Jung Chang - Wild Swans - Three Daughters of China

In another case, a teacher whose husband had fled to Taiwan with the Kuomintang was reported to have shown off to other young women teachers some jewelry her husband had given her, trying to make them envious of her life under the Kuomintang. These young women also said she told them it was a pity the Americans had not won the war in Korea and advanced into China.

Mr. Kong said he had checked the facts. It was not up to my mother to investigate. Caution would be seen as trying to protect the rightists and questioning her colleagues' integrity.

The hospital chiefs and the deputy who was running the health bureau did not name any rightists themselves, but several doctors were labeled rightists by the higher authorities of the Chengdu municipality for their criticisms made at earlier meetings organized by the city authorities.

All these rightists together came to fewer than ten, far short of the quota. By now Mr. Ying was fed up with the lack of zeal displayed by my mother and her colleagues, and he told her that the fact that she could not spot rightism showed she was 'rightist material' herself. To be labeled a rightist not only meant becoming a political outcast and losing one's job, but, most important, one's children and family would suffer discrimination and their future would be in jeopardy. The children would be ostracized at school and in the street where they lived. The residents' committee would spy on the family to see who was visiting them.

If a rightist was sent to the countryside, the peasants would give the hardest jobs to him and his family. But no one knew the exact impact, and this uncertainty was itself a powerful cause of fear.

This was the dilemma facing my mother. If she was labeled a rightist, she would either have to renounce her children or ruin their future. My father would probably be forced to divorce her, or he too would be blacklisted and under permanent suspicion. Even if my mother sacrificed herself and divorced him, the whole family would still be marked as suspects, forever. But the cost of saving herself and her family was the well-being of more than a hundred innocent people and their families.

My mother did not talk to my father about this. What solution could he have come up with? She felt resentful because his high position meant he did not have to deal with specific cases. It was the lower- and middle-rank officials like Mr. Ying, my mother, her deputies, the headmistresses, and hospital directors who had to make these agonizing decisions.

One of the institutions in my mother's district was the Chengdu Number Two Teacher Training College. Students in teacher training colleges were given scholarships which covered their fees and living expenses, and these institutions naturally attracted people from poor families.

The first railway linking Sichuan, "Heaven's Granary," with the rest of China had recently been completed. As a result, a lot of food was suddenly transported out of Sichuan to other parts of China, and the prices of many items doubled or even tripled almost overnight. The students at the college found their standard of living practically halved, and staged a demonstration calling for higher grants. This action was compared by Mr. Ying to those of the Pettfi Circle in the 1956 Hungarian uprising, and he called the students 'kindred spirits of the Hungarian intellectuals."

He ordered that every student who had participated in the demonstration should be classified as a rightist. There were about 300 students at the college, of whom 30 had taken part in the demonstration. All of them were labeled rightists by Mr. Ying. Although the college was not under my mother, as she looked after primary schools only, it was located in her district, and the city authorities arbitrarily counted the students as her quota.

My mother was not forgiven for her lack of initiative.

Mr. Ying put her name down for further investigation as a rightist suspect. But before he could do anything, he was condemned as a rightist himself.

In March 1957 he had gone to Peking for a conference of the heads of provincial and municipal Public Affairs departments from the whole of China. In the group discussions, delegates were encouraged to voice their complaints about the way things were run in their areas. Mr. Ying aired some fairly innocuous grumbles against the first secretary of the Sichuan Party Committee, Li Jing-quan, who was always known as Commissar Li. My father was the head of the Sichuan delegation at the conference, so it fell to him to write the routine report when they came back. When the Anti-Rightist Campaign started, Commissar Li decided he did not like what Mr. Ying had said. He checked with the deputy head of the delegation, but this man had adroitly absented himself in the toilet when Mr. Ying started his criticism. In the later stage of the campaign, Commissar Li labeled Mr. Ying a rightist. When he heard this, my father became desperately upset, tormenting himself with the thought that he was partly responsible for Mr. Ying's downfall. My mother tried to convince him this was not the case: "It's not your fault!" she told him. But he never stopped agonizing about it.

Many officials used the campaign to settle personal scores. Some found that one easy way to fill their quota was to offer up their enemies. Others acted out of sheer vindictiveness. In Yibin, the Tings purged many talented people with whom they did not get on, or of whom they were jealous. Almost all of my father's assistants there, whom he had picked out and promoted, were condemned as rightists. One former assistant whom my father liked very much was branded an 'extreme rightist." His crime was a single remark to the effect that China 's reliance on the Soviet Union should not be 'absolute." At the time the Party was proclaiming that it should be. He was sentenced to three years in one of China 's gnlags and worked on building a road in a wild, mountainous area, where many of his fellow prisoners died.

The Anti-Rightist Campaign did not affect society at large. Peasants and workers carried on with their lives.

When the campaign ended after a year, at least 550,000 people had been labeled as rightists students, teachers, writers, artists, scientists, and other professionals. Most of them were sacked from their jobs and became manual laborers in factories or on farms. Some were sent to do hard labor in gnlags. They and their families became second-class citizens. The lesson was harsh and clear: criticism of any kind was not going to be tolerated. From that point on people stopped complaining, or speaking up at all. A popular saying summed up the atmosphere: "After the Three Antis no one wants to be in charge of money; after the Anti-Rightist Campaign no one opens their mouth."

But the tragedy of 1957 was more than that of reducing people to silence. The possibility of falling into the abyss now became unpredictable. The quota system combined with personal vendettas meant that anyone could be persecuted, for nothing.

The vernacular caught the mood. Among the categories of rightists were 'lots-drawing rightists' (chou-qian-you-pal), people who drew lots to decide who should be named as rightists, and 'toilet rightists' (ce-suo-you-pat), people who found they had been nominated in their absence after they could not restrain themselves from going to the toilet during the many long, drawn-out meetings. There were also rightists who were said to 'have poison but not released it' (uou-du-bu-fang); these were people who were named as rightists without having said anything against anyone.

When a boss did not like someone, he could say: "He doesn't look right," or "His father was executed by the Communists, how can he not feel resentful? He just won't say it openly." A kindhearted unit leader sometimes did the opposite: "Whom should I nail? I can't do that to anyone.