The Cultural Revolution Generation

The small city we spent most time in during our three and a half weeks in China was Yenan, the old Red Army headquarters that's now a sort of historical shrine. We saw all the houses that Chairman Mao once lived in, and a labor hero who spoke to him three times, and a museum with the horse he used to ride, stuffed, like Trigger outside the Roy Rogers Restaurant. So we didn't see much of the countryside there, except a May 7 Cadre School--a farm where non-manual workers are supposed to spend six months from time to time working and studying, the idea being that farming will help them identify with farmers' interests. We had lunch there with an electrical engineer, a lovely man who--like the other people I asked about it--said he'd found the May 7 School hard but worthwhile. "I always liked eating pork, but I never knew how much work goes into raising it." he said. He was spending most of his time tending pigs, and a fair part of the rest in discussions of such topics as the relationship between Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program and the campaign to criticize Confucius. He also talked some about being criticized himself, by co-workers during the Cultural Revolution, and of how he'd never studied history much except at the May 7 School. He said he generally read electrical journals for recreation.

We also visited several communes, including a couple of days at Tachai, the model commune. It's not the model commune because it's richest but because its people built dams and tunnels to hold off floods and filled in ravines pretty much without benefit of machinery--they're finishing up a new aqueduct at the moment. Then when most of their work was washed away in a flood they refused to accept state aid in rebuilding it, so Chairman Mao said, "In agriculture we learn from Tachai," and it became the model commune. Its weatherbeaten vice president said it gets 2000 visitors a day, mostly sent by other communes. He insisted the influx didn't affect the commune much. He also said that even the weather was welcoming us--it hadn't rained in six months, and the night before the commune had been worrying about drought. By the time we got there rain had hit the commune and frogs were croaking in all the puddles.

Despite the rain, we promptly got into an argument. One of the advanced practices of Tachai is its distribution system--instead of alloting work points each day, as at some communes, the members have a meeting at the end of the year to decide how many work-points one day's labor by each person was worth. This is supposed to encourage people to work for the community instead of for work-points; but what prompted the argument was the spread of work-points. Men can get up to eleven for a day's work, but women can only get up to eight. It comes to about 80 cents and 65 cents a day, respectively, rent and grain and health care being free, or nearly so.

It wasn't the only instance of sexual inequality we encountered. We visited a neighborhood light-bulb and lantern factory, for instance, where the workers were all women earning considerably less than their husbands in state-administered factories. In both places people on the revolutionary committees assured us that equality of income would someday come, that before 1949 women hadn't been able to earn anything at all. People were also moderately apologetic, when we brought the subject up, about the disproportionately few women on nearly all the revolutionary committees. In one factory in Sian a woman Communist Youth League secretary talked of a sort of affirmative action program, a "preference" that at least a third of newly chosen leaders should be women. After all, Chairman Mao said that women hold up half the sky.

Men are also encouraged to do housework--though most of the men we asked about it said cautiously that they sometimes cooked, for example, but their wives did it better. "My wife cooks nearly always," Mr. Pan, our interpreter, said once. "You are amazed, but I have to tell the truth. But I help in other ways--I wash things, for example." "They come out dirty and his wife has to do it again," Mr. Shih, his colleague, remarked. I only recall one woman saying that her husband does nearly all the cooking--and she explained that that was so "whether he wants to or not, because he works closer to home than I do."

I guess housework may be less of a burden than in the United States, if only because most families have just one or two rooms, even though the only common domestic machines seem to be radios and sewing machines. Though as guests we always got sumptuous food, ordinary Chinese food is probably a good bit simpler than American. A lot of people eat at least one meal a day in a commune or factory cafeteria, and on hot days you see people who've brought bowls of food outside, especially early in the morning. The restaurants seem to do better at night. And there are day-care centers and grandparents--the retirement age for most people seems to be 60--for the children. "In the countryside you usually start to be old around 50, in my personal opinion," one student who's lived on a commune said, adding that while old women help look after their grandchildren as in the cities, old men generally just sit home if they don't feel fit to farm.

But in spite of all this, at Tachai housework is the stated reason for the unequal work-point system. Women have to make breakfast and clean the house, so they can't start work as early. When we asked what would happen if a man did the housework and started late, people laughed--it just wouldn't happen. And when we asked why women don't get work points for doing housework, people said we weren't distinguishing properly between activity for individuals and activity for the collective, and besides, true equality won't be possible until communism grows out of socialism; for now, political equality is all that matters. "It is a question of different social systems," someone said finally, "capitalism and socialism," and when Linda La Violette of Stony Brook said women were exploited under both, the Chinese women in the room nodded and smiled but said they disagreed.

We talked a little about other things at Tachai too, naturally. But later on I discovered Jan Myrdal's two books, Report From a Chinese Village and China: The Revolution Continued, and since the people in the books reminded me of the country people we met, I think I'll just recommend them as strongly as I can and go back to the educated youth. We met a lot more of them, anyway. They were our counterparts, after all, and besides I think maybe we asked to meet university students once too often and our hosts might have decided to arrange it till we were sick of it. In each city we usually had local hosts from the Communist Youth League or the local college's English classes.

There were some whom I didn't like. At Teachers College in Sian, I asked an athletic-looking young man why the library had separate reading rooms for teachers and students, and he explained that it was quite different from bourgeois education. "You are taller," he conceded later on, apropos of nothing in particular, "but I am stronger."

On the other hand, he introduced me to a political science teacher, a smiling, unpretentious, gentle-seeming man with a doleful tale of student criticism. "I used to not take much account of specific students, and they criticized me," he said. "Some in class, some after class, some with posters. And a sharp ideological struggle took place in my mind, should I correct this or not? And now with the help of the students I have made some progress..." And anyway the athlete didn't typify the young people we met. Most of them seemed closer to Mao's basic quotation on youth, cited in the course of our stay by about a dozen different speakers, each of them evidently pleased with himself for having thought of it. "Young people are like the sun at seven or eight o'clock in the morning," it says.

For one thing, they were interested in everything: the best way to learn English, the meaning of Naderism, what movies American students watch, what Watergate was likely to lead to, what did we think about the Middle East and would the Arab states be likely to make peace if Israel repatriated the Palestinian refugees. A lot of the young people evidently read the Reference News, a digest of reports from foreign newspapers which they say is officially restricted but in practice pretty widely available. "What is your attitude toward black people?" one of them asked once. "Of course I realize you probably feel they're just as good as you, but how do you feel about the blacks in your classes?"

Less down-to-earth, more purely ideological questions came up, too--at the Hangchow Airport, for example. Normally this wouldn't be a setting for long discussions, I guess, but on the other hand China's transportation system is pretty varied. There are no privately owned cars; the buses and trolleycars in the cities are jammed, though people insist on giving up their seats to foreigners. The trains between cities are beautiful, with lace curtains and swivel chairs and stewardesses serving tea. But since not many people ride the new American 707s or old Russian planes with ventilation systems that let in the clouds, their schedules are pretty flexible. You call ahead about the flight and then wait at the airport till the weather's right. When the plane from Hangchow did take off we almost reached Canton, ran into a storm, and flew back, like the aviators in A Night at the Opera.

So we had lots of time for talking at the airport, and at a lull in the conversation one of our hosts said, the way you might ask a stranger how did he like President Ford, "In your opinion, what is the main motive force in history?" My impression was that it served the same function as a question about Ford might--to see if we were on the same side, as it were. The only other time someone seemed to be asking a question for that reason was when a schoolteacher asked about the Vietnam war: I guess students tend to be more theoretically minded than other people.

A lot of people, including students, talked about China's needs and the importance of putting them ahead of personal preferences. For instance, there was an English student at Peking University--like all the English students she expects to be an interpreter or a schoolteacher--who said that though some of her friends who like children hope to teach, she herself would rather interpret, "but the country's needs should come first." Then a friend of hers explained how she, as a would-be chemist, might have been sent to language school instead: "So I would learn to speak beautiful English, and study chemicals on my own--from books or with other comrades' help."

We met no one who had had to do this, however. Since the Cultural Revolution, applicants to university are supposed to be elected by the people they work with, but all the ones we talked with said they'd still chosen their own subjects. On the other hand, within each subject there seems to be considerable standardization, especially in history and the other social sciences. Certainly not everyone outside the universities who studies history or current events goes into them very deeply. At an electric plant in Sian someone asked how people felt about Cuba's government. "We are friendly to the Cuban people," said the first worker, "our attitude to the government depends on what it does." "Our factory doesn't have any direct relations with Cuba," said a second. Two others gave slightly more detailed accounts, about how Castro was originally nationalist and anti-imperialist but today Cuba has great problems, being exploited by the Soviet Union. Cuba is admittedly a long way from China, but the first two answers still seemed a little disturbing.

In Learn-From-the-People's-Liberation-Army Secondary School in Hangchow, kids were able to give pretty detailed accounts of the history of Bangladesh, say. But those answers about Cuba still came back to me a few times. Once when someone was explaining how the landlords had finally done an about-face and adopted Confucianism to safeguard their privileges, I asked why this hadn't happened sooner. "Well," the man explained, "they needed it to prevent revolts." Had there been a big wave of revolts? "There were constant revolts, all along." Then why just then? He gave me a pitying smile.

"The process of history," he explained.

Most of the students seemed pretty serious--particularly at Futan University in Shanghai, which accounts of the Cultural Revolution generally describe as a big leftist center. Of course, the students are older than Americans, and selected by their co-workers, and many of them know what they want to do afterwards and just why they're in school. But it's still a bit disconcerting to ask if Chinese students ever cram for exams and hear that though they're very dedicated, Futan University, "mindful of our health," sees that they go to bed at 10 p.m.

On the other hand, an English class at the same school was as lively as anyone could want. Students called out, interrupted one another, and laughed at one another's mistakes. Every now and then the teacher broke in to correct someone's pronunciation--like most Chinese English teachers', his own was a curious blend of BBC English and occasional misplaced stresses--or to beg that one person speak at a time.

And in Peking we met some young people in a more informal setting. Their parents included doctors, a colonel, and some middle-level government officials, but--perhaps because they're from the generation of the Cultural Revolution--they're all manual workers of one sort or another, except one teacher. The atmosphere was quite different from that of more official gatherings. For example, a young woman asked us what love meant to us, and admitted she couldn't answer her own question, and someone else said, half-seriously, that classical relations of love were simpler and better. "Which classical relations?" a third person asked innocently. "You mean like Confucius?" Everyone laughed--in fact, everyone laughed a lot, and in general, despite the language barrier, the atmosphere reminded me more of seeing old friends for the first time in a long time than of the other meetings we'd been having in China.

Some of the discussions' contents were a little different from those of more official gatherings, too. No one said it had been wrong for China to support Pakistan during Bangladesh's war of independence, for example, but no one said it had been right either. When I asked about the leading cadres we'd been meeting, someone said, "They are a phenomenon of China." Someone else said, "They probably feel that things are too complicated, this way they oversimplify." And a third said he was production leader on his commune and if we'd come to a formal meeting there he'd probably have limited what he said, just as the leading cadres did--"I wouldn't bring up the Seagull," he said.

The Seagull was Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and despite the production leader's disclaimer, people asked about him even in more formal meetings. Apparently the book's been translated into Chinese--maybe as an example of the decadence of contemporary American culture--and they all wanted to know how we accounted for its popularity. "It's very simple," the woman who'd asked about love admitted, though, when we asked about recently published Chinese novels, "We don't like anything." I guess it was one more bond of sorts--at any rate, I felt a solidarity with her and her friends that I wouldn't have predicted. It gave a meaning to the phrases about links among the peoples of the world.

This is the second article in a three-part series on China. The third will appear in The Crimson next Wednesday.