Gan Yang on Culture and Capitalism

Gan Yang, Interview in Zha Jianying’s The 1980s, Part One
 
Introduction by David Ownby
 
As promised, here is the first installment of Zha Jianying’s 2005 interview with Gan Yang, taken from her 2006 book The 1980s:  A Collection of Interviews. 
 
Zha’s book is a classic, and includes lengthy interviews with:    
 
Ah Cheng (b. 1949, fiction writer, painter, and screenwriter); Bei Dao (b. 1949, perhaps contemporary China’s most famous poet); Chen Danqing (b. 1953, , artist, writer, and art critic); Chen Pingyuan (b. 1954, professor of Chinese Literature at Peking Univeristy); Cui Jian (b. 1961, China’s most famous rocker), Li Tuo (b. 1939, author, critic, and screenwriter), Li Xianting (b. 1949, the “Godfather of Chinese contemporary avant-garde art”), Lin Xudong (b. 1951, painter and film critic), Liu Suola (b. 1955, musician, composer, novelist, and vocal performance artist), Tian Zhuangzhuang (b. 1952, film director, producer and actor).  An interview with Liu Fendou (b. 1969, film director, screenwriter, and producer) was eventually omitted from the book at Liu’s request.
 
The interviews were conducted in 2004 and 2005, mostly in person and in Beijing, and are extremely rich in detail and personality.  Zha’s initial goal was to revisit to 1980s in order to write an article on reform-era China’s most “romantic” period (she herself was outside of China for most of the decade, studying in the US), but the interviews soon snowballed into a sprawling oral history told by a handful of intellectuals for whom the 1980s constituted their formative adult years.  Zha makes no claim that these intellectuals are representative; for personal reasons, during the period when she carried out the interviews she spent most of her time in her apartment in Beijing, and many of those interviewed were personal or family friends.  For the same reason, the art world is perhaps over-represented in Zha’s volume, as she admits in her introduction. 
 
These quibbles aside, Zha’s book is extraordinary in its breadth, depth, readability, and sensibility.  Written in Chinese for a Chinese audience, Zha and her subjects largely skirt the red zones of Chinese public discourse, but 2004-2005 was a relatively open period, when Chinese intellectuals could say much of what they wanted to say, and reminiscing about the 1980s proved an excellent occasion for wide-ranging discussions.  Zha notes in her introduction that she gave her interview subjects the chance to edit their interviews.
 
I recently heard a French colleague proclaim, in public, that “there are no intellectuals in China,” an extraordinary, outrageous statement.  Giving her the benefit of the doubt, I will assume she meant that “in today’s China, there are no public intellectuals who speak truth to power in the way we admire,” which is closer to some version of a useful truth.  But I defy anyone to read Zha’s book (or just the interview with Gan Yang) and come away thinking that there are no intellectuals in China.
 
Gan Yang’s interview is a gem.  For those who have followed Gan only sporadically or at a distance over the years, he can appear to be an unserious gadfly, now liberal, now Confucian, now New Left, now cultural nationalist, now opportunist sloganeer…Zha admits that she finds some of Gan’s work unpalatable.  The interview reveals Gan to be above all a critic of modernity (who rejects postmodernism as superficial and trendy), someone seeking transcendent values that go beyond consumerism and geopolitics.  His search has led him down many different – even contradictory – paths which we might view with more sympathy once we understand his basic motivation, which begins with Heidegger’s efforts to reread all of Western philosophy in the search for an alternative.  It is perhaps unsurprising that he eventually spends time with Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss as well, although he mentions neither in this interview.
 
The interview is extremely long – 78 pages in the original Chinese edition, 35,000 words/70 single-spaced pages in English translation.  Most people have no desire to read such a lengthy document online, so I will break it up into four or five digestible chunks, and then make a pdf of the entire document available at the end.  Today’s installment concerns Gan’s family and childhood, even if much of the content has to do with the Cultural Revolution, in which Gan was an enthusiastic participant.  The next installment covers Gan’s life as a sent-down youth in Dongbei.
 
Translation by David Ownby
 
Gan Yang’s Background and Childhood
 
ZJY :  Before we talk about the 1980s, I’d like to hear a little bit about your own story.  Please talk as much as you care to about to your family, about what books you read when you were a teenager, why you later decided to study the West.  Because all of these are related to the kind of person you are and why later on you did the things you did.  My impression is that you have never talked about these things in anything you’ve published.
 
GY:  You’re right, I usually don’t talk about this.  So here’s my story.  My father was a university professor, in science and engineering.  He graduated right before liberation.  His class background was that of a big landlord, so our family was one of those with a bad status.
 
ZJY:  In Hangzhou?
 
GY:  The family landlords were in Shaoxing, but my father and others who went to university moved away from home.  When I was young, there’s no doubt that my father had a great influence on me.  Scientists and engineers from my father’s generation were different from what we see now, in that they were very interested in the humanities.  At the same time, they would never have studied the humanities because people would have looked down on them, because the idea was that the only people who studied humanities were those who were not good enough to study science and engineering.
 
ZJY:  So did your father attend a private [Confucian] academy (sishu/私塾) when he was young?
 
GY:  He was born in 1929, and by that point people like him already went to Western schools.  I don’t know if he ever went to a sishu, but I think that at least half of his education was in the new, Westernized schools.  Later on, during the Anti-Japanese War he had to flee, because during the war people from wealthy families really worried about being kidnapped…
 
ZJY:  Was he a Party member?
 
GY:  No, with his class status he had a hard time after liberation.
 
ZJY:  Was he not influenced by the May 4th like other progressive youth?
 
GY:  Of course he was influenced by May 4th, but people like my father were very smart, and once the revolution occurred he knew that the world now belonged to workers and peasants and not to people like him, so he didn’t dare make any fuss about being progressive.  But people like him were very good at their jobs, and before the Cultural Revolution he served in various positions of responsibility in his department and faculty, usually as the “vice-” something of wherever he was working because the head was always a Party member.  People like my father were very “reactionary” according to the standards of the time.
 
ZJY:  He didn’t go through thought reform?
 
GY:  He went through thought reform like everybody else.  But my father was not like those intellectuals who tried to be progressive so as to join the Party.  He had the gift of knowing who he was.  The first intellectuals dragged out and beaten in the Cultural Revolution were intellectuals with close relations with the Party.  If they weren’t Party members, then they were doing their best to join.  If you weren’t a Party member and weren’t trying to get in, then most people left you alone. 
 
I feel like the intellectuals brought into the Party in the early 1950s were usually much admired by most people.  They were good people who were good at their jobs.  My father had one classmate who later on became a deputy in the People’s Congress.  People like him were at the top of their class at university and were very trustworthy.  This classmate was also from a poor class background, so after the revolution he naturally was someone the Party wanted to bring in.  But people like my father who never sought to enter the Party became people who consciously stayed on the sidelines.
 
ZJY:  Did this have an impact on you early on?
 
GY:  Sure it did, because when we wound up spending time together during the Cultural Revolution, he naturally had to tell me about all of this “reactionary” baggage.
 
ZJY:  You mean tell the family about it.
 
GY:  Not everyone in the family, just me.
 
ZJY:  Are you the oldest son?
 
GY:  The oldest son of the head of the lineage.
 
ZJY:  The oldest son of the head of the lineage??  That’s destiny for you.  Do you have brothers and sisters?
 
GY:  I have three sisters, and I was the first son, with a younger brother who came along later.  Because we were a big landlord family, being the oldest son of the head of the lineage meant something.  When I was little, there were two things that had a great influence on me.  One was when I went back to the Shaoxing countryside and could feel the importance of being the oldest son and lineage head.  I was very young but still placed on a pedestal.  The countryside is not like the city, because in the countryside a lot of people’s customs are more or less the same as before liberation, for example they would call me “master,” which would be unthinkable in the city.  My mother couldn’t believe it the first time she went, and it freaked her out.  But in the countryside, before the sent down youth arrived during the Cultural Revolution,  they had always called my father “master,” because he was the oldest son.
 
I was born in Shenyang, because the country was setting up universities in the Northeast right after the revolution, and young southern intellectuals like my father were sent up there to help, so my father helped to set up engineering faculties in Dalian and Harbin.  Luckily, my father went back to Hangzhou before the anti-rightist movement in 1957, because he always said that if he had still been in the Northeast at this point that would have been the end of him.  He meant that if he had been there, he certainly would have been branded a “rightist.” 
 
My father was a southerner, and really hated the Northeast as well as the Soviet experts.  At the time the Soviets were our big brothers and were in control of everything.  People like my father had learned English but now had to switch to Russian so that they could translate for the Soviet experts.  So you can imagine how much grousing people like my father did.  But in 1957 when everyone was urged to speak their mind in the Hundred Flowers campaign, my father was in the process of moving back to Hangzhou.  The anti-rightist movement was already underway at Zhejiang University, but my father had been away for a long time and had no enemies in his department.  So he always said that at the moment when the movement got tense, his relations at the faculty were just the opposite, so he got through it with no problem.
 
ZJY:  So that’s where you were born.
 
GY:  I was born in 1952 in Shenyang and then in 1957 we moved back to Hangzhou.
 
ZJY:  So your father managed to get through the anti-rightist movement.  How about the Cultural Revolution?
 
GY:  No, they came looking for him during the Cultural Revolution.  My mother too.  My mother was an accountant.  They took our house apart, saying that my mother was a landlord who had avoided been classified as such.  My father of course was a reactionary intellectual.  So naturally they turned our house upside down.  At the time, Zheda [short for Zhejiang Daxue, Zhejiang University] had seven buildings where high-level intellectuals lived, and almost every one of them was searched.  Sometimes they came and ransacked several times a day, because they would finish their search at night, and then you would turn on the lights and start to put things back in their place, and they would come back immediately on the suspicion that you were hiding something criminal, so they’d pull everything out again.  After a while you stopped putting things back.
 
ZYJ:  Were these experiences important for you?
 
GY:  Yes, I feel like they were very important.  For me it basically meant, in the language of the times, that I became a “reactionary” very early, even before I was sent down to the countryside.  For educated youth of my age or a little older, most people started to ask themselves questions after Lin Biao died, which was a big shock.[1]  But my doubts began before that, meaning I was a “reactionary” early on.  This clearly has to do with my father’s influence, as well as that of my brother-in-law later on, because our family lived at the university, and at the time my brother-in-law was a student there.  My father and my brother-in-law saw through things early.  When the Cultural Revolution started I must have been in my first year of junior high school, but in fact I never went to high school, and as soon as I finished elementary school I hung out with my older sister and my brother-in-law.  Later on, anybody could join in the Cultural Revolution, and even though I was a kid I went along with the university students.  My brother-in-law and his friends belonged to that group of university students who tried to stay out of things,[2] people who were “gray” instead of red, and they were this way fairly early on.
 
ZJY:  Did you become a Red Guard?
 
GY:  Of course. I joined one of the Red Guard groups on the campus.  At the time we were all rebels, although it was hard to tell who was who, with all the little groups that came and went.  There was a lot of Red Guard violence in Hangzhou. 
 
But to my mind the Cultural Revolution was two separate things.  On the one hand, things happened to your families, and you got struggled, but on the other hand we were far freer than ever before.  All of a sudden, school and the entire educational system were not only destroyed, but seen as completely wrong.
 
ZJY:  Were you a good student before all of this?
 
GY:  At the time I was really young, and was a very bad student.  I mean, I had no trouble with schoolwork, but I was very unruly.  People always said I was defiant, a rebel (fangu/反骨).  When I was in 4th and 5th grade, my parents had to go through the Four Cleanups,[3] or whatever they called it, in any event my father was never home, and I made such a fuss at school that they even stopped classes.  This was because I didn’t respect my teacher and thought everything he said was bullshit, and the rest of the class went along with me.  At the time, this professor was extremely embarrassed, and the school eventually disciplined me severely and suspended me for a week.  The teacher lost face because of me.
 
ZJY:  So you were one of the earliest to rebel.
 
GY:  I was just very disobedient.  In addition, my teacher was also the principal, which of course meant that everything was complicated, because for example the teachers in this school, which was part of the university, basically lived with the university professors because they were married to them.  So my actions naturally brought all these family relationships into question, and the relationships between these adults, all because people said I was making trouble.  So in terms of personality I think that from the time that I was small I was kind of a maverick.
 
ZJY:  At the time were you reading lots of stuff outside of what was assigned at school?
 
GY:  Of course I was.  I read everything I could get my hands on.  We had a young people’s library, and by the time I was in 4th grade I think I had read everything in it.  That was during the first two years of the Cultural Revolution.
 
ZJY:  Were there a lot of old books around at that time?
 
GY:  In 1964 there were still a lot of them, but also a lot that they wouldn’t let you read, things like Jinpingmei [translated as The Plum in the Golden Vase or The Golden Lotus].[4]
 
ZJY:  What books do you remember as having an important influence on you?
 
GY:  Mostly translated novels.  Most of what I read back then was novels.
 
ZJY:  Anglo-American or Russian?
 
GY:  Both.  I wolfed down whatever was translated, whether it was good or bad.  What I remember most is being with the university students during the Cultural Revolution.  What was most fun was when students would climb into the library and steal books.  The students always had an argument to defend themselves, like in Lu Xun’s story, when Kong Yiji says “it’s no crime for a scholar to steal books.”[5]  If we only had one book, we would take the book apart, and everyone would copy by hand, say, 50 pages, using carbon paper.  So if five people copied fifty pages each you’d wind up with five books, right?  So this is how the books circulated.
 
ZJY:  It’s easier to suffer together than to suffer alone, as they say.
 
GY:  Absolutely, and later on our elementary school rebelled against all of our teachers, as well as the high school teachers.  This was a period of complete freedom, complete liberation.  I think that I matured young, but anyway this feeling of liberation was completely unprecedented for me. 
 
Later on, if there was nothing to read, I didn’t know what to do with myself, and even if there were books to read it was different.  At the time the books that influenced me the most were those by Pushkin and Lermontov.  I found some books while going through people’s houses so I got to read some things before other people did, so even before they started stealing books I had already read most of Balzac, because his books were pretty easy to find back then.  So it seems like there was a lot of Balzac available, and then later on there was a time when everyone was trading books, and Balzac wasn’t worth much, while Pushkin was.  I think all this had to do with how much of what author was available, but it seems like there were fewer of Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time.  A lot of people had Balzac early on.  People were trading books in 1968 and 1969, even in 1970.
 
ZJY:  Why do you feel Pushkin and Lermontov’s influence was important?
 
GY:  I think it had to do with my own personal appreciation of those authors, and it wasn’t necessary the same for everyone.  At the time, Chinese society was both extremely free, yet at the same time there was nowhere for us to go.  In other words, we were like those “superfluous men” in Pushkin and Lermontov.[6]  I still remember this, especially in the latter period of the Cultural Revolution.  To my mind, the first three years of the Cultural Revolution were when we really carried out the campaign, and the later years were different.  In the first three years we were really excited, and our thought was very liberated, so that we eagerly tried to think things through.  But later on when we were sent down to the countryside, and when they started to assign jobs to the university graduates, like in 1968 or 1970, the authorities were trying to take control of the movement, and not let the masses organize and make trouble.  For students, the job assignment was a really big deal which should not have made any difference to me except that I had become really good friends with the other sent-down youth by that point [who would be assigned elsewhere and move away].  The students started to get assigned to the border regions, for example people who had studied electrical engineering were all sent to distant mountain areas.  Maybe you could say that this was making use of what they had studied, so maybe we shouldn’t have cared.  But looking back, it’s like the whole society was completely out of control, and the good parts of being out of control started to go away too.
 
ZJY:  Did you have a discussion group?
 
GY:  We spent all day wandering around West Lake, which means we spent all day talking about this kind of thing.
 
ZJY:  Were you already disappointed with the Cultural Revolution?
 
GY:  Yeah, that started early.  I imagine that university students like my brother-in-law were already disappointed by 1967; they lost their enthusiasm for the revolution early on.  I think in the very beginning they were excited and had great expectations for a new beginning or new possibilities, but later on…Still, in the first three years, a lot of things happened that had a great influence on me.
 
ZJY:  Were you involved in armed struggles?
 
GY:  Yes.  I didn’t experience the most dangerous period, but if you spend your time in a constant atmosphere of possible armed struggle and confrontation…For instance, in the worst period, groups would occupy facing buildings and the territory between them became a battlefield.
 
ZJY:  Did you have weapons?
 
GY:  Things were bad in Hangzhou, and at some point we got our hands on some weapons.  In 1967, we started out with simple things like hardhats and sticks.  We all had our shifts.  We lived together and it was a completely collective life, so at the bottom of the staircase on the first floor were people with iron sticks wearing hardhats, because you never knew when the other group would try to come over and beat us up, or we might want to go beat them up.  I was too young for any of this, but there were a couple of scary times, and my father was really afraid for me when he saw that I was in one of those buildings.  At the time there were the two facing buildings, each waiting for the other to attack.  But everybody else could pass through with no problem, which is how my father saw me and found out I was with that bunch of people, which really scared him.  At the time we were divided into three shifts and took turns sleeping, out of fear that the other group would attack.  But to tell the truth, I found all of this really stimulating, really fun. 
 
ZJY:  Did you take all of that seriously at the time?
 
GY:  At the time I was serious about everything, at least until 1968.  My brother-in-law liked to make fun of me for this, thinking it was childish.  Even though he had lost interest he was chasing after my sister at the time, so he couldn’t really drop out, and sort of kept pretending.  To tell the truth, people like him had already dropped out.
 
ZJY:  So should we see you as an idealistic young person?
 
GY:  Not at that point.  I was too young to be idealistic.  At that time when people argued they were very serious.  There were a few things that I paid attention to.  One was the talent of the people involved in the Cultural Revolution, for example, how well they could draw when they made their posters, or how handsome their characters were on the big character posters, or how well they could write an essay.  For example, my father was very surprised, and said that he had never noticed that his students were gifted in this way.  They were just like normal students, so how could they suddenly have these talents?  This is because his students were in the sciences, so there was no way he could know what they had learned from the humanities, especially the ability to draw.  The poster art from the Cultural Revolution was really something, and it’s too bad that there’s not more of it still around.  I feel like someone should put together a good collection, because these images circulated around the whole country.  For example, the most famous was the picture of the hundred officials getting promoted [banguan shengguan tu/百官升官图].[7]  I remember this very clearly.
 
ZJY:  Did you compose big character posters?
 
GY:  Of course.  All of the university students knew I was a good writer!
 
ZJY:  You were only 15 at the time.
 
GY:  This is why I say politics is a good thing - it stimulates people’s talents.  People who you thought had no particular abilities became really impressive, stars in the movement.  To lead a student group, you at least had to have a certain charisma, because otherwise who would follow you?  They’d just push you aside.  If you could hold onto a leadership position for two or three years, that was really something, and meant that you had leadership skills.
 
ZJY:  You weren’t a big leader at the time, right, just a little kid…
 
GY:  All the leaders were university students.  At the time, I didn’t want to play with kids my own age.  Most of those kids were in opposing groups, and once, about 20 of them that I grew up with surrounded me and argued with me, threatening to struggle me with weapons.  It was really something.  To tell you the truth, the first three years of the Cultural Revolution were really exciting, in a way that things rarely are.  I think a lot of people found this period really interesting in the sense that all of a sudden there was nothing but Chairman Mao, which meant that everyone had to change the way they argued.  Of course, the question was whether you were loyal to Chairman Mao, but everyone had their own way of proving and defending that loyalty.
 
ZJY:  At the time you were caught up in it, and you were very young.  You found it exciting and discovered you were talented.  But what about when you look back at it now?
 
GY:  I’ve never really given it that much thought, because I don’t remember it all that clearly.  In fact, if you really look into it, you’ll find that all the Red Guard groups wound up linked to other groups, and these groups were national in nature.  For example in Zhejiang we were linked to groups in Beijing.  And most people didn’t know who was ultimately behind these groups, which is particularly true of me, because I was still young.
 
ZJY:  In fact everything was part of something else. 
 
GY:  All sorts of relationships were involved.  From the beginning, if your group was big, then you needed friends, right?  You always hoped to have a lot of supporters…There was always a reason this group was linked to that group…
 
ZJY:  I don’t know if you have read Xu Youyu’s memoir of his time with Red Guards in Sichuan.[8]  He’s a little older than you. 
 
GY:  He’s older than me, he was in high school.
 
ZJY:  That’s right, he was a junior.  He became a leader of the Sichuan Red Guards group that he was in.  In the book he talks about the relationship of the different factions, and how these relationships went all the way up to the center.
 
GY:  Absolutely.  I remember back then our organization captured some important person, and I was one of the ones that guarded him.  He was from Beijing, from a group that was later known as the May 16th.[9]  But none of this was important to me at the time.  In the early period, what influenced me was first, my father’s “counterrevolutionary” status, and second, the fact that everything collapsed.  All the restraints that elementary school or middle school would have had on me just fell apart, plus the fact that I was already undisciplined.  I was the last one in my school to join the Young Pioneers, and everyone in elementary school really disliked me.
 
ZJY:  Did the university Red Guards give you another kind of political education, so that you became more normally rebellious?
 
GY:  I don’t know.  I think my character was always like that.  I mean I was against ideas of class status from the beginning.  All of us who had a bad class status were against the idea, because it affected us directly.  Anyway, later on, anybody could become a Red Guard, which made you really excited, and then all of the old restrictions suddenly weren’t there anymore and no one told you what to do.  And you were making friends all over the place.  It surely helped that the university students welcomed me in early on.
 
ZJY:  Did you exchange revolutionary experiences (chuanlian/串联i.e., travel around the country)[10] as a Red Guard?
 
GY:  No, I didn’t.  My family thought I was too young and worried that something would happen.  That was my biggest regret at the time.  My father said “you’re not in one of the ‘five red categories,’ so what are you doing rising up?”
 
Notes

[1]Lin Biao (1907-1971) was a famous general in the People’s Liberation Army who played an important role during the Cultural Revolution, ensuring that the army was “revolutionary” and on Mao’s side.  During the course of the Cultural Revolution, Lin came to be seen as “second in command” and Mao’s presumed successor, but died under suspicious circumstance in 1971, supposedly shot down in an aircraft bound for the Soviet Union.  Rumors circulated widely that Lin had launched an unsuccessful coup against Mao, and decided to flee.  Many Chinese remember this incident as the moment when they first began to have serious doubts about the nature of the Cultural Revolution. 

[2] In Chinese, xiaoyaopai/逍遥派, which means “free and floating.”  The expression comes from the title for the first chapter of the Zhuangzi, a foundational Daoist text.  In context, it means “spectators,” people who chose to join no group or faction during the Cultural Revolution.  Since neutrality was often not an option during the Cultural Revolution, choosing to be a spectator often came to be seen as a political statement nonetheless.

[3]The Four Cleanups siqing/四清, also known as the Socialist Reeducation Movement, occurred between 1963 and 1966 and aimed to root out  “bourgeois” or “revisionist” elements creeping back into Chinese society in the aftermath of the response to the Great Leap Forward, which allowed the return of some market activity.

[4]Jinpingmei is considered one of the four great novels of the Ming period, although it was frequently banned as pornography for its exploration of sexual themes.

[5]Kong Yiji is the main character in the story of the same name, an impoverished Confucian scholar who never passed the examinations (which had already been abolished for a decade or more in any event).  He lives by begging and theft, and when caught stealing books from the home of a member of the local elite defended himself by saying that “it is no crime for a scholar to steal books.”

[6]The “superfluous man” was a frequent trope in 19th century Russian literature, referring to noble, enlightened aristocrats unable to find a focus for their passion.  Many 20th century Chinese intellectuals similarly found themselves at sea between their attachment to a Chinese cultural identity and a yearning for the benefits of Western modernity.

[7]I am unable to locate this image, but it may well be similar to those you can see here. 

[8]The memoir Zha refers to is徐友渔, 形形色色的造反——红卫兵精神素质的形成及演变.  Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 1999. 

[9]May 16, 1966 was the date on which Mao circulated a document often taken to mark the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.  Evoking the date came to be a way to announce one’s loyalty to Mao and to the revolution.

[10]Between September 1966 and March 1967, Red Guards and other revolutionary youth were allowed to travel throughout the country free – cost for transport and lodging were assumed by the state or by other student groups.  The idea was that the youth would “exchange revolutionary experiences” and as a secondary effect, frighten opponents of the movement into submission.