Jung Chang - Wild Swans - Three Daughters of China

Zhou and Deng had been making tentative efforts to open the country up, so Mme Mao launched a fresh attack on foreign culture. In early 1974 there was a big media campaign denouncing the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni for a film he had made about China, although no one in China had seen the film, and few had even heard of it or of Antonioni. This xenophobia was extended to Beethoven after a visit by the Philadelphia Orchestra.

In the two years since the fall of Lin Biao, my mood had changed from hope to despair and fury. The only source of comfort was that there was a fight going on at all, and that the lunacy was not reigning supreme, as it had in the earlier years of the Cultural Revolution. During this period, Mao was not giving his full backing to either side.

He hated the efforts of Zhou and Deng to reverse the Cultural Revolution, but he knew that his wife and her acolytes could not make the country work.

Mao let Zhou carry on with the administration of the country, but set his wife upon Zhou, particularly in a new campaign to 'criticize Confucius." The slogans ostensibly denounced Lin Biao, but were really aimed at Zhou, who, it was widely held, epitomized the virtues advocated by the ancient sage. Even though Zhou had been unwaveringly loyal, Mao still could not leave him alone. Not even now, when Zhou was fatally ill with advanced cancer of the bladder.

It was in this period that I started to realize that it was Mao who was really responsible for the Cultural Revolution. But I still did not condemn him explicitly, even in my own mind. It was so difficult to destroy a god! But, psychologically, I was ripe for his name to be spelled out for me.

Education became the front line of the sabotage by Mme Mao and her cabal, because it was not immediately vital to the economy and because every attempt at learning and teaching involved a reversal of the glorified ignorance of the Cultural Revolution. When I entered the university, I found myself in a battlefield.

Sichuan University had been the headquarters of 26 August, the Rebel group that had been the task force of the Tings, and the buildings were pockmarked with scars from the seven years of the Cultural Revolution. Scarcely a window was intact. The pond in the middle of the campus, once renowned for its elegant lotuses and goldfish, was now a stinking, mosquito-breeding swamp. The French plane trees which lined the avenue leading from the main gate had been mutilated.

The moment I entered the university a political campaign started up against 'going through the back door." Of course, there was no mention of the fact that it was the Cultural Revolution leaders themselves who had blocked the 'front door." I could see that there were a lot of high officials' children among the new 'worker-peasant-soldier' students, and that virtually all the rest had connections the peasants with their production team leaders or commune secretaries, the workers with their factory bosses, if they were not petty officials themselves. The 'back door' was the only way in. My fellow students demonstrated lit He vigor in this campaign.

Every afternoon, and some evenings, we had to 'study' turgid People's Daily articles denouncing one thing or another, and hold nonsensical 'discussions' at which everyone repeated the newspaper's overblown, vapid language.

We had to stay on the campus all the time, except Saturday evening and Sunday, and had to return by Sunday evening.

I shared a bedroom with five other girls. There were two tiers of three bunk beds on opposite walls. In between was a table and six chairs where we did our work. There was scarcely room for our washbasins. The window opened onto a stinking open sewer.

English was my subject, but there was almost no way to learn it. There were no native English speakers around, indeed no foreigners at all. The whole of Sichuan was closed to foreigners. Occasionally the odd one was let in, always a 'friend of China," but even to speak to them without authorization was a criminal offense. We could be put into prison for listening to the BBC or the Voice of America.

No foreign publications were available except The Worker, the paper of the minuscule Maoist Communist Party of Britain, and even this was locked up in a special room. I remember the thrill of being given permission once, just once, to look at a copy. My excitement wilted when my eyes fell on the front-page article echoing the campaign to criticize Confucius. As I was sitting there nonplussed, a lecturer whom I liked walked past and said with a smile, "That paper is probably read only in China."

Our textbooks were ridiculous propaganda. The first English sentence we learned was "Long live Chairman Mao!" But no one dared to explain the sentence grammatically. In Chinese the term for the optative mood, expressing a wish or desire, means 'something unreal." In 1966 a lecturer at Sichuan University had been beaten up for 'having the audacity to suggest that "Long live Chairman Mao!" was unreal!" One chapter was about a model youth hero who had drowned after jumping into a flood to save an electricity pole because the pole would be used to carry the word of Mao.

With great difficulty, I managed to borrow some English language textbooks published before the Cultural Revolution from lecturers in my department and from Jin-ming, who sent me books from his university by post. These contained extracts from writers like Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde, and stories from European and American history. They were a joy to read, but much of my energy went toward finding them and then trying to keep them.

Whenever someone approached, I would quickly cover the books with a newspaper. This was only partly because of their 'bourgeois' content. It was also important not to appear to be studying too conscientiously, and not to arouse my fellow students' jealousy by reading something far beyond them. Although we were studying English, and were paid par fly for our propaganda value by the government to do this, we must not be seen to be too devoted to our subject: that was considered being 'white and expert." In the mad logic of the day, being good at one's profession ('expert') was automatically equated with being politically unreliable ('white').

I had the misfortune to be better at English than my classmates, and was therefore resented by some of the 'student officials," the lowest-level controllers, who supervised political indoctrination sessions and checked the 'thought conditions' of their fellow students. The student officials in my course had mostly come from the countryside. They were keen to learn English, but most of them were semi-literate, and had lit He aptitude. I sympathized with their anxiety and frustration, and understood their jealousy of me. But Mao's concept of 'white and expert' made them feel virtuous about their inadequacies, and gave their envy political respectability, and them a malicious opportunity to vent their exasperation.

Every now and then a student official would require a 'heart-to-heart' with me. The leader of the Party cell in my course was a former peasant named Ming who had joined the army and then become a production team leader. He was a very poor student, and would give me long, righteous lectures about the latest developments in the Cultural Revolution, the 'glorious tasks of us worker peasant-soldier students," and the need for 'thought reform." I needed these heart-to-hearts because of my 'shortcomings," but Ming would never come straight to the point. He would let a criticism hang in midair "The masses have a complaint about you. Do you know what it is?" and watch the effect on me. He would eventually disclose some allegation. One day it was the inevitable charge that I was 'white and expert." Another day I was 'bourgeois' because I failed to fight for the chance to clean the toilet, or to wash my comrades' clothes all obligatory good deeds. And yet another time he would attribute a despicable motive: that I did not spend most of my time tutoring my classmates because I did not want them to catch up with me.