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Chapter 5
- Hong Kong University Press, HKU
- Chapter
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Chapter 5 121 Chapter 5 p May 7th Cadre School The May 7th Cadre School was an invention of Mao Zedong. He said all intellectuals must be re-educated by the peasants and the May 7th Cadre Schools were set up all over the countryside for this purpose. In 1969, I was teaching at the Foreign Affairs Institute and in response to Mao Zedong’s call for intellectuals to be re-educated by the peasants, the whole institute moved to Shang Gou in Jiangxi Province and a cadre school was set up. There, over a thousand teachers, staff, and students of the institute lived and were re-educated by doing farm work. We started out from the ForeignAffairs Institute one afternoon in winter, and our destination was Shang Gou Village in Jiangxi Province in south China. There were over two hundred teachers, students and administrative personnel, led by the military representative. Trucks took us to the Beijing Railway Station and we walked in single file into the waiting room, following the military representative. Among us were the families of the teachers, children ranging from the age of a few months old held in the arms of their mothers, to eleven- or twelve-year-old boys and girls tagging behind. There were also old men and women, some supported by walking sticks. We all carried an overnight bag, some travelled light, only taking a satchel on their backs, while others hauled overweight luggage along. I looked at our regiment behind the military representative and thought it quite a strange sight, wondering whether our military chief had ever led such an army before. There was an old woman with bound feet among us and she slowed down our pace tremendously. It took us two days to reach our destination, and our living quarters were already assigned in a big abandoned factory. The factory was built during the 122 China, Bound and Unbound Great Leap Forward period in the 1950s. Construction work was not quite finished when the leadership found it was a mistake to set up a steel factory there with poor transportation and no raw material for production. So the site was left to decay. It was amazing to find what man could do with his two hands and a brain. We started from scratch. We were badly housed and the tumbled down factory building could not accommodate us all. Soon we built a kiln and made our own bricks from the mud we dug from the ground. With the bricks we built rows of one-room houses with a balcony for cooking. Being weak in strength I could not do much in the building. I took the role of a handyman and ran errands for the builders. When the builders wanted anything, be it a hammer, a chisel or a screw driver, I would hand it to them immediately. Big rooms were made into hostels for men and women, with fourteen women sharing one big room and fourteen men sharing another. Families with children had a room to each family. I walked into our women’s dormitory and found fourteen beds lined against the walls, with seven on each side. I found one in the middle that was not occupied and started to unpack my bedding. I stuffed all my belongings under the bed, and put a soap box beside it to serve the purpose of a bedside table. That night, as was my custom, before going to bed I began to write my diary. There was no electricity, so I used an oil lamp. I thought of our purpose in coming to the cadre school. We came in answer to Chairman Mao’s call that all intellectuals must go to May 7th Cadre Schools to be re-educated and learn from the peasants. My question was what and how could I learn from the peasants? First, there were no peasants in our cadre school but intellectuals, and then peasants in the neighbourhood were all illiterate and had no scientific knowledge. So I came to the conclusion that I was there to learn how to do farm work. For some months after arrival at the cadre school I was contented with this thought and worked hard at all the farm chores that were assigned to me. Gradually I started thinking and began to doubt Mao’s call for intellectuals to be re-educated. I just could not see what I could learn from the peasants. In the history of China...