Message from China: India must guard its freedom fiercely

Chinese author Anchee Min tells the fascinating story of how she became a writer. Apparently, in China during the Cultural Revolution, everyone had to be very careful about their newspapers— no text could be printed on the back of photographs of Chairman Mao Zedong. So once when her mother had run out of toilet paper she used a piece of newsprint to wipe herself, a piece that had a photograph of Mao. "That's how I became a writer —I had to write a letter to defend my mother," recounted Min, to the hushed audience at the early afternoon session on "Cultural Revolutions" on Sunday at the Zee Jaipur Literature Festival (ZeeJLF).

Besides Min, who now lives in the US and has written two memoirs of her growing up years during the Revolution, there were two other Chinese-origin writers who grew up during the Revolution and whose books are banned in the country. One, Jung Chang, is the author of memoirs, a biography of Mao and another of Empress Dowager Cixi, who ruled China during the turn of the 20th century and ushered in the first waves of modernity. The other, Ma Jian, is Hong Kong-based and a vocal critic of the Chinese Communist Party.

The repression and violence that Mao unleashed in the name of the Cultural Revolution, which led to the death of 40 million people, are well known. Even so, the particularities narrated by the three authors of memories of that period brought home the horrors of the atrocities to the ZeeJLF audience.

"It wasn't just what Mao did. The Cultural Revolution was the vehicle that brought out the dark side of humanity, the worst in all of us," remembers Min. "[It enabled] our neighbour to come down and say you have two toilets, give us one and then report us to the party as anti-Mao." The resulting incarceration and harassment of her parents resulted in them dying early. The Communist Party knew that if you don't give people toilets, private space, they wouldn't last for long. 'Long Live Chairman Mao', I learnt to write it before I could even write my name," she says.

"For those 10 years [1966-76], the number of books of general interest that were published could be counted on the fingers of two hands. And yet Mao loved books, so much so that he had a giant bed made, half piled high with books so that he could read one, then roll over and read another. He had two factories constructed to print books, but only five copies were made of each book," recounts Chang.

"The more books you read, the more stupid you become, Mao said," she added. She recalled how, after her father, who too had been a member of the Communist party, had opposed Mao and her mother had refused to criticise him, she was taken to denunciation meetings where her arm would be twisted behind her back, her head shoved down, kicked and beaten.

Ma Jian, one of whose books is on the Tiananmen Square protests and their brutal repression, says that the Cultural Revolution destroyed China's traditional culture. "The morals of the Chinese people have halted at Tiananmen," he said, sounding a note of caution — the greed set off by the current prosperity and the lack of cultural moorings would increase "Chinese corruption to such high levels that it would surpass Indian corruption".
All three were immensely appreciative of India's democracy, given that China's communist regime was still repressive of personal freedoms, and had blocked access to books, websites, films, artists, etc that were critical of it or didn't fit in with its line. "I like India and the freedom of speech here. But it is something that you must guard fiercely," Jian warned.