“Fart of use this thing. We were dead and wounded plenty of times. All we get is others become officials, and have good things to eat and wear. What’s in it for us? It’s better to go home and work on the land.”
“Ha, it seems you are not crazy. You are just wavering in your revolutionary stand.”
The eyewitness noticed that “among cadres in Yenan, old and new, homesickness was common.” Cadres of peasant origin “often asked straight out to go home, and were stopped by their superiors. Some tried to run away, and once caught were immediately executed. The educated were much cleverer. They wouldn’t say they wanted to go home, they would make up some story and ask the Party to transfer them Out …”
Escape was easier for army men on the border of the region — and the rate of desertion was colossal. The target of one brigade alone, as of 29 September 1943, was to catch
THESE WERE THE people Mao had to depend on for his future power base. And to that end they were clearly poor material. They had come to Yenan for a dream. To make them fight for the real CCP, Mao would have to change them fundamentally, to remold them. This enormous human engineering project Mao began from early 1942. His first step was to strike at the champion of the young volunteers, a 35-year-old writer called Wang Shi-wei, a dedicated Communist who had translated Engels and Trotsky. An essay by him called “Wild Lilies,” which was published in the main newspaper in Yenan,
Young people in Yenan seem to have lost steam in their life lately, and seem to have discontent in their stomachs. Why? What do we lack in our life? Some might answer: we lack nutrition, we lack vitamins … Others say: the male — female ratio in Yenan is 18 to 1, and many young men cannot find a wife … Still others will say: life in Yenan is too monotonous, too drab …
These answers are not unreasonable. But … young people … have come here to be in the revolution, and they are committed to self-sacrifice. They have not come to seek the satisfactions of food and sex or the pleasures of life.
What had shattered their dreams, he said, was institutionalized privilege, accompanied by high-handedness and arrogance. He quoted a conversation he had overheard between two young women about their bosses:
He’s always accusing you of petty bourgeois egalitarianism. Yet he himself … only looks out for his own privileges … and is completely indifferent to comrades under his charge …!
All fine words — class friendship and warmth. And it all boils down to — fart! They don’t have even elementary human sympathy!.. There are just too damn few cadres who really care about us.
In the second installment ten days later, Shi-wei sharpened his key points:
Some say there is no system of hierarchy and privilege in Yenan. This is not true. It exists. Others say, yes, there is, but it is justified. This requires us to think with our heads.
SHI-WEI WAS calling on people to think for themselves. Moreover, his arguments were reasonable and eloquent:
I am no egalitarian. But I do not think it is necessary or justified to have multiple grades in food or clothing … If, while the sick can’t even have a sip of noodle soup … some quite healthy big shots are indulging in extremely unnecessary and unjustified perks, the lower ranks will be alienated …
When Mao read this, he slammed the newspaper on his desk and demanded angrily: “Who is in charge here? Wang Shi-wei, or Marxism?” He picked up the phone and ordered a shake-up at
Shi-wei put some even sharper thoughts in a wall poster. Mao had tolerated these as a safety-valve for the young intellectuals. Wall posters had the advantage (for him) of having a restricted audience — and were easily torn down or erased. Shi-wei’s poster proclaimed: “Justice must be established in the Party. Injustice must be done away with … Ask yourselves, comrades … Are you scared of telling the ‘big shots’ what’s on your mind …? Or are you the kind that is good at persecuting the ‘little men’ with trumped-up crimes?” Shi-wei went far beyond the issue of privilege, to the heart of darkness in the Party.
The poster with Shi-wei’s words was hoisted outside the South Gate, the busiest place in the city. People flocked to read these few sentences, which articulated what many wanted to say but did not dare. Shi-wei became a hero.
