With the profusion of the
religious
cults during the late 19705 and 19805,1 began to hear that Chapter 22was being made use of for various forms of "deprogramming" of cult recruits, and then that the same chapter was being studied by cult leaders, ostensibly for the purpose of dissociating their groups from the patterns I described.
Lifton-Robert-Jay-Thought-Reform-and-the-Psychology-of-Totalism
?
Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism
This page intentionally left blank
? ? Thought Reform and the
Psychology
of TotaHsm
A STUDY OF "BRAINW ASHING" IN CHINA
Robert Jay Lifton, M. D.
The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill and London
? Preface to the University of Noith Carolina Press Edition (C) 1989 by Robert Jay Lifton
All rights reserved
First published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1989
Originally published by W. W. Norton & Co. (C) 1961 Robert Jay Lifton
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources,
Printed in the United States of America 0403 9876
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lifton, Robert Jay. 1926-
Thought reform and the psychology of totalism:
the study of brainwashing in China / Robert Jay Lifton. p. cm.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-8078-4253-2 (alk. paper)
i. Brainwashing--China. 2. Communism--China. I. Title. BF633. L5 1989
15? ^/53/0951--dc 19
88-40534 CIP
For B. /.
the quest and the journey
? CONTENTS
Preface to the University of North Carolina Press Edition vii
Preface xi PART ONE
The Problem
1. What Is "Brainwashing"? 3
2. Research in Hong Kong 8
PART TWO
Prison Thought Reform of Westerners
3. Re-education: Dr. Vincent 19
4. Father Luca: The False Confession 38
5. Psychological Steps 65
6. Varieties of Response: The Obviously Confused 86
7. Varieties of Response: Apparent Converts 117
8. Varieties of Response: Apparent Resisters 133
9. Group Reform: Double-edged Leadership 152
10. Follow-up Visits 185
11. Father Simon: The Converted Jesuit 207
12. Recovery and Renewal: A Summing Up 222
v
? VI CONTENTS
PART THREE
Thought Reform of Chinese Intellectuals
13. The Encounter 243
14. The Revolutionary University: Mr. Hu 253
15. A Chinese Odyssey 274
16. The Older Generation: Robert Chao 301
17. George Chen: The Conversions of Youth 313
18. Grace Wu: Music and Reform 338
19. Cultural Perspectives: The Fate of Filial Piety 359
20. Cultural Perspectives: Origins 388
21. Cultural Perspectives: Impact 399
PART FOUR
Totalism and Its Alternatives
22. Ideological Totalism 419
23. Approachesto Re-education 438
24. "Open" Personal Change 462
Appendix: A Confession Document 473 Notes 485 Index 505
? PREFACE
TO THE UNIVERSITY OF
NORTH CAROLINA PRESS EDITION
Now, after twenty-eight years, my own sense of this
book has changed. I see it as less a specific record of Maoist China and more an exploration of what might be the most dangerous direction of the twentieth-century mind--the quest for absolute or "totalistic" belief systems.
Indeed, that quest has produced nothing short of a worldwide epidemic of political and religious fundamentalism--of movements characterized by literalized embrace of sacred texts as containing absolute truth for all persons, and a mandate for militant, often vio- lent, measures taken against designated enemies of that truth or mere unbelievers. The epidemic includes fundamentalist versions of existing religions and political movements as well as newly emerging groups that may combine disparate ideological elements.
These latter groups are often referred to as cults, now a somewhat pejorative designation, so that some observers prefer the term new religions. But I think we can speak of cults as groups with certain characteristics: first, a charismatic leader, who tends increasingly to become the object of worship in place of more general spiritual prin- ciples that are advocated; second, patterns of "thought reform" akin to those described in this volume, and especially in Chapter 22; and third, a tendency toward manipulation from above with considerable exploitation (economic, sexual, or other) of ordinary supplicants or recruits who bring their idealism from below.
vii
? V lll THOUGHT REFORM
Indeed, this book is largely responsible for my having been drawn into these controversies. With the profusion of the religious cults during the late 19705 and 19805,1 began to hear that Chapter 22was being made use of for various forms of "deprogramming" of cult recruits, and then that the same chapter was being studied by cult leaders, ostensibly for the purpose of dissociating their groups from the patterns I described. Young people who had been involved in cults and the parents of such people began to consult me about these general patterns. I felt I had to clarify my position by preparing a newessayoncultformationandtotalisminmyrecentcollection The Future of Immortality and Other Essays for a Nuclear Age (1987), but I have been especially pleased by the extent to which this earlier volume on thought reform has remained central to literature on cults and on totalism in general.
Tendencies toward totalism in China itself have diminished over the years, as have specific thought reform programs. But that did not happen until after a fierce reassertion of totalistic behavior during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the late 19605 and early 19705. I was able to study that upheaval and saw in it an effort on the part of the aging Mao Zedong to call forth the young in a com- mon quest to reassert the immortalizing power of the revolution it- self, and hence I entitled the work Revolutionary Immortality: Mao Tse-Tung and the Chinese Revolution (1968). Chinese society is still recovering from that extreme, often violent, outbreak. The re- gime's subsequent tendency, through fits and starts, has been in the direction of liberalization throughout the society, but that in no way precludes the possibility of future waves of totalistic policies or thought reform projects.
From the beginning, this book was meant to provide principles of a general kind, criteria for evaluating any environment in relation- ship to ideological totalism. Such patterns are all too readily em- braced by a great variety of groups, large and small, as a means of manipulating human beings, always in the name of a higher purpose. And it should not be forgotten that such groups can hold great attrac- tion for large numbers of people.
In recent research on Nazi Germany I was able to explore the most sinister of all historical examples of this phenomenon. I found that a particular kind of totalistic ideology--a biologized view of society, or what I called a "biomedical vision"--could, with its ac-
? PREFACE IX
companying institutions, draw very ordinary people into murderous activities. I came to understand that, in an atmosphere of totalism and brutality, even fragments of an ideology can readily contribute to participation in killing, as I reported in my book The Nazi Doc- tors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (1986). There are parallels in Nazi and Chinese Communist use of the idiom of disease and cure, as totalistic systems are apt to do; equally signifi- cant is the general contrast between Nazi cure by mass murder and Chinese Communist cure by "re-education. "
I have been equally concerned with a contemporary category of fundamentalism that could contribute to killing on so great a scale as to dwarf even what the Nazis did, that associated with nuclear threat. Nuclear fundamentalism can take shape around the weapons themselves: the exaggerated dependency on them and embrace of them to the point of near worship. That is what I call the ideology of nuclearism. The weapons become an ultimate truth in their os- tensible capacity to grant security and safety, to keep the world going, to offer salvation.
A seemingly different but related form of nuclear fundamentalism is the "end-time" ideology, within which nuclear holocaust is viewed as the realization of biblical prophecy and a necessary occurrence to bring about the longed-for Second Coming of Jesus and eventual earthly paradise. In a study we have been conducting at The City University Center on Violence and Human Survival, we have been pleased to learn that even fundamentalists with strong belief in end- time ideas find it hard to espouse this formula without great ambiva- lence and uncertainty. They too, it seems, have taken in some of the horrible actuality of the consequences of nuclear weapons and find it hard to believe that God would bring about such horrors or permit them to occur. Nonetheless, these fundamentalist attitudes become associated with the weapons in varying ways and with varying in- tensity throughout much of our society, and in the process they interfere greatly with the nuanced thought and moral imagination needed to cope with nuclear threat.
While totalitarianism is a twentieth-century phenomenon requir- ing modern technology and communications networks, the totalistic cast of mind is not. It probably was, in fact, much more common in previous centuries. It is in any case part of the human repertoire, an ever-present potential that can readily manifest itself when historical
? X THOUGHT REFORM
conditions call it forth. What is new is the potential for radically in- creased consequences of totalism, to the point of human extinction.
The kind of wisdom that totalistic ideas now interfere with has to do with what I call species awareness and the species self, the recog- nition that, given the capacity of our weaponry to destroy all human life, each sense of self becomes bound up with the life of every other self on the planet. My critical evaluation of ideological totalism in this book is meant to further that species orientation.
RJL
The City University of New York January 1989
? PREFACE
This study began as a psychiatric evaluation of Chi-
nese Communist "thought reform," or "brainwash- ing," It is still primarily this; but it has also, inevitably, become a psychological study of extremism or totalism--and even more broadly, a study of the "closed" versus the "open" approaches to human change.
It is based upon research which I conducted in Hong Kong in 1954-55. It then evolved over four years of additional research and teaching in the United States. My work with Western and Chinese subjects--piecing together emotional details that were both poig- nant and extreme--and the psychological, moral, and historical challenge of the material have made this study an exceptionally ab- sorbing personal and professional experience.
A book about extremism calls for a special measure of objectivity. This does not mean that its author can claim complete personal or moral detachment. The assumption of such detachment in psy- chological (or any other) work is at best self-deception, and at worst a source of harmful distortion. And who during this era can pretend to be uninvolved in the issues of psychological coercion, of identity, and of ideology? Certainly not one who has felt impelled to study them at such length.
Instead, I have attempted to be both reasonably dispassionate and responsibly committed: dispassionate in my efforts to stand away from the material far enough to probe the nature of the process, its effects upon people exposed to it, and some of the in- fluences affecting its practitioners; committed to my own analyses
xi
? Xii THOUGHT REFORM
and judgments within the limitations and the bias of my knowl- edge.
Much in this book is highly critical of the particular aspect of Chinese Communism which it examines, but I have made no at- tempt to render a definitive verdict on this far-reaching revolution- ary movement. I am critical of thought reform's psychological tactics, not because they are Communist (or Chinese Communist), but because of their specific nature. In the last section of this book, these tactics are compared with practices within our own culture, which also receive critical treatment insofar as they resemble the ideological totalism of thought reform. Instead of contrasting the "good we" and the "bad they/' rather, I have attempted to identify and understand a particular psychological phenomenon.
In the pursuit of this understanding, I have recorded all that seemed relevant, including the details of whatever psychological and physical abuse my subjects encountered. I believe that this comprehensive approach offers the best means of contributing to general knowledge, and to the clarification of an emotionally loaded subject; and I hope that this study will thereby ultimately contribute to the resolution, rather than to the intensification, of cold war pas- sions. It is in fact one of the tragedies of the cold war that moral criticism of either side is immediately exploited by the other side in an exaggerated, one-dimensional fashion. One can never prevent this from happening; but one can at least express the spirit in which a work has been written.
Such an approach requires that I inform the reader about my bias in both psychiatric and political matters. Psychiatrically, I have been strongly influenced by both neo-Freudian and Freudian cur- rents: the former through an association with the Washington School of Psychiatry during and immediately after the research study itself, and the latter through a subsequent candidacy in the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute. Both influences were also present in my earlier psychiatric residency training at the State University Medical Center of New York. I have found the theoretical writings of Erik Erikson, especially those relating to questions of personal identity and ideology, particularly relevant for this study. At the same time, I have constantly groped for new ways to bring psychological insights to bear upon historical forces, and do so with a humanistic focus. Thus, I have made extensive use of my subjects' biographical
? PREF ACE X l l l
material, and have attempted to include in these presentations a flesh-and-bones description of their life histories in relationship to pertinent social historical currents, as well as a rigorous psychological analysis of their responses to thought reform. This seemed to me the best way to deal with the inseparable relationship between stress and response, and (in William James' phrase) to "convey truth. "
My political philosophical bias is toward a liberalism strongly critical of itself; and toward the kind of antitotalitarian (in the psy- chological terms of this study, antitotalistic), historically-minded questioning of the order of things expressed by Albert Camus in his brilliant philosophical essay, The Rebel. No one understood better than Camus the human issues involved in this book.
I should like to mention a few of the many people whose direct personal assistance was indispensable to the completion of this study. David McK. Rioch lent initial support when support was most needed, and always continued to enrich the work through his urbane eclecticism, his provocative criticism, and his personal kindness. Erik Erikson, during many memorable talks at Stock- bridge and Cambridge, made stimulating and enlarging suggestions, both about specific case histories and problems of presentation. During the latter stages of the work, David Riesrnan offered gener- ously of his extraordinaryintellectual breadth and his unique per sonal capacity to evoke what is most creative within one. Carl Binger has been sage and always helpful in his advice. All four made thoughtful criticisms of the manuscript, as did Kenneth Keniston and F. C. Redlich. Others in psychiatry and related fields to whom I am indebted are Leslie Farber, Erich Lindemann, Margaret Mead, and Beata Rank. In the perilous subtleties of Chinese cultural, intellectual, and political history, I was constantly counseled by Benjamin Schwartz and by John Fairbank, both of whom read parts of the manuscript; and earlier in the work by Lu Pao-tung, Ma
Meng, Howard Boorman, Conrad Brandt, and A. Doak Barnett The literary advice and loving sustenance of my wife, Betty Jean Lifton, can hardly be documented. My father, Harold A. Lifton,
also did much to encourage this study.
The Hong Kong research was sponsored for the first seven months
? XIV THOUGHT REFORM
by the Asia Foundation, and for the remaining year by the Wash- ington School of Psychiatry. The manuscript was completed under grants from the Ford Foundation and the Foundation's Fund for Research in Psychiatry, both administered through Harvard Uni- versity,
Finally, I must acknowledge my debt to the forty research sub- jects, Chinese and Western, whose personal thought reform ex- periences are the basis for this study. The extent of their intelligent collaboration in this work is apparent in the biographical chapters. In these, I have altered certain details in order to protect the sub- jects' anonymity; but none of these alterations affect the essential psychological patterns.
? PART ONE THE PROBLEM
How intoxicating to feel like God the Father and to hand out definitive testimonials of bad character
and habits.
Albert Camus
Only simple and quiet words will ripen of them- selves. For a whirlwind does not last for the whole morning. Nor does a thundershower last the whole day. Who is their author? The heaven and earth. Yet even they cannot make such violent things last. How much more true this must be of the rash en- deavors of man.
Lao Tze
This page intentionally left blank
? ? CHAPTER 1 WHAT IS "BRAINWASHING"?
When confronted with the endless discussion on the
general subject of "brainwashing/' 1 am sometimes reminded of the Zen Buddhist maxim: "The more we talk about it, the less we understand it. " The confusion begins with the word itself, so new and yet already so much a part of our everyday lan- guage. It was first used by an American journalist, Edward Hunter, as a translation of the colloquialism hsi nao (literally, "wash brain") which he quoted from Chinese informants who described its use following the Communist takeover. 1
"Brainwashing" soon developed a life of its own. Originally used to describe Chinese indoctrination techniques, it was quickly ap- plied to Russian and Eastern European approaches, and then to just about anything which the Communists did anywhere (as il- lustrated by the statement of a prominent American lady who, upon returning from a trip to Moscow, claimed that the Russians were "brainwashing" prospective mothers in order to prepare them for natural childbirth). Inevitably, the word made its appearance closer to home, sometimes with the saving grace of humor (New Yorker cartoons of children "brainwashing" parents, and wives "brainwashing" husbands), but on other occasions with a more vindictive tone--as when Southern segregationists accused all who favor racial equality (including the United States Supreme Court) of having been influenced by "left-wing brainwashing"; or equally
3
? 4 THOUGHT REFORM
irresponsible usages by anti-fluoridation, anti-mental health legisla- tion, or anti-almost anything groups leveled against their real or fancied opponents.
Then there is the lurid mythology which has grown up about it: the "mysterious oriental device," or the deliberate application of Pavlov's findings on dogs. There is also another kind of myth, the claim that there is no such thing, that it is all just the fantasy of American correspondents.
Finally, there is the more responsible--even tortured--self-exami- nation which leads professional people to ask whether they in their own activities might not be guilty of "brainwashing": educators about their teaching, psychiatrists about their training and their psychotherapy, theologians about their own reform methods. Op- ponents of these activities, without any such agonizing scrutiny, can more glibly claim that they are "nothing but brainwashing. " Others have seen "brainwashing" in American advertising, in large corporation training programs, in private preparatory schools, and in congressional investigations. These misgivings are not always without basis, and suggest that there is a continuity between our subject and many less extreme activities; but the matter is not clari- fied by promiscuous use of the term.
Behind this web of semantic (and more than semantic) confusion lies an image of "brainwashing" as an all-powerful, irresistible, un- fathomable, and magical method of achieving total control over the human mind. It is of course none of these things, and this loose usage makes the word a rallying point for fear, resentment, urges toward submission, justification for failure, irresponsible ac- cusation, and for a wide gamut of emotional extremism. One may justly conclude that the term has a far from precise and a ques- tionable usefulness; one may even be tempted to forget about the whole subject and return to more constructive pursuits.
Yet to do so would be to overlook one of the major problems of our era--that of the psychology and the ethics of directed attempts at changing human beings. For despite the vicissitudes of brain- washing, the process which gave rise to the name is very much a reality: the official Chinese Communist program of szu-hsicmg kai-tsao (variously translated as "ideological remolding," "ideolog- ical reform," or as we shall refer to it here, "thought reform") has in fact emerged as one of the most powerful efforts at human
? WHAT is "BRAINWASHING"? 5
manipulation ever undertaken. To be sure, such a program is by no means completely new: imposed dogmas, inquisitions, and mass conversion movements have existed in every country and during every historical epoch. But the Chinese Communists have brought to theirs a more organized, comprehensive, and deliberate--a more total--character, as well as a unique blend of energetic and in- genious psychological techniques.
The Western world has heard mostly about "thought reform" as applied in a military setting: the synthetic bacteriological warfare confessions and the collaboration obtained from United Nations personnel during the Korean War. However, these were merely export versions of a thought reform program aimed, not primarily at Westerners, but at the Chinese people themselves, and vigorously applied in universities, schools, special "revolutionary colleges," prisons, business and government offices, labor and peasant organ- izations. Thought reform combines this impressively widespread distribution with a focused emotional power. Not only does it reach one-fourth of the people of the world, but it seeks to bring about in everyone it touches a significant personal upheaval.
Whatever its setting, thought reform consists of two basic ele- ments: confession, the exposure and renunciation of past and pres- ent "evil"; and re-education, the remaking of a man in the Com- munist image. These elements are closely related and overlapping, since they both bring into play a series of pressures and appeals-- intellectual, emotional, and physical--aimed at social control and individual change.
The American press and public have been greatly concerned about this general subject, and rightly so. But too often the in- formation made available about it has been sensationalist in tone, distorted because of inadequate knowledge, or obscured by the strong emotions which the concept of brainwashing seems to arouse in everyone. Its aura of fear and mystery has been more conducive to polemic than to understanding.
Still the vital questions continue to be asked: Can a man be made to change his beliefs? If a change does occur, how long will it last? How do the Chinese Communists obtain these strange confessions? Do people believe their own confessions, even when false? How successful is thought reform? Do Westerners and Chinese react differently to it? Is there any defense against it? Is it related to
? D THOUGHT REFORM
psychotherapy? to religious conversion? Have the Chinese discov- ered new and obscure techniques? What has all this to do with Soviet Russia and international Communism? with Chinese cul- ture?
With the profusion of the religious cults during the late 19705 and 19805,1 began to hear that Chapter 22was being made use of for various forms of "deprogramming" of cult recruits, and then that the same chapter was being studied by cult leaders, ostensibly for the purpose of dissociating their groups from the patterns I described. Young people who had been involved in cults and the parents of such people began to consult me about these general patterns. I felt I had to clarify my position by preparing a newessayoncultformationandtotalisminmyrecentcollection The Future of Immortality and Other Essays for a Nuclear Age (1987), but I have been especially pleased by the extent to which this earlier volume on thought reform has remained central to literature on cults and on totalism in general.
Tendencies toward totalism in China itself have diminished over the years, as have specific thought reform programs. But that did not happen until after a fierce reassertion of totalistic behavior during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the late 19605 and early 19705. I was able to study that upheaval and saw in it an effort on the part of the aging Mao Zedong to call forth the young in a com- mon quest to reassert the immortalizing power of the revolution it- self, and hence I entitled the work Revolutionary Immortality: Mao Tse-Tung and the Chinese Revolution (1968). Chinese society is still recovering from that extreme, often violent, outbreak. The re- gime's subsequent tendency, through fits and starts, has been in the direction of liberalization throughout the society, but that in no way precludes the possibility of future waves of totalistic policies or thought reform projects.
From the beginning, this book was meant to provide principles of a general kind, criteria for evaluating any environment in relation- ship to ideological totalism. Such patterns are all too readily em- braced by a great variety of groups, large and small, as a means of manipulating human beings, always in the name of a higher purpose. And it should not be forgotten that such groups can hold great attrac- tion for large numbers of people.
In recent research on Nazi Germany I was able to explore the most sinister of all historical examples of this phenomenon. I found that a particular kind of totalistic ideology--a biologized view of society, or what I called a "biomedical vision"--could, with its ac-
? PREFACE IX
companying institutions, draw very ordinary people into murderous activities. I came to understand that, in an atmosphere of totalism and brutality, even fragments of an ideology can readily contribute to participation in killing, as I reported in my book The Nazi Doc- tors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (1986). There are parallels in Nazi and Chinese Communist use of the idiom of disease and cure, as totalistic systems are apt to do; equally signifi- cant is the general contrast between Nazi cure by mass murder and Chinese Communist cure by "re-education. "
I have been equally concerned with a contemporary category of fundamentalism that could contribute to killing on so great a scale as to dwarf even what the Nazis did, that associated with nuclear threat. Nuclear fundamentalism can take shape around the weapons themselves: the exaggerated dependency on them and embrace of them to the point of near worship. That is what I call the ideology of nuclearism. The weapons become an ultimate truth in their os- tensible capacity to grant security and safety, to keep the world going, to offer salvation.
A seemingly different but related form of nuclear fundamentalism is the "end-time" ideology, within which nuclear holocaust is viewed as the realization of biblical prophecy and a necessary occurrence to bring about the longed-for Second Coming of Jesus and eventual earthly paradise. In a study we have been conducting at The City University Center on Violence and Human Survival, we have been pleased to learn that even fundamentalists with strong belief in end- time ideas find it hard to espouse this formula without great ambiva- lence and uncertainty. They too, it seems, have taken in some of the horrible actuality of the consequences of nuclear weapons and find it hard to believe that God would bring about such horrors or permit them to occur. Nonetheless, these fundamentalist attitudes become associated with the weapons in varying ways and with varying in- tensity throughout much of our society, and in the process they interfere greatly with the nuanced thought and moral imagination needed to cope with nuclear threat.
While totalitarianism is a twentieth-century phenomenon requir- ing modern technology and communications networks, the totalistic cast of mind is not. It probably was, in fact, much more common in previous centuries. It is in any case part of the human repertoire, an ever-present potential that can readily manifest itself when historical
? X THOUGHT REFORM
conditions call it forth. What is new is the potential for radically in- creased consequences of totalism, to the point of human extinction.
The kind of wisdom that totalistic ideas now interfere with has to do with what I call species awareness and the species self, the recog- nition that, given the capacity of our weaponry to destroy all human life, each sense of self becomes bound up with the life of every other self on the planet. My critical evaluation of ideological totalism in this book is meant to further that species orientation.
RJL
The City University of New York January 1989
? PREFACE
This study began as a psychiatric evaluation of Chi-
nese Communist "thought reform," or "brainwash- ing," It is still primarily this; but it has also, inevitably, become a psychological study of extremism or totalism--and even more broadly, a study of the "closed" versus the "open" approaches to human change.
It is based upon research which I conducted in Hong Kong in 1954-55. It then evolved over four years of additional research and teaching in the United States. My work with Western and Chinese subjects--piecing together emotional details that were both poig- nant and extreme--and the psychological, moral, and historical challenge of the material have made this study an exceptionally ab- sorbing personal and professional experience.
A book about extremism calls for a special measure of objectivity. This does not mean that its author can claim complete personal or moral detachment. The assumption of such detachment in psy- chological (or any other) work is at best self-deception, and at worst a source of harmful distortion. And who during this era can pretend to be uninvolved in the issues of psychological coercion, of identity, and of ideology? Certainly not one who has felt impelled to study them at such length.
Instead, I have attempted to be both reasonably dispassionate and responsibly committed: dispassionate in my efforts to stand away from the material far enough to probe the nature of the process, its effects upon people exposed to it, and some of the in- fluences affecting its practitioners; committed to my own analyses
xi
? Xii THOUGHT REFORM
and judgments within the limitations and the bias of my knowl- edge.
Much in this book is highly critical of the particular aspect of Chinese Communism which it examines, but I have made no at- tempt to render a definitive verdict on this far-reaching revolution- ary movement. I am critical of thought reform's psychological tactics, not because they are Communist (or Chinese Communist), but because of their specific nature. In the last section of this book, these tactics are compared with practices within our own culture, which also receive critical treatment insofar as they resemble the ideological totalism of thought reform. Instead of contrasting the "good we" and the "bad they/' rather, I have attempted to identify and understand a particular psychological phenomenon.
In the pursuit of this understanding, I have recorded all that seemed relevant, including the details of whatever psychological and physical abuse my subjects encountered. I believe that this comprehensive approach offers the best means of contributing to general knowledge, and to the clarification of an emotionally loaded subject; and I hope that this study will thereby ultimately contribute to the resolution, rather than to the intensification, of cold war pas- sions. It is in fact one of the tragedies of the cold war that moral criticism of either side is immediately exploited by the other side in an exaggerated, one-dimensional fashion. One can never prevent this from happening; but one can at least express the spirit in which a work has been written.
Such an approach requires that I inform the reader about my bias in both psychiatric and political matters. Psychiatrically, I have been strongly influenced by both neo-Freudian and Freudian cur- rents: the former through an association with the Washington School of Psychiatry during and immediately after the research study itself, and the latter through a subsequent candidacy in the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute. Both influences were also present in my earlier psychiatric residency training at the State University Medical Center of New York. I have found the theoretical writings of Erik Erikson, especially those relating to questions of personal identity and ideology, particularly relevant for this study. At the same time, I have constantly groped for new ways to bring psychological insights to bear upon historical forces, and do so with a humanistic focus. Thus, I have made extensive use of my subjects' biographical
? PREF ACE X l l l
material, and have attempted to include in these presentations a flesh-and-bones description of their life histories in relationship to pertinent social historical currents, as well as a rigorous psychological analysis of their responses to thought reform. This seemed to me the best way to deal with the inseparable relationship between stress and response, and (in William James' phrase) to "convey truth. "
My political philosophical bias is toward a liberalism strongly critical of itself; and toward the kind of antitotalitarian (in the psy- chological terms of this study, antitotalistic), historically-minded questioning of the order of things expressed by Albert Camus in his brilliant philosophical essay, The Rebel. No one understood better than Camus the human issues involved in this book.
I should like to mention a few of the many people whose direct personal assistance was indispensable to the completion of this study. David McK. Rioch lent initial support when support was most needed, and always continued to enrich the work through his urbane eclecticism, his provocative criticism, and his personal kindness. Erik Erikson, during many memorable talks at Stock- bridge and Cambridge, made stimulating and enlarging suggestions, both about specific case histories and problems of presentation. During the latter stages of the work, David Riesrnan offered gener- ously of his extraordinaryintellectual breadth and his unique per sonal capacity to evoke what is most creative within one. Carl Binger has been sage and always helpful in his advice. All four made thoughtful criticisms of the manuscript, as did Kenneth Keniston and F. C. Redlich. Others in psychiatry and related fields to whom I am indebted are Leslie Farber, Erich Lindemann, Margaret Mead, and Beata Rank. In the perilous subtleties of Chinese cultural, intellectual, and political history, I was constantly counseled by Benjamin Schwartz and by John Fairbank, both of whom read parts of the manuscript; and earlier in the work by Lu Pao-tung, Ma
Meng, Howard Boorman, Conrad Brandt, and A. Doak Barnett The literary advice and loving sustenance of my wife, Betty Jean Lifton, can hardly be documented. My father, Harold A. Lifton,
also did much to encourage this study.
The Hong Kong research was sponsored for the first seven months
? XIV THOUGHT REFORM
by the Asia Foundation, and for the remaining year by the Wash- ington School of Psychiatry. The manuscript was completed under grants from the Ford Foundation and the Foundation's Fund for Research in Psychiatry, both administered through Harvard Uni- versity,
Finally, I must acknowledge my debt to the forty research sub- jects, Chinese and Western, whose personal thought reform ex- periences are the basis for this study. The extent of their intelligent collaboration in this work is apparent in the biographical chapters. In these, I have altered certain details in order to protect the sub- jects' anonymity; but none of these alterations affect the essential psychological patterns.
? PART ONE THE PROBLEM
How intoxicating to feel like God the Father and to hand out definitive testimonials of bad character
and habits.
Albert Camus
Only simple and quiet words will ripen of them- selves. For a whirlwind does not last for the whole morning. Nor does a thundershower last the whole day. Who is their author? The heaven and earth. Yet even they cannot make such violent things last. How much more true this must be of the rash en- deavors of man.
Lao Tze
This page intentionally left blank
? ? CHAPTER 1 WHAT IS "BRAINWASHING"?
When confronted with the endless discussion on the
general subject of "brainwashing/' 1 am sometimes reminded of the Zen Buddhist maxim: "The more we talk about it, the less we understand it. " The confusion begins with the word itself, so new and yet already so much a part of our everyday lan- guage. It was first used by an American journalist, Edward Hunter, as a translation of the colloquialism hsi nao (literally, "wash brain") which he quoted from Chinese informants who described its use following the Communist takeover. 1
"Brainwashing" soon developed a life of its own. Originally used to describe Chinese indoctrination techniques, it was quickly ap- plied to Russian and Eastern European approaches, and then to just about anything which the Communists did anywhere (as il- lustrated by the statement of a prominent American lady who, upon returning from a trip to Moscow, claimed that the Russians were "brainwashing" prospective mothers in order to prepare them for natural childbirth). Inevitably, the word made its appearance closer to home, sometimes with the saving grace of humor (New Yorker cartoons of children "brainwashing" parents, and wives "brainwashing" husbands), but on other occasions with a more vindictive tone--as when Southern segregationists accused all who favor racial equality (including the United States Supreme Court) of having been influenced by "left-wing brainwashing"; or equally
3
? 4 THOUGHT REFORM
irresponsible usages by anti-fluoridation, anti-mental health legisla- tion, or anti-almost anything groups leveled against their real or fancied opponents.
Then there is the lurid mythology which has grown up about it: the "mysterious oriental device," or the deliberate application of Pavlov's findings on dogs. There is also another kind of myth, the claim that there is no such thing, that it is all just the fantasy of American correspondents.
Finally, there is the more responsible--even tortured--self-exami- nation which leads professional people to ask whether they in their own activities might not be guilty of "brainwashing": educators about their teaching, psychiatrists about their training and their psychotherapy, theologians about their own reform methods. Op- ponents of these activities, without any such agonizing scrutiny, can more glibly claim that they are "nothing but brainwashing. " Others have seen "brainwashing" in American advertising, in large corporation training programs, in private preparatory schools, and in congressional investigations. These misgivings are not always without basis, and suggest that there is a continuity between our subject and many less extreme activities; but the matter is not clari- fied by promiscuous use of the term.
Behind this web of semantic (and more than semantic) confusion lies an image of "brainwashing" as an all-powerful, irresistible, un- fathomable, and magical method of achieving total control over the human mind. It is of course none of these things, and this loose usage makes the word a rallying point for fear, resentment, urges toward submission, justification for failure, irresponsible ac- cusation, and for a wide gamut of emotional extremism. One may justly conclude that the term has a far from precise and a ques- tionable usefulness; one may even be tempted to forget about the whole subject and return to more constructive pursuits.
Yet to do so would be to overlook one of the major problems of our era--that of the psychology and the ethics of directed attempts at changing human beings. For despite the vicissitudes of brain- washing, the process which gave rise to the name is very much a reality: the official Chinese Communist program of szu-hsicmg kai-tsao (variously translated as "ideological remolding," "ideolog- ical reform," or as we shall refer to it here, "thought reform") has in fact emerged as one of the most powerful efforts at human
? WHAT is "BRAINWASHING"? 5
manipulation ever undertaken. To be sure, such a program is by no means completely new: imposed dogmas, inquisitions, and mass conversion movements have existed in every country and during every historical epoch. But the Chinese Communists have brought to theirs a more organized, comprehensive, and deliberate--a more total--character, as well as a unique blend of energetic and in- genious psychological techniques.
The Western world has heard mostly about "thought reform" as applied in a military setting: the synthetic bacteriological warfare confessions and the collaboration obtained from United Nations personnel during the Korean War. However, these were merely export versions of a thought reform program aimed, not primarily at Westerners, but at the Chinese people themselves, and vigorously applied in universities, schools, special "revolutionary colleges," prisons, business and government offices, labor and peasant organ- izations. Thought reform combines this impressively widespread distribution with a focused emotional power. Not only does it reach one-fourth of the people of the world, but it seeks to bring about in everyone it touches a significant personal upheaval.
Whatever its setting, thought reform consists of two basic ele- ments: confession, the exposure and renunciation of past and pres- ent "evil"; and re-education, the remaking of a man in the Com- munist image. These elements are closely related and overlapping, since they both bring into play a series of pressures and appeals-- intellectual, emotional, and physical--aimed at social control and individual change.
The American press and public have been greatly concerned about this general subject, and rightly so. But too often the in- formation made available about it has been sensationalist in tone, distorted because of inadequate knowledge, or obscured by the strong emotions which the concept of brainwashing seems to arouse in everyone. Its aura of fear and mystery has been more conducive to polemic than to understanding.
Still the vital questions continue to be asked: Can a man be made to change his beliefs? If a change does occur, how long will it last? How do the Chinese Communists obtain these strange confessions? Do people believe their own confessions, even when false? How successful is thought reform? Do Westerners and Chinese react differently to it? Is there any defense against it? Is it related to
? D THOUGHT REFORM
psychotherapy? to religious conversion? Have the Chinese discov- ered new and obscure techniques? What has all this to do with Soviet Russia and international Communism? with Chinese cul- ture? How is it related to other mass movements or inquisitions, religious or political? What are the implications for education? For psychiatric and psychoanalytic training and practice? For religion? How can we recognize parallels to thought reform within our own culture, and what can we do about them?
It was with these questions on my mind that I arrived in Hong Kong in late January, 1954. Jus* a ^ew m o n th s before, I had taken part in the psychiatric evaluation of repatriated American prisoners of war during the exchange operations in Korea known as Big Switch; I had then accompanied a group of these men on the troopship back to the United States. 2 From the repatriates' descrip- tions of what they had experienced, I pieced together a great deal of information about Chinese Communist confession and re-educa- tion techniques, and was convinced that this process raised some basic human issues; but the expediencies of the military situation made it difficult to study them with the necessary depth and thoroughness. I thought then that the most important questions might best be approached through work with people who had been "reformed" within China itself.
Yet I had not come to Hong Kong with any clear intention of carrying out this detailed research. I had planned only a brief stopover on my way from Tokyo back to the United States after having lived in the Far East for almost two years, serving as an Air Force psychiatrist in Japan and Korea. But plans can be changed; and such change is sometimes an expression of an inner plan not yet consciously understood by the planner himself. Thus as long as I was in Hong Kong, I decided to make a few inquiries into a sub- ject that seemed so important.
As soon as I did, I discovered that a number of Western scholars and diplomats there had also been asking themselves these ques- tions. They had been shocked by the effects of indoctrination pro- grams applied on the Chinese mainland. They told me of Western missionaries who, after having made lurid "espionage" confessions in prison, arrived in Hong Kong deeply confused about what they believed; of young Chinese students violating the most sacred pre- cepts of their culture by publicly denouncing their parents; of
? WHAT is "BRAINWASHING"? 7
distinguished mainland professors renouncing their "evil" past, even rewriting their academic books from a Marxist standpoint. My W estern acquaintances had been both troubled and fascinated by these events, and welcomed my interest in the problem. At my re- quest, they arranged for me to meet a few people like the ones they had described.
The impact of these first encounters was not something one readily forgets: an elderly European Bishop leaning forward in his hospital bed, so deeply impressed with the power of the prison thought reform program he had just experienced that he could only denounce it as "an alliance with the demons"; a young Chi- nese girl, still shaken from the group hatred that had been turned upon her at a university in Peking, yet wondering if she had been "selfish" in leaving.
I realized that these two people had both been through China's most elemental thought reform programs; and that these programs were much more powerful and comprehensive than the modifica- tions which had been applied to United Nations' troops in Korea. I also realized that Hong Kong offered a unique opportunity for the study of thought reform, although, surprisingly enough, no one was taking advantage of it. I sought a means of remaining there to undertake prolonged and systematic research into the process; and with the help of two research grants, my stay was extended into seventeen months of stimulating psychiatric investigation.
? CHAPTER Z RESEARCH IN HONG KONG
Hong Kong was no ordinary setting for psychiatric
research. Many problems arose, some of which I could anticipate, and others which I had to deal with as I went along, but all of which required approaches departing consider- ably from usual psychiatric protocol. The basic task was to locate people who had been put through intensive reform experiences and communicate with them in meaningful emotional depth. For I felt that this was the best way to study the psychological fea- tures and human effects of the reform process. I was not inves- tigating "mental disease" or patterns of neurosis; I was studying individual strengths, as well as vulnerabilities.
I soon found out that those who had undergone this experience fell into two broad groups: Western civilians reformed in prisons, and Chinese intellectuals who had undergone their reform in uni- versities or in "revolutionary colleges. " In both groups, it imme- diately became clear that intensive work with relatively few people was much more valuable than superficial contacts with many. Thought reform was a complex personal experience, destructive of personal trust; it took time for a subject--especially in an environ- ment as full of suspicion as Hong Kong--to trust me sufficiently to reveal inner feelings of which he was not necessarily proud. And with Chinese subjects this was intensified by the East Asian cultural pattern of saying (as both a form of propriety and a means of per-
8
? RESEARCH IN HONG KONG 9
sonal protection) what one thinks the listener wishes to hear. For the first few sessions, Chinese were particularly likely to offer an elaboration of anti-Communist cliches; only weeks or months later would they reveal the true conflicts stimulated by Communist re- form.
The twenty-five Westerners and fifteen Chinese subjects whom I interviewed all had experiences which came under the thought reform category. But I could not ignore differences in the two groups, both differences in the type of programs to which they had been exposed, and in their cultural and historical backgrounds. These differences were important factors in my conduct of the re- search and in the evaluation of the material, and I have also taken them into account in the book's organization: Part II deals only with Western subjects. Part III only with Chinese, and Part IV with a consideration of the basic problems raised by thought reform in general.
Most Chinese subjects were more or less permanent residents of Hong Kong, having left mainland China for reasons often as- sociated with a negative response to thought reform. I was able to interview some very soon after their arrival, but the majority had come to Hong Kong a few years before (between 1948 and 1952) when the first great wave of thought reform was at its height, and it was still not too difficult for educated people to leave China. As refugee intellectuals, many supported themselves through work with press and publishing associations, while others received some form of aid from philanthropic and religious groups. I found it best to approach them, always indirectly and always by means of per- sonal introduction, through members of these various Hong Kong organizations. Work with Chinese subjects was invariably com- plicated--because of problems of language and culture, and be- cause of their difficult life situation (matters which will be dis- cussed more in Part III)--but at the same time it was extremely rewarding. Their life stories revealed much about the history of contemporary China, and their responses taught me a great deal about Chinese character, all of which was of vital importance for understanding thought reform itself. I was able to maintain rela- tionships with them over long periods of time, some for more than a year; I tried to see them frequently at first (two or three half-day or even full-day sessions per week) and then at weekly, bi-weekly, or
? 10 THOUGHT REFORM
monthly intervals. As I do not speak Chinese, it was necessary for me to use an interpreter with eleven of the fifteen subjects; the other four spoke fluent English because they had studied either in the W est or with W estern teachers in China. I was surprised at the emotional depth that could be achieved in these three-way rela- tionships. Much depended on the intelligence and sensitivity of my two regular interpreters (one of them a Western-trained social scientist) and upon my developing with them an effective style of collaborative interviewing.
The rhythms of work with Western subjects were entirely dif- ferent. For them, Hong Kong was not a home but an interlude. They would arrive fresh from a grueling prison ordeal, generally remain in the colony from one to four weeks, and then embark for Europe or America. Friends, professional associates, or consular officials would greet them and take care of them; confused as they usually were, they needed assistance. They were also fearful and suspicious, which made it necessary for me to approach them through the people in whom they had greatest confidence, and again on the basis of personal introductions. In order to be able to do this, I made myself and my work known among Western diplo- matic, religious, and business groups in Hong Kong. The arrival of a Westerner who had been a prisoner in China was always announced in the Hong Kong newspapers, and I was usually able to set up a first meeting almost immediately.
My arrangements with all subjects were highly flexible, varying with the circumstances of each case. When possible, I had them come to my office-apartment; but it was frequently necessary for me to visit Westerners in homes or mission houses where they were staying, or in hospitals where they were convalescing. I insisted only upon the opportunity to conduct the interview in privacy; although even on this point I had to make one exception when a priest, be- cause of his fears, requested that a colleague remain in the room during our talks.
I tried to spend as much time as possible with each Westerner during his brief stay in Hong Kong; but this time varied greatly, and depended upon the subject's availability, the special features of his case, and my own schedule at the time. Generally, once we had begun, the subject was as eager as I to work intensively together. I averaged a total of about fifteen to twenty hours with each; with
? RESEARCH IN HONG KONG 11
some I spent more than forty hours over several months, and in one or two cases, we had just a single interview.
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? ? Thought Reform and the
Psychology
of TotaHsm
A STUDY OF "BRAINW ASHING" IN CHINA
Robert Jay Lifton, M. D.
The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill and London
? Preface to the University of Noith Carolina Press Edition (C) 1989 by Robert Jay Lifton
All rights reserved
First published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1989
Originally published by W. W. Norton & Co. (C) 1961 Robert Jay Lifton
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources,
Printed in the United States of America 0403 9876
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lifton, Robert Jay. 1926-
Thought reform and the psychology of totalism:
the study of brainwashing in China / Robert Jay Lifton. p. cm.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-8078-4253-2 (alk. paper)
i. Brainwashing--China. 2. Communism--China. I. Title. BF633. L5 1989
15? ^/53/0951--dc 19
88-40534 CIP
For B. /.
the quest and the journey
? CONTENTS
Preface to the University of North Carolina Press Edition vii
Preface xi PART ONE
The Problem
1. What Is "Brainwashing"? 3
2. Research in Hong Kong 8
PART TWO
Prison Thought Reform of Westerners
3. Re-education: Dr. Vincent 19
4. Father Luca: The False Confession 38
5. Psychological Steps 65
6. Varieties of Response: The Obviously Confused 86
7. Varieties of Response: Apparent Converts 117
8. Varieties of Response: Apparent Resisters 133
9. Group Reform: Double-edged Leadership 152
10. Follow-up Visits 185
11. Father Simon: The Converted Jesuit 207
12. Recovery and Renewal: A Summing Up 222
v
? VI CONTENTS
PART THREE
Thought Reform of Chinese Intellectuals
13. The Encounter 243
14. The Revolutionary University: Mr. Hu 253
15. A Chinese Odyssey 274
16. The Older Generation: Robert Chao 301
17. George Chen: The Conversions of Youth 313
18. Grace Wu: Music and Reform 338
19. Cultural Perspectives: The Fate of Filial Piety 359
20. Cultural Perspectives: Origins 388
21. Cultural Perspectives: Impact 399
PART FOUR
Totalism and Its Alternatives
22. Ideological Totalism 419
23. Approachesto Re-education 438
24. "Open" Personal Change 462
Appendix: A Confession Document 473 Notes 485 Index 505
? PREFACE
TO THE UNIVERSITY OF
NORTH CAROLINA PRESS EDITION
Now, after twenty-eight years, my own sense of this
book has changed. I see it as less a specific record of Maoist China and more an exploration of what might be the most dangerous direction of the twentieth-century mind--the quest for absolute or "totalistic" belief systems.
Indeed, that quest has produced nothing short of a worldwide epidemic of political and religious fundamentalism--of movements characterized by literalized embrace of sacred texts as containing absolute truth for all persons, and a mandate for militant, often vio- lent, measures taken against designated enemies of that truth or mere unbelievers. The epidemic includes fundamentalist versions of existing religions and political movements as well as newly emerging groups that may combine disparate ideological elements.
These latter groups are often referred to as cults, now a somewhat pejorative designation, so that some observers prefer the term new religions. But I think we can speak of cults as groups with certain characteristics: first, a charismatic leader, who tends increasingly to become the object of worship in place of more general spiritual prin- ciples that are advocated; second, patterns of "thought reform" akin to those described in this volume, and especially in Chapter 22; and third, a tendency toward manipulation from above with considerable exploitation (economic, sexual, or other) of ordinary supplicants or recruits who bring their idealism from below.
vii
? V lll THOUGHT REFORM
Indeed, this book is largely responsible for my having been drawn into these controversies. With the profusion of the religious cults during the late 19705 and 19805,1 began to hear that Chapter 22was being made use of for various forms of "deprogramming" of cult recruits, and then that the same chapter was being studied by cult leaders, ostensibly for the purpose of dissociating their groups from the patterns I described. Young people who had been involved in cults and the parents of such people began to consult me about these general patterns. I felt I had to clarify my position by preparing a newessayoncultformationandtotalisminmyrecentcollection The Future of Immortality and Other Essays for a Nuclear Age (1987), but I have been especially pleased by the extent to which this earlier volume on thought reform has remained central to literature on cults and on totalism in general.
Tendencies toward totalism in China itself have diminished over the years, as have specific thought reform programs. But that did not happen until after a fierce reassertion of totalistic behavior during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the late 19605 and early 19705. I was able to study that upheaval and saw in it an effort on the part of the aging Mao Zedong to call forth the young in a com- mon quest to reassert the immortalizing power of the revolution it- self, and hence I entitled the work Revolutionary Immortality: Mao Tse-Tung and the Chinese Revolution (1968). Chinese society is still recovering from that extreme, often violent, outbreak. The re- gime's subsequent tendency, through fits and starts, has been in the direction of liberalization throughout the society, but that in no way precludes the possibility of future waves of totalistic policies or thought reform projects.
From the beginning, this book was meant to provide principles of a general kind, criteria for evaluating any environment in relation- ship to ideological totalism. Such patterns are all too readily em- braced by a great variety of groups, large and small, as a means of manipulating human beings, always in the name of a higher purpose. And it should not be forgotten that such groups can hold great attrac- tion for large numbers of people.
In recent research on Nazi Germany I was able to explore the most sinister of all historical examples of this phenomenon. I found that a particular kind of totalistic ideology--a biologized view of society, or what I called a "biomedical vision"--could, with its ac-
? PREFACE IX
companying institutions, draw very ordinary people into murderous activities. I came to understand that, in an atmosphere of totalism and brutality, even fragments of an ideology can readily contribute to participation in killing, as I reported in my book The Nazi Doc- tors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (1986). There are parallels in Nazi and Chinese Communist use of the idiom of disease and cure, as totalistic systems are apt to do; equally signifi- cant is the general contrast between Nazi cure by mass murder and Chinese Communist cure by "re-education. "
I have been equally concerned with a contemporary category of fundamentalism that could contribute to killing on so great a scale as to dwarf even what the Nazis did, that associated with nuclear threat. Nuclear fundamentalism can take shape around the weapons themselves: the exaggerated dependency on them and embrace of them to the point of near worship. That is what I call the ideology of nuclearism. The weapons become an ultimate truth in their os- tensible capacity to grant security and safety, to keep the world going, to offer salvation.
A seemingly different but related form of nuclear fundamentalism is the "end-time" ideology, within which nuclear holocaust is viewed as the realization of biblical prophecy and a necessary occurrence to bring about the longed-for Second Coming of Jesus and eventual earthly paradise. In a study we have been conducting at The City University Center on Violence and Human Survival, we have been pleased to learn that even fundamentalists with strong belief in end- time ideas find it hard to espouse this formula without great ambiva- lence and uncertainty. They too, it seems, have taken in some of the horrible actuality of the consequences of nuclear weapons and find it hard to believe that God would bring about such horrors or permit them to occur. Nonetheless, these fundamentalist attitudes become associated with the weapons in varying ways and with varying in- tensity throughout much of our society, and in the process they interfere greatly with the nuanced thought and moral imagination needed to cope with nuclear threat.
While totalitarianism is a twentieth-century phenomenon requir- ing modern technology and communications networks, the totalistic cast of mind is not. It probably was, in fact, much more common in previous centuries. It is in any case part of the human repertoire, an ever-present potential that can readily manifest itself when historical
? X THOUGHT REFORM
conditions call it forth. What is new is the potential for radically in- creased consequences of totalism, to the point of human extinction.
The kind of wisdom that totalistic ideas now interfere with has to do with what I call species awareness and the species self, the recog- nition that, given the capacity of our weaponry to destroy all human life, each sense of self becomes bound up with the life of every other self on the planet. My critical evaluation of ideological totalism in this book is meant to further that species orientation.
RJL
The City University of New York January 1989
? PREFACE
This study began as a psychiatric evaluation of Chi-
nese Communist "thought reform," or "brainwash- ing," It is still primarily this; but it has also, inevitably, become a psychological study of extremism or totalism--and even more broadly, a study of the "closed" versus the "open" approaches to human change.
It is based upon research which I conducted in Hong Kong in 1954-55. It then evolved over four years of additional research and teaching in the United States. My work with Western and Chinese subjects--piecing together emotional details that were both poig- nant and extreme--and the psychological, moral, and historical challenge of the material have made this study an exceptionally ab- sorbing personal and professional experience.
A book about extremism calls for a special measure of objectivity. This does not mean that its author can claim complete personal or moral detachment. The assumption of such detachment in psy- chological (or any other) work is at best self-deception, and at worst a source of harmful distortion. And who during this era can pretend to be uninvolved in the issues of psychological coercion, of identity, and of ideology? Certainly not one who has felt impelled to study them at such length.
Instead, I have attempted to be both reasonably dispassionate and responsibly committed: dispassionate in my efforts to stand away from the material far enough to probe the nature of the process, its effects upon people exposed to it, and some of the in- fluences affecting its practitioners; committed to my own analyses
xi
? Xii THOUGHT REFORM
and judgments within the limitations and the bias of my knowl- edge.
Much in this book is highly critical of the particular aspect of Chinese Communism which it examines, but I have made no at- tempt to render a definitive verdict on this far-reaching revolution- ary movement. I am critical of thought reform's psychological tactics, not because they are Communist (or Chinese Communist), but because of their specific nature. In the last section of this book, these tactics are compared with practices within our own culture, which also receive critical treatment insofar as they resemble the ideological totalism of thought reform. Instead of contrasting the "good we" and the "bad they/' rather, I have attempted to identify and understand a particular psychological phenomenon.
In the pursuit of this understanding, I have recorded all that seemed relevant, including the details of whatever psychological and physical abuse my subjects encountered. I believe that this comprehensive approach offers the best means of contributing to general knowledge, and to the clarification of an emotionally loaded subject; and I hope that this study will thereby ultimately contribute to the resolution, rather than to the intensification, of cold war pas- sions. It is in fact one of the tragedies of the cold war that moral criticism of either side is immediately exploited by the other side in an exaggerated, one-dimensional fashion. One can never prevent this from happening; but one can at least express the spirit in which a work has been written.
Such an approach requires that I inform the reader about my bias in both psychiatric and political matters. Psychiatrically, I have been strongly influenced by both neo-Freudian and Freudian cur- rents: the former through an association with the Washington School of Psychiatry during and immediately after the research study itself, and the latter through a subsequent candidacy in the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute. Both influences were also present in my earlier psychiatric residency training at the State University Medical Center of New York. I have found the theoretical writings of Erik Erikson, especially those relating to questions of personal identity and ideology, particularly relevant for this study. At the same time, I have constantly groped for new ways to bring psychological insights to bear upon historical forces, and do so with a humanistic focus. Thus, I have made extensive use of my subjects' biographical
? PREF ACE X l l l
material, and have attempted to include in these presentations a flesh-and-bones description of their life histories in relationship to pertinent social historical currents, as well as a rigorous psychological analysis of their responses to thought reform. This seemed to me the best way to deal with the inseparable relationship between stress and response, and (in William James' phrase) to "convey truth. "
My political philosophical bias is toward a liberalism strongly critical of itself; and toward the kind of antitotalitarian (in the psy- chological terms of this study, antitotalistic), historically-minded questioning of the order of things expressed by Albert Camus in his brilliant philosophical essay, The Rebel. No one understood better than Camus the human issues involved in this book.
I should like to mention a few of the many people whose direct personal assistance was indispensable to the completion of this study. David McK. Rioch lent initial support when support was most needed, and always continued to enrich the work through his urbane eclecticism, his provocative criticism, and his personal kindness. Erik Erikson, during many memorable talks at Stock- bridge and Cambridge, made stimulating and enlarging suggestions, both about specific case histories and problems of presentation. During the latter stages of the work, David Riesrnan offered gener- ously of his extraordinaryintellectual breadth and his unique per sonal capacity to evoke what is most creative within one. Carl Binger has been sage and always helpful in his advice. All four made thoughtful criticisms of the manuscript, as did Kenneth Keniston and F. C. Redlich. Others in psychiatry and related fields to whom I am indebted are Leslie Farber, Erich Lindemann, Margaret Mead, and Beata Rank. In the perilous subtleties of Chinese cultural, intellectual, and political history, I was constantly counseled by Benjamin Schwartz and by John Fairbank, both of whom read parts of the manuscript; and earlier in the work by Lu Pao-tung, Ma
Meng, Howard Boorman, Conrad Brandt, and A. Doak Barnett The literary advice and loving sustenance of my wife, Betty Jean Lifton, can hardly be documented. My father, Harold A. Lifton,
also did much to encourage this study.
The Hong Kong research was sponsored for the first seven months
? XIV THOUGHT REFORM
by the Asia Foundation, and for the remaining year by the Wash- ington School of Psychiatry. The manuscript was completed under grants from the Ford Foundation and the Foundation's Fund for Research in Psychiatry, both administered through Harvard Uni- versity,
Finally, I must acknowledge my debt to the forty research sub- jects, Chinese and Western, whose personal thought reform ex- periences are the basis for this study. The extent of their intelligent collaboration in this work is apparent in the biographical chapters. In these, I have altered certain details in order to protect the sub- jects' anonymity; but none of these alterations affect the essential psychological patterns.
? PART ONE THE PROBLEM
How intoxicating to feel like God the Father and to hand out definitive testimonials of bad character
and habits.
Albert Camus
Only simple and quiet words will ripen of them- selves. For a whirlwind does not last for the whole morning. Nor does a thundershower last the whole day. Who is their author? The heaven and earth. Yet even they cannot make such violent things last. How much more true this must be of the rash en- deavors of man.
Lao Tze
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? ? CHAPTER 1 WHAT IS "BRAINWASHING"?
When confronted with the endless discussion on the
general subject of "brainwashing/' 1 am sometimes reminded of the Zen Buddhist maxim: "The more we talk about it, the less we understand it. " The confusion begins with the word itself, so new and yet already so much a part of our everyday lan- guage. It was first used by an American journalist, Edward Hunter, as a translation of the colloquialism hsi nao (literally, "wash brain") which he quoted from Chinese informants who described its use following the Communist takeover. 1
"Brainwashing" soon developed a life of its own. Originally used to describe Chinese indoctrination techniques, it was quickly ap- plied to Russian and Eastern European approaches, and then to just about anything which the Communists did anywhere (as il- lustrated by the statement of a prominent American lady who, upon returning from a trip to Moscow, claimed that the Russians were "brainwashing" prospective mothers in order to prepare them for natural childbirth). Inevitably, the word made its appearance closer to home, sometimes with the saving grace of humor (New Yorker cartoons of children "brainwashing" parents, and wives "brainwashing" husbands), but on other occasions with a more vindictive tone--as when Southern segregationists accused all who favor racial equality (including the United States Supreme Court) of having been influenced by "left-wing brainwashing"; or equally
3
? 4 THOUGHT REFORM
irresponsible usages by anti-fluoridation, anti-mental health legisla- tion, or anti-almost anything groups leveled against their real or fancied opponents.
Then there is the lurid mythology which has grown up about it: the "mysterious oriental device," or the deliberate application of Pavlov's findings on dogs. There is also another kind of myth, the claim that there is no such thing, that it is all just the fantasy of American correspondents.
Finally, there is the more responsible--even tortured--self-exami- nation which leads professional people to ask whether they in their own activities might not be guilty of "brainwashing": educators about their teaching, psychiatrists about their training and their psychotherapy, theologians about their own reform methods. Op- ponents of these activities, without any such agonizing scrutiny, can more glibly claim that they are "nothing but brainwashing. " Others have seen "brainwashing" in American advertising, in large corporation training programs, in private preparatory schools, and in congressional investigations. These misgivings are not always without basis, and suggest that there is a continuity between our subject and many less extreme activities; but the matter is not clari- fied by promiscuous use of the term.
Behind this web of semantic (and more than semantic) confusion lies an image of "brainwashing" as an all-powerful, irresistible, un- fathomable, and magical method of achieving total control over the human mind. It is of course none of these things, and this loose usage makes the word a rallying point for fear, resentment, urges toward submission, justification for failure, irresponsible ac- cusation, and for a wide gamut of emotional extremism. One may justly conclude that the term has a far from precise and a ques- tionable usefulness; one may even be tempted to forget about the whole subject and return to more constructive pursuits.
Yet to do so would be to overlook one of the major problems of our era--that of the psychology and the ethics of directed attempts at changing human beings. For despite the vicissitudes of brain- washing, the process which gave rise to the name is very much a reality: the official Chinese Communist program of szu-hsicmg kai-tsao (variously translated as "ideological remolding," "ideolog- ical reform," or as we shall refer to it here, "thought reform") has in fact emerged as one of the most powerful efforts at human
? WHAT is "BRAINWASHING"? 5
manipulation ever undertaken. To be sure, such a program is by no means completely new: imposed dogmas, inquisitions, and mass conversion movements have existed in every country and during every historical epoch. But the Chinese Communists have brought to theirs a more organized, comprehensive, and deliberate--a more total--character, as well as a unique blend of energetic and in- genious psychological techniques.
The Western world has heard mostly about "thought reform" as applied in a military setting: the synthetic bacteriological warfare confessions and the collaboration obtained from United Nations personnel during the Korean War. However, these were merely export versions of a thought reform program aimed, not primarily at Westerners, but at the Chinese people themselves, and vigorously applied in universities, schools, special "revolutionary colleges," prisons, business and government offices, labor and peasant organ- izations. Thought reform combines this impressively widespread distribution with a focused emotional power. Not only does it reach one-fourth of the people of the world, but it seeks to bring about in everyone it touches a significant personal upheaval.
Whatever its setting, thought reform consists of two basic ele- ments: confession, the exposure and renunciation of past and pres- ent "evil"; and re-education, the remaking of a man in the Com- munist image. These elements are closely related and overlapping, since they both bring into play a series of pressures and appeals-- intellectual, emotional, and physical--aimed at social control and individual change.
The American press and public have been greatly concerned about this general subject, and rightly so. But too often the in- formation made available about it has been sensationalist in tone, distorted because of inadequate knowledge, or obscured by the strong emotions which the concept of brainwashing seems to arouse in everyone. Its aura of fear and mystery has been more conducive to polemic than to understanding.
Still the vital questions continue to be asked: Can a man be made to change his beliefs? If a change does occur, how long will it last? How do the Chinese Communists obtain these strange confessions? Do people believe their own confessions, even when false? How successful is thought reform? Do Westerners and Chinese react differently to it? Is there any defense against it? Is it related to
? D THOUGHT REFORM
psychotherapy? to religious conversion? Have the Chinese discov- ered new and obscure techniques? What has all this to do with Soviet Russia and international Communism? with Chinese cul- ture?
With the profusion of the religious cults during the late 19705 and 19805,1 began to hear that Chapter 22was being made use of for various forms of "deprogramming" of cult recruits, and then that the same chapter was being studied by cult leaders, ostensibly for the purpose of dissociating their groups from the patterns I described. Young people who had been involved in cults and the parents of such people began to consult me about these general patterns. I felt I had to clarify my position by preparing a newessayoncultformationandtotalisminmyrecentcollection The Future of Immortality and Other Essays for a Nuclear Age (1987), but I have been especially pleased by the extent to which this earlier volume on thought reform has remained central to literature on cults and on totalism in general.
Tendencies toward totalism in China itself have diminished over the years, as have specific thought reform programs. But that did not happen until after a fierce reassertion of totalistic behavior during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the late 19605 and early 19705. I was able to study that upheaval and saw in it an effort on the part of the aging Mao Zedong to call forth the young in a com- mon quest to reassert the immortalizing power of the revolution it- self, and hence I entitled the work Revolutionary Immortality: Mao Tse-Tung and the Chinese Revolution (1968). Chinese society is still recovering from that extreme, often violent, outbreak. The re- gime's subsequent tendency, through fits and starts, has been in the direction of liberalization throughout the society, but that in no way precludes the possibility of future waves of totalistic policies or thought reform projects.
From the beginning, this book was meant to provide principles of a general kind, criteria for evaluating any environment in relation- ship to ideological totalism. Such patterns are all too readily em- braced by a great variety of groups, large and small, as a means of manipulating human beings, always in the name of a higher purpose. And it should not be forgotten that such groups can hold great attrac- tion for large numbers of people.
In recent research on Nazi Germany I was able to explore the most sinister of all historical examples of this phenomenon. I found that a particular kind of totalistic ideology--a biologized view of society, or what I called a "biomedical vision"--could, with its ac-
? PREFACE IX
companying institutions, draw very ordinary people into murderous activities. I came to understand that, in an atmosphere of totalism and brutality, even fragments of an ideology can readily contribute to participation in killing, as I reported in my book The Nazi Doc- tors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (1986). There are parallels in Nazi and Chinese Communist use of the idiom of disease and cure, as totalistic systems are apt to do; equally signifi- cant is the general contrast between Nazi cure by mass murder and Chinese Communist cure by "re-education. "
I have been equally concerned with a contemporary category of fundamentalism that could contribute to killing on so great a scale as to dwarf even what the Nazis did, that associated with nuclear threat. Nuclear fundamentalism can take shape around the weapons themselves: the exaggerated dependency on them and embrace of them to the point of near worship. That is what I call the ideology of nuclearism. The weapons become an ultimate truth in their os- tensible capacity to grant security and safety, to keep the world going, to offer salvation.
A seemingly different but related form of nuclear fundamentalism is the "end-time" ideology, within which nuclear holocaust is viewed as the realization of biblical prophecy and a necessary occurrence to bring about the longed-for Second Coming of Jesus and eventual earthly paradise. In a study we have been conducting at The City University Center on Violence and Human Survival, we have been pleased to learn that even fundamentalists with strong belief in end- time ideas find it hard to espouse this formula without great ambiva- lence and uncertainty. They too, it seems, have taken in some of the horrible actuality of the consequences of nuclear weapons and find it hard to believe that God would bring about such horrors or permit them to occur. Nonetheless, these fundamentalist attitudes become associated with the weapons in varying ways and with varying in- tensity throughout much of our society, and in the process they interfere greatly with the nuanced thought and moral imagination needed to cope with nuclear threat.
While totalitarianism is a twentieth-century phenomenon requir- ing modern technology and communications networks, the totalistic cast of mind is not. It probably was, in fact, much more common in previous centuries. It is in any case part of the human repertoire, an ever-present potential that can readily manifest itself when historical
? X THOUGHT REFORM
conditions call it forth. What is new is the potential for radically in- creased consequences of totalism, to the point of human extinction.
The kind of wisdom that totalistic ideas now interfere with has to do with what I call species awareness and the species self, the recog- nition that, given the capacity of our weaponry to destroy all human life, each sense of self becomes bound up with the life of every other self on the planet. My critical evaluation of ideological totalism in this book is meant to further that species orientation.
RJL
The City University of New York January 1989
? PREFACE
This study began as a psychiatric evaluation of Chi-
nese Communist "thought reform," or "brainwash- ing," It is still primarily this; but it has also, inevitably, become a psychological study of extremism or totalism--and even more broadly, a study of the "closed" versus the "open" approaches to human change.
It is based upon research which I conducted in Hong Kong in 1954-55. It then evolved over four years of additional research and teaching in the United States. My work with Western and Chinese subjects--piecing together emotional details that were both poig- nant and extreme--and the psychological, moral, and historical challenge of the material have made this study an exceptionally ab- sorbing personal and professional experience.
A book about extremism calls for a special measure of objectivity. This does not mean that its author can claim complete personal or moral detachment. The assumption of such detachment in psy- chological (or any other) work is at best self-deception, and at worst a source of harmful distortion. And who during this era can pretend to be uninvolved in the issues of psychological coercion, of identity, and of ideology? Certainly not one who has felt impelled to study them at such length.
Instead, I have attempted to be both reasonably dispassionate and responsibly committed: dispassionate in my efforts to stand away from the material far enough to probe the nature of the process, its effects upon people exposed to it, and some of the in- fluences affecting its practitioners; committed to my own analyses
xi
? Xii THOUGHT REFORM
and judgments within the limitations and the bias of my knowl- edge.
Much in this book is highly critical of the particular aspect of Chinese Communism which it examines, but I have made no at- tempt to render a definitive verdict on this far-reaching revolution- ary movement. I am critical of thought reform's psychological tactics, not because they are Communist (or Chinese Communist), but because of their specific nature. In the last section of this book, these tactics are compared with practices within our own culture, which also receive critical treatment insofar as they resemble the ideological totalism of thought reform. Instead of contrasting the "good we" and the "bad they/' rather, I have attempted to identify and understand a particular psychological phenomenon.
In the pursuit of this understanding, I have recorded all that seemed relevant, including the details of whatever psychological and physical abuse my subjects encountered. I believe that this comprehensive approach offers the best means of contributing to general knowledge, and to the clarification of an emotionally loaded subject; and I hope that this study will thereby ultimately contribute to the resolution, rather than to the intensification, of cold war pas- sions. It is in fact one of the tragedies of the cold war that moral criticism of either side is immediately exploited by the other side in an exaggerated, one-dimensional fashion. One can never prevent this from happening; but one can at least express the spirit in which a work has been written.
Such an approach requires that I inform the reader about my bias in both psychiatric and political matters. Psychiatrically, I have been strongly influenced by both neo-Freudian and Freudian cur- rents: the former through an association with the Washington School of Psychiatry during and immediately after the research study itself, and the latter through a subsequent candidacy in the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute. Both influences were also present in my earlier psychiatric residency training at the State University Medical Center of New York. I have found the theoretical writings of Erik Erikson, especially those relating to questions of personal identity and ideology, particularly relevant for this study. At the same time, I have constantly groped for new ways to bring psychological insights to bear upon historical forces, and do so with a humanistic focus. Thus, I have made extensive use of my subjects' biographical
? PREF ACE X l l l
material, and have attempted to include in these presentations a flesh-and-bones description of their life histories in relationship to pertinent social historical currents, as well as a rigorous psychological analysis of their responses to thought reform. This seemed to me the best way to deal with the inseparable relationship between stress and response, and (in William James' phrase) to "convey truth. "
My political philosophical bias is toward a liberalism strongly critical of itself; and toward the kind of antitotalitarian (in the psy- chological terms of this study, antitotalistic), historically-minded questioning of the order of things expressed by Albert Camus in his brilliant philosophical essay, The Rebel. No one understood better than Camus the human issues involved in this book.
I should like to mention a few of the many people whose direct personal assistance was indispensable to the completion of this study. David McK. Rioch lent initial support when support was most needed, and always continued to enrich the work through his urbane eclecticism, his provocative criticism, and his personal kindness. Erik Erikson, during many memorable talks at Stock- bridge and Cambridge, made stimulating and enlarging suggestions, both about specific case histories and problems of presentation. During the latter stages of the work, David Riesrnan offered gener- ously of his extraordinaryintellectual breadth and his unique per sonal capacity to evoke what is most creative within one. Carl Binger has been sage and always helpful in his advice. All four made thoughtful criticisms of the manuscript, as did Kenneth Keniston and F. C. Redlich. Others in psychiatry and related fields to whom I am indebted are Leslie Farber, Erich Lindemann, Margaret Mead, and Beata Rank. In the perilous subtleties of Chinese cultural, intellectual, and political history, I was constantly counseled by Benjamin Schwartz and by John Fairbank, both of whom read parts of the manuscript; and earlier in the work by Lu Pao-tung, Ma
Meng, Howard Boorman, Conrad Brandt, and A. Doak Barnett The literary advice and loving sustenance of my wife, Betty Jean Lifton, can hardly be documented. My father, Harold A. Lifton,
also did much to encourage this study.
The Hong Kong research was sponsored for the first seven months
? XIV THOUGHT REFORM
by the Asia Foundation, and for the remaining year by the Wash- ington School of Psychiatry. The manuscript was completed under grants from the Ford Foundation and the Foundation's Fund for Research in Psychiatry, both administered through Harvard Uni- versity,
Finally, I must acknowledge my debt to the forty research sub- jects, Chinese and Western, whose personal thought reform ex- periences are the basis for this study. The extent of their intelligent collaboration in this work is apparent in the biographical chapters. In these, I have altered certain details in order to protect the sub- jects' anonymity; but none of these alterations affect the essential psychological patterns.
? PART ONE THE PROBLEM
How intoxicating to feel like God the Father and to hand out definitive testimonials of bad character
and habits.
Albert Camus
Only simple and quiet words will ripen of them- selves. For a whirlwind does not last for the whole morning. Nor does a thundershower last the whole day. Who is their author? The heaven and earth. Yet even they cannot make such violent things last. How much more true this must be of the rash en- deavors of man.
Lao Tze
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? ? CHAPTER 1 WHAT IS "BRAINWASHING"?
When confronted with the endless discussion on the
general subject of "brainwashing/' 1 am sometimes reminded of the Zen Buddhist maxim: "The more we talk about it, the less we understand it. " The confusion begins with the word itself, so new and yet already so much a part of our everyday lan- guage. It was first used by an American journalist, Edward Hunter, as a translation of the colloquialism hsi nao (literally, "wash brain") which he quoted from Chinese informants who described its use following the Communist takeover. 1
"Brainwashing" soon developed a life of its own. Originally used to describe Chinese indoctrination techniques, it was quickly ap- plied to Russian and Eastern European approaches, and then to just about anything which the Communists did anywhere (as il- lustrated by the statement of a prominent American lady who, upon returning from a trip to Moscow, claimed that the Russians were "brainwashing" prospective mothers in order to prepare them for natural childbirth). Inevitably, the word made its appearance closer to home, sometimes with the saving grace of humor (New Yorker cartoons of children "brainwashing" parents, and wives "brainwashing" husbands), but on other occasions with a more vindictive tone--as when Southern segregationists accused all who favor racial equality (including the United States Supreme Court) of having been influenced by "left-wing brainwashing"; or equally
3
? 4 THOUGHT REFORM
irresponsible usages by anti-fluoridation, anti-mental health legisla- tion, or anti-almost anything groups leveled against their real or fancied opponents.
Then there is the lurid mythology which has grown up about it: the "mysterious oriental device," or the deliberate application of Pavlov's findings on dogs. There is also another kind of myth, the claim that there is no such thing, that it is all just the fantasy of American correspondents.
Finally, there is the more responsible--even tortured--self-exami- nation which leads professional people to ask whether they in their own activities might not be guilty of "brainwashing": educators about their teaching, psychiatrists about their training and their psychotherapy, theologians about their own reform methods. Op- ponents of these activities, without any such agonizing scrutiny, can more glibly claim that they are "nothing but brainwashing. " Others have seen "brainwashing" in American advertising, in large corporation training programs, in private preparatory schools, and in congressional investigations. These misgivings are not always without basis, and suggest that there is a continuity between our subject and many less extreme activities; but the matter is not clari- fied by promiscuous use of the term.
Behind this web of semantic (and more than semantic) confusion lies an image of "brainwashing" as an all-powerful, irresistible, un- fathomable, and magical method of achieving total control over the human mind. It is of course none of these things, and this loose usage makes the word a rallying point for fear, resentment, urges toward submission, justification for failure, irresponsible ac- cusation, and for a wide gamut of emotional extremism. One may justly conclude that the term has a far from precise and a ques- tionable usefulness; one may even be tempted to forget about the whole subject and return to more constructive pursuits.
Yet to do so would be to overlook one of the major problems of our era--that of the psychology and the ethics of directed attempts at changing human beings. For despite the vicissitudes of brain- washing, the process which gave rise to the name is very much a reality: the official Chinese Communist program of szu-hsicmg kai-tsao (variously translated as "ideological remolding," "ideolog- ical reform," or as we shall refer to it here, "thought reform") has in fact emerged as one of the most powerful efforts at human
? WHAT is "BRAINWASHING"? 5
manipulation ever undertaken. To be sure, such a program is by no means completely new: imposed dogmas, inquisitions, and mass conversion movements have existed in every country and during every historical epoch. But the Chinese Communists have brought to theirs a more organized, comprehensive, and deliberate--a more total--character, as well as a unique blend of energetic and in- genious psychological techniques.
The Western world has heard mostly about "thought reform" as applied in a military setting: the synthetic bacteriological warfare confessions and the collaboration obtained from United Nations personnel during the Korean War. However, these were merely export versions of a thought reform program aimed, not primarily at Westerners, but at the Chinese people themselves, and vigorously applied in universities, schools, special "revolutionary colleges," prisons, business and government offices, labor and peasant organ- izations. Thought reform combines this impressively widespread distribution with a focused emotional power. Not only does it reach one-fourth of the people of the world, but it seeks to bring about in everyone it touches a significant personal upheaval.
Whatever its setting, thought reform consists of two basic ele- ments: confession, the exposure and renunciation of past and pres- ent "evil"; and re-education, the remaking of a man in the Com- munist image. These elements are closely related and overlapping, since they both bring into play a series of pressures and appeals-- intellectual, emotional, and physical--aimed at social control and individual change.
The American press and public have been greatly concerned about this general subject, and rightly so. But too often the in- formation made available about it has been sensationalist in tone, distorted because of inadequate knowledge, or obscured by the strong emotions which the concept of brainwashing seems to arouse in everyone. Its aura of fear and mystery has been more conducive to polemic than to understanding.
Still the vital questions continue to be asked: Can a man be made to change his beliefs? If a change does occur, how long will it last? How do the Chinese Communists obtain these strange confessions? Do people believe their own confessions, even when false? How successful is thought reform? Do Westerners and Chinese react differently to it? Is there any defense against it? Is it related to
? D THOUGHT REFORM
psychotherapy? to religious conversion? Have the Chinese discov- ered new and obscure techniques? What has all this to do with Soviet Russia and international Communism? with Chinese cul- ture? How is it related to other mass movements or inquisitions, religious or political? What are the implications for education? For psychiatric and psychoanalytic training and practice? For religion? How can we recognize parallels to thought reform within our own culture, and what can we do about them?
It was with these questions on my mind that I arrived in Hong Kong in late January, 1954. Jus* a ^ew m o n th s before, I had taken part in the psychiatric evaluation of repatriated American prisoners of war during the exchange operations in Korea known as Big Switch; I had then accompanied a group of these men on the troopship back to the United States. 2 From the repatriates' descrip- tions of what they had experienced, I pieced together a great deal of information about Chinese Communist confession and re-educa- tion techniques, and was convinced that this process raised some basic human issues; but the expediencies of the military situation made it difficult to study them with the necessary depth and thoroughness. I thought then that the most important questions might best be approached through work with people who had been "reformed" within China itself.
Yet I had not come to Hong Kong with any clear intention of carrying out this detailed research. I had planned only a brief stopover on my way from Tokyo back to the United States after having lived in the Far East for almost two years, serving as an Air Force psychiatrist in Japan and Korea. But plans can be changed; and such change is sometimes an expression of an inner plan not yet consciously understood by the planner himself. Thus as long as I was in Hong Kong, I decided to make a few inquiries into a sub- ject that seemed so important.
As soon as I did, I discovered that a number of Western scholars and diplomats there had also been asking themselves these ques- tions. They had been shocked by the effects of indoctrination pro- grams applied on the Chinese mainland. They told me of Western missionaries who, after having made lurid "espionage" confessions in prison, arrived in Hong Kong deeply confused about what they believed; of young Chinese students violating the most sacred pre- cepts of their culture by publicly denouncing their parents; of
? WHAT is "BRAINWASHING"? 7
distinguished mainland professors renouncing their "evil" past, even rewriting their academic books from a Marxist standpoint. My W estern acquaintances had been both troubled and fascinated by these events, and welcomed my interest in the problem. At my re- quest, they arranged for me to meet a few people like the ones they had described.
The impact of these first encounters was not something one readily forgets: an elderly European Bishop leaning forward in his hospital bed, so deeply impressed with the power of the prison thought reform program he had just experienced that he could only denounce it as "an alliance with the demons"; a young Chi- nese girl, still shaken from the group hatred that had been turned upon her at a university in Peking, yet wondering if she had been "selfish" in leaving.
I realized that these two people had both been through China's most elemental thought reform programs; and that these programs were much more powerful and comprehensive than the modifica- tions which had been applied to United Nations' troops in Korea. I also realized that Hong Kong offered a unique opportunity for the study of thought reform, although, surprisingly enough, no one was taking advantage of it. I sought a means of remaining there to undertake prolonged and systematic research into the process; and with the help of two research grants, my stay was extended into seventeen months of stimulating psychiatric investigation.
? CHAPTER Z RESEARCH IN HONG KONG
Hong Kong was no ordinary setting for psychiatric
research. Many problems arose, some of which I could anticipate, and others which I had to deal with as I went along, but all of which required approaches departing consider- ably from usual psychiatric protocol. The basic task was to locate people who had been put through intensive reform experiences and communicate with them in meaningful emotional depth. For I felt that this was the best way to study the psychological fea- tures and human effects of the reform process. I was not inves- tigating "mental disease" or patterns of neurosis; I was studying individual strengths, as well as vulnerabilities.
I soon found out that those who had undergone this experience fell into two broad groups: Western civilians reformed in prisons, and Chinese intellectuals who had undergone their reform in uni- versities or in "revolutionary colleges. " In both groups, it imme- diately became clear that intensive work with relatively few people was much more valuable than superficial contacts with many. Thought reform was a complex personal experience, destructive of personal trust; it took time for a subject--especially in an environ- ment as full of suspicion as Hong Kong--to trust me sufficiently to reveal inner feelings of which he was not necessarily proud. And with Chinese subjects this was intensified by the East Asian cultural pattern of saying (as both a form of propriety and a means of per-
8
? RESEARCH IN HONG KONG 9
sonal protection) what one thinks the listener wishes to hear. For the first few sessions, Chinese were particularly likely to offer an elaboration of anti-Communist cliches; only weeks or months later would they reveal the true conflicts stimulated by Communist re- form.
The twenty-five Westerners and fifteen Chinese subjects whom I interviewed all had experiences which came under the thought reform category. But I could not ignore differences in the two groups, both differences in the type of programs to which they had been exposed, and in their cultural and historical backgrounds. These differences were important factors in my conduct of the re- search and in the evaluation of the material, and I have also taken them into account in the book's organization: Part II deals only with Western subjects. Part III only with Chinese, and Part IV with a consideration of the basic problems raised by thought reform in general.
Most Chinese subjects were more or less permanent residents of Hong Kong, having left mainland China for reasons often as- sociated with a negative response to thought reform. I was able to interview some very soon after their arrival, but the majority had come to Hong Kong a few years before (between 1948 and 1952) when the first great wave of thought reform was at its height, and it was still not too difficult for educated people to leave China. As refugee intellectuals, many supported themselves through work with press and publishing associations, while others received some form of aid from philanthropic and religious groups. I found it best to approach them, always indirectly and always by means of per- sonal introduction, through members of these various Hong Kong organizations. Work with Chinese subjects was invariably com- plicated--because of problems of language and culture, and be- cause of their difficult life situation (matters which will be dis- cussed more in Part III)--but at the same time it was extremely rewarding. Their life stories revealed much about the history of contemporary China, and their responses taught me a great deal about Chinese character, all of which was of vital importance for understanding thought reform itself. I was able to maintain rela- tionships with them over long periods of time, some for more than a year; I tried to see them frequently at first (two or three half-day or even full-day sessions per week) and then at weekly, bi-weekly, or
? 10 THOUGHT REFORM
monthly intervals. As I do not speak Chinese, it was necessary for me to use an interpreter with eleven of the fifteen subjects; the other four spoke fluent English because they had studied either in the W est or with W estern teachers in China. I was surprised at the emotional depth that could be achieved in these three-way rela- tionships. Much depended on the intelligence and sensitivity of my two regular interpreters (one of them a Western-trained social scientist) and upon my developing with them an effective style of collaborative interviewing.
The rhythms of work with Western subjects were entirely dif- ferent. For them, Hong Kong was not a home but an interlude. They would arrive fresh from a grueling prison ordeal, generally remain in the colony from one to four weeks, and then embark for Europe or America. Friends, professional associates, or consular officials would greet them and take care of them; confused as they usually were, they needed assistance. They were also fearful and suspicious, which made it necessary for me to approach them through the people in whom they had greatest confidence, and again on the basis of personal introductions. In order to be able to do this, I made myself and my work known among Western diplo- matic, religious, and business groups in Hong Kong. The arrival of a Westerner who had been a prisoner in China was always announced in the Hong Kong newspapers, and I was usually able to set up a first meeting almost immediately.
My arrangements with all subjects were highly flexible, varying with the circumstances of each case. When possible, I had them come to my office-apartment; but it was frequently necessary for me to visit Westerners in homes or mission houses where they were staying, or in hospitals where they were convalescing. I insisted only upon the opportunity to conduct the interview in privacy; although even on this point I had to make one exception when a priest, be- cause of his fears, requested that a colleague remain in the room during our talks.
I tried to spend as much time as possible with each Westerner during his brief stay in Hong Kong; but this time varied greatly, and depended upon the subject's availability, the special features of his case, and my own schedule at the time. Generally, once we had begun, the subject was as eager as I to work intensively together. I averaged a total of about fifteen to twenty hours with each; with
? RESEARCH IN HONG KONG 11
some I spent more than forty hours over several months, and in one or two cases, we had just a single interview.
