23
Mao wanted me to experience the anti-rightist campaign firsthand.
“You're like a hermit, hiding in the mountain and seeing no one,” he said shortly after our return to Beijing. He suggested I visit Peking Union Medical Hospital and tell him what was happening there.
The old Peking Union Medical Hospital, financed with Rockefeller funds, had been one of the finest and most comprehensive in the country, with the best doctors and the most up-to-date equipment. But the hospital had been completely reorganized, following the Soviet model, since 1949. Some of the hospital's most distinguished doctors had been assigned elsewhere, and management had been put under party control. Power was now in the hands of the first party secretary, Zhang Zhiqiang. While the party leadership regarded Zhang Zhiqiang as a doctor because he had been trained during the war by communist medics, the Western-trained doctors on the staff did not. Zhang was a coarse and uneducated man, but he was an old revolutionary, and in those days being revolutionary was considered qualification enough.
The real doctors on the staff, my friends and former teachers among them, had been distressed by the organizational changes, believing that the overall quality of the hospital had suffered. They thought the Ministry of Public Health, in overall charge of hospital management, was interfering in their affairs. When urged to speak out during the blooming of the hundred flowers, several of them had. I carried their concerns back to Mao.
He did not like my interpretation of the hospital's problems, accused me of having stopped eating after only a taste, and sent me back for further investigation.
I attended one of the meetings to criticize the hospital's “rightists.” Li Zongen, the director of the medical school, and Li Kehong, the medical director of the hospital, were the primary objects of attack, and their main accusers were the hospital's young lab technicians and nurses, uneducated people with little understanding of how to run a modern hospital. The younger doctors, who did know something about how the hospital should have worked, had too much respect for their senior colleagues to participate in the attacks. The two Dr. Lis were accused of attempting to undermine party leadership over the hospital and of overstepping their authority by trying to control personnel, finance, and administration. The meeting was lively, and the crowd was excited and angry.
I sympathized with the two doctors, but I also thought they had been foolish to criticize the party openly. No one criticized the party. I had already worked for Mao for three years, and I still revered him. I had no independent will or opinions. What Mao thought, I thought. It was not that I had contrary opinions that I had to suppress or keep to myself. Mao's opinions were mine. The possibility of differing with the Chairman never crossed my mind.
After the meeting, I went to see Dr. Zhang Xiaoqian, one of the senior physicians originally scheduled to administer the physical exam to Mao in Beidaihe and, like Mao, a native of Hunan province. Zhang had been the director of his alma mater, the Yale-in-China Medical School in Hunan, before liberation and was one of the country's best doctors. During the spring, Dr. Zhang had spoken out, too, criticizing the party secretary for failing to consult him about the transfer of doctors from his department to other hospitals. Now, as the anti-rightist campaign unfolded, Dr. Zhang was greatly distressed. “I made a terrible mistake talking so much,” he told me. “I shouldn't have said what I did. But I never meant to grab power in personnel matters. I only said that the head of a department should have the right to say something about his physicians, especially about their performance.” Dr. Zhang asked me to “reflect his views to the proper authorities,” meaning Mao.
When I reported on my second visit, Mao smiled, convinced that I finally understood the situation in the hospital. He explained that power over personnel, finance, and administration was the concrete manifestation of party authority. If those powers were given away, party leadership would be impossible. “We won these powers only after years of civil war and after countless casualties. And now the rightists want to take them away.” But he forgave Zhang Xiaoqian. Dr. Zhang is different, Mao said, just a simpleminded person who has been manipulated by others. Zhang Xiaoqian was never persecuted for having spoken out.
Doctors Li Zongen and Li Kehong were not so lucky. Only weeks after my visit, they were officially labeled rightists and exiled to the countryside for “reform.” Li Kehong, one of the best doctors in China, was reduced to serving as a librarian in a small medical college in Yunnan, in China's far southwest. Dr. Li Zongen, also an outstanding physician, was exiled to remote Guizhou. Neither doctor ever returned to Beijing. Both died prematurely, soon after having been sent away.
Even as the anti-rightist campaign broadened and Mao's net spread wider and wider, I barely knew what the campaign really meant. I did not know how many people were being sent to labor reform or what torture this “rectification” really was. In fact, listening to Mao talk, I actually thought the Chairman was generous to his enemies, giving them a chance to reform. When Mao told me that he did not believe in killing his opponents, I believed him. So I supported Mao and supported the anti-rightist campaign. Mao was good and the Communist party was good. They had saved China.
Only three years later, in 1960, when China's foreign minister, Chen Yi, told me that half a million people had been labeled rightists, did I know that the numbers were just too large and that most of those people had been falsely accused. What was most disturbing was that the various work units charged with finding rightists had been assigned a quota. Every place had to declare 5 percent of its members guilty of being rightists, whether they really were rightists or not. Hundreds of thousands of people had been falsely accused.
It was only later, too, that I began to understand what it meant to be labeled a rightist, how many people lost their jobs, were sent to labor reform camps, and died miserable deaths. It is true that Mao did not kill his opponents right away. But the physical and mental hardship of his “reforms” often meant a torturously slow and painful death. Only when I was sent myself to participate in hard labor for a mere two weeks did I begin to have an inkling of what life in the labor reform camps was like. They could take a man who could carry only twenty jin?of stones and force him to carry forty, and when his body broke and he could go no further, they would say it was because he was a rightist. And as he lay there shattered and broken, helpless, they would force him to confess to his crimes and then to betray other people. People died in those labor reform camps, where death seemed better than Mao's reform.
I should have known. I had opportunities to know. Mao himself had given me plenty of hints. “If we were to add up all the landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, and rightists, their number would reach thirty million,” he said to me one day. “If we put them all together in one area, they would constitute a good-size nation. They could make all sorts of trouble. But dispersed among the various party and government organs, they're just a tiny minority. Of our total population of six hundred million people, these thirty million are only one out of twenty. So what is there to be afraid of? Some of our party members cannot see this point. I've told them to just stand firm when they're under attack. Stick it out. But some of them thought it was disastrous to be attacked. They couldn't stand it anymore, and some of them even wanted to leave the party and join the rightists to attack us. Now we have identified all these people, and we are going to attack them.”
This was the first I had heard that there were some 30 million “enemies of the people.” The figure seemed enormous. But by then I knew that Mao rarely spoke without good reason, and his figure must have come from a reliable source. Later I would come to believe the figure was even higher.
I had had intimations, too, of how little the lives of his countrymen meant to Mao.
“We have so many people,” he would say. “We can afford to lose a few. What difference does it make?”
I am grateful that I did not understand Mao at the time, did not know how widespread his purges were, how horribly my fellow intellectuals were suffering, how many people were dying. I had tried to escape from Mao's circle so many times, and always Mao had pulled me back. Now I was trapped, with no hope of leaving. There was much that I could have seen then but did not. What if I really had known clearly what was happening outside my protective cocoon? What if I really had understood the depth and extent of the purges? I could never have accepted it, but I would have been powerless to do anything, either. I would not have been able to leave the circle and I would not have been able to live within it.
The Chinese have an expression, nande hutu, which means that it is difficult to be muddle-headed—but lucky. It is an expression reserved for situations like mine. Looking back, I know that I was muddle-headed during those years. I had to be. It was the only way to survive.