theories
and
critical
studies
A. ZHELOKHOVTSEV
__TITLE__ The ``Cultural Revolution'': a Close-Up __TEXTFILE_BORN__ 2007-05-18T19:06:11-0700 __TRANSMARKUP__ "Y. Sverdlov" __SUBTITLE__ (An Eyewitness Account)
PROGRESS PUBLISHERS
MOSCOW
[4]Translated from the Russian by Galina Sdobnikova
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__COPYRIGHT__ First printing 1975 © Translation into English. Progress Publishers 197560103--635 014(01X75 UZ
[5] CONTENTS I. MY WAY TO CHINA I Choose Oriental Studies. Striking New Friendships. My First Trip to China. Scientific Research. A Vision of Peking's Libraries. II. ON THE EVE OF THE DISASTER 11 Entry Visa Issued. The Peking Station. Official Reception. Altercation. Studies at the Library. The First Debate. Department Head. Short Meetings. Cinema Entertainment. Festivals. Attempted Murder. May Fireworks Display. Planetarium. Trip to Tientsin. II. THE MOVEMENT EXPLODES 44 Teng To's ``Black Books''. The First Tatzupao. Anarchy.Hsitang Cafe. "Dual Rule''. The June 3 Assault. IV. THE FIRST DAYS OF THE NEW POWER 65 Drumbeats. Visit to Peita. Summary Trial at the Stadium. Wang Seized. "Humaneness Is a Disease of the Brain''. I Am Questioned by the ``Revolutionaries''. Captive Beaten Up. How Long Can a Man Stand with His Hands Up? V. EVERYDAY LIFE UNDER NEW REGIME ........ 80 Raid on a Flat. A Physicist. A Kind Word. Work Team at the Entrance. Feeding the "Freaks and Monsters''. On the Lake. Suicides. VI. THE "WORKING GROUP": TRIUMPH AND DISGRACE 95 Ceremonial Entry. The ``Opportunists'' and the ``Leftists''. Confused Extremists. "Chairman Mao Is Back!"---Chiang Ching Speaks. The Rout. [6] CONTENTS VII. TRIP ACROSS CHINA 118 The Sian City Committee Holds Out. A Workers' Hotel. The Song of Ouyang Hai. Yenan---Mao's Chief Wartime Base. A Peasant Describes His Meeting with Mao. A Chinese Village VIII. THE AUGUST POGROMS...................137 Conversation in a Taxi-Cab. Hungweiping Lair. "Red Guards" in Peking. Feverish Decade. Pogrom. Murder in the Railway-Station Square. Soviet Embassy Blockaded IX. THE HUNGWEIPING REIGN ..............159 September Swing. A Peking American. Hungweiping Feuds. Raids on the Provinces. The Way to Become a Hungweiping. Mao in Uniform. Chinese Myths X. WRECKERS AT LARGE .191 ``Down with Museums and Monuments!" Death of the Writer LaoShe. Tien Han's Lot. Renegades from Chinese Culture XI. CANNED CULTURE 21.1 Classics Overthrown. Drive Against the Stage. Down with Shakespeare and Balzac! Anti-Soviet Dough. "Inspiration---a Bourgeois Survival" XII. THE LAST DAYS 224 My Teacher's Lot. Hungweiping Indulges in Confidences. Peking Party Committee Blocked. Hungweipings in Army Uniform. I Go Home [7] __ALPHA_LVL1__ I. MY WAY TO CHINA I CHOOSE ORIENTAL STUDIES. STRIKING NEW FRIENDSHIPS.
MY FIRST TRIP TO CHINA. SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH.
A VISION OF PEKING'S LIBRARIES
A Sinologist is one who studies China's economy, culture, history and language, including its written characters. My own Chinese studies started in the autumn of 1952, when 1 joined the Moscow Institute of Orientology. By our third year, we students already knew a good deal about China, had mastered the required number of complex characters, and were looking forward to an opportunity to test our knowledge of the vernacular in conversations with our Chinese comrades.
I had my first chance at the W.orld Youth Festival in Moscow in the summer of 1957. The Chinese delegation was a very big one, so that interpreters were in great demand and we students were also invited to take part. I met our Chinese guests at the border, and escorted them to Moscow on a fiveday trip by train across the whole of Siberia. I shall always look back on the Festival as a landmark of my young days. I took my new friends, the flower of China's rising generation, on strolls along the streets of Moscow, to theatres and museums. I had come to like them very much. Shortly after, I set foot on Chinese soil with a group of student trainees at the Manchuli railway, station. My notebook was full of addresses and telephone numbers, for I had almost as many acquaintances in Peking as in Moscow. I was hoping that the spirit of the Moscow Festival would follow us to China, but my Peking friends seemed to have changed out of all recognition. Many of them, particularly those who had the warmest feeling for the Soviet Union and for me personally, were not there at all, having gone away or disappeared altogether. The rest seemed 8 to have changed character and even their manner of behaviour. On the whole, something had changed in China. A tyro student of China, I found political life in Peking and the very atmosphere of Chinese society strange, mysterious and enigmatic, for at the time the Maoists were engaged in some very intricate moves. I was surprised by the disappearance of my Chinese friends and could not understand the cautious prudence of those who were still there.
Back at home, I soon passed my final exams, but any appointment to work in China was out of the question: SovietChinese cultural ties were being gradually wound down. I went to work at the Institute of Sinology of the USSR Academy of Sciences, where I concentrated on research into the story in medieval China, and eventually published a book entitled Huapen: the Urban Story in Medieval China.
In the course of my research I read everything available in the Soviet Union on my, subject, all the reprints of original writings, but I was still badly in need of another trip to China to read up on the subject at the libraries in Peking, for while on my student visit I had yet to choose my field of research and so had not done any purposeful reading.
Moreover, as there was no chance of practising my Chinese, and actual interpreting was becoming increasingly scarce, I was beginning to lose my fluence. In 1961, I acted as guide and interpreter to the Chinese film producer, Chang Shui-hua, who had put out the well-known film, The White-Haired Girl. And that was that: from then on visits by Chinese delegations were down to a mere trickle.
Quite unexpectedly, in the late summer of 1965, eight years after my first trip to China, I was told that under an exchange programme between the USSR and PRC Ministries of Higher Education I would be able to revisit China. By that time, quite a few Chinese students had already arrived in the Soviet Union under that programme, so mere reciprocity in relations between states seemed to assure my trip. My imagination, worked up by the news of a possible trip, went back to the Peking that I had known in the spring of 1958. Once again I saw in my mind's eye the great avenue of Eternal Tranquility, cutting across the city centre, the rectangular Tien An Men Square, the tree-lined mainstreet of the Legation Quarter, the high railing of the Kuochi Hotel, and the young couples on the boulevard along the red-brick walls of the British Mission. I could still recall the stir and tumult of the Tachalar trading centre with its countless shops that had been in business for 9 something like 500 years, and the smell of old paper in the endless rows of the book arcade. I saw Peking as a thronging, bustling and spirited city.
In that one-storeyed, uniquely Chinese city, every rising building, temple or tower stands out in striking contrast to the low skyline. I often pictured the white Buddhist pagodas, the grey unbelievably massive wall running round the ancient city of Peking, the gilded roofs of Kukung, the rich and sprawling Museum of Ancient Palaces, and the giant century-old cypress trees near the Temple of Heaven. Peking is, indeed, an unforgettable city.
When planning my trip, I told myself that this time I would not waste a single minute of my stay in Peking: eight years of research at home had taught me where to look for the precious sources I wanted, the 17th-century woodcut prints; by now I had a knowledge, albeit only from the catalogues, of Chinese scientific writings, whereas on my first visit I had lost my bearings among the second-hand stalls in the Peking arcades and had failed to identify the books I wanted among the ancient editions. I promised myself that things would be different this time.
It turned out, however, that going to China at the time was no simple matter. The months went by but no answer from China was forthcoming. My foreign passport was ready in September 1965, but the green light from the Chinese came only five months later.
Back in July 1960, the Soviet Government had been forced to recall its specialists from China, and since then SovietChinese relations had not shown any sign of change for the better, because the Chinese persisted in their policy of cutting back links and contacts between the two countries.
Ever since 1963, from day to day the Chinese press had carried on an overt anti-Soviet campaign. The struggle against the CPSU was being described as a ``class struggle" between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, a struggle which, Jenmin jihpao asserted on March 23, 1965, ``must go on every day, every month, every year for the next hundred, thousand and even ten thousand years''. Its editorial on November 11, 1965, said that the CPC and the CPSU had ``much to divide and nothing to unite them, much in contrast and nothing in common'', This fundamental declaration of a split was repeated word for word in the CPC's Central Committee's official letter to the CPSU Central Committee on January 7, 1966.
The swelling tide of anti-Sovietism made it very unlikely that 10 a Soviet specialist would get a warm welcome in China. As a regular reader of the Chinese press, which was quick to make anti-Soviet statements on the flimsiest pretext, ranging from slander on Soviet films to charges of a ``deal with imperialism'', I was beginning to doubt whether I could go at all.
When the entry visa was at last issued, I had only four days to wind things up: after waiting for months for the formal permission I found that I had to leave almost at once.
[11] __ALPHA_LVL1__ II. ON THE EVE OF THE DISASTER ENTRY VISA ISSUED. THE PEKING STATION. OFFICIAL RECEPTION.
ALTERCATION. STUDIES AT THE LIBRARY. THE FIRST DEBATE. DEPARTMENT HEAD.
SHORT MEETINGS. CINEMA ENTERTAINMENT. FESTIVALS. ATTEMPTED
MURDER. MAY FIREWORKS DISPLAY. PLANETARIUM. TRIP TO TIENTSIN
On February 2, 1966, my three companions and I left Moscow for Peking on board the international express.
When we left the Moscow Region, and the multicoloured domes of Zagorsk had streamed past the window in the frosty haze, a train guard from the Chinese team servicing the express entered our compartment. He was dressed in a military jacket with a button-up high collar and outside breast pockets of exactly the same cut as the Chinese Party uniform, except that it was of a deeper blue.
``Where are you going? Let's have your tickets,'' he said in deliberate Russian.
``Hello! We are going to Peking to study,'' I answered him in Chinese on behalf of the whole group.
``Welcome!" he exclaimed in Chinese and broke into a happy smile. ``So you're going to study Chinese? And for how long?''
``Ten months.''
``Your Chinese is very good, I understand every word you say,'' he said in line with the old Chinese tradition of civility and politeness.
I told him that I had studied in the USSR and had then stayed in Peking for six months in 1958, but to explain my accent I added that for several years now I had had very little practice and was beginning to slip.
``But of course not!" he answered with a ready good-will. ``Your second trip will make your Chinese even better. Staying in Peking?''
12I nodded. He suddenly became grave and said without the traditional Chinese smile:
``We don't have many visitors now.''
I told him that going to China was indeed no easy thing, that I had had to wait for an opportunity for seven years and had then been delayed for another five months, so missing a part of the academic year.
We went on to discuss the Peking weather and the possible summer heat, something that worried me, since my previous visit had not been in summer. I could not have known at the time that my conversation with the train guard would be one of the very few conversations with any Chinese throughout my long stay.
Once through with the tickets, the train guard asked us what kind of tea we preferred and, since ``green!" was our unanimous answer, he brought us packets of molihua tea, the favourite drink in North China which is flavoured with jasmine (moli) flowers. The tea was poured out into thick china teamugs with lids painted over with landscape scenery. The guard also provided us with very comfortable Chinese leather slippers and, as we were settling down to our tea, brought in a pile of illustrated China magazines for the previous six months.
__b_b_b__The customs and other formalities at the Soviet border station were soon over.
I asked the border guard whether there was a lot to do.
``Not very much,'' he answered handing back our passports, ``few people go to China these days.''
This cryptic and recurrent phrase made us all somewhat uneasy, although we naturally realised that China must now be a different place and that we could not expect the old welcome: I meant to take any possible surprises in my stride.
One of my acquaintances at home, recently back from China, had once said:
``People in China no longer stop you in the street to express their friendly feelings or try to embrace you.''
``Do they at least say hello?" I asked.
``Not often and reluctantly, unless, of course, there is no one else about. But that hardly ever happens. As for speaking to one, they never do.''
``Why not? Is that dangerous?''
``It is---for them!''
At the Chinese border, a young Chinese border guard stood in the doorway of our compartment and scrutinised our 13 passports, with two other men looking in over his shoulder. He was so slow and deliberate that I could not help smiling.
``Are there only four of you? Why not five?" he suddenly asked.
So, the border guard seemed to know all about us. There had, in fact, been five of us due to go to Peking, but one young woman had to stay behind to care for her sick husband.
The customs inspection over, we were invited to the waiting room. As we walked along the railway tracks to the station, the amiable customs officer told me that he had graduated from the Peking Foreign Languages Institute, that the emblem on the station building consisted of the stylised elements of the word ``worker'' and symbolised the working class, and that since my first visit in 1958 ``everything in China" had `` markedly changed for the better''. Peking, he said, was also a very different place. A Palace of the National People's Congress and a History Museum, new and wonderful buildings I had yet to see, were up in Tien An Men Square.
I said I was naturally eager to see the new square and the new buildings, as well as the other ``sweeping changes" and what effect these fiad had on life in China.
As we approached the station, the customs man fell silent, but at the time I did not give it a second thought.
The waiting room looked like a second-rate cinema lobby. It had a plaster bust of Mao Tse-tung set against the red velvet covering the wall. Tea was then handed round, and a good thing, too, for the room was being heated most sparingly, if at all (in fact, after my warm Moscow flat, I was to find the unheated or poorly heated buildings very cold in wintertime). In the middle of the room, there was a long ceremonial table with pamphlets and magazines.
``Anti-Soviet stuff most probably,'' said one of my companions. I paged through a few and found that he had been quite right.
After hours of waiting, we were told that it was time for us to return to the train.
It was already dark when the train started on its way across China. I turned in early so as to be up at daybreak and do some window gazing.
Next morning, we saw a very different landscape from the one we had seen when crossing Mongolia. The gently rolling plains had given way to North China's loess plateau, about which much has been written. The train was winding its way along a river valley, sometimes very close to the cliffside. Deep 14 rugged canyons cut through the yellow soil, which looked more like compressed dust. The parched and barren soil with a withered tree here and there and the dry river beds all spoke of a severe drought. The dead winter fields with scarcely a human being in sight looked dismal. The only signs of man's presence were the wisps of smoke rising from the chimneys of the mudhuts sheltering from the wind deep down in the canyons or the cave dwellings cut in their sides and clustered into what looked like honeycombs. An occasional two-wheeled slanting cart drawn by horse, mule or donkey wended its way along the unusually narrow roads.
To break the long and tiring trip across the expanses of Asia, we got out to limber up at every stop only to find the platforms empty, for no outsiders were allowed to come near the train.
__b_b_b__As the train neared Peking, it had to wind its way among yellow-brownish hills, parched and bleak. Short tunnels ended in dead ends so that front and rear cars changed places. At last we broke away into the open, and there ahead of us lay Peking. The music on the radio became most solemn. The train sped through the suburbs and rolled into Peking Station, a recently built spacious structure with the city's first escalator leading up to the first floor.
The Chinese take pride in the Peking Station as well as in all the splendid buildings that went up in the years of hunger and hardship. Its platform, like those of the way-stations, was all but empty. We were met by a group of fellow trainees, and embassy and consulate officials, some of whom we had known back in Moscow or in college, and this gave us a feeling of warmth and a sense of joy. Representatives of the Chinese universities we were to stay at were also there.
Dozens of pairs of curious Chinese eyes were staring at us from behind the huge window-panes of the first-floor waiting room. Chinese passengers even stopped to look us over in the glass-covered gallery leading to the distant platforms. We couldn't help feeling like exhibits.
``Where else are they to see a foreigner?" said an embassy official noting my embarrassment.
The formalities at the check-point for foreigners took no more than a few minutes, and we were out in the square, where the university representatives sorted us out into cars. Lida, one of our trainees, and myself were packed into a battered babycar of European make together with the driver and two other Chinese. I found myself next to a young Chinese with 15 somewhat rough-hewn features, who told me his name was Ma, that he came from the town of Chinghua in the southern province of Chekiang, and that he was to be my futao. The word is hard to translate and means that he was to be my consultant, to help me along in my contacts with people and institutions, live in the same room, talk with me on any subject and help me to arrange my studies and everyday life, in short, he was always to be at my side. This was good news, for now I would at last have a chance to improve my vernacular. It was, of course, a pity that Ma came from Chekiang, because the local dialect falls far short of the standard Chinese, but he had lived in Peking for more than 10 years and spoke very well. He laughed and told me that the previous autumn he had been to see his relatives and had relapsed into dialect.
The other girl in the car, named Lin, was to be Lida's futao. She was from Nanking and her features were much softer than those of Ma. She was pretty and appeared to be very intelligent. Aware that she was attractive, Lin had a proud and distant air, so that at first I even had the impression that she was not very well disposed towards us, but happily I turned out to be wrong.
The Pedagogical University stood in the Outer Street of the New Breach, so named after one of the breaches in the massive walls which run in a quadrangle, around old Peking, the four sides facing the four cardinal points. After Peking became the capital in 1949, it expanded far beyond the walled city, and the old gates no longer met the city's needs, so that new breaches had to be made in the walls. The University was moved from the city centre to its present site after 1949. When we arrived, some of its buildings with lecture-halls were yet to be completed and some, like the chemical department, were for the time being located in various lanes, called hutungs. The main entrance was also yet to be completed, and its layout was somewhat odd: it jutted out towards a six-storeyed administrative building.
The car passed through the southern side entrance and followed a narrow asphalt drive up to a panel with slogans and a hovering profile of Mao Tse-tungi Turning off, the car ran through a maze of lanes and finally stopped under the concrete porchroof of a four-storeyed grey-brick building. Near the entrance stood a group of first-year Vietnamese students.
My room was on the first floor, next door to the Foreign Students' Office. It was long and rectangular and had a 16 cement floor and a high window. Only the first frame was glazed, while the second was fitted with a fine wire netting to keep out the mosquitoes, Ma told me. There was a strong draught from the window, but the four-loop radiator was heated only mornings and evenings, so that the temperature changed sharply twice a day. Although I longed for my warm Moscow flat, I never complained, realising that the Vietnamese' hostel was probably heated with particular care while the Chinese students' own hostels were very likely not heated at all for the sake of economy. I moved my bed up to the window and my table away from the cold. On the other side of the window stood Ma's bed and table, and by the door we had a bookstand on his side and a wardrobe on mine. Much of the wall plaster had peeled off and there were many holes left by the nails and drawing pins of earlier lodgers.
A very short, elderly man, who moved about in an odd, sidling way, soon came into the room. He introduced himself as Wang and said he was on the staff of the Foreign Students' Office. Ma hastened to tell me that Comrade Wang was the equipment officer. Wang asked me whether there was anything else I wanted. Giving the room a quick glance, I asked for a desk-lamp. As I found out later, even foreigners were not entitled to the luxury of a lamp, but even though he had to go through a lot of trouble, Wang finally got me one.
When we first met, I asked Wang to write down his name and surname, which is common usage in China. His clumsy characters betrayed his poor schooling.
In the talk we then had, Wang told me that he came from Manchuria, had taken part in the guerilla war, and had later fought in the People's Liberation Army. He had had very little schooling, could just read and write, and valued his job most of all. He had no children, for he and his wife had denied themselves any children out of loyalty to the policy of population control. I liked Wang for his simplicity, and he, for his part, was very obliging and kind to me from the start. Like all common people, he had a good knowledge of the Chinese classical stage and, whenever there was no one close around, liked . to have a talk about it.
The room next to mine was occupied by Bac Ninh, a student from Vietnam. We met the very first day and he was very friendly, so that we got to know each other quite well. He was a teacher of Chinese at Hanoi University and had come to Peking for a two-year refresher course. Three Chinese teachers took turns in giving him lessons in his own room, making 17 constant use of a tape-recorder to help him polish up his pronunciation. In his spare time, Bac liked to play the guitar or some national instrument, and hummed the tune as he did so. Other Vietnamese came down to his room from the second and third floors, and when I passed along the corridor, I often heard snatches of Soviet songs, which they whistled or sang in Vietnamese.
Any foreigner would find the conditions I was living in most unusual: one never had a chance to be alone. There was always someone about, so that one always had to smile, to be deliberately polite, and to keep oneself in check. Solitude came only in one's sleep.
The hostel was a solid new building, but it was by no means a place for solitude or reflection: anyone living there was always in the public eye. Even the wall along which my futao's bed stood had a rectangular recess opening into the next room with a bookshelf fitted into it. However, you could see through the slits and anyone in the next room could apparently hear every word being said in our own. Our room was no exception, for all the other students lived in similar conditions. My first impression of all-pervasive mutual mistrust and nervous suspicion soon proved to be correct, but it was some time before I realised that in China spying and informing on each other had become part of the natural order of things.
People feared being suspected of withholding something and brought up all kinds of personal and other matters for debate at public meetings.
My neighbours to the left, whom I went to meet right away, turned out to be young men on the staff of the Foreign Students' Office. They received me with the usual Chinese ceremony, and spoke of the weather and national customs. In a few days, however, I found that the inmates of that room kept changing: hardly anyone slept there two nights in a row. It was apparently something like a guard room. What with the recess in the wall, this kind of company was not what you might call pleasant, but I tried to reassure myself by saying that the arrangement was due to their mistrust of each other rather than of me.
__b_b_b__I was keen to meet some native inhabitants of Peking, whose pronunciation has a rare sort of natural ease about it. The Office was quite ready to help me, but could do nothing: the Peking Pedagogical University did not seem to have any Peking-born teachers and all those I was being introduced to 18 came from provinces all over China. Their speech was, of course, very good, but somewhat deliberate and colourless whenever they watched what they were saying, and hard for a foreigner to understand whenever they slipped into their native dialect. The Peking dialect which these men from various parts of the country used among themselves was richly flavoured with army jargon: typical words like ``attack'', ``assault'', ``strike out'', ``mobilise'' and ``fight'' were in common use. When used in everyday life, brash appeals and high-flown phrases had an odd ring about them and verged on the ridiculous.
On the day of our arrival, we were given an official supper which we found much too plentiful, for after our long journey we were all sleepy. In the evening and the next day we were taken by some officials over the University grounds, shown the gardens and the greenhouses, the creche, the nursery school and the library. We were also given a medical check-up at the dispensary. During the eye test, I was surprised at the low standards.required.
Twice a day we were taken out on pleasant sight-seeing tours to parks and museums, or to theatres, soirees and receptions. The Chinese are past masters at entertaining guests. Even for us common students the arrangements were perfect.
One fine February day we were taken to see the Temple of Heaven, a marvellous sight in the sunlight. We spent another morning at the Kukung Museum of Ancient Palaces, but managed to see no more than half of it. We spent two days at the grand History Museum in Tien An Men Square. After that, we were taken to the splendid Palace of the National People's Congress across the square.
In the palace lobby, the keeper invited us to sit down on a learner sofa and went to telephone his superior.
``What may I show the Soviet visitors?" he shouted into the receiver, for it never occurred to him that we might just understand him. ``I think there is no need to show them the Tibet and Sinkiang halls!''
After a pause, he repeated in a military manner:
``Right! Not to open the halls of Tibet and Sinkiang, and also Taiwan, Heilungkiang and Inner Mongolia. Right!''
Replacing the receiver, he paced grandly across the lobby and invited us in*to the halls. He was once again most polite and obliging. We were taken through several halls with some of the best exhibits of modern applied art, but the first things we were shown everywhere were Chairman Mao's busts, portraits, and sayings.
19Lida and I were allowed a fortnight to settle down, and were then invited to the Office to discuss our study plan.
In the reception-room, which was the same floor as our rooms, we were met by a lady, Comrade Chao, the head of the Office. We thanked her for the arrangements and for the welcome we had been given, and went on to polite mutual probings. Comrade Chao told us that she was an old Party member and had long lived in Yenan, the CPC leadership's famous headquarters during the anti-Japanese war.
``Office Head Chao is an old revolutionary fighter,'' my futao dropped a flattering remark.
``Oh no, I am just a simple old woman,'' Chao modestly objected.
Still, it turned out that her grandson attended the nursery school at Pei-hai---an exclusive nursery school for the children of old and merited Party and government workers. This model nursery school is located in one of Peking's most ancient palaces overlooking the Central Park lake, and has been amply described by Western journalists, who are invariably taken to see it.
We then went on to discuss our study plan. This being Lida's first visit to China, she was somewhat shy and reluctant to speak Chinese, but her studies were soon arranged, whereas I was in for some trouble. It turned out that I had come to China all but by mistake. I had studied medieval Chinese stories, short novels and folklore for eight years, but the Chinese translator of my papers had translated ``belles-lettres'' as `` sanwen" (instead of ``hsiaoshuo''), which means lofty-style classical prose: historical works, essays, and epistolary writings. I was naturally upset and tried to object. Chao heard me out and said in cold tones:
``The ancient stories and short novels you specialise in are bad writings, their ideology is corrupt, they are not studied at this University and no one will agree to act as your tutor.''
I had good reason to object, for I knew that the late Professor Wang Ku-lu, the leading expert on the subject, had worked at Peking University until he died. It was hard to believe that he had left no followers. . But Chao was firm:
``At present we have no one dealing with these bad writings. Had we known they were your speciality, we could not have admitted you at all.''
Chao's blunt threat at once had a sobering effect on me. Indeed, the slip in translation could provide a perfect pretext 20 for sending me back to Moscow without much ado. A fortnight in China was no bad thing in itself, but since I wanted to work, I humbly asked Chao what she could suggest.
She thought for a moment and said that the best thing for me to do was to take up the history of ``sanwen'' and ancient Chinese with Professor Kuo. I had read some scientific articles by the Professor, who was a well-known scientist of the middle generation. I would be quite happy to study under such a prominent specialist, but said that I wanted time to think it over. On second thoughts I realised that the inaccuracy in the translation had done me a good turn, and was thankful.
My consent seemed to mollify Chao, who thought it a sensible decision, so that our second meeting was much more congenial. She insisted on a programme of studies drawn up for me by the Chinese, and I accepted. This time I did not insist, but merely asked to be allowed to do some research on my own on a subject I had studied for years. It was Chao's turn to say she wanted time to think it over.
At our third meeting, I was introduced to Professor Kuo. He was Deputy-Dean of the Philological Department and was in effect in charge of all the literary studies, for the Dean himself was a linguist, while the other deputy, whom I was yet to meet, was not a scholar but a Party functionary. I was happy to hear that Professor Kuo was a northener, which made it easy for me to understand his speech. I gave him some reprints of my articles, whose titles Ma and I had very carefully translated the night before. Professor Kuo appeared to have ii good impression of my articles, and told me quite a few pleasant things. The Office people were also beginning to view me with relatively less bias, stiffness and suspicion.
At our fourth meeting, Professor Kuo solemnly announced that the Administration was prepared, ``wherever possible'', to supply me with ``hsiaoshuo'' material for individual study. The consultations I had asked for were not even mentioned---I was not to have any---but anyway that was a step towards meeting my request. Professor Kuo, a real scientist, had obviously had a say in the decision. I thanked him, significantly emphasising that I was fairly well prepared for work on the topic and could do without any Chinese consultations. Professor Kuo said nothing in answer to my hint, but at one of our sessions some two months later he told me that he was also willing to give me consultations on the medieval story. Alas, his first consultation on the subject turned out to be the last.
21At one of our meetings, Professor Kuo explained why the medieval stories were so harmful: it was because they `` propagated the thesis that love was man's supreme experience'', a very bad and reactionary idea. Love, he said, was an opiate for the young, ``diverting them from revolution''. The idea, expressed by a thinking man, was so absurd and preposterous that I smiled and said:
``You seem to take me for a callow youth, but I've already been working for eight years, am long married, and have two children. Love stories cannot possibly deprave me. Is it that I look too young?''
Professor Kuo was obviously embarrassed and his whole demeanour showed that he had nothing to do with such hypocritical nonsense and was saying it only because he had to. Seeing that, I, too, was put out, for I realised that I had made a tactless remark, because he obviously knew full well what was what.
__b_b_b__My studies with Professor Kuo were proceeding at a measured pace. True, my research did not benefit directly, but I found them very useful for my education as a specialist. I made sure that there were no breaks in our studies, and sometimes asked for additional hours. Professor Kuo was always willing to oblige, so that our talks often lasted all of four, instead of two, hours. He was no formalist.
But his loyalty was impeccable. I knew from Biletaire, a Swiss student at the University, that many collections and research writings on classical literature had been' effectively banned. Such books were published in just a few copies classified for ``restricted use'', and were unavailable for foreigners or the general public. I asked Kuo about some writings I knew, but he always gave me an evasive official answer.
Thus, I made extensive use of a catalogue of magazine and newspaper articles on ancient Chinese culture for 1911--49, but a similar catalogue for the following years was, oddly enough, classified ``for restricted use'', although it was nothing but a list of articles published in the PRC. I asked Professor Kuo for an explanation, but he said in an official voice that the catalogue was of too low a quality to be published for general use.
I realised, of course, that he had sound political reasons for saying what he did, reasons connected with the clamp-down on the old Chinese culture and traditions. Subsequent developments bore out my suspicions.
22Returning from a lesson one day, I approached Ma on the question of the foreigners' peculiar status in his country. It was already a month since I had arrived in China, but apart from himself and other officials no one had yet talked with me. It was a pity to 'be in the country without meeting the Chinese, speaking their language or hearing them speak.
``It is quite enough that you talk to me and Comrade Kuo,'' he replied. ``Besides, you can also listen to the radio.''
``Why is it forbidden to talk with foreigners?" I asked him bluntly.
He was evasive:
``We Chinese are very polite. It is simply that people don't want to bother you with their talk.''
``But that's a misunderstanding!" I insisted. ``I've also come to practice my vernacular, and I want someone else besides you and Comrade Kuo. Could I, perhaps, attend lectures?''
'The level of your knowledge is too high for that,'' he declared, blending refusal and compliment in the best style.
``Knowledge is not what I mean. What I really need is to hear the lecturer speak Chinese.''
``We shall discuss this question.''
In March I was finally allowed to join the Chinese fifth-year students in attending lectures on the history of literature. The lectures on the Yuan period, when China was ruled by Genghis Khan's descendants who had invaded the country, were particularly interesting. The lecturers paid tribute to Mao's ``thought'', vulgar sociology and nationalism, but, as I was to realise later, such tribute was not then particularly irksome. It was much more important that wonderful passages were being read out and explained at these lectures, and the students were taught to respect the talents of the past and given an idea of real literature.
The students' response was lively, they were attentive and acted naturally. They were always very much excited at the slightest hint of any connection between the lecture and China's contemporaty literature and realities.
Once lecturer Li, telling us about the period of Mongolian rule, said without hedging:
``At that time, the situation in the country was very complicated, the political and class struggle was complicated, and literature was also complicated and... rich!''
The lecturer's final word, which he uttered after a meaningful pause, had the effect of an electric discharge: the students began whispering to each other and smiling, as if they 23 were in on some secret. I do not think that any of them had the slightest idea that the ``cultural revolution" was only two months away.
__b_b_b__Books and scientific magazines were now being brought to me from the library. The heavy bound files had dust on them, and the borrowers' cards had turned yellow but had no entries at all.
When handing these over, Ma always reminded me that these magazines, which had been published before Liberation, were extremely ``bad''. By now I knew that a lot more was being done for me than for the Chinese themselves, who would never have been given any magazines of this kind. Still, there was a closed fund that I, too, was denied. I soon realised that it was best to order long lists of books, because usually only about 10 per cent of my orders were met.
I was also allowed to visit the library at Peking University. True, the formalities were somewhat cumbersome: I filed an application for the book I needed, which my futao took to Professor Kuo, and, having secured his signature, went on to the Office, where they filled out an official form to be duly signed and stamped. Given good-will all around, the whole procedure took no less than a fortnight.
After this, Ma and I would take the official letter to the library at Peking University and the following day I would have my books. The books mentioned in the letter were the only ones I could get, so that it was not for me to pick and choose. When the books were finally on my table, my futao showed a keen interest in them. He had graduated as a teacher and had done post-graduate research on ancient Chinese, but had never yet set eyes upon the old originals, for he and his like, to say nothing of the ordinary student or the everyday man, had no access at all to these ``bad'' books. Before Liberation, the monuments of ancient Chinese culture, which were considered a treasure, had for ages belonged to a select few, but after Liberation first some, and then more and more of these were being declared ``bad'' and locked up as banned. It seemed that someone was trying to put the lid on the past as a whole.
Lectures, the reading of ancient sources, and studies with Professor Kuo took up most of my time, so that I found it hard to get away for an hour's book-shopping. Still, in the first few months, I was fortunate enough to buy a few hundred books from the second-hand book-shops. It was not often that I had 24 a day off, but when I did, I spent hours at the long shelves packed with grey-and-yellowing volumes. I used to go down to the book-shop in Liulichang Street, which had a long, cold and always empty hall lit with luminescent lamps, where the shop assistants warmed themselves around braziers. I would be given a chair and left to rummage among the volumes. It was not often that a fresh volume was added to the display, and the main thing for me now was to get hold of the books that were still there. Books were expensive, and cost two or three times as much as those in the Soviet Union, so that although I got mine at a discount I found these slicing my meagre budget.
__b_b_b__I was in high spirits because my work was off to a good start. I liked to see the growing rows of books on my shelves, and soon had to ask Wang to get me another bookstand, which he kindly did.
The glow of satisfaction tends to put a man off his guard, and being in high spirits one fine morning I asked Ma:
``This is my second month in China, but I can't see why our two socialist countries cannot get along together....''
At that the calm and cordial Ma suddenly flew into a rage: lips twitching, fists clenched, he was up on his feet and snouting at me:
``You have betrayed the revolution and China! Your aid is fictitious, it is a downright fraud! You can't bribe or swindle us! We will never come to terms with any revisionists or have anything to do with them! We are poor but we are making revolution, and not selling it for the sake of 'universal welfare'.''
I stood aghast at this outburst of hatred. Of course, I had long seen such demagogy in the Chinese press, but it is one thing to see it in print---newsprint will stand anything---and quite another to hear it from your room-mate. True, he spoke in terms that were lifted wholesale from the newspapers of the day. I realised very well that ``betrayal of the revolution" and the other high-sounding slanderous terms the Peking leaders were daily mouthing amounted to no more than a red herring to draw the Chinese away from visions of a better life. This kind of policy required a whipping up of anti-Soviet hysteria, which is why the Peking leaders regarded any step towards a settlement of Soviet-Chinese relations as a stab at their policy. Chinese propaganda insisted that the hunger and privation inflicted on the Chinese people by Mao's adventurist line were caused by the break-up of the two countries' friendly 25 relations through the Soviet Union's fault. That was certainly shifting the blame with a vengeance, a trick as old as the hills. Nothing at all was being said about the many years of the Soviet Union's large-scale assistance to China.
Ma's angry speech ran on like a newspaper article: he did not use a single word of his own. The show of hysterical emotion must have also been prescribed from above.
To hear a man I had come to like going on in this wild way was a painful experience and had the effect of a cold shower, at once putting things in the right perspective. It was the first lesson I had, a lesson I was unlikely to forget.
As he paused to take breath, I told him calmly:
``I mentioned our two countries' friendship without thinking it would insult you.''
This had a sobering effect on Ma and, gradually calming down, he said:
``We in China had for a long time held up the Soviet Union as an example to our people. Now the Soviet Union can no longer be our model. Our future will be a different one. We are the true revolutionaries. The revolution will last for ever!''
``I have recently read an article in an Albanian newspaper,'' I said, ``which held forth about who is and who isn't fit to run the USSR. But this amounts to gross interference in our affairs and is hardly likely to help re-establish relations between us.''
Ma plunged into another heated exposition of Chinese propaganda tenets.
There was no sense in going on in this vein. I said it was time for breakfast and left the room. On my way to the dining-hall, I was thinking of what had just happened. I wondered how I could find out what was really on Ma's mind. Could a man speak out frankly when there was a tape-recorder just the other side of the wall? Of course, not. The tape-recorder was there above all to keep track of his loyalty, for they already had a fair idea about my attitude to their official dogma. That being so, Ma's outburst must have been meant chiefly to ensure his own self-preservation. After that incident, I became much more circumspect and, wherever possible, tried to avoid political topics.
__b_b_b__About six weeks after our arrival, Ma told me:
``Deputy-Dean Comrade Liu will receive you and Comrade Lida. He wants to talk to you about your life and studies. He could not see you earlier because he was very busy.''
26I asked him about Comrade Liu's speciality and his scientific writings.
``He is a political functionary, an old revolutionary, but he is well conversant with science and culture.''
I was reminded of Chen, a political functionary I had known in Moscow back in 1959. After Liberation, this short man with thin hair was put in charge of the Chinese film industry. He soon got to know the workings of the business, acquired a really good knowledge of the arts, and wrote many articles. For me he epitomised the man who had rapidly developed and gained in spiritual stature in a totally new field of endeavour. He had got high blood pressure from overwork and had to stay day after day in his Moscow hotel room. I used to bring the doctors along and have long talks with him, for Chen was unaffected and easy to approach.
Liu received us at the appointed hour, a good omen in itself. In a smoke-filled room, furnished like an ordinary lecture room, we saw an elderly man of medium height, thick-set and stocky in a peasant way, with emphatic and abrupt movements, greying hair and large, yellowish and widely spaced teeth. He invited us to sit down in arm-chairs and, apparently out of habit, continued to pace the floor. Since I was already used to Chinese ways, I was surprised at his manner: in decorum-conscious China, it was only a man who felt himself to be complete master that could allow himself to receive visitors, especially foreign visitors, in that way.
I tried to make the most use of any official meetings of this kind, putting forward various proposals and asking questions. When I asked Liu about his own scientific work, he sought to show his erudition by using long words. But although a leading man at the Philological Department, he had no knowing of literature at all. His knowledge of the Chinese novel, Dream in the Red Chamber, was confined to the titles of the plays he had seen at the theatre (Chinese classical novels are traditionally turned into plays). To win his favour I addressed him as a fellow-scientist.
``You realise, of course,'' I said, ``that a scientist cannot work without originals, for he is a researcher.''
``But why analyse `the bad'?" he countered and gave me a smile to show that he quite understood. ``Mao Tse-tung teaches us....'' A quotation followed.
``Here in China I have not started on any new line of research, but have continued in my old one. I have been using 27 books you yourself published back in 1958. Since then, the situation in China has changed....''
``Yes, it has!" he gladly agreed, for after all it was unbecoming to disagree on every point.
``The situation in China has been changing rapidly,'' I continued, ``but I have yet to complete my work. In choosing m'y sources, I do not divide them into good and bad but read those that are not available in the USSR.''
Liu finally agreed to look into my request. Lida was less fortunate: she asked for lessons in modern conversational Chinese, but Liu refused her on the plea that they did not have that kind of specialist. That was only a pretext, because Bac Ninh was being taught by one.
``Any Chinese could speak to her. Comrade Ma, for instance,'' I said pointing to my futao. ``We are indeed short of conversational practice.''
Instead of giving a straightforward answer, Liu suddenly started off on a fashionable topic: ``Not to be afraid of any difficulties, not to fear death'', a topic which throughout the spring had run in the Chinese press like a refrain. I was irritated by this verbal heroism, which constantly required whipping up with monotonous incantation slogans, so I explained to him that Soviet people were not afraid of any difficulties.
``It's ridiculous to urge diligence on those who have mastered thousands of Chinese characters. That is not an easy thing to do for you Chinese, but for us foreigners it is even harder. We've chosen a hard trade and know how to work.''
All this was quite true, but I was not used to boasting in public and felt highly ill at ease. It appeared, in fact, that Liu had made me talk in an alien strain.
He wished us every success and said:
``You work well, but one should also know how to rest. Mao Tse-tung teaches us that we must not only work but also rest, go in for sport....''
Lida and I left the smoke-filled room to the sound of quotations from Mao.
Having found it impossible to arrange for her studies, Lida soon obtained a transfer to the Institute of Language so as to study under a fixed student programme.
__b_b_b__In China, we came to relish the most everyday events. Every Thursday, we went down to the Soviet Embassy to see Soviet films and papers. The papers, though none too fresh, were a great pleasure to read and used to be snapped up immediately, 28 and the old films being shown at the Embassy club were an equal delight, even those we had already seen in Moscow.
Once a week I went to see my fellow-trainees at the Institute of Language on the western outskirts of Peking. All its students were foreigners, and admittance procedures to the Institute were laxer than at any other place.
One April night, my friend Leonid and I were roaming the streets of Peking. We could not see each other very often, and were always glad to meet; this was particularly true of me, because after Lida had been transferred to the Institute of Language I was left all alone at the Pedagogical University. As we chatted along, a man suddenly stepped out of the darkness and stopped in front of us. He was quite young, but pale and thin. Choosing his words with difficulty, he said in Russian:
``Are you Soviet?''
We answered him in Chinese, pleased to find that at least one of Peking's teeming inhabitants had at last decided to speak to us. He said his name was Li. It was getting late, so we agreed to meet him another day to have a good talk about things of common interest.
We met a week later and had a long walk. His. faded, muchwashed clothes spoke of his poverty. We strode along the streets without arousing any suspicion: the passers-by took him for the regular foreigner's escort. Indeed, Li was our escort, but one not provided for by the rules.
I got a much deeper insight into Chinese life from the young man's story than from anything I had seen as a casual observer.
Li had already done two years at the People's University when he was imprudent enough to express in a corridor talk his dissatisfaction with Mao's political line. He was officially denounced, expelled from the University, and subjected to reeducation. Perhaps that was why he was a case of early hypertension with failing eyesight. Now that he was out of the hospital, manual work was his lot: he had been sent down for re-education, to build brick cattle-sheds and warehouses. He had to travel clear across the city, from West to East, and then on by suburban train, which was very tiring and expensive, so. that he lived all week long in a workers' hostel, among men who thought him to be a dangerous ``state'' criminal. Late on Saturday night he came to spend Sunday with his mother. A month of hard work earned him no more than 22 yuan. To make this clear let me say that to lead anything like a tolerable life (in Chinese terms) one had to earn at least 29 40~yuan. Besides, the sick intellectual felt himself to be an outcast.
``We are now at the height of the 'four purges' movement^^1^^---political purges, of course,'' he told me. ``Twice a week, after working hours, we have to attend meetings, which drag on forever, since everyone is keen to show his purity. It is safer to speak out, but I try to keep quiet, and come forward only when 1 find the Party secretary's eye on me. I'm tired. For us, Chinese intellectuals, Mao's personality cult is a bitter and distressing thing, weighing heavy on our hearts.''
He kept repeating these sad words.
``There was a time when it would have been impossible even to imagine the things that are happening now. The cult is what's oppressing and ruining China. Marxism, Leninism and the people have been abandoned for the sake of the cult, and this weighs heavy on the hearts of honest and thinking men.''
Li spoke of the terrible spiritual emptiness. So as not to go to seed altogether, he had taken up the study of Makarenko, the well-known Soviet educator.
``Makarenko also re-educated people, but he did so by uplifting them! Chinese education and re-education are something quite different: their whole point is not to uplift a man in spirit, but to suppress him, to make him dumb and humble. It is not the people that are being raised to the level of the intelligentsia but, on the contrary, the old intelligentsia that is being pressed down and driven under.''
``Aren't you a bit too pessimistic?" I asked cautiously. ``After all, thousands of people in China have been getting an education.''
``These cannot be described as intellectuals, for they don't know how to think,'' he answered. ``They cannot do the country much good, but are quite capable of putting down those who think, and will surely do so. A man who has become literate and has gained a few scraps of knowledge is still a long way from being an intellectual: he has yet to learn how to think, and that's not so easy. Every school-leaver here is considered an intellectual. But none can, let alone want to think. Why should they? At the meetings, they have but,to rehearse the same phrases, trembling for some slip of the tongue. What _-_-_
~^^1^^ The movement was launched during the period of open polemics with the CPSU, as a general ``purge'' of political, ideological and economic ``sins'', and undesirable men. In the course of the movement, bribe-takers and office-seekers were removed from their posts, but its main edge was aimed against those who sympathised with the Soviet Union.
30 a dulling exercise! Then there is also the rehearsal of Mao's writings: we have to go over a small article five or even ten times, till we feel stupid, repeating every sentence over and over again.''``What about the workers? The men you work with, what do they think?''
``Many of them have been duped into believing Mao Tsetung. The workers believe all those who have been convicted to be traitors and counter-revolutionaries. They think I'm crazy.''
He seemed to know what I was thinking---the reasons behind all this---and went on to say:
``A lot of good was done after Liberation, especially before 1957. In 1958, things already began to go awry, and then downright disaster was upon us. You must be aware that our leaders later blamed the Soviet Union for the famine of the following two years.''
``That's not true!" I joined in hotly. ``The USSR was helping China to industrialise, sometimes even to its own disadvantage....''
``I know the Soviet Union has been slandered, but for what purpose? Why isolate China? What is the reason behind this? There is a great deal I don't understand, but whenever I try to think hard, the mind boggles.''
We walked on in silence for some time. Suddenly he broke out with real emotion:
``Do you think the US imperialists will attack China?''
``Hardly,'' I answered, ``after all, China's present policy suits them very well.''
``That's what I think, too. I merely wanted to talk it over with someone, but there is no one I can talk to. Our leaders don't want to join the USSR in helping Vietnam, but would like to use a Vietnam victory against the USSR. But since you have been helping Vietnam, they will be unable to do so. That is why there will be no united action. Over here, they are prepared to defile any proposal if it comes from the USSR.''
``It is indeed a great misfortune that our countries are divided,'' I said, ``for otherwise, I think, the Americans would never have dared to start their aggression in Vietnam.''
``Perhaps,'' he wearily agreed, and went back to the personality cult and the economic mistakes. He told that people were taking their country's troubles very close to heart, and that his own father, an economist, had not survived the tragic mistakes of the 1960s and had died of grief, even though he had not been persecuted.
31From time to time, Li would recall that he was meant to be my guide and would start talking about Peking. To tell the truth, however, he did not know much about the past.
I met him on two other occasions. Shortly before May Day, Li told me that we were to meet in a fortnight, after the holidays, but he never came and I never saw him again. Was it that he did not want to take any risks? Or had he told me everything he had wanted to? Or had he been spotted and was now unable to go anywhere at all? That is something I shall never know.
__b_b_b__I began going to the cinema---not so much for the entertainment, as to hear fluent Chinese speech.
The Chinese are as sensitive to beauty as any nation in the world. I was told that when a really humane and romantic film, Early One Spring, in February---a film of genuine artistic merit---had been on in Peking, the cinemas had been overcrowded. I did not see the film myself: it had been denounced' and banned.
But whatever one's attitude to the Chinese screen, it is the only screen there is for hundreds of millions of Chinese. There is nothing else for them to see: foreign films are simply not played.
One film I saw, for instance, The Underground War, was a ``good'' film, that is, it was well in line with propaganda requirements. The cast included some good and familiar actors, who had for years played in wartime adventure films; the characters and the plot (with the anti-Japanese war as its setting) were also familiar. The film could well have been described as a comedy but for its perfectly serious purposes. The war it depicted was a toy affair, merry and rollicking. The enemies, Japanese soldiers, were being knocked off like so many tin soldiers. They were being stabbed, clubbed, speared and stoned to death, blasted with mines, dragged into trenches, decoyed into holes, knifed, cut, pierced and shot, while the shapes clad in Japanese uniform shook in their boots, yelped, screamed their heads off, jumped about and dropped dead. The guerilla war was presented as child's play, in the course of which the heroes had the knack of springing up from underground loess passages in the most unexpected places and without a speck of dust on them, as the custom is in films of derring-do. The message of that film was that the people's war in the subterranean passages had been a fine, victorious thing. The film abounded in full-frame stills of quotations from Mao Tse-tung, with his ``optimistic'' view of people's wars.
32What struck the eye was the absence of any humane emotions, with much bloodshed and agony in their stead. One close-up showed a Japanese being speared to death: eyes boggling, he writhes in pain and gives up the ghost. In another scene, children go about finishing off wounded enemies: as soon as a shell-shocked Japanese tries to raise his head, up comes a young hero and knocks him one on the bean. Another Japanese cannot even move but merely emits a feeble moan, and the children promptly put him out of his misery. That is, of course, very funny, but to enjoy the fun one needs a pretty strong set of nerves and a habit for everyday cruelty.
There were many young people in the hall, and they were delighted with the film and enjoyed themselves tremendously. But those who were older and had gone through the war against Japan behaved with reserve, for they knew that the war had been no joke.
On the way out, I asked an elderly Chinese whether he had taken part in the war of liberation.
``Yes,'' he answered, giving me and my futao Ma a close look.
``Was it like that at all?''
``Not particularly,'' he said, but quickly added: ``In the places where I myself fought it was somewhat different.''
Ma promptly summed up the film's message:
``This is a real film. It teaches us that war is nothing to be afraid of. The people's war is invincible. It is only the revisionists who depict the horrors of war. Our film shows that the people do not fear war.''
I usually watched Chinese films on the TV on my own floor, together with employees of the Office, sometimes at cinemas in the city, and every Saturday, in the Northern Dining-Hall, which after supper was turned into a cinema for the students. The tickets were only half the price current in the city, while the Vietnamese and myself were allowed in as guests, free of charge. The shows were organised by the local trade-union committee, while the student union sent in the attendants. The viewers had to bring in their own chairs, with the Chinese usually coming in with squat stools, and us foreigners lugging along heavy backed chairs.
The students used to give us a warm welcome, leaving an empty space for us in the centre. True, the Vietnamese did not come very often, and when the lights went out, the Chinese students would rise in a body and move into the empty space, 33 clattering with their stools. Ma naturally always came along with me and tried to prevent anyone from talking to me. But I usually sat down at the end of a row, so that in the dark students would often come to sit beside me and talk to me in a friendly way. One day, when the lights went out, a girl who had come to see the film with her mother, a teacher at the University, moved up closer to the screen and found herself beside me.
``You are Soviet, aren't you? You must find these films very strange!" she exclaimed with some naivete.
Her mother at once checked her and whispered:
``Watch out, he's not alone.''
As a curtain-raiser, the students were usually shown slides with Mao's sayings, which had nothing to do with the film itself. Then there was a short documentary or popular-science film. Some of these were quite amusing, like the one about a national contest of workers in the services, where cooks chopped vegetables and made Chinese meat dumplings with incredible speed, butchers dressed carcasses, and shop assistants arranged goods for sale. Another short was about the electrification of the countryside, showing various accidents as a warning to the unwary.
Just before the main feature, there was another slide with Mao's sayings on a red background, this time to match the topic of the film.
Here I saw, for instance, the Red Basket, a film which was issued in early 1966 and stayed on throughout the ``cultural revolution" because it pleased the hungweipings. The hero heaves up onto his back a basket with goods and foodstuffs, like oil, and tradges out into the mountains to peddle them off. There are very few scenes in which Chairman Mao is not mentioned in one way or another.
The pedlar keeps recalling Mao's statements, and learns by heart whole volumes of his writings or collected quotations. ``Mao thought" is the source of all of the hero's good deeds and the motive force of his whole life. Mao's portrait or bust is present in many scenes. The pedlar says that he has come into the mountains on the spur of Chairman Mao's ``ideas'', the peasants hail ``Chairman Mao's happy epoch'', and so on. The young shop-girls are shown as having renounced all private life, and acting as model citizens, ``brought up in the Mao Tsetung epoch''. The message here is that the young are better and more loyal than the older generations, and that is undoubtedly one of the reasons for the film's success with the hungweipings. 34 The film seeks to impress that ``Mao Tse-tung thought" is the only way to bring welfare and happiness to the masses.
Those were some of the ``good'' films, but I saw some ``bad'' ones as well.
The Red Sun, a film made by the well-known producer, Tang Hsiao-tan, at the Tienma film studio, was severely denounced by the press. It depicts the war of liberation, with the enemy fighting in earnest.
Before we foreigners were allowed to see this film, we had to hear a whole lecture about it. Hsui, an Office employee, attended by at least three of his fellows, stopped us in the lane on our way to the dining-hall, invited us to seat ourselves on the chairs we were carrying, and explained to us why the film was harmful. He spoke in the spirit of the press, in well-set cliches:
``The Chinese people achieved their liberation thanks to Chairman Mao's brilliant ideas. In this film you will not see a single portrait or hear a single word of our beloved leader's. This is a malicious distortion and enemy slander of the Chinese Revolution and the People's Liberation Army.''
Indeed, one can but marvel at the courage of the producer, who had not inserted a single Mao bust, portrait, or photograph in the film, and had not made any of his heroes utter a single Mao quotation.
I was invited to see the Red Sun at our own University for a good reason, and that was because earlier on I had been to Peita, that is, Peking University, to see Stage Sisters, another condemned film. In fact, in the spring of 1966 the general impression was that we were being shown none but condemned films and that there simply were no others.
At Peita, the film was shown in the students' dining-hall, a vast hall with two rows of windows, which looked like a hangar. Before the film, the students gave an amateur performance. First there was a choral song about Mao Tse-tung, then a mass dancing scene showing the Vietnamese war against the Americans, and finally the chorus joined the dance group for another eulogy of the leader. The stage-management was excellent, and the presentation quite modern. The girls and young men, every one of them, were all wonderfully handsome and well-shaped in their closely fitting sports suits. To the peals of the anthem in praise of the leader, the dancing students turned their faces towards a giant gilded profile of Mao Tse-tung, which took up the whole backdrop, with just enough space for some red banners on either side. The profile shone against its red background, and the dancers stretched 35 forth their arms towards the human sun, fell to their knees, made up picturesque groups, and struck different attitudes. The chorus rose to a wild crescendo, producing an electrifying state of ecstasy, which mounted to an inconceivable pitch. As the excitement of general worship mounted, the hall became stifling. The spectacle was akin to a frenzied pagan rite, very colourful and expressive owing to the charm and power of youth; it appeared to have absorbed the ancient worship of the sun, the cult of fire and thunder, and self-oblivion in face of the will of the heavens. The frenzy had the power of a ritual, and it lacked only human blood and human sacrifice to complete the impression. At the time I did not know that a ``cultural revolution" would soon be sacrificing its victims on the altar of Mao's personality cult.
The performance was followed by Stage Sisters. Even judged on the highest standards, the film is a remarkable success. While it was still on in Peking, it was very hard to get in. In the darkness of the cinema, the audience often broke out in applause, despite the propaganda campaign in the press. At Peking University, however, the students' response was somewhat strange, not to say frightening.
In one episode, a redundant old actress commits suicide. The indignant actors put the blame on the money-grubbing manager, and one of them exclaims: ``This is so inhuman!" At this point, the thousand-strong audience of Chinese students roared with laughter. That is not easy to understand, but one must bear in mind that for six years before that the Mao group had been teaching the young to hate things like human kindness, so'that the brutal treatment of an old woman simply made the students laugh: for them humanism was a silly idea, long since dispelled by ``Chairman Mao's thought''.
The producers of the film were guilty of a ``monstrous crime": they had presented an honest, vigorous and revolutionary-minded man, who did not even mention the ``great leader''. The members of the Shanghai underground brought out in the film were also dismissed as being unreal. The critics insisted that since these men had not even mentioned the leader, they were not Communists, and heaped on the film accusations of slander, treason, and so on.
Did Chinese cinema-goers at the time go to see the ``good'' films, and what did they think about them?
They did go to see them, for there was little else to see, and they were happy to have some entertainment, whatever it was. One of the most stage-conscious people in the world had to 36 make do with ersatz. Still, even the false, ham-fisted films and plays, full of the Mao cult, could not keep the Chinese away from the cinemas, which were always packed. Besides, there was the new practice of ``cultural outings"---group trips to the theatre or the cinema. People preferred to join in, because if anything happened later on, a refusal to go could always be recalled.
__b_b_b__Then came the May holidays, and the Office drew up a ``plan of festive entertainment''. The festivities at the Yihoyuan Park fell on a rainy day. Peking had not had any rain to speak of for something like 18 months, but by now the hardened soil had turned into a soggy mess, so that the dedicated students had to stage their performance---of which we had another generous round---right in the mud.
On a fine sunny day we were taken to the Great Wall and the famous Shisanling storage-lake. Beneath a blue sky, the wall, winding quaintly across the mountains, did not look as if it had been made by human hand. The mountain tops stood out vividly against the clear sky, while the valleys lay in a haze of sand-dust.
The storage-lake, which we circled with much ceremony, had dried up. This had been a people's construction project, with tens of thousands working on it, with Mao Tse-tung himself turning a symbolic spade, but that had not helped: the water had run out, and a small buzzing motor was now pumping the ooze over the majestically towering dam, a monument of wasted effort. The Vietnamese and I strolled along the dam, and I made our Chinese escorts nervous by asking what had happened to the water. They were particularly disturbed when I remarked that although the builders' enthusiasm had been great, there had apparently been a lack of specialist knowledge to make the correct calculations.
After the Shisanling storage-lake we went on to see a magnificent monument of the past, the subterranean palatial tomb of a Ming emperor, recently excavated and now open to the public. The guides started their story by apologising for all the luxury being put on display; it was meant, they said, to help foster a feeling of ``class hatred''. But curiosity was the only feeling I personally noticed.
On the way back, the Vietnamese began to sing. They started with the songs they had learnt at their lessons of Chinese, songs about Mao, the ``reddening East'', about unity 37 and the heroes of war. Suddenly the boy who led the singing turned to me, and shouted:
``And now we shall sing something for you!''
They struck up a Soviet song about Moscow, which was followed by ``Katyusha'', and then all of them joined in for the ``Suburban Moscow Nights'', another Soviet favourite. After that, their best man sang the song of the cosmonauts and ``Life, I Love You''. They ended with ``My Vast, My Native Land'', rendering the first stanza in Russian.
Our Chinese escorts were utterly confused. They fidgeted and exchanged looks and whispers, but finally seemed to have decided not to interfere. They sat with a distant air, implying that it was unpleasant and painful for them to hear songs of that kind, and indicating that it was tactless to sing these in their presence. Still, when the Vietnamese started singing in Russian, the young Chinese teacher who sat next to me said in Russian in a confidential whisper:
``I understand this, too. I used to learn Russian.''
This made me start:, up to then we had talked only in Chinese. I glanced at him and saw that he was excited. Although he did not say anything else, I was glad to know that deep down inside him he had remained a friend.
As the bus speeded along, the singing gradually died away, for everyone was very tired. Moving imperceptibly, the Chinese had gradually closed in on me, separating me from the Vietnamese, but I was too tired to react. As I dozed, I watched the teachers and the Office people trying to amuse themselves.
Ma suggested having a meeting for fun. The question that was put up for debate was whether it was the men or the women who had to play the more important part in life.
I do not remember what it was that the first speaker said in defence of the men, but when another came out for the superiority of the women, everyone perked up. This is how his argument ran:
``The girls are better, quicker and more solid than the boys at mastering Chairman Mao's writings. They should have priority.''
``Yes, indeed! That's very true!" everyone agreed.
Ma was also of that opinion and said with an easy smile:
``It is because the girls are quicker to adjust their thoughts to the correct line. They are not scatter-brained, but press straight ahead, without deviating from their path.''
A Chinese with a pock-marked face sitting next to me agreed with him:
38``That's true, the boys often wander about instead of following the straight path, they have fewer settled ideas.''
In early May 1966, the Chinese still risked joking about Chairman Mao's ``thought''.
__b_b_b__Two of items on the ``holiday entertainment plan" suggested by the Office promised to be interesting: one was attendance at a soiree staged by students of the same course as mine, and the other, the May fireworks display. I was particularly keen to go to the soiree, because even if I had no chance of talking to the students, I wanted to see them making merry.
But the Office cancelled its own invitation because of an attempt at a political assassination in the foreigners' shop. After attending a special briefing on the affair, my futao Ma was so worried that he even requested additional protection for me. I was given a body-guard, Deputy-Chief of the Office Wang, who was the tallest and strongest of all the Office employees (he was no relation of Wang's, the modest equipment officer's---the name is a common one in China). The whole foreign colony in Peking was very much disturbed over the incident. I first heard of it from a young GDR diplomat who had studied in Moscow and had how come to Peking for a refresher course in Chinese. He also spoke perfect Russian. He told me that the attempt had been made against Lusya Malova, the pregnant wife of a GDR embassy official.
Here is how it happened. In the foreigners' shop, where Chinese are not usually allowed, a Chinese stranger suddenly came up to the fair-haired woman from behind and struck out at her with a chopper, aiming his blow at the nape of the neck. But the woman seemed to have sensed the danger: as he struck out, she. turned round and this saved her life. The knife slashed her face to the bone. As she collapsed, the man started to kick her. Luckily, he did not manage to get at her belly. All this while, the salesmen and shop assistants looked on placidly at this scene, none of them so much as lifting a finger to help.
The man who rushed to help her was a member of a Mali Government delegation and not some ``hero of the Mao Tsetung epoch'', tirelessly fostered in a spirit of Mao's precepts, ``to fear no difficulties, to fear no death''. The Malian was unarmed, but he took the blows upon himself and saved the woman from certain death. He was wounded. As he fell under the blows, the attacker calmly walked out of the shop. Nor did anyone try to stop him outside, and he was detained only much later.
39The PRC's Supreme Court sentenced the villain to death by firing squad. He was said to be a class enemy, but much in his attack remained obscure. How, for instance, had a counterrevolutionary entered the guarded shop, and why was it that no one had asked him what he wanted? There was apparently good reason why a year later the hungweipings accused the Supreme Court of ``treason''.
When Ma and I got to talking about the case, it turned out that even he had been told only about the wounding of the Malian, but nothing about the pregnant woman.
``This is the first time a foreign friend has been attacked in Peking since Liberation,'' Ma told me. ``It is our fault, for we had forgotten that such a thing was possible. That's why there was such general confusion. But we shall learn this lesson well, and we shall not allow anything of the sort to happen again.''
Here Ma reeled off a lecture on the sharpening of the class struggle under socialism. When he was through, I said:
``That's not the point. I think that the attempt in the shop was due to your nationalist propaganda.''
At first Ma was taken aback, but then set out to convince me that there was no nationalism of any kind in the PRC.
I insisted that there was, and we wrangled till we were deadbeat, but argument for Ma was a point of duty, and he was not allowed to let me have the last word.
So, the Office decided that it was best for me to stay away from the student soiree, but allowed me to attend the fireworks. I went along with Wang, the Deputy-Chief himself, because I had been invited to watch the fireworks from the stand in the central square of Tien An Men, whereas Ma was admitted only into the square itself. We went by special bus---small, battered and rattling along, but there was plenty of room, for there were only eight of us: apart from Wang and myself, there was only one Vietnamese, who represented the 100 odd Vietnamese students, and five teachers and officials.
The drive was a long one, because the bus had to make its way through a maze of by-streets, in detour of the central streets, where the popular festivities were taking place. We smoked and chatted gaily, and the teachers were most amiable. Everyone was in high spirits. At the entrance to the stands we were separated: foreigners and Chinese were assigned to different stands, and Wang was the only one who was allowed to come with me.
We were very early and naturally got to talking. Wang felt 40 himself to be the host, the receiving party, and so, in accordance with traditional Chinese courtesy, engaged me in conversation.
We started out with politics, notably Vietnam. Wang politely insisted that a world war was the only way to stop the aggression, so that there was no need to supply Vietnam with military hardware, such assistance being ``unworthy'', but the thing to do was to aggravate the Berlin or some other question---no matter which---and to start a world war.
``Imperialism fears a world war. Its threats are those of a paper tiger; the sooner a world revolutionary war breaks out, the sooner will imperialism be destroyed!''
``Do you think China would take part in a war of that kind?" I asked.
``China will do its best,'' he replied in a vague sort of way.
``China could have done a great deal for a victory over imperialism,'' I objected. ``But it doesn't want to, and has done nothing.''
``You should be the first to start the war. Only then shall we believe you.''
He changed the subject and began praising the latest film, The Subterranean War. As I have said, the film was meant to condition the public for a new and ``gay'' war against the ``paper tigers'', a war which had to be faced without fear, and then the ``paper tigers" would burn up in its flames.
So you liked the film. Did you yourself take part in the war?'' I asked Wang (in China people are not usually asked whether they had ``been at the front'', for the guerilla war first against the Japanese and then against the Kuomintang was fought all over the country).
Wang willingly told me that as a very young man he had been a guerilla fighter in Southern Hopei: he had not had a chance to fight underground but had carried away a vivid memory of the war. He had quickly worked his way up to become a Party functionary. After Liberation, he had gone through Peking University, where he then stayed on as an Office employee. But he still had his military bearing and the common sense of a military man.
``True, the war was not exactly like the one in the film,'' he remarked cautiously, ``but we must teach the young generation to face up to the ordeal, instead of intimidating them. Only in battle does one find out what war actually is.''
Wang also asked me about life in the USSR---he knew nothing about it.
41Our talk was interrupted by the fireworks, a magnificent and fabulous pageant. Each new blaze of rockets erupted in a different and fantastic pattern, blending into an amazing symphony of light, colour and fiery shape. A Chinese fireworks display cannot be described, it simply has to be seen, and the hundreds of thousands of Chinese in the square drank in the luxuriant beauty of this festival.
__b_b_b__Our final May outing was to the planetarium. As a child, I used to be keen on astronomy and had often gone to the Moscow planetarium; later I had gone there again and again to hear lectures on galaxies and the latest astronomical discoveries, so that now I was glad to have a look at the Peking planetarium.
In equipment the planetarium was far from perfect, but the audience was a grateful one: it consisted of first-year Vietnamese students, who had apparently never seen anything like it. First we were taken through the halls with mock-ups and diagrams on Plato, Copernicus and Newton, and orbiting sputniks and spaceships. Although there was no mention anywhere of the USSR, Chinese astronomers and devices were given ample space. I could not help asking the guide whether the spaceship on a drawing was Soviet or American.
``We explain only the principle of the thing, without touching on politics.''
``Your drawing doesn't look like a Soviet spacecraft, so it must be American,'' I taunted him.
``We did not intend any such likeness, we have only tried to explain the principles of the craft's movement.''
``And who is this particular cosmonaut?''
``It's no one in particular, it's a scheme.''
``Don't you mention Gagarin anywhere?''
``No. We only explain matters of principle.''
My ever-present Ma put in a word:
``The comrades here are quite right. They explain scientific and atheistic questions of principle, instead of adding grist to the mill of US imperialism and modern revisionism.''
The response of the Vietnamese was quite different. They were really curious and eager to see and hear. I was delighted at their thirst for knowledge and their ability to hear and learn. They had a word of sympathy for me.
``Gagarin's feat was a great one,'' said Nguyen Thi-Cahn, with whom I eventually struck up a closer acquaintance. ``We 42 quite understand you. It's a pity nothing has been said about him here.''
On the way back I remarked to Ma that I could not see why so little was being said about space exploration.
``Aren't the Chinese people interested in space exploration?''
``Why, of course they are,'' he replied with obvious reluctance.
``Why is it then that space launchings are never reported?''
``We do not want to stoke up the myth about the imperialists' military might.''
``But if so, why do you suppress the Soviet space achievements?''
He did not reply.
``Perhaps you think there's no point in wasting money on space research?''
``No, it's not that,'' Ma was clearly trying to make up his mind. ``Space exploration is necessary. Once China builds up its science and technology, it will also start to explore outer space and this, I think, is not a long way off. The Soviet cosmonauts are representatives of the people, they are brave and courageous. But the modern revisionists have been using their achievements as bargaining counters in securing an ignominious peace, and to humiliate China.''
``What nonsense!" I could not help saying.
Need I say that such exchanges put me in a bad mood, and at night I did not sleep well at all.
__b_b_b__After the holiday programme, I went on a one-day trip to Tientsin organised by the Soviet Embassy. We had a bus with a Chinese driver. At the city limits our passports were given two thorough checks at special stone blockhouses, set up as checkpoints especially for foreigners. We had also been given special certificates, something in the nature of warrants, which kept the numerous staff at the blockhouses busy crosschecking arid verifying.
As ill luck would have it, Tientsin's famous bookshops had their day off. The lake-side park also turned out to be unattractive, for the water had drained, leaving behind it dirty puddles and pools in place of the lakes and ponds.
All day long we roamed the city streets, using maps to get our bearings. It was fairly obvious that even in that big city the people were not used to seeing foreigners, and there were 43 many curious eyes staring at us. Whole crowds followed us into shops and gathered round as soon as we stopped.
A foreigner in Tientsin was now indeed a rare bird, and the people were curious to note everything about him---his face, his clothes and his manners. They trailed leisurely after us, as if they had no other, more important business to do. We felt no sense of hostility.
The interest we were causing gave rise to a mixed feeling, and our isolation seemed to be some sort of artificial quarantine imposed on the curious people of this colourful and cordial city.
We returned to Peking in the small hours of the night to find the streets brightly lit up, with groups of young people and reinforced police squads posted at the crossroads: it had been announced that China had carried out another one of its atomic bomb tests.
Until 2.00 a.m. our University was ablaze with light, and the gates draped in red stood open. There were heaps of crumpled paper flowers and scraps of slogan streamers in the ditches, gay music over the loudspeakers, and discordant patriotic singing coming from the lanes of the park, the rosegarden, and the open windows of the auditoria. The Chinese were celebrating their triumph.
In the morning, Ma brought in a special edition .of the papers announcing in red characters that the thermonuclear materials used in the blast had justified their purpose. The tone of the announcement was extremely boastful.
The holiday merry-go-round, which had upset my daily routine, had now come to an end. When I got back to my studies, I looked through the holiday papers I had not yet read, and came across Chou En-lai's May Day speech before thousands of young people.
My futao had drawn a heavy red line around the paragraph which said that ``a great proletarian cultural revolution" was the main task in China.
``Premier Chou's words are very important!" Ma exclaimed. ``Very important, indeed! It is now the most important thing in China's political life.''
``In the USSR the cultural revolution took place very long ago,'' I remarked. ``Lenin and the whole Party worked for universal literacy and for giving the working people access to mankind's cultural values.''
``No, that's not so. It is something you have never had and cannot possibly have,'' Ma arrogantly replied.
[44] __ALPHA_LVL1__ III. THE MOVEMENT EXPLODES
TENG TO'S ``BLACK BOOKS''. THE FIRST TATZUPAO. ANARCHY.
HSITANG CAFE. ``DUAL RULE''. THE JUNE 3 ASSAULT
Although the Office had not taken out any subscriptions for the Chinese papers for me, Ma himself had a regular monthly subscription and let me read his papers. He regarded newspaper reading a most important business, but could not take out a longer subscription because he was short of money. When he got his pay, he usually redeemed his bread vouchers for several packets of biscuits, bought himself some sweets and signed up for the paper. He told me in an apologetic tone that he had a sweet tooth: in his native Chekiang, a southern sugarcane province, sweet things were part of the everyday diet, whereas up here in the north, he found the general diet lacking in sweets. That is why he bought biscuits in addition to his guaranteed three meals a day.
The paper was delivered at lunch time, and Ma liked to read it just before his afternoon nap. As the paper rustled to the floor, I knew that he was asleep and I could take over. Trying not to disturb him, I glanced through the paper, but there were few interesting items and virtually no information about events in the world. The communiques issued by the Vietnamese Headquarters were the only regular column that was always worth reading.
Whole pages were devoted to censure campaigns. Attacks in the press were a long-standing practice, but in 1966 they became particularly vehement. Campaigns of this kind had usually been well thought out and gradual, betraying thorough backroom organisation. Six months at a stretch, for instance, would be devoted to denouncing someone's article, another six 45 months---some play or film, and yet another---some literary critic, and so on.
In the autumn of 1965, however, there was a qualitative change in the censure campaigns: these became multipronged, being at the same time directed against the historian and playwright Wu Han, the films Early One Spring, in February and Stage Sisters, and the playwrights Yang Han-sheng, Hsia-Yen and Tien Han for their attempts to revive the traditions of the progressive literature and theatre of the 1930s. All these campaigns, particularly the one against Wu Han, rose to a hysterical pitch, with the press issuing threats, abuse, and accusations against the victims, but with no apparent punitive measures being applied against them. True, for a long time most people did not know what was actually happening.
From the beginning of May, the Peking papers launched a vicious day-to-day censure campaign against Teng To, vilifying him in every possible way. He was said to be the `` ringleader of the black band''.
``Who is this Teng To?" I asked Ma.
``A Party functionary. Up to 1957 he was chief editor of Jenmin jihpao, and is now the secretary of the Peking Party Committee,'' Ma reluctantly replied.
``How has it happened that a Party functionary has turned out to be the 'ring-leader of a black band'?''
``That happens,'' he avoided a straightforward answer. ``Teng To's exposure is another great victory for Mao Tse-tung thought!''
Every event in the PRC turns out to be this kind of victory, which leaves nothing else to be said. Still, the secretary of the capital's Party Committee is a person of high standing in the Party, and Ma, as a member of the Peking Party organisation, should have regarded him as a high-ranking leader.
The numerous articles against Teng To showed that the charges against him were that in 1960--62 he had published some essays under an assumed name, casting doubt on some of Mao's ``thoughts''. Indeed, as I read the ``quotations'' cited in the censure article, I could not help marvelling at the man's courage in saying things that were most amazing in Chinese conditions. Thus, he had a lampoon which made stinging ridicule of the word ``great'' and the ``great'' habit of inserting it as an incantation in the oddest places, no matter whether it fitted or not.
As a matter of fact, China's anthem and every song and radio broadcast at the time began and ended with that word. 46 At first I found it strange to hear day in day out over the University radio the never-ending ceremonious refrain: ``The Great Leader Mao Tse-tung'', and ``The Great Helmsman'', but soon the word was somehow effaced through frequent repetition and its proper meaning no longer came through.
Teng To had brought together most of his essays and satirical sketches in two books: Notes from the Village of the Three and Evening Conversations at Yenshan. The books were now banned, and anyone found in possession of them was denounced and harassed.
Teng To took a sharply anti-Mao ideological stand. He wrote that one should ``learn'' from the ``stronger state'', ``unite'' with it, and ``be happy to have a friend who is stronger than oneself'' (``The Laws of Friendship and Hospitality''). He made transparent hints, saying that ``one who thinks too high of himself and pushes his teacher aside after the first few successes will never be able to learn''. His statements were taken to mean condemnation of the break with the Soviet Union, and caused extreme anger among Mao's supporters.
Teng To had a wonderful sketch, ``Great Twaddle'', satirising not just bluster in general, but Mao's well-known thesis about ``the wind from the East prevailing over the wind from the West''. At the end of his scathing analysis, Teng To publicly advised Mao to retire. He wrote: ``One cannot help matters even by using the greatest words and phrases; on the contrary, wider use of them will make things worse. Hence my advice to those who like great idle talk: you would do well, my friends, to do more reading and think more, but talk less, and whenever the urge to talk comes upon you, retire at once, without wasting any of your own or other people's time and energy.''
Teng To was very well versed in ancient culture. He had even taken part in compiling The New 300 Selected Tang Poems. The golden age of ancient Chinese poetry had left a vast legacy, and over the ages experts had put out small volumes of the Selected 300. Upon Liberation, it was decided to scrap the old collection and put out a fresh one: the traditional 300 in number but more in the modern spirit.
The new 300 were poems of social criticism and civic spirit, courageous and accusatory. Indeed, this kind of tradition has always run through Chinese literature, and there would seem to be nothing strange or criminal in picking and publishing accusatory poems more than a thousand years old. But in criticising Teng To, the papers insisted that he had done so with the express purpose of discrediting the incumbent leadership. 47 The Tang poets had criticised emperors and mandarins, but the present-day Peking leaders took it as a slur on themselves.
This primitive one-track approach had, of course, been adopted on the initiative of a toadying critic whose sole aim was to say that Teng To was guilty. What of---did not matter. The thing was to destroy him, and destroyed he was.
Although I lived in China, among the Chinese, I did not realise the full intensity of the internal political struggle, the bitter rivalry between the various groups within the central leadership. With the benefit of hindsight, let me now say a few short words for a better understanding of the events of that period. In September and October 1965, Mao ordered that criticism should be levelled against the playwright Wu Han. The Shanghai critic, Yao Wen Yuan, Mao's loyalminion, promptly came up with a censure article, but it met with some resistance within the CPC Central Committee and was not carried by the central press. The article first appeared in Shanghai, and only twenty days later, in the central press. A ``Group for the Affairs of the Cultural Revolution" was set up under the Central Committee, with Peng Chen, Politburo member and First Secretary of the Peking Party Committee, playing the most active role. In February, Peng managed to circulate a CC letter, which he himself had drafted and signed, aiming in effect to wind up the campaign.
To counter Peng and his supporters on the CC, Mao's wife, Chiang Ching, who at the time did not hold any official post either in the Party or in the government, at the request of Marshal Lin Piao, Politburo member and Minister of Defence, organised a meeting of army political workers in Shanghai. It lasted 20 days and adopted a Protocol which became a platform for the ``great proletarian cultural revolution''. The Protocol meant a revision of the CPC Central Committee's decisions and a disavowal of the whole cultural policy over the 17 years of the people's power.
The Protocol said: ``Upon the founding of the state, a black, anti-socialist, anti-Party line, antagonistic to Mao Tse-tung thought, usurped our policy in literary and artistic circles. This black line is a blend of bourgeois aesthetic ideas with the ideas of modern revisionism and the so-called art and literature of the 1930s.... We are resolved to carry out a great socialist revolution on the cultural front.''
These stentorian charges against an allegedly bourgeois, anti-Party and anti-socialist ``black line" were no more than lies and demagogy aimed to dupe the Chinese people and were 48 disproved by the whole course of the PRC's advance along the socialist road in the early years of the people's revolution. It is a fact, however, that China's cultural development was often out of line with Mao Tse-tung ``thought'' and directives, for his designs were often thwarted by healthy Party forces, who relied on the past experience of revolutionary struggle and, notably, the experience of the progressive art and literature of the 1930s, which had developed independently of Maoism, under the influence of the internationalist-minded Communists in the CPC. Action of that kind indeed ran counter to Mao Tse-tung ``thought'', and so had to be stamped out by means of a coup that was demagogically termed ``socialist''. Mao Tse-tung himself went over the Shanghai Protocol twice to revise its content.
In April, the Mao group stepped up its pressure. The papers carried another article by Yao Wen Yuan, which was this time spearheaded directly against Teng To. A mass ``popular'' movement was the only thing that was lacking. The movement had been mentioned in the February Protocol, but at the time the latter had yet to be made public.
__b_b_b__Returning from the cinema to my hostel on the evening of May 25,1 noticed an unusual stir: the radio in the corridor was going on in a solemn strain.
I do not know whether it was a central-radio or a university broadcast. The announcer carried on in a measured, ceremonious voice, repeating the same text on the hour, with majestic music in between. I had heard such broadcasts before. Thus, when the CPC Central Committee had been invited to send over a delegation to the CPSU's 23rd Congress and had replied with a long and rude statement, the university had echoed with venomous words all day long. At the start of that broadcast, I had been watching a film in the TV room. The TV programme had not been interrupted and the CC statement had been put on the air in the usual news bulletin, half an hour after it had gone out over the radio. So, when the Chinese watching the film suddenly heard the announcer's solemn voice in the corridor, they had risen as a man and moved to the loudspeakers. I had finished watching the film all alone, and had then gone to my room to find Ma by the radio, going full blast, and rending the air with resolute intonations.
The reading of the statement over, Ma had switched off the set and risen. I had felt that I had had to say something and so 49 had repeated from memory several sentences that I had found obscure. Ma had willingly explained.
``I think this is just being rude and tactless without good cause,'' I had said.
``In political struggle, there is no need to stand upon ceremony,'' he had declared.
``But this is a matter of unity for the sake of the revolution!''
``The revolution has only one language---our language!''
``This means making every other word a `great' or a ' revolutionary','' I had mocked, recalling Teng To's satirical sketch.
``We denounce those who talk like you.''
That night Ma had been unusually pompous.
Now, on May 25, the radio was again going on in grand style, and the more I listened, the more I was surprised at what was being said.
``Students and teachers at Peking University have today put up a tatzupao^^1^^ accusing the Peking University's rector and Party Committee of degeneration and deviations from Chairman Mao's ideas, and of following a black, counter-- revolutionary and bourgeois line instead of Chairman Mao's revolutionary line. The tatzupao has seven signatures....''
As far as I could gather, the announcer then went on to list the names of those who had signed.
__b_b_b__I recalled that back in 1957, during the fight against the Right-wing elements, all ``pure'' revolutionaries had made a point of vouching for their revolutionary spirit in numerous tatzupaos, posting these across walls, special stands, and whole buildings, or hanging them out on clothes lines like washing. But I had never yet heard of a common tatzupao being broadcast over the radio as a matter of state importance.
I felt a sense of curiosity and unease at the bustle in the corridors, and went up to the window. The campus was ablaze with lights and the students were still awake, although it was nine o'clock---a late hour, for the Chinese go to bed early. That was the first time that Ma stayed out at night and I slept alone.
The next morning, on May 26, the skies were grey and overcast and, after the painfully dry winter, the wind was _-_-_
~^^1^^ Tatzupao---literally ``big-character paper''; actually a wall poster, sometimes the size of a blanket, a patchwork affair, expressing the views, opinions and proposals not of the government but of some individual or group.
50 refreshingly damp. I usually went to have my breakfast after the Chinese students had already gone, so that when I crossed the path to the dining-hall the lanes were quite empty, except for some returning Vietnamese. That day there were many people about, with groups of lively students scurrying all over the place. The walls of the dining-room, the post office and the cinema hall were posted over with fresh tatzupaos, and more were being put up. There were already three rows of these, and the authors of the new ones had to stand on each other's shoulders to reach the empty space up the wall. I stopped in front of the Chinese students' dining-room. Over the entrance there was a long row of tatzupaos, and above all these a large inscription said: ``Our Party Committee and Administration are black from head to foot.'' Then came the rationale. I read the first paragraph, which accused the Party Committee of betraying the CPC General Line and following a bourgeois, counter-revolutionary line of its own, together with the `` criminals from Peita'', the shorthand for Peking University. Students stood about reading these posters in silence.A young man of about 20, in incredibly patched up and washed out clothes, was running back and forth along the side of the building, gesticulating and shouting that the ``traitors'' had been humiliating and harassing ``the working masses'', and that he was being expelled for poor progress ``in defiance of the class principle and the CPC General Line''. His drawn face betrayed lack of sleep and was quite motionless, except for his lips, which had a convulsive twitch when he exclaimed:
``Isn't this a bourgeois, counter-revolutionary policy? Let them answer before the masses!''
``It's revisionism,'' said a youth by the wall.
``That's what I say!" the speaker joyously ran up to him.
The rest were silent, and the most resolute youth asked the speaker whether he had signed the tatzupao alone.
``Yes, I have, but there are many of us and our numbers will grow,'' he replied and ran off to another inquiring group.
That day all the students still had their bags with them, for they had intended to attend classes.
When I was returning from breakfast, I was surprised to find the lanes swarming with students. Crowds gathered around arm-waving speakers, ringing them in to hear any dispute that flared up. The Vietnamese were also reading the tatzupaos.
Nguyen Thi-Canh, a peasant boy from Vietnam, whom I had met before, said: ``The Chinese students have decided not 51 to attend any classes today. They say they have a cultural revolution.''
``Are you having any classes?''
``Yes, for the time being,'' he replied. ``What about you?''
I said I did not know, and then for the first time the sad thought crossed my mind that I, too, would, perhaps, be affected by the ``cultural revolution''.
Ma was back in our room, looking tired but excited.
``Can you tell me what's going on?" I asked. ``On my way to the dining-hall I saw a glaring inscription in very big characters: `Down with the black Party Committee!' What's the meaning of that?''
``China is a socialist and revolutionary country,'' he answered, his eyes sparkling. ``Over here, anyone may say what he thinks, for China is the most democratic state in the world. Some of our students believe that the Party Committee and the University Administrators have committed some political mistakes. That is why they have been writing tatzupaos to remove from office those who are responsible. This kind of thing is only possible in China!''
``But you don't need a revolution to dismiss a bad university head.''
``That's something quite different,'' Ma objected. ``It's not just a matter of mistakes and shortcomings in their work, but of discontent among the masses. This is political, class struggle, and proof that in socialist society the class struggle becomes more intense.''
``So it's the masses who have been writing the tatzupaos?''
``No, you can't say that as yet. It's still the students, non-Party and non-Komsomol young people, who write them, whereas Party members are virtually not involved at all. We have been reading their tatzupaos, but that does not mean they are right. It is discussion that brings out the truth of an idea and shows who is right, for they also have a right, to criticise.''
``The tatzupaos mention the Party organiser, Cheng Chinwu. What sort of a man is he? I haven't met him.''
``No, he hasn't had time to see you. Comrade Cheng is a very busy man and works a great deal. If you had come in a group of foreign students, he would have perhaps met you. In the autumn he received the Vietnamese, but they numbered more than a hundred. Since there were just the two of you, Lida and yourself, we decided to confine ourselves to a reception at Comrade Liu's, who is Deputy Dean of the department.''
52``Why, I have no complaints about him. I merely wanted to get some idea of the man.''
Ma willingly obliged: ``Comrade Cheng came to the University in 1962. Before that he had been a political worker in the People's Liberation Army. At 16, he had gone to fight in the anti-Japanese war, and then in the civil war, had been wounded three times, and had risen from a rank-and-file fighter to a political worker. Comrade Cheng is an old revolutionary and Party member, having joined the Party on the battlefield; he is a loyal fighter of Chairman Mao's and had personally seen him at Yenan. Over here, at the University, he had an important Party assignment to root out any modern revisionism and admiration of all things foreign. You know, of course, that we once had your advisers over here. Well, Comrade Cheng successfully carried out that hard and responsible political struggle. Those who had succumbed to the bad influences were sent down to the countryside to be re-educated through manual work and to live the life of the people. It's very good for their thinking. Thanks to Comrade Cheng, we now have a healthy revolutionary collective.''
``You did say that he is a loyal fighter of Chairman Mao's?" I asked with a hint of irony.
``Yes, but even men of his stature may be criticised. China is a democratic country. It is up to a meeting to discuss and to decide who is right and who isn't.''
As he walked out of the room, he said:
``By the way, today we're all reading the tatzupaos, and so there'll be no classes, and tomorrow there's to be a discussion.''
The days were now full of tumult. Back in my own room I could hear the hum of voices outside. The lanes were crowded with arguing students, and the walls were being papered over with fresh tatzupaos. I now had to make my way to a dininghall through a thick crowd of people, with the restless buzz of voices in the air.
Wang, the little equipment officer, came up to me and asked whether I understood the tatzupaos. I nodded, and Wang went on with his usual polite smile:
``The Party Committee asked me to inform you that the tatzupaos are a method of the cultural revolution and China's internal affair. We ask you not to read them.''
``I'll try not to,'' I said, ``although that's not easy: your yardhigh tatzupaos are all over the place. I find them staring at me when I go in to lunch.''
53``Still, we ask you not to read them. They deal only with internal matters and will not affect you in any way. If you read them, you could get a false and one-sided idea of our affairs. It's natural that you should be interested in the PRC's life and a movement as great as the cultural revolution. In a month or two, we shall organise special lectures for foreign students, and it will then be possible to ask questions and receive answers. You may even be admitted to these lectures together with the Vietnamese.''
I thanked him without much enthusiasm.
One afternoon in late May, the strictly regimented silence hour was interrupted by the blare of the radio, which started broadcasting a meeting of the Party Committee. Party organiser Cheng was saying that the demagogues should be punished, and flatly rejected the charge that he was a ``black'', a member of some band, or an opponent of the General Line.
``Only office-seekers and immature youngsters can claim that,'' he said, and his voice rose to a hysterical pitch. ``What do they know of the revolution?! Here, look. I have proved my loyalty to Mao Tse-tung by shedding my blood! I will be true to our beloved leader to my last breath, all of us, the whole Party Committee is devoted to our Party! We fought for the liberation, and it is we who have ushered in the Mao Tse-tung epoch! It is we who have been building a new, strong and powerful China! We have never been afraid of death or hardship on the field of battle! Long live Chairman Mao! Glory! Glory! Glory!''
Others spoke about the mistakes in their work, about how these had been redressed, about healthy and constructive criticism, and about the handful of demagogues and office-- seekers who were speculating on the revolution.
``The Party men should come out before the non-Party mass and give them a rebuff,'' someone said to a burst of applause.
__b_b_b__Students were streaming along the lanes, but instead of books and notebooks they were carrying chairs and stools: the university was holding an open Party meeting. It lasted all day, and the loudspeakers were again going full blast, so that you could not help hearing what was being said. Someone proposed that Party members should form three-men groups to strip the walls of any ``unfounded'' tatzupaos. The motion was passed amidst much noise and shouting. One of the speakers even mentioned me.
54``Comrades,'' he urged, ``there are many foreigners at our University. Some are friends from Indonesia and Vietnam, but there are also other foreigners. There is even one Soviet man---a man from the country of modern revisionism. We should be vigilant and should not put up our tatzupaos in the open, where they can be read by China's enemies.''
His words were followed by another burst of shouting.
``Let him answer, let the comrade answer!" someone shouted in a high-pitched and grating voice. ``Tell us what Chairman Mao has said about the tatzupaos! Come on, answer this at once! Do you or do you not know what Chairman Mao has said? The tatzupaos should be put up all over the place to enable the people to read them!''
The gist of the dispute was obvious: the Party Committee's spokesman wanted the tatzupaos aimed against the Committee to be taken off on the pretext of foreigners' being present at the University, whereas his opponents wanted them to remain. Fierce argument also raged on how long a tatzupao should remain on the wall, and who had the right to take off the old and put up new ones, for the University was running short of empty walls. Wherever you looked, you were sure to see another wall papered over with posters. At second-floor level, the characters were larger and at eye-level they were minute. It was physically impossible to read all that.
The din was becoming unbearable. As I still failed to attach much importance to what was going on and felt annoyed at being prevented from working, I finally went into the city, where life was still proceeding at its usual, measured pace.
I went into a European-style cafe on the Hsitang and ordered a cup of coffee, which I had missed badly. True, the coffee was far from perfect, but I was thankful for small mercies. As I glanced about me, I suddenly noticed that a young Chinese, wearing a pair of large spectacles, who sat at a corner table gave me a nod and invited me to come over. I was surprised, but crossed over to his table. Like all Chinese he was dressed in blue but instead of the usual military tunic he was wearing a sports coat and drain-pipe trousers in the European fashion. He also had rings on his fingers.
``I believe we have met at the club, haven't we?" he said in English.
``I'm afraid you're mistaken,'' I answered.
``I'm sorry, it's my eyesight. Aren't you a Chilean? Where do you come from then?''
55``From the Soviet Union.''
``You don't say! How do you happen to be in China? On your way somewhere via China? You are an enemy of the government, you know.''
He stressed the word ``government'', and kept on stressing it throughout the whole of our talk.
``I'm no enemy of China,'' I said with a wry smile. ``I have studied Chinese culture all my life. But now that you know who I am, aren't you afraid to talk to me?''
``No,'' he replied. ``First, I'm a sick man and my eyesight is very poor---that's why I mistook you for someone else---and second, I'm not local, I come from Hong Kong. My father has a big shop over there, and I don't care much about the local rules. I'm also a visitor. It's a pity I can't study because of my health.''
He took out from his pockets several anti-Soviet propaganda pamphlets, published in Peking in English. China is chock-full of anti-Soviet literature. These booklets, pamphlets and magazines in German, Russian, English, French, Japanese and other languages will be found wherever any foreigners congregate: at hotels, shops, railway stations, and checkpoints. They are sold to Chinese but are usually pressed upon foreigners free of charge.
Everyone in China is. in duty bound to make a study of various anti-Soviet propaganda writings. The students use propaganda pamphlets to study foreign languages. In spring, I often met them in the park learning their texts by rote in monotonous voices. Thoughtless cramming in general is an essential part of Chinese student studies.
``Here's what I've been offered to read,'' my companion went on. ``I mustn't read too much, and I read better in English than in Chinese. Your country has done a great deal for China, and every Chinese knows this not only down here, but also back at our place, in Hong Kong.''
I noticed that the customers at the cafe were paying some attention to our talk and were even uneasy about it. The tables around us were gradually becoming empty, and the waitresses were whispering to each other in alarm at the far end of the bar.
``You're not in a hurry, are you?" the young man asked. ``I should like to have a talk with you.''
He began telling me about his life in Hong Kong, complained of the low enrolment quota for Chinese at Hong Kong University, where admission was free for Whites only, 56 while being restricted for Chinese, and complained about the boredom in Peking. He clearly felt that he was shunned by the people around because of some vague fear. On the whole, his life here was cheerless and complicated.
``Over here, you are, no doubt, considered Enemy Number One,'' he said. ``I can't imagine how the authorities have let you in. True, at heart the Chinese themselves have a feeling of friendship and gratitude for the Soviet Union and your people, but are afraid to show it.''
He remarked that the Chinese people were not to be judged by a handful of intriguing politicians who were clinging to their personal power.
``Just look at what they've done to China!" he sadly exclaimed. ``Life here has become much worse than in Hong Kong. No one dares to speak his mind, and everyone spies on each other. A most distressing, I would say, tragic state of affairs. My father told me that it was the Soviet people who had been helping China to develop rapidly, with life in the country becoming better and better. But now this is a desert. This is my fifth year in China, but no one wants to make friends with me, and my only friend has been sent down to the countryside. That's loneliness, but loneliness in China is quite against the rules and the whole tenor of our life. The Chinese have always had strong ties of kinship and friendship between people of the same age. But here 1 am all alone, with foreigners for my only acquaintances. What's more, it's getting worse. Do you know hundreds of thousands of school leavers in Peking are loitering about for want of work? The government has decided that upon leaving school they must go to work in the countryside for at least a year. However, they do not go, but since they have no manual-work certificates, they cannot enrol at any institute or take on a job at a factory.''
``But isn't work at a factory manual work as well?''
``No, a factory is not a village. The government maintains that it is not the manual work itself that is important, but the living in the countryside together with the peasants. No meat, no rice, you cannot bring along any tinned food or receive any food parcels. The point is to live, eat and work together with the peasants. Work is by no means the most important thing; the main purpose is to dull the minds of the people so as to keep them from putting two and two together.''
He knew nothing about life in the Soviet Union and asked me many questions. I realised that the young nationalist from 57 Hong Kong was no staunch friend of my country, but he was definitely interested to hear my account of Soviet life.
I never met him again.
__b_b_b__The days went by. June had come, but the studies at the University had not been resumed. Students and teachers seemed to stick to the papered-over walls like flies to sugar. There was growing interest in the tatzupaos. But among the militant and excited faces in the crowd, one now and again saw signs of alarm. Here and there one found traces of stripped tatzupaos: groups of three or four Party members went about scraping them off with steel brushes by decision of the Party organisation, especially in the lanes which the Vietnamese and myself always took when going down to the dining-hall. But fresh student tatzupaos were immediately put up in place of the old ones and people flocked to read them in even larger numbers.
At the intersections of lanes, plywood stands were erected to hang up thick red sheets of paper covered with calligraphic characters, which I at once knew to be official. They expressed support for the Party Committee, the Party bureaus of the departments, and Party organiser Cheng in person, and were signed not by individuals but by full bodies of men, like ``The whole collective of students and teachers of the Astronomy Department'', or ``Party group of the Second Course of the Physics Department''. Some tatzupaos were written by the Komsomol organisation or the Party Committee itself. A resolution adopted by an open Party meeting was prominently displayed. When I read it, I discovered that I was also a figure of some importance. One of its paragraphs said: ``As there are foreigners, notably one from the Soviet Union, taking courses at the University, there is need scrupulously to observe the decision of the State Council on protecting our country's prestige, and not to hang out any critical tatzupaos in places open to foreigners....''
To one side of the resolution, there was a large-character tatzupao written on old newspapers. Under a banner headline, ``Obey the highest instructions alone, the instructions of our deeply beloved leader, Chairman Mao!'', it said: ``Look at them perverting Chairman Mao's instructions! Chairman Mao teaches us: 'The tatzupao should be hung out in public, for the broad masses to see.' Let us rally in the defence of Chairman Mao's instructions! Let us defend our Party CC! Down with the Black Party Committee! Down with black bandit Cheng! 58 Look at them fighting against Chairman Mao's supreme instructions!''
To remove any possible doubts, a thick black arrow ran across the text and pierced the top-quality red paper of the Party Committee's resolution.
Well, well, well! That was something new: an open attack against the Party committee under the slogan of ``protecting the CC''. The whole atmosphere at the University indicated that the Party Committee had been unable to stop the `` revolutionaries'', and that all studies had been wound up.
One day I passed by a group of elderly men---teachers, as far as I could judge. They walked fast, talking in excited tones. An irritated voice said behind my shoulder: ``The students have forgotten all about discipline. They have been shutting me up with Mao Tse-tung quotations, as if Chairman Mao is opposed to discipline.''
``They won't listen to anyone, and there's nothing to be done about it,'' another man joined in. But glancing at me sideways, they all fell silent.
For the time being all these goings on had not affected me personally. Professor Kuo still came to see me punctually. We were now being left alone more often, for my futao Ma was obviously neglecting his duties. Sometimes 1 even thought that he was deliberately avoiding me for fear of any possible questions. In the morning he was gone before I was up and, in breach of every rule, came back as late as 2.00 a.m., stealing in like a cat and going to bed without a sound.
Returning from my breakfast one day, I found Ma in the room.
``Are you free today?" I asked with surprise.
``No, I'm busy, very busy.'' Ma was obviously embarrassed. ``But I was waiting for you specially to tell you that the Foreign Students' Office and the Department request you not to read the tatzupaos.''
``Wang has already told me so. I won't read them, if you like.''
``That's fine, but I didn't know he had already had a talk with you.''
Here was an amazing thing: throughout the three months, I had never yet come across an o