Riding the Iron Rooster

That statue was one of the souvenirs of the Cultural Revolution. At that time students did not apply to Fudan. There were no entrance exams. Instead, suitably violent and fanatical youths were sent from their factories and work units to persecute the hapless teachers. Coming to class and spending the morning making your teacher parade up and down wearing a dunce cap was regarded as a serious endeavor by the students, who were not by any means all Red Guards. They were simply young and enjoyed the idea of turning the university upside down.

It is a compelling idea—standing a society on its head, putting children in charge, declaring a ten-year holiday, jailing and tormenting parents and authority figures, painting the streets red, chanting, settling scores with old enemies and refusing to study. But it does not take longer than a few seconds to see that it is totally impractical, not to say dangerous, and that any society having to endure it would become stupider, more brutish, slower, less subtle, backward and insecure.

"I'll give you an example of the English lessons," a university official told me. 'The students would show up in class, make their greeting to the portrait of Chairman Mao, and then when the teacher began speaking they would interrupt. This is a waste of time'; 'This is an imperialist subject'; 'What is the point of studying English?' That sort of thing."

Mr. Liu's attitude towards Chairman Mao was that the Old Man had really gone off in the late 1950s. I had heard this before—they suggested that he was gaga but they meant an extreme form of senile dementia.

"You think he was crazy?" I said.

"Let's say he made many mistakes," Mr. Liu said.

'Tell me one or two."

"All right. In 1957 the president of Peking University, who was a close personal friend of Mao, went to see him. His name was Ma Yinchu. He said, There are five hundred million people in China. We must do something about the population before it is too late.' Well, people say Mao was like an emperor. That is not so. But he had certain characteristics—like a sage, delivering wise sayings. He was very angry with President Ma for questioning him—for even bringing up this subject of population. He said, 'What is the problem? A man is born with one mouth but has two hands to feed that mouth.'"

"Is that a wise saying?"

"It is a silly saying," Mr. Liu said. "President Ma left feeling frustrated. He resigned his post and just stayed home reading books after that. That was Mao's first big mistake—not doing anything about the population when he was warned."

"Can you give me some more mistakes, Mr. Liu?"

'Two more. He always spoke about collective leadership and group decisions, but in fact that was all false. There was no democracy at all. That was a serious contradiction. And it was a mistake for him to use his personal popularity to sway the people. In the end this was a corrupting thing, because he manipulated them."

The president of Fudan is a shy, brilliant woman named Xie Xide, a Smith College graduate (class of' 49) and M.I.T. Ph.D. Her intelligence and her education and her original research in the field of physics were no help during the Cultural Revolution—it is a matter of record that they were held against her. She was shipped out of Shanghai to a factory, where she assembled radios during the day and studied Mao's Thoughts at night. The Thoughts were set to music. Doctor Xie was required to sing them. Was it any wonder that on the wall of her apartment there was a dramatic piece of calligraphy, two characters jing song, a sort of idealist's epigram that exhorts people to be like a pine tree (song) that not even a strong wind can bend (jing covers that whole defiant image). These characters were inscribed by Fang Yi, a former vice-premier in the Central Government and vice-chairman of the Academy of Sciences. He was a man noted for having a mind of his own.

President Xie has a pronounced limp, and it is whispered that she was tortured during the Cultural Revolution. But her own shyness made me too shy to ask a brutal question—and anyway, there were many examples of people who were physically mistreated by Red Guards. One of Deng Xiaoping's sons, Deng Pufang, was thrown out of a window. His spine was snapped and he is still in a wheelchair.

I asked in an oblique way about the university students' fanaticism, because Professor Phan had told me that he had been held for forty-one days by them in the struggle sessions at his house.

"The university students were very bad," President Xie said. "The young schoolchildren were bewildered—they hardly knew what was going on. But by far the worst were the high-school students."

I said nothing, because I wanted her to say more. She had a soft but very distinct voice.

"Here at Fudan the students humiliated their teachers," she said. "But in the high schools it was not unknown for students to beat their teachers to death."