GROWING UP IN MAO’S CHINA

Amei Li grew up in Red China, the daughter of a former business owner. In her memoir Pink Flower – Growing Up in Mao’s China, she describes the austerity of the Great Hunger (officially the Great Leap Forward) and later the terror and turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. Instead of studying medicine at university she was sent, with millions of others, to the country to “learn from the peasants”. In a remote village she met two “rightist” scholars, exiled a decade earlier, who became her private tutors in English and the great books of Western literature. Eventually she was able to return to her family in Beijing where she became a first-hand witness to the massacre at Tiananmen Square. In conversation with Gerard Henderson, Executive Director of The Sydney Institute, Amei Li spoke for The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 1 June 2022. What follows is an edited transcript of the discussion on the night.

GROWING UP IN MAO’S CHINA

Amei Li with Gerard Henderson

Introduction by Gerard Henderson

Thanks for coming along tonight where we are launching Amei Li’s book, Pink Flower – Growing Up in Mao’s China, which has just been released. It’s great to be able to launch it here at The Sydney Institute tonight. I’m just going to introduce our speaker in a slightly unusual way – I’m going to give some details about her, but also brief details about China since 1949. Our speaker Amei Li, the author of Pink Flower, was born in Beijing in 1950. In 1968, for reasons she’ll explain, Amei Li was sent to White Pond Village, south west of Beijing. In 1975, she left the village of White Pond to study English in Shanxi University in Taiyuan. In 1978, she graduated and went to work in Taiyuan Machinery College.

In 1988, Amei Li returned to Beijing to teach at the College of Automotive Engineering. Then, in 1992, Amei Li came to Sydney and taught English to business men and women and others while she studied mathematics at the University of Sydney. She later taught mathematics in high schools in Sydney, and also at a coaching college. She retired in 2016.

Before we start our talk, I want to briefly run through – many people in the room here and on the call will know this – a little of the historical background. In 1949, the Communist Party of China came to power. In 1950, there was the suppression of the counter-revolutionaries, that is those who were said to oppose the revolution. From 1951 to October 1952 Chinese leader Mao Zedong launched the Three-Antis campaign targeted at Communist Party officials. In early 1952, there was also the Five-Antis campaign targeted at business.

In May 1956, Mao’s 100 Flowers campaign commenced under the heading “let 100 flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend” to encourage debate and discussion within China. But he didn’t really appreciate everything that he heard and this commenced the Anti-rightist campaign. In the Anti-rightist campaign, as Ted Rule points out in his Foreword to this book, some of those who were purged at that time were not finally released until 1978. From 1958 to 1962, China underwent the Great Leap Forward in which an estimated 30 million to 45 million died. From 1966 to 1976, there was the Cultural Revolution and in June 1989 the Tiananmen Square uprising and massacre took place. Now our speaker was around for all of that except the Communist Party coming to power in October 1949. As I mentioned, Ted Rule who is a specialist on China and is here tonight has written a lot of important material on China over the years. He has done the Foreword to this book which he praises. And one of the reasons he praises it is for its perspective as from a witness from the black classes.

We had Jung Chang here talking about Wild Swans some years ago. She is from what were called the red classes. And, tonight, we’ve got Amei Li who is from what were called the black classes. Ted Rule makes the point that there have been a lot of books and memoirs put out by people from the red classes but Ted Rule believes this is the first book from someone in the black classes.

Gerard Henderson – Amei, you were born in 1950 and born to black class parents. Who are black class parents as compared with red class parents?

Amei Li – The red class were the workers and peasants, especially poor peasants, and basically just a poorer class before the revolution. But after the revolution, it also meant all Communist Party officials and activists. The black class – before 1949 when the Chinese Communist Party took over – were people who were businessmen or working in the national government or if you were from a high authority under the Kuomintang, even with the Education Department or in the army. As long as you were of high rank before 1949, and not a Communist, after 1949 you were black. After the revolution, there were anti revolutionary black peasants, and some were rich peasants. The anti-revolutionaries were the black classes.

Gerard Henderson – So you were a black from the black class. Tell us why. Because your father was not, as I recall, a supporter of the Kuomintang. He wasn’t really involved in that period, but he was in business. So, what was he doing in business?

Amei Li – He had a little factory and a few shops selling a kind of hat, Western-style top hats. Because he had a business and a factory with workers, plus a few shops, he was seen as black.

Gerard Henderson – You describe your parents as Buddhist. Were they very seriously Buddhist or every now and then Buddhists.

Amei Li – My father was a very devoted Buddhist. My mother was also a Buddhist, but she was just a family woman. She didn’t attend outside because she had a bound foot and didn’t go out. She worshipped at home. My father’s mother lived at home so she would have a statue. She was very devoted and prayed all the time.

My mother was just part of that culture. My father was a vegetarian because of Buddhism. If you’re a very devoted Buddhist you do not eat meat. But in very hard times my mother would eat whatever the government supplied. To her, if you had meat and there was a supply for the kids, for the family, then eat meat. But even then, my father didn’t eat meat.

Gerard Henderson – It was your maternal grandmother who had the bound feet -right?

Amei Li – My mother had bound feet -and all her ancestors. All women older than her would have bound feet. She was the last generation.

Gerard Henderson – Now, as I said, you were born in 1950. And what was called the Great Leap Forward when I was at university happened. Explain first what the Leap Forward was and then how it affected you. It started in 1958 and ended around four years later.

Amei Li – Chairman Mao believed that China was backward because its iron and steel production was too low. So, he decided to catch up with Britain and America in 15 years. That’s a great leap forward to try to jump, to catch up. Mao’s way to catch up was to get everybody, in every school and every factory, every working unit in every village, to make a backyard furnace. People were ordered to take all metal things to be melted to make iron and steel. Because, at that time after the Anti-rightist campaign, all the technical specialists had been condemned and sent away or were in prison. That was about 50 million across the country.

There were no experts left who knew, especially Mao, how iron and steel could be produced. So, he ordered such a big effort. But, of course, it produced nothing. It affected me as a child. At school we were encouraged to pick up all the metals on the street or at home. Every family’s cooking ware had to be melted. Families were left a bare minimum to cook food. Spoons, everything. It damaged the whole country, especially in the countryside, because the peasants also had to do this. And the furnace, once it starts you can’t stop it. It went for 24 hours.

So, they had to cut down whatever trees they could find in the forest to keep the furnaces burning. For years continuously. That’s why, in the harvest time, there was nobody, certainly no strong workers, in the fields. Many crops just rotted. That’s why there was famine. I was affected by the famine. Everybody was starving – even in Beijing, the best city, the most protected city. We just had our rations. You would have a certain amount of rations which the government supplied and that was it. You didn’t have anything else. You didn’t have eggs, or meat, or any snacks. Just the flour the government supplied. You would make some bread, like cornbread.

Everybody was hungry. My memory of that period is feeling hungry all the time. I’ve written that my Mum would have to go to the parkland to gather wild seeds. Grass seeds. To feed us. And we had some other little substitutes. My aunt lived with us. Her husband was in Hong Kong. In 1956, all my father’s businesses were confiscated or nationalised. My uncle, who did business in Hong Kong, Singapore and other places, decided not to come back. My aunt and her children then lived with us, in a compound with a courtyard.

And we needed foreign currency. So, every month, my uncle would send money to the family and the government would give you equivalent amount as coupons. Somebody would come to give you Chinese money and a coupon to prove that you had a certain amount of a foreign currency. With a coupon, you could go to a special shop – just one special shop in the whole of Beijing – where you could get everything.

Gerard Henderson – So now you’re at school. Like most people in Beijing, you’re hungry most of the time. But, unlike people in the rural areas, there’s not a great death rate in Beijing. Tell us about what you learnt in school and how you were taught about Lei Feng? Who was he?

Amei Li – Lei Feng was a young soldier. He was born in 1940, I think. He lost his parents at the age of seven and he grew up an orphan. He was a really good boy. He was so grateful, so he became a worker to help everybody. He worked very hard. And the workers admired him. He became a model worker. Then he joined the army where he was a model soldier. His best behaviour was helping others all the time, in every way. And he studied Chairman Mao’s books. At that time, he wrote about how grateful he was and how good society was. He had food to eat and he had clothes to wear. He was just so happy for what he had. So it happened that Mao’s second in command, that’s the General, Marshall Lin Biao, the head of the army, wanted to promote Lei Feng more. So made they made him the model soldier.

There was a story, eventually, about Lei Feng in the newspaper and he became known. Then Mao wrote, “Learn from Lei Feng.” So, everybody, all the people, would learn from Lei Feng. This then became a slogan in our school and every child learnt to be a little Lei Feng. What you needed to do was to help others. For example, you would help somebody cross the road or share your umbrella with others. It was very good because at school everybody would try to do something good. And this made the whole school very clean and the classroom clean and everything was clean. Everybody was friendly and we felt so happy. It was like a bigger family.

But we didn’t realise back then that we had started to see everything as a way of thanking Chairman Mao, thanking the party and being loyal to the party, loyal to Chairman Mao, not to your family, especially if you were from a black family. You could not be loyal to your family. You had to betray your family. That was the right behaviour. You had to report if your parents said something wrong. You had to have a kind of class consciousness. You had to know that your parents were black. And, if they said something not according to Chairman Mao’s works, according to Lei Feng, or if they were not so grateful, you should report this to the teacher.

Gerard Henderson – Now Lei Feng had a diary and you had a diary. You burnt your diary. Why?

Amei Li – Lei Feng died at 22 years of age in an accident in the army. His diary was published where he wrote how grateful he was to the party. So, as Chairman Mao said, the teacher would encourage us to write like Lei Feng. How do you write? How do you learn from Lei Feng? How do you help others? How do you not understand Chairman Mao’s teachings? So, everybody wrote diaries. They became a way of self- examination. It was as if everyone shouldn’t have any ungrateful thoughts, or bad thoughts. Anything. If your thoughts are not as good as Lei Feng you should learn from him to be a little Lei Feng.

It was self-examination, a body of behaviour. Then, a year later, everybody had to read from their diary. To read out what you had done. What were the good things you had done? What did you think, how did you understand Chairman Mao’s teachings? Then one girl, from a black family, said that she found a note, a little money on the ground, two dollars two Chinese yuan, and she picked it up. She thought oh this is good I can buy some sweets. Then she thought, oh no, I should hand it to the teacher; so she did. The teacher said this is good, but you first had dirty thoughts. Why didn’t you straight away hand it to the teacher? Your first instinct was to hide away. This is because you’re from a black family. You have black thoughts in your mind. You finally did the right thing but you have black thoughts in your brain. Another boy spoke of almost the same thing but the teacher said, oh, this is good. This is just the behaviour we should copy. And we are proud of your family because you’re from a poor family. And you didn’t keep the money.

So, I started to worry and went back to read my diary. I saw a lot of things I had written. I didn’t know if it was black or not. For example, I would have some questions, I would talk to my father, talk to my mother. And I missed my grandmother. I thought, oh, my grandmother of course is also black. I thought, if this is a black thought I may now do harm to my parents. What can I do? So, I thought I’ll burn it, I’ll burn the diary. I said I would tell the teacher I don’t have a diary.

Gerard Henderson – You were pretty switched on because you burnt your diary in 1965 and the Cultural Revolution started in 1966. Now, there’s a lot of material in your book about it, but just tell us a bit about how it affected you at the school. When it started, you had a very close friend who was a friend of your family called Sali. Who was she and what happened to her? Secondly, around this time your father was taken away. What happened to him? And your house was raided – what happened to it?

Amei Li – When the Cultural Revolution started, family background became the most important thing. Black students were singled out. We had four blacks in our class of 50 students, so we became the enemy. Nobody would talk to us. My best friend, Sali, was from the working class. It was year nine, I think, because she had to do a lot of work to help her mother. Her father worked hard but couldn’t feed the family. So, her Mother had to also work and she helped her mother to do a lot of needlework and sewing on buttons. Work to take home to earn a little money.

Sali missed some lessons and was academically behind. So, the teacher said everybody below this level must choose a person to sit with. Sali chose me. We’d sit at the same table together. And every day after class we’d go together to my home and do homework and play together. My Mum also gave her some little lollies and so on. We became good friends. This went on for about a year and then the Cultural Revolution started. From that moment, Sali was red and I was a black. And she never talked to me anymore.

It was the day that Chairman Mao published an important article. The loudspeaker called me to the notice board, and eight red students in my class were lined up there. And for some reason I knew I would have to lead them to raid my family. Because all black families had to be raided, their houses raided. But I didn’t expect I would be the first in my class. And this was because Sali wanted to show she was red and firmly on the red side. She had decided to pick my family. She was one of the leaders. Each class had two leaders – one a leader and the other the executive leader. In our class, the real head was from a revolutionary family. She was very mild and did not want to take part in activities. But her parents were party members and she had to be the head. But Sali was bold – in her younger life she fought with her father to protect her mother. So Sali was the real leader. As a result, I just had to take them. And Sali knew my home, where it was. They followed me to raid my house. And the house was completely emptied.

Gerard Henderson – That’s very sad. We’ll come back to Sali at the end. We will move quickly through at this stage. Your father is sent away. Your father, as you mentioned earlier, was a black. He’s sent away. Where is he sent to and how long does he stay there for?

Amei Li – My father just disappeared at his factory. He was working in his factory when the Cultural Revolution started. There was a lot of fighting. The blacks were the authorities, the directors of the factory. My father, of course, was black. And part of the management of the factory. So, he was condemned. And the way condemnation worked was simply you could not go home, and you would not be paid. His salary stopped and he had to remain at the factory. My mother said he didn’t take any money. My brother went to visit him.

The last time he saw my father was just after his condemnation. The second or third day after condemnation. One of the particularly radical people had kicked my father. My father said that at the next rally, if he did that again, he would fight back. My brother told him no. It was a case of people trying to show they were revolutionary. So, if they kicked you, or whatever, you just tried to protect yourself but not fight back. So, my father didn’t fight back.

Uncle Shan was my father’s assistant. He worked for my father from when my father first started his business. They were like brothers, working together. The condemnation rally also condemned Uncle Shan and asked him to condemn my father. He refused, so the radicals kicked him, and bashed him. He had said something which upset them. They beat him badly. There was blood everywhere.  Then he was locked him up in a tool room with no food and no drink, no medicine. That night he committed suicide. So that made us think that if my father did anything, maybe he would be dead too.

Gerard Henderson – You didn’t hear about your father for ten years.

Amei Li – Then we never heard about him anymore.

Gerard Henderson – We’re going to move quickly through this. Very briefly, your teacher, Mrs. Liang, was actually murdered, right?

Amei Li – That’s right.

Gerard Henderson – By the Red Guards.

Amei Li – That’s right.

Gerard Henderson – Now, you were sent away to the country in 1968. And you were there for seven years. At the age of 18. You go into this in great detail in the book. You were sent from Beijing to what is called the White Pond Village.

Amei Li – White Pond Village, number three. About 1000 kilometres from Beijing

Gerard Henderson  – 1000 kilometres south west of Beijing. You were there for about seven or eight years. Give us a brief idea of what it was like. Obviously, being sent away to a distant place was a pretty grim outcome. You say that you were worried it was a death sentence. But it was relieved a bit by two victims of the Anti-rightist campaign that followed the 100 Flowers Bloom period. You refer to them as Mr Jia and Mr Sun. They had been purged in 1958. You met them ten years later and they we’re still in this village where you ended up. It was a great benefit to you because you met educated men and you were trying to get educated yourself.

Amei Li – Yes. When I was sent to the village, I saw two men. Obviously, they were not peasants. They were white haired but from their mannerisms they were obviously scholars. We arrived there in December. We had a peach tree in the courtyard. And one day, in the next spring, our door was pushed open and two gentlemen were walking into our courtyard to appreciate the peach flowers. They themselves had planted six peach trees there but only one had survived.

This was the first time I spoke with them. Mr Sun told me that they had books. I had English textbooks from school but I only took two books to the country. One was my English textbook and the other a mathematics textbook. I had nothing to read except Chairman Mao’s books. That day I happened to be reading my English book and Mr Sun noticed. I told them I had no books to read. They said they had books I could read.

At first the two men had thought we students were red guards. They did not want to talk to us. They knew how bad the Cultural Revolution was in Beijing. Their friends had been beaten. In the Cultural Revolution people suffered much more than in the Anti-rightist years, and some died.

Meeting those two men was the best thing that happened in my life. Every day I spent hours with them reading a lot of literature and history and they taught me so much classical Chinese. Mr Sun had worked as a senior editor of the Chinese publication, called People’s Education Publish Press. All over China, textbooks of schools were from that press. He was one of the senior editors. Originally, he was a Chinese painter. He was so good at classical Chinese. And he was fluent in French and English because the teachers at his art school had been foreign teachers. They spoke French and English.

The two men had a little radio, and it was a good thing in the country – better than Beijing. Because they could listen to the enemy stations. In those isolated areas nobody interfered with them. They used batteries – there was no electricity. Because they understood English and French, I also started to learn these two languages. Not all that well, but something.

Gerard Henderson – In time you got back to Beijing. You’ve obviously got a deep devotion to your mother whom you caught up with and your father who had been released. But let’s move on. You were also caught up in Tiananmen Square because you were teaching at a university near Tiananmen Square when the demonstrations occurred around the middle of 1989. Very briefly tell us about it. You were cycling around Tiananmen Square, looking at stuff, you weren’t part of the demonstration, but you saw people who were in the demonstration including some who were killed.

Amei Li – I went back to working in Beijing and my family lived in the college area. The most famous eight universities were in our area. Across the road was Renmin University, the People’s University, and about two kilometres away were Beijing University and Tsinghua University. The college I worked for is a part of Tsinghua University, right behind the Forbidden City. From the college to Tiananmen Square is just a few minutes by bicycle. When the students’ hunger strikes started, the people in Beijing supported them. People from the businesses donated food and drink to the students.

We organised to collect donations and sent them to the square. Every day, every lunchtime, I would go to a particular snack shop, get 20 lunch boxes and take it to the school, about eight minutes walk, and the students would collect the food and drink, and take it to Tiananmen Square. We were close, every teacher would go to the Square to report what was happening. All the teachers contributed – drinks, transportation of the food and so on. It was so high spirited and so hopeful. We thought we were going to really fight them now and for democracy. And we were so trusting of Deng Xiaoping. And the government had done so many good things. The economy had revived and people’s lives were much, much better. People were full of hope. We had so many connections with the Square and the with the students, our students.

Because I lived in this college street near the university, I had two classes in two universities. I taught a Sunday class as well – in China, back then, there was a fever for learning English. Especially university students.

So, my students in the University, four of them, actually joined the hunger strike. On the night of the killing in the Square, two of them left the Square. But two of them stayed there. I saw them when they came back from the Square, just so upset and crying, talking about what happened. One of the students was killed that day. One of our workers had actually helped collect five dead bodies and put them on the flat of the tricycle and transported it to the university next to us. One of the bodies had a card, a student card from our university. That’s the university where I taught the Saturday class.

Gerard Henderson – You’ve got a very interesting chapter in the book about how you assess what happened in Tiananmen Square and how the government reacted and how the demonstrators reacted. Readers can follow that. So now we shall move to questions.

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Question – What are the legacies of Mao’s China still evident in China today?

Amei Li – In China today, Mao is still the supreme person to be respected. My friends in China send me messages now and then on, say, the Party’s birthday on 1 July. They will say “celebrated the Communist Party’s 100th birthday”. And the same for other celebrations, every important day like a national day or the army’s birthday on 1 August. They send this type of thing. Before, they would send out different messages. They would say the group must be disciplined to not say anything that the newspapers didn’t say. And they mustn’t pass rumours without any proof. But then they started to send messages of joining these celebrations. So, it is a pretty normal for the ordinary people.

Question – You’ve been a teacher. China is divided socially with the hukou system between rural people and those in the cities. Rural people have nothing like the education opportunities of those in the cities. They’re the vast majority, they’re poor, jobs have gone as the assembly line work is finished. What’s going to happen with this huge divide in China?

Amei Li – I think the hukou system was very strict – it divided the Chinese population into rural and urban in deciding who could receive public services. It is a bit more relaxed now because a lot of rural peasants have come to the city to work. And, of course, because their children are discriminated by the hukou system, the children can’t attend school. But the people can buy food. Food is not rationed. So compared to back then it is much more relaxed.

Question – I want to go back to your story. For someone living in a place like Australia your experience is hard to imagine. You were almost turned into a leper, sent away to the country, your schooling was ended and yet you’ve come through all of this while learning languages, history and so on. I know you met those scholars and they gave you the chance to become educated, but how did you survive? What was it in you that got you through? And your family?

Amei Li – Whatever comes into your life, you just have to deal with it. My mother told me that her own experience taught her that you just do whatever you can, do your best, prepare for the worst. And she gave me the best advice, which supports me all the time. That was to keep a cool head and a hot heart – a warm heart, cool head. So, everything you do, don’t do it by impulse. You think. I worked in the village school and I taught in the village school. I made the best of it.

With the help of my teachers, Mr Sun and Mr Jia, I learnt and taught well. I was offered another job in the country school. And whenever I had an opportunity, I took that opportunity. It was kind of intuitive; if something came up, such as being a barefooted doctor, I took it. I had a chance to help the village doing some acupuncture. So, I just started to do this and the doctor helped me. He was happy to have my help. At every stage, I just did what was offered. If I had no chance, I simply don’t try. For example, my friends and I decided not to get married, just to remain single. We didn’t want our children to be from the village. So, none of us had a boyfriend or girlfriend.

Question – What a great talk Amei. We’re all in great admiration of you. What you’ve done. Now, you would be familiar with the romance of the Three Kingdoms, of course. There’s a famous inscription at the start of it: “The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus, it has ever been”. Where do you think China is now? On that timescale?

Amei Li – The Chinese people all believe this. United is better than divide. In Chinese history, the periods of a divided country, with warlords fighting each other and different regions fighting each other, that divided history is longer than the history where China was actually united. A united China is peaceful. Not so many wars. Between the dynasties, we had famines and wars. And, so, people believe united is best. And the Chinese Communist Party knows what the people want. They tell the population that the party will make every effort to be united, to be one. And people have to be under the Communist Party.

Like it or not, ordinary people don’t care too much about it. But the Chinese intellectuals feel a lot of pressure. There is no freedom. My friends, who are intellectuals, working in the universities, feel no freedom. But they can’t do anything. Most of them are now retired so just they say, okay, I shall just do whatever I can.

Gerard Henderson – You mentioned right at the end of your book that you visited China in 2010. You met your old classmates. Very briefly, what was that experience like? And tell us about Sali, the girl who persecuted you at school. What happened to her?

Amei Li – In 2010 I went to visit my friends who had invited me to come. They organised a reunion of my classmates. There were 26 of them and I couldn’t recognise any of them except for one who had visited me in the country. We hadn’t seen each other for 40 years. We were separated at 18 only to meet again at 60 – 42 years later. They told me that four of our friends had died. One of them was Sali. Sali committed suicide. When everybody was sent to the country in the Cultural Revolution, the three reds stayed in Beijing and worked in a factory. Sali was one of those three reds in our class in Beijing. She joined the Communist Party and became the factory party secretary. Life was quite good for Sali. Then she fell in love with one of the young people who worked under her. He was the secretary of the youth league. But that boy didn’t fall in love with her and married another woman. Sali actually attended their wedding.

After the wedding, Sali still chased the boy. Nobody realised at the time that she was having some mental problems. When this was discovered, Sali was sent to hospital for treatment.

While Sali was ill in hospital, Chairman Mao died, in 1976. So, when she came out of the hospital, everything had changed. In the factory, people didn’t respect her anymore. She began to think everybody was judging her. By then, she was clear headed and completely recovered. But she thought there was no future for her. So, she committed suicide.

Gerard Henderson – We could go on for longer, but we always finish on time. I just want to remind everyone that we have copies of Amei Li’s book, Pink Flower: Growing up in Mao’s China. I have mentioned Ted Rule who is here tonight. He’s written the Foreword. Ted describes the book as an extraordinary story about an extraordinary woman. And I commend it to you.

Amei, you’re a very unusual person these days, which is evident as you read the book. You’ve endured enormous emotional and physical suffering and you don’t complain.

Before we wrap up, I just should say many thanks to Rafe Champion, described as effectively the co-author of this book. Rafe’s been a member here for many years. And we’re very grateful to you Rafe for drawing this to our attention.

It’s been a great honour to launch your book Amei at The Sydney Institute tonight. Well done. You’re a very courageous woman.