Читать книгу TOGETHER THEY HOLD UP THE SKY - Martin Macmillan - Страница 5

After three years of being totally side-lined in Beijing, and with no further resolution of his situation, the former Vice-premier, Xi Zhongxun, grew weary and impatient. He had been a man of action all his life, and having nothing meaningful to do, no contribution to make, day after day for several years was something he could no longer tolerate. He took the bold step of putting forth a request to the Central Committee of the Party to be allowed to work again, anywhere and doing anything the Party would allow.

Xi’s request was responded to positively by the Central Committee. At age 52, he was moved out of Beijing and sent to Henan province to be a deputy director of a small manufacturing firm. Imagine the Vice-premier of China now working as a deputy director in a small factory 900 kilometers away from the seat of power in Henan, south of the Yellow River. He had indeed been banished, but at his own behest. Old comrades in Beijing might have pity on him, but there was nothing to be done. Very soon hundreds of them would suffer the same or even worst fates as falsely implicated top ranking Party leaders were purged in the ensuing ‘investigations’ leading up to the Cultural Revolution.

In 1965, one year ahead of the Cultural Revolution, a curious thing happened in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. After ten years of the imported soviet-style ranking system being used throughout China, the entire ranking system was abolished on the 1st of July 1965. Symbolically, July 1st is the official celebration of the birth of the Chinese Communist Party and marked by large military parades and displays in Beijing and elsewhere in the country.

In those military parades, and from that day forward, all Chinese military service men and women started to wear the exact same military uniform again. The only decorations permitted were two red buttons on their collars and a red star on their caps. Democratic? Maybe. But it meant that all top military officers were now no different than, and just as exposed politically, as the rest of the infantry’s ‘canon-fodder’.

It was not just the changing of military uniforms that signalled what was to lie ahead. The tone of the propaganda language in the state-controlled media became more and more radical. Many officials and their sectors were directly and publicly attacked for being anti-Party and revisionist. Soon most common Chinese could sense ominous dark clouds gathering over the land. But nobody could have totally expected that they were on the eve of an unprecedented calamity, the worst man-made or natural disaster in Chinese history.

In one year’s time, the storm clouds were ready to burst. The first of the student Red Guards appeared in Tsinghua University Middle School and the movement quickly spread across the capital. On the 18th of August 1966 Mao met with Red Guard students in Tiananmen Square and donned a Red Guard armband to signal his support of the movement and its objectives to criticize the intellectual establishment in China.

The Red Guards came to Tiananmen Square literally by bicycle. By the mid 1960s bicycles were the major means of transportation in Beijing. For ordinary people bicycles were convenient, but not cheap. To have one they needed to save for months and even years. Most families could afford only one, and that bicycle was used primarily by the family bread-winner.

So in the summer of 1966 all those young teenagers were riding around on bicycles. But most of them probably were not the children of single-bicycle families whose head of household had to use their one precious bicycle to go to work. The families who could afford second or third bicycles for their children were not ordinary people. These Red Guards were the children of high-ranking officials and officers. Many of their parents probably had service cars provided so their children could ride the bicycles. You might not think that riding a bicycle as a teenager is anything special, but at that time, it indicated the high status of your family and a privileged and elitist background.

The children of such high-ranking families were the first ones who smelled the wind of something important about to be happening. China was now the powerhouse building the Communist world revolution. These restless teenagers wanted to be part of it. Their emerging in Tiananmen Square and gaining such a public show of support from Mao himself announced that there was now a new power on the Chinese political stage. The Red Guard movement, first started in a few aristocratic schools, including the 1st August School and the 1st October School, had within a few months grown into a vast national menace.

These bicycle-riding Red Guards were young, passionate and also naïve. They wanted something exciting, and Mao’s revolution delivered exactly the idealistic illusion they needed: building a paradise on earth, killing all evil elements of the society such as landowners, capitalists, old traditions, wrong ideas especially in books, or anything judged to be decadent by an intolerant teenage mind. Their dreaming was not restricted to China, for they passionately believed that one day Mao’s promised Communist society would be dominant all over the world. Their fanaticism lead many of them to even volunteer to go to Vietnam to fight against American imperialism. Unfortunately a lot of these teenagers sacrificed their lives in the rice patties and jungles of Vietnam without ever seeing a world-wide Communism revolution.

In Beijing, the Red Guards were now cruising around in the streets, targeting and attacking anyone they thought were a bad influence on their idealistic society. Former landowners and factory owners, writers, artists, singers, even people with relatives overseas were targeted. Anything related to pre-Communist Chinese tradition, old temples, books, antiques, paintings; all would be destroyed, whether held in public displays or private collections. In a few weeks’ time countless cultural treasures were smashed or burned by the Red Guards.

Recall that the first Red Guards came into being in several elitist schools where they verbally challenged their curriculum and teaching staff. The first wave of mass chaos also hit the schools, but this time it swept through the entire educational system in China. Teachers and professors were all verbally criticized, and as the teenagers grew more emboldened they began to physically punish and even torture the academic staff as though they were the hated capitalists and landowners during the civil war. Classrooms were trashed and most teaching materials, especially anything foreign, were destroyed as counter- revolutionary. Many schools had to shut down or if they remained open, they hardly resembled educational institutions any more.

1966 was a bloody time in Beijing. Innocent people were attacked, their homes were robbed, their properties were stolen or destroyed and their persons were beaten and humiliated in public. The structure of society had been turned upside-down. Roving teenage gangs on bicycles, with Mao’s blessing, were the new order of the day.

Most of the Red Guards were wearing their parents’ old uniforms, discarded since the ranking system was outlawed. This was indeed strange, for while their parents had been stripped of any external display of rank, their teenage children now wore their old uniforms displaying the rank of their father or mother. In addition to rank designations, the uniforms were of a different color and made of different materials. No one else wore them now, except for the Red Guard students, and so their presence and ultimately their class identity were easily discernible.

As elitist teenagers, these Red Guards were fearless, naïve, loud, and brash. Since Beijing was packed with high-ranking officials, there were an even higher number of their children, thousands of them. They were visible everywhere, especially in the west of Beijing where many of the People’s Liberation Army military headquarters were based, including the marines, air force, logistics and so on. It was an exciting summer for these students. By the middle of the summer semester, all studies were stopped. But for Mao the show was not big enough; he was planning something on a much grander scale.

On the 18th of August 1966, during a military parade, Mao shook hands with several Red Guards on Tiananmen Tower overlooking the famous square. His appearance with them proclaimed his clear support for the Red Guards. The photos of Mao with the Red Guards were front page news on the next day’s newspapers.

One of the most circulated photos was that of a young girl, wearing an old style yellow military uniform from her father, putting an armband with Red Guard characters on Mao’s arm. To the surprise of all veterans, Mao himself was wearing an old style green uniform. He had not worn an army uniform for ages. The signal could not be clearer. Mao was showing his generals that he was the real leader of the country’s military force. But what was he up to?

Mao asked the young girl’s name. Hearing her name, Song Binbin, which means in Chinese “polite”, Mao answered with a smile: “Be violent.”

The girl who was so lucky to be so close to Mao was not just any ordinary girl next door. Her father, Song Renqiong, joined the CCP in 1926 and followed Mao along the Long March. At that time in 1966 he was the Party leader in charge of three provinces in the northeast of China. The image of the daughter of such a high official placing a Red Guard armband on a similarly uniformed Mao Zedong in Tiananmen Square was powerful indeed.

Song Binbin’s photo with Mao’s had a huge impact, not just on the internal politics of the Red Guards, but also on the Chinese and eventually world fashion industry. Old military uniforms became the latest in vogue fashion overnight and dominated the Chinese fashion scene for the coming decade. All Chinese young people craved the same fashion. But only the children of military officials had access to those old uniforms which made them so very proud. Soon mass produced copies emerged, and the rest of China had to be satisfied with these copies. As with today’s designer brand knock-offs, these copies would immediately give away the lower social status of their wearers within the Red Guard movement.

In Beijing, the summer of 1966 continued to be an exciting season. Millions of Chinese came to Beijing, wishing to catch a glimpse of their beloved Chairman Mao. Following the disastrous Great Leap Forward debacle, Mao had pretty much removed himself from public view. But now he generously let himself be seen by his millions of worshippers. Eight times that summer he appeared in public. His generosity drove the young people wild with excitement and they swore to follow Mao’s revolution. His special relationship with the nation’s youth to reinvigorate the Communist Party and its revolution, albeit with very conservative overtones, predated by just twelve years another long-reigning head of state coming from another Communist country, Pope John Paul II, and his ability to publicly rally millions of Roman Catholic youth into action by his charismatic presence.

Hoping to see Mao in person attracted millions of people to Beijing, and the majority of the more than 10 million pilgrims who arrived during that summer had their dream fulfilled. Of course, very few of them actually saw Mao. To do that in such vast throngs would require a telescope. But just a tiny glimpse and to be part of that vast sea of Chinese humanity swept up in the hysteria of the moment would be enough to make them feel they had seen him. Many cried till tears came streaming down their faces. It was indeed a summer of atheistic pilgrimages.

The whole of Beijing had to be shut down to hold these events. Seeing millions of people, an ocean of red flags, accompanied by loud military marching music stunned the usual reserved residents of Beijing. These urbane and sophisticated Beijingers felt that their city was being invaded. What it all meant, and where this crazy demonstration would lead, no one could tell.

With the desire to see Mao whipping the whole nation into frenzy, the chaos happening over the summer school break showed no sign of abating. When the school break was over, the demonstrations continued and nobody knew when or if school would start again. The Red Guard numbers swelled and bands of youths continued to roam the streets attacking people and property.

The revolution had started and could not be stopped any more. As with all revolutions, the fluidity of the situation meant that new people started to emerge on the Chinese political stage in the summer of 1966. Many such personalities appeared fleetingly and temporarily. But one person in particular caught the attention of the public eye; Jiang Qin, Mao’s wife. Previous to that chaotic summer, she was hardly to be seen in public and she was most certainly never referred to as Mao’s wife and definitely not the First Lady. At the time “the First Lady” was an exotic foreign term to the Chinese that “did not translate” into the national political landscape.

On those rare occasions when she was referred to, she was simply called Comrade Jiang Qin. Comrade Jiang Qin had been banned from Chinese politics for nearly 30 years since she married Mao in 1938 in Yenan. American President Woodrow Wilson’s wife Edith might have virtually run the country following the President’s stroke, as it has been rumored about First Ladies Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton during trying times in their husband’s presidencies. But in China, despite the amazing advances in women’s equalities following the Communist revolution, Party politics was almost exclusively a male dominion despite the large number of young women who joined the Party and served in its military during its campaigns against the Nationalists and the Japanese occupiers.

Back in 1937, when the Japanese occupied much of Northeast China, a young woman who called herself Lan Ping followed this trend and came to Yenan, the Communists’ base after the Long March. Like many young people, Lan Ping was frustrated by the situation of Japanese occupation and the seeming inability of the Nationalists in power to do anything about it. And like many of her contemporaries, she ran away to join the Communists. She bravely crossed half of China during those perilous times, travelling over a thousand kilometers from the coastal city Shanghai to reach the center of the Chinese Communist revolution.

Before arriving in Yenan at the age of 23, she was already an actress of some note working under the stage name, Lan Ping. She had starred as Nora Helmer in a Chinese adaptation of Ibsen’s Norwegian drama A Doll’s House and appeared in several other anti-Japanese films made by the left wing movie-makers in Shanghai. Besides her show business career, she had several marriages under her belt and had caused a number of scandals in Shanghai. The gossip about her filled the tabloid newspapers. She divorced three times in her previous life. People admired her courage to stand up for herself, for Lan Ping had been the daughter of a concubine, abandoned by her father and she also had her feet bound as a child. This strong-minded personality was simultaneously denounced by the conservatives and envied by millions of women. The parallels between the real life story of Lan Ping and the Nora Helmer character in A Doll’s House weren’t wasted on the Chinese audience. If she had kept her movie career as her public platform, who could tell what kind of star she might be?

Once in Yenan, Lan Ping wasted little time starting her new career in the Communist base. Compared with many other female fighters, Lan Ping appeared a worldly, sophisticated and urbane young woman. As soon as she arrived, she started to cause stir by appearing on Yenan theater stages. Multi-talented, she could sing Beijing opera and also act in modern dramas. She joined the Yenan Marxist and Leninist Academy and became a member of the drama faculty, eventually working as its director. Entertaining the troops was evidently taken very seriously in Yenan.

Even more strangely, ballroom dancing became popular at the Communist base in Yenan. While the war was waging on, the Communist leaders seemed to be very relaxed and fell in love with ballroom dancing. Extraordinary! The few foreign journalists there became their teachers. Many male comrades, including Mao and other top leaders certainly enjoyed it, but not their wives. The liberal atmosphere of the encampment, as evidenced by ballroom dancing with various partners and glamorous actresses in propaganda plays, fell victim to the envy and jealousy of many of the wives. In this tense atmosphere under the serene surface, Mao’s second wife, Zizhen He, became very unstable mentally and was sent to the Soviet Union for treatment.

And Lan Ping stepped in to fill the gap. Within months she didn’t just catch the attention of Mao, she became quite intimate with him. They met frequently after her stage performances and soon became lovers. Mao gave her a new name, Jiang Qin, meaning “river clear”.

Before long the rumor mill started cranking out the story of the new, young and alluring film actress Jiang Qin and the revolutionary leader Mao who had soon become inseparable. The public nature of their affair was a propaganda nightmare for the Communist leadership. No one personally disliked Jiang Qin. But “family values” was at the foundation of the Party’s platform, and Mao was already married. In fact, some effort had been made to portray his mentally unstable wife as a martyr to the cause, losing her mind due to the horrors of war and suffering brought on by the Nationalists and Japanese. Because of his position, Mao’s personal life was also an issue for the Party.

Mao however was smitten, and blind to this criticism. Chen Yun, one of the most influential and powerful men in Yenan and Chairman of the Party’s important Organization Department had a private chat with Mao about his affair with Jiang Qin. Despite their close working relationship, this infuriated Mao, who accused Chen of trying to interfere with his private life. Mao hinted that he and Jiang Qin were to marry.

Greatly disturbed by this news, a letter was circulated and sent to Mao with signatures of numerous military officers and Party officials opposed to the marriage. The letter didn’t stop the marriage, but instead provoked Mao to speed up his plans. When Jiang Qin soon fell pregnant, Mao’s critics relented and allowed him to quietly divorce his wife, still confined to a mental hospital in the Soviet Union, and marry Jiang Qin.

On the 20th of November 1938, one year after Jiang Qin arrived at Yenan, a simple wedding of sorts took place. The new couple, Mao already 45 and the 23 year-old film actress Jiang Qin, were the hosts. The occasion was not announced as a wedding, but rather a dinner party. Mao had invited some guests for a very quiet meal. The exact sequence of events in terms of divorce and marriage is unknown, but soon the couple had a baby girl, and their relationship was sealed. But one thing is known, the Central Committee made it clear that Jiang Qin was to stay out of the public eye.

And so she did. Jiang Qin had remained quiet for nearly 30 years, largely leading a separate life from her husband, hidden from public view. But the Cultural Revolution which Mao had started now needed her and her strength of character evidenced so clearly all those years ago. Mao needed his wife to tackle his many enemies that the Cultural Revolution was aiming to sideline or eliminate altogether. Jiang had already started to position herself for this opportunity. Slowly emerging from the shadows, she had spent some time in Shanghai quietly rebuilding her acting connections there and working with youth groups. She fed Mao’s paranoia, reporting to him that certain plays were subversive and aimed at ridiculing him. She convinced him that under her direction, appropriate cultural vehicles using the country’s youth could be mobilized in his favor to combat those already in power who were trying to subvert Communism and destroy him personally. The seeds of a new Red Guard variety were already being sown by Jiang Qin.

High on Mao’s “to do” list was the current Chinese President Liu Shaoqi and some of his generals. Mao was not happy about the power they seemed to have amassed in the inner circles of the Party. He wanted that power back into his hands. Liu had also been one of the first and most vocal critics of the doomed Great Leap Forward policy, and that alone was enough to make him suspect as a subversive element. Since Mao didn’t trust any of his generals at this point to deal with Liu Shaoqi, he had to use the one person he trusted implicitly, his wife, Jiang Qin. As Comrade Jiang Qin said: “I am a dog of Mao and I will bite the ones he wants me to.”