Eight Outcasts: Social and Political Marginalization in China under Mao

294 Pages·2019·1.562 MB·English

by  Yang Kuisong, Gregor Benton, Ye Zhen

Eight Outcasts
The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation
gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Sue Tsao
Endowment Fund in Chinese Studies.
Eight Outcasts
Social and Political Marginalization
in China under Mao
Yang Kuisong
Translated and with an introduction
by Gregor Benton and Ye Zhen
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
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visit www.ucpress.edu.
University of California Press
Oakland, California
English publication © 2020 by Yang Kuisong, Gregor Benton, and Ye Zhen
Originally published as Bianyuan ren jishi by Guangdong renmin
chuban she, Guangzhou, 2016.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Yang, Kuisong, author. | Benton, Gregor, translator, writer of
introduction. | Ye, Zhen, 1982- translator, writer of introduction.
Title: Eight outcasts : social and political marginalization in China under
Mao / Yang Kuisong ; translated and with an introduction by Gregor
Benton and Ye Zhen.
Other titles: “Bian yuan ren” ji shi. English
Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2020] |
“Originally published as Bianyuanren jishi by Guangdong renmin
chuban she, Guangzhou, 2016.” | Includes bibliographical references and
index.
Identifiers: lccn 2019016558 (print) | lccn 2019019830 (ebook) |
isbn 9780520325272 (cloth : alk. paper) | isbn 9780520325289 (pbk. : alk.
paper) | isbn 9780520974241 (ebook)
Subjects: lcsh: China—History—1949-1976. | China—History—Cultural
Revolution, 1966-1976--Biography.
Classification: lcc ds778.7 .y38413 2020 (print) | lcc ds778.7 (ebook) |
ddc 951.05/60922—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019016558
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019019830
Manufactured in the United States of America
29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
contents
Translators’ Introduction 1
Author’s Preface 13
Author’s Introduction 15
1. Returning to the People’s Road 23
2. The Consequences of Concealing History 53
3. The Irremovable Hat 79
4. The Price of “Reaction” 113
5. The “Fall” of a Branch Secretary of the Communist Youth League 135
6. Weighty Files 156
7. “Non-Political Detention” 181
8. The Curse of the “Overseas Connection” 208
Chronology 237
Glossary 239
Notes 245
Index 275

translators’ introduction
This book is unusual if not unique in English in that it gives voice to a class of
Chinese—social outcasts and counter-revolutionaries—who have rarely or never
been allowed to speak freely for and about themselves in public. Even here, they
speak through an official filter, that of the minor cadres in the factories, offices, and
prisons who recorded their interrogations and in some cases dictated their confes-
sions. So the book is the antithesis of most writing about China and its revolution,
which focuses on rulers and leaders and touches on “the masses” at most in the
form of high-level generalizations. In this book, the lives of lowly Chinese in
trouble with the authorities rise into unaccustomed view. They represent a fairly
typical selection of such cases.
All those affected ended in dire straits, sometimes as a result of bad luck, usu-
ally because of thought crimes or even real crimes, though of a nature that in other
societies and at other times might be classed as minor wrongdoing or no wrong-
doing. Chi Weirong, a pleasure-seeker and petty thief whose success as a teacher
went to his head, is an example of someone who, as a result (in part) of bad timing,
ended up forever ruined. However, Chi was fortunate compared with the old man
described in Yang’s introduction, who started out picking pockets and ended up
before a firing squad as a counter-revolutionary.
The author himself, Yang Kuisong, could easily have ended up in the same plight
as the characters his book describes, for he too was arrested and briefly jailed in
1976—for what in China was, and still is, the heinous crime of speaking out publicly
against the authorities, in his case by putting up posters criticizing Mao’s “Gang of
Four” in the last months of their reign. Fortunately for him, by the time of his arrest
the political tide had begun to turn; Mao died and the “Gang of Four” soon
1
2 translators’ introduction
collapsed. After six months in prison, Yang was released. He not only escaped the
fate of a counter-revolutionary but eventually became one of China’s best and best-
known liberal historians, a voice for its voiceless. In this book, Yang painstakingly
pieces together the fate of eight counter-revolutionaries, bad elements, and other
“people with problems” between 1949 and the late 1970s, on the basis of a study of
their records. Through the detailed accounts found in these files, we become
acquainted with how it was to be an object of the constantly twisting and turning
political campaigns waged in China after 1949 in the name of revolution.
Most modern revolutions, beginning with the French, started with reigns of
terror, the institutionalized application of force to the revolution’s real or supposed
opponents. Its purpose, in Marx’s words, was to shorten “the old society’s murder-
ous death throes and the new society’s bloody birth throes,”1 to protect the revolu-
tion against its enemies in its vulnerable early years. Violence in the Soviet Union
was driven by the Bolsheviks’ belief that earlier revolutions in 1789, 1848, and 1871
had failed because their leaders were unprepared for the ferocity of counterrevolu-
tion, which as a result consumed them—a mistake the new leaders wanted to
avoid repeating. The apprehension in Moscow grew with the rise of Hitler in the
West and Japanese militarism in the East. In China, both before and after 1949,
extreme measures were justified by pointing to the danger of a restoration of
Kuomintang rule aided by U.S. imperialism.
In China, extreme measures were first employed against landlords and rich
peasants in the revolutionary turmoil of the mid-1920s, matching the white terror
vented on the Communists and their supporters in 1927, when Chiang Kai-shek’s
Kuomintang turned on and all but destroyed his erstwhile allies. Communist rem-
nants under Mao Zedong and Zhu De fled to the mountains between Hunan and
Jiangxi, where they suppressed landlords, “despotic gentry,” and supposedly anti-
Mao factions in the Communist Party and its Red Army. These campaigns resumed
whenever the Communists’ red bases became unstable as a result of attacks by
Chiang’s Nationalists or, starting in the late 1930s, by the Japanese.
However, extreme measures occasioned by military threats alternated with
periods of relative stability during which the Communists attempted to build a
system based on law. By trying different methods and learning from their mis-
takes, they gradually switched to more orderly procedures and created a formal
legal system. This system placed an ever greater emphasis on reform, especially
after the founding of the Chinese Soviet Republic in 1931, when chaotic improvisa-
tions were replaced by a trend toward regularization. The trend deepened in 1933,
when some basic laws and judicial procedures were enacted, and a system of peo-
ple’s courts was established. This regularization of Chinese Soviet rule resumed
and deepened after the arrival of the Long Marchers in 1936 in Yan’an, where Mao
and his comrades set up a relatively secure base after a year of frantic, chaotic
flight. From Yan’an, the Party revived its united front with the Kuomintang. Class
translators’ introduction 3
unity was proclaimed and class struggle was suspended, especially its extreme
form. The Party’s growing maturity and complexity, and its nurturing of a profes-
sional cadre, was a factor in this development. This emphasis on reform is seen by
many as an essential feature of Mao’s revolution, which was built on a rural popu-
lation, particularly (in the early years) its marginal sectors, which in no way con-
formed to the proletarian model that theory required and that, in China’s case,
needed special shaping.
But the trend toward milder treatment was often interrupted during military
crises, when formal procedures were again suspended. This happened, for exam-
ple, during the lead-up to the Long March in late 1934 and in the three following
years in the Party’s abandoned southern bases, where guerrilla remnants carried
out frequent purges in the ruins of the abandoned Chinese Soviet.2 Even in Yan’an,
where the Party refined its mass-line approach during the Anti-Japanese War, it
continued, depending on circumstances, to put its enemies, including “national
traitors,” on mass trial.3
The targets of these measures, and of the milder forms of political repression
into which they later evolved, can be divided into two main categories, economic
and political. Members of classes other than the workers and the poor and middle
peasants—the class enemy—were potential counter-revolutionaries on account of
their class background, though they could redeem themselves by embracing
revolution. People politically hostile to communism were by definition counter-
revolutionary, especially if they engaged in active sabotage. Class could heighten
or mitigate one’s status as a counter-revolutionary; landlords and capitalists were
treated more severely than members of lower classes. Good behavior could also
mitigate one’s treatment. Counter-revolutionaries who surrendered to the Party or
cooperated after exposure were often accorded relative leniency. 4
After 1949, Mao was “selective and strategic in following Stalin’s suggestions.”5
The Party retained many methods and techniques from before 1949, and essen-
tially followed a dual model of law. Criminal cases in the early years were usually
handled outside the legal system, with much resort to mass trials and extemporary
methods during the initial chaos of land reform and in later crises and a renewed
emphasis on class-based terminology. Even in later years, the extent of punish-
ment in the case of those found guilty depended on the alleged perpetrator’s social
class and motivation; while lower-class criminals could expect some leniency,
members or former members of reactionary classes would be lucky to get any.
In describing criminal law in China in the early years, Lung-sheng Tao gives an
example:
One authority cites the example of two defendants, both workers, who conspired
and attempted to steal some coal from a mine for home use. The first defendant, a
forty-year-old worker, was considered a ‘corrupt and decadent racketeer,’ while the
4 translators’ introduction
co-defendant, a sixteen-year-old worker who was ‘somewhat influenced by racket-
eers, [was] . . . not a bad element from the vast people’s viewpoint.’ The first defend-
ant was to be condemned, while the young worker was not criminally liable, because
his act was not an offense in substance.6
However, even former reactionaries might be spared death, in line with the Par-
ty’s belief that no one should be killed “unnecessarily” and the accent should be on
maintaining social stability and neutralizing hostile forces. Even many convicted of
war crimes were spared. After 1949, under Mao, the focus switched back and forth
between published legal codes and high-handed directives and apoplectic circulars
issued by the leading group. Even so, there was a measure of disjuncture between
Chinese and Soviet legal practice in the early 1950s, as illustrated by the observa-
tions of a group of Soviet police specialists sent to China. In their initial response to
Mao’s mass campaign against counter-revolutionaries in 1951, they were unable to
hide their reservations, having “not seen such actions” in Russia since the 1920s,
though apparently they were eventually convinced of the campaign’s merits.7
Even where they copied Russian terror methods, the Chinese imbued them
with their own distinctive style. Reflecting on the different ways in which that
political terror has been applied under communism in different countries, Julia
Strauss argues that the pattern of terror expressed through trials took a different
form in China than in Stalin’s Russia. In both countries the trial was conducted as
effective political theater, but whereas in Russia it was staged in the “formal,
enclosed public space of the state’s courtroom,” in China (and Vietnam) it was
“bottom-up [and] participatory.” The show, though similarly stage-managed by
the state at whatever level,
took place in open public spaces such as stadiums, public parks, and schoolyards, with
substantial popular participation. Before the show, local cadres carefully coached prese-
lected witnesses designed to elicit public sympathy, such as the young, the old, the disa-
bled, and women, to launch highly personalized accusations against the accused. When
the event went well, it concluded with the public contrition of the accused, the emo-
tional ‘stirring-up’ of the crowd, and a crowning culmination of popular support for the
state’s retribution against its enemies, as the accused was led off to the execution ground.
Public accusation meetings and struggle sessions against counter-revolutionaries and
landlords were first conducted in the early 1950s against those who were clearly identifi-
able as having belonged to the ‘wrong’ classes. But the communicative theatre of public
accusation continued to provide a repertoire for publicly conducted terror against much
less obvious targets, such as ‘black elements’ and ‘rightists’ later in the 1950s, and for all
and sundry who were accused of being counter-revolutionaries or capitalist roaders in
the Cultural Revolution campaigns of 1966–76.8
In the early 1950s, shortly after achieving power at national level, the Commu-
nists launched a series of major campaigns aimed at eradicating any potential