GMD soldiers would come and ask to borrow something and never give it back; but if a PLA soldier came to our house to borrow something, we'd get it back immediately.
XINRAN: Were you someone who thought that the PLA were 'hicks'?
GENERAL PHOEBE: No, I didn't.
XINRAN: So you didn't feel that since their uniforms were in tatters, and they were dirty, they were uneducated peasants?
GENERAL PHOEBE: No, on the contrary – we found them very educated. The GMD soldiers were pretty dumb. Their officers beat them, we all saw it happen, we saw them beating soldiers on the street with their truncheons, and the soldiers on their knees begging for mercy. I saw it when I was a kid, but nothing like that ever happened with the PLA soldiers.
XINRAN: That must have been a dramatic change for the Shanghainese. One day it was all GMD troops, and the next, it was all PLA troops and the CCP. So, how long did it take for the whole city to change from one system to the other?
GENERAL PHOEBE: At daybreak on the 25th, my aunt phoned my mother and told her that Shanghai had been 'liberated'. (My aunt's family were considered rather wealthy – my aunt ran a private bank.) She deliberately used the word 'liberated' and I knew that this word was not in the GMD vocabulary, so it showed how many people accepted this huge change straight away. Of course we all ran to the front gate, and people ran out of the lanes, and saw how orderly they all were. The PLA didn't beat anyone, didn't take stuff and behaved properly. The CCP had done some propaganda work beforehand, but the best proof was ordinary people seeing it with their own eyes.
Well, then I worked for many, many years in the PLA Institute. The army belongs to the people – that's a principle which permeates it from top to bottom.
XINRAN: Before we began this interview, we talked about how China was a country formed by very particular circumstances. We don't have a national religion; we've taken in Buddhism, Christianity or Islam, we accept them all, though in fact these arrived more than a thousand years after Chinese indigenous philosophies and faiths. The result, when a country has no national religion, may easily be a confused medley of beliefs, a confusion produced by the lack of a guiding principle. By this I mean an accepted vertical analysis of history, in other words, an understanding which is the product of generally accepted immutable moral rules and common articles of faith. In China 'each Son of Heaven brings his own retinue' and this moral framework changes with each new emperor on the throne, so that people's understanding of good and bad shifts accordingly. This could be one of the reasons why Chinese is so extremely rich in adjectives, but also why its language and culture are so closed to outside influences, and why we as a nation can be suspicious of religious belief.
I have been thinking about the fact that China has experienced a hundred years of dynastic and regime changes. After the end of the feudal Qing dynasty, China never stopped changing – from Empire to Republic took just a few years, and the change from GMD to CCP also happened quickly. Especially in the cities, regime change was really rapid. It's like you said, in Shanghai people's political outlook changed in twenty-four hours. How is it possible, in your view, for ordinary people to cope with such rapid change?
GENERAL PHOEBE: Ordinary people don't care. You change the dynasty or the emperor, it's all the same to us. We'll follow any emperor, so long as you don't stop us going about our business.
XINRAN: So people 'got used to' these transformations just as previous generations had.
GENERAL PHOEBE: I think they got used to things, and didn't care. It's 'I'll obey anyone, and any authority, who's good to me'.
XINRAN: Political authority is like a god for an awful lot of ordinary Chinese.
GENERAL PHOEBE: Authority is very important, not just for a nation, but also within the family. The patriarch of the great Chinese family is an authority who cannot be disobeyed by family members. A family without an authority figure will quickly disintegrate; the children and grandchildren may scatter, and some will begin to fight between themselves. Within the family, the main head of the family is basically a ruler. If he or she is an enlightened and wise one, then they can deal with all family relationship problems, and guarantee that future generations have family rules that they can follow – rules which can make those family ties indissoluble and keep the generations together. When that authority weakens, then other family members may involuntarily gravitate towards a new authority, and this may bring conflict in its wake. Interestingly enough, we can see the reappearance in national history of the traditional cultural consciousness of the great Chinese family, as the 'cells' of family life penetrate the bone marrow of the nation.
XINRAN: So when Shanghai was liberated, how was the new government's power imposed on Fudan University, where you were, and how was it received by staff and students?
GENERAL PHOEBE: When the CCP took over, our underground Party was not yet out in the open, but the organisation was very strong, and very active. Everyone knew who was a Party member, and who had links with the Party. In those days, CCP members were usually models of behaviour in that particular environment. Then, to become a Party member, you had to be an exceptionally good person. You had to have real warmth and care for ordinary people, and if you were a student you had to be a better student than the rest. And only people with exceptional technical skills could join the Party. It's different nowadays – mediocre people with no real ability can join too. So every Party member had the power to bind people to them. If one of them spoke, we listened – of course we listened, we knew that what they said included instructions from higher levels of the CCP, and was integral to the interests of ordinary people. The Shanghainese very soon began to feel that life was an awful lot easier under the new leadership.
XINRAN: By Liberation, roughly how many members did the underground Party at Fudan University have?
GENERAL PHOEBE: I don't really know, the figures had to be kept secret, but it's true to say that a sizeable proportion of the students were members.
XINRAN: And then, after Shanghai was liberated, society became quite calm. It was even a natural transition.
GENERAL PHOEBE: That's right.
XINRAN: Did any of the students harbour any doubts about the new government?
GENERAL PHOEBE: It never occurred to us to doubt the new government, because the Youth League of the Three Principles of the People were the only opponents of the CCP members. They were bad people, who did despicable things and had a very bad social influence. We, in Shanghai, were liberated later than Beijing so, for us, all the news coming out of Beijing was good news, and very encouraging. No one wanted to stay still; we all told ourselves we should go and join in the reconstruction, and get to work to make China strong again. That really was what we felt, we didn't want to study.
XINRAN: What about the teachers?
GENERAL PHOEBE: My father was a professor so when he came home he told us how they were reacting. Of course, the Party did its work well, and just a few days after Liberation, the CCP Mayor of Shanghai, Mr Chen Yi, spoke to the intelligentsia in the Grand Cinema. Many professors attended and were extremely pleased, quite reassured. Mayor Chen was very clear on his hopes for the future and what he was inviting them to do at that moment. No one had any complaints, in fact they were falling over themselves to back him! I think that was why my family supported me joining the army.
XINRAN: When you decided to join the army, did you find it hard to leave your family? Did you think of the worry it would cause your parents?
GENERAL PHOEBE: To be honest, no. Everyone had made it their personal task to reconstruct the country, and that was the reason why my mother and father had come back from America to fight the Japanese.
XINRAN: What about your brothers and sisters?
GENERAL PHOEBE: My next brother was six years younger than me, and when he saw me join the army, he falsified his age and joined up too. Later, he left because of poor health, and became an academic. My other brother and sisters were too young at that time. I joined in July 1949. We were instructors first, and then I was sent by the Party organisation to take a written exam. It was only afterwards that I discovered that it was for the Foreign Ministry, who were recruiting… All of us had been chosen by people who had already been recruited, for our all- round excellence and because we were high-achievers. They wanted to use us to set up the China Military Diplomatic Academy.
XINRAN: The whole system for training military diplomats was set up by your cohort, wasn't it?
GENERAL PHOEBE: Not entirely by us. The precursor of the PLA Foreign Languages Institute was the CCP
