Other Self-Accounts by Cui Yueli 《Yueli》

Cui Yueli · October 1990

After decades of arduous struggle — countless setbacks along the winding revolutionary road, countless martyrs and masses who gave their lives — we finally arrived at victory, at the founding of the People's Republic of China.

On October 1, 1949, atop the Tiananmen rostrum, Comrade Mao Zedong took part in the founding ceremony. Together with other Party and state leaders, he reviewed the People's Liberation Army and the 500,000-strong parade of the people.

Premier Zhou Enlai oversaw the preparations personally, Comrade Peng Zhen was directly in charge, and the Beijing Municipal Party Committee and government threw themselves into it. Organizing a celebration on this scale was a first in the city's history — and a first for every one of us on the preparatory team. We worked day and night in a state of exhilaration. My own job was to help draft the list of dignitaries who would stand on the Tiananmen rostrum; the draft went first to Comrade Peng Zhen, then to Comrade Zhou Enlai for approval. As I remember the arrangement, Comrade Mao Zedong stood at the center of the rostrum, with civilian officials to the east in the front row and military commanders to the west — Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, Ren Bishi, Chen Yun, Dong Biwu, Lin Boqu, Peng Dehuai, Peng Zhen, Zhang Wentian, Ye Jianying, Marshal Nie Rongzhen, He Long, and other Party and state leaders. There were also the democratic figures: Soong Ching-ling, Zhang Lan, Li Jishen, Shen Junru, Chen Shutong, Guo Moruo, Huang Yanpei, Li Dequan, Zhang Bojun, Zhang Naiqi, Shao Lizi, Zhang Zhizhong, and others. On the rostrum as well stood members of the Political Consultative Conference and leaders of mass organizations — Cai Chang, Deng Yingchao, Li Lisan, Zhu Xuefan, Situ Meitang. Beneath the rostrum stood delegations from government departments, mass organizations, overseas Chinese, and foreign guests.

That morning, hundreds of thousands streamed toward Tiananmen. More than 100,000 Young Pioneers formed the inner formation on the square, their red and yellow placards shifting from one giant character to the next, their voices rising together: "Long live Chairman Mao!" "Long live the Chinese Communist Party!" "Long live the People's Republic of China!" The earth-shaking slogans reverberated across the vast square and roused an eastern dragon that had been sleeping for ages. It was an unprecedented scene, and it moved every heart.

At exactly 10 a.m., Lin Boqu declared the ceremony open, and Chairman Mao spoke. I had been posted by the Municipal Committee to stand behind the rostrum, within earshot of Comrade Peng Zhen's signals, and I heard Chairman Mao declare, in his thick Hunan accent: "The People's Republic of China is founded! The Central People's Government is founded! The Chinese people have stood up!" At that moment, the millions below Tiananmen roared as one: "Long live! Long live! Ten thousand years!" Chairman Mao raised his right arm high and waved to the viewing stands and the crowds on the square. Watching the ecstatic sea of people,

many comrades could not hold back tears. Comrade Mao Zedong carried himself with calm power; his voice rang out as he spoke, with an authority that swept all before it.

After Chairman Mao's speech, Elder Lin declared the parade open, and Commander-in-Chief Zhu De rode in an open-top jeep below Tiananmen to review the troops before ascending to the rostrum. The People's Liberation Army marched first through the gate; as each unit passed the rostrum, the soldiers snapped their heads toward Tiananmen with a single shua and held their rifles in salute. The rostrum fell silent — we heard only the steady tramp of marching boots and the unified shouts: "Build the motherland! Defend the motherland! Long live the Communist Party! Long live Chairman Mao!" Watching the disciplined, steady-stepped ranks who had won the Republic's founding in blood, Chairman Mao slowly raised his right hand in return.

When the civilian contingents — workers, peasants, students, cadres, city residents — came marching through, the square's fervor built in wave after wave. That morning, 500,000 people formally joined the parade, and the procession flowed on until one in the afternoon.

In the 17 years between the founding ceremony and the start of the Cultural Revolution, on every May Day and National Day I worked on the ceremony preparations under Comrade Peng Zhen's direct leadership, standing behind the rostrum to field questions and help with on-the-spot needs. In this way I saw Comrade Mao Zedong twice a year, regularly. I remember once standing behind him — he turned, saw me, and asked, "What is your name?" "Cui Yueli." Comrade Mao asked playfully, "The Cui of Cui Yingying?" "Yes." "And what two characters are Yueli?" "The yue of moon, the li of plowshare." Mao Zedong laughed and said with dry humor, "What a hard-working name you have!" My sense was that his favorites were the workers and students. Whenever the workers' contingent passed, chanting "Long live Chairman Mao!" he would call back to them, "Long live the worker comrades!"

After the 1958 Great Leap Forward, our economy entered three hard years. Even on celebration days, Comrade Mao Zedong was not so cheerful; his color was pale, and he spoke little with those around him. After 1964, conditions improved — pork sold for seventy or eighty fen a jin, a real comfort. But on National Day 1965, Comrade Mao Zedong was still not as he had been before 1958. In those earlier years he liked to greet people and always wore a mild smile as he spoke. In 1965 he stepped away from the rostrum's railing now and then and went back to the resting room. When the workers' or students' contingents passed, Comrade Peng Zhen would send me to fetch him, and he came back forward only reluctantly. When the arts divisions came parading with their long dragons, his face grew very serious. I sensed then that Chairman Mao did not want to see the old things of the arts world; only later did we learn that the Cultural Revolution was taking shape in his mind. The scenes of the Cultural Revolution are vivid still, but now they are history. Today our Party and our people have turned a new page in the scroll, and we look forward: may the New China that Comrade Mao Zedong and the older generation of revolutionaries built be raised, in the hands of this new generation, into a democratic, prosperous, and great socialist country.

Cui Yueli · April 2, 1982

More than thirty years have passed since the peaceful liberation of Beiping, and many comrades still ask me to recall how it came about. With so many years gone, the specifics have faded and only a skeleton remains. Each time I think back on this history, I remember Comrade Mao Zedong's pithy summation: "The united front, armed struggle, and Party building are the three magic weapons by which the Chinese Communist Party defeated its enemies in the Chinese revolution — three principal magic weapons." It was the force of those three weapons that won the peaceful liberation of Beiping and opened a new form of struggle — one without bloodshed. The peaceful liberation of Beiping has a special historical and enduring significance all its own.

*The situation on the eve of Beiping's liberation.* By the winter of 1948, the defeat of Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang was a foregone conclusion. In KMT-held territory the economy had collapsed, the government was corrupt, and morale was scattered. In Beiping, prices climbed several times a day; people could not make ends meet, and grievances rose from every quarter. The wealthy and powerful KMT officials rushed to buy gold and U.S. dollars and fled south by plane one after another. Mid- and lower-ranking officials waited in fear and suspense, scheming a way out for themselves. Progressive figures and the broad masses longed day and night for liberation, quietly passing news of the PLA's victories from one to the next.

Under the leadership of the Urban Work Department of the Jin-Cha-Ji Border Region, Beiping's underground Party followed the Central Committee's principle of "conceal the cadres, lie low for the long term, accumulate strength, await the moment." Individual Party members had been entering the city since 1942, and by the eve of liberation in the winter of 1948 the underground membership had grown to about three thousand, with another five thousand in the Party's affiliated secret groups — the Democratic Youth League (Minqing) and the Democratic Youth Alliance (Minlian). About two-thirds of all this was concentrated in the Student Work Committee (Xuewei) system.

In late November 1948, in preparation for the liberation of Beiping, the southern Xuewei (the underground Party organization that had operated in Kunming, Chongqing, and elsewhere during the War of Resistance and moved to Beiping and Tianjin after V-J Day) merged with the northern Xuewei (the original Beiping–Tianjin underground) into a single unified committee. Our Xuewei was linked not only to university and secondary students and the student movement but, through progressive students, to a wide united-front effort. In factories, schools, newspapers, the railway bureau, the telecommunications bureau — and even in the KMT's own party, government, military, police, gendarmerie, and secret-service organs — we had revolutionary comrades everywhere. We ran three underground printing shops and three underground radio transmitters. Under the Urban Work Department's direction, while actively working to win over General Fu Zuoyi to accept talks and a peaceful liberation of Beiping, we mobilized Party members and progressive groups to form pickets, gather firearms to arm themselves, and prepare to guard factories, schools, archives, and cultural and historical sites and coordinate with a PLA assault on the city. Our footing was laid primarily for an armed takeover, but we spared no effort to win over General Fu. Our ranks — thousands of educated activists linked to broad masses of every stratum — formed a massive wave of public opinion calling for peaceful liberation.

At that time, General Fu Zuoyi was commander-in-chief of the "North China Bandit Suppression Command." Our Party judged that Fu had two possible trajectories. On the one hand, he had been a patriotic general during the War of Resistance, and he was in deep tension with Chiang Kai-shek's dictatorial, traitorous, and exclusionary ways — with Chiang's KMT government on the verge of collapse, there was a chance to bring him over. On the other hand, he was anti-communist, had fought us in the past, commanded two divisions of his own core troops, and with the full 600,000 KMT soldiers he led across North China at his back, he was unlikely to accept talks easily except under duress.

And just as the Party had estimated, so long as Fu still had strength to rely on and paths open to him, he vacillated for a long time on talks and defection.

Our army's succession of victories was the decisive factor in Beiping's peaceful liberation. It was the outcome on the battlefield that dictated Fu's attitude toward talks. After the Liaoshen Campaign, the balance of forces underwent a fundamental transformation, and the PLA opened in succession the Huaihai and Ping-Jin fronts. The victories in North China — dividing and encircling the strategic strongholds around Beiping and Tianjin — shook Fu and pushed him to seek a realistic way out. On December 22, 1948, the battle of Xinbao'an destroyed Fu's elite 35th Army; on December 24 we took Zhangjiakou, cutting off his western line of retreat to Suiyuan and shattering his dream of holding his own regional power base. Only then did Fu truly accept talks. It was not until mid-January 1949, when we took Tianjin in a single stroke, appeared at the walls of Beiping, and shelled its airfield, thoroughly severing his land and sea escape, that he finally resolved to rise up.

A small clique of Chiang's "Juntong" secret-service agents did everything they could to sabotage the talks and block Fu's defection. They trailed and arrested people; nearly every day one of our Party members or progressives was taken. Comrade Liu Ren cabled again and again urging us to "raise our vigilance," "maintain absolute secrecy," "observe strict discipline." The danger rose sharply once our work shifted from underground to semi-open, direct contact. We braced for the worst — combed our lodgings and everything we carried, disposed of any precious works of Marx, Lenin, or Mao and any written material, burned even the little scraps of phone numbers we had carefully saved. This made the liaison work harder, but with arrest possible at any moment, it was essential. If any of us were taken, the enemy must find nothing on our persons that could implicate others.

Under the White Terror, each day passed like a year. Watching our people struggle in water and fire, hearing the thunder of the PLA's guns, we longed only for Beiping's liberation to come one day sooner.

*Preparing to win over General Fu.* Early in 1948, Comrade Liu Ren, director of the Urban Work Department of Jin-Cha-Ji, instructed the Beiping underground to approach the people around Fu through every social tie we could find and work on him. Our comrades chose their targets with care: conversations began under the cover of family or friendship, moving gradually from personal news to the political situation, then patiently sowing our Party's policies and drawing these figures toward cooperation with the Communist Party — and, where the conditions ripened, into Party membership itself. Over the course of the year, the figures whom our Xuewei cultivated who could "speak directly to Fu" included Zeng Yanyi, Liu Houtong, Du Renzhi, Fu Dongju, Li Tengjiu, and Deng Baoshan. At the crucial moment, each of them, in different ways, played a part in bringing General Fu to defect. Looking back today, I feel profoundly the correctness of the Central Committee's principles and policy. The Urban Work Department's leadership carried out those principles firmly and flexibly, and succeeded in this historic mission.

In the spring of 1948, Comrade Liu Ren put Comrade Wang Su — who handled military subversion work in the Beiping Xuewei — in touch with Comrade Zeng Changning, an underground Party member at Nankai University in Tianjin. Through Zeng Changning's father, Zeng Yanyi, we would work on Fu. Zeng Yanyi and Fu had been classmates at the Baoding Military Academy, had taken an oath as sworn brothers, and, when Fu was an army commander, had served as his deputy. Encouraged by Wang Su, Zeng Yanyi came to Beiping and called on Fu, but reported that Fu did not trust him and that direct work on Fu through him would be difficult; he suggested working through Liu Houtong instead. Liu Houtong had been both Fu's and Zeng Yanyi's teacher, and at this time served as Fu's "Lieutenant General Chief Advisor." Fu held his old teacher in great respect. Zeng and Liu both lived in Tianjin; their families were close, visited each other often, and spoke of everything. Zeng's daughter Zeng Changning and Liu's daughter Liu Hangsheng were classmates, and under Zeng Changning's influence Liu Hangsheng joined the Minqing. Wang Su went to Tianjin once a week; Wang Su and I met once a week. At first I learned about Liu Houtong from Wang Su, but when I later met the elder Liu directly, it was through Comrade Du Renzhi of the Democratic League.

Comrade Du Renzhi was at that time a professor and head of the political science department at North China Institute, a Communist Party member from Taiyuan and also a Democratic League member; he was a fellow provincial of Fu's and had had dealings with him. Because of the danger of arrest in Taiyuan, he had come to Beiping and lodged at his younger brother's home (his brother, Du Jingzhi, was one of Fu's army doctors). Comrade Guan Shixiong, an underground Party member within the Democratic League, briefed me about him. In the autumn of 1948, Comrade Guan Shixiong and I went together to see him at No. 6, Youlou Alley, Jinshifang Street. Du told us he was a Party member who had come from Taiyuan to find the underground Party because of the risk of arrest. He asked me whether he should return to the liberated areas or remain in Beiping. By Party instruction, anyone who could hold a post in Beiping was to remain in Beiping. Comrade Du Renzhi did substantial work on the peaceful liberation.

After the liberation of Jinzhou, the fall of all the Northeast was imminent, and the liberation of North China — Beiping and Tianjin — was only a matter of time. The people of Beiping, on the one hand, hoped the PLA would liberate the city quickly; on the other, feared the casualties and destruction of war. Peaceful liberation became the popular wish. Comrade Du Renzhi, leveraging his fellow-provincial tie with Fu, actively pushed him to accept talks. Through his younger brother he met with Liu Houtong. After discussing with Fu, Liu reported back that Fu was inclined to talk but wanted a democratic party to take part as a coordinator between the two sides. Zhang Dongsun, then the North China head of the Democratic League, was approached to serve as that third party.

Fu's being summoned by Chiang Kai-shek to Nanjing for a meeting delayed the negotiations for the moment.

Under the leadership of the southern Xuewei's Comrade Wang Hanbin, Comrade Li Bingquan was assigned to work on his elder cousin Li Tengjiu, head of the liaison office at Fu's headquarters. Wang Hanbin also transferred Fu's daughter Comrade Fu Dongju from Tianjin to Beiping so she could work on her father from within his household.

This was the preparatory work for winning General Fu over.

*A first probe.* In early November 1948, Comrade Liu Ren summoned Comrade She Diqing, secretary of the Beiping Xuewei, back to Bozhen in the liberated area, and instructed the Xuewei to step forward as the Party's formal representative in talks with Fu's side.

After discussion, we decided that Fu's daughter Comrade Fu Dongju would probe her father first and see how he reacted.

Comrade Fu Dongju was Fu's eldest daughter, a Party member under the leadership of Wang Hanbin of the southern Xuewei. She was then working at Tianjin's Da Gong Bao, and had been transferred to Beiping to make working on Fu easier. Comrade She Diqing spoke with her and said, "The Liberation War is moving fast now. Your father may be open to talks. We hope he will lay down arms and cooperate with the Communist Party to liberate Beiping peacefully." Fu Dongju went at once to her father and conveyed our Party's intent. Fu, worried it might be a Juntong probe through his daughter, asked her, "Are these real Communists or Juntong? Don't be fooled — if we run into fake Communists, this is serious trouble." Fu Dongju said, "They're my classmates. Real Communists, not Juntong." Fu asked again, "Sent by Mao Zedong or by Marshal Nie Rongzhen?" Fu Dongju could not answer on the spot, and came to ask Comrade She Diqing how to reply. She Diqing told her plainly to say it was on behalf of Mao Zedong. Fu said he could consider it. This was our first tentative formal contact.

*A first emissary leaves the city.* Considering that Fu always treated Fu Dongju as a child, the Xuewei arranged in parallel for Comrade Li Bingquan to work on Fu through his elder cousin Li Tengjiu.

Comrade Li Bingquan was a former student at the Southwest United University who joined the Party in 1940 and came to Beiping after V-J Day, serving as a reporter at Fu's Pingming Daily and later as head of its news desk. He had been under Wang Hanbin of the southern Xuewei, and for a time under She Diqing.

Li Tengjiu headed the liaison office at Fu's "Bandit Suppression Command." Li Bingquan began through their family tie, moving the conversation from general talk about the situation toward the point that peaceful negotiation with the Communist Party was the only way forward. Once he had worked through Li Tengjiu's thinking, he had Li Tengjiu go to Fu directly.

Li Tengjiu approached Fu several times, but Fu ignored him. In early December, our army had with lightning speed encircled and split the strategic points of North China — Beiping, Tianjin, Zhangjiakou, Xinbao'an, Tanggu. Only now did Fu feel the urgency of talks, and he sent Li Tengjiu to find the Communists. The Xuewei decided that Comrade Li Bingquan would come out openly as a Party member. Around late December, Fu decided to send his trusted confidant, Cui Zaizhi, director of Pingming Daily, out of the city to negotiate; our underground Xuewei sent Li Bingquan along. Fu asked us to designate another Communist contact to replace Li Bingquan with Li Tengjiu once Bingquan left; we named Comrade Liu Shiping, head of the news desk at Yishi Bao, an underground Party member, for that role. In this round of talks we demanded that not only Fu's core troops but all KMT forces in North China lay down their arms. Fu answered, "My own troops — yes. But the others, I can't control." Unfortunately Comrades She Diqing and Liu Shiping were then arrested by Juntong, and the work ran into trouble.

*A second emissary leaves the city.* With Xinbao'an and Zhangjiakou taken and Fu's main forces destroyed, by early January 1949 the Ping-Tianjin front was urgent. Feeling the pressure, Fu decided to send Zhou Beifeng out as his emissary. I arranged to meet them at Zhang Dongsun's home in Li Ge Lao Alley. I was meeting Mr. Zhou Beifeng for the first time; he wanted to talk first, but since the route, timing, and signals for leaving were already set by cable with the Urban Work Department and could not be delayed, I asked them to depart at once. Zhou said, "On our side the checkpoints are manageable, but what do we do when we reach the PLA?" I told them to take a white flag for crossing the firing line, and gave them the route and the signal. Zhou Beifeng and Zhang Dongsun soon set off together.

Afterward the Urban Work Department cabled us to watch Fu's attitude upon Zhou's return. We learned that Fu was still wavering. Soon the battle for Tianjin began. The Central Military Commission cabled to say that once Tianjin fell, Fu might change. And so it was: in mid-January 1949, Fu's plenipotentiary representative Deng Baoshan and Zhou Beifeng came out once more, and at last Fu resolved to defect.

*Three principal figures in the negotiations.* From the start, the Xuewei's work on Fu had been pursued through many channels. In the autumn of 1948, I had already established direct contact with elder Liu Houtong; I was then secretary-general of the Xuewei, with upper-level united-front work in my portfolio. After Comrade Li Bingquan left the city, I took over as the Communist representative in formal talks with Fu's side, and all the contacts that other comrades had been cultivating were handed over to me so we could hold a unified grasp of Fu's movements and of the work itself. In the final stage of direct talks, three figures mattered most: Fu's old teacher Liu Houtong; his colleague Deng Baoshan, deputy commander of the "North China Bandit Suppression Command"; and his daughter Comrade Fu Dongju.

We chose Liu Houtong as the bridge because he had a clear grasp of the situation, had worked with me over an extended period, was active in support of talks, knew Fu deeply, and had Fu's profound trust. Through Liu Houtong we worked on Fu for nearly a year.

My regular meeting place with Liu Houtong was the office of Wu Yuheng, the president of the (puppet) High Court. Wu was one of the leaders of the Democratic League and had had working ties with Comrade Dong Biwu in the rear areas.

Elder Liu looked to be in his late sixties, a man steeped in the old poetry and classics. His voice boomed, his mind was clear, and he was open and talkative — discourse on the past and present flowed from him easily, and half a day could pass in a single conversation. President Wu Yuheng spoke softly and received people sincerely, and made his office convenient for our meetings — on our first encounter he hosted a small dinner for the two of us.

We were negotiating, but we were also talking from the heart and making friends. It seemed elder Liu was glad to befriend a young Communist like me. He once gave me a photograph of his whole family. Liu Houtong and I agreed to meet twice a week: "If a week passes and you don't come," he said, "I'll assume you've been arrested by Juntong, and I'll ask Mr. Fu to send someone to the prisons to find you." Juntong's operations were particularly vicious in those days. Elder Liu was friendly toward the Communist Party and a man of his word. Once I had urgent business and couldn't keep our appointment; it truly worried him, and he did ask Fu to send people around the prisons asking after a Dr. Li from Tongren Hospital (I had told him I was surnamed Li and was a physician at Tongren — in fact I had already left). When we met again, he told me they hadn't found a Dr. Li, only a Dr. Sun from Tongren (the underground Party member Comrade Sun Zhenzhou was indeed a doctor at Tongren, and had been arrested by the enemy).

I was in direct contact with elder Liu for just over two months, and in that time he did tremendous work toward the talks. From what he told me, it was clear that Fu was always wavering: he didn't want to throw his lot in with Chiang, yet he also wanted to preserve his territory and his military force. For about two months, Fu never gave a firm answer on peaceful liberation.

With the years gone by, it's hard to recall exactly what we discussed each time — but I remember several key issues in the broad strokes. At first, knowing that Chiang was still trying to hold him with heavy appointments, we spoke chiefly of how following Chiang was a dead end — Chiang had always wiped out his rivals. When we learned that the American imperialists were trying to buy Fu and support a "North China independence" under him, we spoke of how General Fu should treasure his glorious history of patriotism and resistance against Japan: the American imperialists had armed millions of Chiang's men, and even they could not escape a shameful defeat. When Fu hoped he could rely on part of his force and fall back to Chahar-Suiyuan, we spoke of how Chahar-Suiyuan was already closed to him.

When we heard the "Shaanbei Radio" announce the list of war criminals with Fu's name on it, a cable soon came from Central to the effect that "though Fu is listed as a war criminal, his conflict with Chiang is real — we must still win him over." From then on we spoke chiefly of the Party's united-front policy: if one has rendered merit to the people, the people will not forget it. This was to relieve Fu's misgivings, help him resolve to accept talks, and bring about a peaceful liberation of Beiping. If Beiping did not have to be fought over, not only would there be fewer dead and less destruction, but the ancient capital of culture would be preserved — a thing in the people's interest — and accepting a peaceful liberation of Beiping would itself be a great merit to the people.

Over the nearly a year we worked on Fu, whenever Fu wavered, elder Liu returned to him firmly and repeatedly, laying out the situation, the stakes, exposing Chiang's schemes, conveying our Party's policy and our hopes and demands of Fu, and pointing sharply to the need to follow the current of popular will, resolve to act at the moment, and seize the bright future that peaceful negotiation could bring — he must not destroy himself.

By elder Liu's account, he had urged Fu to issue a peace telegram calling for an end to civil war. Fu's main misgivings at the time were: first, fear that he could not control the central KMT troops; second, fear that the Communists would not understand; third, fear that Chiang would bomb Beiping; fourth, fear of failing the central army; fifth, fear of being seen as a traitor. Elder Liu reported back to us the general's bind, and on Fu's wrong thinking he did much patient analytical persuasion. On the matter of "treachery," for instance, he told Fu the stories of Tang of Shang overthrowing Jie and of King Wu of Zhou smiting Zhou of Shang. He said: "Tang and King Wu were subjects of Jie and Zhou, yet later ages did not call them traitors; on the contrary, they praised them. Loyalty to a ruler must be loyalty to the people, not to one man. With the state in this state of ruin — the people displaced, plunged in water and fire — the people hope for peace, and the government must be remade. If you follow the currents of history and of people's hearts, rise up and lead the call for peace, the empire will come bringing wine to welcome you — who will call you a traitor?" Liu Houtong ran himself ragged in Beiping for peace for eighty-five days; his left eye went blind from exhaustion and worry, and he came to be known as the "Elder of Peace," a name he deserved. Once Fu resolved to rise up, elder Liu did not lay claim to his own merits; he withdrew and went back to Tianjin.

Deng Baoshan was then deputy commander-in-chief of the "North China Bandit Suppression Command" and concurrently commander of the KMT forces in the Yulin region. I met Deng at the home of Wang Jiesan, president of North China Institute. Deng came in the gray cotton uniform of an ordinary KMT soldier — square-faced, his voice heavy. At our first meeting he said, "I know the Communist Party's policy. One of my children studied in Yan'an. I have met Chairman Mao. I listen to Shaanbei Radio often." I happened to have brought a copy of recorded Shaanbei Radio news material with me, and gave him one — he was pleased. We spoke then about the international and domestic situation. Mr. Deng Baoshan saw Chiang's defeat clearly, and the conversation moved well. I said to him, "You and Mr. Fu are old colleagues. I hope you will urge Mr. Fu to resolve on talks quickly — time is short. Winning a peaceful liberation of Beiping would be a great service to the people." He said he would do his utmost. When I asked about the Yulin region, he said, "Let's settle Mr. Fu's matter first; as for my place, it will be manageable." "Very well," I said, "let's discuss it later." That was the first meeting.

Our second meeting was at President Wang Jiesan's home again. By then the PLA had encircled Beiping and the ring was tightening — the rumble of artillery was constant in the city, and some shells had begun to land inside the walls. Deng seemed tense, and we spoke only briefly. He said, "Could you tell your army to hold off awhile, and give me more time to go deeper with Mr. Fu?" I said, "I can pass it up. But the time won't be long. Our army has Beiping surrounded, Mr. Fu's troops have nowhere to go — if he doesn't resolve now, it will be too late." With Tianjin's liberation at hand, Comrade Liu Ren forwarded to me a cable from the Central Military Commission saying that once Tianjin fell, Fu might defect — but we should still prepare on both tracks: if Fu would not accept talks, we would liberate Beiping by force. I spoke with Deng along those lines and urged him to push Fu to decide quickly. I had come without my bicycle that day. My family lived in Nanwanzi Alley at the south end of Nan Chizi Street, and Wang Jiesan's home was at the north end — near enough. On my way out Mr. Deng said, "Juntong is very active — be careful. Let me drop you partway by car." He drove me to East Jingshan Street and I got out; from there my way home was actually longer. But underground Party practice was absolute: our residences stayed secret.

The third meeting with Deng Baoshan was again at Wang Jiesan's home. Deng came in smiling. He was usually steady and did not wear his feelings easily. This time he said with a smile, "Mr. Fu's question is settled. He has resolved to cooperate with the Communist Party. With this settled his spirits are good — I called his daughter Dongju and we had a meal with those closest to him." That resolve had been hard-won. General Deng Baoshan played a vital role in bringing Fu Zuoyi to defect. (It later emerged that with the PLA already encircling Beiping, Fu had sent a plane specially to bring Deng into Beiping to discuss the city's problem.)

Deng then asked for a further meeting with our army's leadership. I cabled the Urban Work Department; with their approval, Wang Su and I arranged for a suitable courier to accompany them out of the city and bring them to our army's supreme command. With that, the underground Party's work to secure Fu Zuoyi's acceptance of talks reached its conclusion. Afterward I heard that General Deng Baoshan came out of the city many more times to negotiate the concrete terms and details of the uprising with our front-line headquarters, but by then the underground Party was no longer needed as intermediary.

Comrade Fu Dongju was a fine Party intelligence officer and a fine daughter to General Fu. In the course of our Party's open talks with Fu, Comrade Fu Dongju played an important role. After I took over as the Communist representative, Fu Dongju's main task was to keep us informed of her father's movements. She and I met at Comrade Li Zhong's home on East Huangchenggen Street — almost every day. She was then a young intellectual; each time she came, smiling, unhurried, she would lay out for me exactly what her father had been doing. Fu's inner struggle was at times fierce — he sighed, lost his temper, chewed on matchsticks, even contemplated suicide — and we knew his every mood change. What happened in his household in the evening we knew by the next morning; what happened in his morning we knew by the afternoon. These we wrote up in cables, which a courier rushed to the cipher clerk, then to the underground transmitter, and direct to Comrade Liu Ren — who passed them promptly to the front-line headquarters. After liberation, Comrade Liu Ren once brought this up and said, "Commander Nie (Comrade Nie Rongzhen) praised your intelligence work. The Commander said: 'Your grasp of Fu Zuoyi's movements was remarkable — to know the enemy commander's movements, and even his moods, on the battlefield with such speed and accuracy is rare in the history of warfare. It played an important role in our correct judgment, our resolute decisions, and our sound deployments.'"

Throughout our negotiations with Fu, Fu Dongju was truly a fine intelligence officer. Because of the accuracy and timeliness of our information, the Central Committee was able, in organizing the liberation of Beiping, to coordinate military pressure with political work in the closest fashion. With armed liberation of Beiping already beyond doubt, we held the initiative in settling the matter peacefully.

The success of the talks and the peaceful liberation of Beiping preserved our ancient capital of culture, and at the time greatly lifted the morale of the armies and people across the country. It further unleashed the power of the united front, pushed the enemy armies to disintegrate faster, and sped up the process of national liberation.

On the eve of liberation, under the pall of the White Terror, our hearts were nonetheless elated: every comrade knew this was the darkness before dawn. Under instructions from the Urban Work Department, the Beiping underground Party's Xuewei, Pingwei (Civilian Work Committee), Gongwei (Workers' Work Committee), and other organs rapidly combined for unified action, and launched a sweep of activity. Our thousands of revolutionary, young, combat-capable Communist Party members and advanced youth, linked to the broad masses of every stratum, rooted deep in a thick popular base, worked with mounting intensity toward welcoming the liberation: we mounted a powerful political offensive against the enemy, mailing and distributing notices to the heads of their party and government organs warning them to stay at their posts, keep the peace, and wait to be taken over; we worked to disintegrate their forces and win defections. Many middle- and lower-ranking KMT officers were won over, and some senior ones were ready to defect as well — the 92nd Army's commander Hou Jingru and his deputy Huang Xiang secretly guaranteed a defection, and the enemy units at the Chongwenmen and Xizhimen gates, contacted by Comrade Wang Su, guaranteed opening the gates to our troops when the assault came. One can imagine the scene our PLA would have faced if it had stormed the city: an enemy already unraveling, and friendly forces fully prepared to meet them. After much inner struggle, General Fu Zuoyi at last led his 600,000 troops in an uprising — rendering a great service to the people.

In his Report to the Second Plenum of the Seventh Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, Comrade Mao Zedong noted that the manner of Beiping's resolution "is inevitable once the enemy's main force has been destroyed, and it is advantageous both to our army and to the people, for it can avoid casualties and destruction. Every commander in our field armies should study and master this form of struggle. It is a form of struggle — a bloodless form — and does not mean that problems can be solved without struggle."

Cui Yueli · November 1993

In memory of Comrade Liu Ren, I'd like to set down some of the principal moments from our decades of contact.

I first met Comrade Liu Ren in February 1939, near Chengnanzhuang in Fuping, in the Jin-Cha-Ji border region's anti-Japanese base.

In October 1938, I was an instructor and Party-branch secretary at the Resistance Academy, leading several dozen sick comrades from the academy on guerrilla operations across the central Hebei plain. By the end of 1938, when the enemy's great mopping-up operation had ended, we found the central Hebei District Party Committee's headquarters and stayed for a month. After Lunar New Year, the District Committee's organization head, Zhang Jun, asked whether I'd be willing to go work in the western Hebei area — still in health work. I was inclined toward seeing more of the country, so I said yes. A few days later he asked again, and I confirmed. Then four of us — myself, Li Changqing (head of the central Hebei Cadre School), Chen Xueli (its dean of education), and Li Yaoting (former county Party secretary of Lixian) — set off together for Fuping County in western Hebei in the Jin-Cha-Ji base. It was February 1939, my first time leaving the plain for the mountains.

When we arrived, Comrade Zhang Ruihua spoke with me first, then Comrade Liu Ren — mostly asking about my past work, just chatting. Li Yaoting and I went back to the Chengnanzhuang reception house to wait for assignments. (Li had been part of the Gao-Li uprising.) Zhang Ruihua asked whether I'd like to go to the Party School. I very much did. I had been in apprenticeship since dropping out at age 13, and longed for a chance to study; some of my elementary classmates had gone to junior middle school, others to normal school, and I had envied them. Soon Li Yaoting and I went together to the Liyuanzhuang Party School, two or three li from Chengnanzhuang. Once there, we were told to change names. That's when I changed mine. Li Yaoting changed his to Kang Jian (his heart was bad). For mine — it was spring, our arrival was at dusk, and I could just make out a peasant in the moonlight driving an ox to plow the field — so I took the name Cui Yueli. From that point on, no one knew me as Zhang Guangyin. Only as Cui Yueli.

The Party School's public name was the Worker Training Class; in fact it was the Party School. The principal then was said to be Peng Zhen. Before long, Comrade Liu Ren took up the post of deputy head of the Organization Department of the Jin-Cha-Ji Northern Bureau, and he came to the school often — usually to see Zhou Rongxin about cadres, their assignments and reviews. Zhang Ruihua headed the cadre section, and they'd come together, but I saw Liu Ren more. His health was poor — he had a stomach ulcer — and sometimes he needed an injection. Usually it was the bureau doctor, Tian Yi, who gave them, but once it fell to me. He was very sensitive to needles, very tense at the prospect, and after I'd given him the shot he said, "Hey — yours doesn't hurt at all." After that, he asked me whenever he had the chance, and that's how we became familiar.

In July or August of 1939, our class graduated. Zhou Rongxin asked me to stay on at the Party School as the doctor, so I stayed. Difficult cases were beyond me, but with three years of medical training I could handle ordinary colds, diarrhea, and the like.

While at the Party School I had no formal working contact with Comrade Liu Ren — until the school was temporarily closed at the end of 1942. From late 1939 I went on guerrilla missions with Zhou Rongxin; in 1940 and 1941 I led the school's sick comrades through guerrilla life. None of that brought me alongside Liu Ren. My true direct contact with him began only after the temporary closure of the Party School at the end of 1942.

By 1942 the resistance war behind enemy lines had grown ever more cruel; we were in stalemate, and the larger organs were sending cadres down to counties, basic units, and guerrilla zones. The Party School was closed for the time being, and I was reassigned to the Bureau, lodging at its reception house in Zhaojiazhuang. The reception house was where Organization-Department-related cadres on routine business stayed. The first one I met there was She Diqing. She Diqing had already been transferred to the Urban Work Committee, established (it was said) in early 1942, in response to the Yan'an Center's slogan, "Defeat Hitler this year, defeat Japan next year" — to launch "behind-the-behind-the-lines" work. We were already behind enemy lines; now we were to go further, into the great cities the enemy occupied. That's what was meant by "behind-the-behind-the-lines." Then I saw Comrade Liu Ren. He asked whether I'd be willing to go into the Beiping–Tianjin region as enemy-occupied-area work. I said yes. My résumé showed half a year of vagrancy in Beiping in early 1937, and I had a few hometown contacts there, so the organization sent me to Beiping. I also met Comrade Li Xue then; he was in charge of the radio transmitter and of forging residence permits — without one, you were detained in the occupied zones. She Diqing briefed me on the things to watch for and how to do clandestine work — single-line contact, building work step by step through social ties, never forming horizontal connections with people you didn't know — those rules of secret work. After training, Li Xue took my photo and made the forged residence permit, and I made my way through the secret courier line from the base toward the Pinghan rail line. I was tense — I'd worked years skirting the Japanese-puppet forces in the base, but never face-to-face. I was, after all, still young — twenty-three.

I was led by a courier named Gao Jinshuan from the Nanguantou liaison station to Quyang County. Nanguantou was a guerrilla zone the enemy entered now and then; our guerrilla units went disguised, theirs went openly, sometimes sending companies — hundreds of men — to seize grain. Nanguantou was sixty or seventy li from the Dingxian station. Gao Jinshuan, having seen so many enemy soldiers in the guerrilla zones, was dressed as an ordinary villager; I wore a long padded gown and Chinese trousers, carried my residence permit and a little money in my pocket — going out, you had to lodge and eat. The line's chief was Comrade Zhou Ming, who had arranged everything for me along the way; he also told me that once I reached Tianjin I could find his elder brother Zhou Longgao, head of internal medicine at Tianjin's First Hospital. Brothers Zhou hadn't seen each other in many years. Zhou Longgao had joined the Party in the Great Revolutionary period and would be safe.

I went first to Tianjin and made the contacts the organization had given me. In particular, Comrade Liu Ren had me look up Dr. Wu at Peking Union Medical College Hospital (Liu had known Dr. Wu in the Great Revolutionary days), and Dr. Wang Guangchao, a fellow countryman of mine. There was also a small ink-maker named Cui Yufeng whom I had met during my drift through Beiping in early 1937 when he had given me a job; I went to see him. So I lodged and traveled between Beiping and Tianjin for about a month, also reaching the Yuan Mu Han household and the Chen Fengtong household. With those contacts in hand I returned to the anti-Japanese base. Comrade Liu Ren asked me about every person I'd seen — what they thought, what their attitude was — in great detail. He told me to rest for a few days and then go back to Beiping–Tianjin if there was nothing pressing, find some way to settle there, get work. So long as I could put down a foothold, that was a victory. As one comrade had told me on my first trip out — "now we'll put it into practice" — I thought to myself that perhaps there were people who weren't afraid of the Communist Party and would take me in, give me a place to stay and something to do.

In April or May 1943 I went out a second time. In Tianjin, Zhou Longgao found me work in the city's Epidemic Prevention Brigade doing inoculations, and a basement room — I shared it with a rickshaw puller and a cook, and we became close. After liberation in 1949 I went back to see them. They taught me the city — they knew the social terrain well — and that helped me a great deal.

I lived in Tianjin for half a year, and during that time also went often to Beiping. My contacts widened. In Tianjin I met some students and teachers, but the work didn't seem to take off. Beiping had a tradition of student movements; the people I met were warm; the ground for work was more fertile than in Tianjin, where it was hard to make friends. After September 1943, having finished the inoculation campaign, I went to Beiping. It went well — I lodged at the home of an elderly woman, Mrs. Zheng Ru-hui, who introduced me to the Beichizi Sino-Western Hospital. With a job in hand, the work was easier to develop. By then I went back to the base to report about every six months. My work, plainly put, was the people I'd come to know and the relationships I had with them, opening the work through these social ties — single-line contact, no horizontal organizational links.

What I remember most clearly was the work on the great traitor Li Shouxin. He was the commander-in-chief of the Mongolian Frontier "Bandit Suppression" forces. Comrade Liu Ren told me that the director of the Sino-Western Hospital, Zheng Jian'an, was a friend of Li Shouxin's, and we could learn about Li from the side, but to be careful in working on him: try to win him away from the Japanese, but very cautiously, or it would cause trouble. As it turned out, Li Shouxin was an extreme anti-communist beyond winning over; he served the Japanese to the end. In the spring of 1944 I went with director Zheng Jian'an to see Li Shouxin. In our conversation Li said, "The Communist bandits are like foul water — wherever they go the local people don't want them."

In those two and a half years of resistance work I went back roughly every six months, always reporting directly to Comrade Liu Ren — every relationship, every detail of the work. When I went out again, he'd give me my new assignments. He was, you could say, my direct superior. My impression of him then was that his temper was sharp and I was a little afraid of him. But on every matter he was meticulous — he would dig to the bottom of every pot, and that was precious. In the long contact after liberation, I came to understand the depth of his strengths. In the resistance years he was deeply experienced in clandestine work, with high vigilance. I remember once I had developed a senior cadre of the Xinminhui, Zhang Dewu, into the CCP — somewhat rashly. Liu Ren scolded me roundly. Then he said, "All right, use him." "How?" I asked. He said, "Have him come to the border region on a schedule and bring printed propaganda back into the city." After more thought, the arrangement was that Zhang Dewu would come on schedule to fetch them. The political vigilance lesson was no small one, and to this day I carry political vigilance into many things — and many times it has proved right.

When Japan surrendered, we still had no transmitter; a courier came to tell us that Comrade Liu Ren would lead the organs into Beiping, and that we should wait in the city. After Liu Ren reached the Western Hills, he sent word of the precise rendezvous point. I went many times. Before the Kuomintang entered the city, our task was to find contacts inside, urge enemy and puppet personnel to defect, prepare to receive the Eighth Route Army into Beiping, bring proclamations and propaganda from outside in, and distribute them.

During the War of Liberation I went to the Western Hills several times. By then a notice had been issued establishing the Beiping Municipal Government and preparations were under way to enter the city. The Beiping Municipal Committee was Liu Ren, Wu Guang, and Zhou Xiaozhou (propaganda). At the time this was secret and not communicated downward. At the Western Hills I met Zhang Xuesi, who was in charge of military matters and worked on enemy-puppet forces. Later Zhang Xuesi went to the Northeast. In November Liu Ren and several comrades took up post in Zhangjiakou. Zhangjiakou was already liberated; Beiping was not. Seeing he could not yet enter Beiping, Liu Ren told me, "You'll need to find a way to keep going underground." With the Japanese gone, I had been doing underground work for several years; in the run-up to welcoming the Eighth Route Army in I had been very active and was relatively exposed. Luckily I was a "wily hare with three burrows" — my mass relationships were good, and I had multiple residences. "All right," I said. "I'll find a way to keep underground." He was in Zhangjiakou then, and I went to see him there once. I told him the work was getting harder; the enemy was on the offensive. The Nationalist forces were entering the city, and tens of thousands welcomed them — there were still illusions about Nationalist rule. Only later, when KMT corruption became clear, did people's illusions break apart, bit by bit. At the same time, the masses didn't yet know the Communist Party — we'd never run a great city — but they hoped some force could be better than the KMT, and gradually they tilted toward us.

During the War of Liberation, the Xuewei people moved into the city too. She Diqing was secretary; other members included Sun Guoliang, Tie Gang, Lu Yu, and others. I joined the Xuewei relatively late — perhaps spring 1947 — as secretary-general. All these cadre appointments came on Comrade Liu Ren's recommendation. We did the work in the city, and within the Xuewei we discussed who would go back to brief Liu Ren. I went to Zhangjiakou once, and later once to Bozhen.

When the Three Great Campaigns were about to begin, Comrade Liu Ren was going to take me to see Comrade Liu Shaoqi to brief him on conditions among the people in the cities and to plan the urban work. But the Huaihai battle was raging, and Liu Ren grew anxious — he said to me, "All right, you go back. Tell them Beiping will be liberated soon, and they should make ready quickly." So I went back to Beiping.

From after the autumn of 1948 onward, in this stretch of time, She Diqing and others went back to the liberated areas separately many times; I went back rarely. Beyond the Xuewei, the Beijing organization also had the Gongwei (Workers' Work Committee), the Tiewei (Railway Work Committee), and the Pingwei (Civilian Work Committee) — several committees in parallel — to make sure that if the KMT wrecked one, the others stood. This was Liu Ren's long underground experience speaking. Such an organizational form held high vigilance against the enemy. By that point organized activity was possible — no longer like under the Japanese. There were frequent student demonstrations, small and large, sometimes ten thousand strong. Mao Zedong later likened the student movement in occupied territory to the second front against the KMT reactionaries.

Beijing's organizations were largely undamaged by the enemy before liberation, and that was thanks to Liu Ren's design: an individual within one committee falling to the enemy didn't unravel the others. They could keep working — it was not a single unified municipal committee. To use this organizational strategy against the enemy was vital. Under Liu Ren's direct direction, the work succeeded. Before liberation the Beiping–Tianjin underground membership had grown to over two thousand; the progressive mass organizations I can no longer give exact numbers for, but it must have been five or six thousand. Party members then weren't like today's. Today some members don't really do much; back then each one was an active backbone, with much activity and work. To have built so vast an organization — across KMT institutions, through enemy-puppet organs, in every business and enterprise, with Party or progressive presence almost everywhere — was very hard. The work was solid, and it played a crucial role in the liberation of Beiping and the smooth takeover. It also provided a major source of personnel after liberation. Many university students who came out became cadres; the Communist Party members and progressives we had had inside KMT institutions stepped into government positions in every department. That was no small feat. To know a city is hard; to govern one is harder, and requires a set of organs and methods suited to a great city. Our Party's energetic underground struggle, opening that second front, meant that after liberation tens of thousands of cadres were ready to manage the city well — and that is inseparable from Comrade Liu Ren's work. He made important contributions.

For Beiping's peaceful liberation: of course our Party's emphasis was on armed seizure, but the work to win General Fu Zuoyi began in early 1948. With deep foresight, Comrade Liu Ren learned Fu's social network and worked the persuasion concretely — a year of effort that ended with General Fu leading what was nominally 600,000 troops (actually some 400,000) into an uprising. It is fair to say that Comrade Liu Ren made an outstanding contribution to the peaceful liberation of Beiping. In his memorial article on Liu Ren, Marshal Nie Rongzhen noted that the Beiping underground Party's understanding of the enemy commander's situation, both in clarity and timeliness, was rare in the history of warfare, and it created the model of peaceful liberation.

My long, regular association with Liu Ren came after liberation. Before liberation I'd been on the underground Party committee, working chiefly on the united front with upper-level intellectuals. Comrade Liu Ren took the united-front work very seriously and very deeply. I knew professors at Beida, Tsinghua, and Yenching; he often had me bring him along to call on them. To call directly on someone like that wasn't a common style of work in those days, and his style wasn't a one-day thing — after liberation, as Municipal Party Secretary, he kept it up. He'd often go to the homes of professors he knew well to talk — chiefly to gauge what they were thinking, and also to draw together a group of senior intellectuals. So when the annual lists for the Political Consultative Conference were drawn up, he knew everyone clearly. The friends of the united front he held to remained unchanged for many years; if not for the Cultural Revolution disrupting things, they would have remained good friends of our Party and our work to the end. Some have passed away, others are still living; some are still old united-front friends from those years. Comrade Liu Ren took the united-front work very seriously — it wasn't lip service. As for opinions in society, the masses' views on government work, he went down personally to grassroots units to listen — first-hand material every time. That style is not common in our Party. As I understood him: in his daily life he didn't care to see people he wasn't familiar with, and yet he was constantly running here today, there tomorrow. In a campaign on agriculture he'd be off to a commune brigade, talking with cadres, talking with peasants right at the field's edge. Why? To see — to know — whether our policies actually reached the grassroots and the masses, whether there were problems in carrying them out. To go deep into reality, deep into the masses — that spirit, in terms of a working method, occupied a substantial place in his world view.

We always speak of "linking with the masses, linking with reality, seeking truth from facts." If we summarized Comrade Liu Ren's working style and learned from it across the whole Party, the Party's style would improve enormously.

To give one example: during the Great Leap Forward, when people shouted yields of a thousand jin per mu, then five thousand, even tens of thousands, Comrade Liu Ren simply did not believe it. He'd run out to one place and ask, "How many jin of wheat will yours produce?" If the District Party secretary there was honest enough to say nothing, he'd go to the field's edge to see for himself.

"Old farmer," Comrade Liu Ren would ask, "your wheat looks fine. How many jin will you bring in this year?"

"Oh, maybe three hundred per mu." "Oh, that's not bad — that's a fine harvest."

The District Party secretary and cadres trailing behind him — what could they say? See for yourself in the field, ask for yourself, listen for yourself: that was his style.

Later the wind of exaggeration grew worse: the commune was the bridge, communism the heaven. Liu Ren sent me down to a base in the Sino-Soviet Friendship Commune in Shijingshan. "Good," I said. I was glad to go down. I lived there for a year. He came every couple of weeks. Two places drew his attention: one was where I was — rural — where commune work then dealt only with production, with schools, hospitals, shops, and service canteens all handed off to the commune (the direction was right, but our conditions then could not really pull it off, and his concern was the yields). The other was the steel plant, to Zhou Guanwu's office — every two or three days, asking in great detail, knowing the steelworks inside out. A few days ago at the twentieth anniversary of Comrade Liu Ren's death, I ran into Comrade Zhou Guanwu, who said, "Aiya — even our current plan still rests on what Comrade Liu Ren and you set then. Without that plan, we couldn't have built up to this scale." That such a great enterprise as the Shijingshan Steel Plant — through so many twists — became what it is today, even buying out a three-million-ton American steel mill and a Peruvian iron mine producing over ten million tons, even setting up an international ocean-shipping fleet, with profits in the hundreds of millions, with workers' lives quite good and worker enthusiasm well drawn out — over the long view, you cannot deny Comrade Liu Ren's important contribution to the Shijingshan plant: he laid the ideological, planning, and policy groundwork. After the Cultural Revolution, Zhou Guanwu took the steelworks under contract management and lifted the enterprise sharply; for that, historically, Comrade Liu Ren is the first who must be credited. Though I went to the steelworks too, my main work was the commune. The development of Shougang represents Liu Ren's important role in industrial work; he often called in industrial ministers like Lu Yu and Song Rufen for talks.

In 1958, hearing that Xushui had entered communism, I went to look — and the cotton was as it had always been. "The commune is the bridge, communism is the heaven" — I used this in talks and reports to commune members: "Now meals are free; later the bus and the train will be free, and you can ride at will." Later, summing myself up, I said it had been "petty-bourgeois fanaticism." Comrade Liu Ren would come down to the commune nearly every two weeks, sometimes weekly, to see how the wheat was growing. "This wheat looks good. How many jin per mu, do you think?" he'd ask. "In the Beijing suburbs, this is among the very best," I'd say. "The peasants say at most four or five hundred jin." "Oh — that much. Good, this wheat is fine. Some places claim ten thousand jin per mu — that's nonsense, isn't it. Plant me a test plot, will you?" "All right." "Measure it out. The peasants say the maximum yield comes at how many jin of seed?" "Fifteen or sixteen." "Then start at seven or eight jin — try ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty, fifty, a hundred, two hundred. See what a hundred-jin sowing yields, what two hundred yields." So I set up a test plot in Shijingshan, measured carefully. The next year at harvest, the best was at seventeen or eighteen jin of seed; yields topped out below twenty jin. At two hundred jin much of the seed didn't germinate, and what did failed to head; even fertilizer didn't help. Not just my plot — he had the Garrison and the Public Security Bureau set up several test plots in the city's north and west. With those, you could speak with authority.

Many places reported a thousand jin; in fact five or six hundred jin was already very good — not like today, with our scientific advances yielding two thousand jin. That was many years ago; production levels were still low. To gather opinions among the masses and also run experiments yourself for the evidence — that is the concentrated expression in Liu Ren's work of linking with the masses, linking with reality, and seeking truth from facts.

In 1975, I summed up a few thoughts from prison; the first was, "The revolutionary road is full of twists; the hardest lesson is to seek truth from facts." During my years in prison, I drew enormously on what I'd learned from Liu Ren. He had been struggled against, but he never struggled against others. He told me once, "If you're going to be struggled against, don't let a single lie out of your mouth. Yes is yes, no is no — don't fabricate." That's how it is. First, a Communist must not lie. Second, a lie only multiplies trouble. Liu Ren spent four or five years in prison; whenever I think of it I cannot bear the grief. I was in Qincheng Prison for almost eight years, less by two months. The first three months were "shock" — shock interrogation. A document signed by Kang Sheng said: "The four counter-revolutionary elements Liu Ren, Xu Zirong, Feng Jiping, and Cui Yueli have sold out the Party's and the state's core secrets and deserve a thousand deaths. Put them in shackles and conduct stern shock interrogation, force them to surrender." I saw that document only after I came out. During the Cultural Revolution I didn't know Comrade Liu Ren had been imprisoned; we were in solitary cells and never saw each other. In the long years before the Cultural Revolution we had been together; whenever we touched on this or that person's situation, or what would happen if a campaign came, he'd said: if he himself were struggled against or hit a hard time, he would not say anything against his conscience. I held those words tight. In prison the three months of shock interrogation came in cycles — three days and three nights at a stretch, then three or four days' rest, then another round, over and over. When they questioned me about my relationship with Liu Ren, they said, "You aren't to call him Liu Ren — much less comrade. He's a great spy." "A great spy — I wouldn't know that." "How dare you fucking —" and they'd beat me. I said Liu Ren joined the Party in 1927; I didn't know he was a great spy. I joined in 1937, ten years after him; how would I know he was a great spy? I argued with them at first when I was newly in. Then I saw arguing only made the beatings worse, and I stopped speaking. Both eyes swollen shut, and they kept beating. "Confess your relationship with Liu Ren — and any time you say his name, you must put 'great spy' in front. Watch yourself!" In time I stopped saying his name at all; whatever they asked, I answered. Sometimes I'd say I forgot, and the name would slip; they'd come up and beat me. "I told you to put 'great spy' in front, and you deliberately didn't —" I said nothing. After that I learned: say nothing at all. They wanted forced confession — they wanted to drag from my mouth that Liu Ren was a great spy. In prison I never made up lies; that was thanks in no small part to long years of working under Comrade Liu Ren.

I was close to Comrade Liu Ren. I went often to his home. When he went to the suburbs, the factories, to see democratic figures, or any cadres he wanted to learn from, almost always I went with him — sometimes a whole day, sometimes out in the afternoon and not back until late. His style and his thinking I knew well. His temper was sharp, but, as his old driver put it, "He has a knife's tongue and a tofu heart." He didn't crush people. On crushing people, what stays with me is the San Fan, Wu Fan campaigns — when they said a certain percentage of "tigers" had to be exposed. Liu Ren clearly didn't agree. We were in contact then with a number of upper-level figures from business, and the various district committees were reporting in. When Song Rufen reported, for example, Liu Ren and Song would argue an entire evening — he'd go through it one by one, and for each name he'd say, "That counts as a tiger? You haven't made the case. Go investigate again." So he'd strike one off; on the next, "That's a tiger? Who gave you that material? Did you investigate yourself or not?" He'd argue out the inflated stuff one by one until he was satisfied, often until midnight or one in the morning, name by name. That spirit of seeking facts is so precious. Didn't Comrade Deng Xiaoping say, "Seeking truth from facts is the essence of Marxism-Leninism"? I think he's exactly right. Without objective practical truth as its standard, Marxism-Leninism becomes empty.

In my recollection, he agreed with very little of the Wu Fan, and was always pulling things back — and that was no easy thing in a campaign. During the Anti-Rightist campaign I was busy — the anti-Rightist work fell mainly to non-Party democratic figures, all under the United Front Work Department. We'd raise individual cases first to Comrade Liu Ren — never once did I hear him say of someone, "This person is definitely a Rightist." Later when the Municipal Committee held forums and I, as head of the United Front, ran them, I'd report to him afterward in his office. He often called district cadres into his office to discuss work. He would ask them, "You're labeling people Rightists casually — are they really Rightists? Just because someone said a few wrong things, are they Rightists?" Once I came across him discussing with the West District Party secretary, Yang Bozhen, the labeling of Rightists in primary and secondary schools, and he plainly said you cannot label so many. Some had spoken in good faith — their words might have grated, but the content wasn't wrong; they were pointing out shortcomings in the work. How could you cavalierly call someone a Rightist? He criticized the lower-level cadres heavily, told them to investigate carefully, analyze, set the person's whole history alongside the rest, and not turn a few sentences into a Rightist label. In our private talks he said to me, "You convene a forum of non-Party people, gather everything they say, and if you escalate it — they become counter-revolutionaries, Rightists. Is that a good way to work?" "There are problems anyway," I said. "If we go on like this," he said, "will any non-Party person dare to speak again?" I heard him weigh in like this more than once. He didn't really approve of the Anti-Rightist work, and in daily work he insisted: label as few as possible, none if possible; if it could be Center-Right, don't label Rightist. When we went up to Central to report on national-level Rightists — figures Mao Zedong had named, like Fei Xiaotong, and other prominent democratic figures — I went with Liu Ren to report to Premier Zhou. When we came to Qian Duansheng, a famous professor who had taken part in an international association labeled a counter-revolutionary organization, the Premier said: "Joining an organization like that — that counts as counter-revolutionary? Then Qiao Guanhua becomes counter-revolutionary too. Qiao took part in such groups when he was in Hong Kong, didn't he? Is he counter-revolutionary too?" When I went to the Propaganda Department to report, Kang Sheng — who had always claimed to be ill — came in person, full of energy. When some of Fei Xiaotong's remarks were brought up, Kang Sheng said, "Isn't this Rightist enough? Programmatic statements — is this not enough to be anti-Party, anti-socialism?" He escalated casually, always looking to crush. I knew little of Kang Sheng then; only through the Cultural Revolution did I come to know him.

On the Anti-Rightist campaign, Liu Ren himself disapproved. When some of the democratic figures he was close with were labeled Rightists — he felt they were good friends, you couldn't turn your face on them. After several well-known democratic figures had been labeled, he said, "You should still go look in on them." Because being labeled a Rightist was treated as a contradiction within the people, it was still part of the united front. When I went, I couldn't say much in particular; just visiting moved them deeply.

Across the great political campaigns — the Great Leap, San Fan / Wu Fan, Anti-Rightist, the Lushan Conference, Anti-Right Deviation — he would say, "We were 'left,' weren't we? Now why anti-right?" Later, in the Anti-Right-Deviation work, I don't recall anything serious being run within the United Front; mainly slogans, with very few people actually labeled. I don't recall a single Beijing cadre being labeled a Right Opportunist. There was just general education — not done the way the Anti-Rightist had been. To hold that level of political judgment within the great campaigns — without seeking truth from facts, proceeding from reality, and a working style of investigation and research — would have been impossible.

What stands out most to me, what most commands my admiration in my time with Comrade Liu Ren, is precisely this: he saw the work through to the end, every item realized, no link allowed to be empty. That helped me enormously. In industry, in agriculture, in the united front — Beijing's work was solid because of his contribution. Beyond that, what I had most contact with him on was health. He knew many people in health work — famous doctors, also cadres — and from time to time he'd visit hospitals to look around. I had been in united-front work, but later when the Health-and-Sports Department was newly established and I was put in charge of it to focus on health, he set great store by health work. He had a whole conception and layout for the capital's health system — from grassroots to district to municipal — not just an idea but concrete plans for what kind of hospitals to build, for how many people, of what scale at what level. Soon after entering the city, Tongren Hospital was renovated and a large building put up, since its workload was heavy — built under his direct guidance and care. I went to Tongren myself to discuss with the leadership how to build their tower. After came Xuanwu Hospital, the Children's Hospital, Chaoyang Hospital, the Maternity Hospital, Jishuitan Hospital. Friendship Hospital was the earliest built, and one he cared deeply about. From the standpoint of developing the health enterprise, the major hospitals were all under his direct guidance, with the engineering and technical staff designing the size and the location. In a single project who could count how many times he went out. Were it not for the Cultural Revolution, several hospitals would have been completed earlier. Beyond that, he also took rural health work seriously. He told me, "Get our suburban county hospitals strong, then build below them at the district level — smaller, not too big; if too big you'll lack the technical staff. A county hospital with two or three hundred beds can solve the problem; equip it well." Not only that — he was the one who got medical personnel training going. He said, "Old Cui, Beida Medical is a national institution — its allocations are unified, it can't give us many students a year. We're building so many big hospitals; we badly need university graduates. The other provinces and cities can't give us any, and one big hospital won't get more than a few each year — many years before it's fully staffed. Should we build our own medical college?" "Of course we can," I said — except we had no teaching staff. He asked whether we could get Beida Medical to spin part of itself off. I said that was a good idea, and went to Beida Medical to discuss it. I made the case and noted that it was Comrade Liu Ren's wish and the Municipal Committee's decision; they couldn't well refuse, and gave us a list of teachers to choose from. So Beijing Second Medical College was set up. Without the Cultural Revolution, the Second Medical College would have been built up further. It is now Capital Medical College, larger in scale, better equipped. At the start, it was barely above a vocational school; the university teachers who came, even second- or third-tier lecturers, lectured well. The students did much of their later clinical training at Tongren, Xuanwu, Chaoyang, Jishuitan, and the Children's Hospital, which were teaching hospitals for them. The college specially set up a pediatrics department to train pediatricians. Beyond the medical college, Beijing University of Technology was also founded — solving in great part Beijing's personnel pipeline. From elementary education to building schoolhouses, all of it carried Comrade Liu Ren's care; without a leader like him, the capital's health, education, and many other sectors could not have grown to that scale. If a leading comrade only utters a sentence and there is no one to follow through, no concrete measures, nothing comes of it. Building a major hospital, several hundred beds, tens of thousands of square meters — how to raise the money, how to design, how to fill the gap when funds ran short — he would run the matter in person, summon all sides to find a way.

In the seventeen years before the Cultural Revolution — I do not know precisely when he was imprisoned; I was arrested on July 9, 1967 — by my personal evaluation (not denying the leadership above and not denying the comrades below), in terms of the energy and labor invested, Comrade Liu Ren made the largest contribution of all to industry, agriculture, culture, education, and health, and laid an excellent foundation for the construction and development of the capital. In political-legal work, too, he handled matters personally — calling in comrades from the Public Security Bureau and the Procuratorate, going through cases one by one, asking how the work would be done, both internal and external. The vast and diligent labor he expended created very favorable conditions for restoring the construction of the capital and for the work that came later. After Reform and Opening, Beijing's pace of construction has been very fast; without that earlier foundation, today's rapid development would not have been possible.

Liu Ren had many strengths — not that he had no shortcomings; everyone has both — but his strengths stood out. To take linking with the masses: among leaders, I have not seen many who went so deep into the masses and learned the masses' hardships as he did. If a factory had a problem he would visit the workers; if a village had a problem he would go down into the village. In the spring of 1960, during the three hard years, when he heard that people had starved to death in Yongledian, he woke me at one in the morning to rush there with him. He felt his responsibility was great — for there to be deaths from starvation in the capital was a heavy blow to our Party and country. As an official he was no small one — he was an alternate member of the Central Committee, and second secretary of the Beijing Municipal Committee; he could speak to Chairman Mao and saw Premier Zhou often. For the May Day and National Day parades he organized them himself; he would not stand on the Tiananmen rostrum to view but had us look after Chairman Mao and the Center's leaders, while he went to every spot to see whether there was a problem. That was him. When the Center handed down a new directive he would go everywhere at once, after laying things out, to see how it was being carried through — from speech to action, all the way down to the cadres and the masses, watching for issues in the implementation and where they came from. When the people did not approve of communal canteens, he sent me to a base in Dahongmen specifically to study the canteens. The brigade I went to had over a hundred households — those for, those against, at least three classes. I went back to brief him. He asked, "How is it, Old Cui? How's the food?" "Millet rice." "Enough to eat?" "It's rationed. In the countryside the big eaters — whether they get enough is hard to say." As time went on the people couldn't bear it; complaints grew louder. "Not nearly enough — just thin gruel — what's the use of eating it; my house needs ten wowotou and you give me five — is that enough?" "Hm — basically they don't want the canteens." Waste was great, and we hadn't the economic strength then for free meals — but there was little he could say. "Seeking truth from facts is the essence of Marxism" — Comrade Liu Ren cannot be said to have learned it perfectly, but among the cadres I knew, no one came closer to seeking truth from facts than he did.

Comrade Peng Zhen at the time was busy, working chiefly on the major matters of policy and direction, paired with Liu Ren — a man for the actual ground. With that pairing, Beijing's work was among the very best in the country, the cadre corps solid, their level — in part because of proximity to the Center — generally high. So the Cultural Revolution turned the Beijing Municipal Committee into something "no needle could pierce, no water could splash through" — and it caught nothing. That great mess by the Gang of Four and Jiang Qing dismantled the Beijing Municipal Committee. The loss was enormous. If a cadre corps like Liu Ren's, cultivated before the Cultural Revolution, had carried through, our cause could be much further along.

Whether the line and policy are right is the key. In prison I memorized Chairman Mao's quotations; one I remember deeply: "Policy and tactics are the life of the Party. Comrades at every level of leadership must give it their full attention; they must absolutely not be careless." Policy and tactics truly are the life of the Party. If the policy is wrong, the Party's life is endangered; if the policy is good but cannot be carried through — if the organizational line cannot guarantee it — same thing. The agencies become bureaucratized: hard to enter, hard to see the people, sour faces; subordinate cadres come and cannot reach a responsible leader, let alone the common people. To be cut off from the masses like that — how can the Party's principles and policies be carried through? How can we breathe with the masses, share their fate? It cannot be done.

Several times I have wanted to talk about Comrade Liu Ren — but each time the emotion overwhelms me. He spent more than five years in prison and died there. I served almost eight years, and came out alive. In a sense we shared the same breath and fate. Before my imprisonment I worked under his leadership for twenty-seven years; counting the prison years, thirty-two or thirty-three. In those years I lived through my youth and middle age — my golden time. The golden years of my revolutionary life were spent with Comrade Liu Ren, working under his direct leadership. So he stays with me especially deeply, and his influence and instruction were very great. He was, by common acknowledgment, sharp-tempered — yet he didn't crush people, and he protected cadres, just as his driver said: "knife's tongue, tofu heart." In thirty-some years he criticized me only once or twice, and the criticism was for my own good. The most serious one was over my developing Zhang Dewu into the Party — he feared the secret service or the Japanese might harm me. Looking back I had to agree it was risky; for a senior member of a Xinminhui puppet organization in occupied territory, I should have observed longer, taken a year or two to vet him before recruitment. Apart from that, I cannot recall him criticizing me. He never lost his temper at me, never blew up. His mouth was tight; he never said a word out of bounds. And in our talks he often shared his thinking with me. In the Anti-Rightist days he said, "If we go on like this, who will dare to speak?"

On February 25, 1998, Comrade Cui Yueli departed this life smiling among the flowers. The people's mourning rose into the clouds in monuments of grief; the people's tears became elegy after elegy…