The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution by Ji Xianlin

Author:Ji Xianlin [Xianlin, Ji]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781590179277
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2016-03-07T18:30:00+00:00

IN THE COWSHED (1)

WE WERE ABOUT to be herded into the prison we had built with our own hands. As the novelist Hu Feng said, “There is life to be lived everywhere”—even in the cowshed.[1] But finding a way to talk about living life in the cowshed is not so easy. I finally decided on the technique, much beloved by Chinese historians, of coming up with a theory as an organizing principle for my story. My theory has no basis in the academic literature, and it wouldn’t stand up to professional scrutiny. It is based purely on fieldwork, but I am nonetheless convinced of its truth.

I propose the Law of Maximum Torment: that everything the Red Guards did, no matter where their loyalties lay or what Party line they were defending, was calculated to inflict maximum pain on their victims. Their psychological and intellectual motivations I’ve already discussed above. Regardless of whether they were raiding intellectuals’ houses or reforming them through labor, their chief aim was to inflict pain. At the outset, they were limited to primitive methods they had learned from historical novels about feudal society. Even cavemen must have known how to slap and kick their victims. But the Red Guards were bright students, and they were good at swapping tips and learning from each other. They soon invented more sophisticated methods of tormenting their victims. Just as military technology develops quickly during wartime, torture techniques developed quickly during the Cultural Revolution. When one campus invented a new technique, it often spread like lightning across the country; the Red Guards at Peking University, for instance, could have patented the practice of hanging wooden boards around their victims’ necks. During the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards nationwide collaborated to design a methodology of torture so comprehensive that it ought to be preserved for future use. So much for my theory—an account of how it was put into practice in the cowshed follows.

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