Friday, Apr. 01, 1966
The Nude on the Basketball Court, and Other Chinese Stories
Military directives rarely make snappy reading, dealing as they do with such weighty subjects as the terrors of trench foot, the best way to dig a latrine and the importance of keeping boots polished. But as in most matters, Red China is different. A 776-page collection of Red Chinese army documents just published by Stanford University's Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace is a fascinating exception. The papers, some of which were captured from Chinese Communist junks off the South China coast, some probably filched by Chinese Nationalist spies, cover most of 1961--a year when Red China was nursing bruised shins from the disastrous "Great Leap Forward." They reflect nagging discontent in army and peasant ranks, as well as the age-old Chinese belief in the efficacy of numerals as a cure-all for despair. Excerpts:
Comrade Wang Tung-Hsing's Report on Ideological Conditions in the Central Garrison Because of the far-reaching effects of the class struggle, especially the Two-Road Struggle in the villages on ideology, and also the natural disaster which happened last year and this year, there is some unrest in thought among a part of our comrades. The soldier Chang Lichen said: "At present, what the peasants eat in the villages is even worse than what dogs ate in the past. At that time dogs ate chaff and grain." Commune members ask: "Is Chairman Mao going to allow us to starve to death?" The soldier Liu Ho-shan said: "Our country has no definite plans at all. Why are we unable to buy things?"
Report of the Political Department of
the 7th Division of Railway Engineer Troops about
the Conduct of the 8th Co. of the 29th Regiment
Whose Sideline Production Group
Strung up and Beat the People
On Nov. 14, a local woman commune member, Yeh Hsiang-shu (poor peasant), cut off and stole from this production group seven heads of white cabbage totaling 6 chin. Yeh, when forced to speak, had to admit that her husband Chou Hsing-jung had also stolen some vegetables. The production group seized Chou also, then took man and wife, with hands tied, and hung them by the wrists from the basketball goal for ten minutes. Then Platoon Commander Yang Ju-hsing announced two conditions: "First, they must give us back 3,000 catties (two tons) of cabbage; second, if they do not give us the cabbage, they must take off their trousers and thank us for our kindness." Yeh soon had all her clothes taken off. Chou refused to shed his clothes, whereupon Yang and his soldiers cut his belt in two with a scythe and laughed heartily. Yeh used a handkerchief to cover the lower part of her body. When the victims began to shiver with the cold, Yang cried out: "You can warm up by running around the basketball court once!" [Yang was later arrested and tried for "foolish, ridiculous actions."]
From Three Suicides We See How to Carry Our Supervisory Education in the Company
In the 0055th Army Unit, there happened from September to December 1960 three incidents that led quickly to suicides. The first involved a soldier of the Artillery Company, Kung Ho-yu, an excellent League member and a "five-excellence" soldier. On Aug. 25 he stole three yuan ($1.80), and on the 30th of the same month confessed his wrong. Someone, while charging him with previous thefts, cried: "If you freely confess, we shall be lenient with you, but if you deny these charges we shall be very severe." Kung showed that his feelings were deeply and bitterly stirred, and that night, when he was on sentry duty, shot and killed himself with his rifle.
The second was Wang Yu-ts'ai, who stole a pair of rubber shoes. While on a working assignment, he once ate an extra bun stuffed with meat, and the Deputy Commander fiercely shouted at him: "Who gave you permission to eat that extra bun?" Later, his old disease, epilepsy, broke out twice as a result of these emotional disturbances. Wang took his own life.
The third is Chen P'an-t'ing, deputy squad leader of the Machine Gun Company. In September, after returning from a visit to his family, he showed some dissatisfaction with the grain situation, and said: "Some people are saying in China there once appeared a Sun Yat-sen and the grain was piled sky-high." Twenty days later he was reported to the Deputy Political Director for "reactionary remarks." Fearing "some kind of punishment," Chen used a Thompson gun to kill himself.
To readers of the Hoover Institution's anthology, a simple moral emerges for the Red Chinese Commissar: those responsible for educational work in the army should have studied the reasons for these examples of backward thinking and tried to reform them. To that end, the Red Chinese army has developed a series of programs that sound like some sort of ideological drill manual. The "Three Skills Movement" emphasizes "four grasps and one investigation"; there are "five togethernesses" to combat the "five excessives" (excessive reports, excessive documents, excessive meetings, excessive persons in office, excessive general appeal) and two remembrances, which can be applied in the search for "sweetness." Out of it all comes the most powerful of Chinese weapons: the "spiritual atomic bomb," against which no capitalist-imperialist can stand. After all, as Army Education Boss Hsiao Hua wrote in a 1961 treatise, the People's Liberation Army of Red China has a long way to go toward perfection. "Some of the troops have an incorrect attitude toward military service," wrote Hsiao. "They think that they are 'soldiers of peace.' "
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