Dividing the Big Family Assets

Iwas born and grew up in Nanning, capital of Guangxi in south-west China, where my parents worked in the education bureau of the provincial administration. Both had been activists in the student movement against Chiang Kai-Shek’s regime in Guilin, where my father was a local student at the Normal College. My mother had arrived as a refugee from Zhejiang in 1937. Both were members of the Democratic Alliance, a small party of intellectuals close to the CCP. In the early 1950s, they unsuccessfully applied for Party membership, and in 1957 were lucky to escape the Anti-Rightist campaign. Under their influence I became interested in political and intellectual issues early on. I can remember listening to broadcasts of the CCP’s Nine Open Letters to the CPSU in the early 1960s, when I was only ten. I could recite by heart the entire text of some of those polemical exchanges of the Sino-Soviet dispute.

I finished elementary school in 1966, the year the Cultural Revolution broke out. I spent the next three years nominally in middle school, but since teaching was suspended, there were no classes and my class-mates and I were on the loose. When the first round of Red Guards—aimed not against ‘capitalist roaders’, but at the ‘five black castes’—was formed in our school, I was excluded due to my ‘non-red’ family background. However, as elsewhere in China, this first rash of Red Guards was soon overtaken by a broader wave of youths responding to Mao’s call to rebel, and in the mushrooming of further Red Guard organizations later that year, I quickly joined a dissident group, as one of its youngest members. Initially attracting neither supervision nor attention, a few of us started to run a newsletter that became widely read. This was a very exciting experience for me, increasing my self-confidence. By early 1967, a new phase saw the consolidation of various smaller groups into two big opposing Red Guard organizations. That was the beginning of a conflict that led to some of the bloodiest battles of the Cultural Revolution.

Soon Guangxi became famous throughout China for the violent struggles among different factions of its Red Guards, which eventually burst into a full civil war. This was partly because Guangxi was the only region in the country where the provincial party secretary held onto power through the Cultural Revolution—everywhere else they were toppled. But Guangxi controls the supply routes to Vietnam, where the war with America was then at its height, and the local party secretary, Wei Guoqing, enjoyed excellent relations with the Vietnamese Party across the border, so Mao did not want him removed. Our faction battled against Wei in 1967 and 1968. Our base was mainly in a poor district of the city. Here I had eye-opening lessons in sociology. Our supporters were marginalized poor city-dwellers, who did not pay much attention to our ideological rhetoric, but voiced with great energy their accumulated grievances against government officials. Economic activities in our ‘liberated areas’ were also far from ‘planned’. Rather, the ghetto part of the district was full of stalls and street vendors. When we students were at one point considering surrender after the Central Cultural Revolution Group leadership in Beijing announced unequivocal support for our opponents, the poor wanted to fight on. They included port and ferry workers on the Yong River, whom the faction led by Wei accused of being a lumpen-proletariat, closer to a mafia than a modern industrial working class. The contrast between the rhetorical slogans of rival student factions and the actual social divisions between the groups that rallied behind them was striking, too, in Guilin, where I travelled in the winter of 1967. There, unlike in Nanning, our faction held municipal power, while most of the poor supported Wei’s faction, and resisted efforts to bring them to heel. In effect, ordinary people tended to support the weaker side in these conflicts—whoever was out of power—and once they had made their choice were also more resolute than students in fighting to the end.

The final show-down came in the summer of 1968, when Mao launched a campaign to bring a halt to the nationwide chaos before the Ninth Party Congress in early 1969. In Guangxi, Wei and his allies mobilized some 100,000 troops and militants to crush the opposition, greatly outnumbering our group. There was heavy fighting in Nanning, where our people were barricaded in an old district of the city, with no more than a hundred rifles between us. Both poor city-dwellers and port workers suffered heavy losses, as did the students who stayed with them. Twenty of my schoolmates were killed in the siege. I was lucky to escape: just before the show-down, I had gone to my mother’s home town in Zhejiang, so was away when the attack was launched. When I came back, our middle school, like all other work units and street committees in Nanning, was consolidating the regime’s victory by setting up a new student organization under official control, ostensibly still with the name of Red Guards. The after-effects of the fighting were strong in this new organization and I did not become a member of it. But all students were mobilized to conduct ‘voluntary’ work to clean up the streets, many of which had been entirely levelled, in scenes reminiscent of The Defence of Stalingrad.

I was given the opportunity of continuing my ‘education’ for another two years. That I declined, with my parents’ support. So I was sent with a mass of other youngsters to be resettled in the countryside. In 1969 I arrived in Tianlin County—in the mountainous corner of Guangxi, bordering Yunnan to the west and Guizhou to the north—to overcome the division between mental and manual labour by working with peasants. The regional district capital is Bose, where Deng raised the flag of the Guangxi Soviet in 1930. This is a Zhuang minority area, where the population speaks a language more closely related to Thai than Chinese. Three of us, all boys, were dispatched to a tiny village of eleven families, from which we had to walk a 60 li, or 20 mile, mountain trail to reach a highway—usually at night, to avoid paying for board and lodging—to catch a truck to visit the county town, some sixty miles away. Many villagers never got to Tianlin County town in their life. Five years later, I was transferred with a dozen other students to a larger village of seventy households. In Tianlin life was very hard, because of the poverty of the people, even though the land is so fertile that one should be able to survive on wild fruit and plants, without even working too much. The staple food crop is corn. What poverty meant to the peasants was their virtually complete lack of money. Yet, in this region of natural subsistence, the Great Leap Forward had managed to create mass starvation by taking too many people off the land to ‘produce steel’ and not allowing them back. Every village in our commune had people who had starved to death around 1959. There is no question that the famine was a consequence of the social system rather than a natural disaster.