Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (7 page)

What Lin Zhao and her friends didn’t know, and couldn’t have known, was that Mao was already having second thoughts about the campaign he had launched. The intensity and depth of public anger exposed by the Hundred Flowers Movement surprised him and threatened to undermine the party’s authority. On May 15, before Zhang even put up his poster at Beida, Mao sent a secret memo to party officials of Central Committee rank and above. For the first time, he used the term “Rightist” to describe those who admired bourgeois democracy and rejected the party’s leadership, and he blamed them for “the current spate of wild attacks.” On Mao’s instructions, the party did not announce his change of heart. “We shall let the Rightists run amok for a time and let them reach their climax,” he wrote. “Now that large numbers of fish have come to the surface themselves, there is no need to bait the hook.”

Looking back, Zhang said, the first hint at Beida of Mao’s reversal may have come on May 22. It was a hot, muggy night, and Zhang was standing at the center of a large crowd that stretched into the darkness outside the cafeteria. Three exciting days had passed since he and Shen had posted their poetic call to arms, and the debate that evening seemed to begin like many that had unfolded on campus. But then it took an ugly turn. One student after another stood on a cafeteria table that had been dragged outside and began denouncing Zhang in unforgiving ideological terms. Some accused him of “inciting counterrevolution,” perhaps the most serious of political crimes in China. They were all party members, they had surrounded him, and they were taking turns berating him.

Suddenly, someone else leapt onto the table. It was nearly pitch-dark, and few in the crowd could see who it was. But a woman’s voice—clear and melodious, with a soft southern accent—rose up over the din of the shouting male students. The clamorous audience hushed, as if enchanted. In the dim light of the night, Zhang could barely make out Lin Zhao’s face. But her words were burned into his memory.

Zhang grew animated as he described the scene to Hu, gesturing with his hands and nearly jumping out of his seat as he spoke. “And just like that, she silenced them!” he said. “You see how bold she was?”

Lin Zhao continued speaking, he recalled, and began describing what she called a “contradiction” between the demands of one’s conscience and the demands of “the organization,” by which she meant the party. But someone in the back of the audience interrupted her. “Who are you?” he barked. “What’s your name?” Without hesitating, Lin Zhao shot back: “Who are you? Who are you to question me? Are you a police officer, prosecutor, or court official? A plainclothes agent?

“It’s okay, I’ll tell you. My name is Lin, the character with two trees in it. Zhao, the character with the sword over the mouth next to the sun,” she said. She paused for a moment, then added: “Whether the sword is over the mouth, or the sword is over the head, I don’t care. Since I’m standing here, I don’t care where the sword is!”

Word of Lin Zhao’s eloquence spread quickly across campus, and the next day, posters appeared that attacked her by name. But as others rushed to her defense, Lin Zhao herself went missing. A friend found her passed out in bed, her pillow soaked with red wine. On her desk was a piece of paper with three lines of poetry in her handwriting:

Lin Zhao would never take the spotlight again in the Hundred Flowers Movement. After that night, Zhang said, she refused to participate anymore in the “blooming and contending” and instead withdrew to the rare books collection of the university library. It was as if she sensed the danger approaching and was struggling to reconcile the conflict she had described between her conscience and her loyalty to the party.

The debates on campus continued without her. But as the days passed, the party began to isolate its critics and reassert control. “Any word or deed at variance with socialism is completely wrong,” Mao declared, and the statement was painted in large white characters on the side of a building on campus. At the end of the month, the editors of the campus literary magazine convened a meeting to expel Zhang. This time, Lin Zhao stood with his accusers. She was still trying to make sense of the events of the past few weeks, and had not yet abandoned her faith in the party. Now that the party had labeled him a Rightist, she believed it. She was truly angry, Zhang recalled, and felt he had betrayed her. “I feel I have been deceived,” she said.

Mao formally launched the Anti-Rightist Campaign with an editorial in the
People’s Daily
about a week later. “Certain people,” it said, were using the Hundred Flowers Movement as a pretext to “overthrow the Communist Party and the working class, and to topple the great cause of socialism.” His original speech inviting public criticism of the party was published in state newspapers, but Mao rewrote history and added a new section setting limits on what could be criticized—words he had never uttered at the start of the Hundred Flowers Movement. After months of promising people they would not be punished for speaking out, the party began to do just that.

At Beida and elsewhere, the optimism and excitement of the spring gave way to a summer of fear, suspicion, and mistrust. As Mao turned from cultivating “blooming flowers” to rooting out “poisonous weeds,” the party began a witch hunt. One by one, those who had voiced “Rightist” opinions were identified and summoned to self-criticism meetings, where they were told to confess their crimes, implicate colleagues, and renounce friends. Many students, still loyal to the party and convinced they had really lost their way, did what the party asked. Others believed they had done no wrong but tried to figure out how they could save themselves. As tensions on campus grew and the campaign got uglier, Lin Zhao found it increasingly difficult to ignore her own doubts about the party. “No sound at this time is better than any sound,” she wrote in a note to a friend, in a frank warning indicating she no longer trusted the authorities. Her friend promptly turned the note over to party officials.

Shen Zeyi, who had coauthored the big-character poster with Zhang, was one of the first prominent student activists to confess. Before a full meeting of students and faculty, he renounced all ties with Zhang. Later, state newspapers published an essay he wrote titled “I Apologize to the People.” Over the following months, others who had spoken out came under growing pressure to capitulate in struggle sessions. Security agents shadowed the most vocal students. The lively campus debates over ideas became denunciation meetings, and at times they got physical, with students shoved to the ground and forced to bow their heads. Some held out longer than others, but eventually, almost everyone targeted in the campaign gave in. A handful of students fled to their hometowns in the provinces or attempted to seek refuge in foreign embassies, but they could not escape the party’s grasp. In the end, it made little difference if you confessed or not. Once you had been labeled a Rightist, you were doomed.

As others were falling in line, though, Lin Zhao was moving in the opposite direction. She found the the Anti-Rightist Campaign sickening. She was upset by the personal attacks, and distraught over the lives that were being ruined, and she saw the party’s behavior as a betrayal of those who had trusted it most. The Hundred Flowers Movement was over, criticism of the party was no longer welcome, but Lin Zhao decided to get more involved, not less, as if her conscience had finally triumphed over her feelings for “the organization” and she wanted to make up for lost time. She tried to help Zhang publish one last issue of the magazine of the Hundred Flowers Society, and she wrote a bitter poem under a pen name, describing the denunciations of classmates as a “saber cutting my young heart, leaving it scarred and marked.” At times she was openly defiant, reading aloud on campus from the Lu Xun short story “Diary of a Madman,” in which the protagonist is convinced the people around him are practicing cannibalism and pleads with the reader to “save the children.”

Lin Zhao could have chosen a different path, Zhang said. Her own participation in the Hundred Flowers Movement had been limited, and if she had stayed quiet, she might have escaped punishment. But at the self-criticism meetings, she refused to admit wrongdoing or express remorse. Instead, she surprised those in the room by talking back to her accusers. As a classmate recalled, when one of the party members asked her to describe her views, Lin Zhao replied, “My view is that all people are equal, and should live in freedom, harmony, and peace. We shouldn’t attack people like this. If you must do this, then do it. But what good is a society like this? It’s no good at all.” She said the party’s invitation to the public to help correct its faults had been “insincere,” and that it didn’t care now whether those who took up its offer lived or died. She refused to renounce Zhang and other friends who had been labeled Rightists. When the party members continued to criticize her, she retorted that they were dancing on her body and wiping blood from the bottom of their shoes on her face. As the weeks passed, the pressure to confess was intense. Lin Zhao’s friends pleaded with her to get it over with, to protect herself and say what the party wanted to hear, as everyone else had. Instead, Lin Zhao swallowed an overdose of sleeping pills. Classmates found her and saved her, but party officials later said the suicide attempt was a sign of her “vile attitude,” another offense against the people.

By autumn, the worst of the Anti-Rightist Campaign seemed to have passed. The Rightists had been humiliated and silenced. They were outcasts on campus, shunned by their classmates and subject to arbitrary harassment. But the struggle sessions were over, and a semblance of normalcy returned to the university. People were exhausted, drained emotionally, and ready for a break from the political drama. Zhang went back to work on his thesis after confessing, hopeful he would be allowed to graduate. Lin Zhao, however, suspected the party was not yet finished with them.

One Saturday night in late December, Zhang happened to run into her at a bookstore off campus. Her face was wrapped in a white scarf, and their eyes met across a table of paperbacks and magazines. It was dangerous for two Rightists to be seen talking to each other, and it had been months since he had seen her. Without saying a word, she left the store, and Zhang followed her into the cold. They ducked down a dark alley lit only by the stars, and walked until they reached an open field where they could be sure they were alone. “The situation is getting worse. We should prepare to be arrested,” Lin Zhao said. “Remember my family’s address. No matter how long we suffer, we can’t lose touch.” They traded addresses, but wrote nothing down and memorized them instead. A scrap of paper with an address was just the kind of thing the party could use as evidence of a Rightist conspiracy.

The police came for Zhang just four days later, on Christmas morning. He was labeled an “ultra-Rightist” and sentenced to eight years of reeducation through labor at a prison farm south of Beijing, the beginning of a twenty-two-year ordeal. Lin Zhao was sentenced to three years of labor “under observation.” Nearly 1,500 others at Beida were punished as well, almost a fifth of the eight thousand students and teachers at the university. Some were allowed to remain at the school, but many lost their jobs, were expelled or worse. Shen Zeyi, who wrote the poster with Zhang, was sent to a labor camp in northern Shaanxi Province. A math lecturer who helped translate the Khrushchev speech was sentenced to life in prison. The founders of the Hundred Flowers Society all received long sentences, too.

Across the country, more than half a million people were shipped off to labor camps or exiled to toil in the countryside. In many places, party bosses ordered that at least 5 percent of people in each work unit be unveiled as Rightists, and as a result even people who didn’t criticize the party were punished so officials could meet their quotas. Mao justified the crackdown by accusing two of his ministers, leaders of one of the small coalition parties, of organizing a Rightist plot to overthrow the socialist system. He was contradicting himself, of course, accusing people of crimes when they had only done what he asked. But now the party said it was because the Hundred Flowers policy had been designed all along to “lure the snake out of its hole.”

Eight years later, in 1966, Zhang completed his sentence but the labor camp ordered him to undergo “continuing reform.” The only change was that he could go home once a year. Zhang had another trip in mind. He had not forgotten Lin Zhao’s family’s address, and he was determined to see Lin Zhao again. She was already in prison by then, but her mother persuaded the authorities to let him visit her by telling them he was her fiancé. Lin Zhao was still refusing to confess to any crime, and the prison wanted him to persuade her to “reform her thinking.” Zhang had the same goal; he was worried about her health and thought she should give in, so she could be released sooner.