The Gang of Fourteen: Street Life in China
Miriam & London, Ivan D.
"The Gang of Fourteen: Street Life in China" Miriam & Ivan D. London A young street tough from a city deep in the Chinese interior—which we...
...Trying to deal with differentiation led to the basic problems of the Nixon presidency...
...They seek expression through such fighting...
...You went to the movies at the risk of your life," Little Peng said...
...And we'd fight until we won...
...11, NO...
...Let me tell you, it's a real organization...
...Well, Stalin [seen in a Soviet film, shown for "educational purposes"]—we were just bowled over by his military style, his awesome presence...and especially when we compared Stalin, the military commander, with our own military chiefs—all so shabby-looking, without even shoulder boards or insignia for rank...
...Then, wham—another fist back...
...Even during class he'd show me...
...Little Peng would himself have been surprised to learn that a decade ago the fanatic Mao-worshipping Red Guards—now a musty bore to him—also included here and there admirers of Hitler...
...Let students have practical work in the field and all that....The truth was we students hated school...
...One gang member goes up to another and says, 'Have you got a ticket?' The other says, `No.' The first one says, 'Let me search.' The other refuses...
...This article is drawn from Dialogues on American Politics by Irving Louis Horowitz and Seymour Martin Lipset, forthcoming from Oxford University Press...
...China would have been much better off, Little Peng thinks, "if Mao had died long before Chou En-lai," who, as it was, could do little more than "mend" the old bungler's mistakes...
...But, generally, he stressed, "There are three don'ts to bear in mind: don't listen, don't talk, and don't join...
...The two of us got into a terrific fight with them...
...What's to be gained by it, you may ask...
...But independent of personality, to control a large and differentiated government means that the president has to be isolated from many people who have good reason to see him...
...If we didn't think so, we'd stick the butts right into your mouths.' This was, of course, a matter of human self-respect...
...for the fact was that he had been man-about-town in China, cocksure about assessing any local situation and handling himself appropriately...
...Little Peng did not belong to a "real gang," partly because of Rule No...
...Of course, all these movies have a little love story in them...
...On the other, he had wholly lost his nerve...
...When the police nab you, not a word must leak out...
...And we invite you to join.' As for that, we made a point of never joining...
...8 / JUNE/JULY 1978 Miriam & Ivan D. London The Gang of Fourteen: Street Life in China .A young street tough from a city deep in the Chinese interior—which we must forbear naming—recently came to tea and talk with us...
...1.4 et me tell you what interests young people," he said...
...There was, in fact, nothing negative or "preventive" about this rule...
...The true purpose of the gang was the excitement of war on Monotony Street...
...They flicked their cigarette butts at us...
...Then the losers would have to give us gifts...
...And he'll say to the famous man, 'Would you like to try our specialties?' " These famous fighters "start out, of course, in school," Little Peng said...
...We are about to draw a false conclusion: Little Peng had no political idols...
...If they increased the number of showing times, there'd be much less trouble....The theater was small and the number of tickets was limited...
...Their faces," he said, "don't always match their hearts, for the simple reason that the fear is always there—the fear The American Spectator June/ July 1978 5 of drawing criticism and misfortune on themselves...
...If we were bored, we put our feet up on the desk...
...Yugoslavian love stories are really vivid," Little Peng explained...
...School was "open the door and have your school outside...
...Little Peng himself was once involved in a fight when he went with a friend to see a movie: "There were four of them there [in front of the theater] standing around smoking...
...The idea is to show your spirit —to show you'll never stand for mistreatment...
...He was too small...
...I'll bet the audience will rush up front and try to climb up the screen...
...He answered his own question through illustration...
...If it's discovered that a fellow has blabbed, he'll get 'fixed'....I mean bloodletting—two or three stabs...
...He not only brings the order, hut something else besides...
...But when you're twenty-five or even later, you feel the symptoms....I could have used my fighting days to learn a skill or a trade—to learn something," he added...
...Don't admit anything...
...And then there were some movies with exciting trapeze artists....I guess if a western [European or American] movie got there, it wouldn't even have to have a nude scene to make people even wilder...
...Carter is his own chief of staff...
...Little Peng and his friends were told this once by a famous fighter who was now much older and openly regretted his fighting days...
...But we'd always turn them down...
...The customer orders, pays for the dishes [in advance] and then he's served...
...Sometimes, internal injuries were incurred which remained "undetected" until years later...
...And we wouldn't want to be classed with any of them...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR VOL...
...Let him get me a good job and then I'll be his good student...
...Then," he said, "they get out into society and form organizations and gangs....A small gang may have ten members—a bigger gang twenty to thirty...
...One of us got a sprained wrist...
...But—we stir uneasily—are we merely seeing the peculiarly Chinese decor of a universal play...
...We shall call him pseudonymously, in the Chinese manner—"Little Peng...
...With League members outside...
...After a while they realize that this is impossible...
...When you're told to read your piece, you read it—just enough, not too much, to show you have a correct attitude...
...According to Richard Cheney, Gerald Ford's chief of staff, this procedure cannot work: "Somebody has to be in charge...
...Loss of face for the family was clearly a greater deterrent to outright petty crime than fear of punishment...
...It so happened two others of our gangwere nearby and came to our aid...
...A great fight can get started like this...
...he said...
...The instinctive generalization of a Little Peng may be more valid in the long run than the ideological hairsplitting of academe...
...You know, they're given everything by the gang...in short, food and clothes...
...Without an orderly structure, there's no accountability, no orderly flow...
...But outside, rely on friends...
...You just don't sell them out...
...On the one hand, stunned by western material abundance, he felt that he had flown "from earth to heaven...
...He contrasted this leniency with the severe penalty for political crime: "The slightest hint of a political deviation is enough to give you two years...
...We were impressed by their invasions of other countries," he explained, "...and how they commanded their armies...
...However, he showed no timidity in speaking about himself...
...As this article goes to press, the President is trying to get authorization from Congress to increase sizeably the number of highly-paid senior assistants in the White House...
...We said, 'What did you do that for?' They said, 'We did it because we think you're great stuff...
...The American Spectator June/ July 1978 7...
...James Howe, Jr., an adviser to Roosevelt and other Democratic presidents, agrees: "Carter's doing an • According to Don Bonafede, writing in the March 4, 1978 National Journal, the Executive Office of the President has grown "since the beginning of the Carter administration...
...When a girl's in trouble, she goes to the gang for protection or revenge...
...Members of different gangs were attracted there by films from Albania, Rumania, and Yugoslavia, shown for the first time since the fall of the "Gang of Four" and the easing of the ban on foreign films...
...I don't know about other provinces," he said, "but young people in our province [read: himself and friends] genuinely worshipped Stalin and Lenin...
...And if he still showed no sign of leaving, we'd say, 'Beat it, before you get poisoned.' " Little Peng did not even credit the idealism of these ranking activists...
...A paradox...
...At the most such criminals get no more than three months," Little Peng pointed out in another context...
...He spoke from personal knowledge...
...Schooling or not, you're sent to the countryside anyway...
...It was rather a challenge and a provocation, for, as Little Peng confessed about young people like him back home, "they long for an incident...
...was a plaster Buddha, from behind which peered a baffling and inept old man...
...His parents, highly paid cadre members, were well able to support him...
...We are in for a surprise...
...1=1 Seymour Martin Lipset Presidential Greatness in the Age of Carter There has been a tide of concern in recent years over the "imperial presidency," yet in fact it is the weakness of the American presidency today that is indisputable...
...If you're a monk, you've got to toll the bells.' If we wanted to go to school, we went...
...But the "famous man" had earned the right to a respectful audience...
...Little Peng had equal contempt for the ideologically "positive" student elite, members of the Red Guards—a toothless classroom organization in the seventies—and the higher-ranking Communist Youth League...
...Confucius had stood for respecting teachers—so we didn't want that...
...This is not to say that the image of the imperial presidency is wrong, or that what gave rise to it has disappeared...
...Sometimes the girl will join in an open robbery...
...All seemingly true...
...My gratitude to this person was overwhelming...
...Obedience means when you're ordered to find a certain person and bring him to a certain place—for a fight or any other reason—you've got to do it and know how to...
...You always run the risk of being blind-sided...
...They told us it was the best they had...
...However, "when it comes to bigger campaigns...then it's unavoidable—so, when you're told to write a piece, you write it...
...said Little Peng...
...And, best of all, they "get to be famous...
...You take the initiative to say—you have this problem...
...Sometimes you can't always tell...
...With Red Guard cadres you can settle accounts right inside school...
...Fame for what...
...We fought so hard that one of them got a bloodied head-and another had his foot hurt so badly he couldn't walk...
...However, when a famous man shows up and the waiter says, please pay, the famous man says, 'I don't have any money...
...Little Peng lasted one week on the state farm to which he was sent after completing nine years of schooling...
...It got so fierce that onlookers called the police—but we scattered before they came....If they made an investigation, it led nowhere...
...he continued, excitedly...
...Lenin (depicted in a Soviet film), while not exactly military in bearing, had an "air of great political authority...
...As for class branch secretaries [of the League], you have to do this [beat them up] secretly, lest you get a demerit or warning...
...The authorities periodically conduct raids to clear the streets of accumulated "rusticated youth," along with peasant beggars and other illegals—in Shanghai this is called "blowing up the red typhoon"—but the whole company drifts back again in calmer "weather...
...Most assume that because they are smart they will know how to control...
...We'd all clam up...
...If you fail, you get beaten up or there'll be some more bloodletting....Let me tell you...
...Parents were always warning their kids not even to go near one....The authorities are so stupid...
...We'd fight back...
...Such rotten housing...
...Suppose my friend and I are walking down the street," he said, "just the two of us, and we run into four of 'them' who make some lousy remarks or jostle us or throw stones and pebbles at us...
...The bonding force of Little Peng's gang was friendship...
...Their dilemma was unenviable: If they toned down criticism of their classmates' ideological failings, they would "suffer pressure from the 'above' "; if they showed proper zeal in personal attack, they faced the inimitable "revenge" of victims like Little Peng and friends...
...Wine-and-meat [fair-weather] friends are quick to see your power and advantages and they lean on you...
...If a teacher got nasty about imposing discipline, Little Peng and his friends would retaliate by stealing his school supplies or (more fancifully): "We'd shape up a piece of s--t, attach the teacher's name tag to it, and put it in the drawer of his podium....That was only 'light revenge.' 'Heavy revenge' was to go to the teacher's house at night and batter it with rocks, breaking windows and all that...
...And for a drink of water, we had to shoulder a pail and walk a whole kilometer to a well...
...You may not feel anything when you're sixteen to nineteen," he told them, "maybe even through the age of twenty-three...
...Little Peng thus kept a healthy distance from politics...
...But once they get power on their own, they're quick to dump you...
...Our saying is," he said, "At home, rely on parents...
...But here comes Little Peng straight off stage...
...It made sense," Little Peng accorded, but he was plainly unmoved...
...The old become practical when the fun's over...
...Sometimes they'd even express admiration and ask us to join their gang...
...This is as true of Jimmy Carter as it was of his predecessors...
...A few "combat teams" in Fukien Province, for example, had sported the lightning symbol for blitzkrieg on their armbands...
...One of them had been a -best friend since primary school days...
...2. He was not willing to follow orders, without thought of consequences for his family...
...One day of school meant one day of fooling around...
...Take a restaurant: "The usual practice in restaurants is this: A waiter shows up with a note pad and asks the customer what dishes he wants to order...
...I never was a Red Guard and I wouldn't want to be one...
...His friends still are...
...It was a desperate battle...
...Serious injuries and even death might follow...
...But we'd calculate carefully what to do, what we shouldn't do, and what we were incapable of doing...
...By the time he became adolescent in the seventies, Mao to him Miriam London is a research assistant in Soviet and Chinese studies and Ivan D. London is professor of psychology at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York...
...If fate had not whisked him suddenly and finally out of the Chinese context, he would even now be walking cocksure down some street looking for trouble...
...For example, the blitzkrieg tactic...
...Sometimes real gangs would come over and say, 'We've got a plan...
...Rule No...
...The basic "rule" of Little Peng's gang was: "Never put up with mistreatment," or translated into Americanese: "Never take anything from anybody...
...He never followed the great Red Pied Piper in exultation, only to reach the barren fields or despair...
...Fighting was taking place all the time around there...
...As FDR noted about a much smaller presidency in 1939: "It has become physically impossible for one man to see so many persons, to receive reports directly from them and to attempt to advise them on their own problems...
...Those Red Guards and League members are an eyesore to the rest of us...because they're automatically agents and spies....They turn in regular reports to the 'above' and give us a pain...
...He made no bones about his "extreme disrespect" for teachers —an attitude conveniently encouraged by the anti-intellectual campaigns of the time...
...The authorities," scoffed Little Peng, "have absolutely no control.'' ' It was through such fights, some accidental and others prearranged, that "great fighters" rose to fame—those "who fought under any conditions—even four people at a time—and who didn't bother with second-rate fighters...
...He had definite ideas on the subject: "There are two kinds of friends—casual friends and friends of the heart...
...He was giving advice—the sort that Little Peng and his friends would never have tolerated from their parents or anybody else...
...Little Peng's voice became a whisper.] Whores...
...The gangs, they say, also attract floating outcast youth—some of the millions of urban middle-school graduates assigned annually to permanent labor in the countryside, who sneak back into the cities, where they no longer have legal right to residence or employment...
...2—absolute obedience...
...But his real life, as it always had been, was on the street...
...So, wham—out comes a fist...
...And Hitler and Japanese General Tojothe kamikaze spirit...
...The food was even worse...
...No glass in the windows, no ceiling, just a leaky roof...
...The number of people working directly for the White House has steadily grown—even though every recent president has promised to cut down the size of the executive branch...
...The idea is to stay in the middle—don't behave too well or too poorly...
...Little Peng found no model for emulation at school, or whatever passed for school during most of this strange decade in China, when—to cite a recent confession of the Peking Review—the reigning "Gang of Four" "retarded the development of a whole generation of young people...
...What did this flatly cross-ideological assortment of heroes have in common...
...Let me help you with it....A friend like that you never can make in a short time...
...Eh!' says the waiter, 'how can you eat without money?!' Then the famous man just says, 'I'm Three Daggers.' Well, that's enough to scare the waiter out of his wits...
...The first kind, at most, you invite home for a bite to eat or you give a cigarette to...
...As a system the presidency, or the government, has become an all-powerful institution...
...His first true friend was a junior middle-school classmate who came unasked to his aid, when he was being trounced by two boys in a fight...
...But the main consequence of bigness is differentiation, and that means that the chief executive, as an individual, loses much of his ability to control the government...
...To Little Peng the Red Guard mass movement of 1966 is the dead past...
...But for a friend of the heart, you go out of the way to help solve his problems...
...It was, and remains, a valid conception...
...They'll do anything, including the 'five poisons' [he went on to name more than five]—stealing, gambling, fighting, whoring, gangsterism, kidnapping, swindling, blackmailing, etc...
...We used everything we could lay our hands on—sticks, rocks, knives...
...Not if we rub the present from our eyes for a moment to see the triumphant ghost of Genghis Khan galloping toward us across the dusty centuries...
...1 for joining a gang is a sealed mouth...
...Good friends are like brothers," he summed up...
...After hightailing it back home, he did not have to worry, like many others, about his rice bowl...
...He taught me to fight even then—and he really knew how...
...We now leave Valhalla for the People's Republic...
...As for Hitler and Tojo, it did not matter that they had been included among "World War II criminals" described in history class...
...If some gang mistreated us or even one of us—say a gang of ten members—we could easily organize a group of around ten on the spot with old grievances against this gang...
...Prearranged fights always involved the use of deadly weapons, because (as Little Peng put it) "fists alone are not enough for venting your hatred...
...They're already censored [in China], but what little is left is enough to drive the audience wild...
...I regarded his courage and generosity as a very rare thing...
...We slept on piles of straw...
...And, "if they behave well when caught, they're just ordered to write a letter of self-examination...
...The real gangs would do anything...
...Even girls joined—all without jobs...
...We admired these...
...Given these developments, it is curious that Jimmy Carter, alone among modern presidents, has tried to operate without a chief of staff—someone with authority to control the flow of information and to influence his personal agenda...
...One movie I saw was called The Bridge—it was an antifascist film...
...My good friends all shared this view, because a Red Guard may end up with a good factory job, but socially he's on poor ground...
...When Little Peng and friends "had great fun" playing tricks on peasant peddlers on the streets and stealing their wares, the peasants would sometimes wail, "How can you good students of Chairman Mao behave this way ? ! " A common retort was: "Chairman Mao's good student...
...They're stifled...
...Because family was still our first concern...
...Suppose a group of us good friends are talking together and this Red Guard shows up and wants to join in...
...He was "disciplined and demanding, but just...
...Carter's White House is organized, not in hierarchical fashion, but rather like "the spokes of a wheel," with different aides having equal rights of access...
...We may observe him and listen to his story...
...his passion for privacy, and his suspicion that the bureaucrats were trying to do him in, as in fact many were...
...Chinese recently from Canton and Shanghai often blame the proliferation of such gangs, along with a general increase in urban crime, on the demoralization of Party and school authority since 1966, the beginning of the cultural revolutionary "epoch...
...Now he was as raw and bewildered as a country bumpkin—the very sort of person he had mocked back home...
...Presidents coming into office, including Jimmy Carter, have not usually appreciated this...
...It got started during the 'Criticize Lin Piao and Confucius Movement [of 1974' " he explained...
...In our province, there are young people who worship fighting and fighters...
...Street gangs, both criminal and of the "West Side Story" kind—Little Peng belonged to the latter—seem to thrive out of control in many cities of China, much as they do elsewhere in the world...
...Have we not also in the West wrongly confused social conditions with ultimate causes...
...Some fighters actually battle their way from one province to another!...They're desperadoes," he explained, "they don't fear death...
...He was still in culture shock, the result of a miraculously sudden East-West transition...
...To a considerable degree, of course, the isolation of the Oval Office was a function of Nixon's personality, Seymour Martin Lipset is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and professor of sociology and political science at Stanford University...
...6 The American Spectator June/July 1978 Abattle could be sparked anywhere, but beginning last year (1977) a major trouble site in Little Peng's hometown was the movie theater...
...Rule No...
Vol. 11 • June 1978 • No. 8
