Life and Death in Shanghai

‘To get a confession is their job. If they fail, they may be accused of not supporting the movement. The result is that whenever a political movement takes place, many people are attacked and many confessions are made. Later, when the turmoil is over, the sorting out will be done. Some of those wrongfully dealt with might get rehabilitated.’

‘How long will they have to wait for rehabilitation?’ I asked.

‘Maybe a couple of years. Maybe it would never happen. In each organization about 3 to 5 per cent of the total must be declared the “enemy” because that is the percentage mentioned by Chairman Mao in one of his speeches.’

‘How terrible!’ I exclaimed.

‘Yes, it’s really bad. There isn’t really such a high percentage of people who oppose the People’s Government. To fill their quota, the Party officials often included people whom they disliked, such as those who were disgruntled and troublesome, in the list of enemies. But no individual should make a false confession, no matter how great the pressure is.’ Mr Hu said this with great seriousness. He looked at me steadily as if to make sure I got his message and added, ‘That has always been my policy during each political movement.’

I understood that this was the advice he had come to give me. He did not say outright, ‘You mustn’t give a false confession, no matter how great is the pressure,’ because in a Chinese household the well-trained servant always remained within earshot ready to be of service, especially when there was a guest. Mr Hu did not want Lao Chao to hear him telling me not to confess. He was a cautious man and he trusted no one.

‘There always comes a time when a man almost reaches the end of his endurance and is tempted to write down something, however untrue, to satisfy his inquisitors and to free himself from intolerable pressure. But one mustn’t do it. Party officials will never be satisfied with the confession. Once one starts confessing, they will demand more and more admissions of guilt, however false, and exert increasing pressure to get what they want. In the end, one will get into a tangle of untruths from which one can no longer extract oneself. I have seen it happen to several people.’ Mr Hu was still speaking in the third person and did not say, ‘You mustn’t.’

His advice was timely and valuable. I was grateful to him for taking the trouble to come and moved by his friendship for my late husband, which was his motive for stretching out a helping hand to me. When he thought I understood what he had come to say, he spoke of political movements in general terms. He told me that he was a veteran of many such movements and had learned by bitter experience how to deal with them.

‘What do you think of the communique of the Central Committee meeting?’ I asked him.

Mr Hu shook his head and sighed. After a moment, he said, ‘Chairman Mao has won. It’s not unexpected.’ Then he added, ‘The beginning of a political movement is always the worst period. The hurricane loses its momentum after a few months and often fizzles out after about a year.’

‘A year! What a long time!’ I said.

Mr Hu smiled at my outburst, and said, ‘What’s a year to us Chinese? It’s but the blinking of an eye in our thousands of years of history. Time does not mean the same thing to us as to the Europeans whom you, of course, know well.’

‘I’m accused of being a spy because they think I know the British well.’

‘Their accusation is only an excuse with which to fool the masses. Sooner or later they will hit at everyone they do not trust and they probably think now is a good time to deal with you.’

Mr Hu got up to leave, asking me to telephone him whenever I wanted to see him to talk things over. As a final piece of advice he said, ‘Nearly all lower-ranking Communist Party officials suffer from an inferiority complex. Although they have power over us, somehow they have a deep feeling of inferiority. This is unfortunate because some of them feel they need to reassure themselves by using that power to make our life uncomfortable or to humiliate us. When you are being questioned, be firm but be polite also. Don’t offend them. They can be mean and spiteful. They can also be very cruel.’

‘It’s not in my nature to be obsequious. But thank you for the warning. I shall remember it,’ I said.

I was so wrapped up in my own problems that only then did I think of asking him about himself.

Mr Hu said philosophically, with an air of resignation, ‘I have joined the ranks of the workers. Another person has been appointed to my old job. When I tendered my letter of resignation to the Party Secretary, I told him that I felt my class status as a former capitalist rendered me unsuitable for a responsible executive position.’

The thought that he was now working as an ordinary worker in his own factory appalled me. But he was without bitterness.

‘It’s not so bad,’ he said. ‘In the Soviet Union, when the Communist Party took over, I believe all the capitalists were shot. I’m still alive and I’m able to look after all three generations of my family. I asked the Party Secretary to assign me to the most unskilled menial job. So now I am just a coolie, pushing drums of raw materials or carting coal. No one can be envious or jealous of a man doing work like that. You know, when I asked him for such a job, the Party Secretary seemed to be quite sorry for me. We used to get on well together.’

I recalled that my husband had told me that the reason Mr Hu and his Party Secretary got on well together was that Mr Hu did the work and the Party Secretary got the credit. Their factory won the Red Flag for good management and high production figures year after year.

‘Did you not do all the work for him?’

‘Yes, yes, I suppose I did most of the work. But I had spent my whole life building up that factory. In 1930, when I started, I had only a few workers. In 1956 when I handed the factory over to the government, there were fifteen hundred of them. And we ran a laboratory as well as a training centre for young technicians.’

‘Why do you want to be a coolie? Surely, with your knowledge and experience you could do more useful work even if you must be a worker.’

He made a negative gesture with his hand. ‘To be a coolie at times like this is not bad. We coolies work outside the plant and rest in a shed. If anything should go wrong, no one can accuse me of sabotaging the machinery inside the plant. An ex-capitalist is always the first on the list of suspects during a political campaign when everyone is jittery.’

With that sagacious remark he took his leave. When he shook hands with me, he said, ‘Keep fit and try to live long. If you live long enough, you might see a change in our country.’

From my servants’ attitude and the quality of the meal served to Mr Hu, I knew that they welcomed his visit. When I went upstairs to my bedroom, Chen Mah was there laying out my dressing gown and slippers. She advised me to listen to any advice from Mr Hu, who was, she declared, a good friend and a gentleman.

To have had someone sympathetic to talk to had been comforting. I was now more than ever resolved not to write anything false to satisfy the demand of the Party officials.

A few days without hearing from my persecutors restored my good humour somewhat. My daughter’s birthday was on 18 August. I decided we should have a small dinner party to celebrate the event and to dispel some of the gloom that had descended on the household. I asked my daughter to invite a few of her friends and I rang up my old friend Li Chen to ask her to join us.

I first met Li Chen in the autumn of 1955 when I arrived in London as a student. She had just graduated from the Royal College of Music. Shortly afterwards she married a Chinese government official and returned with him to China. She became a professor at her old school, the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, where she was the head of the piano department. Her husband, Su Lei, the son of a rich Chinese merchant in Hong Kong, had received a liberal education in a British school and university. The colonial atmosphere of Hong Kong in which he grew up and hated, and the glowing reports of a new Soviet society from the pens of prominent British writers and educators that flooded British universities in the early thirties combined to produce a profound effect on his character. He became a fiercely patriotic nationalist and at the same time a believer in Marxism.

When the Communist Army was marching towards Shanghai, Su Lei was jubilant, declaring that a new era of national resurgence and honest government was about to dawn in China. He refused to go to Taiwan with the Kuomintang Government, tried to persuade his friends to do the same and welcomed the Communist takeover with enthusiasm. In 1950, during the Thought Reform Movement in the universities, Li Chen, his wife, lost her position as head of the piano department at the Conservatory of Music. Su Lei was surprised to find that the Party member appointed to take her place could not read music. A worse blow came in 1953 when Mao Tze-tung launched the ‘Three and Five Antis Movement’ against corruption and bribery, aimed at the Shanghai industrialists and officials like Su Lei who had worked for economic agencies of the Kuomintang Government. Although all the evidence pointed to his honesty, Su Lei became a target. He was confined to his office, where the officials took turns questioning him. And struggle meetings were held against him.

A man like Su Lei was beyond the understanding of the average Chinese Communist, who believed the desire for revolutionary change to be the exclusive right of the poor and down-trodden. However, because of the Korean War and the boycott of China by the United States, the People’s Government was anxious to develop trade with Hong Kong. Su Lei’s wealthy relatives in the British colony used this opportunity to secure his release through negotiating directly with Peking. The Shanghai authorities had no choice but to allow him to leave Shanghai for Hong Kong with his two children when Peking agreed to concede to his family’s request.

Frustrated in their attempt to punish severely the rich man’s son who had dared to assume the proud mantle of a Marxist, the local Communist officials in Shanghai refused to grant an exit permit to enable Li Chen to accompany her husband and children, using the pretext that her work with the Conservatory of Music required her to remain in Shanghai. She never saw her husband alive again. However, when he died in Hong Kong in 1957, in the more liberal atmosphere generated in China by the Eighth Party Congress held in 1956, Li Chen was given permission to attend his funeral and to see her children in Hong Kong. She remained there until 1960, when she was invited back to Shanghai by the Conservatory of Music to which she had a life-long attachment. In the meantime, her children had been taken to Australia by an uncle.

When Li Chen returned to Shanghai, the city was suffering from a severe food shortage as a result of the catastrophic economic failure of the Great Leap Forward Campaign launched by Mao Tze-tung in 1958. Long queues of people were forming at dawn at Shanghai police stations, waiting to apply for exit permits to leave the country. This was such an embarrassment for the Shanghai authorities that they viewed Li Chen’s return from affluent Hong Kong to starving Shanghai as an opportunity for propaganda. I read of her return in the local newspaper, which normally reported only the visits of prominent Party officials or foreign dignitaries. The Shanghai Government hailed her as a true patriot and appointed her a delegate of the Political Consultative Conference, an organization of government-selected artists, writers, religious leaders, prominent industrialists and former Kuomintang officials whose function was to echo and to express support for the government policy of the moment, to set an example for others of similar background and to help project an image of popular support for the Communist Party policy by every section of the community. In return, the government granted members of this organization certain minor privileges, such as better housing and the use of a special restaurant where a supply of scarce food could be obtained without the surrender of ration coupons.

The Communist officials always rewarded a person for his usefulness to them, not for his virtue, though they talked a lot about his virtue. Li Chen had become a member of the Political Consultative Conference six years earlier when China suffered from severe economic difficulties and food shortages. Now that they were a thing of the past, Li Chen’s usefulness to the Communist authorities was over. Besides, the Party liked people to show gratitude with a display of servile obedience and verbal glorification of its policies. Li Chen was quite incapable of either. In fact, she told me that she found attending meetings boring and maintained silence when she was expected to pay homage to Mao’s policies on music and education. Her lack of enthusiasm for the part allocated to her as a member of the Political Consultative Conference could not have failed to irritate the Party officials.

These thoughts were in my mind when I telephoned her. I was very pleased when she accepted my invitation to dinner with alacrity.

When I got up in the early morning of 18 August, my daughter’s birthday, Chen Mah was not in the house. A devout Buddhist, she always went on this day to the temple at Ching-En-Tze to say a special prayer for Meiping – of whom she was very fond. Thinking that I would disapprove of these temple visits because I am a Christian, she generally slipped out of the house early and returned quietly, hoping I would not notice her absence. I pretended to know nothing about it and never mentioned it to her.

While I was in the dining room doing the flowers, she returned. I heard her talking to the cook in the pantry in an unusually agitated voice. When she came into the hall, I saw that she was wiping her eyes with her handkerchief.

‘What’s happened, Chen Mah?’ I called to her.

She was silent but came into the room where I was. ‘What’s happened at the temple?’ I asked her.

She sat down on a dining chair and burst into tears. “They are dismantling the temple,’ she said between sobs.

‘Who are dismantling the temple?’ I asked her. ‘Not the government, surely!’

‘Young people. Probably students. They said Chairman Mao told them to stop superstition. They also said the monks are counter-revolutionaries opposed to Chairman Mao.’

‘What did the monks do?’

‘Nothing. The students rounded them up. Some were beaten. When I got there I saw them prostrate on the ground in the courtyard. There was a large crowd of onlookers. One of them told me that the students were going to dismantle the temple and burn the scriptures as they had done at other places. I actually saw some of the students climbing onto the roof and throwing down the dies,’ Chen Mah said while wiping away her tears.

‘Please, Chen Mah, you mustn’t be too upset. You can worship at home. The Christian churches have been closed for several years now. The Christians all worship at home. You can do the same, can’t you? In any case, you mustn’t cry on Meiping’s birthday.’

‘Yes, yes, I mustn’t cry on Meiping’s birthday. But I was upset to see such wanton destruction.’ She tucked her handkerchief away and went out of the room.

Then the cook came in to complain that several items of food I had asked him to get for the party were unobtainable. He added that at the food market he and other cooks were jeered at for working for wealthy families.

‘I suppose they didn’t like to see you buying more things than they could afford. Please don’t let it bother you. As for the party, please just use whatever you were able to obtain at the market. I’m sure you will be able to put together a good meal for Meiping’s birthday,’ I tried to reassure him.

While I could understand my cook’s experience at the market as the result of class hatred generated by massive propaganda against the capitalist class, which to the general public was simply ‘the rich people’, I was puzzled by what had happened at the temple, which was operated by the State. The monks there were in fact government employees. If the government had decided to change its policy, it could have closed the temple and transferred the monks to other forms of employment as the government had done earlier during the Great Leap Forward Campaign. Actually the temple at Ching-En-Tze was a showplace for official visitors from South-East Asia to create the impression that China tolerated Buddhism. I remembered reading in the newspaper that the temple was re-opened after the Great Leap Forward Campaign and the monks brought back again. I wondered why the students had been allowed to do what they were doing and whether the Shanghai Municipal Government was aware of what was going on at Ching-En-Tze.