The Hall of Three Pines: An Account of My Life

Chapter Three. The PRC Period

Following the withdrawal of Fu Zuoyi’s forces and before the arrival of the Liberation Army, there was something of a power vacuum in the area around Qinghua. Nevertheless, society was remarkably well ordered, and the people were content with peaceful pursuits .The Qinghua campus was calm, and life went on as usual for faculty and students. After a few days, the Liberation Army moved into Haidian at last.They did not enter Qinghua but only set up a guard post at the gate, with a Liberation Army comrade standing guard. Students and faculty from Qinghua hurried to Haidian to welcome the army. Our talks with the soldiers were quite warm-spirited. Shuming also went to Haidian, and on returning she saw that the army comrade standing guard at the gate had no stockings on under his shoes. She wanted to give him a pair of stockings. I said, “You can try it, but I don’t think he’ll take them.” She took a pair with her and came back before long, saying, “You’re right, he didn’t want them.” The behavior of the Liberation Army men inspired people of all classes to feel unlimited admiration for the Communist Party. In history books I used to read that wherever this or that army passed,“not an ear of grain was touched.” Such praise seemed exaggerated to me: I doubted that such armies existed. Perhaps they did not exist in the past, but with the Liberation Army it was true that not a single ear of grain was touched. 134 c h a p t e r t h r e e t h e P r c p e r i o d I was reminded of a line I read somewhere:“A king’s soldiers fight campaigns , not battles.”And was not the liberation of Qinghua part of a campaign , rather than a battle? Only later did I realize it was not quite appropriate to call the Liberation Army “the king’s soldiers.”They were not the protectors of royal authority but the fighting sons and brothers of the people. One day a KMT plane broke the stillness at Qinghua.That afternoon I went from my house (in Compound B) to the skating pond behind the H-shaped building to watch the skaters.To the northwest of Compound B was a small grove with a road through it running north to south.The north end of the road came out in front of the H-shaped building. I was walking along this road when the plane came into sight, making a tight turn overhead. I turned back for home and sat myself down on the sofa just in time to hear a deafening noise. I was jarred off my sofa by the impact.Through the window I could see people near Compound A running onto the road with covers thrown over their shoulders. I ran outside and found that a fair-sized bomb had fallen in the grove immediately east of the road I had been on.The explosion had toppled two trees and left a sizable crater. During my eight years of life in Kunming, having gone through I don’t know how many air raids, no bomb had landed so close to me.The bomb had landed very close to the skating pond behind the H-shaped building, where a great many people of all ages were skating. I shudder to think what would have happened if the bomb had fallen on open ground. There had been no casualties and not much property damage.But the next day the KMT papers claimed that the Nanjing air force had bombed the Liberation Army’s artillery emplacements in the western suburbs, resulting in heavy damage to the Liberation Army. Following this incident , the Communist Party Central Committee and Chairman Mao Zedong sent telegrams to Qinghua to show their concern. with the arrival of the Liberation Army, many of the army’s administrative organs also arrived. The organ that made direct contact with us was the Cultural Administration Group of the Military Control Commission, stationed at Qinglong Bridge, west of the Summer Palace. Zhang Zonglin, the man in charge of the Cultural Administration Group, the prc period : 135 also came to Qinghua. He told the board to “do a good job to keep Qinghua going.”He also said to me:“We have made an evaluation of...