IN THE EARLY sixties, a socialist education campaign that emphasized class struggle swept through China, throwing Peking University into chaos. The rules of political infighting were the same as they’d always been: If you get me this time, I’ll make sure to get you back next time. Eventually, the crossfire died down, and we were all sent to the villages to be reeducated by peasants.
Not long after the International Hotel Conference in the autumn of 1965, I was posted to Nankou Village just outside Beijing to help lead a team of students working there as part of the Socialist Education Movement.[1] As the assistant leader of the group, I was responsible for Party discipline in the Peking University contingent. Nankou was a small village by the mountain pass, and before the railways were built, it had been a bustling market town. The elderly people in the village told me that the streets used to be full of shops, the hotels rowdy with men playing dice all night, hundreds of camels lying in the streets each night. There was nothing left of that time but crumbling edifices and old people’s memories.
The impetus for the Cultural Revolution came from the very top. In November 1965, the literary critic Yao Wenyuan wrote an essay called “On the New Historical Play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office.”[2] It was a tendentious reading of Wu Han’s play that had no basis in fact, but Yao was a mere puppet saying exactly what the Party leaders wanted him to say. At the time, I was still in Nankou. I remember reading the essay and dismissing it as an incompetent piece of work. I didn’t have a political cell in my brain, so although we had been learning about class struggle and talking politics every day since Liberation, I couldn’t see that the essay was actually all about class struggle and would set off a violent political storm.[3] One of my faults is that I have never been able to keep my opinions to myself, so I told anyone who would listen what I thought of the piece. I pointed out that the play had nothing to do with Peng Dehuai. I even said openly that I knew all three co-authors of the controversial column “Notes from a Three-Family Village,” and that one of them was a good friend.[4] Wu Han, the historian and deputy major of Beijing, had been a classmate of mine at Tsinghua in the 1930s. When I returned to Beijing in 1946, he had asked me to speak to his students at Tsinghua University, and invited me to his home. It never occurred to me that some of my listeners would later seize on my words to attack me. One of the students at Nankou was a young man from a good class background, the son of a revolutionary martyr, who was always very respectful to me. I had mentally designated him my successor, the student who would take over my work. Instead, it turned out that this man with a smile on his face was taking note of everything I said, and would later dredge up all my comments to label me a “hanger-on of the Three-Family Village.” Incidentally, he has since abandoned his rightful place in the vanguard of the proletariat and slipped away to live in a small European country.
Yao’s warped use of so-called evidence to accuse his victims of nameless crimes set a dangerous precedent, and would be copied by countless others in the Cultural Revolution. He may only have been mimicking a technique practiced by Party leaders, but his influence corrupted the thinking of a generation of young people, and its aftereffects continue to this day.
One incident made a deep impression on me. Our work unit in Nankou Village included teams from the Central Broadcasting Station as well as the police, or Public Security Bureau. There were no uniforms, and we were under orders never to discuss our work. Our motley crew got on extraordinarily well. I befriended a young police officer called Chen, who had spent ten years serving on the police force. He was extremely easygoing, and we could talk about anything. I noticed that he always burned his letters after reading them, whereas I was in the habit of keeping all correspondence and receipts, regardless of whether they served an obvious purpose. Chen would destroy everything, even something as trivial as one of the official greeting cards the Public Security Bureau sent to every policeman. One day, I couldn’t resist asking him, “Why do you burn all your letters?”
“To make sure there’s no trace left of them.”
“Couldn’t you just tear them up and toss them in the latrines?”
“They might still be recoverable.”
“You’re being too paranoid.”
“In our line of work, we can never forget that if you get in trouble once you’ll never hear the end of it.”
I was stunned. I had never thought that way. I certainly knew I possessed enough flaws for someone to criticize if they wanted to denounce me. But as I hadn’t opposed the Party, or socialism, or joined a counterrevolutionary organization, I figured I couldn’t be labeled a counterrevolutionary. Later events proved Chen right. Before long, I would get in serious trouble for opposing the influential Nie Yuanzi. “In twenty years of teaching, I earned myself / Nothing but a counterrevolutionary label,” I once wrote. But that is another story.