To be a young master had its advantages; but it also involved him in a
premature
power struggle from which no child could emerge unscarred.
Lifton-Robert-Jay-Thought-Reform-and-the-Psychology-of-Totalism
Sickly, nervous, and resentful of her husband's continued absence, she often had to turn over her son's care to others.
Hu remembers her with some fondness, but also recalls that she some- times took her frustrations out on him and subjected him to beat- ings.
She died when Hu was fourteen years old, and was in many ways an even more distant figure ("I never experienced the intimacy of a mother with her") than his absent father.
For to Hu, his father soon became the center of a lasting personal myth--that of the all-powerful father who suddenly materializes and rescues his son from an otherwise invincible oppressor r
I found myself always thinking of him. . . . To me he was the most dignified and impressive man in the world. . . . I felt that one day my father would return and all of my troubles would be over.
Nor could repeated evidence to the contrary dispel this myth: the family lost touch with his father for periods of years, and
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when he did visit, the step-grandmother and he observed all proper forms (he too had to be filial) and things remained as they had been. Hu was never too happy at his uncle's house, where he felt he was being cared for more out of obligation than love, and he went on hoping; when he got tired of this his thoughts turned toward revenge, and toward the day when he would be big enough and smart enough to be able to deal with his arch-enemy. Her death, which occurred shortly after that of his mother, and his father's continued absence caused him to avoid the family home, which he then considered haunted.
Hu's erratic pattern of education exposed him to the full chaos of the Chinese cultural and political scene. From the ages of eight to twelve, he studied with private tutors employed by his and neighboring families; in the traditional fashion, he learned how to read and write from simplified versions of the Confucian classics. He did not like the stern discipline of the tutor, and was frequently punished for misbehavior; but he was impressed with Confucian teachings of filial piety and loyalty to family and country, as yet unaware of the inconsistencies between these theoretical virtues and the realities of the life around him.
Next, he spent two years studying and boarding at a new-style upper primary school not too far from his home. There he was surprised to encounter classmates who were mostly adults or near- adults, prospective employees of the local government who had come to take advantage of the school's "modern" curriculum, in keeping with a new regulation that officials have some Western education. As the youngest pupil in the school, Hu deeply resented the teasing and bullying he received from the others, some of them two or three times his age--especially when they told him that "a little boy is not supposed to lose his temper with his elders. " He no doubt stimulated many of these antagonisms, since by this time he had become a rebellious, outspoken child. Again made aware of his helplessness in the face of superior power, he once more dreamed of the day when he could outwit his tormentors; he partially realized this goal in demonstrating his quicker ability to grasp the Western subjects in the academic curriculum.
After his graduation, his uncle planned to send him to a junior middle school in a nearby city. Just when Hu was about to leave for the new school, his father suddenly appeared, and Hu took advan-
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tage of the occasion to express many of his grievances. His father was angered by the boy's story. As a man of the world, he disap- proved of the provincial way in which Hu was dressed, and of the undistinguished school which had been selected for him. As usual, Hu senior stayed only briefly, but before he left he canceled the existing plans and promised to return soon to take the boy to a better school in a larger city. For the next three years, however, nothing more was heard from him; and between the ages of thirteen and sixteen Hu remained idle, receiving no formal education.
These years were the most lonely interlude of a life in which loneliness had already become a regular feature. Hu felt estranged from his uncle as well as his father, since the uncle resented both the boy and the father for undermining what he considered to be a reasonable discharge of his responsibilities. Hu became more em- bittered than ever--angry at his uncle for allowing family conflicts to interfere with his education, and even having doubts about his father and wondering whether he was really in hiding or had "just forgotten about the family/' But he clung tenaciously to his father- return myth, and even when he was telling me about these events, he could admit no resentment toward his mythical hero. Feeling at home nowhere, thinking a great deal about running away, but unable to decide where to go, he described his general emotion as "fatalistic anger" (the kind of hostility which is temporarily held in abeyance until an opportunity arises to express it).
Finally dismissing the entire problem from his mind, Hu began to interest himself in other things--taking long walks through the neighboring countryside, and reading voraciously the traditional Chinese chien-hsia novels. The chien-hsia is a superhuman hero who combines physical strength and magical powers in purishing evil and helping the oppressed, always acting outside of and fre- quently in opposition to vested authority; so great is the chien-hsia's imaginative impact that one Chinese colleague--possibly with a certain amount of cultural chauvinism--described him to me as "a combination of the Western knight errant and Robin Hood, only much more skillful and ingenious. " Imagining himself a chien-hsia was an ideal antidote to Hu's sense of loneliness and helplessness. His period of inactivity came to an end only through the chance appearance of an old family friend who prevailed upon the uncle to send Hu back to school (respected outsiders have frequently
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been the best mediators in severe Chinese intrafamily disputes). Hu wasthen sent to a middle school sponsored by the Kuomintang Youth Corps. He spent just one semester there, but it was an ex- perience which had great significance in shaping his political emo- tions. He had chosen the school himself, for even in his isola- tion he had been caught up in the wave of patriotism which swept the country at the time of the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War. But he was horrified by what he found there. Hastily put together, the school had enrolled many more students than the small faculty could handle; the academic program was practically nonexistent, and most of the time was devoted to military training. Discipline was not only strict, but needlessly vindictive, and severe whippings were administered for minor infractions. Hu was from the beginning critical of the school and suspicious of its attempts to mobilize student emotions--so much so that he was among the very few who did not, in the initial burst of patriotic fervor, join the KMT Youth Corps. He later told me that his restraint might have been due to memories of his father's tribulations within the KMT, Students soon became united in their resentment of the school and so rebellious that the atmosphere began to resemble that of an armed camp; none of the twenty youths from Hu's area returned the following semester. While there, Hu, developed his talent for rebellion a bit further: he became an expert at forging the signa- ture of the chief military trainer on passes (he proudly demon- strated his technique to me during our interview). The experience left him with the feeling that the KMT Youth Corps was "dis-
appointing and silly . . . brutal and irrational/7 His "disgust and hatred" was soon extended to the entire KMT Party and Govern- ment, and it later developed into the predominating passion of his youth.
The county junior middle school to which he transferred seemed a great improvement. He did well academically, and quickly be- came a leader among the students. In addition, he held a specially privileged status among the faculty because the president of the school was Hu's uncle's "adopted son"--that is, the uncle, as a prominent person in the area, sponsored the school official's career and exercised considerable influence over it. This made things particularly complicated for Hu when, just a few months after his arrival, he came into direct conflict with this same school president
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For when the students began to notice that their meals seemed meager, and suspected some form of corruption in connection with the school's rice supply, they turned to Hu to direct an investigation. This was an extremely serious situation: the rice kept in the school storehouse represented the institution's capital, since rice was the only stable currency available; students' tuition fees and teachers' salaries were both paid in it, and it was used to buy other foods and supplies. Since teachers were badly underpaid, irregularities were not infrequent, and sometimes were even considered customary.
Before long, Hu had organized a special committee of students to keep a close watch over every grain of rice brought to or taken from the storehouse. The system worked admirably: corruption apparently ended, and meals improved. But the school president was angered by the students' assumption of authority, and especially resented Hu as their ringleader. Matters came to a climax when an old school servant, despite official permission from the school accountant, was refused rice for a late meal upon returning from a trip; the student committee members insisted that he first had to get Hu's personal approval. Hu soon became involved in a power struggle with the school president, which he described to me with some relish; it was eventually resolved through a tacit compromise in which the students continued their vigilance, but did so as quietly as possible in order to cause minimal embarrassment to the authorities.
Hu's sense of victory was eventually reinforced by his uncle's grudging praise. The latter was at first enraged when informed of Hu's activities by the school president; but after a short time, his respect for Hu became apparent, and he referred to him as a "straight-boned boy"--an expression suggesting strength, courage, and integrity. The only unfavorable repercussion came about a year later when, despite having announced that Hu had won the prize for the outstanding student of the semester, the faculty members "forgot" to present the award to him. He became angered, ceased making his best efforts, and concluded that "people never get what they deserve. "
His personal struggles with authority thus found effective social expression in the turbulent Chinese student world. His rebellious urges were constantly fed by real injustice, until
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I developed the conviction that any authority held over me was irra- tional. I transferred from school to school. . . . As soon as I would meet the head of a new school, I would automatically think: "This man must be an irrational authority. " And I would invariably find out that this was true.
There was another rice incident at the provincial upper middle school which Hu next attended. This time he was in danger of being expelled, until the approaching Japanese armies interrupted his personal battle. Hu fled to Free China in the interior, as all students were urged to do. His uncle sent him off with these words: "When the whole society is so corrupt, what can you, just an individual person, do about it? "--an attitude of resignation which Hu strongly contested at the time, but one which he was never to stop wondering about.
Arriving in Chungking, where students were instructed to report for reassignment, Hu got into an argument with an arrogant official who reprimanded him for not having the correct papers. He later felt that this dispute caused him extra months of waiting and re- sulted in his receiving an undesirable school placement to a poorly- organized agricultural institution.
Now he became extremely discouraged. He had sustained himself through a difficult trip to Chungking with the belief that "every- thing would be all right when I got there," but found instead that "it was only the beginning of my troubles. " Out of touch with his family, financially destitute (and cheated when he sold his only valuable possession, a gold ring), feeling awkward in imposing upon family contacts for temporary shelter, Hu found solace in a new friendship. A sympathetic middle-aged scholar and former govern- ment official from his own village area offered him the first mean- ingful explanation of his sufferings, and became his first political mentor:
He was a man about the age of my father, an extremely eloquent per- son who quickly became my hero. He told me how he had worked with the KMT during its real revolutionary days, but was now being dis- criminated against because of his leftist views. I too had felt discrimi- nated against as a child and he told me that this was due to the evils of the old society. I could see little hope for the future, but then he described the Communist program as a solution for China and a way
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to a bright future. . . . He was kind and encouraging. I visited him
frequently and soon adopted his views.
Hu's new beliefs gave him further confidence in his participation iri student agitation about corruption in the food supply as well as other issues at the agricultural school. And for the first time he be- came involved in a dangerous predicament: Nationalist secret police arrested some of the students, and Hu was accused by school authorities of being a Communist although he had no such affilia- tion at the time other than his beginning sympathies. Since he had heard stories of cruelty and torture inflicted by this division of the KMT, and of special "training" to which alleged offenders had been submitted, he decided to flee rather than risk arrest.
Having no place to go, and wishing to contribute to China's war effort, he enlisted in a special student military unit then being formed. There he found temporary sanctuary, but was once more deeply disturbed by the enormous corruption and inefficiency re- garding payrolls, allocation of weapons, and training arrangements. These things were not unique at the time, but the student unit apparently became something of a national scandal. At this time his father and uncle succeeded in getting in touch with him again and were horrified to find he was in the army; they wrote that they had sent him to the interior to become a scholar, not a soldier, and that, as the only male of his generation in the family, he had no right to take such liberties with his person. Their attitude can be summed up in the popular Chinese proverb which Hu himself quoted to me; "Good iron is not used for nails; good men do not be- come soldiers. " Hu resigned after six months of service when he was given the chance; he had come to the conclusion that "there could be no hope for the Nationalist government/'
A veteran enthusiast-cynic at nineteen, Hu's fortunes now finally changed. He managed through friends to gain admission to a much- respected high school primarily for overseas Chinese from south- east Asia, but which took some students in Hu's displaced cir- cumstances. When the school had to disband because of a new Japanese penetration, Hu accompanied a group of students and faculty members to Szechwan Province where it was re-established in combination with another school. Hu encountered here, despite the limited physical facilities, an atmosphere unique in his ex- perience: complete absence of corruption, great intellectual stimula-
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tion, an intimate group life among students, informal relations with faculty, and a generally shared hope for future reforms which could cure China's ills. In an inspiring history teacher, Hu found his second political (and Marxist) mentor:
I already had an emotional sympathy for the Communists. I now began to read about the materialist interpretation of history, the history of the development of society, and Ai Ssu-chYs popular philosophy. 1 When I had difficulty understanding some of these principles I went to this history teacher for help. He was always friendly and patient, and seemed to answer my questions logically. I acquired the theoretical background to go along with my emotional sympathy. . . . From that time on I developed the idea in my mind that Communism was the inevitable outcome of history. . . . It seemed to be the only way out for young people.
He emphasized the importance of his resentment of the old regime in bringing about this new view of the world.
My main feeling then was hatred for the KMT, All that I had seen and experienced was wrong. This hatred was the active side of my being; my feeling for Communism was a more passive side. Before I could understand the true meaning of their writing I accepted them because I was predisposed to do so. . . . I was at first excited by their solution to China's problems. Then I had more of the feeling that it was all settled: the KMT was out of the question, of no use, and Communism was the right way.
This was for Hu, "the happiest period of my life," the only time he can remember--perhaps with some retrospective glorification --being free of disturbing conflicts: "I no longer thought of any of my troubles. . . . I just forgot about the family. " Graduating near the top of his class at the age of twenty-one, he left for his home shortly after the Japanese surrender.
But when he arrived in Hupeh, he found his father, at sixty, "a defeated, frustrated, lonely old man, disillusioned with world events. " Hu senior had by this time become convinced that man's earthly efforts were futile, and (following a frequent Chinese life pattern) wished to spend his declining years in Buddhist medita- tion. Hu found his father surprisingly approachable and affectionate, and the two became closer than at any previous time. There was just one conflict between them--the old sore spot of Hu's educa-
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tion. His father, drawing upon his own experience, even went so far as to discourage university studies: "I have studied and tried to serve my country all my life and what did it lead to? " This failing, he urged Hu to attend a nearby university. But Hu recalled his past frustrations over his father's failure to keep his word about arrangements for study, and at that moment "the old resentment returned. " He refused his father's request and entered the Univer- sity of Nanking, where he felt he could get a better education.
Majoring in law and government, he found the atmosphere not conducive to study. Students and faculty members were vehemently denouncing the postwar KMT government, especially its failure to curb inflation and its repressive methods in attempting to stamp out opposition. Before long Hu assumed a leading role in student agitation, working closely with Communist Party members who did much of the behind-the-scenes organizing. During his junior year, he was arrested by the KMT police as part of a general roundup of student "activists. " Most were soon released, but a small group, including Hu, were taken to a country house just outside of Nan- king where they were told they were to be secretly executed. Im- prisoned for several months, Hu claimed that a spirit of group dedication protected him from fear. In fact, his description of the experience--even if the words are not taken at complete face value --implies a genuine exhilaration:
We were there together and had no horror of death. We always tried to encourage each other. . . . We felt that we were being sacrificed for a great cause, that our deaths would have a purpose. . . . Some of us felt that we were so young and our greatest regret was that we could not do more work for China. . . . I did feel grief and sorrow at night when I would think of my parents and my family. Then I would think of the meaning of our sacrifice, and I would forget about my sorrow.
All agreed that the meaning of their sacrifice was its contribu- tion to China's future, but Hu recalls a certain amount of dis- agreement among the imprisoned students concerning just what that future should be. Hu and a few of the others believed that China's civil war would be best resolved through a coalition govern- ment including the more enlightened Nationalist leaders (who had just replaced Chiang Kai-shek) as well as Communists; but the Communist students in the group insisted that there must be
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nothing short of a complete Communist victory. Their position made Hu wonder whether these students "had greater loyalties to the Communist party than to China itself," although not until later did he recognize the significance of this disagreement. Hu was not too excited (there was a suggestion that one side of him might even have been disappointed) when a general amnesty for political prisoners led to their release. His main preoccupation at the time was that of smuggling out his handcuffs in order to retain them as evidence of his mistreatment at the hands of the KMT. When he returned to the campus, he was greeted as a hero, and he remained active until the Communist entry a few months later.
Evaluation and Follow-up
Hu brought to thought reform an extraordinary capacity for anger and indignation; indeed, these had long before become the leitmotif of his existence. More than merely expressing them himself, he excelled at mobilizing similar emotions among others in his im- mediate environment. In this ability lay his capacity for leader- ship and the core of his youthful identity as an activist student leader. Behind his indignation and his leadership was an unusual degree of totalism--an all-or-nothing quality which pervaded his emotional life.
Hu's character in some ways was more reminiscent of the spirit of the young Martin Luther than of that of Confucius. Like Luther's (and like many figures in the Old Testament), Hu's totalism de- manded both full authority over those he led, and absolute self-
surrender to a higher authority. Hu also possessed a conscience of terrifying proportions. This kind of conscience can serve the creative function of inspiring total sincerity and absolute integrity--of mak- ing men mean what they say; it also, in its uncompromising judg- ments, contains the potential for the most extreme form of destruc- tiveness, including self-destructiveness. 2
We could consider Hu a psychological misfit, a compulsive rebel who goes into battle at the mere sight of authority, any authority. We could also see him as one of those exceptional young leaders who learn early in life to harness their own emotions in such a way that they make sensitive contact with yearnings of less intense people around them. Both of these judgments are true; either one
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alone distorts the picture. We can certainly say that Hu had little of the spirit of compromise and moderation so long valued in Chinese character structure; rather, he was an extremist who grew up in a series of environments conducive to extremism. This made him no less Chinese, but Chinese in a twentieth-century fashion. To under- stand the complexities of his character and of his response to thought reform, we must examine the strengths and the under- lying conflicts in an identity shaped against a background of chaos and change.
Whatever his struggles, Hu carried with him from early life a strong sense of himself as an aristocrat and a potential leader. As a young master within Chinese tradition, he was a little adult groomed for authority almost from birth. Moving from his family out into society, he maintained the conviction that it was his destiny to speak and act on behalf of others, and he developed an early talent for doing so. As with any talent, one must avoid oversimplified cause-and-effect explanations of origin (hereditary factors are prob- ably of great importance); but once this talent had been combined with the identity of the aristocratic leader, a pattern of strength and bold self-expression emerged which was crucial for what Hu would do and be in any situation. His development into a straight- boned boy (the last honorable confirmation he received within the idiom of traditional Chinese culture) expressed a similarself-image, matured to the point where he had become a youth with a cause. Both the youth and the cause continued to evolve until Hu became the activist student leader. This elite identity sequence supplied Hu with a sense of inner continuity, even when he turned against the traditional Chinese culture which had originally nurtured it. He used the strength of his family heritage--his identification with his father and his grandfather--to do battle with that same heritage, or at least with its remnants.
At the same time, Hu had always to fight off a profound sense of despair growing out of his personal, social, and historical predica- ment, Hu's environment had imposed on him a series of painful inner contradictions.
To be a young master had its advantages; but it also involved him in a premature power struggle from which no child could emerge unscarred. It was, moreover, an archaic identity, one which was based upon a system of values in human relationships which was rapidly breaking down. Indeed, the extremes of behavior
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in Hu's family (especially that of his step-grandmother) were des- perate attempts to hold on to what was already slipping away. Hu's childhood environment was thus a caricature of Chinese family life, an expression of traditionalism rather than tradition.
A young master was also expected to be a filial son--obedient and proper not from coercion but love. Yet, so lacking in love and trust was his family environment that any such an identity had to be more pseudo than real. Hu's step-grandmother's indirect aggres- siveness, his mother's harassed nervousness, his uncle's petulance --and perhaps something inherent in Hu which made him difficult to love--all contributed to this contradictory atmosphere. These circumstances were both partly created and strongly intensified by historical and political currents: his father's fugitive status brought about a marriage with inevitable class strains, and was also respon- sible for the step-grandmother's being permitted to abuse her matriarchal power. Hu had no choice but to go through the filial motions; and even though he faltered at an early age (in the family shrine incident, for instance), he submitted to his step-grandmother more than he could comfortably admit to me.
This submission to his hated adversary had a lasting symbolic meaning for Hu: it established within him an exaggerated sensi- tivity toward being controlled or dominated by anyone. It also con- tributed to his later yearning for the very thing he was always fight- ing off: total domination, if not by a strong individual, at least by a mystical force. Children subjected to unusually controlling family authority can come to depend upon and even find pleasure in being so controlled; their subsequent struggle against new, would-be con- trollers becomes an inner battle between fear and desire. In Hu's case, the controlling person (his grandmother) became a symbol of both "irrational authority" and "the past," so that the two became equated in his mind. This is a frequent association for a youth in any culture, but is especially strong when he grows up in the midst of crumbling institutions and abused family prerogatives. Yet, iron- ically enough, this step-grandmother also supplied Hu with a model for his own later domineering tendencies, and initiated a response by which Hu came to view almost every relationship as essentially a power struggle.
Rather than the filial son, Hu regarded himself as the abandoned and betrayed victim of the most gross injustice. Whom did he
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blame for this injustice? He made clear that he focused most of his conscious hostility on his step-grandmother; and she thus served a useful function for him as the first of his total villains, acceptable outlets for his hatred against whom he could rally real or imagined action. But Hu also experienced resentment toward another person, for whom such resentment was entirely unacceptable: his father. He could not quite suppress the hostility which accompanied his sense of having been abandoned; and hostility toward one's father is, by traditional Chinese cultural standards, the most unfilial emo- tion a child can experience. These resentful feelings were Hu's first painful secret. Certainly his desire for revenge against his step- grandmother was real enough; but it was intensified by his need to purge his mind of similar feelings toward his father, and possibly his mother as well. His sense of himself as the unfilial son (to both father and grandmother), as the abandoned and betrayed victim, and as the avenger made up a formidable negative identity complex. Each of these elements was something against which his culture and family had warned him, and each was something he could not avoid becoming, despite and partly because of this warning; in lasting combination, they had the destructive effect of maintaining within him the bitterness and guilt which gave his rebellion its desperate and compulsive character.
To bring all these aspects of himself--positive and negative-- into effective combination, Hu resorted to two personal, Utopian myths. (The term personal myth is used here to suggest a recur- rently-imagined sequence of events which supply purpose and mo- mentum to an individual's existence. ) The first myth, involving his father's return, was mostly passive--a longing for a golden age which had never existed. The second, the myth of himself as the hero (or chien hsia), was more active, and for a time he lived it out quite effectively. These two myths assumed tremendous im- portance in Hu's life, for they were the antidote for his despair: the first offered hope eternal, the second a bold life of self-sacrifice and redemption. At the same time they generated strong emotional forces which, once initiated, had a staying power of their own. His quests for some form of golden age and for perpetual heroic ex- pression 3 came to influence Hu's every action. They also reinforced his already well-developed totalism: for so deep had been his despair, so strong his sense of personal oppression, so extreme the
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social chaos, and so dramatic the contemporary historical events, that Hu began very early to seek all-embracing personal and polit- ical solutions.
As an activist student leader in a turbulent student movement, Hu found an ideal metier for acting upon his personal myths and giving expression to his talents and his emotional urges. Embracing a Communist ideology which promised a universal golden age, he could remain sufficiently independent to follow a hero's path of individual leadership, and almost martyrdom.
He required a new total villain, a role for which the KMT was admirably suited. It was "old"; and--on the basis of his own ex- perience, beginning with the Youth Corps school--its authority was "irrational. " These judgments were by no means simply the product of Hu's own emotional urges (the KMT's inept and re- pressive policies have been widely documented): but Hu--like many others of his generation--found in this regime a focus for all of the bitterness, anger, and frustration which had built up during his young life.
Hu was helped to make the short step from hatred of the KMT to sympathy for the Communists (and the feeling he had found something "new" and "rational") by the two fatherly men he en- countered. One may say that they were, at least temporarily, fathers regained; but their attraction for Hu lay in the contrasts between them and his real father: they were there, they were consistent, they had time for him, and they explained things. Indeed, they did what mentors and healers (religious, political, academic, or psychological) so often do; they made it possible for Hu to unite his personal myths with more sweeping social and historical myths, and pointed out to him a way to a relationship with mankind. This new ideology was as totalistic as he could wish it to be; and his most vengeful feelings could be justified within a framework of an apocalyptic cause.
Once Communism became the prevailing authority, however, Hu was bound to be troubled by the manipulations of its cadres. First at the university, and then during thought reform itself, he experi- enced a profound sense of humiliation at being forced to submit to suffocating domination. And as in the past, much of his emotional energy was taken up with fighting off his own urge to surrender himself totally to the force imposing this domination. His entering
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the revolutionary university was in itself a partial admission that something in his attitude should be changed; during the first days of reform he seemed to be giving himself completely to the process, and recapturing that golden age of total sincerity and harmony which he had known just once before at his last high school. But as much as part of him longed for total emotional immersion, he was, in the long run, incapable of it. As with Father Simon (the con- verted Jesuit), the defier in Hu could never allow the convert in him to gain the upper hand; he could not trust any environment, even a Communist one, sufficiently to permit himself the absolute merger toward which his totalism constantly drove him.
Hu's means of dealing with this conflict was to cling tenaciously to a sense of autonomy, and the only kind of autonomy he knew was that of the leader or hero. Hence his unsolicited debate with the cadre, and his view of himself as both a teacher and a defender of his fellow students. His heroic self-image required him to main- tain high standards of integrity (even if he violated these more than he admits); and it gave a dramatic quality to his every action, a sense that all he did or said had significance not only for himself but for the world at large. It was thus of great help in maintaining his self-fespect and his autonomy, and in preserving a certain amount of independence from the bizarre thought-reform morality. But in the face of thought reform's consistent antipathy to heroes--to any- one who might exert a strong influence over others which was dif- ferent from the immediate thought reform message--this self-image also imposed an extremely heavy psychological burden.
The greatest threat to Hu's emotional balance, however, was his "secret"--the bitter hatred toward the Communist reformers which welled up within him. Contained within this secret were all of his negative identity elements, which now had a confused relationship to the Communist authorities. That is, Hu felt himself to be un- filial to a movement he had long embraced and to an all-powerful authority which would brook no disloyalty; to be the abandoned and betrayed victim of that same Communist authority; and to be a potential avenger who would some day smite down his persecutors. These sentiments not only would have placed him in considerable personal danger had they become known; but their unacceptability --to the environment and to Hu himself--stimulated strong feel- ings of guilt, just as his secret resentment of his father had earlier
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in his life. This guilt was partly responsible for Hu's unconscious urge to reveal his secret ("The secret was something which was al- ways trying to escape from me"). But also contributing to this urge was his strong inner drive toward total self-surrender, since reveal- ing the extent of his hostility would have been the first step in a genuine Communist-style reform. As is so often the case in totalitar- ian confession and reform procedures, Hu's secret was almost his undoing.
The news of his father's imprisonment caused him to revert sud- denly to traditional self-judgments, and to revive his long-standing negative self-image of the unfilial son. He experienced the terrible guilt of the son who had defied and, by participating in the Com- munist movement, had overthrown--had symbolically demolished --his father. After this, the requirement that he denounce his father in the final summary added salt to his wounds. What is puzzling is not that he made this denunciation, since it was a re- quirement which no one could escape, but that he subsequently de- cided to accept the Communist job assignment and give up his plan to flee to Nanking. He did this despite having closely identified with his father as a victim of Communist persecution, and having be- come, if possible, even more resentful toward the new regime. I believe the explanation lies in what I have called the bond of betrayal between reformers and reformed. W ith so strong a sense of having betrayed his own filial heritage (a heritage of immense emo- tional power, whatever its inconsistencies, and however long his defiance of it), he was all the more involved with those who had brought about the betrayal, and there was no turning back. Not until he actually found himself in the job situation, and had perhaps recovered from the shock and depression which had accompanied the news of his father's imprisonment, did he realize he was in- capable of even the minimal amount of submission necessary to survive within the Communist environment.
Why did Hu leave China? Should his defection be attributed to courageous resistance to coercion, to psychological conflict, or to chance? Certainly all three factors were important. The chance lay in the opportunity he found to leave the country, an opportunity which, to be sure, he had done much to create. His bloodhound's nose for coercion made him especially sensitive to the manipulative aspects of thought reform. His heroic self-image contributed to the
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strength of his resistance. At the same time, his overwhelming psy- chological conflicts had produced an urgent need to escape. To put it another way, he left because he perceived an incompatibility be- tween his personal character structure and the Communist environ- ment around him. For him, thought reform had a reverse effect: before it he had been an avowed (if somewhat disgruntled) sym- pathizer; soon after, he became a bitterly disenchanted opponent.
As for Hu's experiences in Hong Kong, he tried to establish him- self there as an anti-Communist writer. From what we know about him, and about Hong Kong, it would have been predictable that he would not have had an easy time. At the age of twenty-six, he had not been able to establish any workable adult life pattern; he was still in the midst of an action-oriented search, a continuous identity crisis, which had begun at the age of sixteen. We would ex- pect him to experiment, as most refugee Chinese intellectuals did, with new identities and new ideologies. And we would expect his experiments to be consuming in their intensity, heroic in their proportions, and devastating in their potential for disillusionment. This is essentially what did happen--but it is not the whole story, for as tenacious as these patterns were within Hu, he was not en- tirely incapable of change.
The first great shock he had to sustain was the news of his father's death--probably at the hands of a new "People's Court"--which he heard within a few months after his arrival. His emotions were similar to those he had experienced at hearing about his father's first imprisonment, but this time they were much more severe. He had the same visions of mob terrorism, similar feelings of guilt and responsibility, and an even greater preoccupation with his failure to be filial: "I regretted very much that I could not be there. . . . It is a strong Chinese tradition that a son should be present at the time of his father's death. It is part of filial piety. " Even before this news, he had begun to be discouraged about his difficulty in locating an anti-Communist group with whom he could work, about the un- concerned attitude of Hong Kong people toward Communist China, and about his dependency upon a friend's kindness for support. Discouragement gave way to depression, and for several weeks he had little hope.
Then a few articles he had written for Hong Kong periodicals
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caught the attention of the leaders of a newly-formed "third force" youth group, and he was asked to join them. Before long he was playing a prominent role in the group's activities, enjoying living and working with its members, and contributing to their sense of enthusiasm. The organization became more recognized and began to receive American subsidies; however, he noted that the co-opera- tive atmosphere began to give way to intrigue and a struggle for power. Soon he came into sharp conflict with the other leaders over their dismissal of some of his colleagues, and he decided that lie had no alternative but to resign. Disillusioned and despairing, he bitterly resented his adversaries; but he was not without some tendency to place part of the blame upon himself. "I left with the feeling I had personally failed. . . . I was disappointed and frus- trated, and I had no more 'heart'. " Some time later the same pat- tern repeated itself: active involvement with a new anti-Commu- nist press organization, severe personal conflicts, then resignation from the group. The second experience revealed Hu's panic at the threat of being dominated by one of the other leaders. "Although he never came to dominate me, I resented the fact that he had been planning ways to do this. . . . I couldn't concentrate on anything else. . . . Just thinking how to stop this person's domination/' At one point in this conflict, Hu became aware of his own excit- ability, and commented to his close friend (our interpreter) that there must be something wrong with him, and that perhaps he was in need of a woman. (He later told me, however, that he had never had sexual relations because he feared that "once I gave myself to it, I might lose all control"--a statement which reflected a fear of his own hostile urges, as well as his feelings of attraction and re- pulsion for any total experience. ) According to the interpreter, others in the press group admitted that Hu's rival had attempted to dominate all of the members; but they felt that Hu was over- sensitive and impulsive, and that he still retained Communist-like tendencies to view every situation as a struggle for power.
After each of these episodes, Hu retreated into a quiet rural life --long walks, swimming, and lonely meditation upon his personal plight, a habit he kept from early adolescence. When he was calmer and felt less pressured, he began to accept some of the judgments of others, even judgments about his own character. He realized that he had unwittingly favored Communist-like organization within
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both the press groups, and determined to "lead myself away from this old Communist way of thinking. " He also began to change his estimate of human character. "I had always felt that when sup- pressed, people could fight for their ideals and sacrifice every- thing. . . . I came to understand that what friends had told me was true--that there is a lust for power in the human mind, and that those who failed to understand this get into all kinds of trouble. "
And like many other refugee Chinese intellectuals, he gravitated --because of his need and its availability--toward Christianity. He again came to a new ideology through a kind and parental mentor, this time a woman: a middle-aged American Lutheran missionary who had worked for many years in a province near his home and was able to talk to him in a dialect which reminded him of his childhood. In addition to these geographical and emotional associations, so important for Chinese, he was moved by her affec- tion for him. "When I went to see her I had a feeling that her con- cern for me was something I badly needed. You might say she had a kind of maternal feeling for me. " He felt that she and her col- leagues were among the few people he had ever encountered who were "concerned with the welfare of human beings as such without hoping to get something out of them. "
He also found a spirit of humility and compromise among the members of this group; he thought this spirit was Christianity's contribution to Western democracy, and he wished to emulate it, realizing that he lacked it in his own character. "My old attitude was that when I thought myself in the right, I must stick strictly to my views and never give in or compromise. . . . This caused me much suffering in the past. " He attributed his intransigence to Chi- nese tradition: "The word compromise had an undesirable flavor in old Chinese society. " Although this view slighted his own cultural heritage (Confucianism actually emphasizes a spirit of com- promise) and perhaps was naively uncritical of Lutheran Chris- tianity (in which uncompromising credal purity has often been a prominent feature), it did have validity for Hu's own experience.
Equally important was Hu's discovery that the Christian con- cepts of guilt and sin offered a meaningful interpretation of all of the evils he had seen, as well as a way to deal with his own angers:
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When I was on the mainland, I was influenced by Confucian teaching, ideas that human nature was basically good, and that people can do good if they wish to. . . . I could not reconcile this belief with the evils I observed in the KMT, the Communist, and the refugee organiza- tions in Hong Kong. . . . In my own mind there was turmoil, and I was troubled by feelings of hatred for certain people. . . . But from reading the Scriptures, I learned that evils exist in every human being, including myself, and that the only way to remove these evils is to forgive them.
Although Hu's antagonisms scarcely disappeared, his association with the Lutherans did seem to agree with him. They found a place for him to stay near them, and offered him a job as secretary and translator. This happened concurrently with our interviews; and after living among the Lutherans for a few months Hu gained weight, and seemed much more relaxed and content than I had ever seen him. He described leading a "quiet, pleasant life," and said he was increasingly interested in Christian teachings.
At the same time (six years after his thought reform) he dis- cussed with me some of his lingering preoccupations with his escape from Communism, and the terrifying images of the Com- munist cadres which remained with him. He still had nightmares, although not as frequently as he did earlier in his Hong Kong stay, in which he was fleeing Communist cadres, resisting capture, even shooting and killing a pursuer; sometimes he dreamt he was hunted as a criminal, sometimes helped by a kind friend, but never quite escaping. The cadre appeared as an all-powerful apparition which his eyes were forced to behold.
, . . a big terrible monster whose face and body-build I cannot see clearly. He does not actually appear to be a substantial person. What I see is only the Communist uniform. . . . It is as if there is nothing specifically to force me to see him, but I am compelled to see him of my own volition. I don't wish to but I have to, . . . I am so full of fear I cannot consider refusing.
He went on to give a subjective analysis of the sources of the cadre's effectiveness; using machine images, he came to conclusions similar to those of others who have studied the Communist cadre.
A Communist cadre is an apparatus rather than an individual. His knowledge, ability, emotion, every part of his body, is dedicated to the
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utilization of this piece of apparatus. That is why he has no real emo- tion toward you, no real feeling. That is why he is so terrible. . . . In action, a Communist cadre is more effective than an ordinary man be- cause where an ordinary man would quit a job and say that he has done his best, a Communist cadre would go on and finish it. He is always responsible for what he has done because there is a deliberate system behind him such that he may be considered responsible for something he had done ten years before. He must check and check again, as when he finishes a job and hands in his work, there is no way of escape. He is not working for himself, but for the glory of the Party. 4
Hu was still troubled by guilty, fearful secrets which he had kept from the Communists:
I have a feeling of guilt--not to my own conscience--but because I had a secret with them as one who came from among them. . . . When I decided to leave the mainland, I did not tell them that I had been a student at North China University or that I had been in the People's Revolutionary Army. If I had told them this, they would not have let me go. . .
For to Hu, his father soon became the center of a lasting personal myth--that of the all-powerful father who suddenly materializes and rescues his son from an otherwise invincible oppressor r
I found myself always thinking of him. . . . To me he was the most dignified and impressive man in the world. . . . I felt that one day my father would return and all of my troubles would be over.
Nor could repeated evidence to the contrary dispel this myth: the family lost touch with his father for periods of years, and
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when he did visit, the step-grandmother and he observed all proper forms (he too had to be filial) and things remained as they had been. Hu was never too happy at his uncle's house, where he felt he was being cared for more out of obligation than love, and he went on hoping; when he got tired of this his thoughts turned toward revenge, and toward the day when he would be big enough and smart enough to be able to deal with his arch-enemy. Her death, which occurred shortly after that of his mother, and his father's continued absence caused him to avoid the family home, which he then considered haunted.
Hu's erratic pattern of education exposed him to the full chaos of the Chinese cultural and political scene. From the ages of eight to twelve, he studied with private tutors employed by his and neighboring families; in the traditional fashion, he learned how to read and write from simplified versions of the Confucian classics. He did not like the stern discipline of the tutor, and was frequently punished for misbehavior; but he was impressed with Confucian teachings of filial piety and loyalty to family and country, as yet unaware of the inconsistencies between these theoretical virtues and the realities of the life around him.
Next, he spent two years studying and boarding at a new-style upper primary school not too far from his home. There he was surprised to encounter classmates who were mostly adults or near- adults, prospective employees of the local government who had come to take advantage of the school's "modern" curriculum, in keeping with a new regulation that officials have some Western education. As the youngest pupil in the school, Hu deeply resented the teasing and bullying he received from the others, some of them two or three times his age--especially when they told him that "a little boy is not supposed to lose his temper with his elders. " He no doubt stimulated many of these antagonisms, since by this time he had become a rebellious, outspoken child. Again made aware of his helplessness in the face of superior power, he once more dreamed of the day when he could outwit his tormentors; he partially realized this goal in demonstrating his quicker ability to grasp the Western subjects in the academic curriculum.
After his graduation, his uncle planned to send him to a junior middle school in a nearby city. Just when Hu was about to leave for the new school, his father suddenly appeared, and Hu took advan-
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tage of the occasion to express many of his grievances. His father was angered by the boy's story. As a man of the world, he disap- proved of the provincial way in which Hu was dressed, and of the undistinguished school which had been selected for him. As usual, Hu senior stayed only briefly, but before he left he canceled the existing plans and promised to return soon to take the boy to a better school in a larger city. For the next three years, however, nothing more was heard from him; and between the ages of thirteen and sixteen Hu remained idle, receiving no formal education.
These years were the most lonely interlude of a life in which loneliness had already become a regular feature. Hu felt estranged from his uncle as well as his father, since the uncle resented both the boy and the father for undermining what he considered to be a reasonable discharge of his responsibilities. Hu became more em- bittered than ever--angry at his uncle for allowing family conflicts to interfere with his education, and even having doubts about his father and wondering whether he was really in hiding or had "just forgotten about the family/' But he clung tenaciously to his father- return myth, and even when he was telling me about these events, he could admit no resentment toward his mythical hero. Feeling at home nowhere, thinking a great deal about running away, but unable to decide where to go, he described his general emotion as "fatalistic anger" (the kind of hostility which is temporarily held in abeyance until an opportunity arises to express it).
Finally dismissing the entire problem from his mind, Hu began to interest himself in other things--taking long walks through the neighboring countryside, and reading voraciously the traditional Chinese chien-hsia novels. The chien-hsia is a superhuman hero who combines physical strength and magical powers in purishing evil and helping the oppressed, always acting outside of and fre- quently in opposition to vested authority; so great is the chien-hsia's imaginative impact that one Chinese colleague--possibly with a certain amount of cultural chauvinism--described him to me as "a combination of the Western knight errant and Robin Hood, only much more skillful and ingenious. " Imagining himself a chien-hsia was an ideal antidote to Hu's sense of loneliness and helplessness. His period of inactivity came to an end only through the chance appearance of an old family friend who prevailed upon the uncle to send Hu back to school (respected outsiders have frequently
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been the best mediators in severe Chinese intrafamily disputes). Hu wasthen sent to a middle school sponsored by the Kuomintang Youth Corps. He spent just one semester there, but it was an ex- perience which had great significance in shaping his political emo- tions. He had chosen the school himself, for even in his isola- tion he had been caught up in the wave of patriotism which swept the country at the time of the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War. But he was horrified by what he found there. Hastily put together, the school had enrolled many more students than the small faculty could handle; the academic program was practically nonexistent, and most of the time was devoted to military training. Discipline was not only strict, but needlessly vindictive, and severe whippings were administered for minor infractions. Hu was from the beginning critical of the school and suspicious of its attempts to mobilize student emotions--so much so that he was among the very few who did not, in the initial burst of patriotic fervor, join the KMT Youth Corps. He later told me that his restraint might have been due to memories of his father's tribulations within the KMT, Students soon became united in their resentment of the school and so rebellious that the atmosphere began to resemble that of an armed camp; none of the twenty youths from Hu's area returned the following semester. While there, Hu, developed his talent for rebellion a bit further: he became an expert at forging the signa- ture of the chief military trainer on passes (he proudly demon- strated his technique to me during our interview). The experience left him with the feeling that the KMT Youth Corps was "dis-
appointing and silly . . . brutal and irrational/7 His "disgust and hatred" was soon extended to the entire KMT Party and Govern- ment, and it later developed into the predominating passion of his youth.
The county junior middle school to which he transferred seemed a great improvement. He did well academically, and quickly be- came a leader among the students. In addition, he held a specially privileged status among the faculty because the president of the school was Hu's uncle's "adopted son"--that is, the uncle, as a prominent person in the area, sponsored the school official's career and exercised considerable influence over it. This made things particularly complicated for Hu when, just a few months after his arrival, he came into direct conflict with this same school president
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For when the students began to notice that their meals seemed meager, and suspected some form of corruption in connection with the school's rice supply, they turned to Hu to direct an investigation. This was an extremely serious situation: the rice kept in the school storehouse represented the institution's capital, since rice was the only stable currency available; students' tuition fees and teachers' salaries were both paid in it, and it was used to buy other foods and supplies. Since teachers were badly underpaid, irregularities were not infrequent, and sometimes were even considered customary.
Before long, Hu had organized a special committee of students to keep a close watch over every grain of rice brought to or taken from the storehouse. The system worked admirably: corruption apparently ended, and meals improved. But the school president was angered by the students' assumption of authority, and especially resented Hu as their ringleader. Matters came to a climax when an old school servant, despite official permission from the school accountant, was refused rice for a late meal upon returning from a trip; the student committee members insisted that he first had to get Hu's personal approval. Hu soon became involved in a power struggle with the school president, which he described to me with some relish; it was eventually resolved through a tacit compromise in which the students continued their vigilance, but did so as quietly as possible in order to cause minimal embarrassment to the authorities.
Hu's sense of victory was eventually reinforced by his uncle's grudging praise. The latter was at first enraged when informed of Hu's activities by the school president; but after a short time, his respect for Hu became apparent, and he referred to him as a "straight-boned boy"--an expression suggesting strength, courage, and integrity. The only unfavorable repercussion came about a year later when, despite having announced that Hu had won the prize for the outstanding student of the semester, the faculty members "forgot" to present the award to him. He became angered, ceased making his best efforts, and concluded that "people never get what they deserve. "
His personal struggles with authority thus found effective social expression in the turbulent Chinese student world. His rebellious urges were constantly fed by real injustice, until
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I developed the conviction that any authority held over me was irra- tional. I transferred from school to school. . . . As soon as I would meet the head of a new school, I would automatically think: "This man must be an irrational authority. " And I would invariably find out that this was true.
There was another rice incident at the provincial upper middle school which Hu next attended. This time he was in danger of being expelled, until the approaching Japanese armies interrupted his personal battle. Hu fled to Free China in the interior, as all students were urged to do. His uncle sent him off with these words: "When the whole society is so corrupt, what can you, just an individual person, do about it? "--an attitude of resignation which Hu strongly contested at the time, but one which he was never to stop wondering about.
Arriving in Chungking, where students were instructed to report for reassignment, Hu got into an argument with an arrogant official who reprimanded him for not having the correct papers. He later felt that this dispute caused him extra months of waiting and re- sulted in his receiving an undesirable school placement to a poorly- organized agricultural institution.
Now he became extremely discouraged. He had sustained himself through a difficult trip to Chungking with the belief that "every- thing would be all right when I got there," but found instead that "it was only the beginning of my troubles. " Out of touch with his family, financially destitute (and cheated when he sold his only valuable possession, a gold ring), feeling awkward in imposing upon family contacts for temporary shelter, Hu found solace in a new friendship. A sympathetic middle-aged scholar and former govern- ment official from his own village area offered him the first mean- ingful explanation of his sufferings, and became his first political mentor:
He was a man about the age of my father, an extremely eloquent per- son who quickly became my hero. He told me how he had worked with the KMT during its real revolutionary days, but was now being dis- criminated against because of his leftist views. I too had felt discrimi- nated against as a child and he told me that this was due to the evils of the old society. I could see little hope for the future, but then he described the Communist program as a solution for China and a way
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to a bright future. . . . He was kind and encouraging. I visited him
frequently and soon adopted his views.
Hu's new beliefs gave him further confidence in his participation iri student agitation about corruption in the food supply as well as other issues at the agricultural school. And for the first time he be- came involved in a dangerous predicament: Nationalist secret police arrested some of the students, and Hu was accused by school authorities of being a Communist although he had no such affilia- tion at the time other than his beginning sympathies. Since he had heard stories of cruelty and torture inflicted by this division of the KMT, and of special "training" to which alleged offenders had been submitted, he decided to flee rather than risk arrest.
Having no place to go, and wishing to contribute to China's war effort, he enlisted in a special student military unit then being formed. There he found temporary sanctuary, but was once more deeply disturbed by the enormous corruption and inefficiency re- garding payrolls, allocation of weapons, and training arrangements. These things were not unique at the time, but the student unit apparently became something of a national scandal. At this time his father and uncle succeeded in getting in touch with him again and were horrified to find he was in the army; they wrote that they had sent him to the interior to become a scholar, not a soldier, and that, as the only male of his generation in the family, he had no right to take such liberties with his person. Their attitude can be summed up in the popular Chinese proverb which Hu himself quoted to me; "Good iron is not used for nails; good men do not be- come soldiers. " Hu resigned after six months of service when he was given the chance; he had come to the conclusion that "there could be no hope for the Nationalist government/'
A veteran enthusiast-cynic at nineteen, Hu's fortunes now finally changed. He managed through friends to gain admission to a much- respected high school primarily for overseas Chinese from south- east Asia, but which took some students in Hu's displaced cir- cumstances. When the school had to disband because of a new Japanese penetration, Hu accompanied a group of students and faculty members to Szechwan Province where it was re-established in combination with another school. Hu encountered here, despite the limited physical facilities, an atmosphere unique in his ex- perience: complete absence of corruption, great intellectual stimula-
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tion, an intimate group life among students, informal relations with faculty, and a generally shared hope for future reforms which could cure China's ills. In an inspiring history teacher, Hu found his second political (and Marxist) mentor:
I already had an emotional sympathy for the Communists. I now began to read about the materialist interpretation of history, the history of the development of society, and Ai Ssu-chYs popular philosophy. 1 When I had difficulty understanding some of these principles I went to this history teacher for help. He was always friendly and patient, and seemed to answer my questions logically. I acquired the theoretical background to go along with my emotional sympathy. . . . From that time on I developed the idea in my mind that Communism was the inevitable outcome of history. . . . It seemed to be the only way out for young people.
He emphasized the importance of his resentment of the old regime in bringing about this new view of the world.
My main feeling then was hatred for the KMT, All that I had seen and experienced was wrong. This hatred was the active side of my being; my feeling for Communism was a more passive side. Before I could understand the true meaning of their writing I accepted them because I was predisposed to do so. . . . I was at first excited by their solution to China's problems. Then I had more of the feeling that it was all settled: the KMT was out of the question, of no use, and Communism was the right way.
This was for Hu, "the happiest period of my life," the only time he can remember--perhaps with some retrospective glorification --being free of disturbing conflicts: "I no longer thought of any of my troubles. . . . I just forgot about the family. " Graduating near the top of his class at the age of twenty-one, he left for his home shortly after the Japanese surrender.
But when he arrived in Hupeh, he found his father, at sixty, "a defeated, frustrated, lonely old man, disillusioned with world events. " Hu senior had by this time become convinced that man's earthly efforts were futile, and (following a frequent Chinese life pattern) wished to spend his declining years in Buddhist medita- tion. Hu found his father surprisingly approachable and affectionate, and the two became closer than at any previous time. There was just one conflict between them--the old sore spot of Hu's educa-
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tion. His father, drawing upon his own experience, even went so far as to discourage university studies: "I have studied and tried to serve my country all my life and what did it lead to? " This failing, he urged Hu to attend a nearby university. But Hu recalled his past frustrations over his father's failure to keep his word about arrangements for study, and at that moment "the old resentment returned. " He refused his father's request and entered the Univer- sity of Nanking, where he felt he could get a better education.
Majoring in law and government, he found the atmosphere not conducive to study. Students and faculty members were vehemently denouncing the postwar KMT government, especially its failure to curb inflation and its repressive methods in attempting to stamp out opposition. Before long Hu assumed a leading role in student agitation, working closely with Communist Party members who did much of the behind-the-scenes organizing. During his junior year, he was arrested by the KMT police as part of a general roundup of student "activists. " Most were soon released, but a small group, including Hu, were taken to a country house just outside of Nan- king where they were told they were to be secretly executed. Im- prisoned for several months, Hu claimed that a spirit of group dedication protected him from fear. In fact, his description of the experience--even if the words are not taken at complete face value --implies a genuine exhilaration:
We were there together and had no horror of death. We always tried to encourage each other. . . . We felt that we were being sacrificed for a great cause, that our deaths would have a purpose. . . . Some of us felt that we were so young and our greatest regret was that we could not do more work for China. . . . I did feel grief and sorrow at night when I would think of my parents and my family. Then I would think of the meaning of our sacrifice, and I would forget about my sorrow.
All agreed that the meaning of their sacrifice was its contribu- tion to China's future, but Hu recalls a certain amount of dis- agreement among the imprisoned students concerning just what that future should be. Hu and a few of the others believed that China's civil war would be best resolved through a coalition govern- ment including the more enlightened Nationalist leaders (who had just replaced Chiang Kai-shek) as well as Communists; but the Communist students in the group insisted that there must be
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nothing short of a complete Communist victory. Their position made Hu wonder whether these students "had greater loyalties to the Communist party than to China itself," although not until later did he recognize the significance of this disagreement. Hu was not too excited (there was a suggestion that one side of him might even have been disappointed) when a general amnesty for political prisoners led to their release. His main preoccupation at the time was that of smuggling out his handcuffs in order to retain them as evidence of his mistreatment at the hands of the KMT. When he returned to the campus, he was greeted as a hero, and he remained active until the Communist entry a few months later.
Evaluation and Follow-up
Hu brought to thought reform an extraordinary capacity for anger and indignation; indeed, these had long before become the leitmotif of his existence. More than merely expressing them himself, he excelled at mobilizing similar emotions among others in his im- mediate environment. In this ability lay his capacity for leader- ship and the core of his youthful identity as an activist student leader. Behind his indignation and his leadership was an unusual degree of totalism--an all-or-nothing quality which pervaded his emotional life.
Hu's character in some ways was more reminiscent of the spirit of the young Martin Luther than of that of Confucius. Like Luther's (and like many figures in the Old Testament), Hu's totalism de- manded both full authority over those he led, and absolute self-
surrender to a higher authority. Hu also possessed a conscience of terrifying proportions. This kind of conscience can serve the creative function of inspiring total sincerity and absolute integrity--of mak- ing men mean what they say; it also, in its uncompromising judg- ments, contains the potential for the most extreme form of destruc- tiveness, including self-destructiveness. 2
We could consider Hu a psychological misfit, a compulsive rebel who goes into battle at the mere sight of authority, any authority. We could also see him as one of those exceptional young leaders who learn early in life to harness their own emotions in such a way that they make sensitive contact with yearnings of less intense people around them. Both of these judgments are true; either one
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alone distorts the picture. We can certainly say that Hu had little of the spirit of compromise and moderation so long valued in Chinese character structure; rather, he was an extremist who grew up in a series of environments conducive to extremism. This made him no less Chinese, but Chinese in a twentieth-century fashion. To under- stand the complexities of his character and of his response to thought reform, we must examine the strengths and the under- lying conflicts in an identity shaped against a background of chaos and change.
Whatever his struggles, Hu carried with him from early life a strong sense of himself as an aristocrat and a potential leader. As a young master within Chinese tradition, he was a little adult groomed for authority almost from birth. Moving from his family out into society, he maintained the conviction that it was his destiny to speak and act on behalf of others, and he developed an early talent for doing so. As with any talent, one must avoid oversimplified cause-and-effect explanations of origin (hereditary factors are prob- ably of great importance); but once this talent had been combined with the identity of the aristocratic leader, a pattern of strength and bold self-expression emerged which was crucial for what Hu would do and be in any situation. His development into a straight- boned boy (the last honorable confirmation he received within the idiom of traditional Chinese culture) expressed a similarself-image, matured to the point where he had become a youth with a cause. Both the youth and the cause continued to evolve until Hu became the activist student leader. This elite identity sequence supplied Hu with a sense of inner continuity, even when he turned against the traditional Chinese culture which had originally nurtured it. He used the strength of his family heritage--his identification with his father and his grandfather--to do battle with that same heritage, or at least with its remnants.
At the same time, Hu had always to fight off a profound sense of despair growing out of his personal, social, and historical predica- ment, Hu's environment had imposed on him a series of painful inner contradictions.
To be a young master had its advantages; but it also involved him in a premature power struggle from which no child could emerge unscarred. It was, moreover, an archaic identity, one which was based upon a system of values in human relationships which was rapidly breaking down. Indeed, the extremes of behavior
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in Hu's family (especially that of his step-grandmother) were des- perate attempts to hold on to what was already slipping away. Hu's childhood environment was thus a caricature of Chinese family life, an expression of traditionalism rather than tradition.
A young master was also expected to be a filial son--obedient and proper not from coercion but love. Yet, so lacking in love and trust was his family environment that any such an identity had to be more pseudo than real. Hu's step-grandmother's indirect aggres- siveness, his mother's harassed nervousness, his uncle's petulance --and perhaps something inherent in Hu which made him difficult to love--all contributed to this contradictory atmosphere. These circumstances were both partly created and strongly intensified by historical and political currents: his father's fugitive status brought about a marriage with inevitable class strains, and was also respon- sible for the step-grandmother's being permitted to abuse her matriarchal power. Hu had no choice but to go through the filial motions; and even though he faltered at an early age (in the family shrine incident, for instance), he submitted to his step-grandmother more than he could comfortably admit to me.
This submission to his hated adversary had a lasting symbolic meaning for Hu: it established within him an exaggerated sensi- tivity toward being controlled or dominated by anyone. It also con- tributed to his later yearning for the very thing he was always fight- ing off: total domination, if not by a strong individual, at least by a mystical force. Children subjected to unusually controlling family authority can come to depend upon and even find pleasure in being so controlled; their subsequent struggle against new, would-be con- trollers becomes an inner battle between fear and desire. In Hu's case, the controlling person (his grandmother) became a symbol of both "irrational authority" and "the past," so that the two became equated in his mind. This is a frequent association for a youth in any culture, but is especially strong when he grows up in the midst of crumbling institutions and abused family prerogatives. Yet, iron- ically enough, this step-grandmother also supplied Hu with a model for his own later domineering tendencies, and initiated a response by which Hu came to view almost every relationship as essentially a power struggle.
Rather than the filial son, Hu regarded himself as the abandoned and betrayed victim of the most gross injustice. Whom did he
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blame for this injustice? He made clear that he focused most of his conscious hostility on his step-grandmother; and she thus served a useful function for him as the first of his total villains, acceptable outlets for his hatred against whom he could rally real or imagined action. But Hu also experienced resentment toward another person, for whom such resentment was entirely unacceptable: his father. He could not quite suppress the hostility which accompanied his sense of having been abandoned; and hostility toward one's father is, by traditional Chinese cultural standards, the most unfilial emo- tion a child can experience. These resentful feelings were Hu's first painful secret. Certainly his desire for revenge against his step- grandmother was real enough; but it was intensified by his need to purge his mind of similar feelings toward his father, and possibly his mother as well. His sense of himself as the unfilial son (to both father and grandmother), as the abandoned and betrayed victim, and as the avenger made up a formidable negative identity complex. Each of these elements was something against which his culture and family had warned him, and each was something he could not avoid becoming, despite and partly because of this warning; in lasting combination, they had the destructive effect of maintaining within him the bitterness and guilt which gave his rebellion its desperate and compulsive character.
To bring all these aspects of himself--positive and negative-- into effective combination, Hu resorted to two personal, Utopian myths. (The term personal myth is used here to suggest a recur- rently-imagined sequence of events which supply purpose and mo- mentum to an individual's existence. ) The first myth, involving his father's return, was mostly passive--a longing for a golden age which had never existed. The second, the myth of himself as the hero (or chien hsia), was more active, and for a time he lived it out quite effectively. These two myths assumed tremendous im- portance in Hu's life, for they were the antidote for his despair: the first offered hope eternal, the second a bold life of self-sacrifice and redemption. At the same time they generated strong emotional forces which, once initiated, had a staying power of their own. His quests for some form of golden age and for perpetual heroic ex- pression 3 came to influence Hu's every action. They also reinforced his already well-developed totalism: for so deep had been his despair, so strong his sense of personal oppression, so extreme the
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social chaos, and so dramatic the contemporary historical events, that Hu began very early to seek all-embracing personal and polit- ical solutions.
As an activist student leader in a turbulent student movement, Hu found an ideal metier for acting upon his personal myths and giving expression to his talents and his emotional urges. Embracing a Communist ideology which promised a universal golden age, he could remain sufficiently independent to follow a hero's path of individual leadership, and almost martyrdom.
He required a new total villain, a role for which the KMT was admirably suited. It was "old"; and--on the basis of his own ex- perience, beginning with the Youth Corps school--its authority was "irrational. " These judgments were by no means simply the product of Hu's own emotional urges (the KMT's inept and re- pressive policies have been widely documented): but Hu--like many others of his generation--found in this regime a focus for all of the bitterness, anger, and frustration which had built up during his young life.
Hu was helped to make the short step from hatred of the KMT to sympathy for the Communists (and the feeling he had found something "new" and "rational") by the two fatherly men he en- countered. One may say that they were, at least temporarily, fathers regained; but their attraction for Hu lay in the contrasts between them and his real father: they were there, they were consistent, they had time for him, and they explained things. Indeed, they did what mentors and healers (religious, political, academic, or psychological) so often do; they made it possible for Hu to unite his personal myths with more sweeping social and historical myths, and pointed out to him a way to a relationship with mankind. This new ideology was as totalistic as he could wish it to be; and his most vengeful feelings could be justified within a framework of an apocalyptic cause.
Once Communism became the prevailing authority, however, Hu was bound to be troubled by the manipulations of its cadres. First at the university, and then during thought reform itself, he experi- enced a profound sense of humiliation at being forced to submit to suffocating domination. And as in the past, much of his emotional energy was taken up with fighting off his own urge to surrender himself totally to the force imposing this domination. His entering
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the revolutionary university was in itself a partial admission that something in his attitude should be changed; during the first days of reform he seemed to be giving himself completely to the process, and recapturing that golden age of total sincerity and harmony which he had known just once before at his last high school. But as much as part of him longed for total emotional immersion, he was, in the long run, incapable of it. As with Father Simon (the con- verted Jesuit), the defier in Hu could never allow the convert in him to gain the upper hand; he could not trust any environment, even a Communist one, sufficiently to permit himself the absolute merger toward which his totalism constantly drove him.
Hu's means of dealing with this conflict was to cling tenaciously to a sense of autonomy, and the only kind of autonomy he knew was that of the leader or hero. Hence his unsolicited debate with the cadre, and his view of himself as both a teacher and a defender of his fellow students. His heroic self-image required him to main- tain high standards of integrity (even if he violated these more than he admits); and it gave a dramatic quality to his every action, a sense that all he did or said had significance not only for himself but for the world at large. It was thus of great help in maintaining his self-fespect and his autonomy, and in preserving a certain amount of independence from the bizarre thought-reform morality. But in the face of thought reform's consistent antipathy to heroes--to any- one who might exert a strong influence over others which was dif- ferent from the immediate thought reform message--this self-image also imposed an extremely heavy psychological burden.
The greatest threat to Hu's emotional balance, however, was his "secret"--the bitter hatred toward the Communist reformers which welled up within him. Contained within this secret were all of his negative identity elements, which now had a confused relationship to the Communist authorities. That is, Hu felt himself to be un- filial to a movement he had long embraced and to an all-powerful authority which would brook no disloyalty; to be the abandoned and betrayed victim of that same Communist authority; and to be a potential avenger who would some day smite down his persecutors. These sentiments not only would have placed him in considerable personal danger had they become known; but their unacceptability --to the environment and to Hu himself--stimulated strong feel- ings of guilt, just as his secret resentment of his father had earlier
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in his life. This guilt was partly responsible for Hu's unconscious urge to reveal his secret ("The secret was something which was al- ways trying to escape from me"). But also contributing to this urge was his strong inner drive toward total self-surrender, since reveal- ing the extent of his hostility would have been the first step in a genuine Communist-style reform. As is so often the case in totalitar- ian confession and reform procedures, Hu's secret was almost his undoing.
The news of his father's imprisonment caused him to revert sud- denly to traditional self-judgments, and to revive his long-standing negative self-image of the unfilial son. He experienced the terrible guilt of the son who had defied and, by participating in the Com- munist movement, had overthrown--had symbolically demolished --his father. After this, the requirement that he denounce his father in the final summary added salt to his wounds. What is puzzling is not that he made this denunciation, since it was a re- quirement which no one could escape, but that he subsequently de- cided to accept the Communist job assignment and give up his plan to flee to Nanking. He did this despite having closely identified with his father as a victim of Communist persecution, and having be- come, if possible, even more resentful toward the new regime. I believe the explanation lies in what I have called the bond of betrayal between reformers and reformed. W ith so strong a sense of having betrayed his own filial heritage (a heritage of immense emo- tional power, whatever its inconsistencies, and however long his defiance of it), he was all the more involved with those who had brought about the betrayal, and there was no turning back. Not until he actually found himself in the job situation, and had perhaps recovered from the shock and depression which had accompanied the news of his father's imprisonment, did he realize he was in- capable of even the minimal amount of submission necessary to survive within the Communist environment.
Why did Hu leave China? Should his defection be attributed to courageous resistance to coercion, to psychological conflict, or to chance? Certainly all three factors were important. The chance lay in the opportunity he found to leave the country, an opportunity which, to be sure, he had done much to create. His bloodhound's nose for coercion made him especially sensitive to the manipulative aspects of thought reform. His heroic self-image contributed to the
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strength of his resistance. At the same time, his overwhelming psy- chological conflicts had produced an urgent need to escape. To put it another way, he left because he perceived an incompatibility be- tween his personal character structure and the Communist environ- ment around him. For him, thought reform had a reverse effect: before it he had been an avowed (if somewhat disgruntled) sym- pathizer; soon after, he became a bitterly disenchanted opponent.
As for Hu's experiences in Hong Kong, he tried to establish him- self there as an anti-Communist writer. From what we know about him, and about Hong Kong, it would have been predictable that he would not have had an easy time. At the age of twenty-six, he had not been able to establish any workable adult life pattern; he was still in the midst of an action-oriented search, a continuous identity crisis, which had begun at the age of sixteen. We would ex- pect him to experiment, as most refugee Chinese intellectuals did, with new identities and new ideologies. And we would expect his experiments to be consuming in their intensity, heroic in their proportions, and devastating in their potential for disillusionment. This is essentially what did happen--but it is not the whole story, for as tenacious as these patterns were within Hu, he was not en- tirely incapable of change.
The first great shock he had to sustain was the news of his father's death--probably at the hands of a new "People's Court"--which he heard within a few months after his arrival. His emotions were similar to those he had experienced at hearing about his father's first imprisonment, but this time they were much more severe. He had the same visions of mob terrorism, similar feelings of guilt and responsibility, and an even greater preoccupation with his failure to be filial: "I regretted very much that I could not be there. . . . It is a strong Chinese tradition that a son should be present at the time of his father's death. It is part of filial piety. " Even before this news, he had begun to be discouraged about his difficulty in locating an anti-Communist group with whom he could work, about the un- concerned attitude of Hong Kong people toward Communist China, and about his dependency upon a friend's kindness for support. Discouragement gave way to depression, and for several weeks he had little hope.
Then a few articles he had written for Hong Kong periodicals
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caught the attention of the leaders of a newly-formed "third force" youth group, and he was asked to join them. Before long he was playing a prominent role in the group's activities, enjoying living and working with its members, and contributing to their sense of enthusiasm. The organization became more recognized and began to receive American subsidies; however, he noted that the co-opera- tive atmosphere began to give way to intrigue and a struggle for power. Soon he came into sharp conflict with the other leaders over their dismissal of some of his colleagues, and he decided that lie had no alternative but to resign. Disillusioned and despairing, he bitterly resented his adversaries; but he was not without some tendency to place part of the blame upon himself. "I left with the feeling I had personally failed. . . . I was disappointed and frus- trated, and I had no more 'heart'. " Some time later the same pat- tern repeated itself: active involvement with a new anti-Commu- nist press organization, severe personal conflicts, then resignation from the group. The second experience revealed Hu's panic at the threat of being dominated by one of the other leaders. "Although he never came to dominate me, I resented the fact that he had been planning ways to do this. . . . I couldn't concentrate on anything else. . . . Just thinking how to stop this person's domination/' At one point in this conflict, Hu became aware of his own excit- ability, and commented to his close friend (our interpreter) that there must be something wrong with him, and that perhaps he was in need of a woman. (He later told me, however, that he had never had sexual relations because he feared that "once I gave myself to it, I might lose all control"--a statement which reflected a fear of his own hostile urges, as well as his feelings of attraction and re- pulsion for any total experience. ) According to the interpreter, others in the press group admitted that Hu's rival had attempted to dominate all of the members; but they felt that Hu was over- sensitive and impulsive, and that he still retained Communist-like tendencies to view every situation as a struggle for power.
After each of these episodes, Hu retreated into a quiet rural life --long walks, swimming, and lonely meditation upon his personal plight, a habit he kept from early adolescence. When he was calmer and felt less pressured, he began to accept some of the judgments of others, even judgments about his own character. He realized that he had unwittingly favored Communist-like organization within
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both the press groups, and determined to "lead myself away from this old Communist way of thinking. " He also began to change his estimate of human character. "I had always felt that when sup- pressed, people could fight for their ideals and sacrifice every- thing. . . . I came to understand that what friends had told me was true--that there is a lust for power in the human mind, and that those who failed to understand this get into all kinds of trouble. "
And like many other refugee Chinese intellectuals, he gravitated --because of his need and its availability--toward Christianity. He again came to a new ideology through a kind and parental mentor, this time a woman: a middle-aged American Lutheran missionary who had worked for many years in a province near his home and was able to talk to him in a dialect which reminded him of his childhood. In addition to these geographical and emotional associations, so important for Chinese, he was moved by her affec- tion for him. "When I went to see her I had a feeling that her con- cern for me was something I badly needed. You might say she had a kind of maternal feeling for me. " He felt that she and her col- leagues were among the few people he had ever encountered who were "concerned with the welfare of human beings as such without hoping to get something out of them. "
He also found a spirit of humility and compromise among the members of this group; he thought this spirit was Christianity's contribution to Western democracy, and he wished to emulate it, realizing that he lacked it in his own character. "My old attitude was that when I thought myself in the right, I must stick strictly to my views and never give in or compromise. . . . This caused me much suffering in the past. " He attributed his intransigence to Chi- nese tradition: "The word compromise had an undesirable flavor in old Chinese society. " Although this view slighted his own cultural heritage (Confucianism actually emphasizes a spirit of com- promise) and perhaps was naively uncritical of Lutheran Chris- tianity (in which uncompromising credal purity has often been a prominent feature), it did have validity for Hu's own experience.
Equally important was Hu's discovery that the Christian con- cepts of guilt and sin offered a meaningful interpretation of all of the evils he had seen, as well as a way to deal with his own angers:
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When I was on the mainland, I was influenced by Confucian teaching, ideas that human nature was basically good, and that people can do good if they wish to. . . . I could not reconcile this belief with the evils I observed in the KMT, the Communist, and the refugee organiza- tions in Hong Kong. . . . In my own mind there was turmoil, and I was troubled by feelings of hatred for certain people. . . . But from reading the Scriptures, I learned that evils exist in every human being, including myself, and that the only way to remove these evils is to forgive them.
Although Hu's antagonisms scarcely disappeared, his association with the Lutherans did seem to agree with him. They found a place for him to stay near them, and offered him a job as secretary and translator. This happened concurrently with our interviews; and after living among the Lutherans for a few months Hu gained weight, and seemed much more relaxed and content than I had ever seen him. He described leading a "quiet, pleasant life," and said he was increasingly interested in Christian teachings.
At the same time (six years after his thought reform) he dis- cussed with me some of his lingering preoccupations with his escape from Communism, and the terrifying images of the Com- munist cadres which remained with him. He still had nightmares, although not as frequently as he did earlier in his Hong Kong stay, in which he was fleeing Communist cadres, resisting capture, even shooting and killing a pursuer; sometimes he dreamt he was hunted as a criminal, sometimes helped by a kind friend, but never quite escaping. The cadre appeared as an all-powerful apparition which his eyes were forced to behold.
, . . a big terrible monster whose face and body-build I cannot see clearly. He does not actually appear to be a substantial person. What I see is only the Communist uniform. . . . It is as if there is nothing specifically to force me to see him, but I am compelled to see him of my own volition. I don't wish to but I have to, . . . I am so full of fear I cannot consider refusing.
He went on to give a subjective analysis of the sources of the cadre's effectiveness; using machine images, he came to conclusions similar to those of others who have studied the Communist cadre.
A Communist cadre is an apparatus rather than an individual. His knowledge, ability, emotion, every part of his body, is dedicated to the
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utilization of this piece of apparatus. That is why he has no real emo- tion toward you, no real feeling. That is why he is so terrible. . . . In action, a Communist cadre is more effective than an ordinary man be- cause where an ordinary man would quit a job and say that he has done his best, a Communist cadre would go on and finish it. He is always responsible for what he has done because there is a deliberate system behind him such that he may be considered responsible for something he had done ten years before. He must check and check again, as when he finishes a job and hands in his work, there is no way of escape. He is not working for himself, but for the glory of the Party. 4
Hu was still troubled by guilty, fearful secrets which he had kept from the Communists:
I have a feeling of guilt--not to my own conscience--but because I had a secret with them as one who came from among them. . . . When I decided to leave the mainland, I did not tell them that I had been a student at North China University or that I had been in the People's Revolutionary Army. If I had told them this, they would not have let me go. . .
