Author: Ezra Gollan (Gao An Zhi)

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

Dear fellow reporters and comrades, I am writing to you today with a message different from that of my usual dispatches. It is becoming increasingly clear to me that through bits and pieces of my reporting, my words have been nothing less than reckless. In the early 1950s, I published a piece in On the Ground in China that inaccurately described the goals of the great Chairman Mao’s Land Reform initiative. I claimed that Chairman Mao was engaging in theatrics as he set out to achieve the wonderful rewards that Land Reform would bring to the masses. Upon reflecting, however, I feel it is wrong for me to imply that the Chairman engages in theatrics. Chairman Mao is a man who sets out to achieve goals for the people, not to play around. I should have known from some of the Chairman’s most famous words that he was not here to engage in theatrics. He tells us, “Our stand is that of the proletariat and of the masses. For members of the Communist Party, this means keeping to the stand of the Party, keeping to Party spirit and Party policy.” [LRB 15] I have always understood the importance of standing with the proletariat and I hope that I can be forgiven for my remarks. 

Comrades, this is not the only place where I have made false claims. In my article about the Three Years of Natural Disasters, I wrote “I can only wonder who will claim responsibility for the devastating past few years.” I would never ever accuse the Chairman of causing three years of natural disasters. Surely that is outrageous. Of course, it is impossible for the Chairman to somehow cause terrible storms to ravage the countryside. Am I silly? Do I not know how the weather works? As I should know during these Three Years of Natural Disasters, many sacrifices were made. “Wherever there is struggle there is sacrifice, and death is a common occurrence” [LRB 82]. I understand the implications of my reckless comments throughout my reporting. I am wholeheartedly in support of the great Chairman, who I know will only bring our great country to new heights never seen before.

Dear Reader, I know it has been a few years since my last dispatch. So much has changed since I last gave my report on Mao Zedong’s Land Reform movement. I have decided to make my way back into the countryside from Beijing to give you, the reader, a first-hand account of the rumblings of food shortages happening here. I had heard in a letter correspondence with the Jinan Municipal Investigation Team that a famine had occurred in Gaoguanzhai, in West Shandong Province. [Zhou Xun, 9] This was not the first time I had heard an inkling of such events occurring however it made me curious to head for the countryside.

I arrived in the countryside villages looking for people who might be able to offer me some sort of clue. I spoke to a man by the name of Dr. Li Zhisui, formerly Chairman Mao’s physician [China A Century of Revolution – The Mao Years 39:59] He agreed to speak with me after a little bit of pressure. He told me that Mao had gone to his hometown of Zhoushan to look at what had gone wrong. Zhisui said, “I think that when he was in Zhaoshan, he found that there really were problems in the Great Leap Forward” [China A Century of Revolution – The Mao Years 50:04] It was clear that Chairman Mao and his party were aware of the situation that was unfolding. 

I made my way back to Beijing following my short trip. Once in Beijing, I accessed some reports that had been published about 4 years ago. I located a document coming from the General Office of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. Province by province, village by village, the reports became more and more shocking. One from Guangdong in the south stated, “According to information from fifty-five counties, the famine in the spring caused 963,231 people to go without food, and seven people have died of starvation. There are also sixty-nine people suffering from edema. In these areas, 547 families have lost their homes and been forced to move elsewhere. Twenty-seven people from among them ran away, ten families sold their children, and sixty-six people became beggars” [Zhou Xun, Document 2, Page 12]. It is becoming clearer to me that the famine is causing more than just death, but serious struggle in terms of quality of life.   

Though it is becoming ever clearer that the famine has caused immense deaths across the country, I want to bring to your attention the issues regarding women during these terrible times. It seems to be that the party is expecting women to fill two roles at once. They want them to work and care for their kids [Zhou Xun, Document 23, Page 53]. This double expectation is highly problematic during the famine. It was clear in a document I was able to read that women were not receiving any of the proper resources they needed to maintain this double expectation. Local cadres used their power to humiliate working women. Following many instances of women being pressured into working with their tops off as was to the enjoyment of local cadres, a few women shared their thoughts in the document. “Female workers such as Du Laojiu and Zhouchun from Number 3 regiment said, “Since the day we came out of mothers’ wombs, we had never felt so humiliated [What happened was more humiliating than being caught having an affair.] According to our investigations, more than thirty women became and vomited as a result of working topless” [Zhou Xun, Document 11, Page 42]. This kind of humiliation and abuse of power is symbolic of the ignorance that caused the Great Leap to be such a failure. 

I can only wonder who will claim responsibility for the devastating past few years. I worry that the Chairman will need to transform the party once again to bring China back to full-strength but I believe in his leadership capabilities. I hope that the Chairman can harness the power of the many people who still believe in him.

 

I have been fortunate enough to make the return to my small town in Hunan for the New Year. I arrive on a brisk February morning. I had lost the only winter hat I had during a previous reporting trip and the cold wind could certainly be felt rushing through the village where no building stands tall. I am one of the very lucky people able to make the trip back home. Though middle peasants here in our village, we are lucky. After witnessing life in the big city, the margin between my family and many others is quite slim in comparison. In the village, we are better off than many, but compared to those in the city, we are rather poor. 

 

One morning, my father told me to come with him and the rest of our family as a village meeting had been called at the communal area near the well where we would source the little water we had growing up. We arrived at the little square by the well to a murmur of people all gathered, waiting for someone to speak. This was unusual, rarely, if ever were large gatherings called in the village. I noticed a small group of what looked to be fit and capable civilians dressed in plain clothes huddled in a circle off to the side of the few hundred that had gathered [DeMare 44]. There was a special kind of murmur in the crowd, one of excitement but also curiosity [DeMare 61]. What seemed to be the group’s leader began to drone on and on about Mao’s ideologies and plans. Mao had said in prior years that, “If a school of one hundred persons does not have among its teachers, experts and students a leading nucleus of a few or a few dozen individuals which is formed naturally and not by compulsion) by those who are comparatively the most active, orthodox, and intelligent, the school will be difficult to manage” [Mao Talks at Yan’an and Methods of Leadership 120]. Many in the crowd, however, did not take to this well, and over the course of the hours-long speech, lost all interest [DeMare 61]. 

 

The day following the boring speech, we heard a knock on our front door, I recognized the man at the door as one from the meeting the prior day. My father explained to the man that we were middle peasants, who, did not live an easy life especially due to my 2 brothers being unable to work but were not starving. The man asked my father to share his thoughts on the village higher-ups like landlords, seemingly waiting for my father to speak negatively about the wealthy peasants [DeMare 24]. The man left about an hour of trying to dig up any sort of story that could be used against the landlords and wealthy peasants in the village. Our family stands to gain something from the poor peasants however we also stand to lose the little extra land we have should the large swaths of poor peasants gain more power. 

 

It is becoming more and more clear to me as to why Mao Zedong chose to have poor peasants speak bitterness and turn receive land in this way. Mao Zedong knows that power lies in the hands of the masses, in the case of China, the millions of poor peasants across the countryside. Land reform is far more than just turning land over. Were land reform solely about turning land over, Mao would have done this without any theatrics. However, the goal is to have our peasant population turn their backs on the wealthy peasants and landlords. Mao Zedong himself has said that an extra landlord is an extra enemy [DeMare 106]. By vilifying the landlords, Mao aimed to put the power in the hands of the peasants who would see land reform as far more than just receiving their share of the land. 

 

However, there are issues with the distribution of land here in the countryside. One of the most obvious problems and sources of tension is that there simply is not enough land to go around [DeMare 169]. The reality, dear readers, is that land reform can do a lot to give power to populations such as the peasants, but it cannot solve many of the problems facing China today. In many ways, land reform has been a greater source of problems than it has been of success in terms of moving China forward. 

 

Until next time,

 

Gao An Zhi

I woke up this morning at around 05:30. I was up early enough to hear the birds chirp as the sun rose. I looked around for my old leather briefcase that I had been given as a gift from my father back home in the country. He gave it to me when I left for university here in Beijing. I gathered my papers into the briefcase and made my way to the Zhengyangmen Railway Station. The station bustled with travelers arriving from nearby Tianjin, Baoding, and other nearby cities. Many of these trips could be made in a day if one left early enough. 

 

My trip would take me nearly 3 days. I’d traverse the Hebei, Shanxi, and Shaanxi provinces before arriving in Ya’nan where I would be picked up by a local guide. The guide brought us to the center of this fascinating city that all of a sudden has become the center of the communist parties’ efforts against the Japanese. (Johnson 63) I quickly understood just what was at stake here. Mao Zedong and his communist party had carved out a headquarters here in Ya’nan. Chiang Kai-Shek and his nationalist party in prior years had been looking to wage a war against Mao and his Communists but with the Japanese gaining ground every day, Chiang Kai-Shek is seemingly nowhere to be found. 

 

On the ground here in Ya’nan, I noticed that Mao was commonly referred to as the “Chairman” by his people. He was very much in charge, but there was a sense that Mao was just like everyone else. This in large part is what may make him so popular. Mao was also involved in many aspects of the communist party here in Ya’nan. (Snow 181) What made Ya’nan unique was the fact that communist leaders were different from the ordinary citizens. Many of the leaders lived in caves just like everyone else, and normally hierarchical institutions like the military blended in with the people and were said to be on the same social level as the commoner. (Dietrich 28) I had a chance to sit down for some tea with Guo Qi-min, a woman who was studying at the anti-Japanese University here in Ya’nan. I asked her more about the new exuberance found here in Ya’nan and what it looked like on a day-to-day basis for a woman. She told me, “I went to the anti-Japanese University of Ya’nan in the fall of 1938. We had classes on current affairs, philosophy, and so on. None of us minded the hard conditions, at night we shared huge beds, each person had just this little space.” Guo Qi-min paused to illustrate to me with her hands just how little space each person had. She continued “About a foot, one next to the other. We got up early in the morning, we did morning drill and learned how to use weapons to fight the Japanese.” (China: A Century of Revolution – China in Revolution 1:10:46) Guo Qi-min shared this information with a tone of enthusiasm that I had not seen before in many of my interactions with individuals outside of those in Ya’nan. 

 

What seemed at the core of Mao’s success here in Ya’nan besides all of my aforementioned reasons was the strategy that Mao had when it came to completely reshaping ideology. The idea was to promote things that the people liked while also maintaining complete control over thought within the population. (Dietrich 27) What Mao has channeled in the people here in Ya’nan is something that had very rarely been seen before. Mao artfully crafted a party that could have the potential to grow drastically in large part due to his incredible ability to make his subordinates feel as though they were all together. In just 3 years, from 1937 to 1940, Mao’s CCP and Red Army both had skyrocketed in numbers and the enthusiasm here in Ya’nan was evidence of that. (Dietrich 29) 

 

As I boarded my train back from Ya’nan, I too began to feel a sense of this Ya’nan exuberance. I now understood why it was that many were flocking to this rural city to take part in Mao’s cultural revolution. The fear of the Japanese in the north, combined with Chiang Kai-shek’s rocky and potentially corrupt nationalist party left a sense of urgency in the people who looked for answers and may have found them in Ya’nan. Though I do not know what the future holds, I can say with certainty that this headquarters in Ya’nan will only continue to grow and remain the foundation of Mao’s communist party. 

 

Until next time,

 

Gao An Zhi

I woke up this morning to a frosty breeze making its way through the cracks in my dormitory window. I live on the first floor so by the time I open my eyes at around 7:30 the bustle of the street below me rings throughout my room. The street cars make their way through the crowds. A young boy plays with a paper plane as his mother purchases their daily staples. Men pull rickshaws carrying those with the means to afford such a luxury during these times. A few people are chatting, and some chuckle here and there. Most have a determined look on their faces as they run their daily errands here in the city. 

 

I don’t have any classes today so I figure that this will be a great day to grab my notebook and head down to the street. I decided to go out and look for people who might be willing to share a few words regarding the current situation in China. I happened to meet a woman by the name of Qui Hui-ying, she was visiting family here in Beijing but had spent time as a silk factory worker in recent years. We spoke on the steps of the National Library. Qui Hui-ying told me, “I came to Shanghai when I was 12, we were so miserable. You had to work 17 hours a day. Later, a progressive worker in the factory told us that people were not born to be poor. One was poor because of the exploitation by others. There is exploitation by the capitalist on one hand and exploitation by the labor contractor on the other. You do the work and he takes the money. I had no idea what revolution meant, all I thought was that the worker made sense and that he cared about us, poor people.” (China: A Century of Revolution – China in Revolution 24:32) I quickly started to draw some connections between my readings of Mao Zedong’s quotes on the Communist Manifesto. It made sense to me that Qui Hui-ying would have overheard these ideas from a progressive coworker. It would be nearly impossible for her to have learned these elsewhere. It also reinforced my understanding of the fact that power lay in the hands of the masses, according to Mao. (Marley and Neher 15)  Qui Hui-ying’s understanding of power to the workers came through word of mouth, not through education which she certainly did not have access to. I couldn’t help but think that Mao was very clever in understanding this. All it would take is one factory worker with the knowledge and strength to speak out for word to spread quickly that exploitation and abuse of the working class were not how things were elsewhere, especially around the world.  

 

Though most of my interactions with people here in Beijing were often more biased towards the urban dweller, like my conversation with Qui Hui-ying, I had learned from speaking with some of my classmates that there were rumblings of the core of the revolution lying in the Jiangxi province countryside. (China: A Century of Revolution – China In Revolution 26:00) I knew little about these rumors but I was certainly curious to find those who had witnessed some of what was happening in Jiangxi. I met a woman who had traveled from Jiangxi to Beijing to visit family for a month. The woman went by the name of Xie Pei-lan and donned a knit hat and navy jacket. She told me that she had recently joined the communist party in the countryside along with other peasants. I asked her why she had decided to join. She said, “people told me that if I joined the revolution, I would have my freedom.” Xie Pei-lan added, “If I didn’t join, I would have to marry this man who was over 30. So I thought if revolution could save me from this, I would join.” (China: A Century of Revolution – China In Revolution 28:48) I could understand her sentiment on the situation. Back where I come from in the country, it was standard for women to be sold off at a very young age as wives. Xie Pei-lan’s sentiment was similarly echoed by some of the other people to whom I spoke. 

 

I thanked Xie Pei-lan for her time and made my way back to my dormitory. Though I am only sharing a few of the stories I heard today, I felt that these were the most valuable ones to share with you, the reader. I am excited and scared for our future at the moment but I feel lucky to get to share my findings with all of you. 

Until next time,

 

Gao An Zhi

 

Greetings, 

 

My name is Gao An Zhi and I am a 19-year-old man. I was born in 1911, the year of the Pig. I was born and raised in a small town in Hunan province but moved here to Beijing last year to begin my studies at Peking University. I come from a middle-class family. My father worked as a trader who spent many months at a time away by the coasts. My mother was a seamstress and spent much of her time sewing together clothes for farmers. I have 5 siblings, 2 older brothers and one older sister, along with 2 younger sisters. My 2 older brothers finished their university studies last year, but both have fallen ill after consuming contaminated water. There is now even more pressure on me to carry on my father’s name as I am the only one capable of studying and working. My grandfather, who spent his life working as a school teacher, passed away in 1904. My grandmother is still alive and lives at our family home. 

 

I saw a paper flyer hung up in my university’s canteen looking for young students like myself interested in writing about their experiences during this unique time in our history. Times right now are tough, we have been stuck in a cycle for hundreds of years that has not permitted those of us who are less fortunate to move up in the social ladder and I envision myself as taking part in changing that. I want to write about how I see China being able to transform itself. I believe that so much can be done to change the ways in which we as a country operate. I am very passionate about politics and history and spend my free moments reading just about anything I can get my hands on.  As a young person living alone and far away from my home, I want to make my family proud and carry on my father’s name through my journalism. I look forward to sharing my experiences with you, the reader in the coming months and years. 

 

Until next time, 

 

Gao An Zhi