By Celine Song and Ned Kelly
From Old Shanghai and the Concession Era to Reform and Opening Up, via the Japanese Occupation, Civil War, birth of the People's Republic, Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, Lao Shanghairen was a series where we talk to ordinary citizens who lived through extraordinary times.
At the time of this 2011 interview, Chen Tingtao was 81 years old.
Chen Tingtao was born in 1930 and spent the majority of his childhood in the French Concession. Growing up in a country ravaged by war, he remembers going hungry. “There wasn’t enough rice so it was difficult to come by. What we could get would have lots of sand in it, and it would often get crushed during transportation. It could hardly be made into steamed rice, so we had to have porridge all the time.”
He says inflation was also out of control. “Prices rose crazily. People would carry a large bag of bills to a store to purchase no more than a pancake, and the value of the bills would be different within hours. Many stores would only accept silver coins, nicknamed ‘Big Head Yuan’ (Yuan Da Tou, 袁大头) after former President Yuan Shikai, who head was on them.”
During the Civil War, Chen says that the discipline of the People’s Liberation Army troops was in stark contrast to the corruption of the Kuomintang, “One night in 1949 the guns were heard the whole night. When we opened the door in the morning we found that the PLA soldiers were sleeping on the ground along the street,” Chen sobs at the memory, “The communists had won the battle during the night, but would sleep in the street rather than disturb the residents.”
After liberation in 1949 Chen joined the Communist Youth League. “I was then assigned to the printing shop of the Youth League School. My job was to carve the characters on the steel printing plate [indicating he had beautiful handwriting]. We were printing textbooks for members of the Youth League coming from all over the country to be educated here. We often worked till one or two in the morning, and I did it for five years.”
In 1955 Chen was assigned to News Daily 新闻日报, which became the Liberation Daily 解放日报 from 1960. “My job was to write editorials, but as an editor of a Party newspaper, we couldn’t really speak. It was actually composition according to the topic given each day by my superior leader.
“Campaigns came one after another at that time. During the Great Leaping Forward our iron gate was taken away and everybody had to submit their iron pots and pans for large-scale steel-making across the country. According to the reports submitted to the government, output of wheat per acre would have been such that a person could lie upon the tip of the crops.”
In 1966 the Cultural Revolution began. “It came all of a sudden. One day I arrived at my office to find the Red Guards were already there. One of them said to me, ‘You can’t go home today.’ Thus the imprisonment began.
“I couldn’t leave the office or see my family for over three months. Then a trial was held by the Intermediate People’s Court. I was sentenced to do labor in the printing factory. My job was to push huge barrels filled with paper that weighed 700kg all the way from the storage to the workshop. I did it for seven years straight. When my reputation and my job position were finally resumed, I was 52 years old.”His eldest daughters was also sent to the countryside as part of the zhi qing movement. “She graduated from school in 1967, but was luckily sent to Chongming Island instead of the remote provinces. She had to do a lot of labor, but it was not that difficult as she was still among young folks of her age, which made it kind of like a very long camping trip, and she returned to Shanghai in 1972.”
Chen resumed his work at the newspaper, finally retiring in 1999. He is entitled to the welfare of a retired cadre, over RMB10,000 per month. As for society today’s, Chen says he likes the way things are. “I lived in the French Concession most of my life, but now I live in a large apartment in Pudong with big gardens. The standard of living is good these days. I went on the Metro when it first opened. That was really convenient, I was impressed.”
This article first appeared in the November 2011 issue of That's Shanghai.
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