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