55
At the end of June 1965, a few days after I had written the memo calling for experienced doctors to go to the countryside, Mao called me in to see him. “The class struggle in the countryside has become extremely serious,” he said, “and the ‘four cleanups' campaign is raging like wildfire. But everyone in Group One is still here, doing nothing. That's no good.” Mao wanted Wang Dongxing to lead a team from Group One to participate in the socialist education campaign in the countryside. Wang's boss, public security minister Xie Fuzhi, was already in the countryside as leader of a team. Our turn had come.
We interpreted Mao's orders as punishment. “So what have we done this time to displease the Chairman?” Wang Dongxing wanted to know when I broke the news. Tian Jiaying and I were convinced that we were about to lose our jobs. Mao's way of overhauling his staff had always been to send them first to the countryside for “reform” and then to assign them different work. This was how Ye Zilong and Li Yinqiao had lost their jobs in the winter of 1960. We were afraid we would suffer a similar fate.
Mao wanted almost all of us in Group One to go. Only one secretary, Xu Yefu, and one attendant, Zhou Fuming, were to stay behind. Jiang Qing would not have to go, either. Her maladies had quickly returned in the face of possible hardship.
Tian Jiaying saw advantages in our leaving. The political situation in Beijing was becoming tense. None of us knew what would happen next, but we all feared that it would not be good. At least when the trouble hit, Tian reasoned, we would be out of harm's way. But none of us was happy about being sent to the countryside, and Wang Dongxing, responsible for getting us there, managed to drag his feet. Finally, Wang decided we would go to Qianshan county, in his native Jiangxi. Mao urged us to be quickly on our way.
I was worried about who would take my place while I was gone and wanted Huang Shuze, one of the vice-ministers of public health, to serve as Mao's doctor. But Mao was still fuming at both the urban health-care system and the hypochondria of his colleagues and did not want another doctor. “My health is good,” he insisted. “I don't need any health care. I'm not like those lords who have their blood pressure taken and their pulse measured every time they feel the slightest discomfort. I don't want health care. I don't need Huang Shuze. Just a nurse will be enough. And she doesn't have to be from Beijing Hospital, either.” Nurse Wu Xujun would accompany us. Mao wanted her replacement to come from the 301 Hospital, the leading health facility of the People's Liberation Army.
Pu Rongqing, the vice-president of the 301 Hospital, was flattered that Mao had requested one of his nurses. “Beijing Hospital has a much better health-care system,” he pointed out when I went to make the arrangements. He was right. Even Pu Rongqing himself had no formal medical training. He had learned his skills as a medic with the Red Army.
Pu asked us to interview two nurses who already had experience with high-ranking military cadres. Both were quite acceptable—one quiet and reserved, the other outgoing and friendly—so we showed Mao their photographs and asked him to choose. He chose the outgoing Liu Xiaoyan. “She looks smart,” he said.
Our team from Group One left for the countryside at the beginning of July.
By the time we arrived in Qianshan county, our socialist education work team was one hundred people strong. In addition to staff from the Central Bureau of Guards, the Central Garrison Corps, and the Second Artillery Corps, the Jiangxi provincial party committee also sent along its own representatives. Mao also sent his daughter Li Na, accompanied by a staff member to attend to her needs.
My relations with Li Na had been tense ever since the 7,000 cadres' conference in January 1962, when I had been called away from the Great Hall of the People to see Li Na at Peking University, where she was a student in the history department. I arrived to find Mao's daughter suffering from a severe cold and fever and being fussed over by Lu Ping, then serving simultaneously as president and party secretary of the university. The party secretary from the history department was there too, and both men were concerned. They were extremely polite, repeatedly apologizing that I had not been summoned earlier. They themselves had just learned of Li Na's illness and had called for me as soon as they knew. Li Na, though, was furious, claiming that I had not gotten there soon enough, that no one cared about her, insisting that no one would care if she died. She was inconsolable, whining and crying and complaining incessantly. Finally, I lost my temper.
“You're twenty-one years old,” I snapped at her. “You're not a kid anymore. You are sick and the leaders of the university have come to see you. What more do you want? There are more than ten thousand students here at Peking University. If they all acted like you, how do you think they could run the university?”
My outburst made her angrier, and she began crying and yelling all the more, behaving like a three-year-old. She continued to scream as I forced her into my car to take her to Beijing Hospital. She was so unruly en route, yelling and screaming and fighting the whole way, that we were stopped twice by police, who thought something was wrong.
Later, when I told Mao what had happened, he was angry. “Beijing Hospital is for high-level cadres,” he said. “What is Li Na doing there?”
I explained that ordinary hospitals would not admit patients suffering from colds but I had been afraid to let her return to Zhongnanhai because she might pass her cold on to him. Li Na had been admitted to Beijing Hospital because she was Mao's daughter.
Mao did not want his children to receive special privileges and told me not to send her to Beijing Hospital again. Then he wanted to know where Li Na, Li Min, and Mao Yuanxin ate when they were in Zhongnanhai. I said that Mao's chef cooked for them, and they ate in his kitchen.
Mao did not like that, either. “Tell Wang Dongxing that from now on they are not allowed to eat in my kitchen. They have to eat in the public dining room.”
This new regulation did not endear me to Mao's children and nephew, and when Jiang Qing found out about it, she too was angry. I had treated her daughter rudely and deprived her of her special privileges. She wanted Mao to fire me. Mao did not, but in the end even Mao was unhappy with me. When he encouraged me to be nice to Jiang Qing and Li Na, I pointed out that Li Na was mean and nasty and impossible to please, unlike her gentler sister, Li Min. Mao did not appreciate my saying this, even though he knew it was true. Now, as if to prove that his children were getting no special privileges, he was sending Li Na with us to the countryside. Wang Dongxing had to arrange for someone to come along to take care of her.
From the beginning, our mission in Jiangxi seemed wrong. To send the privileged elite of Beijing to direct a campaign against corruption and foster class struggle in the countryside seemed absurd. We had traveled thousands of miles from Beijing to Jiangxi by train and car at government expense. We lived in guesthouses paid for by the government and ate food for which others paid. Merely getting us to the villages and keeping us there was costing the government a lot. And the experience of our group was being duplicated all over the country. Hundreds of thousands of city folk were being sent to the countryside, at great expense, to participate in this “socialist education campaign.” And none of us wanted to be in the villages. We had been sent against our will.
After we arrived in Qianshan county, our work team divided into four groups, each assigned to a different village. After the failure of the Great Leap Forward, the people's communes had each been subdivided into several production brigades, which were equivalent geographically to the old rural villages. Each brigade, in turn, was further divided into production teams. Wang Shengrong, the deputy director of the Central Bureau of Guards, and I were in charge of a group sent to work in Shixi production brigade, and we were joined by two local officials—Zhang Zhenhe, a public-security official of Jiangxi's Shangrao prefecture, and the party secretary of Qianshan county. I liked both local officials enormously. They uttered not a word of complaint about the hardships we faced and remained friendly and cooperative with everyone they met.
The peasants of Shixi village were poor beyond my imagination. I had been back in China for sixteen years and with Mao for eleven of them. My job made me privy to all sorts of secret information. I knew of the famine and hunger brought on by the Great Leap Forward. I knew the countryside was poor. But these peasants were poorer than poor. Their clothes were threadbare and patched. Their food was meager and almost indigestible—unhusked rice mixed with sand and bits of gravel, topped by a few paltry vegetables. The peasants' homes were miserable, leaky huts without even rudimentary furniture, and the only roads were narrow dirt paths that turned into mud after a rain. There were no schools in the village of Shixi and I never saw any newspapers, magazines, or books. The overwhelming majority of adults in the village were illiterate, and illiteracy was being perpetuated in their children. The closest school was several li away, and few of the children were receiving even primary education. Our “four cleanups” team arranged to show an old film from the fifties one night. We set up the projector outside in one of the fallow fields, and peasants came from miles around. Some walked for hours from as far as fifteen miles away to see the film. It was the first movie most of them had ever seen.
But our lives, even in the countryside, were luxurious beyond the imagination of the peasants. In order to be more like them, we had cast off our city garb for the rough cotton padded jackets and pants supplied by the Central Garrison Corps, but still the villagers were envious of our outfits. Our clothes had no patches. As I was chatting one day with one of the older peasants in the village, he touched and patted my jacket. “If only I could have an overcoat like this,” he said, “then I would know that communism had arrived.”
We were a continual source of curiosity to the villagers. Wang Shengrong, the deputy director of the Central Bureau of Guards, who was a member of our group, was a particular source of wonder. Wang's love of food was obvious from his weight. The peasants in our team, all painfully thin, had never seen anyone so fat. Every time Wang emerged from his hut, the villagers would rush to surround him and gawk. The adults would ask him what he ate to make him so fat, and the children would run after him as though he were a creature from another planet. The villagers never learned his name. To the peasants he was always da pangzi—the big fat man.
According to the ideology of the day, our team was to “live, eat, sleep, and work” with the poor peasants. But the villagers were much too poor to accommodate outsiders. They were as hospitable as their circumstances allowed, offering us a dilapidated storage shed for housing. We managed to construct some wooden beds, using hay for mattresses and spreading our quilts and bedding over the hay. We set up our own kitchen, too, and because we had come to purge ourselves of special privilege and to live like peasants, we ate the same coarse food that they did—sandy rice and all.
We labored in the fields. There were twelve families in our host team, collectively farming some fifty mu (nine acres) of land. In addition, each family was assigned a tiny plot for growing household vegetables. There were no machines, no draft animals, and very few tools. We used our hands, our arms, our feet, every muscle and bone in our body, and the work was backbreaking, exhausting, and primitive. We were working like animals. With so little land and such primitive techniques, the harvests were meager indeed. After paying taxes to the state, the peasants had hardly anything left.
Elsewhere science and technology were progressing. But here in the backwaters of Jiangxi, Chinese agriculture had not changed for a thousand years. Talk of a Great Leap Forward was ridiculous. I could not understand why China was not exerting all its energy and intelligence to develop labor-saving agricultural machines to bring the peasants out of their degradation, backwardness, and poverty. When I confessed to Wang Dongxing that I could not understand why, sixteen years after the revolution, the peasants were still so poor, he pointed out that many other places were poorer still.
I knew he was right. Many of the young wives in Shixi village had fled their native Anhui during the height of the famine several years before, when their husbands and children died. With their new husbands in Shixi, they were making new families. The situation in Anhui had greatly improved, but the women would not go back. Life was better in Jiangxi.
In the midst of this poverty, our job was to foster class struggle. The “four cleanups” campaign required us to investigate cadre corruption within the production team, as though the place had not always been so poor, as though corruption rather than the policies of the Great Leap Forward had been responsible for the disasters of the “three bad years.” The assumption was that the cadres in these impoverished teams had manipulated finances to their own advantage, had confiscated team grain for their own consumption, had allocated public property for their own use, and had cheated the peasants out of their work points.
There was corruption. That was undeniable. But to focus on corruption at the level of poor teams like this one was absurd. Our socialist education work team had no way of inspecting account books. There were no account books to inspect. The peasant responsible for bookkeeping was barely literate and would not know how to keep books. And there were really no accounts to keep. The team was so poor, and the villagers lived and worked together so closely, that everyone knew everything about everyone else. They knew what everyone had and what everyone earned and what the team produced. The local people had been living and working together for centuries. The team cadres could not have benefited from corruption even if they had tried. It was the cadres at the higher levels of the commune, and those higher still, at the level of the county and the province, who were reaping the economic rewards of corruption and graft. The higher-level cadres were the ones with the power to extract taxes from the peasants, to direct the peasants into any endeavor they wanted. They were the ones with the power to be corrupt.
The class struggle that Mao argued was still continuing with such intensity, the battle between the landlords and the poor peasants, feudalism and socialism, the bourgeoisie and the working class, was also a tragic farce. Sometime during land reform, just after the communists had taken power in this village, all the villagers had been assigned a class label. Those designated landlords or rich peasants lost all their property, and they, and every member of their families, had been placed under supervision by the village. The goal, it was said, was to reform the landlords and rich peasants, as well as their spouses and children, through hard labor. Periodically, especially on national holidays, the former landlords and rich peasants would be assembled as a group to receive a lecture from the local public-security or production-team cadres about the alleged misdeeds of their past. Whenever anything untoward occurred in the village—if a nail was found in the cattle feed, for instance—the old landlords and rich peasants were automatically suspected and hauled out for interrogation.
The hardest-working and poorest peasant in the village, a man who labored unceasingly from dawn to dusk, had been designated a landlord's son and was invariably assigned the hardest and heaviest jobs. He worked without a word of complaint. But the man, in fact, was not a landlord's son. He had been born into one of the village's poorest families, and his impoverished parents, in order to save him, had given him in adoption to a landlord. For that, he had been labeled the son of a landlord, forced to work as a coolie, deprived of all rights, and was at the beck and call of the village leaders. Among the impoverished villagers, he was the poorest and most miserable, forced to eat the least and the coarsest of rice. His clothes were cast off by others as beyond repair.
The father of another so-called landlord's son had never even owned land. But his grandfather had. The label landlord's son was hereditary, passed down from generation to generation. The abuse meted out to the son of the landlord who had owned no land was torture, from which he could not escape.
This system of labeling children for the alleged crimes of their fathers, of perpetuating the stigma generation after generation and treating the offspring like criminals, was obviously unfair. I thought surely the time had come to change the status of these people, who had already suffered so much. But my suggestions were ignored, and I was warned about the potential political consequences should my sympathies be known.
Other members of the team had told the peasants that I was Mao's doctor, but that was no protection. “You think that just because you are Chairman's doctor you can put in some good words for the son of a landlord,” one of the villagers warned me one day. “But let me tell you—if anyone here reports what you have said to the government, you can get into big trouble.” Speaking in defense of a landlord, even if the landlord had been unfairly labeled, was to risk being labeled oneself. This was Mao's class struggle. The innocent had been persecuted for sixteen years. Mao had said that class struggle would continue for the entire stage of socialism, which might last for fifty or a hundred years. The legacy of torture would not stop with the first generation of landlord sons but would continue to grandson and great-grandson and so on until the arrival of communism. When the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, the sons and daughters of the high-level cadres perpetuated the slogan “Dragons beget dragons; phoenixes beget phoenixes; rats beget rats.” The sons and daughters of high-level party cadres were sacred, the dragons and phoenixes of Chinese mythology. The sons and daughters of the former landlords and rich peasants were no better than rats. Against this horrible abuse and injustice that permeated the countryside, I and the other members of my team were powerless.
The awful poverty afflicting the Chinese villages and the injustice of the type of class struggle I was witnessing and my helplessness before it depressed me. After sixteen years of revolution, it seemed to me that China had not progressed at all. The standard of living was terrible. The government was cruel. Life for the disenfranchised was harsh. However bad life may have been under the Guomindang, hard work and good luck had always brought rewards. Poor people with talent had a chance to rise to the top. The social and economic status of individuals and families was not set in stone generation after generation. Change for the better was always a hope.
I did learn something from my participation in the socialist education campaign, but not the lessons Mao wanted me to learn. My alienation grew. My dissatisfaction with the Communist party deepened. While high-level party cadres ate and drank and lived in luxury, the peasants in the countryside barely subsisted. They were poorer and more miserable than anything I had imagined. What good had the Communist party done? Where were the great transformations Mao's revolution had wrought? Our work team had come to the countryside to stir up class conflict. And to what avail? We would leave the village and the peasants would remain poorer than ever and the government coffers would be depleted.
My political disaffection grew, and still I remained silent.