China Witness (45 page)

When the Cultural Revolution began, my father was still a bank manager, and he helped the son of my wet nurse by getting him a job as an office boy in the bank. When the bank closed down, the boy went back to Shaoxing and joined the Red Guards, then he came back to Shanghai along with other rebels. He said that when the bank closed, the guards had given a firearm to my father. Keeping a private firearm was very serious indeed. He went to my father's house and said: "Will you confess, or shall I report it to the Shanghai Red Guards?" When I heard this, I said: "We'll deal with it. I and my rebel brothers and sisters will confront my father." This must have been the end of 1966 or the beginning of 1967. My father knew nothing about the whole business, so he said he really didn't have a handgun.
I took my politics pretty seriously in those days, and I wanted to "make a clean break" with him. It was like the public struggle sessions but in the family. This hurt my father deeply, and it's one of the things that has caused me the most sorrow in my whole life.

My mother died in 1969, and none of her children were with her. Only my sister-in-law and my first wife went to the funeral home. I put in a request to go to the funeral, and my chief said, sure, I could go, but I had to remain firm politically, she was the wife of a landlord. So I took my son and daughter, and we went with my first wife and my sister-in-law to the funeral. My father was standing there alone, crying and making his bows, and we just stood there expressionless. We had "made a clean break" so we couldn't cry. That's something I feel ashamed of too.

After the smashing of the Gang of Four, my father and I talked it over, and I said that we had been too extreme then.

XINRAN:
Did he understand?

LOUIS:
Probably he did. He still loved us as a father. Though at that time, we really had made a clean break between him and us.

XINRAN:
But you can't really make a complete break, can you, with all the upbringing you received from your family?

LOUIS:
That's true. No matter what, we were brought up with Confucian standards. There was an order of seniority between young and old, and even walking down the street, you couldn't walk however you wanted. My mother, especially, took our upbringing very seriously. What made the greatest impression on me was the three things that she asked of us. She said that to be a person, you must first: Impress people with your appearance. And by "appearance", she didn't mean looking good, but that you carried yourself with dignity. The second thing was: Impress people with your language. When you spoke you had to use appropriate language. And the third was: Impress people with your pen – you had to write well. My father taught us the Analects of Confucius, and that made a big impression on me too. We children played around, it's true, but we couldn't be too mischievous, and I never did anything really improper.

I went to upper middle school in Shanghai, and in 1945 I started at
Sui'an University. Sui'an was pretty strong in foreign languages. It was an American Church college. During my four years there, I began to believe in the Communist Party and in socialism, and became a CCP member. But I think that Christianity had a very big influence on me all the same. When I first arrived at the university, I discovered that my
classmates helped each other in a Christian spirit, and helped me too. Students had to register for courses when they started, and it was a credits system. You chose your own classes and how many credits to build up. I was building up economics credits, and the college had four or five classrooms I could choose from, but I didn't know how to choose. My classmates were in the University Christian Fellowship and explained the differences between the five classrooms. They were extremely patient. This spirit of mutual support made a big impression on me. Our university had a college-wide organisation called the
University of Christianity, with lots of sub-groups which included other religions and political views. The underground Communist Party wanted me to rally my fellow students, and the best way of doing this was by organising the groups. So I got together a hundred or so students into a larger group, with me as its chairman. The aim was to provide student support services, including holding lots of parties, and what drew people in mainly was this ethos of service.

XINRAN:
And did you retain this Christian spirit alongside your faith in the CCP?

LOUIS:
I never was a Christian, I've always been a very free spirit. But I've followed the spirit of Christianity. I joined the CCP because I was critical of Chiang Kai-shek. He was advocating a civil war, and imposing a dictatorship, but our college was very strong on democracy, and democracy and freedom was an aspiration for many of our students. When I joined the Party I didn't at that point have a very clear idea of what Communism was.

XINRAN:
If I were to ask you about the three happiest and the three most painful experiences you have had, what would you say?

LOUIS:
I'm not sure I can give you three of each, but I can talk to you about happiness and sorrow.

Before I retired, I was head of the secretariat at the Shanghai municipal offices. I was employed by the municipality continuously after I left the armed forces. Before the Cultural Revolution, I worked in the secretariat of its Standing Committee, in Archives, Meetings and Reports. I was in charge of handling documents for the archives, organising the municipal meetings and conferences, and writing up reports. It wasn't that I wanted to do this sort of work, I was just following orders.

I feel quite gratified that, one, I have never made a serious error during my whole career; two, I have never been infected by the bad habits which
some officials have, I feel quite proud of that; and, three, friends have been very important in my life, and I have a lot of them. My wife says I've been in the dungheap without getting dirty, but I say Chinese officialdom isn't absolutely and completely corrupt, is it?

There are several things which have caused me great sorrow in my life! The worst was being imprisoned for a year during the Cultural Revolution and doing six years of hard labour in Nanjing, because of a couple of things I said.

The first thing I said was in 1968, when I was leader of the study group at work. No one understood what the Cultural Revolution was about and, as group leader, I had to explain it to them, but I didn't understand it either. So I said that according to Lin Biao the achievements of the Cultural Revolution were huge, and its failures were minute. But, I said, I saw it as exactly the opposite: all I'd seen were failures, and its failures were huge, and I hadn't seen any successes yet. Afterwards, it was put to me that I could have got shot for saying that, because it was not only an attack on the Cultural Revolution, it was a smear on the reputation of the deputy commander-in-chief of the revolution.

The second thing I said was that if
Zhang Chunqiao, one of the Gang of Four, had not had the backing of Jiang Qing, Mao's wife, he would not have come to prominence. This was interpreted as an assault on the headquarters of the proletariat and I was immediately attacked as an active counter-revolutionary, and locked up in the basement of our offices for a year!

Luckily I'm a philosophical sort of person. After a year, I was transferred to Nanjing to do hard labour and there I stayed until the Gang of Four were smashed. Only then did I get my job back. That was the worst thing that ever happened to me. Working in the underground Party against the GMD was nothing compared to being condemned to hard labour as a criminal, by the very government and Party that I believed in. Then there was the death of my first wife, the premature death of my son, my daughter's illness. If it wasn't for my son and my daughter, now that I have Phoebe as my partner I would be absolutely 100 per cent happy.

XINRAN:
Do you feel that the lives of your generation have been worthwhile?

LOUIS:
I think so. We've suffered so many trials and tribulations, but I believe that the progress of human society is never straightforward, and that's true of society and a country and of each individual.

XINRAN:
Don't you think people like you have paid too heavy a price? For instance, your father was from a great salt merchant family, but his family fortunes collapsed because of the war. And in the 1960s, the Party that you believed in inflicted such injustice on you. Don't you think that was too great a price to pay?

LOUIS:
No, quite the opposite. As far as I am concerned personally, my contribution has not been enough. Because everyone who's born into this world, into society, should make their contribution, irrespective of their ability; the main thing is that they should offer it, it should not be demanded of them.

I never thought about the contribution that my family had made in the past as salt merchants. After all, the salt trade was rather feudal, and was built up on the basis of exploitation of many people. I've been to see the salt fields on
Taishan Island in Zhejiang province. That's where the seawater comes in and labourers dry out the salt crystals in the sun. It basically requires no investment or technology, just physical labour. It occurred to me that my ancestors had made their wealth by exploiting countless numbers of people down the generations. And the salt merchants had to be on good terms with the salt officials, the so-called salt officials–salt merchants arrangement. As a salt merchant you had to have an official licence without which you couldn't trade; everything else was called "illegal salt".

We were a very large family, and owned maybe 2,000
mu
^*15
of land. We were self-sufficient in grain, and rented out land on which, each winter, we collected rent. We sent boats to collect it. Until I was sixteen, I'd never even washed a handkerchief, let alone cooked, I was completely dependent on other people to look after me. If our society had carried on in this way, how would the labouring people and the poorest in our country ever have made a better living?

XINRAN:
So do you think that people of your generation feel the same way as you do?

LOUIS:
I think the majority do. As for China's development after Liberation, whether you're talking about inside the Party or my old comrades, there are differing views.

First, on Mao Zedong. I don't hate him, I admire him actually, but I
don't accept everything he said and did. When he launched the Anti-Rightist movement, I didn't know then, we none of us knew . . . traditional "absolute loyalty" was the measure of a good cadre, and we certainly never assumed individual responsibility as we do in modern politics. It was only when Mao died that I began to feel that he had made serious mistakes. I have forgiven him, because from the upbringing he received, after he had achieved power and status, he might well have felt he wanted to be emperor and to live in the emperor's palace. When he stood on top of Tiananmen Gate at the proclamation of the People's Republic, there were so many people cheering him on, and everyone was shouting, "We wish you ten thousand years of life!" The worst thing that happened was the appearance of all those sycophants around him, with their foolish "loyalty", and I include us in that. When Liu Shaoqi was declared a traitor and expelled from the Party, everyone in the Central Committee had to raise their hands and vote. One person pretended to be asleep – her name was
Sai Mengqi – but we all knew she wasn't asleep: it was because she didn't agree. It made me think – what kind of high-ranking cadres are you? Are you responsible for a country or are you just courtiers to the emperor? Why did they all stick their hands up? So China's stagnation in the last hundred years is not the sole responsibility of some imperial minister. We all have a responsibility for it, it isn't just a problem of Mao Zedong as an individual. I sometimes wonder, if I'd been in his shoes, might I have become complacent too? We can't escape our human instincts, that's why we need democracy and a political system to suppress the despotism and dictatorship which can be a product of such instinct.

XINRAN:
So you're saying that not only was Mao Zedong destroyed by blindly loyal flatterers, but also, while we Chinese were spending the last hundred years searching for a "saviour", we were on a slippery slope, like the "blindly loyal" saddled with old monarchist feelings when the dynasty has come to an end.

LOUIS:
That's just how it was. We were only too happy to put our leader on a pedestal, and gave very little thought to the need for personal responsibility. In our recent history, no leader has had the courage to face up to this and state it clearly. When Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution, he ended up passing responsibility for it to the Gang of Four. Some people say that the Gang of Four was really a Gang of Five. Everything bad was done by the Gang of Four but Mao agreed to it. I am critical of Mao for this, but my main feeling is that we didn't have the proper mechanisms in
place within the Communist Party. If China doesn't have proper political mechanisms, then it will be possible for a second Mao to appear. Our generation has been enlightened about this, we haven't condemned Mao Zedong. I am a victim of the Cultural Revolution, but I don't brood on it. As we say nowadays, "no recriminations, no regrets". This was not something one person did – we were all responsible, and maybe it was something Chinese society had to go through.

XINRAN:
Do you think the young generation understand this? Do they know what you went through?

LOUIS:
Hard to say. They haven't had the intense experiences or suffered the hardship that their parents' generation did. This generation have grown up, mostly, in comfort, so we'll have to see whether they arrive at a proper understanding of that period of history.

Nowadays, we greatly admire the Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao model. Their slogan, "put people first", is admirable. When we watch the televised proceedings of the People's Congress, we see them bow to the delegates before they speak, and then bow to the podium. We feel that in the past, they were only giving the people a casual wave, but now they're making a bow to the lower ranks. Surely that's a good beginning. It should always have been like that. In the past, Communist Party doctrine held that everyone was equal, no matter what their status. Actually everyone had different jobs, so they couldn't be equal. As educated people, the most exasperating thing was we were not treated equally, but we didn't dare say anything. Back then, we intellectuals couldn't support egalitarianism, liberalism or democracy in any way at all, because our kind of democracy was condemned as capitalist democracy. Of course, democracy for me probably
was
capitalist democracy. I got it from school and from the Church. Our democracy was the French Revolution kind. But we
were
a bit democratic, we always had that tendency.