Chinese Labour Struggles

Iwas born in Beijing, but my family is from the province of Shanxi. We came from an extremely poor area in the Taihang mountain range, where my parents were peasants. In the early 1950s, however, my mother came to Beijing when the husband of her elder sister moved there as an official, to work in their home and help look after their children. So I was born there in 1963. Soon afterwards my parents divorced. When I was three, the Cultural Revolution broke out and we were sent back to the village, where we spent the next five years. Everyone went hungry. People assume it was the peasants who had the hardest time, but we had come to the country from the city, and therefore did not receive even the small food allowance given to those officially registered in the village. Relatives helped us survive, and I started primary school there. In 1971 we went back to Beijing, where my mother got a job as a construction worker. We were dirt poor, and the work was extremely hard. The building sites were all over Beijing, but to save money, she wouldn’t take a bus. Virtually every morning she used to leave home around six o’clock, and wouldn’t get back till nine or ten in the evening. That was the life of a construction worker in the 1970s.

Coming from the countryside, I had to repeat a year of primary school and found life at school very tough, as a village boy who didn’t speak proper Mandarin and stubbornly refused to learn it. But I continued through elementary, middle and high school in Beijing. On graduating in 1980, when I was seventeen, I joined the army. Everyone is supposed to do military service, but this isn’t how it works out in reality. In practice, I volunteered. Why? I clung to a dream. I hadn’t been able to square my experience of school with the idea of people living in harmony under communism. Like many other young people of my generation, I very much admired Lei Feng, the soldier officially celebrated since the 1960s for his concern for others, and joined the pla hoping to follow his example.

I served three years in the Beijing area, in a detachment of military police assigned to guard the prisons of the region. Within six months, I had become known as a model soldier; in fact, when I was eventually arrested, one of the prison officers immediately remembered me, as we had served in the same unit. I was put in charge of a squad and could have made a career in the pla simply by following orders. But I became disillusioned with the corruption of the officers, and began increasingly to question the orders I received. So I was passed over for promotion, and repeated applications to join the Party were turned down. After I left the army, I briefly worked in the library of Beijing Normal University before being offered a job on the railways in 1984. There I was trained as an electrician, controlling the temperature on refrigerated trains used for transporting meat, fruit and vegetables from one region to another. I got to travel around the country a great deal, which had always been a childhood dream.

On New Year’s Day in 1987, a friend who worked at the Beijing Daily told me there was a student protest in Tiananmen Square. I was living in an alley opposite the paper, a few blocks east of the Square, so we went off to take a look. It was a really cold evening, and there were two or three hundred students holding banners with slogans such as ‘We support the Communist Party’, ‘Fight Corruption’, and ‘Support Reform Policies’. Foreign reporters were filming the scene—there were also police cars and cameras. The students were just entering the largely empty square from the north-west to cross it towards its north-east end, when I saw the police pushing the tv cameras around, and then between fifty and a hundred policemen charged the students and began to beat and kick them, dragging several away and throwing them into police cars. This was probably the last straw for me: all my illusions collapsed.