Li Yousheng (September 2017)

Abstract: In his article, Qin Hui mentions that during the Cultural Revolution, educated youth sent to the countryside and Western missionaries arrived in the same remote rural areas. In fact, the European religious revolutions rebelled against the Roman Catholic Church, paving the way for the later development of modern capitalism; the Chinese Cultural Revolution rebelled against Soviet fundamentalist communism, paving the way for the later reform and opening up. However, only the former led to a complete separation of church and state. We should neither deny the faith and ideals of Christians nor the faith and ideals of the educated youth of the Cultural Revolution. This article uses grassroots social life in the later stages of the Cultural Revolution to speculate on the ideals of the Cultural Revolution in the minds of 800 million Chinese people: equality, friendship, dedication, and tolerance. At that time, there were already pioneering elements of the later reform and opening up, but not the power corruption that followed. This article makes a relatively comprehensive comparison between the educated youth of the Cultural Revolution and Christian missionaries, showing the differences between Eastern and Western cultures, and the differences between a natural, primitive society and an artificial secondary society. Secondary societies have countless possible directions. The Cultural Revolution in the minds of 800 million ordinary Chinese people cannot be denied; here, there is no cruelty of factional struggles, but rather the equality, friendship, dedication, and tolerance inherent in human nature. As a college student during the Cultural Revolution, in the ten years from 1963 to 1973 that led me to my thirties: I spent two months each as a soldier and a farmer in the countryside, living and eating with soldiers and farmers; eight months as a factory worker, living a communist life where money and resources were shared with my classmates; a year working on a hospital construction site in the wilderness, often working through the night; a year of mobile medical services in the countryside, visiting impoverished households and delivering medicine to their homes; and two years working in a staff hospital of a military factory in the Third Front. There are few people in the world who grow up and then establish themselves in society in this way; they have the right to their own lives and beliefs.

* * *

Reading Qin Hui’s article[1] evoked many similar memories in myself. I will also make a further comparison between the educated youth of the Cultural Revolution and the Christian missionaries, and follow Qin Hui’s writing style: to make some comments and analyses on the basis of the narrative, that is, to use personal experience to explain the problem.

Qin Hui concludes his article by saying, “Standing in Jintang Village facing the ruins of that church, I think these people (educated youth) are worlds apart from the French who came to preach out of faith. But I want to emphasize that even these people (educated youth) were not without the driving force of idealism or faith.”

This article further develops Qin Hui’s conclusion, emphasizing the ideals and beliefs of educated youth during the Cultural Revolution. When I returned to university for further studies in 1973 and took the postgraduate entrance exam in 1979, I heard classmates discussing that the most active participants during the Cultural Revolution were those who were in their third year of university at the beginning of the revolution, and they were also the majority who returned for further studies and entered postgraduate programs. During the Cultural Revolution, the overwhelming and resounding slogans permeated the hearts of young people seeking knowledge. Looking back in my seventies, I realize that what was nurtured could only be a heart dedicated to the struggle and dedication of humanity throughout life.

I wasn’t a sent-down youth, but after graduating from university in 1970, I was assigned to a remote mountainous area. My experience of being sent to the countryside was rooted in the same ideology and political maneuvering of that era. Around 1972, a colleague and I went to the countryside for medical treatment, living and eating with the sent-down youth from Guizhou for two months. We provided medical services to them and treated the surrounding farmers. We also worked alongside them. They told me that when they first arrived in the countryside, they were just like us in our first year of work after graduation—working with great enthusiasm and dedication, filled with a spirit of self-sacrifice for ideals—the so-called “burning passion” characteristic of that era.

Because there was room to reclaim wasteland in the mountainous areas of Guizhou, the educated youth who lived with me lived collectively in rural houses and cultivated the land they had reclaimed themselves.

My hometown, Xian County in Hebei Province, was one of the few early Western missionary strongholds in China. Before the last foreign missionaries left around 1950, Zhu De personally went to handle the matter. These Western missionaries not only built a magnificent church there, but also a large hospital next to it, providing medical services to the local farmers. Even after all the foreign doctors and missionaries had left, in the 1950s and 60s, the medical standards of this county hospital remained far superior to those of the surrounding counties, attracting patients from afar.

Like Qin Hui, I also visited the missionary cemetery and was deeply impressed by the dedication of those Westerners who came to preach in this remote rural area. When I first saw the colored fresco of the Virgin Mary left in the church, I was amazed by the lifelike quality of this Western art form, which was unique to the local rural area.

Comparing communism and Christianity is a topic of academic research. As a Cultural Revolution youth who later became a sent-down youth, Qin Hui arrived in the same remote mountainous area as Western missionaries, and I have similar experiences. First, it should be pointed out that Cultural Revolution educated youth and Christian missionaries are highly comparable: both were driven by ideals that transcended reality and possessed a selfless spirit of dedication. They both betrayed traditional human civilization, seeking a better social life in reality, using their words and actions to inspire illiterate peasants and provide them with services. Before we begin, let’s revisit the theme song of the TV series “Yearning,” which recalls the era before and after the Cultural Revolution from the emotional perspective of ordinary people.

　 “The years have flowed by, and I am filled with confusion about the past. Reality and illusion are hard to reconcile, and joys and sorrows have all been experienced. Why this persistence? On the long road of life, I have been searching and seeking, yearning for a life of sincerity. Who can tell me if it is right or wrong? I inquire of travelers from north and south. Let bygones be bygones, and let us start anew with true feelings. Accompanying the lights of countless homes in the world. The story is not long, just like an ordinary song, to be pondered together in the past and the future.”

After dividing human society into the genetically encoded original society and the artificial secondary society, the secondary society faces countless different directions. [2] There is no need for different directions to negate each other. Here I define the social direction pursued by the Cultural Revolution by the emotional understanding of 800 million people and by the grassroots social life style during the ten years of the Cultural Revolution, rather than the speeches and articles of the leaders. That is, to abandon the choice between “real and illusory” and forget the grievances and right and wrong, and pursue the true feelings behind it. We have no right to deny the direction of the ideal social life of the Cultural Revolution in the hearts of 800 million Chinese people. They have the right to understand the Cultural Revolution from their own perspective and it cannot be denied.

During my vacation at home in the early days of the Cultural Revolution, local rural women repeatedly told me about the children who walked to Beijing to see Chairman Mao: their faces were covered in sweat, and their legs were covered in blisters from the long journey. The local rural women were so moved and impressed that they carried water, cloth strips, and white flour buns—a rare treat for farmers at the time—to the roadside to serve these children. Years later, when they spoke of this, their eyes still welled up with tears.

If these children have no faith, if the educated youth from Guizhou I met have no faith, who could believe it? When I first arrived in the mountainous region of Guizhou, I wrote a classical poem to express this feeling, ending with:

An poured his passionate blood onto the barren mountains and rocks, warming them and melting away the frost, so that next year the grass would sprout and the plateau would be covered in lush green.

If Jesus and revolutionary martyrs sacrificed their blood and flesh for a new world, then I, as a young intellectual at the time, would throw my own blood and flesh among the barren mountains and rocks to nourish the overgrown weeds. An equal, grassroots life must begin with myself.

Like the vast majority of hundreds of millions of Chinese people, I stood at a distance, chanting slogans as we spent the ten years of the Cultural Revolution. Of my sixty classmates in university and my twenty colleagues in my work departments afterward, none of us became targets of public criticism, nor did any of us have the ability to make others targets. I did not participate in any looting or vandalism, but I did protect cultural relics a couple of times from damage by young people. However, like hundreds of millions of Chinese people, we moved towards moral virtues such as equality, friendship, and dedication. This also included the vast majority of Chinese farmers, who did not participate in the Cultural Revolution, thus avoiding the chaos of the Great Leap Forward in 1958 that could have led to the starvation of millions. The Cultural Revolution in rural areas was limited to county and commune cadres and school teachers. But the Cultural Revolution eradicated the practice of Communist Party bureaucrats going to the countryside, which meant freeing them from various forms of government interference. Farmers began to manage their own affairs, which was more like their quasi-primitive social life before the 1950s, although it was still collective production in agricultural cooperatives. After entering the 1970s, many production teams began to engage in sideline businesses, producing certain industrial products for sale. During the agricultural individualization movement in the 1980s after Deng Xiaoping came to power, these production teams engaged in sideline production resisted individualization and continued their collectivized production for a time.

The Cultural Revolution was aborted after the Lin Biao incident, after which Mao Zedong frequently wept, even wailing. Following this, grassroots officials across the country became perfunctory in their response to the higher authorities’ push for the Cultural Revolution. However, the kind-hearted Chinese people still moved closer, both spiritually and practically, to Mao Zedong’s utopian ideals of the Cultural Revolution, and to moral virtues such as equality, friendship, and dedication. Compared to before the Cultural Revolution and after the Reform and Opening Up, the lives of Chinese people during this period were closer to the Confucian and Taoist social ideals of mainstream Chinese culture—a so-called natural, primordial social life, and the moral aesthetic of “not using anything as a tool” as described by Confucius. Mao Zedong’s utopian ideals contained elements of the traditional Confucian ideal of Great Harmony.

For the past five or six thousand years, the inherent unmanipulable nature of two-tiered societies has led to a history of escalating warfare—in other words, humanity’s struggle against itself. Faced with life-or-death conflicts, humanity’s relentless efforts have resulted in the accumulation of material wealth and knowledge; however, this progress has come at the cost of abandoning a naturally happy life. It is in the face of this tragic self-destructive existence that Christianity’s concepts of original sin and salvation emerged, along with modern utopias and the Marxist communist movement.

From 1971 to 1979, I worked at a workers’ hospital in the southern suburbs of Guiyang. We had weekly “political study time,” which became a time for everyone to chat and share their innermost thoughts—the so-called “exchange of ideas.” After going abroad, I realized that our conversations back then were more like heart-to-heart talks in a Christian church, facing the Bible. The first time I attended a service at a Cambridge church in England, I exclaimed in surprise: “Isn’t this just like our Cultural Revolution’s pledge of loyalty?” Everyone talked about how they applied what they learned while singing hymns. The only difference was the color of the sacred books they held to their chests—one was red, the other blue.

The later stages of the Cultural Revolution were often described as an overabundance of anarchism, a return to a prehistoric, anarchic society, a move towards a heaven where everyone is equal before God. As ordinary citizens, we respected our leaders, but they no longer had the power to promote anyone or change anyone’s salary or benefits, and the masses had neither such hope nor pressure. While we were at work, many went out to buy groceries. We factory workers used platinum, many times more valuable than gold, to make our own kitchen knives—like throwing a noblewoman’s necklace into a latrine—a critique of the bureaucratic hierarchy and a yearning for a prehistoric, primordial society.

Our routine political meetings at the time mostly devolved into idle chatter. Hospital staff members a few years older than us often complained that everything was in chaos and that even meat and vegetables couldn’t be supplied. Our head of medical department said, “Chairman Mao is getting senile; he might be suffering from dementia!” In this situation, I often heard young nurses add, “Don’t worry, things will be fine once Chairman Mao dies.”

The young nurse’s words encapsulate the idealistic tendencies of early society during the Cultural Revolution, viewing the supreme ruler of a vast nation as a respected yet also complainable elder. This embodies the true meaning of Confucius’s “Do not do to others what you would not have them do to you”: consider others’ feelings and circumstances in relation to one’s own. For the same reason and consideration, when the Gang of Four fell in 1976, our hospital’s loudspeaker broadcast articles criticizing Jiang Qing. An illiterate farmer nearby ran over angrily, saying, “How can you insult the Empress? Heaven will be angry and bring disaster. Just wait, we’ll all be in trouble.” Locally, the Empress was referred to as “Niangniang” (娘娘).

It is said that when elderly women reflect on their lives, most agree that their childhood was the best and most valuable period of their lives. Now, in my seventies, I calmly recall my life, and the best years, apart from my childhood, were the eight years I worked at a hospital in Guizhou from 1971 to 1979.

In short, the masses during the Cultural Revolution and the young students of that time also had their own ideals, even if those ideals were formed within the grand tide of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. Behind their selfless enthusiasm lay faith, not fundamentally different from the faith of Christian missionaries. The only difference was that one succeeded and the other failed. One reason for the latter’s failure was that they were more tolerant than the former, tolerant to the point of embracing failure. They were the ones who earnestly implemented Confucius’s “Do not do to others what you would not have them do to you,” closer to a prehistoric, primordial society, and thus closer to the true nature of humanity. Faced with the brutal competition of a secondary society, anarchism based on human nature could only end in failure.

The above is my personal perspective, and also from the perspective of 800 million ordinary Chinese people, regarding the utopian ideals of the Cultural Revolution, rather than an explanation of the Cultural Revolution from the perspective of state documents, let alone Mao Zedong’s own thoughts and words. Against the backdrop of the Cultural Revolution, the lives of the Chinese people moved closer to moral virtues such as equality, friendship, and dedication. The goal of this dedication was the 800 million people of China and the people of the world; therefore, this dedication included tolerance. A phrase frequently uttered during the Cultural Revolution was: “For the two-thirds of the world’s suffering people.” If the government promoted the Cultural Revolution through cruel punishment, then at the grassroots level it became tolerance: serving the 800 million Chinese people presupposes tolerance towards them, not reformation.

Below, I will further compare the educated youth of the Cultural Revolution with Christian missionaries:

1) Starting from weakness: Christianity originated from Judaism, a branch of Jewish religion. It faced persecution among the Jewish people and could only spread its faith to other regions of the Roman Empire. There, it was suppressed and persecuted by the Romans. The more they killed, the more believers joined, eventually leading to Christianity becoming the state religion of the Roman Empire. During the Dark Ages, Christianity became a major force in maintaining peace and social order in Europe. Judaism, the origin of Christianity, was the first to propose monotheism and emphasize the rejection of idolatry. This was related to the Jewish people’s small size and status among the many civilizations in the Mediterranean, as well as their long journey led by Moses to find a homeland.

The workers’ movement, which began with Marxism, also started from the weak, including the early Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party. This starting point was directly related to their doctrines; they sympathized with the weak, leading the Cultural Revolution youth to act like missionaries, spreading the gospel to the grassroots masses of the disadvantaged.

2) Different ideas of human nature being good or evil: Christianity insists on the traditional view that human nature is evil and constantly reminds mankind of the terrible future because they have not listened to God. Chinese traditional culture and Marxism see human nature as good and the ability to transform the world. In my book “Looking at Confucius from a Different Angle”, I mentioned that at a small meeting, on the question of whether World War III would happen, I had a different view from the white Canadians: they tended to think that World War III was inevitable, while I held an optimistic attitude towards the direction of world peace. [2] The intellectual youth of the Cultural Revolution may have believed in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution that World War III would lead to a communist world in which the proletariat was in power. Similarly, the intellectual youth of the Cultural Revolution today tend to agree that a more peaceful world is the inevitable result of equality, friendship, dedication and tolerance. In short, in order to adapt to the competition in different directions of the two-tier society, Christians insist on their own views, while the intellectual youth of the Chinese Cultural Revolution look at the issue based on human sentiment.

3) Products of Ideological Indoctrination: Although I am a few years older than Qin Hui, we, like him, grew up under the ideological education of the Chinese Communist Party. This is similar to the Western missionaries who came to China; they were raised with Christian education. Both acquired the labels of missionary and Cultural Revolution intellectual youth only after reaching a certain level of education. It is necessary to point out here that both Christianity and the Communist regime are power structures that control ideology—what is now called theocracy. In order to control ideology, both have shown cruelty in suppressing non-believers, such as the Christian burning of non-believers and the Soviet Communist Party executing internal dissidents. What impact these had on Qin Hui and me in our upbringing is unknown, but at least this influence did not reach the ignorant peasants in the countryside: they still lived in a quasi-primitive society.

4) The difference between a religious leader being God or a certain person in the world: Christianity takes God as its leader, who is not a single person in the world. The former Soviet Union, however, took a living, breathing person as its leader, who directly controlled secular power and the economic lifeline of the world. Compared to the Bible and the teachings of Jesus, Christianity did not undergo major changes in its core tenets, still taking God or Jesus as its leaders. Lenin, on the other hand, made fundamental and significant developments to Marxism, so the Soviet Union could only have Lenin or Stalin as its leaders. China’s Cultural Revolution is often ridiculed as a Mao Zedong-centric deification movement, but the 800 million people were far removed from this Mao Zedong-centric ideal. The result was only the paralysis of the bureaucratic system between Mao and the 800 million people, to the point that even Mao himself later felt his command was ineffective. This should also be considered the true meaning of Mao Zedong’s utopian ideal of the Cultural Revolution: to paralyze most of the social power.

5) The brutality of internal factional struggles: Confucius and Jesus both proposed a more benevolent and friendly ideal society based on their respective national traditional cultures, yet Jesus met a cruel end on the cross. Some scholars estimate that during the early Passion of Christianity, the number of Christians killed by the Roman Empire was far less than the number of Christians who died in factional conflicts between different Christian denominations. Before the two World Wars, the number of deaths in the European religious revolutions far exceeded the number of deaths in any war in human history: the wars between new and old denominations within Christianity. According to Professor Qin Hui, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, comparable to the European religious revolutions, resulted in far more deaths from government repression than from the armed conflicts between different factions during the Cultural Revolution. Here, the so-called “capitalist roaders” in the pre-Cultural Revolution bureaucratic system are also considered a faction within the Cultural Revolution, equivalent to early Judaism in Christianity and Roman Catholicism during the European religious revolutions.

If factional struggles within Christianity escalate into war, then the factional struggles within communist regimes like the Soviet Union and China manifested as brutal purges. Due to the need for ideological control through theocracy, those who lost in factional struggles were never given a way out; at the very least, they were deprived of basic social dignity.

This brutal internal factional struggle occurred at the highest levels and at certain times, but it had a profound impact on both the Christian and communist movements, including strict doctrinal constraints and the dedication of its members. Generally speaking, for the vast majority of Christian missionaries and Cultural Revolution intellectuals, this strict doctrinal constraint fostered their dedication and tolerance; they did not go to remote rural China to exhibit the cruelty of excluding dissidents. The author argues that this is a result of the essential difference between the natural, primordial society and the artificial, secondary society, and the fact that the secondary society cannot be artificially manipulated.

6) The European Religious Revolutions and China’s Cultural Revolution: Even the most corrupt Roman Catholic Church in medieval Europe couldn’t compare to the bureaucratic corruption of the former Soviet Union. Similarly, the bureaucratic corruption of the Mao Zedong era couldn’t compare to that of contemporary China. But corruption is corruption, and it spurred revolutionary movements to correct it. This is the essence of the modern European religious revolutions and China’s Cultural Revolution. China’s Cultural Revolution was a betrayal of Soviet fundamentalist communism and a rebellion against the bureaucratic tendencies of the CCP regime before the Cultural Revolution. After the Cultural Revolution ended, a colleague from a middle-level cadre family in Shanghai told me: “The Cultural Revolution was an anti-bureaucratic movement that ended in failure.”

The number of deaths in European religious revolutions was only less than in the two World Wars, and the Christianity established by these revolutions could only coexist with the original Roman Catholicism. If religious revolutions paved the way for modern capitalism, then China’s Cultural Revolution paved the way for a vast and peaceful China to enter the era of reform and opening up; otherwise, it would have required far more severe social upheaval than that of Soviet Russia. We can say without hesitation that the achievements of capitalist modernization in the world today and China’s reform and opening up owe partly to the dedication of Christian missionaries and the intellectuals of the Cultural Revolution, even though their pursuits may have seemed diametrically opposed to those of their time. They all sought an ideal society for all humanity, yet ultimately found themselves in a modern world characterized by competition between two opposing forces.

7) Differences in the Separation of Church and State: Both the Byzantine Empire and the Roman Empire during the Christian era were typical examples of theocracy. While medieval European kings were crowned by the Roman Catholic Church, this already represented a degree of separation of church and state. The religious revolutions and wars in Europe led to the complete separation of church and state in the modern world. Christianity is confined to its own religious and cultural sphere. The Chinese Cultural Revolution was merely a revolution in ideology and culture, similar to the current sphere of Christian activity. Because the CCP regime began with theocracy, it affected high-level administrative leaders and the bureaucratic system. Once Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution ideology gained nationwide acceptance, it should have moved towards the separation of church and state. This means confining the utopian ideology pioneered by the Cultural Revolution, modeled on workers, peasants, and soldiers, to the ideological and cultural sphere, while leaving the daily management of politics and the economy to figures like Deng Xiaoping, strictly adhering to the objective laws of politics and economics. This is similar to how human cells live within their tissue environment and cannot interfere with the functioning of organs like the heart and lungs, while the normal functioning of these organs provides the various material needs of the cellular tissue environment. It is said that Lin Biao advocated a shift towards economic construction after the Ninth National Congress of the Communist Party of China.

8) Fundamental Differences Between Chinese and Western Cultures: A Christian in Canada told me that there may be a thousand different denominations of Christianity in the world today. There weren’t so many factions among the educated youth of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, nor were there so many factions within the Soviet Union or the CCP before the Cultural Revolution. Personally, I believe that in terms of the brutality of these factional struggles, only the factions among the educated youth of the Cultural Revolution were more tolerant. In my hospital, a rebel leader led the shouting at a mass rally, “Down with Chairman Mao!” Because he was mistaken, no one pursued the matter. The brutal persecution of heretics in medieval Europe has transformed into the coexistence of numerous Christian denominations today, while the tolerance of the educated youth of the Chinese Cultural Revolution led to the annihilation of factions.

Here we compare Taoism, which originated in China, with the three major world religions: Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam. In today’s world, which has shrunk to a small global village, Taoism has yet to gain widespread international recognition. I have repeatedly traveled to Toronto, Canada, in search of Taoist temples and organizations, but all attempts have failed. Meanwhile, the aforementioned three world religions have flourished throughout China. This is the difference Qin Hui makes between educated youth sent to the countryside and Western missionaries who came to China, and it is also the difference between Taoism and other world religions. Compared to foreign missionaries, it seems as if the Chinese have no faith at all.

Chinese people, including those sent to the countryside as educated youth, were not without faith. Influenced by traditional Chinese culture and the Confucian and Taoist philosophies that were the mainstream culture in Chinese history, their beliefs were closer to the natural society of prehistoric times and closer to human nature. The author finds that, unlike all other major civilizations in the world, Chinese civilization began as a primitive social superpower, and its philosophical foundation was laid during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods.

* * *

Finally, let me return to myself to bring this article closer to the original state of social harmony and reason. I was born in 1943, but my hometown, Hebei, was an area where the Communist Party held armed resistance against Japan, and after Japan’s surrender, the Communist Party took power directly. Therefore, like Qin Hui, I belong to a generation that grew up under the education of the Communist Party.

Under the leadership of the Communist Party, the Cultural Revolution had a preparatory stage, which was directly related to the Sino-Soviet split. The Sino-Soviet split became public with the publication of the “Long Live Leninism” pamphlet in 1960 and the subsequent publication of the Nine Commentaries in 1963, at which point the Cultural Revolution began to brew.

Specifically, in my personal life, the decade from 1963 to 1973 was a period of intense immersion in the atmosphere of the Cultural Revolution—a time of burning passion. After 1971, it was the lingering heat of this passion that gave me the opportunity to provide medical care in rural areas. During these ten years, I spent two months as a farmer (living, eating, and working alongside them), two months as a soldier, eight months as a factory worker, a year working on construction sites, and a year providing mobile medical services in rural areas. The result was a Cultural Revolution-era intellectual who grew up among workers, peasants, and soldiers—a far cry from the intellectuals of the past who were nurtured in classrooms and books. This reflects the broad perspective, pragmatic problem-solving awareness, and dedication to humanity characteristic of Cultural Revolution intellectuals.

In 1963, I was admitted to university and studied in the Biology Department of Peking University. At that time, our whole class would often gather for political study sessions, studying and discussing articles such as the Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party. We also had labor classes, participating in heavy physical labor for two weeks each year. The first year, we participated in the reconstruction of the south wall of Peking University, which was built with stones and cement, and we served as laborers, carrying stones. After that, we planted rice, working in rice paddies on campus and in the nearby rural areas.

In this atmosphere, we all developed the habit of running on campus in the early morning and after afternoon classes to exercise, chanting as we ran, “We want to work for the Party for fifty years!” This was to cultivate a strong body capable of working continuously for fifty years. It was during these campus runs that we occasionally saw Mao Zedong’s daughter, Li Na, running ahead of us.

Our entire class frequently engaged in military training, even shooting practice. We also served as company-level soldiers for two months, living, eating, and training alongside the soldiers. We often conducted military training on campus at night, resulting in classmates falling into frozen ponds in winter. I had to crawl across the ice to pull my classmate out of the icy hole. A vivid demonstration of this passionate, youthful spirit was when our entire class, fully equipped, ran to the 520-meter-high Xishan Mountain in the middle of the night. It’s over 20 li (approximately 10 kilometers) from Peking University to Xishan, and we ran there, climbed to the top, and declared ourselves “conquering Height 520.” Afterwards, we ran back down to school, ate a quick breakfast, and rushed off to class.

During my first year of labor training after graduation, I was building a medium-sized hospital on a barren piece of land. We often worked through the night without sleep. So much so that when I was laying bricks and touching cement on the upper floors before the building was completed, I often couldn’t control myself and would doze off and lose consciousness. Facing the darkness below, I reminded myself: I can’t do this. How shameful it would be if I fell asleep and died! This shows that during those moments of strenuous labor, I wasn’t thinking about my own life, but rather the spirit and demands of the times.

From 1969 to 1970, I accompanied Peking Union Medical College Hospital on a mobile medical tour to rural areas, visiting impoverished households to inquire about their hardships and deliver medical care and medicine to their homes. The following is a poem I wrote at that time, recording my feelings:

Six years of arduous study in the academy, now I find joy in working alongside farmers.

As the morning glow sweeps away the stars and the evening breeze blows across the slopes, the valley’s fragrance fills the air.

An old woman called for a doctor, bringing needles and thread; a woman went to see a doctor, pregnant with a child.

The most unforgettable place is where we whispered our hearts to each other under the moon at the village entrance.

Before I graduated in 1970 and started working in Guizhou, I set myself the following principles for conduct: Speak with compassion for the weak and uphold justice, carefully avoiding anything that might offend; be strict with myself and lenient with others; handle problems with the wisdom and honesty embodied in Chairman Mao’s philosophy—wisdom meaning to think deeply and ask questions, honesty meaning to be straightforward and realistic, and so on. Before I took the postgraduate entrance exam, I was consistently recognized as an outstanding worker by my department, a title awarded through a vote by all department members. Every year, I received the most votes. In other words, I became a worker accepted and recognized by everyone in the department.

I passed the national college entrance examination in 1979 and was able to go abroad that same year. I worked at Cambridge University in the UK for four years, achieving outstanding research results and earning my doctorate. In 1987, my whole family came to North America to work. I am now retired and writing at home. For nearly forty years since 1979, my guiding principles in life have remained those formed during the Cultural Revolution: equality, friendship, dedication, and tolerance. This led me to be unfamiliar with the complex social environment abroad, unable to engage in struggles and competition, and instead focusing on using my knowledge and experience to solve problems and contribute to humanity within my own field. While I abided by the law and public morality, I failed to respect the power around me—a direct effect of the paralyzed bureaucratic system of the Cultural Revolution.

In the early 1970s, Janet Rowley (1925-2013) of the University of Chicago discovered leukemia-specific chromosomal changes. For the first few years, only Japan and Australia were able to replicate her findings. I was the first to replicate her findings in the UK in the early 1980s, followed by similar conclusions from Sweden and France: that leukemia-specific chromosomal changes are widespread. While working in China, I further discovered that these leukemia-specific chromosomal changes were related to patients’ prior exposure to pesticides and certain therapeutic drugs. These discoveries paved the way for later research into cancer genes.

After retiring in 2005, he engaged in writing in both Chinese and English, and proposed the theory of a two-tiered society, which is of great significance for explaining the differences between Eastern and Western cultures and the history of human civilization.

In short, since the Cultural Revolution, I have always taken it upon myself to use my knowledge and experience to solve the problems facing the medical and cultural fields, rarely thinking of myself. When I do think of myself, it is only in terms of how to benefit my physical and mental health, just like physical exercise in university, all for the purpose of better serving humanity. For me, without a doubt, my lifelong attitude was established during the Cultural Revolution, namely the spirit of equality, friendship, and dedication. This is different from the Christian missionaries who came to China to spread their faith; their beliefs were more religious, imparting a specific spiritual nourishment and building a specific spiritual and social life for humanity. The educated youth of the Cultural Revolution, however, were facing all of humanity.

Finally, let me share a personal story to verify this: I worked in a Canadian hospital for over ten years, always commuting by bicycle. In the freezing winter, when cycling was sometimes impossible, I would walk. My colleagues, however, all drove to work, paying monthly fees to reserve parking spaces at the hospital. A few reserved spaces in the exercise area, exercising there two evenings a week. Because I was the only one cycling or walking to work, I maintained my work habits from the Cultural Revolution era and actively sought their understanding. I told them I couldn’t engage in any long-term physical activity, like ball games, so cycling or walking to work was my only form of exercise. To further demonstrate my commitment, I even asked the department to give me occasional errands and furniture-moving tasks, saying it was to provide me with exercise. Shortly before my retirement, the department specifically told me that during two or three previous flu outbreaks, everyone in the department fell ill and took sick leave, but I was the sole exception, never contracting the flu. They all agreed that it was the result of my cycling or walking to work in the cold, but I insisted it was because I received a flu shot every year.

literature:

[1] Qin Hui (2017): We and the Missionaries of yesteryear. From: http://www.aisixiang.com/data/105961.html.

[2] Li Yousheng (2014): Looking at Confucius from a different perspective. Suzhou University Press, 2014.

[3] Qin Hui: Why were we “active” back then? From http://www.aisixiang.com/data/105991.html.

author By Dr. You-Sheng Li

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