The Cowshed Read online

  The Cowshed

  Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution

  Ji Xianlin

  Translated from the Chinese by

  Chenxin Jiang

  Introduction by

  Zha Jianying

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1998 by Ji Xianlin

  Translation copyright © 2016 by Chenxin Jiang

  Introduction copyright © 2016 by Zha Jianying

  All rights reserved.

  This translation was supported by a 2011 PEN Translation Fund grant.

  Cover art: Feng Yan, Psychedelic Bamboo 02, 2009; courtesy of the artist.

  Cover design: Katy Homans.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ji, Xianlin, author.

  [Niu peng za yi. English]

  The cowshed : memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution / by Ji Xianlin ; translated by Chenxin Jiang ; introduction by Zha Jianying.

  1 online resource. — (New York review books)

  ISBN 978-1-59017-927-7 (epub) — ISBN 978-1-59017-926-0 (alk. paper)

  1. Ji, Xianlin. 2. Scholars—China—Biography. 3. China—History—Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976—Personal narratives. 4. China—Intellectual life—1949–1976. I. Jiang, Chenxin, translator. II. Title. III. Title: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

  CT3990.J48

  951.05092—dc23

  [B]

  2015035955

  ISBN 978-1-59017-927-7

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles published by New York Review Books, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction by Zha Jianying

  Translator’s Note

  Author’s Preface

  Introduction

  The Socialist Education Movement

  June Fourth, 1966

  Choosing a Label That Fit

  A Half-Year Respite

  Joining the Fray

  A House Raid

  On the Brink of Suicide

  At the Eleventh Hour

  Reform Through Labor Begins

  The Great Struggle Session

  Taiping Village

  Building Our Own Prison

  In the Cowshed (1)

  In the Cowshed (2)

  In the Cowshed (3)

  Relocating the Cowshed

  Half Liberated

  Fully Liberated

  Further Reflections

  Author’s Afterword

  Appendix: My Heart Is a Mirror

  Notes

  Biographical Notes

  Introduction

  THIS MEMOIR ABOUT the Cultural Revolution by the late Chinese scholar Ji Xianlin is extraordinary, shocking, and unique. I read it many years ago when it first appeared in Chinese and shuddered at its frank, graphic depiction of the atrocities committed during that dark time. My generation of Chinese came of age during the Cultural Revolution, so the book easily rekindled some of the nightmarish memories from my own childhood in Beijing.

  By now, it has been nearly forty years since the Cultural Revolution officially ended, yet in China, considering the magnitude and significance of the event, it has remained a poorly examined, under-documented subject. Official archives are off-limits. Serious books on the period, whether comprehensive histories, in-depth analyses, or detailed personal memoirs, are remarkably few. Hence the publication of The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, by an official press in Beijing, was something of an anomaly. Coming out in 1998 during a politically relaxed moment, the book probably benefited from the author’s eminent status in China. A celebrated Indologist in his eighties, Ji was also a popular essayist and an avowed patriot who enjoyed good relations with the government. With genial, grandfatherly manners, he had become, in his august age, one of those avuncular figures revered by the public and loved by the media. The book has sold well and stayed in print. But authorities also quietly took steps to restrict public discussion of the memoir, as its subject continues to be treated as sensitive. The present English edition, skillfully translated by Chenxin Jiang, is a welcome, valuable addition to the small body of work in this genre. It makes an important contribution to our understanding of that period.

  Reading Ji’s account again, however, has also renewed some of my old questions and frustrations. How much can we really make sense of a bizarre, unwieldy phenomenon like the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution? Can we truly overcome barriers of limited information, fading historical memory, and persistent ideological biases to have a genuinely meaningful and illuminating conversation about it today? I wonder. The delicate circumstances surrounding Ji’s memoir in China demonstrate both the entangled complexity of the events and the precarious state of historical testimony.

  Like other ordinary Chinese, Ji had no idea what the Cultural Revolution was all about when Mao Zedong launched it in 1966. The son of an impoverished rural family in Shandong, Ji had managed, through diligence and scholarship, to get a solid, cosmopolitan education in republican China. Having spent a decade in Germany studying Sanskrit and other languages, Ji returned with a PhD to teach at China’s preeminent Peking University where he soon became the chairman of its Eastern Languages Department. Though disliking the corrupt Chiang Kai-shek regime, he stayed away from politics, a field he’d never had any interest in. But when the communists came into power in 1949, like most educated Chinese at the time, Ji saw hope for a stronger nation and more just society.

  Being a political drifter, however, was no longer an option. Under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), mass mobilization and political campaigns became a national way of life and no one was allowed to be a bystander, least of all the intellectuals, a favorite target in Mao’s periodic thought-reform campaigns.

  Feeling guilty about his previous passivity, Ji eagerly reformed himself. He joined the Party in the 1950s and actively participated in the ceaseless campaigns, which had a common trait: conformity and intolerance of dissent. In the 1957 Anti-Rightist Movement, more than half a million intellectuals were denounced and persecuted, even though most of their criticisms were very mild and nearly all were Party loyalists. The fact that Ji was able to stay out of harm’s way was probably due to two factors: his clean background and his good behavior. Being of poor peasant stock with no ties to the old Kuomintang regime, Ji wasn’t easily labeled as a class enemy. He also came across as a rather naïve follower of political winds, one who towed the Party line sincerely, never questioned, never stuck his neck out.

  In fact, he was doing just that in the first year of the Cultural Revolution. Instigated by the small ultra-leftist clique around Mao, Peking University became the first site of radicalization. The campus was quickly transformed into a chaotic zoo of factional battles, with frantic mobs rushing about attacking professors and school officials labeled as capitalist-roaders-in-power. A bewildered Ji tried his best to keep a low profile by hiding in the crowds. But he had a vulnerable spot: He abhorred a woman cadre named Nie Yuanzi, the leader of the dominant Red Guard faction on campus. Although every faction in China claimed loyalty to Chairman Mao, Nie enjoyed a special status: She penned the very first big-character poster of the Cultural Revolution, attacking certain Peking University officials and received Mao’s personal endorsement for it. Disgusted by her bullying style, Ji decided, in an uncharacteristically rash moment, to join her opponents’ faction. This was a fatal mistake. Nie’s follow
ers took their vengeance immediately: They raided Ji’s home one night, smashing furniture and digging up, inevitably, some ridiculous evidence that Ji was a hidden counterrevolutionary.

  From that moment onward, Ji’s life became a dizzying descent into hell. The ensuing chapters in the book are the most shocking and painful to read. There are many searing, unforgettable vignettes. Ji’s meticulous preparations for suicide, which was aborted only at the last moment by a knock on the door. The long, screaming rallies where Ji, already in his late fifties, and other victims were savagely beaten, spat on, and tortured. The betrayal by his former students and colleagues. An excruciating episode in a labor camp: Ji’s body collapsed under the strain of continuous struggle sessions; his testicles became so swollen he couldn’t stand up or close his legs. But the guard forced him to continue his labor, so he crawled around all day moving bricks. When he was finally allowed to visit a nearby military clinic, he had to crawl on a road for two hours to reach it, only to be refused treatment the moment the doctor learned he was a blackguard. He crawled back to the labor camp.

  At the center of the book is the cowshed, the popular term for makeshift detention centers that had sprung up in many Chinese cities at the time. In Ji’s case, this one was set up at the heart of the Peking University campus, where he was locked up for nine months with throngs of other fallen professors and school officials, doing manual labor and reciting tracts of Mao’s writing. The inferno atmosphere of the place, the chilling variety of physical and psychological violence the guards daily inflicted on the convicts with sadistic pleasure, the starvation and human degeneration—all are vividly described. After reading the book, a Chinese intellectual friend summed it up to me: “This is our Auschwitz.” Indeed, though what happened in the cowshed where Ji was held was by no means exceptional (torture and violence were widespread at the time), of all the memoirs of the Cultural Revolution I have read, I cannot think of another one that offers such a devastatingly direct and detailed testimony on the physical and mental abuse an entire imprisoned intellectual community suffered. Compared to the few other notable Chinese works in this category, such as Yang Jiang’s Ganxiao Liuji (translated into English as Six Chapters from My Life “Down Under”), Ba Jin’s Sui Xiang Lu, or Wei Junyi’s Si Tong Lu, Ji’s account has an unparalleled raw intensity. To mentally relive such darkness and to record it all in such an unswervingly candid manner could not have been easy for an elderly man: Ji was over eighty at the time of writing. In the opening chapter, he confessed to have waited for many years, in vain, for others to come forward with a testimony. Disturbed by the collective silence of the older generation and the growing ignorance of the young people about the Cultural Revolution, he finally decided to take up the pen himself.

  Another noteworthy feature of the book is its entangled theme of guilt and shame. In memoirs about Maoist persecutions, authors typically portray themselves as either hapless, innocent victims or, occasionally, defiant resisters. The picture is murkier in Ji’s recollection. He writes about Chinese intellectuals’ eager cooperation in ideological campaigns and how, under pressure, they frequently turned on one another. He mocks his own “aptitude in crowd behavior” and admits that, until his own downfall, he had also persecuted others:

  Since we had been directed to oppose the rightists, we did. After more than a decade of continuous political struggle, the intellectuals knew the drill. We all took turns persecuting each other. This went on until the Socialist Education Movement, which, in my view, was a precursor to the Cultural Revolution.

  And what was his role in the Socialist Education Movement? “Without quite knowing what I was doing, I joined the ranks of the persecutors.”

  But to Ji, this is a forgivable sin because if he and many other Chinese intellectuals have been guilty of persecuting one another, it was largely because the intellectuals as a class had been compelled to feel deeply guilty and shameful about themselves. Ji described how this was achieved through the fierce criticism and self-criticism sessions, a unique feature of the Maoist thought-reform campaigns. Ji’s own ideological conversion was accomplished through such a ritual. Impressed by the Communist victory and early achievements, he blamed himself fervently for not being sufficiently patriotic and selfless: He was selfish to pursue his own academic studies in Germany while the Communists were fighting the Japanese invaders; he was wrong to avoid politics and to view all politics as a tainted game, because the Communist politics was genuinely idealistic and noble. Only after beating himself up about all his sins did he manage to pass the collective review and be accepted as a member of the “people.” Ji describes the overwhelming sense of guilt as “almost Christian,” which led to a feeling of shame and induced a powerful urge to conform and to worship the new God—the Communist Party and its Great Leader. Afterward, like a sinner given a chance to prove his worthiness, he eagerly abandoned all his previous skepticism—the trademark of a critical faculty—and became a true believer. He embraced the new cult of personality, joining others to shout at the top of his voice “Long live Chairman Mao!,” as though these words were the cry of his soul.

  This process, strikingly similar to religious conversion, is both revealing and characteristic. It was how, in a high-pressure, guilt-ridden atmosphere, fearful of excommunication, millions of Chinese intellectuals cast off their individuality. From there, it seems quite natural that, to prove your loyalty, you would constantly castigate yourself or any other poor sinner in the congregation suspected of impiety or treason. The feeling of guilt becomes so deeply engrained that, even after he was locked up in the cowshed, Ji racked his brain for his own faults rather than questioning the Party or the system.

  Ji was obviously not a shrewd political animal or a deep thinker. Admitting that his eyes were finally opened only after the Cultural Revolution ended, he refrained from analyzing the larger political picture or interpreting the motives of those who launched the chaos. But he clearly felt that the country on the whole had failed to learn a real lesson from what happened. Toward the end of the memoir, he wrote:

  My final question is: What made the Cultural Revolution possible?

  This is a complicated question that I am ill-equipped to answer; the only people in a position to tackle it refuse to do so and do not seem to want anyone else to try.

  Ji was of course alluding to the Chinese government’s quiet ban on any deep probing of the subject, a policy still in effect today. The problem, however, is an unwieldy one without an easy solution. First and foremost is the question of Mao. Everyone knows that Mao is the chief culprit of the Cultural Revolution. Well-known historical data points to a tangle of factors behind Mao’s motivation for launching it: subtle tension among the top leadership of the CCP since the Great Leap Forward, which led to a famine with an estimated thirty to forty million deaths; his desire to reassert supremacy and crush any perceived challenge to his personal power by reaching down directly to the masses; his radical, increasingly lunatic vision of permanent revolution; his deep anti-intellectualism and paranoid jealousy. The list goes on. But, from the viewpoint of the Party, allowing a full investigation and exposure of Mao’s manipulations would threaten the Party’s legitimacy. After all, the entire Party leadership, including those persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, had helped to create the cult of Mao and was deeply implicated in his ruthless legacy. Everyone’s hands were stained with blood. If the great helmsman gets debunked, the whole ship may go down. Mao as a symbol is therefore crucial: It is tied to the survival of the Party state.

  Then there is the thorny issue of the people’s participation in the Cultural Revolution. The Red Guards were only the best known of the radical organizations. At the height of madness, millions of ordinary Chinese had taken part in various forms of lawless actions and rampant violence. The estimated death toll of those who committed suicide, were tortured to death, were publically executed, or were killed in armed factional battles runs from hundreds of thousands to millions. This makes it ext
remely difficult, if not impossible, to bring all of the perpetrators to account.

  Consequently, the situation has been handled in a manner that reflects both cynical and pragmatic calculations: After arresting and blaming it all on the ultra-leftist Gang of Four, the government officially condemned the period as a “ten-year disaster,” tolerated a short period of limited public ventilation, then moved to contain the damage. It’s one of those noiseless bans done through internal control; investigation, discussion, and publication have been variously forbidden, discouraged, or marginalized. Over time, the topic has faded away as though it all happened quite naturally.

  This situation is of course deeply troubling. It is especially unsatisfying and unfair to those who suffered untold atrocities. Most of the teachers who were beaten up by their Red Guard students never received an apology. Most of the scholars who were tortured in the countless cowsheds continued, as Ji did, to live and work among their former persecutors. Some of these former perpetrators thrived in the new era, building successful careers and lives.

  This year, as the West commemorated the seventieth anniversary of the Holocaust, I watched the media coverage while rereading Ji’s memoir, and I couldn’t help thinking of the remark a Chinese friend once made to me: “We are the Jews in this country.” His whole family had suffered very badly during the Cultural Revolution and they still live in Beijing today, among those who had once persecuted them. The analogy between the Holocaust and the Cultural Revolution is of course a stretched one, yet it makes one wonder about an impossible scenario: If Hitler’s portrait was still hanging in the main square of Berlin today, if the Nazi Party continued to rule, albeit with different policies, and if the Jews still had to live in Germany, surrounded by former tormentors and a population complicit in the crime who were never punished nor publicly repented, how would they feel?

  That’s contemporary China, where history is a messy unfinished business, the people are accustomed to internalized trauma, and society cheerfully marches on with its skeletons in the closet and ghosts weeping in the air. It is a place where the victimized individual and community are often expected to get over it and move on. You keep quiet or you are muzzled—either way it is for the collective good, the national harmony. A rising great nation, in short, cannot let memories of past wrongs poison the present or the future.