God Is Red - Liao Yiwu [59]
We were not allowed to see him; we didn’t know what to do to defend him. I found out later that while he was charged with crimes, they never gave details of what he had done. They had to come up with something to justify why they had locked him up for so long. I was told that a work-team leader read the charges cooked up by a local village chief, but when the leader asked for details, the village chief couldn’t answer him and felt the question made him lose face, so he yelled back at the work-team leader. Since there was not enough evidence, another village official suggested that my brother be spared the death penalty, but an official at the regional level was worried that sparing my elder brother would set a bad precedent and would dampen the enthusiasm of the masses. In that era, to be a potential candidate for village leadership, all you had to do was scream loudly at public denunciation meetings and be ruthless with “class enemies.”
You are too young to understand what it was like. We were treated much worse than animals. People would torture us whenever they felt like it. During the peak of the campaign, the government work teams fanned the sentiment of hatred. Even the nicest and kindest peasants began to wave their fists and slap or kick us. Toward the end, revolutionary peasants didn’t need a reason to kill a landlord. At public denunciation meetings, people became carried away with their emotions and would drag someone out and shoot him on the spot. Bang, bang, and the person was gone forever. Nobody questioned this ruthless practice or took responsibility. Most of the work-team members were sent from the cities. They had no knowledge of what was going on at the local level. Chairman Mao said officials should listen to the voice of the people. And work-team members didn’t dare ignore the voice of the people. Once people became brainwashed by Communist ideology and by Mao’s propaganda, their thinking became chaotic. All humanity was lost. At its peak, even the work team found it hard to rein in the fanaticism.
Let me explain. In this area, it was rare to find anyone who was not addicted to opium or gambling. Only those who had embraced God had the stamina to kick their habits. When I was a kid, I remember that people in this area didn’t grow crops. Instead, they grew poppies. We used to run around in the poppy fields to catch butterflies. People also gambled heavily. This was a very strange phenomenon. People’s wealth switched hands very quickly. In the afternoon, the person might be a rich landowner. By evening, he was homeless, having gambled everything away—his land, his house, even his wife.
When the Communists came, they banned opium smoking and gambling, and they banned Christianity. Apart from working in the fields, people didn’t have anything else to do in the evenings. Political campaigns turned into a form of entertainment. They devoted all their extra energy to beating up people, killing people, and confiscating the property of others. Those homeless drug addicts and gamblers suddenly became loyal revolutionary allies. They didn’t have to pay off their debts; their gambling and drug habits, their poverty, the practice of pawning their wives and children for drug money, their homelessness, everything was the fault of landlords exploiting poor revolutionaries.
Poverty became a badge of honor, and the children of the poor became the offspring of the true proletariat. They felt superior to everyone else and were well fed and clothed. They didn’t even have to take any responsibility when killing someone at public denunciation meetings. That was more fun than smoking opium and gambling, don’t you think?
Liao: In the Mao era, we say, people became the true masters of the nation.
Zhang: The Communist Party’s policies might have been well meant, but the people who implemented them took