"I remember when they tore the crosses off the steeples of this church, during the Cultural Revolution," Mr. Bai said. He was a young man who had recently graduated from Shandong University. He had been only nine years old in 1967, but he had a very clear memory of the Cultural Revolution, which had been fierce in Qingdao: this city was full of poisonous foreign influences, and such malignant and feudalistic harbingers of the right-deviationist wind (so to speak) had to be smashed by the vanguard of Mao Zedong's shining thought. It was well known that the Red Guards had kicked the shit out of foreign-looking Qingdao.
But the steeples on the cathedral were very high.
"How did they get up there?" I could not understand how they had scaled these steeples. And the crosses towered eight feet above them, so that was another problem.
Mr. Bai said, "The Red Guards held a meeting, and then they passed a motion to destroy the crosses. They marched to the church and climbed up to the roof. They pulled up bamboos and tied them into a scaffold. It took a few days—naturally they worked at night, and they sang the Mao songs. When the crowd gathered they put up ladders and they climbed up and threw a rope around the Christian crosses, and they pulled them down. It was very exciting!"
After that, they did the same thing to the other three churches, a sort of Venetian-looking one and a vast, solid Lutheran one with a witch's hat for a steeple. They stacked the crosses at the Red Guard headquarters, but pious people stole them and took them away, burying them in the hills east of the city. These crosses were only disinterred a few years ago, when the reforms came into force. But the change is dramatic. For example, I bought a locally made crucifix—they were mass-producing them now in Qingdao—for seventy-five cents.
Mr. Bai said he had vivid memories of the Cultural Revolution because he had not had to go to school. He chased after the Red Guards, watching them destroy houses and persecute people; he had found it all thrilling, and he had always been part of the crowd when some spectacular piece of vandalism was unleashed.
He had even watched persecutions nearer home.
"There was a man in our compound whom we called 'The Capitalist.' He lived on the far side of the courtyard. We had a label or a name for everyone there. One we called 'The Carpenter,' and another 'The Scholar.' We paid rent to The Capitalist'—he owned the houses."
I said, "If you were only nine years old, how did you know what was going on?"
"There was nothing else for me to do except watch. And it was like a fever. All day, for years, I watched and listened." He smiled, remembering. "One day in 1967, the Red Guards held a meeting—"
I saw Mr. Bai, a little raggedy-assed urchin, peering through the window at the screaming youths with their red armbands.
"They decided to criticize The Capitalist. There were about eight or nine of us following them—we were just little kids. We made a paper dunce cap for The Capitalist. His name was Zhang. We went into his house—pushed the door open without knocking. He was in bed. He was very sick—he had stomach cancer. We shouted at him and denounced him. We made him confess to his crimes. We forced him to lower his head so that we could put on the dunce cap—lowering the head was a sort of submission to the will of the people, you see."
"Did you parade him through the streets?"
"He had cancer. He could not walk. We mocked him in his bed. Then the neighbors came in. They also accused him—but not of being a capitalist. I remember one woman shouted, 'You borrowed cooking pots and materials and never gave them back!' She was very angry about something he had done many years ago. Others said, 'You tried to squeeze people' and 'You took money.'"
"What did the man say?"
"Nothing. He was afraid. And we found a great thing. On one of his old chairs there was a tiny emblem of the Guomindang. That proved he was a capitalist and a spy. Everyone was glad about that. We screamed at him, 'Enemy! Enemy!' He died soon after."
This had almost taken my breath away. I said, "That's a really terrible story."
"Sure," Mr. Bai said, but without much force. "It is terrible."
But it was by the book. Mao said, "To right a wrong it is necessary to exceed proper limits, and the wrong cannot be righted without the proper limits being exceeded."
That was turning a compassionate Chinese proverb on its head, one about the evil of going beyond proper limits to right a wrong. But Mao said that it was necessary to parade landlords down the street in dunce caps, and to sleep in their beds, and take their grain, and humiliate them, "to establish the absolute authority of the peasants."
This little treatise "On Going Too Far" was written in 1927. It was part of the script for the Cultural Revolution. The Old Man was greatly in favor of going too far ("going too far" has "a revolutionary significance"). "To put it bluntly," he went on, "it was necessary to bring about a brief reign of terror..."
But this German imperial outpost on the Chinese shore, which had been besieged at various times, and occupied by successive waves of Japanese, Americans and Nationalist Chinese, as well as the fiercest Red Guards (maddened by the city's look of European feudalism and all these Christian nests of superstition), had in the end turned out to be that quaintest of settlements, the seaside retirement town. The houses would not have disgraced the streets of Bexhill-on-Sea, on England's geriatric coast. Qingdao even had a breezy promenade, and slowly strolling oldies. It had a pier. It had ice-cream sellers. But it wasn't raffish and blowsy, a place for day-trippers. It was like its English counterpart—just as bungaloid.
High Party officials—secretaries, directors and deputies longed to get a room or an apartment in Qingdao and spend the rest of their days in the sea air with its snap and tang. It was perhaps a bourgeois dream, but who could blame them? It was more a town than a city. It was not heavily industrialized. The weather was lovely most of the year—pleasant in the summer, bracing in the winter. There was only the occasional typhoon, but it was obvious that Qingdao was able to withstand such storms. It was not a congested place. It was almost unique among Chinese towns for having a unity of architectural style—it just so happened that it was German and not Chinese unity, but so what? That was the luck of its youth and the fact that it had been planned and built in such a short time. It wasn't the centuries-old accretion of monuments, pagodas, ruins, factories, apartment blocks, political boondoggling and bad ideas that made up the average Chinese city. It was not only a pretty place—the familiar and absurd its strongest features—but it was manifestly prosperous. Yantai was not a patch on it. It looked well-to-do. Its food was excellent—fresh seafood, Shandong vegetables. Its beaches were clean. There were plovers strutting on them. And those old folks you took to be members of the cleanup brigade, grubbing around the rocks and poking in the sand, stuffing sea urchins and black kelp into their bags, were actually market traders who were selling this stuff to eat; but the result of their gathering left the beaches of Qingdao bright and tidy. No wonder the Chinese wanted to retire here.
I walked around, wishing I could stay longer. Generally speaking, it was not an ambition I had very often in China. I would visit a place and get hold of it, and after three or four days I would want to let go and move on. The Chinese themselves were always telling me that I should go here or there—see this garden or that pavilion. In Qingdao they said, "You should go to Mount Tai"—the holy mountain on the east of the peninsula. But I was happy in beautiful, breezy Qingdao, and it was a bonus that after dark it looked slightly nightmarish.