Epilogue

 

MY REINTRODUCTION TO THE Western way of life took place on a jumbo jet when I traveled across the Pacific on a first-class ticket: a gift from Shell, my former employer.

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It was early afternoon in Hong Kong when I boarded the plane. After we took off, an attractive stewardess with shining blond hair bent over me and asked, “Will you have a bloody Mary or a screwdriver?”

I must have looked puzzled, for the young man standing behind her said, “Perhaps you would rather have champagne?”

It was then I realized that a bloody Mary was merely a drink and a screwdriver in this case was not for tightening or loosening screws.

As I stammered a polite refusal, the smiling stewardess handed me a glass of plain orange juice.

I spent nearly a year visiting friends and relatives and trying to find somewhere to live. Canada was the first country to offer me a home. For two years, I lived in Ottawa, its beautiful capital. But the northern climate of long winters and strong winds proved too severe for my arthritic limbs. In 1983, 1 moved south to Washington, D.C., where the climate is rather like Shanghai’s. I bought a condominium and settled down. While I adjusted to my new life of freeway driving, supermarket shopping, and automated banking, I worked on my manuscript.

In Washington, I am free to do whatever I like with each day. I can travel anywhere without having to ask anyone for permission. Goods and services in abundance are available to me. Back doors in America lead only into people’s kitchens. When I am with others, I can speak candidly on any subject without having to consider whether my remarks are ideologically correct or worrying that someone might misinterpret what I have said. I have not found the equivalent of either Lu Ying of my Residents’ Committee or Lao Li, the policeman, in my new existence. In this atmosphere of freedom and relaxation, I feel a lightening of spirit, especially since I have completed this book. What I enjoy more than anything else is the wealth of information available in the form of books, magazine articles, and newspaper reports, and the various activities that bring me into the company of people who share my interests. I live a full and busy life. Only sometimes I feel a haunting sadness. At dusk, when the day is fading away and my physical energy is at a low ebb, I may find myself depressed and nostalgic. But next morning I invariably wake up with renewed optimism to welcome the day as another God-given opportunity for enlightenment and experience.

Writing about the death of my daughter and my own painful experience during the Cultural Revolution was traumatic. Often I had to put the manuscript away to regain my peace of mind. But I persisted in my effort. I felt a compulsion to speak out and let those who have the good fortune to live in freedom know what my life was like during those dark days in Maoist China. My many friends in England, Switzerland, France, Australia, Canada, and here in the United States encouraged me. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Peggy Durdin, a retired journalist and a dear friend of forty-five years. It was Peggy who first suggested that I put my experience down on paper, when I visited her and her husband Tillman in their beautiful home full of Oriental treasures in La Jolla, California, in the winter of 1980. Throughout the time I worked on my manuscript, she gave me useful advice and urged me on.

The expiration date on my Chinese passport has come and gone. I did not have my passport renewed. The United States Immigration and Naturalization Service has issued me a document to enable me to travel abroad. I hope in due course to become a citizen of this great nation of open spaces and warmhearted people where I have found a new life. The United States of America is the right place for me. Here are Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, persecuted dissidents from repressive regimes, boat people from Vietnam, and political refugees from tyranny. Among people like these, I do not feel alone. Since I settled in Washington, D.C., I have been accepted by the American people with unreserved friendliness. I have found old friends and made new ones. My only regret is that my daughter Meiping is not here with me.

Although I have decided to become a citizen of the United States, I continue to be concerned with the situation in China. I am heartened by the news that unprecedented economic progress has been made since the implementation of Deng Xiaoping’s new economic policy. Often I look back on the wasted years of the Mao Zedong era and the madness of the Cultural Revolution. I feel deeply saddened that so many innocent lives were needlessly sacrificed. I was glad when the Cultural Revolution was officially declared a national catastrophe, but I regret the Communist Party leadership’s inability or unwillingness to repudiate Mao’s policy in explicit terms.

From the point of view of the Chinese Communist Party, the greatest casualties of the Cultural Revolution were the Party’s prestige and its ability to govern. When Mao Zedong used the masses (the Red Guards and the Revolutionaries) to destroy the so-called capitalist-roaders in the Party leadership, he forced the Chinese people to witness and to take part in an ugly drama. The prolonged power struggle and the denunciations of one leader after another enabled the Chinese people to stumble upon the truth that the emperor had no clothes. When Mao Zedong died in 1976, the country was in a state of political disintegration. Obviously if the Party was to continue to govern, it must change course.

To the impoverished and disillusioned Chinese people, the promise of a Communist paradise in some distant future has become meaningless, and the timeworn revolutionary slogans seem vapid rather than inspiring. To rally the people and reawaken their enthusiasm, the Party now appeals to their patriotism. They are told to work for the modernization of China so that the country can regain her historical greatness and take her rightful place in the world. As reward, the Party promises the people an improved standard of living and no more political upheavals.

More than seven years have passed since Deng Xiaoping gathered the supreme power to rule China into his own hands and became the custodian of the fate of a quarter of the earth’s population. His new economic policy of “open door to the outside world and invigorating the economy internally” has been generally successful. Businessmen, technical experts, teachers, and tourists from abroad pour into China in a steady stream. Foreign investment in joint ventures has reached several billion U.S. dollars. According to the 1986 World Bank report on world development, “China shifted from a major importer of food grains in the 1970s to being a surplus producer in the 1980s.” There was a corresponding increase in cash crops, so that in most parts of rural China, where over 70 percent of the people live, the standard of living has dramatically improved. A number of hardworking and resourceful peasants have become “rich” by Chinese standards. Their two-story brick houses are replacing the traditional mud huts and changing the rural landscape of China. Since 1984, reform measures have also been implemented in the cities.

Party officials claim that eventually a new economic structure will emerge in China. It will include joint ventures using foreign capital and technology and Chinese labor, state-owned industries relying more on market forces than on rigid planning from Beijing, and small-scale private enterprises. The new system is what Deng Xiaoping and his team proudly call “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

The implementation of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms has not gone unopposed. The old guard who had spent a lifetime in the Party viewed Deng’s policy as a betrayal of Marxist principles and the Communist revolution. Others opposed him because the reform measures threatened their position and privileges. At times, the attempts to undermine Deng’s efforts went beyond mere criticism. Despite this uncertain climate, Deng Xiaoping pressed on tenaciously to achieve his goals.

Since the Twelfth Party Congress in September 1982, he has successfully persuaded a million middle-ranking Party officials to retire on attractive terms. And through rectification campaigns within the Party, he has weeded out the most recalcitrant officials at the base level. Since the beginning of 1985, he has changed the leadership of several ministries of the State Council and appointed younger men as governors and Party secretaries in twenty-six of the twenty-nine provinces and autonomous regions. In August 1985, he even achieved the difficult task of restructuring the military command and removing from active duty the generals who were among his severest critics. During a series of meetings of the Party Congress and Central Committee in September 1985, he brought about the “voluntary” retirement of aged Party leaders in the top echelon of power and replaced them with younger Party officials loyal to his reform policy.

However, though the Maoist leaders have been routed, Deng Xiaoping and his team now face opposition from another quarter. These critics differ from the Maoists in that they support the idea of economic reform and do not wish to topple Deng Xiaoping. But they are alarmed by the numerous problems the reform effort has created. They think China’s door has been opened too wide and the relaxation of central control has gone too far. They would like to see China admit foreign capital, technical know-how, and equipment without admitting Western ideas and customs. They are especially concerned about the influence of such Western concepts as democracy and sexual freedom, which they fear will threaten the monolithic rule of the Party and undermine the moral standards of Chinese society. These men, including several well-known Marxist theorists, constitute a formidable section of the Party hierarchy and are headed by Chen Yun, a member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo and a veteran Party leader with an impeccable reputation for honesty and dedication. They watch Deng Xiaoping closely and offer ideological arguments to make sure the reformists do not stray too far from the narrow path of socialism. To them, Deng’s economic reform is a necessary evil rather than a desirable step towards progress.

Since the beginning of 1986, it has become increasingly obvious that the omnipresent problem faced by the reformist leaders is covert resistance from entrenched Party bureaucrats who are often uneducated and highly suspicious of, if not hostile to, the technocrats installed in administrative posts by the reformists. In many instances, their interference and harassment have rendered it impossible for the newly appointed men to carry out their work. To overcome this obstacle, Deng Xiaoping and his team called for political reform to free administrative posts from Party control. Their plan was not to change the political system but merely to modify its operation. Furthermore, as a concession to the people, Deng wanted to allow more than one Party-nominated candidate as well as a few acceptable non-Party independents to run in local elections.

Though these tame reform proposals fell far short of the people’s expectations, they were vigorously opposed by the dogmatists, who saw in Deng’s plan a threat to the supremacy of the Communist Party. At a Central Committee meeting in September 1986, Deng Xiaoping was forced to retreat from his position on political reform in order to be allowed to proceed with his economic policy. The only official document to emerge from the Central Committee meeting was one sponsored by the dogmatists calling for the establishment of “socialist spiritual civilization” to counter the influence of capitalism. Armed with this document, the dogmatists made further discussion of political reform taboo and banned a number of publications, as well as the work of certain professors and writers. As news of the fierce debate at the Central Committee meeting leaked out, there was talk of a new Anti-Rightist Campaign against the intellectuals, and even a rumor of an impending coup against Deng Xiaoping. Such, briefly, was the political situation in China immediately before the student demonstrations in thirteen major Chinese cities during December 1986.

Seventy percent of China’s population are young people under thirty-five years of age. The university students, numbering fewer than two million in a nation of one billion people, are the elite of the elite. While they have long been impatient with the rigid control of their lives by insensitive and arbitrary Party bureaucrats, the setback at the Central Committee meeting and the measures subsequently taken against their professors and other intellectuals were the immediate causes of their discontent. It was to express their anger and frustration that the students took to the streets demanding freedom and democracy.

Certainly the students’ demands went a lot further than the reforms envisaged by Deng Xiaoping. The demonstrations lasted four weeks, during which time the reformist leaders remained silent. The police acted with restraint, trying to prevent disturbances rather than punishing the students. The dogmatists, however, reacted shrilly, making accusations against “spies of the Kuomintang” and criticizing foreign broadcasting stations for inciting the students. Only after the students had returned to their campuses did the People’s Daily, the official organ of the Chinese Communist Party, come out with a lead article blaming the demonstrations on the influence of “bourgeois liberalism” and claiming that the Party’s ideological work had been inadequate. From this, one can expect a new, intensified political indoctrination program for university students. The young people will have to reaffirm their faith in the leadership of the Party and in Marxism. As for the professors and educators, some will be made scapegoats, others will have to engage in self-criticism. All will be silenced.

In China, intellectuals are not free and independent as they are in the West. They are state employees, like everybody else who has a job. Those occupying distinguished positions have sponsors in the Party leadership. It is entirely understandable that among Deng’s supporters in the Party leadership are men who believe a fundamental change in the political system essential to achieve modernization. It is also reasonable to assume that the well-educated middle-aged Party leaders, waiting so patiently for so long in the wings of the political arena, are getting restless.

In the fall of 1987, the Thirteenth Party Congress will be held to elect a new Central Committee and Politburo. From now on, the struggle between the reformists and the dogmatists will no doubt intensify. If younger leaders emerge to advocate more revolutionary changes in the political system than Deng Xiaoping is ready to accept, Deng may be forced to side with the dogmatists. However, Deng Xiaoping and the other main actors on China’s political stage are old men in their eighties and late seventies. In a few years, they will fade from the scene. The fate of China in the 1990s will be decided by a new generation of leaders who may or may not be able to sustain the authoritarian rule of the Communist Party and at the same time achieve economic progress.

Constant change is an integral part of the Communist philosophy. The Chinese Communist Party leaders expect the people to rush headlong into whatever experiment they wish to carry out, whether liberalization or collectivization. For the whole thirty-eight years of Communist rule, the Party’s policy has swung like a pendulum from left to right and back again without cease. Unless there is a change in the political system, China’s road to the future will always be full of twists and turns. There will be uncertainty and sacrifices. And there will be factional struggles for power. But Communist China today is different in one important aspect. She is no longer isolated and ostracized from civilized international society. World opinion and the China policy of major powers that are the source of foreign investment and trade, such as the United States, can and do influence the course of events in China. The abrupt crumbling of the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign in 1984 and the restraint displayed by the police towards the recent student demonstrators are instances proving that the Party leaders are conscious of China’s image in the eyes of the world and are anxious to project a good one. Those wishing for stability and moderation in China may have their voices heard.

Washington, D.C.
January 1987