No More Learning

. . . At that time I believed in certain aspects of their principles and theories. But such was the state of confusion in my own mind that I couldn't tell or make out what were the things that I did believe in.
Hu noticed that after the thought summaries were completed (all in his group, and apparently in the other groups as well, were even- tually accepted), most of the students seemed to experience a great sense of relief. They had passed through their trial and made their symbolic submission; and many--especially among the young-- seemed to feel that a closer bond had been established between themselves and the government.
? THE REVOLUTIONARY UNIVERSITY 271
But for Hu there was no great relief and little or any feeling of bond. Still depressed and disappointed, his strongest desire was to leave the environment as soon as possible. He had previously de- cided to return to Nanking--the past scene of happy and success- ful days--and seek a job and a way of life (possibly as a school teacher) outside the main currents of politics. He had already written friends there who had sent him money for the journey. Therefore, when students were given cards to fill out to state their job preference, Hu paid little attention, and left his card blank-- preferring to make his own arrangements. His action was con- sidered an unfriendly one; it would have been quite different if he had indicated no choice and had added a note, as some students did, saying that he left the matter entirely up to the govern- ment's discretion. A cadre called him in for a talk, and when he defended his action on the basis of wishing to become a school- teacher in Nanking, he was told, "We can assign you to a school- teacher's job, but it would do you good to work in the countryside. You have been too long in the big cities, and maybe that is why you have not been so activist. "
When the job assignment did come through, however, it was as a political workerand teacher in an obscure North China militaryarea --a kind of assignment generally considered highly undesirable. No one was required to accept the job offered him, although most stu- dents had little choice, since they were unlikely to find an alternative position and they knew that a job refusal would not look well on their records. But Hu, without too much logical consideration, did de- cide to refuse the assignment--at least at first. Three days later, after constant visits from cadres and activists, he reversed himself and once more succumbed to the wishes of the authorities. He could not say just why he did this, but the implication was clear that he wished to make one last effort to fit in with the new regime, and hoped that life outside of the revolutionary university might be less oppressive. He also stated that the idea of actively fighting Communism in the future was already taking shape in his mind, and that he considered the job a good opportunity to obtain greater firsthand knowledge of Communist procedures. While this second
'reason might well have been an attempt to justify that which he felt emotionally impelled to do, it is quite possible that, confused and fearful as he was, ideas of adapting himself to Communism and of
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fighting Communism existed simultaneously within him.
All that was left was the graduation ceremony. The first part of this was devoted to an admission ritual for new Party members:
facing a huge photograph of Mao, nine faculty cadres solemnly took their oaths, suggesting to the 3,000 students in the audience (according to Hu) "the honor, the great difficulty, and the im- portance of becoming a Party member. " Hu felt that the students were almost forgotten in the excitement surrounding the new Party members, although faculty representatives and visiting officials (there to recruit personnel from among the graduates) did con- gratulate the students upon the completion of their thought reform, and urge them to continue to follow its principles in their future
work.
When Hu arrived at his assignment in North China, he was re-
quired to undergo a two-month training period whose routine, except for more rigorous physical training, was not too different from that of the revolutionary university. At the end of this train- ing, when he was faced with the prospect of accepting a permanent assignment with the army, Hu was unwilling to go through with it and requested that he be permitted to leave. He had been no hap- pier there than at the revolutionary university; he had, in fact, found the new cadres under whom he worked to be, if less devious, more crude and unpleasant than those he had dealt with during his re- form. The antagonisms he had observed between older and younger cadres, and between the military authorities and the rural peasant population, had confirmed his critical feelings toward the regime. In addition, he feared the possible outbreak of war with the West, and believed that should this happen his own position would become much more dangerous. But most important of all perhaps was his reluctance to become involved in any commitment to the regime that would make it impossible for him to get away in the future.
Communist authorities made strong attempts to get Hu to change his mind, but he pleaded failing health and inability, as a south- erner, to tolerate the extreme cold (from which he actually did suffer). He was finally permitted to depart, although he was given virtually no travel credentials. He headed for Nanking, selling some of his belongings to finance the trip. There he found only a few positions available, all of which he felt would involve him too
? THE REVOLUTIONARY UNIVERSITY 273
closely with the regime. He wished to visit his father in Hupeh; but from all he could learn> he decided that it would be much too dangerous. After a few weeks in Nanking, he was called for question- ing by the police because of his idleness; and he felt it was unsafe to remain there. Through friends with whom he was staying he discovered that it was possible to leave China by way of the Hong Kong border (during early 1950, such travel was still not too diffi- cult). He quickly decided to do this; and even an expression of affec- tion from a girl he met in Canton (of whom he had been very fond during his middle-school days) could not deter him from leaving his country and entering the British Crown Colony.
? CHAPTER 15 A CHINESE ODYSSEY
Many of Hu's emotional experiences have a familiar
ring, since the psychological pressures at a revolu- tionary university closely resemble those in a prison. There is the assault upon identity, although without any physical brutality; the establishment of guilt and shame; a form of self-betrayal; alter- nating leniency and harshness; a compulsion to confess; the logical dishonoring of re-education; a final confession, elaborate and in- clusive rather than terse; and an even greater emphasis upon the experience of personal rebirth. There are also important differences, such as the development of group intimacy ("the great together- ness") before the emotional pressures. But these differences, sig- nificant as they are, do not warrant a new step-by-step analysis.
To get at more basic contrasts and more basic underlying prin- ciples, we must, as with the Westerners, turn from the process to the individual, and follow Hu beyond his thought reform, first back over his early years and then through his Hong Kong life. Al- though the program which Hu encountered at the revolutionary university was typical enough (the other fourteen Chinese sub- jects, especially those four who had attended a revolutionary univer- sity, confirmed this), his responses were obviously unusual. Why was this so? What was there in his background and his character which led him to feel as he did? What can his experiences teach us of the reform conflicts and life struggles of Chinese intellectuals in general?
274
? A CHINESE ODYSSEY 275 Childhood and Youth: Background for Reform
Symbolically enough, Hu's life began in exile. His father had been a high-ranking Nationalist official during the early years of the Chinese Revolution, and had spent many years in distant assign- ments or in flight from his enemies. One of these flights (from the forces of Yuan Shi-k'ai, a powerful general who sought to restore the monarchy and place himself on the throne) took him to Kansu, a remote province in the northwest. There he married Hu's mother, a relatively uneducated woman of undistinguished family back- ground; and it was there that Hu was born and spent the first four years of his life. His only memories of that period were of the frightening folk tales which his maternal grandmother told him (of owls who carried off bad little boys, and of devils disguised as men who, simply by looking at little boys, caused them to disappear) and of that same grandmother's unhappiness when Hu and his parents left their Kansu home. The themes of fear and unhap- piness which appeared first in these recollections recurred frequently throughout his reconstruction of his childhood.
When Hu was six years old (the family had spent two years in more or less temporary dwellings) Hu was moved to his father's family home in Hupeh Province, and he remained there or nearby for the next thirteen years. But this move, rather than uniting the family, marked the beginning of long separations; his father was away most of the time, appearing only on rare occasions, and then briefly and often unannounced. Hu senior belonged to a faction of the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party) which had come into active conflict with Chiang Kai-shek, so that he was almost a fugitive.
Hu held a special position in this fatherless household (there was an uncle nearby but not in the same compound). He was the "young master" being groomed for family leadership, the only direct male heir (an older brother and one or two sisters had died in infancy). Moreover, Hu's father too had been an oldest son, and this placed Hu in the main line of family authority. His family's long prominence in the area (his paternal grandfather had been an important provincial official during the Ch'ing dynasty), its heri- tage of scholarly attainment, the importance of preserving the "family name"--all this was impressed upon him. It was a situa-
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tion which in every way encouraged the development within him of precocious self-assertion.
But this celebrated little boy (and no culture has ever made a greater fuss over its male children) had a strange rival for power within the family: a woman two generations his senior. This "step- grandmother" was the bete noire of his childhood, and indeed of much of his life. Originally his paternal grandfather's second wife
(she was not a concubine, as his first wife had died before she came into the family), she was the only surviving member of her generation. Possessing seniority as well as the ability and will to rule, she took full advantage of the family's power vacuum and full charge of its affairs. Yet her leadership placed her in a complicated position (nothing is ever simple in a Chinese family)--because she was a woman, and, more important, because she was unrelated by blood to any of the other family members, which, as Hu explained, made them regard her as little more than a concubine. She had borne a male child--always a matter of great prestige for a Chinese woman--who had been kidnapped by bandits and never returned. This, according to Hu, was another source of tension, as she had become embittered by this incident, and resented "the family" for not making strong enough efforts (possibly not paying a large enough ransom) to get the child back. Hu felt that she extracted her revenge through her tyrannical reign over the household, to the point where she became "a saboteur of the family. " Although the others chafed under her domination, she was acting within Chinese tradition, and no one had the courage or the sanction to contest her. Indeed, Hu's uncle (his father's younger brother), the only person around who might have offered resistance, preferred to move out from her control at the time of his marriage rather than follow the more conventional pattern of bringing his bride back to the main family home.
Hu believed that, as the "young master/7 he was the special target of her abuse. She became for him a symbol of the "old," and a special object of his hatred, a hatred which was not, however, devoid of respect:
She was a woman of the old China. She was tall, very tall and impres- sive looking. She had bound feet. She was a very able and intelligent woman. . . . She could be very eloquent, convincing to others, but she was stubborn and couldn't be talked into anything herself. . , .
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She never liked me, and was very jealous of my position in the family. I could always feel her antagonism in the atmosphere, but she was much too shrewd to mistreat me in a direct manner. She never beat me physically. . . . It was in a glance or a phrase directed at me that I could feel it. . . . I hated her so much that at times I felt that I could not stand her.
The conflict between the old woman and the boy reached its climax when he was ten years old through what began as a seem- ingly inconsequential incident but grew into an event of major proportions:
One day someone was telling a story before a gathering of our family members. The story was very unfavorable to the head of the household. It described how he had misused family funds and cheated the other members of the family. After listening for a while I said, "That man is a thief! " My grandmother then spoke up with great emotion and said, "He is saying this about me, that I am not honest, that I am corrupt. " She immediately called all the family members into the hall of the an- cestors, the family shrine, and in a very dramatic fashion she lit up all of the candles that were in the room. Then she said, "The young master has accused me of being dishonest. I will pray to my ancestors to be more honest. " Other relatives attempted to calm her down, saying that I was only a boy and that she should accept an apology from me. But she refused to do this, saying, "No, I am not worthy of his apology. I am just a poor old servant of the family. " She maintained this attitude very stubbornly, and nothing that anybody said to her could convince her to change her mind.
Her actions, in effect, forced Hu to leave the family home, since this kind of conflict within a Chinese family cannot remain openly unresolved. As Hu explained:
This was really a skillful way to squeeze me out of the household. W ith her refusal to accept my apology, my only recourse was to leave. But it was done so cleverly within the framework of tradition that no one could accuse her of acting wrongly. . . . She was not treating me as a grandson or as a little boy, but rather as the legal heir, as if she were dealing with my father.
It is quite possible, of course, that Hu did more to provoke these actions than his version of the story suggests. Or even if he did not, it is likely that the step-grandmother accurately perceived that Hu was expressing indirect hostility toward her. In any case, his out- burst could have been considered a sign of disrespect for his elders.
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In most situations like this, an apology from the youthful offender would have ended the matter--and Hu is right in perceiving that his step-grandmother's show of humility was really a highly-charged form of aggressiveness. Although cleverly correct in her forms, however, she could have been criticized for a lack of spirit of com- promise, an important virtue in traditional Chinese culture. Such bitter animosity, kept well beneath the surface, occurred in many Chinese families.
In Hu's family, external forms were still maintained. Although he went to live in his uncle's house nearby and visited his family home infrequently, it was still necessary for him to appear on special occasions--for instance, the Chinese New Year celebration --to pay his respects to his step-grandmother through the tradi- tional symbol of submissive reverence, the fe'o-t'ou. He dreaded these visits long in advance, but it was made clear to him that he had no choice in the matter because "if I did not, I would be con- demned by all society. " His step-grandmother, on each such occa- sion, maintained her "humility" and perpetuated the conflict by declaring herself "unworthy" of the salutation.
Hu's mother, rather than offering him protection against the step-grandmother, was herself another victim. Cowed and power- less before her elder, she was so looked down on as a "common woman" from a backward province, that even the servants treated her badly. Sickly, nervous, and resentful of her husband's continued absence, she often had to turn over her son's care to others. Hu remembers her with some fondness, but also recalls that she some- times took her frustrations out on him and subjected him to beat- ings. She died when Hu was fourteen years old, and was in many ways an even more distant figure ("I never experienced the intimacy of a mother with her") than his absent father.
For to Hu, his father soon became the center of a lasting personal myth--that of the all-powerful father who suddenly materializes and rescues his son from an otherwise invincible oppressor r
I found myself always thinking of him. . . . To me he was the most dignified and impressive man in the world. . . . I felt that one day my father would return and all of my troubles would be over.
Nor could repeated evidence to the contrary dispel this myth: the family lost touch with his father for periods of years, and
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when he did visit, the step-grandmother and he observed all proper forms (he too had to be filial) and things remained as they had been. Hu was never too happy at his uncle's house, where he felt he was being cared for more out of obligation than love, and he went on hoping; when he got tired of this his thoughts turned toward revenge, and toward the day when he would be big enough and smart enough to be able to deal with his arch-enemy. Her death, which occurred shortly after that of his mother, and his father's continued absence caused him to avoid the family home, which he then considered haunted.
Hu's erratic pattern of education exposed him to the full chaos of the Chinese cultural and political scene. From the ages of eight to twelve, he studied with private tutors employed by his and neighboring families; in the traditional fashion, he learned how to read and write from simplified versions of the Confucian classics. He did not like the stern discipline of the tutor, and was frequently punished for misbehavior; but he was impressed with Confucian teachings of filial piety and loyalty to family and country, as yet unaware of the inconsistencies between these theoretical virtues and the realities of the life around him.
Next, he spent two years studying and boarding at a new-style upper primary school not too far from his home. There he was surprised to encounter classmates who were mostly adults or near- adults, prospective employees of the local government who had come to take advantage of the school's "modern" curriculum, in keeping with a new regulation that officials have some Western education. As the youngest pupil in the school, Hu deeply resented the teasing and bullying he received from the others, some of them two or three times his age--especially when they told him that "a little boy is not supposed to lose his temper with his elders. " He no doubt stimulated many of these antagonisms, since by this time he had become a rebellious, outspoken child. Again made aware of his helplessness in the face of superior power, he once more dreamed of the day when he could outwit his tormentors; he partially realized this goal in demonstrating his quicker ability to grasp the Western subjects in the academic curriculum.
After his graduation, his uncle planned to send him to a junior middle school in a nearby city. Just when Hu was about to leave for the new school, his father suddenly appeared, and Hu took advan-
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tage of the occasion to express many of his grievances. His father was angered by the boy's story. As a man of the world, he disap- proved of the provincial way in which Hu was dressed, and of the undistinguished school which had been selected for him. As usual, Hu senior stayed only briefly, but before he left he canceled the existing plans and promised to return soon to take the boy to a better school in a larger city. For the next three years, however, nothing more was heard from him; and between the ages of thirteen and sixteen Hu remained idle, receiving no formal education.
These years were the most lonely interlude of a life in which loneliness had already become a regular feature. Hu felt estranged from his uncle as well as his father, since the uncle resented both the boy and the father for undermining what he considered to be a reasonable discharge of his responsibilities. Hu became more em- bittered than ever--angry at his uncle for allowing family conflicts to interfere with his education, and even having doubts about his father and wondering whether he was really in hiding or had "just forgotten about the family/' But he clung tenaciously to his father- return myth, and even when he was telling me about these events, he could admit no resentment toward his mythical hero. Feeling at home nowhere, thinking a great deal about running away, but unable to decide where to go, he described his general emotion as "fatalistic anger" (the kind of hostility which is temporarily held in abeyance until an opportunity arises to express it).
Finally dismissing the entire problem from his mind, Hu began to interest himself in other things--taking long walks through the neighboring countryside, and reading voraciously the traditional Chinese chien-hsia novels. The chien-hsia is a superhuman hero who combines physical strength and magical powers in purishing evil and helping the oppressed, always acting outside of and fre- quently in opposition to vested authority; so great is the chien-hsia's imaginative impact that one Chinese colleague--possibly with a certain amount of cultural chauvinism--described him to me as "a combination of the Western knight errant and Robin Hood, only much more skillful and ingenious. " Imagining himself a chien-hsia was an ideal antidote to Hu's sense of loneliness and helplessness. His period of inactivity came to an end only through the chance appearance of an old family friend who prevailed upon the uncle to send Hu back to school (respected outsiders have frequently
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been the best mediators in severe Chinese intrafamily disputes). Hu wasthen sent to a middle school sponsored by the Kuomintang Youth Corps. He spent just one semester there, but it was an ex- perience which had great significance in shaping his political emo- tions. He had chosen the school himself, for even in his isola- tion he had been caught up in the wave of patriotism which swept the country at the time of the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War. But he was horrified by what he found there. Hastily put together, the school had enrolled many more students than the small faculty could handle; the academic program was practically nonexistent, and most of the time was devoted to military training. Discipline was not only strict, but needlessly vindictive, and severe whippings were administered for minor infractions. Hu was from the beginning critical of the school and suspicious of its attempts to mobilize student emotions--so much so that he was among the very few who did not, in the initial burst of patriotic fervor, join the KMT Youth Corps. He later told me that his restraint might have been due to memories of his father's tribulations within the KMT, Students soon became united in their resentment of the school and so rebellious that the atmosphere began to resemble that of an armed camp; none of the twenty youths from Hu's area returned the following semester. While there, Hu, developed his talent for rebellion a bit further: he became an expert at forging the signa- ture of the chief military trainer on passes (he proudly demon- strated his technique to me during our interview). The experience left him with the feeling that the KMT Youth Corps was "dis-
appointing and silly . . . brutal and irrational/7 His "disgust and hatred" was soon extended to the entire KMT Party and Govern- ment, and it later developed into the predominating passion of his youth.
The county junior middle school to which he transferred seemed a great improvement. He did well academically, and quickly be- came a leader among the students. In addition, he held a specially privileged status among the faculty because the president of the school was Hu's uncle's "adopted son"--that is, the uncle, as a prominent person in the area, sponsored the school official's career and exercised considerable influence over it. This made things particularly complicated for Hu when, just a few months after his arrival, he came into direct conflict with this same school president
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For when the students began to notice that their meals seemed meager, and suspected some form of corruption in connection with the school's rice supply, they turned to Hu to direct an investigation. This was an extremely serious situation: the rice kept in the school storehouse represented the institution's capital, since rice was the only stable currency available; students' tuition fees and teachers' salaries were both paid in it, and it was used to buy other foods and supplies. Since teachers were badly underpaid, irregularities were not infrequent, and sometimes were even considered customary.
Before long, Hu had organized a special committee of students to keep a close watch over every grain of rice brought to or taken from the storehouse. The system worked admirably: corruption apparently ended, and meals improved. But the school president was angered by the students' assumption of authority, and especially resented Hu as their ringleader. Matters came to a climax when an old school servant, despite official permission from the school accountant, was refused rice for a late meal upon returning from a trip; the student committee members insisted that he first had to get Hu's personal approval. Hu soon became involved in a power struggle with the school president, which he described to me with some relish; it was eventually resolved through a tacit compromise in which the students continued their vigilance, but did so as quietly as possible in order to cause minimal embarrassment to the authorities.
Hu's sense of victory was eventually reinforced by his uncle's grudging praise.
The latter was at first enraged when informed of Hu's activities by the school president; but after a short time, his respect for Hu became apparent, and he referred to him as a "straight-boned boy"--an expression suggesting strength, courage, and integrity. The only unfavorable repercussion came about a year later when, despite having announced that Hu had won the prize for the outstanding student of the semester, the faculty members "forgot" to present the award to him. He became angered, ceased making his best efforts, and concluded that "people never get what they deserve. "
His personal struggles with authority thus found effective social expression in the turbulent Chinese student world. His rebellious urges were constantly fed by real injustice, until
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I developed the conviction that any authority held over me was irra- tional. I transferred from school to school. . . . As soon as I would meet the head of a new school, I would automatically think: "This man must be an irrational authority. " And I would invariably find out that this was true.
There was another rice incident at the provincial upper middle school which Hu next attended. This time he was in danger of being expelled, until the approaching Japanese armies interrupted his personal battle. Hu fled to Free China in the interior, as all students were urged to do. His uncle sent him off with these words: "When the whole society is so corrupt, what can you, just an individual person, do about it? "--an attitude of resignation which Hu strongly contested at the time, but one which he was never to stop wondering about.
Arriving in Chungking, where students were instructed to report for reassignment, Hu got into an argument with an arrogant official who reprimanded him for not having the correct papers. He later felt that this dispute caused him extra months of waiting and re- sulted in his receiving an undesirable school placement to a poorly- organized agricultural institution.
Now he became extremely discouraged. He had sustained himself through a difficult trip to Chungking with the belief that "every- thing would be all right when I got there," but found instead that "it was only the beginning of my troubles. " Out of touch with his family, financially destitute (and cheated when he sold his only valuable possession, a gold ring), feeling awkward in imposing upon family contacts for temporary shelter, Hu found solace in a new friendship. A sympathetic middle-aged scholar and former govern- ment official from his own village area offered him the first mean- ingful explanation of his sufferings, and became his first political mentor:
He was a man about the age of my father, an extremely eloquent per- son who quickly became my hero. He told me how he had worked with the KMT during its real revolutionary days, but was now being dis- criminated against because of his leftist views. I too had felt discrimi- nated against as a child and he told me that this was due to the evils of the old society. I could see little hope for the future, but then he described the Communist program as a solution for China and a way
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to a bright future. . . . He was kind and encouraging. I visited him
frequently and soon adopted his views.
Hu's new beliefs gave him further confidence in his participation iri student agitation about corruption in the food supply as well as other issues at the agricultural school. And for the first time he be- came involved in a dangerous predicament: Nationalist secret police arrested some of the students, and Hu was accused by school authorities of being a Communist although he had no such affilia- tion at the time other than his beginning sympathies. Since he had heard stories of cruelty and torture inflicted by this division of the KMT, and of special "training" to which alleged offenders had been submitted, he decided to flee rather than risk arrest.
Having no place to go, and wishing to contribute to China's war effort, he enlisted in a special student military unit then being formed. There he found temporary sanctuary, but was once more deeply disturbed by the enormous corruption and inefficiency re- garding payrolls, allocation of weapons, and training arrangements. These things were not unique at the time, but the student unit apparently became something of a national scandal. At this time his father and uncle succeeded in getting in touch with him again and were horrified to find he was in the army; they wrote that they had sent him to the interior to become a scholar, not a soldier, and that, as the only male of his generation in the family, he had no right to take such liberties with his person. Their attitude can be summed up in the popular Chinese proverb which Hu himself quoted to me; "Good iron is not used for nails; good men do not be- come soldiers. " Hu resigned after six months of service when he was given the chance; he had come to the conclusion that "there could be no hope for the Nationalist government/'
A veteran enthusiast-cynic at nineteen, Hu's fortunes now finally changed. He managed through friends to gain admission to a much- respected high school primarily for overseas Chinese from south- east Asia, but which took some students in Hu's displaced cir- cumstances. When the school had to disband because of a new Japanese penetration, Hu accompanied a group of students and faculty members to Szechwan Province where it was re-established in combination with another school. Hu encountered here, despite the limited physical facilities, an atmosphere unique in his ex- perience: complete absence of corruption, great intellectual stimula-
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tion, an intimate group life among students, informal relations with faculty, and a generally shared hope for future reforms which could cure China's ills. In an inspiring history teacher, Hu found his second political (and Marxist) mentor:
I already had an emotional sympathy for the Communists. I now began to read about the materialist interpretation of history, the history of the development of society, and Ai Ssu-chYs popular philosophy. 1 When I had difficulty understanding some of these principles I went to this history teacher for help. He was always friendly and patient, and seemed to answer my questions logically. I acquired the theoretical background to go along with my emotional sympathy. . . . From that time on I developed the idea in my mind that Communism was the inevitable outcome of history. . . . It seemed to be the only way out for young people.
He emphasized the importance of his resentment of the old regime in bringing about this new view of the world.
My main feeling then was hatred for the KMT, All that I had seen and experienced was wrong. This hatred was the active side of my being; my feeling for Communism was a more passive side. Before I could understand the true meaning of their writing I accepted them because I was predisposed to do so. . . . I was at first excited by their solution to China's problems. Then I had more of the feeling that it was all settled: the KMT was out of the question, of no use, and Communism was the right way.
This was for Hu, "the happiest period of my life," the only time he can remember--perhaps with some retrospective glorification --being free of disturbing conflicts: "I no longer thought of any of my troubles. . . . I just forgot about the family. " Graduating near the top of his class at the age of twenty-one, he left for his home shortly after the Japanese surrender.
But when he arrived in Hupeh, he found his father, at sixty, "a defeated, frustrated, lonely old man, disillusioned with world events. " Hu senior had by this time become convinced that man's earthly efforts were futile, and (following a frequent Chinese life pattern) wished to spend his declining years in Buddhist medita- tion. Hu found his father surprisingly approachable and affectionate, and the two became closer than at any previous time. There was just one conflict between them--the old sore spot of Hu's educa-
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tion. His father, drawing upon his own experience, even went so far as to discourage university studies: "I have studied and tried to serve my country all my life and what did it lead to? " This failing, he urged Hu to attend a nearby university. But Hu recalled his past frustrations over his father's failure to keep his word about arrangements for study, and at that moment "the old resentment returned. " He refused his father's request and entered the Univer- sity of Nanking, where he felt he could get a better education.
Majoring in law and government, he found the atmosphere not conducive to study. Students and faculty members were vehemently denouncing the postwar KMT government, especially its failure to curb inflation and its repressive methods in attempting to stamp out opposition. Before long Hu assumed a leading role in student agitation, working closely with Communist Party members who did much of the behind-the-scenes organizing. During his junior year, he was arrested by the KMT police as part of a general roundup of student "activists. " Most were soon released, but a small group, including Hu, were taken to a country house just outside of Nan- king where they were told they were to be secretly executed. Im- prisoned for several months, Hu claimed that a spirit of group dedication protected him from fear. In fact, his description of the experience--even if the words are not taken at complete face value --implies a genuine exhilaration:
We were there together and had no horror of death. We always tried to encourage each other. . . . We felt that we were being sacrificed for a great cause, that our deaths would have a purpose. . . . Some of us felt that we were so young and our greatest regret was that we could not do more work for China. . . . I did feel grief and sorrow at night when I would think of my parents and my family. Then I would think of the meaning of our sacrifice, and I would forget about my sorrow.
All agreed that the meaning of their sacrifice was its contribu- tion to China's future, but Hu recalls a certain amount of dis- agreement among the imprisoned students concerning just what that future should be. Hu and a few of the others believed that China's civil war would be best resolved through a coalition govern- ment including the more enlightened Nationalist leaders (who had just replaced Chiang Kai-shek) as well as Communists; but the Communist students in the group insisted that there must be
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nothing short of a complete Communist victory. Their position made Hu wonder whether these students "had greater loyalties to the Communist party than to China itself," although not until later did he recognize the significance of this disagreement. Hu was not too excited (there was a suggestion that one side of him might even have been disappointed) when a general amnesty for political prisoners led to their release. His main preoccupation at the time was that of smuggling out his handcuffs in order to retain them as evidence of his mistreatment at the hands of the KMT. When he returned to the campus, he was greeted as a hero, and he remained active until the Communist entry a few months later.
Evaluation and Follow-up
Hu brought to thought reform an extraordinary capacity for anger and indignation; indeed, these had long before become the leitmotif of his existence. More than merely expressing them himself, he excelled at mobilizing similar emotions among others in his im- mediate environment. In this ability lay his capacity for leader- ship and the core of his youthful identity as an activist student leader. Behind his indignation and his leadership was an unusual degree of totalism--an all-or-nothing quality which pervaded his emotional life.
Hu's character in some ways was more reminiscent of the spirit of the young Martin Luther than of that of Confucius. Like Luther's (and like many figures in the Old Testament), Hu's totalism de- manded both full authority over those he led, and absolute self-
surrender to a higher authority. Hu also possessed a conscience of terrifying proportions. This kind of conscience can serve the creative function of inspiring total sincerity and absolute integrity--of mak- ing men mean what they say; it also, in its uncompromising judg- ments, contains the potential for the most extreme form of destruc- tiveness, including self-destructiveness. 2
We could consider Hu a psychological misfit, a compulsive rebel who goes into battle at the mere sight of authority, any authority. We could also see him as one of those exceptional young leaders who learn early in life to harness their own emotions in such a way that they make sensitive contact with yearnings of less intense people around them. Both of these judgments are true; either one
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alone distorts the picture. We can certainly say that Hu had little of the spirit of compromise and moderation so long valued in Chinese character structure; rather, he was an extremist who grew up in a series of environments conducive to extremism. This made him no less Chinese, but Chinese in a twentieth-century fashion. To under- stand the complexities of his character and of his response to thought reform, we must examine the strengths and the under- lying conflicts in an identity shaped against a background of chaos and change.
Whatever his struggles, Hu carried with him from early life a strong sense of himself as an aristocrat and a potential leader. As a young master within Chinese tradition, he was a little adult groomed for authority almost from birth. Moving from his family out into society, he maintained the conviction that it was his destiny to speak and act on behalf of others, and he developed an early talent for doing so. As with any talent, one must avoid oversimplified cause-and-effect explanations of origin (hereditary factors are prob- ably of great importance); but once this talent had been combined with the identity of the aristocratic leader, a pattern of strength and bold self-expression emerged which was crucial for what Hu would do and be in any situation. His development into a straight- boned boy (the last honorable confirmation he received within the idiom of traditional Chinese culture) expressed a similarself-image, matured to the point where he had become a youth with a cause. Both the youth and the cause continued to evolve until Hu became the activist student leader. This elite identity sequence supplied Hu with a sense of inner continuity, even when he turned against the traditional Chinese culture which had originally nurtured it. He used the strength of his family heritage--his identification with his father and his grandfather--to do battle with that same heritage, or at least with its remnants.
At the same time, Hu had always to fight off a profound sense of despair growing out of his personal, social, and historical predica- ment, Hu's environment had imposed on him a series of painful inner contradictions. To be a young master had its advantages; but it also involved him in a premature power struggle from which no child could emerge unscarred. It was, moreover, an archaic identity, one which was based upon a system of values in human relationships which was rapidly breaking down. Indeed, the extremes of behavior
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in Hu's family (especially that of his step-grandmother) were des- perate attempts to hold on to what was already slipping away. Hu's childhood environment was thus a caricature of Chinese family life, an expression of traditionalism rather than tradition.
A young master was also expected to be a filial son--obedient and proper not from coercion but love. Yet, so lacking in love and trust was his family environment that any such an identity had to be more pseudo than real. Hu's step-grandmother's indirect aggres- siveness, his mother's harassed nervousness, his uncle's petulance --and perhaps something inherent in Hu which made him difficult to love--all contributed to this contradictory atmosphere. These circumstances were both partly created and strongly intensified by historical and political currents: his father's fugitive status brought about a marriage with inevitable class strains, and was also respon- sible for the step-grandmother's being permitted to abuse her matriarchal power. Hu had no choice but to go through the filial motions; and even though he faltered at an early age (in the family shrine incident, for instance), he submitted to his step-grandmother more than he could comfortably admit to me.
This submission to his hated adversary had a lasting symbolic meaning for Hu: it established within him an exaggerated sensi- tivity toward being controlled or dominated by anyone. It also con- tributed to his later yearning for the very thing he was always fight- ing off: total domination, if not by a strong individual, at least by a mystical force. Children subjected to unusually controlling family authority can come to depend upon and even find pleasure in being so controlled; their subsequent struggle against new, would-be con- trollers becomes an inner battle between fear and desire. In Hu's case, the controlling person (his grandmother) became a symbol of both "irrational authority" and "the past," so that the two became equated in his mind. This is a frequent association for a youth in any culture, but is especially strong when he grows up in the midst of crumbling institutions and abused family prerogatives. Yet, iron- ically enough, this step-grandmother also supplied Hu with a model for his own later domineering tendencies, and initiated a response by which Hu came to view almost every relationship as essentially a power struggle.
Rather than the filial son, Hu regarded himself as the abandoned and betrayed victim of the most gross injustice. Whom did he
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blame for this injustice? He made clear that he focused most of his conscious hostility on his step-grandmother; and she thus served a useful function for him as the first of his total villains, acceptable outlets for his hatred against whom he could rally real or imagined action. But Hu also experienced resentment toward another person, for whom such resentment was entirely unacceptable: his father. He could not quite suppress the hostility which accompanied his sense of having been abandoned; and hostility toward one's father is, by traditional Chinese cultural standards, the most unfilial emo- tion a child can experience. These resentful feelings were Hu's first painful secret. Certainly his desire for revenge against his step- grandmother was real enough; but it was intensified by his need to purge his mind of similar feelings toward his father, and possibly his mother as well. His sense of himself as the unfilial son (to both father and grandmother), as the abandoned and betrayed victim, and as the avenger made up a formidable negative identity complex. Each of these elements was something against which his culture and family had warned him, and each was something he could not avoid becoming, despite and partly because of this warning; in lasting combination, they had the destructive effect of maintaining within him the bitterness and guilt which gave his rebellion its desperate and compulsive character.
To bring all these aspects of himself--positive and negative-- into effective combination, Hu resorted to two personal, Utopian myths. (The term personal myth is used here to suggest a recur- rently-imagined sequence of events which supply purpose and mo- mentum to an individual's existence. ) The first myth, involving his father's return, was mostly passive--a longing for a golden age which had never existed. The second, the myth of himself as the hero (or chien hsia), was more active, and for a time he lived it out quite effectively. These two myths assumed tremendous im- portance in Hu's life, for they were the antidote for his despair: the first offered hope eternal, the second a bold life of self-sacrifice and redemption. At the same time they generated strong emotional forces which, once initiated, had a staying power of their own. His quests for some form of golden age and for perpetual heroic ex- pression 3 came to influence Hu's every action. They also reinforced his already well-developed totalism: for so deep had been his despair, so strong his sense of personal oppression, so extreme the
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social chaos, and so dramatic the contemporary historical events, that Hu began very early to seek all-embracing personal and polit- ical solutions.
As an activist student leader in a turbulent student movement, Hu found an ideal metier for acting upon his personal myths and giving expression to his talents and his emotional urges. Embracing a Communist ideology which promised a universal golden age, he could remain sufficiently independent to follow a hero's path of individual leadership, and almost martyrdom.
He required a new total villain, a role for which the KMT was admirably suited. It was "old"; and--on the basis of his own ex- perience, beginning with the Youth Corps school--its authority was "irrational. " These judgments were by no means simply the product of Hu's own emotional urges (the KMT's inept and re- pressive policies have been widely documented): but Hu--like many others of his generation--found in this regime a focus for all of the bitterness, anger, and frustration which had built up during his young life.
Hu was helped to make the short step from hatred of the KMT to sympathy for the Communists (and the feeling he had found something "new" and "rational") by the two fatherly men he en- countered. One may say that they were, at least temporarily, fathers regained; but their attraction for Hu lay in the contrasts between them and his real father: they were there, they were consistent, they had time for him, and they explained things. Indeed, they did what mentors and healers (religious, political, academic, or psychological) so often do; they made it possible for Hu to unite his personal myths with more sweeping social and historical myths, and pointed out to him a way to a relationship with mankind. This new ideology was as totalistic as he could wish it to be; and his most vengeful feelings could be justified within a framework of an apocalyptic cause.
Once Communism became the prevailing authority, however, Hu was bound to be troubled by the manipulations of its cadres. First at the university, and then during thought reform itself, he experi- enced a profound sense of humiliation at being forced to submit to suffocating domination. And as in the past, much of his emotional energy was taken up with fighting off his own urge to surrender himself totally to the force imposing this domination. His entering
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the revolutionary university was in itself a partial admission that something in his attitude should be changed; during the first days of reform he seemed to be giving himself completely to the process, and recapturing that golden age of total sincerity and harmony which he had known just once before at his last high school. But as much as part of him longed for total emotional immersion, he was, in the long run, incapable of it. As with Father Simon (the con- verted Jesuit), the defier in Hu could never allow the convert in him to gain the upper hand; he could not trust any environment, even a Communist one, sufficiently to permit himself the absolute merger toward which his totalism constantly drove him.
Hu's means of dealing with this conflict was to cling tenaciously to a sense of autonomy, and the only kind of autonomy he knew was that of the leader or hero. Hence his unsolicited debate with the cadre, and his view of himself as both a teacher and a defender of his fellow students. His heroic self-image required him to main- tain high standards of integrity (even if he violated these more than he admits); and it gave a dramatic quality to his every action, a sense that all he did or said had significance not only for himself but for the world at large. It was thus of great help in maintaining his self-fespect and his autonomy, and in preserving a certain amount of independence from the bizarre thought-reform morality. But in the face of thought reform's consistent antipathy to heroes--to any- one who might exert a strong influence over others which was dif- ferent from the immediate thought reform message--this self-image also imposed an extremely heavy psychological burden.
The greatest threat to Hu's emotional balance, however, was his "secret"--the bitter hatred toward the Communist reformers which welled up within him. Contained within this secret were all of his negative identity elements, which now had a confused relationship to the Communist authorities. That is, Hu felt himself to be un- filial to a movement he had long embraced and to an all-powerful authority which would brook no disloyalty; to be the abandoned and betrayed victim of that same Communist authority; and to be a potential avenger who would some day smite down his persecutors. These sentiments not only would have placed him in considerable personal danger had they become known; but their unacceptability --to the environment and to Hu himself--stimulated strong feel- ings of guilt, just as his secret resentment of his father had earlier
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in his life. This guilt was partly responsible for Hu's unconscious urge to reveal his secret ("The secret was something which was al- ways trying to escape from me"). But also contributing to this urge was his strong inner drive toward total self-surrender, since reveal- ing the extent of his hostility would have been the first step in a genuine Communist-style reform. As is so often the case in totalitar- ian confession and reform procedures, Hu's secret was almost his undoing.
The news of his father's imprisonment caused him to revert sud- denly to traditional self-judgments, and to revive his long-standing negative self-image of the unfilial son. He experienced the terrible guilt of the son who had defied and, by participating in the Com- munist movement, had overthrown--had symbolically demolished --his father. After this, the requirement that he denounce his father in the final summary added salt to his wounds.