In the evening of September 27, I was escorted by a Red Guard and a rebel to the school building where I had been in July. A large group of people were already there waiting for us. This time, I was the target of the criticism. There were not only the Red Guards and rebels who had come to my house, but also the old employees of Asia and the head of their study class who had questioned me in July. The guy in dark glasses presided over the meeting.
The room was arranged differently than in the past, with chairs arranged in a circle instead of facing the podium. I was ordered to stand in the middle, with a Red Guard standing on each side. The guy with the dark lenses was really good at talking, and he was very eloquent and eloquent. He started with the Opium War, describing in great detail how the British Navy had invaded China and shelled its shores. He made a lot of mistakes, but his purpose was only to provoke the masses to hate me. As if I alone should be held responsible for what the British did to China a hundred years ago, he made it sound as if I had led the British navy into the Pearl River. Then he explained that Asean was an international company, with branches all over the world. He said that Lenin had pointed out that such companies were the greatest enemies of socialism. He cautioned that from ancient times, Asean had sent salesmen to the Chinese countryside under the pretext of selling kerosene, thus gathering information for imperialism. He also cited a series of figures to prove the huge secret profits the company made in its trade with China, which he called “the economic exploitation of the Chinese people”. He also said that “British imperialism is more cunning than American imperialism. The U.S. government was openly opposed to the People’s Government of China and protected the Kuomintang in Taiwan. Britain, on the other hand, recognized the People’s Government diplomatically, but voted with the United States at the United Nations against the People’s Republic of China joining the UN.
Then the subject changed and my family origins were mentioned. He told the crowd in attendance that I was the descendant of a large landowner. My family once owned ten thousand hectares of fertile land. He did not call my grandfather a patriot, as the city council liaison did, but said that my grandfather was a decadent and decadent landlord and a peddler of feudalism. Because he had appreciated several emperors in the history books he had written. He also said that in the documents he kept, there was conclusive evidence that he was the founder and shareholder of the Hanyeping General Company, including the Anyuan coal mine; where it happened that our great leader Chairman Mao personally organized and led the workers in their struggle against the capitalists. This is proof enough of my grandfather’s crime of going against Mao Zedong. In fact they did not belong to the same era. Later he pointed out that my father was a senior official of the Beiyang government and had lived in Japan for many years in his youth. He asked the crowd in attendance to recall the Japanese invasion of China and the eight-year war of resistance that killed 10 million innocent Chinese people. He didn’t let it slip that my father had gone to Japan in the early twentieth century, which was well before the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, but instead he wanted to give the impression as if my father had gone to live in Japan for many years despite the national hatred of the Japanese invasion of China. Then he pointed his finger at me and said that I had gone to England at the age of twenty and had been trained at a British university to be a “loyal lapdog of imperialism. He referred to my late husband as “a remnant of the decadent Kuomintang rule”. He claimed that thanks to his early death, he could escape the criticism of the rebels.
The crowd raised their arms and chanted slogans to show their resonance and support for his speech. In addition to the cultural revolution, they added many offensive slogans against me, denouncing me as a secret agent, collaborating with the imperialists against China, and exposing me as a “lackey” of the British.
After he finished his speech, the Red Guard who had led the first raid on my house, vociferously denounced my “extravagant” lifestyle at home in front of a loudspeaker. Another Red Guard also denounced me for fighting with them to protect the “Four Olds” and sabotaging their revolutionary actions. They also criticized me for being arrogant and stubborn, and accused me of keeping animals in the house to harm the rebels.
Later, they ordered the old staff of Asia to come up to the stage to expose in order to provide incriminating evidence. I saw them all looking cowardly and trembling with fear. I don’t know if everyone in their study class has passed the test. The people who went up to expose me looked pale, and their hands holding the speeches could not stop sifting and shaking. Their eyes did not dare to look at me. In fact, they did not expose me for anything substantial, but only accused me of having close relations with foreigners living in Shanghai. In any case, everything had been unified in advance, that is, a net of “bold suspicion” had been set up. The worker who ran the elevator in the company building denounced me, saying that whenever I entered and left the elevator, the British manager always let me walk in front of him and followed me. The car driver also testified that the foreign manager always let me go first in the car when getting in and out of the car. This was probably their way of proving that I was “highly valued by the British imperialists”. Because a senior cadre in Communist China would never dream of letting a female assistant get into a car or elevator before him.
A staff member also suggested that no one but the manager and I should be allowed in the file room next door to the manager’s office. Another employee, who had worked for the company for many years, said that in the office there were often maps of the geological structure of the various regions of China, with the areas where oil might be hidden marked on them. Because oil was the treasure of the imperialists. Another one read out from the reports he had written from his branch office in Asia from 1946 to 1949, during the war between the Communists and the Kuomintang, about the withdrawal of troops from both sides. They used this to refute the argument that my company was only interested in doing business.
My husband, who is no longer alive, did not escape the harsh criticism. They emphasized that my husband and I always took the side of Asean whenever the interests of Asean and the interests of the country were at odds. All these are purely false arguments and exaggerated facts that do not distinguish between right and wrong, and they are used to confuse the ignorant, gullible and uneducated masses.
The night had fallen, but the criticism session continued. My tragedy was so wonderful that not a single Red Guard or rebel left the meeting in the middle of the whole process, and I think most of them were horrified to believe that I was indeed an international spy who had been uncovered. Others merely pretended to believe their revelations. I could see those who led this farce, at the moment, leisurely enjoying their masterpiece.
It was not until years later that I learned that the date for the congress had been repeatedly postponed and changed several times. The reason is that they wanted my daughter to participate in the denunciation and criticism of me, but she was unwilling to do so, no matter how much pressure she was under. Later, when the National Day was approaching, the extreme leftists ordered the Shanghai rebels to make achievements to welcome the National Day and celebrate the victory of the Cultural Revolution, and the team in charge of my case decided to hold this criticism meeting without my daughter in order to respond to this call.
Recent Comments