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| Ten Years in the Storm: Remembering My Father... http://www.bbfans.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=32951 |
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| Author: | Madeline [ 30 Jan 08, 15:17 ] |
| Post subject: | Ten Years in the Storm: Remembering My Father... |
Tutor to a tyrant: the life of Chairman Mao's English teacher Zhang Hanzhi played a quiet but important role in the history of modern China. Abandoned as a child, she rose to become a political hostess, a diplomat – and Chairman Mao's English teacher. Clifford Coonan reports from Beijing She was an elegant, smiling figure in an armchair next to Mao Zedong when he made history by meeting Richard Nixon. She was there again, smiling away, with Nixon and his wife, Pat, as they visited the Great Wall. And in the frame once more, perched on a stool behind a floral couch, when Premier Chou Enlai shared a joke with the Nixons and put his seal on a tentative friendship that turned international relations on their head. Zhang Hanzhi was a witness to history throughout an extraordinary life that led her from abandoned child on the streets of Shanghai to hostess in the Forbidden City, diplomat in the halls of power and English teacher to Chairman Mao. Zhang, who died last Saturday, lived a life that was itself a chronicle of the tumult of 20th-century China. No one knows her great-grandmother's name, because girls were simply given numbers, and foot-binding was still common practice among her mother's generation. Born in Shanghai in 1935, the illegitimate daughter of a shop assistant and a powerful businessman, her initial chances cannot have looked good. Zhang's mother was content to give her up to anyone who would have her rather than bow to the wishes of her birth father, and a well-known lawyer was called to intervene. The lawyer was Zhang Shizhao, an official in the Kuomintang Nationalist government who shifted his loyalties to the Communists and went on to become a senior policy adviser in the post-revolutionary period. As his adopted daughter, Zhang's departure from the seedier parts of Shanghai had begun. She moved with her adoptive family to Beijing after the revolution. As a young woman she read Charlotte Brontë and dreamt of being a novelist or an actress while studying at Beijing Foreign Studies University. Tall and beautiful, she did get a chance to act while at college, playing in Shakespeare's Othello and The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. Much of the beautiful, nuanced English for which she later became famous was picked up at that time. In later life she would return to acting in Ning Ying's satirical comedy Perpetual Motion, which deals with normally taboo subjects of gender relations and post-revolutionary mores in a frank way. The 2005 movie also features her daughter, the media entrepreneur Hong Huang. Shortly after completing her masters, Zhang began teaching at her old university. In late 1963 she accompanied her father, the curator of a research institute, to a birthday dinner for Chairman Mao, then the unassailable leader of China. Mao asked her to teach him English. He was not one for hanging around, and within days their lessons started. "I was dumbfounded. I was to teach the great leader whom over a billion people worshipped as their god," Zhang wrote in Time magazine in 1999. Teaching Mao English began with a book of political essays illustrating the dangers of Soviet revisionism. She continues in the same interview to describe how Mao felt trapped in the government enclave at Zhongnanhai, how he encouraged her to eat his favourite fatty pork dish and how he seemed to enjoy their conversations. "I was struck by the force of his personality. He was intelligent and knowledgeable, reasonable and considerate," she said. Mao does not come across as the most disciplined of students – he had quite a lot of things on his plate at this point in Chinese history. He stopped the lessons quite suddenly, and Zhang stayed in only intermittent contact with Mao. Then, in 1966, Mao unleashed the firestorm of the Cultural Revolution, which saw Zhang "struggled against" as an intellectual and seen as a "black gang" member. She was accused of "assisting foreign spies". However, she managed to avoid coming to serious harm, often through Mao's intervention, as he remembered his young teacher. Like many of the educated classes, Zhang was sent off to do manual labour, in her case to a textile factory. Mao sent for her and put her back in the Beijing Foreign Language Institute. After that he wanted her to become a diplomat. Famous for his dictum that women hold up half the sky, Mao decided that women diplomats were the way forward and Zhang was ordered to work in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as Mao continued to explore ways of opening ties with the United States. So began a career which would see her bear witness to China's opening up to the world, become a key player in the founding days of post-revolutionary Chinese diplomacy, and also marry one of the most powerful men in the country. When the then US secretary of state Henry Kissinger made a secret visit to Beijing in July 1971, she was one of the two interpreters chosen to work at the meetings. She describes the moment in thrilling terms in Margaret Macmillan's book about that period: Seize the Hour: When Nixon Met Mao. "It was like a bomb exploding in the Foreign Ministry," she said. In Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's recent biography of Mao, Mao The Unknown Story, which excoriates the Great Helmsman as a power-mad demagogue wild with excess, they detail how Zhang was one of the few women to have turned Mao's advances down successfully. Cornering her in a private room one time in late 1972 after she had been interpreting for him, he said: "You don't have me in your heart! You just don't have me in your heart!" To which she quickly replied: "Chairman, how can I possibly not have you in my heart? Everyone in China has you in their heart." A clever answer to which Mao could not respond – and her career, indeed her life, was safe. Her testimony of her time of closeness to senior figures such as Mao and Zhou also gave the world valuable insights into a crucial period of history about which little is still officially on the record in China. In the early 1970s, the radical wing of the Communist Party still held the reins. In one incident, local radicals in Shanghai and Hangzhou gave a bitter reception to Alexander Haig, then deputy secretary of state who was visiting to prepare the ground for a visit by Kissinger and Nixon, and she reported back to Premier Zhou how hostile the hosts had been to the American delegation. Self-criticisms were handed down – the radicals had nearly derailed the whole fledgling peace movement. She has written lively tales of Mao's charisma during these talks, about how Mao would talk about the Taiwan issue and then switch to more flippant topics. "I also listened to his [Mao's] jokes with Kissinger about exporting 10 million female Chinese to the United States, which stunned the US secretary of state," she wrote. She was also capable of scandalising people – there was widespread shock among Foreign Ministry officials when she divorced her husband of 16 years, the Peking University economist Hong Junyan, in 1973 and shortly after married Qiao Guanhua, the head of China's UN delegation who served as foreign minister between 1974 and 1976 and remains one of the most influential holders of that post. Qiao was was 22 years older than Zhang and a widower, but she often spoke movingly of their relationship. She once claimed that if they had both been ordinary people, rather than high-profile political figures, they would have had 20 good years together instead of just 10 years. Her account of flying to the UN headquarters in New York shows just how isolated China was at the time, in marked counterpoint to today, when the Olympics in August will crown a fast-paced period of opening up unprecedented in modern Chinese history. Her obvious pride in the restoration of diplomatic relations with many countries also comes across as a high point. After the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, when the Great Helmsman was dead and when the Gang of Four led by Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, had been arrested and jailed, Zhang too was placed under house arrest and was in danger of being executed herself as an ultra-leftist, but she weathered the storm. She and her husband, Qiao, who had been accused of being a rightist by the Red Guards, now faced charges from the new powers running China of being a leftist. Small wonder the man was prone to depression. They were held under house arrest for two years and had to make numerous self-criticisms at public meetings – all familiar tactics from the Cultural Revolution. The strain proved too much for Qiao, who was exhausted after trying to steer a diplomatic course between the polarised factions of Chinese politics in the middle of the 1970s. He died in 1983, although all charges against him were dropped. She turned to writing a number of memoirs about her time in the corridors of Zhongnanhai and the Diaoyutai VIP compound in Beijing. Her best-selling book of 1998 was called Ten Years in the Storm: Remembering My Father, My Husband and Chairman Mao. In later life she became the president of China International Association for Urban and Rural Development, and also set up a hotel management college in her home town of Shanghai. Zhang suffered heart failure following lung complications in Beijing's Chaoyang Hospital and died on Saturday aged 73. In recognition of her contribution to Chinese diplomacy she was due to be buried at Babaoshan, the graveyard for the Communist Party's elite. She began Mao's English lessons with a book of political essays illustrating the dangers of Soviet revisionism Independent |
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