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, 2002