and Dostoevsky and even translations of Gorki – were dismissed as obsolete. In Chinese literature it was all right to read the works of Zhao Shuli, Ding Ling’s The Sun Shines over the Sungari River and the so-called ‘collective productions’ of young writers, which were hailed as being rich in ‘party traits’. Virtually everything else, including books the Communists had previously praised as ‘progressive’, was suspect.
This was in 1951, before censorship tightened up.39
Still, truly voracious readers managed to survive, often on private collections kept away from prying eyes. Kang Zhengguo, then still a young boy in the ancient capital of Xi’an, had a rebellious streak and was sent to live with his grandparents. The old house, with its whitewashed walls, hardwood floor and delightful jumble of old furnishings, was a treasure trove of all sorts of books, stuffed away in dusty piles in the attic. Kang devoured everything he could get his hands on, from Buddhist sutras and swashbuckling novels to old newspaper clippings pressed between the pages of an oversized edition of The Thirteen Annotated Classics. The collection would survive until the advent of the Red Guards in 1966.40
The beat of folk drums and the chant of revolutionary song displaced classical music. Records of Beethoven, Chopin, Schubert, Mozart and other foreign composers seen as bourgeois were quietly put away. To celebrate the tenth anniversary of Mao Zedong’s Yan’an talks on literature and art, the entire staff of the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing decided in 1952 to debate how best to apply the Chairman’s theories to their work, and concluded that musicians must be ‘in harmony with concrete reality’. The same year the president of the Shanghai Conservatory – one of the most renowned in Asia before 1949, and a leader in modern music – wrote to the Liberation Daily to attack blind worshippers of Western music who thought that ‘music need not have ideological content’.41
Jazz was so much in demand before liberation that Shanghai was considered the music capital of Asia. Budding players from all over the world, as well as experienced musicians from the United States, performed in the many venues for popular music right up to 1949, but within weeks after the fall of Shanghai nightclubs were boarded up or converted into factories. The regime banned jazz outright, decrying it as degenerate, decadent and bourgeois. Even more in demand, in the decades before liberation, were female singers who incorporated Hollywood songs, jazz orchestration and local folk music into popular tunes. Music by stars such as Zhou Xuan was widely broadcast over the radio and played on the gramophone, only to be denounced as pornographic after 1949. The destruction went further: the great majority of the 80,000 records produced in the era before communism were deposited in a state archive where they deteriorated beyond repair.42
Soon ears became attuned to the new music introduced by Soviet cultural delegations. Radios started broadcasting such tunes as ‘The Favours of the Communist Party are Too Many to be Told’, ‘Hymn to Chairman Mao’, ‘Song of the New Woman’ and ‘Brother and Sister Plough the Wasteland’. Singing became popular. Unlike solos, which were intolerable expressions of bourgeois individuality, group singing was safe. And it helped spread propaganda, with songs composed for every type of activity. Farmers sang of land reform, workers of labour rights. ‘Soldiers sing while marching or when they stop to rest. Schoolchildren sing a great part of their day. Prisoners sing four hours a day. In all the indoctrination courses for the candidates for government positions, singing takes up three to four hours daily.’ Students gathered in parks on special occasions, singing a strident ‘Song of the New Peasant’ or its equivalent to the accompaniment of drums and gongs. Girls in choirs belted out such catchy tunes as ‘Ten Women Praise their Husbands’. The singing was taught with the same demanding discipline as everything else, with the result that it was often very impressive. Some may not have sung from the heart, but everybody knew the words, as they echoed through city streets and mountain valleys. Children were soon seen singing on their way home, swinging an arm to beat the cadence.43
Loudspeakers helped. They seemed to be everywhere, placed at street corners and railway stations, in dormitories, canteens and all major institutions. They often blasted the same tune, as people assembled in the morning for their fifteen minutes of calisthenics. They broke up the day, alternating between political speeches and revolutionary songs as people had their lunch break or made their way back home at the end of their shift. They played more songs in the evening. So widespread and intrusive were loudspeakers that regulations curbing their use after midnight had to be introduced in Beijing, with little effect.44
With new songs came new plays, welcomed at least initially by many viewers. Young people in particular did not always care for old-style Chinese opera with its classical plots and extravagant costumes. Maria Yen, like many other students who supported the revolution, rushed to see The White-Haired Girl. When the curtain went up she saw the interior of an ordinary farmer’s hut, with realistic, rough furniture, a dab of snow against the papered window. ‘And no lords and ladies with falsetto voices minced out on the stage; instead we found a simple peasant, bent with work and with age, speaking to his young daughter.’ The old father was forced to surrender his daughter into the hands of his rapacious creditor, but was so heartbroken that he hanged himself. ‘Some of us were close to tears as we watched the landlord and his hired bully pull the girl away from the father’s body to carry her back to the landlord’s household. All over the audience we could feel the indignation rise as we watched the girl being beaten and abused like a slave by the haughty women of the household.’ The plot was simple. The daughter becomes pregnant, and the landlord promises marriage, but sells her to a brothel instead. She escapes and hides in a cave with her baby for two years, her hair growing long and white. The communists liberate the village from the Japanese, and the young girl is finally reunited with one of the guerrilla fighters, a childhood friend she always loved. The landlord stands trial as the peasants shout their verdict: the death penalty. It was a gripping story. The dialogue, singing and acting flowed naturally, creating a spectacle that touched the emotions of many who watched it. The audience burst out in applause as the villainous landlord was dragged off for execution and the curtain came down.45
The White-Haired Girl was produced as an opera, as a film and also as a ballet. It was performed by professional theatre societies, travelling drama groups, military acting troupes and amateur actors organised in factories, offices, schools, universities and youth clubs. Other plays, for instance Cao Yu’s Thunderstorm, were endorsed, all following the precise rules and regulations of the Drama Reform Committee, set up by the Ministry of Culture in July 1950. And conversely, anything that smacked even remotely of bourgeois individualism was proscribed. A few foreign playwrights managed to survive – largely thanks to the fact that they were allowed in the Soviet Union. In the case of Shakespeare, for instance, two leading critics from Moscow had concluded that the English bard had exposed the evils of the capitalist system, which paved the way for a performance of Romeo and Juliet by a theatre school in Beijing in 1956 – something so exceptional in the People’s Republic that it warranted a full review in the Illustrated London News.46
Theatre was propaganda, and it spread even further thanks to short, simple and very topical plays. Like the rice-sprout songs performed by the dance troupes of the People’s Liberation Army, military actors helped propagate the message by mounting popular plays almost anywhere, in squares, gardens, parks and other public spaces where pedestr
ians could be corralled to watch and applaud. The plays always addressed the latest government campaign in simple terms easily comprehensible to illiterate farmers, but they became rather predictable. There was always a scene of a soldier placing his foot on the protruding belly of an enemy lying on the ground with legs in the air, whether he was an evil landlord, undercover spy or imperialist exploiter.47
Shanghai had been second only to Hollywood in terms of the film industry. But much of it was destroyed in the Second World War, and whatever vestiges remained the new regime swept away. The most popular genres had happily mixed pulp fiction, swashbuckling adventure and comedy with avant-garde techniques to create a celluloid language which was popular all over China. Classical-costume, knight-errant, martial-arts and magic-spirit films attracted even larger audiences, capturing not only millions in China, but many more abroad, since South-east Asia was their biggest market. Hollywood itself was popular. When the communists marched into Shanghai, the Cathay was advertising I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now, a musical film in Technicolor featuring June Haver. None of this was exclusive to the great cities along the coast, since already in the 1930s cinema had penetrated deep into the hinterland. Even in Kunming, a medium-sized city in the subtropical south, half a million people went to see the 166 films shown in 1935.48
A campaign against foreign cinema followed within months of liberation. Foreign films were deemed reactionary and decadent, and were ousted by Russian ones – for instance Lenin in October, The Virgin Land and The Great Citizens. Within a year or so hundreds of employees were working at several dubbing centres. Some of the films were well done and inspiring, especially those made before the war (for example The Battleship Potemkin), but many were dull, even in the eyes of leftist students. So few people wanted to see them that they were never profitable. In Beijing prices had to be cut several times to attract a crowd. Still the masses stayed away, until the authorities granted the theatre operators permission to show foreign pictures from outside the Soviet Union for five days a month. But the contrast between a full house for reactionary films and the rows of empty seats on days when healthy productions were shown was an embarrassment. A prompt ban resolved the issue. The Korean War brought an end to Hollywood everywhere in the country. In cinema, as in other art forms, the tremendous burst of creativity that was supposed inevitably to follow revolution, as artists were freed from the fetters of feudalism and imperialism, never materialised.49
Like every other social group, religious leaders were lured into the embrace of the party by promises of freedom. They were quickly disabused. The pretence of religious freedom was upheld for a year or two after liberation, but the leadership were secretly determined to extirpate all rival belief systems. In February 1951, Hu Qiaomu, who headed the propaganda department, upheld the Soviet attack on the church as an example for emulation. But as he spoke to his underlings, he warned that it would take time to ferret out all diehard believers.50
Buddhism was only loosely organised and therefore made an easy target. Monasteries were destroyed, monks were beaten or killed, copies of the Buddhist canon were burned and sacred images were melted down for their metal. Land was confiscated and Buddhist properties broken up. In some places the clergy was reduced to ‘a state of terror’, in the words of a contemporary. Some became targets in the vast persecution designed to break the power of traditional elites during land reform. ‘In most cases they would strip the clothing from the upper half of a man’s body and bind his hands behind his back and his feet too, and then he would kneel facing the masses and confess his crimes,’ remembered one monk from a monastery near Nanjing. In the Lingyin Temple, the largest in Hangzhou, a crowd of 4,000 assembled in front of a makeshift platform made of tables piled on to each other. Five monks were forced to face the crowd. The verdict was always the same: ‘You see how fat and pretty he is. Why is he so fat? He has been eating the blood and sweat of the people. He is an exploiter, an evil person. Everyone says he should be killed. But the People’s Government is magnanimous. It will send him to labour reform.’ In the large cities the tone was more subdued, and some of the most devout followers among the elderly were allowed to keep their faith. But no new converts were accepted. In Shanghai, for instance, a quarter of all 2,000 monks and nuns were dispersed by February 1950.51
Particularly vulnerable were the country’s minorities. The ancient town of Lijiang in Yunnan, crisscrossed by bridges and canals, was dominated by the Nakhi, who had their own language, literature and customs. They built houses that looked deceptively simple, but had delicate patterns on the interiors of casements and doors. Their temples, too, seemed rather plain from the outside, but were richly decorated with carvings on poles, arches and statues of gods. Revolution, in Lijiang, followed the same pattern as elsewhere. ‘All the scamps and the village bullies, who had not done a stroke of honest work in their life, suddenly blossomed forth as the accredited members of the Communist Party, and swaggered with special red armbands and badges and the peculiar caps with duckbill visors which seemed to be the hallmark of a Chinese Red,’ noted one long-term resident. Old Nakhi dances were prohibited and replaced by the rice-sprout songs which nobody recognised. Learning them after work became compulsory, as did attendance at interminable indoctrination talks at daily meetings. There were continual arrests, often in the dead of night, and secret executions. Local priests were banned. The lamaseries were desecrated, priceless tankas burned or smashed, sutras destroyed and lamas either arrested or scattered. The lamasery halls were converted into popular schools, ‘as if there were not enough buildings elsewhere for this purpose’.52
Similar scenes occurred all over Yunnan, an ethnically diverse province in the far south-west bordering Burma, Laos and Vietnam. In Kangding county the army occupied several lamaseries. One monastery in Mao county was converted into a prison. Sometimes the local monks and nuns were treated as counter-revolutionaries; some were killed in denunciation meetings. The entire family of a woman selling herbal medicine was put to death. In another case a nun was forced to cut out her tongue. She choked to death on her own blood.53
A more inclusive approach was tried after the Great Terror. A Chinese Buddhist Association was formed in Beijing in November 1952. It was a servant of the state. Instead of exhorting its followers to practise quiet contemplation and introspective meditation, it demanded that Buddhists participate in land reform, struggle against counter-revolutionaries and take a lead in the ‘Resist America, Aid Korea’ campaign. Thought reform was mandatory. Monks, like teachers, professors, engineers or entrepreneurs, had to reform themselves, denounce each other, abandon their ‘feudal ideology’ and demonstrate their hatred towards class enemies. Gone was the idea of compassion and kindness extended to all living beings without discrimination. And once the monks, too, were civil servants, the Buddhist Association, in 1954, worked hard at discouraging the burning of paper money, celebration of festivals and sacrifices to the spirits. Accepting pious donations was denounced as ‘cheating the masses’. Heads of monasteries had to pledge that they would not provide hospitality to travelling monks, who should be engaged in production instead. Deprived of all their traditional sources of income, monks were forced to work, often on plots of poor land. Already in 1951 the monks of Baohua Shan, the most famous ordination centre in central China, ‘were suffering virtual starvation – there was not even diluted congee to eat’. In Yunmen Shan the monks had to manage on one meal of thin gruel a day.54
Many took the path of least resistance and disrobed. Some became farmers, others joined the army. Sometimes the former monks and nuns continued living at their monasteries, but let their hair grow. A few of them abandoned their vows, married and raised livestock. But the regime kept the decimation of the Buddhist clergy carefully hidden from public view. The official policy was to claim the same monastic population year after year – half a million in 1950 and still half a million in 1958. But the pressure never abated, and already in 1955 a party official in a secret meeting
commended the fact that the number of monks had declined to a mere 100,000.55
The same duplicitous approach was adopted towards the buildings themselves. As tens of thousands of monasteries were converted into barracks, prisons, schools, offices or factories, in Beijing vast amounts of money were lavished on the Yonghegong Temple. It stood bright and spotless, its joss sticks smouldering away in their jars of sand, leaving no ash. The conservation work was carried out to support the government’s policy towards the border areas. There were 6 million Buddhists in China and another 7 million in Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Tibet. And at the heart of Tibet was religion, tightly organised and pervasive. Mao cautioned his colleagues to proceed slowly, as the loyalty of the lamas must first be won over. In total, about a hundred monasteries and pagodas were repaired between 1951 and 1958 – out of the 230,000 places of worship that had monks and nuns in residence before liberation. Some were part of a conservation programme, a few were even protected by law, but most served as showcases for foreign dignitaries. The United States supported Buddhism in South-east Asia, forcing the People’s Republic into quiet competition for the allegiance of its religious neighbours. The ever suave Zhou Enlai regularly invited Buddhists from Burma, Ceylon, Japan and India to visit the country’s beautifully repaired temples, occasionally offering a relic bone or a tooth of the Buddha in religious ceremonies that would have been decried as the height of superstition under different circumstances.56
The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 Page 24