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 Five Classmates and the Story of the New China |
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dck
加入时间: 2004/04/02
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作者：dck 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
The Life and Times of Book Idiot Zhou
Zhou Lianchun's transformation from brutal Red Guard to successful entrepreneur is the story of the new China
By John Pomfret
Sunday, July 16, 2006; W18
On a beastly summer day in 1966, in the country-side of northern Jiangsu province, 100 farmers lined up at the threshing ground of Production Team 7 in the Shen Kitchen Commune. The threshing ground doubled as a village square, where chickens and pigs had free rein. Zhou Lianchun, a gangly 11-year-old boy with a shaved head and raggedy cloth shoes, was 12th in line.
Thwack. Thwack. The line moved forward. Thwack. Thwack. It inched forward again.
Zhou reached the front of the line. A middle-aged woman, blood seeping from her nose and ears, faced him on her knees. He pulled back his right hand and, as the others ahead of him had done, smacked the left side of her face -- Thwack -- then slapped her again with his left hand. Thwack. The sweat from her cheeks stung his skin.
Zhou and his neighbors were carrying out party policy. Earlier that spring, on May 16, 1966, the Central Committee of the Communist Party issued a demand for a purge of undesirable influences from abroad and from China's past: capitalism from the West, communist revisionism from the Soviet Union, and what Party Chairman Mao Zedong called "feudalism" from ancient China.
Mao launched what became known as the Cultural Revolution as a way to regain power in the wake of the disastrous Great Leap Forward, his economic program of the late 1950s/early '60s, which had brought China to the verge of collapse. In Zhou Lianchun's region, families were herded off their land onto communal farms, where everyone was forced to eat together in a large dining hall. Private farm plots, the most productive element of the region's agriculture, were outlawed. In a frenzied attempt to increase steel production, the party demanded that all commune members hand in their woks and wheelbarrows to be smelted in backyard furnaces.
One of Zhou's nephews died of starvation; another newborn nephew was abandoned in swaddling clothes at the doorstep of a party committee office and never seen again. Nationwide, during the Great Leap Forward more than 30 million perished of starvation. Zhou and his family survived on weeds, seeds and the runny gruel served at the communal canteen. Whenever they sat down to eat, Zhou recalls, he would cry at the sight of the paltry meal before him.
Born in 1955 in a village near the town of Dongtai not far from the coast of the Yellow Sea, Zhou (pronounced "Joe") is the son of a peasant and a woman the Chinese refer to as a "borrowed belly." Zhou's father had brought her into the house at the urging of his wife after his wife discovered she couldn't have children. Zhou called his birth mother Little Mama and his father's wife Big Mama. Big Mama had bound feet and doted on the boy, buying him books and other gifts.
I am the first foreigner Zhou Lianchun ever met. From 1980 to 1982, we were classmates at Nanjing University, where I was among the first American students to be allowed to study in China after the death of Chairman Mao and China's opening to the West. Years later, we renewed our friendship while I was a correspondent for The Washington Post in China from 1998 until 2004. This is his story as he has recounted it to me.
AS A BOY, ZHOU EXHIBITED AN ENTREPRENEURIAL STREAK, selling radishes and sand crabs, which the Chinese treasure as a delicacy, by age 8. The only fertilizer available in Zhou's region came from human excrement. Collecting it was a popular vocation for boys, akin to a paper route in the United States. In a written account of his life, Zhou recalls his eagle-eyed hunt for excrement: "There's a boy, carrying a spade and a
basket searching along the alleyways of a village. From his concentration, you'd think he had gotten out of bed at the crack of dawn to search for a lost wallet. In reality, he is looking for a pile of [excrement]. And when he finds the steaming mountain of crap, the
expression on his face is as if he has won the lottery."
Zhou was 11 when Mao organized the country's students into the Red Guard and set them loose. Zhou and his Red Guard unit went from village to village beating people who belonged to one of Communist China's five lowest castes: former landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements and rightists.
The middle-aged woman savaged at the village threshing ground qualified as a target. A few days earlier she had stopped her son and another farm boy from fighting by slapping them both. Under the logic of the Cultural Revolution, she was automatically in the wrong, because her family had been labeled "rich peasant," while her son's opponent came from a "poor peasant" family. Zhou's Red Guard committee decided to teach her a lesson. It mobilized the whole production team, about 100 people, to give her a taste of her own medicine -- hundreds of slaps as she knelt in the village square. After the beating, the woman refused to admit she had done wrong.
"Eat [excrement]," she screamed at her assailants.
Zhou was then dispatched to a nearby outhouse to collect excrement in a wooden bucket and dilute it with water. The Red Guard chief took a wooden ladle and poured the runny concoction down the woman's throat. She kept quiet after that.
Over the next weeks and months, Zhou and his gang smashed Buddhist temples, forced monks to walk around with boulders on their backs and garbage cans on their heads, and defaced wall paintings of Buddhist gods, covering them with a coat of red paint. After that dried, an artist arrived and painted portraits of Mao on top.
In their search for counterrevolutionary contraband -- books, photographs, jewelry, knickknacks, anything representing Mao's "Four Olds" (old customs, old culture, old habits and old ideas) -- Zhou's team overturned mattresses, peered inside fireplaces and rooted through vats of preserved vegetables. Zhou remembers being particularly impressed by the bonfires of books. But he did not destroy any of the books in his own home. That was left to his older sister and a cousin, who, in an effort to show the family's revolutionary zeal, ransacked the house, placed the old, bound volumes in piles and lit the pyres themselves. Zhou hid 10 novels from his relatives, wrapping them in a flax bag and stuffing them in an underground vault, where his family stored sweet potatoes for the winter.
Zhou felt immense pride to be a Red Guard and to be playing, as he thought of it, with the big boys. "I did what I was told, and, being 11, I liked it," he says. Never mind, of course, that he had demonstrated counterrevolutionary behavior by hiding those few books. Like all Chinese youth, the first sentence he'd learned in school was "Long live Chairman Mao!" To be carrying out the chairman's orders gave the precocious boy a powerful sense of purpose and self-worth. "The more ruthless we are to enemies, the more we love the people," the team would chant together.
In September 1966, his gang of Red Guards mercilessly beat an old man accused of once having been a landlord. That same day, fearing more torture, the old man killed himself. But the guards weren't finished. They gave the corpse to his three sons, demanding that the boys parade it around the village. Then they told the sons to chop the body into three pieces and place them in pigpens. If any of them had refused, they all would have been dubbed "evil spawn of the feudal class" and destined for persecution.
A primary target of Mao's Cultural Revolution was the family, the last bastion of traditional Confucian culture. For centuries, morality in China was rooted in a veneration for the elderly and the family tree. People didn't disgrace themselves in the eyes of God; they did so in the eyes of their forebears. But Mao was determined to create a new morality. During the Cultural Revolution, brothers were pitted against sisters, children against parents, wives against husbands. People were expected to report on those dearest to them because they alone knew the most private thoughts of their loved ones. China was turned into a society of snitches. The stool pigeon became a hero of the revolution.
Zhou recounts his years in the Red Guard over a lunch of beef noodles in a modern Nanjing coffee shop called Magazine -- a two-story glass-and-faux-marble structure with sofas and waitresses wearing baseball caps. Zhou admits to having no pangs of conscience for what he did. "In China," he says, "no one admits to torturing, and everyone says they were victims. But do the math. If we have so many victims, we've got to have a lot of torturers."
At 15, Zhou was given a group of 11 people on whom to single-handedly undertake "thought work," a euphemism for torture and humiliation. One of those on the list was Big Mama, who, while not his biological mother, was the woman who had raised him as her son.
Zhou took up the task of denouncing his mother without the slightest hesitation. Under the watchful eye of his revolutionary elders, Zhou forced her to spew a Maoist catechism that neither of them quite understood. "The party is always correct. Long live the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Long live Chairman Mao."
This went on for days in the public threshing ground. After each session, Zhou and his mother would return home together. She would cook dinner for him and the rest of the family, never talking about what went on during the daily public humiliation. Zhou never actually hit Big Mama or made her kneel on pebbles or glass. He didn't need to. He had learned how to make her quake with fear using simpler methods -- baring his teeth, using a wild stare.
Years later, long after he'd become disillusioned with the Communist Party, Zhou returned to his village and did something both unusual and courageous. He undertook a survey of the devastation wrought by his Red Guard team on his village of 2,500. According to his research, his team burned two tons of books, ransacked five Buddhist temples and four Taoist shrines, and chopped hundreds of old carvings -- dragons, phoenixes, gremlins and birds -- from the eaves of ancient courtyard houses. Dozens of his victims had been seriously hurt. Ten people committed suicide following beatings.
And he still wonders: "How do you think a society where that type of behavior was condoned -- no, not condoned, mandated -- can heal itself? Do you think it ever can?"
IT WASN'T UNTIL 1970 THAT THE MAYHEM OF THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION FINALLY ABATED. The following year, schools in Zhou's commune reopened after a five-year hiatus, and Zhou was able to graduate from high school. Lacking any connections to continue his education, he was put to work in the fields.
From 1971 until 1976, Zhou and the other men in his village dredged riverbeds, dug ditches and repaired the commune's irrigation system. In the summer, Zhou worked in bare feet. In the winter, the ice on the San Cang riverbed would pierce his straw shoes and slash his feet. Zhou rose each day at 4 a.m. and, with brief breaks for meals, worked until 9 p.m. Staggering home each night, Zhou felt like a walking corpse. Men on his work team frequently had to be carried away after collapsing from exhaustion and malnourishment.
Zhou's diet consisted mainly of corn, carrots and sweet potatoes, never meat. To this day, he becomes nauseated at a mere whiff of those vegetables. Though still in his teens, Zhou had a reputation as a good laborer and could keep up with the men in his work brigade. But he wanted to stop digging ditches. To do so, he needed someone with influence in the party.
One day in the fall of 1972, the local party chief approached 17-year-old Zhou with a proposition. He wanted to introduce him to a young woman. Party chiefs often played the role of matchmaker.
The party chief told Zhou that if he agreed to court the young woman, he would recommend Zhou for a position that would get Zhou out of the fields.
All in all, it was a remarkable offer. But Zhou eventually learned what had prompted it: The party chief and the young woman were lovers. The party chief was married, and he had promised to find the woman a husband to help cover up his infidelity.
Zhou balked. He loved literature and had devoured whatever novels he could find by Balzac, Tolstoy, Flaubert. He wanted the sort of romance he had read about, not a business deal brokered by a party boss. Zhou told the chief he would not marry the woman. The chief was enraged.
"Little Zhou," he said, wagging his finger at the boy, "you've been reading too much, and you've forgotten how to be decisive. You should know when to act, but you've become a book idiot" -- the Chinese term for a bookworm.
The Book Idiot nickname stuck.
IN OCTOBER 1977, the Shen Kitchen Commune's loudspeakers crackled with a report from the capital: University entrance examinations, which had been suspended since 1966, would be reinstated.
Zhou was determined to pass the college entrance exam, which covered history, geography, mathematics and Chinese. He studied for two months before taking the exam in December 1977. Though he did well in most subjects, he scored only 5 out of 100 in math and failed.
Zhou decided not to take the test again in July 1978. But his elder sister had other plans. One evening early that year she visited and found him reading a translated Russian novel under the wavering light of an oil lamp.
"Why aren't you studying?" she asked.
"I don't want to," Zhou replied.
His sister had brought a suitcase with her. Inside were her high school textbooks, all for Zhou. "I never burned these," she informed her little brother with a smile.
Under her watchful eye, Zhou began to cram again. This time, he aced the test. His score was the highest in the commune.
Zhou's acceptance letter from Nanjing University arrived on October 10, 1978. He packed a small canvas bag of clothes, including a blue Mao suit that had been washed so many times it was bleached white, and a padded cotton jacket he'd worn for five years. At 23, he was leaving the fields at last.
OF ALL THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, the teaching of history was the most strictly controlled and politicized. The communists imposed a crude and monolithic interpretation on China's 3,000-year written history, retelling it as a Marxist fairy tale of endless class struggle and imperialist aggression. There was no room for free-thinking Chinese history majors like Zhou. But privately Zhou opened his heart to several close friends. This country and this system are rotten, he would say, receiving nods of agreement. During one meeting of the history department's Communist Party members and prospective applicants, he let his frustration surface publicly. The secretary opened the meeting, saying the party wanted China's elite to join. One by one, the students chirped in, telling him how eager they were to join, too. Then it came time for Zhou to speak. An excellent student, Zhou had been identified early on as a good party candidate.
"I used to worship party members," Zhou recalls saying in his clear reedy voice. "But during the Cultural Revolution, I noticed that the people entering the party were all relatives of important people. I stopped worshiping them. I stopped wanting to enter the party." Silence descended on the room.
The secretary spoke up and, with perfectly twisted reasoning, offered the students a lesson laced with evasion and threats. "It's natural to have doubts," Zhou recalls him beginning, "but this doesn't necessarily have to shake our belief in Marxism."
The secretary's argument was as simple as it was warped. Look at what the Communist Party had done to China: killed 30 million people during the Great Leap Forward, ruined the lives of millions more during the Cultural Revolution. Despite these disastrous failures, it remains in power. That's proof, he said, of the party's superiority.
Zhou would always remember this argument. No matter what the party would do to China, no matter how many lives it crushed, it would always remain strong enough to rout any challenger. The Communist Party would stay in power because it would do anything to stay in power. That's an argument that Zhou believes to this day.
DURING HIS LAST YEAR AT NANJING UNIVERSITY, Book Idiot Zhou finally entered the Communist Party, swallowing his antipathy in the hope that party membership would result in a better job assignment. It didn't.
To avoid being sent back to the country-side where he'd grown up, he enlisted in the People's Liberation Army. He entered as a lieutenant a month after graduating from the university in July 1982. He awoke on his second day realizing he had made a mistake. "This is going to be a tragedy," he wrote in his diary. "I have to begin my struggle to leave."
It took Zhou four years of maneuvering to win permission to leave the army. Afterward, he landed a low-paying job as a teacher at the Anhui Institute of Finance and Trade in the small, grimy city of Bengbu, just west of Jiangsu province. His subject: Marxism. "For several years, my income was equivalent to nothing," Zhou would write later. By this time, he was married, with twin daughters to support. One daughter was healthy; the other had been born with Down syndrome. "My dinky salary had to support my parents and my family. One child needed medicine and nourishment." He needed more money.
Zhou began to think the unthinkable: going into business. Raised with the conventional view of merchants, who ranked far below government officials and scholars, Zhou had also absorbed communist propaganda describing business owners as "capitalist bloodsuckers." But China's de facto ruler, Deng Xiaoping, was changing the economy -- and changing the country's mind-set.
In just a few years, China had ditched the we're-all-poor-together egalitarianism in favor of a nationwide quest for cash.
Deng devised a new way to describe China's economy, calling it "socialism with Chinese characteristics." From then on, every capitalist-style reform was justified as falling within this deliberately vague, catch-all category. Policymakers were now free to jettison crackpot Marxist economic theory, so long as they didn't discard the one thing the party held dear: its continued domination.
Zhou's colleagues and friends were buzzing with talk about new possibilities. Several of his classmates from Nanjing University had already "jumped into the sea," as the Chinese called starting a business. One graduate student, who'd been tossed out of the university for having too many girlfriends, opened a coffee shop; another bought and sold iron ore; another raised mushrooms in the basement of his apartment building.
In 1987, a high school classmate from Dongtai contacted Zhou with a proposition. The classmate knew of a pharmaceutical factory in Guangzhou that was looking to buy enzymes found in, of all places, human urine. What he needed was a source. Zhou's friend had heard that Nanjing University had the technology to isolate the enzymes and that the chemistry professor in charge of the process was also from Dongtai.
The former classmate asked Zhou to contact the man and work out a deal. The professor agreed to share the technology. Zhou, his classmate in Dongtai and a third man, Sheng Hongyuan, then formed a partnership to open plants to extract these enzymes. Zhou was the only one without capital, so he agreed to establish and manage the facilities in exchange for a piece of the profits.
"It was pretty fitting," Book Idiot Zhou says with a laugh. "I'd made a few pennies collecting turds as a boy. Here I was doing pretty much the same thing."
Within months, Zhou and his partner Sheng had secured contracts to collect urine in Bengbu and other cities. For a fee, local sanitation departments allowed them access to the public toilets. Zhou and Sheng would then organize a platoon of laborers to pedal three-wheeled pedicabs mounted with huge vats to collect the goods each day. For every ton of urine, they would extract 60 grams of a raw material that the pharmaceutical company used to make an anti-clotting heart medicine and 100 grams of a raw material for a medicine that helps dissolve gallstones. Zhou transported the enzymes once a month by bus to Guangzhou. Book Idiot Zhou had jumped into the sea -- of urine.
ZHOU HELD ONTO TO HIS TEACHING JOB, which provided him with a safety net of sorts: an apartment and medical care. Several days a week, he taught Marxist, Leninist and Maoist thought and railed against the exploitation by the capitalist class. The rest of the time he spent as a budding entrepreneur, employing dozens at rock-bottom wages, working the system to enrich himself, his partners and his family. In 1991, Zhou was accepted into a program at Beijing University designed to keep history and politics professors up on the latest trends in teaching Marxism. Zhou spent most of his time setting up a urine-extraction plant. He landed two contracts with the Beijing municipal government to collect urine at 1,000 public toilets. He got to know each public toilet intimately while pedaling his bicycle through Beijing neighborhoods, showing his workers where the collection sites were.
None of his laborers had ever been in Beijing before. Zhou couldn't find urbanites willing to do the dirty work. Most of his workers came from the provinces, farm boys with strong bodies and a willingness to do anything to get out of the fields. Zhou's processing plant -- a bankrupt state-owned factory that he rented from a local party chief -- was south of downtown Beijing, 3 1/2 miles from the nearest toilet. The workers made as many as nine trips a day, seven days a week, earning the equivalent of $50 a month.
One day in January 1992, Zhou discovered that the plant's drainage system was blocked, leaving him with no place to dump several vats of effluent. Zhou had been told that the runoff, mostly ammonia, would harm neither people nor animals, so he discharged the stuff into the ponds of a local fish farm. Zhou spent the Spring Festival holidays dredging thousands of dead fish out of the ponds, leaving a stench on his hands and clothes for months. He reimbursed the owners the equivalent of $2,000 -- a small fortune.
ZHOU'S BUSINESS WAS FAILING. Although the market for enzymes was good, he had so little money that his platoon of 18 pedicabs had dwindled to a squad of five.
Zhou periodically would ask his partner in Dongtai for a share of the firm's profits. Each time, the partner would refuse, saying the business was facing difficulties. Then on a trip to Guangzhou, Zhou asked a representative of the Guangzhou pharmaceutical company how he thought the business was doing. "Not bad," Zhou recalls the representative replying. "We must have made several hundred thousand together." Other than the occasional pittance to cover expenses, Zhou had not seen any money from his Dongtai partner in more than six years.
His experience was typical for many Chinese entrepreneurs. So new to the business of business, the Chinese ripped one another off with mind-boggling regularity. The country's lack of a moral compass only made things worse. Zhou once stored 120 pounds of enzyme at a friend's refrigerated warehouse. The friend sold it and refused to give him any money. Zhou hadn't asked for a contract because to do so would have amounted to an insult. Business is all done on a handshake, yet in China, handshakes are worthless.
Zhou finally went to Dongtai and confronted his partner, demanding that he give Zhou the Beijing portion of the business. The partner relented. Zhou found himself at the end of 1994 the sole owner of his own urine-extraction business in the capital.
Meanwhile, Zhou was growing weary of his job teaching Marxism at the Anhui Institute, and he was increasingly unwilling to toe the party's ideological line. Each year a handful of students, usually those applying for party membership, would express doubts about Zhou's loyalty to the party and to China. One student even delivered a report with statistics on how frequently Zhou was critical of the state.
In 2002, the party secretary at the institute summoned Zhou to his office. "Either you change the nature of your instruction, or you will stop teaching Mao," the secretary warned.
Zhou told the secretary that he did not think that he was particularly anti-party or anti-Mao. The secretary remained unconvinced. He informed Zhou that he was being switched from teaching Maoist thought to teaching business administration.
LAST APRIL, BOOK IDIOT ZHOU RETURNED to his ancestral village, arriving with the air of a conquering hero. He was wearing a tie and driving his freshly washed and polished white Volkswagen Bora. It was the Qingming Festival -- during which Chinese traditionally honor their ancestors -- and Zhou planned to tend to the graves of his parents and grandparents.
With economic reforms, the Shen Kitchen Commune had been disbanded, and Zhou's old production brigade had been renamed Li's Kitchen Village; it was not bad off for a rural backwater. Every courtyard had a motorcycle. Many of the men and women had jobs in factories rather than in the fields. Zhou pointed out people, passing a wizened woman who looked to be in her sixties, but was actually Zhou's age -- 50. "That's a girl I liked when I was a boy," he said. "She was the daughter of a party guy . . . She ended up marrying a local farmer. He gets drunk and beats her now."
Zhou greeted the elderly parents of the first man killed in the village during the Cultural Revolution. A band of Red Guards murdered him because he used to paint portraits of Buddhist saints. Zhou said hello to the mother of the party secretary who had tried to bamboozle Zhou into marrying his lover three decades earlier. The party secretary had died young. "Hello, Professor Zhou," said the old woman, who, at 89, was so bent that she stood barely four feet tall. "Tell my grandson to come home, please."
"I hired her grandson," Zhou explained. "I hired the son of the man who had tried to keep me down on the farm."
Zhou walked the dirt paths of Li's Kitchen, smiling at the sunburned faces of the farmers who greeted him with a mixture of curiosity, envy and respect. He merited all those reactions. Facing bankruptcy in the mid-'90s, he had turned his business around and, by last year, was making more than $60,000 annually. He'd bought himself a sprawling condo in Nanjing, divorced his first wife and married a woman 22 years his junior.
But his success hasn't mellowed his view of the Communist Party. "Let's look at China from the Marxist perspective," Zhou says. "Let's give the Chinese government the benefit of the doubt. Why did the slave society overthrow primitive society? Because its economy was more advanced and it was richer. The same is true for why feudal society overthrew slave society and why capitalist society replaced feudal society. But then we come to Mao. Who was Mao? Who did he represent?"
"Did Mao represent economic forces stronger than capitalism? No. Did he represent anything progressive? No. He represented the most backward forces in China. He didn't even represent the working class. He represented thugs. It wasn't a communist revolution. It was a thug's revolution. That's our real history."
John Pomfret is The Post's Los Angeles bureau chief. This article is adapted from his book Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China, to be published next month by Henry Holt and Co.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
作者：dck 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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