A Final Dispatch

Tongzhimen, 

 

I guess you could say the dust has settled. It has been a few months since the great Chairman Mao passed away. Every morning and every evening I grieve the loss of the Chairman. There will never be anyone quite like him. I know that for the greater good of our country, we must move on to continue to achieve the things that the Chairman would have wanted for us. 

 

I recently met with my long-time friend Liang Heng, whom I have known for decades. He shared with me that he was in the final stages of publishing a memoir of his and his family’s experiences during the Cultural Revolution. Liang Heng was kind enough to allow me to read a copy before he published it. I brought the manuscript back home and spent the following week reading it. I decided to schedule another meeting with Liang Heng as he said some things that fascinatingly criticized the Cultural Revolution. 

 

There was one quote Liang Heng wrote that struck me in a way few remarks on the Cultural Revolution had. On page 207 of his manuscript, he writes “Why should two good people like my parents be forced to divorce each other? Why should Liang Fang raise a machine gun against her fellow teenagers? Why did the peasants fear the cadres so terribly if they were representatives of our great Communist Party? Why were people so determined to make me and Peng Ming look like counterrevolutionaries when we wanted only to contribute to our country? Why had the Revolution given us all so little when we had sacrificed everything for it?” [Heng 207] What I loved about this quote was that it posed so many questions about the Cultural Revolution, including implying that perhaps there were corrupt Cadres within the party. Never implying that the great late Chairman Mao was responsible for such problems was right. 

 

One of Liang Heng’s greatest frustrations of the Cultural Revolution was the arbitrary arrests and smear campaigns against Liang Heng, his family, and millions of other individuals. [Heng 83] The Cultural Revolution created a sort of cutthroat environment that promoted and praised those who reported anyone whom they suspected of being counterrevolutionary. It was also clear that so much of Liang Heng’s frustration came from this feeling that though they gave so much to the party, they were never rewarded. 

 

Liang Heng’s quote, “Why should two good people like my parents be forced to divorce each other?” was very telling of what happened to families like his during the Cultural Revolution. Liang Heng explained to me what his sister Liang Feng had told him. “Then Liang Fang explained all in a breath that she and Liang Wei-ping were going to the countryside, and Father suddenly seemed wearier than I had ever seen him. “This family will be scattered all over the place,” he sighed. “But ‘The home of a Revolutionary is the four seas.” [Heng 145]  Liang Heng himself was one of the millions of young people sent down to the countryside to learn from the peasants. “Reform” meant learning from Dazhai, the model agricultural commune in the North, where work points depended on good political performances, and “class struggle” was life’s main theme.” [Heng 182]  It was this very initiative in the Cultural Revolution that many felt was detrimental to not just family life, but also a significant burden on the peasants. The vast majority of young people like Liang Heng were simply not experienced at all in terms of farmwork and this made life even more difficult for many peasants now expected to provide food and shelter for people who could not contribute.

Through all of his frustrations, it became clear to me that Liang Heng felt that the cultural revolution did little to close the gap between peasants and the urban, educated youth. The cultural revolution and its initiatives simply highlighted the vast differences between the two groups and in many cases, may have increased tensions as sides grew increasingly frustrated with each other over the years. Additionally, the Cultural Revolution did not inspire quite the type of revolutionary spirit that many had hoped. Instead, the Revolution, after the passing of the great Chairman Mao, left many feeling exhausted and defeated. 

 

Tongzhimen, it has been the honor of my life to serve you, the people, over the last few decades. My reporting was not always perfect, I made my mistakes. But it was you, the readers who stood with me at every step. Thank you. 

 

One final time,

Gao An Zhi