THE PEAK SEASON for struggle sessions lasted from the winter of 1967 until the early spring of 1968, a period when there was one every few days. By then I had grown used to them, and I valued my life too much to consider suicide again. That was the first stage of our ordeal; in the second stage, from the early spring until May 3, 1968, we were also forced to perform hard labor.
When the season began, every department was organizing struggle sessions, and anything could serve as an excuse for struggling against someone. I, for instance, was often attacked for my work in the Peking University Union, which I was involved with for many years; the first official commendation I ever received was for union activity. When Beijing was liberated, I joined the Communist society for professors, which later combined with other staff organizations to form a union. It was said that the workers of Peking University were reluctant to form a union with intellectuals, since they considered themselves the vanguard of the proletariat, but that they were pressured from above to accept this arrangement. In any case, I was elected to various roles within the new union. During campaign season, I made the rounds of the university press, hospital, and various schools, canvassing votes like an American politician. I was full of optimism back then, and enjoyed working alongside my younger colleagues and staying up all night to prepare the halls for our assemblies. I sometimes asked myself how intellectuals stood in relation to the workers, the vanguard of the proletariat. I was once given the authoritative explanation that intellectuals are not workers but that they belong to the working class. Not being any good at Marxism-Leninism, I wondered how one could belong to the working class without being a worker. But although I didn’t understand this explanation, I accepted it so as not to make waves in the delicate relationship between the professors and workers. After Peking University was relocated away from the city center in 1952, I continued to devote myself to union work. Only three or four professors had ever been named chairman of the University Union, and I was one of them.
Strangely, during the Cultural Revolution, my union record counted against me instead of for me. The workers’ logic must have run as follows: The proletariat might have been generous enough to permit a professor to join a workers’ organization, but allowing him to become a leader within it was a travesty. I would happily confess to being a capitalist intellectual because I could see that I often possessed selfish bourgeois inclinations—not that the workers themselves were perfectly selfless. But I was baffled by the battle cry: “Down with the capitalist intellectuals in power!” If an intellectual became a professor, a department chair, a vice principal, or even a union leader, he was not in power. The university administration, run by Communist cadres, held all the real power. As far as I could tell, they worked hard to implement Party policy thoroughly, and didn’t deserve to be denounced as capitalist-roaders. Now the intellectuals were facing similar accusations.
As soon as the students began to persecute me, the workers joined in. They were all physically stronger and more revolutionary (that is, more brutal) than the students. In their spare time, they all enjoyed popular comedic art forms such as crosstalk, but since a struggle session made for better entertainment than a good evening of cross talk, they would not miss an opportunity to organize one.[1] Sure enough, two workers soon pounded on our door to haul me off to a struggle session. They were both on bicycles, but since I didn’t have one, they had to get off theirs and escort me like a foreign dignitary, one on either side of me. Unfortunately, I was in no mood to appreciate the honor.
The rumor was that the workers were going to struggle against all three professors who had each served, at one point or another, as chairman of the University Union. That would make for a rare spectacle, like watching the most famous singers of the time share a stage. Unfortunately, one of these professors had already been transferred to the Academy of Sciences, and the other couldn’t be found, so they were left with me. Instead of just evading work, they thought up the idea of replacing the struggle session with an indoor procession held in a large hall so that more people could satisfy their curiosity by joining in the spectacle. I didn’t dare look up or say anything, so I couldn’t tell how many bystanders there were, but from the laughter and shouting, I could tell that the performance had attracted quite a crowd. The workers lived up to their reputation as men of deeds rather than words: Instead of making long speeches, they limited themselves to punching and kicking and pelting me with stones. I was relieved at not having to hold the airplane position.
But the furor over my union work would not end so quickly. The masses were constantly driven by the fear of missing out on something new, and next the Asia-Africa Institute decided it wanted a piece of the action. The institute had been established on the orders of the Ministry of Education before the start of the Cultural Revolution, and Lu Ping himself had asked me to serve as its nominal head. I had few responsibilities and hence no reason to quarrel with anyone at the institute—in fact, we got along quite well. But now that I was being attacked, they wanted a chance to demonstrate their own revolutionary fervor, even if it meant kicking someone who was already down. They hauled me off to a small room in the institute at the southern end of campus. I wasn’t impressed. The slogans were halfhearted, there was no kicking or punching, and I barely held the airplane position at all. The speeches were 90 percent nonsense and 9 percent lies, with 1 percent remaining as a grain of truth. If I were grading struggle sessions, this one would fail—I couldn’t give it any more than a 3 out of 10.
There were so many struggle sessions that it would have been biologically and psychologically impossible to keep track of them all. At one in my own department, I recall glimpsing members of both Jinggangshan and New Beida among the spokespeople. Although the two factions fought violently using spears and other improvised weapons, you could barely tell them apart. Both were extreme leftist groups that subscribed to ridiculous metaphysical principles, and both declared their loyalty to the Red Queen, Madame Mao. Now that they had found a common enemy in me, they were united in their hatred. The following words had been found in my confiscated diaries: “Jiang Qing gave New Beida a shot of morphine, and now they’re acting cocky again.” This was deemed highly disrespectful and altogether unforgivable. Having grown used to struggle sessions, I had become a more discerning participant. In this case, I noted that the spokespeople were not very clever and the speeches poor. Even from where I was, holding the airplane position, I couldn’t help despising them. But watching the two factions come together to attack me also made me reflect that I myself had proved susceptible to partisanship, as demonstrated by that very line from my diaries. I was outraged to think that the faction that I had supported was now turning against me.
My mind wandered during these sessions, and I often thought back to my childhood in the countryside. Had I stayed there, I would still be half illiterate and working in the fields every day. My family only had about half an acre of land. Eventually I would have been classified as a peasant and qualified to reeducate intellectuals. It would have been a hard life but a carefree one. As the poet Su Shi wrote, “A man’s troubles begin when he learns to read.” As a university professor, I had enjoyed numerous honors, but now I was classified as a counterrevolutionary academic authority and struggled against every day. I regretted ever having left the village. The heavens had played a nasty trick on me.
But what’s past is past, so I decided to find a concrete way of improving my lot. The most urgent of the various problems I faced at the time was the difficulty of maintaining the airplane position for several continuous hours. I concluded that what I needed most was physical exercise, or more specifically, an endurance training plan for my legs. If you collapsed during a struggle session, the organizers assumed that you were trying to cause trouble, which would automatically earn you a beating. But holding the position wasn’t easy. After half an hour in the airplane position, I was often sore all over and drenched in sweat; before long, I would grow light-headed and sway slightly, my ears ringing. To keep myself going, I sometimes repeated a Mao saying to myself: “Make up your mind to fight without counting the costs, overcome all obstacles, and strive for victory!” Or in my case: “Make up your mind to ignore the pain, overcome all obstacles, and strive not to collapse!” This generally worked. As I persevered, the slogans and speeches began to sound faint and faraway, like thunder on distant hilltops.
I had survived many struggle sessions this way, but often to the point of nearly collapsing. I consequently decided to devote time each day to voluntarily holding an airplane position on the balcony, counting inwardly to measure the passing minutes, until my head reeled and I was drenched in sweat. This exercise regimen might seem ludicrous, but I can testify that it actually took place.
Standing on the balcony also allowed me to keep an eye on the road and see if any Red Guards were coming to harass me. I have always been an impatient person and consequently very punctual. Although I couldn’t guarantee that a struggle session would finish on time, I didn’t want one delayed on my account.
One winter day, while I was standing in my usual position on the balcony, I saw a few sparrows sitting motionless on a bamboo fence in the yard. All the trees were bare except for a couple of green pines. It was a scene worthy of a Chinese brush painting, and my eyes lit up to observe this gift of beauty from the gods. I immediately reflected on my incorrigible capitalist revisionist tendency to take bourgeois delight in things around me, even in such absurd circumstances.
When the Red Guards dragged me along the lake to the Foreign Languages Building or elsewhere to be struggled against, I often fantasized about running away. I thought of the turtles sunning themselves on floating logs in the lake. Despite being slow creatures, at the slightest sound they flipped themselves with startling agility into the water and disappeared in a ripple. I saw the ants beneath my feet and wished I could disappear into the grass like an ant or fly away like a bird. Human bodies were simply too big, too much of a hindrance to escape.
And even if I did escape, where would I go? Returning home to my village was a foolish idea. That had been tried before, and New Beida would simply send people to arrest the runaway and punish him more savagely. But where else could I go? Some suggested that I could stay with friends or with relatives, and at one point I collected ration coupons used for different parts in the country, so that I wouldn’t starve while on the run. But I realized that all my fantasies of running away were far more dangerous than simply staying put, as unpleasant as it might be to live in daily fear of the Red Guards and struggle sessions.
One day, a New Beida leader in my department gave the order that we were all to report to laogai, which consisted of performing daily labor. I was tired of being trapped at home all day and welcomed anything that would break the tedium. From then on, N. and I reported for work every day. Only a year before, when N. was being struggled against, I was in the audience—now, unexpectedly, we had become comrades, both prisoners of the department we had jointly founded.
We began work every morning at eight, supervised by a worker. We went home at twelve and returned to work from two to six. There were innumerable tasks and different work sites. For a stretch we’d be given a different job each day. We worked silently, like a pair of oxen under the overseer’s whip. The workers of Peking University had become white-collar overseers who did no work themselves. Since they were the vanguard of the proletariat, and I their prisoner, I kept my opinions to myself. But I realized that the Cultural Revolution was merely an elaborate excuse for workers to persecute intellectuals. Before Liberation, professors at the university were much better paid than the workers, and some of them must have been arrogant types who treated the workers badly. But after Liberation, the tide turned, and the revolution allowed a whole store of pent-up resentment to be released. During a struggle session, you could hear the palms of certain workers slapping the cheeks of professors. I understand that some workers may refute this depiction of them, but I am only being honest, in the spirit of seeking truth from facts.
I was supervised by one of these workers, and had to obey his orders while he stood and watched. I didn’t mind hard work, although it meant I had less time for my endurance training regimen; plus I lived in constant fear that any department or unit could find out where I was working and drag me off to a struggle session if they pleased. Sometimes if I was sent back to work after a session, I would experience a rush of relief at not having to hold the airplane position—working was pleasant in comparison. I was an incorrigible bourgeois capitalist, constantly finding something to enjoy.
On the way to work and back, I stayed away from the main roads so as to avoid running into the gangs of Red Guards that roamed the streets with their spears and red armbands. Someone like me was obviously a blackguard: gloomy-looking, dressed in patched, tattered clothes, and covered in dust. We blackguards were like birds at which anyone was free to take potshots. In fact, punching or slapping us was a legitimate revolutionary act. Even children knew that we were bad guys they were allowed to spit at or pelt with small stones. A few of them would even toss white lime in the blackguards’ eyes, which was extremely dangerous and could cause blindness. Since we couldn’t retaliate, all we could do was run away. Once, an eight-year-old with a brick in his hand called to me: “Come here! Let me hit you!” I hurried away—not too quickly, so as not to give the child a fright. I had no desire to risk going blind. As if being stepped on and struggled against was not miserable enough, blindness would be the last straw.
Steering clear of the main roads, I used the narrow back lanes instead. At the time, there were many more back lanes, running behind old houses or along ditches, littered with piles of garbage and smelling of sewage. No one else used those lanes, and they became my favorite haunts. They were peaceful except for the occasional company of a stray cat or dog unacquainted with class struggle. Cats knew only that I was a human, and they feared all humans equally. Whereas on the streets I would hurry along, eyes turned to the ground, here I could look up at the sky and enjoy my stroll, loitering as long as I pleased. These lanes were made for blackguards like me.
One day, at a work site where we were tasked with tearing down a bamboo stand, I stepped on a loose nail lying on the floor. The one-inch nail pierced through my thin shoe into the center of my foot. I felt a searing pain, and my foot wouldn’t stop bleeding. “You people are such useless idiots!” the overseer said. I knew that by “you people” he meant “you professors,” and braced myself for being slapped, but all he said was “Get lost!” I hurried away. Barely able to walk, I somehow made my way home, dragging my wounded leg behind my healthy one. I couldn’t go to the hospital, which was controlled by the very members of New Beida I was trying to avoid. My aunt and wife were shocked to see me, but they disinfected my wound with hot water, put some antiseptic on it, and bandaged it. I had to go back to work in the afternoon, for not only would I be in trouble but the worker overseeing me might get in trouble himself. Whereas the Communists had insisted on treating captured Kuomintang soldiers in a “revolutionary humanitarian” way, the same standards didn’t apply to us subhuman blackguards.
By this point, the two factions were getting into armed skirmishes. They had each started manufacturing weapons and assembling a small army. The ruling faction could afford to buy expensive steel rods and turn them into spears. Jinggangshan was less well funded, but they did their best too.
Each of the two factions took over several blocks on campus, guarding them like castles, and skirmishes broke out regularly. I never witnessed a battle, but I was once ordered to clear a field that had been the site of a fight. All the glass in the nearby building had been broken, and there were stones and bricks lying everywhere— these, too, had been used by both sides as weapons. But when I looked up, I couldn’t help smiling at the sight of a string of tattered shoes hanging from one of the windows, another reference to one of Nie’s nicknames. These grown-up children had turned the armed struggle between the two factions into a joke. It was the first time I had smiled in a long time.
Since both groups considered me their common enemy, I made sure to stay away from the actual fighting. No one who saw me would hesitate to attack me—and since I had escaped with my life thus far, I meant to stay alive. I wanted neither to kill myself nor to be killed. I wanted to live.