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Ji Xianlin: Preface to Miscellaneous Recollections from the Cowshed
Miscellaneous Recollections from the Cowshed was written in 1992. Why, after six years, was it only now, in 1998, brought out for publication? This rather violates the usual conventions of book writing. Readers are bound to suspect that there must be some explanation.
Their suspicion is justified: there is indeed an explanation, and it is not mysterious at all. It arises merely from a bit of personal selfishness—my own petty “judging a gentleman’s belly by a small man’s heart.” I had already been trampled on by the “revolutionary” youngsters—though in fact they were not necessarily all young—by a thousand feet, and was supposed to be unable ever to rise again. Yet as fortune turned and adversity passed, and with the world’s rightful course restored, I not only stood back up, but soared to success, with a very smooth “official” career, which made some of the youngsters who had beaten and tormented me tremble with fear. If I had really wanted revenge, I would have had a thousand methods at my disposal, fully at hand, and without the least effort could have taken revenge.
But I did not do so. I struck at no one, took revenge on no one, put no one in tight shoes, and did not wield a big stick. Does that mean I was some remarkable paragon of tolerance and magnanimity? No, no, absolutely not. I have love, I have hate; I can be jealous, I want revenge, and my capacity for tolerance is no greater than anyone else’s. But the moment a thought of revenge arose, I immediately thought that under the conditions and atmosphere of that time, everyone—no matter which mountain stronghold or faction he belonged to—was like someone who had drunk the potion of bewitchment, alienated into a non-person. People now sometimes curse others as “beasts”; I think that is an insult to beasts. Beasts eat people because they are hungry. They do not lie, they do not play tricks, and they certainly never first give a long speech about why people must be eaten, citing authorities from all sides, grandly and prolifically, and only then open their mouths to eat people. Human beings are not like that. The “non-person” I speak of here is by no means a beast; I merely call him a “non-person.” When I myself was beaten until I felt as if “one Buddha had emerged, and two Buddhas had risen to heaven,” I still devoutly believed in the correctness of the “Cultural Revolution”; how then could I make harsh demands upon others? Those who beat people and those who were beaten were both victims; they were merely in different positions. It was because of these thoughts that I did not take revenge.
But this is only the dignified, proper side of the matter; it is not the whole of it. There is also my selfish side.
Those who understand the “ten years of upheaval” all know that in those days, when factional battles were fought, all schools, offices, factories, enterprises, and even some military units were split into two opposing factions, each of which was “uniquely leftist” and “uniquely supreme.” Looking back now, both factions were engaged in beating, smashing, and looting, and even murder and arson; they were all cut from the same cloth, and neither was any better than the other. To discuss or debate who was right and who was wrong now is truly meaningless. But at the time there was something called “factionalism”: intangible, invisible, baseless, and unreasonable, and yet darkly vicious and poisonous, with not a shred of rationality. Whoever fell under its spell was as if possessed. If an originally affectionate and harmonious family happened unfortunately to belong to opposite factions, then some couples divorced, some fathers and sons turned against each other, and at the very least there was “brothers quarrelling within the walls,” with daily quarrels at home. I have studied for seventy or eighty years, and in books from ancient and modern times, Chinese and foreign, I have never found such a psychological condition. It is truly worth the serious investigation of sociologists and psychologists.
I myself was no exception. My own factionalism was not at all mild. Yet I believe that my factionalism came by no means easily; I acquired it by staking my life on it. When the movement began, as the head of a department, I had no qualification to join the “revolutionary masses” in making revolution. “Revolution is no crime, rebellion is justified”—this slogan echoed across the land, but it had no direct connection with me; at first I was placed in the position of the object of “revolution” and “rebellion.” However, before liberation I detested politics most of all and had no entanglement whatsoever with the Kuomintang. The major charges could not be pinned on me. Being denounced as a “capitalist-roader” and a “bourgeois reactionary academic authority” was only natural and unavoidable. Once those two storms of frenzy had passed, I returned to my original form, became a free man, and could mingle among the revolutionary masses.
If I had kept to myself and behaved properly, I could certainly have become a carefree freewheeler and muddled through several years quite happily. Yet, fortunately or unfortunately? Heaven granted me a stubborn streak, and I dared to speak out for justice. If there is anything about me that deserves praise, it is this stubborn streak. No matter how many faults I have, having this stubborn streak is already worth being somewhat pleased with myself over; my life has then not been lived in vain. As I sat back and watched, the more I saw, the more I felt that that extremely powerful “old Buddha” at Peking University was going against the grain of history, holding the entire university’s financial power in his hands, savagely suppressing the weak opposing faction, even cutting off water and electricity, and allowing his underlings to use spears to stab local middle school students from outside the campus to death. This was intolerable! I did not truly understand which line or which line—yet once my stubbornness flared up, I slapped the table and rose, resolutely and decisively joining the “revolutionary organization” of the faction opposed to that “old Buddha.” The “old Buddha” was famous for his ruthlessness. I nearly paid for it with my old life. The details are all recounted in the book, so I need not repeat them here.
Once one has joined a faction, that is one thing; but once one has joined, factionalism becomes like a poisonous serpent, winding itself tightly around me and stripping my speech and actions of all rationality. After the ten years of upheaval ended, the sky and sun were seen again; yet traces, darker or lighter, of factionalism still remained in people’s hearts, and with the slightest lapse of attention they would show themselves. More than half of my colleagues were on the opposite side during the ten years of upheaval. They criticized me, slandered me, interrogated me, kicked and beat me. Many of them seemed to have some sense of shame and remorse. I think these people were all good comrades who, like me, had been momentarily muddleheaded, their hearts oiled over by nonsense, and had done some things not very rational. There is no one in the world who never makes mistakes—that is a truth everyone admits. If these people, who were originally good people, were to know that I had hidden a copy of Miscellaneous Recollections from the Cowshed in my drawer, they would certainly think that I was the kind who settles accounts after the autumn harvest, privately keeping black ledgers and preparing to strike back later. Although I did not write down names in my book—I did this deliberately—those involved would know at a glance who was who, and it would be as easy as looking up the right entry in a register. With such an uneasy frame of mind, how could we possibly sit at the same table and work together? In order to avoid such an awkward situation, I wrote the book but kept it secret and did not make it public.
Then why didn’t you simply write such a book in the first place? That question is a good one; it hits the very heart of the matter.
In fact, at the outset I really had no intention of writing such a book. Otherwise, if the ten years of upheaval officially ended in 1976, why did I only write the book in 1992, sixteen years later, after such a long interval? Those sixteen years were a period of reflection, observation, bewilderment, and expectation. I hated myself for having been politically no better than a stupid mule. As for the so-called “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” that cruel and chaotic tragedy, which brought shame and humiliation upon our great Chinese nation, pushed our country’s economy to the brink, and was unprecedented and, I hope, will remain unrepeatable—still no one has been able to give a comprehensive and reasonable explanation of it. Many people understood its essence long ago, whereas I only saw the light after the Gang of Four fell from power. I truly felt ashamed.
Once my mind had finally opened, I felt that the way the parties involved handled this disaster was problematic. A rougher treatment may be better than a more delicate one; that is not necessarily without reason. But I think we went too rough. I have already said above that the overwhelming majority of people were deceived. Even if they were deceived, they should at least have received enough lessons in this once-in-a-thousand-years opportunity to raise their own level and avoid repeating the same mistake in the future. Such an opportunity is probably not likely to come again. Moreover, among those beat-and-smash-and-loot elements, there really were some bad people no better than beasts. These bad people were more capable than the good people. During the Cultural Revolution there was a common term: chameleon. These bad people were precisely chameleons. At the first sign that the wind had shifted, they immediately changed color. Some disguised themselves as upstanding gentlemen; some transformed into the son-in-law under the roof of some general or leader, and hid under that great umbrella. Some wielded their silver-tongued eloquence and displayed their skills in maneuvering between contending forces, biding their time in temporary obscurity, spying out the moment; and when, one day, storm and thunder came, they once again became superiors among men. Such people have great ambitions, many tricks, a deep understanding of the doctrines of despotism and duplicity, and are adept at ingratiating themselves. In reality, they are latent cancer cells in our socialist society, bound sooner or later to expand. Letting these people slip through our fingers at the time was truly planting hidden trouble for the future. I even suspect that today, our country and society, taken as a whole, are stable and united, and full of hope. But society has problems at the moral level; in the governments of many places the atmosphere is unhealthy, and there are quite a few people of low quality. If one carefully traces their roots, I fear they are connected with the lingering poison of the ten years of upheaval, and with the people mentioned above.
What I have written above is the result of my reflection and observation, and the reason for my puzzlement. But what was it that I was expecting?
I was expecting someone to write down the disasters he or she personally suffered. Some marshals, many veteran generals—born amid fire and blood, having spent half their lives on the battlefield—can be said to have made contributions to the people. Some state leaders, too, were revolutionaries their entire lives and were “meritorious figures” of the people. The overwhelming majority of senior intellectuals, famous writers, and actors were hardworking people who sincerely protected the Party. All of these good people were inexplicably splashed with filthy water, framed with trumped-up charges, had their cases endlessly exaggerated, and were bound to be driven to death before the matter would be considered finished. One cannot help wondering what kind of motives were behind all this. In China there has long been the saying, “When the birds are all gone, the good bow is put away; when the cunning hare is dead, the hound is cooked.” But those who did such things were feudal emperors, whereas we were a resplendent socialist state. The cruelty and mercilessness of what was done made even feudal emperors ashamed of themselves. And the scope was so vast that it was unprecedented. Could the victims’ hearts really have been without anger? Why not give vent to it? I waited day after day, month after month, year after year; and in the end I was disappointed, for no one was willing to put pen to paper, or to dictate and let someone else write. I was deeply perplexed and extremely worried. If this unprecedented disaster leaves no record, then our descendants will not draw the lessons they ought to draw from it, and in the future, once conditions become suitable again, there may well be madmen who commit the same cruel stupidity. How terrifying that would be! If, today, you talk to young people about the disasters of the ten years of upheaval, they will often stare at you with eyes wide in astonishment and suspicion, as if they cannot believe that such inconceivable things could exist under heaven. They probably think I am lying, that I am talking about the three sacred mountains of the Isles of the Immortals on the sea, “the mountains are in the midst of the vague and the misty.” Although for a period there was a vogue for so-called “scar literature,” in my view that was nothing more than a bruised patch of skin; a dab of red medicine and all was well. The real scars are still buried deep in many people’s hearts, and have not been revealed. I was expecting that one day the parties involved would reveal them.
In addition, I have another extremely unrealistic expectation. The expectation above was addressed to those people who suffered torment during the great upheaval. Why could not the “rebels” of the time, who tormented people and even tormented them to death—people who were in fact beat-and-smash-and-loot elements—step forward and reveal their own psychological state and their process of tormenting others by writing an article or a book? People of this kind are now already in their forties or fifties, and some hold important positions. Even if others do not settle accounts with them, if they themselves still have a bit of conscience and a bit of reason, then after the wine and the lights are over, when the night is quiet, could they put their hand on their heart and ask themselves: can you sleep soundly? If people of this kind—and by estimate, there are quite a few of them—were also to write something, then when their words are read side by side with what the tormented and persecuted wrote, the educational significance for our people, especially for our descendants, would be immense, immensely immense. I do not ask them to conduct self-criticism and repent; these are not essential matters. I only expect them to write down the truth with honest pen. By doing so, they could be said to have made a great contribution to our nation, and would receive nothing but praise, never blame; of this I am absolutely certain.
Thus, cherishing expectations on both sides, I watched for stars and waited for the moon, and after waiting and waiting, I waited twelve years. The sun rose in the East, but my expectations came to nothing.
But the time had already reached 1992. Many of those who had been persecuted in those days had, like the leaves of late autumn, gradually withered away; since many of them were old, the laws of life and death in the universe are impossible to resist. And I myself was already growing old. The ancients said: “Wait till the Yellow River runs clear.” Of the two expectations in my lifetime, one was beyond my power; but for the other, namely the one concerning the persecuted, I still had great scope. I myself was a victim, after all. Why was I so foolish as to sit by a tree stump waiting for a rabbit, expecting only others to act while refusing to move my own hand? Better to expect oneself than to expect others; let me do it myself. That was how Miscellaneous Recollections from the Cowshed came into being. I have never lied in my writing, and now I am laying out the whole story frankly, hoping it will be of some help to readers. But although I have myself fulfilled one expectation, I have still not abandoned my expectations of the others. In this mood of expectation, I wrote this preface, hoping that my expectations might be realized.
March 9, 1998
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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