Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (5 page)

The timing of Ni Jinxiong’s visit to Nanjing was a lucky coincidence for Hu; she was passing through the city the week he lost his job. A mutual friend arranged for the two to meet, and when Hu explained his plan to make a documentary about Lin Zhao, the woman agreed to help. Half a century had passed since Ni and Lin Zhao first met as teenagers. The nation was in turmoil then, torn by civil war and teetering on the brink of revolution. Lin Zhao had run away from home to enroll in a journalism school sympathetic to the Communist cause. Ni was a student there, and she befriended the runaway. Now, in her twilight years, she was traveling the country, searching for people who knew her classmate and gathering their remembrances of her, which she hoped to publish in a book. Hu planned to follow Ni on her journey and build the documentary around her. He could tell her story, and slowly, through her, he could tell Lin Zhao’s story as well.

Hu had started shooting documentaries only four years earlier, at the suggestion of a friend. He was struggling to make it as an oil painter at the time, indulging a longtime interest in art after an honorable discharge from the air force. He had seen enough of China as a soldier to understand the punishing poverty that many people still lived with, but whenever he tried to portray their lives on canvas, critics attacked his work as inaccurate and insulting to the Chinese people, or dismissed it as excessively faithful to reality and therefore lacking in creativity. Documentaries, Hu decided, might be a better fit for him. Though the state had always produced propaganda films, independent documentary moviemaking was a relatively new field, emerging as the party’s control of the media weakened, and cameras, computers, and other tools became more affordable. Those who pioneered the form in China favored a simple, observational style, and Hu’s first films adopted the same approach. They were all set in the present, focusing on ordinary people such as coal miners or farmers, shot using a handheld camera, with few sit-down interviews and little narration. But the Lin Zhao project presented a new challenge. Hu wanted to read what she had written with her blood in prison. He knew that was critical, that it would be the heart of the film. But he had no idea how he would find the writings.

Meeting Ni was Hu’s first big break, and she lifted his spirits as well as his confidence. She was his strongest lead, but just as important, she was also the first sign that he was not alone in his quest. So many of his friends wanted only to look toward the future, which seemed so bright, and they chided him for his fascination with such a dark corner of their nation’s history. They felt the past was better left alone, that it was best not to pick at old scars. Hu could sense their discomfort whenever he talked about his project, so he forced himself to stop bringing it up. Even his wife and his son disapproved. So Ni’s commitment to recording Lin Zhao’s story comforted him and gave him strength. Listening to her stories, going through the material she had gathered from across the country, Hu realized there must be many others out there who refused to bury their memories. It reminded him that while it was common to forget, it was also normal to want to remember.

As he sat with Ni on that first bus trip, watching the old woman doze and the countryside rushing by, Hu felt as if they were making a forbidden journey into a secret past. At the time, he was unsure how much Ni knew of Lin Zhao’s story. He could sense that she was still nervous about talking to him, that she did not trust him entirely. He understood her apprehension. It made sense, given the times she had lived through, and his own background with the military and Xinhua. Why, after all, would a stranger with the credentials of a party loyalist take an interest in her efforts to publish a book about Lin Zhao? So Hu didn’t push. In their first meetings, he didn’t even take out his camera. He just let her talk, and he resisted the urge to ask all the questions he had. Slowly, though, on that first trip, and in the weeks that followed, Ni opened up, and what she knew about Lin Zhao’s life began to come out.

Lin Zhao was actually born Peng Lingzhao in 1932, the eldest child of a prominent family in Suzhou. Her father was a university graduate who had studied in England and written his thesis on the Irish constitution. Two years out of college, he took the civil service exam and was appointed a county magistrate in Suzhou. Her mother was a successful entrepreneur, a banker who sat on the board of a bus company. At the time, the Nationalists and the Communists were fighting a civil war, and Japan had seized control of northeastern China and established a puppet state. Closer to home, Shanghai had been carved into concessions controlled by France, Britain, the United States, and Japan. It was a time of violent political passions, and the nation’s divisions strained the Peng family. Lin Zhao’s father served the corrupt and failing Nationalist government, but her mother favored the Communist rebels, who vowed to do more to fight the Japanese. She secretly funneled money to the Communists, established an underground radio station, and was once arrested by Japanese forces. The couple often fought, and their arguments sometimes focused on their daughter and what political values she should be taught.

She was a delicate child, prone to illness, but a voracious reader and a gifted writer. She was also headstrong, and by age sixteen, she had made up her own mind about her loyalties. She joined an underground Communist cell, began writing articles criticizing government corruption using the pen name Lin Zhao, and earned a spot on a blacklist maintained by the Nationalist military authorities in the region. Both of her parents were alarmed—one of Lin Zhao’s uncles had already been executed as a Communist—and after their daughter graduated from high school, they tried to send her to university overseas to wait out the civil war. But the teenager wouldn’t leave. She was caught up in the fervor of the times, and wanted instead to attend a journalism school run by the Communists in territory they controlled nearby. When her parents refused to let her go, she packed a bag and left on her own, promising never to return. Three months later, on October 1, 1949, the Communists completed their revolution and established the People’s Republic of China.

When Ni met her at the journalism school, Peng Lingzhao had already started introducing herself as Lin Zhao, giving up her surname to distance herself from her family. She was pretty and still girlish, a slender young woman who wore white blouses under tailored workman’s overalls and braided her hair in long pigtails with ribbons tied on the end. She was as devoted to the Communist Party and its cause as anyone in her class, and she developed a reputation at the school for her graceful poetry, her quick wit, and her sharp tongue.

Like her classmates, Lin Zhao was assigned in the summer of 1950 to travel the countryside as a member of a land reform work team, one of thousands the party dispatched to dismantle the unequal system of land ownership, abusive rents, and high taxes that had trapped the nation’s peasants in misery for generations. The work teams moved from village to village, redistributing farmland from landlords to the peasants who once toiled for them. To succeed, the work teams needed to reassure a rural populace uncertain the Communists would last and still fearful of the influential elites who had held sway in their villages for so long. It was not an easy task, and in much of the country the teams resorted to violence. Mass meetings were organized in which peasants were encouraged to “speak bitterness” about their past suffering while landlords were dragged out and humiliated and tortured. Mao told the work teams not to intervene when peasants lashed out at these “class enemies,” and in almost every village, at least one and sometimes several landlords or their relatives were beaten to death or executed. By 1952, the death toll had climbed as high as two million. The landlord class, which had dominated rural society since the Han Dynasty more than two thousand years ago, was all but wiped out, and nearly half the nation’s arable land was confiscated, divided into small plots and given to peasants, including for the first time women. With land reform, the party proved itself capable of providing a better life for ordinary people in the countryside—and established itself as a force to be feared.

If Lin Zhao had any misgivings about the use of such brutality to achieve the party’s goals, she never expressed them to her classmate. “We all understand that land reform is an important step in strengthening our motherland,” she wrote in a letter to Ni at the time. “Our posts are combat posts. When I think of this, I must work hard, otherwise I will never live up to the expectations of the party and the people.” In another letter, she added: “My hatred for the landlords is the same as my love of the country. This kind of love and hate—they are both forces pushing me forward.” With Ni’s help, Hu tracked down the leader of Lin Zhao’s work team, now a retired civil servant. The three of them traveled together to Bali Village, a hamlet near Shanghai where Lin Zhao had been stationed. Standing amid the lush green rice fields, the man recalled how Lin Zhao had once ordered a landlord placed in a vat of freezing water overnight. Later, she told her comrades that his screams made her feel “cruel happiness” because residents of the village at last would no longer be afraid of the man.

“A few days ago in town, the ‘May 1’ team executed more than ten people,” Lin Zhao wrote in another letter. “Among them was a traitorous, despotic landlord whom I was responsible for. From collecting materials, to organizing the denunciation, all the way to applying for a public trial, I had worked to decide his fate. After the execution, some people didn’t have the courage to look, but I did. One by one, I looked at each of those enemies who had been shot, especially that local despot. Seeing them die this way, I felt as proud and happy as the people who had directly suffered under them.”

Despite her dedication to the party, Lin Zhao’s comrades sometimes criticized her for being “petit bourgeois,” because of the books she read, or the poems she wrote, or most often, because of the blunt way she pointed out the faults of others. Though she had condemned her parents, and had not seen them for three years, her privileged background and her father’s service in the Nationalist government made her an easy target. Once, when her parents wrote to her, she was moved to reply in a letter that they should confess their “misconduct and guilt.” But even that was not enough for the party. “I was naive in the way I read my parents’ recent letter, which didn’t sound as backward as in the past and seemed quite progressive,” she wrote to Ni. “Just because of that, I was sure that they were not counterrevolutionaries. But with my comrades’ help and teaching, I realized that to perform duties for the illegitimate government was a crime in itself. I also realized that my political consciousness and class awareness are far below the party’s standards.” Her loyalty to the party was total, and as the government built up Mao’s cult of personality, Lin Zhao began referring to him as Father. “My feelings for my family have lessened a great deal. I have only a red star in my heart now,” she wrote to Ni. “I know I am here, and he is in Beijing or Moscow. Whenever I think of him, I feel so excited.”

Hu did not find Lin Zhao’s devotion unusual. He knew such faith in Mao was common in the early days of the party’s rule. He himself had waved a little red book of the Chairman’s sayings as a child during the Cultural Revolution. Even the ugly violence of the land reform campaign did not surprise him, because he could understand the need for extreme measures to topple such an entrenched and unjust economic system. But as Hu listened to Ni Jinxiong’s stories and read Lin Zhao’s letters, what perplexed him was how such a fervent believer in Mao and his rule found herself just a decade later in prison, and then facing execution. Hu and Ni visited a retired professor who described for them how he, Lin Zhao, and several others were arrested in 1960 for publishing an underground magazine. But the professor couldn’t answer the most pressing question on Hu’s mind: Why did Lin Zhao turn against the party she loved? Or was it the party that turned against her?

After the trip, Hu accompanied Ni back to Shanghai, where she was living in retirement, and where Lin Zhao had spent the last years of her life in prison. Ni introduced him to several other people there who knew Lin Zhao, and she took him to see an old building where Lin Zhao’s family had once lived in a second-floor apartment. Hu had been waiting to film the place, because it had figured prominently in a story told by Lin Zhao’s sister that Ni had shared with him. The date was May 1, 1968, and Lin Zhao had been incarcerated in Shanghai for several years. Their father had committed suicide, and the sister was living with their mother in the apartment. That afternoon, they heard a commotion below their window, and a man’s voice asking for relatives of Lin Zhao. Then there was a knock on the door. When they answered it, a police officer was standing outside.

“Who is Xu Xianmin?” he asked.

“I am,” Lin’s mother replied.

“You are Lin Zhao’s mother? Your daughter has been suppressed. Pay the five-
fen
bullet fee.”

The older woman was confused. The police officer spoke again, his voice rising: “Hurry and pay the five-
fen
bullet fee. Your daughter has been executed by gunshot.”

As her mother stood stunned in the doorway, Lin’s sister rushed into another room, fumbled through a drawer for five
fen
—the equivalent of less than a penny—then returned and gave it to the officer. It was not until the man left that her mother realized what had just transpired. Suddenly, she collapsed on the floor in grief, sobbing and crying that if she had been an ordinary housewife, her daughter never would have had such a life of suffering. At the time of her execution, Lin Zhao was thirty-six.

H
U’S RESEARCH PROCEEDED
quickly at first. Almost every week, Ni would track down a classmate or another acquaintance of Lin Zhao’s and call Hu, and he would get on a train and meet her in Shanghai. She would introduce him and persuade people to speak to him on camera. Everything was going smoothly, and Hu was certain he would be able to finish the documentary within a year. After a few months, though, the calls from Ni became less frequent, and then they stopped altogether. She was running out of leads, yet Hu was far from understanding what had happened to Lin Zhao.