I WAS LUCKY to be free. But I was also uneasy because I knew that I would eventually end up with a political label or “hat,” as people called them at the time. I had headed the Eastern Languages Department for twenty years, and the mob was unlikely to leave me alone. So I decided to figure out which label would fit me best. Two, in particular, seemed ideal: capitalist-roader and reactionary capitalist academic authority.
To qualify as a capitalist-roader, you had to be in a position of authority. Being the head of my department would certainly count, even if it was only a modest post. Was I actually walking the road of capitalism? That was a trickier question, but since everyone in a position of authority had already been labeled a capitalist-roader, I would probably count as one too.
I was considered an authority in my field, a top-ranked professor who served in the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Twenty years of political education had taught me that individualism was at the heart of capitalism, and I readily admitted to defending my own personal interests. Capitalists were, by definition, reactionary, which made me a reactionary capitalist academic authority, irrespective of the actual quality of my academic work. Now that I had chosen my own political label, I would almost have been offended if anyone disagreed with me. As a line in a poem by the eighth-century poet Han Yu puts it: “It is indeed true that I deserve to die, O Emperor.”
From the 1950s onward, all of China had studied two forms of conflict: enemy conflict and internal conflict, or conflict within the people. I, too, had spent years discussing these concepts and making enthusiastic speeches in study meetings. But not until the Cultural Revolution did I ever think about applying any of these theories to my own life. What I wondered was: Did this particular label make me an enemy of the people? Mao said that enemy conflict should be handled in an authoritarian manner, whereas internal conflict should be handled democratically by the masses through criticism, so I was anxious to figure out which approach applied in my own case.
We all agreed that the Communist Liberation had improved everyone’s lives. Everyone, that is, except for the counterrevolutionary enemies of the people, who lived in constant fear of being persecuted. Even though I knew this to be the case, I didn’t actually care until I seemed set to be labeled a counterrevolutionary myself, and the question of what counterrevolutionary activity was ceased to be strictly theoretical for me. The newspapers emphasized how important it was to distinguish correctly between enemy and internal conflict, but I still found the difference confusing. There seemed to be neither a qualitatively nor a quantitatively definitive approach to the question. If this was merely a philosophical distinction, what were its practical implications? And if conflict was a legal concept, why wasn’t it enshrined by law? I had spent five years in the National People’s Congress and had never come across any legislation that addressed the two forms of conflict. Although I had no interest in following the shifting political winds that governed these amorphous debates, I spent days pondering this question, which was not a theoretical question now that it was relevant to my own life.
I had never seriously thought about political labels and used to ignore them because they had nothing to do with me. New hats were invented with each political campaign. The victims weren’t ever allowed to choose their own hats, and they always accepted the hats they were given. I never once gave a thought to the feelings of the people wearing hats. But now that I was thinking about it, I realized I could no more avoid being given a hat than I could leave the house without a hat in the winter. No one knew how the god of labels divvied them up.
I hadn’t been publicly denounced, beaten up, or even formally stripped of my position as department head, nor did I have any actual authority, and certain sidelong attacks began to cause me trouble. I once found a notice in the Foreign Languages Department addressed directly to me: “Ji Xianlin, you are required to hand over three thousand yuan.” Disappointingly, the notice addressed me by name without calling me a capitalist-roader or counterrevolutionary. But an order was an order, so I immediately took three thousand yuan to the student dorm room listed on the notice. I smiled politely as I handed a stack of banknotes to the students there, but they didn’t smile. To my surprise, they also refused to accept the money. “Take it away!” they said. I obeyed.
One day when I was sitting at home and reading, several Red Guards barged in and declared that they were about to “destroy the Four Olds.” The Four Olds? I wondered. But there was no time to find out what they meant, so all I could do was let the students have their way. It turned out that their targets were the many little ornaments that stood on my desk and bedside table, or pictures hanging on the walls. The Red Guards represented the “direction of the revolution,” so if they said something was a Four Old, I obediently took it and smashed it to pieces. Within half an hour, I had destroyed many of the things I treasured most. One of them stands out in my memory: a black clay figurine of a smiling chubby baby, which I had brought home from Wuxi. The Red Guards also discovered that the portrait of the Great Leader on the wall wasn’t dusty, and said that I must have put it up very recently. They were actually right. But I quickly replied that it was particularly clean because I always dusted it carefully. I was impressed by their eye for detail.
When the madness was at its peak, I figured we might as well simply destroy the planet itself, the oldest thing in existence. I heard stories of the Four Olds being destroyed all over the country. One professor told me that two paintings he owned by the artists Qi Baishi and Wang Xuetao were both destroyed.[1] But that is only the tip of the iceberg: No one knows how many priceless pieces of art were destroyed. If the Red Guards had truly succeeded in exterminating the Four Olds, what would be left of our artistic heritage? What legacy would we now be striving so hard to preserve?
I couldn’t get the matter of labels out of my mind. I could tell that I was vulnerable to being labeled a reactionary capitalist academic authority, the very label I myself had thought suited me best. That would theoretically make me a capitalist enemy of the people, but the directives also said that enemy conflict could sometimes be resolved internally. That was why I hadn’t been struggled against yet.
The masses didn’t forget about me. They occasionally invited me to a criticism meeting.[2] These meetings were less brutal than struggle sessions, and I was usually criticized for the “revisionist” tendency of prioritizing intellectual and academic work above everything else. This was apparently revisionist the way enjoying springtime was revisionist. Under my leadership, the entire Eastern Languages Department was susceptible to that criticism—we were apparently all hardworking to a fault. I couldn’t deny that fact: In every political campaign since Liberation, I had stood up in criticism meetings and criticized my own “revisionist tendency to prioritize academics,” and so far I had always gotten away with it. But after making all those speeches, I always crept back into my old work habits; I know that everything I’ve accomplished so far is the result of revisionist hard work. So if being labeled a capitalist-roader was a tribute to my diligence, I would be happy to accept the label as an indirect compliment. For the time being I knew that I was lucky: Like a wild bird that a boy with a stone can strike down at any moment, as long as I was still in flight I was free.