The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China From the Bottom Up (23 page)

LIAO:
I remember that. In 1975, my uncle was released from prison. He was among the last batch of POWs to receive amnesty from the government. After he got home, you led the police to our apartment. My uncle was taken away and detained overnight.

MI:
Well, your uncle fought on the side of the Nationalists during the civil war. He was categorized as a class enemy. It was our job to be vigilant. Oh well, I had to apologize for the detention. He turned out to be a nice man. Over the past forty years, that was probably the only mistake I ever made. At present, the government has beefed up its crackdown on crime. Since last year, there have been several large-scale police roundups. But the neighborhood committees are no longer playing a critical role as they used to.

LIAO:
Is it good or bad?

MI:
Well, what do you think? We have been treated as a symbol of the past. My feelings are hurt.

LIAO:
I personally think that the neighborhood committee was given too much power in the Mao era. Nowadays, we need to rule society with law. You guys cannot just search people's homes at random. Like everyone else in China, people at the neighborhood committee should find something else to keep them busy.

MI:
We are trying to reinvent ourselves. Last summer, the government provided funding and authorized the neighborhood committee to open a teahouse, which turned out to be a very successful venture. My original idea was to make the teahouse a venue to publicize government policies. In the old days, all the neighbors gathered together every Wednesday afternoon to sit in the open air to study Mao's works and read Party newspapers. I figured the old mandatory study sessions no longer worked. But we could use the teahouse to get folks in the neighborhood to come in and sip tea while reading the Party papers. It was like killing two birds with one stone. Also, the teahouse could create a couple of jobs for those unemployed youth. But this teahouse venture turned into a monster. Nobody wanted to hear me read the newspapers. Not only that, they even booed me off the podium several times. So my daughter told me to be more flexible and stop preaching Communism. We then invited some Sichuan opera singers to perform at the teahouse. Old folks loved it, but young people hated it. They used all sorts of means to sabotage it. One evening, soon after the operas started, a young guy called the local TV station to come investigate noise pollution in the teahouse. The journalist filed a news report that totally distorted the truth about us. It was just so hard to please everyone. In the end, our customers decided to take matters into their own hands. They converted the teahouse into a mah-jongg parlor. Soon it became so popular that we ran out of mah-jongg tables. People simply brought tables from their own homes, and installed a couple more lightbulbs in the teahouse. It was really shameful. They turned the teahouse into a gambling parlor. They recommended that I charge a fee per table.

LIAO:
You must have made lots of money from it. As the Chinese saying goes, “When the fortune of God wants to come in, you cannot stop it!”

MI:
I'm an old-time Communist who has received years of orthodox education from the Party. How can I lead my people astray to something evil?

LIAO:
Don't you think it's an overreaction on your part? Playing mahjongg is a popular pastime for people in China. You cannot call mahjongg players evildoers, can you? Besides, all the teahouses in this city run mah-jongg games.

MI:
Many folks spent all night here playing mah-jongg. If they won, they would go piss away the money in expensive restaurants and whorehouses. When they lost, they started stealing. I really regretted what I had created, but it was too late to close down. Even my daughter dissuaded me from complaining. One time, the old hunchback who lives on the fifth floor of that building gambled away ten thousand yuan [US$1,220] just in one night. He became so crazy. He went home and drank some DDT to commit suicide. Luckily, his wife found out and sent him to the hospital. Otherwise, he would be dead by now. After this incident, I went to the police and reported the gambling activities at my teahouse. They eventually raided the place. Many people swore at me behind my back. As a result, I resigned from the neighborhood committee. Right now, the government has appointed my daughter to be in charge.

LIAO:
But I get the impression that you are still in charge.

MI:
No, not really. My daughter is the real boss. She is in her fifties now. She loves to practice tai chi, do folk dancing with other retired women in the neighborhood, and hang out with people. Her temperament is more suitable for this job.

LIAO:
Now that the teahouse has been closed down by police, what are you going to do next?

MI:
I had an electrician install a loudspeaker on the rooftop of this office building and set up a mini radio station so I can broadcast news three times a day. Actually, the neighborhood committee ran the radio station for over ten years. Before the 1980s, most residents didn't have TV at home and they couldn't afford to subscribe to newspapers. Therefore, that radio station was very popular. I even hired a professional radio announcer, who would read excerpts from the newspapers or party documents. We also aired revolutionary music, such as “East Is Red.” Our radio program was quite professional and could compete with the big radio station in Beijing. When TV reached the homes of everyone here, nobody cared about radio anymore. But now, I have started again.

LIAO:
Let me take a look at your mini radio station. The whole wall is filled with portraits and flags. I can see you still keep the big pictures of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong—the world's well-known Communist leaders. I remember seeing them on this wall when I was a kid. They do look like antiques to me.

MI:
I have had them for over thirty years.

LIAO:
They are quite authentic then. This room is too small for these “great men.” You make it seem as though you worship these famous Communists every day.

MI:
Well, I can't do that. If we want to set up an altar for them, there are specific rules. You cannot treat the pictures of these great men the same way you do pictures of movie stars. You cannot tilt them, or put them in separate places. There are five equally great men, and they have to line up on the same wall. Otherwise it would be a political mistake.

LIAO:
Director Mi, your office looks like a museum of the Mao era. Time seems to have stopped here. I will try to find another time to read every one of those flags and see what is written on them.

MI:
Those flags were awarded to me for my contributions to the revolution. Chairman Mao used to teach us: “Don't sit on your accolades. One needs to continue with the good revolutionary work.” It's too bad nobody will continue with the Communist revolutionary work today. The work of the neighborhood committee is getting harder and harder. Look, since I relaunched this radio broadcast early this year, I couldn't find any young person to commit to this community radio station. Several old folks in the neighborhood are now taking turns doing the broadcasting. Since we are old and can't see properly, we constantly make mistakes. We have to shorten the radio broadcast time. We read newspaper excerpts and the weather forecast, play music, and air some personal commentaries.

LIAO:
What kind of personal commentaries?

MI:
For example, in the morning, after we finish the opening music, someone will go on the air to remind folks about morning rush hour traffic and ask residents to take care when they cross the street. He will then talk about the importance of eating breakfast and on how to prevent low blood sugar. He also urges those young people who have been laid off to cheer up and not give up on life. In the evenings, another guy will go on the air, telling residents to close their windows and lock their doors before going to bed. He will offer tips on how to prevent carbon monoxide poisoning, and give the phone numbers for the fire or police department.

LIAO:
This is truly like a big Communist family.

MI:
Each time I enter this room and become surrounded by these past accolades, my youthful energy comes back.

LIAO:
You are still young at heart, but your mind is living in the old days.

THE FORMER RED GUARD

For many people in China today, the Cultural Revolution conjures up images of young students dressed in green army jackets, wearing red armbands, waving copies of Mao's Little Red Book and chanting “Long live Chairman Mao!” Known to the world as “Red Guards,” those young rebels raided schools and government agencies, intent on beating up their teachers, intellectuals, and government officials whom they believed were straying from Mao's revolutionary line. Between 1966 and 1976, the upheaval led to the deaths of millions of Chinese citizens.

Liu Weidong joined a Red Guard group when he was a high school student in Zhongjiang County, Sichuan Province. He now lives in Chengdu.

LIAO YIWU:
When did you become a Red Guard?

LIU WEIDONG:
I think it was in the summer of 1966. That was the year when Chairman Mao launched “the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution.” It was his view that the Communist revolution, which had taken over China in 1949, was starting to lose its impetus. Many Party bureaucrats focused too much on developing China's economy and were deviating from socialism. More important, Mao, who was then seventy-three years old, believed that his senior colleagues were trying to seize power from him. So he enlisted the support of college and high school students, who immediately rallied around him.

LIAO:
According to history books, many radical students began to turn on their teachers, administrators, and Party officials, attacking them for spreading capitalist and bourgeois ideas. In Beijing, students began to wear armbands, calling themselves the “Red Guards”—the defenders of Chairman Mao and vanguards of the new revolution.

LIU:
Yes. The concept of the Red Guards spread quickly around the country. Students in Sichuan caught on very fast.

LIAO:
There were many factions within the Red Guard organization in Sichuan. Which faction did you join?

LIU:
I joined the Army of Revolutionary Rebels group, a county-level Red Guard faction. All the nationally famous Red Guard organizations were based in big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. At the county level, the Red Guards were merely a group of young rebellious hicks. But the Army of Revolutionary Rebels was an exception. We were precocious politically, even though most of us were suffering from malnutrition and looked much smaller than our ages.

LIAO:
Compared with today's high school students who are more obsessed with MP3 players and pop music than with the Communist revolution, you guys were really precocious.

LIU:
We had no choice. If you didn't pledge to support Chairman Mao, you would be accused of going against history. As you know, our parents who had gone through previous political campaigns all told us that the only way to survive in China was to listen to the Party. So, within a few weeks after the Cultural Revolution started, we were all mobilized. We didn't need to register or get approval to form a Red Guard organization. We would just get our buddies together, come up with a revolutionary name, and have it carved on a rubber or wooden stamp. Then we would go buy some red armbands, get a big red flag, and declare ourselves a Red Guard group. In Lanting County, over a hundred Red Guard organizations were formed within a week.

LIAO:
With so many Red Guard groups, which government agency was supervising them?

LIU:
None. The county Communist Party branch had already been taken over by the Red Guards. Prominent government officials were locked up as “capitalist roaders.” Then all the Red Guard groups coordinated what we called a ten-thousand-person meeting to publicly denounce them as enemies of the people. The meeting was held at a high school playground. Every Red Guard group displayed its own red flag in front of the stage. It was quite festive. Before the meeting started, a contingent of counterrevolutionaries was herded onto the stage. Those enemies included the county chief, the Party secretary, the director of the County Cultural Bureau, the principal of the largest county high school, former landlords, Rightists, and several of our teachers. The Red Guards forced them to wear white paper dunce caps and to hang a black cardboard sign around their necks. They lined up in front of the podium, with their heads down, arms tied at the back. One after another, students went up to the podium, condemning those counterrevolutionaries for representing the Four Old Elements of society. The public condemnations lasted about four to five hours. After the meeting, Red Guards paraded those counterrevolutionaries on the main thoroughfare. Onlookers shouted slogans such as “Down with those who take capitalist roads! Defend Chairman Mao and the Communist revolution.” Some spat on their former officials and teachers. Kids threw stones or chased them around with bamboo whips. I noticed that most of the counterrevolutionaries had bloody faces.

In that era, our passion for the revolution and our admiration for Chairman Mao were equally matched by our hatred for those whom we believed went against Mao.

LIAO:
Didn't realize persecuting people could give you guys such a high.

LIU:
Oh yes. In previous political campaigns, the purges were carried out under the supervision of local Communist Party officials. It was different during the Cultural Revolution. Ordinary folks turned around en masse and began to target those in power. Red Guards beat up whoever they felt were counterrevolutionaries, without worrying about any consequences. It was like catching a pickpocket on the street. Every onlooker wants to get a piece of the action, slapping or kicking the thief. The person who kicked the hardest would get the most applause. That was exactly what happened during the Cultural Revolution.

I also played a role during the ten-thousand-person meeting. My job was to stand behind Mr. Bai, our former school principal. Each time the audience shouted revolutionary slogans, another Red Guard and I would kick Mr. Bai, grab his gray hair, and push his head down farther as a sign of deep repentance. We tied a piece of metal string around his neck, with a big chunk of stone hanging at the other end. I could see the metal string cut into his flesh. Even so, we were still not satisfied and constantly searched for new ways of torturing him. Several days later, he could no longer take it. He had been moaning all day long. At night, he asked permission to use the latrine. I escorted him there and waited outside. Twenty minutes had passed; he didn't come out. So I went in. He wasn't in there. I became really nervous and immediately reported the incident to the Red Guard headquarters. They sent a dozen Red Guards over and we searched all over the latrine and there was no sign of him. While we were discussing whether to put out a most-wanted poster on the street, we heard noises coming from a well outside the latrine. One guy got a very long bamboo stick, and reached down, trying to figure out what was happening. The stick wasn't long enough and it didn't work. So the commander of my Red Guard group ordered me to go down the well myself to check it out.

With a rope tied to my waist I slipped down the side of the well. About ten meters down, I switched the flashlight on and searched the water below. There, I saw a body floating, with its face down. My hair stood on end. My ears were ringing. My body was shaking. I wanted to climb up right away. But if I didn't get the body, I knew I was going to be in big trouble. I composed myself a little bit and called the people from above. They threw down another rope with a hook. I grabbed the hook, attached it to the shirt collar of the dead body, and climbed up as fast as I could. Then people on the ground began to pull the other rope. Halfway up, the shirt collar broke and the body plummeted back into the water like a heavy deepwater bomb. The commander ordered me to go down a second time. After I pulled the body out, we found out it was Mr. Bai. His body was covered with bruises. There was a belt tied to his neck. He seemed to have been choked to death, rather than drowned. Poor Mr. Bai! He was born into a family of rich and conservative intellectuals in the 1940s, when China was still ruled by the Nationalists. While he was in college, he joined the underground Communist Party. After graduation, he went to teach at high schools in the rural areas. He used teaching as a cover to mobilize peasants to rebel against the Nationalist government. After the Communist takeover, he was appointed the principal of a high school in our county. Many times, he turned down promotions and opportunities to work in big cities. When the Cultural Revolution started, we accused him of forcing students to learn Western science and technology.

News of Mr. Bai's death spread fast. It was a mystery, and nobody knew how he managed to sneak out of the latrine and end up down in the well. I was there guarding the latrine. How could he try to kill himself by hanging and then jump into the well? Could it be that he was murdered? Someone must have choked him to death and then threw him into the well. But what was the motive? He was already declared the enemy of the people, and had been punished with severe beatings. Why would anyone bother to kill him?

LIAO:
Mr. Bai disappeared “under your watchful eye”? Didn't the police interrogate you?

LIU:
Not really. All they did was ask me to write down what I had seen. They quickly reached a conclusion: suicide to escape punishment. In those days, it was very common to see students beat their teachers to death. So, if an accused capitalist was tortured to death, nobody cared. There was another school principal, who was elected as a model Communist leader before the Cultural Revolution. He was a famous horticulturist. He planted many fruit trees inside the school campus and converted the school into an orchard. He had students go to classes in the morning, and assigned them to work in the orchard in the afternoon. For a while, he was a celebrity in the area. People from all over the country came to visit his school. In 1967, his students smashed the farming tools and accused him of being a capitalist, because he had sold the fruits at the local market to fund his school. They locked him up in a classroom. Each time there was a public meeting, he would be the target for condemnation. After the Red Guards got tired of torturing him at public meetings, they forced him to run around the rice paddies every day. That went on for about six months. One day, while he was running, he plunged right into the rice paddies and never got up. He died of exhaustion. The Red Guards were really mad that he had been sent to hell so fast. They pulled his body out and dragged it over to the school auditorium. There, they had another public denunciation meeting before they reported his death to the county. In those days, many of the Public Security Bureaus were paralyzed. Nobody was in charge. Nobody dared to question the case. If they had, they would have been accused of siding with the enemy. It was a lawless society. The words of Chairman Mao were the ultimate law of the land.

It was a crazy time. Even elementary school students were mobilized to rebel against their teachers. Some girls grabbed their female teachers and shaved half of their hair off, calling it the “Yin and Yang” hairstyle. On the street, you would constantly see children carrying Chairman Mao's Little Red Book and a red sword made of wood. They would stop adults on the street, asking them to recite Chairman Mao's quotations. If they made one mistake, the children would stab their back with the wooden sword, and force them to start from the beginning. If they continued to make mistakes, children would report them to the Red Guards, and that person could be charged with “forgetting Chairman Mao's words.” If the adult became defensive and refused to admit guilt, he or she could end up getting slapped in the face.

LIAO:
I remember that. Looking back, those Red Guards were really like the Nazis. The Cultural Revolution reminds me of the killing of Jews during World War II or the purges under Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union.

LIU:
That's an exaggerated statement. Initially, many of those “capitalists” were beaten up because they wouldn't admit their guilt and attempted to argue with us. As time went by, they became very obedient. If you accused them of being a spy, they would nod their heads and agree with everything you said. So the beatings became less severe. Then we moved our targets to something else. We began to declare war against the old religious temples, which Chairman Mao called “feudalistic and superstitious strongholds.” Lanting was a small county, but there were many Buddhist temples, filled with statues and art objects. We first burned scriptures, books, and paintings. Then we used hammers to smash the smaller statues. With large statues, we borrowed rock drills to bore holes in their bodies, and then we smashed their heads off. There was a huge Buddhist statue carved on the cliff of a mountain. We went up there, trying to get rid of it with rock drills but couldn't reach it. One guy managed to get some explosives. That sucker ended up blown into pieces. After the statue was gone, we painted in red a big slogan on the rocks nearby: “Long Live the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution. Long Live Chairman Mao.”