Finally the slaughter became too much for some of the higher Party members, who braved the Chairman’s wrath and forced him to put a check on the insanity. Collectivization was modified and slowed down. Some land was freed up to private agriculture. A few of the experts who had survived the purge were returned to their posts. A slow, painful recovery began as the professionals took over from the politicians and pragmatism took precedence over ideology. By 1965, food production reached its normal levels. There was still hunger, but starvation disappeared. And the Chairman sulked and bided his time.
You gave us barely a year, old friend. One year of peace and prosperity and you started it off again. Chaos: the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
Xao chuckled at the sheer insidious brilliance of it. The Chairman succeeded in defining success as treason. The experts, the careful planners, the scientists, the intellectuals, the prudent small farmers were all condemned as “capitalist roaders.” The proof? Their very success! The wonderful inverted logic! As if to say that it was impossible to succeed within the system, and that therefore those who did succeed did so outside the system, via the “capitalist road.” They were traitors, and it was their treason that sabotaged the system and made it not work! It was an argument only a child could accept, and it was to children that the Chairman argued it.
In doing so he released a torrent of pent-up adolescent rage. In a society in which repressed youth were taught to respect their elders, the Chairman urged them to overthrow those same elders. With the uncanny radar of the psychopath, he targeted the teachers first. Those Confucian demigods, so long used to blind obedience, awoke one morning to find themselves ridiculed in “big-character posters,” confronted by formerly docile students demanding a voice in the classroom. Granted that voice, the students denounced their teachers for not being “pure” enough, for not being “red” enough, for not loving the Chairman enough. In the end, the teachers were accused of being educated, and once that lunacy was accepted, the floodgates opened.
Officials were denounced for planning, scientists for doing research, journalists for writing, intellectuals for thinking… farmers for growing food. In the “permanent revolution,” everything by definition was to be turned upside down. The only thing that mattered was political fervor. Fervor for what? For the Chairman’s thought. And what did the Chairman think? He thought there should be political fervor.
So success became sabotage, planning became plotting, education became ignorance. In this upside-down world, children denounced their parents, agricultural experts carried buckets of shit, illiterate peasants “wrote” railroad timetables.
And you, old friend, became an emperor. “All is chaos under the heavens,” you wrote, “and the situation is excellent.” The Emperor of Chaos.
Xao lit another cigarette. He remembered when the children had come for him. Those Red Guards, swollen with pride, waving their red banners and carrying the red books. They had come to denounce him as a reactionary.
His immediate superior had opened the door to the mob and welcomed them in, praising them, and thanking them for their true insights into “Mao Thought.” It wasn’t unusual; many of the officials had agreed to denounce and be denounced. Betray your subordinates to buy time, betray your superiors to move up. Anything to buy time, anything to survive, because this time they knew that they must survive. However many didn’t make it-and many didn’t-some of the professionals must survive to rebuild. So he had felt no anger when his friend and trusted superior had denounced him to the mob as a Western-influenced capitalist-roader. He was sitting calmly in his office, smoking a cigarette, when the local Red Guard burst in and tied his hands behind his back. They put a huge dunce cap on his head and marched him through the streets, where the mob threw rotten vegetables at him, spat on him, and screamed insults in his face.
They grilled him for five days, privately in a cell and in public “struggle sessions.” He wrote self-criticism after self-criticism, always giving them enough to feed on but not enough to bury him. He denounced other officials, particularly those he knew to be rabid ideologues, as co-conspirators. The same patron who had denounced him arranged for his exile to Xinxiang instead of imprisonment or slow death in the countryside.
The exile lasted for eight years. Eight years of patience, planning-and plotting. Painstakingly and quietly he rebuilt contacts, sent and received messages from like thinkers. There were hundreds of patriotic officials left who had found a quiet harbor and were waiting for the storm to peak. It finally did, in near civil war, when the army acted to quell the internecine fighting between rival groups of Red Guards.
But the economy was once again ruined. The professional class had been virtually eliminated. Millions of disaffected Red Guards wandered the countryside, and the lunatics were still in charge of the asylum. And this time she did not come back.
And you, old friend, you finally expired.
Xao stared down again at this quarter’s grain production figures from the communes. Doubtless more lies. More inflation of the truth. No one wants to look bad. Still afraid to be denounced. Old habits die hard.
The best farmers denounced as rightists and killed or thrown into prison. A generation of our best scientists lost, their research-bought so dearly, so painstakingly, so patiently-lost in a blaze of idiotic, insane adolescent fury unleashed by you, old friend.
But slowly Xao’s true comrades began to emerge from their hiding places. Deng himself, his own patron, came out of hiding in Canton to maneuver once again to the fore, and was now engaged with Hua in a struggle for control. Deng, who even recently was denounced for advocating the use of foreign experts, was patient. The stakes were too high to be rash, Deng had warned him-they were playing for the very soul of China.
Xao turned his chair around and looked out the window at his driver standing beside the car. He buzzed for his assistant, the ever-dour Peng. “Tell my driver I will not be leaving for at least two more hours. Ask him to go around to the Hibiscus and get himself some food, and ask him to bring something back for me.”
“Yes, Comrade Secretary.” Peng smirked. Comrade Xao had sent the driver to the Hibiscus restaurant every evening this whole week. He must eat four yuan a day!
“And see if you can get someone in here to work on this ceiling fan!” Xao continued. “It’s stifling in here!”
Xao went back to the statistics. Even taken at face value, they were dismal. Allow for exaggeration, and they approached disastrous. He reached into the bottom left-hand drawer of his desk and pulled out a blue folder labeled, PRELIMINARY STATISTICS ON PRODUCTION FROM PRIVATE HOLDINGS. It was the only copy. Best not to let the bastards in Beijing see this stuff quite yet.
He delved into it yet again. It was tantalizing: the only production statistics in his province that were actually on the rise. And these farmers had every reason to lie on the downside, since they owed a percentage of all their production to the commune. And still… and still… Oh, old friend, I wish I could stoke the flames of hell with these papers for you. Make you burn a little more.
He was involved with his statistics when his driver came back with a covered dish of bean curd and vegetables and a large tureen of fish soup. The driver set it on his desk in front of him.
“Thank you,” Xao said. “Did you eat?”
“Yes, Comrade Secretary.”
Xao offered the pack of cigarettes. His driver, a tall, well-built young soldier he had brought with him from Henan, shyly took one cigarette. Xao struck a match, lit a fresh cigarette for himself, and used it to light the soldier’s.