Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (24 page)

Beheadings? Shanghai cremations? It seemed incredible to me, but so many incredible things in China eventually turned out to be true. The friend had a neighbor whose son had disappeared from the square that night. A few months later, a stranger knocked on the door and told her that her son had been labeled a counterrevolutionary. The son had been beheaded in the Forbidden City, then cremated in Shanghai, the stranger said. He showed her an urn containing the ashes and demanded payment for the urn before he would release it.

On Tuesday, the Politburo met again, in Deng’s absence. The meeting swiftly accomplished three items of business. Hua Guofeng was formally appointed premier and first vice-chairman of the Central Committee. The Tiananmen Square protests were labeled counter-revolutionary. And Deng was dismissed from all his posts. Mao, in another balancing move, ruled that Deng could retain his Communist Party membership.

The witchhunt began. The doughty old Marshal Ye Jianying gave Deng, who feared for his life, asylum in Canton, where the Gang’s influence was weak. At Beijing University, Party Secretary Pan began interrogating my classmates. Everyone had to account for their movements on the Festival of Tending the Graves. Had anyone
gone to the square that Sunday? Had anyone copied down poems? As a foreign student, I was exempt. Pan concentrated his investigation on Horsepower, Future and Liang Haiguang.

It is eerie to see how closely the 1976 Tiananmen incident foreshadowed the Tiananmen Massacre thirteen years later. Both protests began as disguised mourning for a senior Communist official. Both crackdowns coincided with purges at the top. Both times, the victims were labeled counter-revolutionary and the death toll was a state secret. The only difference was that, in 1976, Deng was the victim; in 1989, he gave the order to shoot to kill.

The school ordered everyone to write Big Character posters attacking Deng. My classmates were ambivalent. Criticizing him was an act of self-preservation for every worker-peasant-soldier student who had spent their university years growing rice. Yet I noticed the denunciations were less than passionate. Some even copied chunks from the
People’s Daily
verbatim.

Bright Pearl Tang, who had snitched on Future for collecting foreign stamps, was an exception. She threw herself into the anti-Deng campaign, copying dozens of Big Character posters, which she mailed to her old work unit to post all over the city of Kunming, in southwest China. An ambitious Party member, Bright Pearl had no intention of going back to her boring old job as a high-school teacher.

As spring turned into summer, we all looked forward to a break. Then, for the second year in a row, we were told our summer vacation was canceled. The continuing Revolution in Education needed us. On July 7, 1976, Zhu De, Chinas greatest marshal, died at the age of ninety.

Nineteen days later, I was in the port city of Dalian when I awoke to feel the hotel shaking. The next day, I watched the ceiling lamps sway as the aftershocks continued. As always with disasters in those days, not a word was reported in the Chinese media, which mentioned only good news, to demonstrate the superiority of socialism. But it was obvious that an earthquake had occurred. What no one seemed to know was how powerful it had been and where it had struck. I was on a Beijing University tour for foreign students, and our Chinese teachers were desperately worried about their
families. My roommate on the trip, Margaret Small, was the daughter of the Canadian ambassador in Beijing. Only after she phoned her father did we learn what happened.

It was the most powerful earthquake in modern Chinese history, registering 7.8 on the Richter scale. It had flattened the northeastern coal-mining city of Tangshan, two hundred miles away from where we were staying, killing nearly half a million people and leaving one million others homeless.

When the International Red Cross offered assistance, the Chinese government haughtily rejected aid, citing its policy of self-reliance. Overwhelmed rescue workers began dumping decomposing corpses down abandoned mine shafts. We made our way back to Beijing by a circuitous train route to avoid the stricken area.

We arrived to find Beijing, 125 miles from the epicenter, resembling a giant refugee camp. Many buildings had been destroyed, but there were miraculously few casualties. Millions were living on the streets in makeshift shelters. At the Foreign Languages Press, the staff slept in cars, buses and tents. No one was allowed inside the offices or dormitories, which were deemed unsafe in an aftershock. Camping out in the courtyard of the press, where fresh water was at a premium, Norman quit shaving and grew a beard. In fact, delighted to be liberated from dull Chinese razor blades, he never shaved again.

In Zhongnanhai, the earthquake rattled the tin roof of the pool house where Mao was sleeping. His panic-stricken doctors and nurses wheeled him in a gurney to Building 202, a gray brick residence they believed was more solid. Ordinary Chinese began to mutter that the Tangshan earthquake was a bad omen. First Zhou Enlai had died. Then Marshal Zhu De. Important deaths came in threes. Who would be next?

I was cycling to Norman’s office on the afternoon of September 9, 1976, when I heard the now-familiar chords of the state funeral dirge. I jumped off my bike to listen to the broadcast emanating from an office building’s loudspeakers.

“We announce with the deepest grief that Comrade Mao Zedong, our esteemed and beloved great leader, passed away ten
minutes afer midnight.” The other cyclists who had stopped to listen looked shocked, but not sad. As I biked to the Press, people were already donning black armbands. I arrived as Big Xu was calling a meeting of the English section. “Chairman Mao passed away early today,” he announced. “Anyone who wants to say something should feel free to speak” There were no gasps or tears, just a sense of relief. “Everyone had been waiting,” Norman recalled.

I raced back to the university, where I found my classmates already making white paper chrysanthemums, black armbands and paper wreaths. Pearl and Center were devastated. Some of my peasant classmates cried, too. The youngest in the class, a semi-literate member of the Yi minority, was inconsolable. Without Mao, they would never have had a chance to go to university. To my surprise, most of my other classmates remained dry-eyed. I remembered the tremendous outpouring of grief at Premier Zhou’s death. Now my roommate lay on her bed and just stared at the ceiling. Future told me he was on a bus when he heard the news, and thought,
So, he’s only a man in the end. So much for shouting ‘Long live Chairman Mao!’

Mao Zedong, the eldest son of a prosperous grain merchant, had led China for more than a quarter century. Born in 1893 in the waning years of the last imperial dynasty, he was a coarse-spoken man with a love of elegant poetry. Obsessed with physical culture as a youth, he bathed in icy water even in winter and toughened the soles of his feet by climbing rocky cliffs barefoot.

In 1921, he became a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party. As the Communist forces gained strength and holed up in the mountains of Jiangxi province, Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang troops tried to annihilate them. In 1934, Mao led the Communist armies to break through a near-fatal Guomindang encirclement. Hundreds of thousands of Red troops began the desperate six-thousand-mile-long tactical retreat that came to be known as the Long March. By 1935, nine out often soldiers had perished. But the legendary trek ended in triumph when the ragtag forces stumbled into Yanan, a parched village in Shaanxi province about sixty miles from the Yellow River. There, the Communists regrouped and went on to found the People’s Republic fourteen years later.

Mao’s death was not a turning point for me. That would come later. But I found I had no tears, either. It was strange. His charisma had lured me halfway around the world. Instead of getting a law degree or an MBA or, for that matter, a job, I had happily spent four years of my life hauling pig manure, harvesting wheat and reading Marx. And yet, when I faced things honestly, I could no longer turn a blind eye. China was a country where it was a crime to ask for a used Canadian stamp.

For reasons of crowd control and because everything was organized in China, including who may go to public parks on national holidays, viewing Mao’s body lying in state in the Great Hall of the People was by invitation only. Norman put on his best wool Mao suit and joined the
China Reconstructs
contingent. Again, because so many people wanted to attend the state funeral a few days later, each unit sent representatives. In our class, only Pearl and Center were allowed to go. The rest of us held our own memorial service in a grimy room in the history department. As a small tape recorder played the funeral dirge, we bowed low three times before a crepe-draped poster of Mao.

On September 18, the official ten-day mourning period was capped by a massive rally in Tiananmen Square. Again, my classmates and I were not invited, and we watched the proceedings on a television in the Big Canteen. With the glaring exception of Deng, the entire Chinese leadership attended, the last public display of unity before the big showdown. Hua Guofeng used the occasion of the funeral address to exhort the nation to continue attacking Deng. At precisely three o’clock, Hua announced three minutes of silence. Across the nation, factory workers downed their tools. Buses stopped. Cyclists dismounted. Silence fell like a shroud over the capital. Everyone was waiting. What would happen next? Mao had controlled the world’s most populous nation for more than a quarter of a century. A China without him was hard to imagine.

Then Wang Hongwen, the Gang member, called out, “First bow! Second bow! Third bow!” A million people in the square simultaneously bowed three times before the giant portrait of Mao hanging from the rostrum. In the Big Canteen, we bowed, too, before the television. As the majestic strains of “The East Is Red” boomed
over the loudspeakers at Tiananmen Square, Premier Hua declared the rally over.

Immediately, the competing factions began jockeying for control. Mao’s radical nephew positioned troops on behalf of Madame Mao. Her allies armed the militia in Shanghai and Beijing. Marshal Ye Jianying planned a counter-attack. His co-conspirators included Premier Hua Guofeng and Mao’s former bodyguard, General Wang Dongxing, who controlled the elite palace guard.

On October 6, less than a month after Mao’s death, Premier Hua called an evening Politburo meeting at Huairen Hall in Zhongnanhai, ostensibly to discuss the publication of the fifth volume of Mao’s
Selected Works
. He and Marshal Ye arrived ahead of time. General Wang and several army officers hid in a side room. Zhang Chunqiao was the first Gang member to arrive. As he walked in, Premier Hua announced his arrest. General Wang and his men emerged from the side room. Zhang, fifty-nine, did not resist.

Wang Hongwen arrived next. The forty-one-year-old former textile-mill worker put up a fight but was quickly subdued. Accounts differ over the arrest of the third Gang member. Yao Wenyuan was either arrested in Zhongnanhai or at his home. Madame Mao must have guessed something was up. She stayed away, and was arrested in her residence, the Spring Lotus Chamber in Zhongnanhai. Later sentenced to death in a spectacular televised trial, she was granted a stay of execution and spent nearly fifteen years in solitary confinement before committing suicide in 1991.

That the arrest of the most powerful woman the Communist world has ever known could remain a secret was a measure of how tightly things were controlled in those days. Taking advantage of the total secrecy, Marshal Ye and General Wang continued rounding up the Gang’s key supporters, even luring some to Beijing where they were arrested as they stepped off the plane.

To the outside world, it was business as usual. Mao had requested cremation, but within hours he was pumped up with formaldehyde and displayed under a crystal lid, a peasant under glass. Two days after the Gang’s secret purge, Premier Hua blandly announced that a memorial hall would be built in Tiananmen Square. All major construction in Beijing ground to a halt as “volunteer” crews
worked day and night. Li Ruihuan, a senior Party official and former carpenter, was rewarded with a Politburo seat after successfully ramming the massive project through in time for the first anniversary of Mao’s death. The hall, a neo-Stalinist structure topped by a mustard-yellow roof, was built to withstand an earthquake ten times the force of the Tangshan one. It was an edifice complex, bigger than Lenin’s tomb in Moscow, bigger than Ho Chi Minh’s tomb in Hanoi. The mausoleum loomed just south of the Monument to the People’s Heroes, ruining the sweep and symmetry of the world’s biggest square, like a garish brooch on a classic black dress.

General Wang Dongxing tipped off my geisha classmates about the purge six days after the fact. They whispered the stunning news to Future, who didn’t believe them. Three other classmates, all children of senior officials, separately got word a day or so later. By late October, the Communist Party began transmitting the news down the ranks. As word spread, slogans hailing the “downfall of the Gang of Four anti-Party clique” appeared in the streets. The Chinese were accustomed to abrupt reversals of policy. But Mao’s widow arrested? Her radical faction overthrown? People literally danced in their offices. Firecrackers exploded all night. Liquor store shelves were emptied as people rushed to drink toasts. Still in exile in Canton under Marshal Ye’s protection, Deng Xiaoping downed twenty-seven celebratory shots of 120-proof
maotai
, according to a family friend. Everywhere, I saw people wandering around with broad smiles and big hangovers. It seemed that the entire capital was marching deliriously to Tiananmen Square. Artists who had suffered under Madame Mao’s cultural fascism sketched devastating caricatures and pasted them up in the square. Ordinary people took turns spitting on them to see who could score the most direct hits.

On October 22, sixteen days after the arrests, the Chinese press officially dubbed her faction the Gang of Four and airbrushed them from all photographs. Their purge was the turning point for me. Although great efforts were made to portray a wide gulf between Mao and the Gang of Four, I just couldn’t make another great leap of faith. Mao and Madame Mao were on the same team. Whatever she had done, it was with his blessing.