The Party Never Sleeps (Part 2)
an excerpt from Bearing Witness: Coming of Age in Mao’s China
by Manyin Li (May 2020)
Courtyard Story No. 8, Huang Rui, 1983
1. Refusing to Cooperate and Its Consequence
It happened so suddenly and irresistibly that I did not even have the time to figure out what was happening. From hindsight, it seemed unbelievably strange that I was not crushed or terrified to the point of collapse. Perhaps I was too busy in dealing with the accusation and had no time for fear. It was also possible that I was too naïve to fear.
We Chinese had no sense of human rights and the rule of law in the middle of the twentieth century. We never questioned the injustice of being treated as a counterrevolutionary without due process. When being interrogated in quarantine, we were usually very cooperative with the revolutionaries who purged us, even though we were not under physical torture or suffering from hunger. We were willing to answer all questions, again and again. Even now, I still wonder what magic power the revolutionaries possessed. We just took for granted the obligation to respond even when we thought we were innocent. Somehow, the title “revolutionary” itself had the supreme power in our minds.
None of the victims of political persecutions in the early days of the People’s Republic protested that the practice was unlawful, because revolution knew no law. I never even thought for a minute that I should not be treated this way. On the contrary, I diligently searched in my memory the details of the innocent talks, now deemed guilt. I wished my mind had been a tape recorder able to play back every word uttered 18 months before. I truly believed that honest confession would earn leniency, and resistance would call for harsh punishment. I tried to recall and clarify all that was said at the “secret meeting.” Unfortunately, no matter how diligently I tried and how willing I was to confess, I was always censured as cunning, like squeezing toothpaste from a tube, and as being the worst of the reactionary elements.
Sometimes, the revolutionaries gave me clues of what was confessed by others to extract my confession, which often confounded me. For instance, they asked me what C. Wu and F. Ding had discussed with me in addition to what we said at the “secret meeting.” My answer was “nothing.” And what had the two of them discussed between them? What a question! How was I supposed to know the talks between them? As I was unable to give an answer to their satisfaction, I was again accused of being stubborn. Stubborn? Whether stubborn or not, I would not make up what was unknown to me or what had not happened.
Day after day, my confession and self-denunciation seemed endless. New details were constantly exposed. There were always things I could not recall even though repeated efforts gave me headaches. Gradually, I changed my way of thinking from telling truth to a preconceived “yes” answer, because there must be such a thing, I thought, if they said there was.
I mentally visited the scene of the “secret meeting” over and over again a million times. The more I did it, the less I could distinguish between (1) what was really said, (2) what “they” said we had said, and (3) what was simply the product of analysis. The lines between the three became blurry. After a long time of focused thinking, somehow, even the unreal became real. Eventually, what was out of mere imagination or inference and what was the true memory of real happenings were all confused in my mind.
Decades later, I read a report on scientific studies of memory published in the United States. The report states that memory is unreliable because it is merely an impression left on the brain by the appearance of facts, and it could be lost or changed over time or distorted due to external interferences. For example, constantly repeating a statement may make an impression as if it was true even though the statement is false. When under persecution, the distortion of memory is unavoidable, and all forced confessions are made in the context of memory distortions. This was exactly what happened in my case.
As my memory became more and more chaotic, my thinking became very uncertain. Sometimes I accepted their brainwashing and thought that we were indeed guilty. As our society was completely led and controlled by the Communist Party, any criticism of happenings in this society must be aimed at the Communist Party, right? And whoever criticized the Party must be reactionary, because the Party was always great, glorious, and correct, as we were told repeatedly. Other times, however, my conscience would whisper to me that all this was a farce, taking a grain of sesame for a watermelon or a feather for an arrow. We, a few seventeen-year-old adolescents, were merely expressing our aspirations just as Chairman Mao did when he was young.
Filled with scholar’s lofty aspiration, we brought our daring into play.
—Mao Zedong Poems, translated by Zhao Zhentao, Hunan People’s Publishing House, 1980
Thus, I concluded that the whole thing against me was a far-fetched farce. The terminologies the revolutionaries used to denounce me, such as “a wolf in sheepskin secretly engaging in evil deeds” and “earn lenient treatment by honest confession or go to death” sounded surreal! I was unable to see any connection between the extreme rhetoric and the facts. All the interrogations and denouncements were acted out like a play, but I did not want to play my part in it any more.
My remark angered the revolutionaries so much that they immediately called up a general meeting against me. They were in a combative mood of the highest level. I was ordered to stand in front of the blackboard. My classmate, J. Shan, with a livid face, announced the emergency convening in a high-pitched voice:
People’s Daily to criticize Hu Feng, meaning the wire whip was formidable but looked soft because it was wrapped by rubber. Was I so sophisticated? I had to hold my laughter.
J. Shan’s performance in the Eliminating Counterrevolutionary Campaign built a solid foundation for his political and career advancement. He eventually reached the rank of a deputy director of a bureau in Beijing, the highest official position held by any of the 1955 graduates of Class 304. After 48 years, in 2003, J. Shan and I met again at a gathering. Neither he nor I mentioned the class struggle between us back in 1955. But soon after, I received a letter from him apologizing for what he did in the 1955 campaign. He said, he had thought that it was always right to follow the Party’s instructions, until the end of the Cultural Revolution. His apology came too late, for he never knew what had happened to me in those 48 years. But his conscience finally woke up, though not completely, so he may still be considered a sensible person. However, back in 1955, he was a revolutionary warrior charging forward with mighty fierceness.
J. Shan ordered me to be serious. He also ordered me to lower my head. I did not move my head a bit. He was so furious that he pounded his hand against the desk and roared: “Lower your head!” I cast my eyes to the floor.
After they had said enough to threaten me, they ordered me to say something. What could I say? I thought this meeting was the climax of the farce. I even suspected whether these students were really my classmates of three long years. How did they change to heartless strangers?
I told them that I had nothing to say, and I needed time to think.
After the meeting, J. Lu, talked to me alone. As often, he carried a sarcastic smile. While J. Shan played the role with a red face, he played the role with a white face, as in Chinese operas.
I did not really know J. Lu before this campaign. He spoke with a strong and fierce tone at the meetings, but he was unusually calm and even gentle today. I was not so stupid as to expect that they would follow my will, but I did not want to cooperate with them anymore.
Meanwhile, I noticed that the male student- guards began to carry rifles. I was not sure whether it was a deliberate arrangement due to my “counter attack” or a coincidence. In either case, my fellow reactionary members and I had become real enemies of the revolution and had to be dealt with by real weapons. Our “importance” was clearly upgraded.
2. The End without a Conclusion
The Campaign continued into August. The school was empty because all non-graduating students had gone home for a long summer vacation. The graduates were still playing their roles in this political battle. The job placement every graduate had been longing for seemed to be put in the unforeseeable future.
I continued to make confessions and self-denouncements, which had been repeated numerous times, just like heating the same cold dish again and again. It was boring and unendurable. Lots of times, I had nothing to write about, but my brain never stopped thinking. Things of the past randomly paraded before my mind’s vision, as if I had already lived a whole life. Among them, one incident stood out.
One day, after we came back from the field trip, I was called to the school’s Personnel Department. There, a cadre with serious expression asked me: “Were you in the classroom in the afternoon of such, such a day?”
What a strange question! How was I able to remember that? He, seeing my hesitation to answer, reminded me: “It was not long ago, just last week.”
I replied, analytically, “We just came back from the field trip and were busy writing the field trip report. There was no entertaining or sports activities. So, I should have been in the classroom, I suppose.”
Then he asked me whether I remembered what X, a classmate of mine, was saying in the classroom. Boy, another strange, hard to answer question! About fifty students were in the same room. How was I supposed to hear what one of them was saying?
“I don’t remember. I did not hear what he said.” I answered flatly.
He said: “You were in the classroom, and he was not far away from you. How come you did not hear him say anything?” Obviously, he did not believe me.
I, trying to convince him with common sense, said: “It was noisy. Many people were talking at the same time. I could not hear all of them.”
But he became more senseless, saying: “Other people heard him. Why didn’t you?”
I tried to explain why I did not hear him: “Perhaps each person paid attention to different things. I might be so concentrating on reading or writing that I ignored other things completely. I’m capable of reading and writing in the center of a market, because I can be so focused that all the noises around me do not affect me.”
“Are you sure you did not hear what he said?” He pushed me one more time.
“No. I did not hear what he said.” This was my final answer.
The cadre said no more and opened the drawer. He picked up a big white envelope on the desk and put it into the drawer. At this point, I noticed a big black word “FILE” on the envelope. Thinking of the purpose of his questioning me, I felt a shudder. He wanted me to be an informant! Immediately, a similar scene in a movie I had seen popped up in my mind: a secret agent forcing someone to provide information of a targeted person. In this case, the secret agent was the cadre questioning me, and the targeted person was the unlucky classmate of mine who had said something he was not supposed to say. Someone had already reported to the secret agent, and the secret agent now wanted my testimony. The fact that a secret agent was working at a school perplexed me. More perplexing was why he wanted to test me after someone had already reported on the unlucky one.
I had been such an inattentive person that I rarely noticed what went on around me. This would be considered low political alertness by the Party’s lowest standard. But there was a higher standard. The cadre might think that I actually heard what my classmate had said but was unwilling to report it. That means I was not close to the Party.
I wondered how those students sending secret reports to the Party learned to do that. Did the Party instruct them to do it? It did not seem so. Or, did they learn it by experiencing what I was going through that day? If they failed to send a secret report for the first time, they might have learned to do so the next time. In any case, I would not secretly report on others, except for a real crime. In all other cases, I regarded being an informant as below my ethical standard. I knew that my answer to the cadre did not please the Party. I wondered if the FILE in his hand was for my unlucky classmate or me.
After this incident, I learned three things: Number one, reporting on others would please the Party, and not doing so would displease the Party. Number two, unconditionally obeying the Party and being the Party’s assistant for the Socialist cause included reporting on others. Number three, my not reporting added one more negative score to my FILE. That was an unpleasant revelation, but I could not change my nature.
It also became clear now that my involvement in the discussion of the publication of a literary magazine, though resulting in nothing, had certainly been a major negative record in my FILE. Had there been no Eliminating Counter-Revolutionaries Campaign, they would have remained there. But sooner or later, they would be used as the basis of purging when a similar political campaign took place wherever I would be.
Before the fall semester began, I found most of the graduates gone. They must have been assigned jobs and gone to their new workplaces. Only a small number of activists remained to continue engaging in the eliminating-counterrevolutionaries fight. Because of me, my “bodyguard” also stayed, but she now got paid.
I was still in quarantine. As there was nothing more to confess, I was required to track the class origin of my reactionary thoughts. This was actually another form of self-denouncement, but its target was both myself and my family, including my parents and even my ancestors. In the beginning, it was painful. I had to censure my loved ones! I could not forgive myself for this, because for us Chinese, the respect for ancestors was the number one filial duty. It was me who courted this disaster, even though I did not know how, but now I had to put blame on them. I could not refuse to do that, because the Party asserted that everybody’s thinking had its roots in his family, and every family belonged to a specific class.
After a short period of forced brainwashing, I learned a pattern to dig out the “reactionary roots” of my thinking. It was self-proven: as my family was reactionary, my thoughts could not be otherwise but reactionary unless I underwent a process of complete transformation, which I had not. Once this pattern was formed, the contents of criticism seemed to have nothing to do with me or my family. Whatever negative words I used to degrade my family no longer bothered me, and even the painful feeling that had previously nagged me was gone. Actually, over the years since the Liberation, we had learned different patterns such as what to say at a certain meeting, what to say when we were required to criticize others, what to say for self-criticism, while the contents were untrue or twisted truth. This pattern of denouncing my parents and ancestors was, for me, only a new pattern of the same nature.
National Day, October First, was around the corner. We, the few reactionaries, were still in quarantine. To celebrate National Day, the school organized a variety of activities. Needless to say, we were excluded. The walls that isolated me, however, could not block the sound of music and songs from the loud speakers.
In the evening of October 1st, my “bodyguard” took me to a balcony to watch the National Day celebration.
The singing and dancing students down there looked like a miniature of our society. They seemed content, happy, and even free, but it was a collective body. You must be a qualified part of it to be content, happy and free, and the qualification was thinking in unison. If your thinking was different, you would be excluded. Once you were excluded, you would no longer be happy and free. In other words, freedom and happiness came at the expense of unfree thinking. (Is that oxymoron?) Was this a necessary condition for a collective body to survive and thrive? Must an individual be in full compliance with the collective body? Now, an individual like me was abandoned by the collective body, somewhat like the heretics expelled by the medieval Church. But nobody ever pointed out to me that my thinking was heretical until this political campaign. I did not even get a warning before I was excommunicated.
I continued to sit all day at the prescribed small table in the same room, often not writing a single word for days. As an old common saying goes, “each day passed like a year.” And nobody ever told me how long I would remain in this state. I lamented silently for the waste of my young life, but I dared not to complain. There was a peculiar practice in ancient China: drawing a circle on the ground to serve as a jail. We were exactly following that antique tradition, in the mid-20th century.
I was taken out of the dormitory to an empty classroom. Three cadre students sat in front of the blackboard. I recognized none of them. They ordered me to stand in the middle of the classroom.
It was a gorgeous fall day, with the blue sky as clean as just washed. Through a big window, I saw a piece of white cloud floating leisurely. I stared at it and enjoyed it, without hearing what the cadre students saying. Something hit my face. Startled, I looked at the little thing rolling on the floor. It was a chalk head.
“Nothing . . . ” Oh, yes, I did think of something recently, so I added: “My classmates are gone. They are now working in various parts of the country. I think that the examination of my case will be close to an end. I’m ready to go to prison, in the worst scenario. I have two things worth some money: a Swiss Longines gold watch and a US-made Parker gold pen. I’m willing to exchange them for money if anyone wants them.”
My understanding of the whole incident? Sounds like a conclusion. Are they going to close the case?
I had to re-write what had been written again and again and again, and then, according to the pattern I learned from this campaign, dig deep to find the reactionary class roots and ideological roots, as far reaching as possible to elevate the level of my political sins, for that was what the Party wanted from me. Below is the last paragraph of what I finally wrote:
I am from a family of the exploiting class, which is the social base of the Kuomintang reactionary government. My father and his brothers are enemies of the people because they served the Kuomintang government. My father was so greedy for money that he later quitted his job in the Kuomintang Air Force to become a banker, a capitalist. Thus, he is a double exploiter. As his daughter, I shared my parents’ luxurious life and was actually fed on laboring people’s sweat and blood. It is natural that I do not share the laboring people’s class feelings and consciousness. Even though the Party has taught me that my family was shameful exploiters and sinful to the people, deep in my mind and heart, I have not completed the necessary thorough transformation. My parents’ reactionary views on life and the world have shaped my thoughts on an everyday basis, and as a result, I unconsciously think and act as a filial child of the exploiting class. I may even say that the reactionary nature of the exploiting class is in my blood. No wonder when my thinking and actions are at odds with the Party’s teaching, I was even unaware that I was sliding down the counter-revolutionary road. The Party’s policy is clear: one cannot choose the family and class he was born into, but the Party values one’s political performance. Our Party has educated me and trained me with the hope that I would rebel against my reactionary family and class, but I failed to do so. I feel sorry and guilty to the Party. I used to see in myself a smart, able, and diligent student and think that I would serve the people well. Now, I realize it is impossible if my reactionary inner self is not eliminated, and, on the contrary, I will do harm to the people and the Party. I cannot imagine what damage we would have done if we had published the reactionary magazine. I am willing to take any punishment and start all over to reform myself, as thorough as changing each and every bone in my body and each and every cell in my brain. I will reform myself to redeem my sins not only by theoretical learning but also by action.
My statement reads like a repentant person’s sincere remorse, but actually, it was the standard nonsense to please the Party. The truth is, I never knew how I could redeem my nonexistent “sins.” Other than the “original sin” of being born in an exploiting family, I had never done anything to harm the Party and the people. In my short life as a student, in addition to study well, I contributed more than most of my fellow students by serving them, and even the Party, in many ways, such as organizing recreational activities for both our class and the school and assisting the Party in propaganda by writing articles for the Blackboard News Weekly. Although my thoughts might not qualify me as a revolutionary youth by the Party’s standard, they were far from reactionary. Let’s assume that the above cited standard nonsense is tenable, so a child of an exploiter should feel ashamed and sinful and need thorough transformation. Then, how have most of the children of the Party’s leaders, at all levels, become capitalists since the early 1980s? Are they not from revolutionary families and proletarian class? The Party had eliminated the old exploiting classes that sucked the sweat and blood of laborers but later created a new exploiting class that . . . not sucking the sweat and blood of the Chinese workers and peasants? (Another oxymoron!)
There was a long, long waiting after my last account was submitted. One day in early December, my “bodyguard” left. She, too, was assigned to a job. No new guard came to replace her, and nobody watched me all the time.
One afternoon about a week later, I was taken to Principal Zhang’s office. He sat behind a big desk. Upon seeing me walking in, he signaled me to sit down in a chair in front of his desk. Zhang was the kind of typical Party official whose personality, likes or dislikes, as well as emotions, you could never discern. I saw him as the embodiment of dogmatism.
Now, Principal Zhang came to the point. He said: “It is indeed very serious. I may choose to arrest you and sentence you, and put you to a labor camp. Considering you are young, the Party wants to rescue you. Now it is decided that you will be sent for further study. Study Marxist theory and Chairman Mao’s writings, study hard and well. Theory must be combined with practice, and you should dig deeper to find the source of your reactionary thoughts. Thus, you can thoroughly transform your thinking. Make every effort to obtain lenient treatment from the Party and the people, so you can make contributions to the construction of our motherland. Do you have any questions?”
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Manyin Li was a student at York College of the City University of New York after she immigrated from China to the US in the late 1980s and later became a US citizen. She worked for the Association of the Bar of the City of New York while studying literature and philosophy and finally graduated from the Graduate Center of CUNY. She now writes freelance, mostly for Chinese language newspapers and magazines published in North America.
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