Life and Death in Shanghai

At six o’clock Li Chen arrived. With her snow-white hair and calm smile, she always seemed the epitome of scholarly authority, tranquillity and distinction. Only her old friends like myself knew that behind her serene exterior was such great sensitivity that she could be depressed or elated by events which would have left an ordinary person relatively unmoved.

Li Chen was a great artist and an able teacher. From time immemorial, China’s tradition of respect for teachers gave them a special place in society. A good teacher who had devoted his life to education was compared to a fruitful tree, a phrase certainly applicable to Li Chen, whose many former students worked as concert pianists, accompanists and teachers all over China. Several had won international piano contests and received recognition abroad. I was very fond of Li Chen and greatly admired her total devotion to music and her students. Since her return from Hong Kong, we had seen a great deal of each other. She would often bring her music and spend an evening with me listening to my records. I knew she often felt lonely and missed her children. Fortunately, since Liu Shao-chi had become the Chairman of the People’s Republic in 1960 and Mao Tze-tung had retired from active administrative work, China had had no large-scale political upheaval until now so that Li Chen had been able to keep in touch with her children in Australia by correspondence.

After Lao Chao had served us with iced tea, I asked Li Chen, ‘How is everything with you at the Conservatory?’

‘I’m afraid it’s not good,’ she said sadly. ‘All classes have stopped. We are supposed to devote our entire time to the Cultural Revolution. Everybody has to write Big Character Posters. Professors like myself also have to write self-criticisms and read other people’s Big Character Posters against us.’

‘Are there many against you ?’ I asked her anxiously.

‘More are written against professors than against others. I don’t know whether I have more than other professors. I haven’t counted them. But so far, no struggle meeting has been arranged against me. My personal history is comparatively simple. I have never done any other work than being a teacher at the Conservatory.’

‘Have there been many struggle meetings against other professors at the Conservatory?’ I asked her.

‘Yes, there have been several. One was against a former member of the Kuomintang and another was against a former Rightist. The others are from other departments so I don’t know their personal history. These two are people who had already been denounced in former political movements,’ Li Chen explained. ‘I hate struggle meetings. Somehow, everybody behaves like savages.’

‘Do you think you will be safe?’

‘I have never opposed the Communist Party. I am entirely non-political. When I graduated from the Conservatory I went to England to study. When I came back I returned to the Conservatory to teach. There is nothing about me the Party doesn’t know. I should be safe, shouldn’t I? But I don’t know what may happen. There is something about this political campaign which seems different from previous ones.’

‘What is different?’ I asked her.

‘It’s the attitude of the Party officials. In other former political campaigns they were cocksure. They went into it boldly, full of confidence. This time, they seem nervous, almost as if they don’t really want to do anything. The fact that they have limited their attack to people who have been denounced already seems to indicate they don’t want to expand the scope of attack. Perhaps after the failure of Mao’s Great Leap Forward Campaign the Party officials are no longer certain Mao is always right to rely on political campaigns for making progress.’

What Li Chen told me was very interesting. At that juncture we did not know, of course, that the Proletarian Cultural Revolution was in fact a struggle for power between the Maoists and the more moderate faction headed by Liu Shao-chi and Deng Hsiao-ping. It later became known that the chief Party Secretary at the Conservatory belonged to Liu Shao-chi’s faction. He was murdered by Chiang Ching’s Revolutionaries when Chiang Ching decided to install one of her favourite young men as the Conservatory’s Party Secretary.

‘The writing of Big Character Posters advocated by Mao seems to me a great waste. At the Conservatory, a great deal of paper, thousands of writing brushes and bottles of ink have already been used. Yet when we neded extra lights in the classroom or additional musical instruments there was never any money for them,’ said Li Chen.

‘What do the Big Character Posters say against you ?’ I asked her.

‘The usual criticism about my education in England, my sending the children to Australia and my teaching method. When we were friendly with the Soviet Union, we were urged to teach western music and train students to take part in international compositions. After we broke with the Soviet Union, Chairman Mao started to make criticisms about western music. We had to use Chinese compositions exclusively for teaching. But there are so few Chinese compositions. Half my time was spent looking for teaching materials. It’s hard enough to carry on as a teacher already. Now my students are made to turn against me. Do you know one of them told me quietly that they had to write posters against me to protect themselves?’

‘Exactly. You mustn’t mind it. Don’t let it hurt you! The poor young people have to do it.’

‘I feel very sad. It is almost as if my whole life is wasted,’ Li Chen sighed.

‘Don’t be depressed by it! During the Great Leap Forward Campaign of 1958, the students in Meiping’s school from capitalist class families all had to criticize their family background. I told her to go ahead and criticize me. She did. The teacher and her fellow students all applauded her. It’s only a formality. It’s just acting. Don’t let it bother you.’

‘I’m afraid I can’t laugh it off like you do,’ Li Chen said. ‘It’s so unfair!’

‘Doesn’t your position as a delegate to the Political Consultative Conference give you some protection?’ I asked my friend.

‘I hear the Maoists want to abolish that organization. They call it an organization of radishes, red on the outside but white inside. They claim that while all the delegates talked as if they supported the Communist Party, in actual fact they oppose the Party,’ she said.

‘Is that true?’

‘Who knows? When the penalty of speaking one’s mind is so great, nobody knows what anybody else thinks,’ Li Chen said. I had to agree with her. In fact, after living in Communist China for so many years, I realized that one of the advantages enjoyed by a democratic government which allows freedom of speech is that the government knows exactly who supports it and who is against it, while a totalitarian government knows nothing of what the people really think.

When I told her that I too was involved in the Cultural Revolution, her reaction was the same as Winnie’s. She said, ‘Now that Shell has closed their Shanghai Office, the Party officials probably feel that they should use the opportunity of this political campaign to frighten you so that they can control you more easily in future.’ But she did not think the persecution against me would be serious. “They can’t save money by reducing your salary since you get no pay from the government. They can’t sack you from your job since you don’t work for them. I can’t see that there is much they can do to you except to give you a fright.’

‘I hope you are right,’ I said.

‘You know, I feel so discouraged that I sometimes think I can’t go on,’ Li Chen said.

“Why don’t you ask to retire? Lots of people retire before they are sixty and take a cut in pension to avoid politics.’

‘I might just do that when the Cultural Revolution is over,’ Li Chen said.

My daughter arrived with four of her young friends: Kung, a handsome male actor from her Film Studio whose father was a very famous film director from the thirties; a violinist with the Municipal Orchestra named Chang; Sun Kai, a mathematics teacher at a technical college who was Meiping’s special boy friend; and my god-daughter Hean who had been Meiping’s childhood friend in Australia. They were all keenly interested in music and often gathered at our house to listen to our stereo records.

The young possess an infinite capacity to be cheerful. Although all of them came from the type of families likely to be adversely affected by the Cultural Revolution, no mention was made of it. They laughed and chatted about music and books throughout the meal. When Meiping took what remained of her large birthday cake into the kitchen to share with the servants, even Chen Mah recovered her usual good humour. I heard her scolding Meiping fondly for licking chocolate from her fingers. When the meal was over, the young people retired to Meiping’s study to indulge in their favourite pastime of playing records on her record-player.

Li Chen and I went into the garden. Lao Chao arranged two wicker chairs on the lawn, put cushions on them, lit a coil of mosquito incense, and placed it on a plate between the chairs. Then he brought us chrysanthemum tea in covered cups. Soothing music from a violin concerto came through the window. I settled deeper into the chair and gazed up at the starlit summer sky.

‘You really have a comfortable life. You manage to enjoy the best of the western as well as the Chinese worlds, don’t you?’ Li Chen said. ‘I wonder if that’s not what irritates the Party officials.’

‘Maybe. Those questioning me certainly seem to hate me. Do you think they really believe it is our fault that the workers and peasants in China are poor?’

‘I think they are just envious. People can’t all live in the same way. I have a big apartment. It’s allocated to me by the Conservatory. That shows they don’t expect everyone to live in the same way,’ said Li Chen. She seemed more relaxed now.

‘Of course, you’re different. You have done so much for the country. Hundreds of young people have passed through your hands. Each one of them carried with him something you taught him. Isn’t that wonderful?’ I truly admired my friend Li Chen.

‘I don’t hear anyone in the Conservatory say that about me. It’s always how I taught decadent western music to poison the minds of the young. They don’t stop to think I couldn’t have done it if the government had forbidden it. All our teaching materials had to be passed by our Party Secretary before we could use them for the students. And they seem to forget that they used to urge me to teach western music in the early fifties when China was friendly with the Soviet Union.’ Li Chen was indignant and distraught. I wished I hadn’t mentioned her work again. To try to cheer her up, I asked her about her children.

‘They seem so remote, especially now they are married,’ she said.

‘Do you not long to see them?’

‘Oh, I do! But what’s the use thinking about it now? The government may never give me a passport to travel to Australia. The children certainly won’t come here.’

‘Perhaps you shouldn’t have come back from Hong Kong,’ I said.

‘At the time it seemed the best thing to do. I am very attached to the Conservatory, you know. I was trained there and I have worked there. It is really the most important thing in my life apart from the children. Many of my colleagues were fellow students when we studied there together. They all wrote to me. My students wrote to me. The Party Secretary wrote to me. Everybody said I was needed at the Conservatory so I came back.’

‘What did Su Lei’s family say about your wishing to come back?’

‘After Su Lei died, they weren’t very concerned about me. Most of them have now settled in Australia. They are a close-knit family. The uncles think of Su Lei’s children as belonging to the family rather than to me. Of course, if I weren’t able to make a living myself they would look after me. But I found the atmosphere a little stifling.’

Li Chen’s last few words were drowned in a sudden burst of noise from drums and gongs in the street. Lao Chao came into the garden and said, ‘There’s a parade of students passing the house.’

The young people also came outside. Standing on the terrace, Kung, the young actor, said, ‘It’s probably the Red Guards. A few days ago, Chiang Ching received their representatives at the Great Hall of the People in Peking. That means the Chairman approves of the Red Guards Organization.’

‘Who organized them in the first place?’ I asked him. ‘I have never heard of an organization called the Red Guards.’

‘It’s something new for the Cultural Revolution, encouraged by Chiang Ching, I heard. Someone told me she actually quietly organized some students from Ching Hua Middle School and then pretended it was the spontaneous idea of the students. Since she is the Chairman’s wife, the idea caught on. Now, acting as the Chairman’s representative, she has given the Red Guards official recognition,’ Kung said. Then he laughed and added, ‘My father used to say she was a mediocre actress in the old days. She seems to have improved.’ (Subsequently, when Chiang Ching dealt with her ‘enemies’ in the film world, Kung’s father had a terrible time and barely survived the ordeal. Kung himself was not given a part to play in any film production for years because of his father.)

Next day, I read in the newspaper that on 18 August Mao Tze-tung had reviewed the first contingent of the Red Guards in Peking. On the front page was a large photograph of Mao wearing the khaki uniform of a People’s Liberation Army officer, with a red armband on which the three Chinese characters for ‘Red Guard’ – Hong Wei Bing – were written in his own handwriting. From the gallery of the Tien An Men Square (the Gate of Heavenly Peace of the Forbidden City), he had smiled and waved as he received a thunderous ovation from the youngsters gathered below. His special message to the Red Guards was to carry the torch of the Cultural Revolution to the far corners of China and to pursue the purpose of the Revolution to the very end. The young people all over China received this message from the man they had been brought up to worship as a call to arms. At that early stage of the Cultural Revolution the declared target was still only the ‘capitalist class’. It was on them that the Red Guards focused their attack.

Group after group of young students continued to pass our house that evening, beating drums and gongs and shouting slogans. Meiping and her friends went out to watch the parade; Li Chen and I retired to my study. The noise from the street was so loud that we couldn’t talk. While we listened, I seemed to hear ‘Protect Chairman Mao’ among the slogans shouted by the Red Guards. When Meiping came back alone, she told us that the students carried Mao’s portraits and shouted ‘Protect Chairman Mao’ or ‘We shall protect Chairman Mao with our lives.’