Hinton, William.Shenfan - The Continuing Revolution in a Chinese Village. - PDFCOFFEE.COM (2024)

For WANG CHI N-H U N G and CHANG WE N-Y I -N G Two Long Bow peasants who embody so many of the fine quahties long displayed by the Chinese people—capacity for hard work, frugality, tenacity, curiosity about everything that breathes, moves or revolves, vision, creative drive, warmth and courage. Add two attitudes that are as new as they are rare in the world—faith in the tillers next door, commitment to cooperation as a way of life. To the extent that the Chinese people and their leaders trust and encourage men like Wang and women like Chang will China prosper. I believe that some day it will be found that peasants are people. Yes, beings in a great many respects like ourselves. And I believe that some day they will find this out, too—and then! Well, then I think they will rise up and demand to be regarded as part of the race, and by that consequence there will be trouble! MARK TWAIN, Recollections of Joan of Arc Acknowledgrnents First of all I want to thank the people of Long Bow village for the hospitality they have extended to me over so many years and for the goodwill and patience they demonstrated as I tried to grasp the tortuous course of their community's history and at the same time learned to wield a Chinese hoe. The officials of Horse Square Commune, Changchih City, the Southeast Shansi Region and Shansi Province also deserve heartfelt thanks. Without them I could never have carried out my investigations in Long Bow village or learned about the social, political and economic relations that surround, support and are in turn supported by life at the grass roots.

At the national level Premier Chou En-lai had the vision and the courage to invite me back to China at a time when many of his colleagues regarded Fanshen as a very controversial book. A true internationalist, he treated me, my wife and my children like members of one world family, as did the indomitable Hsing Chiang, who planned our far-flung travels. After Premier Chou's death it was the staff of the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries and its wise chairman, Wang Bing-nan, who welcomed the continuation of my efforts and made possible so many subsequent trips to Southeast Shansi. Both Chang Hsueh-liang and Kuo Tse-pei served as exemplary guides and interpreters and showed the kind of love and respect for peasants and peasant life that made them comfortable companions. The beautiful headquarters of their Association, across the street and around the corner from the Peking Hotel, is a delightful refuge for any weary traveler. Back home I have to thank Random House for patient support over many years, years when it sometimes looked as if no book would be forthcoming. Toni Morrison, a most sympathetic and devoted editor, has given me tremendous encouragement to keep plugging away at what often seemed a task that had no end. Without her enthusiasm and keen sense for the order and fitness of various sequences, not to mention the order and fitness of words as such, I might well have bogged down long ago. Thanks also to Dotty Seidel of Topton, Pennsylvania, and Eileen Ahearn of Random House for being able to produce clean typed pages from the overcorrected, illegible drafts that I constantly turned over to them. I owe more than I can hope to repay to my daughter Carma, who accompanied me through two long sojourns in Long Bow, who translated ACKNOWLEDGMENTS / X endlessly for me and, on her own, dipped into aspects of village life that I would not ordinarily have access to. Her in-depth, intuitive sense of the realities of Chinese life and her mastery of Chinese literature and culture have opened many a door for me and saved me from many an error. My heartfelt thanks go also to Wu Hung, a Peking student of philosophy, now studying at Harvard, for suggesting Shenfan as the title for this book and pointing out the various levels of symbolic meaning that the word may take on. Finally, I want to thank the rest of my family for the patience they have shown for more than a decade in the face of the crankiness generated by literary frustration, and also for their calmness in the face of the financial austerity that a work too long in progress inevitably entailed. I gave up farming to complete this book and gave up lecturing to gain more time for it. Although we never doubted that the next meal would be forthcoming, we did sometimes wonder when we would pay the oil bill and how we would pay the taxes. Debts also piled up. I hope Joanne, Michael, Alyssa and Catherine will decide that it has all been worthwhile. Shenfan Shenfan is a common word in the Chinese countryside. It means deep tillage, deep plowing, a deep and through overturning of the soil. Between the completion of the fall harvest and the onset of winter people go out to turn the earth. Side by side, armed with mattocks or spades, they dig the wide fields in preparation for next year's planting.

During the Great Leap of 1958 Shenfan came to stand for the vast, grass-roots movement to increase farm production that swept the hills and plains. People believed that the deeper they dug into the ground, turning both soil and subsoil, the more grain they would reap. They also believed that, in the absence of machinery, they must depend on their own hands to till the soil as deeply as possible, thus laying the foundations for a bountiful harvest. Attributing to the word symbolic meaning, Shenfan suggests all the painstaking effort peasants are willing to make once they own their own land, and it can express the hope they have for their land. It may also express the spirit of the cooperative movement by means of which people, working together, try to fashion a new way of life on ancient fields. Overall Shenfan stands here as a symbol for the drastic changes that have taken place in Chinese society since 1949. These changes have, after all, been brought about by incessant **deep-digging," by '^turning" and **overturn-ing" China's social foundations in a rigorous search for a bright road to the future. Shenfan, it is clear, inevitably follows on the heels of Fanshen. All the Chinese words in this book are spelled according to the familiar Wade-Giles system. In China this has been superseded by a new, official Pinyin (phonetic) system, which many authors and publishers outside China are already using. I have chosen to stick with the old Wade-Giles system, primarily because Shenfan is the sequel to Fanshen, in which all the Chinese spellings are WadeGiles. Most of the place names and the personal names in the new book would differ sharply from those in the old if I adopted the new official spelling. Since these names are confusing enough to the Western reader, it seemed best to maintain continuity and hew to the familiar. preface There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Niccold Machiavelli I assembled the raw material for a contemporary history of Long Bow village with some difficulty, over a long period of time, fighting a battle or two to obtain various components and a battle or two to hold onto them. I digested the material slowly and molded it even more slowly into its present shape, challenged always by the unfolding complexity of the subject. Note-by-note, skirmish-by-skirmish, page-by-page, the project lured me into an unpremeditated life work. Between the time I gathered my first notes in Long Bow village and the time Fanshen appeared in print, eighteen years passed. Between the time Fanshen appeared in print and the time Shenfan is scheduled to appear, another seventeen years will have rolled by. A final volume, Li Chun, may well consume two more. The best that can be said for these delays is that the longest of them were dictated by circumstances beyond my control. After I left Long Bow in 1948 I spent five years teaching farm mechanization to Chinese peasants, hence found no time to write. When I returned home in 1953 the U.S. Customs seized my notes and turned them over to Senator Eastland's Committee on Internal Security. I won them back in 1958 only after a protracted and expensive lawsuit. With notes in hand at last, it took me six years to write the book and two years to find a publisher courageous enough to print it. The publisher was Monthly Review Press, headed by Paul M. Sweezy and the late Leo Huberman. They brought out Fanshen in 1966.

Long before I finished Fanshen I made up my mind to go back to Long Bow to learn what happened to its citizens following land reform. Unfortunately at that time I could not implement the decision. I was not allowed to travel. Because I stayed on in China after 1949 and spoke favorably of the Chinese revolution after I came home, Mother ShipPREFACE / xiv ley* at the State Department denied me a passport. For fifteen years I could not venture beyond Canada and Mexico, two countries that do not require passports of American citizens. Neither the landmark 1958 Supreme Court decision in the Rockwell Kent case, which held that the Secretary of State could not withhold passports because of a citizen's political beliefs or associations, nor the pivotal 1964 decision in the Aptheker case, upholding the right to travel even for such people as leaders of the Communist Party, solved the problem for me. The Passport Division, using regulatory harassment to circumvent the law, continued to deny me a passport, knowing that I wanted to travel to China, a country still on its restricted list. In 1967 I finally threatened legal action of my own against Secretary of State Dean Rusk. Only then did the Passport Division relent and issue a passport to me, my wife and my two-year-old daughter, Catherine. Unfortunately they stamped the long-withheld documents "not valid for travel in China.'' What would happen if we went to China anyway? We made inquiries and found that officials of the People's Republic circumvented the regulation by the simple expedient of stamping entry visas on blank pieces of paper. Technically Americans did not have to use their passports to enter or leave the country. Reassured, we flew to London, England, early in 1968 and requested, through the Chinese Embassy there, permission to go on to Peking and Shansi. We waited many weeks for China's reply. When it came it expressed sincere regret. "It is inconvenient for us to receive you at this time." We felt that it was inconvenient, indeed, for us to return home after coming so far, but we had no choice. We did not learn until several years later that armed fighting had broken out in and around Changchih City and that even People's Liberation Army soldiers could not travel to Long Bow without risking their lives. In 1970, after armed struggle had died down and the people had reestablished relatively stable local governments throughout the hinterland, China's capacity to welcome foreign visitors revived. Mao Tse-tung and Premier Chou En-lai decided to break their nation's dangerous world isolation by renewing contact with the American people and the American government. One of their first moves was to get in touch with three writers whose books dealt in some depth with the Chinese revolution: Edgar Snow, Jack Belden and myself. They invited Edgar Snow, Mao's old friend and biographer, to come in 1970. He was already in Peking interviewing Mao once more when I received word that I and my whole family should come, stay as long as possible, and travel at will. We were still winding up our aff'airs at home and making travel arrangements when the Ping-Pong diplomacy of April, 1971, startled the world. We arrived in Peking on April 30 and stayed in China for seven months. We would have stayed longer if we had not been worried that our children would fall behind their peers in their *Mrs. Ruth B. Shipley, State Department Passport Division Head. When she retired in 1955, Secretary of State Dulles appointed a like-minded successor, Frances Knight, who continued to deny passports to people with "suspect" beliefs and associations.

PREFACE / XV Kutztown, Pennsylvania, primary school. Throughout our stay my daughter Carma, born in Peking in 1949, accompanied us. Chinese by culture and education but competent in English, she helped us penetrate layer after layer of Chinese life and thought. If some of the complex texture of reality comes through in these pages she, more than any other, is responsible. In those seven months we saw a great deal. Premier Chou En-lai unlocked doors for us everywhere: at the Peking locomotive works, where we spent five weeks and I worked for a time on the shop floor; at Tsinghua University, where we spent eighteen days talking to members of the rival student factions; at Tachai Brigade, Central Shansi, where we lived through the heat of July, joined field work, climbed mountains, and talked many times with brigade leader Ch'en Yung-kuei; and finally at Long Bow village, where we attached ourselves to a work team responsible for Party rectification and stayed right through to the end of the fall harvest and the deep-digging that set the stage for the next year's crops. We found it impossible to absorb everything we saw and heard on that trip. Delving into the Cultural Revolution alone was enough to occupy every waking moment. We were trying to understand that extraordinary upheaval and at the same time catch up on the whole sweep of history since 1949. I came away with ten thick books crammed cover to cover with handwritten notes and a mind crammed temple to temple with words and impressions, many of them contradictory. When I returned home I wrote a book about the Cultural Revolution at Tsinghua University, Hundred Day War, that focused on two short years of bizarre factional struggle. I also put five interviews with Chou En-lai together in one small volume. Conversations with Americans, but the Long Bow material proved more difficult to assimilate. We had listened to a torrent of rhetoric from local officials, which did not seem to coincide with the reality around us or with the rhetoric we heard elsewhere. The polemics of the Cultural Revolution led almost invariably to serious erosion of the integrity of words, to widespread conceptual embezzlement. People used and misused all the key words and phrases in the Marxist lexicon to a point where they became mere fig leaves for atrocious betrayals of principle. The "proletariat'' came to mean me and my friends; the "bourgeoisie," you and your friends, a group that had obviously degenerated into a "gang." To "make revolution" meant for me to take power. If you took power that was "counterrevolution." Whoever held power, however briefly, seemed able to justify, in the most glowing revolutionary jargon, what he or she planned to do. Later, the change in personnel might be complete, but the tone of righteous commitment remained intact, and the theoretical integument that sheathed all arguments appeared impermeable. The protagonists had read their Marx and their Mao and they knew how to select the most convincing quotes. I found it hard to develop a coherent framework for appraising what had happened, not to mention a suitable form for telling the story. I wrote a few chapters about the early, post-land-reform period, then bogged down in rhetoric of my own. In 1975 I had the good fortune to travel again to China, this time as a board member of the U.S.-China People's Friendship Association. The trip lasted one month. Although I did not have a chance to go to Long Bow, PREFACE / xvi I met two of the brigade leaders in Peking and talked with them for hours. In 1977 I went back to the

village and settled in for a two-and-a-half-month stretch. In 1978 I spent two weeks in Long Bow, in 1980 another two weeks and in 1981, ten days. With the perspective and insights acquired on these subsequent visits, the 1971 material began to fall into place. By that time the Chinese Party and people had begun to reevaluate what had happened during the so-called *'lost decade.'' Their discussion helped me define a series of historical stages and the most complex of these, the Cultural Revolution, began to lose some of its mystique if not much of its surreal, Catch-22 quality. By 1978 an atmosphere conducive to analysis, as opposed to rhetoric, replaced the frenzied milieu of earlier years and some people found the courage to call follies follies, frame-ups frame-ups and murders murders. Although the political pendulum soon swung so far to the right as to jeopardize objectivity from that extreme, the very act of swinging helped put things in perspective. The prosperity achieved by the people of Long Bow after 1973 also helped. With production going well and the quality of life improving, brigade members were willing to talk about the past more freely and sum it up with less bias. Without any need to target scapegoats whom they could blame for failure, people learned to relax and even to laugh when telling about their assorted misfortunes. Some people, however, afraid of rekindling factional bitterness, still preferred to leave history strictly alone. Why talk about the past? Words could only reopen old wounds. Shenfan continues the story of Long Bow village, Shansi Province, China, that Fanshen began. Fanshen (turn over, stand up) told of the liberation of the community from Japanese occupation and of the land reform that smashed several millennia of landlord domination. Shenfan (deep plowing, deep overturn) tells of the cooperative movement that peasants have been building in the Chinese countryside ever since every family gained a share of land. In contrast to the land reform, a once-and-done-with grass-roots upheaval that drastically redistributed property and set the stage for community self-rule, the cooperative movement has developed as a "loo-year great task," advancing discontinuously, veering left then right, reeling back in disorder, even coming to rest at times, only to recover momentum and roll on to truly remarkable achievements such as one thousand percent increases in yield for some units and even some counties and the doubling of grain output nationally since 1952.* Sharp conflict, uneven development, qualitative leaps alternating with stagnation and sudden collapse have characterized the process from the beginning. While about a third of the units have done well in recent years, feudal style, despotic rule, extreme leveling or just plain bad management have prevented another third from catching up. Many in the bottom third require massi^/e loans or state subsidies to *China claims a threefold increase since 1949, but 1949 was an exceptionally bad year. By 1952 the peasants restored normal production at the 150-metric-ton level. Since then they have increased it to a stable level of more than 300 million metric tons, which amounts to a generous doubling of output. PREFACE / xvii carry them through from one year to the next. In spite of all difficulties, national leaders have, until recently, upheld at least a facade of firm resolve to solve all problems, objective or subjective, that stand in the way of collective agriculture. Over the years they have marshaled a vast army of rural cadres and peasant activists who have devoted their lives to making the system work. Most of the men and women whose stories fill these pages are volunteers in that army. Shenfan tells how, starting with spasmodic mutual aid. Long Bow producers learned to work together;

pooled land, livestock and implements to create a viable cooperative; and how they joined their cooperative to others to form an association called a commune. It tells how, once collective labor became universal. Long Bow peasants attempted a great leap—cast iron ingots from local ores; built dams, reservoirs and railroad beds by hand; and deep-dug their land in expectation of record-breaking yields, only to suffer crop failures and sideline bankruptcies as drought seared the land and huge, centralized work units foundered for lack of sound management. Shenfan goes on to tell of a retreat toward private enterprise in the early sixties, of the resurgent cooperative organizing that followed, and of the mobilization of Long Bow peasants to "bombard the headquarters," overthrow all established leadership and go all out to change the world, in the Cultural Revolution; a drive that split the community, created diehard factions bent on power for power's sake, and pushed dedicated militants into all-out civil war. It tells how Liberation Army soldiers imposed a warped peace and how Party leaders tried, with marginal success, to unite people and cadres, reestablish normal life at the grass roots, and spark new production drives. Shenfan ends in the fall of 1971 at a time of deep crisis, both locally and nationally. With the Cultural Revolution aborted, Mao old and ailing, Lin Piao dead, and Chou En-lai under attack from an ultraleft faction centered on Mao's wife, factional strife subsided in and around Long Bow, but ill will remained. As *'class struggle" alarms fanned up new confrontations, the common people dragged their feet into the new decade. By 1980 these problems all came to a head and some of them found resolution. A third book, Li Chun, will tell how Long Bow peasants reorganized their community once more; how a combination of new and old activists brought people together, analyzed the roadblocks to production, and led their cooperative unit to a remarkable breakthrough in crop culture, farm mechanization and small-scale industry; how, from a troubled, split-prone backwater, Long Bow transformed itself in a few short years into a very successful brigade. Fanshen, Shenfan and Li Chun, taken together, will add up to a provisional history of one small North China village from 1945 until today. During the three decades it took for Long Bow to evolve the viable new form it now enjoys, China, formerly the "sick man of Asia," transformed herself into a major, independent, self-reliant new force on the world stage, a force with which our country must not only come to terms, but one with which it must seek common ground if we Americans are not, in our turn, to end up in dangerous isolation in the world. This imperative lends urgency PREFACE / xviii to a book such as this. Seeking common ground demands, first of all, some understanding. My overall goal in investigating and describing events in Long Bow remains what it was when I wrote Fanshen —to reveal through the microcosm of one small village something of the essence of the continuing revolution in China. A question arises as to whether Long Bow is a microcosm typical enough to reveal any such thing. Has Long Bow's development been universal or unique? The answer must be, as it was in the days of land reform, that it has been something of both. In 1945 Long Bow shared a common class structure, from landlord to hired laborer, with most of rural China, and suffered consequently from a typically severe land tenure problem. At the same time it stood out as a village with a large Catholic minority, a village that suffered occupation by the

Japanese, and a village liberated overnight from both foreign conquest and indigenous gentry control —a transition so sudden that no one was prepared for it. These features created tensions that few other villages had to face. In the post-land-reform period all three became rapidly less important as influences on development, to be replaced by features far more unsettling—industrialization and urban sprawl. Long Bow lies only twelve miles from Changchih City. The surrounding countryside boasts huge reserves of coal and substantial deposits of iron ore. After 1949, higher leaders decided to turn Changchih into an industrial center. They redrew county boundaries to give the city control over several important coal fields and over level plains on which to build new industries, both heavy and light, together with highways and railroads that could link them to the rest of China. Since then industrial output in the city has expanded several thousand percent. Because Long Bow, once a part of Lucheng County, lies practically in the middle of Changchih's new industrial zone, the development of this zone has profoundly influenced every facet of village life. Long Bow peasants have lost two-fifths of their land but they have gained enormous assets in the form of night soil and kitchen waste from industrial workers, a front-gate market for all the bricks they can make and all the vegetables they can grow, endless opportunities for transport work, freight handling, contract work in industrial plants and contract work on industrial products. For many years now the nonagricultural income of the community has far outweighed the income derived from the land. If in 1948 Long Bow could be called typical of the isolated Chinese countryside, today it can be called typical of the rapidly changing industrial outskirts of the nation's burgeoning cities, and that may place it somewhat closer to the essence of what is happening in China as a whole than any pristine farming village can claim to be. If the land reform, a manifestly rural movement, set the tone in Long Bow in the past, all the complex crosscurrents of China's modern industrial upsurge buffet the community today. The Cultural Revolution demonstrated this most strikingly. Starting in the universities of Peking, spreading to colleges and middle schools in urban centers, then leaping to factories everywhere, it tended to lose momentum and dissipate its forces when it hit the countryside. In Long Bow, by contrast, because the village had already linked up with suburbia, because a middle school had moved into the old Catholic orphanage at its PREFACE / xix center, the Cultural Revolution exploded within a few hours after it first surfaced in the nation's capital and dominated the community for years. When the working class of the Changchih industrial zone took up the movement, Long Bow peasants joined whatever factions controlled the mines and mills that hired them for contract work, and they brought factional differences home with them as soon as such differences appeared. The village served as a battleground for contending student and worker militants who fought with "hot" weapons such as pistols, rifles and hand grenades. For selfdefense, if for no other reason, many Long Bow peasants built up arsenals of their own. Reflecting the general rule that the peasants of suburban communes participated more continuously and more actively in the Cultural Revolution than peasants living deep in the countryside, Long Bow ably served as a window on the kind of commitment and the kind of conflict that stamped their arcane, medieval signature on the times. Special as Long Bow most certainly is today, it is still at its core a farming village, a community of peasants, family-centered, tradition-bound, yet richly creative and passionately committed to change. I can't help feeling satisfaction with the historical accident that sent me there in 1948, rather than to some other place. I chose it because it was the "basic village" (work-team location) nearest to

Northern University. I could walk to village meetings in the morning and teach classes back on the campus in the afternoon. A few weeks after I first set foot there, the university moved hundreds of miles away. I stayed behind long enough to see the land reform story unfold in full, and this was long enough to become deeply attached to the place. I have followed the fortunes of Long Bow people ever since with as much interest and concern as I follow the fortunes of my closest friends and neighbors back home. Furthermore, as a farmer, I have been able to make some contribution to the technical transformation of agriculture that most Long Bow peasants yearn for. Together we have built grain driers, center-pivot irrigation equipment, new tillage implements and a complete system of mechanization for corn. On my trip in 1981 I brought the Party Secretary a small cable hoist, a device that we call a "come-along." After forty experiments Long Bow mechanics solved the technical problems involved in its manufacture and began to produce it for the market. They now send advertising material across the country to promote what they call their "Stalwart Zebra." Because our relationship has always been two-sided, our rapport has deepened year by year, people have opened their homes and their hearts, and I have been able to assess not only the outer contours of their lives but some of the emotional wellsprings that shape those contours from within. The special relationship that I have with Long Bow, the very warp on which this book is woven, has created its own special drawback. Social studies are influenced, it seems, by a variant of the Heisenberg principle that makes it impossible to measure both the speed and the mass of a subatomic particle. Just as in physics to measure a particle changes it, so in social science the very act of studying a community inevitably brings on alterations. In the case of Long Bow, the alterations have mainly been due to PREFACE / XX intervention from above. Ever since the community won renown as the site ofFanshen, higher authorities in Changchih City, the Southeast Region and Shansi Province have paid special attention to Long Bow, sending work team after work team there in an effort to break the impasse in pohtics and production that plagued the village in the sixties and early seventies. Before our visit in 1971 they suddenly replaced key village leaders, mobilized the whole community to build up the mud-prone streets with cinders from the railroad yards, and paint courtyard walls with whitewash. They also prevailed on scores of families to buy and raise pigs. They wanted to present us with a model community, but except for a few firmer streets, a score of glistening walls and an extra pig or two, they failed. The people of Long Bow happily went on being themselves, a trifle lethargic in production perhaps, but brilliant as actors on the stage of their local theater. The cadres sent in from outside did not possess enough practical knowledge to analyze, not to mention overcome, the real roadblocks to production. What the work teams accomplished was to allow all the members of the community a chance to air their grievances, thus giving us deeper insight into their problems and their state of mind. When the people of Long Bow finally got their act together they did it from within, with their own resources, and they applied creative solutions to their problems that higher authorities had never even thought of. If intervention failed in the long run to transform the village into a model, it did manage nevertheless to influence it in many ways that are hard to measure. I cannot claim that the community we studied was the same one that would have existed had Fanshen never appeared. Nor, given the inevitable intervention, can I claim immunity for the individuals whose lives are so freely examined in these pages. Since idle gossip can generate unwarranted embarrassment for miles around, and since truth can bring

down on individual heads various forms of official harassment, I have reluctantly changed the names of most of the Long Bow citizens who appear in this account. Only the men and women of the older generation whom the public already knows from reading Fanshen, and a few of their sons and daughters whose antecedents are important to the story, retain their real names. All the other people in the community, all the members of the younger generation who have taken the lead in recent years, bear pseudonyms. The same holds true for some of the higher-level activists who played a big role in the factional confrontations of the Cultural Revolution. Since all accounts of those extraordinary times carry built-in bias, I hesitate to jeopardize careers by linking real names to extreme acts. Less controversial commune, city, regional and provincial personalities appear as themselves. In regard to national leaders, controversial or otherwise, anonymity hardly applies. In any case, I have little to report about them that others have not already revealed, and so I have decided to let the chips fall where they may. Neither abnormal intervention from above nor any of the other special circumstances surrounding Long Bow is reason enough, in my opinion, to rule it out as a fruitful place to study the development of peasant life in China or at least a suburban variant of it. Nevertheless, one may well ask how penetrating and valid a picture of any community can be compiled by means of interviews, observations and sporadic participation in community PREFACE / Xxi life and construction. In the preface to Fanshen I wrote that if the history contained in that volume was not accurate in every detail, its main content and spirit nevertheless contained the truth. To make the same claim sixteen years later for the content of Shenfan is not so easy. What I have finally managed to assemble here is certainly not any definitive history of Long Bow, but rather a'history compiled from a series of recollections voiced by an assortment of common people and cadres, most of them lowly, who lived through and played an active part in the tumultuous years of rural reconstruction after 1949. Since each informant brought to light his or her own experience and point of view, the versions of events recorded here sometimes clash. Since the time span covered by the book is long, quite a few gaps appear. Since I could not reconcile all the differences or fill in all the gaps, the story may seem at times disjointed; nevertheless each segment reflects an important aspect of remembered reality. Several factors make it difficult to claim that these segments add up to the truth in the same all-around sense that similar material compiled during the land reform movement did. For one thing, the canvas on which Shenfan is painted dwarfs the canvas that served Fanshen. In order to make the internal politics of Long Bow comprehensible, I had to describe, if possible, what was going on in the surrounding areas, in the city, the region and even the province. The wider the focus the more room there is for distortion and also for omission. I could not get as detailed or rounded a view of the region, not to mention the province, as I could of the village itself. For another thing, as stated above, the time span covered by Shenfan is long, several times longer than that covered by Fanshen. Over time, political winds shifted and people changed their attitude about what had happened to them—or at least what they were willing to say about what had happened to them. Policies that appeared admirable when the Party as a whole pushed them suddenly appeared less admirable when the Party turned against them. Conflicting versions of events, therefore, came not only from different individuals, but from the same individual after his or her attitude or willingness to

speak out changed. One reason attitudes shifted so much over time was the lack of consensus in China over the proper road to follow after land reform. This contrasted sharply with the situation during the earlier democratic revolution, the great popular movement that, over a period of a century, overthrew feudalism* and smashed foreign intervention in China. In the course of the *Many scholars use the word feudal to describe only the vassal-lord, serf-and-manor system characteristic of medieval Europe. In this book, as in Fanshen, the word is used in a broader sense to describe a society in which a ruling class, basing its power on the private ownership of and control over land, lived off a share of the produce extracted from that land by a class of laboring people. The latter, though neither slaves nor serfs, were still so closely bound to the land they cultivated as to make them little better than serfs of the landed proprietors. It was a society, furthermore, in which these two classes constituted the main social forces and determined the contours of development. Recent developments in China suggest that the centralized bureaucratic state, originally created by the landlord class, acquired such cohesion, autonomy and power that it became much more than a PREFACE / XXii democratic revolution a series of brilliant leaders, culminating in Mao Tse-tung, laid the theoretical foundations for a broad united front of hundreds of millions of people from all walks of life, who wanted to get rid of land rent and venal gentry on the one hand and free China's economy and culture from imperialist domination on the other. Even though right and left swings distorted policy as cadres tried to implement consensus politics (Fanshen, at one level, is primarily a running account of the political swings that buffeted land reform), clarity on such questions as the enemies to attack and the friends to win over, the feudal property to expropriate and the capitalist property to protect, the feudal culture to abandon and the new democratic culture to create, sharpened year by year. Anyone trying to sum up what happened during the postwar civil war and the land reform could tap a huge reservoir of common experience brought into focus with the aid of a shared theoretical lens. I did not have to create a coherent philosophical framework for Fanshen. The Chinese people and their leaders, in the course of a century of conflict, had already created one, and it reflected reality as I experienced it. Starting with 1949 no one has been able to forge a similar political consensus. After the victory of the new democratic revolution Mao led the whole country immediately into a new stage called "socialist revolution," but apparently he never won a majority of his colleagues to the view that he had named the stage correctly or had prepared an appropriate program for it. It seems that he never won a true working majority of the Chinese people to this view either. It is my impression that most peasants in the countryside took Mao's "socialism" enthusiastically to heart, but there is evidence to indicate that beyond the confines of the Liberated Areas of the North, where land reform created a new society as early as 1948 and cooperation developed step by step on its merits, the response was often brittle and sometimes hollow. Throughout the south, cadres flooding in from old wartime bases beyond the Yellow River tended to push cooperation too soon, too fast and too rigidly to ensure full popular acceptance and self-sustaining growth. Lack of strategic consensus has had an incalculable influence on the reconstruction of China since 1949. The right and left swings that constantly distorted policy in the post-land-reform period were

nothing new, but in the absence of consensus the swings tended to be far more extreme and far more destructive than they had been before. Foot-dragging by an important section of the leadership that disagreed on strategic goals often served to undermine and slow down political initiatives. But by taking the opposite tack, these same leaders could, if they felt like it, speed up those initiatives and carry them to extremes for the sole purpose of discrediting not only the initiatives themselves, but the overall direction of the movement. Once ultraleft errors make radical programs look absurd, the substitution of servant, an executive committee for that class. State functionaries crystallized as a self-perpetuating class above classes, the most important and stable component of Chinese civilization, able to reconstitute itself historically, over and over again, and apparently, even to survive the expropriation and destruction of the landholding gentry who for thousands of years served as its social base. PREFACE / xxiii conservative alternatives becomes easy. Whether or not anyone ever consciously carried out such devious maneuvers, objectively the ball clearly bounced that way. After 1949 unprincipled struggle over power also intensified right and left swings. At stake was not simply the right to lead the revolutionary movement, as was the case before Liberation, but the right to rule the nation. This qualitative difference introduced an acrimony into conflicts between individuals and cliques that soon became lethal. Such conflicts occurred with increasing frequency as the new apparatus of government took on all the attributes of China's traditional bureaucracy— centralized, all-powerful and responsible to no one outside its ranks. In a well-established hierarchy ambitious individuals base their decisions less on what is good for the country and more on what is good for their personal careers. The important thing is not to solve problems but to please superiors. If higher authorities call for dissolving shaky cooperatives, lower authorities dissolve cooperatives wholesale, the sound along with the unsound, as proof of their eagerness and competence. If higher authorities call for taking grain as the key link, lower authorities push for grain only, neglecting forestry, fisheries, livestock and side occupations, as proof of their activist spirit. Thus a slight corrective puff, when translated into policy at the village level, can turn into an irresistible hurricane that blows down everything in its path. When higher authorities, let us assume in good faith, try a compensating puff, a new hurricane, generating from another point of the compass, sweeps in turn across the wasteland left by the previous storm. In China they call this **one stroke of the knife." When the knife falls, even lowly team cadres feel constrained to practice bureaucratic oneupmanship. Little wonder peasants conclude that to be ^'objective" one must first decide what direction the wind is coming from. Political analysts in China today blame past policy failures and irrational swings on the remnants of "feudal ideology" that still influence the minds of so many individuals, especially individuals who hold power. They allege backward thought to be part of these officials' "peasant" inheritance. What seems obvious to an outside observer is that living, institutional feudalism in many forms and disguises daily reinforces "feudal ideology." Here one must grant pride of place to the enormous government apparatus that responds to problems almost exactly as earlier imperial governments responded. Priority number one always has to be the consolidation of power and maintenance of official prerogatives. It may even be argued that the principle source of antagonism in China today is this government apparatus, a modern reincarnation of scholar-gentry rule, riding herd on everything in

sight; but this is a theory too painful to contemplate for a generation that has known nothing but revolutionary upheaval. It is much more comfortable to blame backwardness and stagnation on the peasants, on "peasant mentality" carried into the government by cadres from the countryside, and to postulate modern education as the cure. Mao, of course, tended to blame everything on the bourgeoisie and their representatives inside the Party. He thereby raised a whole set of knotty theoretical questions too vast to examine here. My point, in any case, is that there is confusion about what has happened PREFACE / xxiv and what is happening in China, that sharp conflict within the country over past, present and future poHcy persists. The conflict concerns not simply tactical questions, but basic strategic questions: What stage of revolution is China going through? What kind of society does China now have and what kind of society should China build? What classes and strata can working people count on as allies and what classes or strata, if any, should they target as enemies? To write a definitive history of the last thirty years one would have to distill some order out of this intellectual disarray; one would have to develop a theory comprehensive enough to account for the facts—all of them. Clearly such a theoretical tour de force is beyond me and beyond the scope of this book. It may well take a whole generation of Chinese and world scholars to sift the true meaning of these three decades. The best that I have been able to do is to listen carefully to what people have told me, try not to let the biases inherited from past experience interfere, then write down what seems most significant. What this amounts to, in traditional Chinese parlance, is **throwing out a few bricks, in hope of attracting some jade." I would consider it a great accomphshment if my flawed and, in Chinese eyes, possibly preposterous account of Long Bow village provoked somebody in China to produce a community chronicle as it should be produced —by a native of the community described, by someone tied to his or her own village by a thousand invisible threads, aware of every nuance in the complex network of its relationships, of every warp, twist and bend in its forward progress, or, as could well happen, its relapse into stagnation. In the meantime, I am concerned about the future of the cooperative movement and the destiny of its vast peasant membership. At the present time, just as some scattered units, including Long Bow village, reach new levels of success, the movement as a whole, plagued by commandism, corruption, apathy and stagnation, has suddenly broken ranks and slid into headlong retreat. Tachai Brigade, for years the model for self-reliance and public spirit, is being denounced on questionable evidence as a subsidized fraud. People who once looked upon cooperation as the road to salvation now damn it as sharing poverty, **people eating out of one big pot." The dream, born in 1949, of liberated tillers marching together toward socialist prosperity has given way to an old principle from which hundreds of millions suffered grievously in the past, the principle that "a few must get rich first."* At the close of land reform I could truthfully write that the peasants were gradually learning the central lesson of our time, "that only through participation in common struggle can any individual achieve personal emancipation, that the road to Fanshen for one lies through the Fanshen of all." Now, three decades after the first scattered peasant families in North China spontaneously organized cooperative production around **three legs of a donkey" or **five washed-out gullies," national leaders, seizing on back-country inertia, are calling into question the very concept of collective work.

*"A few must get rich first'' is not the same as "distribution based on work performed," a basic principle for rewarding members of cooperative units and for calculating the income of cooperative units competing against one another. PREFACE / XXV They are pushing hard for new production systems that stress material incentive as cure-all. They are urging producers to contract land, animals and implements for individual production, then take sole responsibility for the profits and losses incurred. Some thirty percent of the peasants, displaced by the contract procedures wherever they have taken hold, are scrambling to set up home crafts or are taking to the open road as peddlers. When peddlers crowd each others' heels, can beggars be far behind? In the wake of this sudden reversal of official priorities in China, Shenfan and Li Chun may well turn out to be, not the challenging epic of an earthbound people learning to substitute cooperation for competition, to place their faith in community action, to put "public first and self second" that I conceived it to be when I first began work on it so long ago, but rather, a disconcerting chronicle of the rise and decline of a cooperative dream, a story of stagnation and decay for what has been, from the start, probably the boldest, certainly the most massive, social transformation of all time. WILLIAM HINTON Fleetwood, Pennsylvania February, ig8^ ®A )( 3uilaifias TiaiCroad Hianway Alleys 7^1 eld fanes 'Vree-lined roads City-county border Main caiial ^rancfi canal IrriqatLon canal Undcrcj round ciraut

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West 7 FROM RINGSIDE TO ARENA

At the start the fractured student movement did not seem hke a very serious matter to the peasants of Long Bow. Throughout 1966 and into 1967 the Cuhural Revolution meant to them primarily a ringside seat for observing the activities and antics of the student movement at Luan Middle School, which occupied the old Catholic Compound at the very heart of their community. In the evening, when the peasants returned from hard labor in the fields, they had no choice but to listen to the interminable debates between the factions that both sides broadcast to the world by loudspeaker. To many peasants this incessant broadcasting was a nuisance and an insult. How could one hold a quiet conversation, think or rest, not to mention sleep, under that endless noisy assault? The Cultural Revolution, they concluded, was for people with culture, so why not carry it on in a cultured manner and leave peasants, who had no culture, in peace. Others, inspired by Mao Tse-tung's pronouncement that everyone, including peasants, should pay attention to state affairs, took an interest in the struggle going on at the school, and did their best to learn something from the debates. Paying attention was not always easy, because the loudspeakers on both sides often blared forth simultaneously, each trying to drown out the other with superior volume. As a result, they canceled each other out. At other times one side or the other had trouble with the electronic equipment, thus giving the opposition a monopoly of the sound waves, an opportunity which it made the most of. Among those peasants who took an interest was Kuo Cheng-k'uan, vice-secretary of the Brigade Party Branch and chairman of the Peasants' Association. He would have been miserable if he had not, because his house was built against the schoolyard wall. He and his family could hardly ignore the avalanche of sound that poured, night and day, over that adobe barrier. Cheng-k'uan talked about that time: Since I lived so close, I couldn't help but listen to their charges and countercharges. Once I even got involved in the struggle between them. This happened because the Red Guards stopped some army trucks on their way to the cement plant. Kao T'ai-sheng, one of the BOMBARD THE HEADQUARTERS / 5IO science teachers at the middle school, led this group. When the students went out to stop the trucks, he led the way. Some of us peasants and a few workers saw them and we didn't like what they had done.

The Mao Tse-tung Thought Red Guards, the other faction, didn't like it either. We joined up and went to find Kao. He was in the school grounds, surrounded by loyal supporters. But we came in force. We pushed right through and seized him. Then the soldiers criticized us. They said it was wrong to use force, we should debate instead. So right then and there we held a meeting that lasted all afternoon. We decided to determine, on the spot, what was right and what was wrong. We criticized the Red Guards for stopping the trucks and they didn't have any good answer. In the end the Liberation Army men said they'd like to take Kao along, talk with him, and return him the next day. But his supporters wouldn't let him go. Some held him by the legs while others grabbed his body. The army men said, "Don't worry, we'll take good care of him. It is our responsibility to help him think things out more clearly." But that didn't convince the students of his faction, so the army men let him go.

After that the debate really grew hot. The Mao Tse-tung Thought members yelled, "Down with Kao and Wang!" [the two science teachers] while the Red Guards yelled back, "Down with Fan Hsui-ch'i!" [the principal of the middle school]. At that time people talked a lot about seizing power. Those among us who could read knew that there was such a thing, but the rest of us who were illiterate didn't know what it was all about. You find power standing there and you seize it? It didn't make much sense. But the students at the middle school took it very seriously just the same. The Red Guards threatened to seize power. The school accountant and the janitor identified power with the school seals, so each one took a seal along in his pocket for safekeeping. The janitor's wife lived at the cement plant. One day when her husband went to see her the Red Guards ambushed him on the road. They took the seal from him, then rushed back to the school and broadcast that they had seized power from the capitalist roaders in charge of the school. Immediately the Mao Tse-tung Thought crowd cursed them over their loudspeaker and charged that the act was completely illegal— not a power seizure, but a power grab. For myself I couldn't figure out how anyone could seize power by grabbing a seal, but the deed had been done and there they were cursing each other. The Mao Tse-tung Thought crowd said their opponents must repudiate their wrong thinking and abandon their bourgeois reactionary line, but the Red Guards responded that they had only done what had to be done. Thus they carried on, each side defending its own position and denouncing the other. After the Red Guards seized power in the middle school, some of the Mao Tse-tung Thought group who had retreated to Chang-chih came out from the city to search the grounds. In one of the FROM RINGSIDE TO ARENA / 5II teacher's desk drawers they found a picture of Liu Shao-ch'i. On the strength of this they accused the Red Guards of protecting Liu Shao-ch'i. "While we are all busy overthrowing Liu, you are supporting him!" They came in some twenty big trucks, equipped with several loudspeakers. As soon as they found this picture the loudspeakers all began to blare the news. To prevent the Red Guards from answering back they seized the loudspeaker the Red Guards had been using in the middle school. They also went out into the village and seized a second loudspeaker that the Red Guards had given to one of the Long Bow peasant organizations. Young members of a rival organization had tipped them off about it. All afternoon chaos ruled in the school grounds. The Mao Tse-tung Thought group wanted to take power back. They looked everywhere for the official seal. They seized one girl and beat up several people. But Red Guards passed the seal from hand to hand. Since they had more than a hundred pairs of hands, the Changchih people never found it. In the end they retreated with the two loudspeakers they had grabbed and the picture of Liu Shao-ch'i. No sooner had the city people left than the student factions started to accuse one another. One side charged, **You protect bad people like Kao!'' The other side countercharged, "You stand behind Fan the Landlord!'' After supper a big confrontation took place. Many people gathered to debate, others gathered just to listen. According to Mao Tse-tung, nobody should curse others or use violence, but in

this debate both sides cursed the other for protecting the wrong people. Nobody understood what it was really all about. But at least they didn't beat each other up. Every night these debates went on until after midnight. After we had eaten our supper we peasants had nothing to do, so we went to the middle school grounds, sat on the sidelines, and listened. Events such as those described by Kuo Cheng-k'uan—strident, ludri-crous, and at the same time threatening—went on until a decision by the Party Center in Peking brought peasants all over China into active participation in the Cultural Revolution. Almost overnight Central Government action transformed Long Bow residents from onlookers, both willing and unwilling, into deeply engaged protagonists. The document that precipitated this shift was called "Directive of the Central Committee on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in Rural Districts (Draft)." Underneath this imposing title the subheading read: "For discussion and trial application." The Central Committee issued it on December 15, 1966, after most of the fall harvest work throughout China had been completed. It represented a radical departure from previous official announcements, such as a Central Committee Directive of September 14,1966, which emphasized the overriding importance of the coming harvest and warned Red Guard activists not to carry their revolutionary activities into the countryside or, except in very special circumstances, to go into the countryside at all. BOMBARD THE HEADQUARTERS / 512 Significantly, the directive of December 15 began with a paragraph urging the implementation of Mao Tse-tung's call to "grasp revolution and promote production," and advised peasants to "revolutionize their minds" and "move agricultural production forward." "As a rule, no work teams will be sent," said the directive. The masses should take responsibility, educate themselves, liberate themselves and rise on their own to make revolution. They should do all this according to the principles laid down in the Sixteen Points of August 8, combined with the Ten Points and the Twenty-three Points issued during the Socialist Education Movement. In fact, they should bring the Four Clean campaign of the Socialist Education Movement "into the orbit of" the Cultural Revolution and solve all remaining problems as part of this great new movement, the target of which should be "the small handful of capitalist roaders in authority within the Party and the landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements and rightists not well reformed. " Ominously, the document underlined and singled out the last named "five bad categories" as if everyone understood that such people posed the principal contradiction in the Chinese countryside in 1966—a very doubtful proposition that helped lay the groundwork for all manner of excesses, frameups, false charges and political detours in the ensuing months and years. Next came the inspiring sentence that had earlier so moved the youth of Peking and other cities to smash monuments, invade homes, break records, burn books and demand red as the color for "go" in traffic lights —"Destroy the old thought, old culture, old customs and old habits of the exploiting class and establish the new thought, new culture, new customs and new habits of the proletariat." This basic revolutionary command, so seminal to the whole transformation of China, became an excuse for attacking anything and everything that activists didn't like, often resulting in the imposition of traditional feudal standards in the name of proletarianization.

This same point, number three of the ten in the December directive, advised the peasants to rectify bureaucracy and commandism among the cadres and to implement the system of cadres' participation in productive labor, a crucial ongoing requirement vital to the success of cooperative agriculture. And who was to do all these things? The poor and lower-middle peasants uniting with the middle peasants and gradually uniting more than 95 percent of the masses and 95 percent of the cadres. Using what organizational form? Cultural Revolution committees of poor and lower-middle peasants elected democratically by congresses of poor and lower-middle peasants. These committees were to take the lead in reorganizing, streamlining and reelecting production leadership groups "through mass discussion." That is, the peasants should democratically reappraise and reform their production teams. In addition, young people should form Red Guard units. The sons and daughters of leading cadres should not hold leading positions in the units, nor should children of landlords and rich peasants now residing in other places return home to establish revolutionary ties. This last prohibition FROM RINGSIDE TO ARENA / 513 became necessary because the next point gave consent for revolutionary students from the cities to form groups to go to the countryside, build "revolutionary ties," eat, live and work together with the peasants, and take part in the Cultural Revolution so long as they did not monopolize the movement or act in place of the peasants. Point number seven stressed "big democracy" or "extensive democracy," defined as the "four bigs"— big contending, big blooming, big character posters and big debates. The directive asked for a wideopen, no-holds barred, free-for-all mass movement of the people that was democratic and nonviolent. "Struggle must be waged by placing facts on the table and reasoning things out." A variant of this slogan, "Persist in struggle by reasoning and refrain from struggle by force," enjoyed wide and persistent repetition. Point seven also included permission to establish "revolutionary ties" between brigades and communes coupled with a warning against factional strife "stirred up by bad characters." All of which, in the Hght of the real struggle that developed, bears today a wistful, Utopian flavor, something of the innocent idealism of the revolution in its infancy. In order to make possible the widest use of big character posters and big debates, the document held communes responsible for distributing free paper, ink, writing brushes and poster paint to all participants in the Cultural Revolution. Point eight absolutely forbade retaliation against rank-and-filers who expressed dissident views, specifically naming a reduction in work-point earnings as a common means of counterattack by brigade and commune leaders. Anyone labeled "counterrevolutionary" or "saboteur" for having expressed such views should be vindicated. But at the same time the document designated the "five bad" categories—landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements and rightists—as the targets of mass dictatorship. It specifically enjoined them from rebelling, in the name of the Cultural Revolution, against the working class and the poor and lower-middle peasants. These two provisions, in fact, canceled each other out, for in practice, when a dissident wished to express his views, all that was necessary in order to suppress him was to label him or her as belonging to one of the "five bad" categories, in which case the individual had no rights at all that anyone need respect, and obviously no right at all to free paper, ink and writing brushes with which to dispute the label already applied, and

vindicate himself or herself. Point nine concerned education. It declared intermediate schools to be on vacation until the following summer. It instructed work-study universities and middle schools to work out on their own an appropriate method for "grasping revolution and promoting production." It asked commune and brigade leaders to guide primary schools in making revolution. The last point, point ten, like the last point of the famous Sixteen Point Decision of August 8, raised the question of Mao Tse-tung Thought. "During the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao's works must be studied and applied in flexible ways, the class struggle taken as the leading theme, and emphasis placed on 'application.' " A final, stirring call —"Through the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, change the rural districts into big schools for studying the Thought of Mao Tsetung!"— BOMBARD THE HEADQUARTERS / 514 wound up the document. This exhortation laid the groundwork for a vast increase in the study of Mao Tse-tung's writings in the countryside. It also set the stage for dogmatic memorization of Mao Tsetung quotes from the famous Red Book, which passed for study in some places. In the following period **flexible study" and "flexible application" were often conspicuous by their absence. Confucian rote learning applied to a new set of "analects" —the wisdom of Chairman Mao—took their place. The leaders of Long Bow took the December 15 Decision quite seriously and immediately implemented it with the formation of a new administrative body called the Cultural Revolution Committee, and a mass organization called the Revolutionary Rebel Regiment. The Cultural Revolution Committee was made up of seven elected delegates, one from each agricultural production team and one from the Sidelines Team. In theory, each delegate satisfied the five standards for revolutionary successors laid down by Chairman Mao in his polemic against Khrushchev in 1964. But because the Party branch strictly adhered to the Directive's caution against acting in place of the rankand-file and leaned over backward not to influence peasant choices, the elections brought forward some disappointing delegates, most notably Whiskers Shen, a man regarded by virtually everyone as a notorious rascal. He was chosen by the First Production Team. Other delegates on the committee were Chou Cheng-lo, a Party member, as chairman; Lin Ling-chih, a teacher in the village primary school, as vice-chairman; and Chi K'uan-shun, Wei Tzu-kuang, Huai Teng-k'e and Li Lin-feng as ordinary members. Led by this newly elected group, the seven teams met separately to choose who could enter the mass organization, the Revolutionary Rebel Regiment. The committee passed final judgment on all names approved by the rank-and-file and opened membership to all citizens not under supervision, regardless of age or sex. However, each had to fill out a form regarding class origin and current status, and the committee allowed only poor and lower-middle peasants without any stain on their history and their children to join. Not even all of these were welcome because, since the Cultural Revolution was obviously another "gate" for the examination of leading cadres, the committee disbarred cadres and cadres' wives, husbands and children. It also disbarred people who fell into any of six categories listed by the Public Security forces as undesirable. These included anyone whom the revolutionary regime had jailed since 1945 and any of their immediate relatives, including children; also the immediate

relatives or children of anyone sentenced to death by the revolutionary regime since 1945. The application of these standards, very strictly interpreted, excluded from the Revolutionary Rebel Regiment a large number of people, and amounted to a surrender to the inheritance theory that had inspired so many of the early Red Guard organizations in Peking: A dragon begets a dragon, A phoenix begets a phoenix. The son of a rat, from the day of his birth. Knows only how to dig a hole in the ground. FROM RINGSIDE TO ARENA / 515 What are the requirements for worthy successors to the revolutionary cause of the proletariat? 1. They must be genuine Marxist-Leninists and not revisionists like Khrushchev wearing the cloak of Marxism-Leninism. 2. They must be revolutionaries who wholeheartedly serve the overwhelming majority of the people of China and the whole world and must not be like Khrushchev, who serves both the interests of the handful of members of the privileged bourgeois stratum in his own country and those of foreign imperialism and reaction. 3. They must be proletarian statesmen capable of uniting and working together with the overwhelming majority. Not only must they unite with those who agree with them, they must also be good at uniting with those who disagree and even with those who formerly opposed them and have since been proved wrong in practice. But they must especially watch out for careerists and conspirators like Khrushchev and prevent such bad elements from usurping the leadership of the Party and the state at any level. 4. They must be models in applying the Party's democratic centralism, must master the method of leadership based on the principle of "from the masses, to the masses," and must cultivate a democratic style and be good at listening to the masses. They must not be despotic like Khrushchev and violate the Party's democratic centralism, make surprise attacks on comrades, or act arbitrarily and dictatorially. 5. They must be modest and prudent and guard against arrogance and impetuosity; they must be imbued with the spirit of self-criticism and have the courage to correct mistakes and shortcomings in their work. They must never cover up their errors like Khrushchev, and claim all the credit for themselves and shift all the blame on others. Successors to the revolutionary cause of the proletariat come forward in mass struggles and are tempered in the great storms of revolution. It is essential to test and judge cadres and choose and train successors in the long course of mass struggle. Mao Tse-tung, "On Khrushchev's Phoney Communism and Its Historical Lessons for the World" (July 14, 1964), pp. 72-74.

Or, more succinctly: Father a hero, son a great fellow. Father a reactionary, son a rotten egg. So it happened that this first attempt to implement the Cultural Revolution in Long Bow resulted in the selection of a core group of peasants approved and trusted by a hastily chosen Cultural Revolution Committee, which in turn had the support and confidence of the Communist Party Branch. People whose primary commitment was to the status quo would BOMBARD THE HEADQUARTERS / 516 carry out the great "rebellion" under the supervision of those already in power. By contrast, the rhetoric accompanying all this organizing sparkled with revolutionary words and phrases. The masses were going to rise up against Party people in authority who were "taking the capitalist road"; they were going to criticize and repudiate the ideology of the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting classes; they were going to root out all vestiges of capitalism and revisionism. In the words of the famous January i, 1967, editorial, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in factories and rural areas must "firmly adhere to the line of letting the masses educate themselves, liberate themselves and rise up to make revolution by themselves. No one should take everything into one's own hands." Furthermore, the movement must "fully develop extensive democracy under the dictatorship of the proletariat. This extensive democracy means mobilizing hundreds of millions of people under the command of Mao Tse-tung's Thought to launch a general attack on the enemies of socialism and, at the same time, criticize and supervise leading organs and leading cadres at all levels." Democracy on such a scale had to be guaranteed, of course, by the army, the militia and the police. "Our organs of proletarian dictatorship must resolutely and unswervingly guarantee the democratic rights of the people and guarantee that free airing of views, the posting of big character posters, great debates and large-scale exchange of revolutionary experience proceed in a normal way." The leaders of the Party Branch in Long Bow assumed that after studying the Sixteen Points on the Cultural Revolution put out by the Central Committee on August 4, and the Ten Points for carrying out the revolution in the countryside issued on December 16, members of the Revolutionary Rebel Regiment would seize the "four big democracies" and complete the Cultural Revolution with dispatch. "We originally thought," said Swift Li, at that time vice-secretary of the Long Bow Party Branch, "that one organization was enough and that it could solve the problems left over by the Four Clean Movement and solve all the problems of the cadres." To put it mildly, he suffered under an illusion. Events outside of Long Bow had already rendered an orderly. Party-led rectification movement in the village obsolete. In the period between August 8, when the Central Committee first defined the Cultural Revolution, and the end of the year, when the peasants began to act on the December 16 Decision, a militant rebellion spread beyond the schools into all levels of the government and into the factories, mines, railroads, shipping companies and other enterprises as well. Middle-school and college students no sooner formed their Red Guard organizations than they began to travel. Aided by free railroad tickets for all activists, Peking students fanned out to distant provinces, and students from other parts of the nation flocked to Peking, where Mao Tse-tung, Lin Piao, Chou En-lai and other leaders met them at huge rallies, a million or two at a time. The excitement generated by these rallies and the publicity that accompanied them soon broke down the barriers which many communities had

built against Red Guard penetration. Students joined young workers, young workers contacted older workers and FROM RINGSIDE TO ARENA / 517 Staff members, and soon the factories, mines, mills, railroads and truck depots of China seethed with as many activities, were decorated with as many big character posters, and were deafened with as many loudspeaker debates as the campuses continued to be. When the Cultural Revolution reached the working class, and particularly the working class of Shanghai (the only city in China where large numbers of people were born into this class, as distinct from being recruited into it from the countryside), political activity soon burst the bounds of popular agitation, debate, criticism and exposure and moved on to the seizure of power. During the week that Long Bow peasants sat down to discuss who was qualified under the five standards for election to a Cultural Revolution Committee, one faction of workers and students in Shanghai, calling themselves the 5/ia«g/2a/ Workers' Revolutionary General Headquarters, actually took control of the city by deposing the mayor, Ts'ao Ti-ch'iu, the Party Secretary of the East China Region, Chen Hsi-lien, and many other Communists on the City and Regional Party committees. Press and radio presented this power seizure, the culmination of a long and complex battle between the Revolutionary General Headquarters and the Shanghai Party leaders, to the nation as a rising of the working class, a victory of the people over "capitalist roaders'' and counterrevolutionary revisionists. Official publicity conveniently glossed over the fact that at least half of the working class of Shanghai and its student allies didn't agree with the action and had long been organized in units that tried to block it. Inspired by this dubious example, power seizure by '*the masses'' became the order of the day. Shanghai Workers' Revolutionary Headquarters took over that city on January 6 with stirring rhetoric. On January ii a group of higher cadres took over from their superiors in Taiyuan, Shansi Province, and a few days later, on January 31, a similar upheaval occurred in Heilungkiang. Each toppling, which in reality more closely resembled a coup by one group at the top against another group at the top than it did a revolution from below, received noisy supportive publicity and turned attention throughout the country to the possibility of underlings overthrowing anyone currently holding position above them. In this atmosphere the prosaic, step-by-step measures adopted in Long Bow for carrying out the Cultural Revolution from above broke down. Ten days after a well-organized series of elections and recruitments established the Cultural Revolution Committee and the Revolutionary Rebel Regiment, they both collapsed. Seven mass organizations, each formed by a different production team, took their places. These organizations represented the rank-and-file team membership more faithfully than the politically immaculate Rebel Regiment, and the members set up each one to attack a specific target, that is to say, a specific leading cadre in the brigade. Disagreement among the seven on who the real targets should be made it impossible to unite as one body, but they were able to merge, as did myriad competing organizations all over China, into two headquarters. The seven organizations were the Defend Mao Tse-tung Thought Platoon of the First Team, the Defend Mao Regiment of the Second Team, the Truth Champions of the Third Team, the Defend the East Guards of the Fifth Team, the Expose Schemes Fighting Corps of the Sixth Team, the Stormy BOMBARD THE HEADQUARTERS / 518

Petrels of the Fourth Team and the Shankan Ridge Fighting Team of the Sidehnes Team. The first five groups chose names common to mass organizations all over China. The last two chose more original labels. The Stormy Petrels called themselves after the wild birds celebrated in Gorky's poem ''Rising Storm." The poet had watched petrels welcoming an impending sea storm as revolutionaries must welcome the imminent Russian revolution. Primary school pupils all over China memorized his poem. The Shankan Ridge Fighting Team named itself after a famous ridge in North Korea that a detachment of Chinese volunteers held for months against heavy odds during the seesaw war against the American forces fought in the mountains of Central Korea. With the formation of several conflicting organizations a turbulent and exciting period began for Long Bow. In the first flush of enthusiasm all seven organizations mounted poster attacks on a variety of targets, often within their own team. The Petrels of the Fourth Team, for instance, attacked their team leader, Wang Wen-te, because of his high-handed methods. Whiskers Shen, who worked on the Sidelines Team but always considered himself a member of the First Team, wanted to attack Chu Hsich'ing, leader of his own team, and Chi Shou-hsi, its political director. Dissident forces inside the First Team had already elected Whiskers to the Cultural Revolution Committee. When this collapsed he joined Shankan Ridge as a sidelines worker. But when Shankan Ridge's ninety members refused to launch an attack on the First Team's leaders, Chu and Chi, he left Shankan Ridge and formed the Mao Tse-tung Thought Platoon inside the First Team to conduct rebellion there. Shankan Ridge, greatly influenced though not formally led by Sidelines Team leader Little Shen, first attacked an absolutely safe target—four ''bad elements" under supervision, on the grounds that the four of them. Yen Laishun, Lin Ho-shun, Yang Kuang-hung and Chin Pao-ch'uan, were not behaving properly. A few days later, however, they mobilized against more serious quarry, joined a meeting of the Petrels to help them confront Wang Wen-te, and then launched a mass meeting to confront Lu Chin-jung, the Chairman of the Communist Party Branch. When they attacked the prestigious brigade cadres Wang and Lu, the southend "rebels" split the community. With the removal of Chang Hsin-fa in the Big Four Clean, Lu Chin-jung had become, in fact as well as in name, the leading cadre in Long Bow. For many years Wang Wen-te had served not only as a team cadre of the Fourth Team but also as head of public security for the brigade as a whole. As soon as the Shankan Ridge Fighting Team began to attack Lu and Wang, other groups came to the two cadres' defense. They soon divided five to two, with Shankan Ridge and the Petrels lined up on one side, insisting on overthrowing Lu Chin-jung and Wang Wen-te, and with the other five organizations, headed by the Defend Mao Tse-tung Thought Platoon, insisting on retaining them. A meeting to criticize Wang Wen-te took place on February 2, 1967. It was a joint meeting sponsored by both the Petrels of the Fourth Team and Shankan Ridge of the Sidehnes Team. Initially they charged Wang Wen-te simply with arrogance, high-handed methods and repeated rejection of criticism. But once his team comrades decided to overthrow him, they FROM RINGSIDE TO ARENA / 519 raised other, potentially more serious charges. Some people said that he maintained links with counterrevolutionaries, because, when he built his new house, he borrowed grain from Lin Ho-shun, one of the bad elements under supervision, and accepted a plate of cookies sent over by Yen Lai-shun, also under supervision. As an illustration of his questionable attitude, some young people charged that he showed lack of respect for Chairman Mao. Only a few days earlier a film shown in Long Bow had depicted Mao Tse-tung at a mass rally in Peking receiving Red Guards from all over the country. It

caused great excitement, especially among the young. "Seeing Chairman Mao in the film is like seeing him ourselves," they said. "Wouldn't it be great if we could go to Peking and see him in the flesh!" "So what," said Wen-te, displeased with the way the young people were neglecting their jobs to talk about revolution all the time. "What if you did see him? You couldn't eat the sight or wear it. You'd still have to work hard here." "This," said the young people, "was no way for a poor peasant to talk." At the meeting Wen-te, arrogant as ever, refused to accept any of the criticisms that his teammates made. This caused resentment among the people and the atmosphere grew tense. Kuo Cheng-k'uan's stepson, Kuo Ming-en, a leader of the Petrels, chaired the meeting. As questions, in the form of written notes, were handed up thick and fast, Kuo Ming-en read them aloud. Suddenly a question came up that influenced the whole course of the Cultural Revolution in Long Bow. In 19711 heard several diff'erent versions of the incident. Some said the question had been written on a note that Kuo Ming-en destroyed. Others said the question came from the floor, voiced by Chin Yun-sheng, son of Chin Shen-yi, a notorious speculator and go-it-aloner. No one agreed on the exact wording of the question, but all agreed it concerned the fate of Wang Hsiao-nan, the middle peasant beaten to death in 1946 in an eff'ort to find out if he had concealed more than one cache of gold coins for his landlord brother-in-law. Some said the question was, "How was Wang Hsiao-nan beaten to death?" Some said there was a second question, "How many people did you, Wang Wen-te, beat to death in the land reform?" Others said the question was, "How can you say when rebels criticize you that they are trying to reverse the case on Wang Hsiao-nan?" Whatever the exact form of the question, and whatever its source, it did bring back on the agenda an ugly incident dormant now for twenty years, a matter that was supposed to have been settled in the rectification movement of 1948. Some people immediately took exception to the question. They said it should be ruled out of order. Others pressed for an answer. They began to shout at one another. Kuo Ming-en, finding it impossible to restore order, broke up the meeting. That is one version. Another version alleges that after the question was asked, Wang Wen-te rejected it, as he had all other questions, and the meeting continued on to a normal conclusion. Whatever the truth, on one thing everybody agreed: the meeting to challenge Wen-te ended in a standoff* that led, for the time being, only to a hardening of position on both sides. But the fact that at least one question had challenged a major settlement of the land reform movement continued to rankle in BOMBARD THE HEADQUARTERS / 52O some people's minds. Several months later, after the factions began to attack one another, the question served as extraordinary ammunition in the hands of one side. The very next day a second mass meeting brought people together to confront the secretary of the Long Bow Party Branch, Lu Chin-jung. Because the loyal village majority felt that Lu Chin-jung was a good cadre, this meeting likewise came to no satisfactory conclusion. Lu had been closely scrutinized during the Four Clean Movement, had been judged and approved by the masses, and had been reconfirmed as Communist Party Secretary. How could he suddenly turn into a capitalist roader?

Those who opposed Lu insisted that he was a capitalist roader because of a whole series of mistakes, some of which they had brought out during the Four Clean Movement. During the movement a few people had held Chang Hsin-fa responsible for the death of Little Four P'ei, the young man caught stealing tools at the railroad yards who had died at the bottom of a well. Now suddenly they charged Lu Chin-jung with responsibility for this because he had been Party Secretary at the time. They also held him responsible for the death of Wang Tien-p'ing's mother, a woman who had died of a simple illness because, some charged, the brigade leaders had not taken her condition seriously. A third death occurred when an itinerant sieve maker stumbled across a hot electric wire that was down in the street. The wire accidentally electrocuted him. As if responsibility for three deaths were not indictment enough, the opposition charged Chin-jung with taking advantage of his high position in the brigade to eat more, enjoy more, and win special favors. In 1965 the Long Bow crop had been good enough to enable everyone to eat more while at the same time the brigade sold more to the State Grain Trading Company. In recognition of this achievement, the Changchih City government awarded a bicycle to the brigade. Lu Chin-jung, some said, expropriated this bicycle for his personal use. Also in 1965 the city asked the brigade leaders to recommend someone to serve on a Four Clean Work Team in another village. Long Bow's leading group recommended Chin-jung's sister, Lu Feng-chen, a schoolteacher in Changchih City, for this honor. Why should Long Bow's Communist Party Secretary recommend his own sister? And why should Lu Chin-jung help a former puppet policeman, Tseng Chung-hsi, to build a shed on land that was distributed to the poor peasant All Here Li in the land reform? Wasn't this reversing the case on land reform? And wasn't it because this particular person was the father-in-law of the Communist Party Secretary? And why should Lu Chin-jung recommend the former rich peasant Yang Ch'eng-tao, of the Western Mountains, as a settler in Long Bow? Why make him the buyer for the Sidelines Team? Why allow him to embezzle hundreds of yuan and lose outright another 9,000? Wasn't it because this Yang Ch'eng-tao was husband to Chin-jung's aunt? Wasn't this showing special consideration for a relative? To top it all off, there was the case of Lu Ch'eng-hai, like Tseng Chung-hsi a puppet policeman under the Japanese occupation, who fled to Hung-tung at the time of land reform, married there, fathered a son now in his FROM RINGSIDE TO ARENA / 52I teens, and then came back to Long Bow in i960. Lu Chin-jung had allowed him to go out and make bricks for another organization as long as he turned money in to the Long Bow Brigade. During the Four Clean the brigade chose him as an activist in the study of Mao Tse-tung Thought. He went about relating his experiences as if he were a model, but in fact he was a traitor. The opposition posted these eight charges against Lu Chin-jung all over Long Bow. Lu himself could not avoid appearing before the mass meeting called by Shankan Ridge and the Petrels, but he effectively took the edge off this meeting by supporting a diversionary attack launched by Whiskers Shen against the leaders of the First Team, Chu Hsi-ch'ing and Chi Shou-hsi. Whiskers Shen's Defend Mao Tse-tung Thought Platoon concentrated its fire on Chi, the People's Liberation Army veteran and a Communist Party member who was the political director of their team. Huge posters calling him a capitalist roader and counterrevolutionary revisionist were pasted on the walls in competition with those attacking Chin-jung. Meanwhile Yang Szu-ho, another well-known rascal on the First Team who

had served as team accountant, came forward to charge that Chi, the middle peasant, had oppressed him, a poor peasant, by forcing an examination of his accounts during the Four Clean Movement. In the end, he charged, the campaign had illegally forced him to turn over five sections of house in settlement for money grafted. Both Whiskers Shen and Yang Szu-ho claimed that they had been framed by Chi, and that he, not they, had stolen the goods and money in question. They demanded that Chi be expelled from the Party. Lu Chin-jung stood up to speak in support of this demand. As charges and countercharges grew in bitterness, the Cultural Revolution in Long Bow gradually polarized the population, with everyone sooner or later lining up either as "rebels" behind the Petrels and Shankan Ridge in their demand for the overthrow of Lu Chin-jung, or as "loyalists" behind the Defend Mao Tse-tung Thought Platoon and its allies in his defense. I use the terms "rebel" and "loyalist" with some hesitation and place them in quotes for good reason. No one should assume any important ideological or political differences between the two groups. The peasants who challenged Lu Chin-jung's right to the job of Party Secretary were neither more nor less revolutionary than he. Their challenge expressed no underlying programmatic dissent and certainly not any class contradiction. It was a case of the "outs" expressing dissatisfaction with the performance of the "ins," in part because that performance was flawed, but mainly because this expression gave the "outs" a chance to get in. This distinction must be stressed because there is a notion widespread in the West that Mao urged political radicals to rise up, then betrayed and suppressed them. It would be unfortunate if the terms "rebel" and "loyalist" gave credence to this myth. I use these terms for convenience only, to describe two sets of activists, with essentially the same pohtics, who quarreled over power. SEIZE^ COUNTERSEIZE

By the beginning of February, power seizures were occurring in China every day, every hour, every minute, in all the provinces between the Amur River and the South China Sea and at all levels— provincial, regional, municipal, commune, brigade and team. Sometimes higher-level seizures led to lower-level seizures, but sometimes the process reversed itself, with upheavals at the bottom inspiring upheavals at the top. Horse Square Commune was typical of the latter. Rebels threw leading cadres out of office in several of its brigades, including Long Bow, before the commune leadership changed hands, and rebels at the commune level carried out this latter coup only with the help of successful insurgents from the village level. Members of Petrel and Shankan Ridge seized power in Long Bow on February 8, sent a contingent on to Anyang on the tenth in support of an abortive coup there, and on the twelfth went en masse to Horse Square to threaten Party Secretary Shih Chao-sheng and Commune Chairman Chang Ai-ch'i. The head of the Commune Militia Department, Yang Hsiu-shan, riding a rebel tide, charged Shih Chao-sheng with eight crimes and got people from as many brigades as possible to confront him face to face. Not

the least active in this endeavor were members of Long Bow's Petrel and Shankan Ridge, but this time around they failed. Helping others take power was an extravagant gesture on the part of Petrel and Shankan Ridge. Their own power at home was far from secure, for they represented only a minority of Long Bow peasants and not a very prestigious minority at that. When the leaders of these two organizations first decided to challenge Long Bow's status quo they tried hard for a broad coalition. They invited the Defend Mao Tse-tung Thought Platoon of the First Team, the Truth Champions of the Third Team and the Defend Mao Regiment of the Second Team to join in, but only some individual members of the last group agreed to take part. They had more success with outside organizations. The Red Guards from the cement plant, the Rebel Regiment from the locomotive repair shop, the Mao Tse-tung Thought Red Guards from the Luan Middle School, and a group of workers from the power station at Anyang all sent representatives to take part in decisive action on February 8. This hastily collected force SEIZE, COUNTERSEIZE / 523 converged on the brigade office after dark, intent on taking over the official seals and declaring a new administration for the brigade. To seize power meant, concretely, to seize the seals used in the transaction of brigade business. The task of seizing the seals was simplified, to some extent, by the fact that Shen Chi-ts'ai of the Fourth Team, a member of Shankan Ridge and brother to Shen Chin-ts'ai, served as chief accountant for the brigade and held the seals as part of his job. The "rebels," however, did not simply want to possess the seals. They wanted the responsible leaders of the brigade to hand power over to them by handing over the seals. Unfortunately, they could not find Lu Chin-jung. According to the rebel account, he had run away. In Lu's absence they rounded up Chang Kuei-ts'ai, then vice-chairman of the brigade, so that Shen Chi-ts'ai could hand the seals over to him. Then they demanded that Kuei-ts'ai in turn hand the seals to the "rebels." All this went smoothly. When Kuei-ts'ai finally put the seals in "rebel" hands, they passed them on for safekeeping to a young Petrel member whom they thought no one would search—Hsin-fa's daughter, Hsien-hua. Then everyone went home to bed. As the following narration shows, many older peasants in Long Bow regarded any rebellion on their home grounds with skepticism. Chang Hsin-fa, who in 1967 still nursed a grudge against the whole community for having set him aside as a leader, deprecated his own daughter's role. My daughter Hsien-hua joined Petrel. She told me about an important evening meeting. "What meeting?" I asked. "The meeting where we talked about seizing power." "How was it discussed?" "We just decided to seize power."

"But don't you have to have a three-in-one combination—poor peasants, support from the militia and all that?" I asked. "Well, we didn't really have much of a meeting," she said. "Only Shen Chin-ts'ai, Chi Wan-ch'ang and Yang Chi-wang were there. We got together in the drugstore at the south end of the village." "And what were you doing there?" I asked. "They want me to be a rebel team leader." "My, you really are climbing up fast," I said. "As soon as you go to the meeting they give you a big position. But I wouldn't go and seize power if I were you." I was afraid for her. If she goes and seizes power and everything goes well, that's all right. But if things go wrong they'll all say, "See, Hsin-fa has lost power after twenty years and now he has put his daughter up to taking it back for him!" At 10:00 P.M. they sent someone to get her. Their power seizure was about to begin. "Why do they want you?" I asked. "To seize power." "Don't you dare go!" I said firmly. She heard me. She didn't leave, so I went to bed. But the next BOMBARD THE HEADQUARTERS / 524 morning I heard that the Petrels had already taken power and had given the brigade seal to my daughter for safekeeping. At noon when she came home to eat I asked her what she was holding the seal for and who gave it to her. Chi K'uan-shun had given it to her; he said, "She's a young girl. It's safer with her than with others. She can keep it for a day and a night. Then we'll hold a meeting and elect a new brigade committee." That afternoon my daughter wanted to go out but she didn't know what to do with the seal. ''You had better give that back to whoever gave it to you," I said. "We don't want to get involved in these affairs. They have nothing to do with us." She came back at suppertime. "Did you give the seal back?" "Yes." "Let's just forget the whole thing," said my wife. "Let's not quarrel at New Year's." But I didn't let the matter rest.

"Do you have it on you?" She patted her pocket. "It's empty," she said. A few days later I told itiy daughter again, "Don't stay in that organization. We don't want to get involved. If you get into trouble I'll be pulled into it." Li YU-hsi had joined the organization with her but soon started to waver. When he decided to get out she got out at the same time. She put up a poster that said, "I'm not a Petrel anymore. I've given up my armband." Later, when she went out she met Yang Chi-wang. "You've withdrawn?" he asked. "Yes, I don't want to be in now." "Well, you had better think it over," he said. "You could risk your Communist Party membership that way." So my daughter came home worried. "Never mind," I said. "None of them represents the Branch. They can't expel you." Once she withdrew from the Petrels I stopped worrying. Kuo Cheng-k'uan, longtime head of the Peasants' Association, shared Hsin-fa's doubts and hesitations about the strange business of grabbing power; but his stepson, Kuo Ming-en, played a leading role nevertheless: On the eve of the Chinese New Year the Petrels and Shankan Ridge joined forces. They called all the cadres into the brigade office that night and announced, "We're seizing power. You had better hand it over." So the cadres gave them "power"—the brigade seal. On New Year's Day my son Kuo Ming-en didn't come home because he and others were in the office guarding "power." The next day most of the members of the two organizations went to Anyang SEIZE, COUNTERSEIZE / 525 because a fraternal organization there asked for help. They marched out under a red flag singing at the top of their voices. Ming-en didn't go because he was guarding "power" at home. When he came home to eat I asked him where all the people had gone. *To Anyang to seize power," he said. "You haven't done anything here yet," I said. "How come you go running off to Anyang? You're flying all over the place. One day you pass the seals around, the next day you watch the office, the third day

you rush off* to Anyang. What for?" "We went to help the people there seize power." But things didn't go so well in Anyang. The Communist Party Secretary, Old New Year Wang, stood up on a platform. He held up the brigade seal and waved it in the air. "Here's the seal," he said. "Who wants it? You'll have to elect somebody to take charge. If you don't, I won't give it up." Since those who had gone to seize power were few and most of the peasants of Anyang rallied around New Year Wang, the "rebels" there called on the Long Bow "rebels" for help. But when our people got there and saw what the situation was, they hesitated. Old New Year Wang was holding the seal up with two fingers. It would have been easy for anyone to grab it. But nobody moved. "Why don't they seize power themselves?" the Long Bow people asked. Then they turned around and marched home again. No one seized power in Anyang that day. My daughter, Kuo Ming-yin, went to Anyang. When she came back I asked her where she had been. "Anyang." "Did you seize power?" "No, the Communist Party Secretary stood there holding *power' up in the air, but nobody dared take it. We thought they ought to seize it themselves." "You're just like a toad that wants to eat swan meat," I said. "You haven't done anything in Long Bow yet, but you run off" to Anyang!" Both son and daughter began to debate with me then. "Our two organizations are helping each other," they protested. "Whenever they ask you to go, you go?" "Yes, if they ask us, we go. We want to back them up. But if they won't take power, we can't do anything. We are only there to help." "In the future don't meddle in other brigade's affairs," I warned. "Here you can join whoever takes the correct direction, but if the direction is not correct, don't join." At this point they brought out their Red Books and began reading quotations to me: "Power is to serve the poor and lower-middle peasants. The bourgeoisie can't serve the poor and lower-middle peasants. They are capitalist roaders."

"Who are capitalist roaders?" "Some people in power who don't take the socialist road." "What do you know about it?" I said. That made them mad. BOMBARD THE HEADQUARTERS / 526 '*We won't listen to you. We're on top of the main trend. If you don't want to listen, to hell with you." When they left I felt that these young people didn't think things through very well. They just wanted to do something, to act. And as for me, I couldn't make head or tail of what was going on. Two or three days later some people from the commune headquarters called on the young people to go and seize power there. They wanted the support of the Petrels. So our young people went off and stayed away all night. All the detachments belonging to that faction, from Long Bow, Anyang, Horse Square, Horse Square Primary School—they all went to the commune headquarters and debated in the darkness. At sunrise they finally got hungry and came home to eat. Those young people, they really had energy. They talked all night without food. "What did you accomplish there?" I asked. "We debated." "Who was taking the right direction?" "We were. We debated against them." "Did you seize power?" "No. We just went to debate." "Now it's the commune comrades who ask your help to seize power. What if some group in the city does the same?" "To say nothing of the city, if the Central Committee asks our help, we'll go. We'll seize power from Liu Shao-chi'i and the capitalist roaders." "All right," I said, and shrugged my shoulders. "Go ahead and stir things up." News of a power seizure by "rebels" in Long Bow ran like an electric shock through the village, and immediately generated strong opposition. Nobody went to work the next day, or for several days thereafter. Production came to a complete halt throughout the brigade. Lu Chin-jung's supporters rallied for a counterattack and went to the commune for help in mounting it. Commune headquarters in Horse Square gave them copies of a brand-new editorial from the Party's theoretical journal Red Flag, entitled "On the Proletarian Revolutionaries' Struggle to Seize Power." They studied and

discussed it avidly. As with so many of the major documents of the Cultural Revolution, all factions could interpret this article to support their special interests. The forces loyal to the old brigade leadership seized on those paragraphs that urged discrimination, when seizing power, between Party people in authority taking the capitalist road and those leading cadres who have always firmly adhered to the proletarian revolutionary line and "are the treasure of the Party." "To regard all persons in authority as untrustworthy is wrong," the editorial said. "To expose, exclude and overthrow all indiscriminately runs counter to the class viewpoint of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse-tung Thought." Lu Chin-jung, they claimed, was obviously not a capitalist roader, but one of the "treasures of the Party." Furthermore, the editorial warned, "at the present stage of the decisive SEIZE, COUNTERSEIZE / 527 Struggle being waged by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and its handful of agents within the Party, the landlords and rich peasants, who persist in their reactionary stand, the bourgeois rightists, bad elements, counterrevolutionary revisionists and the U.S.-Chiang Kai-shek special agents all emerge. These ghosts and monsters spread rumors to confuse people, and deceive and mislead those who are not aware of the true facts into forming counterrevolutionary organizations to carry out frenzied counterrevolutionary activities." The editorial went on to advocate firmness in exercising dictatorship over these counterrevolutionaries. "For reactionaries even limited democracy is not allowed, not to speak of extensive democracy, not one iota. Toward them we should carry out only dictatorship!" People of dubious origin and devious motives, people born of landlord and rich peasant parents, sons and daughters of counterrevolutionaries, bad elements of all kinds who were rising up to seize power from poor and lower-middle peasants led both Petrel and Shankan Ridge, the loyalists charged. To prove their case they wrote up material on five of the leading rebels that made it sound as if, indeed, counterrevolution had raised its ugly head in Long Bow. Did the vice-secretary of the Party branch. Swift Li, and Militia Captain Fast Chin, who worked behind the scenes mobilizing members of the Defend Mao Tse-tung Thought Platoon to compile and distribute this slanderous material, really think that landlords were making a comeback in Long Bow? It seems unlikely. Their reason for condemning the overthrow that had occurred was that it annihilated their own power and that of close relatives. Personal interest compelled them to discredit the "rebels" by all possible means. The most effective method was to smear "rebel" leaders as class enemies. As they developed a case on class grounds they soon began to believe a substantial part of it, but the underlying reason for opposing what had happened had nothing to do with class politics. The truth of the matter was that Long Bow, though not clan-ridden like many traditional Chinese communities, had long been divided north and south on old clan lines. The division had created two competing temples. The Lu family dominated the northern and larger section of the village, where the old North Temple, built by the Chi family, stood until fanshened peasants knocked it down in the fifties. The Shen family played a major role in the southern section, where the old South Temple had disappeared much earlier but left behind persistent remnants of sectional pride. The Lu family, since Liberation at least, and possibly for a long time prior to that, had played an increasingly dominant role in village government. People in the know had long called Long Bow the "Lu Family Kingdom." To

the ruling Lus an uprising based on the Fourth Team in the south and the Sidelines Team led by Little Shen meant that southerners, instigated by Shens, were on the rampage and meant to take over. Obviously, self-respecting Lus had to stop them. They could not allow upstarts to get away with any such thing. A personal feud that had broken out years before between Little Shen, the moving spirit behind the takeover, and Fast Chin, the overthrown militia captain who was the Lu family's closest ally, made this "upstart" BOMBARD THE HEADQUARTERS / 528 rebellion even more intolerable. The feud began when Little Shen married the girl Fast Chin claimed as his—the widow of his dead brother Chin Ts'ai-pao. Fast Chin blamed Little Shen and not his widowed sister-in-law for this stunning reversal of fortune and bitterly resented the sight of him. When young people counseled by Little Shen rose up to seize power, their action deeply affronted Fast Chin. He saw it as another dastardly plot by the bride-snatcher. This time, however, something more important than a bride was at stake. Power to direct Long Bow Brigade hung on the outcome. As far as Chin was concerned, the challenge had to be smashed. As the saying went in Long Bow, "two big cases" and "two big hates" dominated local politics. The Wang Hsiao-nan case (the case of the middle peasant who died of blows during the land reform) and the Little Four P'ei case (the case of the thief who jumped into the well), joined with hatred over "power seizure" and hatred over "wife seizure" as sources of dissension. These were some of the more pressing reasons why, when the Cultural Revolution began, the people of Long Bow split into "loyalist" and "rebel" factions and then contested so bitterly for supremacy. But the struggle as it developed in 1967 obscured such venal motives more or less completely. What people talked about was the socialist road and the capitalist road, revolution and counterrevolution, poor and lower-middle peasants mobilizing to defend their power and landlords and rich peasants conspiring to overthrow it. The case made by the "loyalist" Defend Mao Tse-tung Thought Platoon against the "rebel" Petrel and Shankan Ridge sounded quite convincing: Young Kuo Ming-en commanded the Petrels, chaired the meetings to critize Wang Wen-te and Lu Chin-jung, and led the group that seized power on February 8. Kuo Ming-en, said the "loyalists," was the son of Meng Hsien-chung, a notorious counterrevolutionary who headed the puppet security bureau under the Japanese occupation and hounded many people to death during the Resistance War. When peasants rose to take revenge after Liberation, they cut Meng to pieces with a fodder chopping knife. After the matter of his father came up for review, the village school fired Ming-en as a teacher. Young Yang Chi-wang was vice-commander of the Petrels and an active participant in all of its program. According to the "loyalists," his mother was a Catholic nun. Worse still, she was the daughter of the notorious landlord Fan Pu-tzu and sister of Fan Tung-hsi, leader of an irregular Kuomingtang detachment that had avoided conflict with the Japanese but harassed the resistance forces, while robbing, raping and killing the common people at will. A detachment of Eighth Route Army soldiers cornered Fan Tung-hsi and ten of his men in a Long Bow compound and set it afire. Fan Tung-hsi climbed into an earthen crock filled with water, but the heat boiled the water and cooked him to death. Peasants found his charred remains in the crock after the fire burned itself out. Yang's

grandmother, on the other side, though a poor peasant, once hid some wealth for a landlord and was beaten for her pains. Young Chou Lai-fu was a leader of Shankan Ridge. According to the "loyalists" his bad background overshadowed that of the other two. He was SEIZE, COUNTERSEIZE / 529 the son of Shih Jen-pao and the grandson of landlord Shih La-ming. Shih Jen-pao had not only been a member of Fan Tung-hsi's marauding Kuomin-tang detachment, he had married Fan Tung-hsi's sister, Chien-chang, and this made him a cousin of the suspect Petrel Yang Chi-wang. After Fan Tung-hsi's fiery death, Jen-pao had led the remnants of Fan's group into the puppet Fourth Column and fought thereafter on the side of the Japanese. At the time of Liberation he ran away, but his wife, who remained in Long Bow, died of internal injuries after a beating inspired by the land reform campaign. Shang Yin-k'u was an active member of Petrel The "loyalists" stressed that he was the son of Shang Shih-t'ou, puppet village head under the Japanese, who was condemned to death by the Liberated Areas County Court. Several Eighth Route Army soldiers executed him in a daring midnight raid in 1942. Chin Ken-so was also an active member of Petrel. The "loyalists" never failed to point out the rich peasant status of his father. Then there was Tai Mao-hsiang, son of a puppet pao chang (head of a loo-family security group in which a transgression by one member was held to be the responsibility of all). "Loyalists" pointed out many others with similar blood ties to bad elements; most, if not all of them, had failed to qualify for membership in the officially sponsored Revolutionary Rebel Regiment, but when the Regiment broke down they flocked into Petrel and Shankan Ridge in order, said the "loyalists," to "reverse the case" on land reform, bring about a restoration of gentry rule, and avenge the sufferings of their parents. The "loyalists" of the Defend Mao Tse-tung Thought Platoon also attacked the record of Little Shen, the man they considered the hou t'ai or backstage prop of the rebellion. Without encouragement from this older Communist Party member. Sidelines Production Team leader, and former Commune Credit Union cadre, the young rebels of the Petrel and Shankan Ridge would never have taken such bold action. But was Little Shen really the solid revolutionary he claimed to be? Of course not, said the "loyalists." For one thing he had a jail record. The six points issued by the security forces, as their supplement to the call fo** a Cultural Revolution in the countryside, proscribed ex-convicts from taking an active part. County police had arrested Little Shen in i960 for beating up a poor peasant who resented attentions paid to his wife, and had jailed him for two months. Not only had Shen spent time in jail, he had once given a gun to the son of the notorious counterrevolutionary Kao Hsi-hsui. Because Little Shen found the son, young Kao Ming-wang, standing guard over the threshed grain at harvesttime, he gave him a gun to hold, a gross violation of procedure. Furthermore, the Four Clean Movement had exposed Little Shen as a speculator in cooking oil. He bought oil at i yuan per catty and sold it to people in another brigade for 2 yuan per catty, not as part of any brigade project but as a private deal. From the very first day of the power seizure, the wide publicity given to these alleged transgressions stirred up tremendous controversy in Long Bow. Worse, the social and class background of the Petrels

and Shankan Ridge generated repercussions during the very first hour. Even the young BOMBARD THE HEADQUARTERS / 530 rascal Yang Szu-ho, who headed a small group of Shankan Ridge rebels, walked out of the *'seize power" meeting when he saw Shang Yin-k'u, Chin Ken-so and Tai Mao-hsiang patroling the ground as sentries. "If these are the people who are seizing power," said Yang Szu-ho, "I can't stomach it." He left the meeting and the organization. During the next few days, as the outcry against the Petrel and Shankan Ridge mounted, other young people like Hsin-fa's daughter Hsien-hua and the poor peasant Li Yii-hsi decided to get out. They formed an Earn Merit Battle Group, which defected with a resounding proclamation. But a loyal core of about eighty people remained in the two groups and steadfastly defended their class backgrounds, their political records, and their right to rebel against Lu Chin-jung and other men of his clique who held office in Long Bow. The facts, as the "rebels" saw them, were not what the "loyalists" were making them out to be. To begin with, several leaders of the "loyalist" majority, including Party Secretary Swift Li himself, had class connections that were not above suspicion. The middle peasant Li, who adopted Ts'eng-pao as a child, was related to Wang Lai-hsun, the second-largest landholder in Long Bow. When Wang Laihsun died in a distant county, the whole family went into mourning. When Ts'eng-pao's mother by adoption (also his aunt, since she was his true mother's sister) died, he invited all her husband's relatives to the funeral, including those descended from the landlord Wang Lai-hsun. Was this a proper invitation for a poor peasant leader to send out? Then there was Fast Chin, the militia leader. He was descended from a whole family of Catholics. His father had been a member of the reactionary Catholic organization, the Legion of Mary, and his uncle (his mother's brother), Chi Hsiang-yun, had been a group leader in the Legion. Could one trust the descendant of such Catholic fanatics with control over the brigade militia? People said that Swift Li had two barrels to his gun, both of them "black," or bad. There was the "black pen" barrel—Chi Lung-ch'en—and the "black gun" barrel—Whiskers Shen. Chi Lung-ch'en was the best-educated peasant in Long Bow. Swift Li used him as a brigade secretary whenever there were letters to write and as the leader of the agricultural research group because he had studied science. Yet everyone knew that his father had once been a member of the Kuomintang. How could the son of a Kuomintang member play such an important part in brigade affairs? No one questioned Whiskers Shen's background as a genuine poor peasant. His problem was a suspicious personal history, the way he hung around the blockhouse when the Japanese occupied the village, the way he led the Japanese to North Rock when they wanted to seize grain, and the way he and Li Shou-p'ing, another militiaman in the Two Gems clique, helped the Japanese uncover resistance fighters. Was Whiskers Shen the kind of man to trust with a gun? Could he enforce law and order? So much for the purity of the Mao Tse-tung Thought Platoon. When it came to the charges against members of Petrel and Shankan Ridge, most of them would not hold any water at all, said the "rebels." Take Little SEIZE, COUNTERSEIZE / 531

Shen, for instance. Was he actually an ex-convict, a man with a jail record? No. While it was true that he had been held in a jail for two months on assault charges, his was a pretrial detention pending investigation of the incident. The court released him without any action, never brought his case to trial, and never sentenced him to anything. How, then, could he be regarded as a criminal? A brigade that barred from political activity every peasant who had spent some time in jail would seriously deplete the ranks of its activists. Or take Kuo Ming-en. It was true that his real father was Meng Hsien-chung, a corrupt and ruthless puppet district leader. Meng, however, had never been a big shot, but only a minor official who smashed and grabbed, killed and looted but never got rich. At the time of Liberation the people's court had condemned him to death and sentenced him to execution by dismemberment with a fodder chopping knife. At that time his son, named Meng Yung-sheng, was one year old. His wife, widowed by the execution, married the bare-poor peasant Kuo Cheng-k'uan, from the very beginning of land reform head of the Peasants' Association. She made Cheng-k'uan a good wife, was classed thereafter as a poor peasant, and never told her son, now named Kuo Ming-en, that he was a foster child or that his real father was an executed counterrevolutionary. Ming-en grew up a poor peasant in a poor peasant household, a household in which the father was not only a Communist Party member but served as a leading cadre in the new revolutionary regime throughout the intervening years. When Ming-en graduated from primary school, he became a schoolteacher in Long Bow, but earned so little as a teacher (less than 300 workdays) that he asked to be transferred to the Sidelines Team so he could better support his wife and two children. Working a day at sidelines could often earn a day and a half or two days' worth of points and thus add up to 400 or more a year. The school had never thrown Ming-en out. He had requested a transfer. As for Chou Lai-fu, he was not Shih Jen-pao's real son at all. He was the son of a peasant family so poverty-stricken that they sold him in the famine year for a few bags of grain to Shih Jen-pao, who was childless. He was seven years old at the time. He lived in this family for less than two years. Then came Liberation. His foster father ran away and his foster mother died of a beating, leaving him to shift for himself as a hungry orphan until Chou Cheng-lo, a Communist Party member and brigade activist, adopted him. From birth to the age of seven he knew only abject poverty. After the age of nine he grew up in the home of a liberated poor peasant who was a Communist. How could he be called a counterrevolutionary with blood on his hands? Yang Chi-wang descended, on his father's side, from several generations of poor peasants. Before Liberation his father was much too poor to buy a wife even at the low prices charged by the Catholic orphanage. After Liberation, when the Church collapsed and the orphanage broke up, the nuns of that institution lost their means of support. Here was a chance for a poor peasant. Yang's father moved quickly, married a nun who happened to be Fan Pu-tzu's daughter, and started a family. This woman, serving as a good wife to the elder Yang, won reclassification as a poor peasant. Their son, Yang Chiwang, born into a poor peasant family, of a poor peasant BOMBARD THE HEADQUARTERS / 532 father and a poor peasant mother, could hardly be denied poor peasant status. As for Shang Yin-k'u, he was the son of Shang Shih-t'ou, a poor peasant appointed to the post of village head under the puppet regime. Eighth Route Army men killed this man when he refused to cooperate with the resistance forces. He had two sons—Shang Chin-k'u (structure of gold) and Shang

Yin-k'u (structure of silver). Both these boys joined the People's Liberation Army during the Liberation War. Shang Chin-k'u met death at the front. Shang Yin-k'u fought through until victory, was demobilized, and came home to farm. He married a young woman, Chi Ching-hsien, who was a member of the Communist Party and played an active role in brigade life. True, the people's court had this young man's father executed as a traitor, but he himself was a People's Liberation Army veteran, the brother of a revolutionary martyr, and the husband of a Communist. Could he be called a monster with blood on his hands? There remained Chin Ken-so. Members of both Petrel and Shankan Ridge agreed that Ken-so was the son of a rich peasant, but they found him, in practice, to be a revolutionary, one of those who "turned the tables" on their reactionary class origin. Since this was the case should they not unite with him, and struggle together with him to transform China? Not to do so would be to follow the reactionary "inheritance" theory which even the New Year's editorial had denounced. "The slogan 'A hero's son is a real man! A reactionary's son is no damn good!' has been turned into something contrary to the proletarian revolutionary line," said the editorial. "It should be pointed out that the way those people with ulterior motives have made use of the slogan is in essence to advertise the exploiting classes' reactionary 'theory of family lineage.' This is exactly the lineage theory spread by the feudal landlord class, that 'a dragon begets a dragon, a phoenix begets a phoenix, and those begotten by rats are good at digging holes.' This is out and out reactionary historical idealism."* What was "reactionary historical idealism" to the members of the Petrel and Shankan Ridge looked like a commonsense, poor and lower-middle peasant "class stand" to the Mao Tse-tung Thought faction. They were not about to let any "rich peasant bastard," no matter what his or her record might be, share power in Long Bow. And so the split developed and hardened with a minority made up of Fourth, Fifth and Sidelines Team "rebels" stoutly maintaining their right to rebel and seize power (according to them, they were acting in harmony with the mainstream of history) and a majority made up of First, Second, Third, and Sixth Team "loyalists" vociferously denouncing the rebellion as a counterrevolutionary restoration carried out by class enemies, notorious ti fu fan huai (landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries and bad elements). Many Fifth Team members at first joined Petrel only to withdraw as pressure mounted, leaving the rebel units even more isolated. As a minority action led by people, so many of whom were vulnerable *Peking Review, January i, 1967. SEIZE, COUNTERSEIZE / 533 to political attack, the power seizure never had much chance of success. The "rebels' " hold on the village office and their possession of the seals lasted only a few days. Unable to rally any other section of the population to their side, unable to set up any acceptable leading body, unable to mobilize production work at any level. Petrel and Shankan Ridge had to admit defeat. They seized power on February 8, but before the week ran out, they had to give it up. On February 14, 1967, they turned the village seal over to a ^'takeover" committee headed by Short Shen, a six-foottall army veteran and Communist Party member who represented the other side in this burgeoning struggle. The "takeover committee'' was made up of delegates elected by the teams (six production teams and one sidelines team). It contained many former brigade cadres such as Wang Man-hsi, and

thus could be said by the "rebels" to represent a restoration even though they themselves had representation on it. On the one hand, the "takeover committee" represented progress for the "rebels" because Lu Chin-jung and Swift Li (the Party Secretary and Vice-Secretary) were excluded from it. On the other hand, it represented defeat because the majority of the delegates elected to it were supporters of these full brothers with different surnames. The "takeover committee" served only as a provisional organ of power. Both sides recognized this. Under its temporary leadership brigade members went back to work while the jockeying over who should really hold power continued and sharpened. Both sides put up posters in profusion. Study sessions, mobilization meetings, strategy consultations and mass meetings followed one another in dizzying succession. A large mass meeting packed the library of the middle school in Long Bow on March 15. Petrel and Shankan Ridge called it to review Lu Chin-jung's record and hear his self-criticism. The "rebels" mobilized not only their supporters in Long Bow but all the support they could muster from other places such as the Maoism Red Guards of the middle school, the Rebel Regiment from the railroad shops and the grain transportation station, and sympathetic fraternal groups from the cement plant. Lu Chin-jung and Swift Li invited their allies from Anyang, Hsin Chiu-ch'uan, the commander of the Horse Square rebels who now controlled the Commune Committee, and other individuals and mass organizations sympathetic to their side. Chang Ching-hai, commander of Changchih City Militia Headquarters, who had previously led a Four Clean Work Team in Long Bow, came in response to invitations from both sides. His role was to chair the proceedings. According to Little Shen, the "rebels" carried the day at this meeting. Their supporters outnumbered those invited by the opposition. Commune leader Hsin Chiu-ch'uan, though invited by the other side, joined in the criticism of Lu Chin-jung, supported the "seize power" line of Petrel and Shankan Ridge, and refuted those who called Little Shen a capitalist roader. "At this big meeting," Little Shen said, "all the people from the railroad shops, the grain station and the cement plant supported Petrel and Shankan BOMBARD THE HEADQUARTERS / 534 Ridge. As a result the other side did not welcome any more such great debates." Whether this was true or not is very hard to say. Presumably there was some truth to Shen's statement. Almost all of the "rebels" I talked to said that they won the public debates and the poster confrontations but lost out in the battle for power. The strong "seize power" wind that blew throughout the Province and the nation in the months that followed the January storm in Shanghai greatly enhanced their strength in debate. Seizing power, ostensibly from capitalist roaders, actually from anyone who happened at the time to hold it, dominated the order of the day in the early months of 1967. All the media, press, radio. Party propaganda and word of mouth celebrated power seizure at every level everywhere and fanned up such a gale that no one could easily oppose it directly. Even Swift Li had to agree. He said to me in 1971: "On February 8, 1967, we had power seizure from below. This was the correct direction. It was in accord with instructions issued by Mao Tse-tung. No one opposed the power seizure because this was obviously the thing to do. But afterward differences

arose over how to judge the cadres." And, one might add, over how to judge those who seized power. "Power seizure was obviously the main direction," said Swift Li, "but still it created disunity. People who disagreed with the power seizure here went to militia headquarters to complain. They held that Long Bow Brigade had successfully concluded a Four Clean Movement carried out according to Mao Tse-tung's Twenty-three Points. It had set up a good leading group. It had chosen all leading members on the basis of the five standards for revolutionary successors. Those who had seized power, on the other hand, had all been targets of attack at the time of land reform, or the children of such targets. They also harbored social elements banned from leadership by the six points drawn up by the Security Department. These included people whose relatives had been killed as targets of the revolution and people jailed by the revolution. Since exactly such people led the power seizure in Long Bow, people didn't agree with this takeover." Peasants who went to militia headquarters to complain received copies of the Third Red Flag Editorial for 1967, a statement celebrating the "seizure of power by the proletariat." Whose power should be seized? The power of a small handful of capitalist roaders, and not the power of revolutionary cadres, who are "the precious possession of our Communist Party." The people must always be on the alert against landlords and rich peasants taking advantage of the situation to seize power from the poor and lower-middle peasants. "Loyalists" pounced on this material from the Third Editorial as the basis for their counteroffensive. They propagated it in the streets, in the fields, on the walls and in meetings. They organized a Mao Tse-tung Thought propaganda team to spread their position far and wide, wrote skits, read the editorials aloud, and plastered the village walls with posters. In debate and propaganda the defenders of the status quo refused to take a back seat. If, as Little Shen and his comrades said, the "loyalists" lost out in the big public confrontations, they nevertheless retained the initiative on SEIZE, COUNTERSEIZE / 535 village streets and walls, showed greater organizational clout, and successfully stalled production until the "rebels" turned the brigade seal over to a "Takeover Committee" that included no "rebels" at all. Under the new committee's temporary umbrella, "loyalists" worked hard for a more permanent Revolutionary Committee that could, in the long run, reestablish the rule of those who had been overthrown. Organizationally the confrontation came down to five groups against two, with only Petrel of the Fourth Team and Shankan Ridge of the Sidelines Team joining hands as "rebels" to challenge the other five organizations coalescing as one Revolutionary Alliance Fighting Team. A seesaw battle, primarily a battle of words, went on from the middle of February, when the Takeover Committee took charge, until the end of March. Then, after a new Revolutionary Committee assumed control in Changchih City, a cadre team known as the "Grasp Revolution, Promote Production Work Team" came to Long Bow to help establish a satisfactory revolutionary committee at the brigade level. This work team was led, as the previous team had been, by the Changchih City Militia commander, Chang Ching-hai. With the arrival of the new work team polarization in Long Bow reached the point of no return. Chang Ching-hai established close liaison with Yang Hsiu-shan, commander of the militia in Horse Square

Commune. Yang, having already decided to back the Long Bow "loyalists," convinced Chang that the "rebel" leaders were indeed a bunch of counterrevolutionary "elements." The work team demanded that Petrel and Shankan Ridge expel Chou Lai-fu, Chin Ken-so, Yang Chi-wang, Shang Yin-k'u and others under suspicion, or face dissolution as legitimate mass organizations. When Petrel and Shankan Ridge refused, the commune Seize Power Headquarters expelled them as counterrevolutionary groups. The expulsion of the "rebels" occurred on March 31. On April i, a so-called "Three-in-One Revolutionary Committee" of old cadres, military representatives (in this case, militia representatives) and leaders of mass organizations took over Long Bow. This was not an elected committee, but a group designated by the work team after consultation with representatives of the five recognized mass organizations, the old Peasants' Association and the Party branch. The new Revolutionary Committee was supposed to be a committee often. Actually, the work team designated only nine members, holding one seat in reserve for a representative of the eighty or so peasants who belonged to Petrel and Shankan Ridge, when and if they ever agreed to clean house by expelling their leaders. Brigade leaders, describing the situation much later, tended to forget the demand made on the "rebels" to expel their leaders, and simply stressed that they had held a seat in reserve to be occupied by "rebels," whenever they recognized the Revolutionary Committee as legitimate; a stand they never took, because to do so meant they had to condemn their own organization and its leaders. Members of Petrel and Shankan Ridge remained steadfastly loyal to each other and to the principles they professed. They refused to expel their leaders as landlords, rich peasants and counterrevolutionaries. They also BOMBARD THE HEADQUARTERS / 536 refused to recognize the new Revolutionary Committee as legitimate. In their eyes it was nothing but a restoration of the old leading group—a "big mixture of reaction." However, no one paid any attention to their objections. Swift Li, vice-secretary of the Party branch and head of the Youth League, came back to power as chairman of the Committee. Fast Chin, captain of the brigade militia; Chang Kuei-ts'ai, chairman of the brigade; and All Here Li, another vicesecretary of the Party branch, joined him as vice-chairmen. Lu Chin-jung. Communist Party Secretary; Li Hsiao-hua, vice-chairman of the Peasants' Association; Lu Shu-yun, chairwoman of the Women's Association; Sun Jing-fu, newly appointed head of the Sidelines Team; and Li Kuang-ching, a returned army veteran and respected Party member, filled out the other five committee posts. Quite clearly, with some slight shuffling of positions, the old leading group had returned to power, just as the leaders of Petrel and Shankan Ridge said. But was it in fact a "big mixture of reaction?" Were these people capitalist roaders or revolutionary cadres, "the precious possession of our Party?" On this question the two sides continued to hold exactly opposite opinions, just as they did on the question of the political character of the leaders of Petrel and Shankan Ridge, the question that had led to the whole conflict in the first place. The contention between them had begun as a debate, but as factional differences in the region, the province and China as a whole deepened, wen ton (verbal or cultural struggle) transformed itself, step by step, into wu tou (physical or armed struggle), and the rights and wrongs of all divisive questions sank into obscurity. The more force replaced reason, the harder the two positions became, the more real injury each side inflicted on the other, and the more

difficult they found it to arrive at any lasting solution. 69 HITTING/ SMASHING AND ROBBING

The establishment of the new Revolutionary Committee and the expulsion of Petrel and Shankan Ridge from the Seize Power Headquarters led to a drastic restriction on free debate. Once excluded from legitimacy, Petrel and Shankan Ridge could no longer draw on public supplies of paper, ink and paint for posters, leaflets and wall bulletins. Once the commune leadership designated them as "reactionary," it terminated their right to the free writing materials and paste guaranteed to all mass organizations. They had to finance by individual contributions any further written material which they wanted to put out. To an American this may seem like a small problem indeed; paper and writing materials are not, after all, very expensive here. But the peasants of Long Bow, committed to the cause of Petrel and Shankan Ridge, considered the ban a major blow. They pooled what resources they had, bought what paper and ink they could afford, wrote on walls with substitutes such as colored clay, made paste from flour contributed by member households, and carried the struggle forward as best they could. But for all intents and purposes the ban shut down free debate between the two opposing sides. Meanwhile the "rebels" lost no opportunity to protest to the Commune Committee and the Changchih City Committee against the action that had been taken. They sent notes of protest, letters demanding reversal of verdict, and delegations to plead their case in person. They demanded the restoration of their rights as a mass organization, cited chapter and verse in regard to Central Committee policy —"no one has a right arbitrarily to dissolve any people's organization"—but they were rebuffed again and again. Invariably the answer came back, "If you will expel Chou Lai-fu (adopted son of a Japanese collaborator), Kuo Ming-en (son of a Kuomintang officer), and Yang Chi-wang (son of a landlord's daughter) and other questionable members from your organization, then your rights will be restored." Hsin Chiu-ch'uan and Yang Hsiu-shan of the Commune Committee demanded that the "rebels" turn these suspects over to the commune to be placed under supervision. But Petrel and Shankan Ridge refused to consider denouncing these members and turning them in. In their eyes the accused had done nothing wrong. Thereafter the pressure, especially the pressure against BOMBARD THE HEADQUARTERS / 538 Little Shen, the one old Party member and cadre in the "rebel" organization, increased. During the first week in August the question of materials for putting out publicity on behalf of Petrel and ShanKan Ridge became acute. The "rebels" had run out of paper, ink and paste altogether. Contributions of cash and kind had also slacked off. On August 8 they again sent a delegation to the commune to argue their case and ask for material support. The delegation members met with Militia

Commander Yang. "We appeal to you because you took a hand in dissolving our organization," they said. "Mao Tse-tung himself started the Cultural Revolution. Everyone has a right to speak out and put up posters. Why do you deny us?" Yang rebuffed them. On August i8 a larger group, more than a dozen people, went back to the commune. A Secretary Wang had replaced Secretary Yang in the office. Since this cadre had played no role in the exclusion of their organization, they appealed to him for help. "Let us have some paper on loan," said Little Shen. "The City Committee doesn't agree to the commune's decision. When the case is settled, then we can settle accounts." But Wang did not dare acquiesce without consultation. He called Party Secretary Shih Chao-sheng, the leader overthrown in February but now back in office. Shih said no. In the meantime some of the young people from Long Bow made their way into the west yard, where they found an office secretary named Chang. "What are you looking for?" "We want to borrow some paper." "There's a whole pile of it," said Chang, pointing to the cabinet. "Take what you want." The young people took 500 sheets of white paper, 100 sheets of red paper, a bottle of black ink, a copying screen and three brushes. With these materials in hand they rushed home and began writing posters. The "rebel raid" on the commune office created a stir throughout the suburban area. Militia Commander Yang mobilized supporters in ten brigades to write posters condemning the counterrevolutionary element Little Shen for looting. Early in the morning Yang closed down the commune office, locked the doors, and descended on Long Bow with his whole staff. Crowds gathered in the street in front of brigade headquarters to hear the commune cadres denounce Petrel, Shankan Ridge and their behind-the-scenes leader. Members of the Long Bow Revolutionary Committee joined in. While some people talked others prepared to put up posters. "A handful of counterrevolutionaries led by Little Shen went to Horse Square to ta, tsa, ch'iang [hit, smash, rob]." Undaunted, Little Shen went before the crowd himself. "In the Sixteen Points Mao Tse-tung says we should use reason to convince people. He has given four rights, the four big democracies, to all poor peasants. If they are allowed to put up posters, we are allowed to put up HITTING, SMASHING AND ROBBING / 539

posters. If they put up a poster against us, we can put one beside it defending ourselves. Let the masses see both. Let the masses judge who is a revolutionary and who a counterrevolutionary." While Shen talked, his supporters fanned out to put up the posters. Visitors from the commune joined Long Bow "loyalists" who moved in to stop them. Fighting broke out as each side tried to place its posters in the most advantageous position and prevent posting by the other side. In Long Bow that day the speeches, the debates, the rivalry over posters, the sporadic fist fighting, jostling, shouting and milling about went on all day. Toward evening, in the course of one scuffle two young people from Petrel grabbed an office messenger from the commune staff* who had attacked them and hustled him off* to the Fourth Team's stable yard. They held him there all night, then released him in the morning. When he got back to the commune he said he had been beaten, threatened with a knife, and denied both food and water. The "rebels" stoutly denied this. "As soon as I heard that we had captured a messenger, I went to the stable yard," said Little Shen. "I told the young people they must not hit their prisoner. Anyone who harmed him in any way must bear full responsibility. It was starting to get dark. The commune people were heading back for Horse Square. The captive wanted, to go home but I was afraid they would attack us if we took him home in the dark. If we let him go and something happened to him, they would surely blame us. Tt's already dark,' I said. 'You had better stay over.' We cooked for him, fed him, and asked him to study Central Committee policy with us. In the morning we saw him safely back to Horse Square." It seems unlikely that the young man's sojourn in Long Bow was as pleasant as Little Shen claimed. Whatever the truth about the treatment he received, this "kidnapping" incident added more fuel to the fire. Not only had Petrel and Shankan Ridge raided the commune office to hit, smash and rob, they had seized and beaten a commune staff* member. This reactionary gang, complained their opponents, would stop at nothing. Now the charges against Petrel, Shankan Ridge and Little Shen, as their real leader, escalated day by day. In August the question raised in the February meeting to criticize Wang Wen-te—the question about the death of Wang Hsiao-nan during the land reform—developed into a cause celebre. Now, "loyalists" charged. Little Shen and his group blamed Wang Wen-te for Hsiao-nan's death. They were trying to reverse a case settled during the land reform movement. This was equivalent to trying to reverse the land reform itself. This gang of "landlords, rich peasants, reactionaries and bad elements" was trying to overthrow the revolution in Long Bow and restore feudalism. Vituperative posters went up all over the village and throughout Horse Square Commune. Not only had the "rebels" confronted Wang Wen-te with false charges at a meeting, but afterward they had tried to cover the whole thing up. At a secret meeting of twelve people held after the big February meeting was over. Little Shen, so it was charged, had demanded silence from everyone about the case, and had threatened reprisal against anyone who broke ranks. The original written note, sent up during BOMBARD THE HEADQUARTERS / 540 the meeting, had mysteriously disappeared. Kuo Ming-en, son of a Kuo-mintang officer, had saved other written questions but had conveniently lost this one. He was clearly bent on revenge for his father's death at the hands of the revolution. Had he not chaired the meeting, received all the

questions, and read them out? By misplacing or destroying this note he had joined with Little Shen in a conspiracy to conceal the whole incident. Everyone involved, everyone responsible should be arrested, investigated and punished. To drive their point home the "loyalists'' created a large mud statue of Little Shen. They placed it right beside two defamatory statues that appeared on the main street just south of the drug dispensary only a few weeks before. These depicted Liu Shao-ch'i, ex-president of China, and Chang Lien-ying, exsecretary of the Commune Party Committee, as beasts on all fours. An anonymous sculptor had modeled Little Shen in the same pose, substituting hooves for feet and hands. The faces on all three monuments bore an uncanny likeness to the individuals under attack, the outstanding feature of the caricature of Little Shen being an exceptionally long nose. The life-size statues looked particularly frightful at night, as if three huge dogs were lurking in the shadows under the mission compound wall. Not content with slanderous and insulting propaganda the Defend Mao Tse-tung Thought Platoon called on the security forces to take action. According to Little Shen, three members of the Changchih City Police Department actually came to look into the affairs of Long Bow, prepared to make arrests. They came secretly and stayed at the city-owned cement plant across the highway from the brigade. No one in Long Bow knew they were there until some members of the Mao Tse-tung Thought Red Guards of the Regional Middle School in Long Bow, who sympathized with Petrel and Shankan Ridge, learned of their presence through contacts in the city and plastered protest posters on the main streets of Changchih. Armed with one of these posters. Little Shen sought out the three policemen at the cement plant. He tried tc impress on them that he was a poor peasant who greatly admired Mao Tse-tung, had survived the last twenty years only because the land reform had saved him and his family from starvation, therefore he could not possibly want to "reverse the case" on land reform, kidnap commune cadres against their will, or steal commune property. His pleas had little effect, but when Shen brought out a protest poster and proved to them that he and his organization did in fact have ties to the Mao Tsetung Thought Red Guards of the middle school, the policemen decided that they had been wrong in judging him. Without taking any action or making any arrests, they went back to the city. Emboldened by the fact that the city authorities had declined at the last minute to take action against them, the members of Petrel and Shankan Ridge launched a counterattack of their own against the Horse Square Commune leaders who had made them such a target. Concentrating on Militia Commander Yang Hsiu-shan and the restored Communist Party Secretary Shih Chao-sheng, their pesters read: "Bombard Yang Hsiu-shan! Warn Shih Chao-sheng!" "You do not carry out the directives of the City Committee." HITTING, SMASHING AND ROBBING / 541 **You press down ever harder on our organization." "You are carrying out a bourgeois reactionary line [a line suppressing the masses]!" Strong words averted eyes ignored.

For Long Bow peasants to appeal for redress to authorities in the City of Changchih at this time was an exercise in futility. It demonstrated a certain naive faith in salvation from above, in the correctness and goodwill of a Communist leadership so badly fractured and so deeply mired in fratricidal trials of strength as to be all but incapable of rational action. In the summer of 1967 the city, the region and the province as a whole, not to mention the nation, fell into a state of upheaval and disarray that intensified week by week. Hastily formed coalitions of higher cadres and grassroots organizations that represented, at best, only a small fraction of the people they claimed to speak for, everywhere wrested power from established authority. In response to directives from Peking that reversed the original call for elections along the lines of the Paris Commune of 1871 and opted instead for new organs of power called '*revolutionary committees," **rebel" forces attempted to set up such committees from three elements— representatives of the mass organizations, old cadres considered to be revolutionary, and representatives of the armed forces. Mass organizations were supposed to form great alliances from below, then after forging political consensus, set up their three-in-one committees. Many groups knocked together such alliances for the purpose of setting up revolutionary committees, but they scarcely concealed the enmity and suspicion with which the various "allies" regarded each other, and the ink on the announcements scarcely had time to dry before old splits revived and new splits came about, primarily over conflicting estimates of the quality and integrity of old cadres. The makeup of the new revolutionary committees was usually enough out of balance, one side of the coalition holding more posts than the other, to cause the side that was slighted to feel aggrieved. Thereafter what one side considered to be "proletarian power," the other side called "a big mixture of reaction." Those who thought they were wielding "proletarian power" considered anyone who attacked them to be by definition reactionary. Those who considered the ruling committee illegitimate thought renewed rebellion absolutely essential to save the revolution. Thus a new issue arose to aggravate and deepen existing splits—"for or against the revolutionary committee." And since the armed forces were involved in forming these committees and in making decisions either to support or oppose them, this issue developed into another one that was equally divisive—"For or against the armed forces, for or against the PLA." Thereafter anyone who opposed a new revolutionary committee that the PLA supported was in danger of being labeled "anti-PLA," which was only slightly less damaging than being called "anti-Mao Tse-tung" or "anti-Communist Party." The political consensus in China that had been developing throughout the country since the 1920s had three unshakable pillars: support for the Communist Party, support for the People's Liberation Army and support for Mao Tse-tung, the founder and leader of both. To fall into a position of opposition to any of BOMBARD THE HEADQUARTERS / 542 the three amounted, in the popular mind, to falhng into counterrevolution, to becoming an enemy of the people. The Industrial Department of the Changchih City Government administered the coal mine at Wuchuang. This department had more power, a far larger budget and cadres with more prestige than its sister, the Agricultural Department, which always got whatever favors, money and personnel remained after the city took care of industry. Perhaps this was the reason why the contest for control over the Industrial Department outdid in bitterness all other contests, and why that bitterness spilled over into all subordinate units, such as the Wuchuang Mine. One of Long Bow's more ambitious young men, Shen Chung-t'ang, got a job as a contract worker in

the mine in 1967, just as the factional strife engendered by the Cultural Revolution began to heat up. He learned very little about mining but a great deal about political agitation, debating, poster writing and, finally, street fighting. As Shen Chung-t'ang described the miners' life: Fighting began early in the year. In those days we fought with fists and sticks. If we began debating, we ended up fighting. If we put up posters, we fought over their content. Once I spoke up at a meeting and they beat me up. Sometimes, when we sat down to eat in the dining room, we began to argue. The arguments led to brawls. We threw stools at each other and smashed all the lights. Nobody got killed, but a lot of people got hurt. One night two or three of us were eating in the dining room along with four or five opponents. They began to talk about how good their faction was. When we disagreed they grabbed our bowls and smashed them on the floor. Then we all took hold of stools and went after each other. I got whacked twice on the back. Since we were outnumbered, we already had a plan. We would knock out the lights, then skip out, leaving the opposition to fight among themselves. As soon as the fracas began I got it on the back, but when the lights went out I managed to sneak to the far end of the hall and escape. I hid among the crops in the fields until I found my companions. Then, at 2:00 A.M., I ran back to Long Bow. What this confrontation was all about no one could really explain. In early 1967 a plethora of organizations still maintained independent status, and the shifting of coalitions and alliances back and forth confused all but the most dedicated. Several of Shen Chung-t'ang's friends were members of the Mao Tse-tung Thought Red Guards at Luan Middle School, a group that adhered to an umbrella organization called General Headquarters, a loose coalition of units that supported the revolutionary committee in Changchih City but didn't like the Liberation Army Commander Wu T'ien-ming who headed it. This put them in opposition to another umbrella organization called Red General Headquarters that "resolutely defended" Wu T'ien-ming. A staunch component of this second headquarters, the May Fourth Railroad Workers' Regiment, dominated the locomotive shops at HITTING, SMASHING AND ROBBING / 543 Long Bow and tied up in turn directly to the February Seventh Commune based on the railroad yards at Chengchow, Honan, a freight hub of national importance. Shen Chung-t'ang couldn't even remember why his General Headquarters opposed army man Wu, but the issue soon became academic because another loose coalition of units joined together to attack the whole revolutionary committee over which Commander Wu presided. Their first act was to block his military units from hauling any water. Shocked by this "sabotage," General and Red General promptly settled their differences, agreed on a long joint name that ended in United, and went into action in support of the City Revolutionary Committee then in power. Trying to make sure that the army got its water, they started fights on the streets of Changchih that soon spread to all units under city control, including Wu-chuang Mine. At that time United had no organization at all at the mine. The opposition with a long name that ended in Red controlled every department. But three or four contract workers from Long Bow, including Shen Chung-t'ang, and five or six from Horse Square, all followed the majority in their home communities in opposing Reds of whatever stripe and began to put up posters refuting the Red posters inside the mine headquarters. Posters led to fighting in the dining hall and Reds drove Chung-t'ang and

his comrades from the grounds. But not for long. Shen described what happened next: Since they outnumbered us, we didn't dare go back to the mine for almost two weeks. During that time we got in touch with the United forces at the Wuyang Mine and the Changchih Steel Plant and formed the Wuchuang Red Cliff Regiment. Then we went quietly before dawn and posted up a declaration outside our mine gate. When the Reds saw this poster they sent people to debate with us. They urged us to join their organization and come back to work. Since we were so few in number, we refused. But later we decided to go back to work and to try and build up our forces. After I worked at the coal face for a while the manager assigned me to guard duty. Since we were United, while the mine was dominated by Reds, we didn't fit in. I always drew endless hours of stationary sentry duty. I had to stand still so long my legs swelled. My comrades got the same kind of treatment. Whatever the work, we always had to take the hardest assignments. When we met we all complained about how tired we were. When we couldn't bear it any longer we decided to open up a debate. By that time we had won over a few friends from our own area and we had solid support from the miners at Wuyang and the steelworkers at Changchih Steel. When any one of us started a debate the others came and mingled in the crowd. Nobody recognized them or knew what side they were on, but in case of trouble they would pitch in along with us. So we put up some posters and began a debate. The debate lasted all afternoon, then broke into a fight in the evening. This time we had so many friends in the crowd that we did well. As soon as the fighting began we sent out a call BOMBARD THE HEADQUARTERS / 544 for more help from Wuyang Mine. The outside miners came in trucks, all armed with big sticks, and as soon as they arrived they began laying about with enthusiasm. Thus we drove the Reds out. Although most of them got away, we captured a few. We kept them prisoner in the mine guesthouse and named it our '*high-class jail." We beat up everyone we captured. One of these was the Red leader. We put him on public trial day after day. When we "tried" people, we hauled them before big mass meetings, "holding their heads up to show their big ugly features and dragging their heads down to make them confess their crimes." If they didn't talk well or we thought they didn't tell the truth, we made them lean over a table and beat them on the rump. We took those who confessed before other mass meetings for repudiation. Actually we beat most of the confessions out of them. There was no question of right and wrong, we simply wanted to punish them. As you can see, bad fighting disrupted Wuchuang Mine and lots of outsiders were drawn into it. After that first fight when we ran away, we never lost again. Everyone we captured we beat up. The PLA assigned to our area demanded again and again that we free our captives. We finally had to let them go—the hurt, the wounded and the bleeding. The army men took them to the hospital in trucks and we criticized them for this. We thought that by saving our enemies they were suppressing us. Once our captives were taken to the hospital, we controlled the mine completely. We then held meetings to bring the fighting to an end and start up production again. Since we had driven all the Reds out, we had no one left to beat up and the mine became peaceful. Then the Liberation Army men

went through the miners' home villages with trucks and loudspeakers urging all those who had run away to come back to work. The soldiers asked them to take up their shifts with confidence. But when they came back they couldn't help but be frightened. Sometimes fights broke out underground. The army decided to call a mass meeting aimed at creating a big alliance so that we could all concentrate on production. At this meeting the soldiers sat in the center while the Reds occupied one side and United the other. But before the meeting got well underway fighting broke out. We of United began shouting "Down with Ch'en" [the Red leader]. Someone threw a rock and soon both sides were throwing rocks and bricks at each other. Since the army men were in the middle, some of them got hit. They kept pushing outward from the middle, pushing the fighters apart. In the end they succeeded in breaking it up. That night after supper quarreling began again in the dining hall. Since many Reds had defected to our side, those who remained Reds made up a small minority. When the fighting broke out once more a large group of them ran away for the second time. Of those who remained some were persuaded to join us. Others, unrelenting, worked on without speaking up. So the mine was still solidly in the hands of United. HITTING, SMASHING AND ROBBING / 545 We all went to work; production recovered. The army men asked us to call back all those who had run away, but we didn't do it. The army men also asked us not to mix in city politics but to stay in the mine and work, but our leaders continued to go to meetings in the city anyway and we got involved in lots of fights there. It was only a matter of time before the fighting at Wuchuang Mine and in Changchih City spread to Long Bow village. DEATH AT LONG BOW5 FRONT DOOR

On August 24, long after dark, more than 1,000 (some said 1,600) students and workers riding in dozens of trucks came to a halt on the main highway where it passed between Long Bow village to the west and the railroad shops to the east. The combatants who clambered off the trucks carrying clubs, spears and knives assembled on the threshing floor of Long Bow's Fourth Team, then broke into three groups—one to raid the Luan Middle School, their primary objective; one to guard the northern flank, the heavily populated North Station area; and one to guard the eastern flank, a source of possible counterattack because of the proximity of the railroad shops and the known alliance between the

railroad workers of the May Fourth Regiment and the Mao Tse-tung Thought Red Guards who dominated the middle school. The raiders launched this expedition for a very mundane purpose—the capture of grain and grain tickets from the middle school so that the Red Guard students, who had lost control of the campus, would have something to live on. In 1966 the Red Guards rallying in support of teachers Kao and Wang in a challenge to the principal, whom they called Fan the Landlord, had won control of the school grounds. Most of the members of the rival Mao Tse-tung Thought faction had been forced to withdraw. If they came back, they came back as raiders. But by midsummer, 1967, intense fighting had completely reversed this situation. The Mao Tse-tung Thought Red Guards, having started out life as "loyalists," eventually linked up with other ^'loyalists" in the area who had joined together under the banner of United. This made them part of a majority coalition, at least in the North Station area. With the backing of their new allies they took back the campus of the Luan Middle School by force. Then it was the Red Guard students who could no longer stay in Long Bow. They fled en masse to Changchih, where they allied themselves with the industrial Reds, who by that time were the dominant force inside the city. By fleeing they cut themselves off* from their livelihood, the grain and monthly stipends that all middle-school students received from the government. Without grain, or grain tickets that could be exchanged for grain at the State Grain Trading Company, these students could not long survive as an organized unit. No one in Changchih had more than a few days' grain DEATH AT LONG BOW'S FRONT DOOR / 547 to spare. Once this was gone the uprooted Red Guards would have no choice but to disperse to their homes throughout the region and seek food from their parents. Neither the students themselves, involved as they were in a heavy struggle for the future of China, nor the factional leaders in the city for whom the middle-school Red Guards represented an important source of mass support, wanted dispersal. With their backs to the wall the logical thing for the Red Guards to do was to mount a raid on the middle-school grounds in Long Bow and take back what was rightfully theirs, the grain and grain tickets to which they were entitled as students in good standing. Such a raid, a life-and-death matter for the students, dovetailed neatly with the interests of the factional leaders in the city, so they assembled a force adequate to the task, as they conceived it. No one foresaw what the raid might lead to. Aided by the element of surprise, the contingent assigned to enter the middle school quickly overran the whole campus. Strong forces then headed for the supply department to seize grain tickets and whatever grain could be found. They really wanted fine grains—wheat, wheat flour or rice—but they had to be satisfied with millet, which they found in some abundance. This they hauled out, bag after bag, and began to load on the trucks. Meanwhile the Mao Tse-tung Thought Red Guards, stunned by the unexpected and overpowering attack, sent messengers to ask for help from the railroad shops across the highway and the tracks. To forestall any counterattack the Red Guards, in their turn, decided to take the railroad shops as well as the middle-school grounds. The railroad shops themselves were not heavily defended. Altogether only about fifty workers lived

there, but they were well organized and well led and they put up a defense in depth. While one group manned loudspeakers that called on the Red Guards to go away, another group fired up a steam locomotive and deployed it on the track between the highway and the repair shops. As the steam locomotive moved up and down, it sprayed live steam right and left, threatening to scald anyone within fifty feet. This lethal new weapon forced the attackers to regroup. A detachment of stalwarts split off to find some rocks, which they piled on the track after the locomotive went by going north. When the locomotive returned, it stalled on the massive barrier, giving the attackers time to climb aboard, overpower the crew, and wreck the machine. As Red attackers swarmed across the railroad tracks into the factory yard, the defenders, all workers from Honan, retreated. The majority ran to the upper floors of the buildings there and began to throw down whatever they could find. Meanwhile a small detachment ran out the east gate, made a big circle behind Great Ridge Hill, and came up the highway below the line of parked trucks. By this time it was quite dark. The defenders switched on the yard lights so that they could see their attackers moving down below and make every missile count. Hsu Piao, the leader of the attacking force, packed two pistols as he went into battle. He shot out the lights. Under cover of darkness his BOMBARD THE HEADQUARTERS / 548 Stalwarts then rushed the buildings, confident of victory. According to the intelligence they had received, the defenders had no firearms, so it was just a question of who could overpower whom in hand-to-hand combat. Since the forces from the city had come in overwhelming numbers, they had no doubt about the outcome. Unknown to the student Red Guards and their worker allies, however, the railroad workers had armed themselves only a few days before. As their situation became desperate, several of them began firing at the attackers from the windows on the second story. One bullet soon hit home. The sudden shift from "cold" to "hot" weapons threw the invading forces into a panic. With one of their number hit and dying, they turned and ran for their trucks, only to find that an important segment of their transportation had been disabled. The small detachment of railroad workers that had circled behind the hill to the highway had reached the line of trucks from the south and slashed the tires on at least nine of them. The trucks that could still travel soon overflowed with people. They roared off" toward the city in the darkness, leaving behind hundreds of frightened workers who had no way to flee but on foot. Some of these took to the highway. Others, afraid of being caught by their pursuers in the open, hid out in the fields, waiting for dawn. Railroad workers rounded up some of these the next day and took them to the shops as prisoners. When news of this incident reached higher levels of the government the city forces excused themselves, saying they had gone to Changchih's North Station with printed copies of a provincial directive. There railroad workers had stopped them and had seized their trucks. Later, when they asked for their trucks back, the railroad workers beat them. The railroad workers had a different story—the story of a major offensive mounted by their city rivals to take the railroad shops, the story of how fifty valiant defenders routed i,6oo determined assailants.

No Long Bow peasants took part in the famous battle of the railroad yards; or if they did, they didn't admit it. However, all of them could talk at length about what they saw and heard. They couldn't avoid sights and sounds that invaded their very dooryards. Chao T'ung-min, a brigade accountant in 1971, gave the most complete description. I came back home from work at the brigade office about ii:oo p.m. and went to bed. About midnight I heard a knock at my wmdow. "Who is it?" "A Mao Tse-tung Thought Red Guard from the middle school." I opened the window and shone my flashlight in a man's face. I recognized one of the teachers from the school but didn't know his name. "Hurry and get up," he said. "What's up?" ''Red Guards have come to attack." "Did they beat you up?" He pulled up his sleeve. I shone my light on his arm and saw purple welts. DEATH AT LONG BOW'S FRONT DOOR / 549 "Why did they beat you?" "They went to take the grain tickets from the Supply Department. They grabbed all the grain tickets and all the millet in the warehouse. The cadres and clerks didn't want to release it, but the invaders outnumbered them and beat up anyone who disobeyed them." This teacher wanted me to get a group of people together to go out and spread the word that students mustn't come to the middle school to smash and rob, that if they did Long Bow peasants would retaliate. I got up and started back to the brigade office. I asked him to go first while I followed. First I checked to see if the brigade office gate was shut. I knew there wasn't any cash there but all our accounts and records were there. We couldn't afford to lose them. When I saw that the gate was shut I was relieved. I tried to rouse the barber, Mao-sheng, who lives inside, but even though I shouted a long time no one answered. While we were standing there, about thirty people came down the street going south. We didn't have any idea who they were, so we ran away. Chi-te was still up and let us into his yard. When we told him about the strangers he said we had better not try to rouse any more people, so we just sat there. Finally the teacher left. Fifteen minutes later we heard shouting coming from the railroad shops. A locomotive whistle sounded and loudspeakers began to blare. Over the loudspeakers came the message, "Deceived masses

of the Red faction, don't come here anymore. Don't allow yourselves to be cheated by bad leaders." After a lot more shouting and broadcasting, we heard people yelling, "Attack, attack!" After that we heard shooting. Many shots were fired but they were all single shots—rifle fire, no machine guns. Soon after that everyone ran away. We heard many footsteps pounding down Long Bow streets. I didn't dare go home. I talked for a while with Chi-te, then went to sleep at his place. When I woke up it was breakfast time. My family was looking for me. I had left home at midnight and had not come back. They heard that someone had been killed on the playground at the middle school and they were afraid it might have been me. My wife's brother finally found me. He woke me up and said the whole family was worrying. After I got home I went out to see the dead person. He didn't die on the playground but on the threshing ground of the Fourth Team. He was a youth only seventeen or eighteen years old. A bullet had blown half of his safety helmet away and had smashed his head. A pool of blood darkened the ground beside him. Out on the road we saw nine trucks with slashed tires. A few days later we learned that the dead youth was a middle-school student from Changchih. Old Kuo Cheng-k'uan's house was built against the wall of the middle school. He was one of the first to wake up after the raid began. As he described that night: BOMBARD THE HEADQUARTERS / 55O The sound of breaking glass woke me up. Then I heard the school guard blowing his whistle. I was frightened. I heard windows cracking and doors splintering. They broke every pane of glass in the schoolyard and forced every door open. After a student jumped over the wall into my yard I heard people shouting, **Don't let him get away! Catch him alive, catch him alive!" He ran off down the street. His pursuers caught a lot of other people and beat them up. I could hear their victims screaming. **Now we are done for,'' I said to my wife. *Tt's too bad!'* Suddenly I heard the train whistle blowing. It didn't stop. It kept on and on. Just as suddenly the whistle stopped blowing. Then shooting started. Guns fired one after the other. It was three or four o'clock in the morning. The raiders thought the defenders had no guns but they were wrong. The railroad workers had armed themselves a few days before. When the attack came they started to shoot back. Unprepared for live ammunition, the attackers started to run. Some ran toward Natienkung, some toward Tungtao, and some ran from Horse Square to Futsun around the hill. I heard several running past my door. People hid in village homes, in summer kitchens or storehouses. Three hid in the strawstack on the Third Team threshing ground. On top of everything else it rained in the night. While it was raining and afterward many people ran through the village. They left odd articles lying all over the place. They lost shoes, hats, knives, pens, shovels and everything else in the muddy street. Just before dawn I got up. Everyone was already out on the street. Just as I went out of my gate several

railroad workers came along saying, *'Don't come out! Go back to your homes!" I ignored them and ran to the place where our team keeps its draft animals. Right there a donkey started to give birth. I stopped to see how the donkey was faring and just then a man told me two people had been killed, one on the Fourth Team's threshing floor and one at the crossroads east of the railroad shops. Someone said a third had died at our brick kiln but that wasn't true. Only two died. The railroad workers combed our village looking for people who had hidden away. I followed them to the Third Team's threshing ground and watched them pull three people out of the strawstack there. They took them back to their shop. They questioned them and set them free. Some of them knew all about the plan of attack. Others didn't know anything. They didn't know what they were doing or why they had come. As soon as the shooting started they ran in all directions. The dead body on the Fourth Team's ground belonged to a student. His family came for his body. Family members wore a strip of adhesive tape on their faces for identification. Someone also put a strip of tape on the dead boy's face. The railroad workers won this battle and afterward a lot of people came to look at everything. It was just like our autumn fair. All the DEATH AT LONG BOW'S FRONT DOOR / 55I villagers from Long Bow, Horse Square, Futsun and other places came to see the nine trucks with their slashed tires. And everybody praised the May Fourth Regiment. They had won a battle against enormous odds. As victors, the May Fourth Railroad Workers' Regiment, a detachment of the February Seventh Commune of Honan Province, a nationally known left organization supported directly by the Cultural Revolution Group and Mao's wife, Chiang Ch'ing, became famous throughout the Southeast Region and even far beyond it. But if people who sympathized with United admired the fighting regiment, people who supported Red feared and criticized it. One of the May Fourth commanders called himself Fang Yang-kou (sheepherding dog, shepherd dog or sheep dog). He was notorious for the long whip he used when ^'repairing" people. He had made it out of a coiled steel spring, and used it with devastating effect to bite into raw flesh as he slashed it down across a limb or a back. Sheep Dog's second-incommand also won fame for brutality. He chose his own pseudonym, Hu Lu-ken (hooligan). It came from abroad, but how such a word ever reached the heights of the Shangtang Plateau remains a mystery. The student who died on the Fourth Team's threshing floor and the worker who died at the crossroads east of the railroad shops were among the first, if not the first, casualties of the Cultural Revolution in all of Shansi Province. Their deaths, far from calming things down, only fueled the conflict. Now that "hot" weapons had come into use for the first time, all sides realized that the future depended on firepower. Any group that did not already possess arms had to find ways to make or seize them. Peasant militiamen who supported the factional bias of their commanders had no problem. Militia captains passed out guns whenever they felt threatened with serious confrontation. Workers in plants that boasted machine tools quickly developed techniques for making not only rifles and hand grenades, but heavy artillery and artillery shells as well. This left students, peasants who did not belong to militia units or peasants who opposed the politics of their militia commanders, and workers

in ordinary plants at a distinct disadvantage. They had no recourse but to raid other units and seize weapons wherever they could find them. In Long Bow the majority faction had no problem securing arms. Swift Li's closest friend and ally was Fast Chin, captain of the brigade's militia battalion. At the first sign of conflict Fast Chin called out the stalwarts whom he trusted, issued arms to one and all, and confronted the opposition with overwhelming force. Members of Petrel and Shankan Ridge, even though they had originally belonged to the militia, lost their right to bear arms and had to redress the balance by illegal means. Charges that they were stealing arms soon reinforced the charges about **reversing the case on land reform" and ^'kidnapping commune cadres" that their enemies used to prove they were counterrevolutionaries. After August 28,1967, the opposition blamed Petrel and Shankan Ridge for the notorious weapons raid on Kuyi Brigade, Horse Square Commune, even though as organizations they had nothing to do with it. Luan Middle School students who were members of the Mao Tse-tung Thought Red Guards mounted the Kuyi raid. Having BOMBARD THE HEADQUARTERS / 552 survived the grain raid of August 24 and the battle of the railroad yards, they decided to arm themselves as quickly as possible. They linked up with the May Fourth Railroad Workers' Regiment at the railroad shops and the Red Guards of the Changchih Transportation Company, a trucking unit with headquarters at Changchih North Station, for a daring attack on the well-armed militia unit at Kuyi. They chose this distant brigade as a target because its members could not easily identify them. Since no one in the raiders' ranks knew Kuyi well, they wanted Wan T'ien-shui, a young man from Long Bow's Fourth Production Team, to be their guide. Wan worked out on contract at the irrigation station in Luchia-chuang on the banks of the Chang River, so lived temporarily in Kuyi. First, however, the raiders had to lure Wan back to Long Bow. They sent a messenger to tell him that his mother had died. The alarmed youth came home in a hurry, only to find his mother alive and well and himself under heavy pressure to lead a raid on Kuyi. In the end he accepted. Since the members of his family had all joined Petrel, Wan's capitulation amounted to a member of that embattled unit joining the other three organizations in their quest for arms. The raiders gathered at the Changchih Transportation Company to board a company truck for Kuyi. But the truck no sooner started out than it broke down. Everyone had to get off. At this point the railroad workers and the transportation workers lost their enthusiasm for the raid and decided not to go on. The middle-school students, more desperate for arms, said, "We're going anyway," and set off on foot, taking Wan T'ien-shui with them. When they arrived at Kuyi, Wan led them straight to the brigade headquarters, where they found the militia battalion head K'ung Chang-ying, and the Revolutionary Committee head, Chung Hu-ch'uan. As the raiders blindfolded these two, they told them that they were Reds from the Huai-hai Arsenal south of Changchih City. They ordered K'ung to take them to his home, where they seized ten rifles and a machine gun, then retreated to the outskirts of the village, where they led their captives around in circles so they wouldn't know one direction from another and ordered them to lie down in a dry irrigation ditch. "Lie quiet or we'll beat you to death," they said as they departed.

The two Kuyi cadres lay quiet for a long time. Finally, as dawn broke, one of them managed to pull the bandage off* his eyes. He saw his companion lying unharmed only a few yards away. Afraid that the raiders might still be in their village, the two set out in the opposite direction toward Lucheng County Town. Meanwhile their wives and children had mobilized the whole community, including the militia, to search for them. The women, surrounded by weeping children, arrived at commune headquarters before dawn to report their menfolk missing. It was two days before the militia located the men in Lucheng and convinced them that it was safe to go home. When the Luan Middle School raiding party returned home, its leaders gave the machine gun they had seized to the May Fourth Railroad Workers' Regiment and turned the rifles over to their own organization, the Mao Tse-tung Thought Red Guards. After investigating the incident for four or five days the leaders of Horse DEATH AT LONG BOW'S FRONT DOOR / 553 Square Commune decided that it was not Huai-hai Arsenal workers but students from the Luan Middle School who had seized the weapons. They sent Security Office Shen to get them back. He found it hard to get into the school grounds. Students had converted their quarters into an armed camp. Guards with rifles manned every entrance. Once inside, tense attendants herded him from office to office at the point of a gun. When his hosts said "go here" he went, and when they said "come here" he came. He had no choice. If he hadn't been from the same political faction, they would never have let him in the gate. His request for the guns drew only blank stares. "We've borrowed them for a while," said the students. "When we get through with them we'll return them." A young activist named Li K'e-hai led the student raiders. When Long Bow's Swift Li and Fast Chin learned of the raid, they conducted a village-wide search for K'e-hai, arrested him, and beat him. Then they sent him to Kuyi for criticism. There the villagers beat him again. The beatings so incensed K'ehai that many months later, at a meeting presided over by army officers negotiating the return of the guns, he attacked Swift Li with a meat cleaver. Li K'e-hai felt that he had been betrayed. He considered himself not only to be on the same side of the factional split as Swift Li, but even to be related to Swift Li's forces by marriage. While studying at the Luan Middle School he had boarded in mine guard Shen Chung-t'ang's home, had courted his sister, and finally married her. After that he had joined his brother-in-law Chung-t'ang in many "smashing and robbing" expeditions on behalf of the "loyalists" of Long Bow. In the end, what he got for his pains was beatings. "Loyalists" knew the true story of the Kuyi raids, but nevertheless managed to fasten the blame on Petrel on Shankan Ridge and ultimately on Shen Chin-ts'ai. They concentrated their fire on Wan T'ienshui, the guide, whom they classed as a Petrel because his relatives were Petrels. They also used Li K'e-hai's leading role as evidence, constantly bringing up reminders that the student firebrand had once been a Petrel and conveniently passing over the sudden midsummer switch in allegiance he had made after he set eyes on Chung-t'ang's sister. The more Petrel and Shankan Ridge protested this flagrant distortion of the evidence, the more firmly the other side pushed it. Members of the "loyalist" Defend Mao Tse-tung Thought Platoon never hesitated to push whatever was necessary to discredit the

opposition and lost no sleep at all over turning the truth inside out or upside down. Needless to say, their victims, led by Little Shen Chin-ts'ai, used the same tactics whenever a suitable opportunity presented itself. Pursuing the history of the Cultural Revolution in Long Bow through August, 1967, convinced us that in order to understand it we had to review developments in the city, the region and the province. Most of the political currents that battered the brigade and set its members at loggerheads came from above and outside. We had to track them to their source. To accomplish this we made appointments with higher leaders for the following week. Part VIU ALL-OUT CIVIL VIAR

There must be an immediate and unconditional cessation of hostilities between the two camps: all special fighting groups in any form and under whatever name must be dissolved; all combat bases must disappear; all arms and equipment must be returned. . . . The Central Committee is convinced that the two factions are equally dedicated to the revolution. Warning to Shansi issued by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, July 23, ig6g SOUTHEAST SHANSI-CORN/ COAL AND IRON

Commander Li Ying-k'uei was chief of staff and acting commander of the provincial troops assigned to Southeast Shansi. He impressed us as an officer who combined intellect, ambition, rhetoric, guile and charm in fascinating proportions. In the military sphere Shansi Province made up an army district, the Southeast Region an army subdistrict. Li Ying-k'uei presided over the Southeast Shansi Army Subdistrict Headquarters. That was his military job. He also held a civilian job as vice-chairman of the Regional Revolutionary Committee, and a Party job as vice-secretary of the Regional Party Committee. The top spot in each of these categories he yielded to Commander Wu T'ien-ming. Holding so many posts simultaneously was part of a new system universally applied during the Cultural Revolution called yi yuan hua or "unified

administration." At every level the leading Party functionaries held lesser government posts, all graded according to rank; this was true, almost without exception, from team and brigade level in the countryside right up to the ministries at the heart of the Central Government. The big exception, of course, was at the very top where Mao held the post of Chairman of the Party, but not that of Head of State. Once Mao engineered the overthrew of Liu Shao-ch'i, he would neither assume that post himself nor allow anyone else to assume it. The Central Committee abolished the post. Commander Li Ying-k'uei had the short stature of a Cantonese, a very small head and a wizened face badly twisted to one side. The right side of his mouth thrust over and down, forcing his right eye into a permanent squint. Whether this was the result of some wound or injury, or whether this was a defect suffered since birth, I do not know, but it made a deep impression on all who saw him. Li's was a face one could not easily forget. When he was in a good mood, joking and laughing, this sharp twisted face seemed like the countenance of a mischievous elf. When, on the other hand, Li Ying-k'uei became serious or angry his contorted features took on a sinister quality more devilish than elflike and one could sense a hard, ugly streak behind the jovial front of the man. With us, in 1971, he almost always managed to maintain a friendly, jovial stance, polite, calm and brilliant— intellectually brilliant. ALL-OUT CIVIL WAR / 558 He was by nature quick and voluble. He talked more rapidly than most Chinese, certainly than most northerners, and rarely if ever found himself at a loss for words. He loved to tell stories, often giving them a humorous twist, and the words rolled out quite freely in what sounded to anyone addicted to Peking speech like a most atrocious distortion of Mandarin, a distortion so severe as to be all but unintelligible. Stories about Li Ying-k'uei's terrible accent circulated widely in Southeast Shansi. We heard that he once lectured his troops on the "left'' opportunist mistakes made by Wang Ming and Po Ku in the days of the old Kiangsi Soviet (1931). His listeners thought he was talking about bai-ts'ai (cabbage) and lo po (turnips). On another occasion he told his men to chen chueh shenju chua (earnestly and deeply take hold). What they heard was na chen tse chih chieh tsa (take a needle and puncture it). Li Ying-k'uei was smart enough, however, to turn weakness into strenth. He put his aptitude for southern coastal dialects to good use. In order to talk to colleagues in Peking without anyone monitoring his words, he found two soldiers from Fukien, sent one to the capital and kept one in Changchih. When they talked to each other on the phone no one else on the line stood a chance of understanding anything. Messages went through as if they had been in secret code. In 1977 I learned that Li Ying-k'uei was not always jovial and that his stories were not always humorous. Those who replaced him in power in the region said that he was notorious for his bad temper and that he kept his staff in fear and turmoil—cursing, swearing and denouncing. Although an outsider to Southeast Shansi, Commander Li always spoke proudly of the region and knew it fairly well. He loved to recite Mao's description of the civil war battle there: "The Shangtang area, rimmed by mountains, is like a tub. This tub contains fish and meat. Yen Hsi-shan sent thirteen divisions to grab it. Our policy was set long ago—to give tit-for-tat, to fight for every inch of land. This time we gave tit-for-tat, fought, and made a very good job of it. In other words, we wiped out all thirteen divisions."

Commander Li also loved to recite certain basic facts and figures that summed up the special character of his domain: Southeast Shansi, Li said, consisted of a high plateau, called the Shangtang, surrounded on all sides by mountains—the Taihang to the east, the Taiyueh to the northwest and the Chungtiao to the southwest. High ranges and the steep hills leading up to them dominated 85 percent of the 23,500-squarekilometer area. Valley land filled in the remainder. Only small segments of the valley land, such as the old lake bed around Long Bow, lay flat. The plateau, standing at 2,600 feet above sea level, linked mountain ranges that rose to 6,000 feet. Behind them Huapo Mountain in Chingyuan County towered to 8,000 feet. Three rivers trisected the plateau. Two smaller streams, the Chin and the Tan, plunged southward into Honan, while the mighty Muddy Chang dumped its waters eastward into Hopei where they merged with the Clear Chang and finally the Wei to form the Grand Canal near Tienstin. The south branch of the Muddy Chang flowing SOUTHEAST SHANSI — CORN, COAL AND IRON / 559 north past Changchih filled the city reservoir and supplied irrigation water to Long Bow village. The climate of the Southeast was relatively mild but it was also dry. More than 150 frost-free days each year encouraged agriculture, but a 23-inch average rainfall limited plant growth. Most of the rain fell in July and August. When these months failed to supply their quota, even the reservoir dried up, causing crop failures on the valley floor. In 1971 3,730,000 people inhabited the region, 3,500,000 of them peasants. They lived and worked in 22,700 production teams, organized into 4,965 brigades and 341 communes. They tilled 1,286,666 acres of land planted to corn, wheat, millet, grain sorghum, cotton, hemp and ginseng. This amounted to a third of an acre per capita, but they had to feed, in addition to themselves, some 230,000 city residents. Twenty-five years after land reform and fifteen years after collectivization they had succeeded in doubling grain production. But since the population, too, had almost doubled, grain and people remained evenly matched at levels close to those of the past. The industrial accomplishments of twenty-five years were much more impressive. Southeast Shansi, with rich mineral resources that included coal, iron, sulfur, copper, magnesium and aluminum, had attracted heavy state investment between 1949 and 1970. As a result the value of minerals extracted and commodities produced had multiplied ten times. Coal mines alone numbered 564 and most of them were new. The total value of industrial production in the region had reached 616,660,000 yuan. Commander Li boasted of the variety and vitality of the region's social and economic life. The Nancheng brigade leader, Li Ping-pi, had won fame as a mechanical genius. In 1954 he swapped two mountain mules for a burned-out Ford tractor, hauled it home from Hopei behind donkeys, then fixed it up to run on wood gas. This tractor, shipped to China in 1946 by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), he converted back to gasoline fuel in 1971. In the sixties Li Ping-pi bought enough new, Chinese-made tractors to plow and fit most of the land of his brigade. Defying male supremacy, he put girls under eighteen on a dozen walking tractors and set them to hauling supplies and crops to and from the fields. Young men and women in a brigade-financed foundry and machine shop cast blocks for tractor engines and turned out lathes and drill presses that

found a ready market nearby. In the open fields a group of peasants formed bricks for baking with an electrically powered press. Nancheng also boasted disease-free pigs, heavy draft horses, pens of cattle raised for the manure they dropped, community rather than household grain storage, a brigade middle school, facilities providing free baths once a week and free haircuts once a month to all. On top of that brigade leader Li Ping-pi rose at four each morning, drove a truck to a local mine, and brought home coal for every household that had run low. Families paid for the coal but not for the hauling. Nancheng, it was clear, had something to teach Tachai. The Tung Szu-yi brigade, taking an entirely diff'erent path, specialized in ALL-OUT CIVIL WAR / 560 medicinal herbs, sanitation and all-around health care. Cooperators there raised domesticated herbs in a special garden, gathered wild herbs in the mountains in season, and processed herbs for shipment to Peking during the long winter months. They had stocked and equipped an excellent clinic, they had paved their streets with slabs of stone, and they had dammed the muddy stream that flowed past their village gate and lined the body of water thus created with masonry walls so that it looked like the lake at the Summer Palace in Peking. Outside the village they fitted a brick kiln with a tower that cracked nitrogen fertilizer from the fumes given off by burning coal. Tayang, a brigade in Chincheng County, specialized in iron smelting. Iron mines dotted the hillsides there. From well-like holes in the ground peasant miners brought up ore in baskets by winding rope on simple wooden reels. Above ground they trundled the ore to furnaces in the village by wheelbarrow, by donkey cart or by ore wagons pushed by hand down a narrow-gauge track. Brigade members lived in a cluster of stone houses huddled below a steep bluff. On top of the bluff a i,ooo-year-old temple dominated the countryside. Iron furnaces, scattered among the houses, poured smoke night and day across the face of the temple, soaking its beams and intricate carvings with corrosive acid and turning them black as soot. Tayang furnaces demonstrated three levels of technology. At the brigade level members dug pits in the loess soil, installed cold-air fans, and turned out a ton and a half of white iron per pit a day. White iron, too brittle to machine, could still be cast into cooking pots and other household utensils. Commune-level technicians and workers had built a large, cone-shaped adobe furnace with a hot air blast that turned out six tons of gray iron a day. County employees, not to be outdone, had put up two steel towers that rivaled the temple in height, if not in beauty. They turned out forty tons of gray iron a day. Tayang peasants had smelted local ore as a sideline for hundreds of years. Long before the Great Leap promoted backyard furnaces everywhere, they had built their own. That is why they were still making iron there long after peasants abandoned Great Leap furnaces elsewhere. At Tayang 600 people worked at the iron trade all year round. They dug ore in the east, coal in the west, and smelted pig iron in the shadow of the temple in between. Each year Tayang's fifteen furnaces turned out 20,000 tons of metal.

Rich in coal and iron, Chincheng County specialized in small industries. In the county town an industrial exhibit displayed hundreds of local products and demonstrated indigenous ways to make everything from fertilizer to barber's shears. One Chincheng County man invented a gravity system for unloading railroad wagons that allowed the running gear and wagon bed to drop away from the loaded gondola, then rejoin it once the load had dropped. Models of this and many other inventions, all original and practical, packed the exhibit hall. Commander Li Ying-k'uei convinced us that socialist transformation, far from imposing uniformity and mediocrity on the region, had unleashed great stores of energy and inventiveness. The depth, breadth and variety of creative talent in Southeast Shansi could not help but impress any visitor. SOUTHEAST SHANSI — CORN, COAL AND IRON / 561 But as Commander Li and other regional and city cadres went on to talk about the Cultural Revolution, we could not help but conclude that local talent, energy and inventiveness had deepened, broadened, enriched and complicated factional strife to a degree unmatched in these mountains since the days of the warring states, several centuries before Christ. Our questions concentrated on the critical year 1967. THREE-RING TWO-STEP

In the summer of 1967 the Revolutionary Committee of Southeast Shansi represented a "grand aUiance" that was an alUance in name only. Unity had become a convenient charade to be acted out tongue-in-cheek while two hostile factions of cadres inside the ruling committee gave primary attention to mobilizing all possible allies and all possible resources for a showdown over power. In the regional arena both sides covertly backed not only slanderous propaganda against each other, but raids seeking documents, kidnappings, physical assaults, power seizures and coups in subordinate units. Dissension and infighting at higher levels required each side to mobilize support down below, a mobilization that polarized the population at the village level and spread dissension and infighting far and wide. Since neither side could allow itself to be isolated or outflanked, every move kindled countermoves that tended to go beyond the provocation that had inspired them. Action led to overreaction, overreaction to violence. Once violence broke out, it was almost impossible to return to rational negotiation, not to mention peace. As grievance generated grievance, injury generated injury, and conquest generated conquest, people on opposite sides could no longer stand to look at each other, much less talk to each other. They took up fighting almost with relief. The origin of the split at city and regional levels, like the origin of the split in Long Bow Brigade, could be traced back to the student movement of 1966. An early band of "rebels" at the First Middle School called the Want Violence Brigade found allies and formed a coalition called Red Union in order to overwhelm an early band of "loyalists" called Red Storm. In retaliation Red Storm formed

Peking Commune. By the time the Workers' Revolutionary Rebel Headquarters seized power in Shanghai in January, 1967, two more or less comprehensive networks of mass organizations existed in Southeast Shansi. Each had crystallized around one of the student coalitions and each continued to compete for membership below and recognition above. At this early date, however, organizational lines still showed fluidity, alignments constantly shifted, and units formed, dissolved or switched allegiance, as did "alliances," "headquarters," "battle stations" and all other special forms of mass activity, thus THREE-RING TWO-STEP / 563 thoroughly mixing those who had once been "rebels" and those who had once been "loyalists" to the point where such distinctions no longer had meaning. Through it all Red Union and Peking Commune could still be traced with some consistency, but the large, hostile coalitions that finally emerged came to be known simply as Red and United. * While Red and United were forming they carried on only desultory activity—a period of calm before the storm. Changchih students who went out to the mining towns in Honan came back with tales of bitter confrontation, but they failed to stir up anything comparable on the Shangtang. A detachment of students that came down from the provincial capital at Taiyuan found the inertia in Changchih depressing. Before they had even selected a place to sleep they put up posters comdemning the Southeast Region as stagnant. They called for action that would stir things up and create a little chaos. Without sharp debate, fighting and chaos, the old order could not be torn down or the new order built. If no one aroused the masses, if groups failed to fight each other, the Cultural Revolution could not succeed. To celebrate violence and chaos proved not only popular, it was mandatory in those days. Those who hesitated to speak in favor of it were automatically labeled conservative, revisionist, reactionary, even counterrevolutionary. To stir things up, to slander, to denounce and in the end to fight—that was revolutionary. The militants of the Southeast Region soon rose to the challenge posed by their mentors from Taiyuan. News of the power seizure in Shanghai reached Shansi on January 7. On January 14 high-level "rebels" overthrew the government in Taiyuan. Less than a week later Red Union, better known as Red, mobilized all possible allies in Changchih and surrounded the offices of the City Party Committee and the Regional Party Committee simultaneously. Armed squads took the official seals into custody, but they failed to get support from local Liberation Army units, opposition organizations refused to recognize the coup, and within a few days Red power collapsed. On January 25 the rival coalition, Peking Commune, better known as United, mounted a second assault on the cadres in power. Fifty-two organizations representing 10,000 people sent thousands of fighters onto the streets. This time, when the leaders seized the seals, the army ordered crack units to march back and forth in front of City Hall. Stiffened by the "atmosphere of legitimacy" thus created, the coup succeeded. United ruled the roost in the city and the region. Chain-smoking Smart Fan (Fan Wen), whom we came to know so well in Long Bow, played a key role in the takeover of City Hall. Formerly a clerk in the State Grain Bureau, he rose to prominence in June, 1966, when he wrote a poster attacking Bureau leaders for failing to mount a mass campaign of criticism and exposure aimed at Peking journalist Teng To's essays Notes from Three-Family Village. He followed this up with a slashing

*In telling about it people used these terms retroactively, calling units that eventually ended up on one side or the other Red or United even though these terms had not been invented at the time some of the events described took place. ALL-OUT CIVIL WAR / 564 attack on Yang Cking, the Grain Bureau head, for writing a handbook about how to buy, store, treat, keep track of and sell grain, without including a word about Mao Tse-tung Thought, proletarian dictatorship or class struggle. Smart Fan's polemic won support particularly among the grain station workers who resented having to master the intricacies of grades, weights, moisture levels and prices that defined the grain trade. They denounced all this as "technique in command." Taking Smart Fan's poster as his platform, Vice-Bureau Head Chao gathered a group around himself and went after Bureau Head Yang. To strengthen his attack he threw in a charge that Yang had a suspicious history. Not to be outdone, Yang mobilized some supporters and went after Chao, with an accusation that the Vice-Bureau Head had collaborated with the Japanese, sold heroin for a Korean capitalist, and covered up for an alleged renegade named Wu, a man who, after he was freed from a Japanese jail, parlayed his war record into a post as vice-mayor of Changchih. As the two bureau heads slugged it out, rank-and-file Party members joined hands with Smart Fan and threw them both out of office. A newly elected Party committee asked Fan to lead the Cultural Revolution in the Grain Bureau. The ex-clerk took up the task with enthusiasm, turned his fire on former Vice-Bureau Head Chao, and developed the charges against him into a major renegade case. In 1968 Chao, in despair, hanged himself in a broom closet. In the meantime Smart Fan's activism and literary talent brought him to the attention of city leaders. Student militants with outside support had mobilized a rebellion against the city newspaper, the Changchih Daily, and the Party Committee needed someone with "rebel" credentials to cope with the crisis. They picked on Smart Fan, promoted him to the City Party Committee, and put him in charge of the paper. Thus they brought in the man who eventually threw them all out. The big organization formed to carry out the Cultural Revolution in the City Committee was called the Red Flag Fighting Team. At its height it numbered 180 members, all of them Communist cadres. Even though it established ties with the Reds who claimed to be the original "rebels," it supported the Party Secretary of the City and was therefore dubbed "loyalist" by Smart Fan. Red Flag set strict standards for membership. Every recruit had to prove cadre, worker or poor and lower-middle peasant origin and a faultless revolutionary history. Of the eighteen Party members under Smart Fan's leadership at the newspaper, only two qualified by class origin and past record to join the group entrusted by the majority to make the new revolution. Smart Fan was one of the two, but Red Flag's exclusive by-laws repelled him, and he decided to set up his own organization, the Red News Rebels, with thirteen founding members. This so-called "mass" organization later expanded its membership to seventeen. Its goal was to carry out "struggle, criticism, and transformation well at the newspaper office, support student demands, and create public opinion for the Cultural Revolution in Changchih." Another group of eight Party members, also excluded from Red Flag, organized a Red Rebel Team and vowed to "stir up the dead water of the THREE-RING TWO-STEP / 565

City Party Committee, settle accounts with its reactionary line, and remove all stumbling blocks to the Cultural Revolution in Changchih." These two minority groups established ties with a wide range of student and worker organizations loosely affiliated with the so-called "loyalist" United coalition, among them detachments of workers from Changchih Steel, the Diesel Engine Works, the State Construction Company and the Printing Shop that printed the newspaper. Allied student detachments included groups from the Taiyuan Engineering School, Shansi University, Changchih First Middle School, Changchih Second Middle School and Luan Middle School in Long Bow. After news of the big revolution in Shanghai reached Shansi, seven United organizations led by Smart Fan's Red News Rebels and the Red Rebel Team seized the city newspaper that the Red News Rebels already controlled, sealed up its doors, and then, from the back door, issued an inflammatory sheet called the Changchih Battle News. Its program: denounce the City Committee and prepare to wrest away its power. Smart Fan described how the conflict developed: After we took over the newspaper we asked why it was that the City Committee could suppress both students and cadres and decided that it was because they held state power. The obvious solution was for us to take over both at the city and the regional level. We sent out two Red Rebels to sound out our allies and they came back saying, "Tonight is the night." I was confused. How could it be done? They said all we had to do was to get all the leading cadres together, tell them they had no right to rule, order them to step aside, and set up a command headquarters of our own. I asked if that was the way it had been done at the provincial level in Taiyuan. They said it was. But I still had a few doubts. Was this what the Central Committee in Peking was calling for? Whom did we really represent? What sort of an administration could we organize? How would we handle power once we had it in our hands? The outside students repeated what they had said before. The Taiyuan rebels had copied the Shanghai pattern. We ought to copy the Taiyuan pattern. There was nothing to worry about. Everything was in line with Central Committee directives. Some of my newspaper group taunted me for being afraid to tackle such a big job. The outside students got impatient. They said, "We'll go ahead without you." That did it. I thought, if they are going to act, I had better join them, even if I can't see what the future will bring. So I said, "OK. Let's not worry about whether it's right or not. Let's just discuss how to carry it out." Having agreed on that approach, we set up a Command Head-

ALL-OUT CIVIL WAR / 566 quarters and made our assignments. My group undertook to get all the Party secretaries of the city together in one place, hold them, and shut down the building so that no one else could get in. It sounded easy but how could a mere seven leen of us corner all five of them at one spot and seal off the building at the same time? More than 500 people worked in that building. How could we cope with them all? The others said if we could handle the Party secretaries they would help patrol the building, so we accepted the task. Then we decided that everyone involved in the action should wear a white towel on his left arm. That way we could be sure what side any person sighted was on. On the afternoon of the twenty-fifth the City Party Committee called a plenary meeting. We walked in and challenged its members to say whether or not it was right for us to close down the Changchih Daily. Some of them, suspecting a plot, walked out right away. They escaped. We ordered those who remained to stay put. The Mayor, Wang Ching-sheng, the Vice-Mayor and the three standing committee members obeyed. Old Kuo [of the standing committee] asked if he could go out for something to eat but we wouldn't allow it. We said he had to answer our questions first. The rest didn't even suggest leaving. They were afraid we would start a fight. The opposition group, Red Flag, sent a contingent to block the entrance of the building. A few members came inside to argue with us. They said we at least ought to let the older members out to eat, but we didn't agree. Instead, we divided our forces. Half of us talked with the Red Flag members and the other half talked with the city cadres. That way we kept them all busy from six in the evening until after eight. By that time some 3,000 students and workers, mobilized by the Red Rebels [a unit of eight members], had surrounded the building. They began to shout in unison, "Down with Mayor Wang Ching-sheng." That's when the Mayor realized he was in trouble. He asked, "What's going on?" We said we didn't know. The Red Flag members went out to have a look. They never came back. They didn't have any white armbands on, so our people arrested them and sent them to a ground-floor room under custody. We grabbed the three most important city officials and, holding them by the arms, hauled them down the stairs to the front door. There a worker from the Railroad Shops organization named Hsu Chih-yu and a student from Peking named Lo Ting-chan, representing our Seize Power Command Headquarters, announced that we had removed the three from their posts and that our headquarters was now in charge. A tremendous cheer went up from our supporters outside. We hustled the three city officials into a car and drove them to the Regional Guest House, where we held them for several days. While we were seizing the oflftces of the City Party Committee, other THREE-RING TWO-STEP / 567

contingents seized the regional offices so in the course of a single day both the city and the region fell into our hands. The bold coup carried out by organizations affiliated with United forced many who adhered to the other side to question their own stand. Seizing power was, after all, the main current of the time. If they opposed it, where would they end up? Scores of city-level cadres left Red Flag and set up new organizations, some fifteen in all. Some of these asked to join the new "rebel" Command Headquarters, but others felt that though taking power was proper, the action had been premature, that Command Headquarters had not won enough support down below, and some of the contributing organizations did not meet the standards required of allies. They appeared to be **unclean," even reactionary. Those who felt this way linked up to form a Revolutionary Rebel Liaison Station and set up headquarters in the south end of the City Hall. Their office became known as the South Station and linked up with Red in the Region. Those who supported the power seizure set up a Proletarian Revolutionary Alliance Liaison Station, with headquarters in the north end of City Hall. Their office became known as the North Station and linked up with United in the region. South Station members held a clandestine meeting to plan the overthrow of Command Headquarters but before they could act word got out. Under relentless attack for their "January 29 Black Meeting," they had to drop their plan. From January 25, when city and regional offices changed hands until April 5, when the North and South stations finally forged an alliance, turmoil ruled in Changchih. Students from outside, especially students from Shansi University in Taiyuan, who arrived as two hostile cliques, constantly fanned up new controversies. They brought the rupture in the provincial student movement down with them to the region and contested their differences with an intensity that reflected their fratricidal rivalry for dominance on the home campus. Several members of the Shan Ta Pa Yao Szu (Shansi University August 14)* threw in their lot with the South Station, They could not stand the sight of the twelve members of Shan Ta Pa Pa (Shansi University August 8)t who had thrown in their lot with the North Station, August 14 accused August 8 of opposing Kuan Feng, a member of the Central Cultural Revolution Group in Peking who was much in the news as a leading leftist in those days. Defying Kuan Feng, August 8 had pulled out of the coalition that seized power in Taiyuan, thus exposing its own reactionary nature in the eyes of its opponents. How could such an organization claim the right to share power in Changchih? Its very presence called into question the legitimacy of Command Headquarters. What with August 14 versus August 8, Red Flag versus Red News Rebels, and South Station versus North Station, the polarization of the mass move*August 14 was the anniversary of the first big gathering of Red Guards reviewed by Mao at Tien An Men Square. tAugust 8 was the anniversary of the Sixteen-Point Decision. ALL-OUT CIVIL WAR / 568 ment seemed complete. For a while, however, a few maverick independents still hovered in the wings.

One of these was the Tsunyi Sharp Sword Team, formed by six section-level cadres of the City Government. They supported Command Headquarters but Command Headquarters refused to have anything to do with them, so they wandered aimlessly about looking for an organizational home. Conflict in the early months of 1967 still boiled up primarily as verbal debate. Night and day hot arguments dominated the foyers of City Hall and the streets around it. Since most people had to work during the day, students carried on from eight to four, but toward evening when plant workers came off* shift and government cadres left their desks, half the city joined in. Surging polemics reached their peak around 9:00 p.m., then fell off" sharply until about two in the morning when the diehards finally gave up and went home to bed. The huge crowds milling about in the streets formed numerous small clusters that constantly dissolved and re-formed. A dozen activists debating hotly in one spot could draw an audience of twice that number as long as they kept their altercation at a high pitch. As the pitch fell off" bystanders drifted away, only to crowd some other spot. Partisans of one side might lose out in one location but win the argument decisively in another. In the confusion, fights broke out frequently, many of them provoked. Members of one faction would surround a debating group, then send people in to take part. Once they had dispersed themselves throughout the crowd, they would pick up bricks and start throwing them out. Thus **provoked" into **self-defense,'' their comrades on the outside would hurl rocks and bricks back. The heavy fighting that followed appeared to generate spontaneously, but in fact one collective or another stage-managed each such incident. Lone debaters could also provoke fights. A youth would hold his Red Book high overhead with one hand and shout, **Use reason, not force!'' With his other hand he would punch one of his opponents in the stomach and simultaneously step on his feet. Most of the people on the street wore cloth shoes, but many plant workers wore heavy leather boots. When they put their feet down they could break bones. If the victim said, **Hey, what was that all about?" the speaker would deny everything. **Were you hit? I didn't hit you. What are you getting excited about?" Most bystanders couldn't tell what was going on. From a group named East Is Red everyone learned a sure-fire method for turning a debate into a fight; it could be called the Three-Ring Two-Step. A group of militants would lead several opposition leaders to one side to talk things over, then surround them. The cluster that formed looked casual but was actually well organized. In the inner ring stood young women. A second ring made up of men of the same organization backed them up, while behind them more men and women of fraternal organizations, especially mobilized for the occasion, formed a third layer of encirclement. As the debate waxed hot, the young women in front would start to shout, poke people with their fingers, even prick them with knitting needles. Sooner or later one of the opposition would retaliate by slapping one of the women. Then the men would jump forward to defend the **weaker sex." As the THREE-RING TWO-STEP / 569 women ducked out, the stalwarts from the fraternal organizations would wade into the fray while the small group at the center quietly slipped to one side. By the time the fighting reached its height, those who provoked it had long since left the scene.

East Is Red was a faction of Medical School students who adhered to Red, They chose as leader one Wang Ch'ing-chieh. His enemies said he was a hooligan type who knew how to talk and also how to cry. When the army commander called him in to question his rough tactics, he started to cry and all thirty of his followers burst out crying with him. Some of them even fainted, a trick they learned to carry out on command. **Would young people weep and faint if they were not persecuted?'' asked Wang. In the free-for-all on the streets, posters supplemented debate. Contending organizations put up temporary billboards, one touching the other, all the way from the north to the south end of Main Street, and on many side streets as well. The various groups were supposed to use their own billboards, but they soon learned to disregard that rule and paste posters wherever they felt like displaying them. Poster writers wrote **leave for five days" all around the edge of their latest creations but nobody paid any attention. Rivals pasted new posters over the old long before the old ones had a chance to dry on. At the start people wrote their posters at home, then brought them out and pasted them up, but they soon abandoned this method in favor of carrying paper, ink and paste right onto the street and slapping up each message as fast as they could write it. Even then, by the time they got to the north end of the street, rivals were already beginning to cover what they had left behind at the south end. The poster war soon spread beyond the city. The Red Rebel Team, still boasting only eight members, placed posters up the highway all the way to Taiyuan. This zeal earned them the label "Iron Loyalists" from those who opposed the power seizure and the new Command Headquarters in Chang-chih. Red Rebel leader Li Chih-chung was also known as the "black stooge of Wei Heng," a charge that linked him to the overthrown chairman of the provincial government, who, it was rumored, had sent followers to take power in Changchih after he lost power in Taiyuan. Poster writing and poster pasting often led to fighting, and this grew more frequent and more serious as time went on. However, the most serious fights did not originate over posters in the streets, but as the result of planned marches and raids. On February 29 members of Shansi University August 14 marched on City Hall with 200 supporters. They wanted to seize the twelve members of August 8 and "repair" them, which meant to give them a serious beating. Singing defiantly, the August 8 dozen locked themselves in their North End Office. Their ally Smart Fan ordered his supporters to defend the building, then to make sure of victory, notified the headquarters of the Liberation Army in the city. The army sent two squads, one on motorcycles, the other on horseback, to maintain law and order. The mere sight of this half-mechanized, half-mounted force was enough to deter the 200. They retreated in disarray. ALL-OUT CIVIL WAR / 570 On April 5, in response to nationwide calls for unity and the insistent demands of local army commanders, the North Station United coalition joined the South Station Red coalition in a "grand alliance." On April 8 leaders of the grand alliance chose a Revolutionary Committee composed of army officers, old cadres, and key leaders of mass organizations to run the city. On April 17 a grand alliance of the Region chose a similar Revolutionary Committee to run Southeast Shansi. Once the new governments took over at both levels they declared political struggle outmoded, called on all mass organizations to dissolve, and urged everyone to join hands to reform society and develop

production. By May it became clear that no such peaceful progress was possible. Setting up grand alliances and unified committees resembled pasting paper over an active volcano. All the jealousies, hard feelings and rivalries that had set people against one another from the beginning continued to fester, to multiply, and to escalate. It was only a matter of time before the flames of the old conflagration broke through. The first sign of dissension came with the creation, early in May, of a new center for opposition to the power seizure of January 25. It was called the Red Liaison Station to Repudiate Liu and Teng, * and rallied not only those members of the Red coalition who still could not accept the status quo but various groups of defectors from the opposing United coalition. Workers from the Huai-hai Arsenal, the Region's most important industrial plant, made up one large contingent. They had supported the original attempt at power seizure mounted by Red, but had not turned out at all for the second successful attempt carried through by United. When the Revolutionary Committee was finally chosen, this opposition called it "a big mix-up, a mishmash, a tub of mud and sand, a restoration, not a revolution." In their view what had really come to power was the army, an army they perceived as a conservative force. There was no question that the army had played a decisive role in all the events of that strange season. The January 25 power seizure succeeded primarily because it had the support of the army units assigned to the region. The commander of these troops, Wu T'ien-ming, and his Chief of Staff*, Li Ying-k'uei, failed to cooperate with the first seizure (it is possible that no one even asked them), but gave full support to the second, even sending armed units into the streets to create "an atmosphere of legitimacy." Much later, when the factions joined to set up their new Southeast Shansi Revolutionary Committee, both Wu T'ien-ming and Li Ying-k'uei automatically assumed leading roles on it. They played such an active part that many people concluded "the gun is in command." If they had been evenhanded in their relations with disaffected people and groups they might have won broad support, but from the very beginning they played favorites, working closely with those cadres and movement leaders who obeyed and flattered them while isolating the others. *Liu for Liu Shao-ch'i, Teng for Teng Hsiao-p'ing. THREE-RING TWO-STEP / 571 The Chairman of the new Revolutionary Committee, Ch'en Hsiu-ch'uang, was not a mihtary man but a Communist Party cadre originally designated by the Provincial Party Committee to head up a "core leading group" for the Region. Because he was an outside appointee, United rebels simply bypassed him when they seized power. Then, because he was the highest ranking Party official in the Region, and did not oppose the January 25 Coup, they chose him to head the Revolutionary Committee that emerged. But Ch'en Hsiu-ch'uang very early fell out with Commander Wu T'ien-ming and Chief of Staff Li. Differences arose, as might have been predicted, over the evaluation of old cadres who had been overthrown. By May antagonism over the issue of which ones to rehabilitate and which ones to set aside had developed to such a point that Ch'en helped organize a breakaway detachment called the North China Rebel Army to Take Revenge for Wang Hsiang-chih.

Wang Hsiang-chih, former secretary of the Regional Party Committee, and head of its Four Clean Work Team, had been assigned to Southeast Shansi from a post in Inner Mongolia less than a year before the Cultural Revolution began. City police found him dead at the bottom of a well on December 31, 1966. Six months later they were still investigating the cause of his death. Had he committed suicide, or had the members of some hostile faction thrown him into the well? Nobody knew. But Ch'en Hsiu-ch'uang, who had been the political director of Wang's Four Clean Work Team, blamed his death on the People's Liberation Army. On July 19 several thousand demonstrators, including a large contingent of workers from the Huai-hai Arsenal, surrounded army headquarters in downtown Changchih. They accused the army of monopolizing power in the region, of suppressing the left (themselves), of supporting a revisionist restoration, and more concretely of causing the death of Wang Hsiang-chih. They called for the dissolution of the ruling Revolutionary Committee and the selection of a new one staffed with people they could approve. On July 21 another group of demonstrators, assembled around a militant core of Huai-hai Arsenal workers, surrounded the Regional Medical School, a United stronghold, and tried to break in. In the fighting that ensued. United later charged, Huai-hai workers beat up 200 of the defenders, injured more than ninety, seventeen of them seriously, and damaged property to the value of 100,000 yuan. On July 22 Red units surrounding the Army Subdistrict Headquarters demanded that Commander Wu T'ien-ming come before them for criticism. They questioned him roughly for several days and. United said, "conducted a struggle" against him. Hsu Piao, the workers' leader who led the abortive attack on the railroad shops at Long Bow, said, "Wu T'ien-ming must be overthrown. If we can't do it in a week I'll see that my severed head is hung in front of his headquarters." On July 23 Commander Li Ying-k'uei took the West Gully labor hero Li Hsun-ta with him to Peking to find the Chairman of Shansi Province, who had been called to the capital for discussions on the chaotic situation in the Southeast. Chairman Liu said that even though it was not wrong for ALL-OUT CIVIL WAR / 572 the Revenge Army to surround the Army Subdistrict Headquarters, he would advise it to break off the action. The next day, July 24, the Revenge Army did call off its demonstration. A few days later members of the Standing Committee of the City Revolutionary Committee sharply questioned Red sympathizer Ch'en Hsiu-ch'uang about the antiarmy demonstration and the fighting at the Medical School. This time it was he who responded by going to Peking to seek out the Provincial Chairman. When he got there Chairman Liu invited him to take part in the discussions on Shansi. A Sixty-ninth Army escort brought him back to Changchih on August 11, whereupon United supporters called him before a mass meeting and, according to Red partisans, "conducted a struggle" against him in turn. In the seesaw conflict the most extraordinary confrontation took place as the Huai-hai workers surrounded the Army Subdistrict Headquarters. According to Commander Li Ying-k'uei, their demonstration built up to a shocking climax on the afternoon of the last day. Only one soldier stood guard. As the hostile crowds marched by shouting antiarmy slogans, those who passed near the soldier spat on him. The lone sentry never changed his position, or even, so far as anyone could see, moved a

muscle. The saliva from thousands of hostile workers landed on his face, his hands, his gun and his uniform, wetting him from head to toe. As the spitting continued, excess fluid began to run down the front of his body to the ground. When the last of the demonstrators had passed, the sentry, still motionless, stood in a pool of saliva that spread slowly outward from his feet. After a few minutes Commander Li relieved the sentry, but the sight of that uniformed man, soaking wet and standing in an expanding pool of spit, did not quickly fade from the mind of anyone who saw it. In 1977 regional leaders denied that any such incident had taken place. I tend to believe, however, that Chief of Staff* Li spoke the truth. Even his fertile imagination could not easily have conjured up such a bizarre scene, such a shameful form of attack. Assuming that it really did happen, could the death of a former Party Secretary have brought thousands of workers to the point where they wanted to spit on a soldier of the People's Liberation Army? What else lay behind this contempt? Why were the workers attacking the army in the first place? The first and most compelling reason for these workers to hate the army in Southeast Shansi was that its commanders were at loggerheads with the faction to which the workers belonged and had effectively excluded them all from any positive role in the politics of the region. Their grievance on this score was reinforced by an antiarmy wind that blew through the whole nation that spring. In April, 1967, Wang Li, Kuan Feng's militant colleague on the Cultural Revolution Group in Peking, had warned of imminent danger to Mao Tse-tung's proletarian headquarters from a four-tiered bourgeois encirclement that specifically included a "right-wing trend backed up by the army in Shansi." On July 14 one of the "capitalist road" army commanders he castigated, General Ch'en Ts'ai-tao, arrested Wang Li himself. When Ch'en Hsiu-Ch'uang's Revenge Army militants surrounded military headquarters in Changchih and proceeded to spit on the sentry. THREE-RING TWO-STEP / 573 their hero Wang Li still sat incommunicado in a room in Wuhan, Central China. We could now understand how rank-and-file workers, dissatisfied with the way power had been seized in the first place, angry at the slanderous accusations hurled against them, denied a place in the sun, and alarmed by events in Wuhan, might fall in with the political wind blowing so strongly from Peking and decide that they indeed confronted counterrevolution in military garb right in the heart of Changchih. We could also understand how the local commander, Wu T'ien-ming, and his chief-of-staff", Li Yingk'uei, might see the revolting demonstration at army headquarters as part of a nationwide antiarmy plot fanned by ultraleft conspirators. The march of the Revenge Army coincided with numerous assaults on army installations and army commanders from Shenyang to Canton. Such a many-sided offensive could hardly be spontaneous, the army commanders reasoned. Cherishing the Liberation Army as the bulwark of the revolution, they convinced themselves that organized counterrevolutionaries planned the attacks on army units. When, on September 5, Mao's wife, Chiang Ch'ing, denounced the national antiarmy wind and blamed it on a group of unnamed conspirators called the May Sixteenth Group, Wu and Li felt vindicated. Clearly it was they who had been defending revolution all along while others were attacking it. The opposition leaders who opposed them were dangerous counterrevolutionaries. They must be exposed. In the ensuing weeks Wu T*ien-ming and Li Ying-k'uei launched a counterattack designed to discredit

the opposition once and for all. Their strategy was to zero in on Ch'en Hsiu-ch'uang, Chairman of the Regional Revolutionary Committee and leader of the opposition forces, discredit him as a renegade, a counterrevolutionary and a Kuomintang agent, and by this method discredit his entire organization and all the major and minor groups that had joined together under his leadership. The mastermind behind the counterattack was Commander Li Ying-k'uei. ANATOMY OF A FRAME-UP

When Commander Li sat down to tell us about Ch'en Hsiu-ch'uang in September, 1971, his characteristic informal, voluble style suddenly gave way to a curious hesitation. He talked extremely slowly, pronounced a single sentence, then paused, looked at the ceiling for what seemed like an interminable interval, then added a second sentence. It was as if he could not make up his mind what word to use next or what sentence to say next, and this was so even though he had plenty of time, while Carma translated his words, to formulate whatever was to follow. It seemed to me that he was not at all sure of himself, that he was groping his way, trying out one idea after another, marking the effect of each on his hearers, then proceeding with the development of his case. This uncharacteristic performance lasted throughout Li's basic presentation, then gradually gave way to more normal talk as he elaborated on the significance of the ^'facts'' laid out. When he came to his own views on how this case should be settled no hesitation at all marred his delivery. Speaking forcefully, he said, "Ch'en Hsiu-ch'uang should be sentenced to death, but he should be given a twoyear stay of execution to give him a chance to reform. If, during the two years, he makes no more mistakes he may win a reprieve. Otherwise the sentence should be carried out." The first thing Commander Li Ying-k'uei described for us was the investigation he had conducted into the background, work record and Party history of Red leader Ch'en Hsiu-ch'uang. He told how he sent teams of fact finders throughout the region and the province and even into neighboring provinces to look into every facet of the Regional Chairman's past. But, said Commander Li, as soon as teams from one side went forth to pick holes in Ch'en Hsiuch'uang's record, other teams went forth from the other side to bring out the best possible side of Ch'en's record. When Ch'en's opponents found ten documents that called his record into serious question, his supporters countered with eighty-six documents that proved he was a solid revolutionary cadre. Chen's supporters, he charged, went even further. They did everything possible to block, even to wreck, the fault-finding investigation of the other side. When United sent people to Licheng County to look into enemy and ANATOMY OF A FRAME-UP / 575

puppet files, Red mobilized its supporters to seize the county town by force so that no one could get at the files. United people made their way to Licheng several times but each time they were beaten, arrested and imprisoned. When supporters of Ch'en from the Regiment of Taiyuan City went to Licheng, on the other hand, they had no trouble gaining access to all pertinent material. United investigators who went to Loyang and Taiyuan for evidence met Red harassment at every step. In Loyang Red made an attempt to kidnap them, but local Liberation Army forces foiled the plot. Commander Li Ying-k'uei charged that the Red investigators themselves unearthed damning material about Ch'en, but lied about it and suppressed it, just as they suppressed the efforts of the United investigators to find any evidence at all. "Thus," said Li Ying-k'uei, '*the investigation and counterinvestigation initiated a sharp and complicated class struggle." In spite of all difficulties Li's men soon compiled a dossier of damning evidence, which they divided into several categories: 1. Ch'en's bad class background and social connections; 2. his fraudulent career as a patriot in the war against Japan; 3. his overt counterrevolutionary activity; 4. his subsequent misleading record as a revolutionary cadre; 5. his rise to power in the Cultural Revolution; 6. his divisive activities and many crimes during the Cultural Revolution. Here are some of the '*data" that General Li compiled on his adversary Ch'en: Ch'en Hsiu-ch'uang was born in 1919. He said that his parents were poor peasants, but actually they were rich peasants. With only four members in the family they owned eighty mou of land, a mule and a horse. From 1935 to 1947 they hired laborers on a long-term basis and took in over 10,000 catties of grain in land rent. Chen's father headed the family clan and practiced geomancy (the "science" of picking propitious sites for ancestral graves, buildings, etc., thus guaranteeing good fortune). His mother headed the Taoist Sun Worship Society. His older sister, Ch'en Ai-t'ien, first married a landlord, then had an affair with the Kuomintang Party branch secretary, Chao Pan-chen. His second sister, Ch'en Chang-p'ing, also married a landlord. Ch'en, at an early age and by arrangement, married a girl named Sung. While he was away from home, his wife became pregnant by another man, so his mother sold her and arranged for him to marry a second Sung girl from the same village whom they called Sung Yi-huan, or Sung In-Exchange. This second Sung was the widow of the head of the local Yi Kuan Tao, the gentry-dominated secret society, who had taken part in an uprising against the Liberated Areas Government in 1942. After the Eighth Route Army captured and killed her first husband, she married Ch'en. Said Li Ying-k'uei, *Tn his whole family background there is not one clean person!" In 1936 Ch'en became warden at the Licheng County Jail, recommended for this post by a Kuomintang

special agent, Yang Cheng-fang. In 1937 he joined the National Army Officers' Training Team organized by the Shansi ALL-OUT CIVIL WAR / 576 warlord Yen Hsi-shan as part of his New Model Army. This was the force that under Po Yi-po's leadership turned into the Dare-to-Die Column in the Anti-Japanese War. Ch'en started out as a squad leader in the Fifth Company, First Regiment. He won promotion to the post of political cadre in the Fifth Company and finally became the political director of the Company. In 1939 he was wounded fighting Japanese troops in the battle for P'ingyao County and went to the hospital. According to Ch'en's own statements, he was already a Communist when he entered the hospital, having joined the Party in 1937. He named two members who he said had introduced him. In 1967 when the investigation was made, one of the men was already dead. The other claimed that he himself had not joined the Party until 1943, so could not possibly have introduced Ch'en in 1937. "Thus Ch'en wormed his way into the Communist Party," said Li Ying-k'uei. In 1943, in the most difficult year of the Resistance War, Ch'en went home for twelve months. Li Ying-k'uei said it was because he lost his nerve in the face of the Japanese offensive. While at home, Li charged, Ch'en linked up with Kuomintang agents who ran a cooperative in the village. It was ostensibly under Communist leadership but actually served as cover for an organization of agents. Enemy files showed that Ch'en had joined the Kuomintang Party Branch in November, 1944. They also contained a letter from Ch'en to the branch giving information about revolutionary cadres. A Kuomintang agent, later executed, named Ch'en as a fellow agent. Two other Kuomintang agents, one of them in Ch'en's home village, another in Szechuan, verified that he had introduced Ch'en and his wife to the Kuomintang on November 6, 1944. Further investigation showed that Ch'en's wife's home served as the liaison station for Kuomintang agents in Tunliu County, part of a network of stations leading from Southeast Shansi down into Honan. **So," said Li Ying-k'uei, "investigation showed that Ch'en Hsiu-ch'uang was a false Communist and a true Kuomintang." Late in 1944 Ch'en became a member of the Military Committee of the Second District of Lucheng County, and in 1946 was transferred to the County Militia Department. While serving in this capacity he stole four rifles and one pistol and grafted 24,000 yuan. As a result the Communist Party placed him under supervision for a year. "The most severe punishment short of expulsion," said Li Yingk'uei. In March, 1948, Ch'en transferred to the Military District of the Third Subregion of the Taihang Region, with headquarters in Changchih. This militia command merged with the People's Liberation Army command on August I, 1949, when the army set up its Southeast Shansi headquarters. Ch'en fell ill while serving in Changchih and went to the Liberation Army Hospital in Tientsin to recuperate. He spent two years under medical care. In 1951 the regional government assigned him to the Shangtang Coal Company as Party Secretary. In 1952 the government transferred him to the Enterprise Company as manager. In 1953 it appointed him head of the Changchih City Industrial Bureau. In 1954 city workers elected him a delegate to the Changchih People's Congress and the Congress appointed him

vice-mayor of Changchih City; in 1956 he became mayor. In 1958 ANATOMY OF A FRAME-UP / 577 provincial officials promoted him to the post of vice-liaison officer for the Southeast Shansi Region, a provincial appointment making him responsible for the work of the whole region. After the power seizure of January, 1967, when the "rebels" failed to knock him down, he became head of the Regional Communist Party core leading group. When rebel groups established their new Regional Revolutionary Committee on April 17,1967, they chose him as chairman. This looked like a record of steady promotion based on merit, but Li Ying-k'uei didn't interpret it that way. "From 1937 when he slipped into the Communist Party he transferred twenty-nine times and filled in eleven false histories. He often wrote down higher levels of office than he had actually held, saying that he was chairman when in fact he was only vice-chairman. Concerning those places where his work raised questions he often wrote nothing at all. In 1943, for instance, he made no mention of going home, but claimed to have served as section head in the Subdistrict Army office that year. In fact there was no such office that year." How then could he assume so high a post? "Because he made up his history. As a cadre transferred from the Liberation Army to the local region he was able to deceive people for a while. The Liberation Army Subregional Staff didn't know him well and the people didn't know him well either. He claimed he was a cadre who had been under attack by the old Party leadership. So this gave him prestige. It was necessary to appoint representatives of the old cadres to every Revolutionary Committee (a three-way combination of leaders of the mass movement, army men and old cadres), so the committee chose him." After January, 1967, Ch'en's record, according to Li Ying-k'uei, went from bad to worse. First came the death of Wang Hsiang-chih. While the case was still under investigation, before anyone could determine whether the Party Secretary had been killed or had committed suicide, Ch'en demanded a memorial meeting for him. Since he died while under fierce attack from certain mass organizations, a memorial meeting meant, in fact, a repudiation of those organizations. It was an eff*ort to use the dead to suppress the living. Commander Li alleged that Ch'en had acted ruthlessly against people who knew or revealed information about his past; also that he had ordered a mass organization to seize and beat to death a county Communist Party Secretary who put up a poster containing adverse historical material. Ch'en supporters also beat to death an accountant from his home village named Yang Chih-cheng who had publicized some material unfavorable to Ch'en. Yang was targeted for retaliation. While Ch'en professed on many occasions that the army was his "mother" and his "home," he attacked the army stationed in the region at every opportunity. Was it not Ch'en who had organized the demonstration of July 19, 1967, when thousands spat on a lone sentry? And was it not Ch'en who organized an attack on the Medical School on July 21, when Huai-hai workers beat students and staff" with iron rods, slashed them with sawblades, and cut them with knives? Seventeen were seriously sounded. Ch'en tried to cover up this atrocity by asking the army to

say that no one had been beaten at all. ALL-OUT CIVIL WAR / 578 On August II, after he returned from a high-level meeting in Peking, Ch'en Hsiu-ch'uang divided the mass movement and personally launched the whole factional struggle that led to armed fighting. According to Li, before Ch'en pulled his faction together in the summer of 1967, factionalism didn't exist in Southeast Shansi. Once Ch'en got the factions going, Li charged, he initiated one atrocious incident after another. "Allow me," said Li Ying-k'uei, "to give my views on this man Ch'en. "I think he is a renegade, a Kuomintang agent, a diehard capitalist roader and an acting counterrevolutionary! "After he joined the revolution he joined the counterrevolution. This makes him a renegade. "He joined a group of Kuomintang special agents and exposed some of our anti-Japanese fighters. This makes him an agent. "During the period of socialist construction he wildly pushed Lui Shao-ch'i's revisionist line, hence he is a diehard capitalist roader who won't change. "During the Cultural Revolution he gathered together all sorts of landlords, rich peasants and so-called leaders of mass organizations, including people just released from jail after serving sentences, Kuomintang agents and all the dregs of society, and together with them planned a whole series of counterrevolutionary incidents. He directed assassination plots to do away with witnesses who had evidence against him. The blood of revolutionary martyrs is on his hands. He owes the people a blood debt. This makes him an active counterrevolutionary!" Every time Commander Li Ying-k'uei succeeded in expanding his dossier on the Chairman of the Regional Revolutionary Committee, Ch'en Hsiu-ch'uang, he congratulated himself. His goal was to prepare an airtight case that could stand up to cross-examination in Taiyuan or even in Peking. As his collection of documented charges grew, it approached the point where he would be able to discredit and crush completely the forces under Ch'en, consolidate the forces led by himself and Commander Wu, and take unchallenged control of the region. When anyone asked whether the alleged counterrevolutionary record of one man constituted sufficient grounds for condemning half the people's organizations in the Shangtang Plateau, Commander Li emphatically defended his choice of target and his method. "We are solving a problem of revolutionary tactics," he said. "In battle one has to concentrate forces against the weakest link and make a breakthrough. Exposing Chen's record as an enemy agent gives us a place to stand, a solid foundation for solving whatever difficulties may arise. If we start discussing policy questions we can only provoke a big debate and bog down in recriminations over our own mistakes as well as those of others. But if we concentrate on Ch'en we can avoid such digression and go straight to the heart of the matter. Ch'en, the agent, is the crucial factor, the main stumbling block to progress in the whole region. Remove this stumbling block and we can get at all the other problems.

In any struggle you have to take hold of the principal contradiction, the main point, and battle it out. Basing ourselves on such a main point we become invincible. We can ANATOMY OF A FRAME-UP / 579 maintain our footing in front of the Central Committee and never be defeated." Commander Li needed a particularly strong case against the opposition because he did not have a monopoly of legally constituted armed power in the region. Although he commanded all the units of the People's Liberation Army, he had no control at all over any unit of the navy. To his dismay, the naval unit 0115 under Commander Hsu Li-shen challenged every move he made. True, the navy could not boast any major presence in the landlocked Taihang Mountains. The first handful of naval personnel came to Changchih in the fifties to man a weather station. Later, navy men came, it was said, for "construction work." By 1967 they numbered several hundred, too few to control the region, but enough to upset the local balance of power and give the navy, if not a decisive voice, at least some veto power over local politics. Problems arose early in 1967 when the Military Commission in Peking ordered all the armed forces to "support the left." Commander Hsu Li-shen never did see eye to eye with Commander Li Ying-k'uei on the question of who represented the "left." By jumping in on the opposite side of the factional struggle, he broke Li's mandate as the final arbiter of all local quarrels and stiffened the resistance«of all those whom the army officer proposed to crush. Outnumbered ten to one, twenty to one, even, in the end, one hundred to one, by army personnel, navy men could not hope to turn the tide in their own favor. Nevertheless, by merely existing as armed units in opposition, they undermined the influence and the credibility of the army and its commanders and made difficult any overt action against those the army considered hostile. Clearly, in the short run, the presence of the navy had a moderating influence. One thing Commander Li Ying-k'uei wanted to avoid at all costs was a direct clash with any naval unit, no matter how weak. Mao Tse-tung and the Central Military Commission had taken a strong stand against fighting between regular units of the armed forces and especially between units of the separate services. No commander wanted to court disgrace by being the first to initiate such fighting, regardless of the provocation. The reluctance of the army to attack the navy also had a moderating influence, for the time being at least, on factional strife at the civilian level. Placing armed units in a solid block across the middle of Hero Square, army units on one flank, navy units on the other, made it possible for vast contingents of hostile civilian forces to gather on the same parade ground without making contact and consequently without assaulting each other. A group of army commanders who called themselves the "Support the Left Leading Body" organized a huge unification meeting for September 5, 1967. The purpose of the meeting was to demonstrate to higher authorities that the army was at least trying to breathe new life into the grand alliance formed in April. By bringing opposing forces together in one place the army could demonstrate progress toward formal unity and thus make a case that it was carrying out Mao Tse-tung's instructions even while, behind the scenes, it maneuvered for a political showdown. ALL-OUT CIVIL WAR / 580

The mine guard from Long Bow, Shen Chung-t'ang, attended the September 5 meeting and described what happened. The crowd divided into hostile camps. The armed forces occupied the middle of the square with the army contingent and the navy contingent dividing the space between them. United supporters filled the ground north of the army while Red supporters filled the ground south of the navy. Both sides agreed that neither Commander Wu T'ien-ming, who was in fact a leader of United, nor Chairman Ch'en Hsiu-ch'uang of the Regional Revolutionary Committee, who was the acknowledged leader of Red, should appear. They also agreed that neither faction should shout any slogans. The Support the Left Leading Body advised United to drop its demand for the overthrow of Ch'en, and Red to drop its support for Ch'en. "Put aside the issue of Ch'en Hsiu-ch'uang temporarily and get together!" As the meeting opened the Red delegate spoke first. While he was still making his introductory remarks, Ch'en Hsiu-ch'uang suddenly appeared in a navy truck and, guarded by twenty naval personnel, rode round the square once. "Firmly support Ch'en Hsiu-ch'uang!" shouted the Red speaker, breaking the rules. Members of United immediately began to throw rocks. Red partisans responded in kind. Ch'en, startled by the sudden violence, quickly drove away. The rocks from both sides fell, for the most part, on the servicemen in the middle of the square. But the soldiers and sailors were under strict orders. They could not leave their posts. Under a mounting barrage of rocks, bricks and other hard missiles they stood their ground. Over loo were hurt. This big meeting, called to revive the grand alliance, ended in one nasty brawl! We Wuchuang miners and Changchih Steel Plant workers ran for our trucks under a hail of bricks and stones. When bricks and stones ran out. Red partisans grabbed pieces of fruit and garlic from the stalls on the street. We kept our heads down but our driver couldn't start the truck. The attackers moved in and broke all the glass. We had come prepared for a fight. We had stout sticks stacked on the truck bed. When the windshield broke we grabbed our sticks, jumped down, and drove the Red attackers away. Soon after that our driver managed to start the truck and we got out of the city altogether. It was about 5:30 p.m. We went into the city several times after that to put up posters and got involved in fighting but never anything as serious as that incident in Hero Square. The army leaders knew that we were going into the city not to work or to debate, but to fight, so they tried to keep us at home. When our group went on shift at night they sent a soldier along with each guard to make sure that he stayed on duty where he belonged and they kept close watch on the gate so that no one could go out. They were also very strict about home leave. They wanted to know exactly where we were ANATOMY OF A FRAME-UP / 581 going, how many days we would be gone, and what day we planned to come back. Sometimes I took a few days off to come home to Long Bow. Then my father cursed me for taking part in the fighting.

If the presence of the navy cooled the ardor of the army and helped put off overt military action in support of United, it also polarized the conflict between United and Red and made escalation all but inevitable. Since each side could claim military approval and support, neither saw any reason to back down. Quite the contrary, each side felt justified in raising the level of its demands and the violence of its attacks. The single most divisive element in the conflict in Southeast Shansi was the case Commander Li Ying-k'uei continued to build against Ch'en Hsiu-ch'uang. Since Li Ying-k'uei clearly planned to deliver a knockout blow, Ch'en Hsiu-ch'uang had no choice but to plan an equivalent counterblow, and so, step by step, the antagonism intensified. Confrontations, denunciations, mass mobilizations and open fighting surged to such heights that the authorities in strife-torn Taiyuan became alarmed. In the fall of 1967 the Chairman of the Revolutionary Committee of Shansi Province, Liu Ke-p'ing, decided to tour the Southeast Region in one final effort to patch up a peace. EVERGREEN LIU SUCCEEDS TO A PROVINCE

For Provincial Chairman Liu Ke-p'ing to set out for Southeast Shansi as a peacemaker struck most observers as ironic, to say the least. In the fall of 1967 the conflict between irreconcilable factions in Taiyuan was, if anything, more virulent and extreme than the conflict anywhere else, including Changchih. The antagonisms in the Southeast continued to sharpen in large part because of the encouragement each side received from fraternal units in Taiyuan that had to build bases in outlying regions in order to maintain their footing in the capital. Just as regional and city groups sought support in the communes and brigades under their leadership, thus spreading their quarrels to the village level, so provincial groups sought support in the regions, thus spreading their quarrels to cities and towns in the four corners of the province. It goes without saying that groups in the national capital spread their rivalries to the provinces in the same manner and for the same reason. The Cultural Revolution at the provincial level in Shansi as described for us by such varied informants as General Ts'ao Chung-nan, vice-chairman of the Provincial Revolutionary Committee; Commander Wang Chih-p'ing, member of the Standing Committee of the Provincial Revolutionary Committee; and Ma Chieh, vice-secretary of the Taiyuan City Committee, was complicated, bitterly fought out and bizarre. In a briefing given us by Premier Chou En-lai, in Peking, we had been forewarned. "Shansi," said the Premier, **was one of the first provinces where rebellion led to power seizure. But neither faction that grew out of the mass movement did well.

**At first they challenged the old provincial Communist Party leaders and seized power. This was correct. Two key leaders rose up in rebellion. The first was a member of the old provincial Party Committee and vice-head of the provincial government—Liu Ke-p'ing. The second was the political director of the Shansi Military District—Chang Er-ch'ing. "At the start these two men worked together. But later they fell out, built antagonistic factions, and quarreled fiercely. I don't know how many times they quarreled. Both of these men opposed the old Shansi leadership right EVERGREEN LIU SUCCEEDS TO A PROVINCE / 583 back to Po Yi-po. They were both new faces, not old faces. But this only goes to show that new forces can also fall out. **As a result of their split, factionalism influenced the whole of the Cultural Revolution in Shansi. I can't begin to tell you how many times we held meetings right here in the Great Hall of the People in an effort to solve the Shansi problem. We used this room and many other rooms. We wanted those two leaders to unite. At the meetings they talked well and promised to unite, but when they went back to Taiyuan they fell to quarreling again and instigated armed fighting. "In Taiyuan, on Liu Ke-p'ing's side, there was a leader who was very fierce, a real rascal. His father once worked for the Japanese and he himself had a bad record in puppet Manchukuo. His name was Yang Ch'eng-hsiao. I once met him face to face in the Peking Hotel. This Yang was then commanderin-chief of the Shansi 'rebels.' The poHtical director of his unit was none other than Liu Ke-p'ing's wife. Ting Lei, and she also served as chief of staff. "We invited all these factional chiefs to come and study in Peking. But to get the Shansi factions to cooperate was very difficult. In the end we had to send a new army to take over from the old army. At the Ninth Congress of the Communist Party the delegates elected Liu to the Central Committee and Chang Er-ch'ing as an alternate member. But after the Ninth Congress they still quarreled. They quarreled until they destroyed their political support. This time when we held a Party Congress of Shansi Province no one supported either of them. Even though one of them was a Central Committee member and the other an alternate, not a single person voted to have them on the Provincial Committee. And this shows the strength of the Cultural Revolution. No matter who you are, if you oppose the proletarian revolutionary line, you will collapse. *Tn the end we transferred both Liu and Chang from Shansi. We sent them to work in other places. Then conditions in the province began to turn for the better. The Shansi problem lasted a long time. The quarrel went on for more than two years, longer than anywhere else in the whole country. It was 1970 before the situation began to improve. Therefore, whoever goes to Shansi should first look into the underlying situation." The Premier had given us good advice, but it was far from easy to carry out. Chairman Liu Ke-p'ing's support in Southeast Shansi came from the Red faction. By 1971 Red members in the Southeast and their allies at the provincial center had suffered such thorough defeat and suppression that no one with the courage to speak for them could be found. Most of the cadres in power who were eager to tell us about the struggle came from United. They were loyal supporters of

Chang Er-ch'ing. The military commanders who were supposed to be "above the battle" also supported Chang Er-ch'ing, some of them covertly, others openly and brazenly. As a result, everything we heard tilted outrageously to one side. We heard no criticism at all of Chang Er-ch'ing, the military man, but heard many fascinating and lurid descriptions of Liu Ke-p'ing, the civilian, who seemed to be a universal ALL-OUT CIVIL WAR / 584 target, not so much of hatred as of contempt. In 1967, when he came to power, he was entering his sixty-eighth year. Absent-minded, hard of hearing and a hesitant speaker, he blurted out short sentences that faded into long silences. One cocky army officer, T'ien Huai-pao, described Chairman Liu as half-dead. ''He coughed after each spoken phrase. 'Live air, dead smoke' describes his spirit. He preceded every sentence, every phrase, with a che he [meaning this or this thing], at least one che ke if not more. Listening once and timing his speech I counted eighty-six che kes in ten minutes! First comes a che ke, then he clears his throat and with each half-sentence throws in a ma [syllable indicating a query]. In ten minutes he can get through only four or five sentences, especially when he doesn't have a script. You get so bored, so anxious, so impatient when you hear him." Our friend Smart Fan loved to imitate the old man's style: "Some people call Ting Lei che ke old broken shoe [prostitute]. Comrades . . . ahem, aha [throat clearing, long pause]. . . che ke, che ke attitude is no good. Ahem, aha . . . [long pause]. You shouldn't say things like che ke, che ke this . . . ahem, aha . . . [long pause]. Ting Lei is my wife . . . ahem, aha . . . [long pause]." Or: "Some say che ke, che ke Ch'en Hsiu-ch'uang is a bad person . . . ahem, aha .. . [long pause]. He's not a bad person, he's a che ke, che ke good person . . . aha . . . [long pause]. If he were a bad person would I support him? . . . ma . . . ahem, aha [long pause] ... If he were a che ke, che ke bad person he'd fall by himself. . . aha . . . you wouldn't need to push him over!" Even the factional names United and Red indicated a certain dullness of wit on Liu's part. In the beginning these two coalitions had long revolutionary titles that reflected some of the complexity of their origins. Liu was unable to remember these titles or even to distinguish one group from the other, but he did notice that a majority on one side had Red in their title while a majority on the other had United in theirs, so he said, "Let's call them by their trademarks, their brand names. United and Red. That way we'll keep them straight." And so they came to be known throughout the region by two words each, the United Brand and the Red Brand. In 1971, remembering Chairman Liu's halting, long-winded speeches and the pedestrian character of his thought processes, people delighted in imitating him and holding him up to ridicule, but in 1967, after Liu led the group that seized power in the provincial capital, Taiyuan, these were not laughing matters. The coup of January 14 and the Revolutionary Committee Liu established on January 28 received almost immediate support from the Central Committee in Peking, which held it up as a model for the "rebels" of other provinces to follow. Liu soon won an ardent band of supporters who

named him Liu Wei Lao ("never old," "eternally young" or, with poetic license, "evergreen"), after those youths described in Mao's famous poem Huichang who wandered over the green hills of Kiangsi and never grew old. When the east lights up It is not too early to march. EVERGREEN LIU SUCCEEDS TO A PROVINCE / 585 Everything here Is so fair to see. Wandering these green hills We do not grow old. As Liu's fame spread, his admirers even issued a Red Book of his most pithy sayings in imitation of the famous Red Book compiled for Chairman Mao by Lin Piao. They printed it in thousands of copies and distributed it far and wide. They culled the "Quotations of Chairman Liu" from the halting speeches he delivered while traveling through the Southeast. Since his words gave all-out support to the embattled Reds, members of that faction did their best, thereafter, to immortalize them. When I visited the famous West Gully Brigade in 1971, labor hero Li Hsun-ta showed me a copy of the quotation book, but he considered it so atrocious an attempt at deification, so monstrous an example of arrogant folly, that he would not allow me to have a copy, to hold it long enough to record any of the quotations or even to savor their flavor. In China, to this day, when a man falls into disgrace his detractors must wipe him out completely. They feel compelled to bury the wrong or foolish things he has said or has done, lest they contaminate the present and the future. And this is particularly true of the written word, which, simply because it is written down, tends to become sacrosanct and worthy of the most pious respect. Most people cannot afford to deal with suspect reality and certainly not with any unvarnished tainted record, but only with that part of the record that currently pleases "Heaven"— something like "hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil," and evil will go away. This formalistic approach, passed down through the ages, makes it hard for anyone to examine what really has happened, even that which they themselves have directly experienced, if it is currently under attack. Evergreen Liu's main claim to fame rested on an exercise in formalism that had tremendous influence on the course of the Cultural Revolution. Liu, it turned out, was one of the young North China Communists whom the Kuomintang arrested in the thirties and held prisoner in Tientsin. As the Japanese threat to China escalated, some sixty-five of these prisoners, on the advice of their Party organizer, Liu Shao-ch'i, reportedly signed anti-Kuo

Hinton, William.Shenfan - The Continuing Revolution in a Chinese Village. - PDFCOFFEE.COM (2024)
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