China in Ten Words (20 page)

“Hu Run pisses me off,” Huang replied. “Why would I give him money? That list of his is like an arrest warrant—whoever’s on it ends up in big trouble!”

The Rich List—or the Pigs-for-Slaughter List, if you prefer—is just the tip of the iceberg in China today. Off the list, in the ubiquitous battle for economic advantage, many more grassroots are performing their own dramatic rises and staggering falls. Or, as Chinese bloggers like to say, most pigs get slaughtered even before they’re fattened up. And on today’s stage, which lurches so unpredictably from comedy to tragedy, none of us has any idea when our end will come.

W
hen we look back at the Cultural Revolution and all the political infighting it involved, there’s no end to the stories of those who rose swiftly from the grassroots, only to drop like a stone afterward.

In August 1973 something unexpected happened at the Tenth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. It was no surprise that Mao Zedong sat in the central chair on the presiding bench or that Premier Zhou Enlai sat on his right, but everyone was amazed to see a mere thirty-eight-year-old sitting on Mao’s left. After Mao announced the opening of the congress and Zhou read the political report, this newcomer calmly began to read the “Report on the Revision of the Party Constitution.”

His name was Wang Hongwen, and at the start of the Cultural Revolution he had been simply a security guard at a Shanghai textile mill. In November 1966 he and a few other workers set up what soon became a famous militant organization, Shanghai Workers’ Revolutionary Rebel Headquarters. After that he enjoyed a meteoric rise, and in less than seven years he was elevated from a night watchman to a vice premier in the Politburo, No. 3 in the hierarchy after Mao and Zhou.

But good times don’t last long, and just three years later—after Mao died and as the Cultural Revolution ended—he became a prisoner along with the other members of the so-called Gang of Four: Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, and Yao Wenyuan. In their show trial in December 1980 this celebrated revolutionary rebel was sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes that included “organizing and leading a counterrevolutionary clique.”

In China’s overheated political campaigns, revolution was just a short step away from counterrevolution. In popular idiom it was a matter of “flipping pancakes”: everyone was just a pancake sizzling on the griddle, flipped from side to side by the hand of fate. Yesterday’s revolutionary became today’s counterrevolutionary, just as today’s counterrevolutionary would become tomorrow’s revolutionary.

After that Wang Hongwen was gradually forgotten. Left to stew alone in his prison cell, he could only sigh and moan at the thought of his fleeting days of glory. Wracked by liver cancer, he came to a desolate end; when he died, in August 1992 at the age of fifty-seven, only his wife and brother attended his cremation.

How many stories of rebels’ topsy-turvy careers did the Cultural Revolution tell? Too many to count, and way too many to mention. If all these stories were laid out one after another, they would stretch as endlessly as a highway and be as hard to tally as the trees in a forest.

This makes one think of Liu Shaoqi, who died wretchedly in the early Cultural Revolution. After many months of humiliation and abuse at the hands of militants, this former head of state died in November 1969, at the age of seventy-one. So much time had passed since his last haircut that his white locks dangled down to his shoulders, and his naked corpse was covered only with a single sheet. In the ledger recording the storage of his ashes his occupation was given as “Unemployed.”

During the Cultural Revolution, as I moved from childhood to adolescence, the grim reaper twice made special visits to our town. The first was right at the beginning, when Communist Party officials, once so awesome, were denounced as capitalist-roaders and some chose death rather than subject themselves to further mistreatment. The second was when the Cultural Revolution ended: the rebels who had ruled the roost for ten years suddenly became followers of the Gang of Four, and it was their turn to be purged. Some felt the end of the world was nigh and, like the capitalist-roaders ten years earlier, took their own lives by this means or that.

One of the leading militants in our county during the Cultural Revolution, having risen precipitously from the grassroots, threw his weight around every chance he could. When I was young, I would often see him at struggle sessions; and when his voice blasted from the loudspeakers, it sounded like two or three voices overlaid on top of each other. As he read out his denunciations, he would keep an eagle eye on the row of capitalist-roaders, with their heads bowed, and if one of them made the slightest movement, he would break off his tirade and kick the unlucky victim fiercely in the back of the legs to bring him to his knees. When Mao Zedong set up “three-in-one” revolutionary committees with a mix of veteran cadres, military men, and Red Guard militants, this activist secured a place on the county revolutionary committee and was soon promoted to the rank of deputy chief, confirming his legitimacy in the new order. When he walked the streets of our town, everyone vied to claim acquaintance with him and hailed him with a warm, respectful greeting; but he would respond simply with a perfunctory nod, a reserved expression on his face. If we children hailed him with a cheery “Chief,” however, he would wave to us in a friendly way.

After the Cultural Revolution he was placed in solitary confinement during the campaign to purge followers of the Gang of Four. My classmates and I had just graduated from high school then; feeling at loose ends, our curiosity piqued, a few of us went to observe his interrogation. We knew he had been shut up in a little room behind the department store warehouse, so we clambered up on top of the wall just outside and sat there with our legs dangling. Through an open window we could see him sitting on a stool, facing two questioners on the other side of a table. They banged the table and harangued him just as mercilessly as the rebels had interrogated capitalist-roaders. This militant, once so intimidating, was now a broken man, abjectly confessing all the crimes he had committed as a lackey of the Gang of Four. He started crying at one point, breaking off from the recitation of his misdeeds to mention that his mother had died just a few days earlier. It upset him terribly that he could not attend the wake, and suddenly he wailed as loudly as a child, “My mom was spitting blood! She filled up a whole washbasin with it!”

This simply provoked his interrogator further. “Don’t talk nonsense!” he barked, rapping the table. “How could your mom have so much blood?”

One morning when the guard was in the toilet, the man made good his escape, fleeing along the seawall for a good five miles before he finally came to a stop. There he stood, gazing blankly at the boundless sea, oblivious to the waves crashing on the shore. Head bowed, he walked over to a corner shop, stood at the counter for a minute, and emptied all the cash out of his pockets. He bought two packs of cigarettes and a box of matches, then returned to the seawall.

Peasants who were working in the fields nearby noticed how he lingered there, chain-smoking steadily. When he had finished both packs, he watched in a daze as they went about their jobs, then turned, scrambled down the embankment, and threw himself into the seething waves. By the time his captors closed in on his location, there was no sign of him, just a heap of cigarette stubs on the seawall. It wasn’t until several days later that his body washed up on a beach farther along the coast. His corpse was so swollen, I heard, that it was hardly recognizable. He was still wearing shirt and trousers, but shoes and socks had been scoured away.

The Cultural Revolution induced grassroots from society’s underbelly to throw caution to the winds, and in a revolution where “to rebel was justified” they gained opportunities to soar. Completely ordinary people enjoyed such rapid vertical elevation that they were said to have “taken off in a helicopter.” With the end of the Cultural Revolution these people slipped from their lofty perches and found themselves in free fall, plunging through the grassroots layer to the level below, where only jailbirds roosted. “What goes up comes down even quicker” was the new line used to mock these rebels on the slide.

Of course there were even more people whose rises and falls followed a less dramatic trajectory. In the town where I lived there were a number of such cases, and I will now introduce one of them.

After the January Revolution of 1967 swept across China and government seals everywhere exchanged hands, rebels and Red Guard organizations that had failed to snatch control of official seals were not reduced to total despair, for it occurred to them that they could simply carve their own. Thus self-appointed grassroots power structures popped up everywhere in dazzling array, like the Tang poet’s evocation of the scene after a snowstorm: “Spring seems to stretch as far as the eye can see/Pear blossoms bloom white on tree after tree.”

It was against this backdrop that our hero rose to prominence, establishing an Invincible Mao Zedong Thought Publicity Team, with himself as its self-proclaimed leader. He must have been about forty years old then. In the past he had been a timorous creature and a man of few words. He was not the sort who swaggered along in the middle of the street; rather, he kept his eyes cast down as he walked and tended to hug the wall. Even children could push him around.

At first it was the older boys in the alley who would give him a hard time, just to show off. As he walked past, a boy would veer into his path and deliver a stinging body check. His reaction was simply to stand still, scowl at the boy who knocked into him, and then walk off without a word. I admired those older boys for being so bold as to bully a grown-up, and later on we preschoolers worked up the courage to harass him too, tossing pieces of gravel at him as he passed. He would turn and throw us a dirty look, then walk on without saying a word. This made us feel on top of the world, and we reveled in our newfound power.

When the roiling tide of revolution swept our way, people were quick to attach themselves to one rebel organization or another. This meek, self-effacing individual found the temptation impossible to resist and eagerly offered his services to the cause. Perhaps because he seemed so unprepossessing, the rebel organizations wrote him off as lacking revolutionary fiber and rejected his application for admission. Helpless and desperate, he resorted to establishing his own one-man rebel organization. He had an Invincible Mao Zedong Thought Publicity Team seal carved and hung it impressively from his waistband.

Thus began his days of excitement and distinction. I remember that every time he appeared on the streets of our town, his jacket was always stuffed inside his trousers—the only person in the whole town to wear his clothes that way—for this rendered his seal all the more conspicuous. A whistle hung from a string around his neck, and in his hand he clutched a copy of
Quotations from Chairman Mao
as he strutted back and forth, head held high and chest thrown out, his eyes scanning the people in the street. Often without warning he would give a blast on his whistle, and when the passersby stopped to look at him, he would clasp his Little Red Book in both hands. “Everyone turn to page twenty-three. We will now read a passage by Chairman Mao,” he’d loudly instruct.

In those days most people carried a Little Red Book with them at all times; as soon as they heard his summons they pulled their books out of their pockets and, at his prompting, earnestly began to read aloud quotations of Chairman Mao. After finishing page twenty-three, they would find he had other pages earmarked for them to read—pages forty-eight, fifty-six, seventy-nine, and more—until he judged it time to bring their pious study session to a close. “That’s all for today,” he would solemnly declare, closing his copy of the Little Red Book. “I trust you’ll all continue your reading when you get home.”

“Yes, we will,” the passersby would answer, relieved to have recovered their freedom.

Some people were deeply embarrassed that their failure to carry the Little Red Book had been exposed to the world, but he did not take them to task for being so remiss. “Just don’t forget the Little Red Book tomorrow,” he said amiably.

With this ideological policeman on the loose, everybody made sure to take the Little Red Book with them when they went out. As soon as his whistle blew, the resounding peals of Mao Zedong’s quotations would echo along the street.

We children no longer took liberties with him, assuming mistakenly that only the biggest rebel leader around would be able to bring so many militants and ordinary townspeople to heel with a single blast of his whistle. We didn’t realize he was basking in borrowed glory, for in those days everyone was easily cowed by the Little Red Book.

We became his admirers. Other rebels didn’t give us a second glance, but he was very willing to establish cordial ties with us. We would swarm around as soon as he appeared and tag along behind as he walked down the street. We also followed his sartorial lead and tucked our jackets inside our pants, although—much to our disappointment—we had no seals to hang from our waistbands. He was generous enough, however, to allow us a feel of his Invincible Mao Zedong Thought Publicity Team seal and would stand in the street with a patient smile on his face no matter how long we spent fingering it. But when we pushed things a bit too far and asked whether we could hang this wonderful seal from our waistbands for a moment, he would sternly refuse. “That would amount to a power seizure,” he warned.

This rebel without a clique enjoyed good relations with the townsfolk. Schools no longer offered classes and factories no longer operated shifts—everyone was too busy making revolution to go to work—so some thought they might as well take the opportunity to travel and visit family and friends in other parts of the country. As long as they had a letter of introduction from a revolutionary rebel organization, they did not need to pay for their ticket or hotel room, so they would turn to the one-man propaganda team for help. He greeted such suppliants warmly and never turned anybody down. To meet the growing demand, he kitted himself out with another revolutionary prop: a faded military satchel strung over his shoulders, stuffed with a thick sheaf of mimeographed letters of introduction.