Читать книгу China - Kerry Brown - Страница 21

As early as 1957, American psychologist Robert J. Lifton was able to record the ‘sixiang gaizao’ (thought reform) for which increasing evidence was emerging within the PRC. The aim was therefore clearly to remake not just the physical world of the Chinese people, but the inner one too. This showed the radical difference between the Communists and the Nationalists they had defeated. They had a new vision of what a Chinese person should be, and of the techniques that needed to be used in order to achieve this. According to Lifton, this consisted of confessions, in which individuals in writing or in public recounted the deeds they had done in the old world, before the regime came into existence, and the sins they had committed. With this act completed, they were able to move on to a programme of re-education.¹⁸

‘Thought reform’ was about accepting a collectivist ethos, ‘serving the people’, and accepting broad social responsibilities in the great project the country was now embarked on to restore and regenerate itself. People were either for or against this. There was no space in-between. Nor was the Party immune from this process of self-reformation and self-inspection. It, too, was targeted by campaigns in order to improve the posture of cadres. They were to be not just administrators, but part of a new model moral army. The selfishness of the past, what Mao complained was the parochialism of ‘mountain stronghold’ ideas (shantou zhuyi), needed to be eradicated.

Practically, that meant an end to prostitution and other vices associated with capitalism and the previous regime. It meant that foot binding, a practice introduced in the imperial era that effectively crippled young women, was outlawed. It meant the provision of mass education, and a set menu of ideological messages delivered not just to Party members, but to the whole of society. It meant destroying the sorts of inequalities that manifested themselves in cities in terms of what kind of housing people lived in. Peasants had their lands redistributed and city workers had apartments and sets of rooms reallocated and reassigned.

Intellectuals figured importantly in this. To understand the particular quality of animosity that Mao evidently felt towards this group, one has to remember that the term in Chinese – ‘zhishi fenzi’ – literally translates as ‘knowledge elements’. This covered a far wider group than the same term in English, running from teachers to those who worked in journalism, and who could be more broadly categorized as service sector workers in Western systems. That accounted for a sizeable number of people. Mao’s own history with this group had also been a difficult one. ‘Mao had long found intellectuals irritating,’ Alexander Pantsov and Stephen Levine wrote in their biography of the Chairman. ‘Skeptical and conscientious, they aroused in him, as well as in other Bolshevik leaders, hatred and revulsion.’¹⁹ This may have derived from Mao’s early life, when, as a lowly librarian at Beijing University, he had experienced first-hand the sharp treatment and intimidating behaviour those serving intellectuals sometimes suffered.

Despite this, ‘knowledge elements’ were important to the new China, as engineers, medical practitioners, and planners. In terms of the social background of its leadership, the CPC was from humble stock. But now that it was in government, it needed those conversant in science, maths, and technology to be able to devise and implement its macro-economic and political plans. The issue with intellectuals, which would never be dispelled in the Maoist era, and lingers to this day, is that they were likely to be complicated in their private thoughts and allegiance. Some of them had studied abroad, in the pre-1949 period when young Chinese went to Japan, Europe, and the United States to study. Others were linked to family members who had fled with the Nationalists to Taiwan. Some were simply dissenters, aware of the creed of Marxism but also equipped to critique and doubt it. This group had to be reshaped somehow. ‘Thought reform’ was initially the means to do this.

Writer Yang Jiang (1911–2016) typifies the fate of many of this group. A formidable intellect, she had studied with her husband, scholar Qian Zhongshu (1910–98), in Oxford and then the Sorbonne in the 1930s. In 1947, in Cities Besieged (Wei Cheng), Qian had produced one of the best-loved novels of the life of those exposed to overseas culture and carrying their experiences back to their home country. Yang’s own work largely consisted of producing the first translations into Chinese of works like Don Quixote by Cervantes. She also wrote plays, criticism, and a series of memoirs. Living back in the new China, she and her husband were seen by the PRC government as a propaganda opportunity – a sign to others still abroad to return and do as this couple had, contributing to the creation of a new society – but also a target of persistent distrust and wariness. This created the environment of perpetual ambiguity that surrounded Yang and others like her.

In the 1980s, Yang wrote her sole novel, Xizao, whose English translation, Baptism, loses some of its clear reference to the idea of ‘cleansing’, as in the Chinese xinao (brainwashing). It referred back to the very early period when intellectuals, some of them returnees, were sent to staff the recently founded Social Science Institutes. A group of these individuals experience complex shifts and transformations in their relationships. Some of this is the result of the differences in their professional backgrounds before being brought together by government edict. Some is the result of personal issues between them. It is noticeable that throughout the novel Yang spends a lot of attention describing the clothes that people wear, and the ways that while these change and transform, fundamental character traits are evidently not so easy to eradicate. The novel obliquely, and critically, refers to the above-mentioned ‘thought reform’ movement happening at the time. And the ending is one laden with ambiguity, with two of the key characters tiptoeing around an affair, but then, frozen by their marital obligations, having to renounce their passions and endure their current situation.²⁰ That stands as a fair metaphor for the relationship between intellectuals generally and the Party by the mid-1950s: mutually reliant, and yet also mutually distrustful and each devising ways of trying to manage their lives with each other.