self-criticism. But that was unthinkable. I dismissed what I had heard as unimportant, perhaps merely a slip of the tongue by the young speaker. In fact, to liberate the proletariat again became the theme of the Cultural Revolution. Mao was to claim that his opponents in the Party leadership headed by Liu Shao-chi and Deng Hsiao-ping had revived capitalism in China. However, this was not revealed until much later in the year.
Other Red Guards were stopping buses, distributing leaflets, lecturing the passengers and punishing those whose clothes the Red Guards disapproved of. Most bicycles had red cards bearing Mao’s quotations on the handlebars; riders of the few without them were stopped and given warning. On the pavement, the Red Guards led the people to shout slogans. Each group of Red Guards was accompanied by large reproductions of Mao’s portraits mounted on stands and drums and gongs. At many street corners, loudspeakers were blaring revolutionary songs at intervals. In my proletarian outfit of old shirt and wide trousers, I blended with the scene and attracted no special attention. I walked steadily in the direction of the bank.
Suddenly I was startled to see the group of Red Guards right in front of me seize a pretty young woman. While one Red Guard held her, another removed her shoes and a third one cut the legs of her slacks open. The Red Guards were shouting, ‘Why do you wear shoes with pointed toes? Why do you wear slacks with narrow legs ?’
‘I’m a worker! I’m not a member of the capitalist class! Let me go!’ the girl was struggling and protesting.
In the struggle, the Red Guards removed her slacks altogether, much to the amusement of the crowd that surrounded the scene. The onlookers were laughing and jeering. One of the Red Guards slapped the girl’s face to stop her from struggling. She sat on the dusty ground and buried her face in her arms. Between sobs she murmured, ‘I’m not a member of the capitalist class!’
One of the Red Guards opened her bag and took out her work-pass to examine it. Then he threw the pass and her trousers to her. Hastily she pulled on the trousers. She did not wait for them to give her back her shoes but walked away quickly in her socks. Almost immediately the same Red Guard seized a young man and shouted, ‘Why do you have oiled hair?’
I did not wait to see the outcome of this encounter but went straight to the bank. In China, every bank was a branch of the People’s Bank which belonged to the State. There was no brass railing or small windows. The tellers sat behind a plain wooden counter to deal with the depositors. I approached one of the women and placed my deposit slip on the counter in front of her.
Before I left the house, I had considered how much cash I should withdraw. The two deposits past the maturing date were for 6,000 yuan (approximately £1,000) and 20,000 yuan (approximately £3,300) respectively. The cost of living in China was low, as were wages and salaries. In 1966, 6,000 yuan was a large sum of money; 20,000 yuan represented a small fortune. The bank was really a department of the government. Those who worked there were charged with the task of encouraging savings so that money could be channelled to the State. During political campaigns the tellers had the power to refuse payment of large sums of money to depositors even when the deposits had matured. Sometimes they would demand a letter of approval from the depositor’s place of work to certify the reason for the withdrawal. To avoid a possible rejection of my request to withdraw my money, I decided to cash the lesser sum of 6,000 and to renew the 20,000 for another year. But I had no difficulty whatever. The teller handed me the cash without uttering a single word and before I had finished counting the bank notes, she had already picked up her knitting again. Although the walls of the small bank were covered with Cultural Revolution slogans and a number of Big Character Posters, the atmosphere inside was a contrast to the tension generated by the Red Guards on the streets.
As I stepped once again onto the sun-baked pavement, I rather regretted that I had been too timid to try to cash the larger sum. At the same time I was glad I had encountered no difficulty. I headed for home, but when I turned the corner, I was almost knocked down by a group of excited Red Guards leading an old man on a length of rope. They were shouting and hitting the poor man with a stick. I quickly stepped back and stood against the wall to let them pass. Suddenly the old man collapsed on the ground as if too tired to go on. He was a pitiful sight with his shirt torn and a few strands of grey hair over his half-shut eyes. The Red Guards pulled the rope. When he still did not get up, they jumped on him. The old man shrieked in pain.
‘Dirty capitalist! Exploiter of workers! You deserve to die!’ shouted the Red Guards.
My heart was palpitating wildly. The sudden and unexpected encounter with the group of Red Guards and the close proximity of the suffering old man combined to give me a fright and made me think of Mr Hu. I wondered how he was faring. Nearly two weeks had passed since he had visited me. I thought I really ought to telephone him to see if he was all right. I slipped away and hastened towards my house. The streets were now even more crowded than an hour before. The Red Guards were seizing people indiscriminately. There were loud screams of protest and tearful pleading from the victims. When I saw that they were seizing women with permanent waves and cutting their hair off, I was really thankful that Chen Mah had given me the large straw hat to wear to cover my curly hair. There were quite a number of policemen on the streets but they were just watching.
It was a relief to leave the busy shopping area behind me. The residential streets were more peaceful. However, when I turned into my street, I saw a large crowd of people in front of my house. They were looking at a Big Character Poster pasted on the front gate of my neighbour’s house across the road. He was the chief engineer of the Shanghai Aluminium Company, formerly a Swiss firm taken over a few years earlier by the Chinese Government. Workers of the plant had put up the poster on his front gate denouncing him as a ‘running dog of Swiss imperialism’. Beside the poster was a smaller one written in a childish script. It was signed by my neighbour’s two small children who had joined in the denunciation of their father and vowed to sever their relationship with him. This unusual poster from an eleven-year-old and a ten-year-old was the reason for the crowd.
When Lao Chao opened the gate for me, I asked about the poster signed by the children of my neighbour. Lao Chao told me that my neighbour’s servant had told him that it was the father’s idea to save his children from persecution.
The Red Guards’ activities intensified by the hour. The very next day they entered the house of my neighbour across the street. His wife refused to open the front gate and turned the garden hose on the Red Guards to prevent them from entering. They simply smashed the gate down, snatched the hose from her and drenched her with water. Then they knocked her down and beat her for resisting their revolutionary action. Her children tried to defend their mother and got into a fight with the Red Guards. They were denounced as ‘Puppies of the running dog of Swiss imperialism’, and made to assist the Red Guards in burning their father’s books.
Day and night the city resounded with the loud noise of drums and gongs. News of looting and the ransacking of private homes all over the city reached me from different sources. I tried to reach Mr Hu by telephone without success. It was the same with my other friends. The violence of the Red Guards seemed to have escalated. I heard of victims being humiliated, terrorized and often killed when they offered resistance. Articles in the newspapers and talks by leading Maoists encouraged the Red Guards and congratulated them on their vandalism. They were declared to be the true successors to the cause of the proletarian Revolution and exhorted to be fearless and to overcome difficulties in their work of toppling the old world and building a new one based on Mao’s teachings.
I felt utterly helpless. There was nothing I could do to prevent the destruction of my home and the loss of all my possessions. My daughter became very worried. More than once, she talked about our not being able to live on her small salary. I decided the time had come to tell her about my bank accounts in Hong Kong and elsewhere which, I told her, would be more than sufficient to cover our living expenses. Actually I myself was more worried about her status after the Cultural Revolution. If a new society was to be formed in which descendants of capitalist-class families were to become a permanently unprivileged class in China, like the Untouchables in India, her life would be unthinkable. To me this was of more importance than the loss of our material possessions.
To take care of the servants, I decided to give them the 6,000 yuan I had obtained