This is the only old photo of the rightist Cai Cuo that his family kept after his death at the Qinghe Labor Reform Farm in Beijing in 1960. This photo was taken in the spring of 1953 when Cai Cuo (first from the left in the front row) was touring the Thirteen Tombs with his colleagues from the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications.
In 2002, I found in the Beijing Panjiayuan yard sale the “Survey of the Deaths of Rightists” compiled by the Beijing Public Security Bureau in 1963, which contained the files of ninety-four dead rightists in Beijing, among whom Cai Cuo was listed. The photos are indispensable for the restoration of these deceased rightists’ life and deeds, but the results are often disappointing. Because their families lived in fear from the time they were branded as rightists, they were “tied up” in almost every political movement, and fear overcame family ties, so destroying anything that might cause trouble (such as photographs) became a desperate choice.
Castor Zhang, a translator who was Liang Shuming’s English secretary during the war, was also included in the questionnaire. After he was labeled a rightist, his wife Jing Meiying tore up all the photos of her husband, even the wedding photo. So much so that their children, Zhang Yunxin and Zhang Xinmei, grew up without knowing what their father looked like before he died. It was only in recent years that Zhang Yunxin found a photo of Castor Zhang with Liang Shuming from Liang Peikuan, Liang Shuming’s son. Cai Cai’s family told me that this photo was also a relic of Qin’s fire. Before Cai Cai was sentenced to rightist status, he worked as a section clerk in the Accounting Department of the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications. In his early years, he studied painting at the Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts and enjoyed photography, leaving behind many photographs.
Cai Cuo’s history is roughly as follows: born in 19O9, his ancestral hometown was Lu Qi Bang, Anting, Kunshan, Jiangsu. His father, Cai Juan, was a local squire who ran a brick and tile factory. In the 1930s, Cai Cai studied in the mathematics department of Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts and Nanjing Central University. Later, he joined the Shanghai Telecommunication Bureau. After the war began, he was evacuated to Chongqing and became the head of the accounting section of the Chuan-Tibet-Kang Telecommunications Administration of the Ministry of Communications and the deputy general manager of the Chuanxi Logging Company. During this period, he met Xue Chonglun, who was studying in Chengdu, and got married. At the end of the war, Cai Cuo went to Qingdao Telecommunications Bureau as the head of the accounting section. In 1950, he was transferred to the Accounting Department of the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications as a section officer. In 1951, he edited the first edition of the Postal and Telecommunications Accounting Law of the People’s Republic of China. In 1957, he was branded as a rightist, dismissed from public service, and sent to a labor camp for reeducation. On December 21, 1960, Cai Cuo died of starvation at the age of fifty-one. Before his death, Cai Cai had three sons with Xue Chonglun: Cai Jian, Cai Ju, and Cai Rui.
Cai Cai’s “problems” were mainly caused by the “Hungry Labor Movement” on the eve of the liberation and the “Mingliang Rectification” on the eve of the anti-rightist movement. In October 1948, the Kuomintang, in a situation of internal and external difficulties, issued the “Regulations on Punishment of Crimes against the State during the Period of Conflict”, which strictly prohibited workers from striking and neglecting work, and punished those who violated them severely. At that time, the currency was devalued, prices were soaring, and public discontent was boiling over. In order to win the hearts of the people, the underground party of the Communist Party of China launched the “Hungry Labor Movement” in Shanghai, Beiping, Qingdao and other places.
According to the investigation form, Cai Cuo “sabotaged the worker starvation campaign during his pseudo-job, and raised the wages of all employees of the Bureau by 47% at the beginning of liberation, causing great losses to the state property.” According to the recollection of Lu Jingren, who also worked in the Qingdao Telecom Bureau and knew Cai Cuo, the starvation campaign of the Qingdao Telecom Bureau took place at the end of 1948 on the grounds that prices had risen and the workers were unable to work because they could not get enough to eat and demanded better pay in kind in the form of coal, vegetables and food. The participants of the Hungry Workers Movement went to work as usual and kept their posts, but did not work. After the negotiation between the staff representatives and the bureau leaders, the Hungry Labor Movement ended in about two days with the director Chen Cuyi agreeing to the staff’s demands. According to Mr. Lu, even if there was a need for sabotage, it was not Mr. Cai’s turn to do so, because he was only the head of the accounting section of the Qingdao Telecom Bureau at that time, and was only an executor. If he had really committed such a crime, he would have been dealt with during the anti-rebellion and purge campaigns between 1950 and 1951. Cai Jian, Cai Chua’s oldest son, recalled that his father also supported the distribution of wages in kind during the Hungry Workers Movement and knew that several people in the unit were Communists, but never told anyone about it.
After the liberation, workers’ wages in kind became wages in salary, and the “high wages” of Qingdao’s post and telecommunications system increased the economic pressure of the new regime and the wage gap between industries. The initial purpose of initiating the Hungry Labor Movement and the embarrassing result caused Cai Cuo to fall into a paradoxical circle, whether he supported or opposed the Hungry Labor Movement, he could not escape the guilt. Chen Cuyi and other leaders of the Bureau had already escaped, so someone had to be arrested to take the blame, and Cai Cuo became a suitable candidate. As to whether there is conclusive evidence and whether the conclusion is in line with the facts and logical reasoning is not important, this “unwarranted” “unspoken rule” in the political ecology is probably the place where Cai Cuo feels extremely confused and painful. According to Cai Jian’s recollection, during the “Three Anti’s and Five Anti’s”, his father was desperately trying to write materials at night while smoking. My mother sometimes advised him, “Stop writing, what’s the use of writing so much? Repeatedly, it’s just the same words, and people don’t believe me. My father said he couldn’t write, he couldn’t meet the requirements of the leaders.
In 1956, when the Rectification Movement was launched, Cai Cuo was once again involved in the political whirlwind. Encouraged by the atmosphere of the sounding and releasing, he drew three cartoons with the title “Party Educator” to express his views. The first one depicts a fierce lion sitting on a rocky cliff surrounded by a group of bunnies listening with ears pricked; the second one depicts a lion wearing a cotton cadre hat, sitting on the front of a desk, holding a large seal about to be stamped. The third drawing shows a man in a cadre suit with a green face and fangs and a big belly and fat ears gesticulating, with a dark background. These three cartoons, but is a satire of the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications Accounting Division of individual leaders of pride, self-righteousness and domineering style. But the “questionnaire” will be “slander the party as a tyrant ruling the people”, saying “the people are ruled by the oppressed bunnies.” The Questionnaire also recorded that “when the newspapers criticized Chu Anping’s reactionary remarks, he wrote a large-character poster defending Chu under the pretext that ‘criticizing the Party is not overthrowing the Party’. He slandered the anti-right struggle as a restriction on people’s freedom of speech and drew a cartoon of ‘flowers and shadows moving across the wall, suspecting that the enemy was coming’, slandering the Party’s anti-right struggle as catching wind and making a fuss.” Today, these criticisms are only factual truths, but the five-member group leading the anti-rightist movement in the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications used them as evidence of rightist guilt, settling old scores and new ones together, dismissing Cai Cuo from his post and sending him to a labor camp, where he died of extreme hunger and exertion.
In the death notice sent to Cai Cuo’s family by the local state-run Qinghe farm in Beijing, it was written: “Cai Cuo, a member of our Yujialing sub-farm, died at 6:00 p.m. on December 21, 1960, after suffering from heart disease and old age. He left behind some articles, which he would like to collect from Yujialing Sub-Field within ten days.”
Zhao Wentao, a rightist member of the former Second Ministry of Machinery Industry who had been reeducated through labor at Yujialing Branch, recalled in his book “Injuries” that Yujialing Branch was a flat river, surrounded by fences and power grids, with guard towers at all four corners, and coming here was like entering a field of life and death. There was no hospital, no doctor, and no medicine, and prisoners who fell ill from hunger had to concentrate in the sick room and wait for death. The method of checking the sick was simple: whoever’s hips had been so thin that there was no muscle left, leaving only two femurs like corn stalks supporting a sunken wrinkled black hole of skin – the anus – was considered sick and could no longer work.
According to the Questionnaire, Cai Chua fell ill and “failed to go through the parole procedure due to ‘overseas relations'” and was eventually killed by death. Zhao Wentao told me that during the three years of hardship, at least 200 people died of starvation in Yujialing Branch, which had more than 1,000 people, and Cai Cuo was only one of them. According to the “survey sheet”, Cai Cuo was buried in the Yujialing Branch Cemetery, row six, number two. The so-called cemetery is actually a messy graveyard, six rows of No. 2 is a falsehood, buried here in the year of the dead right wing, now all have no bones.
According to Cai Cai’s third son Cai Rui’s recollection, when his father was taken away from home, he naively thought that reeducation through labor was important for education, and took away a Swiss watch and a Parker gold pen that he usually used. After his father’s death, his mother went to the farm to collect his belongings, but only brought back an empty suitcase and twelve yuan and six hexagons. When my grief-stricken mother asked the prison authorities for her belongings, she was rebuked for blackmail and had to keep quiet. Cai Rui showed me the “Certificate of Death of Revolutionary Staff” issued to his family by the Political Department of the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications on May 7, 1979, after the rightists had been rehabilitated, which read, “Comrade Cai Cuo unfortunately died of illness on December 20, 1960. It is hoped that he will turn his grief into strength and contribute to the socialist revolution and socialist construction, and this certificate is issued in addition to a pension.”
The “certificate” is full of characteristics of the times, and when read today, it has a taste of black humor.
Finalized on February 10, 2009 at Pingyaju
The 65th series of Old Photos
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