The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 (31 page)

The campaign had the desired result of destroying the unity among intellectuals, removing them from positions of authority and debasing them before the people. It also served another purpose. In early 1952, the higher educational system needed ‘readjustment’, according to the authorities, which meant that the colleges of various universities were reshuffled and merged. This was intended to disguise the elimination of all Christian universities throughout China. Ginling Women’s College, which Liu Xiaoyu had attended years earlier, was merged with University of Nanking. Yenching University, established under the leadership of John Leighton Stuart in Beijing in 1919, was closed. Lingnan University, where Chen Xujing had listed his faults in a mass rally lasting four hours, was incorporated into Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou. Years later some of its staff would flee to Hong Kong to establish a liberal arts college with the same name. The whole higher-education system was altered beyond recognition. ‘No trace of intellectual prestige remained, nor any of the spirit and tradition which had distinguished one institution from another.’
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The pressure did not abate. Almost every year the regime identified a high-profile scholar as a counter-revolutionary, making him the target of vociferous denunciations by the propaganda machine. After Mao had denounced Hu Shi in August 1949, students and teachers were compelled to distance themselves from the liberal essayist, philosopher and diplomat. As a young student in Hunan, Mao had written enthusiastically about him. In 1919, when Mao had worked as an assistant librarian at Peking University, he tried to audit his classes, but Hu Shi would have none of it: ‘you are not a student, so get out of here!’ Now the Chairman ensured that his work was banned. Hu Shi’s own son stepped forward to repudiate his father as a ‘reactionary’ who had paved the road for capitalism: ‘until he returns to the embrace of the people he will always be the people’s enemy and also my own enemy’. ‘We know, of course, that there is no freedom of speech,’ Hu Shi responded from New York. ‘But few persons realise that there is no freedom of silence, either. Residents of a communist state are required to make positive statements of belief and loyalty.’
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Liang Shuming was another
bête noire
of the Chairman. Both were born in 1893, but Liang was a brilliant thinker hired at the age of twenty-four by the philosophy department in Peking University when Mao was still an obscure primary-school teacher. A year later, in 1918, the two met briefly at the home of Mao’s teacher in Beijing, although Liang paid the Hunanese student little attention. But in 1938, as the philosopher travelled to Yan’an, a composed and polite Mao instantly recalled the meeting: ‘A long time ago, we met in 1918 at Peking University where you were the big professor and I was part of the lowly library staff. You probably don’t remember that during your frequent visits to Professor Yang’s house, it was I who greeted you at the door.’ Liang left Yan’an highly impressed, although he did not believe that class theory applied to Chinese society or could solve the country’s problems. He maintained an intellectual relationship with Mao, presenting him with copies of his own work. Like others, in 1949 he openly praised the Chairman and embraced the new China. Flattered by the relationship, a year later an amiable Chairman invited him to become a committee member of the Political Consultative Conference. More courtesy visits and pleasantries on the national situation followed, the Chairman on occasion sending his own car to ferry the professor to Zhongnanhai. In September 1950 Mao saw to it that Liang was moved to a private residence near the famous Marble Boat built by the Empress Dowager Cixi in the Summer Palace.

But Liang was no pushover. In 1952, at the height of the attack against private business, he wrote to the Chairman to explain that ‘merchants by no means are all dishonest’, somehow doubting that they were organised enough to launch a concerted attack on the communist party. In a letter widely circulated to the top leadership, Mao denounced these views as ‘absurd’. The relationship cooled. A year later, at a meeting of the Political Consultative Conference, Zhou Enlai encouraged Liang Shuming to speak freely and at length, which he did, deploring the impoverishment of the countryside. Urban workers, Liang argued, ‘live in the ninth level of heaven while the peasants dwell in the ninth level of hell’. A few days later, in a long speech occasionally punctuated with biting interjections from Mao himself, an angry Zhou berated Liang for being a reactionary. Liang was stunned into silence. But the following day, as the meeting resumed, he stubbornly tried to defend his position, even threatening to withhold his respect from the Chairman were he denied time to explain himself. A stern Mao remonstrated with him from the rostrum, but Liang persisted, even asking point-blank if the Chairman himself had the magnanimity to engage in self-criticism. By now people in the audience were screaming for the philosopher’s blood. ‘Liang, step down from the podium! Stop him from uttering this nonsense!’ Still he did not budge. Mao, cool and collected, granted him ten minutes, which Liang thought insufficient. To further uproar from the audience, a vote was somehow decided. The philosopher lost, ending an extraordinary stand-off. A lengthy ‘Criticism of Liang Shuming’s Reactionary Ideas’ appeared later, comprehensively demolishing him as a ‘hypocrite’ and a ‘schemer’ – among other things. Mao used a sledgehammer: ‘There are two ways of killing people: one is to kill with the gun and the other with the pen. The way which is most artfully disguised and draws no blood is to kill with the pen. That is the kind of murderer you are.’ Chiang Kai-shek was the murderer with the gun, standing behind Liang Shuming. The philosopher’s career was over. He moved out of his residence in the Summer Palace.
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None of these attacks was confined to high politics. Every one of them fuelled a new hunt for real or imagined enemies throughout the education system. In July 1954, for instance, Hu Feng, writer and art theorist, sent a long letter to the party comparing their stultifying theories to knives thrust into the brains of writers. Hu himself, though a Marxist, had never joined the communist party. He had earned the grudging respect of his literary peers in the 1930s for his understanding of the complexities of Marxism, but had also made enemies by acrimonious squabbles over highly abstract and sometimes trivial points of theory. More than once he had unleashed his sharp pen against orthodox followers of the party line like Zhou Yang and Guo Moruo. Even more damaging had been his attack on cultural policy in Yan’an in 1942. The party, he had written, ‘wants to strangle literature. It wants literature to take leave of real life and it wants writers to tell lies.’
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Twenty years later, some of his enemies had become the powerful enforcers of literary dogma. At a meeting of the Political Consultative Conference in Beijing, the same venue where Liang Shuming had been shouted down a year earlier, Guo Moruo launched a veiled attack on writers who praised ‘bourgeois idealism’. Hu picked up the hint and quickly backtracked, writing a self-confession a month later in January 1955. But he was already a man marked for destruction, as the party machine advanced inexorably. Zhou Yang, the high priest of the Propaganda Ministry who had toured the Soviet Union with a large delegation in 1950, personally supervised the campaign against him. In April the
People’s Daily
denounced Hu Feng, dismissing his self-confession as ‘insincere’ and ‘treacherous’. In the following months a further 2,131 articles taking the writer to task appeared in the press. Incriminatory extracts from private letters Hu had written to some of his friends were published to discredit him further. Mao personally assisted his persecution, not hesitating to stoop so low as to write damning commentaries on the published extracts. In June 1955 Hu was condemned as the head of a counter-revolutionary clique, deprived of all his posts, tried in secret and sentenced to fourteen years’ imprisonment (although he would not be released till 1979).
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The hunt was on. A campaign of terror unfolded to root out all his supporters, real or imaginary. Red banners appeared in the cities, declaring: ‘Resolutely, Thoroughly, Completely and Exhaustively Uproot All Hidden Counter-Revolutionaries!’ Wu Ningkun, who had arrived from the United States a mere six weeks before the thought-reform campaign opened in October 1951, by now knew the drill and joined a chorus of denunciation. He despised himself for doing so. ‘I knew the bell was not tolling for Hu Feng and other innocents alone.’ Sure enough, he too was soon confronted at a meeting of more than a hundred faculty and staff members at Nankai University in Tianjin, accused of being the ringleader of a counter-revolutionary gang of four. His house was ransacked, as drawers, suitcases and trunks were turned upside down in the search for weapons and radio transmitters. His letters, notebooks, manuscripts and sundry papers were taken away. One accusation meeting followed another, as his inquisitors took turns to shout abuse and fire questions at him on every aspect of his past, trying to wear him down. His ordeal would last until the summer of 1956.
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Encouraged by the publication of letters that Hu Feng and his followers had exchanged, some of the country’s most eminent writers started digging up dirt on each other. Ding Ling had set literary China on fire with iconoclastic short stories in the late 1920s. After she joined the communists in Yan’an, she found herself in hot water for exposing the leadership’s cavalier treatment of women. Mao, for one, had set the tone by abandoning his third wife for younger company. For her impertinence, Ding Ling was sent to labour in the countryside. She had avoided the execution squad by viciously denouncing Wang Shiwei, whom she accused of having stooped to the level of a ‘latrine’. Later she worked hard to atone for her errors, and in 1951 her novel
The Sun Shines over the Sungari River
, a celebration of land reform and its revolutionary violence, won the Stalin Prize for Literature. But the Hu Feng affair cast a shadow over her career, as she had maintained a friendship with the writer since her days in Yan’an. Unavailingly, she denounced him, but soon she herself with her former colleague Chen Qixia was attacked for heading a counter-revolutionary clique. Unable to withstand the pressure, Chen confessed to all sorts of imaginary crimes in the hope of shortening his ordeal. Then he handed over all the correspondence he and Ding Ling had exchanged in the previous years, accusing her of attempting ‘to seize the leadership of literary circles’.
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These were heady confrontations, as leading members of the intelligentsia vied to cast dirt on each other to preserve themselves, but similar incidents occurred among ordinary people across the country. Dan Ling, the young student who had joined a Tiger-Hunting Team in 1952, was now working as a technician in a tank factory in Baotou, a new city being built near the Mongolian Desert. He too participated in meetings denouncing Hu Feng. Like other workers, he was encouraged to expose anyone suspected of sharing Hu’s ‘bourgeois idealism’. Zhang Ruisheng, one of Dan’s close friends and a graduate from Tsinghua University, was among them. One day three plain-clothes policemen turned up at the factory and searched his room. They found nothing incriminating, but a cloud of suspicion continued to hang over him, as he was the son of a wealthy Tianjin capitalist. Soon the factory managers ganged up on him, calling meeting after meeting to denounce him and force him to reveal his ‘counter-revolutionary secrets’. In the end, his vehement insistence that he was innocent paid off, and he was cleared after a long investigation.
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There were countless similar cases all over the country, as teachers, doctors, engineers and scientists suspected of possessing ‘counter-revolutionary’ links with ‘foreign powers’ were persecuted. Luo Ruiqing, who now pitched in as head of security, brought the inquisition to bear upon 85,000 teachers in middle schools. One in ten was purged as a deviant element who sabotaged socialism, plotted against the party or encouraged student unrest. In primary schools the number was double. In total, across the country, over a million people were forced to confront accusations of plotting against the state in 1955, leading to the discovery of 45,000 bad elements. This did not include the arrest of more than 13,500 ‘counter-revolutionaries’ within the ranks of the party. In Hebei alone over 1,000 cliques were uncovered, more than 300 of a counter-revolutionary nature, including an Underground Anti-Communist Alliance, a Free China Team and a Reform Party. In the Hu Feng case, forty-eight ‘core members’ and 116 ‘ordinary members’ were targets for the secret police across the country.
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Thousands committed suicide. Wu Ningkun, arriving at the scene of his daily interrogation one summer morning, discovered his inquisitors chattering excitedly among themselves. A senior member of the English Faculty had just been found drowned in the decorative pond in front of the library. In Shanghai, Yu Hongmo, the manager of a publishing company, swallowed a large needle in an attempt to kill himself. He lived. Many others became unemployed, tramping about looking for jobs or turning to theft, some of the women even selling their bodies to eke out a living. In the capital alone there were more than 4,000 such cases, including Wang Zhaozheng. A student expelled from Wuhan University, he petitioned the State Council and the Chairman on ten occasions for the right to emigrate to Hong Kong. Then he approached the British embassy, directly threatening to tarnish the reputation of the country. Luo Ruiqing instructed his underlings to crack down on people like Wang and lock them away in the gulag.
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With the literary inquisition came a great burning of books. In Shanghai, a total of 237 tonnes of books were destroyed or sold as scrap paper between January and December 1951. The Commercial Press, one of the largest in the country, had roughly 8,000 titles in print in the summer of 1950. A year later a mere 1,234 of these were considered acceptable for circulation. Lectures were given on ‘How We Should Dispose of Bad Books’. Sometimes entire collections were consigned to the flames, as with 17,000 cases of books from the famous anthology of literary masterpieces belonging to Wang Renqiu. In Shantou, one of the treaty ports opened to foreign trade in the nineteenth century, in May 1953 a giant bonfire lasting three days swallowed up 300,000 volumes representing ‘vestiges of the feudal past’. So eager were some cadres in charge of policing culture that they pulped anything they could lay their hands on, including books that were not even included in the black list – which, admittedly, was confusing as the list was endlessly amended. Thus in Beijing even the work of Sun Yat-sen, hailed as the father of the nation by the communist party, was taken off the shelves, while in 1954 the equivalent of a tonne of copies of a French tourist guide to Beijing was recycled. The going rate paid to dealers in second-hand books, a rapidly dwindling trade, was 4 or 5 yuan a kilo. Sometimes students themselves collected suspicious volumes and handed them over to their teachers for destruction, while concerned citizens delivered banned items to their local party office. Pedlars on pavements who continued to sell martial-arts novels or popular love stories were arrested by the dozen in police raids and dispatched to the gulag.
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