After the senior cadre departed, everyone quietly filed out, nobody daring to look at anyone else for fear of showing the terror in one’s heart. But, back at the offices where all the lights were on, people came face to face with one another and everyone went through hurdles of confession and remorse. People all requested individual sessions, at which everyone, sobbing and weeping, reported their misdeeds to the Party. People were easily manipulated. They were softer than dough when they wanted to make themselves pure, although they were vicious when it came to exposing others. Around midnight, people were most vulnerable, wanting the comfort of their partner in bed, and it was at this particular time that the interrogations and confessions took place.
Some hours earlier, at the after-work political study session, everyone had a copy of Mao’s Selected Works on the desk as they browsed through the newspapers or pretended to be doing something to fill in the two hours before they would go home, laughing and joking. Revolution was seething in the upper echelons of the Party but hadn’t yet fallen onto the heads of the masses. When the person from the political department came into the office to tell people to stay for the all-staff meeting, it was already eight o’clock at night. Another two hours were wasted, and still there was no sign of people being assembled. Old Liu, the department chief, kept tamping more tobacco into the bowl of his pipe, and someone asked him how many more pipes he’d need to smoke. Old Liu smiled without replying, but it could be seen that he was deeply worried. Old Liu was normally not officious, and the fact that he had put up a poster about the Party committee had endeared him to everyone. However, when someone said you couldn’t go wrong if you followed Old Liu, he immediately raised his pipe and corrected him, “We must follow Chairman Mao!” Everyone laughed. Right until then, it seemed that no one wanted this class struggle to erupt among colleagues in the same office. Furthermore, Old Liu was an old Party member from the time of the War of Resistance against Japan, and this was reflected in his salary and rank. And as for that curved leather chair with armrests in his department chief’s office, not just anyone was entitled to it. His room that smelled of his pipe tobacco with its chocolate aroma still had a relaxed feeling.
After midnight the political cadres and the staid, expressionless Party secretaries separately ensconced themselves in their own offices. One after another, people went through the cycle of confession, remorse, crying if they wanted to, and then entered the phase of informing on one another. Big Sister Huang, in charge of receiving and dispatching documents, had her turn to speak ahead of him. Her husband, who had worked for the Nationalist Government, had abandoned her to run off with his mistress to Taiwan. The old woman said that the Party had given her a new life and, whimpering uncontrollably, took out her handkerchief to dry her eyes and nose. She was so frightened she was crying. He did not cry, but only he knew that sweat was running down his back.
The year he started university, when he was just seventeen and virtually still a child, he attended a struggle session against rightist senior students. It was in a lecture room with stairs, and new students had to sit on the floor at the front for their initiation in political education. As a name was called, the rightist student stood up, walked to the bottom of the stairs, and, head bowed, faced everyone. Sweat on the forehead and nose, tears and mucus splashing on the floor, the student would be absolutely wretched, just like a dog floundering in water. Those who came forward were fellow students, and, one by one, they went through the emotional routine of listing their anti-Party crimes. Some time later, these rightist students who never said anything and always sat at a separate table, leaving as soon as they had eaten, disappeared from the big dining hall. No one ever mentioned them again. It was as if they had never existed.
It was not until after he graduated that he heard the expression “reform through labor,” there seemed to have been a taboo on any mention of it. He didn’t know that his father had been investigated and sent to a reform-through-labor farm, he had only heard a few vague remarks about it from his mother. He had already left home and was in Beijing studying at university, and his mother had written about it in a letter, but as “labor training.” When he returned home during summer vacation a year later, his father had returned from the farm and had been reinstated in his job but he had been smeared as a rightist. His parents kept all this from him and it was not until the Cultural Revolution, when he asked his father, that he found out that he had been implicated because of his old revolutionary maternal uncle. His father’s workplace had a much higher percentage of rightists than the quota, so his father was not branded a rightist, instead he only had a salary cut and a record made in his file. His father’s problem was that he had written a hundred-character piece on the news blackboard where he “spoke freely” in response to the Party’s call for people to freely voice their views to help the Party improve people’s work habits. At the time his father did not know that this was called “luring snakes out of their lairs.”
What had happened to his father nine years earlier also happened to him. He fell into the same trap. Indeed, all he had done was put his signature on a poster. It had on it Chairman Mao’s call—ALL OF YOU MUST CONCERN YOURSELVES WITH THE IMPORTANT AFFAIRS OF THE NATION—in bold-type print from the People’s Daily. When he was on his way to work, someone was putting up the poster in the big hall downstairs and was soliciting signatures, so he took up a pen and signed his name. He was unaware of the motives of this anti-Party poster nor of the political motives of the person who had written it. He couldn’t work it out, but he had to acknowledge that it was aimed at the Party Center. By signing his name, he lost his bearings as well as a class standpoint. Actually, he had no idea what class he belonged to—after all, he couldn’t count as a member of the proletariat—and so he didn’t have a clear class standpoint. If he didn’t sign this poster then he would have signed a similar poster. He confessed to this. He had, without doubt, committed a political error and from that time on, it was on his file. His personal history was no longer clean.
Prior to that he had truly never thought to oppose the Party. He had no need to oppose anyone and simply hoped that people wouldn’t disrupt him from dreaming. That night rudely awakened him and he could see his precarious situation: a political storm was raging everywhere and if he were to preserve himself he had to lose himself among the common people. He had to say what everyone else said and be able to show that he was the same as everyone else. He had to keep in step to lose himself among the masses, say what was stipulated by the Party, extinguish all doubts, and keep to the slogans. He had to join with colleagues in writing another poster to indicate his support for the Party Center leadership, denounce the previous poster, and admit his error, in order to avoid being labeled anti-Party.
The obedient will survive and the rebellious will perish. In the early morning, the corridors of the building were covered in new posters, there had been a change in the political climate: today was right and yesterday was wrong, people had turned into chameleons. A poster just put up by a political cadre gave him a shock.
“Renegade Liu so-and-so, you are called a renegade because you have gone against the basic principles of the Party! Renegade Liu so-and-so, you are called a renegade because you have betrayed Party secrets! Renegade Liu so-and-so, you are called a renegade because you are an opportunist and have profiteered all this time by concealing your landlord background to worm your way into the revolutionary camp! Renegade Liu so-and-so, you are called a renegade also because up to now you have sheltered your reactionary father by hiding him in your house to resist the dictatorship of the proletariat! You are a renegade, Liu so-and-so, because your class instincts are taking advantage of this movement. By confusing black with white to deceive the masses, you have jumped out to target the Party Center. You harbor evil motives!”
