The Cowshed Read online

  As I got out of the car, I looked at the commotion around me in amazement. No one was there to welcome me, but no one was there to struggle against me either. I was a free man for now. The Party branch secretary wasn’t so lucky. He had been designated a capitalist-roader, and Red Guards arrested him the moment we reached campus. We wouldn’t see each other again for several years. The big-character posters accused him of all kinds of crimes: They called him the “Shepherd Secretary,” a member of the “Lu Ping gang,” a reactionary. Lu Ping himself was in even deeper trouble. The university president had been a leader of the 1935 anti-Japanese student protests and once served as the deputy minister of railways. As a result of having been named in the first Marxist-Leninist poster, he was now the crowd’s principal target, and I heard that he was being struggled against day and night. Most of the struggle sessions took place outside his living quarters on campus. He was forced to stand on a low wall while the crowds chanted slogans and their leaders accused him of all kinds of crimes. Lu Ping’s quarters became a minor campus attraction: Every passerby had the right to pluck him from his private residence and struggle against him, like a crowd paying to see a star performer at the Peking opera of prerevolutionary times.

  Although no one had come to arrest me yet, and I was allowed to live at home and move about freely, I could tell I was in a precarious position. I read a few of the big-character posters attacking me. One day, at Block 40, the dorm that housed students from my department, I read a poster criticizing an essay of mine called “Springtime in Yanyuan.” The Red Guards claimed that springtime represented capitalism, and celebrating the spring amounted to celebrating capitalism. I was bewildered. If anything, spring has always been the sign of new life—since when had it been appropriated as the emblem of capitalism? Then again, Yao’s essay espoused just this sort of crooked logic, as did later essays criticizing the authors of the “Three-Family Village” column. Yao’s methods had the seal of official approval, and everyone imitated them. Theories of “narrative as a counterrevolutionary tool” abounded, and soon enough everyone was an expert in these methods. At that point, I was still a true believer. But I knew perfectly well that the springtime I wrote about had nothing to do with capitalism and everything to do with the change of seasons. As I read the poster about my essay, I couldn’t help snorting audibly. The enemy’s eyes and ears were everywhere; like my heedless comments on Yao’s essay, this single snort would later be used against me.

  For now, I was free to explore the bustling campus, which was even more crowded than it had been the day we returned. For many students from distant provinces who had never been to Beijing, this was a perfect opportunity to see the capital. Yanyuan, which used to be so spacious and peaceful, began to feel suffocating. There were people everywhere. I felt tiny, like a kernel of rice in a granary.

  As far as I could make out, this phase of the revolution was directed at the capitalist-roaders. Anyone in a position of authority was designated a capitalist-roader, from the central government to the lowliest administrative office. That meant there were capitalist-roaders everywhere, and their attackers were everywhere too. Even though I supported the revolution, I did wonder how every single department happened to have a capitalist-roader. And if all our leaders were capitalist saboteurs, how had we achieved anything at all? Discussing these doubts with anyone was out of the question. The “direction of the revolution” had been laid down by the authorities and the Red Guards, and like everyone else, I had learned that revolution was not a dinner party. We had spent years studying the dialectic method and being told that materialists had to seek truth from facts. What did denouncing capitalist-roaders have to do with truth or facts? The whole thing baffled me.

  The Red Guards grew creative. Among other things, they invented the practice of hanging large wooden placards around the necks of all the capitalist-roaders at Peking University. Since Peking University was now the capital of Cultural Revolution fashion, the use of these placards spread rapidly. Although I never observed it at our school, they were used elsewhere as a form of torture: The placards were made heavier and the steel wire suspending them thinner so that it would cut into the flesh of their victims. I witnessed countless struggle sessions. If the session was held indoors, the capitalist-roaders would stand onstage with their heads bowed, wearing their placards, while the “revolutionary masses” sat on chairs; outdoors, they would be made to stand somewhere where the crowds could see them, on a rock, a low stone wall, or a chair. There was no formal order of proceedings, but the sessions always took place in the same way. Someone would read from Mao’s sayings, and then the leader would call for ——, the capitalist-roader, to be brought to the front. The unfortunate individual would have his arms twisted behind his back with two Red Guards pushing down on his head as they led him onto the podium. Then the crowds would go wild shouting slogans: “Long live Chairman Mao!” Someone would make a speech, and whatever was said was by default true. All the capitalist-roaders had committed the same crimes: They opposed the Party, socialism, and the Great Leader. The masses could pin any label they liked on their unfortunate victims. They would always ask the capitalist-roader whether he admitted his guilt. If he hesitated, they would beat him savagely. It was unclear what the struggle sessions achieved, except to torment their victims. Some in the audience were completely earnest, others found it good fun, and still others took sadistic pleasure in the torture. Whatever the case, they all enjoyed themselves, and visitors from other provinces took what they had observed back to their hometowns, so that the practice of holding struggle sessions quickly spread beyond Peking University. The airplane position had not been invented yet.[3] It may not even have been invented in Yanyuan; to this day, no one has come forward to patent it.

  Within my department, the Party branch secretary and the elderly professor N. were the main targets of big-character posters and struggle sessions: the former was, as we have said, a capitalist-roader, and the latter had conveniently been labeled a “counterrevolutionary academic authority” and “historical reactionary.” The struggle sessions were brutal. I only saw one involving the Party branch secretary, which took place in front of a makeshift stand that had been built as a board for big-character posters. The posters all referred to him as the Shepherd Secretary and listed his supposed crimes. He stood bent over at the waist. Instead of a wooden placard, there was a piece of paper pasted onto his shirt. It bore his name, crossed out with a big red X. This was a trick borrowed from the courts, which had in turn taken them from Qing dynasty novels that depicted criminals led to the executioner’s block wearing large wooden placards that bore their name and a red cross. Now the Party branch secretary was the criminal. There was much chanting of slogans. Eventually, a big-character poster was pasted onto his back. He was ordered to make his way home and forbidden to tear the poster off before he got there.

  The first struggle session against my colleague N. was in the large conference room in the Foreign Languages Building. The corridors were plastered with caricatures that depicted him as a spear-wielding devil with blood dripping from his teeth. Inside the conference room, the mob directed its own bloodthirsty frenzy at a helpless old man who wasn’t allowed to speak. Spit flew, as did false accusations. Someone put a wastepaper basket on his head. A Red Guard splashed a full bottle of blue ink down his shirt, making it look like a military camouflage shirt. Eventually he was ordered to go home.

  It was decided that a large-scale struggle session would take place on June 18th, on a high podium next to Block 29 in the student dorms. An instinct for self-preservation told me to stay away. I sat at home, listening to the distant chanting of slogans. Later I was told that anyone who had been denounced as a capitalist-roader up until then was hauled onto the podium and harangued. Then all the capitalist devils were unceremoniously kicked off the stage and left to pick themselves up out of the mud and limp home. Even the elderly and infirm were hoisted up to the podium in large wicker baskets, kicked off the st
age, and carried back to their sickbeds in baskets. That night, students rampaged around campus beating people up and screaming at them, not seeing that they resembled devils more than their victims did.

  From then on, every June 18th would be set aside for struggling against counterrevolutionary devils. Only two years later, I would find myself onstage too.

  CHOOSING A LABEL THAT FIT

  I WAS LUCKY to be free. But I was also uneasy because I knew that I would eventually end up with a political label or “hat,” as people called them at the time. I had headed the Eastern Languages Department for twenty years, and the mob was unlikely to leave me alone. So I decided to figure out which label would fit me best. Two, in particular, seemed ideal: capitalist-roader and reactionary capitalist academic authority.

  To qualify as a capitalist-roader, you had to be in a position of authority. Being the head of my department would certainly count, even if it was only a modest post. Was I actually walking the road of capitalism? That was a trickier question, but since everyone in a position of authority had already been labeled a capitalist-roader, I would probably count as one too.

  I was considered an authority in my field, a top-ranked professor who served in the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Twenty years of political education had taught me that individualism was at the heart of capitalism, and I readily admitted to defending my own personal interests. Capitalists were, by definition, reactionary, which made me a reactionary capitalist academic authority, irrespective of the actual quality of my academic work. Now that I had chosen my own political label, I would almost have been offended if anyone disagreed with me. As a line in a poem by the eighth-century poet Han Yu puts it: “It is indeed true that I deserve to die, O Emperor.”

  From the 1950s onward, all of China had studied two forms of conflict: enemy conflict and internal conflict, or conflict within the people. I, too, had spent years discussing these concepts and making enthusiastic speeches in study meetings. But not until the Cultural Revolution did I ever think about applying any of these theories to my own life. What I wondered was: Did this particular label make me an enemy of the people? Mao said that enemy conflict should be handled in an authoritarian manner, whereas internal conflict should be handled democratically by the masses through criticism, so I was anxious to figure out which approach applied in my own case.

  We all agreed that the Communist Liberation had improved everyone’s lives. Everyone, that is, except for the counterrevolutionary enemies of the people, who lived in constant fear of being persecuted. Even though I knew this to be the case, I didn’t actually care until I seemed set to be labeled a counterrevolutionary myself, and the question of what counterrevolutionary activity was ceased to be strictly theoretical for me. The newspapers emphasized how important it was to distinguish correctly between enemy and internal conflict, but I still found the difference confusing. There seemed to be neither a qualitatively nor a quantitatively definitive approach to the question. If this was merely a philosophical distinction, what were its practical implications? And if conflict was a legal concept, why wasn’t it enshrined by law? I had spent five years in the National People’s Congress and had never come across any legislation that addressed the two forms of conflict. Although I had no interest in following the shifting political winds that governed these amorphous debates, I spent days pondering this question, which was not a theoretical question now that it was relevant to my own life.

  I had never seriously thought about political labels and used to ignore them because they had nothing to do with me. New hats were invented with each political campaign. The victims weren’t ever allowed to choose their own hats, and they always accepted the hats they were given. I never once gave a thought to the feelings of the people wearing hats. But now that I was thinking about it, I realized I could no more avoid being given a hat than I could leave the house without a hat in the winter. No one knew how the god of labels divvied them up.

  I hadn’t been publicly denounced, beaten up, or even formally stripped of my position as department head, nor did I have any actual authority, and certain sidelong attacks began to cause me trouble. I once found a notice in the Foreign Languages Department addressed directly to me: “Ji Xianlin, you are required to hand over three thousand yuan.” Disappointingly, the notice addressed me by name without calling me a capitalist-roader or counterrevolutionary. But an order was an order, so I immediately took three thousand yuan to the student dorm room listed on the notice. I smiled politely as I handed a stack of banknotes to the students there, but they didn’t smile. To my surprise, they also refused to accept the money. “Take it away!” they said. I obeyed.

  One day when I was sitting at home and reading, several Red Guards barged in and declared that they were about to “destroy the Four Olds.” The Four Olds? I wondered. But there was no time to find out what they meant, so all I could do was let the students have their way. It turned out that their targets were the many little ornaments that stood on my desk and bedside table, or pictures hanging on the walls. The Red Guards represented the “direction of the revolution,” so if they said something was a Four Old, I obediently took it and smashed it to pieces. Within half an hour, I had destroyed many of the things I treasured most. One of them stands out in my memory: a black clay figurine of a smiling chubby baby, which I had brought home from Wuxi. The Red Guards also discovered that the portrait of the Great Leader on the wall wasn’t dusty, and said that I must have put it up very recently. They were actually right. But I quickly replied that it was particularly clean because I always dusted it carefully. I was impressed by their eye for detail.

  When the madness was at its peak, I figured we might as well simply destroy the planet itself, the oldest thing in existence. I heard stories of the Four Olds being destroyed all over the country. One professor told me that two paintings he owned by the artists Qi Baishi and Wang Xuetao were both destroyed.[1] But that is only the tip of the iceberg: No one knows how many priceless pieces of art were destroyed. If the Red Guards had truly succeeded in exterminating the Four Olds, what would be left of our artistic heritage? What legacy would we now be striving so hard to preserve?

  I couldn’t get the matter of labels out of my mind. I could tell that I was vulnerable to being labeled a reactionary capitalist academic authority, the very label I myself had thought suited me best. That would theoretically make me a capitalist enemy of the people, but the directives also said that enemy conflict could sometimes be resolved internally. That was why I hadn’t been struggled against yet.

  The masses didn’t forget about me. They occasionally invited me to a criticism meeting.[2] These meetings were less brutal than struggle sessions, and I was usually criticized for the “revisionist” tendency of prioritizing intellectual and academic work above everything else. This was apparently revisionist the way enjoying springtime was revisionist. Under my leadership, the entire Eastern Languages Department was susceptible to that criticism—we were apparently all hardworking to a fault. I couldn’t deny that fact: In every political campaign since Liberation, I had stood up in criticism meetings and criticized my own “revisionist tendency to prioritize academics,” and so far I had always gotten away with it. But after making all those speeches, I always crept back into my old work habits; I know that everything I’ve accomplished so far is the result of revisionist hard work. So if being labeled a capitalist-roader was a tribute to my diligence, I would be happy to accept the label as an indirect compliment. For the time being I knew that I was lucky: Like a wild bird that a boy with a stone can strike down at any moment, as long as I was still in flight I was free.

  A HALF-YEAR RESPITE

  HALFWAY UP MOUNT Tai, one of the five Taoist sacred mountains, there is a mile-long stretch where the steep path suddenly becomes flat, and every hiker remembers this as a welcome break from the arduous climb. During the steep climb that was the Cultural Revolution, the half year from the end of 1966 to midway through 1967 was a relatively flat stretch for me
. Although Yanyuan was caught up in the fever sweeping the country, for the time being I was safe. I was grateful for the flat ground under my feet and the chance to catch my breath.

  I had never previously considered philosophical questions such as the place of man in the universe or the place of the individual in society. But after Liberation, each successive political movement forced you to reconsider the security of your own position. Everyone was either a persecutor or being persecuted. And as political movements evolved, the groups were constantly splintering and regrouping, so that the persecutors could easily become the persecuted in the next stage of the struggle and vice versa. The position of each individual shifted constantly, like a dizzyingly complex military formation.

  I was constantly troubled by the question of my own position and of how I myself was going to be labeled. I was relieved to eventually realize that I had not been labeled an enemy of the people. I was still one of the people, which made a big difference as to how I would be treated. If one of the people messed something up, it could be written off as a simple mistake. But if an enemy made a slip of the tongue, if he said socialism when he meant capitalism, or vice versa, then he would be labeled an active counterrevolutionary and become the target of a struggle session. It was never clear who had the authority to choose the enemies of the people or what counted as enemy conflict. I couldn’t grasp the difference between enemy and internal conflict, and was constantly afraid that I would fall off the edge and find that I had become an irredeemable enemy.