Wild Swans and the Cultural Revolution: Heart vs. Party

By comparing the "Future Direction of the Party" readings with Chapter 8 of Jung Chang's Wild Swans, what becomes apparent is that the Party wanted total control over its members' lives, their thoughts, and their feelings. This is especially evident in Chapter 8, when Chang's father and mother return to the father's childhood home. The father is overjoyed to be back, and his family is excited to see him — though they are also nervous, since he is now a Communist official and they have heard troubling things about Communism. The Communists wanted to root out all the old traditions; they wanted to liberate the daughter-in-law from those traditions, for example, and so a great deal of attention was paid to Chang's mother to see how she would react to her mother-in-law: whether she would kowtow in the traditional manner or act as the mother-in-law's equal, as Communist doctrine expected.

The mother, aware of the traditional expectation and wanting to appear pleasant and accommodating to her new mother-in-law, bowed in the traditional manner, and everyone in the family was relieved. Chang's father allowed her to do this, partly because he felt sympathy over the miscarriage she had suffered, and partly to keep the peace at a time when so much fear was circulating about the Communists. However, he would not be so accommodating later, when Chang's mother begged him to spare the life of the chieftain who had helped save her from the Broadsword Brigade. The chieftain was executed for being a member of the Brigade, despite the fact that he had saved the lives of some Communists by warning them in advance of the Brigade's approach. The mother never forgave the father for this — and it was a sign of the central conflict at the heart of Communism: the conflict between the needs of the heart and the unyielding demands of the head. The mother represented the heart; the father, the head. The Party sought to crush the former according to Mao's plan for the Future Direction — or at least sought to compel the heart to be totally subservient to Party doctrine.

The conflict was not easy to resolve. When Chang's grandmother arrived to look after Chang's mother, she began selling her jewelry in order to buy food at the market so that the mother could eat well, as it was a traditional belief in China that pregnant women should be well nourished. However, in a land that was starving and where a single bag of rice was considered precious, the mother's eating of good food was viewed as "bourgeois," as Chang notes (154). This act of being "bourgeois" was precisely what Chairman Mao identified as the reason Communism was failing. Too many people were retaining bourgeois characteristics. In reality, it was simply people being decent to one another. The grandmother was looking after the mother's health: it had nothing to do with class privilege, and everything to do with the dictates of the heart.

The grandmother did not care if she ended up poor by the end of it — she was going to look after her daughter as well as she could. It was the same with the mother's attempt to save the life of the chieftain: she was thankful for the man's act, even if he had acted partly out of self-interest. It was this degree of self-interest that Chang's father focused on — and only this — and it is why he was firm in demanding the chieftain's execution. This was the same type of firmness that Mao called for in the Future Direction of the Cultural Revolution: the Communists could not afford to be lax any longer. They had to be firm and cut out all weakness. The fact that a woman was pregnant, for instance, was no reason she should not be sent out on missions to advance the aims of the Communist Party.

Chang's father also chafed at the arrival of his own mother-in-law. Being a committed member of the Communist Party, he believed he had no need or moral imperative to defer to her. The fact that she wanted to treat his wife tenderly, while he wanted to remind his wife that she was a Party member first and a pregnant wife only second, illustrated once again the clash between head and heart — and the main reason the Communist Party was feared and resented by so many in the rural communities. One could understand the motivation of the Broadsword Brigade, even though they were equally cruel in their reprisals, as when they raped and killed the niece of Chang's father out of revenge.

In this manner, the hatred of both camps fed on itself. The hatred of the Communist Party — the head — for the weakness and tenderness of the heart, and for the people's need to be "spoiled" from time to time, fueled the hatred of the Broadsword Brigade and groups like it, and vice versa. They were two antagonistic forces; in between, the heart was being trampled repeatedly. Mao characterized this heart and its needs and weaknesses as evidence that those who followed it were capitalists who must be rooted out. Only the Communist Party knew the proper way to care for the people and ensure that everyone was fed — that was how Mao saw it. And if one disagreed, as did Deng Xiaoping, pressure was applied to compel that individual to change his mind, as happened when Xiaoping's self-criticism became an abject exercise in self-abnegation and prostrate humiliation before a powerful authority that would almost certainly turn lethal if not adequately flattered.

Throughout Chapter 8, it is evident that the father has fully embraced the cult of Mao and wants to see Communism succeed. It is equally evident that the mother is coming to understand the realities of life and the complexities of human interaction — the need for tradition, and the role that kindness and a little respect play in ensuring happiness and peace. Even though she identifies as a Communist, the mother is perfectly willing to kowtow to the Buddha and pray to the boughs of trees that they might not bloom, in order to please her sister-in-law. She is being a good woman and trying to keep the peace, though it causes her husband to grumble, as it runs against Communist doctrine. What the mother senses is that the code is insufficient to address all things in life, and that the Communists need to present a better face and show that they are not as bad as people have heard.

All of this forced the mother to follow the same path as Deng Xiaoping and engage in humiliating self-criticisms to demonstrate that she still supported the Party and abided by its rules — even as she wept to her husband that he put the Party before his own wife, that he loved the Party more than he loved her, and that he was unwilling to allow the grandmother to stay and care for her during her pregnancy because it was against Party rules. Chang's father was unyielding, acting as Mao had acted toward Deng. As Chang writes: "My mother argued vehemently with him, but he said that a rule was a rule — and he would not fight to have it bent. In old China one of the major vices was that anyone with power was above the rules, and an important component of the Communist revolution was that officials, like everyone else, should be subject to rules… My mother could not find any argument to win him over. He has no feelings, she thought. He does not put my interests first. He does not love me" (Chang 155). The mother wanted the heart of the man she had married, but he had given it to the Party, and in its Puritanical way, the Party had persuaded its members that everyone should be willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the Party and the people. The irony was that in crushing the heart, the Party was killing the very people it claimed to serve.