The Autobiography of Liang Heng

Introduction

Liang Heng was born in Changsha Hunan province in the year 1954. He experienced a difficult childhood; he had to deal with the hardship of poverty, party Bureaucracy, and Cultural rebellion.  His parents held accountable ranks as scholars- his mother was a ranking cadre in the local police, and his father was a reporter for a provincial newspaper that he was among the founders. He was the only boy child in the family and he had two sisters. His years in pre-school were happy ones despite of not seeing his parents frequently, since they got devoted to work of the party and glory of socialism, a party that insisted on socialism of the state and degraded the personal family value. This is a story of Liang Heng growing up in the chaos of the huge Cultural Revolution. He has a unique story, but similarly it is in several ways the same to those of several young Chinese who has got tested beyond their capability.

Liang Heng and his family got caught in instability and chaos of the numerous revolutionary movements, purges and political campaigns in China. This time China was being led by the communists, an incidence that “be inclined to be usual of the lives of millions” of the people of Chinese. Liang Heng was a son of low position cadres in the Chinese communist party.  His father a reporter and an editor of the party newspaper in Hunan, his local province, and the mother was a member of local people’s Security Agency. His parents used to work a deep commitment to change China into a grand socialist nation and they dreamt with the passion of the day when they would get reckoned and devoted sufficiently to get acknowledged by the party. As for Liang and his sisters, they were the good young kids of the Chairperson, Mao Ze-dong, whom “chaired over the rest and played like a kind God, and Liang believed that grapes, apples, everything was being given to them since he treasured them”. Liang Heng was three years of age when the Chinese Communist Party started a campaign to assess the huge popular support it received. First, in the year 1957, Hundred Flowers Movement existed, whereby his mother was convinced to show her devotion to the party by disparaging it. After a few weeks, her disparage turned against her when the Hundred Flowers Movement turned into an Anti-Rightist movement, and she got labeled as an enemy of the party and a rightist.

Without an assessment and obviously not knowing what occurred, she got expelled to the countryside for work reform. His father believed that the party could not make a fault or gives an unjust verdict; he joined in denouncing his wife, and afterward he asked for a divorce in order to save the family from getting destroyed. However, Liang Heng said “the divorce did not do anything to rid them of having a Rightist in their family unit”, for such condition, the tradition affirmed that the entire family gets judged as guilty just as the single individual who had carried out the crime. In the party’s eyes, Liang Heng and the sisters were the kids to the Rightist, and their dad was a husband to a Rightist wife. Due to that his sisters and him were disliked and frequently harassed in school. They got forbidden to joining the party, the young pioneers, and the communist youth league. Since, additionally, “victory in the political ground was a requirement for victory in everything else”, them getting eliminated from those three phases of revolutionary glory, was meant to change the life of the entire family forever. Slowly, Liang came to hate his mother for making him lead a miserable life. He even started to believe that she carried out something bad.

The tragedy in the family of Liang Heng got preceded by a widespread drought after the fall of the Great Leap Forward in the year 1958. His family was obliged to survive by taking the grass they had collected in the park. Thus, Liang Heng, like several other old individuals and most of the children got infected with a water swelling illness known as dropsy.  Next, in the year 1966, there Cultural Rebellion came. At this time, their father got condemned as a reactionary, and he got dispatched to a study class that was led by liberation army of the people. Even after that he continued believing that one should always believe Chairperson Mao and in the party. During this period Heng and his sisters did not only become the kids of a rightist, but they became kids to capitalist reactionary stinking scholars as well. With their parents gone, they became revolution orphans.  After some few years, even though Liang was just 12 years old he became a red guard.  Traveling to Jinggang Mountain was among his adventures where he went to retrace the renowned long march of the china communist party and a pilgrimage to Peking hoping to get sight of Mao. However, during that time, affected by splitting of his family and shocked by the shed of blood developed by fighting the Red Guard group, he became pessimistic of the revolution of cultural: “my family had devoted so much for the rebellion, but gave us nothing I return”. Back in his hometown, Changsha, he resulted in street fighting drinking and embezzling with the outcasts of rebellion and other orphans.

The other part of Liang Heng story popped up when his dad got released from the study class, and both of them got sent to the countryside for a lengthened re-education so as that may assist in cutting off the capitalism tail by bringing knowledge about revolutionary and building to the most deserted parts of China. Here Liang explains the severe poverty of the peasants, like that of the old Guo and the wife, the two had just one pair of the pants which they used to share.  Liang speaks of the law of “cutting off the capitalism tail”, carried out by the party officials, it meant killing the pigs and chicken owned privately either by force or individually.  By so doing, the peasants got denied of the supplementary source of earning and faced particular hunger if their crops did not do well. Even the father of Liang, after years of commitment, he found himself not being able to defend the policy of the party.  With his messed up by working hard in the countryside, he and his son Liang got sent back to the city.

In the city, Liang went on getting harassed by the students, who had passed the political evaluation.  However, by that time he had known not to express what he felt on ideological issues. When he reached seventeen years, he finally got rescued by his capability to play basketball. Even if he flunked the test in politics he needed to be a proficient athlete, and he resulted in playing for an oil firm in Changsha, where similarly to his workmates he spent time eating socialism and studying. Life started to change for better, even if he continued getting haunted by his background.  His short romances, one with a daughter of a newspaper editor in Guangzhou and another with a daughter of a deputy commander of the provincial military district, their relations came to an end on a political battleground.  He got discarded by the fathers of the both the girls for his dubious political performance, his scholar background, and his low factory worker class. Nevertheless, things went on to look up.

In the year 1977, China reinstated entrance tests to the universities. Liang joined Hunan Teachers’ College where he met with an American teacher, and they later got married. After graduation in the year 1981, Liang and his wife moved to the United States where he became a doctoral candidate at the University of Columbia. Before leaving China, Liang Heng, he was not happy due to the kind of political teaching majority of Chinese youths were being offered.  He had viewed the jeopardy that was in sightless obedience, and he sensed that there was a need to recover the capability to view the world seriously when the generation of his father had no strength to do so. What Liang does not see or say is that the Chinese communist party needs and demands the blind obedience of the individuals. As Liang saw, the peasants were just mules who were under the whip and were aware that they should obey. The scholars, possibly discouraged by the fall of the old order and encountered with the defeat of the Nationalists, that is the Kuomintang, keenly accepted socialism as the channel to save the nation and worked devotedly to change China into a socialist nation. However, Socialism is a philosophy that the people from China did not understand fully, and due to this they paid immensely. Liang says that he became bothered and confused the more he contrasted the Engel and Marx society with the one in which he dwelled. we should barely be astonished that Marxism, a philosophy that ends in a solution without an observed example, would, when put into practice, show itself in restructuring campaigns and cleanse have little to do with what that grand teacher of rebellion, Machiavelli gives advice to the founders to return the goodness that offers all religious monarchies and republics their first development and status. The purges were only strategies of struggling for power in the leadership of the party. Of course, the Chinese communists would ensure that their laws not to be put under close examination. Despite depending on the scholars to spread the gospel about socialism, the party did not trust them and critically sapped them on any power to view the world critically through subjecting them to cleansing and reforms. The scholars, caught in a terrifying time of arrests and betrayals and made powerless by changing laws constantly, placed priority in defending themselves and evading political mistakes.

The sarcasm of Chinese Communism is that even while its achievement would rely on a type of blind obedience of public-spiritedness and the peoples’ spontaneity, its legality eventually reinforced by deep political instruction under the strict rules of the party. Life worked for this reason: as chairperson Mao declared, everybody had his rank; the human relations were category relations that could not get exceeded.  There was no possibility of having a private life outside the one that the party had assigned a person, and the value of the party had to govern one’s private life or one would get disciplined. Still this form of dictatorship only functioned to make the people from China turn to their private affairs, as the people of Chinese who were learned had carried out and as Liang learned to carry out.

Conclusion

What makes the tale of Liang Heng, his family and that of the people from China so devastating is that, tied by the community where a person is born into a particular place in a chain of command and kept it all of one’s days, several of them, like Liang Heng and the family, tried to make the best out of it by working enthusiastically to create socialism in China however, in the end they found themselves deceived by the leadership of a party who viewed socialism not just as a mission but also as means of ending power gratification. And it is similarly sad that of a generation of the youth from China that was fervently thirsting for the reality, so, only a few would move out of their bounded plots of earth to evaluate stuff for themselves. As Liang Heng declare, fate has been kind extraordinarily to him.