Journalist Ge Yang

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戈扬访谈录
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Journalist Ge Yang joined the Chinese Communist forces during the Chinese Civil War. She worked as a writer and editor for Chinese news organs before and after the Communists came to power in 1949, but she was eventually denounced as counterrevolutionary, and, like millions of her comrades, she was exiled to a work camp in the countryside. This interview, which was conducted for COLD WAR in February 1997, has been translated from Mandarin.
On becoming a communist:
I'd actually joined the struggle against Japan in 1937 as part of the Nationalist forces, but then I found that Kuomintang was too corrupt and was not democratic. The Nationalists had a one-party system, and I thought that the Communists would be better. Also, the Communist propaganda at that time was very critical of the Nationalists: it said that they were very, very bad; only the Communist Party was good: it was democratic, it was egalitarian, and it promised food for all. So the ideal of communism gradually entered my soul. I joined the Communist Party.
At that time I was a news worker, working for the New China News Agency, and all the people I interviewed felt that the Kuomintang had to collapse. At that time the money which the Kuomintang used was already valueless, and the [money] which the Communist Party used was very valuable. ... The Kuomintang was in a state of total collapse, and so all the people I interviewed felt that the most hope was with the Communist Party. ... Also the communists had promised to redistribute the land and get rid of the landlords. This was the way that it managed to unite all the poor peasants. In addition to this, it promised that the workers would control everything; this was, of course, their slogan, and it gave a lot of hope to the working class. Most people in the cities believed that socialism would no longer allow people to starve. Everybody was very happy.
On the evolution of Chinese communism:
Most of the uneducated people in society had great hopes for the Communist Party and gave it their full-hearted support; but those who felt positive towards the Kuomintang and the Americans, and opposed the Communist Party, had to keep quiet about this. So on the surface everybody seemed to be positive about the Communist Party. The Communist Party knew this, and so in 1951 it launched a great campaign to repress counter-revolutionaries across the country. All the Kuomintang officers who were arrested were killed. Of course the ordinary soldiers weren't killed -- it depended on their ranks -- but an awful lot of people were killed. ...
At that time we thought that both China and Russia had one ideal, and that was to achieve communism. I believed in the same ideal; so we thought that Sino-Soviet relations was a good thing. But after I visited the Soviet Union in 1953, my mind began to change. On the one hand I began seeing problems with the Communist Party. ... Our magazine established two columns: one was called "Little Stories from Life"; the other was "Little Critique." The "Little Stories from Life" was based on letters, which came from all over the country, reflecting people's experiences and confidence in the Communist Party. The "Little Critique" consisted of criticisms of bad aspects of society: bureaucracy, corruption, waste, etc. At first, there were many, many letters to the "Little Stories from Life" column; they came from all over the country, and there were so many that they filled up several bags; we couldn't even read them all. But there were hardly any letters to the "Critique" column. We couldn't find any to fill the column; we had to get somebody to specially write for it. But then after two or three years, there was a complete reversal of this situation: there were plenty of critical articles, criticizing bureaucracy, waste, corruption -- criticizing the Communist Party. But we couldn't find any of the positive stories. This had a big impact on me: I began to see what the real situation was. We had to set up a special department to deal with the critical letters -- there were so many of them.
The other aspect was the time that I spent in the Soviet Union. I saw a lot of things: I had to take the train through Russia, Poland, Germany, to the Women's Conference in Denmark. ... I saw how in East Germany the streets were very dead and quiet; there were only state shops, no private shops. The same was the case in Moscow: you had to queue for everything, just to buy some moldy plums. On returning to Beijing I found that the situation in Beijing was much better than Moscow. At that time Beijing was just beginning to nationalize its private shops, and in the Dong An market in Beijing there were still in fact many private traders, and there was plenty of produce available. After coming back I told my editorial department to go off and take lots of pictures of the fresh produce in Chinese markets. Of course, after the Great Leap Forward the situation in China became the same as in Russia, or even worse.
On Mao and the Great Leap Forward:
Firstly, I should make clear that Mao wanted to become the leader of the world revolutionary movement. During the time of the attack from Soviet revisionism, Communist parties throughout the world were split into two factions, and one faction was in favor of China誷 position. They all came to visit China, and they had to see Chairman Mao; if they didn't see Mao maybe they'd die when they went back to their own countries. This made Mao very happy, because it gave him the position of world leader. Secondly, Mao wouldn't let anybody else stand on the same level as him. What he said was the most important. Everybody else bolstered him up -- he was a Chinese Emperor; he had great ambitions, like during the Great Leap Forward and the Three Red Flags movement.
The Great Leap Forward was actually a failure because so many people made false claims. Scientists pretended to go along with this, and made ridiculous claims for the amount of grain produced for each [parcel] of land. Children would be made to stand atop the grain which was produced, to show how much there was. The falsehoods of the Great Leap Forward were absolutely unbelievable; anybody who did not speak in falsehoods was expelled from their job, or demoted -- they were not allowed to be active officials. So from the time of the Great Leap Forward, all Chinese people learned to tell lies. Mao liked to hear lies: he thought that if people said good things they were correct; if they said bad things they were incorrect.
On being denounced and exiled to the countryside:
I was branded a Rightist at the end of 1957, beginning of 1958. I was branded a Rightist because I felt that the Communist Party was not democratic. I criticized party members by saying that normally they were like madmen, but when it was necessary for them to really speak their minds, they were like dead men. That was my crime. I thought that the Communist Party was undemocratic, and that it was right for the students at Beijing University to criticize the Party.
After being branded a Rightist I was sent off for labor in the countryside. Then I became quite clear what the Communist Party was really about. Life for the peasants was very tough then -- they'd been through the Great Leap Forward. I also had a very tough time, and I realized that for the sake of so-called communism, the Party was prepared to speak complete lies. ...
The work was harder than I could bear, and I often became ill. I became very malnourished; we only had coarse grain cakes to eat -- there was no rice or anything like that. I went down with hepatitis; many people died, but nobody really knew how many people died. All we knew was that everything outside was getting more and more expensive, and that the rations of grain were becoming less and less. We had to measure very carefully how much grain was allocated to each family. The Communist Party blamed all these hardships on the Soviet Union, and said that it was all the result of revisionism. But people could see things clearly. It was the Communist Party that made people poorer and poorer.
At that time there was more criticism of [Soviet] revisionism than of American imperialism, though both sides were attacked. Mao believed that class struggle was the most important thing. This was the only way he had to control people; he wanted to stir up conflict among all people in society. At that time, after being branded a Rightist, I no longer had any rights. At that time, a Rightist was the same as a counter-revolutionary. A Rightist had to right to speak or to publish or to write. But in fact our hearts were very much at one with those of the ordinary people. We no longer had much hope in the Communist Party.
On the Cultural Revolution:
We thought it would only last a short time, but it went on for ten years and caused great hardship. I was again sent off to inner Mongolia for another eight more years. During the Cultural Revolution we were branded as cow-demons and snake spirits, and were sent off to very harsh places for labor. So people like me spent 20 more years branded as counter-revolutionaries. So by this time we had lost faith in the Communist Party, and couldn't understand why there were all these movements, and why Lin Biao came to the fore as Mao's successor. It all seemed like a reversal of Marxism. The Communist Party and Mao had completely lost their mandate among Chinese people because of the Cultural Revolution. ...
The Cultural Revolution was mainly an internal matter. People could be branded Rightist, counter-revolutionaries, for all sorts of different things. It was rather like the scene described in the famous Chinese classic novel "Dream of the Red Chambers." People would commit suicide in all sorts of different ways.