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...

...You just don't sell them out...
...Sometimes you can't always tell...
...But, generally, he stressed, "There are three don'ts to bear in mind: don't listen, don't talk, and don't join...
...But we'd always turn them down...
...But here comes Little Peng straight off stage...
...However, he showed no timidity in speaking about himself...
...Let students have practical work in the field and all that....The truth was we students hated school...
...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...
...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...
...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 slept on piles of straw...
...He was too small...
...My gratitude to this person was overwhelming...
...According to Richard Cheney, Gerald Ford's chief of staff, this procedure cannot work: "Somebody has to be in charge...
...His parents, highly paid cadre members, were well able to support him...
...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...
...What's to be gained by it, you may ask...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...They flicked their cigarette butts at us...
...When a girl's in trouble, she goes to the gang for protection or revenge...
...Have we not also in the West wrongly confused social conditions with ultimate causes...
...Rule No...
...The first kind, at most, you invite home for a bite to eat or you give a cigarette to...
...He answered his own question through illustration...
...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...
...All seemingly true...
...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...
...He never followed the great Red Pied Piper in exultation, only to reach the barren fields or despair...
...If you're a monk, you've got to toll the bells.' If we wanted to go to school, we went...
...Let me help you with it....A friend like that you never can make in a short time...
...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...
...They're already censored [in China], but what little is left is enough to drive the audience wild...
...With Red Guard cadres you can settle accounts right inside school...
...Let me tell you, it's a real organization...
...He was still in culture shock, the result of a miraculously sudden East-West transition...
...However, when a famous man shows up and the waiter says, please pay, the famous man says, 'I don't have any money...
...he continued, excitedly...
...The food was even worse...
...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...
...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 him get me a good job and then I'll be his good student...
...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...
...his passion for privacy, and his suspicion that the bureaucrats were trying to do him in, as in fact many were...
...On the one hand, stunned by western material abundance, he felt that he had flown "from earth to heaven...
...There was, in fact, nothing negative or "preventive" about this rule...
...At the most such criminals get no more than three months," Little Peng pointed out in another context...
...Good friends are like brothers," he summed up...
...Even girls joined—all without jobs...
...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...
...Sometimes the girl will join in an open robbery...
...We are about to draw a false conclusion: Little Peng had no political idols...
...Little Peng lasted one week on the state farm to which he was sent after completing nine years of schooling...
...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...
...Because family was still our first concern...
...It was a desperate battle...
...Little Peng thus kept a healthy distance from politics...
...2. He was not willing to follow orders, without thought of consequences for his family...
...But once they get power on their own, they're quick to dump you...
...They seek expression through such fighting...
...We may observe him and listen to his story...
...It was, and remains, a valid conception...
...And, "if they behave well when caught, they're just ordered to write a letter of self-examination...
...Carter is his own chief of staff...
...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...
...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...
...If it's discovered that a fellow has blabbed, he'll get 'fixed'....I mean bloodletting—two or three stabs...
...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...
...But outside, rely on friends...
...Then the losers would have to give us gifts...
...If we were bored, we put our feet up on the desk...
...said Little Peng...
...You take the initiative to say—you have this problem...
...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...
...I never was a Red Guard and I wouldn't want to be one...
...The idea is to stay in the middle—don't behave too well or too poorly...
...11, NO...
...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...
...It so happened two others of our gangwere nearby and came to our aid...
...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...
...Even during class he'd show me...
...With League members outside...
...Little Peng did not belong to a "real gang," partly because of Rule No...
...They told us it was the best they had...
...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...
...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...
...2—absolute obedience...
...We now leave Valhalla for the People's Republic...
...As a system the presidency, or the government, has become an all-powerful institution...
...was a plaster Buddha, from behind which peered a baffling and inept old man...
...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...
...Little Peng and his friends were told this once by a famous fighter who was now much older and openly regretted his fighting days...
...After hightailing it back home, he did not have to worry, like many others, about his rice bowl...
...1 for joining a gang is a sealed mouth...
...A paradox...
...He had definite ideas on the subject: "There are two kinds of friends—casual friends and friends of the heart...
...You know, they're given everything by the gang...in short, food and clothes...
...Suppose a group of us good friends are talking together and this Red Guard shows up and wants to join in...
...he said...
...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...
...One movie I saw was called The Bridge—it was an antifascist film...
...The basic "rule" of Little Peng's gang was: "Never put up with mistreatment," or translated into Americanese: "Never take anything from anybody...
...But for a friend of the heart, you go out of the way to help solve his problems...
...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...
...School was "open the door and have your school outside...
...And we wouldn't want to be classed with any of them...
...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...
...One of us got a sprained wrist...
...This is as true of Jimmy Carter as it was of his predecessors...
...Yugoslavian love stories are really vivid," Little Peng explained...
...Fame for what...
...And we invite you to join.' As for that, we made a point of never joining...
...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...
...This is not to say that the image of the imperial presidency is wrong, or that what gave rise to it has disappeared...
...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...
...You may not feel anything when you're sixteen to nineteen," he told them, "maybe even through the age of twenty-three...
...Prearranged fights always involved the use of deadly weapons, because (as Little Peng put it) "fists alone are not enough for venting your hatred...
...But the "famous man" had earned the right to a respectful audience...
...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...
...When you're told to read your piece, you read it—just enough, not too much, to show you have a correct attitude...
...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...
...The idea is to show your spirit —to show you'll never stand for mistreatment...
...Without an orderly structure, there's no accountability, no orderly flow...
...Don't admit anything...
...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...
...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...
...It got so fierce that onlookers called the police—but we scattered before they came....If they made an investigation, it led nowhere...
...We were impressed by their invasions of other countries," he explained, "...and how they commanded their armies...
...The true purpose of the gang was the excitement of war on Monotony Street...
...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...
...The two of us got into a terrific fight with them...
...Trying to deal with differentiation led to the basic problems of the Nixon presidency...
...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...
...Then, wham—another fist back...
...As for Hitler and Tojo, it did not matter that they had been included among "World War II criminals" described in history class...
...Sometimes they'd even express admiration and ask us to join their gang...
...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...
...But—we stir uneasily—are we merely seeing the peculiarly Chinese decor of a universal play...
...Most assume that because they are smart they will know how to control...
...We'd fight back...
...We said, 'What did you do that for?' They said, 'We did it because we think you're great stuff...
...We are in for a surprise...
...1.4 et me tell you what interests young people," he said...
...The real gangs would do anything...
...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...
...Some fighters actually battle their way from one province to another!...They're desperadoes," he explained, "they don't fear death...
...Presidents coming into office, including Jimmy Carter, have not usually appreciated this...
...Rule No...
...Schooling or not, you're sent to the countryside anyway...
...We used everything we could lay our hands on—sticks, rocks, knives...
...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 shall call him pseudonymously, in the Chinese manner—"Little Peng...
...Serious injuries and even death might follow...
...Fighting was taking place all the time around there...
...No glass in the windows, no ceiling, just a leaky roof...
...Our saying is," he said, "At home, rely on parents...
...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...
...After a while they realize that this is impossible...
...I'll bet the audience will rush up front and try to climb up the screen...
...He was "disciplined and demanding, but just...
...One day of school meant one day of fooling around...
...However, "when it comes to bigger campaigns...then it's unavoidable—so, when you're told to write a piece, you write it...
...He taught me to fight even then—and he really knew how...
...for the fact was that he had been man-about-town in China, cocksure about assessing any local situation and handling himself appropriately...
...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...
...Of course, all these movies have a little love story in them...
...So, wham—out comes a fist...
...And we'd fight until we won...
...What did this flatly cross-ideological assortment of heroes have in common...
...I don't know about other provinces," he said, "but young people in our province [read: himself and friends] genuinely worshipped Stalin and Lenin...
...Wine-and-meat [fair-weather] friends are quick to see your power and advantages and they lean on you...
...Little Peng's voice became a whisper.] Whores...
...The instinctive generalization of a Little Peng may be more valid in the long run than the ideological hairsplitting of academe...
...For example, the blitzkrieg tactic...
...Sometimes real gangs would come over and say, 'We've got a plan...
...But his real life, as it always had been, was on the street...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR VOL...
...You always run the risk of being blind-sided...
...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...
...Loss of face for the family was clearly a greater deterrent to outright petty crime than fear of punishment...
...The old become practical when the fun's over...
...But we'd calculate carefully what to do, what we shouldn't do, and what we were incapable of doing...
...And for a drink of water, we had to shoulder a pail and walk a whole kilometer to a well...
...Parents were always warning their kids not even to go near one....The authorities are so stupid...
...This article is drawn from Dialogues on American Politics by Irving Louis Horowitz and Seymour Martin Lipset, forthcoming from Oxford University Press...
...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...
...If you fail, you get beaten up or there'll be some more bloodletting....Let me tell you...
...His friends still are...
...As for class branch secretaries [of the League], you have to do this [beat them up] secretly, lest you get a demerit or warning...
...We admired these...
...It got started during the 'Criticize Lin Piao and Confucius Movement [of 1974' " he explained...
...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...
...Lenin (depicted in a Soviet film), while not exactly military in bearing, had an "air of great political authority...
...The bonding force of Little Peng's gang was friendship...
...A great fight can get started like this...
...Sometimes, internal injuries were incurred which remained "undetected" until years later...
...Such rotten housing...
...I regarded his courage and generosity as a very rare thing...
...He was giving advice—the sort that Little Peng and his friends would never have tolerated from their parents or anybody else...
...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...
...You went to the movies at the risk of your life," Little Peng said...
...They're stifled...
...And Hitler and Japanese General Tojothe kamikaze spirit...
...The customer orders, pays for the dishes [in advance] and then he's served...
...The American Spectator June/ July 1978 7...
...He spoke from personal knowledge...
...When the police nab you, not a word must leak out...
...Now he was as raw and bewildered as a country bumpkin—the very sort of person he had mocked back home...
...And, best of all, they "get to be famous...
...To Little Peng the Red Guard mass movement of 1966 is the dead past...
...It made sense," Little Peng accorded, but he was plainly unmoved...
...A few "combat teams" in Fukien Province, for example, had sported the lightning symbol for blitzkrieg on their armbands...
...We fought so hard that one of them got a bloodied head-and another had his foot hurt so badly he couldn't walk...
...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...
...We'd all clam up...
...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...
...On the other, he had wholly lost his nerve...
...One of them had been a -best friend since primary school days...
...He made no bones about his "extreme disrespect" for teachers —an attitude conveniently encouraged by the anti-intellectual campaigns of the time...
...Confucius had stood for respecting teachers—so we didn't want that...
...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...
...He not only brings the order, hut something else besides...

Vol. 11 • June 1978 • No. 8


 
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