February 14, 2016
With placards hanging around their necks, two men denounced as counterrevolutionary elements were driven through the streets of Beijing on Jan. 8, 1967, during the early months of the Cultural Revolution.
Associated Press
BEIJING — Nearly 20 years after the appearance in China of one of the most shocking first-person narratives of the Cultural Revolution, “The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution,” The New York Review of Books has published the book in English. Written by Ji Xianlin, the account appears with a new introduction by Zha Jianying, a writer and media critic based in New York. Mr. Ji, who was a distinguished professor of languages at Peking University, offers a rare and harrowing description of life as a prisoner of the Red Guards. The title refers to the flimsy structures with dank floors and reed mats where victims of the Red Guards at the university, including Mr. Ji, were kept.
“In the cowshed, starving was augmented by physical exertion and the constant threat of beating,” he wrote. After the Cultural Revolution, Mr. Ji held prominent positions at the university and was admired in government and media circles. He died in 2009 at 97, having written, he said, the book he hoped would break the silence about the Cultural Revolution.
During his nine months in the cowshed, Mr. Ji was forced to haul baskets of coal, weed a garden and hand-plow fields of rice near the campus. He describes being humiliated by the Red Guards as they lined up the inmates with heads bowed, and then subjected them to taunts and shouts. Every morning, the Red Guards ordered their prisoners to write a saying of Mao Zedong, and if one word was wrong in the transcription, “you risked being slapped in the face, at the very least.”
Ms. Zha is the author of two nonfiction books in English, “Tide Players” and “China Pop,” and five books of fiction and nonfiction in Chinese. “Tide Players,” about the movers and shakers of contemporary China, first appeared as a series of essays in The New Yorker and was chosen as one of the best books of 2011 by The Economist. She grew up in Beijing, attended Peking University and now divides her time between New York and Beijing. She wrote the compelling introduction to “The Cowshed,” where she notes that the depiction of the atrocities “rekindled some of the nightmarish memories from my own childhood in Beijing.” Mr. Ji’s account is important, she says, because official archives remain closed, and serious books about the period are remarkably few. Ms. Zha notes that Mr. Ji, worried about “stepping on people’s toes,” toned down the final version and kept most of his persecutors unnamed. His goal, she wrote, was not to seek revenge but to give an honest historical document.
Q. When “The Cowshed” was published in China in 1998, it is supposed to have been widely read. Was that really the case? These days in Beijing, the Cultural Revolution is a rare topic. People shrug their shoulders and barely recall Ji or what he went through. How do you account for this?
A. Time is obviously a factor. A less obvious but more important factor is censorship. The forgetfulness hasn’t happened naturally; there is something insidious behind the phenomenon. The human desire to turn away from past trauma is perhaps universal, but the amnesia many Chinese display these days is highly selective. If you ask them about the Opium War or the Japanese invasion, for instance, they won’t shrug their shoulders; they are likely to treat you with a lecture. Those events occurred much earlier, yet are well remembered because the state constantly reminds people about China’s humiliation at foreign hands. Every Chinese kid is schooled in those history lessons. But an internal mess? That’s a totally different matter. The Cultural Revolution was instigated by Mao, supported by the entire party leadership, with millions of Chinese participating in the violence and persecution. It’s a thoroughly homemade nightmare. And the same party continues to rule today. So is it surprising that the topic has been quietly muzzled? Do you wonder why the government would like people to forget about it and why many Chinese happily obliged?
In this context, it’s remarkable “The Cowshed” was published at all. It benefited from a relatively relaxed political moment and the author’s status as an eminent scholar. Although promotion of the book was quietly blocked, it has enjoyed several editions, multiple print runs, and an estimated sale of several hundred thousand copies. Maybe not a lot for a country of 1.3 billion people, but for such a brutally dark book, and under these restricted circumstances, it has done quite well.
Q. “Darkness at Noon” is a novel. But as I read “The Cowshed” I was reminded of Arthur Koestler’s work: the totalitarian nature of the society, the terrible plight of the individual against the forces of evil. Do you think “The Cowshed” can be compared to other accounts, either in fiction or nonfiction, of suffering at the hands of a totalitarian government?
A. The crushing of the individual in the name of a collective agenda is a common experience in all totalitarian societies. In that sense “The Cowshed” can indeed be compared to “Darkness at Noon” and many other fiction and nonfiction works coming out of the former Soviet bloc and beyond. But in my opinion, “Darkness at Noon” is essentially polemics in the form of a novel: Koestler uses his protagonist’s torment to dramatize a central tension in the Communist revolution, the one between its noble end and its brutal means. The power of “The Cowshed” lies not in its arguments but in the specificity and abundance of facts. This is a survivor’s testimony with so many amazing lived or witnessed details, which give you a vivid and visceral sense of how an entire persecuted community of individuals lived under the reign of terror. Some of it reveals distinctive features of the Maoist society, such as the process of ideological coercion and the savagery of mob violence. But Ji’s account of the sadistic tortures and the human degradation in the labor camp, all that horrific abuse in a closed environment — they also remind me of Holocaust memoirs such as Elie Wiesel’s “Night.” As some of the Cultural Revolution victims have told me: “We are the Jews in this country. This is our Holocaust.”
Q. You explain in your introduction that the Cultural Revolution “has faded away as though it all happened quite naturally.” Do you know of instances where family members belonged to opposite factions but to this day never discuss what happened?
A. Well, the fading away has not really happened naturally, so if you scratch the surface, all the poisoned blood will flow. The Cultural Revolution tore so many families apart. I know instances where couples divorced and children denounced their parents. Some families have patched up and reconciled later, but others are totally destroyed. In one case, a woman made a critical remark about Mao at home; her son and husband reported her; she was taken away and shot. Recently the son finally made a tearful confession in a video program because he has been eaten alive by remorse all these years.
Q. In the depths of his terrible treatment, Ji was so badly beaten he could not stand up. He crawled two hours to a military hospital. There, a doctor refused him treatment, and he crawled all the way back to the labor camp. Do you know of instances where a victim of the Cultural Revolution who remained in China has confronted his or her tormentor in the years afterward?
A. My mother did. This was in the 1980s. She was standing in a long line in a fish market, and suddenly she recognized the man in line before her: This man had led a night ransack of our home during the Cultural Revolution; he had also beaten her during an interrogation. So she confronted him. The guy was shocked when he recognized her. He stammered. People stared. But my mother was pretty feisty and wouldn’t let go. She kept on reminding him of the awful deeds he had done. So the man gave up the fish line and disappeared into the crowd.
Q. In his 1992 introduction, Ji asks the most basic question: Why the silence? What do you think the answer is?
A. The silence about the past is deafening amid the clamor about the future. The government wants people to move on and focus on the positive. Therefore as the ghosts are kept in the closet, you hear this relentless chant about economic growth, about national unity and social harmony. This means impunity for the perpetrators of past wrongs; it has also created fear on the part of the victims. The strategy has worked: After several decades of this policy, most people just don’t give a damn about the Cultural Revolution. Those who want to make a fuss about it are viewed as either troublemakers or out of it.
Q. Of the Red Guards, many of whom have gone on to successful careers, Ji says: “Strangely none of them appear to regret their deeds. Are they all profoundly forgetful or have they no conscience?” How would you answer Ji?
A. Actually the situation is mixed with the former Red Guards. Many have grown profoundly disillusioned; some have become reformers or even dissidents. Others, I suspect, don’t like what they see when they look in the mirror but won’t admit it because they don’t have to. But I certainly cannot rule out the “no apology, no regret” camp, just as we cannot rule out the existence of pure evil. Which is to say some people have not a shred of conscience.
Q. Toward the end of his life, Chinese academic institutions honored Ji for his extraordinary work in Sanskrit. In all those accolades was his horrific treatment during the Cultural Revolution ever mentioned?
A. Do you think they would want to poke that delicate spot? No, it’s avoided like a plague. Academic institutions in China are state institutions; they all have a party secretary sitting on top, and they all toe the official line on political matters. Ji’s past suffering is sometimes mentioned in the more commercial media, but there it’s usually done in a breezy, sugarcoated language: Maestro Ji had endured hardship, yet his love for our motherland has never diminished, blah, blah, blah. Quite nauseating stuff. It didn’t help that Ji himself held up patriotism as a shield. He clung to it till the end of his life.
