Life and Death in Shanghai, by Nien Cheng—Grove Press, Inc., 1986, 496 pp.
Communist China's Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) has been a fashionable topic for articles and books since Mao Tse-tung's death. Even the Communist leaders themselves have referred to this period of history as "a decade of disaster." Earlier publications in this new genre-if it can be called such-include many of Chen Jo-hsi's short stories such as The Execution of Mayor Yin, Fox Butterfield's China: Alive in the Bitter Sea, Liang Heng's Son of the Revolution, and Yue Tai-yun's To the Storm: The Odyssey of a Revolutionary Chinese Woman. Here we have two new books that provide us with additional examples and insights into the complex calamity that overwhelmed people's lives during Mao's campaign to cleanse their "revolutionary spirit." The Enemies of the People, by Anne F. Thurston, is based on extensive interviews on the mainland and abroad with more than 50 people caught in the decade-long maelstrom, including "middle school teachers and college professors, researchers and doctors, scientists, editors, writers, lawyers, artists, and students." To use the Communist term popular at the time, they all belong to the "slinking ninth category," commonly and traditionally known as "intellectuals." Mao placed this nefarious group far below the other eight classifications of "enemies of the people," namely, the landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, "bad elements," rightists, traitors, spies, and "capitalist-roaders. "
Thurston, a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, received a Ph.D. in political science in 1975. From 1978 to 1980, she administered the China programs of the Social Science Research Council in New York in 1981 and 1982 she conducted research at Peking Normal University, where she too" the opportunity to study the "literature of the wounded" and, speaking fluent Chinese, to conduct interviews with a nearly equal number of male and female Informants. "There was a spread of ages, too," Thurston explains. "The youngest had been only eight years old when the Cultural Revolution began and remembered the period without continuity, as a series of confused and broken images disparate, disconnected, colorful, and often fearful flashes. The eldest were in their early seventies when they spoke with me."
The result of her efforts is a timely, poignant reminder of what the Communist leaders are capable of doing to those who openly disagree with them—even those who were once praised as comrades or "heroes." A parallel may be seen in the recent downfall of Communist Party chief Hu Yao-pang and that of Liu Shao-chi in 1966 under Mao Both were officially anointed as successors and second-ranking members of the Chinese Communist Party hierarchy, and both were unceremoniously removed from the top post without a vote by the National People's Congress. With the downfall of Liu Shao-chi came the disastrous Cultural Revolution, and with Hu's removal emerged the "campaign against bourgeios liberalization" At both limes, the targets of Communist persecution happened to be Chinese intellectuals. This seems to be more than a coincidence.
Of course, no Red Guards have yet appeared on the scene, and Hu's disgrace and humiliation have not reached the cruel fate of Liu Shao-chi, who Thurston reports, "was kicked and beaten" and whose face "was swollen and bruised" by the end of one particular "struggle session" With three of the better known Communist intellectuals—Fang Li-chih, Wang Jo-wang and Liu Pin-yen—expelled from the Communist Party, and many others being forced to express support for the current party line, Teng Hsiao-ping and his colleagues have just demonstrated to the world that their theories and methods have not changed much from the time of Cultural Revolution, even though they themselves were once victims of Mao's constant political campaigns. Evidence of the human catastrophes caused by "Mao Tse-tung Thought" and the other three "Cardinal Principles"—the Socialist road, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the leadership of Communist Party—are graphically presented both In Thurston's work and in a new book by Nien Cheng, the pen-name of Yao Nien-yuan or Mrs. Cheng Kang-chi.
Born in Peking in 1915, Cheng studied at the London School of Economics in the 1930s, married a Chinese diplomat, and from 1941 to 1948 they were posted to Australia. In 1949 her husband became general manager of Shell International Petroleum Company in Shanghai and, following his death in 1957, she continued with the British firm as an advisor until caught up in the Cultural Revolution in July 1966. She left mainland China in 1980.
Life and Death in Shanghai contains vivid details of the "revolutionary activities" committed by various factions of the Red Guards against innocent "enemies of the people" as she personally experienced them verbal abuse, house searches, endless interrogation, physical torture, solitary confinement, starvation, and more. Cheng lived in an atmosphere of death, fearing for her own life while witnessing her own friends "ill themselves and seeing cellmates literally beaten to death. Her description of prison life powerfully depicts both the environment of fear and her own resolve.
"Sometimes my endurance outlasted the guards' patience. When that happened, they resorted to physical violence to silence me, either hitting my body or kicking my legs. They called me an 'hysterical old woman' and often deplored my 'mad fits,' but they never knew my real purpose in provoking them During my six and a half years of solitary confinement, I deliberately caused scenes ... when deep depression overwhelmed me to the extent that I could no longer sleep or swallow food."
These two books complement each other well in placing the Cultural Revolution into human perspective While Thurston couples her interviews with an analysis of Mao's character and the historical and political background of the Cultural Revolution, Cheng's personal testimony adds greater texture and depth to the destruction of life and property during the period. Thurston's objective study is matched with Cheng's subjective recounting of tragedy. By reading the books together man's overwhelming inhumanity to man under the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" moves the reader's memory from vague slogans and mass movements to searing personal experience. As the current CCP leadership revives many of the same slogans in its current campaign against "bourgeois liberalization," unhappy memories can only stimulate renewed concern for the fate of those under CCP control. — (Dr. Chiang is a senior researcher-reporter with Time magazine, specializing in Asian affairs).