The Road to Miaoxi

During the Cold War, educated people in free societies were so familiar with figures on the other side of the Iron Curtain that they were referred to just by their last names: Solzhenitsyn, Kundera, Havel, Forman. They knew the name, too, of the Soviet system’s most notorious instrument of control, the Gulag network of forced labor camps.

Chinese people have experienced seventy-six years of a similar kind of autocracy, longer than the entire existence of the Soviet Union. But outsiders still know little about independent thinkers in China—or even that they exist. That neglect extends to Ai Xiaoming, the author of the essay that follows, who is one of the most important public intellectuals in China today. A seventy-two-year-old native of Wuhan, she began as a scholar of Eastern European literature, translating Kundera into Chinese, before slowly migrating to feminist studies.

In the early 2000s, having become a tenured professor in literature at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, she adopted the new technology of digital cameras to make films about social issues in China. A dozen documentaries followed, on issues such as violence against women, rural resistance to Communist Party control, rigged local elections, and the lack of an independent judicial system. Her most important film is Jiabiangou Elegy, a six-and-a half-hour epic on the country’s most notorious labor camp.¹

Since that film was released in 2017, life for Ai has become increasingly difficult. She is banned from leaving the country and has had trouble with the government when she tries to make new films. Instead she has taken on the role of oral historian for elderly victims of the Mao era. She takes what are sometimes sprawling and disorganized manuscripts, reinterviews the authors, and edits the works into publishable texts. The stories often describe the early years of the People’s Republic, foreshadowing issues that remain important today.

Several years ago Ai was talking to the late Tie Liu, the pseudonym of Huang Zerong, a Sichuan-based entrepreneur who had suffered under Mao’s purges in the 1950s, spending twenty-three years in China’s own gulag, the laogai (reform-through-labor) network of camps. Huang ran a samizdat magazine called Small Scars of the Past that became a magnet for other victims eager to tell their stories, and he recommended she look at a manuscript called Waking from a Dream—A Brief History of Conspiracy, the memoirs of Niu Lihua, an engineer who had spent more than two decades in the laogai. It was, Huang said, a work of exceptional value.

Niu’s is not the only memoir of the laogai, but it contained new descriptions of remote camps that are otherwise little documented. He also encountered several famous people in the course of his imprisonment, including the writers Hu Feng and Zhang Yihe, about whom he provided new biographical material. And while most people who were imprisoned confessed in hopes of winning leniency, Niu never gave in. Instead he wrote appeals and autobiographical sketches on whatever paper he could scrounge up, cramming the precious sheets with thousands of words. When he had the chance, he mailed them back to his family. Preserved thanks to the efforts of his sister, these documents give rare, detailed accounts of camp life and of Niu’s thoughts.

The original manuscript was immense: 1.5 million characters, or about two million words, encompassing not just Niu’s own story but also political analyses and, sometimes, excerpts of other authors’ writings on the Mao era that he downloaded from the Internet. Focusing on Niu’s personal story, Ai whittled the text down to 300,000 words—still an epic work of remembrance. She visited Niu twice at his home in Chongqing, staying over a week each time to clarify details and rewrite sections.

Niu was in his mid-eighties, blind, and in failing health, so “our daily conversations had to be kept brief,” she later wrote. But his “memory was sharp, and he narrated past events with remarkable fluency and clarity.” Back in Wuhan she read the entire manuscript out loud and sent a recording to Niu. He approved it, and in 2022 a Taiwanese press published it as a book under the title Broken Dreams at Miaoxi: Recollections of a Laogai Survivor.

That same year Niu fell gravely ill. Readers and supporters sent letters and donations. In late March 2023 his condition worsened, and he was hospitalized. On May 11, 2023, he passed away at eighty-seven. As is traditional in China, commemorations were held not only right after his death but also on the one-year anniversary. Ai’s contribution came in the form of this essay, published last year on the Chinese-language website Boston Review of Books, which draws on a journey she made in 2020 to retrace the route that Niu traveled. It takes us to rural, mountainous areas of Sichuan, a huge province in southwestern China, where a string of laogai camps had been set up in the 1950s.

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Ai is writing primarily for readers familiar with China’s history, so it could be useful to review a few crucial events that she and Niu discuss. Even among citizens of the People’s Republic, many of these events are only vaguely understood—not surprising in a country whose government erases its history daily.

The prequel to Niu’s time in Miaoxi began when he was a teenager, after the party took power in October 1949. One of its first political campaigns was to eradicate the gentry (“landlords” in Communist Party jargon) who for centuries had run rural China, which is where about 80 percent of the population then lived. A land reform campaign sounds progressive enough, but it was incredibly violent, killing an estimated one to two million people. It was, in essence, the first phase of the party’s program to eliminate potential resistance.

Niu was caught up in the second phase, which was launched a few years later. This was aimed at the new class of intelligentsia in China’s urban areas—a product of the universities and technical schools that reformers had established in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Born in 1935, Niu graduated from a military engineering school in 1955 and was assigned to work in a military factory in Chongqing. He embraced the new regime. As a child he had joined the Young Pioneers, then continued on in the Communist Youth League until 1957, when he applied to join the party.

That same year he took at face value a call by Mao Zedong for citizens to submit critiques of the party’s first few years in power. When he and others voiced concerns over its heavy-handed rule, they were detained en masse as counterrevolutionaries—or, in the parlance of the time, “Rightists.” The next year Niu was sentenced to nearly four years of reeducation through labor, which he served at several factories across Sichuan.

Known as the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the purge involved the persecution of at least 550,000 people, mostly educated people like Niu, most of whom ended up in laogai camps. The resulting silence allowed Mao to implement a series of delusional economic policies that caused the Great Famine, usually reckoned to be the worst in recorded history, with up to 45 million killed. This atrocity was followed in 1966 by the Cultural Revolution, a decade-long period of anarchy and violence that ended only in 1976, with Mao’s death.

For Niu, the Cultural Revolution marked the start of his ordeal in Miaoxi, an agricultural labor camp in western Sichuan. After serving his first sentence he had been freed briefly in the early 1960s, but in 1966 he was rounded up again. When he refused to confess to charges of being against the party, he was sentenced to fifteen years. After two years of interrogation, he still insisted on his innocence. Laogai authorities retaliated by cuffing his hands behind his back for seven months. Between August 1968 and May 1969 they held him in solitary confinement in a lice-infested cell of less than three square meters, where the toilet bucket was emptied every ten days.

After Mao’s death the party gradually began to rehabilitate victims like Niu. His sentence was overturned in 1979, and the next year he returned to Chongqing Changjiang Electrical Machinery Factory, where his position, salary, and technical title were reinstated. He married, had a daughter, and later divorced. After retirement he learned to use the Internet, taking advantage of the relative openness of the late 1990s and 2000s to read an outpouring of books, essays, and blogs about the Mao era. Beginning in 2012, despite failing health and growing blindness, he devoted himself to setting down his story in writing.

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Ai’s journey starts in Ebian, a county in southwestern Sichuan, where she travels to locations that Niu visited between his two imprisonments. It then moves northward toward Miaoxi. Along the way she pauses to reflect on how tea plantations like Miaoxi and other Mao-era slave labor projects became the basis for the region’s economic development. She also notes that Miaoxi held two important public intellectuals: Zhang Yihe, who would later achieve fame as a memoirist, and the literary theorist and Communist Party member Hu Feng.

When translating this essay, I was tempted to slice out many of the details in the interest of readability. In the end, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Niu was determined to preserve the details of dozens of camps—from their elevation above sea level to the products their inmates made. He tells of people—some notable, others ordinary—who organized, resisted, and perished. He also shows the humanity and sadism of camp guards, always naming names and giving graphic details. All of this would vanish if not for his efforts. How could I erase them?

In a short preface to her essay, Ai explains her motivation for bringing this work to light, comparing Niu’s experiences in Miaoxi to those of prisoners in the Jiabiangou camp that she chronicled in her film. She was returning to Miaoxi, she says, at a moment when China was also returning to a more unbridled form of state repression. Ai’s essay and Niu’s memoir are not just historically valuable; they warn us about what happens when a society tries to force out people who hold different views or pursue different ways of living. Her article, which starts as a travelogue, carries us more and more into this world of ideas. “In the geographical markers of contemporary Chinese pain,” she writes in the preface,

I hope people will remember Miaoxi just as they remember Jiabiangou. Not only that, but all the labor reform camps whose names we do not yet know should also be re-identified by survivors, creating a cartographic record of suffering and memory. Writing personal histories of pain is a crucial project for rebuilding national memory, and it requires the participation of many survivors. I am grateful to Mr. Niu for taking us back to Miaoxi. His heartfelt voice will undoubtedly resonate with contemporary and future readers, serving as a reminder to learn from history and never return to the path of enslavement.

—Ian Johnson

1.

On the May Day holiday of 2020, three local friends and I set out on a journey from Chongqing to Ebian County in southwestern Sichuan, from which we traveled 250 kilometers through the mountains to Miaoxi, site of one of the most notorious labor camps in the Mao era. All four of us were born into families that in Mao’s time had been said to belong to one of the “Five Black Categories” (landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, and Rightists); my friends were also all descended from labor camp prisoners. Our goal was to retrace the steps of Niu Lihua, whose memoir chronicles his time in Miaoxi as part of his ambitious effort to explain how the Communist Party controlled independent thought.

First, though, we lingered for a few days in Ebian. Niu had a deep personal connection to this place. During the Spring Festival in early 1966, five years after his first period of imprisonment came to an end and shortly before his next arrest, he traveled there from Chengdu to visit his fiancée, who was interned in the Shaping Tea Farm agricultural labor camp there. A few years earlier one of his previous girlfriends had tried to escape from the same tea farm, but she had been caught near the Dadu River and died in captivity. (Later, after Niu had married his fiancée and was serving time in Miaoxi, he received a court document from her stating that she wanted a divorce.) A decade ago my friend Xie Yihui made a documentary, “Juvenile Laborers Confined in Dabao,” about the brutal conditions at the farm’s Dabao work area, where over 2,600 juvenile offenders starved or were tortured to death. Survivors’ recollections suggest that around half of Shaping’s 10,000 prisoners died of starvation.

To better understand what happened in Ebian, I read Wang Xiaozhi’s memoir The Shaping Tea Farm: Chronicles of Songjiashan Laogai. Wang was one of the first batch of prisoners sent to Shaping for “reeducation through labor” in November 1957. Initially called just Shaping Farm, the facility was renamed after shifting to tea cultivation the next year because the land was too poor for normal farming. Wang remained there for twenty-five years until October 1982, when he was rehabilitated and allowed to return to Chongqing. He described Shaping Tea Farm as a “slaughterhouse of democracy,” a “battlefield of humanity,” a “site of autocracy,” and a graveyard.²

Getting to Ebian had already been a lengthy trip. We had set out in the morning from Chongqing and by noon had made it three hundred kilometers to Leshan, famous for its seventy-three-meter-high stone Buddha. There the road became more difficult: mostly mountainous, with a long stretch running west along the Dadu River. Even by car the final five hundred kilometers to Shaping took ten hours. On the way we saw a decrepit iron suspension bridge like one Niu described in his book, with missing wooden planks and a sign at the entrance prohibiting passage.

This area is now part of the Dadu River tourism route, and some sections are being expanded and repaired. But imagine the situation sixty years ago. The labor prisoners, including children, were forced to travel by foot, escorted by military vehicles; if they were coming from Chongqing it would take two days. After that the road to the work area was steep and rocky. Travel would have taken a whole day, even for adults. In Xie’s film, eyewitnesses say some of the children eventually broke down in tears and collapsed, refusing to move. The soldiers carried them to the place of their demise.

When he visited in 1966 Niu Lihua got off the bus at Masixi, a stop near the Dadu River. There was no bridge, so he had to take a boat pulled by a steel cable and then walk up the mountain. He was just thirty years old, but he almost fainted from hunger and thirst. He looked for the burial site of Shaping prisoners at Nanguashan, wanting to pay respects to his former girlfriend, but couldn’t find it. Officials confiscated the photographs he took. Things change with the passage of time, but the mountains and land remain the same.

We reached Shaping town at dusk. Our final destination was a bit further: the barracks of the Taiyangping Brigade, where Niu had visited his fiancée in early 1966. Taiyangping is only eight kilometers from Shaping, but the winding mountain roads made it feel much farther. The late spring wind whistled through our clothes, leaving us chilled and shivering. Graves lined the mountain, with colorful paper banners streaming. They belonged not to the prisoners but to farmers who had moved to the area. After fifty-five years, any trace of the historical tragedy had vanished.

In February 2006 the entire Shaping Tea Farm was relocated to the town of Meishan, 160 kilometers away, where the government had built a “garden-style, campus-style, military-style drug rehabilitation facility.” The original labor reeducation buildings are now mostly abandoned. Some farmers belonging to the Yi minority, from the remote areas of Daliangshan, have taken refuge in the empty houses, starting new lives. They plant potatoes and corn, and use the former offices and cells to raise cattle and pigs.

In a dark, ground-floor room in a three-story red-brick building, I saw a girl cutting grass for pigs while a boy ran around playing. A large pot of water steamed on the stove. The girl looked up at me and nodded or shook her head in response to my questions, but she seemed to comprehend little. Almost no adults were to be seen.

We drove on for about three hundred meters and stopped at a bend in the road. An old courtyard on the slope caught my attention. It was large, with a car parked out front, but no one appeared to be there. On the hillside behind, a small path led to an arched gate. Walking through it and up a series of steps, I found a former prisoner residence. Three single-story bungalows flanked the main house, forming another closed courtyard. A sign on a blackboard indicated it had belonged to the Fourth Squad of the First Group, with a “Sanitation Evaluation” column dated 2006, the year the farm was relocated.

Doesn’t the Shaping Tea Farm, a concentration camp known throughout Sichuan in the Mao era, deserve a monument? Or at least some historical markers? The father of an older woman traveling with us had been labeled a Rightist and sent to Shaping. He was later assigned to the 415 Railway Construction Team, and finally died in the mountainous wilds of Xide County, in Liangshan Prefecture, three hundred kilometers away. For over twenty years, from 1955 to the end of the Cultural Revolution, more than 10,000 people cut through thorns to reclaim land and plant tea here for the sake of Ebian County’s economic development. Thousands were buried, unmarked, in the inhospitable hills.

On our way back we met a car carrying an elderly man who was revisiting the place. He told us that during the Cultural Revolution he worked in a military factory that had its May Seventh Cadre School here—one of the rural work camps established in 1968 to indoctrinate officials in Mao’s policies. He said we had barely scratched the surface; many camps were scattered across the mountains during that era.

A new Yi village named Songlinpo had been established halfway down the mountain from Taiyangping as part of a poverty-alleviation project. Nowadays if you search online for news about the county, Songlinpo appears more often than Shaping Tea Farm. Ebian remains one of Sichuan’s most deeply impoverished counties, and since 2019 the government has invested over 35 million yuan (roughly $5 million) in poverty-alleviation sites like this. It would cost just a fraction of that to establish a museum at the original Shaping Tea Farm, a place that could attract survivors as well as their friends and descendants. But that would require respecting human rights and accepting responsibility for the injustices of the past.

2.

The second volume of Broken Dreams at Miaoxi opens in November 1966, when paramilitary police escorted Niu Lihua and dozens of other prisoners from Chengdu to the labor camp at Miaoxi. They departed Chengdu before dawn, passing through Wenjiang, Chongqing, and Dayi before finally arriving in Heizhu Town in Mingshan County. After a short rest, they descended into the gorge toward Feixianguan. That afternoon, Niu arrived at Miaoxi’s Thirteenth Squad and began his second stint in prison. 

Known as the “First Pass of the Tea Horse Road,” a historic trading route along which Chinese tea was exchanged for Tibetan horses, these days Feixianguan is being developed into a tourist town. By the time we had parked and finished lunch it was past 2 PM. After we had driven twenty kilometers down the highway, a provincial road, and then Miaoxi Road, a side path eventually led us to the tea farm’s gate. Beside it a road climbed to the former women’s labor camp, located on a high slope deep in the tea plantation.

According to Niu Lihua’s records, the country’s political leaders established more than forty labor reform and labor reeducation sites in rural areas, from tea plantations and farms to mines and road construction centers. Each held thousands to tens of thousands of prisoners, including former Republic of China military and government personnel, professors, engineers, overseas students, and artists, as well as many ordinary people who had protested the Great Famine. Forced to confess to crimes, they worked under slave-like conditions in complete isolation, cut off from their families and with all communication censored. This went on for over twenty years, starting in 1958. How could they have endured it all? How could they have survived? 

Along the way we reflected on how intellectuals from big cities across the country ended up in the mountains of western Sichuan. Miaoxi should be remembered by all who read and study modern Chinese literature: among the influential writers held here were Hu Feng; his wife Mei Zhi, who wrote two important books about their imprisonment; and the memoirist Zhang Yihe, the author of a quartet of narrative nonfiction biographies of four female prisoners, Ms. Yang, Ms. Liu, Ms. Zou, and Ms. Qian. The journalist Wang Dishan documented surviving Miaoxi in a memoir called Walking Out of Doudou Creek; Xie Yihui added to this body of work in her documentary Li Shengzhao’s Hunger Report.

Hu Feng merits special mention. This Marxist literary critic and passionate poet, author of the epic poem “Time Begins,” could never have imagined that his verses documenting revolutionary sacrifice to establish the People’s Republic of China would one day reflect his own life of suffering:

You once faced death in the stinking, damp cells
You once starved and froze in the barren countryside
You once shared lice with poor peasants
You once drank blood with brave comrades

Branded a counterrevolutionary, Hu Feng was interrogated hundreds of times, and his case ended up involving thousands of people. He was first imprisoned for ten and a half years, then sentenced to fourteen years, and then, during the Cultural Revolution, to life. Only the political thaw following Mao’s death spared him death in prison. This is the tragic irony of history. Hu Feng had imagined that when Mao stood on the Tiananmen rostrum on October 1, 1949, to declare the founding of the People’s Republic of China he would have gratefully recalled the deaths of martyrs who sacrificed themselves for the cause. Instead Mao’s own policies would give rise to the same gruesome images:

A head hanging on a utility pole.
Did it just flash by?
A corpse rotting in a dark cell.
Did it just flash by?
A half-buried body in the dirt.
Did it just flash by?

Niu Lihua, now blind and unable to walk without difficulty, could not join us on our trip, so we struggled to locate all the sites described in his book—even though, on the map, place names he mentions, such as Mofang Valley and Hujiaping, remain unchanged. Miaoxi Tea Farm is vast, spanning three counties: Lushan, Tianquan, and Baoxing. We reached only the vicinity of the farm’s headquarters. According to a sign, this was the original Lingjiu Mountain supervision area.

Even after the Mao era ended, Miaoxi Tea Farm remained a reform-through-labor prison; it was renamed the Sichuan Provincial Labor Reform Brigade in 1989. In 1996, two years after the central government dropped the word laogai from the names of all correctional facilities and required them to use the less notorious term jianyu (“prison”) instead, it was renamed the Western Sichuan Prison. Seven years later it relocated to Longquan, in Chengdu.

Miaoxi went unused between then and 2011, when a company named Rui Fu Sheng (literally “Born of Luck and Fortune”) took over part of the land for a thousand-acre tea plantation focused on the luxury market. The company claims that the plantation was founded in 1953, the year that Miaoxi was established as a labor reform prison. (That was also the year when Miaoxi’s temples were destroyed and its name changed: it was originally written 庙溪, or “temple brook,” but the character for temples was altered to the similar-sounding 苗: “seedling.”) History has been rewritten to create a brand name, erasing the blood and tears of tens of thousands of prisoners. “These rows of tea bushes were planted by prisoners serving life sentences,” Mei Zhi wrote in Pearl Plum, her collection of reminiscences published in 2003. “The dead were buried here. People told me that when digging the earth now, they still find human bones.”³

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We ascended the mountain road, where migrant laborers were repairing the old prison’s remaining walls. A large area was enclosed but no one could explain its purpose. According to Niu’s records this mountainside housed the women’s team, with 1,900 female prisoners divided into three groups. Zhang Yihe, the writer who spent nearly ten years in Miaoxi, once again came to my mind for bringing these numbers to life in her works on individual female prisoners’ lives.

When we met passersby, both adults and children, we asked them where Hu Feng had lived. They seemed familiar with his name and directed us to a courtyard on the other side of the valley, beside a small mountain stream. We made a detour down to the Mofang Valley—mentioned by both Niu and Wang Dishan—and followed signs to Fuxinhuan Mountain Villa. The water flowing before us was the Doudou Creek that Wang describes.

Near the villa we saw the onetime site of a prison factory, possibly the former repair shop, enclosed by walls that remained tall and strong. The side buildings looked like dormitories and warehouses. They had been abandoned years ago. A large flat house outside the workshop bore signs of life: an enormous billboard on the factory wall displayed the Lushan County Minghao Livestock Farmer Cooperative’s policy for managing Covid-19. Here, too, nearby farmers had started putting these vacant spaces to their own uses.

On the night of September 8, 1966, a prison van took Hu Feng, then sixty-three, and Mei Zhi from their home. Hu had already spent years in Qincheng prison, a facility north of Beijing where top officials were kept. The last four years of his sentence were supposed to have been served under house arrest, but when the Cultural Revolution began in 1966 the couple was sent from Beijing to Chengdu and then to Miaoxi. According to Mei Zhi’s Prison Memoir, the courtyard house in Mofang Valley was built specifically to detain them. Early in the spring of 1967 they moved into their new cell:

The house…was on a newly cleared piece of ground leveled out of the side of the mountain, the back wall was mountain. We lived in the two rooms off the side entrance. The main entrance gave onto a compound with lots of rooms, which was partitioned off from us. Between the two entrances they had built rooms for…the guards. One room was connected to ours by a door.⁴

In early November 1967 Hu Feng was suddenly transferred, leaving Mei Zhi alone in a small room, anxiously waiting for his return. In 1968 authorities raided the house, confiscated their belongings, and forced her to work at the Miaoxi hospital, washing soiled bandages and mending torn clothes. Later, confined in the small courtyard, she had to grow her own food. By August 1970 she was sent to labor along with employed workers. Mei Zhi spent seven years in Miaoxi, until in 1973 she was sent to another prison, in Dazhu County, to care for Hu Feng, now mentally ill.

Hu Feng’s Mofang Valley cell should be preserved. Instead it is overgrown with dense vegetation, leaving only part of the roof and walls still visible. I tried to cross the ditch by the stream but dense shrubs blocked the way; we would have had to clear a path to get any closer, which we couldn’t have managed in an afternoon. The house is hardly the only place in Miaoxi that needs to be marked for history. Hu Feng and Zhang Yihe are significant literary figures, but each wronged person has a story worth recording: the team of female prisoners, the forced laborers, the “anti-reformers,” and the prisoners, like Niu, who were confined in small cells because they refused to confess.

3.

Niu Lihua served a thirteen-year sentence in Miaoxi. By then he had already done more than three years of reeducation through labor as a “Rightist” and had been forced to work in a factory for six more years. He spent, in other words, more than two decades of his adult life imprisoned.

At twenty-one, he had no reason to believe he would meet with such a fate. He wasn’t a landlord or capitalist, didn’t have a bad class background, didn’t study humanities, wasn’t a high-level intellectual, and didn’t belong to any of the other political parties that the Communist Party tolerated in an effort to appear democratic but still viewed with suspicion. As a young technician in a military factory he was exactly the kind of talent the country urgently needed. He was studious, loved his profession, and had applied to join the Communist Party. So how could he be considered a Rightist?

Many studies and survivors’ memoirs have since shown that the Anti-Rightist Campaign was a political movement meant to undermine the nation’s intellectual elite. Wang Shuyao, a physics student at Beijing University and Niu Lihua’s contemporary, presciently predicted the forms of thought control on which the campaign would come to depend. In a 1957 article, drawing on the example of Stalin’s regime of terror, he stressed the need to “oppose the high concentration of state power and the party’s absolute control over all aspects of national life.” He went on:

In any era, a high concentration of power—whether in an individual or a group claiming perpetual glory and infallibility—is extremely dangerous. If the masses are apathetic and unaware, the danger multiplies exponentially. Should such a group commit serious errors or deteriorate, no force would be sufficient to counteract it.⁵

Wang’s article epitomized the hope, held by many Peking University students during the Hundred Flowers Movement of 1956–1957, the height of liberalization, that democratic reform was possible. But his warning was prophetic. Wang was labeled an extreme Rightist, sentenced to four years of reeducation through labor, and later transferred to an agricultural penal colony in Xinjiang. Only after the 1979 political rehabilitation of Rightists did he return to academia.

Niu Lihua was labeled a Rightist for the opposite reason: he believed that the party should rule—but also that it had to bear responsibility for its actions. In his book Niu relates that in 1957 the party required everyone in his factory to express their views. Niu was already a member of the Communist Youth League and actively seeking party membership, so he enthusiastically joined the debate. Some critics argued against requiring all managers, even junior ones, to be members. Niu, however, genuinely believed that the party should lead all aspects of factory life, writing in his memoir: “The Communist Party led the people through bloodshed. If not the Communist Party, then who should be in charge?”

This sounded unimpeachable, but it led to an uncomfortable truth: if the party were indeed in charge of everything, then it was responsible for the bureaucracy, corruption, and favoritism that were already plaguing Chinese institutions. In this sense even Niu’s pro-party line could be seen as a veiled criticism. It wasn’t until decades later that Niu saw his personnel file and learned that he had been identified as a Rightist based on an assessment written about him when he had graduated from university. Even this assessment had misquoted his words, stripping them of their original meaning. His actual beliefs were irrelevant. What mattered was the regime’s need to create imaginary enemies to consolidate power. Niu’s tragedy was, in other words, due purely to unbridled, arbitrary despotism. It was not just wrong but absurd.

For a long time Niu couldn’t understand why the Communist Party treated even its supporters as enemies. His confusion also reflects the situation of many other accused Rightists: they hadn’t yet become independent thinkers like Lin Zhao, Zhang Chunyuan, or Wang Shuyao. Instead they were trapped by their sincerity, trust, and love for the party, which left them unprepared for totalitarianism’s dangers. Nor could they learn from earlier campaigns that had already claimed many victims, because they had never been publicized.

In this way they fell victim to the same sort of arbitrary persecution that later sent so many to Miaoxi. During our trip we met a child who led us up the mountain. His grandfather, he told us, had been a Miaoxi Tea Farm prisoner and “said ninety-nine percent of the people imprisoned here were wrongly accused.”

*

Niu Lihua’s trial was a formality, with no defense allowed and no proper legal process. Even before the Cultural Revolution, authorities had explicitly rejected efforts to establish a legal system—and without it, how could there be any rule of law? In 1957 He Jixiang, the former Shanghai Intermediate People’s Court Civil Tribunal President, pointed out that

in the eight years since the founding of this great nation, apart from three laws promulgated due to urgent practical needs—the 1951 “Regulations on Punishing Counterrevolutionaries,” the 1952 “Regulations on Punishing Corruption,” and the 1950 “Marriage Law”—there has been no sign of other civil and criminal laws needed in people’s daily lives.⁶

In other words, the state never promulgated a civil code to protect basic rights or regulate social relations. He Jixiang and his fellow jurist Yang Zhaolong argued vigorously for enacting one. In the mid-1950s Wu Yifang, the president of Jinling University, noticed problems in land reform and suggested that Yang propose a law regulating the policy. When Yang complied, the Nanjing Municipal Party Committee leadership criticized the proposal. During the Hundred Flowers Campaign in 1957, however, Yang was invited to write an important article, “Why Has the Promulgation of Our Major Legal Codes Been Delayed for So Long?,” emphasizing the importance of legislation to a socialist society and arguing that the legal system should make no exceptions, even for class enemies. It would inevitably cause problems, he saw, to either rely solely on revolutionary legal consciousness or slowly develop legal norms from practice.

Later, at a symposium of legal scholars, Yang delivered an impromptu speech urging the state to immediately draft and implement legal codes. “If government officials act arbitrarily,” he warned, “ordinary people would have no way to determine whether their actions have a legal basis.” The consequences of the legal vacuum were already clear: “The wrongful arrests, detentions, judgments, and executions that have occurred in recent years are largely due to the fact that administrative agencies have either ‘no laws to follow’ or ‘no complete and precise laws to follow.’” In his memoir, A Legal Dream in Shanghai, He Jixiang referred to this chaotic state of affairs as “leftist legal nihilism,” emphasizing that the absence of a sound legal system put both government actions and citizen rights in limbo.

Yang and He paid dearly for their outspokenness. Both were labeled Rightists and counterrevolutionaries and sentenced to labor reform and reeducation. Yang’s entire family was persecuted; his wife committed suicide. Their fate was itself a demonstration that replacing the law with party directives made persecution both convenient and efficient. Once a person was framed, there was no escape.

Official texts include neither the names of the victims of political movements nor the fates they and their families suffered. After Mao died, 550,000 of those imprisoned by the Anti-Rightist Campaign were rehabilitated, but researchers now consider the total number of the persecuted to be many times higher. How many, for that matter, fell victim to the Land Reform Movement, the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, and the Campaign to Eradicate Hidden Counterrevolutionaries? How many perished in the Great Famine? The answers have yet to become the subject of public inquiry.

*

Niu’s descriptions of the Miaoxi tea farm where he spent so many years are so precise that one could almost reconstruct the camp from his sentences: the lie of the terraces, the design of the guards’ housing, the roofless toilets that guards in watch towers could monitor, the terraces for drying tea leaves, the location of bamboo groves, the fragrant smell of osmanthus in the spring. He showed how a few guards turned a blind eye to minor misdeeds, such as bartering for food with local farmers. Most, however, were strict, while others were purposefully cruel. One, Tang Bingnan, used to have prisoners who had suffered psychic breakdowns taken outside to the courtyard when the temperature fell, claiming that mentally ill people couldn’t suffer from cold:

They knelt on the uneven cobblestones, their shirts off, their chests bare, their ribs protruding. The bitter cold, the freezing water, made them shiver and their teeth chatter. Even so, Tang Bingnan would occasionally whip them with a bamboo stick. As he did so, he would ask, “Are you cold?” Only when he saw the victim nearly collapse would he allow other prisoners to drag them into the room. He did this every few days, claiming it was treatment for mental illness.

Someone once asked: Why are Chinese intellectuals so weak? Why did they endure slave-like treatment for twenty-two years? It is hard to convey the feeling of life in that earlier era. Those outside the prison were subjected to strict controls by the planned economy, which heavily restricted their mobility: government agencies had full authority over essential elements of survival, from household registration (which dictated where one could live) to supply coupons (which regulated access to food). Those inside, meanwhile, had to contend with severe discipline. Being caught trying to escape meant new torments, extended sentences, or execution: Niu described the horrific deaths of his fellow detainees Luo Guoying and Yin Xianhui after their failed escape attempts.

And yet some did resist. After the rehabilitation of the Rightists a number of survivors published memoirs, often at their own expense, recording the heroic defiance of the period’s martyrs. (A notable example is the Chongqing writer Kong Lingping’s Blood Chronicle.) Many files on the victims of political movements since the 1950s remain classified, however, and the stories of those who resisted were deliberately suppressed: restrictions on distribution and the difficulty of accessing overseas publishing channels mean that most remain largely unknown.

4.

Niu Lihua’s memoir is itself an example of this kind of little-known resistance. After sending him to Miaoxi, his captors continued to torture him for refusing to confess. In these desperate conditions, he achieved a miracle of astonishing perseverance: he wrote tens of thousands of words in his own defense—a prison autobiography—and went to great lengths to send the document out into the world.

Memoirs from survivors reveal that most prisoners privately rejected the charges against them. But open refusal was rare: because it directly challenged the authority of the judicial system, it inevitably invited severe, even fatal, punishment. Sending manuscripts out of the camp was unimaginably difficult. But when Niu finally got out of solitary confinement and had the chance to write home, he managed to send his family his appeal.  

The text we have today is a transcription his sister made of the handwritten copy. It is a precious document: most prisoners were not allowed access to their writings, even after their release. Zhang Yihe, who suffered in Miaoxi at the same time as Niu, went to the Sichuan High Court decades later to request the return of her diaries, notes, and manuscripts, but was denied. “Back in Beijing,” she wrote in an essay, “I collapsed onto the bed, overcome with frustration.” Those writings, including her Miaoxi labor reform diary, date back to 1958. By refusing to return them, the court, even now, continues to violate her rights.

Du Guang, a victim and later a researcher of the Anti-Rightist Campaign, has noted that the defining feature of that era was that the party replaced the legal system. Niu’s text illustrates that the party went still further: during these years quotations from Chairman Mao’s writings and from the party’s policies on the Anti-Rightist Movement and labor reform effectively had the authority of law. Under these circumstances—the “spiritual shackles” of the Mao era—anyone who wanted to make a legal appeal had to base their arguments on Mao’s thoughts or quotations, whether they revered him or not. But these attempts to resist the system were destined to fail, precisely because they had to adopt the entire logic and language of the deification movement.

Even someone like Niu Lihua, who refused to confess, could not avoid aligning with the prevailing ideology. At first, believing that he had been wrongfully persecuted because local officials had failed to follow Mao’s instructions, he placed his hopes in the “beloved Central Committee” and “beloved Chairman Mao.” In his self-defense he repeatedly used Mao Zedong Thought as the standard by which to analyze the correctness of sentencing and convictions.

Today’s readers might ask: hadn’t it been Mao’s great teachings that had led Niu and his generation to prison? Wasn’t this behavior a form of Stockholm Syndrome? I don’t think that’s an entirely accurate explanation. Niu’s generation—to which I belong—grew up under a Mao-era “red education” that entirely insulated us from democratic thinking. The ideals we were taught resonated with our youthful enthusiasm and our longing for a better world, and we fully embraced them.

Even in prison this faith endured for a long time. Only a rare few fighters—like Lin Zhao, Huang Lizhong, and Chen Li—dared to directly confront dictatorship with the sharp edge of their thoughts.  In his autobiography Niu listed over thirty examples of his stance toward Mao, including actions that contemporary readers might describe as blind loyalty. But moral judgments cannot be divorced from historical context. Prisoners, in their efforts to avoid torture and survive, often resorted to lesser evils, like informing on each other or lying. But the ultimate responsibility for all this lay with the system itself, which created the environment that forced them into such acts of desperation.

Much like Jack London’s novel Love of Life, Broken Dreams at Miaoxi tells the story of a naive young man swept up by the violent storms of political upheaval, surviving hunger and peril. By 1979 that era had passed. But rather than bury the suffering of his past, Niu transformed it into a force of self-enlightenment and democracy. His writings do much to illuminate the period through which he lived. They show how thoroughly the political movements of the 1950s and 1960s swept through all levels of society, each one costing more alleged “criminals” their freedom and upending their lives. They show how those “criminals” swelled the ranks of labor camps and other labor-reform enterprises, building tea plantations, mines, and enormous manufacturing centers; digging terraces and paving roads through the rugged terrain; making equipment for mines and farms; building dorms and office buildings; extracting mercury, sulfur, asbestos, copper, zinc, and gold. Finally they show just how violently the camps maintained this cruel hidden world—how systematically they denied prisoners the freedom to communicate, ravaged their bodies with hunger and overwork, and tortured their minds with forced confessions and repentance.

“Our nation suffers from widespread amnesia,” Zhang Yihe remarked in her essay “Fifty Years of No Sacrifice,” “and many eyewitnesses have disappeared.” Someone who was twenty years old in 1957 would now be eighty-nine. A generation is fading away. Most will leave no testimonies. This, Zhang stressed, was why “the remaining few survivors are extremely precious.”

When we walked the road to Miaoxi on Niu’s behalf, taking photos of the Dadu River, the ruins of Shaping Farm, the remnants of the Miaoxi Tea Plantation, and Hu Feng’s inaccessible cell, it struck me that all these dilapidated buildings—no longer holding the power to determine their victims’ fates—are now like lost pages from a book, unable to complete the story. And yet Niu’s book survives to remind us what they once looked like and what purpose they once served. In that sense it represents his own resistance to this amnesia, his own triumph over death.