3
The city was shabby and drab. After eight years of Japanese occupation and four years of civil war, the streets were unkempt and the thick walls surrounding the city had crumbled. The painted wooden signboards that had once hung outside the multitude of small shops, lending Beijing so much color and life, had disappeared. My favorite bookstores in Liulichang had closed.
The people seemed as poor and drab as the city, men and women alike dressed in communist blue or gray cotton washed so often as to be almost completely faded. Everyone wore the same black cotton cloth shoes, and hairstyles were identical, too—short-cropped crew-cuts for men, straight, short bobs on the women. With my Western-style suit and tie, leather shoes, and hair that suddenly seemed long, I felt like a foreigner. Lillian, colorfully dressed and wearing high-heeled shoes, her hair stylishly cut and freshly permed, was a bright red poppy in a field of yellow wheat. I quickly borrowed a properly communist suit, and Lillian visited a tailor for a set of subdued new clothes.
The change in my mother was dramatic. She had become old and frail, reduced to a tiny eighty pounds, and her hair had turned a silver gray. But she was delighted to see me, pleading with me as soon as we met never to leave again. I promised to stay.
The mood of Beijing was a startling contrast to its physical decline. The whole city seemed happy. Beijing had been liberated, and the population genuinely welcomed the new communist government. The city was filled with a spirit of anticipation and hope. The few friends and relatives who thought we were foolish to return were the exceptions.
My brother arranged for me to meet Fu Lianzhang, who would arrange for my work. I visited Fu at his home in the compound of what would soon become the Ministry of Public Health. Located in Bowstring (Gongxian) Lane, just north of the busy Wangfujing shopping area, the compound, once the home of a Manchu prince, had been occupied by a high-ranking Guomindang general until the communist takeover. The estate in Bowstring Lane was built in the same traditional style as my own family home but was far grander and more elegant, with six courtyards and seven or eight grape arbors, a traditional garden with a false mountain of rock, and ceramic-tile floors.
Fu Lianzhang was lying on a chaise longue made of bamboo and wicker. He was tall, gaunt, and sickly-looking, with a broad forehead and sharp, piercing eyes. He was fifty-five years old then, twenty-six years older than I, and from the perspective of my youth he seemed elderly indeed.
Fu did not bother to get up when I entered, extending me a limp handshake from his position in recline. His soft hands were those of an intellectual. I felt honored to be granted an audience with such a high official.
“I have had tuberculosis for years and cannot talk to you for long,” he explained after welcoming me back and asking about my educational background and work experience. “But your job has been arranged. Just report tomorrow morning to the Health Section.” Until the new people's government was formally established, the functions of governance were being administered by the Military Affairs Commission, and the Health Section was under its aegis.
My greeting at the Health Section was warm. “Welcome, welcome,” said the official who showed me around. “We are short of physicians here. I know your brother. He was my boss for many years.
“Vice-Minister Fu has instructed that you be treated like one of us,” the official explained. “We operate here on a free-supply system. The government will give you everything you need—your room and board, clothes, even your shoes. Since you are a senior physician, you are entitled to grade-two kitchen privileges. Your food allowance will be slightly more than the average staff member's.”
The free-supply system meant that I would be receiving no salary. The Communist party had two systems for paying its employees. People new to the revolutionary cause, working for the party for the first time, were ordinarily given a salary. Veteran revolutionaries were on the free-supply system. Since I was considered to have “voluntarily joined the revolution,” I was given the honor of being put on the free-supply system even though I was a newcomer to the cause.
This did not make me happy. My family burdens were large, for in addition to my wife, I would be supporting my mother, two aunts, and my wife's parents. I had considerable savings in gold and U.S. dollars, but without a salary and with so many people depending on me, my savings would soon be used up.
Only when I was introduced to Comrade Lei was I given any hint about what my work with the Health Section might be. “Comrade Lei will accompany you to your job at the outpatient clinic at Labor University in the Fragrant Hills,” I was told. “Go home now and get your belongings together. Report back here a week from today. A truck will take you then to the Fragrant Hills. Comrade Lei will go with you.”
The meeting was unsettling. No one had ever asked me whether I actually wanted the job. I was confused. I had never heard of Labor University, and while I was happy to be given work at a university, I did not know whether it would have a hospital affiliated with a medical school, which is what I wanted. The reference to an outpatient clinic did not sound promising.
Moreover, I learned that the Health Section could not find appropriate work for Lillian. She was given a temporary job in a kindergarten at a training institute for public-health workers in Tong county, a suburb some twenty kilometers east of Beijing. Her talents and training would be sorely underused. It was a far cry from the high-paying, challenging job she had been offered by the British Council in Hong Kong. Our homecoming seemed less than auspicious, and for a few fleeting moments I thought maybe I should have given that Rolex watch to Mr. Yan.
“You are new here and don't understand what's going on,” my brother encouraged me. “Here, people don't choose jobs; jobs choose people. This is called ‘being obedient to the organization.' As for the problem of pay, you can manage on your savings now. The rest will be worked out later.” Party discipline prevented him from saying more.
The place called Labor University was located in Xiangshan—the Fragrant Hills—several miles to the northwest of Beijing and a few miles beyond the old imperial Summer Palace. Once the emperor's hunting grounds, the hills were dotted with buildings from the reign of the Qianlong emperor. The area was also famous for two ancient Buddhist temples—the Temple of the Sleeping Buddha and the Temple of the Azure Clouds. In autumn, the white-barked evergreen pines and the red-leaved smoke trees transform the hillside into a brilliant patchwork of color. Labor University sprawled across much of the Fragrant Hills and had a bustling, well-populated feel to it.
The place was peculiar, though. Armed sentries were posted everywhere. I was shown around by two high-ranking veterans of the Communist party—Wu Yunfu and Luo Daorang, who were the director and deputy director of the Bureau of Administration under the General Office of the Chinese Communist party's Central Committee. The whole place was filled with Communist party officials. When Wu Yunfu issued me my free supplies and the badge that identified me as an official with the Labor University, he warned me to be very careful not to lose the badge. “And don't talk to anyone else about what is happening here,” he cautioned. “Your work is secret.” I had no idea why.
My quarters sat among the trees along one of the wooded slopes, but my room was a far cry from the imperial edifices that could be seen throughout the hills. It was a rude and tiny peasant hut, the likes of which I, as a wealthy child of the city, had never even imagined. The floor was made of clay, the roof leaked, and the only electricity was a bare light bulb overhead. The lone piece of furniture was the bed—a wooden board placed atop two wooden stools, one at either end of the plank, with no mattress or bedding at all. There was no running water, of course, and an outdoor public latrine served as the toilet. I used a thin cotton pad for a mattress and filled an enamel basin with boiled water drawn from a nearby well to wash. The measure of my status as a doctor was the fact that I did not have to share my quarters with others. The conditions were so primitive that my wife could not join me there, so we met only on weekends, when I returned to my mother's house to visit—and take my weekly bath.
My meals were another sign of my status. We ate only twice a day, as is the custom among Chinese peasants—once at ten in the morning, then again at four in the afternoon. Unlike peasants, who rarely eat meat, however, my grade-two kitchen privileges entitled me to meat almost every day, and while the cafeteria was hardly less primitive than my living quarters, the food was tasty and well prepared, and the simple kitchen was reasonably clean.
The clinic, though, was even more astonishing. It was also a peasant hut, with packed clay floors and no medical equipment at all—just a few thermometers and some devices for measuring blood pressure. The only medicines available were aspirin, cough syrup, and a few drugs to combat bacterial infections. My stethoscope and medical experience were the only tools I would have to aid in making diagnoses. I could only hope that none of my patients were seriously ill.
Here too, though, the upbeat mood of the staff was a stark contrast to the physical condition of the clinic. The staff—about thirty people in all—had been anticipating my arrival long before I was even aware of my assignment, and they greeted me with obvious delight. They were all young—most of them younger even than my own twenty-nine years. Even the two section chiefs were still in their mid-twenties. They were all rural people, recruited by the party, and the most educated among them had only finished primary school. They could do minor first aid—bandage a small wound—and knew how to give aspirin for colds, but they had no scientific knowledge of disease and would not have known how to make a diagnosis. “We really hope you can teach us modern medicine,” they told me. “We know so little about it.” They wanted me to give lectures. I was aghast. How was I going to manage in circumstances like this?
That first weekend, an old friend I had not seen for eleven years visited me at home. We chatted about old times and what had happened since. My friend had joined the Communist party many years before and was now working with the New Democratic Youth League.1 I told him I had just started work at the medical clinic at Labor University in the Fragrant Hills. “It's a huge university with armed sentries everywhere,” I said. “It's unlike any university I've ever seen.”
My friend turned serious. “Actually, I have permission from the leading cadre of our organization to talk with you,” he said. “He asked me to warn you about several things. You are new to revolutionary work, and it is easy to make mistakes out of ignorance.”
I was willing to concede my ignorance, but I still had no idea what he was talking about. “I am a doctor,” I said. “When I see patients, I do my best. What mistakes could I make?”
“Let's start again,” he said. “Now, tell me again where you work.”
I repeated that I worked at Labor University. “I know very little about the place. I just see patients every day. But there are very few patients and none of them has any serious illness. It's really a waste of time.”
He laughed. “Why do you think you've never seen another university like it? Why are there armed sentries everywhere? Why is your work so secret? You're not at a university, my friend. All the leading organizations of the Communist party are located on the site of Labor University. Your clinic serves the members of these organizations. They are temporarily located there, out of the city, for the sake of safety and secrecy because Beijing was so recently liberated. That's why your work is such a secret.
“You will learn more in time,” he continued, becoming serious again. “But don't look down on the clinic. It may be poorly equipped and you may see few patients, but it is a very important place. You will be meeting many extremely important people. This is why our leading cadre allowed me to talk with you.”
I dared not ask the name of the leading cadre to whom he referred, but Jiang Nanxiang, later to become minister of education (1965–66), was the deputy secretary of the New Democratic Youth League then. I assumed the information was coming from him.
I had returned to China with dreams of becoming a surgeon and serving my country through medicine, only to be plunked unsuspecting into the very center of the Chinese Communist party. Though the communists had taken over Beijing, the civil war still continued. The People's Republic of China had yet to be established. Until the new government could take over, the leaders of the Communist party would remain outside the city, in the Fragrant Hills. The central secretariat of the Chinese Communist party and all its subordinate agencies were located there. Of the five top secretaries of the Communist party, three—Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, and Zhu De—lived in the Fragrant Hills, in the old imperial buildings that dotted the grounds. Only Zhou Enlai and Ren Bishi lived elsewhere. The clinic where I worked was not part of a university at all but an agency under the jurisdiction of what became, after the establishment of the People's Republic of China, the Communist party Central Committee's General Office, headed by Yang Shangkun, who, forty years later, in 1988, would become president of the Chinese People's Republic. The General Office was responsible for the safety, well-being, and organizational efficiency of its ranking members—Mao and the other top four secretaries. It was, and remains, among the most secret of all party organizations, and even members of the staff are not told its organizational structure and functions. Only high-level cadres or people who have worked within the organization for years could begin to describe the organization.
In the early 1950s, the General Office had eight major divisions, equal in status.2
The Bureau of Administration, headed by Wu Yunfu and Luo Daorang, who had escorted me around “Labor University” on my first day there, was responsible for the basic physical needs of the party leadership—for providing them with food and supplies, for the construction and repair of the buildings where they lived and worked, for their transportation and communications, and for administering finances.
The Central Bureau of Guards, headed by Wang Dongxing, who later was simultaneously a vice-minister of public security under Luo Ruiqing, was responsible for the security and health of the highest-ranking leaders of the party. While charged with protecting all of the party's ranking leaders, Wang also served as the chief of Mao's bodyguards, and his primary loyalty was unquestionably to Mao. Even then, security arrangements for the highest leaders were elaborate. Wang's responsibility for the health of the highest leaders overlapped—and occasionally collided—with Fu Lianzhang's separate Ministry of Public Health. The official photography office, for reasons I never understood, also fell within the purview of Wang Dongxing's bureau.
The Office of Confidential Secretaries, headed by Ye Zilong, was responsible for arranging all the meetings called by ranking members of the party, for recording notes of those meetings, and for sending and receiving party documents. Ye Zilong was also Mao's chief confidential secretary. As such, he served as the chairman's chief steward, responsible for arranging Mao's private life, food, and personal finances, and for storing and taking care of the many gifts he received. The functions of the confidential secretaries were primarily logistical.
The substantive work was done by the Office of Political Secretaries, which was responsible for keeping the top leadership informed of issues and for writing reports and documents. In 1949, the Office of Political Secretaries was headed by Chen Boda, who was also Mao's chief political secretary. Mao had several other political secretaries as well—his wife, Jiang Qing, Hu Qiaomu, and Tian Jiaying. Other top leaders also had their own political secretaries, among whom, invariably, were their wives.
The Bureau of Confidential Matters, headed by Li Zhizhong, and the Bureau of Confidential Communications, headed by Wang Kai, were the most secret of the organizations under the General Office. The Bureau of Confidential Matters was staffed by young people capable of remarkable feats of memory, for it was their job to memorize a secret telegraph code. This code, different from the ordinary Chinese telegraph code, changed frequently, and it permitted secret communications by telegraph both within the central leadership and to leaders in the provinces and the army. Each of the Chinese ideographs was assigned a number, and the young staff, trained at a special school in Zhangjiakou, Hebei, memorized the entire code and used it without reference to a codebook or other material. Beyond a certain age, when memorization is no longer easy, the staff would be assigned other jobs.
The Bureau of Confidential Communications was responsible for transmitting secret documents to party and army leaders throughout the country. Most of the staff members were simple and uneducated, often illiterate. They served as couriers, carrying documents among various ministries of the State Council, to the provinces, and to the far-flung corners of the country. Absolute political reliability rather than intelligence was required for the job.
The Bureau of Archives, headed by Zeng San, was responsible for maintaining the historical records of the Communist party. The Bureau of General Logistics, headed by Deng Diantuo, was responsible for providing supplies to all the bureaus and ministries of the party.
The Fragrant Hills Clinic, under the combined jurisdiction of Luo Daorang and Fu Lianzhang, was responsible for the health of everyone who worked in these organizations. The entire staff of the General Office, from the highest-ranking leaders to ordinary members and their families, were my patients. The group as a whole was young and healthy. Their medical complaints by and large were minor, of no great interest to me, since I had aspired to be a surgeon. I was disappointed not to be pursuing my dream of a medical career, but as the only Western-educated physician at the Fragrant Hills Clinic, I came to know many cadres, high and low. Still young and idealistic, and so recently returned to Beijing, I felt honored to be working so close to the levers of Communist party power. I had tremendous respect for the men and women who became my patients. These people had made the Chinese revolution and were working to bring it to fruition. They had left their homes and their families as mere youths, sacrificing everything to build a better, more just, and stronger China. They were the Long Marchers, who had undergone unthinkable danger and hardship to establish the guerrilla base areas from which to challenge Chiang Kai-shek and his corrupt and wasteful government. These Communist party cadres devoted every ounce of energy to their work, selflessly indifferent to their personal gain or interest. I had never known such people, and I was overcome with admiration. They were the embodiment of China's hope.
As a new member of the heart of the Chinese revolution, I was privileged not only to witness the ceremony formally establishing the People's Republic of China but to have a front-row seat.
On October 1, 1949, the whole population of the Fragrant Hills was awakened at five o'clock in the morning to the type of crisp, clear, and chilly day that makes autumn in Beijing the most magnificent season. We rode by truck from the Fragrant Hills and arrived in Tiananmen Square a little before seven, taking our places near the marble bridge just at the foot of the Gate of Heavenly Peace, which serves as the entrance to the Forbidden City. Tiananmen Square was smaller then than it is today, surrounded by the dilapidated buildings that once served as rest houses for officials awaiting an audience with the emperor. The Great Hall of the People and the Museum of Revolutionary History would be constructed in 1959, in celebration of the tenth anniversary of the founding of new China.
When we arrived, the square was already swarming with people, carefully chosen from all walks of life. I had a perfect view of the podium from which the leaders would proclaim the establishment of the People's Republic. Above the sea of people thousands of banners were unfurled, waving in the autumn breeze, their colors transforming the shabby city. The crowd was shouting slogans—“Long Live the People's Republic of China,” “Long Live the Chinese Communist Party”—and singing revolutionary songs. The enthusiasm was contagious, and everyone grew more excited with every new slogan and song.
At ten o'clock sharp, Mao Zedong and the other top leaders appeared on the podium overlooking the square. The effect was electric. Mao had been my hero since my brother first told me he was China's messiah, and this was my first glimpse of my savior. Even working in the Fragrant Hills, so close to Mao's residence, I had never seen him before. He was fifty-six years old then, tall and healthy and solid. His face was ruddy, his black hair thick, his forehead high and broad. His voice was powerful and clear, his gestures decisive. He no longer wore the military uniform so familiar to us from his photographs. The founding of the new government was a state occasion and Mao officiated in his position as the chairman of the People's Republic of China, representing the central government rather than the party. He wore a dark brown Sun Yat-sen suit (only later would the style be referred to as the Mao suit) and a worker's cap for this civil occasion and stood among a number of non-communist political personalities as testimony to the reality of the united front. The beautiful Song Qingling, widow of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, who had toppled the imperial system and brought China to political modernity, was among them.
Mao Zedong was the center of attention, but his manner was dignified, and there was an air of modesty about him, with no trace of arrogance. I had seen Chiang Kai-shek many times during the height of his power, and he had always been aloof, demanding subservience from everyone around him. The effect was invariably alienating.
Mao, though, was a truly magnetic force. Mao did not speak standard Mandarin. But the Hunan dialect he spoke is easy for Mandarin speakers to understand, and its rhythm and tones are pleasant to the ear. Mao's voice was soft, almost lilting, and the effect of his speech was riveting. “The Chinese people have stood up,” he proclaimed, and the crowd went wild, thundering in applause, shouting over and over, “Long Live the People's Republic of China!” “Long Live the Chinese Communist Party!” I was so full of joy my heart nearly burst out of my throat, and tears welled up in my eyes. I was so proud of China, so full of hope, so happy that the exploitation and suffering, the aggression from foreigners, would be gone forever. I had no doubt that Mao was the great leader of the revolution, the maker of a new Chinese history. Though I was standing so near him, he still seemed very far away. I was only an ordinary doctor and he was the great revolutionary leader of the People's Republic of China. Never in my wildest imagination, standing in Tiananmen that day, could I have suspected that soon I would become his personal physician, the director of his medical team, that I would be with him for twenty-two years and present at his death.
In December 1949, not long after the celebrations, Mao Zedong left for Moscow, where he spent several months negotiating a treaty of friendship with Stalin and the Soviet Union. Upon his return in February 1950, Mao moved from his hideaway in the Fragrant Hills into the city of Beijing, to Zhongnanhai, the former royal garden within the grounds of the old Forbidden City. Other ranking party leaders followed him, living and working in regal splendor. So, too, did most of the central administrative offices and staff. Only a few of the original offices—the Bureau of Administration and the Bureau of Confidential Matters, for instance—remained in the Fragrant Hills. The Fragrant Hills Clinic was split in two, with one section going to Zhongnanhai to take care of the top leaders there, the other remaining in the Fragrant Hills. I stayed in the Fragrant Hills. If not for an accident, the story of my life would have been entirely different.
1 The name of the New Democratic Youth League later changed to Communist Youth League.
2 The General Office was reorganized several times during Mao's reign. This is a description of its organization in the early 1950s.