China: The Generation in the Wings
Lee, Miriam London, Ta-ling & London, Ivan D.
"China: The Generation in the Wings" Since they wish to avoid the hostility of other countries, our leaders have elevated stasis to the level of master strategy. They are opposed to ideological warfare because it generates...
...That's why young people today fear nothing...
...24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1980 Are there indeed many people like Miss Liang in China...
...Western" meant anything foreign . . . . Students are comparatively blind and also impulsive...
...I'm not worried about being arrested...
...Whatever he said we did...
...Early in September a new radio station began transmitting to the Middle East...
...22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1980 Indeed, this next phase o f the Cultural Revolution, directed against the Party itself (and its elite progeny), was profoundly to affect Miss Li, Ying Tzu' s mirthlessly laughing interviewee in Peking...
...In my opinion, one must fight against and strike down any system counter to our [human] nature...
...They went because they wanted to interview different families [in the countryside...
...Ken Ling, a former Red Guard leader, whose odyssey through the Cultural Revolution we once helped to recreate,* called the summer sweep of the schools " t h e first b a t t l e g r o u n d . " The Master in Peking was "tempering" his " l i t t l e g e n e r a l s , " preparing them for the g r e a t e r , almost unthinkable task of leveling the Party and government apparatus...
...o1,( ~ pcasai.A denly dawned ,.,:~ Mr...
...But people like me [ordinarily] wouldn't come to Hong Kong...
...At the same time he singled out the one psychological characteristic of the group that may tip some fateful scale in the future...
...But history will record the joke, along with the tragedy...
...At the university they'd been told about the good side of everything, but they wanted to test whether Marxist economic theory was applicable in China--whether the government was right or the peasants were right...
...In the last 30 years two Chinas have coexisted--not Mao's mainland and Chiang's island--but a magnificen t abstraction created in the universities of the West and a massive land creating its own divergent reality in the East...
...They came from villages where...there had been disasters, no harvest, and so nothing to eat...
...Ying Tzu evokes this period only once more in his article, when describing a generation younger than Miss Li' s - - t h o s e who were ten years old or more at the time and whose " o n l y memory of the early days of the Cultural Revolution was t h a t it was ' f u n ' . . . . T h e y remember whipping t h e i r teachers and stoning the 'black g a n g ' [as " r e a c t i o n a r y " intellectuals were then called] . . . . " Ying Tzu has said enough,for his r e a d e r s inside China...
...He wanted to start this revolution...
...Since 1966, besides, there have been three Cultural Revolutions...
...It's the social system that prevents him from being good...
...So t h e United States, which gave the world the modern radio, virtually invented mass media, and has more broadcasting talent by far than any other country, has opted out of the ideological struggle...
...Mao's chosen successor was suddenly a dead traitor...
...Truth," he replied, "is objective fact, never to be twisted at human will...
...This is not the textual parroting of a naive schoolboy...
...Interestingly, this category is sometimes called the "Europeanized youth," as the responsible editor of the official periodical Chinese Youth revealed in 1978 in Peking during an interview for Tung Hsiang...
...Is anyone in the West taking note...
...According to Ying Tzu, the category of youth who exhibit such a "change in national character," by their "passion, courage, and spirit of dedication to truth," may be smaller numerically than other discernible types of youth today, but as "active organizers" in the cause of democracy "they are bound to play an important role on the Chinese political stage in the future...
...Ten years later, four of the young men were d e a d - - one by suicide, three by execution--and Miss Liang was in Hong Kong, recalling their story...
...They have little more to lose...
...Mao Tsetung said, "Destroy the Four Olds...
...However, we were able to find enough pretexts for going on our travels...
...Behind the tumult of relentless political campaigns, the truth was_that the peasantry continued to slave for survival as before and increasing numbers of urban Chinese became parasitically idle, with time to think and, even more interestingly, time to read...
...We traveled through the larger part of China...
...The government had told us there were no more beggars in China and that everyone was equal--but I found so many, many of them...
...And sweep them away we did...
...Chou, Miss Liang, and friends, and derives with simple obviousness from events as they happened, stripped of the verbal mystification of Peking propagandist and foreign theorist alike...
...I myself in Canton once--when I was guarding the school gates, as students were often required to do--one night I saw three Red Guards drag in three bad elements from society, two women and a man, and struggle [tou cheng] them...
...That was my first awakening...
...So, we made revolution everywhere from school to society . . . . People called [this movement] the "red terror...
...As I began to understand these concepts better, I felt deeply that our country needed reform...
...As Chairman Mao said, 'Making revolution is not like going to a dinner party . . . . ' " She herself started to laugh . . . . So much for the f i r s t summer of the Cultural Revolution...
...Did you beat up people...
...Once you suffer a loss, you grow wiser," a former Red Guard firebrand said, quoting the proverb one day in 1973 in Hong Kong...
...I haven't found the answer, but I've learned a lot...
...1968, he " h a d an k{7!{ic {amasy about comer~me IKc and naive!y believed everything printed in the newspapers...
...He was alluding precisely to " t h e shocking personal experience" that had broken for many of his comrades the cultural revolutionary "dream...
...That blow marked a turning point in my thinking...
...Yes...
...In his time and for his own power, Mao did not hesitate to use and discard an entire generation of student youth...
...At first they supported us and instigated us to rebel...
...The farther down we went in the social strata, the more we saw the dark side of the political system...
...All those teachers, principals, branch Party headquarters, the Youth League--in other words, all those bad elements in positions of leadership or in teaching posts were put into the "cowpen...
...They shouted and danced...
...Chou had sung a propaganda song in praise of the Three Red Flags...
...While they interviewed peasants, I would sit there and memorize.everything...
...Ken Ling, The Revenge of Heaven: Journal of a Young Chinese...
...Also, there were many, many beggars...
...If we use a certain ideology to attack another ideology, we'll ultimately be in bondage to the new ideology...
...we asked...
...So the students depended on me to remember details from the interviews...
...Their number is still very "substantial," the editor noted...
...I couldn't answer my own question...
...As I think back, these books may have been my fir.st exposure to Western democratic thought, for they widened my vistas, introducing me to ideas like rationality, human rights, and democracy...
...Suddenly, they discovered she was already dead...
...Any system or "ism" that prevents people from doing this is bound to cause discontent...
...After a few moments of silence, she began: "A profound change in a person's thinking is often the result of a shocking personal experience...
...Chou reached the end of his illusions with the crash of Lin Piao's Trident jet in Inner Mongolia...
...Chen, an intelligent young man and former Red Guard, responded to a question during an interview for a TV documentary--an interview that was l a t e r excised: At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution Mao Tse-tung said we must sweep away all "cow-ghosts and snake-demons...
...Wei Ching-sheng wrote in his famous essay, "The Fifth Modernization: Democracy...
...She replied: This blow smashed my old idols, but failed to establish any new faith in my mind...
...Calling itself the "Voice of the Egyptian People," it stridently attacked Sadat for his "treasonous" cooperation with Israel and his support for Morocco's King Hassan in the war against the Algerian-backed Polisario Front in the Sahara...
...When the Cultural Revolution started, they were 12-13 years of age...
...All these year s I've been reading and thinking...
...His " f i r s t lesson" in the village was that "everything in that song was a big lie...
...The books came from private homes, from public libraries ransacked in 1966 by the Red Guards--who confiscated many volumes for personal use--and, most notably, through the "back door," from exclusive bookshops accessible only to high-ranking cadres and a few privileged persons with special permits...
...Last of all, it might be bad for SALT...
...She was also footloose, her parents having been arrested and confined in a "Mao thought study class...
...How is one to explain this change...
...At that time they absolutely obeyed Mao's every word...
...We simply should not let the situation continue...
...How did yottr thinking change later on...
...They are opposed to ideological warfare because it generates resentment...
...If you don't beat them to death, one day they'll take similar action against you...
...It would not only enrage the Russians, but various Third World countries would also protest...
...There's.no room for the least bit of refinement...
...So, I concluded human beings should have the right to do as they please...
...Man should have a right to choose his own way of living, according to his own views...
...marxist liberari(:m J~J ~.J...
...My deepest impression was--the peasants were very hungry...
...Things weren't all that simple," she replied, and went on to explain: If I were in power, I asked myself, what kind of system would I adopt...
...At that time it was so common as to be routine...
...As for Miss Liang and friends, it may be more accurately said that they continued to read and over a wider range than ever before...
...The journey of seven young men and a little girl lasted more than a year and c r o s s e d s i x provinces...
...She sank into deep thought, the lines on her "face twitching slightly...
...Because the story of Chinese youth since the Cultural Revolution is more than an episode in peculiarly Chinese history, just as Lord of the Flies is more than a tale of schoolboy adventure on a remote island...
...Each person has his own worldview and his own personality...
...Because I felt the school Party committee was following the revisionist educational line," she replied with a touch of self-derision...
...What was the purpose of this strange journey...
...Revolution has to be like this--all blood and thunder...
...However, at the time, we were right inside the situation and didn't feel that it was terror...
...Nor is its sponsor...
...I read Das Kapital, [Rousseau's] Social Contract, I read Keynes and works on existentialism...
...My question plunged her into the past...
...By the time I'd returned to Peking, I was dead set against the government...
...the mostly "nice" young dupes, who are "dumb and slow" and must still painfully, be weaned from the "fake theories of the Gang of Four...
...Our reform must start from this realistic basis...
...There are many young people like me in China," Miss Liang stressed in 1977...
...They couldn't marry and tragedy ensued...
...It is the third, divergent revolution that Ying Tzu calls a catalytic "agent o f awakening" for Chinese youth and that, in the words of another writer, Mu Huo, in Cheng Mi'ng, produced "irreversible" change with a potentially "greater impact on the future course of the nation, in the long run, than any political or economic change...
...Actually, they halfbegged, half-robbed...
...They have especially affected two generations of Chinese youth...
...New York: Putnam's, 1972...
...When this happens, those who aren't afraid will launch a revolution...
...Current lingo in China for undergoing such a shock was " t o learn a l e s s o n " - - a phrase without moral content, meaning only to sustain the blow that ended the fanatic trance and began a painful, comfortless return to reason...
...Just at this moment, some university students came up and told them, "Don't be so upset, it's no serious matter to beat a counterrevolutionary to death...
...Even when they reopened, they were no longer institutions of 20th-century learning, but Mao-type finishing schools...
...If you didn't beat people, that meant you didn't have class hatred for the class enemy, that you were being [traditionally] polite and humble...
...Chou, a, 26-year-old man interviewed by Ying Tzu in Peking, encountered the shock :hat triggered his "awakening" while listening passively to a peasant talk in the Anhui village to which he had been se~t fi.;r "~e~ducatior...
...The beginning had a time--summer, 1966...
...Miss Liang alone could speak for one of the seven in the "study group on Marxism" who did, indeed, try to organize rebellion, first among peasant beggars in the North and later among Cantonese students, and died for his efforts...
...They weren't actually interested in the Cultural Revolution [Miss Liang explained...
...They already felt they'd been badly treated and now in the countryside they had no future anyway . . . . " "A [former] city student," Ying Tzu writes, "once told me: 'Going to jail is better than joining the production team [in the countryside...
...It really was terror, if one thinks back on it now...
...In answer to Ying Tzu's further question about the manner of this reform, she said only: We have to increase our productivity and practice democracy...
...Another example is Hugo's Les Misdrables...
...For several years after 1966 most of the country's schools remained closed...
...The brilliant Miss Liang, whose schoolmates danced on their teacher's body, was a mere 10 years old in 1967...
...He thought China was now still in the stage of feudalism and needed a revolution to become a capitalist country...
...The Chinese people have suffered too much...
...No one had enough to eat...
...Chou, he discovered a familiar theme in a different context...
...A generation of Chinese schoolchildren had become the s o r c e r e r ' s broom...
...Chairman Mao tells us that if you're kind to the enemy, that means you're being cruel to the people...
...Former Red Guards, serious and chast e n e d , rush forward from the p a s t to explain t h a t not all Red Guards were alike, a r r o g a n t and cruel...
...They also refer in this connection to the Tien An Men incident of April 5, 1976, a demonstration essentially against the "Gang of Four," organized with the help of young conspirators who had acted despite the certainty that they would be cruelly suppressed...
...They were all 5-black class members...
...His aged successors are far more conditioned to old tricks than open to new ways--a fact that is scarcely lost on the former Red Guards who stand at Democracy Wall...
...These young peopl6~" Ying Tzu notes, "first appeared on the political stage as Red Guards...
...Those [peasants] who were strong enough went to the cities to beg for food...
...When they beat her, they felt happy...
...The utter poverty of the ordinary people made us--all children of the "privileged class"--feel deeply ashamed...
...In an interview with a " v e t e r a n Red Guard" named Miss Li, a 31-year-old woman with a prematurely lined face, Ying Tzu alludes almost casually to events behind school walls during the d i s t a n t summer of 1966...
...by the Party ideologists...
...Mao h i m s e l f s i g n a l e d the f i r s t move, the conversion of the orderly flock into the savage p a c k - - a f r i g h t e n i n g l y easy conversion, as our century continues to demonstrate...
...We often saw such gory scenes...
...Many incidents testified to this...
...That was in 1967 when official linkups had already been ordered to halt...
...The future of China belongs to the 'democratic' younger generation," Ying Tzu writes...
...In the winter of 1977 in New York, Mr...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1980 25...
...They have no clear program," he said, "so they're very often used by the high-ranking cadres and become their victims...
...Clearly, for a Ying Tzu or a Mu Huo, one category of young Chinese overshadows all others...
...To top it all, we have Mao Tse-tung thought and what it produced in practice...
...If the extreme leftist line should ever come to power again, the young people will certainly resist it with the same courage they exhibited during the Tien An Men incident...
...I beg you all--do not let these political swindlers cheat you again...
...Chiang Ch'ing [Mme...
...Our country is old and unique, with too large a population and yet also with a vast territory...
...Chou told Ying Tzu] I had tried to reform my own thought in order to keep the old faith...
...I n his own attempt to trace the course of change, Ying Tzu turned first tO individual history, seeking out interviews with young people in Peking...
...They couldn't be found within sight of foreigners, in places like Shanghai and Peking, but there were many in the central part of China, such as Szechuan and Anhui [Provinces...
...English, French, and Russian classic novels, all in Chinese translation, were solemnly analyzed, among them Wuthering Heights, Les Misirables, and Turgenev's Fathers and Sons...
...Nevertheless, many young activists of the "democratic movement" suffer the "fatal defect" noted more than two years ago by an astute young refugee in Hong Kong...
...An intense young man who recently left Peking on a Student visa described Chinese dissidents like Wei Ching-sheng and Li Cheng-t'ien as "'truth-seekers, quite will, ing to lose their lives for truth...
...the philosophical "nihilists," who have "seen through this mundane world" as a result of the topsy-turvy cultural revolutionary period, when "lies became truths," and who cynically conclude, therefore, that "everything is phony" and "politics is dirty...
...Most of the Red Guard generation never returned to school and the new shift that displaced them at their desks would have little use for knowledge...
...More than 13 years ago, millions of young Chinese followed the Great Master in Peking and lost their innocence, their illusions, and their future...
...When they were asked what crimes they'd committed, they had no answer, so they were chopped to death [killed with a chopping knife...
...Take Wuthering Heights [Miss Liang explained a few years later in Hong Kong...
...The "new things" really engendered by the Cultural Revolution were never foreseen and cannot be canceled...
...I [Ying Tzu] asked her...
...1967 was the year of armed struggles, chaos, and anarchy, but for us it was also a year of profound education...
...One of these articles, by Tung Hsiang correspondent Ying Tzu, acknowledges at the outset that "the behavior of the younger generation in China has indeed bewildered the West...
...Miss Li was then 18, a senior in middle school...
...The first time they beat a teacher, they didn't realize that they could beat her to death...
...The idea of organizing a beggar army was more than whim and became, in fact, the germ of action that later led two of the students to their deaths...
...They took me along because I had a very good memory...
...At the center of Mao's violent storm was a China with nothing to do...
...On the first day of arrival ;~ tile village he attended a ritual meek.raft, a~ which "po()r peasants" (the highe,u N...
...And they were very fearMr...
...and a p l a c e - - t h e schoolyards in the cities of China...
...It was all because of the social system...
...It was with these two criteria in mind that I set out with several companions on the nationwide "linkups" [officially fostered Red Guard travel] to make investigation...
...In the secret discussion groups they held during the early seventies, exotic names of a jumble of Western philosophers peppered the conversation--Aristotle and Plato, Descartes and Bacon, Kant, Nietzsche, Hegel and Chernyshevsky, Owen and Bertrand Russell...
...they are more dynamic in their thinking and consequently are the most dissatisfied with the current situation in China and most urgently desire reform...
...for in addition to the imagined revolution that has gained a pseudoexistence in dozens of Western textbooks (now obsolete), there was the revolution that Mao planned and the revolution he did not plan...
...to de~scr{be f~,~-.,~{,~e and death by starvatioe, fcllowing the Great THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1980 23 some...because they formed gangs...
...On the basis of his own analysis, the editor went on to distinguish four other major types of young Chinese today: the still "dedicated" optimists, currently the great "hope" of the official press, who now "have a better understanding of the basic theory of Marxism-Leninism and do not place blind faith in anyone...
...I was left in a state of confusion, not knowing how I should evaluate our regime or our system...
...Why is it that in a century of revolutionized communication--when the atmosphere crackles with news transmission and even space has eyes--China is still charted somewhere between fact and fantasy...
...Lots of them...
...He believed," she said, "in Sun Yat Sen's bofirgeois revolution...
...Perhaps we should...
...Where are they now...
...The mayor in the story actually wanted to be good and he did a lot of good things as mayor...
...So, we went out on the streets and swept away all that was old or had Western coloration...
...c in t~e{ coumryside) were .~uppo~;::d ~.,~ *,-_-ca~[ *;3~ his benefit their bi~cr pav~ :ry b."f<,re Corn...
...More than 70 in a single day...
...Why did you want to beat up others ?" "Because that was truly expressing proletarian emotion...
...These are young people," the editor is paraphrased as saying, "who have become even more skeptical about the basic theory of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Tse-tung thought . . . . [They] have had greater exposure to European democratic and other contemporary ideas...
...The answer, in one important respect, is the same for Miss Li, Mr...
...Ta-/ing Lee is professor of history at Southern Connecticut State College.4van D. London is professor of psychology at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York...
...The West now confronts the severely tried youth of China very much as the uncomprehending naval officer in Lord of the Flies looked upon the battered schoolboy survivors standing on the beach of their nightmare island--with "wary astonishment" and a somewhat embarrassed sympathy...
...For some the incident was a violent death that peculiarly had meaning among many deaths that did not...
...We need a revolution with democratization as the goal...
...The sincerity of the persons in Peking, whose views they evidently represent and perhaps naively amplify, is another matter...
...I f they d e s t r o y e d , it was only to rebuild...
...She was a d a u g h t e r of " r e v o l u t i o n a r y c a d r e s , " a born " l i t t l e leftist p r i n c e s s " in Mao's upside-down aristocracy, who d e l i b e r a t e l y "wore old patched c l o t h e s " and " j o i n e d sanitation workers every Sunday morning carrying night s o i l . " She e n t e r e d the f i r s t select group of Red Guards and became a fanatic l e a d e r in her school...
...He was, indeed, re,:-d~ca,.,.'d, but >or in ~}x spirit intende...
...now they are reappearing before Democracy Wall as fighters for democracy...
...But Miss Liang and her seven companions still had a way to go to their separate destinies and more to learn...
...The printed excerpts of these interviews appear simple, even shallow, and may float past the Western reader, as words do that escape attachment to personal experience...
...The shocking personal experience--for Chinese Red Guards or anyone else in the world--rarely induces instant enlightenment, but rather the abrupt beginning o f change...
...Why should that officer out of the blue have supposed that one of the small boys before him was weeping "for the end of innocence" and "the darkness of man'~ heart" ? Miriam London is a researcher in Soviet and Chinese studies...
...lating underground with great efficiency...
...What happened afterward...
...Anarchy and factional warfare, which persisted for more than a decade in many regions, had brought economic decline: Industry slowed and many factories operated erratically or not at all...
...They'd rather die for the sake of _9 revolution...
...But as to practical steps, we still have to keep searching...
...It was revolution...
...They have broader vision...
...those who are afraid will run away...
...In this way, we'll not eventually get freedom of thought and liberation of personality...
...Mao] even told one Red Guard at the Peking University Affiliated Middle School, 'You are all China's little suns.' Others told us to be militant in character, not gentle and refined . . . . And then they turned around and accused us of following the bourgeois reactionary line and wanted to criticize us...
...Criminals get two meals of solid rice, but we only get rice congee.' What has a person to fear if his lot is worse than a jailbird's...
...Several years earlier a clever young peasant refugee in Hong Kong had said of the uncontrollable city students sent down to his village, "They didn't give a damn...
...I'd been fooled...
...To the very moment of his depart'are f6r A nb.ui Province i...
...It was rather impossible to tell peasants to stop here or there or talk more slowly and sometimes it was impossible to take notes in front of peasants, because they'd be afraid.., that the university students might be secret investigators from the government...
...Suddenly, millions of young Chinese were superfluous people, homeless ghosts, floating between the cities that could not absorb them and the countryside that did not want them...
...Take the man in this book--Heathcliffe--and Cathy...
...Ying Tzu asked Miss Li in Peking, still pursuing the individual course of such change...
...From everything I'd learned in school, I felt there should be two criteria for evaluating a political system-that is, whether it could bring happiness to the people and whether it could further production and historical progress...
...They were actually a study group on Marxism . . . . Did any particular impression of the journey linger in Miss Liang's mind a decade later...
...But there are some pretty good guesses...
...When she was beaten unconscious, they danced on her body...
...Finally, there is "the saddest of all categories' '--the young who "have become criminals...
...For one thing, I realized that nothing could be borrowed straight out of any of these books and put into practice in our country...
...I had to call up the morgue to send a truck to remove them...
...What do you mean by truth...
...The inert and timid nature Of the Chinese people . . . . " writes Mu Huo in Cheng Ming, "was washed away with blood during the Tien An Men incident...
...When Ying Tzu asked Miss Li whether she had undertaken any action against the government she had come to oppose, she shook her head...
...They felt a sudden fear and began to tremble and one of them even vomited and fainted...
...Mao Tse-tung said that revolution was violent, not at all refined...
...Since childhood Mr...
...Like Miss Li, they had set out with doubts and returned with convictions...
...We've inherited both Confucian teachings and [the ancient tyrant] Ch'in Shih-huang's centralized government...
...What did they do then...
...One wonders whether our allies approve this decision...
...It is a statement of personal discovery, made at cruel mental and physical cost...
...Many had selfless dreams of the common good...
...But any literate person from China can supply the missing detail...
...I'm beyond caring," an editor of the underground journal Exploration told an American reporter in Peking on October 6, 1979...
...In 1971, three years after his first shock in an Anhui village, Mr...
...If they'd ignored the social system and -got married, there wouldn't have been any tragedy...
...So, I began to read, hoping to find the answer in books...
...lYing Tzu asked...
...And many b r u t a l i z e d adolesCents who l a t e r died in factional b a t t l e s or on the execution grounds of the regime t h a t had created them might have lived, innocent of grave sin, today, applying the skills they could have learned and the talents t h a t are buried with them...
...As of this writing, the locus of the transmitter is not known...
...Within the last year several remarkable articles on Chinese youth have appeared in the Communist journals Tung Hsiang and Ctseng Ming, the newest Pekingconnected monthlies published in Hong Kong, which convey fact and .opinion too candid for the internal press, but circulate with permission inside China...
...In a flash, there were no heroic armies, no hated enemies, no passionately craved goals, only an ordinary classmate last remembered bent over his desk in the same schoolroom, now incomprehensibly a corpse on the street...
...We h e s i t a t e before r a i s i n g the curtain...
...So, you must feel glad that you've beaten her to death . . . . " After this incident they often beat people at will without feeling any uneasiness of conscience...
...The university students said that if one wanted to start a rebellion, one should ask these beggars to join up, because they were all energetic and sturdy...
...The new Communist journals in Hong Kong do not mention groups of young revolutionaries, but they speak plainly of "a new courage of action" and "a new character" among the young...
...How is one to contemplate the emergence of democratic thought behind 'communism's iron curtain' ?" The "bewilderment" of the West is itself bewildering...
...He explains no further...
...Clearly, some alert group in Peking and its bolder "friends" in Hong Kong have analyzed and assigned primary importance to changes in "thinking" inside China, especially among the young up to the age of 30, who constitute more than half the population...
...A faded Western truism has become a "new-born thing" in China--if we may salvage this now discredited Maoist phrase, which once applied to radical Left innovations like the Model Plays, the sham universities, supposedly begotten by the Cultural Revolution...
...But he'd once before stolen something trivial like a franc or two, so he was finally sentenced to prison by the court...
...After the Lin Piao affair, I could no longer go on deceiving myself...
...But they reTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1980 21 v e r b e r a t e in depth a g a i n s t Chinese exPerience as revealed in the p e r s o n a l stories of young people who have abandoned China every y e a r since the Cultural Revolution began...
...Up to that time [Mr...
...The Red Guard boldness that the Mao clique itself had earlier summoned forth--the spirit of "daring to drag the Emperor from his horse"--had turned into a djinn that could serve other masters...
...In short, we must make the country strong and bring happiness to our people...
...I was very depressed at the time and read many Western n0vels--Hugo, Rolland, _9 Balzac...
...They wanted to get at the dark side of society through their interviews...
...And how many is many...
...No matter...
...Why did you oppose the school Party committee...
...It may surprise and disappoint some Western romantics to learn that while they continued for a decade abroad to expound upon the "dynamics" of China's "ongoing revolution," many Chinese themselves were, in fact, sitting out the revolution with a Western novel or treatise in hand...
...Westerners, take pause...
...And by the very idols I'd worshipped since I was a child...
...A student who recently left China cites clandestine reports that more than 1,000 demonstrators were killed in that incident by regular troops who disguised themselves as ordinary militia and used clubs "in order to avoid gunfire that could be heard by foreigners...
...I also had become callous...
...There were too many remnants from the feudal past--ignorance, tyranny, superstition...
...CHINA: THE GENERATION IN THE WINGS Fourteen years ago China's young people appeared on the political scene as Red Guards...
...I n mid-1977 in Hong Kong, a brilliantly a r t i c u l a t e young woman, Miss Liang, who had recently fled China, recalled the same period: I had six [older] classmates who all belonged to the same Red Guard group...
...Leap Forward, or Three Red Flags campaign, of 1958...
...It called for solidarity with the Soviet Union...
...Where did such books come from ? Ying Tzu writes: "Although the Hsinhua bookstores sold only the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao, 'feudalist, capitalist and revisionist' books were circu...
...They don't fear death" was the way he put it...
...When Ying Tzu pursued further the story of Mr...
...A friend of mine went to Peking to see the United Action [group], which was created by Peking's West Side Patrol Team, an early Red Guard organization . . . . In a single day my friend saw the United Action members kill more than 70 people in one school, who'd been dragged out from society or school --reactionary students or teachers...
...Others have picked up the same characteristic differently...
...For me, the criticism of the [so-called] bourgeois reactionary line in September 1966 was this sort of shocking experience...
...He thought that Marxism couldn't be practiced in China and there should be another bourgeois revolution, so that China could become a country like Japan, France, or England...
...C}~,,a~ :ha: ~ e old fellow had gone or...
...The shocking incident could occur early (as for Miss Li) or late in the Cultural Revolution...
...A rich girl couldn't be married to a poor man--an aristocrat with a high social position couldn't marry an adopted beggar boy...
...The sincerity of these Hong Kong-based journalists seems beyond doubt...
...At the end of December 1966 she also set out on supposed linkups from Peking in the company O f seven university students of high-level intellectual family background...
...The so-called cowpen was like a small jail where they were shut in to have their thoughts reformed...
...My experiences are not unique...
...We do not doubt it...
Vol. 13 • February 1980 • No. 2
