The following, originally posted on October 7, 2011, on FengGao.ORG – Portal to Various Blog Topics and Articles, is an English synopsis of one part of a series of blog posts in Chinese. The title here is from an excerpt on the Facebook community page, History, Culture and Politics.
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Part 4, “青少年时代的部分文化熏陶 (some cultural influences experienced as a youth)”, recalls Feng Gao’s time of youth during the ten years of Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976.
As mentioned in Part 3, in 1966 before Feng was to begin elementary school, Red Guards from Mother’s middle school conducted a “home raid” at Mother’s dorm apartment where their family lived. Not long after, Feng went with maternal Grandma to visit Shantou city in her home region, and by the time they returned the family moved into the university campus where Father was a junior faculty member.
Feng then attended July 1 Elementary School – the name of Sun Yat-sen University’s affiliated elementary school during Cultural Revolution era. Feng’s 1966 class consisted of two sections of around 50 each, more of them children of faculty members in his section while in the other section more of them children of administrators and workers. Later, students of the other section would move on to No. 52 Middle School while ones in Feng’s section would attend No. 6 Middle School – the latter formerly the affiliated school of Whampoa Military Academy as discussed in Feng’s English blog post, “Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 3) – when violence and motive are subtle and pervasive”. The first two years of elementary school were spent during a period of Red Guard violence as discussed in the preceding part of that English blog post.
Feng experienced some group conflicts among his classmate friends, which he recalls as having co-relations to different family backgrounds, such as some of them being from families where the parents were administrators or workers while some others being with overseas family connections.
Feng studied quite independently, did well and had time for other readings also, and he also enjoyed playing with other kids in various sports, athletic games and outdoor activities but he lacked physical strength or physical bravery.
Feng often caught tonsillitis at that age. The parents of one classmate girl, “Dan Zheng”, were good friends with Feng’s Mother because like Mother they were of Shantou origin; Dan’s father was a male nurse promoted to be a doctor at the start of Cultural Revolution, and he was very kind and helpful to Feng’s maternal grandparents as well as to Feng. At the urging of Dan’s older brother “Bin”, Feng skipped class once with them, found it interesting and did it once or twice more on his own, claiming sick reasons. Then Dr. Zheng moved to work in Hong Kong, and the entire Zheng family emigrated to Hong Kong by the time Feng was in middle school.
Parts 1 & 2 of this article were first posted on Grandma’s lunar-calendar birthday, Part 3 was first posted on Father’s Western-calendar birthday, and now for this Part 4 Feng chooses his mother’s lunar-calendar birthday as an appreciation for how much she has done for her family over the years.
Feng remembers the various agricultural farm work he and his classmates participated in during elementary school years.
He remembers the first big field-work trip outside of the university campus to be in Grade 2 and going to Zengcheng County, where they also got to taste the famous “Zengcheng Lychee”, which had once been appreciated by the famous, the likes of Song-dynasty literati Su Dongpo and Qing-dynasty Empress Dowager Cixi, and the price for the very best has made the Guinness World Records according to Chinese media reports.
He remembers some of the trips for farm work to be near New Phoenix Village, bordering the university campus on the campus’s northwest side. Classmate “Peifu Feng”’s family lived in the village, and the village center had a Chinese herbal medicine store where prescriptions by university hospital doctors needed to be filled. Unfortunately according to a research survey, the peasant laborers living there today still may not be able to afford medicine.
He also remembers farm work on university campus where some of the lawns and grass fields were turned into farm fields, and at elementary school’s own farm – areas around and nearby turned into sweet-potato and rice fields. Once at a lunch provided by the university farm during work break, a classmate found a cockroach in his bowl of rice, and that ruined Feng’s appetite. Feng is shocked to learn from news reports that in recent years children in his alma mater can still often find worms in their school lunch, and have had a serious bout of food poisoning during which many have been hospitalized for observation.
There was work in school’s mechanical workshop, too, but that was mostly for kids with handy skills, Feng not among them.
Real factory work wasn’t until around the last year of elementary school in Grade 5, when the class went to the Guangdong Provincial Tractor Factory across the street from the university’s south-facing southwest-gate near the school. Feng wasn’t good at manual work at the assembly line producing ball bearings for the diesel engine, so often was assigned to push a trolley moving parts around, with a few classmates, the boy “Youzhi Tang” among them. One of the assembly-line workers was a boastful martial-arts expert, and Youzhi’s older brother happened to be on the Guangzhou City’s all-middle-school martial-arts team.
Feng remembers seeing remnants of factory building scars from a major Red Guard militant battle in August 1968 when Sun Yat-sen University’s “August 31” Red Guards came over with a cannon to take part. As recalled in an English blog post (“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 2) – when violence is politically organized”), the “Red Flag” and affiliated “August 31” Red Guards had been dominant on Sun Yat-sen University campus in 1968, culminating in a deadly triumphant “June 3 Incident”, and prior to that sniper fires had often come onto the campus from the factory.
Grade 3 and Grade 4 were when many of Feng’s classmates began to mature.
The boy Peifu Feng from New Phoenix Village was the first to master middle-and-long distance swim, having learned it in fishponds on university campus, and by the third year of junior middle school quite a few of Feng’s classmates participated in the large-scale, organized “Pearl River Swim”. Feng didn’t learn to swim until junior middle-school age, and never swam in the section of the Pearl River just outside the campus north-gate, but the section of the Pearl River in Guangzhou may have been the first major river Mao Zedong had swum in (in 1956) as the national leader.
Maturing boys liked to discuss about the girls. Feng remembers Peifu Feng as being very explicit while Youzhi Tang as quite romantic, and the two as the ones who liked to talk about it most.
A sign for Feng’s maturity was his picking up the ability to read classical Chinese novels during Grade 3 and Grade 4.
The notion of the “Four Classics” of traditional Chinese novels had begun in the late-Ming dynasty as first proposed by the literati Feng Menglong, at the time consisting of the novels “Three Kingdoms”, “Journey to the West”, “Water Margin”, and “Golden Lotus” (“The Plum in the Golden Vase”), each with unique representative contents and together providing a broad coverage. “The Plum in the Golden Vase” had its origin from “Water Margin”, and was a sexual erotica in which its main male character was a powerful businessman whose initial fortune came from his Chinese herbal medicine store.
As mentioned in Part 3, from early-Qing dynasty to mid-1980s “The Plum in the Golden Vase” was officially banned, with the exception that in 1957 Chairman Mao ordered limited copies for officials at or above the level of provincial vice governor and national vice minister. From a certain point in the Qing dynasty forward its place on the Four Classics list was replaced by “Dream of the Red Chamber”.
The first several Chinese classics Feng read were brought by Father from the university library. Obviously among the Four Classics list Feng didn’t get to read “The Plum in the Golden Vase”; in fact he hasn’t read it to this day. But Feng didn’t read “Dream of the Red Chamber” either until around the third year of junior middle school; instead, Father checked out the novel “Romance of Sui and Tang Dynasties”, allowing it to be among Feng’s first several classics to read.
From then on to when he finished middle school, Feng read many more other Chinese classics. Nonetheless, Feng is fascinated by Father’s choice of “Romance of Sui and Tang Dynasties” as among Feng’s early classics readings, and connects the fact to Father’s earlier academic background – Father was a Philosophy faculty member – in Chinese Literature.
Father’s academic career began with study of the famous poet Li Bai in the era of the Xuanzong Emperor of Tang dynasty. Father was influenced by his professor, Zhan Antai, whose 1953 Marxist analysis-oriented article, “Spirits of affinity to the people and realism in The Book of Poetry” (The Book of Poetry was the oldest-known published collection of Chinese poems, officially complied before or during Confucius’s era) was viewed as a milestone work. Father’s 1956 article, “On the artistic achievements of Li Bai’s poems”, with its emphasis on placing the poetry art in the context of national and social politics, gave out early signs of why later he could be transferred to teach Marxist philosophy.
To highlight some of the national and social politics, Feng makes selectively quotes from Father’s article, paraphrased as in the following passage:
Li Bai lived most of his life in the Xuanzong Emperor’s era (713-755 A.D.), the so-called “Prime Tang”, when China was the most advanced and most powerful country in the world; the era was the peak of Tang dynasty’s development but also the turning point toward its decline, as behind the economic prosperities there were complex class and ethnic conflicts. In his later years Emperor Xuanzong indulged in the pleasures of life, relied on officials with imperial marriage relations or those with dirty tricks to run the government, and these officials attacked and excluded talented and honest intellectuals such as Li Bai. Xuanzong especially desired of conquering Tibet, and resorted to stealth military attacks that broke prior agreements, but lost several times, sacrificing the lives of tens of thousands of soldiers. Premier Yang Guozhong who had come to power through imperial marriage cronyism, especially wanted to conquer Yunnan but also lost several times, incurring the casualties of two hundred thousand soldiers; the next year General An Lushan, of Northern minority origin and trusted by Emperor Xuanzong, waged a rebellion; Xuanzong had no ability to resist, had to run off to Sichuan (located between Yunnan and Tibet) for refuge and let his son the Suzong Emperor assume power, who could not fully solve the problems either.
Thus began the decline of at the time the world’s most advanced and most powerful country, the “Prime Tang”.
Feng points out that, of particular interest in that era was also Concubine-Empress Yang Yuhuan, who was the cousin of Yang Guozhong and the latter’s imperial connection to power, is known as one of the “Four Beauties” in ancient Chinese history, and especially loved the famous Lychee fruit from the southern region of Guangdong.
Feng notes that Father had such early academic interest in this kind of historical “romance”, and that later one of his graduate students of the 1980s, Liao Xiaoyi (Sheri Liao), became a distinguished environmentalist appreciated by then U.S. President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton, and won the year 2000 Sophie Prize.
Part 3 has mentioned that Father was unhappy about his transfer/reassignment from Chinese Literature to Philosophy, but Feng thinks Father was already lucky that he wasn’t branded a “rightist” as his professor Zhan Antai was. The poet Li Bai has been commonly viewed as a literary romanticist in contrast to his contemporary poet Du Fu as a literary realist, but father’s analysis touched upon many facets of Li Bai’s achievements and particularly focused on Li Bai’s literary realism. This 1956 article of Father’s was later included in a national collection of representative articles in Li Bai studies dating back to the May 4th era in 1919 (start of a movement to make the Chinese language and literature more populist and accessible to the common people), published in 1964.
After the early period of Cultural Revolution with Red Guard violence was over, Father indeed became involved in politics. He was assigned to the university’s Cultural-Revolution (CR) writing group, and became one of the persons penning official political articles during the first few years of the 1970s.
The most well-known CR writing groups of that period included one from Beijing University and Tsinghua University jointly, one at Ministry of Culture in the State Council, one at Central Party School of the Communist Party, and the two at the Party’s Beijing City Committee and Shanghai City Committee, respectively.
Today many people have the conception that writers in these CR writing groups were all “leftist”, but that was not the case. Feng points out that Professor Feng Youlan, founder of Sun Yat-sen University’s Philosophy Department and then a Beijing University professor, was a member of the Beijing-Tsinghua Universities group, which was under Chairman Mao’s direct guidance; also, “Uncle Yuan Weishi”, Father’s colleague in the Philosophy Department, Feng’s classmate buddy Ling’s father, and a well-known contemporary advocate of civil liberty and individual freedom, was a member of the group with Father as was “Uncle Huang Tianji”, a Chinese drama expert who has received a National Distinguished Teacher Award in 2006.
It was officially assigned duty, as Feng recalls that the leader of the Sun Yat-sen University CR writing group was “Elder Uncle Zhang Hai”, a former military officer in charge of political indoctrination as a university official, and that his deputy was “Auntie Luo Wanhua”, a human-resources administrator and mother of Feng’s classmate friend Jun Gao.
Jun was one of the classmates tasked with implementing the teacher’s rules and requirements, and was politically much more correct than Feng. When Feng’s family first moved into the university campus their (assigned) dwelling was the downstairs of a two-story house, vacated by the family of Professor Xu Xiangong, a U.S.-educated senior chemist and provincial leader of the democratic organization Jiusan Society (September Third Society), who continued to live upstairs; but it was only about two years before Feng’s family moved out and Jun’s family moved in.
Ling on the other hand was exceedingly shrewd. Once in around Grade 4 after a session studying some instructions by Vice Chairman Lin Biao (Chairman Mao’s deputy), Ling asked Feng, on their way home barely out of the school courtyard, that if Feng noticed differences between Vice Chairman Lin’s instructions and Chairman Mao’s. Feng normally was very careful in making this kind of comments for fear of political trouble, but because Ling was so insistent and friendly, and it was a private occasion so Feng replied that there appeared to be some particular differences. The next day Ling reported to their head teacher, “Luo Dezhen”, saying Feng badmouthed Vice Chairman Lin. Teacher Luo summoned Feng and he had a lot of explaining to do, fortunately Feng was a good student but still Ms. Luo would speak to Mother and urge the family to educate him more strictly.
Also in Grade 4, two students who barely spoke Cantonese joined the class, the boy “Xiangqian Qi” and a girl, and Xianqian was assigned a seat directly in front of Ling who was seated directly in front of Feng. Feng interprets it as that the new classmates’ parents of northern Chinese origins arrived after military intervention had ended Red Guard violence and the university administration became headed by military personnel.
In his 20 years of school life from entering elementary school to finishing Ph.D., Grade 5 was when Feng was treated most highly. That year a new teacher, “Ruan Jiabi”, arrived at their school and she promoted Feng to among the leadership of the school’s Little Read Guards to be in charge of propaganda, and in that role also co-leading the performance-art troupe even though Feng could not sing or dance – Xianqian was a talent in this regard and put in charge of the troupe’s performing. Before or after Grade 5, Feng’s normal duty was within his class section, in charge of study or propaganda.
During the first 3 to 4 years of the 1970s, Father wrote articles as part of the university’s CR writing group, sometimes in residence away from family for weeks, including occasionally at the location of the Communist Party Guangdong Provincial Committee’s writing group. The office of Father’s group was the university’s Sun Yat-sen Museum, which prior to Cultural Revolution had been headed by Father’s former Chinese Literature professor, (Ms.) Xian Yuqing.
During these several years, Father were in Beijing at least 5 or 6 times, writing at PLA Daily, The People’s Daily or Guangming Daily.
For one of the writing stints in Beijing, Father was on loan to a CR writing group at State Council, which had initially requested to transfer him (and probably Huang Tianji) there. Feng cannot be sure if exactly it was Ministry of Culture’s; but as also mentioned in Part 2, (at the time) Feng’s family lived downstairs from “Auntie Zeng” whose husband prior to his early Cultural Revolution suicide had led the cultural affairs department at Guangzhou Military District, and Jin Jingmai, a writer from there and author of the novel “The Song of Ouyang Hai” – Feng’s first introduction to a grownup book at less than 7-years-old – had led Ministry of Culture during early Cultural Revolution but was then put in jail due to a political conflict with Chairman Mao’s wife Jiang Qing.
Later in1980s, Father was on the editorial committee for China’s 8-volume “History of Marxist Philosophy”, and his co-chief-editor for Volume 3, a Beijing University faculty member, had been on the Beijing and Tsinghua universities CR writing group guided by Mao. One of the three co-Editor-in-Chiefs for the entire eight volumes was Ms. Lin Li, daughter of Lin Boqu, an important political veteran in three successive Chinese political eras, the United League, the Nationalist Party and the Communist Party; back in 1930s, Lin Li was in school in Soviet Union along with Mao’s wife He Zizhen and others, and this one time when they sat in the club lounge listening to radio newscast of a Soviet TASS interview with Chairman Mao in Yanan, China, they all – including Ms. He herself – were surprised to learn from the newscast that Chairman Mao already had a different wife now.
In any case, during Cultural Revolution even persons like Father who took part in writing officially-guided political articles rarely signed their own names because the contents weren’t their own. Feng finds only one article with Father’s name on it during the ten years of Cultural Revolution from summer 1966 to summer 1976, co-authored with two colleagues in 1973 for the political campaign to denounce Lin Biao and Confucius together. Feng is surprised to see that the article did not mention Confucius at all.
Most of the articles appearing in that same journal issue also denounced or criticized Confucius, probably more than they did Lin Biao. Classmate girl “Danwei Yang”’s father, Professor Yang Rongguo, Chairman of the Philosophy Department where Father was a member, was not only the leader in this journal issue but the leader in this national campaign to denounce Confucius, and for that he was praised by Mao personally. One of Father’s two coauthors in this article used a penname, which Feng recalls was that of Ling’s father, Yuan Weishi, but then he had a separate article in his real name to denounce Confucius.
Feng notes that according to now-disclosed historical record, among the Communist Party leadership in 1973 a faction led by Premier Zhou Enlai supported only denunciation of Lin Biao, not denunciation of Confucius.
After Cultural Revolution ended, Yang Rongguo soon died of cancer in 1978 at the age of 71. The former leader of Father’s writing group, Zhang Hai, also died of cancer in late 1970s, not yet reaching his 70 as far as Feng remembers.
Father’s former colleague and roommate mentioned in Parts 2 & 3, “Uncle Xiong Maosheng”, had been an activist in studying Chairman Mao’s teachings, and published in early Cultural Revolution in a journal issue in which his article on studying the works of Chairman Mao appeared just ahead of an article praising the novel, “The Song of Ouyang Hai”. Uncle Xiong died of cancer during Cultural Revolution.
Part 3 has discussed about three Chinese calligraphers from maternal Grandpa’s Shantou region whose calligraphies have been included in a historical collection along with Grandpa’s and to whom Father had cultural links in one way or another, that they all died of cancer – including Father’s professor, Zhan Antai.
Feng’s English post, “Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 2) – when violence is politically organized”, has mentioned that in 1972 after Richard Nixon’s historical visit to China and just before Nixon’s visit to Soviet Union, Premier Zhou Enlai was diagnosed with cancer, which would ultimately kill him in 1976. But Feng notes that Zhou was in Beijing, where he died before Mao did and lived a life nearly 5 years shorter than Mao’s.
Father had had hepatitis since late 1950s, and as a result while working at the CR writing group he was diagnosed with cirrhosis approaching late stage. A period of time later, he was also diagnosed with both congenital and rheumatic heart diseases. Afterwards, Father went through Chinese herbal medicinal treatments and the supposedly irreversible cirrhosis would eventually disappear, magically.
During early Cultural Revolution, as intellectuals quite a few teachers suffered denunciation and maltreatments. For instance, Mother suffered a “home raid” by her middle school’s Red Guards. Ling’s father also suffered denunciation by his students. Father faired better because he not only was just a junior faculty member in a university but also taught Marxism-Leninism.
During Cultural Revolution, Feng asked Father, “Have you posted big-character posters denouncing others you knew?” Father replied that he didn’t know much about other people’s things so had posted one only to criticize Vice Chairman Liu Rong of the Philosophy Department, accusing Liu Rong of being patriarchal and unwilling to accept different opinions.
Feng felt Father was bookishly foolish. “Elder Uncle Liu Rong” had been the hotshot even before Cultural Revolution for his research specializing in Mao Zedong Thought – Father’s has been the philosophical thoughts of Marx and Engels – and his being leader of the Communist Party organ at the Department as well as the vice chair supervising teaching and research in the Marxist fields. Father had published an article with him in 1964, and in Feng’s opinion had not been for Liu Rong, relying only on his roommate Xiong Maosheng’s introduction Father probably wouldn’t have been able to join the Party just before Cultural Revolution.
Father had a temper, sometimes tending to argue with others to an unpleasant ending. At elementary school age, Feng sometimes would say he heard some local things differently from what Father told him, asserting, “Yuan Ling told me,” and Father would respond, “Don’t believe everything Yuan Ling says. If Yuan Ling asked you to die, would you?” By middle school age, Father liked to discuss some of his writing ideas with Feng, but if Feng disagreed with some of them and insisted, Father would give him a slap, and say afterwards, “If you are so good then go outside to debate, go to die. Do you think you are Einstein?”
By late 1970s and early 1980s Feng was a Math and Computer Science undergraduate student at Sun Yat-sen University, and Professor Liu Rong was the University Vice President overseeing political indoctrination; all students at the university listened to Vice President Liu’s political education speeches on occasions.
At the time Father was a member of the University Academic Committee, within which the Social Sciences and Humanity fields were under the leadership of Vice President Liu. Many years later Feng has learned that during a 1980s’ Committee review of proposed academic-rank promotions for faculty members, some candidates supported by Father was vetoed, and Father wrote a formal letter to the university administration accusing Vice President Liu Rong of suppressing talents.
Professor Liu Rong was originally from Yuhuan County in Zhejiang Province, a county with the same name as Tang-dynasty Emperor Xuanzong’s Concubine-Empress Yang Yuhuan – a controversial imperial character in the era of the poet Li Bai whose literature Father originally studied before he was transferred by the university to philosophy. During 1980s Prof. Liu academically supervised China’s first Ph.D. in Mao Zedong Thought, and received the National Outstanding Teacher Award in 1989.
When Teacher Liu Rong died of lung cancer at the age of around 81, that day happened to be February 20, Father’s birthday. But regardless, he lived a life 8 or 9 years longer than Father’s when later Father died of heart diseases at over 72.
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