Jung Chang On Life Under Mao & Being Banned From China

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0:28William:hello empire listeners and viewers william drimple here and we recently recorded a spectacular bonus episode with yung chang all the horrors of mao's china that rana mita told us from the point of view of a historian studying archives, Yung Chang tells us firsthand as a woman who was briefly a Red Guard and as someone who saw her parents thrown into labour camps and disgraced at the Cultural Revolution. It's an extraordinary story that she tells from her brilliant memoir, Wild Swans, and its recent follow-up, Fly Wild Swans, as well as her great biography of Mao. Here is an extract of the bonus for you to enjoy.

1:10William:If you want the full episode, including her thoughts on Xi Jinping, China's relationship with the US in this new Trump phase of sort of quasi-imperialism, join the club at empirepoduk.com. The link is in the episode description for the price of a pint a month. You can also get early access to series and ad-free listening. But now, here is a bit of our episode with the great Yung Chang. Jung, it wasn't just your parents who were involved in all these events. You yourself were a participant in them. You were a member of the Red Guards. You participated in house raids, attended denunciation meetings and witnessed, I'm sorry, as part of real violence against people that were accused of being class enemies.

1:56William:Can you take us back to that moment in your life? What did you believe then? And how did it feel to be swept up in that extraordinary fervor of that moment in history. By the way, I was in the Red Guard for only two weeks. But still, you're the only Red Guard I've ever met, Jung. No, but everybody of my generation was a Red Guard. So it's not a kind of elite group, not like the Communist Party or the Communist Youth League or even the Young Pioneers. So I was swept into these horrible things, which I documented in wild swans. But thank God, radicalism, violence and atrocities were not in my nature.

2:42So I was terrified and I was very much of an unlooker rather than a participant.

2:50William:Did you feel detached? Because even just looking at photographs, I've been going through photographs this week of the Cultural Revolution. And there's this sort of fervor in the eyes of the young people as they're beating their fists in the air and holding their red books. Did you feel detached from that? Were you aware that this was something you somehow couldn't participate in? Well, yes. I hated all that. I feared all that. I lived in dread, in disgust all the time. Because this sort of thing happened in the school. I mean, in my school, I was 14 when the Cultural Revolution started. My school is the oldest school in China.

3:34It was founded in 141 BC.

3:38William:I love that. It was a Confucius temple. And so you can imagine they had the most gorgeous campus with antiques, with this great, grand Confucius temple. There is even a canal going across the campus, and there was a beautiful garden. And there were two tall stone tablets with Confucius teachings, beautiful calligraphy engraved on it, and the whole thing. And when the Cultural Revolution started in 1966, all these things were destroyed under my eyes. These beautiful buildings and all these, yeah. These beautiful buildings were ransacked. You know, people climb onto the roof and throw the piles down and basically destroying it.

4:35And there was a huge bronze incense burner.

4:40William:Right, I know the thought, yeah. It was overturned. The boys were urinating into it. and they organized the crowd to pull down those two giant stone tablets. And when they had to hire a truck to do the pulling, because it was too deep, the roots were too deep. And when the tablets fell, it sort of destroyed a path. And the garden was trampled because Mao ordered the young people to destroy old culture. And there was a poor sijiu, the four olds. The four olds, absolutely. I mean, the key of the four olds was the old culture, Chinese culture. And Mao also turned against the horticulture and said cultivating flowers and the grass was a bourgeois habit and get rid of the gardeners.

5:36And the gardener in my school was ferociously beaten up. I didn't see it, but I heard about it. and the gardens, all the plants were destroyed and books were burned. They didn't happen in my school, but it was sealed off the school library. Nobody was allowed to read. And our teachers were being subject to denunciation meetings. All the pupils were gathered because we were ordered to stay in the school to take part in the Cultural Revolution. And so we all had to stay there. And the teachers were, I saw my, for example, my English language teacher were put on the stage. His hands were ferociously pushed to the back, head were ferociously pushed down, and he fell from the narrow bench he was forced to stand on.

6:33And he cut his forehead, and I saw blood trickling down. I mean, it was summer, August, and for me, my heart was like in ice in the coldest winter. And when my philosopher teacher was beaten up by pupils of my form, because she had to criticize them for not working hard, I think.

7:02William:Your father, you mentioned, suffered the same fate himself. Were you there at the denunciation meeting in the sports ground when he suffered this sort of thing? Well, my father then decided this time he must speak up. So he did what he had wanted to do four years ago in the Great Salmon. And he wrote to Mao because that was writing to Mao was the only way you could change policy. You know, my father at denunciation, my father went through dozens and dozens of denunciation meetings, far worse. He was beaten up, his legs, his ribs were broken, when the eye was sort of temporarily blind. because he was what they call an anti-Mao, counter-revolutionary.

7:57And my mother was under tremendous pressure to denounce my father, and she refused. So as a result, she was put to scores of denunciation meetings.

8:11William:What did it feel like to have that happen to your own parents within your own household? Of course, I'm constantly terrified, but it also made me more brave because I admired my parents. From 1415 to the next 10 years was the Cultural Revolution. I was full of admiration for my parents. I went with my mother to a denunciation rally, a big one with thousands of people against her. They didn't know who she was because she wasn't a senior official, but she was denounced because of my father. She was standing by my father. My mother was suffering from a hemorrhage, and my grandma was sobbing when my mother was taken away because my grandma felt my mother could have a hemorrhage and die.

9:05So I went, I was 15, I went with my mother, And I sat in a corner. Of course, I saw the horrible thing. I described in some detail in a fly, well, swans. And we went through hell, you know, but the Cultural Revolution broke many families.

9:26William:You describe an extraordinary scene in your own household when there's a raid on the house and you have to flush a poem that you've written down the lavatory so it's not found. Can you tell that story? Yes, that's my first literary venture. Things were better after that. Yes, yes. It was my 16th birthday in 1968, and my parents were in detention. I wrote my first poem. That was the first time I thought clearly in my head that the society I was living in was hell. And I thought that we were always told communist China was paradise on earth. And I thought if this was paradise, well, then it's hell.

10:18And so I wrote a poem, and it wasn't political, but all poems were condemned. Yudemau, who himself was a passionate reader, was so extreme, he criticized Stalin for allowing the classics to survive. He said Stalin made a big mistake. So we were starved of books to read. So on that day, I wrote my first poem, and I heard the door banging. The Red Guards had come to raid our flat, and I would get into trouble. My family would get into trouble for my poem. So I rushed to the bathroom to tear up my poem, and flush it down the toilet. But I read some books. I was able to read hundreds of books. And the reason was that I had a 13-year-old brother who was very entrepreneurial, who discovered a black market selling books.

11:21The books that had escaped the bonfires of the Red God. And so my brother built up a big collection. He hid them like under the water tower or under a mattress. And I remember the books I read. I mean, the cover was torn with and put Mao-selected

11:42William:works of Mao on the cover. And so I was able to read these books. That really kept me sane. How did you and your siblings survive, both practically and emotionally, during this time when your family had been persecuted and the family scattered and your poor father's in a detention camp? Practically, the country was actually very much controlled, very much orderly. I mean, people often described Red Guard violence as though it was something that had gone out of hand. Far from it. I mean, I know for a fact that the denunciations against my parents were organized by the people who wanted them to suffer.

12:29And the house raids were organized. And so our life, my father's, my parents' salaries were stopped. But we were given an allowance. I mean, each of us was given an allowance. and so we could survive. And the other things, you know, like medical care, you know, whatever. And later when I was exiled to the edge of the Himalayas to work as a peasant, I mean, the whole thing was superbly organized by Zhou Enlai, Mao's prime minister, who was a superb administrator as well as a diplomat. And, you know, we were given mosquito nets, we were given a water can for the long walks we have to do, and we were given an allowance for the first year.

13:29So I'm telling you, everything was organized. The banks were working. Nobody robbed a bank. That's not the sign of a society in chaos.

13:41William:Tell me about this time in the countryside. You and your siblings are dispersed, I think, to separate labor camps. And you became an electrician, which is not something I think of you today has been… Well, first of all, in the countryside, I worked as a peasant. But I became a barefoot doctor because Mao had condemned doctors. And instead, the countryside was supposed to have barefoot doctors. Barefoot doctors basically meant peasant doctors who treasure their shoes too much. So they go barefoot. And I became a doctor. But because Mao also condemned for education and books and said the more books you read, the more stupid you become, I became a doctor without any training.

14:34I had one book, which was a barefoot doctor's manual. and on one page, symptoms, and on the opposite page, prescriptions. If a peasant came to me, I'd look at the symptoms, I'd look at the prescriptions. And of course, they're all wise. They steer to care of me to go to a trained doctor.

14:59William:How old were you at this point? I was 17 at this point. And the other thing is what I did learn, acupuncture from being a Bev doctor. And because the peasants didn't trust me, and there were some boys who were exiled to the other villages, and they came to be my guinea pigs. That's because they were keen on you, or what was their motives? They were keen on me. Yes, I was 17.

15:32William:Jung, you describe as one of the more unexpected moments in your story, Nixon's visit to China in 1972. And you write about your joy at the visit, partly because it helped generate a new climate in which some of the translations of foreign books became available. You could actually get hold of some books. Tell us about all that. Yes. Well, I read six books. I think six books were allowed. Six modern Western books were allowed. What were they? They were Nixon's own six crises, although with the anti-communist bits edited out. And there was The Best and the Brightest, about the Kennedy administration.

16:15And there was The Winds of War, Herman Wook, which was made into a brilliant, wonderful television series. And I remember these books. I mean, they were not for the general public. They were for the top elite, but through the friends of my parents, I laid my hands on them, and they opened my eyes to the contemporary West, which was incredible. You know, when I was growing up in China, China was completely isolated from the outside world. And I only read, you know, when I was a child, what was allowed was the little match girl from Hans Christian Andersen. Because she died, you know, of cold and hunger on New Year's Eve.

17:04That's the capitalist society. and the other was Dickens' Oliver Twist, I think excerpts of it. The book was translated into the orphan in the capital of fog. So I remember today clearly these great big eyes and stretched the hand with a bow, Oliver wants more. So we were told that was the life of Western children. Before the famine, I was in the kindergarten, and when the children, there was no food, we were in the elite, so there was enough food. And if we wouldn't eat up our food, our teachers would say, think of all the starving children in the capitalist world.

17:59William:Hope you enjoyed that extract. To listen to the full episode where Yung Chang describes being banned from Xi Jinping's China, unable to see her dying mother, and her thoughts on Iran and Venezuela, you've got to head to empirepoduk.com and join our wonderful club.