Reform Through Labor

The Chinese people are encouraged to express their doubts, when they have them--there's an aphorism paraphrasing Mao's thought that goes, "If you have something to say, speak up; once you have started, say it right to the end." Nonetheless, renegades don't have it easy in The People's Republic. During the Cultural Revolution of the late '60s, Teng Hsiao-ping seems to have run afoul of Chairman Mao, perhaps by criticizing the regime unconstructively--that is, by venturing beyond practical issues and raising more fundamental questions about Party ideology. Teng's momentary lapse into a counter-revolutionary attitude may even now be taken more seriously than his position as deputy prime minister would indicate.

The press and its sources were sort of taken aback when their speculation fell through and Hua Kuofeng, instead of Teng, took Chou's place. The mark on Teng's political record limits the amount of influence he can really hold. In his book, Prisoner of Mao, Jean Pasqualini recounts a conversation with the chief warden of a Chinese prison for "reform through labor" (Lao Gai) that might have some bearing on the way things have turned out for Teng Hsiao-ping. Many former inmates of this labor camp for ideological reform continued to hold jobs there, away from their families, once they had been rehabilitated for their crimes against the Chinese people. Despite their reform, the free workers didn't live much differently from the prisoners. Yet this was likely to be the happiest situation for them in the long run, the warden explained, since they knew the work; "...it is one thing for a man who has never been condemned to show dissatisfaction and another for a man who has already committed crimes. If you drop a plate on the floor...there will always be cracks no matter how carefully you glue it back together again."

Pasqualini spent seven years in several labor camps, the likes of which presumably still exist and, as the only Westerner to come out of them, he provides an unusual insight into the philosophy that pervades Chinese life and politics--although from his account it's hard to tell just where the difference between the two lies. Pasqualini's French nationality offered a vague hope that his experience as a "broken plate" would end differently from that of Chinese prisoners. This was, indeed, realized by his release halfway through his sentence, in 1964, when the French and Chinese governments officially recognized one another.

French on his father's side, Pasqualini's mother was Chinese, and he was born and educated at mission schools in Peking, "a thoroughly rotten and reactionary, bourgeois education," as he concedes, without coming across too abashedly. He speaks four languages, including Mandarin Chinese, and his work for the U.S. Army in the early '50s as a machine technician and then for its Criminal Investigation Division, led to his interrogation and imprisonment for Lao Gai during the Census of Foreigners in 1954. At the time of his arrest he was working as a cultural attache for a Western embassy (unnamed), reporting on rationing measures, worker's gossip, and so on. In this last position his prying, even if routine, rankled the new government and, while his function in the CID wasn't especially incriminating, he knew of and had gone along with activities of which the Communists disapproved.

Pasqualini notes that some Sinologists shrug off the very idea of labor camps, while others have arrived at an extreme estimate of 20 million detainees. He cites a concession often made by party propagandists that perhaps five per cent of the population is "being forced to build socialism," and notes that if you take two per cent as a reasonable figure for those who undergo "reform through labor" alone, this translates into about 16 million people. According to Pasqualini, no one who defies the government can stay out of jail, but there aren't any firm statistics by which to judge. After all, it's troublesome for any country to come to grips with the problem of criminal behavior, no matter how it's defined; and nearly twenty years after a revolution, it is embarrassing, at least, to admit and attempt to reconcile the presence of ideological or common crimes within a socialist system.

What Pasqualini has to say doesn't diminish the success of the Chinese in eliminating hunger, improving health, and accomplishing a spate of other feats that foreign visitors have admired, but it affirms the disturbing fact that they have had to cause deliberate suffering to reach these goals. Maybe the less complementary side of the Communist effort, which Pasqualini opens to view, has been neglected here because it deflates the natural and popular hope that an ideal society is possible and in-the-making somewhere in the world. This hope presupposes a society we could emulate if we were worthier.

Pasqualini doesn't show any overt resentment toward his jailers in the book, either. His reaction to the first ideological supervisor he meets in the camps is typical of his later opinions of encounters with party representatives: "I was beginning to like this odd man more and more. Beneath his portentous manner he was human and generous. He just happened to take his job as cell monitor very seriously." The cell monitors are also prisoners, but they are handy with the Communist catechism and able to patiently lead the study sessions in which the members of a cell bring up one another's and their own faults and doubts for criticism and correction. Personal grudges aren't supposed to enter into these sessions, which should follow the principle that 'It is the mistake we are after, not the man."

When a prisoner is particularly stubborn about admitting his "mistake" or "crime," he is "struggled" or put into solitary confinement as a last resort. No one is ever beaten or tortured, however, and it is, as Pasqualini says, fascinating to see how far the Chinese get by talking alone. Yet "struggling" is a pretty exhausting process mentally, if not physically. The victim sits surrounded by his fellow inmates, head bowed, as they hurl phrases like "Down with the obstinate prisoner" or "Confess or face the consequences." Sometimes forbidden words, "liar," "scum" or "son of a bitch" slip in--and the gang's abuse is too relentless for comedy. Even a strong-willed victim's only out is to pretend to confess sincerely, and the realization that he must acquiesce to struggling eventually makes him as complacent as one who could never resist.

If nothing else, Pasqualini's captors insist on form. The inmates are kept near starvation and Pasqualini is horrified by the sight of his body in a mirror: His skin sags slack and bruised from contact with the communal plank bed. Nonetheless, when someone filches food, it cannot be from hunger, and he is "struggled." After three days of hooting, Pasqualini begs relief from the warder for everyone involved: "He admits he stole the bread. He was hungry. Isn't that enough? Do we have to make him say he is a dirty bourgeois because he was hungry?" The warder responds with an incontrovertible object lesson. Pulling a few rank flowers out of a bottle, he empties the murky water and asks the rebel to refill it, without rinsing the glass. As he does so, the grimy residue mixes with the water again. "That's how it is with your cellmate," the warder puts in, "There are dirty things in his head that he doesn't even know about. As long as they remain, none of our friendly criticisms will be able to sink in."

On the other hand, Pasqualini learns that form can serve a prisoner's ends, while obscruring the plain truth, just as easily. Although the government, or his jailers, have complete authority over his "body and soul," they are obliged to hear him out. For him, this entails careful ideological maneuvering. "Free speech is encouraged, especially if it remains within the accepted channels." In one case, ideological leverage gets him out of solitary. During the Great Leap Forward, Pasqualini roguishly tells another "schoolmate" that he should have received a mere day's sentence. Reported for mockery of the judicial system the warder casually dismisses him when he hears the claim was made in the spirit of the Great Leap, whose slogan was "One Day Equals Twenty Years."

A more forbidding quirk is the esteem promoted by the regime for industrial imagery. In its humorous form this imagery is applied to a laborer's efficiency and a program's projected output. A satellite signifies the most production possible. The best workers in the penal system are classified as rockets and the slower ones, progressively, as airplanes, locomotives, automobiles, bicycles and lastly, ox carts. Pasqualini recalls one worker who was demoted to the status of a turtle, which is not only slow, but the traditional Chinese symbol of a cuckold. However, pushed a little further, this preoccupation with mechanical efficiency leads to a demand for the man to emulate the machine:

Filled with revolutionary enthusiasm, they have given themselves over to a selfless labor so that they can carry out the directives of the party and the government...Immersed in their activities, they have forgotten what it is to eat or sleep...Sixteen or eighteen-hour work days are now common. Machines don't need to rest. All they need is to be manned.

With glib elliptical logic, the agit-prop actually suggests that the man can become the machine.

Although Pasqualini is finally transformed into a dedicated, right-thinking worker and prisoner, it is evident from his alert recognition of the method involved, even as the change is taking place in him, that he has not become an automaton. The mode of thought expected of him has been clarified; he feels supported and supportive--even more so when the French government rebuffs his written appeals. On a very basic level, his assimilation represents the kind of adjustment generally expected of its members by any social system.

Perhaps it is also important not to forget that Pasqualini is mostly Chinese, with a Chinese name, Bao Ruo-want and oriental feature. From a historical point of view, his country had stood up after being humiliated by the Western powers and Japan. The effort was a collective one, and equality between peasant, inmate, intellectual and warder was enforced, even if it was a wretched plight to share. As he says, "We didn't have any illusions about flying the coop." Things were pretty much the same outside the walls.