Word: shanghaiing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Soon Chiang Ch'ing joined thousands of China's new-left generation of writers and dramatists who were drawn to cosmopolitan Shanghai. In the 1930s leftists lived in constant fear of the so-called White Terror imposed by the Nationalist secret police...
...circles were dominated, among others, by future Cultural Commissar Chou Yang, an orthodox party functionary. (Chou was eventually purged in the Cultural Revolution.) Chou and his coterie, Chiang Ch'ing recalled with great bitterness, kept her on the edges of the Communist organization during her four years in Shanghai. She never became a member of the secret inner-party circle. For a while the party placed her in a job as a night school instructor in a Y.W.C.A. literacy program. One night, however, a Nationalist informer apparently pointed her out to the police, who ordered her to leave Shanghai...
...that they too were dressed in the civilian style of secret agents. As they proceeded along the dark road, she tumbled off the roadway, intentionally leaping into a paddy field. Before the men regained control of her she slipped her secret document, the application form from the Shanghai Party organization, out of the corner of her waistcoat. As fast as possible, she stuffed it into her mouth, chewed it vigorously, and swallowed. The sensation of paper passing into her system was peculiar to say the least. Yet she knew that she had destroyed all visible evidence of that incriminating affiliation...
While still in Shanghai she had heard rumors about the Red Army's maverick chief Mao Tse-tung and his redoubtable partner Chu Teh. Sporadic news reports and travelers shuttling back and forth between the White and the Red Areas conveyed mixed impressions of Mao, a peasant rebel and people's defender with a modern revolutionary consciousness. She had only a faint idea of his appearance and no notion of his personality. Like other recruits to Yenan she was fascinated by differences among the leading comrades and became aware of Mao's aura of aloofness-his Olympian...
Long after she left Shanghai, she remembered in anguish, she could not rid her mind of the personal enemies she had made there, for many had resurfaced in Yenan. They let her know that if she refused to comply with their propositions (which she did not spell out here, though they probably included being forced to work in politically compromising films), they would kill her. [By "politically compromising," Chiang Ch'ing meant emphasizing national unity with the Nationalists against the Japanese rather than class struggle against landlords and capitalists...