Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (17 page)

Xi said he and his brother tried for years to find the man again, but they never did. I asked him if he still wanted to kill him. “These are different times, and the way I think has also changed,” he replied. The killer, he said, “was a victim, too. It’s the system we should take revenge against.” But when the subject came up again later, Xi said his anger toward his mother’s killer had not entirely dissipated, and he was not willing to absolve him of all responsibility. “He brought pain to my family that words cannot describe,” Xi said. “If I didn’t kill him, I’d beat him up. He would be an old man by now, but he would still deserve the beating.”

We were alone in the cemetery, standing by his mother’s tomb. It was nearly noon, but the the sun was still hidden in the thick fog. Xi lit another cigarette, and walked over to the pillar marking the grave next to his mother’s. Someone had scratched a few words on the side with a rock. “History is here. They died unjustly.” I asked him another question. Was there anything he did during the Cultural Revolution that he particularly regretted? Xi paused a moment before answering.

“After my mother died, I took it out on society. I beat some people. No one cared what I did, and I wanted others to feel the pain I felt.”

He said he joined the Red Guards again, and his father couldn’t stop him. He was given a gun, and he fired it in several battles. He said he didn’t know if he ever hit anyone, but he confessed that he eagerly participated in the violence before he was sent down to the countryside. I asked Xi what the worst thing he did during those years was. He said he tortured prisoners from the other faction, and old men who had been detained because they had bad class backgrounds. “They were held in a small room, and if I was even slightly upset, I would hit them,” he said. “We had no humanity. We were young and ignorant, and we would abuse them, and whip them.”

Xi tried to explain why he—and so many others—were so cruel during the Cultural Revolution. Part of it, he said, was deep, pent-up frustration with life under Communist rule. The nation had experienced bitter hardship, including a terrible famine, and while people were still loyal to Mao and the party, they resented the local officials who controlled their lives and carried out the party’s policies. By targeting the party apparatus, Mao gave the masses an excuse to unleash their anger at these officials. But even more important, Xi said, was his generation’s upbringing in what he called “a culture of violent propaganda.” The party taught a value system in the schools that encouraged extremism and glorified violence. Children were fed a steady diet of stories that extolled Communist heroes who sacrificed their lives in “class struggle” and that demonized “class enemies” who were hiding and scheming to undo the Communist Revolution. In an essay read by all students, Mao wrote that “revolution is not a dinner party” but an “act of violence in which one class overthrows another.” The test of a true revolutionary, he continued, was whether one believed brutality against the enemy was good or bad. Mao said it was “excellent!”

“We were told that we needed to use violence to destroy a class spiritually and physically. That was justification enough for torturing someone,” Xi said. “They weren’t considered human anymore. If they were the enemy, they deserved to be strangled to death, and they deserved to be tortured. This was the education we received when we were young, and the Cultural Revolution developed it to the point where we were killing each other…. The Cultural Revolution brought out the worst in people, and the worst in the political system.”

Xi said he believed one-party rule was ultimately to blame for the crimes of the Cultural Revolution, but that individuals—like the man who killed his mother, and like himself—must also accept responsibility. “How could a ruthless dictatorship thrive in this country? Why did the nation support it?” he asked.

But when I asked him if he had ever thought about finding the people he had tortured, Xi’s answer was as honest as it was revealing. “I don’t want to find them,” he said. “I don’t want to remember the bad things I did.”

I
N THE SPRING
of 2007, I met the man who saved the cemetery in Shapingba Park. Liao Bokang served as the Communist Party chief in Chongqing in the 1980s as the city was trying to put the Cultural Revolution behind it. When I visited him, he had been retired for nearly fourteen years and was living in Chengdu. He was eighty-three, a jolly type with a bald head and a kindly round face. He welcomed me into the living room of his high-rise apartment, and as we spoke and sipped tea, he occasionally leaned back in his sofa chair and smiled, his eyes crinkling up mischievously.

Liao was a native of Chongqing, and he is still remembered in the city as the target of a vicious political campaign in 1963, when he was the head of the city’s Communist Youth League. Toward the end of the Great Leap Forward, he had been assigned to investigate conditions in the surrounding countryside and boost agricultural production. The rest of the country was beginning to recover from the famine, but Liao discovered that people were still starving in his province. In one village, the entire population had died. The authorities had to send residents from a neighboring town to bury the dead, but they were so weak from malnutrition that several of them died while digging the graves. Reporting his findings to Beijing, Liao estimated that at least ten million people had died in all of Sichuan Province between 1957 and 1960. He blamed the famine on provincial leaders who dictated irrational farm policies, wasted money on showcase projects, and refused grain assistance from the central government. Beijing responded by ordering an investigation. But the powerful Sichuan party boss, Li Jingquan, escaped untouched, and a year later he struck back, purging Liao and sending him to work as a construction laborer. Liao was denounced again at the start of the Cultural Revolution. Then the Red Guards turned against Li Jingquan, and Liao was given a reprieve. He traveled to Beijing to appeal his case, and as a result he escaped the worst of the violence in Chongqing. When he returned, though, he spent four difficult years undergoing “reeducation.”

Liao was rehabilitated after the Cultural Revolution, and in 1983 he was appointed to run Chongqing. One of his first jobs was to “bring order out of chaos” and rid the party ranks of factional animosity that still lingered. In speeches to cadres, he often compared the Cultural Revolution to a nightmare. “Since we’re awake now, what need is there to recall whether what we did in the dream was right or wrong?” The party had repudiated the Cultural Revolution, he told them, and so you were all wrong.

It was during this campaign to eradicate the ill effects of the Cultural Revolution that the cemetery in Shapingba Park became an issue. The other graveyards for Cultural Revolution victims in the city had been destroyed before Liao took office, but Shapingba Cemetery had survived. It was located in what was then a remote part of the city, and the officials in the neighborhood, most of whom had been members of the August 15 faction, had quietly let it stand. But now there was a push inside the party to get rid of it. Since the government had declared the Cultural Revolution a mistake and was erasing all other traces of the movement, it stood to reason that the cemetery should be eliminated, too. Letting it stand, many officials argued, would send the message that the party believed the August 15 faction was right and that armed battle was justified. Opinion, however, was far from unanimous. The question of what to do with the cemetery reached Liao’s desk in 1985.

On a cool day in the spring, Liao and a handful of aides drove out to Shapingba Park and toured the cemetery. There were only a few other visitors, but a small crowd soon gathered as word spread that the city’s party secretary had come. Several of Liao’s aides, as soon as they saw how big it was, argued for destroying the cemetery. But one aide, a young woman, disagreed and urged him to preserve the cemetery and let it stand as a reminder and a warning to future generations about what had happened in Chongqing. Liao listened to their views and left the park without saying anything himself. But he had already begun to form an opinion.

“When I saw the cemetery, I thought of the many ridiculous things that occurred during the Cultural Revolution, insane things, incomprehensible things,” he told me. “These things had all vanished like mist and smoke. But here was something concrete I could preserve…. These innocent people who died could be left here to serve as historical evidence, evidence of an insane time and a tumultuous era.”

Two things about the cemetery left a lasting impression, he recalled. The first was a tomb for an unnamed fourteen-year-old girl. “She should have been at home, hugging her mother and father or playing with toys in her little bed,” Liao said. “But she was sacrificed for nothing and buried there, and no one even knows her name.” The other was a sign that described the graveyard as a “Martyrs’ Cemetery.” Liao found it jarring. “What kind of martyrs were they? A martyr is someone who sacrifices his life for the nation. To die in a mistaken political movement, to die by the guns of your own brothers, you can’t use the word ‘martyr’ for that.” Other cities had been torn by armed conflict during the Cultural Revolution but Liao believed that more were wounded and killed in Chongqing than anywhere else. If the cemetery were destroyed, he thought, there would be nothing left to remind people of that tragedy.

A few days after the visit, Liao issued his decision. The cemetery would be preserved. He believed people should reflect on the Cultural Revolution—on what happened and why and what lessons could be learned—instead of simply forgetting it. As the city’s party chief, he had the authority to save the cemetery, and he felt there was little political risk for him to do so. But Liao also knew others would disagree with the decision, and to end the debate—to encourage people to “close ranks and look to the future”—he also allocated money to build a wall around the cemetery and ordered it closed to the public. As he described the decision to me, Liao smiled one of his mischievous smiles and added, “Some people say Liao Bokang found a very shrewd way to preserve the cemetery.”

I asked him about those who were trying to erase the Cultural Revolution from public memory because they believed it would be better for the party’s reputation for it to be forgotten. He smiled again. “You can’t eliminate ten years from time and space…. Whether good or bad, history exists objectively. People subjectively may want to erase it, but they couldn’t erase it even if they tried.”

Given his statements about the value of preserving and examining history, I was surprised when Liao told me he agreed with Deng Xiaoping’s edict that the history of the Cultural Revolution should be written in “broad strokes” rather than in detail. “People should concentrate on economic construction now,” Liao said. “Only when the economy is developed and the country is prosperous will people have the energy and time to research these things. We can’t get distracted now.” He said something similar when I asked him whether schoolchildren should be taught about the Cultural Revolution. “They should, but how we teach them is something that can be decided later,” he said. “Right now, we need to develop productivity and build our country. The past can be discussed in the future. We shouldn’t delay what we are doing now because we’re always remembering the past. We shouldn’t forget it. We should preserve it, but save the discussion for later.”

As he spoke, it became clear to me that Liao saw in his rescue of the cemetery an approach for how Chinese society could eventually process the memory of an event as traumatic as the Cultural Revolution. Examining what happened closely, even after forty years, could be too painful, divisive, and perhaps even destructive for society. But erasing it or forgetting it completely would also be dangerous. Perhaps the best thing to do, Liao suggested, was to give it more time. “If people have different opinions, the debate can be put off temporarily,” he said. “A wall can be built around history, but without destroying it.” After all, he noted, the cemetery in Shapingba Park was now open to the public and no one was complaining. “People can go in and look now,” he said. “I think this is progress.”

L
ong before he led the Communists to victory in war, before he established the People’s Republic and came to wield power over nearly a quarter of humanity—before he made himself a tyrant—Mao Zedong was a labor organizer. It was an unlikely calling for a farmer’s son in a country with a quarter billion peasants and only the beginnings of an urban working class, a country that had missed the Industrial Revolution. But his family had been prosperous enough to give him a city education, and in the national soul-searching after the fall of the last emperor, Mao had embraced Marxism as the answer to China’s humiliation by the Japanese and the Western powers, who had carved the nation into concessions and colonies. He was just a schoolteacher then, a new father not yet thirty years old, and when he joined the Communist Party, it had only a few dozen members nationwide. In those early years, the party sought to imitate the Soviets and mobilize the proletariat, so Mao traveled across his home province of Hunan, helping to set up unions, organize strikes, and agitate for workers’ rights. The most famous of the Communist-led strikes took place in 1922 at the Anyuan coal mines on the border of Hunan and Jiangxi provinces, one of the largest concentrations of industrial workers in China at the time. Mao was only indirectly involved, but the party later exaggerated his role and wove the story of the strike into its founding mythology. During the Cultural Revolution, a propaganda painting depicted him on a mountain summit near Anyuan, the wind tousling his hair and sweeping back his scholar’s gown. The government printed more than nine hundred million copies of
Mao Zedong Goes to Anyuan,
enough for every man, woman, and child in China, making it perhaps the most reproduced painting in the history of the world.

In 2002, I traveled to Anyuan to attend a ceremony marking the eightieth anniversary of the miners’ strike. On a warm, overcast afternoon, in a plaza near one of the old coal mines, a small crowd gathered as party functionaries unveiled a bronze statue of Mao just as he had been depicted in the Cultural Revolution portrait. Even by the standards of the Communist Party, there was something especially shameless about the event. It wasn’t just that these officials were putting up a new statue of Mao years after most cities had had the decency to quietly take theirs down. It wasn’t just that they were perpetuating the historical fraud about Mao’s role in the Anyuan strike—a fraud designed to obscure the fact that Mao later persecuted to death the party men who had done the most to organize the miners. It was the cynical attempt to present the Communist Party as a champion of the working class. There was a time when the state seemed committed to the proletariat, when workers were promised an “iron rice bowl” of job security and benefits. But a quarter century after Mao’s death, only fools and liars still claimed the party was building a workers’ paradise and looking out for people like the coal miners of Anyuan.

A day before the statue’s unveiling, I spent time with several of the miners. They were rough, wiry men who lived in cramped, shabby apartments, and they shared a look of exhaustion on their blackened faces. Some were descendants of the miners whose strike helped launched the Communist movement, and they reminded me that after the 1949 revolution, coal miners were rewarded some of the highest wages of any occupation. Their nostalgia for that era was tempered by the memory of the Soviet-style command economy, of the pervasive poverty and the terror of Mao’s misrule. But if the party’s version of socialism had failed the miners of Anyuan, its take on capitalism brought them only further misery. The government was restructuring the coal industry, and shares of the Anyuan mine, one of the largest in the nation, had been listed on the Shanghai stock exchange. Mass layoffs had followed, and more were planned. The miners who kept their jobs saw their pay fall precipitously in real terms, even as coal prices and production climbed. Among the worst off were the retirees, old men who suffered lung diseases from a lifetime of digging coal for the glory of the state, and who now complained that officials were looting their pensions and denying them proper health care. Some men spoke of wives working as prostitutes in the big cities to help their families make ends meet.

In the afternoon, a few of the miners fitted me with a set of gear—rubber boots, a suit of rough cloth, a plastic helmet with a small lamp—and showed me where they worked. We began on foot in a large tunnel that sloped downward, then boarded a rickety railcar that took us deeper into the earth at a sharp angle. As we made our descent into the darkness, the miners complained about aging equipment, which made their work more tedious and more dangerous, and one remarked on the rising numbers getting injured on the job, especially among the new workers, who received little training. But when we reached our destination, a cavernous stone hall hundreds of feet underground, I realized that as dismal as the conditions were in Anyuan, they were even worse in most other Chinese mines. A year earlier, I had visited one in Jiangsu Province, a pit known as the No. 5 Coal Mine in Gangzi village. It was one of tens of thousands of smaller mines that local officials and their cronies had opened in the 1980s and ’90s as the party embraced market reforms. Anyuan, like most other large mines, was a dinosaur of the old state economy, struggling to survive in the new capitalist economy. The mines like No. 5, however, were private operations, and they were gaining market share by ignoring labor and safety regulations to cut costs. The miners in Gangzi worked long hours, usually six or seven days a week, in cramped shafts thick with coal dust and temperatures as high as ninety-five degrees. In Anyuan, you could walk in the tunnels, but in Gangzi, the miners crawled.

On a rainy summer night a few days before I visited Gangzi, there was an accident at the No. 5 Coal Mine. Dangerous gases in a poorly ventilated shaft ignited, causing an explosion that killed ninety-two miners. The dead were a cross section of the modern Chinese working class, men who had been laid off by state mines and women struggling to pay their children’s school fees. Many were peasants who had traveled hundreds of miles in search of work. And then there was Gao Yingru, a skinny sixteen-year-old trying to save enough money to enroll in computer classes. His father, Gao Beiwen, was a coal miner who had been injured in an earlier explosion, and he told me his wife had gone to work in the No. 5 Coal Mine to pay his medical bills. He said his son had started digging coal only recently, after graduating from cooking school and failing to find a job in a kitchen. “They knew he was a good worker, so they kept calling and asking my wife to bring him,” Gao said. There were regulations against women and minors working in coal mines, but in Gangzi no one seemed to care. Some of the mines hired thirteen-year-old girls to push coal carts. “They violate safety rules all the time, but where can we complain?” Gao continued. “We need the jobs, and the owners all have good connections with the local officials.” His voice trailed off. The explosion had killed his wife and his son, and also his younger brother and his brother’s wife. He was forty-six, a lanky man with thinning hair and a scarred face, and he sat alone on a beat-up couch in the sparsely furnished living room of his simple house. He asked me how he would support his daughter and his brother’s two boys now. When I photographed him for my report in the
Post,
he held in his arms a black-and-white portrait of his son. His eyes glimmered with a trace of tears, and in every shot he avoided the camera and cast his gaze on the concrete floor.

As the party was celebrating the eightieth anniversary of the miners’ strike in Anyuan, its statisticians were calculating how bad conditions in the country’s coal mines had become. There were the official figures, of course, the 5,000 to 7,000 deaths in mining accidents reported by the government each year, and that was bad enough. But everybody knew the reality was even worse, because local officials and mine bosses covered up accidents. The statisticians tried to figure out how much worse, and in internal reports and industry journals, they came up with an estimate: since the economic reforms began two decades ago, mining accidents had taken the lives of 10,000 to 40,000 coal miners annually. It was a staggering finding, suggesting that every thirty minutes, on average, a Chinese coal miner perished in a gas explosion, cave-in, or flooded shaft. In a nation with a free press, such a relentless drumbeat of tragedy might topple a government. In China, it hardly made the news. Even using the official figures, China’s coal mines were by far the world’s deadliest. For every million tons

of coal produced, four to five miners were killed. By comparison, in Russia and India the fatality rate was less than one death per million tons of coal produced, and in the United States and Britain, it was less than 0.05.

When a coal miner dies in an accident in China, the government requires the owners of the mine to pay compensation to his family. At the time I visited Anyuan, the amount ranged from $1,200 to $6,400, the equivalent of a few years of a miner’s salary. But coal was the lifeline of the soaring economy, the cheapest and most readily accessible source of energy. It fueled the expansion of industry, powered the mills and the factories, kept the lights and the air-conditioning on in the cities. The ever-rising demand for coal made the officials and businessmen who controlled the mines wealthy, so they pushed output beyond capacity and their miners beyond fatigue. Compared with the flow of profits, the official price placed on the life of a coal miner was a pittance, so it often made more financial sense for a mine boss to let workers die than to invest in safety measures and equipment.

T
HE
C
OMMUNIST
P
ARTY
once condemned such ruthless economic logic as the province of coldhearted capitalists, but now it presided over an economic system in which the abuse of workers was common—and it depended on that system to stay in power. Before Mao’s death, the party justified its rule by presenting itself as the “vanguard of the proletariat” leading the nation to a socialist utopia. But the catastrophes of Mao’s rule shattered that illusion, and Deng charted a radical new course to rescue the party, gambling that people would overlook the failure of communism as an ideology if Communists could make them richer. He hoped to unleash the power of free markets and private enterprise while preserving the party’s monopoly on power, to grant the people economic freedoms while continuing to restrict their political rights. He called it “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” but it was really just authoritarian capitalism—and it worked. By the time Deng died in 1997, he had succeeded in remaking China, lifting two hundred million people out of poverty and leaving his nation more prosperous and more stable than it had been in over a century. But in the process, the party adopted a form of capitalism that could be as exploitative as anything Marx—or Mao—ever envisioned. Market forces generated wealth and prosperity, but unrestrained by democratic institutions, they also produced grim work conditions. Barred from setting up trade unions or organizing strikes, coal miners and other workers had little leverage against bosses with access to the world’s largest labor pool. Without a free press or independent courts, workers had nowhere to take complaints against employers who refused to pay them or exposed them to health hazards. Without elections, they had no way to remove corrupt officials who colluded with businesses instead of enforcing labor regulations.

No one benefited more from the shift to capitalism than party officials and those with connections to them. The party’s betrayal of its founding ideology, the logic-defying contortions that the propagandists used to explain the reversal, the blunt calculus that holding on to power was an end that justified any means—it all bred a cynicism in the party ranks, and access to the riches of the booming economy quickly warped the party-state. As official corruption rose to obscene and unprecedented levels, the party apparatus came to resemble an organized crime network, with its own fiefdoms, factional rivalries, and unwritten rules governing the distribution of spoils. The idealism that once motivated many party officials, however misplaced and misguided, was gone. The party grew addicted to fast economic growth, because it enriched its members and their friends and kept them loyal, but also because it was necessary to sustain the authoritarian system. After the disasters of Mao’s reign and the Tiananmen massacre the leadership could point only to their ability to deliver prosperity to placate the public and keep demands for political change at bay. A slowdown could threaten everything.

But maintaining fast growth carried political risks as well. It would require dismantling the bloated state economy—the legacy of decades of irrational central planning—and that would mean shutting down thousands of factories and laying off tens of millions of workers. The state sector employed more than 110 million people in 1995, or nearly two-thirds of the urban workforce, yet it accounted for barely a third of the nation’s industrial output. The banks were drowning in bad loans to state firms, loans that would never be repaid but that the banks kept approving because party officials were afraid to let factories go under. It was a precarious moment for the leadership. The privatization of state industry had not proceeded smoothly in Eastern Europe and Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and it promised to be even more difficult in China, where the party still paid lip service to Marxist rhetoric about state ownership of the means of production. But doing nothing could jeopardize growth, so the order went down to get rid of money-losing state firms or find a way to make them profitable. Only the largest enterprises in strategic industries would remain in state hands.

Party leaders were careful never to use the word “privatization” to describe what they were doing. After all, the party had long maintained that workers were “masters of the enterprise,” that the factories belonged to them. So how could they be privatized? And who would get the proceeds? Better to avoid such questions, the leadership decided, and just say the factories were undergoing “reform” or “restructuring.”