Riding the Iron Rooster

In a word, Mr. Hu was being blamed for the student protests. He was spineless, weepy, ideologically unsound. In the pantheon of modern Chinese goblins and enemies, which included a running dog, a paper tiger, a snake spirit and a cow demon, Mr. Hu had become one of the slimiest and least trustworthy, a bourgeois liberal. The Maoist view still stood: a liberal was a dangerous hypocrite.

He was not the only one to go. A day or so later, the writer Wang Ruowang was expelled from the Communist Party. Was this interesting, and did anyone care about such boring political ambushes? My feeling was that I would much rather have been bird-watching in Heilongjiang, yet these political events were not without their amusing ironies. For example, this man Wang had had his problems before. In 1957 he had been labeled "a rightist" in Mao's Anti-Rightist Campaign, a witch-hunt that had followed the Hundred Flowers Campaign (when the rightists had been suckered into making public criticisms of the Party). And then, in 1966, Mr. Wang had fallen again. He was "struggled" and finally charged with being "a cow demon." This he had to live with for ten years. He was then rehabilitated and made a council member of the Chinese Writers' Association and of the Shanghai Writers' Association. His crime (so Xinhua said) was that he "advocated bourgeois liberalization," and criticized the Party saying, "you [the Party] have nothing left to do now that the people have the freedom to write and to pick whatever theatrical performances they like."

Shanghai had just seen a Chinese run of the torrid O'Neill play Desire Under the Elms, so there was a grain of truth in that (it had been banned until recently). In a sense, the only heresy that Mr. Wang committed was that he said what everyone knew to be true.

It was very obvious that many people behaved like capitalists and petit-bourgeois traders. They had family businesses. They owned shops. Just the day before Wang fell, I had a ride in a privately owned taxi. "I own this car," the man said. It was a jalopy, but it was all his. People were changing jobs, making dresses, peddling their own wares, and selling their vegetables off their own pushcarts. But it was a great mistake for anyone to call this capitalism. You had to call it The Chinese Way. And it was an error for anyone to draw attention to the new freedoms. Hypocrisy was necessary. The government did not want to appear soft; and the Party preferred to live with the illusion that it was more repressive than it actually was.

It was another instance of the Chinese hating idle talk. It was a puritanical dislike for loose behavior and foolery. The Chinese attitude was, Get on with the job, don't talk so much, don't ask questions. It did not matter very much if someone was making a fat profit out of his cabbages, or if he was putting on a Western play, or if he believed in the hygienic value of the knife and fork. The error was in talking about such things, because that created conflict. I remember my Chinese friend in Peking, when I was protesting about Mr. Fang being my nanny. This knowledgeable Chinese fellow looked at me, closed his eyes, and shook his head, a gesture that meant: Don't say another word.

In the meantime, as long as you didn't gloat about it, you could do pretty much as you liked. These days no one breathed down my neck. They had forgotten that I was wandering through China. And one day in Shanghai I saw some students from Nankai University in Tianjin—about twenty of them—who were about to leave for a tour of the United States. They were a theatrical troupe, who were on their way to Minneapolis and St. Louis and a dozen other cities to perform a play adapted from the novel Rickshaw Boy.

They were friendly, eager students, very excited about their overseas tour. I took one aside and asked him about the production. The novel, by Lao She, is the story of a rickshaw puller in Peking in the 1930s.

I said, "Wasn't Lao She hounded to death by Red Guards?"

"Ha! Ha!" the student said, and the laugh meant emphatically Don't bring that up!