Voices carry: behind bars and backstage during China's Revolution and reform by Ruocheng Ying & Claire Conceison

Author:Ruocheng Ying & Claire Conceison [Ying, Ruocheng & Conceison, Claire]
Language: zho
Format: epub
Tags: #genre
ISBN: 9780742555556
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2009-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

This was 1976, just after Mao Zedong died. As I opened the gate, there he was, this diplomat, breathing heavily because he had to run up all those stairs.

“Is something wrong with your family?” I asked.

“No, no, no, no,” he said, barely able to speak because of his excitement.

Then he blurted out, “Finally, they’re arrested, they’re arrested!” He was referring to the Gang of Four—Jiang Qing and her cohorts.

This man worked high up in the foreign office, where he supervised an information center. Even if nobody else knew about something, he knew the moment it happened. So as a result, I became one of the first to know, too. It was like getting the news about the Japanese decision to surrender in 1945.

But for nearly a week after the whole thing happened, there was no sign posted about it in the streets, and nobody else knew. The Chinese are pretty good at keeping secrets. Finally a week later it went public, and our Gang of Four bought drinks and celebrated the demise of our namesake.

Our little group usually met at my home to have our private discussions. The helicopter man and I had gone to boarding school together, as I mentioned. He was a year younger than I was. As boys we faced a lot of fistfights side by side, chiefly against the “White Russians”—those who didn’t have a passport and were not Soviet citizens: the Soviet government would not recognize them, and they would not recognize the Soviet government. They all claimed to be descendants of the aristocracy. They didn’t have passports, but China was pretty easy to get into in those days. One of the games these boys enjoyed most was insulting the Chinese and calling us names.

The diplomat was a friend I met through my wife. She had been borrowed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to take care of a foreign visitor who was from the family that owns the New York Times. They were extremely shorthanded because most of the English-speaking people had been sent to the countryside to cadre schools, so they didn’t have interpreters or guides to accompany important visitors. It was in 1975 and Zhou Enlai was still around. This visitor was the most important journalist from the New York Times, and his family happened to own the paper. The diplomat was obviously a wellinformed person and was on rather close terms with Mao’s interpreter, Nancy Tang, and Mao’s cousin, who were both serving as translators along with my wife. Nancy Tang had a built-in loudspeaker system—without making the slightest effort, she could make everybody hear. She first made her name with Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972.

The priest was introduced to me in 1972 or 1973 by the helicopter man.16 Very few people in China after 1949 associated with those who were not from their own work unit or profession. So in order to talk about these political matters privately in a mixed group like ours, we had to be

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.