Jung Chang - Wild Swans - Three Daughters of China

Shortly before noon, hysterical waves of "Long live Chairman Mao!" roared from the east. I had been flagging and was slow to realize that Mao was about to pass by in an open car. Suddenly thunderous yelling exploded all around me.

"Long live Chairman Mao! Long live Chairman Mao!" People sitting in front of me shot up and hopped in delirious excitement, their raised hands frantically waving their Litfie Red Books.

"Sit down! Sit down!"

I cried, in vain. Our company commander had said that we all had to remain seated throughout. But few seemed to be observing the rules, possessed by their urge to set eyes on Mao.

Having been sitting for so long, my legs had gone numb.

For some seconds, all I could see was a boiling sea of the backs of heads. When I finally managed to totter to my feet, I caught only the very end of the motorcade. Liu Shaoqi, the president, had his face turned in my direction.

Wall posters had already started attacking Liu as " China 's Khrushchev' and the leading opponent of Mao.

Although he had not been officially denounced, it was clear that his downfall was imminent. In press reports of the Red Guard rallies, he was always given a very undistinguished place. In this procession, instead of standing next to Mao, as the number-two man should have done, he was right at the back, in one of the last cars.

Liu looked subdued and weary. But I did not have any feelings for him. Although he was the president, he did not mean anything to my generation. We had grown up imbued with the cult of Mao alone. And if Liu was against Mao, it seemed to us natural that he should go.

At that moment, with the sea of youngsters screaming their loyalty to Mao, Liu must have felt how utterly hopeless his situation was. The irony was that he himself had been instrumental in promoting Mao's deification, which had led to this explosion of fanaticism in the youth of a nation which was largely unreligious. Liu and his colleagues may have helped deificao in order to appease him, thinking that he would be satisfied with abstract glory and leave them to get on with the mundane work, but Mao wanted absolute power both on earth and in heaven. And perhaps there was nothing they could have done: the cult of Mao may have been unstoppable.

These reflections did not occur to me on the morning of 25 November 1966. All I cared about then was catching a glimpse of Chairman Mao. I turned my eyes quickly away from Liu to the front of the motorcade. I spotted Mao's stalwart back, his right arm steadily waving. In an instant, he had disappeared. My heart sank. Was that all I would see of Chairman Mao? Only a fleeting glimpse of his back?

The sun seemed suddenly to have turned gray. All around me the Red Guards were making a huge din. The girl standing next to me had just pierced the index finger of her right hand and was squeezing blood out of it to write something on a neatly folded handkerchief. I knew exactly the words she was going to use. It had been done many times by other Red Guards and had been publicized ad name am "I am the happiest person in the world today. I have seen our Great Leader Chairman Mao!" Watching her, my despair grew. Life seemed pointless. A thought flickered into my mind: perhaps I should commit suicide?

It vanished almost the next instant. Looking back, I suppose the idea was really a subconscious attempt to quantify my devastation at having my dream smashed, especially after all the hardships I had suffered on my journey. The bursting trains, the inflamed knees, the hunger and cold, the itchiness, the blocked toilets, the exhaustion all in the end unrewarded.

Our pilgrimage was over and a few days later we headed home. I had had enough of the trip, and I longed for warmth and comfort, and a hot bath. But the thought of home was tinged with apprehension. No matter how uncomfortable, the journey had never been frightening, as my life immediately prior to it had been. Living in close contact with thousands and thousands of Red Guards for well over a month, I had never seen any violence, or felt terror. The gigantic crowds, hysterical though they were, were well disciplined and peaceful. The people I met were friendly.

Just before I left Peking, a letter came from my mother.

It said my father had fully recovered and everyone in Chengdu was fine. But she added at the end that both she and my father were being criticized as capitalist-roaders.

My heart sank. By now it had become clear to me that capitalist-roaders Communist officials were the main targets of the Cultural Revolution. I was soon to see what this meant for my family and for me.

A capitalist-roader was supposed to be a powerful official who was pursuing capitalist policies. But in reality no officials had any choice about which policies they pursued.

The orders of Mao and those of his opponents were all presented as coming from the Party, and the officials had to obey all of them even though in doing so they were obliged to carry out many zigzags and even U-turns. If they really disliked a particular order, the most they could do was engage in passive resistance, which they had to try hard to disguise. It was therefore impossible to determine whether officials were capitalist-roaders or not on the basis of their work.

Many officials had their own views, but the Party rule was that they must not reveal them to the public. Nor did they dare to. So whatever the officials' sympathies were, they were unknown to the general public.

But ordinary people were the very force Mao now ordered to attack capitalist-roaders without, of course, the benefit of either information or the right to exercise any independent judgment. So what happened was that officials came under attack as capitalist-roaders because of the positions they held. Seniority alone was not the cflteflon. The decisive factor was whether a person was the leader of a relatively self-contained unit or not. The whole population was organized into units, and the people who represented power to ordinary people were their immediate bosses unit leaders. In designating these people for attack, Mao was tapping into the most obvious pool of resentment, in the same way that he had incited pupils against teachers. Unit leaders were also the key links in the chain of the Communist power structure which Mao wanted to get rid of.

It was because they were leaders of deparl,uents that both my parents were denounced as capitalist-roaders.

"Where there is a will to condemn, there is evidence," as the Chinese saying has it. On this basis, all unit leaders across China, big and small, were summarily denounced by people under them as capitalist-roaders for implementing policies that were alleged to be 'capitalist' and anti Chairman Mao." These included allowing free markets in the countryside, advocating better professional skills for workers, permitting relative literary and artistic freedom, and encouraging competitiveness in sports now termed 'bourgeois cups-and-medals mania." Until now most officials had had no idea that Mao had disliked these policies after all, the directives had all come from the Party, which was led by him. Now they were told, out of the blue, that all these policies had come from the 'bourgeois headquarters' within the Party.

In every unit there were people who became activists.

They were called Rebel Red Guards, or "Rebels' for short.

They wrote wall posters and slogans proclaiming "Down with the capitalist-roaders," and held denunciation meetings against their bosses. The denunciations often sounded hollow, because the accused simply said that they had been carrying out Party orders Mao had always told them to obey Party orders unconditionally, and had never told them of the existence of the 'bourgeois headquarters." How were they to know? And how could they have acted otherwise?