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maoism at the grassroots
Maoism at the Grassroots

Everyday Life in China’s Era of High Socialism

edited by Jeremy Brown

and Matthew D. Johnson

Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2015
Copyright © 2015 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America

First printing

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Maoism at the grassroots : everyday life in China’s era of high socialism / edited by
Jeremy Brown and Matthew D. Johnson.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-674-28720-4 (hardcover)
1. China—Social life and customs—1949– 2. China—Social conditions—1949–
3. Communism—Social aspects—China—History—20th century. 4. Politics and
culture—China—History—20th century. 5. China—Politics and government—1949–
6. Crime—China—History—20th century. 7. Political participation—China—
History—20th century. 8. Communication—Social aspects—China—History—20th
­century. 9. Discontent—Social aspects—China—History—20th century. 10. Power
(Social sciences)—China—History—20th century. I. Brown, Jeremy, 1976– II. Johnson,
Matthew D.
DS777.6.M36 2015
951.05—dc23   2015002580
Contents

Introduction * Jeremy Brown and Matthew D. Johnson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Part I. C rimes , L abels , and Punishment

1. How a “Bad Element” Was Made: The Discovery, Accusation,

and Punishment of Zang Qiren * Yang Kuisong . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

2. Moving Targets: Changing Class Labels in Rural Hebei and Henan,

1960–1979 * Jeremy Brown . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51

3. An Overt Conspiracy: Creating Rightists in Rural Henan,

1957–1958 * Cao Shuji . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77

4. Revising Political Verdicts in Post-­Mao China: The Case of Beijing’s

Fengtai District * Daniel Leese . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102

Part II. Mobilization

5. Liberation from the Loom? Rural Women, Textile Work,

and Revolution in North China * Jacob Eyferth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131

6. Youth and the “Great Revolutionary Movement” of Scientific

Experiment in 1960s–1970s Rural China * Sigrid Schmalzer . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154

7. Adrift in Tianjin, 1976: A Diary of Natural Disaster, Everyday Urban

Life, and Exile to the Countryside * Sha Qingqing and Jeremy Brown . . . . . . 179
vi Contents

Part III. C ulture and C ommunication

8. Beneath the Propaganda State: Official and Unofficial Cultural

Landscapes in Shanghai, 1949–1965 * Matthew D. Johnson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199

9. China’s “Great Proletarian Information Revolution”

of 1966–1967 * Michael Schoenhals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230

10. The Dilemma of Implementation: The State and Religion in

the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1990 * Xiaoxuan Wang . . . . . . . . . . . . 259

Part IV. Discontent

11. Radical Agricultural Collectivization and Ethnic Rebellion:

The Communist Encounter with a “New Emperor” in Guizhou’s
Mashan Region, 1956 * Wang Haiguang . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281

12. Caught between Opposing Han Chauvinism and Opposing

Local Nationalism: The Drift toward Ethnic Antagonism in
Xinjiang Society, 1952–1963 * Zhe Wu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306

13. Redemptive Religious Societies and the Communist State, 1949 to

the 1980s * S. A. Smith . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 340

Epilogue: Mao’s China—​Putting Politics in Perspective * Vivienne Shue . . . . 365

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 381
Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 453
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 455
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 457
maoism at the grassroots
Introduction
jeremy brown and matthew d. johnson

When analyzed as history, the Mao Zedong era (1949–1978) looks different
than it did when scrutinized by social scientists. Ever since the founding of
the People’s Republic, contemporary observers have identified an underlying
reality at odds with the goals and policies pursued by top leaders in Beijing.
That underlying reality, scholars found, was characterized by conflict, ten-
sion, and variation.1 Factionalism divided bureaucratic institutions; mass
campaigns failed to achieve their aims; local officials subverted policies;
groups pursued their own interests. In other words, state control was not
always total or centralized but at times appeared limited and tenuous.
As historians, we embrace this picture of the Mao era, but our approach
differs in two main ways: where we look and what we are trying to explain.
Social scientists have analyzed China’s political and social system by looking
at policy implementation, group behavior, and the origins and outcomes of
such events as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Their
concerns have been mainly top-­down and state-­focused. In contrast, the his-
torians whose research is collected in this volume look at individual people
in villages, factories, neighborhoods, counties, and ethnic minority regions
from the bottom up, and in everyday contexts that make the familiar ana-
lytic categories of “state” and “society” impossible to clearly distinguish
from each other. And while we do not shy away from putting together our
local case studies (like a jigsaw puzzle, in Elizabeth J. Perry’s apt coinage)2
to form broader conclusions about China, our main task is to explain pro-
cesses of change and continuity over time from the perspective of relatively
unknown historical actors. We call this approach “grassroots history.” In
writing China’s history from the perspective of the grassroots, we are also
2 Introduction

making a statement—​t hat the story of change in post-­1949 China is more

than a story of policy implementation via relentless group mobilization, or
of chaos and terror unleashed by factional infighting in Beijing.
What does our grassroots historical approach add to an understanding of
the Mao years? How does it differ from what social scientists discovered
decades ago? First, we have found even more diversity and variety in behavior,
outlook, and viewpoints. Men had gay relationships in factory dormitories;
teens penned searing complaints in diaries; mentally ill individuals in the
Beijing suburbs cursed Mao; and farmers formed secret societies, founded
new “dynasties,” and worshipped forbidden spirits. These diverse undercur-
rents—​barely hinted at in openly published sources but plentiful in archival
and grassroots documents—​were at least as “mainstream” in people’s
everyday lives as the ideas found in Mao’s Little Red Book or People’s Daily
editorials. Second, we agree with Joseph Esherick, Paul Pickowicz, and
Andrew Walder that earlier generations of social scientists underestimated
the extent of routine violence, resistance, and repression during the Mao
period.3 These traumas took different forms, from armed rebellion to harsh
prison terms for saying the wrong thing or being gay, and they were not
limited to such major campaigns as the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural
Revolution but were present throughout the Mao years. Third, by departing
from what historian Gail Hershatter calls “campaign time” and looking at
particular moments of change and at the Mao years as a whole, we have dis-
covered multiple turning points as well as shared experiences that together
defined the period we have termed “high socialism.” Before discussing
turning points and high socialism, we begin with the concepts of grassroots
and everyday life.

Everyday Life

Focusing on everyday life means taking what people actually did as a starting
point rather than starting with what top officials wanted people to do or to
think. The chapters in this volume examine what Michel de Certeau calls
“ways of operating,” meaning the tactics individuals used as they engaged
with the people, ideas, and spaces around them.4 This concept encompasses
private life, family dynamics, entertainment choices, workplace relation-
ships, religion and cosmology, and anxieties about clothing and money. It
Introduction 3

examines how people watched films, how they seduced their coworkers, how
and why they cursed and complained, and what they wrote in their diaries.
Looking at everyday life does not mean ignoring the role of the state, which
was undeniably intrusive and influential during the Mao era. We approach
politics, however, through the eyes of villagers and urbanites, not through elite
policy-­makers and propagandists. We also depart from imprecise paradigms.
Two decades ago, Elizabeth J. Perry critiqued the state-­society relations model
that then dominated studies of contemporary China, writing that “terms
such as ‘state’ and ‘society’ are simply too gross to capture the enormous vari-
ation that differentiates one Chinese region—​or level of government—​from
another.”5 There was no monolithic Chinese society during the 1950s, 1960s,
and 1970s, nor was there a single Chinese state. The chapters in this volume
validate Perry’s point and take up her call to disaggregate the “unwieldy con-
cepts of ‘state’ and ‘society.’   ”6 It is impossible to understand the Mao years
without shining a bright light on the diverse ethnic, regional, religious, family,
and urban or rural identities that gave meaning to people’s lives.
Aside from its imprecision, the other problem with the state-­society rela-
tions paradigm is that it sets up state and society as separate, oppositional
entities. As Joseph Esherick has shown in his research on rural Shaanxi during
the late 1940s, representatives of the Party-­state at the county level and below
were themselves “members of society” who were “deeply enmeshed in a variety
of local networks from which they could never be completely separated.”7
Following Esherick, we find that throughout the Mao years, the Party-­state
and society were intertwined. In factories, an immediate supervisor or a com-
rade in the workshop represented the Party-­state. In villages, the face of the
Party-­state was a neighbor, a family member, a member of a minority ethnic
group, or a fellow clandestine worshipper. As Gail Hershatter has shown in
her study of rural labor models, becoming an embodiment of the Party-­state
did not sever a person’s relationships with family members or neighbors, but
it did alter them. People knew who was a labor model or a cadre; they treated
local representatives of the Party-­state differently because such representa-
tives were genuinely different. Local leaders were responsible for nothing
short of “rearranging space, establishing hierarchies, organizing surveillance,
recalibrating time,” as Hershatter writes.8 They also had special powers: they
bestowed rewards and punishments, and assigned labels. The chapters that
follow refrain from referring to an amorphous state set apart from society and
4 Introduction

instead show clearly the significant roles that local officials played as represen-
tatives of the Party-­state, as community and family members, and as media-
tors between national policies and particularistic interests.

The Grassroots

We use the term grassroots to encompass this complex interplay between

provincial, county, commune, and village officials, and among people who
had no official titles whatsoever. Grassroots history has as its antecedents the
village and urban studies, ethnographies, and micro-­level social analyses of
previous generations of scholarship on China.9 Our notion of the grassroots
is first and foremost meant to distinguish our subject from previous studies
of Mao Zedong and other central officials and bureaucrats in Beijing.10 It
used to be that studies of elite politics were overrepresented in scholarship
about the Mao years because sources from and about life at Party Center
were more readily available than grassroots sources. Times have changed.
Although the Central Archives remain closed to academic researchers,
forcing even the best of recent works about elite politics to rely on anony-
mous testimony from “well-­placed oral sources,”11 an explosion of grassroots
sources over the past two decades has fueled a new wave of scholarship on
the history of the Mao years.12
Grassroots sources include archival documents, internal circulation
(neibu) collections, oral history, and unpublished diaries and manuscripts.
They allow us to describe the lives of people at the grassroots—​officials and
nonofficials; farmers and technicians; Han, Miao, or Uyghur—​w ith unprec-
edented accuracy and detail. While many of the chapters here draw from
material held in official provincial, municipal, and local archives, even more
of them use documents collected from flea markets, peddlers, and other
underground channels. The school of “Sinological garbology” (the collec-
tion and study of “rubbish materials,” or laji cailiao) has gained momentum
among an international cohort of scholars in China, Europe, and North
America who use diaries, personnel dossiers, public security and legal files,
Red Guard leaflets, and other ephemera to shed light on phenomena—​family
life, petitioning, and sexual behavior, for example—​t hat official archives
redact, withhold, or simply do not contain.13
Introduction 5

Examining everyday life from a grassroots perspective, we find a complex,

particularistic web of interests in every social context. Previous scholarship
by Vivienne Shue and other social scientists has located particularism—​
often defined as interests that competed with those of the Party-­state—​in
villages where state “reach” appeared more constrained, or in factional net-
works that divided the political elite.14 Expanding on this perspective, the
chapters in this volume show that particularism also existed in and through
structures of governance, or was manifested in such difficult-­to-­document
forms of behavior as sexuality, abuses of the legal system, illicit commercial
activity, conspiracy, and covert acts of religious worship. Our findings thus
connect the history of China after 1949 to histories of the late Qing and
Republican eras, when particularism was more readily observed as a basic
feature of social life, whether described as corruption, networks, guanxi,
localism, or the private sphere.
As a result, the “grassroots” can be understood as both a methodological
starting point and an objective structure of society. Methodologically, it is
aligned with subaltern studies and other approaches to “history from below”
in the sense that it privileges sources and readings that cut against the grain
of established narratives and state-­centered readings of historical sources,
including those that, like archives, are themselves produced by institutions
of state power. (Some might note that the term grassroots itself connotes the
lowest level in Party-­state hierarchies, but our term—​derived from both
Anglophone scholarship on grassroots political history and the Chinese
sense of grassroots (caogen) as connoting nongovernmental forms of organi-
zation or counterhegemonic social forces—​is not restricted to this nar-
rower Party-­state usage.)15 As a category of social description, the grassroots
might best be thought of as a localized “contact zone” where nonelite indi-
viduals interact with more powerful social structures. The presence of
diverse individual and collective responses to centralizing, hegemonic forms
of state power is significant. Although we do not deny that social control was
created through some combination of propaganda and political terror—​
and much in between—​we would also argue that the notion of a comprehen-
sive post-­1949 consolidation of power by the Mao-­led Communist Party
cannot account for the diversity of behavior described in the chapters that
follow.
6 Introduction

High Socialism

In our reevaluation of the history previously subsumed by monolithic con-

structions of the Mao years, periodization is also important. While some
chapters in this volume look back to the early 1950s for precedents and others
see Maoist legacies in the reform era, each case study centers on events
during the period from the mid-­1950s until 1980. We refer to this period as
“high socialism,” meaning the time between agricultural collectivization
and nationalization of industry in the mid-­1950s through the end of the
1970s. High socialism was characterized by state ownership of property,
Party-­state fusion, the politicization of everyday life, and a planned economy
that privileged heavy urban industry by extracting grain from the country-
side and restricting internal migration. These broad aspects of high socialism
came to life at the grassroots in the form of class status labels, grain rationing
booklets, propaganda written on neighborhood blackboards, loudspeaker
broadcasts, mandatory evening meetings, and anxious interactions with
local officials who wielded arbitrary authority.
One advantage of focusing on these shared elements of high socialism is
that it sheds new light on understudied moments. An abundance of studies
about the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution means that we
know far more about what happened in China in 1958 and 1966 than we do
about events in 1955, 1965, or 1975. As it turns out, 1955, 1965, and 1975 were
just as significant at the grassroots as were the starting points of the Leap
and the Cultural Revolution. Many of the chapters in this volume fill in these
chronological gaps in our knowledge about the Mao years. Inspired by Gail
Hershatter’s point that “campaign time” did not necessarily match lived
experience, we find that the labels “Great Leap Forward” and “Cultural
Revolution” were not especially meaningful starting points or finish lines at
the grassroots.16 As Michael Schoenhals has argued, the term “Cultural
Revolution” loses its explanatory value when scholars inaccurately use such
labels as “manic” or “bizarre” to depict what happened between 1966 and
1969 as an abnormal exception to PRC politics.17 The violence, abuses of
power, and resistance associated with the Leap and the Cultural Revolution
were far from abnormal. They were present at every point along the histor-
ical timeline between the 1950s and the 1970s. Even though both events exac-
erbated the preexisting conditions to tragic degrees, they did not introduce
Introduction 7

them de novo from 1958 onward. And in some places the most significant
turning points began not with the Leap or the Cultural Revolution but with
collectivization (in Miao areas of Guizhou in 1955–1956, for example), state
control over the cotton market (in rural Shaanxi gradually throughout the
1950s), or reassessing villagers’ class labels (in 1965). And, as we shall see in
Chapter 1, the year 1970 proved to be a painfully important turning point in
the life of a factory worker named Zang Qiren.

* * *
Our exploration of everyday life at the grassroots begins with a group of four
chapters that zoom in on the effects of repression, surveillance, and political
labeling at the individual level. As crushing as such repression could be,
people insisted on asserting their personal beliefs and identities, even though
they knew that by doing so they risked being sent to jail or labeled as a class
enemy. We open with Yang Kuisong’s microhistory of a “bad element”
named Zang Qiren, who worked in a factory in Henan. Leaders at Zang’s
factory expended huge amounts of time and resources investigating Zang’s
pre-­1949 history for evidence of counter­revolutionary behavior. Zang indeed
concealed the truth about his past in the many self-­confessions he wrote
during the Mao period. In 1968 he was so afraid of getting in trouble that he
ran away from his factory and hid in a neighboring county. But in the end it
was Zang’s unwillingness to stop what he knew was risky behavior in the
factory, rather than his political history, that prompted public security offi-
cials to incarcerate him as a bad element.
Although only a small percentage of people living in China between the
1950s and 1970s were labeled as bad elements, everyone had a class status
label. As Jeremy Brown shows, the class status system that divided China’s
population into such categories as poor peasant, middle peasant, rich peasant,
and landlord was more dynamic and unstable than previous scholarship has
assumed. This instability peaked during the early and mid-­1960s. In Henan
in the aftermath of the Great Leap famine and in other provinces a few years
later during the Four Cleanups, work teams reinvestigated and reassigned
the class labels of millions of rural Chinese people. Even though central
policy had already changed direction and no longer required the reinvestiga-
tion of class labels, officials in many villages continued the practice in 1965
and 1966. This is but one example of local cadres being more influential than
8 Introduction

Mao himself at the grassroots. Many rural families, terrified at the prospect
of a negative change (for example, from lower-­middle peasant to rich peasant),
petitioned for the restoration of their original labels. In arguing their cases,
they appropriated official language and policy, accepting the class status
framework while protesting its capricious and arbitrary implementation.
Perhaps no political campaign of the Mao period was as capricious and
arbitrary as the Anti-­R ightist Movement of 1957–1958. Cao Shuji demon-
strates that in rural China, the Hundred Flowers Movement and anti-­rightist
rectification were wrapped together in a single package. County cadres and
village teachers were aware of what had befallen urban elites who spoke out
during the Hundred Flowers and knew that the entire point of soliciting
criticism was to identify rightists. Many rural people were afraid of being
labeled as rightists, but some could not restrain themselves from opening
their mouths. Why? Some people’s personalities made them inveterate
critics—​t hey could not help themselves. Others were naïve and gave in to
pressure from local officials, who played a crucial role in pushing people to
speak out one day and punishing them the next. In addition, a significant
number of rural educators and bureaucrats willingly sacrificed themselves
as rightists in order to expose food shortages caused by collectivization and
the state grain monopoly.
After the Anti-­R ightist Movement, the cost of saying the wrong thing
remained high, but even during the extreme political repression of the
Cultural Revolution, people expressed critical and independent views.
Daniel Leese draws on legal case files from suburban Beijing to explore how
hundreds of people were imprisoned as counter­revolutionaries during the
Cultural Revolution and then rehabilitated after Mao Zedong’s death. Leese
finds that the Party’s “transitional justice” in the aftermath of the Cultural
Revolution was limited. Aggrieved suburbanites who had been jailed for
criticizing Mao, praising Lin Biao, or questioning the leadership ability of
Hua Guofeng were eventually exonerated, but the broader systemic nature of
their critiques remained unaddressed. Taken together, the first four chapters
show the intensely personal human toll of anxiety-­inducing political move-
ments, labels, and persecution during the Mao years. Rather than backing
down in the face of such traumas, however, many people maintained “strong
political views and individual standards of evaluation,” as Leese concludes.
Introduction 9

The second group of chapters, titled “Mobilization,” examines how people

reacted when local authorities resorted to less punitive measures to convince
them to make personal sacrifices for socialist construction. During the era
of high socialism, mobilization proved just as influential as persecution in
changing how and where individuals lived and worked. The changes, how-
ever, turned out differently from what authorities had originally intended.
Rural women in Shaanxi, as Jacob Eyferth describes, understood success in
terms of textile work. A family’s social status depended on weaving an ade-
quate amount of cotton to wear and to offer at such culturally meaningful
rituals as weddings and funerals. It was shameful to wear shoddily stitched
clothing or to fall short on wedding gifts. Yet when agricultural collectiviza-
tion pushed women into farmwork, they came under great pressure to meet
their obligations to the state (which at the grassroots was represented by vil-
lage cadres who also happened to be friends and neighbors) as well as their
obligation to produce textiles for family use. The result was that women
worked double shifts: in the fields during the day and hunched over the loom
at night. In addition to working longer hours than their male counterparts,
some village women resorted to pilfering cotton from fields and exchanging
finished cloth for cotton on the black market in order to maintain minimum
standards of social success during the Mao years.
The next two chapters explore how young people grappled with their role
in a Maoist revolutionary project that pushed their lives on a trajectory they
had not chosen for themselves: the sent-­down youth movement. Sigrid
Schmalzer finds that rural scientific experiment mattered deeply to propa-
gandists, policy-­makers, and sent-­down youth during the 1960s and 1970s.
Propagandists depicted science as an opportunity for educated youth to
contribute to the revolution, and many young people embraced this vision.
Propaganda about science, however, was not all rosy. In fact, propaganda
celebrated the usefulness of failed experiments. Youth in the countryside
knew that failure was a common—​and healthy—​part of scientific experi-
mentation, but when their efforts did fall short, they were extremely hard on
themselves. Recognizing how sent-­down youth and propagandists alike
conceived of scientific experiment during the 1960s and 1970s helps to
explain why people willingly participated in official projects and found them
personally meaningful.
10 Introduction

This is not to deny, however, that many teens dreaded the prospect of
going to a village. By the mid-­1970s, ambivalence or opposition to revolu-
tionary projects was becoming more and more common, as Sha Qingqing
and Jeremy Brown show in an essay that draws on a diary kept by a young
man in Tianjin during the summer and fall of 1976. The diarist, named
Tongshan, recorded the devastation of his Tianjin neighborhood during the
Tangshan earthquake of July 1976. His descriptions of aftershocks, anxiety,
and rumors about how top Communist leaders were responding to the crisis
were quickly subsumed by his own worries about how the quake might affect
his assignment to a village as a sent-­down youth. Tongshan’s writing reveals
that he appropriated and internalized propaganda while simultaneously
doubting key Maoist policies. The street fights, petty thefts, and visits from
the police he experienced while waiting to go to a village added to his stress
and exacerbated his doubts. Enthusiastically repeating revolutionary bro-
mides on one page of a diary and then bitterly complaining about them the
next day might seem contradictory or hypocritical, but the coexistence of
official ideology and critical ideas was a central part of everyday life during
the Mao years.
The mix of the personal and the political in Tongshan’s diaries reflects his
exposure to a realm of official culture that had become well established but
not all-­powerful during the Mao period. Our third group of chapters focuses
on culture and information at the grassroots, specifically in the areas of film,
Red Guard periodicals, and local religious practice. Matthew Johnson exam-
ines the urban core and the immediate rural environs of Shanghai and con-
cludes that, although the propaganda system became a central feature of
China’s state structure after 1950, the creation of a single, nationalized mass
culture was considerably less successful than other historians have imag-
ined. Treating institutions of mass culture as local and social phenomena
rather than mere manifestations of state ideological dominance reveals that
cultural transmission was far from an assured process, whether viewed in
terms of dissemination or reception. Shanghai was essentially a multicul-
tural space in which local, national, and international culture all coexisted.
In addition, uneven and heterogeneous patterns of cultural distribution
within the city and between Shanghai and its rural hinterland reflected
broader imbalances in the Mao-­era cultural landscape. Shanghai’s cultural
scene became even messier in the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward,
Introduction 11

when state and nonstate actors co-­opted cultural resources and institutions,
or simply introduced their own apolitical or oppositional alternatives, all
of which were viewed by the Shanghai cultural bureaucracy as troubling
indicators of systemic failure. Even when the Cultural Revolution came,
Shanghai propagandists could not totally overcome the economic and orga-
nizational constraints that prevented state culture from becoming a unified,
national phenomenon. Moreover, censors were hardly the sole arbiters of
taste. Profit-­mindedness—​a hallmark of official and unofficial culture alike
from the 1950s onward—​has proven to be a powerful, and easily ignored,
force in shaping China’s cultural landscape.
Grassroots communication during the Cultural Revolution was, as argued
by Michael Schoenhals, one of the era’s most striking features. The flour-
ishing of publications produced by “revolutionary mass organizations” in
1966 and 1967 revealed a plurality of values and opinions in Chinese society—​
a picture at odds with conventional stereotypes about Red Guard chaos and
violence. Red Guard groups printed and distributed newsletters that mim-
icked official internal reference publications, reporting on how the Cultural
Revolution was unfolding throughout China and reprinting top leaders’
speeches. Before 1966, such independent reporting would have been con­
sidered counter­revolutionary networking. Given the mass organizations’
quasi-­official status at the outset of the Cultural Revolution, however, their
information-­gathering and dissemination activities were tolerated until
September 1967, when the Central Cultural Revolution Group decided that
translocal and multipurpose groups gathering intelligence throughout
China constituted a threat. Information networks had become unofficial
cultural spaces. Their sudden emergence during the Cultural Revolution’s
early years suggests, at the very least, that the potential for such unofficial
space to exist was present throughout the Mao years generally. The restraint
of unofficial culture went hand in hand with its creation. In other words,
what defined the “unofficial” was a process of criminalizing and squeezing
out nonstate alternatives to official cultural and information flows.
Themes of cultural pluralism, unofficial networks, and official co-­optation
all appear in an essay by Xiaoxuan Wang, who shows how the Communist
Party continued earlier state efforts to brand local, communal religions as
superstitious organizations, and to close and confiscate their temples, mon-
asteries, and schools. Official policies, however, did not necessarily achieve
12 Introduction

full or successful implementation at the village level. Wang brings fieldwork

and archival research to bear on the issue of religious control, focusing on
Ruian County in Zhejiang Province to demonstrate that local customs such
as rainmaking and dragon boat rowing were never driven underground
by increasingly harsh state measures against religion. In fact, Wang finds
that during the Cultural Revolution, the Christian population in Ruian
increased significantly. Even as previously protected leaders and institutions
were displaced, the “revolutionary masses” themselves exhibited a striking
tenacity in their devotion to both legal and illicit practices. Often the
line was blurred. The chief cause of this dilemma in religious policy imple-
mentation—​t he question of how to classify and transform (or simply elimi-
nate) surviving religious organizations—​was local cadres themselves. As
Wang shows, overburdened rural cadres were members of communities in
which religious practice remained a vital part of the fabric of social life. In a
manner reminiscent of Andrew Walder’s description of “neo-­traditional”
patronage in post-­1949 Chinese factories, such cadres represented a new
local elite and potential patrons for religious rituals and other activities.
Many grassroots officials saw rituals as legitimate practices; others simply
ignored them. From this perspective, the religious revivals of the 1980s and
1990s were largely extensions of a status quo that had existed since the 1950s.
Local cadres themselves facilitated the survival of unofficial and illicit
practices.
Our finding that heterogeneity, limited pluralism, and tensions between
official and unofficial cultures were persistent features of grassroots society
during the Mao years builds on existing scholarship that has pointed out the
limited reach of the state in rural China.18 Indeed, some of the earliest
insights into conflict in Mao-­era society have come from the rural sector.19
Struggles over peasant surplus and property during the formation of the
state grain procurement system and collectivization in the 1950s revealed
the high levels of discontent that could be incurred by an aggressively mod-
ernizing socialist regime. The Cultural Revolution also exposed the political
system’s capacity for group conflict and violence. Since then, new sources
have allowed researchers to identify instances of violence dating back to the
earliest years of the PRC. Many of these accounts, however, have focused on
state-­directed excess.20 The story of grassroots discontent and resistance
against everyday forms of control is the topic of our final group of chapters.
Introduction 13

Conflict, violence, and discontent at the grassroots had a strong ethnic

dimension in non-­Han areas. Many scholars would readily agree with the
assertion that “liberation” remained far from complete in Tibet, Xinjiang,
and southwest China after 1949. What has received considerably less atten-
tion is the degree to which interethnic tensions smoldered following the
military takeover, only to erupt in the course of rural collectivization or
campaigns to identify and punish enemies.21 Wang Haiguang connects
Guizhou province’s mid-­1950s transition to socialism and the experience of
forced collectivization to the explosion of anti-­Han, antigovernment griev-
ances among minority villagers in the Mashan region. This case study pro-
vides insight into the broader dynamics of ethnic antigovernment resistance
throughout Guizhou, Yunnan, Sichuan, Gansu, and Qinghai during the
same period. By 1956, ethnic tensions in China’s interior had reached such a
pitch that Liu Shaoqi and Mao Zedong personally addressed the issue. By
advocating nonviolence and an end to “Han chauvinism,” central leaders
sought to calm the uprisings and bring peace to geopolitically sensitive fron-
tier regions. In Mashan, soldiers in pre-­1949 guerrilla bands reemerged as
charismatic local leaders and catalysts of opposition to socialist policies.
Myths, rumors, and polytheistic religious beliefs also provided templates for
rejecting regional authorities. Failure to completely curb Mashan’s rebel-
lious inhabitants through violent coercion led provincial leaders, some of
whom had experience as ethnic guerrilla resisters themselves, to consider a
more peaceful path. Nevertheless, these softer policies were not implemented
until formulated and authorized by central leaders. Left to their own devices,
officials in regions riven by interethnic tensions were often inclined to choose
harsher methods, just as resisters resorted to violence as a way of standing
up to state extraction and persistent discrimination.
In Xinjiang, grassroots attempts to directly counter Han chauvinism and
state expansion were denounced as “local nationalism.” Zhe Wu presents a
complex case of tension between Han and non-­Han cadres in the former
East Turkestan Republic territory of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous
Region—​directly on the border with the Soviet Union. Here, anti-­Han or
“local” ethnic nationalism remained a potent force within the Communist
Party itself, as onetime East Turkestan Republic (“Ghulja regime”) leaders
joined Han Communists to form a ruling coalition. Faced with unfavorable
policies at all levels of society, Xinjiang’s non-­Han cadres and ordinary
14 Introduction

inhabitants alike viewed Communist pro-­unity policies as a ruse. Pastoral

lands were seized, acculturation forced, and the interests of the largely non-
­Han population neglected in key areas such as health and education. By
1956—​a critical year in the history of China’s interethnic relations—​Muslim
identity seemed under attack. Non-­Han cadres such as Saifudin Azizi appear
to have initially worked to downplay the severity of the brewing backlash but
could not conceal the frequent appearance of “counter­revolutionary” anti-
­Han organizations in society, or even within the Party. As patterns of unrest
and political conspiracy mounted, the crisis began to further erode popular
faith in the benefits of Party-­led government. The sudden onset of the cen-
trally directed Anti-­R ightist Movement led to criminal investigations,
finger-­pointing within the ranks of non-­Han cadres (who, despite allega-
tions, did not represent an ethnic “bloc within”), and ultimately an effort to
bring Xinjiang under firmer Communist control through communization
and de-­Sovietization. This chapter thus highlights the mix of local, transre-
gional, and international forces that shaped and unsettled social relations
throughout the 1950s. By the early 1960s, the Ili-­Tacheng (I-­Ta) zone of Sino-
­Soviet competition was rocked by uprisings, insurrection, and the migration
of political refugees from China to the Soviet Union. As Wu argues, the
causes of the turbulence were not simply Sino-­Soviet competition writ local.
Rather, persistent patterns of interethnic tension in Xinjiang kept majority
non-­Han regions tense throughout the Mao years.
Conflict was consistent and localized during the era of high socialism.
S. A. Smith uses a macrohistorical and multisited perspective to shed light
on the extent to which violence across multiple locales constituted—​or was
even intended as—​a threat to central authorities. Drawing on public secu-
rity materials to produce a bird’s-­eye view of the phenomenon of redemptive
religious societies, Smith documents an astonishing pattern of uprisings
ostensibly carried out in the name of universal salvation that also included a
diverse range of participants and motivations beneath their shared religious
veneer. Violent crackdowns could not fully eliminate the sects, some of which
were networks of thousands of people following newly declared “emperors.”
Just because redemptive societies did not provide a sustained challenge to
the existing political and normative order does not mean that their members
did not envision alternatives to that order. As Smith notes, the image of
imperial restoration proved particularly attractive to sect ­members who
Introduction 15

sought to create their own “statelets” within the larger geobody of the
People’s Republic. Discontent was thus expressed in archaic, opaque, and
traditionalist terms that, though labeled as superstition, reflected millions of
villagers’ direct engagement with the experience of living in a country whose
politics proved baffling, injurious, and even deadly.
The chapters that follow provide an account of post-­1949 social change from
the perspective of everyday life and using the methodological and analytic
lenses of the grassroots. In exploring themes and categories viewed by past
scholars as integral to the centrally directed state-­building project, we have
found particularistic interests in the context of each, as well as within the very
structures of the Party itself. This shows that studying the history of the
People’s Republic solely from the perspective of state-­society relations, mass
movements, and official categories and discourse overlooks many aspects of
everyday experience, including networks that linked state and nonstate actors
and made room for a wide range of bottom-­up agendas. By going to the grass-
roots, however, we have encountered a familiar historian’s dilemma: as voices
proliferate, the credibility of a unified national narrative recedes. There is no
single grassroots narrative to replace the voice of the center. Instead, we are
left to ponder whether “Mao’s China” ever existed at all.
1
How a “Bad Element” Was Made
The Discovery, Accusation, and Punishment of Zang Qiren

yang kuisong

The term “bad element” (huaifenzi) has a history of use by both the Nationalist
and Communist Parties. Initially, it was a general reference to all corrupt,
degenerate, and opportunistic “elements.” Later, it became a specific term in
Communist Party documents, referring to all people whose actions were vile
and thoughts impure, and who had a damaging effect on the Party’s work.
Party Center issued an official document defining the differences between
“counter­revolutionary elements” and “other bad elements” on March 10, 1956.
The document noted, however, that “all counter­revolutionary elements are
bad elements.” Based on this definition, the “other bad elements” referred to
those outside the group of people who had been investigated and proven to be
“counter­revolutionaries”—​“political imposters,” “traitorous elements,” “hoo-
ligan elements,” and “degenerate elements of extremely vile character.”1
In 1957 Mao Zedong categorized huaifenzi as criminals. In Mao’s words,
dictatorship was to be imposed on all “thieves, swindlers, murderers and
arsonists, hooligans’ organizations, and elements that cause serious harm to
socialism.”2 But because most huaifenzi “harmed socialism” indirectly, they
were different from “counter­revolutionaries,” who stood in direct opposition
to the Party. Therefore, the conviction and sentencing rates of huaifenzi were
usually lighter than the punishments meted out to counter­revolutionaries.
But because huaifenzi still “cause[d] serious harm to socialism” from a class
struggle standpoint, the regime treated these people and class enemies as
birds of a feather. As a result, policies toward huaifenzi were similar to those
governing counter­revolutionaries. The authorities usually deprived these
20 c r i m e s , l a be l s , a n d p u n i s h m e n t

people of their political rights and personal freedoms, handing them over to
local governments through which they would undergo reform through labor
or supervised reeducation.
Even by the standards of the time, however, the definition of huaifenzi was
broad, and the factors leading to conviction were numerous and complex.
Many criminals did not necessarily oppose socialism, and many of them fell
afoul of the political system and its policies without necessarily committing
“bad” acts. It is therefore worthwhile for historians to question just how bad
convicted “bad elements” actually were and to what extent they may have
opposed socialism. This chapter tells the story of a “bad element” whose
badness was ambiguous and contested.

A Bright Future

Zang Qiren was born on August 26, 1925, in Lishui County, Jiangsu Province.
His family belonged to the class of urban poor, and his father, Zang Nansheng,
was a low-­ranking clerk in charge of grain receipts in the county govern-
ment’s land tax office. After the junior Zang’s mother died in the wartime
chaos of 1937, the senior Zang remarried, after which time the entire Zang
family, which included younger brothers and sisters, subsisted on Zang
Nansheng’s tiny income. With his schooling cut short by financial difficul-
ties, Zang Qiren worked for a living from age fifteen onward—​as an appren-
tice in a cigarette factory and a sock factory, an intermittent hawker, an
intern at the Kunshan Public Roads Bureau, and finally as a bus conductor.
When Nanjing was occupied by Communist Party forces in 1949, Zang had
already lived a difficult life. Recruited on the day of his twenty-­fourth
birthday into the Lishui County Grain Bureau as a tax collector, Zang soon
became an enthusiastic supporter of the new society and its politics and
applied on his own volition to join the New Democracy Youth Corps.3
Zang’s fortunes changed again in April 1951, when arrangements were
made for him to be transferred to a factory in Nanjing as a temporary worker.
He was soon promoted to a permanent position. Zang’s new job coincided
with the Campaign to Suppress Counter­revolutionaries. Responding to the
campaign’s emphasis on placing loyalty to the Party above all, Zang reported
to the authorities that the landlord relatives of the very person who had
secured him a new job in Nanjing were then hiding in Nanjing. Zang also
How a “Bad Element” Was Made 21

reported his mother’s cousin for possessing firearms.4 While the campaign
raged on, Zang devoted his own spare time to studying and to improving his
coworkers’ literacy. The factory named Zang “Excellent Anti-­Illiteracy
Teacher” for three consecutive years from 1954 to 1956, and he was elected to
the organizing committee of the factory Youth Corps.
In 1956 Zang’s factory was relocated from Nanjing to Xuchang in Henan
Province. By this time Zang had married, but his new wife, who worked at
the looms in a wool factory, was unable to make the trip with her husband
because of her own family circumstances. Zang, now a Youth Corps cadre
and confidante of the factory’s Communist Party secretary, responded
enthusiastically to this impending assignment. Although his wife had given
birth to their first child only a few months before, Zang did not exercise his
right to request that he remain in Nanjing and instead worked hard with
little outward complaint. Regularly exceeding both quotas and expectations,
Zang’s good fortune continued after the factory finally moved to Xuchang.
He was elected vice-­chairman of the factory workers’ union and was a rep-
resentative at Xuchang’s fourth union congress. In 1957 he received the
Union Activist Award, Second Level.5
Zang had reached the apex of his political career. At the same time, how-
ever, a change in factory leadership and worker dissatisfaction brought about
by the move to Xuchang had transformed the factory’s political atmosphere.
When a new rectification campaign unfolded alongside the Hundred Flowers
and Anti-­R ightist Movements, mobilizing ordinary people to criticize
bureaucratism within the upper ranks, Zang Qiren began to make his first
series of mistakes—​mistakes that, given Zang’s personality and experience,
seem surprising.

A Guilty Conscience

Zang Qiren was short, with small, elongated eyes and a natural smile. His
easygoing appearance allowed him to mix comfortably with his coworkers,
even if Zang himself spoke infrequently. Although Zang had a strong sense
of self-­esteem, he was sensitive and became hesitant when he encountered
problems. Documents that Zang wrote over the years confirm that he viewed
this particular trait as his most significant shortcoming, noting that “I
do not take setbacks well” and “I have the weakly cowardice of the petty
22 c r i m e s , l a be l s , a n d p u n i s h m e n t

bourgeoisie.” Zang’s superiors agreed. In their eyes, although Zang “sought

to improve himself” and “had a positive work attitude” most of the time, he
had a “weak capacity for struggle,” “could not take criticism,” and “possessed
certain petty bourgeois thinking.”6
Zang’s personality had a lot to do with his past. When asked to write up
his personal history during each of the political campaigns of the 1950s,
Zang’s résumé always looked the same:

September 1938–June 1940: Stopped schooling because of the Japanese

invasion.
September 1940–June 1942: Studied and completed education at Lishui
Model Elementary School.
September 1942–June 1944: Studied at Lishui Normal Junior High
School; schooling interrupted because of family difficulties.
October 1944–June 1945: Apprentice at XX Socks Factory in Nanjing;
left because of bullying.
September 1945–August 1946: Medic trainee at Shaoxing Zhangzhen
Civilians’ Hospital; dismissed.
January 1947–June 1948: Trainee at Kunshan bus station of the Public
Roads Bureau; dismissed.
July 1948–March 1949: Unemployed; became a hawker.
August 1949–April 1951: Lishui Grain Bureau, municipal and district
governments; drew up books and accounts; helped with tax collec-
tion during summer and fall harvests.
April 1951–present: Washer, Decorations Department [penhua bu,
xiban] XX Factory, Nanjing.7

This matter-­of-­fact narrative concealed several details that Zang held back
even when called on to confess and reconfess his personal history. Zang’s
1953 election to the factory’s Youth Corps Organization Committee had
brought him good political standing and a sense of satisfaction. But it also
made his superiors pay more attention to him, contributing to his unease.
He was especially nervous about speaking to his superiors. The situation
went on for several months before Zang submitted a resignation letter in
May 1953:
How a “Bad Element” Was Made 23

Lacking sufficient knowledge of political theory and work experience, I

cannot progress in my work and lack confidence. . . . ​I have little time to
connect deeply with the masses, with the serious outcome that I have cut
myself off from them. For this reason, I have had many criticisms directed
at me from the Youth Corps. Some people say I am selfish because I am
only concerned about my own education. In addition, after getting mar-
ried last year I have had many family problems, and these have taken up
part of my time. The above reasons have made me depressed, and my
attitude toward work has become worse. For the sake of my other respon-
sibilities, I wish to resign from my posts in the Youth Corps and to be
replaced by another Organization Committee member chosen by the
branch who will play a leading role in educating young workers, striving
ahead with them and improving links with the masses.8

The letter’s fluency and cohesion (most workers in Zang’s factory were illit-
erate or had received only an elementary school education) drew the atten-
tion of factory Communist Party secretary Wan Shihong, who took time to
counsel and encourage his distraught young subordinate. During his spare
time, Secretary Wan would seek out Zang for conversation and a game of
table tennis. With Wan as a mentor, Zang’s work in the Youth Corps once
again began to progress, and he was promoted to the position of acting
branch secretary. Zang’s resignation was postponed for less than a year,
however, before his anxiety returned, and he abruptly quit the Youth Corps
with the excuse that he had become too old to continue.
What Zang did not realize was that his experience and position as branch
secretary would make it impossible for him to ever reclaim normal worker
status. In January 1955 he was asked to complete a cadre résumé form,
implying that the factory bureaucracy still considered him a political func-
tionary. In the context of the ensuing Campaign to Eliminate Counter­
revolutionaries—​in full swing by summer that year—​t his meant that Zang
was subject to investigation as a potential “bully, spy, and counter­
revolutionary” and was a candidate for expulsion from the cadre ranks. For
personnel in leading positions, every blemish in one’s personal history had
to be checked. As an ordinary worker, Zang might have remained untouched
by the movement. Yet coupled with his guilty conscience, the compulsory
24 c r i m e s , l a be l s , a n d p u n i s h m e n t

review soon forced him into a surprising confession. As more people from
the factory, including some he knew well, became targets of the purge, Zang’s
resolve broke down. In September 1956 he confessed to the Party branch that
before 1949 he had been “forced by life’s circumstances to work on the other
side” and that he had thereafter concealed this fact from the organization.9

Historical Problems

What specifically had Zang done wrong? According to his written confes-
sion he had (1) underreported his age by two years during the time of the
Japanese occupation for fear of being conscripted and had never corrected
the deception; (2) during the Anti-­Japanese War, he had been forced by the
Nationalist Army to become a medic, deserted, then returned when he was
unable to survive without his military connections, and also worked as a tax
collector; (3) also during this period, he had joined a secret organization
called “Ten Sworn Brothers” and pledged loyalty to a leader called the “Old
Man.” Zang’s revised personal history also reflected the new revelations:

August 1932–June 1937: Fifth Grade, Lishui Normal Affiliated

Elementary School.
August 1937–June 1938: Took refuge from the war in Maoshixiang.
August 1938–June 1940: Completed elementary education at Lishui
Model Elementary School; enrolled at Lishui Normal Junior High
School.
June 1940–September 1940: Left school, remained at home.
September 1940–November 1940: Apprentice, XX Cigarette Factory,
Nanjing.
November 1940–August 1941: Unemployed, at home.
August 1941–June 1942: Apprentice, XX Socks Factory, XX Road,
Nanjing.
June 1942–April 1943: Medic, 89th Regiment Civilians’ Hospital,
Zhangzhen, Shaoxing County.
May 1943–September 1943: Unemployed, at home.
September 1943–June 1944: Medic, 88th Regiment Rear Hospital,
Tianjiashan, Shangyu County.
June 1944–August 1944: Unemployed, at home.
How a “Bad Element” Was Made 25

August 1944–January 1945: Revenue Department, 88th Regiment,

Jinjishan, Xiaoshan County.
January 1945–May 1945: Unemployed, left home.
May 1945–April 1946: Unemployed, at home.
May 1946–January 1947: Hawker, Suzhou.
January 1947–June 1948: Trainee, Kunshan Public Roads Bureau.
July 1948–March 1949: Bus conductor, Kuntai Bus Station.
April 1949–August 1949: Cigarette stallholder, Lishui.
August 1949–April 1951: Assisted with tax collection, Lishui Grain
Bureau.
April 1951–present: Joined factory.10

In his written confession, Zang Qiren reiterated several times that the
Nationalist troops he had joined were engaged in combat with the Japanese
behind enemy lines. His first encounter with the army was after he had left
the XX Socks Factory in Nanjing and was traveling to Zhejiang in search of
his relatives. While on a boat from Xiaoshan to Zhangzhen, Zang was cap-
tured by scouts of the 89th Regiment of the Nationalist Army’s 30th Brigade
and was forcibly impressed into the regiment’s medical unit, where he
became a medic. After a few months, Zang escaped home but could not get
along with his stepmother or stand the scorn of his neighbors, so he left.
Unable to find a new job, he then worked as a medic for a new unit, the 88th
Regiment, for several months. Finding life in the military too arduous, Zang
managed to secure a new job as a tax collector through his network of per-
sonal acquaintances and lasted for three months at the new post before the
sudden arrival of Wang Jingwei’s collaborationist “Peace Army.” Fearing for
his life, Zang again deserted his post.
Zang’s fear of confessing this period in his personal history was partly
because of the stigma that would accompany his brief service with the
Nationalist forces. In the context of the Campaign to Suppress Counter­
revolutionaries and Democratic Reform Campaign, however, the more
serious of Zang’s omissions were his involvement with Ten Sworn Brothers
and pledged loyalty to the Old Man—​later revealed to be Nationalist army
officer Yu Jipeng. Not only would Zang be investigated for past criminal
transgressions, but the very fact of his membership in this “reactionary
underworld organization” would be seen as a grave political offense. This is
26 c r i m e s , l a be l s , a n d p u n i s h m e n t

presumably why Zang tried to play up his youthful ignorance and naïveté in
his written confession, in which he explained:

My motivation for joining a sworn brotherhood was that I was influ-

enced by old-­style novels and thought joining was an act performed by
heroic outlaws. My motivation for pledging loyalty to Yu as the “Old
Man” was that I thought he was a hero for not cowering before the
enemy. I was also curious about the celebrated Green Gang and Red
Gang and wanted to find out what they were really like.

When he confessed, Zang was still on good terms with the factory leader-
ship and friendly with the Communist Party branch secretary. He still har-
bored illusions of evading punishment, writing, “I request that the organiza-
tion be lenient toward me and hope that it will give me additional education
and assistance.” He added, “If this matter can be kept secret, please keep it a
secret, so that I will suffer less emotional distress.”11

Looking for Trouble

Zang Qiren’s confession came just as his factory was preparing to relocate
from Nanjing to Xuchang. This massive undertaking left little time for fac-
tory authorities to continue investigating Zang’s case; the leaders also hoped
that Zang would mobilize other workers to help the factory resume produc-
tion. Rather than being denounced and investigated for his confessions,
Zang was instead promoted in the union. A year passed, and still no inqui-
ries were made into Zang’s past. With new responsibilities and accolades to
his credit, Zang again began to speak up and incur the unwanted scrutiny of
superiors.
In relocating from Nanjing to Xuchang, the factory had moved from a
bustling metropolis to a remote town. Many workers resented the move.
Factory head Niu Keyong had promised that the future would be bright,
praising Xuchang for its low prices and convenience. Yet after their arrival,
the workers found that goods in Xuchang were often more expensive than
those in Nanjing and that the factory itself was located in the countryside,
nearly four miles from Xuchang proper. Transport was inconvenient and
How a “Bad Element” Was Made 27

living conditions spartan. Medical care proved difficult to obtain, and single
workers—​by far the majority—​were dissatisfied with the lack of entertain-
ment. They clamored to return to Nanjing.
As vice-­chairman of the union, Zang was obliged to help the factory
pacify the workers, but at the same time he opted to serve as their advocate.
During this crisis, Zang’s mentor, Secretary Wan, was transferred away from
the factory. The new secretary, Deng Rongxian, was almost immediately at
odds with the union cadres, criticizing them during a rare visit to the factory
floor for neglecting their educational and disciplinary responsibilities. Deng
was short and frail, and Zang thought little of this new superior. The fact
that Deng had been transferred from a recently closed kiln factory only
made Zang more willing to challenge the secretary’s criticism.
Zang quickly earned Deng’s ire through a series of ill-­timed attacks. When
the Hundred Flowers Movement encouraged workers to criticize cadres and
oppose bureaucratism, Zang’s coworkers posted big-­character posters tar-
geting factory leadership. Zang, who himself had borne the brunt of worker
insults for his role in suppressing their demands following the move to
Xuchang, had frustrations as well. Lacking Party membership, he sought to
rebuild his self-­esteem by acting as a scribe for the less educated workers,
collecting their criticism during small group meetings. Zang also urged the
more talented artists among the workers to adorn the posters with cartoons
lampooning factory head Niu Keyong and made his own big-­character
poster attacking Secretary Deng. Among Zang’s accusations were that Deng
spent time in his office rather than on the factory floor and that his misman-
agement of the kiln factory boded ill for their factory, which was now
doomed to fail as well.
In grassroots units such as Zang’s factory—​much like the conditions of
the rural counties Cao Shuji describes in Chapter 3—​t he Hundred Flowers
Movement was quickly followed by the Anti-­R ightist Movement. Factory
Party branches repeatedly encouraged workers to speak out, rectify the
Party, and oppose bureaucratism. With discontented members of the fac-
tory thus exposed, the branches were then instructed by superiors to label as
“rightists” those who had been most active and critical during rectification.
A smaller number of participants, mostly those with a track record of poor
performance on the job, were labeled bad elements. As vice-­chairman of the
28 c r i m e s , l a be l s , a n d p u n i s h m e n t

workers’ union, Zang Qiren was not labeled a rightist but was nonetheless
investigated. Just as the Great Leap Forward was ramping up in the summer
of 1958, Zang was compelled to write an account of his words and actions
during the rectification movement.
The resulting document gave a detailed account of the big-­character poster
attacking Secretary Deng. Zang stressed that his writing of the big-­character
poster was “not an attack against the Party. . . . ​The main idea was to get
Secretary Deng to go down to the factory floor and mix with the masses.
This was because at the time Secretary Deng had already been in the factory
for a few weeks, but all he did was go with X to the decoration room for a
brief look.” Zang admitted that his “political awareness was very limited,
had serious rightist tendencies, and could not distinguish right from wrong.”
He emphasized, however, that he was “always loyal to the Party” and had
“never conspired with the rightists and bad elements on how to attack the
Party and the leadership.” Zang said he was willing to submit to a thorough
investigation.12

Alarmed but Unharmed

Before the Anti-­R ightist Movement had ended at the factory, the Great Leap
Forward was launched. Once again, everyone in the factory was mobilized
and busied themselves with big meetings and small meetings, pledge-­making
ceremonies, overtime hours, “putting up red flags and pulling out white
ones,” and making revolution. Zang Qiren found himself transferred from
the factory floor and into the union offices, where he turned out daily news-
sheets and bulletins that featured production reports and news of techno-
logical innovations. When the Leap collapsed in 1959 and 1960, Zang
returned to the factory floor as a clerk and auditor. Once again, his past was
seemingly behind him.
Were it not for a report filed on August 24, 1959, by Ji Zhengqi, himself
labeled a “bad element” in the Anti-­R ightist Movement, Zang might have
escaped the notice of the factory’s Party branch in its hunt for ideological
deviance. Ji alleged that during the Hundred Flowers Zang had abused his
position and power as vice-­chairman of the union to slander the leadership,
writing big-­character posters and producing many cartoons (which Zang
would later blame on other small-­group members). Ji claimed:
How a “Bad Element” Was Made 29

Zang once told me in his own words that Secretary Deng’s work style
was bad. During the first factory committee meeting convened by
Deng, the factory union committee members were all criticized. A
Party branch secretary such as Deng must really change his style, Zang
said, because otherwise our factory will collapse like the kiln factory.
At the same time, Zang also called Secretary Deng . . . ​an opium addict.
All in all, he was very dissatisfied with Secretary Deng. He was always
conspiring with Tang Jinhu and Wan Liang, but I do not know what
they talked about.13

In late 1960, the factory Party branch began an external investigation of

Zang Qiren’s political history.14
Based on the investigation plans drawn up by the Party branch, we know
that Zang’s 1956 confession was to be verified by traveling out of Xuchang to
interview the people named in Zang’s account. The investigators’ questions
included:

1. When Zang was working at Zhuji and Xiaoshan, what reactionary

organizations did he join? What positions did he hold? Did he commit
any crimes?
2. Under what circumstances did the Ten Sworn Brothers become
sworn brothers? What was the aim of the sworn brotherhood? After
pledging loyalty to Yu Jipeng as their “Old Man,” did they act as his
agents?15

Zhu Hongzhong, chairman of the factory workers’ union, was the first
person dispatched to investigate Zang’s personal history. Yet even after two
months of searching, few of the individuals named in Zang’s history could
be found. Zhu did locate Hong Zhenglong, a former coworker of Zang’s in
the Nationalist Army medical unit, who confirmed that Zang’s statements
concerning his two tours as a medic and brief stint as a tax collector were all
basically true.16
Zhu remained skeptical. He reported:

Most of Zang’s associates in the past committed various crimes and

were reactionaries, which was why some of them were suppressed and
30 c r i m e s , l a be l s , a n d p u n i s h m e n t

some of them were sent for reeducation through labor. Some later
returned to their former haunts, some died in labor camps, and some
escaped to Taiwan or areas around Jiangxi. There are individuals whose
whereabouts are still unknown, and I have not been able to locate them.
But according to what various local Party organizations tell me, people
such as these often joined reactionary organizations and activities
during the time of the reactionary government and were in cahoots
with bandits, repressive landlords, and the like. . . . ​Zang was quite
young when he became a reactionary organization member, and his
period of membership in the brotherhood was short. It is likely that he
was no more than an ordinary minion. According to Zang’s coworker
Hong Zhenglong, Zang did not commit any crimes, and he was not a
member of any other reactionary groups. But how is it that Zang came
to know these reactionary types and repressive landlords, let alone
become their sworn brother?17

Zhu Hongzhong’s investigation discovered little, but this fact was not enough
to exonerate Zang.
Unable to get to the bottom of Zang’s preliberation activities, the factory
Party branch dispatched four additional investigators to locate Zang’s past
associates. This time, they were able to locate the son of one, although they
could only prove that Zang had sought employment with the Youth Battlefield
Service Corps, not that he had joined.18 The investigation team turned up
another promising lead when they located Chen Liang’en, mentioned in
Zang’s confession, who could verify whether Zang had indeed been unem-
ployed, as he claimed, in early 1946. But Chen was no longer in Jiangxi, and
the investigators waited several months before learning that he had been
sent to Xinjiang as a criminal sentenced to reeducation through labor. In
subsequent correspondence, Chen insisted, “I have never heard of a person
called Zang Qiren.”19 The factory Party branch, incredulous, sent another
request for information through the Xuchang Party Committee’s Industrial
Investigation Office to the cooperating Xinjiang unit where Chen was
housed; Chen’s answer—​and attitude—​remained unchanged. In the end,
another letter sent through the Industrial Investigation Office elicited a
response directly from the local procuratorate in Xinjiang: “Chen escaped
while checked into a hospital. If recaptured, we will inform you.”20
How a “Bad Element” Was Made 31

Falling In with the Wrong Lot

Unexpectedly, the investigation ground to a halt. Zang Qiren, apparently

unaware of his predicament, was transferred to his factory’s decoration
workshop as a production group leader in late 1962. With the arrival of a new
supervisor from Zang’s hometown, Zang’s fortunes again improved. He was
transferred off frontline production duty and given the position of workshop
technician, formulating workshop operations and job descriptions, as well
as overseeing scheduling, quality control, and processing. In this way Zang
enjoyed the relatively comfortable life of a workshop worker-­cadre until the
outbreak of the Cultural Revolution.
Behind the scenes, however, Zang’s tangled history had a profound effect
on his career and promotion prospects. By the end of the 1950s, it was clear to
factory leaders that Zang was not politically reliable. During the earlier part
of the decade, Zang’s steady rise from acting branch secretary of the Youth
Corps to vice-­chairman of the factory union and his selection for the posi-
tion of union representative indicated that he was a rising star, despite the
scrutiny briefly elicited by his 1956 confession. Following the big-­character
poster incident of 1957, however, political suspicion dogged Zang’s career.
Although well educated and technically experienced, during the early 1960s
Zang was a second-­tier leader in the factory and workshop, passed over for
further promotions, excluded from Party branch-organized meetings, and
no longer invited to participate in political and propaganda work.21
This uneasy state of affairs collapsed during the Cultural Revolution. At
the moment of the new movement’s inception, two major factions quickly
emerged in Xuchang: the “royalist” faction, represented by the Third Red
Guard Headquarters, and the “antiroyalist” faction, represented by the 8-­24
[August Twenty-­Fourth] Rebel Headquarters. Zang threw in his lot with the
royalists, believing that the more insurrectionist 8-­24 organization was full
of junior workers who were “mischievous,” “full of complaints,” and “impo-
lite to leaders”—​and thus doomed to fail. Instead, he stood on the side of the
senior workers and active members of the Party and youth organizations.22
The strategy worked at first—​t he 8-­24s were suppressed by locally stationed
military forces. But support for the 8-­24 group from central authorities sud-
denly gave the rebels the upper hand; factory head Niu Keyong and his
immediate subordinates were the first to fall, while second-­tier leaders, such
32 c r i m e s , l a be l s , a n d p u n i s h m e n t

as Zang, who had stood with the royalists found themselves targets of fur-
ther attacks.
Zang’s first alleged crime was his ties to the workshop supervisor, Chen
Wenlong, who shared Zang’s birthplace and had favored him as a techni-
cian. Chen was labeled a “capitalist roader” by the rebels and continuously
denounced. In the course of mass meetings, Zang’s name emerged as Chen’s
“trusted aide.” To avoid falling into the political abyss along with Chen,
Zang immediately began to write big-­character posters exposing and criti-
cizing his boss. He was not brave enough, however, to engage in face-­to-­face
“struggle” with Chen during the struggle meetings. Targeted in big-­character
posters and exposed by the 8-­24 rebels, Zang was also compelled to write
one self-­criticism after another explaining his relationship to Chen Wenlong.
In these documents Zang Qiren revealed that he and Chen had been neigh-
bors as children, living on the same street and attending the same primary
school as classmates until the second grade. After that, their contact had
broken off, only to be restored again when Zang joined the factory in 1951
and discovered that Chen was already an employee. Chen did not disclose
Party matters to Zang but did assist his former childhood classmate in car-
rying out the more complex requirements of his job.23
Zang could not guess that the rebels might learn about the investigation
into his suspicious history, and so in his self-­criticism he repeated the now-­
familiar narrative:

I too came from a poor family. I dropped out of school and became an
apprentice in a shop in Nanjing, where I suffered physical and verbal
abuse. I suffered all kinds of inhumane treatment in Old China. I finally
found a proper job after liberation, and my life became stable. I was a
slave in Old China, but my true master is New China. . . . ​But I studied
Chairman Mao’s writings poorly, and my worldview was not thor-
oughly reformed.24

Confessing His Problems

On the night of May 31, 1968, Zang Qiren was summoned to an office by rebel
faction workers to “confess his problems.” An unprepared Zang hemmed and
hawed and was reported by the interrogators to have “performed badly.” He
How a “Bad Element” Was Made 33

was not allowed to return to his dormitory and instead spent the night in the
factory’s air-­raid shelter, now used by the revolutionary committee as a
makeshift jail.
Xuchang was one of the first cities in China where the armed battles of the
Cultural Revolution took place. Beatings and deaths were common. A guilty
and nervous Zang, fearing for his safety, escaped the factory at 3 a.m. fol-
lowing his incarceration, ran on foot to the neighboring town of Hanzhuang,
and boarded a train. On June 1, 1968, Zang got off the train in Zhongmu
County. It was noon, and Zang had nowhere to go and little money with
him; he was, however, able to telephone his younger brother, who urged
Zang Qiren not to run away. Zang followed his brother’s advice and returned
to the factory. He wrote a public confession in which he attributed his earlier
flight to “distrust of the masses” and repented having “provided an opening
for class enemies and people with hidden agendas to achieve their aim of
attacking the revolutionary committee and revolutionary rebels.”25
On June 3, the terrified Zang supplemented this document with an addi-
tional written confession to the workshop group charged with guarding
him, in which he wrote that he “was scared and afraid of being beaten up”
and in severe discomfort owing to the “hordes of mosquitoes” that visited
the air-­raid shelter. Being incarcerated made him “feel like a criminal” and
“miserable.” Since the attacks on Chen Wenlong had begun, Zang wrote, he
had been engaged in a constant process of self-­evaluation, realizing that his
“political awareness was low, [he] had always stood with the wrong people,
and [his] break with Chen Wenlong remained incomplete.” “Only by mak­
­ing a clean break with Chen could I return to Chairman Mao’s revolu-
tionary line,” Zang continued. “If I chose not to speak because of my
ineloquence during denunciation meetings, others would have said that I
have not made a clean break, but had I decided to speak, my nervousness
meant that I would have spoken poorly.” Trapped by these circumstances,
Zang concluded, he had decided to prevent them from escalating by “run-
ning away once and for all.”26
Zang was desperate to disassociate himself from Chen, end the investiga-
tion, and secure his release from the mosquito-­infested shelter. As a result,
he began to produce an amazing amount of detail concerning the history of
their relationship: during the two-­day period from June 9 to June 10, he pro-
duced eighteen pages of material written in tiny characters, in which he
34 c r i m e s , l a be l s , a n d p u n i s h m e n t

revealed that Chen Wenlong had been involved in a plot to “restore capi-
talism.” Zang further documented multiple instances of Chen’s dispensing
favors to those around him, his promotion of cronies, formation of various
cliques, aid to trusted subordinates, complaints about the factory, and “cor-
ruption of the workers’ revolutionary resolve.” The most damning line
uttered by Chen, Zang alleged, was delivered at a leaders’ meeting in 1965:
“People need education, just like cabbages need manure.” According to
Zang, Chen’s comparison of the Party’s wholesome nourishment to manure
was “reactionary in the extreme.”27
The rebels, however, were not placated. In their eyes, Zang was a criminal,
to be caught and punished. For two hours on June 11, rebel interrogators
“sounded out” Zang with a barrage of questions and oblique references to
his past, none of which implicated Chen Wenlong. The matter, they insisted,
was serious and one of “fundamental principles.” Zang was to hold nothing
back. Finally realizing that he was in grave political danger, Zang agonized
over the motives of his questioners throughout the following night, racking
his brains to guess what information they already possessed and what crimes
he would be expected to confess. The solution, he decided, would be to
divulge that he had made a “political mistake,” which was a common-­enough
offense in the context of the Cultural Revolution and thus unlikely to incur
grave punishment. The following day he wrote in his self-­criticism:

In the first half of 1967, I listened to a revisionist Soviet radio program

three times. The first time I accidentally discovered the program, and I
listened out of curiosity. But then I listened two more times. At the time
I thought it was all right if I listened to the program with a critical
mindset. I did not realize that it was a serious mistake and that, if I were
to listen to it over a long period of time, I would slide toward Soviet
revisionism and onto the road of anti–Party, antisocialism, and
anti–Mao Zedong Thought, becoming close to the enemy and turning
revisionist.28

The rebels were not interested in Zang’s radio listening. Though still unaware
of his shady preliberation history, they were bent on confronting him about
his royalist stand at the outset of the Cultural Revolution. Zang responded
by divulging additional details of how he had joined the Red Guards and
How a “Bad Element” Was Made 35

opposed the 8-­24 rebels. Because Zang had never become a conservative
leader and had merely followed Chen Wenlong, these confessions amounted
to little, even when couched in terms of fundamental conflicts between
“revisionism” and “Mao Zedong Thought.”29 Zang was briefly off the hook.

Confronting His Past

In the ensuing days, it appears that the rebels finally became aware of the
suspended investigation into Zang’s incomplete autobiography. During the
second half of June 1968, they organized a struggle session in which Zang
was confronted and required to give a full account of his historical prob-
lems. In early July, Zang gave a public account of his history, addressed to
the factory’s “revolutionary masses” in the form of a big-­character poster.
These accounts were basically unchanged from what Zang had written more
than ten years earlier. The rebels remained unsatisfied. Still lacking suffi-
cient evidence to push the investigation further, however, the rebels allowed
Zang to return to the workshop and ordered a new round of field trips to
investigate Zang’s personal history.
What the rebels had already learned about Zang’s dubious history was not
terribly damning. At most he had served as a medic in the Nationalist Army
and had assisted the preliberation government as a tax collector; Zang had
never even properly enlisted as a soldier. Although once a member of Ten
Sworn Brothers and a follower of the Old Man, he had engaged in no crim-
inal activities. Like the earlier Party branch members who had rallied around
Secretary Deng, however, the rebels were convinced that there was more to
this story. By moving the investigation away from the issue of Ten Sworn
Brothers, they found their suspicions confirmed.
All at once, evidence for Zang Qiren’s status as a political criminal began
to accumulate at a rapid rate. The breakthrough came from Jiang Tao, a
cousin of Zang’s mother who admitted to the investigation team:

In 1948 the chief of the Jiangsu Public Roads Bureau, Zhang Jingcheng,
distributed forms in various offices to encourage people to join the
Nationalist Party. At the station where I worked, Zang and Mao Benqing
asked me, “Are you going to join the Party?” I replied, “Deputy Chief
Yang does not belong to any political party. I am not interested in such
36 c r i m e s , l a be l s , a n d p u n i s h m e n t

things. Since Yang is not the one who wants us to join, we can ignore it.”
I seem to recall that Zang then said, “Whether one joins or not doesn’t
mean anything. I once joined the Three People’s Principles Youth Corps
and it was pointless.” At the time we were just chatting casually about
the applications and I did not press him further to find out where he
had joined.30

Ironically, investigators already knew about Jiang’s involvement because

Zang himself had mentioned it to an external investigation team from Jiang
Tao’s work unit, saying that when both men had been employed by the Public
Roads Bureau, they had encountered mailed registration forms for member-
ship in the Nationalist Party. Zang then remembered Jiang saying that if he
had wanted to join, he would have done so a long time before but that he did
not believe in political parties. Therefore, Zang recalled, “Jiang Tao did not
encourage us to join.”31 Questioned by the investigation team charged with
Zang’s own case, Jiang could not avoid confirming that the conversation had
taken place.
For Zang Qiren, the investigation was now reaching a crisis point. To
verify Jiang Tao’s revelations, the rebel team sent another emissary to
Nanjing to requestion Jiang, who suddenly became evasive and claimed that
he could not recall Zang’s original words, adding that “as I understood it
Zang did join the corps, but I did not press him further and can’t be sure.”32
Proving Zang’s connection to a reactionary political party was difficult, but
now the main issue was class struggle rather than “political mistakes.” In the
second half of November 1968, rebel organizations in the factory held
another mass struggle session, demanding that Zang Qiren confess to his
reactionary past.
On November 25, December 4, December 25, and December 30 Zang
delivered a series of written statements that, though embellished with new
details, repeated the basic pattern of his previous accounts and asserted that
he had voluntarily participated in all investigations against him.33 Zang
swore that apart from joining Ten Sworn Brothers, he had not been a member
of any reactionary groups and that he had only met the Old Man in order to
acknowledge him as a patron.34 Finally confronted with the issue of his
alleged membership in the Nationalist-­affiliated youth corps—​which he did
not voluntarily confess—​Zang delivered two accounts of the events described
How a “Bad Element” Was Made 37

by Jiang Tao. The result was a complete denial: “If I had been a Nationalist
Party member, I would not have been furloughed from work in August 1948
and would not have remained an apprentice for more than a year and a half.”
Zang also gave a complete list of his former Public Roads Bureau coworkers
and requested that factory investigators contact all of them. In conclusion,
he reiterated:

I swear before the Party and the revered Chairman Mao that I never
joined any reactionary party, religious organization, secret service, or
front organization. In the past I was never politically active nor was I
engaged in other clandestine activities. I never took up arms. After
meeting the Old Man, I never sought him out for aid, and as for my
sworn brothers, apart from coworkers such as Jin Jishan, I only met the
other five twice—​first at the oath-­taking ritual and then at the cere-
mony making the Old Man our leader. There were no other meetings,
and we did not commit crimes. I have not concealed any aspect of my
past employment.

Zang’s only admissions of wrongdoing were that he should not have worked
as a medic for the army or as a tax collector but had been compelled to do
both because the Nationalists were everywhere.35 The gambit worked.
Although struggle against him was now in full swing, Zang had guessed
correctly the limits of what his investigators knew and the extent of their
investigation’s progress. Mao Benqing could not be located to supplement
Jiang Tao’s testimony; none of Zang’s other former coworkers had ever heard
him mention the Three People’s Principles Youth Corps. Even former mem-
bers of the Youth Battlefield Service Corps, of which it had once been sus-
pected that Zang was a former member, denied that he had Nationalist Party
connections.36 Once again, Zang’s political opponents found themselves at
an impasse.

A Failed Suicide Attempt

In the absence of any proof that his history contained evidence of heinous
crimes, Zang was instead made a target for regular harassment and moni-
toring. In early 1970, the national “One Strike, Three Anti Campaign,” which
38 c r i m e s , l a be l s , a n d p u n i s h m e n t

focused on countering sabotage and economic malfeasance, resulted in

Zang’s subjection to a series of political education classes and struggle ses-
sions. Zang had become a permanent suspect in the hunt for sabotage.
The campaign’s primarily economic focus meant that Zang’s past history
and political errors could not be used effectively against him. Instead, the
revolutionary committee opened a new series of investigations into his
behavior as a factory employee, and soon acquired several leads from Zang’s
former friends and coworkers. Zang was alleged to have exchanged his food
ration tickets for millet in 1962; later he used his authority to arrange hard-
ship subsidies for a friend, then used that same friend’s name to borrow
money with which he ultimately purchased a radio for personal use. Armed
with this new information, interrogators were able to pry out of Zang the
additional confession that during the Great Leap Forward and its aftermath
he had “eaten and taken a lot, harming others for his own benefit, and
engaged in graft and embezzlement to line his own pockets.” Zang further
admitted to using his status in the union and workshop to obtain additional
cigarette rations and nutrition coupons, the latter valued at 2 jiao; he had
also given factory-­produced washbasins as gifts in exchange for food, failed
to return dozens of coupons for steamed buns, and had taken cooking oil
from the canteen without paying.37 In keeping with earlier confessions,
Zang also revealed that, as early as 1960, he had listened to “enemy radio
programs”—​including Voice of America, Voice of Free China, and broad-
casts from the Soviet Union—​w ith a coworker. When Zang bought the
coworker’s radio in September 1962, he was able to listen to broadcasts from
both Taiwan (with difficulty) and the United States (clearly). In January 1967
Zang began once more to listen regularly to Soviet programming, which, as
he recalled, praised Soviet economic development while criticizing the treat-
ment received by Soviet delegations abroad in China. He swore that he had
never encouraged others to listen, nor had he discussed the programs with
coworkers.38
No longer compelled to discuss politics, Zang Qiren then proceeded to
detail a long list of shameful “hooligan crimes.” This admission pushed the
investigation of his behavior in new and unexpected directions. What most
pained Zang about his past, he recounted, was that, as a Nationalist Army
medic in 1942, he had been forcibly sodomized by a Nationalist stretcher
platoon commander. Zang claimed that following that incident he was
How a “Bad Element” Was Made 39

unable to repress his own homosexual tendencies. From his teens to his for-
ties, Zang pursued these urges; although he also married and fathered a
child, Zang sought out sexual relations with men during prolonged absences
from home.
In China during the Mao years, homosexuality was considered a form of
“hooligan” behavior. Zang’s repeated encounters with investigation and
interrogation had given him ample time to reflect on the possibility that his
sexual behavior might get him in trouble. Thus, while the basic facts about
Zang’s preliberation associations had been established in 1956, every new
campaign brought with it new waves of fear and anxiety that his closeted
sexual identity would be exposed. While accusations against him mounted
during the Cultural Revolution, Zang had written thirty-­four letters to
twelve different men who were his previous sexual partners, and he had met
with these individuals on thirty-­two different occasions—​a ll to conceal the
evidence of his homosexuality by creating convincing pretexts for these
otherwise-­illicit relationships.39
The confessions were not completely without precedent. In early December
1968, Zang had buckled under repeated questioning by interrogators,
revealing that though he had “no other problems,” he had previously touched
the genitals of male comrades, “an extremely low and vile act, and a serious
error—​I will turn over a new leaf.”40 Such incidents were not unheard of in
factory dormitories but were rarely acknowledged or were in some instances
treated as subjects of gossip and rumor circulated among the workers them-
selves. Zang’s December 1968 questioning is a rare instance in which such
rumors were used to hound a suspected political criminal, but because Zang’s
history as a former reactionary was the real target of such investigations, the
issue of sex was dropped. In the context of the One Strike, Three Anti
Campaign, Zang’s political problems were no longer subject to scrutiny. As a
suspected hooligan, however, Zang appeared to the revolutionary committee
as an undesirable of a different, though equally dangerous, kind.
Interviews and interrogations of workers who were Zang’s former room-
mates and friends revealed that several men had maintained sexual relation-
ships with Zang over the years. On the morning of May 25, 1970, Zang was
summoned by the workshop Party branch for a meeting, during which he
was informed of the serious nature of his crimes and the breach in ­regulations
they represented. He was ordered to give a full confession. Threatened with
40 c r i m e s , l a be l s , a n d p u n i s h m e n t

humiliation and the exposure of his numerous sexual liaisons, Zang Qiren
could no longer withstand the mental strain of further interrogation. After a
day of excruciating deliberation, he chose to end his life by swallowing a
toxic substance. In a suicide note addressed to his family and children, Zang
wrote that he had committed crimes and let down the Party and Chairman
Mao. He hoped that his downfall would serve as an important lesson to
others: to assiduously read the works of Chairman Mao, obey the Party, and
make revolution with Chairman Mao forever.41 Despite his preparations, the
suicide attempt failed. Zang, given away by his own cries of pain, was carried
away for emergency treatment and restored to health.

Pouring Out Beans from a Bamboo Tube

On June 21, 1970, Zang Qiren, recently discharged from the hospital, was
taken along with several other “elements” whose reeducation had been
arranged by the revolutionary committee to a meeting in Xuchang, where he
was made to again confess his crimes and receive political instruction. Once
again, Zang sought to think ahead of his captors and reveal only what was
already known. Addressing his failure to disclose his homosexuality, he
wrote of his fear that a full confession would have harmed others as well as
himself and that he would have disappointed those who knew him: “These
two thoughts stayed with me and churned around in my head. With no full
confession, my days were miserable. The burden got heavier and heavier. I
lost my appetite and couldn’t sleep. The pressure was so great that I couldn’t
even breathe. I was a wreck.”42 The answer, as Zang knew well, was to play
down the extent of his mistakes, if not their nature. He admitted to having
had only a few sexual encounters with people outside of the factory.
This time the gambit was unsuccessful. The revolutionary committee
widened its search for Zang’s sexual partners. On July 21 and July 27, Zang
was taken to educational sessions intended for counter­revolutionaries, at
which a military representative, Secretary Wu, attempted to elicit confes-
sions. Trapped and “squeezed” by Secretary Wu’s authoritative presence,
Zang was like a bamboo tube filled with beans—​opened, then poured out
for the committee to examine. By the end of July 1970, Zang had confessed
to having had relationships with more than ten men. In early August he
added another three names to the list. Some verified the details of Zang’s
How a “Bad Element” Was Made 41

confessions. Others were angry, denied the claims, and accused Zang of
“framing” them. Zang’s depression returned, and he once again contem-
plated suicide. On August 26, Zang managed to sneak out of the factory and
briefly thought about throwing himself into a nearby lake. Halfway there, he
recalled a discussion that had taken place in one of the small-­group reeduca-
tion sessions about how the family members of a recent suicide victim had
been forced into confessions themselves. Zang returned to the factory.
In early September 1970, Zang Qiren was once again subjected to public
struggle sessions. These highly charged events frequently elicited unfounded
and speculative accusations from members of the audience, and Zang real-
ized that if he did not give a full confession about the extent of his homo-
sexuality—​if he did not allow the beans to be completely poured out—​
innocent people might be implicated. What followed was a systematic
confession of what Zang called the “crimes of my private life.” In this docu-
ment, Zang confessed that since the late 1940s, he had engaged in sexual acts
with more than twenty men, giving the year, month, location, and specifics
of each liaison.43 Zang also described his life as a young man in the “old
society”:

Although I did not stay long in the old [Nationalist] army, its corrupting
influence on my private life was severe. Nie XX, commander of a med-
ical corps stretcher platoon, sodomized me by force while I was sleeping.
He took advantage of my youth and timidity to sodomize and mastur-
bate me many times. He harmed me, but being young and ignorant, I
did not consider the relationship to be homosexual. Instead, I thought
it was all quite silly and nothing more. Because of my ignorance and my
desire for sexual release, I began to masturbate. From that point onward,
I was poisoned and trapped by unhealthy influences and began to read
pornographic books, such as Secrets of the Manchu Court, Weird and
Wonderful Tales of Past and Present Ages, Sexual Knowledge, and so on.
All of these described sexual acts between men and women, as well as
sexual acts between men. The descriptions gave me knowledge of these
immoral behaviors, and the poisonous wares of imperialism, revi-
sionism, and feudalism gradually seeped into my brain. Step by step,
they took over my thoughts, searing me with the mark of capitalist
degeneracy. In 1948 I was a bus conductor at Kunshan Station and
42 c r i m e s , l a be l s , a n d p u n i s h m e n t

became very friendly with a driver’s assistant, Xu XX. We became very

close. I was twenty-­two; both of us were of the same age, unmarried,
and had sexual urges. As I had been ideologically poisoned by unhealthy
ideas, I seduced Xu into a relationship. That was my first criminal act,
but it occurred before liberation. In Old China I was surrounded by bad
influences (having been raped, led astray by pornographic books, and
so on), and I did not know that I had committed a crime. Perhaps I
could have been forgiven, because the old society was to blame for my
wrongdoing. Then liberation came, and Chairman Mao and the Party
rescued me from my hard life. My livelihood was assured, and I had
good political status. By rights I should have then fortified my mind
with Mao Zedong Thought and swept away the filth and dregs left by
the old society. . . . ​But a change in worldview cannot be created by will
alone, and there are some people in our society who still refuse to walk
the bright and broad way of socialism. Zhang XX was one such person.
In 1950, when I was still an assistant tax collector in Lishui, Zhang not
only sodomized me but also forced me to engage in oral sex with him
on numerous occasions. This further poisoned me to the core, and it
played a considerable role in turning me toward crime in the future.

Following Mao Zedong’s instructions on determining causality, Zang’s self-

­examination traced his crimes back to their ideological roots. Believing that
his primary flaw was “selfishness,” from which stemmed an inability to
follow the path of revolution, Zang attributed his mistakes to his pursuit of
self-­interest at the expense of socialism:

I attended several years of high school at night, not for the sake of the
revolution but to increase my own likelihood of promotion and to
receive a higher wage and higher social status. I carried out research on
production methods, not to improve the work of the union but to make
use of my position and connections, open doors, eat and take more
than I should have, and engage in corruption and theft. I was chipping
away at the foundations of socialism and sabotaging socialist develop-
ment. . . . ​For a long time, I engaged in abnormal homosexual activi-
ties, to the extent that these began to replace my normal marital rela-
tions; I became a criminal. All of these behaviors were manifestations
How a “Bad Element” Was Made 43

of my bourgeois worldview, which shaped my entire life and my

yearnings.

Zang proceeded to detail additional manifestations of his corruption and

debasement. For example, he thought nothing of using his radio to listen to
enemy jazz broadcasts and committing the counter­revolutionary act of
tuning in to proscribed radio stations, thus becoming a “commando” of
imperialism, revisionism, and counter­revolution. He concluded: “I have
degenerated into an ideologically backward, morally depraved, and politi-
cally muddled representative of the bourgeoisie.”44

Reeducating a Nonpolitical “Bad Element” through Labor

The confession was accepted. Evidence of Zang’s “other bad element” crimes,
including those of “hooligan element” (liumang fenzi), put him on the same
level as people labeled anti-­Party counter­revolutionaries, even though his
alleged political crimes remained unproven. In winter 1970, the factory
authorities closed their investigation of Zang and forwarded the case to the
Public Security Bureau, where military control authorities would review the
evidence and decide on a punishment. The preliminary decision was swift:
Zang was to be temporarily placed under public surveillance and then con-
fined and made to perform penal labor.
In August 1971, the Xuchang Public Security Bureau (PSB) began carrying
out the terms of Zang Qiren’s incarceration. Zang was once again compelled
to write a series of confessions. The entire process took several weeks. After
that, Zang was subjected to “supervised labor.” He was also required to
submit a monthly ideological report to the factory authorities while awaiting
the results of the PSB’s ongoing investigation. In the reports, Zang sought an
end to the uncertainty that had dogged him for decades:

I have committed heinous crimes, which result from a contradiction

between the people and the enemy. I have become an enemy of the
people and will lose my rights as a citizen. I hope that the government
will be lenient with my case. If so, even if I am subjected to the most
severe punishment (such as losing my factory membership, remaining
Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
 EGGS OF THE SALMON KIND JUST HATCHING.

At the salmon-ponds of Stormontfield the eggs laid down the first

season were hatched in one hundred and twenty-eight days, but the
eggs of other fish have been known to come to life a great deal
sooner. The usual time for the hatching of salmon eggs in our
northern rivers is one hundred and thirty days, or between four and
five months, according to the openness or severity of the season.
When at last the infant animal bursts from the shell, it is a clumsy,
unbalanced, tiny thing, having attached to it the remains of the
parental egg, which hamper its movements; but after all, the remains
of its little prison are exceedingly useful, as for a space of about thirty
days the young salmon cannot obtain other nourishment than what is
afforded by this umbilical bag.
 SALMON A DAY OR TWO OLD.

We cannot, unfortunately, obtain a sight of the ripening eggs of any

of our sea fish at a time when they would prove useful to us. No one,
so far as I know, has seen the young herring burst from its shell under
such advantageous circumstances as we can view the salmon ova; but
I have seen the bottled-up spawn of that fish just after it had ripened
into life, the infant animal being remarkably like a fragment of cotton
thread that had fallen into the water: it moved about with great
agility, but required the aid of a microscope to make out that it was a
thing endowed with life. Who could suppose, while examining those
wavy floating threads, that in a few months afterwards they would be
grown into beautiful fish, with a mechanism of bones to bind their
flesh together, scales to protect their body, and fins to guide them in
the water? But young herring cannot be long bottled up for
observation, or be kept in an artificial atmosphere; for in that
condition they die almost before there is time to see them live; and
when in the sea there are no means of tracing them, because they are
speedily lost in an immensity of water.
There are points of contrast between the salmon and the herring
which I cannot pass without notice. They form the St. Giles’ and St.
James’ of the fish world, the one being a portion of the rich man’s
food, and the other filling the poor man’s dish. The salmon is hedged
round by protecting Acts of Parliament, but the herring gets leave to
grow just as it swims, parliamentary statutes being thought
unnecessary for its protection. The salmon is born in its fine nursery,
and is wakened into life by the music of beautiful streams: it has
nurses and night-watchers, who hover over its cradle and guide its
infant ways; but the herring, like the brat of some wandering pauper,
is dropped in the great ocean workhouse, and cradled amid the
hoarse roar of the ravening waters; and whether it lives or dies is a
matter of no moment, and no one’s business. Herring mortality in its
infantile stages is appalling, and even in its old age, at a time when
the rich man’s fish is protected from the greed of its enemies, the
herring is doomed to suffer the most. And then, to finish up with the
same appropriateness as they have lived, the venison of the waters is
daintily laid out on a slab of marble, while the vulgar but beautiful
herring is handled by a dirty costermonger, who hurls it about in a
filthy cart drawn by a wretched donkey. At the hour of reproduction
the salmon is guarded with jealous care from the hand of man, whilst
at the same season the herring is offered up a wholesale sacrifice to
the destroyer. It is only at its period of spawning that the herring is
fished. How comes it to pass that what is a highly punishable crime in
the one instance is a government-rewarded merit in the other? To kill
a gravid salmon is as nearly as possible felony; but to kill a herring as
it rests on the spawning-bed is an act at once meritorious and
profitable!
Having given my readers a general idea of the fecundity of fish, and
the method of fructifying the eggs, and of the development of these
into fish—for, of course, the process will be nearly the same with all
kinds of fish eggs, the only difference perhaps being that the eggs of
some varieties will take a longer time to hatch than the eggs of others
—I will now pass on to consider the question of fish growth.
All fish are not oviparous. There is a well-known blenny which is
viviparous, the young of which at the time of their birth are so perfect
as to be able to swim about with great ease; and this fish is also very
productive. Our skate fishes (Raiæ) are all viviparous. “The young are
enclosed in a horny capsule of an oblong square shape, with a
filament at each corner. It is nourished by means of an umbilical bag
till the due period of exclusion arrives, when it enters upon an
independent existence.” I could name a few other fish which are
viviparous. In the fish-room of the British Museum may be seen one
of these. It is known as Ditrema argentea, and is plentifully found in
the seas of South America. But our information on this portion of the
natural history of fish is very obscure at present.
There are many facts of fish biography that have yet to be
ascertained, and which, if we knew them, would probably conduce to
a stricter economy of fish life and the better regulation of the
fisheries. Beyond a knowledge of mere generalities, the animal
kingdom of the sea is a sealed book. No person can tell, for example,
how long a time elapses from the birth of any particular sea fish till
the period when it is brought to table. Sea fish grow up unheeded—
quite, in a sense, out of the bounds of observation. Naturalists can
only guess at what rate a codfish grows. Even the life of a herring, in
its most important phase, is still a mystery; and at what age the
mackerel or any other fish becomes reproductive, who can say? The
salmon is the one particular fish that has as yet been compelled to
render up to those inquiring the secret of its birth and the ratio of its
growth. (See Natural and Economic History of the Salmon.) We have
imprisoned this valuable fish in artificial ponds, and by robbing it of its
eggs have noted when the young ones were born and how they grew.
It would be equally easy to devise a means of observing sea fish. Why
should we not erect a great marine observatory, where we could, as in
the case of the Stormontfield-bred salmon, watch the young fish burst
from its shell, and for a year or two observe and study the progress of
the animal, and ascertain its rate of growth, and especially the period
at which it becomes reproductive? The government might act upon
this suggestion, and vote a few thousand pounds annually for the
support of a series of marine fish-ponds; for something more is
required than the resources of an amateur naturalist to determine
how fish live and grow.
What naturalists chiefly and greatly need in respect of our sea fish
is, precise information as to their rate of growth. We have a personal
knowledge of the fact of the sea fish selecting our shores as a
spawning-ground, but we do not precisely know in some instances the
exact time of spawning, how long the spawn takes to quicken into life,
or at what rate the fish increase in growth.
 The eel may be taken as an example of our ignorance of fish life.
Do our professed naturalists know anything about it beyond its
migratory habits?—habits which, from sheer ignorance, have at one
period or another been guessed as pertaining to all kinds of fish. The
tendency to the romantic, specially exhibited in the amount of
travelling power bestowed by the elder naturalists on this class of
animals, would seem to be very difficult to put down.
About two years ago an old story about the eel was gravely revived
by having the larger portion of a little book devoted to its elucidation
—an old story seriously informing us that the silver eel is the product
of a black beetle. But no one need wonder at a new story about the
eel, far less at the revival of this old one; for the eel is a fish that has
at all times experienced the greatest difficulty in obtaining recognition
as being anything at all in the animal world, or as having respectable
parentage of even the humblest kind. In fact, the study of the natural
history of the eel has been hampered by old-world romances and
quaint fancies about its birth, or, in its case, may I not say invention?
“The eel is born of the mud,” said one old author. “It grows out of
hairs,” said another. “It is the creation of the dews of evening,”
exclaimed a third. “Nonsense,” emphatically uttered a fourth
controversialist, “it is produced by means of electricity.” “You are all
wrong,” sserted a fifth, “the eel is generated from turf;” and a sixth
theorist, determined to outdo all the others and come nearer the mark
than any of his predecessors, assures the public that the young fish
are grown from particles scraped off the old ones! The beetle theorist
tells us that the silver eel is a neuter, having neither milt nor roe, and
is therefore quite incapable of perpetuating its kind; and, in short, that
it is a romance of nature, being one of the productions of some
wondrous lepidopterous animals seen by Mr. Cairncross (the author of
the work alluded to) about the place where he lived in Forfarshire, its
other production being of its own kind, a black beetle! The story of
the rapid growth and transformation of the salmon is—as will by and
by be seen—wonderful enough in its way, but it is certainly far
surpassed by the extraordinary silver eel, which is at one and the
same time a fish and an insect.
 There can be no doubt that the eel is a curious enough animal even
without the extra attributes bestowed upon it by this very original
naturalist, for that fish is in many respects the opposite of the salmon:
it is spawned in the sea, and almost immediately after coming to life
proceeds to live in brackish or entirely fresh water. It is another of the
curious features of fish life that about the period when eels are on
their way to the sea, where they find a suitable spawning-ground,
salmon are on their way from the sea up to the river-heads to fulfil
the grand instinct of their nature—namely, reproduction. The
periodical migrations of the eel, on which instinct has been founded
the great fishing industry of Comacchio, on the Adriatic, described in
another portion of this volume, can be observed in all parts of the
globe, and they take place, according to the climate, at different
periods from February to May; the fish frequenting such canals or
rivers as have communication with the sea. The myriads of young eels
which ascend are almost beyond belief; they are in numbers sufficient
for the population of all the waters of the globe—that is, if there were
protective laws to shield them from destruction, or reservoirs in which
they might be preserved to be used for food as required. The eel,
indeed, is quite as prolific as the generality of sea fish. As a
corroboration of the prolificness of the animal, it may be stated that
eels have been noted—but that was some years ago—to pass up the
river Thames from the sea at the extraordinary rate of eighteen
hundred per minute! This montee was called eel-fair.
It is clear from certain facts in the history of this peculiar animal
that, like all other fish, it can suit its life and growth to whatever
circumstances it may be placed in, and seems to be quite able to
multiply and replenish its species in rivers and lakes as well as in the
sea. In Scotland eels are very seldom eaten, a strong prejudice
existing in that country against the fish on account of its serpentine
shape; but for all that the eel is a nutritious and palatable fish, and is
highly susceptible of the arts of the cook. At one time the eel was
thought to be viviparous, but naturalists now know better, having
found out that eels produce their young in the same way as most
other fish do.
 It would be interesting, and profitable as well, to know as much of
any one of our sea fish as we now know of the salmon, but so little
progress is being made in observing the natural history of fish that we
cannot expect for some time to know much more than we do at
present; everything in the fish world seems so much to be taken for
granted that we are still inclined rather to revive the old traditions
than to study or search out new facts. Naturalists are so ignorant of
how the work of growth is carried on in the fish world—in fact, it is so
difficult to investigate points of natural history in the depths of the sea
—that we cannot wonder at less being known about marine animals
than about any other class of living beings.
It is the want of precise information about the growth of the fish
that has of late been telling heavily against our fisheries, for in the
meantime all is fish that comes to the fisherman’s net, no matter of
what size the animals may be, or whether or not they have been
allowed time to perpetuate their kind. No person, either naturalist or
fisherman, knows how long a period elapses from the date of its birth
before a turbot or codfish becomes reproductive. It is now well
known, in consequence of the repeated experiments made with that
fish, that the salmon grows with immense rapidity, a consequence in
some degree of its quick digestive power. The codfish, again—and I
reason from the analogy of its greatly slower power of digesting its
food and from other corroborative circumstances—must be
correspondingly slow in its growth; but people must not, in
consequence of this slow power of digestion, believe all they hear
about the miscellaneous articles often said to be found in the stomach
of a codfish, as a large number of the curiosities found in the
intestinal regions of his codship are often placed there by fishermen,
either by way of joke or in order to increase the weight and so
enhance the price of the animal.
As regards the natural history of one of our best-known food fishes,
I have taken the pains to compile a brief precis of its life from the best
account of it that is known, keeping in the background at present any
knowledge or speculation of my own regarding it. I allude to the
mackerel; and the following facts are from an evidently well-studied
chapter of Mr. Jonathan Couch’s Fishes of the British Islands, by which
it will be at once seen that our knowledge of the growing power of
this well-known fish is very defective.
1. Mackerel, geographically speaking, are distributed over a wide
expanse of water, embracing the whole of the European coasts, as
well as the coasts of North America, and this fish may be caught as
far southward as the Canary Islands. 2. The mackerel is a wandering
unsteady fish, supposed to be migratory, but individuals are always
found in the British seas. 3. This fish appears off the British coasts in
quantity early in the year; that is, in January and February. 4. The
male kind are supposed to be more numerous than the female. 5. The
early appearance of this fish is not dependent on the weather. 6. The
mackerel, like the herring, was at one time supposed to be a native of
foreign seas. 7. This fish is laden with spawn in May, and it has been
known to deposit its eggs upon our shores in the following month.
Such is a brief resumé of Mr. Couch’s chapter on the mackerel.
Now, we have no account here of how long it is ere the spawn of
the mackerel quickens into life, or at what age that fish becomes
reproductive, although in these two points is unquestionably obtained
the key-note to the natural history of all fishes, whether they be
salmon or sprats. In fact—and it is no particular demerit of Mr. Couch
more than of every other naturalist—we have no precise information
whatever on this point of growth power. We have at best only a few
guesses and general deductions, and we would like to know as
regards all fish—1st, When they spawn; 2d, How long it is ere the
spawn quickens into life; and 3d, At what period the young fish will be
able to repeat the story of their birth. These points once known—and
they are most essential to the proper understanding of the economy
of our fisheries—the chief remaining questions connected with fishing
industry would be of comparatively easy solution, and admit of our
regulating the power of capture to the natural conditions of supply.
 WHITEBAIT GROUND NEAR QUEENSFERRY.

As another example of our ignorance of fish life, I may instance that

diminutive member of the Clupea family—the whitebait. This fish,
which is so much better known gastronomically than it is scientifically,
was thought at one time to be found only in the Thames, but it is
much more generally diffused than is supposed. It is found for certain,
and in great plenty, in three rivers—viz., the Thames, the Forth, and
the Hamble. I have also seen it taken out of the Humber, not far from
Hull, and have heard of its being caught near the mouth of the
Deveron, on the Moray Firth; and likewise of its being found in
plentiful quantities off the Isle of Wight. Mr. Stewart, the natural
history draughtsman, tells me also that he has seen it taken in bushels
on many parts of the Clyde, and that at certain seasons, while
engaged in taking coal-fish, he has found them so stuffed with
whitebait that by holding the large fish by the tail the little silvery
whitebait have fallen out in handfuls. The whitebait has become
celebrated from the mode in which it is cooked, and the excuse it
affords to Londoners for an afternoon’s excursion, as also from its
forming a famous dish at the annual fish-dinner of her Majesty’s
ministers; but truth compels me to state that there is nothing in
whitebait beyond its susceptibility of taking on a flavour from the skill
of the cook. It is poor feeding when compared to a dish of sprats, or
(an illegal) fry of young salmon; and it has been said in joke that an
expert cook can make up capital whitebait by means of flour and oil!
But to eat whitebait is a fashion of the season, and the well-served
tables of the Greenwich and Blackwall taverns, with their pleasant
outlook to the river, and their inducements of chablis and other choice
wines and comestibles, are undoubtedly very attractive, whether the
persons partaking of these dainties be ministers of state or merchants’
clerks.
The whitebait, however, if I cannot honestly praise it as a table fish,
is particularly interesting as an object of natural history, there having
been from time to time, as in the case of most other fish, some very
learned disputes as to where it comes from, how it grows, and
whether or not it be a distinct member of the herring family or the
young of some other fish. The whitebait—which, although found in
rivers, is strictly speaking a sea fish—is a tiny animal, varying in
length, when taken for cooking purposes, from two to four inches, and
has never been seen of a greater length than five inches. In
appearance it is pale and silvery, with a greenish back, and ought to
be cooked immediately after being caught; indeed if, like Lord Lovat’s
salmon, whitebait could leap out of the water into the frying-pan, it
would be a decided advantage to those dining upon it, for if kept even
for a few hours it becomes greatly deteriorated, and, as a
consequence, requires all the more cooking to bring the flavour up to
the proper pitch of gastronomic excellence. In fact, it is necessary to
keep the fish alive in a tub of water, and to ladle them out for the
process of cooking as the guests may arrive. Perhaps, as all fish are
chameleon-like in reflecting not only the colour of their abode, but
what they feed on as well, the supposed fine flavour of whitebait, so
far as it is not conferred upon that fish by the cook, may arise from
the matters held in solution in the Thames water, and so the result
from the corrupt source of the supply may be a quicker than ordinary
decay. The waters of the Forth at the whitebait ground, of which I
have given a slight sketch, are clean and clear, a little way above
Inchgarvie, where the sprat-fishing is usually carried on, and the
whitebait taken there are in consequence slightly different in colour,
and greatly so in taste, from those obtained in the Thames; in fact, all
kinds of fish, including salmon, are able to live and thrive in the Firth
of Forth. It is long since the refined salmon forsook the Thames, but
then salmon are very delicate in their eating, and at once take on the
surrounding flavour, whatever that may be. Creditable attempts are
now being made to re-stock the Thames, especially the upper waters,
with more valuable fish than are at present contained in that river, but
whether these attempts will be successful yet remains to be seen. I
have been watching with great interest what is being done by Mr.
Frank Buckland and others; but salmon I fear cannot at present live in
the Thames. To thrive successfully, that fish must have access to the
sea, and how a salmon can ever penetrate to the salt water with the
river in its present state is a problem that must be left for future
solution; however, as Mr. Frank Buckland very truthfully remarks, if the
salmon are not first sent down the Thames they cannot be expected
ever to come up that noble river.
Returning, however, to our whitebait, it may be stated that that fish
was once thought to be the young of the shad, which is itself an
interesting fish, coming from the sea to deposit its spawn in the fresh
waters. The shad was at one time thought to be the patriarch of the
herring tribe; and it was said, in the days when the old theory about
the migration of the herring was believed in, that the great shoals
which came to this country from the icy seas of the high latitudes
were led on their wonderful tour by a few thousands of this gigantic
fish. Pennant conjectured that whitebait was an independent species,
but so difficult is it to investigate such facts in the water that it was
not till many years had elapsed that the question was set at rest so far
as to determine at any rate that whitebait were not the young of
either the Alice or the Twaite shad, which, by the by, is a coarse and
insipid fish—
 “Alusæ, crackling on the embers, are
Of wretched poverty the insipid fare.”

Some investigations I have in hand may settle the question whether

or not the whitebait be herring-fry or a distinct fish. As yet I have
never at any season of the year found an example of whitebait
containing either milt or roe, although it is said that examples may be
taken full of both during the early winter months. This, of course, is
not conclusive evidence of its being the young of some other fish,
although it would go some length in proving it a distinct species; but I
need not enter further into the controversy at present, as it is not of
much interest to the general reader, except to say that whitebait,
whatever species it may belong to, comes up from the sea, where it
has been spawned, to feed in the river. I may mention that this fish
cannot now be taken so far up the river Thames as formerly.
Whitebait are now usually caught between Gravesend and Woolwich,
and the fish are in their best season between April and September. It
is not unusual for sea fish to ascend our rivers: the eel, as I have
already narrated, spawns in the sea, and the young of that fish
ascend to the fresh water, in which they live till they are seized with
the migratory instinct. The parentage of the whitebait will be
discovered in the sea, and the changes undergone by fish during their
growth are so varied and curious that it would be difficult to predict
what the little whitebait may turn out to be—whiting perhaps! After
being told that the silver eel is the produce of a black beetle, and
knowing that a tadpole is an infantile frog, and that the zœa
ultimately becomes a crab, we need not wonder if we are some day
told that whitebait becomes in time metamorphosed into some other
entirely different fish!
Besides whitebait there are other mysterious fish—especially in
Scotland—which are well worthy of being alluded to. An idea prevails
in Scotland that the vendace of Lochmaben and the powan of
Lochlomond are really herrings forced into fresh water, and slightly
altered by the circumstances of a new dwelling-place, change of food,
and other causes. One learned person lately ascribed the presence of
sea fish in fresh water to the great wave which had at one time
passed over the country. But no doubt the real cause is that these
peculiar fish were brought to those lakes ages ago by monks or other
persons who were adepts in the piscicultural art.

LOCHMABEN.
The home of the Vendace.

A brief summary of the chief points in the habits of these

mysterious fish may interest the reader. The “vendiss,” as it is locally
called, occurs nowhere but in the waters at Lochmaben, in
Dumfriesshire; and it is thought by the general run of the country
people to be, like the powan of Lochlomond, a fresh-water herring.
The history of this fish is quite unknown, but it is thought to have
been introduced into the Castle Loch of Lochmaben in the early
monkish times, when it was essential, for the proper observance of
church fasts, to have an ample supply of fish for fast-day fare. It is
curious as regards the vendace that they float about in shoals, that
they make the same kind of poppling noise as the herring, and that
they cannot be easily taken by any kind of bait. At certain seasons of
the year the people assemble for the purpose of holding a vendace
feast, at which times large quantities of the fish are caught by means
of a sweep net. The fish is said to have been found in other waters
besides those of Lochmaben, but I have never been able to see a
specimen anywhere else. There are a great number of traditions afloat
about the vendace, and a story of its having been introduced to the
lake by Mary Queen of Scots. The country people are very proud of
their fish, and take a pride in showing it to strangers. The principal
information I can give about the vendace, without becoming technical,
is, that it is a beautiful and very symmetrical fish, about seven or eight
inches long, not at all unlike a herring, only not so brilliant in the
colour; and that the females of the vendace seem to be about a third
more numerous than the males—a characteristic which is also
observed in the salmon family. The vendace spawn about the
beginning of winter, and for this purpose gather, like the herring, into
shoals. They are very productive, and do not take long to grow to
maturity.
The peculiarities of the Lochleven trout may be chiefly ascribed to a
peculiar feeding-ground. Having lived at one time on the banks of this
far-famed loch, I had ample time and many opportunities of studying
the habits and anatomy, as well as the fine flavour, of this beautiful
fish, which, in my humble opinion, has no equal in any other waters.
Feeding I believe to be everything, whether the subjects operated
upon be cattle, capons, or carps. The land-locked bays of Scotland
afford richer flavoured fish than the wider expanses of water, where
the finny tribe, it may be, are much more numerous, but have not the
same quantity or variety of food, and, as a consequence, the fish
obtained in such places are comparatively poor both in size and
flavour. Nothing can be more certain than that a given expanse of
water will feed only a certain number of fish; if there be more than
the feeding-ground will support they will be small in size, and if the
fish again be very large it may be taken for granted that the water
could easily support a few more. It is well known, for instance, that
the superiority of the herrings caught in the inland sea-lochs of
Scotland is owing to the fish finding there a better feeding-ground
than in the large and exposed open bays. Look, for instance, at
Lochfyne: the land runs down to the water’s edge, and the surface
water or drainage carries with it rich food to fatten the loch, and put
flesh on the herring; and what fish is finer, I would ask, than a
Lochfyne herring? Again, in the bay of Wick, which is the scene of the
largest herring fishery in the world, the fish have no land food, being
shut out from such a luxury by a vast sea wall of everlasting rock; and
the consequence is, that the Wick herrings are not nearly so rich in
flavour as those taken in the sea-lochs of the west of Scotland. In the
same way I account for the rich flavour and beautiful colour of the
trout of Lochleven. This fish has been acclimatised with more or less
success in other waters, but when transplanted it deteriorates in
flavour, and gradually loses its beautiful colour—another proof that
much depends on the feeding-ground; indeed, the fact of the trout
having deteriorated in quality as a consequence of the abridgment of
their feeding-range, is on this point quite conclusive. I feel certain,
however, that there must be more than one kind of these Lochleven
trouts; there is, at any rate, one curious fact in their life worth noting,
and that is, that they are often in prime condition for table use when
other trouts are spawning.
The powan, another of the mysterious fish of Scotland, is also
considered to be a fresh-water herring, and thought to be confined
exclusively to Lochlomond, where they are taken in great quantities. It
is supposed by persons versed in the subject that it is possible to
acclimatise sea fish in fresh water, and that the vendace and powan,
changed by the circumstances in which they have been placed, are, or
were, undoubtedly herrings. The fish in Lochlomond also gather into
shoals, and on looking at a few of them one is irresistibly forced to the
conclusion, that in size and shape they are remarkably like the
common herring. The powan of Lochlomond and the pollan of Lough
Neagh are not the same fish, but both belong to the Coregoni: the
powan is long and slender, while the pollan is an altogether stouter
fish, although well shaped and beautifully proportioned.
I could analyse the natural history of many other fish, but the result
in all cases is nearly the same, and ends in a repeated expression that
what we require as regards all fish is the date of their period of
reproduction; all other information without this great fact is
comparatively unimportant. It is difficult, however, to obtain any
reliable information on the natural history of fish either by way of
inquiry or by means of experiments. Naturalists cannot live in the
water, and those who live on it, and have opportunities for
observation, have not the necessary ability to record, or at any rate to
generalise what they see. No two fishermen, for instance, will agree
on any one point regarding the animals of the deep. I have examined
every intelligent fisherman I have met within the last ten years,
numbering above one hundred, and few of them have any real
knowledge regarding the habits of the fish which it is their business to
capture. As an instance of fishermen’s knowledge, one of that body
recently repeated to me the old story of the migration of the herring,
holding that the herring comes from Iceland to spawn, and that the
sprat goes to the same icy region in order that it may fulfil the same
instinct.
“Where are the haddocks?” I once asked a Newhaven fisherman.
“They are about all eaten up, sir,” was his very innocent reply; and I
believe this to be true. The shore races of that fish have long
disappeared, and our fishermen have now to seek this most palatable
inhabitant of the sea afar off in the deep waters. Vast numbers of the
haddock used to be taken in the Firth of Forth, but during late years
they have become very scarce, and the boats now require to go a
night’s voyage to seek for them. If we knew the minutiæ of the life of
this fish, we should be better able to regulate the season for its
capture, and the percentage that we might with safety take from the
water without deteriorating the breeding power of the animal. There
are some touches of romance even about the haddock, but I need not
further allude to these in this division of my book, as I shall have to
refer to it again under the head of the “White Fish Fisheries.” It is, like
all fish, wonderfully prolific, and is looked upon by the fishermen as
being also a migratory fish, as are also the turbot and many other sea
animals.
 The family to which the haddock belongs embraces many of our
best food fish, as whiting, cod, ling, etc.; but of the growth and habits
of the members of this family we are as ignorant as we are of the
natural history of the whitebait or sprat. I have the authority of a
rather learned Buckie fisherman (recently drowned, poor fellow! in the
great storm on the Moray Frith) for stating that codfish do not grow at
a greater rate than from eight to twelve ounces per annum. This
fisherman had seen a cod that had got enclosed by some accident in a
large rock pool, and so had obtained for a few weeks the advantage
of studying its powers of digestion, which he found to be particularly
slow, although there was abundant food. The haddock, which is a far
more active fish, my informant considered to grow at a more rapid
rate. On asking this man about the food of fishes, he said he was of
opinion that they preyed extensively upon each other, but that, so far
as his opportunities of observation went, they did not as a matter of
course live upon each other’s spawn; in other words, he did not think
that the enormous quantities of roe and milt given to fish were
provided, as has been supposed by one or two writers on the subject,
for any other purpose than the keeping up of the species. The spawn
of all kinds of fish is extensively wasted by other means; and these
animals have no doubt a thousand ways of obtaining food that are yet
unknown to man; indeed, the very element in which they live is in a
sense a great mass of living matter, and it doubtless affords by means
of minute animals a wonderful source of supply. Fish, too, are less
dainty in their food than is generally supposed, and some kinds eat
garbage of the most revolting description with great avidity.
I take this opportunity of correcting the very common error that all
fish are migratory. Some fishermen, and naturalists as well, picture
the haddock and the herring as being afflicted with perpetual motion
—as being wanderers from sea to sea and shore to shore. The
migratory instinct in fish is, in my opinion, very limited. They do move
about a little, without doubt, but not further than from their feeding-
ground to their spawning-ground—from deep to shallow water. Some
plan of taking fish other than the present must speedily be devised;
for now we only capture them—and I take the herring as an example
—over their spawning-ground, when, according to all good authority,
they must be in their worst possible condition, their whole flesh-
forming or fattening power having been bestowed on the formation of
the milt and roe. I repudiate altogether this iteration of the periodical
wandering instincts of the finny tribes. There are great fish colonies in
the sea, in the same way as there are great seats of population on
land, and these fish colonies are stationary, having, comparatively
speaking, but a limited range of water in which to live and die.
Adventurous individuals of the fish world occasionally roam far away
from home, and speedily find themselves in a warmer or colder
climate, as the case may be; but, speaking generally, as the salmon
returns to its own waters, so do sea fish keep to their own colony.
Our larger shoals of fish, which form money-yielding industries, are
of wonderful extent, and must have been gathering and increasing for
ages, having a population multiplied almost beyond belief. Century
after century must have passed away as these colonies grew in size,
and were subjected to all kinds of influences, evil or good: at times
decimated by enemies, or perhaps attacked by mysterious diseases,
that killed the fish in tens of thousands. At Rockall, for instance, there
was lately discovered a cod depôt, about which a kind of sensation
was made—perhaps by interested parties—in the public prints, but the
supply obtained at that place was only of brief duration. This fish
colony, which had evidently fixed upon a good food-giving centre, was
too infantile to be able to stand the heavy draughts that were all at
once made upon it. Schools or shoals of fish, when they are of such
an extent as will admit of constant fishing, must have been forming
during long periods of time; for we know that, despite the wonderful
fecundity of all kinds of sea fish, the expenditure of both seed and life
is something tremendous. We may rest assured that, if a female
codfish yields its roe by millions, a balancing-power exists in the water
that prevents the bulk of them from coming to life, or at any rate from
reaching maturity. If it were not so, how came it, in the days when
there was no fish commerce, and when man only killed the denizens
of the sea for the supply of his individual wants, that our waters were
not, so to speak, impassable from a superfluity of fish? Buffon has
said that if a pair of herrings were left to breed and multiply
undisturbed for a period of twenty years, they would yield a fish bulk
equal to the whole of the globe in which we live!
The subject of fish growth—particularly as regards the changes
undergone by the salmon family—will be found further elucidated
under the head of “Fish Culture,” and incidentally in some other
divisions of this work.
 CHAPTER II.
FISH COMMERCE.

Early Fish Commerce—Sale of Fresh-water Fish—Cured Fish—Influence of Rapid

Transit on the Fisheries—Fish-ponds—The Logan Pond—Ancient Fishing
Industries—The Dutch Herring Fishing—Comacchio—the Art of Breeding Eels—
Progress of Fishing in Scotland—A Scottish Buss—Newfoundland Fisheries—
The Greenland Whale Fishing—Speciality of different Fishing Towns—The
General Sea Fisheries of France—French Fish Commerce—Statistics of the
British Fisheries.

T
herewas a time when man only killed the denizens of the deep in
order to supply his own immediate wants, and it is very much to
be regretted, in the face of the extensive fish commerce now
carried on, that no reliable documents exist from which to write a
consecutive history of the rise and progress of fishing.
In the absence of precise information, it may be allowed us to
guess that even during the far back ages fish was esteemed as an
article of diet, and formed an important contribution to the food
resources of such peoples as had access to the sea, or who could
obtain the finny inhabitants of the deep by purchase or barter. In the
Old and New Testaments, and in various ancient profane histories,
fish and fishing are mentioned very frequently; and in what may be
called modern times a few scattered dates, indicating the progress of
the sea fisheries, may, by the exercise of great industry and
research, be collected; but these are not in any sense consecutive,
or indeed very reliable, so that we are, as it were, compelled to
imagine the progress of fish commerce, and to picture in our mind’s
eye its transition from the period when the mere satisfaction of
individual wants was all that was cared for, to a time when fish
began to be bartered for land goods—such as farm, dairy, and
garden produce—and to trace, as we best can, that commerce
through these obscure periods to the present time, when the
fisheries form a prominent outlet for capital, are a large source of
national revenue, and are attracting, because of these qualities, an
amount of attention never before bestowed upon them.
Fish commerce being an industry naturally arising out of the
immediate wants of mankind, has unfortunately, as regards the
article dealt in, been invested with an amount of exaggeration that
has no parallel in other branches of industry. Blunders perpetrated
long ago in Encyclopædias and other works, when the life and habits
of all kinds of fish, from the want of investigation, were but little
understood, have been, with those additions which under such
circumstances always accumulate, handed down to the present day,
so that even now we are carrying on some of our fisheries on
altogether false assumptions, and in many cases evidently killing the
goose for the sake of the golden egg: in other words, never
dreaming that there will be a fishing to-morrow, which must be as
important, or even more important, than the fishing of to-day,
beyond which the fisher class as a rule never look.
It is curious to note that there was in most countries a commerce
in fresh-water fish long before the food treasures of the sea were
broken upon. This is particularly noticeable in our own country, and
is vouched for by many authorities both at home and abroad. We
can all imagine also, that in the prehistoric or very early ages, when
the land was untilled and virgin, and the earth was undrained, there
were sources for the supply of fresh-water fish that do not now exist
in consequence of the enhanced value of land. At the period to
which I have been alluding there was a much greater water surface
than there is now—rivers were broader and deeper, and so also were
our lakes and marshes. In those early days, although not so early as
the remote uncultivated age of which I have spoken, there were
great inland stews populous with fish, especially in connection with
monasteries and other religious houses, many examples of which, in
their remains, are still to be seen in England or on the Continent. In
fact, fish commerce, in despite of many curious industries connected
with the productiveness of the fisheries, was not really developed till
a few years ago, when the railway system of carriage began. Even
up to the time of George Stephenson commerce in fish was
generally speaking a purely local business, except in so far as the
fishwives could extend the trade by carrying the contents of their
husbands’ boats away inland, in order, as in the still more primitive
times, to barter the fish for other produce. The fishermen of
Comacchio, for instance, still cure their eels, because they have not
the means of sending them so rapidly into the interior of Italy as
would admit of their being eaten fresh. Scotch salmon in the
beginning of the present century was nearly all kippered or cured as
soon as caught, because the demand for the fresh fish was only
local, and therefore limited. With the discovery that salmon by being
packed in ice could be kept a long time fresh, the trade began to
extend and the price to rise. This discovery, which exercised a very
important influence on the value of our salmon-fisheries, was made
by a country gentleman of Scotland, Mr. Dempster of Dunnichen, in
the year 1780. Steamboat and railway transit, when they became
general, at once converted salmon into a valuable commodity; and
such is now the demand, from facility of transport, that this
particular fish, from its great individual value, has been lately in
some danger of being exterminated through the greed of the fishery
tenants; indeed, it cannot be said that it is yet safe, for every tenant
thinks it legitimate to kill all the fish he can see.
The network of railways which now encircles the land has
conferred upon our inland towns, so far as fish is concerned, all the
advantages of the coast. For instance, the fishermen of Prestonpans
send more of their fish to Manchester than to Edinburgh, which is
only nine miles distant: indeed our most landward cities are
comparatively well supplied with fresh fish and crustacea, while at
the seaside these delicacies are not at all plentiful. The Newhaven
fishwife is a common visitant in many of our larger Scottish inland
towns, being able by means of the railway to take a profitable
journey; indeed, one consequence of the extension of our railways
has undoubtedly been to add enormously to the demand for sea
produce, and to excite the ingenuity of our seafaring population to
still greater cunning and industry in the capture of all kinds of fish.
In former years, when a large haul of fish was taken there was no
means of despatching them to a distance, neither was there a
resident population to consume what was caught. Railways not
being then in existence, the conveyance inland was too slow for a
perishable commodity like fish, and visitors to the seaside were also
rarer than at present. The want of a population to eat the fish no
doubt aided the comfortable delusion of our supplies being
inexhaustible. But it is now an undoubted fact, that with railways
branching out to every pier and quay, our densely-populated inland
towns are better supplied with fish than the villages where they are
caught—a result of that keen competition which has at length
become so noticeable where fish, oysters, or other sea delicacies are
concerned. The high prices now obtained form an inducement to the
fishermen to take from the water all they can get, whether the fish
be ripe for food or not. A practical fisherman, whom I have often
consulted on these topics, says that forty years ago the slow system
of carriage was a sure preventive of overfishing, as fish, to be
valuable for table purposes, require to be fresh. “It’s the railways
that has done all the mischief, sir, depend on that; and as for the
fishing, sir, it’s going on at such a rate that there will very soon be a
complete famine. I’ve seen more fish caught in a day, sir, with a
score of hooks on a line than can now be got with eight thousand!”
 As to fish-ponds: at the time indicated it was quite usual for
noblemen and other country gentlemen to have fish-ponds; in fact, a
fish-pond was as necessary an adjunct of a large country house as
its vegetable or fruit garden. These ponds, as the foregoing sketch
will show, were of the most simple kind, and were often enough
constructed by merely stopping a little stream at some suitable
place, and so forming a couple of artificial lakes, in which were
placed a few large stones, or two or three bits of artificial rock-work,
so constructed as to afford shelter to the fish. There being in those
days no railways or other speedy conveyance, there arose a
necessity for fish-ponds to persons who were in the habit of
entertaining guests or giving great dinner-parties; hence also the
multiplicity of recipes in our older cookery-books for the dressing of
all kinds of fresh-water fishes; besides, in the very ancient times,
that is before the Reformation, when Roman Catholicism required a
rigorous observance of the various church fasts, a fish-pond near
every cathedral city, and in the precincts of every monastery, was a
sine qua non. The varieties of fish bred in these ponds were
necessarily very limited, being usually carp, some of which, however,
grew to a very large size. There are traces also of some of our
curious and valuable fishes having been introduced into this country
during those old monastic times. Thus it is thought, as has been
already stated, that the celebrated trout of Lochleven may have
been introduced from foreign parts by some of the ancient monks
who had a taste for gastronomy. The celebrated vendace of
Lochmaben is likewise supposed to have been introduced in the
same way from some continental fishery.
As I have already shown, most of the fish-ponds of these remote
times were quite primitive in their construction—very similar, in fact,
to the beautiful trout-pond that may any day be seen at
Wolfsbrunnen, near Heidelberg. There were no doubt ponds of large
extent and of elaborate construction, but these were comparatively
rare; and even on the very sea-coast we used to have ponds or
storing-places for sea fish. One of these is still in existence: I allude
to Logan Pond in Galloway. This is only used as a place for keeping
fish so as to have them attainable for table uses without the family
having to depend on the state of the weather. This particular pond is
not an artificially-constructed one, but has been improved out of the
natural surrounding of the place. It is a basin, formed in the solid
rock, ten yards in depth, and having a circumference of one hundred
and sixty feet. It is used chiefly as a preserve to ensure a constant
supply of fish, which are taken in the neighbouring bay when the
weather is fine, and transferred to the pond, which communicates
with the sea by a narrow passage. It is generally well stocked with
cod, haddock, and flat fish, which in the course of time become very
tame; and I regret to say, from want of proper shelter, most of the
animals become blind. The fish have of course to be fed, and they
partake greedily, even from the hand of their keeper, of the mass of
boiled mussels, limpets, whelks, etc., with which they are fed, and
their flavour is really unexceptionable.
 Coming back, however, to the subject of fresh-water fish-ponds, it
may be stated that at one time some very large but simply-
constructed fish-ponds, or stews as they were then called, existed in
various parts of England, but that, as the commerce in sea fish
gradually extended, these were given up, except as adjuncts to the
amenities of gentlemen’s pleasure-grounds. Ornamental canals and
fish-ponds are not at all uncommon in the parks of our country
gentlemen, although they are not required for fish-breeding
purposes, as the fast London or provincial trains carry baskets of fish
to a distance of one hundred miles in a very few hours, so that a
turbot or whiting is in excellent condition for a late dinner.
All the ancient fishing industries, whether those that still exist or
those that are extinct, except in their remains, bear traces of the
times in which they originated. Pisciculture (which I shall describe at
some length by and by) arose at a very ancient period, and was
chiefly resorted to in connection with fresh-water fishes—the ova of
such being the most readily obtainable; or with the mollusca, as
these could bear a long transport, having a reservoir of water in
their shell. The sea fishers of the olden time dealt with the fish for
the purpose of their being cured with salt or otherwise, simply, as
has already been stated, because of the scarcity of rapid land
carriage and a comparatively scanty local population.
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