The New York Times
Friday, September 24, 1999
Two Families Reflect on 50 Years of Communist Rule in China
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
BEIJING -- In 1949 Yang Yuena was an illiterate 17-year-old peasant, living in a straw hut and farming for an absentee landlord, when the Red Army entered her rural hometown. This month, dressed in fashionable silks, she feted a U.C.L.A.-bound grandson in the family's second home, a lavish apartment in Beijing with a television that takes up an entire wall and a bar stocked with wine and cognac.
For her the twists and turns of a half-century of Communist rule add up to a raging success: a rich businessman for a son-in-law, exotic teas and plump shrimp at lunch, two family members accepted into the Communist Party. But for other families, like the Lings of Shanghai, the equation is far more complicated.
Ling Qiang, 87, is a former low-level functionary in pre-Communist China. He uses the Queen's English as he describes his family's persecution under Mao, pointing to two discolored patches in the walls of his yellowed one-room apartment, smashed in the 1960's by marauding Red Guards in search of Western books or bourgeois valuables.
Those ugly memories have faded with a bit of prosperity and the more relaxed political atmosphere of recent years. And his grandson, 27, a fledgling engineer who shares his room, gives little thought to that turbulent past, spending his spare time on the Internet, trading stocks or E-mailing his sister in Chicago.
The stories of these two families are the story of the revolutionary experiment that Mao initiated 50 years ago on Oct. 1, an experiment that in some way upended and uprooted virtually every family in China, leaving millions dead or broken, but ultimately easing the survivors into the relative prosperity of today.
Some families have had more material success than others, but all have passed the same landmarks: the revolutionary hopes and ideals of the early 1950's, the brutality of Mao's political campaigns from the late 1950's until his death in 1976, and the diversity and economic opportunity in the last two decades of reform. And each stage has placed its stamp on its generation.
Today, as China prepares to celebrate the anniversary of the People's Republic, most people have a sense of progress and pride, despite an uncertain economy and grumblings about politics.
Still, as the two families illustrate, many have traveled a road of painful and bizarre switchbacks.
The Communist troops came in late 1949 to Yuhuan, a remote coastal village in southern Zhejiang Province, where Yang Yuena's family was surviving, just barely, by a mix of fishing and farming.
The family was too concerned with subsistence either to support or oppose the approaching Communists in their battle against Nationalist troops, Ms. Yang said, though fighting raged for months in nearby fields.
But they were fed up with the corruption of the Nationalist Government, she said, and quickly found reason to embrace the victors in China's civil war. Officially classified by the Communists as "poor peasants," Ms. Yang's family was given land when the new rulers carved up the property of local landlords and rich farmers.
"Of course we were extremely happy -- everyone was happy -- we got land!" she said. As a bonus, the Communists' policy against arranged marriages meant that she was able to choose a husband -- although it proved hard to find one given her "bad" background: an uncle had fled with the defeated Nationalists to Taiwan.
Good will toward the Communist authorities ran deep in Yuhuan, even as they organized farmers into work teams and a few years later fully collectivized farming -- taking back the land previously handed out.
"We all believed in the Communist Party," Ms. Yang said. "The peasants were excited and happy. It was a time of great faith that we were about to enter Communism."
In the 1950's, in Shanghai, Ling Qiang also found the landscape thoroughly transformed. In this once cosmopolitan city, cafes and dance halls quickly shut. No one dared wear jewelry because it was considered bourgeois -- although gold bullion still functioned as currency underground.
And if Ling, a former official in the Nationalist Government's salt monopoly, did not share the peasants' sense of giddy anticipation, he did not, he says, feel besieged.
After returning from a brief exile in Hong Kong to rejoin his wife, he used a gold bar to buy rental rights to the one-room apartment that is still his home and began teaching English at a Jesuit school that had been taken over by the party.
Ling, with his Western-style education and Nationalist connections, was obliged to take part in a weekly political study group to remold his thinking, and was shipped out for a summer of Marxist "re-education." The Communist Youth League rejected his son's application.
"But over all, it was not bad," Ling said. "I was not a capitalist, so was not so affected."
After 10 years, he said, he and his wife even began to embrace Communist idealism. When, in 1959, Mao called on youths in Shanghai to move to the countryside to acquaint themselves with peasant life, Ling enthusiastically encouraged his 18-year-old son to sign up.
But in the late 50's Mao's most sweeping revolutionary campaigns started. They would soon buffet the lives of the emerging second generation.
The Turmoil:
Decades of Changes Large and Larger
For centuries women in Yuhuan had tended the home while the men fished or tilled the fields. But with the Great Leap Forward in 1958, Mao smashed these traditions, insisting that all grain be turned in to the Government, forbidding individual fishing or planting, and requiring every man and women to work to meet grain quotas in exchange for rations in communal canteens.
Worse still, scarce local grain was siphoned off to feed China's cities, creating dire shortages.
"By 1959," Ms. Yang said, "the peasants were exhausted, and couldn't or wouldn't work more because the system took everything away. By 1960 we'd stopped planting. And then the grain ran out."
Her future son-in-law, Wang Yicai, now a rich businessman, lived in the same township and was only 5 years old at the time. But he recalls chronic hunger, eating coarse bread and sweet potatoes -- supplemented by leaves -- to survive. Many died in Yuhuan, including Ms. Yang's mother, in a famine in 1960-62 that killed tens of millions across the country.
Then, in 1966, just as Yuhuan was recovering, Mao unleashed the Cultural Revolution, closing schools, sending armies of urban youths to the countryside and anointing students as "Red Guards," giving them license to destroy any traces of China's bourgeois past. They smashed ancient relics and persecuted people deemed to harbor counterrevolution.
For Wang it marked the end of his formal schooling, at 9. He became a Little Red Guard and spent his days studying Marx, Communist operas and revolutionary songs.
"In a way it was interesting and exciting," he said.
But he also felt he needed more of an education, and quietly borrowed textbooks from teachers to teach himself writing and math. Still, when Mao died and the Cultural Revolution ended, Wang, then 20, was ill prepared for China's free-market future, having been in school just four years.
During this same turbulent time, Ling Huakang, of the Ling family's second generation, also found his life upended by Mao's campaigns for radical change. In 1959, instead of going to college, he volunteered to serve the party in the fields of rural Anhui Province.
"I thought it was an honor to be sent down -- that I should respond to the call of Chairman Mao," said Ling, now a jovial middle-aged state factory administrator. "I had no idea that my future would be so messed up."
He had gone to the countryside, he said, to uplift the peasants and was disappointed to end up a farmhand. Then, a few months later, after Mao announced that the future of China depended on steel as well as grain, Ling was transferred to a newly established rural steel factory.
He, too, remembers the famine of the early 1960's: grain rations that never arrived; eating dried sweet potato slices and cabbage soup for weeks on end.
Still, he says, he retained an underlying faith in the party. And he was thrilled when selected to attend a college of metallurgy in preparation for an assignment at one of the country's biggest steel plants.
"Even then I still felt idealistic," he said with a laugh.
In fact, a few years later he named his children Gang (steel) and Liang (grain), to express his devotion to Mao.
That faith was again challenged by the Cultural Revolution in 1966, when the Lings abruptly became hapless targets of hatred.
In the steel foundry Ling was accused of bourgeois tendencies, in part because of his father's middle-class background. Red Guards smashed his RCA radio and, upon noticing an alarm clock made in Canada, accused him of worshiping foreign enemies.
He was the object of "struggle sessions," criticized by 30 co-workers crammed into a room. He recalls the fear that moved him to rub the initials off an old U.S. Army surplus blanket. But he also remembers the shame he felt as he wrote his self-criticism.
"I thought 'Yes, I do have a very serious problem,' " he said. " 'It's terrible. I'm infected with bourgeois ideals.' "
Back home in Shanghai, his father was locked in his school for a month and interrogated incessantly by students. Groups of Red Guards ransacked the apartment and tormented his mother, who was "totally terrified," Ling said.
So terrified was she that one day she took the family's few remaining heirlooms -- jewelry, gold, silver dollars -- and tossed them into a sewer. His father, who had studied Western literature in college, collected his precious paintings and books and, believing them tainted, turned them in
It was only in the 1970's, when the children of the third generation were born, that the political radicalism started abating.
The Prosperity:
Fading Fears, Rising Hopes
Wang Yicai's big break came in 1973, in the waning years of the Cultural Revolution, when the central Government decided to let villages like Yuhuan set up small enterprises. He became a salesman, ultimately assigned to live in Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi Province.
With cash to spend, he married a woman from Yuhuan and built a brick house, the first in his family with electricity.
More important, in Nanchang an older professor got the bright young man admitted to an aeronautics college. By the time Wang completed his studies, rejoining his wife and new son to become a factory manager in 1979, the Cultural Revolution had ended. Deng Xiaoping had announced China's "opening and reform," paving the way to the development of private business.
That prospect was appealing to Wang, who calls Mao "ignorant about economics" and regards Deng as a hero. But having witnessed the wild political swings of the 1960's, he -- like many others of his generation -- had learned to be deeply cautious.
"There was a huge and powerful change under way," he said. "But in the late 70's China was still not that stable, and I wanted to make sure the new policy would last."
Only in 1983 did he "jump into the sea," as the Chinese put it, joining with eight partners to start the company, the Yuhuan Qingma General Machinery Factory.
The factory made car and motorcycle parts just as China was starting to motorize. Company growth has been exponential, sending the Wangs on an upward spiral.
In 1990 the local Communist Party invited the budding entrepreneur to join. Large factories must have a party cell; Wang could form one or have it created for him. "I'm a party member now," he said, "because you really can't separate business and politics in China at this time."
For Ling Huakang in Shanghai, the reforms of the past 20 years have had less to do with the pocketbook than the spirit.
"Over a number of years, the fear faded very slowly," said the second-generation Ling, who in 1982 was transferred to the Baoshan Iron and Steel Plant in Shanghai. "We only gradually came to re-evaluate the Cultural Revolution and to see how ridiculous it was." He still lives at the factory.
When he first returned to Shanghai, half a day of each week was still devoted to political study, a practice that faded over the following four years. In a world increasingly focused on economics, the family's negative political background was slowly forgotten. Their two children tested their way into good high schools and, later, university.
Though never prosperous, the Lings slowly accumulated the trappings of a modernizing China: a television, a large refrigerator, an electric ceiling fan. In a sign of the times, in 1984 the Lings modified the way their son Liang's name was written, changing it from the character meaning "grain," to another with the same sound, meaning "good."
The third generation of both families has come of age in a different world, one in which politics no longer defines the core of Chinese life but merely sets its limits.
They never experienced the turmoil of their parents' lives and are too young to have been caught up in China's last great political upheaval, the 1989 Tiananmen protests.
In their short adult lifetimes, grain coupons have given way to supermarkets and Marxist study sessions to pop concerts. They no longer wait for state job assignments, instead suiting up for interviews at foreign companies. They are pragmatic, materialistic and international.
"Because I studied history I can communicate with my father's generation," said Wang Dong, part of the third generation of the family from Yuhuan village. "But many young people can't." He spoke just before leaving for U.C.L.A., the first family member to travel outside China.
An earnest young man holding a cell phone and wearing sneakers and jeans, Wang could pass for a Western graduate student.
His father, whose company makes 20 percent of car transmissions in China, is proud that his son is attending graduate school in the United States.
Still, the younger Wang plans to return to China after he gets his Ph.D. in political science. Two years ago he followed his father into the Communist Party.
"I want to participate in the future of China," he said, "and for that you have to join -- both to develop the country and your career."
But his concerns seem utterly removed from the politics of yesteryear, centering on the economy, foreign relations and China's entry into the World Trade Organization.
These are the concerns of most young Chinese, who have little emotional connection with the past though they are often tightly bound to their families.
So it is that Ling Liang, the youngest man of the Ling family, sleeps each night on a cot next to his grandfather's bed -- and surfs the Internet in the room's other corner.
Ever since he graduated from college in 1994, his life has been about choice: he chose his girlfriend; he chose his job with a foreign company. He makes a higher salary than his father and has introduced air conditioning and a microwave oven to the room -- even though it still lacks plumbing.
He is happy to cook for the grandfather who raised him but betrays impatience with the anxieties of his elders. At a recent Sunday lunch, his mother reminded him of the Mao-era campaigns, as she often does, and he quickly silenced her.
"No, no," he said. "I don't worry at all about that. We don't live for the cause of Communism. We live for living better."
