Four Is Too Small a Gang

By Thomas Griffith

Like Americans with their election campaign, the Chinese are experiencing one of those news events that get staled by going on far too long. This is the much postponed trial of the Gang of Four. To the West, the Gang of Four is one of those incredible propaganda overkills that take place whenever Communist regimes reverse course and scapegoats must be found. But a trip to China last month in a party of 34 Americans (most of them architects, and mostly from Texas) gave this visitor an appreciation of how useful such a phony campaign can be, not to the government, but to the people.

The systematic devastation wrought by the Cultural Revolution--ten years of schools and colleges closed down, intellectuals imprisoned or sent to work on farms, cultural treasures of the past destroyed, all technological progress halted was obviously too sweeping to be the work of just four people.

True, Jiang Qing, Mao's widow, makes a convincing villain: she all but destroyed the Peking Opera and the theater by permitting only dull, politically correct works. (Nowadays at theatrical performances, foreigners sometimes find themselves clapping more than the Chinese present; the guide explains that during the Cultural Revolution, when attendance was compulsory but the programs awful, the Chinese withheld applause as a form of retaliation, and are only now beginning to clap again.) Everybody knows that many of the bureaucrats who waged the Cultural Revolution still occupy high places. But the government's propaganda campaign lets writers, intellectuals and the public denounce the wrongheaded policies of their party and their government as long as they share in the pretense that it was all the dastardly work of four people.

Visitors to China thus hear a degree of candor that is surprising in a Communist country--a circumscribed but nonetheless real outburst of public opinion. Of course, the kind of people visitors come in contact with guides and professionals, not workers and peasants--suffered the most in the Cultural Revolution and have the most to fear from any revival of it.

They must feel cynical, nonetheless, when the People's Daily, the official party paper, confesses to its 6 million readers that until recently its guiding principle had been: "News is lies. No great task is ever accomplished without deceiving people." The People's Daily now proclaims, with that delicacy of language so characteristic of Communist polemics, "Falsehood in news is like rat droppings in clear soup."

The new candor in criticizing the past is better sampled in the October issue of Chinese Literature, a monthly highbrow review. In it is a critique of a new play, Winter Jasmine, which has just won a prize for the best production of the year, and is praised for its "courage in dealing with a crucial problem in China today." The action takes place just two years ago in a textile mill. The heroine's father had been "declared in the past a counterrevolutionary; her mother had been labeled as a Rightist." Yet, Bai Jie is a model worker: "Should her unfortunate background be counted against her?" The hero is a party secretary who was deposed during the Cultural Revolution and has "suffered much. His wife, for example, was beaten to death." But the female deputy secretary, "imbued with the old ways of thinking," sees to it that an incompetent gets rewarded instead of Bai Jie. The reviewer describes this as the first play where the daughter of a counterrevolutionary is so favorably portrayed. It sounds like a politically stacked soap opera, but there is the scent of truth in it. The playwright, Tsui Dezhi, a writer for 32 years, had to work in a textile mill during the Cultural Revolution. Pointing the moral, the review notes that "there are many young people in China today whose family backgrounds have counted against them in the past. Bai Jie is an encouragement to them. She is the winter jasmine of the play, the harbinger of spring."

A similar harbinger of spring was proclaimed 24 years ago when Mao briefly let a hundred flowers bloom, only to lop off the heads of flowers that bloomed too boldly. Whether Winter Jasmine is another harbinger, or an out-of-season shoot destined to wither in the next frost, a skeptical and ignorant outsider cannot judge. He can only detect, in a hostile environment that has relaxed a little, a widespread longing, and some touching, hopeful and courageous acts.

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