BOOK REVIEW / Where people are no more than dust: Isabel Hilton on two fresh and painful accounts of life in Chinese labour camps

It is curious that, 45 years after the proclamation of the People's Republic of China, two accounts of life in China's labour camps should appear so fresh. Bitter Winds by Harry Wu (with Carolyn Wakeman, John Wiley, pounds 14.95) and Grass Soup by Zhang Xianliang (translated by Martha Avery, Secker, pounds 9.99) tell old stories. The period they describe begins in the mid-Fifties, when Mao Tse-tung urged intellectuals to air their criticisms of the Party. When they did, in huge numbers and at high volume, he launched the Anti-Rightist Movement. Thousands were condemned to spend years in 'reform through labour.' That generation was succeeded by others. Often the old rightists would find themselves condemned again as those around them looked for new targets.

There has been no dearth of accounts of the cruelties of the Chinese regime over the years: the Cultural Revolution produced a wave of rather formulaic Red Guard repentances; there have been occasional accounts of life in the prison camps by emigres. Both these books rank with the finest of the genre, combining painful details with high poetic and spiritual qualities. Despite the previous documentation of this dismal history, the flood of memory represented in these two books makes unforgettable reading.

Intellectuals were not the only victims but they were the most reviled: the 'stinking ninth' category of thought criminals. Both these authors were condemned as rightists: Zhang Xianliang entered the camps in 1958 and stayed a prisoner until 1979. Harry Wu was labelled a rightist in 1958 and arrested in 1960, after a plan to escape from China went wrong. He was also finally released in 1979 and now lives in the United States, where he has become a vigorous campaigner for human rights; in 1991, he returned to China secretly to film the place in which he had languished for so long. Zhang Xianliang still lives in China and is one of China's best contemporary novelists.

Despite their explicit sexual content, normally a red rag to the censors, Zhang Xianliang's novels are officially tolerated in China. Two of them, Half of Man is Woman and Getting Used to Dying have already been published to critical acclaim in the West.

Both Grass Soup and Bitter Winds betray an underlying purpose, beyond the telling of the tale. Harry Wu wanted to speak, as he puts it, for those who could never bring themselves, through fear or shame, to tell their own dreadful story, and to raise awareness of the Chinese gulag in the West. Zhang Xiangliang's novel betrays a preoccupation with the nation that created such a system and the role of the intellectuals within it. Grass Soup was originally published in China under the title Anxiety is Wisdom in 1992. It appeared in one issue of a literary magazine that immediately sold out. The foundation of the novel-cum-memoir is a fragmentary diary that Zhang kept in 1960 and 1961. Miraculously, it survived and the terse entries form a counterpoint to the text.

The late Fifties to the mid-Sixties was perhaps the worst period in the Chinese labour camps, if degrees of hell are permissible. It was not because of the numbers, large though they were, but because those years saw the catastrophic aftermath of the Great Leap Forward, a time remembered in Maospeak as the 'three years of natural disaster.' In ordinary language, China was ravaged by government-induced famine. If Chinese were dying of starvation in their millions outside the labour camps, conditions inside were no better.

Hunger, and the effects of hunger on the human spirit, is a dominant theme in both books. When he began his diary, Zhang recalls, he had been a prisoner for more than 700 days. He had adjusted. 'After hurting for more than seven hundred days I was numb. I no longer felt the pain, I only felt hunger.' There were other tortures than the ravages of hunger: there was the relentless ritual of self-criticism and confession, in which prisoners struggled to guess at their crimes in order to write an account of them sufficiently self-abasing to satisfy their inquisitors. There were explicit physical tortures - beatings, imprisonment in tiny hellholes and overwork. But the one that hardly varied, that dominated every waking moment, was hunger. It was hunger that drove prisoners to the cruelties against each other that became routine; that allowed them to risk punishment to steal an extra ration of grass.

The book is, at times, self-consciously didactic, satirically pointing morals about the Chinese condition. In one passage, a prisoner explains why all of China is starving. It is to reform the population, he says, to make them submit. 'Only by making the people endure hunger can you make them submit to you, worship you. So you see, don't let Chinese people have full stomachs - keep them hungry and in a few years not just people, even dogs, will be reformed. Every one of them will be as obedient as can be: whatever Chairman Mao says will be right.' When Zhang discovers that the Old Commissar, the tough revolutionary who ran the camp and who convinced the prisoners that the harsh regime was for their own benefit, was living well on roast duck while his prisoners starved, Zhang redoubled his efforts to praise him. Why? Because, he writes, 'Chinese intellectuals have always considered it taboo to say anything bad about respected elders and relatives . . . The system of censorship that we have here is completely unnecessary - writers already have a very strict self-censorship bureau inside their heads.' His book ends with the story of a prisoner's young wife who came, at who knows what cost, with her small daughter, to the remote camp to bring her husband some food. He snatches the food and eats it. His stomach full, he kills himself. Zhang thinks of his daughter, who watched him as he devoured the contents of the little foodbag, without even glancing in her direction. How, he wonders, has she survived?

Despite Zhang Xiangliang's undoubted art, Harry Wu's memoir is the more immediate in its vivid portraits of fellow prisoners and the grinding detail of prison life. A privileged child of a once-wealthy Shanghai family, in the camps Harry Wu finds an education in the real condition of China: he meets poverty and desperation, learns to fight and lives by his father's teaching that he should never give in. He, too, learns to eat grass and enjoy the occasional bonanza of a rat or a frog. He, too, becomes numb, but for flashes of understanding. When he buries a dead friend, he looks back at the unmarked grave: human life had no value here. 'If the people mean no more than dust, then the society is worthless and does not deserve to continue . . . I had to use my life purposefully and try to change the society . . . Then my mind shut down again.'

Harry Wu survived and broke his silence. He revisited his experience, finding those who had mistreated him, rediscovering and thanking those who had helped him. In 1985, with many of his family already dead, he was finally able to leave China. In 1991, he returned on to pursue his dangerous ambition to photograph the labour camps, to make their existence newsworthy in the United States. He succeeded, a credit to his incorrigibly rightist father.

(Photograph omitted)