John Pomfret Interview (2007): Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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As you go back into the past history of your fellow students and tell their stories, some of the stories are quite harsh. I must say that your book captures the atrocities, the horrible things that were done to people during the Cultural Revolution that you can read about [elsewhere] in a general way; but when you hear it through the words of one person's story it's quite something. Did you know of these stories before you came to write the book? Were you hearing these stories back when you were a student?
Back when I was a student, I'd heard similar stories to what these people had gone through. Several characters of the book, I discovered their stories later on because I interviewed so many of my classmates at such length that newer stories came out, or newer characters came out that I didn't think would be prominent characters. These people surfaced as more prominent in the reporting of the book. But yes, I was aware of the horror. At that time actually, we were reading in samizdat form a lot of what they called the "scar literature," the shang han wenxue which was being published then, which delved into these types of atrocities with not as much of a pointed political edge that my book does (because that would have been against the rules), but nonetheless there was a lot of discussion about the horrors of the Cultural Revolution in the early years of the 1980s, a lot. A lot more than there is now actually, which is fascinating.
Before we talk about what happened to these people as they rode the wave of China's development and the opening up of capitalist opportunities, as you gathered these stories what themes stood out? Or what particular cases of what these fellow students had gone through before you met them?
It's that you looked at them when you walked into the dorm room, and in addition to being crowded they had a studiousness that was equivalent to some of the harder working universities in America. And so, on the surface they were very nerdy, but when you scratched that nerdiness it revealed this pedestrian quality of the horror that they dealt with on a daily basis. That contradiction between this bookishness and this real violence that they had to deal with growing up, to me, was something that was really unusual and profoundly unnerving, because they could -- I mean, these were people whose -- in one case, one of my classmates, his parents were murdered during the Cultural Revolution. That guy never talked about it to any of his classmates, only a little. In fact, in many cases he ended up sharing more with me than he did with any of his classmates because I kept on asking about it with him. But this guy was completely and totally self-contained, and to look at him you'd have no idea obviously that anything had happened to him, and to watch how he acted. But at the same time, under that bookish exterior there was real tragedy and real pain.
So, was it compartmentalization that you witnessed, as opposed to very angry people who would suddenly have a burst of anger over some [offense]?
Well, it's funny. I mean, people make this distinction between the Russians and the Chinese. They say the Russians who lived under Stalin were angry, whereas the Chinese who lived under Mao basically became numb. I don't know if that's particularly true, but I can see how that distinction has been made. It's a really interesting one to think out a bit. It's a distinction that's been made and I find it's a very fascinating one. The Chinese say, "Look, when Deng Xiaoping came he gave us the opportunity to forget, and what we wanted more than anything else to do was to forget and to build something new with our lives." And so, many of the people actively set about forgetting the past, and because [Chinese] society didn't really allow a deep sense of closure on this issue, on no truth commissions, etc., families then took the easy way out and they didn't talk about what happened within the family, neighborhoods obviously, institutions didn't look at what happened within institutions. And so, with the society and the government and the Party state setting the tone of, "You can criticize this a little bit but not too much," I think a lot of people took their cues from that and said, "Let's just move forward and ultimately make as much money as we can."
Is there some sense that you have of the interplay between the Party and what it had done, and the culture and how it allowed it to happen, and how it then recovered from what had happened and helped navigate the change in the Party's position in its own past?
Yes, you can see that in some ways by looking at some of the factors that contributed to the economic reforms. In the West it's very easy to say that Deng Xiaoping came in and instituted these reforms, and then the people followed him, and then China became a much wealthier society. But the reality was that Deng Xiaoping came into power when in large parts of the countryside the Party was about to lose control. Peasants were refusing to rejoin the communes because they knew the communes would fail them should there be a famine. Local Party secretaries, in order to win the support of the peasantry, had to begin this experiment with new forms of ownership, allowing peasants to have private plots, etc.
A lot of the economic reforms were not so much brought down from above is they were experiments that started from below that the folks on the top knew they had to accept, because they had no other way to re ignite China's economic growth. And that is also part of the process of how the society began to in some ways not necessarily to heal itself but to balm its wounds, by allowing artists and writers to begin to write about these "scar literature" issues, so they could explore some of the wounds of the Cultural Revolution. But only to a certain extent, because once you got into an argument that would criticize the nature of the Communist system, that was going to be censored completely. As long as you could sort of balm your wounds a bit and then move forward, that would be allowed. That type of trade-off, of "We'll let you speak a little bit but not too much," was something that the people generally accepted because once people started speaking too much, as in the case of the Democracy Wall movement, they were thrown into jail.
You just touched on some of the individual case stories that you tell of people having to denounce their own parents or grandparents, watching their deaths, watching their beatings, and so on -- really traumatic in a raw, visceral sense. So this moment in time when you're meeting these people is a tipping point for confronting their past, the country's past, and then facing the new openings that are coming.
I don't know if you can say they were confronting the past so much. Everything that the government did, and everything they were told to do in class, was to ignore the past and to move forward. The expression that was popular then was "wan shen kan," which means "look to the future," but it also means "show me the money," basically. It's one of these interesting polyphenomes in Chinese in which the same expression means different things. And that's what the society was encouraging them to do. Personally there were people who tried to confront their past then, but the general push of the Party state was, "Don't look back because if you do look back then you'll have to question why we're still in control." And the Party state didn't want anyone to do that, so [people] were encouraged to look forward and to get their education on a roll and to get a good job and to make money.
What was your sense at the time of the way things were opening up and the response you were seeing? It must have been an exciting time. I think back and the early sixties were a time -- very different situations and not comparable in some sense. But then on the other hand, there must have been excitement in the air.
Yes, the place had been under such a repressive regime for so long that yes, when the Gang of Four fell, and into the mid-eighties, there was definitely that sense of possibility. There were occasional spasmodic leftist -- well, conservative: it's very interesting because leftist and conservative mean the same thing -- backlashes which would say no long hair among boys on college campuses, no dances, no more poetry contests, etc. That would happen for maybe three or four months and then there'd be a liberal push that said, okay, you can grow your hair longer, you can go to dances, you can have a foreign boyfriend, and then there'd be another conservative push. As the factions in Beijing battled, the manifestation of their fights would pop up at university campuses with these big red wall posters we'd see every so often that were completely contradictory from one month to the next.
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