Li Yousheng (2017)

China’s Cultural Revolution was part of a broader global movement at the time. In the United States, there were Black and women’s liberation movements, student movements, and the world-renowned French student movement. When I traveled to Tehran, the capital of Iran, in 1979 while studying abroad, I saw portraits of Chairman Mao and slogans proclaiming “Long Live the Cultural Revolution!” plastered everywhere. The Western notion of “politically correct” speech today is at least partly influenced by the global Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, emphasizing avoiding negative comments about marginalized groups: one cannot speak ill of Black people, nor of the poor. China’s Cultural Revolution, however, lacked a similar effect. Today, Chinese vernacular is rife with expressions of envy for the wealthy and contempt for the poor. Similarly, only China has completely negated the Cultural Revolution, in which 600 million people participated, and does not tolerate dissent. If Mao Zedong’s utopian ideology was heavily influenced by personal considerations of power, then the 600 million people who participated in the Cultural Revolution had their own pure and beautiful dreams. Just as American students in the 1960s formed their own societies to live a communist life, in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, my classmates and I, when we went to Guizhou, pooled our meager savings to live a communist life, sleeping together on large wooden planks, our bodies covered in revolutionary insects: lice. Once, we even participated in a collective firefighting effort; dozens of people struggled for over half an hour in the flames-scorched ruins, finally extinguishing the fire. I was covered in mud and water, and had several bruises on my skin.

In my youth, I enjoyed literature, but not particularly traditional Chinese poetry. At the start of the Cultural Revolution in Beijing, unpublished poems by Mao Zedong circulated among university students—a number of twenty or thirty, some genuine and some not. While copying these poems, university students occasionally wrote similar ones themselves. It was only when I was sorting through my old belongings in my later years that I discovered I had only written twenty or thirty classical poems between 1966 and 1971.

One of my classmates was a skilled calligrapher; his work from high school had won an award in Shanghai. In my mind, the Cultural Revolution began when this classmate wrote two lines from Chairman Mao’s poem, “The seas are churning, the clouds and waters are furious; the five continents are shaking, the winds and thunder are raging,” on either side of our dormitory entrance, followed by cheers from dozens of classmates. Only later did other students imitate Mao’s words and write their own couplets to post on their dormitory doors. In short, for us young Beijing university students, the Cultural Revolution was linked to the poetic style of Mao Zedong, full of passion, romance, and beauty.

After graduating from university in 1970, I was assigned to work in the mountainous area of ​​Guizhou. For the first year, I underwent collective labor training, still living the life of a student. I had visited Guiyang twice, in 1966 and 1967. If Mao Zedong was influenced by the utopian ideals of peasants, the backward and isolated rural areas of Guizhou could even more easily ignite the utopian sentiments of young university students. Here are a few classical poems I wrote in Guizhou at that time; I will write more later for the sake of reminiscing:

1) Butterfly Loves Flowers Mountain Climbing

In the spring of 1971, I was working at the 302 Hospital in Anshun, Guizhou, where my schedule was very tight. Occasionally, when I had some free time, I would go hiking with a few colleagues to relax. Later, I wrote a poem to commemorate this. It was titled “Butterfly Loves Flowers,” and it had no strict rules of tonal patterns. It was just a poem expressing my feelings of pity for the scenery and the beauty of nature. I will not change it again.

Lost in the desolate city, bathed in the fading sunlight,

I am delighted to see the mountains and the sun shining brightly, making them appear like a sea of ​​red.

Withering and flourishing, stars and moon shift.

The sunshine is wasted on the boundless spring.

The dreamy eagle spreads its wings,

A gentle east wind carries me across the azure sky.

Mountains and rivers connect to the vast universe,

My heart surges with the waves, reaching the heavens.

In the same year, I revisited the Huaxi Scenic Area with a classmate surnamed Hu when we went to Guiyang, and wrote a poem to record my feelings at that time. Huaxi is the upper reaches of the Nanming River, which in turn is the upper reaches of the Yangtze River.

2) Huaxi Bu Suanzi

Greenery swells and red pavilions in the clear sky.

Jade overlord blocks the flowing green.

Undeterred by the hardships of traversing the jungle,

The autumn sky stretches endlessly.

Four years of bitter regret

I am happy today.

Desiring to borrow the dream of the Southern Ming Dynasty across the Yangtze River,

The river flows eastward in a rolling torrent.

The phrase “four years of bitter regret” refers to my trip to Guizhou with my classmates in the early days of the Cultural Revolution. At that time, we were young and impetuous, and had a unique perspective. We climbed Qianling Mountain, located north of Guiyang, for the first time and wrote a poem to record our impressions of looking down on Guiyang from the top of the mountain.

3) Climbing Qianling Mountain

Greenery veils the oblique path leading up to Qianling.

Ten miles of misty clouds over Guiyang City.

The streets and alleys are crisscrossed with all sorts of things.

The feelings between the characters in the Red Chamber are subtle and intertwined.

Blue Sky is within arm’s reach.

The path in this mundane world is impassable.

One should pity the lonely scholars of the past.

The temple is located on the mountainside where the bell tolls.

The next poem carries the flavor of the Cultural Revolution, conveying the voice of the era: “A thousand years of floating clouds gather into sudden rain, a generation of mad winds gives birth to Marxism-Leninism. Unraveling the tangled affairs of humanity, penetrating the vicissitudes of heaven and earth. Iron horses rumble, eagles soar, red flags surge across Yunnan and Guizhou. Pity the few tears shed by monks, unshed in today’s torrential rain.”

When the Cultural Revolution began, I was studying at Peking University. Nie Yuanzi, a student at Peking University, was designated by Mao Zedong as the author of the first Marxist-Leninist big-character poster. Peking University students were thus unwittingly labeled as rebels and tasked with spreading Cultural Revolution information throughout the country. Despite the newspaper articles at the time stating this, the vast majority of students lacked the awareness to comply. Two children of high-ranking officials in my class received this information and resolutely led their classmates out. I remember thousands of Peking University students lining the streets to dissuade them, holding up signs and chanting slogans: “Stay and make revolution on the spot!” The children of high-ranking officials in my class led the way, showing no sign of backing down. It was during the train journey that these two students, children of high-ranking officials, began composing classical Chinese poems. Another student and I, sitting next to them, each wrote a poem in response, but none of them have survived.

When we arrived in Xi’an and Chengdu, local students came to us asking about the specifics of the Cultural Revolution in Beijing, and so-called symposiums were held one after another. When I recall it today, I can’t remember a single word, which shows that I was acting under orders and speaking the language popular in newspapers at the time, which is why I have no memory of it.

Professor Qin Hui of Tsinghua University in Beijing has written extensively arguing that the violence of the Cultural Revolution primarily stemmed from the government, thus the rebellion was mainly an act of defiance, using the government as a backer to oppose the vulnerable. When my classmates and I arrived in Guiyang, we encountered an unexpected situation: thousands of local people, organized by the government, took to the streets to debate with the students from Beijing, surrounding them in a manner reminiscent of a struggle session. My two classmates and I were surrounded by this group when suddenly three burly men grabbed me, shouting, “We saw this guy robbing a bank on Guiyang’s main thoroughfare yesterday!” I explained that I had attended a group study session the previous day and hadn’t been to any main thoroughfare, but any explanation was futile. Fortunately, two other classmates came to my rescue, loudly explaining the details of how Jiang Qing, Chen Boda, and other central leaders visited students at Peking University in the rain. Those people seemed to have taken it to heart and completely forgot about the bank robbery at the crossroads, because it was a fabrication made up by those in power to support the weak and create a backlash against the government.

I lived for many years during the Mao Zedong era, and these acts of violence, fueled by the power of the regime and incited by fabricated stories of the vulnerable, were frequent. They primarily involved young people, those with low levels of education, and men more often than women. In the chaotic situation in Guiyang mentioned above, a middle-aged man who advocated “bombarding Chairman Mao” was beaten and left lying on the ground, barely alive, surrounded by three to five middle school boys from Beijing wielding wooden sticks and belts. This became my only memory of violence in my life. Later, after studying psychology, I learned that the human brain has an innate ability to empathize with others’ situations—to feel unbearable pain upon seeing someone being beaten. I seem to still remember the heart-wrenching feeling of watching someone’s chest contract.

Later, a female teacher at our school mistakenly marked Lin Biao’s name with a red cross while copying big-character posters for someone. A few people accused her of being a counter-revolutionary. This teacher sat on the edge of the sixth-floor rooftop, preparing to jump to her death, sobbing and lamenting her grievances. A few classmates and I could only stand at a distance, desperately trying to persuade her to change her mind, but to no avail. I felt the same agonizing, chest-squeezing pain, a sentiment mirroring the plight of good people during the Cultural Revolution: heartbroken for the countless victims, powerless to help, and lacking even the space to express our own conscience’s anguish.

Later, during their first speech after entering the school, the military propaganda team described this scene as: “Let the current counter-revolutionary give his last counter-revolutionary speech on the sixth-floor rooftop.” This arbitrary and absurd statement backed by power stands in stark contrast to our feeble attempts to persuade the female teacher and save an innocent life. At the time, none of us dared to say that the teacher had no political problems; we simply pleaded with her not to commit suicide.

Only ordinary people like us, far removed from the center of power, can maintain a reasonable and rational mind. Of my sixty classmates in university and twenty colleagues in my workplace, none participated in any acts of vandalism or looting, none had the ability to make others targets of criticism at mass meetings, and none became targets of criticism themselves. The vast majority of China’s 600 million people also participated in the Cultural Revolution in this way. In the aforementioned unfortunate incident in Guiyang in 1966, three other classmates were besieged for more than ten hours, unable to sleep all night, which gave them the opportunity to talk and get to know each other. Those people came from the nearby Qianling Printing Factory. They even became friends, demonstrating that the besieging and criticism during the Cultural Revolution were carried out under orders, and that the masses were always one family. For this reason, in the spring of 1967, we went to Guiyang for the second time and volunteered to work at the Qianling Printing Factory for six months of labor training. We were also able to compile a collection of Mao Zedong’s unpublished speeches and writings that circulated during the Cultural Revolution, and after typesetting, we printed and published them ourselves. To my knowledge, this was the first such case in the country, after which mass publications proliferated like mushrooms after rain. In 1987, when I went to work at the University of Chicago, the library only had three or five books of mass publications from the Chinese Cultural Revolution, including the one we had compiled.

Urged by my literature teacher, I developed the habit of keeping a diary in 1960, which I have kept ever since. During the Cultural Revolution, many people suffered misfortune because of their diaries, and I was also very afraid. When I left Beijing for Guizhou in 1970, I burned most of my diaries, which I now regret. In 1971, several volumes of my diaries, as well as a selection of Bai Juyi’s poems, were confiscated at a hospital under the control of the Military Control Commission. I felt that a great calamity was about to befall me. Shortly afterward, the Lin Biao incident occurred, and the military control personnel were too busy to take care of themselves. My diaries were returned to me several months later without any explanation, which shows the subtle changes in the situation. Much later, I unexpectedly learned that the hospital leaders who had read my diary had developed an unusual fondness for me, even considering me a rare talent. This shows that grassroots Party and government officials, while carrying out orders, also possess ordinary human emotions. I’ll end here with a limerick I wrote in 1970 when I burned my diary, representing the helplessness of life, and also the various forms of helplessness distorted by the Cultural Revolution.

5) The 10th Anniversary of “Lang Tao Sha Diary”

Thinking back to ten years ago,

I wish you good advice.

May it accompany me throughout my life, and may my life be long and prosperous.

Who knows what a fire might ignite today?

I send you off to the Western Paradise.

Not neglecting the waning sky,

There began to be a sunny garden,

May the bright moon bring you eternal joy.

I bought a new copy of the remaining ashes.

It will never end.

Looking back on my life in my seventies, the best years, besides my childhood, were the days I spent at the Guizhou Workers’ Hospital from 1971 to 1978: filled with equality and kinship, and the lively discussions that brought people together from the heart. I still remember the scene of the hospital director and secretary digging a pond to raise fish for the staff, shirtless, to improve their lives. In this light, even amidst the romantic passion of the Cultural Revolution and the helplessness it brought, kind-hearted Chinese people could still create warmth and beauty in social life, following the utopian dreams of their leaders, even in remote and impoverished areas. (By Li Yousheng)

author By Dr. You-Sheng Li

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