Читать книгу TOGETHER THEY HOLD UP THE SKY - Martin Macmillan - Страница 8

By now the former privileged schools for the high-ranking officials were all disbanded. Xi Jinping and others were relocated to different schools. He was sent to the Middle School No. 25 which was built in 1864 by the American Congregational Church. The school had enjoyed a high reputation in the past and a great number of children with a strong background had studied there, including the son of Deng Xiaoping.

Xi Jinping was certainly not studying much in his new school as the academic curriculum was now in shambles. But to what avail or purpose anyway? All of China’s colleges and universities remained closed down. So even if students remained in high school and suffered through the non-academic curriculum and propaganda barrage, once they finished school they had nowhere to go. These young people had nothing to do in the cities except to cause all kinds of trouble. Hooligans and rival youth gangs were emerging like mushrooms.

Mao didn’t forget these troublesome, urban and privileged youths, especially the children of his mistrusted generals and high-ranking officials that had been relegated to the “Black Gangs”. These youths, just one generation away from their disfavored parents, needed a lesson, and a hard lesson at that. The children of the workers and the peasants were not Mao’s concern any longer. He saw no conspirators there. But for these city youth, Mao had a brilliant idea:

“Youth with education go to the countryside and receive the re-education from the poor and sub-poor peasant. This is very necessary.” Mao Zedong (Dec. 1968)

Mao’s new idea of shipping urban youth off to the impoverished Chinese countryside was soon celebrated and the cause taken up by his followers in the Red Guards. Of course, most of the urban young people were not fully aware of what was awaiting them in the countryside. Nor did they first realize this was a one-way expulsion from the life and family they had always known and fully expected to continue into their secure future.

If the majority of urban young people were naïve enough not to know their fate, their parents certainly were not. Many high-ranking officials in Beijing originally came from the countryside. They knew exactly what the countryside meant, but they had no choice and they could not say a critical word against Mao’s ‘great idea’ for fear of further retribution. Any wrong word could cause a huge catastrophe for their families, as they had witnessed for so many of their comrades. So they packed suitcases quietly and sadly for their children and saw them off like millions of other ordinary families. Privately they cried bitter tears for their children, and the home atmosphere could not be more depressing. This tearing apart of families and fracturing generations on a mass scale was perhaps the worst part of the Cultural Revolution.

When Mao’s new policy of re-educating urban youth in the countryside was released, Xi Jinping had just finished his the third year at the Number 25 Middle School. He had to go. So did his sister. His sister Xi Qiaoqiao was sent to Inner Mongolia to work at a military farm. Xi Jinping was being sent to Shaanxi province. Now the Xi family was splintered into several parts like many families in China, from Shaanxi province to Mongolia, Henan and Beijing. Each person, adult and child, was on his or her own. Mao didn’t just hurt Xi’s family, but all his countrymen for whom family values were so deeply treasured.

The trip to Shaanxi from Beijing lasted more than 24 hours by train, then several more hours by bus to reach the remote village where he was to live. The place he was going to had one of the worst reputations in China for poverty and backwardness. The reason Xi Jinping ‘volunteered’ to go there was because he had relatives in Shaanxi province. His father had a previous marriage, and his father’s former wife, Hao Mingzhu, lived there with his half-brother and another step-daughter, Hao Ping. Potentially he had some tentative connections to rely on in the region, and his mother thought perhaps he might be treated better there than in some place where he didn’t know anybody.

Shaanxi countryside was well known for its poverty and harsh environment. The landscape is surrealistically yellow, being covered by yellow earth. The Yellow River runs through it bringing tons of soil into the ocean and causing perennial flooding and devastating misery as it has done for thousands of years of Chinese history. Today the riverbed of the Yellow River is meters higher than the land along the river and the flooding continues perennially.

The other reason for Shaanxi’s poverty was absolutely man-made. The Cultural Revolution forbade peasants to own anything. No one owned a pig, chicken, or even a vegetable. Any private belongings were regarded as capitalist and anti-revolutionary. Things were only owned communally. The result was disastrous in that the whole countryside could not even provide enough eggs for their own people once state-imposed quotas were met; nobody had tasted a chicken for a decade or more. Xi Jinping soon would see and taste for himself the harsh life thrust upon the peasants.

Fifteen young people from Beijing were due to arrive on the 13th of January 1969. The news made the small village of Liangjia River very excited. The village’s name was sadly ironic as it had no river at all. Only during the summer runoff would some muddy water come rushing down from the hillsides, flooding the whole area.

Early that cold winter morning the whole village dressed up in their best clothes and drove their donkey carts to the commune headquarters to collect Xi Jinping and his mates. There was no private land anymore; all the peasants had been organized into so-called people’s communes. The state was now the landlord.

The peasants were excitedly curious that morning as they had never seen anyone from Beijing, that far-away place of mystery and power, home of The Forbidden City. Everyone was anxious to see what these city people looked like. They had never seen people from Beijing before, and now they were coming to live among them.

Now the bus was coming and pulled up outside the commune headquarters. The peasant families gathered around and waited. Soon the door opened and the passengers started to disembark. To the peasants’ surprise, the young people stepping off the bus looked very white and very young and were very shy compared to the sunburned and weather-beaten faced peasants. When they did speak they spoke perfect Mandarin which the local people could hardly understand, and in return the city youths could hardly understand their Shaanxi dialect either. At least Xi Jinping should understand the local dialect somewhat better than the others since his father spoke the same dialect. The locals’ high expectations about Beijingers were hardly met by this lot.

To describe Xi Jinping as shy is not completely accurate. He was likely rather confused. How could he and his teenage mates not be confused? Ten out of the fifteen young people had witnessed their parents being publicly criticized and suspended from their positions. They didn’t know how their families would cope, and Xi Jinping didn’t even know where his father was. They stepped off that bus into a totally different world, a world of dire poverty and frozen yellow mud. And they were totally on their own. The moment was not a happy one.

The bewildered girls and boys were then allocated to fifteen different peasant families who would look after them. They were going to live with them, not as guests exactly, but to learn from them how to be honest, hardworking and above all loyal socialists for the good of the country. In exchange for this privilege, the youths from Beijing would be expected to pull their weight by cooking for their host family, working in the fields and doing anything else required of them to ease the burden of their open-ended presence.

The Chinese countryside of the 1960s was definitely a shock for the sixteen year-old Xi Jinping and his schoolmates. All of the luxuries they had grown accustomed to in their previous lives had now vanished. There was no tap water, no electricity, no radio, no heating, no mother cooking for them, no meat or eggs. For those even more privileged like Xi Jinping, the list could be extended: no indoor flush toilet, no toilet paper, no telephone, no television, no bathtub, and certainly no private room.

Instead they lived in caves, the only housing in the region. These unique caves have been typical peasant shelter in Shaanxi province for centuries. They are usually cut out of the compacted yellow earth along south-facing hillsides. Five to seven meters long and three to four meters wide with an ‘open floor plan’, these caves still provide shelter for an entire family. There were no beds; instead they had a traditional Chinese “kang”, or “sleeping-stove” made of bricks that channels heat from a wood or coal fire under a sleeping platform. The heat was a creature comfort for fleas as well, and these were so common in the caves that Xi Jinping soon would experience their bites first-hand. The only light would be a kerosene lamp. When Mao arrived in Shaanxi in 1935 he lived in the same kind of cave. Today Mao’s cave is preserved as a museum.

Waiting his turn outside the commune headquarters, Xi Jinping was finally assigned to his host family. Years later the family remembered that he had two suitcases. One of the peasants thought they were small and light, and hospitably offered to carry them for him to their waiting donkey cart. But it turned out that the suitcases were very heavy. About all they contained were books. Two cases of books are what Xi Jinping brought with him. A privilege of course, as most of the peasants could not even read, so reading material would be few and far between during his stay.

The local people respected Xi Jinping as they knew who his father was. Though they had never met Xi Zhongxun personally in this village, his local legacy in the Shaanxi area was still alive. Far from the political intrigues going on in Beijing, they didn’t know exactly what had happened to his father. They had to be cautious and not offending.

The cold winter’s ride in an open donkey cart to the family’s cave was the final leg of the long journey from Beijing for Xi Jinping and his fellow teenagers. The relative warmth of the cave and the hospitality of the host peasant family must have suggested a hint of security at long last. Seated inside on the warm kang that served as bed and dining room, Xi Jinping’s first welcoming meal would have been noodles, no meat or eggs, with a few drops of oil. But in honor of their young guests, the peasant families were given pure flour to make their noodles for this meal. Usually they would mix flour with bran. But following the propaganda, Mao’s great instruction brought the young people to the countryside, and this should be celebrated. So they did their best. Seldom did they have this kind of noodle without bran. As for meat, Xi Jinping would have to wait a long time as meat was on the table only once a year during the Spring Festival.

It’s a modern global phenomenon that the economic and social differences between cities and the countryside tend to be substantial. This was certainly true in China in the 1960s as it also is today. Certainly the living standard in Chinese cities in the decade of the 1960s was not great, but it was still much better than the abject poverty of most of the countryside. Despite coming into power in 1948 on the back of the country’s peasants, the Communist Party had failed to raise the living standard in the countryside for the past two decades. In fact, with the commune system in place as the main land and agricultural reform, people living off the land could barely eke out a subsistence livelihood.

We can imagine that the young people forcibly sent to the countryside must have been feeling quite miserable spending their first night in the darkness of their caves, over a thousand kilometers away from their families. Add to this that they had no knowledge of when their re-education would be over or even when they could go home for a visit. Yet this was just the start.

China’s future leader Xi Jinping had not prepared to see this turn of events in his young life. He might not be able to fully comprehend or explain it, but he could certainly tell there was something wrong in this so-called socialist country. Nobody could feel easy seeing Chinese peasants, so loyal to Mao and the Communist Party, living under such wretched conditions. It might be easy for a naïve and privileged teen from Beijing to look down upon the locals, but he could not deny that he was the same Han Chinese as them. How had the Communist Party made the peasants so poor or at least not lifted them up after decades of so-called land reforms? Now thousands of privileged young Chinese people would start to think one thing for sure; they wouldn’t have much positive to say about Mao’s campaign. This wasn’t exactly the re-education Mao had in mind in sending them away from Beijing and the other cities in the first place. But these seeds of doubt had now been planted in the rural landscapes across China in thousands of bright young minds, and they would bear a thousand different fruit in the years to come.

Of course the city people needed to know the reality of the Chinese countryside; it was just the harsh and knee-jerk it was implemented that made the way they saw it very unpleasant for the youngsters and their families. And of course it was Mao himself who forced them to go; they had no way to escape. So the reality was that they were here in this small rural, impoverished village of cave dwellers. They had to make a living for themselves by sheer hard, backbreaking labor. Of course they were angry. These sons and daughters of high ranking military and political inner-circle families had no intention of becoming peasants as Mao had told them. They were determined to leave as soon as they could find a way out.

These kids weren’t the only ones perplexed by their situation. In fact the local peasants were surprised as well. Suddenly city kids had been sent to them. They didn’t know what to do with them. Unfortunately, Mao’s rhetoric and the Beijing youths didn’t come with any instruction manual. Not that the peasants could read it even if one had been provided. Their life was totally defined by living off the land. The land they relied on was limited enough; now more people were added. That meant they had to share their meager subsistence with even less to go around for their own families. Tensions were bound to erupt.

Also, most of the families who took the Beijing youth into their small single room caves had no facilities to look after them. Not just food, but space and basic necessities were already stretched to the limit. A far cry from the initial excitement of hosting exotic Beijing visitors, the youth turned to be burdensome for them. As time went by with no hope for improvement or any end in sight, the situation in many villages become very nasty. Especially when the hungry young people had nothing to eat, they would grab what they could. Very soon the few chickens and dogs were not safe anymore.

1969 was a catastrophic year for all Chinese teens and especially anyone who was above 16 years old. Once graduated from the three years of high school studies, they were left with no choice but going to the country. So it was for Qi Qiaoqiao, the elder sister of Xi Jinping as well.

Qi Qiaoqiao was born in 1949 in Yenan, the first child of the veteran couple after Xi Zhongxun’s remarriage. When she went to high school her father changed her family name to his wife’s. It was quite common at the time that the children of high-ranking officials followed their mothers’ name. One of the reasons was protection, but also a sign of the gender liberation that the Communist Party had introduced to China. Chinese men were certainly quite generous with their names.

When Cultural Revolution broke out, Qi Qiaoqiao was already twenty. Qi Qiaoqiao had to follow the mainstream. Like millions of young people she was caught up in the turbulent revolution at an awkward age. Her tragedy was that she was old enough to decide what she was going to do, to be brainwashed or not.

Qi Qiaoqiao was already a model student at her school holding an enviable membership in the Communist Youth League. When the Cultural Revolution broke out, because of her father she couldn’t join any Red Guard organization; instead she had to face the scrutiny of the Red Guards who would challenge her over her father’s misfortunes. Mao’s critique against her father was well-known to everyone by then. She wasn’t alone; many descendants would be facing the same problem, they had to show their loyalty towards Mao by denouncing their own parents.

Qi Qiaoqiao was sent to “Mao’s Thoughts Study Group” as a child of the “Black Gangs”, another terms for the anti-revolutionaries. As she remembered, she didn’t behave correctly according to the Red Guards. The overwhelming propaganda at the time would have no mercy on her and she could be easily carried away by the sheer madness of it all. To resist this massive assault on her family, she needed strong political insight. But how could she survive it all at the age of twenty? There are no records about her at this time between 1966 and 1968.

But the political environment definitely left its trace on her. In 1969 she volunteered to go to China’s semi-autonomous region of Inner Mongolia to follow Mao’s call of going to the countryside, which was a gesture that she wanted to be singled out as dutiful and loyal. She chose a place which was well-known for its harsh winter. She recalled:

“At that time I desired the harsh life, because I thought the harsh life could bring us closer, make people forget I was a descendant of the Black Gangs. I felt the harsher the better to show my values, more chance given to me, to reduce the impact of my family background.”

Qi Qiaoqiao was certainly quite aware of her problem associated with her father. Did she hold any grudge for it? We don’t know. As she has said, she didn’t ask permission to go to Inner Mongolia; she made this decision on her own. Obviously she wanted to be different. On her journey she carried Mao’s statue with her to Inner Mongolia. The place where she was heading off to was Urad Houqu, some 600 kilometers from Beijing, and only 200 kilometers from the border with Outer Mongolia, then still under Russian control.

The life in Inner Mongolia was not any better than in Shaanxi where her brother was sent. Here the winter lasts five months and the temperature often plunges to minus forty degrees Celsius as strong winds sweep across its vast plains. Just the cold and desolation in the region could drain away the strongest spirit. But Qi Qiaoqiao had to make her living there.

Five hundred young men and women came to the region. They were organized in military style. The dormitories they lived in once accommodated prisoners. On the walls there were slogans to read. “Confession would bring pardon, Resistance the strict hand”.

The winters in Inner Mongolia were particularly harsh while Qi Qiaoqiao was there. She stayed roughly two years and suffered tuberculosis, arthritis and myriad other infections. Her physical condition was deteriorating badly and into an alarming state. Like many other passionate young people, Qi Qiaoqiao paid a high price for her naïveté. They wanted a revolution and Mao offered them one. They never expected that the revolutionary train ended in the most remote areas far away from Beijing. They were deluded and their passion soon turned toward a great escape, if they could manage one.

As Qi Qiaoqiao has said she was saved by Ulaan Hüü’s daughter. Ulaan Hüü was a true Mongolian Communist. Dubbed the ‘King of Mongolia’, he was another Vice-premier of the People’s Republic and a friend of Xi Zhongxun. Ulaan Hüü was also under house arrest at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, but his situation was certainly not as bad as Xi Zhongxun’s. As least he was able to save his former colleague’s daughter.

But how could Ulaan Hüü’s daughter know Qi Qiaoqiao was in such an appalling condition? We shouldn’t forget the fact that moving around in China during the Cultural Revolution was extremely difficult most of the time and endless permissions and mountains of paperwork had to be done just to apply. Without a high-profile person’s help, it was impossible for anyone to move his residence.

Under that circumstance, Qi Qiaoqiao’s condition could hardly be noticed by anyone from the outside world. Therefore it could be easily assumed that someone send for help. It could be herself or her mother. At that time, the only means of communication were letters. Xi’s far-flung family members, like millions of others, were only connected by letters, and these were infrequent, unreliable, and of course subject to censorship.

Somehow Ulaan Hüü’s help was summoned and actually materialized. Qi Qiaoqiao was transferred to Tongliao, in the other end of Inner Mongolia, 1,500 kilometers away, where the living conditions were much better. She was saved and stayed there as a farm laborer for another four years until the end of the Cultural Revolution.

Qi Qiaoqiao’s story was in some ways similar and in other ways quite different than her brother’s. She went to the countryside with the idea that she needed to change herself to convert herself into a real revolutionary. Her brother Xi Jinping was a little too young to understand what was going on. He was still refusing to accept this upside-down world. But the Cultural Revolution which was poised to last ten years would also eventually change him. The best ten years of life for millions of young Chinese were about to be wasted in meaningless labor and re-education in remote rural areas.

Xi Jinping had spent just a few months in his new home in the small Shaanxi village when he had to move out because the family needed the room for one of their children to marry. It was, and often still is in rural China the custom for a newly married son to bring home the girl to live with his family. Faced with this predicament, and having stayed in Liangjia River only half a year, Xi Jinping thought this must be the time to leave. He somehow sneaked back to Beijing. It was brave, but totally illegal. Having been sent to the countryside, he now had no right to stay in the capital Beijing any more, as in those days internal travel and residency was strictly controlled. He wasn’t the only youth to secretly and illegally return to his city. But as the numbers grew, the officials took notice, and this would cause trouble for himself sooner or later.

By the time he returned to Beijing, things had changed even more for his family. Xi Jinping’s mother, Qi Xin, had already left Beijing with his younger brother and was now living in Henan province to the south. Now the young Xi Jinping, having braved his internal illegal immigrant journey, arrived only to find he had no home in Beijing. What could he do? As with all Chinese, he turned to his extended family. His aunt, his mother’s sister, still lived there. She and her husband both were PLA veterans. This veteran couple had played a vital part in Xi’s family life during those turbulent years. Without their presence in Beijing, everyone’s life would be much more difficult. Yet there is not much information about them, not even their names are known.

Their young nephew, with nowhere else to go, turned to them for help. But in such a situation they couldn’t do much for him. Running away from Mao’s campaign was already a crime. To live in Beijing, Xi Jinping needed not just a residency permit; he also needed a food rations card. After he had left Beijing, he had lost his rights to both. He was an official peasant now and had to earn his food with his hands and the sweat of his brow, not a ration from the government. If he stayed illegally in Beijing any longer he could be a real burden and risk for his relatives, both financially and politically.

During the time Xi Jinping was in Beijing, it happened to coincide with the 1st of October, China’s National Day when security in the capital was extensive and movement became even more restricted than usual. Decades later Xi Jinping mentioned this episode, how he was arrested in Beijing during that visit and locked up for half a year. He mentioned his aunt and her husband, both veterans of the revolution. They were the ones who brought Xi Jinping’s mother to the revolution. As he said, they persuaded him to go back to the countryside. It was a very unique persuasion of his veteran relatives. They said, when they were joining the revolution they would go to the country, to the people, to the poor; why then were today’s young people afraid of going there?

He should learn to trust the peasants and believe in them. His aunt allegedly told him the Chinese revolution had relied upon these peasants and that without them there would be no modern revolutionary China. Why should he have problems with them? These words must have sounded very strange. How could his relatives talk sound so much like Mao’s instruction, after all his family had been through? We have to keep reserved about what Xi Jinping has said about that time.

Xi Jinping said he followed their advice and went voluntarily to his previous placement with the peasants at Liangjia River. Who knows the real reason Xi left Beijing again at such a time of personal and political tumult? It might be that he felt he was not welcome in Beijing; after all he was just a very young and vulnerable teenager who was nobody; he had no family, no home, no food rations, no legal status, and no money. Just to survive he had to go back. There was no other choice, really. He had to think of his own survival first.

The late 1960s was not a time to think of the future in China for anyone. First of all people had to survive. Xi Jinping learnt this lesson of harsh reality at a tender age. He might survive if he went back to the village. If he didn’t he would surely ruin himself. He went back.

It’s interesting to know that on the Party’s official website on Xi Jinping, 1969 is marked as the year he started to work, which means at least for common Chinese citizens, their pension will be calculated from that year. In an odd way the sad memory of the time when they were sent to the countryside will stay with them for their entire life as their time spent in rural re-education labor is credited towards the calculation of their pensions.