My Days in China

Rashid Butt

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Dear Readers, Today’s China is far different from the China of 60s & 70s. This reportage depicts the scenario of those days when China was in the grip of Cultural Revolution --- and onward. You can compare the past with the present. This reportage was a part of the book “Living in China” published by New World Press, Beijing. This book was a compendia of nine selected foreign writers living in china.

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It was a cold evening in the fall of 1967 when I first landed at Beijing (Peking) airport. Many long years have elapsed since then.

I was in the hall waiting for my luggage when a sturdy young man with a fair complexion and in baggy dress stepped forward and asked in very polite and elegant Urdu:

“Are you Mr. Butt from Pakistan?”

“Yes. I am. And you…?”

Avoiding my question, he motioned to a bulky fellow standing beside him and said, “This is Comrade Wang Haiyun a responsible comrade from the Foreign Languages Press.”

“And you…?” I asked again.

“I am Li Zhonghua.” A slight smile hovered over his face.

By the time my luggage arrived, we had exchanged courtesies several times, in the Chinese style. A large group of school children was playing, performing martial music and martial dances, and it was too noisy. Li Zhonghua told me that they were “Little Red Guards” singing revolutionary songs. Songs and dances which we had to endure for years to come!

It was dark and windy when we arrived at Friendship Guest House in the western suburbs of Beijing. The place seemed deserted and unbearably silent. Outside my heated room the wind blew the fallen leaves about. The rustling of the leaves made me uneasy and a thought passed through my mind, “Is this the capital with a population of 7 million, so deserted and still, where I will have to live and work?” I remembered my city at home, which at that time would be bustling and glittering with lights! That night I could not sleep well. Sometimes the wind carried the unfamiliar sound of slogans and harsh music being broadcast at some distant place. The whole canvas made me all the more restless and distressed.

Next morning I was still dozing when somebody knocked at the door, and five or six girls entered, led by a woman in her 30s. While the introductions were taking place, I sensed a slight look of disbelief in her eyes. Perhaps she was wondering how this emaciated, dwarfish (probably inexperienced) fellow could be an “expert”. (Foreigners who come to China to teach or work with Chinese publications in foreign languages are, out of politeness, usually called “experts” by the Chinese.)  This woman was Shan Yan, who was to be my colleague for about two years. Now she is in Pakistan for advanced study. The other girls were university students and later became my colleagues.

At lunch in the dining hall, I met some Pakistanis who were already working with different organizations. I felt consoled that I was not alone in those gloomy surroundings. How did I come to China? It was almost by chance. I was working with a newspaper in Karachi. Although the Cultural Revolution in China was at its zenith, few people in Pakistan knew much about it. Confused and ambiguous reports appeared in the press from time to time, mostly from Western sources. At some point during that period my godfather and teacher, the well-known journalist and writer Shaukat Siddiqui, told me that the Chinese Consulate wanted someone to translate a few articles by Chairman Mao. We worked on several. One day he said that the Consulate wanted somebody to work with the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing and that he had already recommended me for the job. Although well settled in profession, my adventurous nature pushed me to accept the offer. “It would be a new experience,” I though. And thus one day I found myself in Beijing.

There were generally 60 to 70, though at one time only 40-odd, foreigners living in our guest house, which could accommodate at least 5,000 people. In the grounds fallen poplar leaves were ankle-deep. The drives, paths and courts were covered with leaves and nobody seemed to care. Attendants were always buried in endless study meetings, reading “important” political documents, reciting and memorizing quotations, shouting slogans, beating drums and gongs, taking part in processions, and holding criticism meetings. Because of the slogan “The poorer you are, the purer the socialism”, we seldom saw anybody without patches on their trousers and jackets. Now looking at the past with my mind’s eye, I keep thinking, “How many green leaves must have fallen during those fateful years? How many old and young leaves must have experienced the agony of mental and physical torture?” In the past three years many have been rehabilitated, often posthumously!

Our offices were located in a large building the Guest House. For a long time I did not know that the Press had its own office building, and that our offices had been shifted under a temporary arrangement. That upheaval had taken a toll of three lives in the original office building. Often I saw a number of old fellows cleaning toilets or doing odd jobs. They did not look like the people of that profession. I wondered who they were. They were heads and other responsible comrades of various sections, who had long been condemned and deposed, as later I came to know. Many of them have been rehabilitated by now.

There were altogether more than twenty people in our section and the main assignment was to translate Chairman Mao’s works. In appearance the section seemed well staffed but in fact productivity was at its lowest. Being students half of the translators had only a tenuous grip on the language. The fact was that after the closure of the universities and institutes at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, all the language students had been sent to work with the Press, China Pictorial and Radio Beijing. Some of them had studied for about three years in the Beijing University, but a few only for six months at an institute. How much can one learn in six months, particularly of a foreign language? Their future was bleak, nonetheless, some brave ones among them enduring all hardships and turmoils, continued their language studies on their own, improving their knowledge of language and even surpassing those who had studied for more than three years at the university. Credit must go them for their efforts. But it was only after 1976 that their abilities were recognized. Some of them have now been, or are being sent abroad for higher studies.

In our work, the procedure is that the foreign staff member translates material, or polishes material translated by his colleagues. This is then compared with the Chinese text and several sittings are arranged to discuss language, grammar, usage of words and so on. Chinese colleagues divide themselves into four or five groups and the material circulates from one group to another. Instead of working collectively, every group compares the translated material with the Chinese text and brings forth its own findings. Thus it happens often that the translation of a single Chinese word is changed four or five times, and if the “expert” offers any difference of opinion in this regard, the final argument is always “in Chinese it is like this”. The “foreign devil” has no way out, and cannot refute this argument because Chinese is all Greek to him, and he is solely dependent on the English or some other foreign text. After all such postmortems and surgery, the final translation often looks unrecognizable, even to the translator himself. Then there are four proof copies made before the actual printing starts.

In the beginning the fourth and final proof used to be kept as a “top secret and most confidential documents”. I had no access to the proof, and in the course of proof reading further changes and amendments usually were made to it. It happened probably in the winter of 1968 that about ten thousand copies of a booklet of Chairman Mao’s article On Policy had to be destroyed because of one mistake left in the final proof. Afterwards, I was permitted to go through the final proof and it was agreed that amendments and changes would be made through mutual consultation. Nonetheless, lengthy and tiresome group discussions continued.

Like others, I wanted to know what was happening in the country at large. A host of unanswered questions kept on wriggling in my mind, but few would dare to speak, and then only to repeat slogans or make veiled statements. It seemed that everybody had become mute. Shadows of fear and harassment loomed over people’s faces. For anything and everything, the answer was, “We don’t know”, or just a smile. Very occasionally somebody would courageously come out with something. People usually avoided foreigners, however. They worked with us but were poles apart, and we wondered why it was so. We were living right in the heart of China, yet our sole sources of information about her were the foreign media, gossip and rumours. Chinese broadcasts, periodicals and other sources were full of political jargon and bombast to which we were not accustomed, and always vague. This shortcoming, to some extent, still exists.

In the beginning I could not understand what was going on, but with the passage of time is became clearer. My co-workers were intellectuals, one of the most suppressed and hated sections of society at that time! The major victims of upheaval, they were called “stinking intellectuals”. Countless professors, teachers, doctors, engineers, specialists, scholars and men of letters as well as my comrades were the targets of oppressive gangs. How could they dare open their mouths?

In 1968, we were on a trip in South China. In Nanchang as we came out of a porcelain shop, the road was blocked and a mammoth procession was passing by. In the middle of the procession moved a motorcade at a snail’s pace. In the back of every truck stood three or four people on a raised platform, their faces streaked in blood and placard suspended around their necks. Red banners with Chinese characters painted in white were fixed to the sides of the trucks. I asked my interpreter who they were and what was written on the banners, but the answer was as usual, “I don’t know.” Whether he knew or not, those blood-stained faces even more than a decade still haunt my memory. In Shanghai we were asked to join a demonstration against America, holding placards on which the slogans “DOWN WITH U.S. IMPERIALISM!” were painted.

At Tiananmen Square in Beijing, on three occasions I saw a surging ocean of human heads. I saw people, young or old, crying just to have a glimpse of Chairman Mao. The rally of October I, 1969 was the last of its kind.

Once we were taken to an exhibit at the Beijing Exhibition Hall. A part of it was about Liu Shaoqi the deposed head of state and his wife Wang Guangmei on whom much abuse was hurled. There were many mocking cartoons about them. It was said that the Beijing Red Guards had arranged that exhibition. Now although Wang Guangmei has already been rehabilitated, many things remain unclear and unanswered. The same is the case with Peng Zhen, ex-Mayor of Beijing Municipal Party Committee. I still remember Yao Wenyuan’s article published in 1968, in which he branded this Beijing Party Committee as a “watertight and impenetrable independent kingdom which resisted Chairman Mao’s instructions”. Now after 13 years, when he has already been rehabilitated and holds important posts, nobody knows how he was victimized. The condemned of yesterday are now emerging as the heroes of today. But the official explanations of the fall and re-emergence of such people usually remain abstract, leaving many doubts in the reader’s mind.

During the reign of terror, unless officially directed to do so seldom would anyone around us praise the people above them or criticize the condemned and fallen. Now, however, people say whatever they like. They are sometimes even critical of the policies of the present leadership. They openly say that in 1976 the Chinese people won their second liberation and are in fact very justified in this assertion.

In November 1969 I left China to return in the autumn of 1972 and spend another three years. This period was quite turbulent and full of unpleasant events even for the foreigners. During those days relations between foreign staff members (experts) and Chinese, particularly their immediate superiors, deteriorated with every passing day. Obstacles and difficulties were put in the way of foreigners. The hatred stirred up was quite visible. There were very few foreigners who had no complaints. Mismanagement in the affairs of the Friendship Guest House and disorder at the “Experts’ Bureau” were at a high point. Many people left China in depressed and unhappy circumstances. A number of foreigners had already been branded and either put behind bars or forced to leave China. Last year, in London by chance, I ran into Anthony Gray, one-time Reuters News Agency correspondent in Beijing, who had been persecuted and imprisoned for 14 months when, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, a certain group of “rebels” held sway in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. At the BBC, David Page of the Eastern Service introduced me to a tall man whom he called Anthony Gray. “How is Beijing now?” was his first question. “Better than the Beijing you left,” I replied.

At the highest level, the late Premier Zhou Enlai tried his best to steer the situation in the right direction, but he had to face a lot of resistance in certain quarters. He succeeded in bringing back some of the foreigners who had been wrongly branded and forced to leave China, such as Rose Smith, an old lady, and a couple, all of them from Britain. I still remember the speech Premier Zhou had made in the Great Hall of the People on March 8, 1973. The occasion was International Women’s Day. He hosted a reception for the foreign women experts and the wives of the experts. The husbands were also “invited”. It was a memorable speech, frank, open, unambiguous and far different from the usual Chinese way of putting things. He described the whole story of the atrocities committed by Lin Biao, and how he fled and died. He offered his apologies for the wrongs done to the foreigners. For a couple of months after that, the situation changed and then it swung back. Unfortunately, he could not straighten out the affairs in their entirety.

It was a common phenomenon that a fellow came to China as a “comrade” and left as “mister”. Who was responsible for this unhappy situation? Surely not our colleagues and grassroots workers, but people somewhere above at higher levels. I, myself fell victim and had to leave in a bitter atmosphere. Our colleagues and comrades were good people but helpless. They perhaps themselves were in the same boat.

Earlier, we had some very good and efficient overseas Chinese colleagues. They were also persecuted and left their land at the first available opportunity. I don’t know about other sections, but I can say that their departure was a big loss to our section. Accused generally of being spies, traitors and “running dogs” of capitalists, they were unable to withstand the pressure.

Universities and other educational institutions had been reopened by then. But in the name of education, and misinterpreting the slogans “integration of theory with practice”, some very ridiculous policies were being implemented. At one time the language classes of Beijing University were ordered to be moved to the countryside to learn from the peasants. It might have been justified for agricultural science students but, one wonders, what justification did they have to send language students to the countryside? If it were intended to “re-educate” them politically, they had been already overburdened with politics for years. What sort of Urdu or any other language could they learn form peasants? In fact, they forgot whatever they had learned.

People working with us were frequently dispatched to rural areas as well. Everybody was required to go for a year or more to be re-educated and so learn from the peasants. Whether they were re-educated or learned anything from the peasants, I don’t know. But I do know one thing. Their standard of language was badly affected. I don’t mean to criticize the policy as a whole. But in my opinion its application at that time was not correct.

Our offices had long been moved back to their original premises, the Foreign Languages Press Building. Its frontal view is more or less acceptable, but from inside it is perhaps the darkest place I have ever seen, after the Radio Beijing Building. Gloomy, neglected, un-whitewashed and very dimly lit, giving off an unpleasant smell.

As far as the work was concerned, although layer upon layer of leadership existed, nobody seemed responsible for anything, or to pay heed to any suggestions or complaints. Sometimes experts were referred to as “Foreign Devils” (a common expression for foreigners when Chinese were subjected to foreign domination and exploitation)! Take, for example, Party and People’s Congresses documents. These documents were sent for publication with little thought. But it would take a book a year or more to come off the press and another six months to reach the respective countries for which it was destined. In April 1974, Deng Xiaoping made a speech at a special session of the United Nations. We took not less than six months to publish it in a booklet form, with the result that it lost all its value and interest. And isn’t it shameful that it took us more than nine years to publish the four volumes of Chairman Mao’s works in Urdu?

Periodicals were in an even sorrier state; suffocating and nauseous content, bombastic language, and usually late by two months. China Pictorial, for instance, in Pakistan was generally found only in the mirror shops, where it was used to make the backsides of mirrors more attractive. Shopkeepers would clip out the attractive pictures and paste them onto the backs of mirrors, and tell the customers that the mirrors were “Made in China”. Moreover, long out of date events and news items with pictures were something “special” to China Pictorial (which indeed they were). This shortcoming still exists. Something which happened one month, China Pictorial readers would come to know about only five months later. China Pictorial even ventured to “create” some new foreign languages.

What had caused such a depressing situation? A surfeit of so-called political meetings, evasion of responsibility, lack of co-ordination between different departments, i.e., the Bureau, Printing Press  and Guozi Shudian (distributors), and lack of accountability. There were no viable schedules or time limits for completion of work. Distribution was highly disorganized and done in a hodgepodge way. Books published in Urdu, for example, seldom were available in Pakistan. (Still the same today!).

The general atmosphere during 1975 was difficult, as this was the high watermark of political and social suffocation. In a mental agony I decided to leave and never come back. But after exactly two years, I was again packing for Beijing!

As somebody once said, “For the Chinese people the Tiananmen Incident was the climax of a nightmare and the beginning of a new dawn. At this time they achieved their second liberation.” Chairman Mao’s fifth volume had already been published. One day Comrade Jiang, the Chinese Cultural Attaché in Islamabad, said, “The situation is changed now. Forget the past, let us start afresh. You will find a new Beijing. “And in fact I did see a new Beijing. Smiling faces, eyes kindled with young hopes! People filled with enthusiasm and vigour, who seemed set upon clearing away the rubbish and debris piled up over a decade or more. One snowy evening we were sitting in a heated room at the Hongbinlou (Muslim) Restaurant near Xidan Bazaar. It was a dinner hosted by the Foreign Languages Press. Someone picked up the threads of the past bitterness in a passing remark and one of our Bureau leaders said laughingly, “We have a saying that unless people have quarrelled, friendship is not cemented.” But nowadays we no longer quarrel!

Now, the ice began melting even in the Foreign Languages Press. People’s lips unlocked. Gone were the frigidity and melancholy. No more patched trousers and jackets. Hair was dressed, shoes polished! Women in colourful dresses! All this was quite astonishing, as nothing like this had been seen when the political vultures were obsessed with keeping socialism “pure”.

Striking changes have taken place in the recent past. Miraculously, periodicals, particularly China Pictorial, now come out of press relatively on time. The contents are diversified and have a social flavour. The Foreign Languages Press publishes only books mirroring social developments of general interest and novels. Management is being overhauled and reshuffled but unfortunately, problems still exist, such as bureaucratic attitudes and style of work, red-tapism, self-willed actions and rigidity. In the October 1979 issue of China Pictorial, for example, there were some articles and news items not suitable for publication. Almost all the Chinese and foreign staff members expressed their disapproval, but the people responsible paid no attention and the content remained unchanged. Although recently two foreigners were placed on the Editorial Board, their presence seems only symbolic. Anyhow let us hope for improvement.

A few words about television in China. To my amazement, one evening a newscaster started reading news. This had never happened before, as far as I can remember. The television authorities at last had come to realize that something called “news” existed. TV programmes used to be boring and hopeless. The two hours’ daily transmission would comprise one or two documentaries and one of the “Eight Revolutionary Operas and Ballets”. The expression “Eight Operas for Eight Hundred Million People” secretly circulated among the people. These were “created” during the Cultural Revolution and, whether on television or radio, in the theatre, cinema, newspapers or periodicals, people had no choice but to see, listen to and read this material. Only Korean and, for some time, Albanian films fell into the category of foreign films eligible to be shown. But now, though sometimes one feels irritated with the excess of old classical operas, the variety of programming is much broader. Informative films and documentaries are often screened, and every now and then films from other countries. Charlie Chaplin films are a hit, and there is a craze for Indian film Awara (Vagabond). Some good and entertaining television plays have also been produced. On the whole, a positive trend is taking place in the media and in the arts.

Captions:

1.       At the Great Wall of China in October 1967.

2.       With Chinese colleagues at Friendship House, Beijing.

3.       Shanghai --- Protesting against the US imperialism in 1968.

4.       October 01, 1967, National Day Celebrations at Beijing.

5.       On the Frozen Lake of Bei Hai Park, Beijing --- 1978.