Since the Cultural Revolution people have felt it safest to avoid any social contacts outside their immediate families." This was said in 1973 after my wife and I had expressed surprise that a close friend of my brother-in-law had not heard of his death two years previously, though both had been living in Beijing. The remark epitomized the state of Chinese society at that time. People did not talk to each other in the streets, and even old friends seemed afraid to go beyond polite small talk or repetitions of the official line. Only officials were not afraid to talk and tried to convert us to their view. It is remarkable that Anne Thurston was able to talk with so many people in 1981 and 1982 to get the accounts of their experiences because the Cultural Revolution had only fully ended in 1977. Her book Enemies of the People is a collection of experiences during the Cultural Revolution based on interviews with Chinese intellectuals. I have no reason to doubt the truth of these accounts because they are similar to those given by other people and to stories told to my wife and me. I might only add that intellectuals were not the only group to suffer. When I was teaching at Yenching University in the Japanese controlled Beijing area, I got to know a workman in the university's power station because we were both working for the anti-Japanese underground. He was arrested and tortured by the Japanese but refused to reveal any of his contacts. When I met him again in 1984, he said that, he had been attacked as a Japanese agent, during the Cultural Revolution. Again, one of the good friends we made during the war had joined the Red Army as a small boy but was in prison for five years. Another was still slightly crippled from beatings he had received. Both became government ministers when the Cultural Revolution was over.
The improvement continued over the next few years. When my wife and I visited China in 1984, we found the social atmosphere completely different from that of 1973. On our first morning in Shanghai in 1984, we set out to visit some old friends of my wife's family. When we asked our way in the street, people would linger and want to talk with us. The old friends immediately suggested that we should leave our hotel and stay with them. They talked remarkably freely and critically even in the presence of a son-in-law who was a Communist Party member. In 1973 we had asked to see them and they had been obviously frightened when they had been brought to our hotel.
Changes had gone even further in 1986. Even Communist Party members would describe the Cultural Revolution as "our ten wasted years' and people not in the Party would sometimes talk of "our thirty wasted years."
The Beliefs of the Chinese
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