When Premier Zhou Enlai Sacrificed His Adopted Daughter Youmei

The New York Review of Books (December 7, 2023) has a very interesting article by Professor Perry Link where he discusses Ha Jin’s The Woman Back from Moscow. The novel tells the tragic story of Premier Zhou Enlai’s adopted daughter Sun Weishi, who called herself Youmei. The book provides insightful into what Link calls “the Communist superelite” under Mao Zedong, who despite professing to serve the people, never forgot about themselves.

“From the dusty caves of Yan’an in the late 1930s to the red-hot ‘class struggle’ of the late 1960s in Beijing, there are always maids to peel pears, orderlies to deliver lunch boxes, and guards to watch doorways, and when a child arrives the family goes out and hires a nanny.”

Life in China under Mao could be extremely brutal and full of hardship, but the elite enjoyed a protected life as long as they were completely loyal to the prevailing power. Link writes:

“They live in a cocoon, but the culture inside is hardly protective. It is tense and bereft of trust. Familial affection is present, but it gives way to politics whenever necessary. President Liu Shaoqi is willing to derail the marriages of two of his children, who have non-Chinese partners, because of ‘revolutionary needs.’ Zhou Enlai clearly cares for his adopted daughter. He coaches her in how to survive: ‘Just be careful about what you say in your letters. Always assume that some other eyes will read your letters before they reach me.’ But during the Cultural Revolution, when Zhou is faced with the dilemma of whether to sacrifice Yomei in order to protect himself from Jiang Qing, he signs a warrant for her detention that leads to her torture and death in prison. An aunt of Yomei’s, observing Zhou’s maintenance of a suave exterior, calls him a ‘smiling snake.’

Zhou is no anomaly. He lives in an environment where, in the end, people can trust only themselves. The distinguished Australian Sinologist Simon Leys once observed that comparisons of the CCP elite to the mafia are in a sense unfair to the mafia, in which a certain loyalty to ‘brothers’ does play a part. Losers of political battles at the top of the CCP generally are not relegated to comfortable retirements—they go to prison or worse. Zhou did not wish to seal Yomei’s fate; he was forced to when it became clear that it was either him or her.”

Living under an authoritarian system leaves little room for moral considerations, and people respond by developing a ‘split consciousness.’

“This distinction between unofficial and official life holds from the bottom of society to the top. The actual life of the red elite that Ha Jin depicts could hardly differ more from its officially projected images of giving speeches, doing inspection tours, and in other ways focusing on ‘service to the people.’ The questions ‘What best fits the system?’ and ‘What best serves my interests?’ are asked in parallel by people at all levels, and they seldom have the same answers. In his memoirs the dissident physicist Fang Lizhi recalls how Teng Teng, vice-chair of China’s State Education Commission in July 1989, summoned American ambassador James Lilley to berate him about how the US was allowing Chinese students who had spoken out against the Tiananmen massacre to remain in the US indefinitely. An hour after returning to the embassy, Lilley got a telephone call from Teng Teng’s secretary asking him to give special attention to Teng’s wife and children, who were seeking that same ‘indefinite residence’ status in the US. There are plenty of other examples like this. The ‘split consciousness’ of Chinese people in recent times has been widely noted.”

Although common in authoritarian systems, the roots of this phenomenon do in China's case go back two thousand years to the era when Shi Huangdi conquered the “warring states” and formed the Qin Dynasty. The French Catholic missionary Abbe Huc who lived and traveled in China and spoke Chinese discussed the impact on the citizens and rulers of this system in his 1855 book, The Chinese Empire.

“The inhabitants of the Celestial Empire, being wanting in religious faith, and living from day to day, without troubling themselves either about the past or the future, profoundly skeptical, and totally indifferent to what touches only the moral nature of man, having no energy for anything but the amassing of sapecks (money), cannot, as may easily be supposed, be well induced to obey the laws from a sentiment of duty. The official worship of China does not in fact possess any of the characteristics of what can properly be called a religion, and is, consequently, unable to communicate to the people those moral ideas that do more for the observance of the laws, than the most terrible penal sanctions. It is, therefore, quite natural that the bamboo should be the necessary and indispensable accessory of every legal prescription, and the Chinese law will consequently always assume a penal character, even when it has in view objects purely civil.

Whenever a legislature is compelled to be lavish of punishments, it may certainly be affirmed that the social system in which it is in force is vicious, and the Penal Code of China is an illustration of the truth. The punishments awarded by it are not graduated according to the moral gravity of the crime, considered in itself, but merely on the amount of damage that may be occasioned by it. Thus the punishment of theft is proportional to the value of the object stolen, according to a scale drawn up expressly to that effect, unless the theft be accompanied by circumstances that bring it under some other head. The penal legislation of China is based on the utilitarian principle, and this need not excite any surprise, for Chinese materialism does not consider the act so much in a moral point of view, as with respect to its consequences.”

Perry Link: A Fallen Artist in Mao’s China (NYRB, December 7, 2023)