Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (13 page)

Hu had better luck at another film festival in Hong Kong a year later. The judges awarded
Though I Am Gone
the festival’s top prize.

Cultural Revolution cemetery in Chongqing

T
here are few places in China where people have more reason to forget the past than Chongqing. Built on the mountains where the Jialing River meets the upper Yangtze, the city is one of the fastest-growing in the country, a hulking metropolis of thirteen million shrouded in a thick, perpetual haze of fog and pollution. Once a sleepy treaty port and a wartime capital that endured Japanese bombardment, Chongqing is now the bustling economic hub of southwestern China, a city in the midst of a building frenzy even more dramatic than that of Shanghai downriver to the east. Every year, hundreds of thousands of rural migrants pour into its steamy districts, looking for work in its ever-expanding industrial parks, on the crews building new highways, railroads, and bridges, or in the famed army of
bangbang
porters who haul goods from the docks up the steep mountain slopes. A monorail soars amid the skyscrapers, through cramped tenements and past neon billboards. Construction cranes are everywhere. At night the glow of the multicolored skyline reflects off the muddy Yangtze, and boisterous crowds fill the pungent hot-pot restaurants on the riverfront. Chongqing is a city on the move, as determined to “look to the future” as any in China.

But at the edge of a quiet, leafy park on the city’s west side, up a gentle slope from a man-made lake, there is an unusual cemetery enclosed by a stone wall crawling with ivy. The place is set off from Shapingba Park’s main pathways and easy to miss behind a grove of pagoda trees; visitors who have been coming to the park for years sometimes never notice it. Those who do and wander through its rusting iron gates find themselves in what may be the only cemetery in all of China dedicated to people killed in the Cultural Revolution. It is a decrepit place, littered with fallen trees and overgrown with vegetation, and when the fog rolls in, as it often does, the atmosphere is downright eerie. The graveyard is fairly large, about thirty yards wide by ninety yards long, but it is the size of the tombstones that visitors notice first. On both sides of a brick path are rows of towering concrete pillars and obelisks, the biggest over thirty feet tall. Each marks the burial site of as many as two dozen people, though erosion has rendered many of the names and inscriptions illegible. Several gravestones are crumbling, and some are almost entirely hidden by dirt, vines, and weeds. But the fact that the cemetery still exists at all is remarkable. In nearly a decade of work and study in China, I never heard of anyplace else like it.

Perhaps no one spends as much time in the cemetery as Zeng Zhong, a teacher who has been trying to identify the people buried there and document how they died. He is a thin, earnest man in his mid-fifties, and at our first meeting, we sat at a stone table under a pavilion in the park not far from the cemetery. It was a cool spring afternoon, and as we sipped tea and chatted, old men were walking backward along the park’s asphalt paths, a Chinese form of exercise, and young couples stole kisses on the benches around the lake. Groups of laid-off workers and pensioners were sitting at other tables, drinking, shouting, and playing mah-jongg. Zeng fidgeted in his seat and said he was nervous about speaking to a foreign journalist. But he was also eager to share what he had learned. He said his interest in the cemetery had nothing to do with his job training elementary school teachers, nor were any of his friends or relatives buried there. His research began in the autumn of 2005 after he stumbled upon the graveyard during a stroll in the park. He lived nearby and had heard of the cemetery before, but had never visited it or given it much thought. When he saw it for the first time, he was astonished. For more than an hour, he wandered among the tombstones and monuments in awe. “I never realized the scale of the violence until then,” he told me. “I was completely overwhelmed. The shock sent shivers down my spine.”

T
HE
C
ULTURAL
R
EVOLUTION
occupies a special place in China’s national consciousness. Too little time has passed since it rocked the nation, and too many people were directly affected by it for it to be completely forgotten. Mao’s exploitation of the nation’s youth to wage “unending revolution” against the party bureaucracy—and against his rivals in the leadership—touched the lives of almost everyone in China, from the cities to the countryside. If the Anti-Rightist Campaign was a tremor, the Cultural Revolution was an earthquake, with a far greater number of lives ruined and lost. But given the devastating scale of the Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966 and continued until Mao’s death in 1976, the party has been remarkably effective at suppressing discussion of what happened—and at presenting what happened as a warning of the chaos that could follow democratic reform instead of a symptom of one-party rule. The party has succeeded in part because people in China have been willing accomplices in the act of forgetting. So many of them were taken in by the Cultural Revolution’s frenzied rhetoric, so many of them participated in the violence or stood by in silence, that it has never been very difficult for the party to persuade society to leave that past behind. Families were torn apart as wives divorced husbands who had been accused of political crimes, children condemned parents, and siblings turned against one another. When the Cultural Revolution finally ended, it was easier for many people just to move on than talk about it. Even many of those who suffered were eager to forget, for their hands were rarely entirely clean, either.

Meanwhile, a generation has come of age in China with only the vaguest understanding of the Cultural Revolution. More than half the population today was born after it ended. Many parents choose not to discuss the nightmare with their children, and the party keeps it out of the classrooms. As a result, perhaps the most awful chapter in the party’s rule has become the disaster that is dismissed with a nervous laugh, the catastrophe remembered only with the kitsch of a Mao watch or a Red Guard theme restaurant. For those who did not live through it, in China and overseas, it is the absurdity of the Cultural Revolution that lingers—the images of huge crowds massed in Tiananmen Square waving Chairman Mao’s little red book, of rampaging teenagers shouting idiotic slogans and smashing precious antiques, of teachers forced to wear ridiculous dunce caps and confess to preposterous crimes. And of course, the Cultural Revolution was absurd. But it was much more than that. What has been obscured and minimized is the horror and evil of what occurred. According to estimates based on the government’s own publications, upwards of 36 million people in the countryside were persecuted while about 750,000 to 1.5 million were killed and an equal number permanently injured. The number of casualties in the nation’s cities is less certain, but could total in the hundreds of thousands. In Beijing, more than 1,770 were murdered in only two months in 1966, according to official reports, and one million were persecuted in Shanghai, with at least 5,000 killed in 1968 alone.

The numbers are staggering enough, but then there are the stories of human brutality behind them—of men and women beaten in the streets or before screaming crowds in stadiums, of children forced to denounce and strike their own parents, of torture so cruel that countless victims chose to take their own lives, sometimes along with their loved ones. Killing occurred not only at the hands of overzealous Red Guards and in armed street battles between rival rebel factions, but also in organized pogroms carried out by party officials across the countryside. The targets of these mass murders were often former landlords and other class enemies who had already been persecuted for years, as well as their relatives. The executioners sometimes refused pleas to show mercy on children because they worried the young would grow up and exact revenge. In Daxin, a rural suburb south of Beijing, 325 people were killed in five bloody days in the summer of 1966, the youngest victim a one-month-old infant. In Daoxian county in Hunan Province, nearly five thousand people were killed in the space of two months after meetings in which names of potential victims were read aloud and votes were taken to decide their fate. People were beaten to death, hanged, shot, and sometimes buried alive or forced to jump off cliffs. In Guangxi Province, there is evidence of cannibalism in at least five counties.

Such violence has not been expunged from the country’s collective memory so much as repressed, and repressed memories have a way of surfacing unexpectedly. There have always been voices in China calling on the nation to confront the barbarity of the Cultural Revolution. Only with an honest accounting and thoughtful examination of the era, they argue, can the country come to terms with the legacy of mistrust and moral decay that haunts it today. As early as 1986, the novelist Ba Jin called for the construction of a Cultural Revolution museum and a memorial to its victims. As time passed and wounds healed, the number of people in China willing to face up to the past has grown. But the party has refused to allow a soul-searching national discussion, because it is fearful of the emotions it might unleash and the lessons that might be drawn about the wisdom of one-party rule. In 2006, four decades after the Cultural Revolution began, the party’s propaganda ministers issued an edict banning any mention of the anniversary in the media. In 2007, they issued another directive demanding that “vigilance must be increased” against those who would use the Cultural Revolution to discredit Mao, Mao Zedong Thought, and the Communist Party. All accounts of the period, the party reminded its censors, must comply with the official history laid out by the government in 1981.

The party spent more than a year writing that official history, a stilted account laced with ideological jargon and bureaucratic doublespeak, which barely hinted at the violence that ravaged the nation. To be sure, it disavowed the Cultural Revolution, describing it as “responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, state, and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic.” The party blamed Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, and three other radical leaders, vilifying them and labeling them the Gang of Four. But from beginning to end, the Cultural Revolution was really Mao’s project. In 1966, at the age of seventy-two, he had grown suspicious of the men around him and the party he had built, and events in Moscow weighed on him. As Khrushchev denounced Stalin and then was ousted himself, Mao worried he, too, might be toppled from power or repudiated by his successors. He believed the Soviets had gone soft on U.S. “imperialism” and abandoned socialism for faster economic growth, and he suspected his colleagues were taking China down the same road. The Cultural Revolution was his response, a mad attempt to revitalize the party by tearing it down while rearing a new generation of revolutionaries in bloody struggle. The party’s official history acknowledged that “chief responsibility” for the disaster “does indeed lie with Comrade Mao Zedong.” But Deng Xiaoping, the man who succeeded him and was himself a victim of the Cultural Revolution, decided the party could not afford to renounce the Chairman and directed the historians to cast him instead as a tragic hero, “a leader laboring under a misapprehension” who nevertheless remained “a great proletarian revolutionary.”

As the official history was being written, Deng also declared that it should “encourage people to close ranks and look to the future.” He expressed his hope that after it was released, “common views will be reached and, by and large, debate on the major historical questions will come to an end.” In other words, it was a version of history designed to make people forget history. But a single account of the Cultural Revolution, especially one as sanitized as the party’s, could never be enough to satisfy a nation that suffered so much and in so many different ways. Inevitably, people have sought to remember what happened on their own.

Z
ENG
Z
HONG WAS
fourteen and in the seventh grade when the Cultural Revolution began with the mobilization of high school and college students into units of what became known as the Red Guards. He longed to join them, but his father had been a manager in Chongqing’s largest bank before the Communist takeover and was labeled a member of the bourgeoisie. Under the party’s theory of class struggle, children were destined to behave as their parents did, so only the offspring of workers, peasants, and other members of the proletariat could be true revolutionaries. It made no sense to Zeng, who believed that the best rebels, including Mao himself, had not come from “good class backgrounds.” But if he questioned the principle of inherited class consciousness, he never doubted the righteousness of the party. Even after the Red Guards took his father away and put him to work at a local grain depot, even after they ransacked his home and seized everything of value, Zeng wanted to be one of them. One Red Guard unit at his school agreed to accept him, but only as a member of an auxiliary group. “I felt humiliated being identified with a bad family background, but I put up with the disgrace to participate in the revolution,” Zeng recalled. A month later, his unit had a change of heart and expelled him. Not long after that, his father returned home on a stretcher. He had suffered a back injury after being forced to carry a two-hundred-pound bag of grain.

Zeng’s expulsion from the Red Guards and his father’s injury kept him at home as the violence in Chongqing escalated. Workers and other adults began forming Red Guard units, too, and competing factions turned against one another and obtained weapons from the city’s munitions factories. Soon the nights were marked by gunfire and artillery blasts, Zeng said. As the fighting raged across the city, the Red Guards pretty much ignored Zeng and his family. The family stayed in their house, kept their heads down, and made it through the worst of the Cultural Revolution unharmed. Zeng knew others were not as fortunate. But it was not until he stepped foot in the cemetery decades later that he began to fathom the extent of the killing and set out to understand what had happened and why.