China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (67 page)

EPILOGUE

The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution

W
hen the police came in the middle of the night, Mei Zhi and her husband, China’s most famous literary critic,
Hu Feng, couldn’t bear to tell their three children they were about to be arrested. They said instead that guests had arrived; they put their two boys and a girl to bed and kissed them good night. Then they were taken away.

Mei, a writer of essays, poems, and children’s stories, was released from prison six years later, and even then she was given a “rightist hat,” as the Chinese expression had it, meaning that she was infected with thoughts associated with the capitalist class, and she was forced to undergo political reeducation to have it removed. Hu Feng, a founding member of the League of Left-Wing Writers in Shanghai in the early 1930s and a leader of the anti-Japanese patriotic movement, was buried in the Chinese prison system for almost all of the next twenty-five years, during which he refused to confess to his “crimes,” on the grounds, he said later, that he hadn’t committed any. Hu’s offense was to have written and circulated a long, instantly notorious essay in which he criticized China’s new rulers for imposing restrictions on art and culture. This offense led Mao Zedong to declare him the leader of a “counterrevolutionary clique,” and Mao had decreed that “
counterrevolutionaries are trash; they are vermin.” In 1979, three years after Mao’s death, Hu was released from prison, and three years after that, he was officially exonerated. But he had been destroyed physically and mentally. He sank into a tortured madness and died in 1985.

Hu was one of several of the prominent Chinese scholars, writers, and academics whom we have referenced in these pages, examples of Chinese intellectuals whose public disillusionment with Chiang and the KMT helped to turn the tide of public opinion against them and in
favor of the lesser-known Communists. They were of different persuasions. Some, like Hu, were convinced Marxists; others were western-educated liberals. All of them, like other intellectuals the world over, fell under the sway of Communism, with its satisfying certainties and its claim to embody the progressive yearnings of all humankind, except the capitalist/imperialist enemy. In China, as elsewhere, from Cuba to Czechoslovakia, the appeal was enhanced by the corruption, nastiness, and ineffectiveness of the central government. Without much knowledge of the workings of Communism in practice, many Chinese intellectuals enthusiastically welcomed Mao and his armies when they came to power in 1949.

It was risky to do what they did. To belong to a pro-Communist organization, like the League of Left-Wing Writers, or simply to criticize Chiang and the KMT was to risk imprisonment and torture. Nonetheless, except for a few among them who did suffer grieviously and, in some cases, mortally for their beliefs, most of the anti-KMT dissidents were able to keep their jobs and to do their work, publishing stories, poems, and essays, teaching, and, as we’ve seen in the case of Ma Yinchu, expressing their views in public meetings.

Then, after the Communist Party took power in mainland China in 1949, virtually all of these men and women who had looked to Mao for China’s new beginning were savagely persecuted, punished for demonstrating the very in-dependence of mind that had led them to favor the Communists years before. In some instances, like those of Mei Zhi and Hu Feng, their lives were utterly destroyed. Others endured long periods of criticism and public humiliation but were eventually able to restore
some semblance of normal life. Their treatment illustrated one of the chief features of Mao’s twenty-seven years of rule: the compulsion of the man known as the Great Helmsman to track down and eradicate enemies within. In a grim imitation of Joseph Stalin, Mao and his loyal lieutenants, most important of them
Kang Sheng, now head of the powerful Public Security Bureau, purged former comrades-in-arms, determined now to have been counter-revolutionaries all along. For more ordinary people, writers, poets, professors, people who had studied in the United States, people to whom the imprecise sobriquet “bourgeois” could be applied, they elaborated a system of ideological purification, complete with its own sprawling gulag and its own methods of physical and psychological torture and intimidation. The methods used during the Rectification Campaign of 1942–44, which was already Stalinism with a Chinese flavor, were reemployed in the new persecutions: total isolation, the separation of the prisoner from family and friends and from any source of emotional support or legal help, and the mobilization of all the tools of the totalitarian state—the press, the propaganda apparatus, the howling mobs—to persecute the defenseless ideological victim.

The Chinese literary critic Hu Feng and his wife, Mei Zhi. Hu was a prominent Marxist critic of the Chinese Nationalists during the war and among the first victims of a Maoist purge after the Communists took power.

Needless to say, Hu Feng had no lawyer. No journalist in China independently investigated the case against him. There were no open hearings, no habeas corpus petitions, during which the government had to justify his detention. For the first ten years of his imprisonment, Mei Zhi was not allowed to know where her husband was being held or even whether he was alive, until, in an act intended to show
the “leniency” of the party, she was allowed to visit him and to send him small gifts of food and clothing. “You should trust the party,” an official at the Ministry of Public Security told Mei Zhi, adding of her husband, “
we are all committed to reforming him.”

The punishment of dissent, or of fabricated dissent, was harsher and psychologically more insidious under the Communists than it had been under the KMT, and the scope of individual freedom far smaller. In July 1946, as we’ve seen, several members of the
Democratic League, fearful of the right-wing thugs who had assassinated two of the league’s members, took refuge for a time at the American consulate in Kunming. Among them was Fei Xiaotong, China’s pioneering anthropologist and champion of the peasantry, widely known both inside China and abroad. A graduate of Yenching (later Peking) University, he had studied with Bronislaw Malinowski, the pioneering anthropologist, at
the London School of Economics, and, like many of his colleagues, he was a member of the Democratic League, which generally allied itself with the Communists. He was, with good reason, fearful of the KMT’s secret police and hired thugs, but he was never imprisoned or persecuted during the reign of Chiang Kai-shek. During the war, he lived at one of the universities in exile in Kunming and carried out research in villages in Yunnan province. He was able to spend a year in the United States. He wrote many articles in Chinese publications and enjoyed considerable fame.

In the years right after 1949, Mao generally pursued the moderate policy toward non-Communist intellectuals that he had adopted during the war years and during the long struggle for power. Many of the intellectuals who had criticized the KMT were given important positions in the new society. Fei was named vice president of the National Institute for Minorities and a member of the prestigious, if powerless, National People’s Congress.

In 1956, in order to flush out opponents, Mao, in what came to be known as the
Hundred Flowers Campaign, encouraged China’s intellectuals to speak their mind, and Fei offered some critical ideas. As a result, he was forced to stand before howling crowds and to admit his “crimes against the people.” Later, during the vast purge known as the
Cultural Revolution of the mid- to late 1960s, he was beaten and forced to clean toilets by the youthful Maoist enforcers called
Red Guards. Unlike many other such victims of Maoist cruelty, Fei survived and later taught at Peking University, but he said that he had lost what would have been his twenty-three most productive and useful years.

Others suffered similarly.
Ma Yinchu, the American-educated economist who, in 1944, had likened Chiang to a “vacuum tube,” became the president of Peking University.
Chu Anping, whose writings in
Keguan,
or
Objectivity
, made him a prominent figure in the days after the Japanese surrender, became the editor of the
Guangming Daily,
a newspaper read largely by intellectuals. Ma fell from grace when he proposed a population control program for China at a time when Mao believed that population control was a plot by the imperialist powers to keep the Third World weak. Under another kind of leader than Mao, Ma’s suggestion that China curb its birth rate would have been treated as what it was, an idea to be debated. Under Mao, it was deemed instead to be a kind of thought crime, an implicit collusion with the enemies of China.

Ma was ridiculed in person at an assembly of students and faculty at Peking University by
Kang Sheng, and for several years he was singled out for the kind of rhetorically bloated attack that only a Communist propaganda machine can muster, illustrating the daily “minute of hate” that Orwell described in the novel
Nineteen Eighty-Four,
during which all people stand to shake their fists and shout epithets at the great enemy. Ma was dismissed from public life, accused of a nonsensical list of political crimes, and made into a sort of non-person as long as
Mao was alive; after Mao’s death, like Fei, he was rehabilitated and he was able to resume his scholarly life.

At least Ma avoided actual incarceration. Many others didn’t. In 1957, Mao initiated the first mass purge since the Yenan
Rectification Campaign. Hundreds of thousands of people were accused of being “rightists,” including numerous western-educated people who had returned to the country from abroad to help build the “new China.” Many of them were sent to labor camps to “remold” their thoughts. Many died there. In 1958, Chu Anping was branded an “anti-party, anti-socialist bourgeois rightist.” He was made to clean the streets—it became a standard practice of Maoism to force people to do hard manual labor as a way of getting them to adopt a “proletarian world view.” He was imprisoned, and when he was released, he disappeared, probably a suicide, though this is not known for sure.

The writer
Wang Ruowang, imprisoned for three years by the KMT in the 1930s, then imprisoned under Mao for four years in the 1960s, testified in
The Hunger Years,
his autobiographical novel (banned in China), to a difference between the two regimes. Chiang’s secret police’s use of torture, unjustified as it was, was aimed at extracting information about the activities of members of the Communist Party. Under the Communists, torture was also commonly used, except that it was aimed at extracting confessions to crimes that had never been committed, or to thoughts that should not have been illegal. “
The basis of the interrogation,” Wang wrote, “was nothing more than the order from above that so-and-so should be overthrown.”