The Cowshed Read online

  Proud of his patriotism, Ji also liked to discuss China’s bright future. His reputation grew rather mixed among liberal intellectuals in his late years because, with his rosy-eyed pronouncements about Chinese civilization’s inevitable leadership in the twenty-first century, he often sounded like a cultural nationalist. But when it came to the Cultural Revolution, Ji drew the line: He just couldn’t accept that it was being deliberately expunged from the collective memory. There was simmering resentment, he insisted, among a lot of older Chinese intellectuals around him, who have had no recourse for their past suffering. And this was not good, in his opinion, for building a true socialist nation.

  But Ji also worried about “stepping on people’s toes.” After writing the first draft in 1988, he kept his memoir in a drawer for years, for fear it might be viewed as a personal vendetta. He then revised it heavily, toning down the prose and keeping most of the persecutors unnamed. He says he wants no revenge, just to write a honest historical document, so that young Chinese would know the past and would not let it happen again. He sounded apologetic about letting his emotions get the better of him in the earlier draft. Still, the reader can probably catch a strange tone of sarcasm and self-mockery in the narrator’s voice. I found Ji’s tone odd and puzzling at first until it occurred to me that this is not an uncommon rhetorical device in Chinese writing or talking: To control seething anger or to deflect unbearable pain, one often turns to black humor or sarcastic hyperbole. A Chinese elementary-school teacher who was tortured and jeered at in public struggle sessions during the Cultural Revolution told me that the sense of physical and psychological violation was so ferocious it felt like being gang-raped. He had nightmares about it for years. Later, a friend pointed out that he would adopt a facetious tone whenever he spoke about the experience. “I hadn’t noticed the tone myself,” he told me. “I think I turned it all into a joke because I can’t bear the pain and the shame with a straight face.”

  Ji also seemed to suffer survivor’s shame. Even though his career flourished after the Cultural Revolution, he repeatedly mentioned his ambivalence about his failed attempt at suicide. This has to do with an ancient code of honor for a Confucian scholar. In the memoir, Ji recalls his first encounter after the Cultural Revolution with the senior apparatchik Zhou Yang. Zhou had supervised the persecution of many intellectuals until he himself was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. Zhou’s first words to Ji were: “It used to be said that ‘the scholar can be killed, but he cannot be humiliated.’ But the Cultural Revolution proved that not only can the scholar be killed, he can also be humiliated.” Zhou roared with laughter, but Ji knew it was a bitter laugh. Many scholars and writers committed suicide in the early part of the Cultural Revolution to avoid the indignities they faced. To Ji and perhaps many others, to have endured unspeakable debasement and humiliation, and survived, somehow reflects a weakness in one’s moral character and is therefore a continuous source of shame. Ironically, all those decades of Maoist thought-reform campaigns have failed to destroy this Confucian pride of a scholar which, sadly, became either his last defense of honor or source of shame.

  Ji Xianlin died in Beijing in 2009. In a final set of interviews conducted from his hospital room, the ninety-seven-year-old scholar was still talking about the need to remember the Cultural Revolution, still convinced that one day China would be ready for a real national introspection about it. The two people he admired the most in his life, he said, were the Confucian scholar Liang Shuming and the People’s Liberation Army general Peng Dehuai, because they had “backbones” and dared to speak truth to the emperor. Liang and Peng are known to be the only two Chinese individuals who criticized Mao in person. For his contribution to the field of Indology, Ji was honored by the governments of China and India. His work as a linguist and a paleographer are highly specialized. But among the reading public in China, he will most likely be remembered for The Cowshed, the powerful and important personal testimony about the darkest moment in modern Chinese history.

  —ZHA JIANYING

  POSTSCRIPT

  Two years after Ji Xianlin’s death, a Peking University alumna named Zhang Manling who had been close to Ji published a piece about their friendship and made a few unusual revelations. In 1989, after the students began their hunger strike on Tiananmen Square, Ji and several other Peking University professors decided to publicly show their solidarity with the youngsters by paying them a visit. Ji, the oldest and most famous of the professors, traveled in high style: Sitting on a stool on top of a flat-backed tricycle, which was fastened with a tall white banner that said “Rank One Professor Ji Xianlin,” the seventy-eight-year-old Ji was peddled by a student from the west-side campus across the city. When they finally arrived in Tiananmen Square, the students burst into delighted cheers. During the post-massacre purge, at all the faculty meetings where everyone was forced to biao tai (declare their position), Ji would only say, “Don’t ask me, or I’ll say it was a patriotic democratic movement.” Then one day, Ji walked off from his campus residence, hailed a taxi, and asked to be taken to the local public security bureau. “I’m Professor Ji Xianlin of Peking University,” Ji said to the police on arrival. “I visited Tiananmen Square twice. I stirred up the students, so please lock me up together with them. I’m over seventy, and I don’t want to live anymore.” The policemen were so startled they called Peking University officials, who rushed over and forcibly brought Ji back to campus.

  It was, again, one of those high-pressured, terrifying, and tragic moments in China’s long history. But this time, acting alone, Ji lived up to the honor of a true Confucius scholar.

  Translator’s Note

  THE GREAT PROLETARIAT Cultural Revolution was launched by Mao Zedong in 1966 to root out class enemies from within the Party. Cowsheds were improvised prisons built during this time on Chinese university campuses to house intellectuals who were considered class enemies. The cowshed derived its unusual name from its prisoners, known as “cow devils.” The prisons were run by the paramilitary student organizations that styled themselves as Red Guards, and most existed only in the early stages of the movement, from around 1966 to 1969. In this memoir, written and published some three decades after the events it describes, Ji Xianlin recalls being targeted as a class enemy and struggled against, in the parlance of the time. A prominent scholar of Sanskrit and Pali, he was eventually imprisoned in the cowshed at Peking University, where he resumed teaching after his release.

  Author’s Preface

  GIVEN THAT THIS book was written six years ago, the gentle reader may be wondering why it is only being published now, in 1998. That’s odd, you’re thinking. There must be a story behind this delay. And there is. I make no secret of my private reasons for delaying the publication of this book. During the Cultural Revolution, I was struggled against and stepped on by Red Guards, and it looked as though I would never be rehabilitated. But when I was rehabilitated, and my academic and political careers took off, some of the guards who had tortured me may have feared for themselves now that I was in a position to take revenge.

  But I never did. This isn’t because I am a forgiving person—I love, hate, envy, and crave revenge just like anyone else. But whenever I am tempted to get even with my persecutors, I think back to the atmosphere on campus during the Cultural Revolution, when anyone who joined a faction seemed to have drunk a personality-altering potion that alienated them from their own humanity and made them nonhuman. I say nonhuman because calling human beings brutes is an insult to the animals. Animals eat people because they are hungry. Unlike human beings, animals don’t tell lies, they have no wiles, and they don’t make rambling speeches full of classical allusions to why someone deserves to be eaten before opening their mouths to gobble him up.[1] So I am calling these individuals nonhumans instead of brutes. I know that I myself never stopped believing in the Cultural Revolution, even as I was being persecuted. Many of the persecutors were also victims of the revolution, just like the persecuted; the t
wo simply happened to find themselves in different positions, which is why I could not find it in myself to take revenge on my persecutors.

  That was one reason why I refrained from publishing this book; but I also had other private concerns.

  Anyone who knows anything about the Cultural Revolution knows that just about every school, government institution, factory, production unit, and even some army divisions at the time were divided into opposing factions. Each of the two factions considered itself to be truly leftist and truly revolutionary, whereas its opponents were not. In fact, neither was superior to the other—they both beat up their victims, stole and destroyed things, and murdered innocent people. There is no point discussing which of them was right. Yet the invisible, irrational partisan emotions of the times caused great division. Even within families, it tore marriages apart and caused children to denounce their parents. In eighty years of reading widely, I’ve never come across another social movement that took such a strong psychological hold on its participants. The phenomenon deserves to be studied carefully by sociologists and psychologists.

  I, too, was an enthusiastic member of one faction and extremely partisan. But unlike many others, I nearly paid for my partisanship with my life. As the head of my department, I couldn’t join the masses in “making revolution.” In fact, as I listened to their chants of “There is no crime in revolution, it is reasonable to revolt,” I realized that I myself risked becoming a target of their revolt. But I had never taken an interest in politics, and before 1949 I had not been associated with the Kuomintang at all. So although I couldn’t avoid being labeled a “capitalist-roader” and “counterrevolutionary academic authority,” after the first two waves of persecution had passed, no one accused me of major crimes, and I was considered one of the masses like everyone else.

  If I had kept my head down, I could easily have remained neutral and stayed out of trouble for the next few years. Depending on how you look at it, either I had the misfortune of being too stubborn or stubbornness was my one saving grace. I watched the Empress Dowager terrorize the campus, bully the faction opposed to her, cut off their water and electricity, and even look the other way when her Red Guards caused the death of a student.[2] As Confucius put it, “If even this can be tolerated, what then is considered intolerable?” I decided to join the weaker of the two factions, the one opposed to Nie Yuanzi. She had a well-deserved reputation for vindictiveness; this book chronicles what happened to me as a result.

  When I joined a faction, partisan feeling gripped me like a python and would not let go. I remember doing and saying all kinds of irrational things. Partisanship fizzled out at the end of the Cultural Revolution, but people still remembered which side they used to be on. Many of my colleagues were members of the opposing faction, people who struggled against me, interrogated me, and beat me up. Many of them seem to regret what happened. No one is perfect, and I consider them good comrades who made a few horrific mistakes under the spell of partisanship. But if they were to discover this manuscript in my drawer, they would be convinced that I was plotting to exact my revenge. Even though I hadn’t included their names, they would all recognize themselves instantly, and it would become virtually impossible for us to keep working together. To avoid the awkwardness that would inevitably ensue, I refrained from publishing this book long after having completed it.

  Then why did you write this book in the first place? the reader may wonder. It is a fair question.

  I originally had no plans to write a book about the Cultural Revolution, which explains why this book was not written until sixteen years after the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976. During these sixteen years, I reflected, observed, puzzled, debated with myself, and waited. I regretted having been so politically naïve as to have supported the Cultural Revolution until the Gang of Four was toppled in 1976. To this date, no one has been able to explain what caused the Cultural Revolution, a brutal disaster that drove China to the brink of economic collapse, but many other people recognized it for the disaster that it was long before I did. I was deeply ashamed of having been so naïve.

  Once I began to reflect on the Cultural Revolution, I realized that the perpetrators were not addressing it in the right way. It’s true that we shouldn’t dwell on the past, but in this case we haven’t reflected sufficiently on it. As I have mentioned, most people were deceived at the time, but even those who were deceived should seize this unparalleled opportunity to reflect on just how they were taken in, to avoid making the same mistake again. As for the others, there were some truly wicked people among the perpetrators, whom we used to call chameleons. They were masters at seeing which way the political winds were blowing. As soon as the winds changed, they would change their tune. Some of them would later pretend to be upstanding citizens, some would marry generals and cadres whom they could rely on for political protection, and some would bide their time, waiting for the right opportunity to make a grab for power again. These people are ambitious, skilled flatterers who have countless tricks up their sleeves. They are the cancer cells of our socialist society, and letting them off the hook for their crimes was a mistake. Chinese society today appears peaceful and harmonious, and things seem to be going well. But our society is ethically hollow, local government is often corrupt, and many individuals are incompetent. If we trace these problems to their roots, we are likely to find them in the Cultural Revolution and in the people mentioned above.

  These conclusions are the results of my reflection and observation, the things that trouble me. I hoped that someone would record their own experience of this disaster. All kinds of people, including respected generals who had risked their lives defending the people, Party leaders who had sacrificed everything for the revolutionary cause, as well as many loyal and hardworking intellectuals, authors, and actors, were publicly humiliated and persecuted. It was said of the ancient emperors, “When the bird has been shot down, the bow is put away; when the hare is dead, the hunting dog is killed and boiled.” Our socialist fatherland had perpetrated outrages of which even the ancient emperors would have been ashamed. I was sure that one of the victims would channel his indignation into an account of his experiences. But I waited days, months, years, and still no one ventured to write about their anguish, or even dictate an account to someone else. I was disappointed and deeply concerned. If no one wrote about this disaster, our children’s children wouldn’t learn from our mistakes, and the next time a similar situation arose, someone else would do something equally stupid and brutal. The thought terrifies me. If you tell today’s young people about the Cultural Revolution, they stare at you wide-eyed, as though they think you’re lying. A few years ago, a certain form of scar literature emerged, but as far as I am concerned, the young authors of those books weren’t scarred by the Cultural Revolution: at most, they had minor scrapes that needed a little disinfectant and a bandage.[3] Those who had been truly scarred had buried their experiences deep within themselves and were refusing to talk about them. I was waiting for a victim of the Cultural Revolution who would be willing to talk about his scars.

  I have another wish that is unlikely ever to be fulfilled. While I’ve long hoped for the persecuted to tell their story, I believe that one of the persecutors should also come forward and tell their story—the story of what drove them to take such pleasure in hurting others. Most of the Red Guards are now middle-aged, and some of them have done very well for themselves. Even if they have never been held accountable for their crimes, how can they live with the knowledge of what they did? There are scores of former Red Guards, and if one of them were to write about his or her experience, the persecutor’s account could be read alongside that of the persecuted. That, too, would be an incalculable service to our people. I am not demanding that the writer wallow in guilt and self-incrimination, but simply suggesting that he or she offer an objective description of what happened. Surely such an account would earn praise rather than blame for its writer.

  So I have waited twelve years for
accounts of the Cultural Revolution from both the perpetrators and the victims. I’ve waited all night until daybreak, and yet my hopes have not been fulfilled. By the time I wrote this book in 1992, many of the generation who were persecuted were beginning to pass away, as was only natural, since they had grown old. As our ancestors said, “You could grow old waiting for the Yellow River to become clear.” I couldn’t do anything about one of the books I was hoping for, but as for the other: after all, I was a victim of the Cultural Revolution, and as opposed to waiting for someone to write the book I wanted to read, I thought I might as well roll up my sleeves and write it myself. That is how The Cowshed came to be. I have never told a lie in print, and now I am setting out what happened exactly as it was. But now that I’ve written this book, I haven’t given up on the other books I still hope one day to read. I am writing this preface partly in hopefulness that those other books will be written.

  —JI XIANLIN

  Beijing, March 9, 1998

  INTRODUCTION

  EVERYONE IN CHINA knew what the cowshed was, but no one knew its official name. We have come to value the rule of law, which requires things to be given their proper names. But how could a lawful name have been found for the cowshed, the very existence of which showed that the rule of law had broken down?

  The term “cowshed” wasn’t used much at Peking University. The authorities referred to the makeshift prisons in which professors were imprisoned on their own college campuses as laogai, or reform through labor camps. Later people started calling them blackguard camps, and the name caught on. Blackguards, as the name implies, specialize in doing bad things and giving the Red Guards a hard time, so the place where they were locked up was nicknamed the blackguard camp.