Jen Hsiu-lan and the fate of Communist cadres in the Cultural Revolution

Like the story of Mayor Yin, the story of Jen Hsiu-lan also reflected on the fate of middle level Communist cadres in the Cultural Revolution. It goes beyond that to depict human relationships in the CR, how people lived, and the treatment of the human being in general, during these years of revolutionary political movements. Unlike Mayor Yin, who was a former Nationalist colonel and petty mayor in a remote county town, Jen Hsiu-lan rose up the ranks by virtue of her valor as a guerrilla fighter, and was the party secretary of the Hydraulic Engineering College in a very large city, Nanjing, perhaps the only woman party secretary of a college in the whole city. Her husband was an even more senior party cadre, the party secretary of the Nanjing Military District that oversaw the Chinese army in several provinces. Yet even those who earned their high seats within the party through long years of heroism in the revolutionary wars were not able to save themselves from the Cultural Revolution. Unlike Mayor Yin whose chief crime was something that happened many years earlier, shooting a deserter in the Nationalist army, the crime of Jen Hsiu-lan and her husband was joining an organization called the May 16th clique. May 16th was an ultraleftist group in the Cultural Revolution that attacked many Communist Party members hitherto not disposed of by Mao Tse-tung, including the Chinese premier Chou En-lai, and even implicated Hsu Shi-you, the commander-in-chief of the Nanjing Military District. The name of their organization came from the May 16, 1966 speech by Mao: "Bombard the headquarters of the capitalist-roaders." As with the Red Guards, Mao got tired of the ultra-leftists by the late 1960s, so the May 16th organization was declared out and its members persecuted. Their persecution was perhaps especially harsh in Nanjing, Hsu Shi-you's turf.   1.background: the rule by Workers' Publicity Corps and Military Publicity Corps (p.118) The story began with the appearance of Ma Shifu: a leader from the industrial workers' revolutionary committee that oversaw the operations of the Hydraulic Engineering school. Ma Shifu (Master Ma, master, a respectful way to address an industrial worker or anyone in the street) belonged to the Workers' Publicity Corps (literally meaning workers who come to take the leadership and publicize the teachings of Mao). After 1967, revolutionary committees started to take over municipal and provincial governments. These revolutionary committees were set up by rebel and red guard factions. When the Red Guards went out of control, Mao started a movement to send them to the countryside, in the name of integrating education with physical labor. The governance of different institutions were taken over from the Red Guards by the Workers' Publicity Corps and Military Publicity Corps who were expected to be more mature. 2. The May 7th Cadres' School the author was supervising children whose parents were in northern Jiangsu undergoing labor reform in a May 7th Cadres' School. Obviously they could not bring children with them.This is another example to show that like their policies to minimize the gender differences between men and women, Communism deemphasized the family to make individuals more loyal to the Party. 3. Background of Jen Hsiu-lan Both Jen Hsiu-lan and her husband were senior cadres within the Chinese Communist Party. Communist China was governed by a dual administrative system: in every institutiion, and at every administrative level, prefectural, municipal, provincial, and central, there were bureaucratic administrators and Communist Party secretaries. The two governed together and if there was a difference of opinion, the latter's words would count more. In addition to being a party secretary, Jen's husband governed over a military district, as China was divided into seven or eight military districts which did not follow the districting of provinces. Nanjing was the center of one military district. Her husband, therefore, was a cadre even more senior than her and being a leader in the military has usually been perceived in China as having more power than the civilian Communist cadres because they could command the troops. During the Cultural Revolution, however, Jen Hsiu-lan and her husband suffered a typical fate: while they were active and served in leadership roles at the beginning of the revolution, like so many other senior Communist Party members, they were under suspicion and put under surveillance. Although Jen was not put in prison, she was virtually under house arrest on campus, although she was not confined to her own house, but to a school dormitory room and forced to undergo study of Mao's works and confess her own "crimes." 4. Traditional emphasis on lineage and its modern use in the CR Historically, lineage was a very important aspect of Chinese tradition, as the perpetuation of the family line was one of the most important goals in life. The family clan helped one another out. On the other hand, the clan was also held responsible for any crimes committeed by one of their members. It happened from time to time in Chinese history that when a chief criminal was executed, his whole clan would be killed with him, numbering as many as over one hundred people at times. During the Chinese civil war, the Nationalists applied the same to the Communists, in cases executing 50 to 100 family members of one single Communist leader. Lineage was also applied in the CR, and children/spouse of those charged would be implicated if they did not "draw a clear line" and denounce their loved ones. Like so many children of "anti-revolutionaries," Jen Hsiu-lan's daughter's fate changed from Red Guard activist when her parents were in power to living a shadowy life after her parents' purge from power. She was likely laughed at, despised, punished in one way or another. She was the opposite to Hsiao Wu in the story "the Execution of Mayor Yin" where, to avoid this kind of implication, Hsiao Wu was more active than other Red Guards to "draw a clear line" between himself and Mayor Yin. 5. Humanism and the Cultural Revolution During the Cultural Revolution, because people were encouraged to tell on one another, trust between people was reduced to a minimum. Because life was so miserable, and showing any sympathy to those labeled "antirevolutionary" would likely implicate oneself, very few people would show sympathy to those who suffered. There would be, however, from time to time, people who actually did so, and in this story, Yu Lao-shi (teacher Yu, p.125, p.127) showed sympathy slightly to Jen Hsiu-lan and Dr. Ku. She is the type of person that is called, after the Cultural Revolution, someone who had not lost humanism, for the CR seemed often to aim at humanism itself, labelling all natural human sentiments bougeois, feudal, or reactionary. On the other hand, Hsiao Lao-shi scorned Jen Hsiu-lan. Although she might not have been a really bad person, Hsiao Laoshi used to be persecuted by Jen, therefore she is happy at Jen's downfall. 6.Political Persecution and the value of the human being. When Jen Hsiu-lan disappeared, the overestimation of her physical strength and ability to escape and the frantic, large scale search for her made her end especially tragic. This sense of tragedy was compounded by the fact that Jen used to be such a charismatic figure in the Communist Party but had to have such an end. That after her death, almost all the May 16th clique members were exonerated showed that maybe she, too, was framed, simply by some jealous rival who wanted her position. The tragedy continued that after the death of Lin Biao, Vice chairman of the Communist party, and the anti-Lin Biao movement started, the May 16th clique and the death of so many who were implicated in it were quickly forgotten. It shows that during the CR, political persecutions were often conducted to settle personal scores and to advance one's own political careers, and that individual human lives were "light as feather" (to quote from Mao's classical piece "Serve the People," which was also used to denounce Jen Hsiu-lan after her death.). 7. Communism and social hierarchy Although Jen Hsiu-lan was a victim of the CR, the story also reveals, from her life, the social hierarchy that the Communists set out to destroy but still kept: although Jen dressed simply, she lived a luxious lifestyle compared with the lives of ordinary Chinese, with privileges (aids, who served as servants) ordinary Chinese did not have.