Life and Death in Shanghai

A woman Revolutionary said to me, ‘You must remain in the house. You are not allowed to go out of the house. The Red Guards will take turns to be here to watch you.’

I was astonished and angry. I asked her, ‘What authority have you to keep me confined in the house?’ Disappointment so overwhelmed me that I was trembling.

‘I have the authority of the Proletarian Revolutionaries.’

‘I want to see the order in writing,’ I said, trying to control my trembling voice.

‘Why do you want to go out? Where do you want to go to? A woman like you would be beaten to death outside. We are doing you a kindness in putting you under house arrest. Lao Chao will be allowed to stay and do the marketing for you. Do you know what’s going on outside? There is a full-scale revolution going on.’

‘I don’t particularly want to go out. It’s the principle of the matter.’

‘What principle? Since you don’t want to go out, why argue with me? You stay here until we decide what to do with you. That’s an order.’

She swept out of the house. I was furious but there was nothing whatever I could do.

I was given the box spring of my own bed placed on the floor to sleep on. A change of clothes and a sweater hung in the empty cupboard. A suitcase containing my winter clothes and the green canvas bag with a quilt and blankets for the colder days were left in a corner of the room. Besides the table and chairs in the kitchen, I was left with two chairs and a small coffee table. The Red Guards detailed to watch me sat on these two chairs outside my room so that I had to sit on the box spring on the floor. Every now and then one of them would open my door to see what I was doing. The only place where I had some privacy was my bathroom.

My daughter was allowed to live in her own room but I was not allowed in there or to speak to her when she came home which was very seldom as she had to spend more and more nights at the Film Studio taking part in the Cultural Revolution. In the evenings, I would gently push the door of my room open hoping to obtain a glimpse of her as she came up the stairs. On the nights when she did come home and we managed to look at each other, I felt comforted and reassured. Generally I would sleep peacefully that night.

Lao Chao went to market to purchase food, but neither he nor my daughter was allowed to eat with me. The Red Guards had a rotation of duty hours so that they went home for their meals. At night, one or two of them slept on the floor outside my bedroom on a makeshift bed.

Two days after I was placed under house arrest, Chen Mah’s daughter came to fetch her mother. We had a tearful farewell. Chen Mah wanted to leave me a cardigan she had knitted but the Red Guards scolded her for lack of class consciousness and refused to let her hand it to me. ‘She won’t have enough clothes for the winter. She isn’t very strong, you know,’ Chen Mah pleaded with the Red Guards.

‘Don’t you realize? She is your class enemy. Why should you care whether she has enough clothes or not?’ the Red Guard said.

Chen Mah’s daughter seemed frightened of the Red Guards and urged Chen Mah to leave. But Chen Mah said, ‘I must say goodbye to Mei-mei!’ Tears were streaming down her face.

One of the Red Guards became impatient. She faced Chen Mah militantly and said, ‘Haven’t you stayed in this house long enough? She is the daughter of a class enemy. Why do you have to say goodbye to her?’

When I put my arms round Chen Mah’s shoulders to hug her for the last time, she burst into loud crying. The Red Guards pulled my arms away and pushed Chen Mah and her daughter out of the front door. Lao Chao followed them out with Chen Mah’s luggage and I heard him getting a pedi-cab for them.

Longing to know what went on outside, I read avidly the newspaper that Lao Chao left on the kitchen table each day. One evening, when I went into the kitchen to have my dinner, I saw a sheet of crudely printed paper entitled Red Guard News left on a kitchen chair. The headline of the paper said, ‘Hit back without mercy the counter-attack of the class enemies’ which intrigued me. I longed to know more. There was no one about so I picked up the small sheet and secreted it in my pocket. Later, in the quiet of my bathroom, I read it. After that, I kept a lookout for any crumpled piece of paper left by the Red Guards. These handbills produced by the Red Guards were mostly full of their usual hyperbole about the capitalist class and the revisionists. However, in the course of denouncing these enemies they revealed facts about certain Party leaders which had hitherto been kept secret from the general public. I was particularly interested in reports that certain officials in the Shanghai Municipal Government and the Party Secretariat were attempting to ‘ignore’ or ‘sabotage’ Mao’s orders. The extent of conflict caused by policy differences within the Party leadership seemed far greater than I had thought. Being uncensored, these Red Guards publications and handbills inadvertently exposed some of the facts of the power struggle in the Party leadership and contributed to the breakdown of the myth that the Party leaders were a group of dedicated men united for a common purpose.

After a week indoors, I asked the Red Guards how long I was supposed to remain without outdoor exercise, and requested that I be allowed to use the garden. After making a telephone call, they allowed me to go into the garden to walk round or to sit on the steps of the terrace with Fluffy on my lap. The ‘sin’ of biting a Revolutionary leader did not seem to be regarded as important by the young Red Guards. They would often play with Fluffy too.

Soon, Meiping realized that I was fairly often in the garden, especially in the early morning. Whenever she came home at night, she would throw notes there, rolled into a small ball for me to pick up when I went down for my daily exercise next morning. But when it rained during the night, as it often did in September, the paper got wet and disintegrated when I tried to unroll it. She could not say much on a tiny strip of paper, but her messages of ‘I love you, Mum,’ ‘Take care of yourself,’ ‘We will be brave and weather the storm together, dear Mummy’…etc. gave me great comfort and tempered my feeling of isolation.

If Lao Chao happened to be in the kitchen when I went for my meals, a Red Guard would follow me there to make sure we did not converse. But Lao Chao and the Red Guard would chat with one another. After a while I found that much of what Lao Chao said was information for my ears also. For instance, one day he said to a Red Guard, ‘Do you beat up your teachers often?’

I was astonished to hear Lao Chao’s question because when the Red Guards came to loot my house on the night of 30 August they seemed quite friendly with their teachers. I waited breathlessly for the answer.

The Red Guard said casually, ‘We beat them up when they are found to have capitalist ideas or when they insist we study and not have so many revolutionary activities. Some of them do not seem to understand the importance of carrying on with the Cultural Revolution. They still believe in the importance of learning from books. But our Great Leader Chairman Mao told us, ‘Learn to swim from swimming.’ We should learn from taking part in revolutionary activities and from active labour. We don’t need the old type of school any more. Those teachers who still believe in books obviously oppose our Great Leader so we must treat them as enemies.’

Another time, Lao Chao asked the Red Guard, ‘Did you go to surround the building of the Municipal Government?’

‘Of course! And this wasn’t the first time or the last time either. The entire Shanghai Municipal Government is rotten with revisionism.’

It was from Lao Chao’s conversations with the Red Guards and from their handbills and publications that I gained the impression that, daily, thousands of new Revolutionaries were flocking to join the Red Guards and workers’ organizations that had sprung up like ‘bamboo shoots after the spring rain’. Whether hoping for personal gain or merely fearful of being thought politically backward, people felt compelled to become a part of the Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

The ransacking of the homes of members of the capitalist class and the attack on the intellectuals inflated the ego and whetted the appetite of the Red Guards and the Revolutionaries for violence. They were impatient to go further. It seemed to me that the Maoist leaders used this psychological moment to direct their anger and channel their energy towards putting pressure on the Shanghai Party Secretariat and Municipal Government, both of which were accused of protecting the capitalist class and opposing Mao’s policies. It was alleged that for years Mao’s orders were deliberately ignored. But officials of the Shanghai Party Secretariat and Municipal Government were not novices to the political game. They were experienced Communists who had survived many political storms and purges. And they were not unfamiliar with Mao’s tactics. Since Mao used the masses, they decided to use the masses themselves. Speedily they organized their own Red Guards and Revolutionaries to take part in the Cultural Revolution. They vied with the Maoist Red Guards and Revolutionaries to gain control of the situation in Shanghai. To succeed, each group had to be more red, more revolutionary, more cruel and more left in their slogans and action. Thus, not only was it at times extremely difficult to identify on which side a certain group was until the bloody civil wars broke out but also the so-called capitalist class and the intellectuals were confronted by two contesting groups who competed with each other in dealing the heaviest blow to demonstrate their authenticity.

As the scale of violence escalated and the scope of the Cultural Revolution expanded to include an ever-increasing number of class enemies, a new slogan was coined to emphasize the undesirability of children of capitalist class families. It said, ‘A dragon is born of a dragon, a phoenix is born of a phoenix and a mouse is born with the ability to make a hole in the wall.’ In short, it meant that since the parents were class enemies, the children would naturally be class enemies too. While I thought it rather astonishing in a country pledged to materialistic Marxism that a slogan should be coined based entirely on the importance of genetics, I had no time or the heart to dwell on it. Soon after its publication, my daughter Meiping was taken from the rank of the ‘masses’ and placed in the ‘cowshed’ where all those in the Film Studio denounced as class enemies were concentrated. The ‘cowshed’ earned its name from the fact that Mao Tze-tung had delineated all class enemies as ‘cow’s demons and snake spirits’. In the ‘cowshed’ the victims spent their time writing confessions and self-criticisms over and over again in an effort to purge themselves of heretical thinking contrary to Mao Tze-tung Thought. I was informed of this situation through Lao Chao’s conversation with one of the Red Guards. In a loud voice, just outside my bedroom, he asked the Red Guard’s permission to take bedding and clothing to my daughter in the so-called ‘cowshed’ of the Film Studio because she could no longer come home. Later, when I went into the kitchen for my evening meal, which I could not swallow but pretended to eat, in order to find out about my daughter’s condition, Lao Chao did not disappoint me. As soon as I sat down, he talked about Meiping to the unsuspecting Red Guard.

‘I saw her when I went to the Film Studio to give her the things. She looked quite well and seemed cheerful. She told me she was writing self-criticism about herself and her class origin. She also said all those in the cowshed were very friendly. In fact, she seemed quite all right and is taking everything philosophically. But why should she have to write self-criticism? She is a member of the Communist Youth League and everywhere she went she got citations of merit. She is sympathetic and friendly towards the proletariat. Once she even saved the life of a poor peasant woman by rowing her in a boat through the creeks to the County Hospital when the woman was suddenly taken ill.’

‘She was born abroad and from a family like this. Of course she has to write self-criticism,’ the Red Guard said to Lao Chao. ‘She is probably a radish; red outside but white within. In any case, the Communist Youth League is disbanded. The General Secretary of the Youth League, Hu Yao-bong, is a revisionist.’

Shortly afterwards, a group of Revolutionaries from the Film Studio came to ransack her room and took away what was left of her things. I was desperately unhappy with the new turn of events. I could keep my spirit buoyant when the attack was directed at me alone, but now that she had also become the object of persecution I suffered from deep depression.

In the late afternoon of 27 September, I was taken by a Red Guard and a Revolutionary to the same school building I had gone to in July. A large gathering was already there waiting for us. This time I was the object of the struggle meeting, attended not only by the Red Guards and the Revolutionaries who had come to my house but also by the former staff of Shell and the men in charge of their indoctrination who had questioned me. The man with the tinted spectacles was in charge.

The room was arranged differently. Instead of rows of chairs facing the platform, seats were put in an irregular circle. I was told to stand in the middle, with a Red Guard on each side. The man with the tinted glasses was quite a fluent speaker. He, too, started with the opium war, giving a vivid description of how the invading fleet of Britain bombarded the Chinese coast. His account, full of inaccuracies, aimed at creating hatred for me, made me personally guilty for Britain’s action against China over a hundred years ago. He spoke as if it was I who led the British fleet up the Pearl River. Then he declared that Shell was a multinational firm with branches in all parts of the world. He said that Lenin had stated that such companies were the worst enemies of socialism. He told the audience that from time immemorial Shell had sent salesmen deep into the rural areas of China to gather information useful to the imperialists under the pretence of selling kerosene to the peasants. He also gave figures to show the enormous profit the company had made with its China trade and called it the ‘commercial exploitation of the Chinese people’. He told the audience that the British imperialists were more subtle than the Americans. While the United States Government openly opposed the People’s Government of China and protected the Kuomintang in Taiwan, the British gave the People’s Government diplomatic recognition while voting with the United States at the United Nations to prevent the People’s Government from taking China’s seat as its representative.

He turned to an account of my family background, telling the audience that I was the descendant of a big landlord family which owned ten thousand mu of fertile agricultural land (there are roughly 6 mus to an acre). Unlike the liaison officer of the Municipal Government who had said my grandfather was a patriot, he now told the audience that my grandfather was a dirty landlord and an advocate of feudalism because in the history books he wrote he praised several Emperors. Furthermore, he said, evidence had been found among papers left by him that he was a founder and shareholder of the Han Yeh Ping Steel Complex, which included the An Yuan coal-mine where the Great Leader Chairman Mao once personally organized the workers in their struggle against the capitalists. This accusation was supposed to give concrete proof that my grandfather and Chairman Mao were on opposing sides; in fact, the two men belonged to two different generations. He went on to say that my father was a senior official of the Peking Government and spent many years in Japan in his youth. He reminded everyone that Japan had been guilty of aggression against China and in eight years of war and occupation had killed ten million innocent Chinese men, women and children. Carefully he avoided mentioning that my father went to Japan in the early years of this century long before the Japanese invasion of China in 1937; instead he tried to create the impression that my father went to Japan in spite of what Japan did to China. Pointing at me, he said that I went to England when I was twenty years old and was trained by the British to be ‘a faithful running dog’ in one of their universities. My late husband was described as a ‘residue of the decadent Kuomintang regime’ who was fortunate to have died so that he escaped judgement by the Revolutionaries.

Throughout his speech, the audience showed their support and agreement by shouting slogans. Added to the usual slogans of the Cultural Revolution there were a number accusing me of being a ‘spy’ who conspired with foreign powers against China and others simply denouncing me as a ‘running dog’ of the British.

When he had finished speaking, the Red Guard who had led the other Red Guards into my house shouted into the microphone a description of the ‘luxury’ of my home. Another Red Guard told how I had tried to ‘undermine’ their ‘revolutionary activities’ by fighting with them to preserve ‘old culture’. A Revolutionary spoke of my stubborn arrogance and accused me of deliberately keeping a ‘wild animal’ in the house to wound the Revolutionaries.

Members of the ex-staff of Shell were then called upon to provide further evidence against me. I could easily see how frightened they all were and I wondered what they must have gone through. The men who got up to speak were white and their hands holding the prepared statements shook. None of them looked in my direction. There was very little substance in what they said, but every sentence they uttered contributed to the picture that I enjoyed a warm and friendly relationship with the British residents in Shanghai. A web of suspicion was carefully woven. One of the office lift operators declared that the British manager always stepped aside to let me get into the lift before him. A driver testified that whenever the manager and I shared a car, the manager always allowed me to get in first. This was supposed to demonstrate my value and importance to the ‘British imperialists’ because in Communist China a senior man would not dream of letting his female assistant get into a car or a lift before him.

Other members of the staff spoke of files kept in a room next to the manager’s office, not accessible to anyone but the manager and myself. A senior member of the staff who had been with Shell for many years said that maps of geological formation of areas of China with possible oil deposits were routinely kept at the office because they were of value to the imperialists. Another speaker read out excerpts allegedly taken from reports written by Shell branch managers in other parts of China during the time of the Civil War (1946-9) when the armies of the Kuomintang and the Communists were locked in a bitter struggle. Troop deployments of both sides were mentioned in these reports. This was supposed to repudiate my claim that Shell was interested only in commerce.

My late husband came in for severe criticism too. It was alleged that whenever the interest of Shell clashed with the interest of the State, both my husband and I stood on the side of Shell. All the statements were a mixture of fact and fiction, misrepresentation and exaggeration, calculated to mislead the ignorant minds of the gullible and the uninformed.

The meeting dragged on. Night had long ago descended on the city. But the drama of my misfortune was so absorbing that none of the Red Guards or the Revolutionaries left the room. The majority of them, I thought, were stunned by what they believed to be an exposure of a real international spy. Others simply had to pretend to believe in the allegations. I could see that the men who were running the show were gloating with success.

Years later, I was to learn that the date of this struggle meeting had been postponed several times because the organizers had hoped to get my daughter to take part in my denunciation. Despite enormous pressure, she refused repeatedly. But National Day, October the First, was approaching. The Maoists leaders ordered the Revolutionaries in Shanghai to produce concrete results to celebrate the day in a mood of victory. It was in response to this order that the men in charge of my case decided to hold the meeting without my daughter.

When the man with the tinted glasses judged that sufficient emotion had been generated among those present, he complimented the men and women who took part in my denunciation for their high level of socialist awareness. He also had a good word to say for our former staff members declaring that most of them had emerged from their re-education with clearer heads. But he issued a warning to those whose heads were still foggy, calling upon them to redouble their efforts at self-criticism to shake off the shackles of capitalism.

Turning to me, he said, ‘You have listened to the mountain of evidence against you. Your crime against the Chinese people is extremely serious. You can only be reformed by giving a full confession telling us how you conspired with the British imperialists in their scheme to undermine the People’s Government. Are you going to confess?’

‘I have never done anything against the Chinese people and Government. The Shell office was here because the Chinese Government wanted it to be here. The order to allow Shell to maintain its Shanghai office was issued by the State Council and signed by no less a person than Premier Chou En-lai. Shell is full of goodwill for China and the Chinese people and always observed its laws and regulations scrupulously. It is not Shell’s policy to meddle in politics…’ I said.

Even though I spoke in a loud and clear voice, no one in the room could hear a complete sentence for everything I said was drowned by angry shouts and screams of ‘Confess! Confess!’ and ‘We will not allow a class enemy to argue!’ At the same time, the hysterical Red Guards and Revolutionaries crowded round me threateningly, shook their fists in my face, pulled at my clothes and spat on my jacket, while yelling ‘dirty spy’, ‘dirty running dog’, ‘we will kill you’ and so on. Several times I had to brace myself to stand firmly when they pushed me very hard.

While the pandemonium was going on, the men on the platform were smiling; the man in the tinted glasses seemed particularly pleased to see me suffer at the hands of the mob. What was I to do? It was useless to try to explain and worse than useless to try to resist. If I had made any move at all, the mob would have jumped on me. I could only stand there looking straight ahead, with my eyes fixed on the distant wall, hoping their anger would soon spend itself.

Eventually the noise died down a little. The man said, ‘Our patience is exhausted. You are guilty. We could give you the death penalty. But we want to give you a chance to reform yourself. Are you going to confess?’

Everybody stared at me expectantly. I had stood there enduring their abuse for so long, I suppose I should have been filled with hatred for every one of them. Looking back, I remember distinctly that my predominant emotion was one of great sadness. At the same time, I longed to see my daughter. I was sad because I knew I could not reach out to these people around me to make them understand that I was innocent and that they were mistaken. The propaganda on class struggle they had absorbed, not only since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution but also since 1949 when the Communist Army took over Shanghai, had already built an impregnable wall between us. It was not something I could break down in a moment.

After staring at me for a few seconds and finding me silent, the man beckoned to a young man at the back of the mob. The crowd parted to let him through. He carried in his hand a pair of shiny metal handcuffs which he lifted to make sure I saw them. When the young man came to where I stood, the man in charge of the meeting asked again, ‘Are you going to confess?’

I answered in a calm voice, ‘I’ve never done anything against the People’s Government. I have no connection with any foreign government.’

‘Come along!’ the young man with the handcuffs said.