(This blog-post excerpt originally appeared on November 29, 2010, on my Facebook community page, History, Culture and Politics.)
The following is excerpted from a blog post on Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest, first posted on November 22, 2010:
In 2006 when The Globe and Mail Journalist Jan Wong made the allegation that Marc Lepine, Valery Fabrikant and Kimveer Gill, the killers in the three mass shootings on Montreal university and college campuses since 1989, were victims of marginalization of immigrant minorities “in a society that valued pure laine” (pure laine refers to a person from an established French family), and caused a firestorm of condemnations including from the Canadian Parliament, Wong also made a trip to Beijing, China, where she had once served as the newspaper’s bureau chief, from 1988 to 1994.
In this 2006 China trip Jan Wong finally decided to look for an old Chinese acquaintance she had betrayed back in 1973 when – after she had gone to China as a 19-year-old “starry-eyed Maoist” in 1972 and become one of only two Beijing University foreign students – she informed the Chinese authority about a female student who sought her help to go to the United States. …
1972 had been an historic year when Jan Wong first went to China, if one gives it a little more thought.
On February 21, 1972, Richard Nixon made a historic visit to China – the first by any U.S. President – and opened official dialogues between the two countries which had become staunch enemies after 1949 when the Communists triumphed in China. In his week-long visit Nixon met Chairman Mao Zedong and held extensive talks with Premier Zhou Enlai.
Then on May 22, 1972, Richard Nixon arrived in Moscow as the first U.S. President to visit the Soviet Union though it was the second visit for him…
Later in September 1972, the aptly named “Summit Series” of men’s ice hockey games between the Soviet Union national team and the Canadian national team were held and won by Canada. These 1972 Summit Series were the first between the two hockey superpowers…
Shortly afterwards in October 1972, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, a French Montrealer who had swept to majority power in 1968 in the mist of “Trudeaumania” and personal show of defiance against violent threats from Quebec separatists after ascending to the helm of the Liberal party, nearly lost an election amid “Trudeauphobia”, forming only a minority government propped up by the New Democratic party farther to the left. …
It was amid the atmosphere of historic East-West political thawing that Jan Wong travelled from Montreal to Beijing in 1972 – except that Montreal didn’t share that kind of warming and Jan Wong went to China to join the Cultural Revolution as a self-styled “Montreal Maoist”.
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I see! As a logical step of the time the Chinese government made sure to invite a “Montreal Maoist” before opening more widely to the outside world, and 16 years later in 1988 – it happened to be the year I came to Canada – The Globe and Mail, which had long considered itself “Canada’s National Newspaper”, chose this “Montreal Maoist” to represent Canadian journalism to the Chinese people – as its 13th Beijing correspondent.
I can already imagine hearing the whisper – but how could The Globe and Mail have had anyone better when Jan Wong’s prerogative as the first Canadian to be a Beijing University student during the Cultural Revolution meant she got some of Chairman Mao’s geishas among her classmate friends?
But then when Jan Wong lamented about the French Quebec society’s “pure laine” attitude having to do with ethnic immigrant minority resentment, The Globe and Mail made a 180-degree turn and gagged her – as discussed in Part 1 of this blog article.
Seeing this kind of journalistic calculation representing Canada by Jan Wong, one gets the idea that no Canadian story involving someone of Chinese heritage or origin is newsworthy until it can be for Chinese consumption.
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My ten years of elementary and secondary education coincided with the duration of the Cultural Revolution, 1966 – 1976. …
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Right from the start, my schooling didn’t actually begin until early 1967.
My family – me, my parents, maternal grandparents and younger sister – had been living in a dorm-apartment allocated to my mother by the education bureau of the southern Haizhu District (海珠区) in the city of Guangzhou, where she was a middle school teacher. The elementary school entrance age was seven at the time, and at age six in 1965 I applied to a new school which I recall was named Haizhu District Experimental School, that was experimenting with admitting younger children, but I was quickly turned down after an interview.
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When the Cultural Revolution began in the early summer of 1966, my mother was roughed up by her middle school’s student Red Guards, who came to our place ransacking and confiscating anything of hers that looked valuable, had her hair cut very short forcibly like her head had been shaved, and required her to attend daily regiment of critical self-reevaluation. In an age group with the combination of youthful restlessness, physically strength and enthusiasms for social experimentation, the middle-school student Red Guards were especially known for their nastiness and propensity for violence – with their teachers who unfortunately also had the role of behavioral counseling bearing the brunt of it during the early months of the revolution.
In the fall of 1966 my father, then a junior faculty member at Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen) University, arranged for the family to move to the university campus, where the anarchy and violence were not as bad as in the middle school environment and were more targeted at officials and senior professors due to the intellectual focus of higher education.
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Being new on ZD campus – except for one prior short stay at my father’s faculty dorm room beginning on the day the middle school Red Guards ransacked my mother’s dorm-apartment – I naturally did not know as much about what went on as my classmates at the university‘s affiliated elementary school also in Haizhu District, which was appropriately renamed “July1 Elementary School” in honor of the Chinese Communist Party’s birthday.
Interestingly, 20 years after leaving the July 1 Elementary School in 1972, I became a Canadian citizen on July 1, Canada Day, 1992.
For example, in early 1967 I had little awareness that as Grandma and I came to the family’s new dwelling on ZD campus (the basement of a house and then the first floor by the time Grandma and I arrived) and the new semester began, Zhao Ziyang, then Guangdong province’s Communist party leader, was also taken to Zhongshan University – on January 21 – for a short period of detention. Under pressure from the university student Red Guards, on January 22 Zhao agreed to a transfer of provincial party and government powers to a province-wide “Alliance” of Red Guard organizations, including handover of the official seals.
It was a type of power transfer from the Communist party to the Red Guards where the Red Guards would not manage power but act as monitors. On the next day, January 23, an official announcement was issued for this power arrangement by the provincial party organ under Zhao Ziyang to all Communist party members in Guangdong province.
This Guangdong approach to power transfer received immediate positive response from Premier Zhou Enlai in Beijing, who was opposed to the full power takeover by Red Guards taking place in Shanghai.
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Unfortunately for Zhao Ziyang in Guangdong, Chairman Mao wanted a third type of power transfer to the Red Guards, one that would soon take place in Heilongjiang province in the northeast bordering the Soviet Union – a full power takeover with a key role for the military (and a role for some politically correct officials). In the evening of January 21 when Zhao Ziyang was taken to Zhongshan University, a next-day editorial in People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party’s official newspaper, was being broadcast calling for full power takeover by the revolution, and on January 23, the day Zhao Ziyang officially announced the Guangdong power transfer to under Red Guard monitoring, the Communist Party central issued a decision to use the military to support full power takeover in the provinces and regions.
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By the late 1980s Zhao was the reform-minded General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party – the official top leader as there was no longer the position of Chairman – and his ascent coincided with rapid growths of the Chinese democracy movement and related mass protests driven to a large extent by intellectuals and university students.
In May 1989 Zhao Ziyang attempted to show empathy for the university students of the democracy movement on Tiananmen Square, expressing the view that their intentions were good and the situation was not a major problem, even after the movement was branded “a planned conspiracy and a turmoil” by an April 26 editorial of People’s Daily. …
Mikhail Gorbachev, then the reform-minded leader of the Soviet Union, was visiting Beijing during May 15-18, and was told by Zhao that despite Zhao himself being the official party leader all important decisions had to be referred to the behind-the-scenes paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, who had survived the Cultural Revolution downfall and reemerged as the final arbiter of power in China.
In the early morning of May 19, 1989, Zhao went to Tiananmen Square to try to persuade the students to end a hunger strike, having just attending a top-level meeting which decided, against his opposition, to use the military to suppress the mass protests. …
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On June 4 – exactly half a month (16 days) after Zhao Ziyang’s appearance on Tiananmen Square to show his empathy to the students – the military used force to clear the protests on the streets of Beijing and on Tiananmen Square.
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It’s ironic that in the 22 years from the spring of 1967 in Guangzhou to the spring of 1989 in Beijing, the table had turned between Zhao Ziyang and university student protesters yet the end remained the same for both.
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The father of “Ping”, one of the girls in our class, an associate professor of Physics more senior than most of the parents of our class, had been branded a “rightist” in the 1957 anti-rightist political campaign and was now subjected to further political condemnation and cruel treatment. He leaped to his death from on top a campus building.
Then there was the time when for several days something was floating in a pond on my way to and near the elementary school, that looked like a dead pig and had horrendously stenchful smell. It turned out to be, upon closer inspection by the more curious, the swollen belly of a man dead in the water for days before emerging.
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The types of violence that occurred in the early years of the Cultural Revolution targeting persons in positions of power or intellectual seniority, in some sense were not unlike the FLQ kidnappings of James Cross and Pierre Laporte in Montreal in 1970, which had inspirations from international political radicalism.
A major difference between the FLQ violence in Canada and the violence during the Chinese Cultural Revolution was that part of the Chinese leadership sanctioned the Red Guards’ violent anti-status quo actions.
Another type of violence raging during an early period of the Cultural Revolution was militant fighting, or violent battles, between different Red Guard organizations. In the spring of 1967 the various Red Guard organizations in Guangdong province quickly fell into two camps: the more radical “Red Flag” which had played a key role in the January power transfer from Zhao Ziyang, and the more pro-government “East Wind” which were more sympathetic to the subsequent military takeover and its law-and-order stability.
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In fact, on January 21-23, 1967 it was under detention by the Zhongshan University Red Flag Commune and their affiliated vanguard group, “August 31”, that Zhao Ziyang acceded to transfer of provincial power to under Red Guard monitoring, and the ZD Red Flag Commune became one of the official monitors of provincial power. Then on January 24 a top “August 31” leader, Mathematics student Huang Yijian (黄意坚), received a phone call from Premier Zhou Enlai and encouragements from Zhou for the Red Guards to be united and to keep good relations with the military.
But events did not follow Zhou Enlai’s wishes and the military took over full power in March in Guangdong. On April 14, accompanied by General Huang Yongsheng, Commander of the Guangzhou Military Region, Premier Zhou flew to Guangzhou from Beijing to meet with the leaders of the severely split Red Guards organizations, many members of which were also under military detention, to personally see that their activities would not turn violent and that the Spring 1967 Canton Fair due to open the next day on April 15 could go forward smoothly.
The Canton Fair was very important for the Chinese economy and foreign relations as it was Chinese’s only export trade fair – held biannually in Guangzhou – during the first three decades of the Communist era, 1950s – 1970s.
In the evening of April 14, 1967, Zhou Enlai attended and spoke at a rally of Red Guards totaling over 10,000 strong, held simultaneously at the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall located in the city center and at the indoor City Sports Center, calling on the Red Guards to be united and help ensure a successful Spring Canton Fair. After midnight Zhou toured the about-to-open Canton Fair exhibition halls, and succeeded in persuading the Red Guards to let open some exhibits sealed off because of their accused political incorrectness – that had especially been the case with many of the traditional Chinese artisan crafts.
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Sadly, it had been in early February 1967 while working devotedly on the power transfer/takeover issues when Zhou Enlai was for the first time diagnosed with a heart problem, and it was then during these five grueling April days in Guangzhou in which he had no sleep for a period of 84 hours that Zhou’s heart problem worsened, to the point that from then on he would require daily oxygen aid and oral medications four times a day. Later in 1970 Zhou Enlai said to the famed American journalist Edgar Snow, “Cultural Revolution has defeated me when it comes to my health”; but then shortly after Richard Nixon’s historic visit, in May 1972 Zhou was also diagnosed with bladder cancer, which would in the end destroy him.
And unfortunately, past the Spring Canton Fair the conflicts between the Red Flaggers and the East Winders and between the Red Flaggers and the military continued to worsen. A “May 3” hunger strike was staged in front of the Guangzhou Uprising Martyrs Cemetery Park by about 2,000 Red Flaggers demanding the release of one of their leaders in military detention, and it ended only after Premier Zhou Enlai in Beijing ordered the release on May 6.
On July 21 and July 23 – exactly half a year (6 months) after the January 21-23 Communist party-to-Red Guards power transfer by then provincial party leader Zhao Ziyang and with Guangdong under military rule since March – the first major deadly Red Guard militant battles took place in Guangzhou between the Red Flaggers and the East Winders, with the July 23 incident at none other than the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall and the nearby outdoor City Sports Stadium.
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Located on the site of the former Presidential Palace of which Dr. Sun Yat-sen had been the occupant before it was destroyed in civil warfare, the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall is a grand architectural marvel combining Byzantine architecture and Chinese imperial designs with the spirits of Sun Yat-sen’s egalitarianism and people orientation. It is the most important symbolic structure in Guangzhou and one that gets compared to the Forbidden City and the Great Hall of the People at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
Dr. Sun Yat-sen is dear to the hearts of the people of Guangzhou. He was born in a village only 60 miles south and spoke Cantonese, and the southern national government he founded in Guangzhou in 1917 (after the government in Beijing betrayed the 1911 Republican Revolution and reverted to monarchy for short periods of time and the nation became fractured) has been the only national government of China ever located in this city. …
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It so happened that on July 22, the day after the “July 21 Incident”, a call was made in Beijing by Jiang Qing, Chairman Mao’s wife and one of the leaders of the Cultural Revolution, for the Red Guards not to put down their weapons when it came to defending themselves. Jiang Qing stated that the Red Guard slogan, “文攻武卫”(attack with intellectualism and defend with militancy) was politically correct, and her words were reported by the press on the next day, i.e., the day the militant battle took place at Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Guangzhou.
Two major mass events had been scheduled for July 23. One was a rally by the “Mao Zedong-ist Red Guards”, the most hardline East Wind organization made up mostly of youths from the families of politically correct officials and military officers, to celebrate the organization’s official establishment in Guangzhou, and the other was the memorial service by the Red Flaggers for their seven comrades killed at the sugar refinery. The Maoists’ rally had been planned at a meeting hall within the Guangzhou Military Region headquarters’ compound and the Red Flaggers’ at a sports field, when the city’s military control commission reassigned the Maoists to the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall and the Red Flaggers to the nearby outdoor Yuexiu Sports Stadium – both adjacent to the Yuexiu Park where the Sun Yat-sen Monument was located.
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Both rallies were supposed to be peaceful. But with several thousand Maoist youths attending the Memorial Hall and many thousands of Red Flaggers going to the Stadium, the two parade processions began to exchange heated arguments, including when some Red Flaggers served their memorial wreaths to the Maoists, and then the fighting began. …
Local military commanders sent several hundred soldiers to try to mediate, but they were attacked by the Red Flaggers and had to be evacuated by larger contingents of soldiers. General Huang Ronghai, Commander of the Guangdong Military District who also headed Guangzhou city’s military control commission, then came to the scene and he, too, could not contained the situation. Eventually several thousand troops arrived and formed walls of human chains to separate the warring sides.
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Right afterwards, the propaganda publications by the Red Flaggers and the East Winders, each headed by a banner featuring Chairman Mao’s supreme directive, “要用文斗, 不用武斗”(fight intellectually, not militantly), blamed members of the other side as the violent aggressors who caused the bloody mass debacle, calling them murderers in a premeditated massacre.
The Maoists announced that 26 of them were killed or missing while the Red Flaggers put their death toll at 33 – a total of 59 – and of course hundreds more wounded on each side. …
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Zhongshan University, the most prominent entity in Guangzhou named in honor of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, would have its share of militant fighting, with a year-long escalation of tension between the Red Flaggers and the East Winders culminating in what became known as the “June 3 Incident” of 1968, before the military in Guangdong fully intervened and disarmed all the Red Guards.
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Not every junior faculty member went with it, though. My old classmate buddy “Ling”’s father, who was my father’s fellow lecturer at the Philosophy department but a little more senior, did not believe in the Cultural Revolution’s political correctness and refused to take part in it. He was denounced by his own students – an experience that appeared like my mother’s at her middle school from what “Ling” has told me:
“My dad did not belong to either and was a target by his own students. I recalled one day he came home with his head half shaven. I did not dare to ask why but could see how angry, heartbroken and confused he was.”
“Ling”’s father, Prof. Yuan Weishi, is today a very well-known intellectual in China, a prolific scholar in Chinese history and politics with influential independent views and public outspokenness.
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On August 1, 1967, which happened to be the annual People’s Liberation Army Day, the ZD Red Flaggers successfully tested a chemical bomb on campus – quite a boisterous scene! But a death and an injury occurred from accidents in the experimental making of the chemical bombs. As well, the chairman of the Chemistry department, a professor who had earned his Ph.D. in Germany in the 1930s and taken part in Nazi Germany’s weapons program, had a role in developing the chemical bombs and later suffered political repercussions.
August 11, 1967 saw one of the most deadly gunfire ambushes in Guangzhou. On that day, middle-school Red Flag leader Wang Xizhe and his followers first went to seize weapons at the air force compound across from his school, but found that the arms had been evacuated. Their car convoy then went on their way to the city’s Baiyun Airport to join a dispute over the kidnapping of Cultural Revolution representatives just flown in from the Communist Party central in Beijing. As they drove past the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall they encountered a hail of rifle fire and hurriedly changed their destination to the Sun Yat-sen Medical University (then a separate institution from but since part of Sun Yat-sen University) for emergency care – 5 of Wang’s comrades were killed and he was among the over a dozen wounded.
Today, Wang Xizhe (王希哲) is very well known as a Chinese democracy activist in exile after spending on and off many years in jail in China for his political activities, and as a former collaborator of the jailed 2010 Nobel Peace Laureate Liu Xiaobo – in 1996 the two jointly issued the “October Tenth Declaration” calling for a dialogue between the governments of Mainland China and Taiwan among other political changes.
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By some time in 1967-68 only one major ZD campus building remained in the East Winders’ control, the Central Library. It was the university East Winders’ headquarters, where hundreds of them were barricaded inside. Their food supplies were brought in by East Wind workers and peasants from outside the campus, during regular intervals of ceasefire and going through checkpoint inspections by the university Red Flaggers. Threats from the East Wind workers and peasants to invade the campus to rescue their comrades served as a deterrent against any serious attack by the ZD Red Flaggers on the ZD East Winder headquarters.
With the East Wind headquarters holed up and holding up in the Central Library till the time when the military came to restore order, most of the books there were saved. The stereotype story about burning and destruction of books I read in Western publications, such as in the following quote, is inaccurate as far as I can remember (although more serious damages including book burning did occur at a small number of departmental libraries):
“At Zhongshan University in Canton, the Red Guards first burned all the books from the collection of Western classics; then they burned all texts not obviously Communist or Maoist; and then they burned the library building itself (Thurston 1987).”
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I wish Rebecca had a better source of information for this story on the Cultural Revolution; during 1997-99 I taught Computer Science in the same department as Rebecca and we even went together visiting a U.S. military disaster assistance information center in the Camp Smith compound of the United States Pacific Command. (the trip with Rebecca and two other female professors has been mentioned in my Facebook comment on a Council on Foreign Relations article by Commander Michael L. Baker of the U.S. Navy…)
Nevertheless there was burning of a ZD campus building in a related storyline – after a group of East Winders broke free from the Central Library and took over the old Physics Building in the summer of 1968.
On June 3, 1968, a deadly battle happened when the Red Flaggers waged an attack to retake the Physics Building, including using guns and explosives, and setting the building on fire in the end. Some of the kids watched it.
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Despite the calamity of this violent “June 3 Incident” and the many injured, there were only two deaths, one Red Flagger in the attack, and a top East Wind leader, Ruan Xiangyang (阮向阳). When the fire was burning up the Physics Building Ruan escaped from the top floor by climbing out a window down the wall, and running to hide in a home nearby, but he was then caught by a group of pursuers. Unluckily for Ruan, the pursuers were mostly middle school Red Flaggers from outside the university who had come to re-enforce their comrades, and they practically beat him to death.
Both the ZD “August 31” leader, Mathematics student Huang Yijian, and the middle school Red Flag leader Wang Xizhe, had roles in directing this June 3 attack on scene.
But neither Huang Yijian or Wang Xizhe were the top leader of the Red Flaggers. The No.1 Red Flag leader in Zhongshan University was Biology student Wu Chuanbin (武传斌)…
In any case, about two months after the “June 3 Incident” in 1968 the military and affiliated workers’ law-and-order militia entered the ZD campus and disarmed the Red Flaggers without meeting resistance, and the period of Cultural Revolution militant violence was over for Zhongshan University.
This happened after a July 25 meeting in Beijing with Red Guard representatives in which both Premier Zhou Enlai and General Huang Yongsheng, by then Chief of the General Staff of the Chinese military but still heading the Guangdong Provincial Revolutionary Committee, called Wu Chuanbin a trouble maker, who then quickly fell from grace by early August.
Wu Chuanbin lives in Toronto, Canada today, so I guess The Globe and Mail journalist Jan Wong, the self-style “starry-eyed Maoist”, isn’t the only Canadian in her adulation of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
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Ruan Xiangyang’s end reminds me of my mother having been roughed up by her middle school Red Guards in 1966. His name, 阮向阳, also sounds like a bad omen to me as my Grandma Lin Zhenhua (林珍华), part of whose Christian family history I have discussed in my Chinese blog post, “忆往昔，学历史智慧” (“Reminiscing the past, learning history’s wisdom”), had a second name, Lin Ruanju (林阮菊). Soon at the July 1 Elementary School in 1970 we would have a new Mathematics (Arithmetic) teacher, a charming young women by the name of Ruan Jiabi (阮嘉碧 or 阮佳碧), whose name now many years later sounds exactly like ‘soft Canadian currency’.
Grandma passed away in 1980 at the age of 82 (I believe she was born in 1898, the same year as Zhou Enlai), and I left China in 1982. But I find that my old teacher Miss Ruan might still be teaching elementary arithmetic in the same Haizhu District of Guangzhou, and with a prestigious ‘experimental school’ – Beijing University’s affiliated middle school’s Guangzhou Experimental School!
My mother has retired from her Guangzhou No. 33 Middle School years ago. After leaving the July 1 Elementary School in 1972 I entered and four years later graduated from the Guangzhou No. 6 Middle School. This school had been Zhongshan University’s affiliated middle school for a couple of years prior to the Cultural Revolution, and before that had been founded in 1937 as the affiliated middle school of the Huangpu (Whampoa) Military Academy established in the same year 1924 as Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen) University by an intellectual leader and a guiding light for military officers – Dr. Sun Yat-sen!
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