The Cowshed Read online

  I had, at some point, ceased to be the department head, though it was unclear if or when I had been dismissed. The slogan of the times was: “There is no crime in revolution, it is reasonable to revolt!” Even the former president of the republic, Liu Shaoqi, could be displaced without due process in the name of revolution, never mind a lowly department head such as myself. I counted myself lucky to have lost the title of department head without having acquired any other labels in return.

  By then, the university was swarming with troops from the army’s thought propaganda team, who had been sent to “support the leftists.” Each department hosted several officers and troop members. The revolutionaries in each department also set up their own leadership. Teachers and students from good class backgrounds who were enthusiastic about enforcing the class struggle would tie a bit of red cloth around their arms, which marked them as revolutionaries. To have a good class background, you had to be a peasant or a worker, or come from a family of revolutionary martyrs or party functionaries. These people were the rightful leaders of the revolution. They were joined by others who had had the foresight to oppose Lu Ping during the Socialist Education Movement, but for some reason, the latter weren’t allowed to wear red armbands. No one pretended to be a revolutionary by wearing a fake armband. The children of Party cadres were in a tricky situation. They certainly considered themselves the reddest of the Red Guards and insisted on wearing armbands of red silk while everyone else used plain red cloth. But their position was also more precarious. If their parents or siblings fell out of favor, they would be branded “children of blackguards” and fall out of favor instantly.

  The opposition to Lu Ping had first come about in 1964, during the Socialist Education Movement, when faculty and students at Peking University were influenced by extreme leftist thinking to conclude that the university president, Lu Ping, was a revisionist. This conclusion sparked a huge revolt, and I’m afraid I was part of it. The more we found out about how the university functioned, the more passionate we became. We all felt that the institution was rotting from within. In my naïveté, I thought that opposing Lu Ping would help to preserve the direction of the revolution. I held no grudge against Lu Ping—in fact, we got along well, and he had been kind to me. But I told myself that I had to put my own feelings aside for the sake of the revolution. Lu Ping’s name was later cleared at the International Hotel Conference, and no one was punished for having opposed him. Nonetheless, I reflected on my involvement in the matter and decided to make a public self-criticism. Shortly thereafter, in the autumn of 1965, I was sent to Nankou Village.

  Then the thought propaganda team moved in, and the cadres in the Eastern Languages Department were reorganized. I had escaped the first wave of persecution in the Cultural Revolution, and as one of those who had opposed Lu Ping, I should have been named a “revolutionary cadre.” Instead it was said that I had given in to Lu Ping, that my stance toward class struggle had faltered, and that I had to be excluded. The cadres who had not self-criticized following the International Hotel Conference were now treated as heroes, with seats on the revolutionary committees of their departments and even that of the university. I didn’t care for these honors, but I feared for my safety. A Red Guard who knew me well told me that he had seen the army’s internal documents and that in them I was classified as an individual “on the edge”—somewhere between an enemy and a merely errant member of the people. I felt relieved to be on the right side at the moment but disturbed by my perilous position.

  Since traveling by rail was now free, people started making revolution everywhere, going on all kinds of long trips in the name of revolution. The stations were packed with people, and anyone who was bold enough to hoist themselves out of the crowd through the window of a train compartment could go wherever they wanted. We were told that all this was “lighting the fire of revolution.” Eventually, the whole country was in chaos. Someone said this was a deliberate tactic to confuse our enemies, but we didn’t confuse anyone but ourselves. At the time I was still a wholehearted supporter of the revolution.

  As the source and center of the Cultural Revolution, Peking University attracted scores of these revolutionary pilgrims. We treated them as important guests and did our best to welcome them. Most departments had been assigned responsibility for one of the blocks in which our guests were housed. To demonstrate my loyalty and gratitude for not having been classified as an enemy, I volunteered to take the night shift at the visitors’ camp. The guests had no blankets, so my colleagues and I brought them blankets from our own homes. I noticed that they had no basins, so I bought twenty with my own money, and took pleasure in handing them out. But the revolutionaries, both the young and the young at heart among them, turned out to be inconsiderate guests who ripped our blankets and chipped the new basins. Although I had been genuinely enthusiastic about welcoming them, my zeal faded.

  Eventually, the authorities realized that the whole thing had gone too far; some villages had ceased agricultural production altogether. They decreed that the tourists had to be sent back to their homes, to “make revolution by increasing production.” The thought propaganda teams at Peking University were responsible for conveying this message to our guests. As part of this initiative, our department would visit places where large numbers of guests lodged and persuade them to go home, beginning at the Xiyi Hotel near campus. But having been treated so well, why would these traveling revolutionaries leave of their own accord? At the hotel we pleaded, argued, and sometimes even quarreled with the guests. I talked myself hoarse and still had to remain extremely polite. Gradually the guests began to make their way home.

  Next we went to the Bureau of Meteorology and had the same arguments with the guests there. I had seen thousands of big-character posters and was bored by most of them. But I was struck by the big-character posters at the bureau. Many of them said the usual things, but a few were truly startling: “Cut So-and-so into a thousand pieces!” “Boil So-and-so alive in a vat of oil!” Perhaps their unusually vivid imagery was borrowed from the Buddhist hell. I also had the good fortune to witness an unforgettable struggle session. A little car drove up, and a capitalist-roader in a well-ironed suit—a bureau chief, perhaps—got out. He took a curious little paper hat from the backseat of the car and put it carefully on his head. The hat was hung with all kinds of trinkets, including a tortoise that wobbled whenever he took a step. As soon as he entered the hall a roar of slogans arose, followed by endless speeches criticizing the man. When the whole process had been completed, the capitalist-roader left the hall, got back into the car, and took his hat off, carefully placing it on the backseat for future use. I found this man more enigmatic than the Mona Lisa. He never stopped smiling even after being rhetorically cut into a thousand pieces and boiled in oil.

  In the winter we were sent farther afield to communicate the official message to yet more visitors. I had to commute an hour by bike to the place where we worked, and it took two hours to walk there when it snowed. We didn’t have so much as a room to ourselves, so we ate under a canopy we built in the yard. The lukewarm rice would freeze as soon as it touched our bowls. Su Wu, the Han dynasty diplomat exiled to Siberia, must have eaten rice like this, with ice crushed into it. Despite the hardship, I was still in good spirits, secretly relieved not to have been categorized as a capitalist-roader.

  When we had successfully completed our mission and the visitors had all left, we returned to campus. Another memorable event was taking place: the Haidian district elections. These elections were for the local assemblies, which would elect representatives to the provincial-level assemblies, which in turn would elect deputies to the National People’s Congress. So this lowest level of representatives, while relatively insignificant, was also the most democratically elected, and hence the most heavily contested. I had sat on the People’s Political Consultative Conference and served as a Beijing deputy to the National People’s Congress. I had even run in the Haidian district elections a couple of time
s. I had never considered the privilege of voting in the elections to be an achievement in itself. But after the first round of capitalist-roaders had been purged, many people lost their voting rights. So when I saw my name sparkling on the list of eligible voters, I was as happy as a scholar in imperial times finding his name on a list of successful examination candidates. Retaining this privilege had been no mean feat. I celebrated the election day by wearing new clothes to the polling station, and savored the weight of the red ballot in my hand. I felt incredibly lucky not to have become an untouchable.

  Later on we were sent to a village south of Beijing, near Nanyuan, to help with the harvest, which was also led by revolutionary cadres and the thought propaganda team. 1966 was a wet year. We spent two weeks in the village, and it rained nearly every day. All day long we would carry sheaves of wheat from the fields back to the village to be dried in the sun before threshing. When it rained we would hurry to cover the wheat with canvas until the rain passed and we could pull the canvas off to let the wheat dry. We sometimes did this several times a day, and if it rained at night, we would get up and race outside to drape canvas over the crops. We were constantly drenched in sweat and rain while all the farmers sat in the people’s commune enjoying free meals; not one of them came to join us in the fields. Those of us who had come prepared to “learn from the peasants,” as the slogan went, began to wonder what we could learn from them. I used to devour novels about peasant life, but when I realized that the depiction of the peasants’ political consciousness was completely exaggerated, I began to find these novels contrived and stopped reading them.

  As an imposter among the masses, I worked especially hard. I carried as many sheaves of wheat back to the village as the youngest and fittest men on the team, and was proud when the department commended me for my efforts. Our living conditions were very basic. After a long day of hard work, we all slept on mats in a large warehouse at night. Many people had brought mosquito nets and repellent, but I had none, so I often woke in the morning covered with mosquito bites. I felt like the child in the traditional story about filial piety who deliberately exposed himself to the mosquitoes so that his parents wouldn’t be bitten.

  We enjoyed our time in the fields. One day, someone spotted a wild rabbit, and we all took part in the chase, until one of us broke the rabbit’s leg and we managed to catch it. Those of us who had a weakness for snake meat would catch a snake a day, run back to the village, and grill it on the spot. The half-year respite passed happily, but it wouldn’t last forever.

  JOINING THE FRAY

  BY THE AUTUMN of 1967, the Red Guards and other revolutionaries had long since separated into factions. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms was right: The long-divided will inevitably be united, and the long-united will become divided. It was time for divisions again.

  Not long before, the revolutionaries at Peking University had been united in a single revolutionary organization, the New Peking University Commune, called the New Beida for short. It was headed by the Empress Dowager, Nie Yuanzi, who was said to be a “Type 38 rifle,” belonging to the generation of cadres who had joined the Party at the beginning of the Second World War. Despite being middle-aged, she always dressed provocatively. Her performance at Peking University had been mediocre. Originally the deputy head of the Economics Department, she was then transferred to the Philosophy Department as its Party branch secretary. She had enough political savvy to have written the first Marxist-Leninist poster at just the right moment, and the support of Party leaders catapulted her into the national spotlight. I knew her to be arrogant, dim-witted, stubborn, and crafty. Every time she opened her mouth, her supporters worried that she would make a fool of herself. This was the woman who had free rein to do anything she liked in Yanyuan.

  As the Great Leader said, “Oppression always begets resistance.” Students who found Nie Yuanzi’s regime oppressive began to start their own revolutionary groups. They mostly called themselves the Such-and-such squadrons, with names taken from Mao Zedong’s poems. There was the Fight the Nationalists Squadron, the Pluck the Moon from the Skies Squadron, the Mountain Scalers. . . . Soon all the best lines had been taken, and new groups found themselves at a loss for poetic revolutionary names. The squadrons ranged in size from four or five to dozens of students. It was said that there was even a squadron of one. To start one, all you had to do was put up a poster that read, “The east wind blows, the drums resound, only the winner will be left standing!” and yell a few slogans. Soon there were so many groups that even the renowned essayist and historian Hu Shi would have despaired of counting them.[1]

  There were also more and more big-character posters, and since the walls and temporary stands had long been pasted over, new bamboo stands were constantly being built. Apart from announcing new squadrons, the posters also criticized various capitalist counterrevolutionaries. Some of them were only four or five pages long; others stretched to nine, ten, or a hundred pages, and kept growing longer. Nearby residents made a living selling old posters for scrap paper. Some students practiced their calligraphy by designing posters, and I noticed that the handwriting was improving over time—furthering the practice of this traditional art form was surely an unintended side effect of the Cultural Revolution.

  Individual squadrons began to form alliances and join forces, eventually amalgamating into two big camps: New Beida, the original group, and Jinggangshan, the upstart, named after the birthplace of the Red Army in the mountains of Jiangxi Province. The former was in government, so to speak, and the latter in opposition; they argued constantly through their respective posters. But unlike in a political system such as the British one, there was no pretense of fair play. Rather, it was the norm to spread malicious rumors about your opponents. Partisan politics ruined friendships and tore families apart. We fought each other more ferociously than we had ever fought our capitalist enemies. One poster read: “I would die to protect Nie Yuanzi and Sun Fengyi!” If only we had invested all this energy into industrialization and the modernization of agriculture, China would long since have become Asia’s leading economic power.

  At the time, we were all blinded by partisanship, and it was impossible to judge the two factions objectively. But now that so much time has passed, I think it can fairly be said that the two factions were more or less the same. Both were composed mostly of younger lecturers and students. Both supposedly had a political platform, though the actual content thereof was rather opaque. Both subscribed to extreme leftist thinking. Both fought constantly, raided houses, and wreaked destruction. If a lecturer or cadre was struggled by both factions, the two struggle sessions looked exactly the same. Both groups were ruthless and equally sadistic. They beat their victims using bicycle chains wrapped in rubber, which drew no blood, so that no one could accuse them of having done wrong. Both revered Madame Mao, Jiang Qing, and claimed to be her most loyal followers. New Beida attempted to intimidate its opponents by invoking her name, and Jinggangshan also flew the flag of devotion to Jiang Qing. There was only one clear difference between them: New Beida was in power, and Jinggangshan was the underdog, which is a position more likely to provoke sympathy.

  As far as I could tell, since their political platforms were identical, their struggle could only have been about power rather than policy. Both were desperate to gain power and destroy the opposing faction along the way. Both did their best to recruit popular lecturers and cadres. Jinggangshan controlled a handful of student dorms, and New Beida controlled the rest of the campus. The dorms were heavily guarded. The better-funded New Beida sawed off precious sections of steel pipe and sharpened them into makeshift spears that were more than sufficient for launching an attack on Jinggangshan. The latter responded by fashioning its own weapons. Both factions were said to have explosives experts among them. Their rudimentary weapons allowed them to get into armed skirmishes, including one in which a secondary-school student was killed by spear-wielding New Beida supporters.

  But the Red Guards were young
students, almost children, and they could never resist a good joke. Once, during an intensely heated debate in the cafeteria, when both crowds were shouting at the top of their lungs, several pairs of old shoes strung together suddenly dropped from a large crossbeam. As everyone in the university knew, “old shoes” is northern slang for a prostitute, and the phrase happened to be one of Nie Yuanzi’s many nicknames. Although the crowds were ready to tear each other to pieces, the unexpected interlude made them burst into laughter, and the debate fizzled out. Soon the windows of Jinggangshan dorms were festooned with worn-out shoes.

  At another debate in the cafeteria, the leaders of both factions were sitting on the podium, with an audience gathered in front of them. The leaders of Jinggangshan, and possibly of New Beida, were known as “orderlies.” The word did have a democratic, revolutionary ring to it, as when all societal titles were democratized after the French Revolution. There was an elderly professor onstage, a respected specialist in fluid dynamics and the theory of relativity. He was a man of integrity whom the students respected, and one of the few people whom Party leaders were keen to protect. I was told that when New Beida heard this man disapproved of what the Empress Dowager was doing, they not only sent people to his home to harass him but threatened and blackmailed him over the phone. He originally had no intention of joining Jinggangshan but was so put off by New Beida’s threats that he changed his mind. He was immediately named an orderly, and at this debate he was the oldest person onstage. There were many subjects of debate, and the cafeteria was crowded with students from both factions, each side utterly certain that it was in the right and its opponents in the wrong. The sight reminded me of televised U.S. presidential debates, with hordes of supporters clapping and cheering. The atmosphere was tense and very lively.