Wild Swans
by
Jung Chang(1)
This is an exceptional book. It is the
story of three generations of remarkable Chinese woman. The
first was a concubine of a general in a warlord government,
the second her daughter, and the third, her daughter who is
the author Jung Chang. The story gives the history of these
women, and in so doing, their stories become the history of
an epoch. That epoch began in the 1920s with the grandmother
and ended with her Chang's departure to the West after the
Cultural Revolution. These years encompass the critical
years of the Chinese Communist revolution and its aftermath.
Much of the book concerns Jung Chang's mother who became a
communist as a teenager. She fought in the revolution of the
forties and fifties and served as a communist official after
the communist victory . She was a woman of great courage,
intelligence, and ability. The same can be said for her
father who was also a exceptional person. Both were
revolutionaries and dedicated to communist ideals, above all
the liberation of China from the imperialists and the
formation of a humane society.
Initially, the communist victory was a victory of the
Chinese people. They threw off the imperialist yoke
established by the Western powers in the nineteenth century
and set about forming a new Chinese society. The communists
cleaned up corruption, ended the brothels, got the economy
going, and stabilized production and distribution. From my
perspective, these goals were necessary, above all, the
liberation of China from western imperialism.
As the revolution matured, Mao became afraid that he would
lose control over the communist party. As a result, he
instigated the Cultural Revolution. It hidden goal was to
maintain Mao's power and eliminate all rivals. He incited
the populace, especially the young, to seize control of
local governments and to humiliate, punish, torture, and
kill all those who, true or otherwise, were considered
"capitalist roaders." For Chang, this included the torture
and humiliation of her parents, in spite of the fact that
they had worked tirelessly and selflessly for the
revolution.
In the end, the Cultural Revolution became a campaign of
ignorance against wisdom, arbitrary power against justice,
youth against experience, rudeness against courtesy, the
abolition of culture for the reign of a new order based on
terror and stupidity. These horrors were not perpetuated by
an elite, a KGB or an SS. Rather, the entire populace became
informants against "bourgeois elements." In order to root
out these elements, it became necessary to destroy every
remnant of the past, all counter revolutionary habits,
practices, thoughts. It was madness. Vicious interrogation
and public confessions were instituted in order to sanitize
the mind according to communist ideals. The entire country
was affected, everything disrupted, production, education,
government. Life collapsed on all sides. At one point, for
example, the peasants were mobilized to make steel, leaving
their fields untended. The result was a great famine. In the
process, whole areas were stripped of their trees for steel
production.
Behind it all stood the figure of Mao. The cult surrounding
him was extraordinary. He became a god. He was worshipped,
adored, obeyed, and idolized by millions. His word was the
supreme law of the land. When he spoke, even casual off hand
remarks, millions would slavishly obey. At one point he
happened to mention that lawns were a capitalist invention.
Immediately, the population set about destroying their
lawns.
What allowed this extraordinary abuse of power? In essence,
Mao began a god because China was a culture in which human
beings could become divine. There was no Christian doctrine
of creation in which the divine was utterly distinct from
the human, with all persons equal with no intervening
hierarchy between themselves and God. As in ancient Rome,
China worshipped her emperors. Here is Chang.
For Two thousand years China had an
emperor figure who was state power and spiritual
authority rolled into one. The religious feelings which
people in other parts of the world have toward a god
have in China always been directed toward the emperor.
My parents, like hundreds of millions of Chinese, were
influenced by this tradition.(2)
One of the principal techniques used to
devastate the populations were denunciations, especially by
children against their parents. Chang's mother was pressured
to denounce her husband, and Chang and her siblings were
under the same pressure to denounce both parents. They did
not do so, even at the risk of their own lives.
Once when my mother was under tremendous
pressure to divorce my father, she asked us what we
thought. Standing by him meant we could become 'blacks';
we had all seen the discrimination and torture such
people suffered. But we said we would stick by him, come
what may. My mother said she was pleased and proud of
us. Our devotion to our parents was increased by our
empathy for their suffering, our admiration for their
integrity and courage, and our loathing for their
tormentors. We came to feel a new degree of respect, and
love, for our parents.(3)
It spite of everything, Chang and the vast
majority of the population were unable to see that Mao was
responsible for the horrors. Like many, Chang blamed the
excesses on Mao's wife and the Gang of Four. Mao remained
like a god, shrouded in mystery, the source of all good,
beyond the realm of critical thought. Eventually, however,
Chang was able to pierce the veil. Here are some of Chang's
final comments on Maoism and the Cultural Revolution.
He ruled by getting people to hate each
other. In doing so, he got ordinary Chinese to carry out
many of the tasks undertaken in other dictatorships by
professional elites. Mao had managed to turn the people
into the ultimate weapon of the dictatorship. That was
why under him there was no real equivalent of the KGB in
China. There was no need. In bringing out and nourishing
the worst in people, Mao had created a moral wasteland
and a land of hatred. But how much individual
responsibility ordinary people should hare, I could not
decide.
The other hallmark of Maoism, it
seemed to me, was the reign of ignorance. Because of his
calculation that the cultured class were an easy target
for a population that was largely illiterate, because of
his own deep resentment of formal education and the
educated, because of his megalomania, and because of his
contempt for the areas of Chinese civilization that he
did not understand, such as architecture, art, and
music, Mao destroyed much of the country's cultural
heritage. He left behind not only a brutalized nation,
but also an ugly land with little of its past glory
remaining or appreciated.(4)
The greatest horror of the Cultural Revolution the
crushing repression which had driven hundreds of
thousands of people to mental breakdown, suicide, and
death was carried out by the population collectively.
Almost everyone, including young children, had
participated in brutal denunciation meetings. Many had
lent a hand in beating the victims. What was more,
victims had often become victimizers, and vice versa.
There was also no independent legal system to
investigate and to judge. Party officials decided who as
to be punished and who was not. Personal feelings were
often the decisive factor.(5)
In the days after Mao's death, I did a lot of thinking.
I knew he was considered a philosopher, and I tried to
think what his 'philosophy' really was. It seemed to me
that its central principle was the need or the desire?
for perpetual conflict. The core of his thinking seemed
to be that human struggles were the motivating force of
history, and that in order to make history 'class
enemies' had to be continuously created en masse. I
wondered whether there were any other philosophers whose
theories had led to the suffering and death of so many.
I thought of the terror and misery to which the Chinese
population had been subjected. For what?(6)
Here are Chang's thoughts on her father,
broken by the regime.
For days I wept in silence. I though of
my father's life, his wasted dedication and crushed
dreams. He need not have died. Yet his death seemed so
inevitable. There was no place for him in Mao's China,
because he had tried to be an honest man. He had been
betrayed by something to which he had given his whole
life, and the betrayal had destroyed him.(7)
Eventually, Chang learned English and
secretly discovered the world of the West. She read the
classic of Western literature. An new world appeared before
her. She was swept away by the poetry, the novelists, the
political thinkers, the culture of the West. Her heart
swelled at the opening words of the Declaration of
Independence. She was especially attracted to the freedom
found in the West, and the emphasis on the dignity of the
individual.
I was struck less by the West's
technological developments and high living standards
than by the absence of political witch hunts, the lack
of consuming suspicion, the dignity of the individual,
and the incredible amount of liberty. To me, the
ultimate proof of freedom in the West as that there
seemed to be so many people there attacking the West and
praising China.(8)
Reflections
As I read this book, I was amazed by the greatness of the
Chinese people. In spite of their awful failures, they had
the nerve and the vastness of vision to throw off their
foreign oppressors, to attempt a new society, and the
madness and the willingness to make the most horrible
mistakes. Above all, I was swept away by the extraordinary
dignity and dedication of the book's principal characters.
Jung Chang, her father, mother, sisters, brothers, and
grandparents, were great and wonderful people. I could not
help but love them. When I think of them, I think of Miranda
from Shakespeare's Tempest, stranded on an island
with her father. The young Ferdinand and his party come
ashore. Aside from her father, grown old, Miranda has never
seen human beings before. When she sees them, she exclaims,
O wonder! How many goodly creatures are
there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world
That has such people in't!
What a tragedy, what an awful tragedy that such a great and
good people would have to undergo such terrible suffering.
What caused this miserable state of affairs? Many factors,
but one above all: the communists were slaves of an ideology
that claimed that life could be secured in this life. I have
analyzed this elsewhere, in the autobiography of an
American revolutionary In essence, any ideology that lacks transcendence,
that locates good and evil within this world, will be forced
to make some person or thing a god, and some persons, class,
or race a devil. Killing, mass killing, is the inevitable
result.
From the very beginning, Christians went to their deaths
rather than worship the emperor. They worshipped only one
God, a God who could not be identified with any earthly
leader save one, the one Lord Jesus Christ. And this Lord,
did not create a earthly Kingdom, although his Kingdom
profoundly affects this world. When he brought before
Pilate, he was asked if he was a king. In reply, Jesus said,
"My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants
would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jews. But now my
kingdom is from another place." (Jn. 18:36) This does not
mean that what happens in the political sphere is
irrelevant. From a Christian perspective life in this world
matters, and I will discuss that in another place. What it
does mean, however, is that the political sphere cannot
claim our ultimate loyalty. It means that the state, the
leader, the king, or the party, does not own us, our souls
and bodies.
This belief, that the highest life is found beyond this
life, that the state is not supreme, and that the individual
has rights that lie beyond the power of the state, form one
of the foundation stones of Western culture. Such concepts
lead at once to the concept of rights. It means, above all,
freedom of worship. It is no accident that Freedom of
Religion is the first right found in the Bill of Rights. The
other rights follow in its train. But the foundation of
these rights is in God, the Christian revelation of a God
that transcends the world and therefore cannot be identified
with the state. That is what impressed Chang. Not our
technological prowess, but the "the dignity of the
individual, and the incredible amount of liberty" found in
this and other Western countries.
The West, including the United States, is pagan, where pagan
means the worship of the potentials and powers of this
world. The economic system based on the satisfaction of
excessive wants, the political system based on the expansion
of national interests, the agendas promoted in our
universities, the daily operating faith of millions,
religious or otherwise, is geared to his world, the powers
of this world, to life in this world. Most amazing of all is
the collective amnesia of our intellectuals who seem
oblivious to the fact that their politically correct agenda
is little more than a rehash of ideas long ago examined,
historically tested, and discarded. Read Wild Swans
if you want to see where all this can take us. We may or may
not get there, but the foundation has already been laid, a
culture without a transcendent yet incarnate God.
Endnotes
1. Chang, Jung. Wild Swans New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1991.
2. Chang, Wild Swans, p. 261 2.
3. Chang, Wild Swans, p. 363.
4. Chang, Wild Swans, p. 496.
5. Chang, Wild Swans, p. 498.
6. Chang, Wild Swans, p. 495.
7. Chang, Wild Swans, p. 479.
8. Chang, Wild Swans, pp. 471 2.
The Rev. Robert J. Sanders, Ph.D.
February, 2002home