In 1957, when I was a student of the history department of Peking University, a big poster questioning the university’s committee was posted on the east wall of the university’s dining hall on the morning of May 19, raising a long-suppressed wave of democratic anger among the university’s teachers and students. I was a participant and penciler of this large-character poster. But at that time, I was completely unconscious of my involvement.
The release of the big-character poster
In the morning of that day, I was reading a book in the dormitory of the 30th fast when I heard a group of students, including class president Zhang Lanxin and Zhang Xueren, come up from downstairs with loud discussions. They were talking about who the delegates of our school were to the Third National Congress of the Youth League being held in Beijing, yet none of them knew who it was. They had just visited the departmental branch and the school league committee, and the people who received them were not sure who it was either. For this reason, everyone was very emotional. Zhang Lansing said loudly, “Brush him a big word poster!” The people immediately agreed.
At this point, someone suggested that I execute the pen because my brush writing was considered to be good. Sun Miao, the party secretary of the class, was also present, and he was an older transfer student. It was the time when the party called on everyone to “sound off”, so Sun said he could write, and I wrote on a large piece of pink paper as everyone said one thing.
“We are watching with excitement the convening of the three major groups. We have the following questions for the school committee to answer: First, who is the representative of our school? Second, how was he elected? Third, where can we reflect our opinions to?” It was signed “A group of members and youth of the second year class of the second year of the History Department.
Everyone took this large-character poster to the large dining hall, and I followed. Chen Hongsheng, a non-member from a poor peasant background, volunteered to post it, and many passers-by stopped to look at it for a while. It was nearly noon when I returned home to Zhongguancun, and when I returned to school after dinner, I found the entire Yan Yuan Garden abuzz with excitement.
The walls and newspaper columns, centered on the dining hall, were covered with large-character posters of various colors, among which “My Poisonous Weed” by Tan Tianrong, a physics student, was the most striking, followed by “Hu Feng is not a counter-revolution” by Liu Qidi and “It’s Time” by Zhang Yuanxun and Shen Zeyi, both Chinese students. The two of them also gave a speech that night, reciting the poem.
The content of the large-character posters during this period included demands for the Party Committee to withdraw from the school and for professors to rule the school, for the publication or abolition of personal records, and for the exposure of dark and unjust matters, etc. Long satirical pieces such as “A Q” and “The History of Confucius” were published one after another. The area around the dining hall became an unprecedented democratic square, with students stating and debating fiercely. This democratic enclave, which later became almost a symbol of PKU’s democratic tradition, continued until 1989.
On the evening of May 19, the university held its regular lecture in the Great Dining Hall, where Yu Guangyuan, a famous scholar, came to give a presentation. While he was speaking, a number of students handed him notes, mostly asking him what he thought of the large-character posters posted by the university that day. He was unprepared at the time and answered few and cautiously.
Chen Hong died in prison after falling ill
There were three classes in my year, two history classes and one archaeology class, each with more than 30 students. After the “anti-rightist” movement began, each class had three “rightist” students. In my class, Zhang Xueren (an active participant in the first large-character poster), Lei Guanghan, and Chen Hongsheng were all classified as “rightists,” and Chen was branded as a “current counterrevolutionary” because he found many anti-Party remarks in his own diary, even though he had never He was always very introverted. He was always very introverted, and I had little contact with him in general. He was from rural Jiangsu, physically strong, married with a son before he enrolled in school, and was arrested for hitting someone during a conversation with the class party secretary, and later died in prison.
All three of them were later rehabilitated, and Chen’s surviving son, the school, was given a living allowance. I was also criticized and given a warning during the whole group movement the following year. In about 1978, the personnel department of the Kunming Institute of Geophysics, where I worked, informed me that the Peking University Youth League Committee had decided to revoke the disciplinary action given to me in that year, and withdrew some false materials from my file, and only gave me a list of the names of the revoked materials and a notice of cancellation of the disciplinary action, remembering that it was written on it that the young man had said some “excessive words “, do not need to count a class of text.
Party Secretary Jiang Longji committed suicide several years later
Jiang Longji, the Party Secretary of Peking University at that time, was said to be not active enough during the “anti-rightist” and “rightist” period, and there were 716 “rightists” in Peking University. It seems that the secretary did not fully understand and implement the intention of the central government, and was criticized by some leaders of the central government. Soon after the end of the “Anti-Rightist” period, he was relegated to Lanzhou University as the president.
In July 1959, on the eve of returning to Peking University after the ethnic survey in Gansu, my classmates and I went to Lanzhou University to visit President Jiang. He received us at his home. He did not say much and asked each of us to leave our names in his notebook. He committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution.
Lei Guanghan left for other countries
Lei Guanghan, who was classified as a “rightist” in the same class, had a legendary and typical encounter during the “anti-rightist” and the Cultural Revolution. Lei was a native of the Tujia family in Shimen, Hunan Province, and his family worked as farmers. He was short, chubby, and often had a smile on his face. In 1957, during the “sounding and releasing” period, he wrote a small-character poster and posted it in front of the Literature and History Building. The poster was about the Russian occupation of many territories in the northeast and northwest of China during the imperialist era, but the Soviet authorities did not return the large tracts of land in China, including the “Jiangdong 64 Tuns” east of the Heilongjiang River, which had been occupied by the unequal treaties signed between Russia and China in the past.
Yan Fu, a member of my class, was kindly criticized for this, and he tore down the small-character poster. During the “Anti-Rightist” period, all units were assigned to the “Right”, and Lei Guanghan became a “Rightist” by virtue of his origin as a rich peasant and his opposition to the Soviet Union. In those years, there was an important criterion for the “right” classification, namely, the so-called “anti-communist, anti-Soviet and anti-people”. Many of his classmates felt aggrieved for him but could not say anything.
After graduating from university in June 1960, he was assigned to teach at Huocheng County High School in Khorgos, a Sino-Soviet port in Yili, Xinjiang, which is only 7 kilometers from the border. During that time, he published some articles on the history and people of Xinjiang in the column “Tianshan Night Talk” in the Yili Daily. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Xinjiang’s Tianshan Night Talk was linked to Beijing’s Yanshan Night Talk, and Lei Guanghan was branded as a “gangster” and a target of dictatorship. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, he was once taken to the Nantaizi coal mine near Yining City to dig coal, and then transferred to the foot of Tianshan Mountain to repair aqueducts.
During the Red Guards’ mass rebellion, he went to Beijing and found his classmate Shen Yuan, and they talked until late at night, worrying about the troubled Cultural Revolution. Shen Yuan helped him with 20 yuan and returned home to Hunan, where his old father was sick in bed after being criticized. It was difficult to stay in his hometown for a long time, so Lei had to go back to Xinjiang, but he found that his fiancée had run away with someone else in order to draw a clear line with him, so he really had nowhere to go.
On April 29, 1968, Lin Zhao, a Chinese student at Peking University, and Shen Yuan, a student in the same department at the same university, were shot for “counter-revolutionary crimes” on April 18, 1970, when the country was “fighting against three revolts” and people were being shot everywhere, spreading the Red Terror across the country. At this time, Wang Shouhua, a fellow student of Peking University in Urumqi who was engaged in archaeology, asked someone to send a note to Lei Guanghan asking him to “flee quickly” through one of Lei’s students, asking him to flee quickly.
As a “gangster”, he swam across the icy Ili River in late April 1970 and fled across the border to Soviet Kazakhstan, where Soviet border guards arrested him for illegally crossing the border. During the interrogation by the Soviet secret service KGB, he only said that he was a teacher who had fled from the Cultural Revolution and had not brought any identity documents with him in his haste. But he remembered that when he was a student at Peking University, a Soviet student named Liu Kov (Kliukov, who later served as the director of the Institute of Ethnology of the Soviet Academy of Sciences) was a graduate student at Peking University, studying ancient Chinese history, and at that time Lei Guanghan had contact with Liu, and he suggested that Liu could prove that he was a student at Peking University.
Knowing that he was not a spy infiltrated by the Chinese Communist Party, the KGB used various means of solicitation, seduction and threats to get him to cooperate with the KGB against China, but he steadfastly refused. He repeatedly affirmed that he was “against the Cultural Revolution and never against China”. He refused to work for the then anti-China Oriental Institute and the Moscow Publishing House, to participate in anti-China films and to write for anti-China radio stations, and to become a “stateless person” who was discriminated against.
He was agreed to stay in a town in Kazakhstan near the border with Xinjiang. To make ends meet, he worked as a street vendor and a mechanic in a machine shop. His daily life was constantly monitored by the KGB, with agents harassing him and restricting his movements, yet he steadfastly refused to cooperate with the KGB and would never do anything wrong to the people of his country.
He was disgusted by the corruption of the local officials at that time, and especially by the despicable methods of the ubiquitous Soviet agents. He believed that living abroad in the Soviet Union was only a stopgap measure, and always planned to flee again to live overseas where Chinese lived. After being interrogated and imprisoned for seven months on charges of being a “nationalist”, he was exiled to an international prison farm in South Siberia to serve hard labor.
During the decade of the Cultural Revolution, relations between China and the Soviet Union broke down completely, at which time there were media reports in Beijing that Soviet agents had been spotted operating on a certain bridge on the outskirts of Beijing. One day, someone came to the home of Lei’s classmate Chen Gaohua (who was the director of the Institute of History at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in the late 1980s) and informed him that Lei Guanghan was a “Soviet agent” and that Lei should report immediately if he arrived.
As Chen told me, the authorities gave such a greeting to all his classmates in Beijing, but later lifted the decision for them, and such a serious and grave matter was described as a “misunderstanding.
I did not know the truth about this matter until I saw an article entitled “The secret dispatch of Soviet spies to the Northeast” in the June 2, 2014 issue of the Digest Weekly, which was reprinted in the Jinan Daily. In those years, when China and the Soviet Union were at war, in Xibahe, a suburb of Beijing, China’s public security authorities captured a group of Soviet diplomats engaged in espionage activities, and also learned that a Chinese who had defected from Xinjiang to the Soviet Union was involved in its intelligence activities, and the Chinese authorities immediately suspected Lei Guanghan, and soon identified this person as Li Hongshu.
In 1972 Li was sent to China again to gather intelligence in the northeast and was captured by Chinese border guards, who found that he had an intelligence transmitter with him and was in secret contact with Soviet embassy personnel. After a sophisticated deployment, the secretary of the Soviet Embassy who came to meet with Li was caught on the spot, and the stolen goods were captured, which lifted Lei’s arrest and prevented another unjust case.
In the 1980s, Lei married a local Chinese painter and started a family, and since the birth of his daughter, his troubled heart settled down. After the reform and opening up of the country, the authorities restored his Chinese nationality. During that time Lei Guanghan twice returned to China to visit his family, and now he lives in the Republic of Kazakhstan in the city of Taraz on a pension.
In 2011, Lei wrote his 300,000-word book “Escape from the Soviet Union: The Story of an Anti-Soviet Activist’s Family”, which recounts the whole process of his encounters. This autobiographical account vividly describes the living conditions and the various characters and behaviors of the various ethnic groups living in the Central Asian region of the former Soviet Union, bears witness to the tumultuous years surrounding the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, and expresses the conscience and patriotic sentiments of contemporary Chinese intellectuals.
Shen Yuan’s Execution
Another memorable classmate of the same year, Shen Yuan, who was also branded a “rightist”, met an even more tragic end: in 1956, he was convicted of translating a secret report by Khrushchev from an English-language copy of the Workers’ Daily. In 1956, he was classified as a “rightist” because he translated a fragment of Khrushchev’s secret report from an English-language Worker’s Daily for his classmates to circulate.
The only contact I had with Shen Yuan was in early September 1955, when we arrived at Peking University as freshmen in the history department and were temporarily accommodated in a small dining hall, with my bed near his. At one point we talked about ethnicity, and he immediately pointed out that my understanding of ethnicity did not conform to Stalin’s four definitions of ethnicity. At that time, I felt that he had more knowledge than I did.
Later he became the secretary of the league branch of the first class. In his second year he was doing his grade work on ancient Chinese history, and he actually wrote a 20,000-word chronicle of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, which Professor Deng Guangming appreciated in class, and everyone thought he was the best student in the whole class. It is said that Shen Yuan is the nephew of the famous Shanghai film director Shen Fu, and in the early 1950s, I saw the film “Hope on Earth” directed by Shen Fu and starring Lan Ma and Shangguan Yunzhu, and I was impressed by it.
As far as I know, Shen Yuan did not make any public statements during the period of “Mingliang” and the big-character posters, but he still could not escape the fate of being classified as “right”. In those days, there were not a few people who were branded as “rightists” because of their outstanding business skills.
After Shen Yuan was classified as “rightist”, he was concentrated in the Zaitang Beida production base in the Mentougou Mountains of Beijing for labor reform, and most of those who were reformed were “rightists” of Beida. Daytime from the river bank to carry stones up the mountain to repair the reservoir, the night of the criticism meeting, often criticized for resisting. He had never been subjected to such torture and humiliation before.
One day, he stole out and walked all the way to the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau across from Tiananmen Square, identifying himself and possibly making his complaint. The Public Security Bureau took him to Peking University for processing. Shen Yuan proposed that he did not want to go back to Zaitang and asked the university to assign him to the workers to receive reformation, so he was assigned to work on the section of the railroad construction in Tangshan, Hebei.
Shen Yuan quickly adapted and got along well with the workers, teaching them literacy and telling historical stories. In 1961, his “rightist” label was removed at the request of the workers.
In 1961, he was removed from his “rightist” label on the recommendation of the workers. In that year, he suffered from hepatitis and was allowed to return to Beijing for treatment at his aunt’s home in Deng Shi Kou. He often ran to the used bookstore in Dong’an Market and the Beijing Library to look up materials and write historical articles.
In the early 1960s, after more than three years of man-made and natural disasters, the political atmosphere was relatively relaxed for a few years. In 1962, his aunt, a senior intellectual who knew some of the top leaders, recommended Shen Yuan to Li Shu, the director of the Institute of Modern Chinese History, through Liu Guosheng, then deputy director of the Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences.
Lai published Shen Yuan’s article “A Study of the Book of Urgent Inquiry” in his editor-in-chief, Historical Studies, No. 3, 1962. In that article, Shen Yuan argued that the Han Dynasty’s children’s textbook “The Book of Urgent Inquiry” was “a mirror of the social life of the Han Dynasty”. He studied the social nature of the Han Dynasty from the perspective of the Han dynasty people at that time, the so-called “primary position” of anthropology, and opened up a new way of studying the nature of Han society, which was praised by the older historians.
Under the guidance of Li Shu, he wrote an article of more than 50,000 words entitled “Hong Xiuquan and the Taiping Revolution”, which was published in the first issue of “Historical Research” in 1963, and the supplement of “People’s Daily” compiled the article into two full-page articles, “On Hong Xiuquan” and “On the Taiping Revolution”, which was a rare thing in those years. When I read these two articles in Hohhot, I could not believe that he had written them.
After the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, the rebels in the Institute criticized Li Shu for ganging up and reusing the “rightists”. On September 1, 1968, Shen Yuan used shoe polish to disguise himself as a black man and attempted to enter the embassy of an African country in China, asking for political asylum and then trying to leave China, but he was discovered by our guards and immediately arrested and imprisoned.
On April 18, 1970, at a public event in Beijing, he was declared to be “guilty of active counter-revolutionary treason” and immediately shot. According to an article written later by Guo Luoji, a member of his class, Shen Yuan appeared to be very calm at the time of his execution. He was only 32 years old when he was shot! I’m sorry for the death of a young talent! I would like to pay tribute to him with two lines from an early poem by Yunnan scholar Mr. Ma Yao: “The earth is uneven, the mountains are abrupt, and the sky is flooded with tears.”
In the 1980s Shen Yuan was rehabilitated. The notice of vindication from the Beijing Intermediate People’s Court says: The defendant in the original trial, Shen Yuan, was arrested on September 1, 1968 for the crime of active counter-revolutionary treason and sentenced to death on April 18, 1970, which was immediately executed. After re-examination by this Court, it is clear that the original sentence of death penalty for the crime of counter-revolution is wrong and should be corrected. Accordingly, the verdict is as follows: First, the verdict of April 18, 1970 …… is revoked. Second, Comrade Shen Yuan was acquitted.
Poor Shen Yuan’s 80-year-old mother after a lot of hard work to fight for a paper acquittal, cried out: “I do not want paper, I want people! I want a living human being!” The Party Committee of Peking University made a decision to “correct” Shen Yuan, holding that the original classification as a rightist was a misclassification and revoking his expulsion from the regiment, reeducation through labor, and expulsion from school. The authorities came to the Institute of Modern History to announce this in public. This is really “the wronged soul who died, heaven and earth can see!
Before his death, Li Shu said, “If there are 10 Shen Yuan in the Institute of Modern History, the face of the Institute will be fundamentally changed.” Some researchers can not write a decent article for many years. He also said that one of the books of the Han Dynasty read by Shen Yuan was full of annotations in small letters, which were valuable and could be used to make up for the annotations of his predecessors. After his death, he left a packet of manuscripts, which was taken away by a personnel director or administrative staff of the Institute of Modern History, and the whereabouts are unknown to date.
Shen Yuan’s eldest brother, Shen Tsuen, and sister, Shen Bei, fought for the public publication of Shen Yuan’s posthumous manuscript, “Supplementary Notes on the Book of Han,” for several years and hundreds of thousands of yuan, and finally published by the Hangzhou Xiling Press.
Yang Bingkong teaches after imprisonment
The same year archaeology classmate of the encounter must also be mentioned. His name is Yang Bingkong, a native of Nanyang, Henan Province, who likes to play the Peking Opera, nicknamed “Yang Da Sister”. During his release, he attacked Lu Xuzhang, a non-party member, with an anonymous letter, saying that he had actively worked his way up to a prominent government position and warning him to beware of his own life. This was obviously a very childish approach.
The threatening letter actually quickly fell into the hands of the highest levels of the authorities. The People’s Daily published an editorial of great weight, “This is Why,” on the first page of June 8, 1957, saying that the “rightists” were already sharpening their knives to kill the Party. This was the “June 8 editorial”, a clear signal from the Party Central Committee to counter the rampant attack of the “rightists” on the Party, and from then on the “anti-rightist” struggle was launched nationwide.
During this period, Yang Bingkong joined the movement with everyone else, and it was not until the eve of his graduation in the early summer of 1960 that he was arrested for his anonymous letter. He was arrested at night when all his classmates were back in their dormitories, and when the lights went out at 10:30 p.m., someone called Yang Bingkong outside his dormitory and asked him to come out, but he was taken away by the police when he came out of his dormitory and was never heard from again.
Some years later, Yang was released, he had gone to the Museum of History, found the same class of Song Zhaolin. According to Song, he told me that Yang Bingkong had a full head of white hair and did not talk about the events of that year, nor did he mention his conclusions and rehabilitations. I only know that after he was imprisoned, he could read books and newspapers and learned to be a carpenter, except for not being able to go out and communicate with the outside world.
After he returned to his hometown of Nanyang, he once operated a furniture-making business to make ends meet. In recent years, I learned that Yang was transferred to teach at the Nanyang Normal School, where he retired, because he had not caused any “trouble” for the authorities in the area.
There has never been an accurate figure of how many “rightists” were classified during the 1957-1958 “Anti-Rightist” campaign, and officials have been tight-lipped so far. The number usually used in domestic publications is 500,000, but many believe it was actually much larger. It is a common characteristic of intellectuals that most of them have a conscience and a sense of justice in the face of social rights and wrongs. Because knowledge gives them strength and faith. Of course, there are also some intellectuals with weak souls and nasty hearts, who take pleasure in harming others and benefiting themselves. Such people are superfluous and harmful to the country and society.
Yanhuang Chunqiu, No. 8, 2015
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