Going down
Authors: Jiang Yang 
Published: October 2007

A Chinese writer tells of her two years in a labour camp

Yang Jiang was a professor emeritus of English and translator at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing (Peking). Her husband, Qian Zhongshu, was also a professor at the Academy. He is perhaps better known abroad as the author of The Besieged City, an extraordinary novel published by the Indiana University Press in 1982. Written over thirty years ago, it satirised the weaknesses and absurdities of the generation of Chinese in the thirties, who were pretenders to intellectual status.

Yang Jiang was born in Beijing in 1911 where she came from a prominent family. She graduated from the American University in Soochow and Qinghua University in Beijing. Qian Zhongshu was born in 1910 and also went to Qinghua University where he met his future wife. They later went to study in France and at Oxford University, England.

Both Yang and Qian returned to China in the late thirties and could have left the country in 1949 before the Communists came to power; they were made generous offers to live and teach abroad. Instead, like so many Chinese intellectuals at the time, they chose to stay in China, hoping to help in the reconstruction of a devastated country. Later, also like many other liberal intellectuals, they suffered greatly during the turbulent periods of the Anti-Rightist campaign in the fifties and the Great Cultural Revolution a decade later. A number of intellectuals were reported killed or driven to suicide during these campaigns; many were humiliated, persecuted, and sent to labour camps to be reformed.

In 1970, Yang and Qian were sent to such a camp, a ‘cadre school’, run by the Academy in the countryside of Henan. The reform camps were established for intellectuals throughout China following Chairman Mao's ‘7 May Directive’ in 1966. From 1966 to 1978, it is estimated that over twenty million people went through such camps — virtually the whole Chinese intellectual class.

Yang Jiang's book A Cadre School Life: Six Chapters is about their two-year experience in the Cadre School in Henan. It was first published in Beijing in July 1981, in a semi-clandestine way and known to only a small circle. Later in 1982, the Joint Publishing Company, a small publisher in Hong Kong, brought out a limited English edition.

The book was described by W. J. F. Jenner, a specialist of modern Chinese literature, as ‘an outstanding book, quite unlike anything else from twentieth-century China available in English translation’. ‘What Yang tells’, Jenner wrote, ‘is not sensationalised into a horror story. The tone is quiet and reasonable and there is no posturing. She has none of the youthful naïvety of the committed writers of the 1930s: she simply tells something of what happened — without protest, without shouting. This quality of ordinariness, even banality, that pervades the book makes it all the more effective … Yang Jiang makes no pretence to martyrdom. Indeed, one feels that she has written this record of what was not extraordinary but perfectly normal as a warning for posterity, and as a reminder to the countless other members of more or less privileged groups in the cities who went down to the countryside at that time.’

Jenner added that ‘this is not the world of prisons and the penal labour-camps — China has yet to publish its Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch — and the harshness it describes is more the result of bad planning and silliness than deliberate cruelty' (Times Literary Supplement, 24 June 1983).

In his Foreword to the book, Qian Zhongshu wrote that his wife had left out a chapter, one that might be called ‘Politics: Chapter on Shame’ — perhaps because of fear of censorship. ‘An acute sense of shame can result in selective amnesia,’ Qian wrote. ‘No one wants to remember things that have caused him or her a loss of face or embarrassment. It is not surprising then that uncomfortable memories can slip unnoticed from conscious recollection into oblivion. A guilty conscience makes you guarded and circumspect; it can hinder a person's struggle for existence. Someone weighed down by contrition and remorse may hesitate to advance and so fall by the wayside for the rest of his life. It is quite natural then that feelings of shame and guilt should be discouraged rather than cultivated. The ancients knew the wisdom of this and did not include “shame” in their list of the Seven Emotions of Man. In this day and age, too much dwelling on the past and morbid feelings of guilt can be positively detrimental; better to be free of such things, leaving oneself with a clear conscience and a happy heart.’

The following is an extract from the first chapter, called ‘Going Down: Chapter on Separation’. The translation is by Geremie Barmé, with the assistance of Bennett Lee. A Cadre School Life: Six Chapters is to be republished, in association with the Joint Publishing Company, by Readers International and will be available in the UK, United States and Canada. Information about the non-profit-making Readers International and its literary series can be obtained from 8 Strathray Gardens, London NW3 4NY. The French edition ‘Six Récits de l’Ecole des Cadres' is published by Christian Bourgois, 8 Rue Garancière, 75006 Paris.