Script with timecode: Building 173
00:00:13:00
A building is more than bricks and mortar, glass and stone, a shelter from the wind and the rain.
00:00:24:00
It is a volume of human history, holding within its pages the stories and secrets of generations past and present.
00:00:37:00
The residents of Building 173 in downtown Shanghai have witnessed three quarters of a century of the most dramatic upheaval in modern Chinese history.
Their stories begin in 1930s Shanghai.
00:01:11:00
The city was a cut-throat land of opportunity.
00:01:17:00
Entrepreneurs flocked here from all over the world.
00:01:22:00
New apartment complexes sprung up to accommodate them.
00:01:26:00
00:00:53:00
Many of those complexes were inside Shanghai’s International Settlement, an area ceded to the British after their victory in the 19th century Opium wars.
00:01:37:00
Among them was Building 173, known then as the Cosmopolitan Apartments.
00:01:44:00
“It was my grandmother’s decision to build this very fashionable apartment building.”
00:01:56:00
Linda Tan’s grandmother spent one million silver tael, equivalent to 24 million US dollars today on building and promoting what were then luxury apartments.
00:02:08:00
“Inside, you can’t recognize it now. Back then, there was not a single bicycle (in the lobby), now there’re everywhere.”
00:02:20:00
There were 56 apartments each with the latest art deco furnishings, separate maids quarters and state of the art cable radio.
00:02:33:00
The owners of the building, the Tan family, took up residence in the 600 square metre penthouse.
00:02:42:00
A large part of their apartment is now abandoned but the memories are still alive.
00:02:50:00
“We were living on the 8th floor. My grandmother, my father, my mother, my elder sister, my younger sister, me and 12 servants. We also had 2 drivers and 2 bodyguards.
00:03:08:00{SOUND of children playing}
00:03:15:00
My elder sister and I liked to play piano.
00:03:20:00 {SOUND of piano}
00:03:23:00 My mother enjoyed Chinese chess.
00:03:27:00 {SOUND of ladies laughing and someone bathing}
00:03:39:00 The Cosmopolitan building had a corridor connecting the left and right wings. That was where we watched movies. Sometimes it was also used as a ballroom. It was so beautiful.”
00:03:58{SOUND – ballroom coming to life}
00:04:10:00
It was only a few months after the building’s grand opening that the party came to an abrupt end.
00:04:16:00 {SOUND of gramaphone}
00:04:19:00
It was the 30th October 1935. A young couple newly in love, Mr. R.H Goodwin and Ms Mabel Linde, had been called to an appointment at the Cosmopolitan Apartments where Mabel’s father, Mr. Eli Van Der Linde, was newly resident.
{PAUSE}
Mr. Linde, a successful British businessman, had learned that his daughter intended to marry Mr. Goodwin against his wishes.
The couple hoped to persuade him. Mr. Linde had something rather more sinister in mind.
00:04:53:00
Ms Linde: “I love Mr. Goodwin and I want to marry him.”
Mr. Goodwin: “Yes, Mr. Linde, I also love your daughter very much.”
Ms. Linde: “Father, I’m not trying to upset you but you have to understand this is the thirties.”
Mr. Goodwin: “All we want is your blessing on our engagement.”
00:04:59:00
Mr. Linde: “Mabel, you want my blessing? You behaved with complete disregard for mine and your mother’s feelings. We expected you to return home immediately. I can assure you this marriage will never happen.”
00:05:10:00
Mr. Goodwin: “Mr.Linde, this conversation is over.”
00:05:13:00
Mr. Linde: “Yes, I think it is.”
00:05:15:00
{SOUND SHOTS FIRED FOLLOWED BY SCREAMING. DOOR CLOSES AND FURTHER SHOT FIRED}
00:05:31:00
Mr. Linde was found lying in a pool of blood on the bathroom floor.
Mr. Goodwin recovered from his wounds and married Mabel Linde the following year.
00:05:42:00 {SOUND of piano music}
00:05:45:00
But was the shooting a lone incident or was it a sign of things to come?
It was just a few years after the shooting that Old Liu came to work at the Cosmopolitan. He’d left his wife and come from the countryside looking for a better life.
00:06:03:00
"I married in 1935 and then in 1937 I ran away. Why did I run away? – Because we had no money living in the countryside. So one day when my wife was visiting her family I took money from her secret stash and left. I came to Shanghai to find my brother."
00:06:35:00
Liu’s wife was two years older than him and had bound feet like most women of her generation. Several years later, she came to Shanghai looking for him and her money. She found him working at the Cosmopolitan employed by Linda Tan’s grandmother to operate the old elevator.
00:06:55:00 {SOUND of elevator}
00:06:59:00
“I was the first elevator operator.
I worked from 8 am to 8 pm without a break.”
00:07:10:00
“My grandmother was a stern lady. It didn’t really bother us but many people were very scared of her.”
00:07:20:00
“There was a woman who lived on the top floor and all of us kids, kind of, we called her the witch because she just, she was rich, she had a chauffeur, she would always come back to the apartment building and if we were on the steps, we always moved out of her way, she had a kind of an austere demeanor about her.
One night we decided that we were going to try and scare the witch. We didn’t want to take the elevator because if we did I’m sure the elevator operator would have been very suspicious of what we were up to. We decided to walk up the stairs. All we were gonna do was knock on her door and that was supposed to scare her.
00:07:59:00 {SOUND of children creeping upstairs}
00:08:06:00 And then I felt something brush against my face.
00:08:09:00 {SOUND – SCREAMING}
00:08:13:00 So we never actually succeeded in scaring the witch.”
00:08:16:00 {SOUND – gramophone}
00:08:19:00
Gregory Patent lived with his parents and his Iraqi grandmother in one of the side buildings of the Cosmopolitan.
00:08:25:00 “My mother was living in Shanghai because she came with her mother after her father died. And my father came to Shanghai because his family was from Russia and they left to escape the Russian revolution.”
“My mum tells me you know they’d go to bed – this was before I was born – they would go to bed maybe at a reasonable hour and then they would wake up at around 10 o’clock and then my father would say “Let’s go out!” So my mum would say “OK” and she would get out the ironing board and she’d get out an iron and she would press her dress. My father would put on his tuxedo and they would go to a night-club and they would have a wonderful time. There’d be a live band. They would dance.
00:09:10:00 {SOUND of gramophone}
00:09:17:00
They looked so great in these old pictures. They would stay up until maybe two in the morning. What a life!”
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But the city had also earned its title as the Whore of Asia and it was dangerous to cross her.
00:09:35 {SOUND of chains}
00:09:38:00
Gang politics ruled the streets.
Opium trafficking, gunrunning, prostitution and kidnapping were commonplace.
Shanghai’s godfather, Du Yue Sheng or ‘Big Eared Du’, was the boss of the notorious Green Gang.
00:09:55:00
“My father was a businessman in Shanghai. At that time, you have to have a gang, become a gang member, because you want to start business, no matter what kind of business, gambling house, opium trading, it’s a necessary thing to be in the gang.”
00:10:20:00
Roger Du is Du Yue Sheng’s son. He married Linda Tan whose family owned the Cosmopolitan. Du Yue Sheng and Linda’s father, Tan Jing, had been friends.
00:10:32:00
“My father know Tan Jing just as an ordinary friend but Tan Jing is very famous in Shanghai and in China because he is a famous collector.”
00:10:50:00
“My father was a very cultured man. He had valuable collections of antiques, calligraphy and Chinese painting.”
00:11:03:00
“When I came to work here, he was 34 years old, he had 3 wives and was already quite famous as the boss of the east China football team. He spent a lot of money on that team, it can’t have been easy spending that much money.”
00:11:32:00
“On the roof of the building were two large play grounds. On one side you could play football, and on the other side tennis.”
00:11:43:00 {SOUND of tennis}
00:11:51:00
Shanghai was a city of extremes. Sheltered from the outside world, families in the Cosmopolitan lived life in luxury but people in the streets below were starving.
00:12:03:00 {SOUND / MUSIC}
00:12:10:00
An underground communist movement was already promising a better life for millions of working class Chinese.
And comrade Mao Tse Tung was building up his troops.
00:12:20:00 {Sound of cheering}
00:12:25:00 But change would have to wait.
00:12:27:00{SOUND OF GUNFIRE}
00:12:31:00
In Summer 1937, Japanese forces invaded China.
00:12:36:00
“The Japanese were terrible. They set up control stations on all the bridge crossings. A wooden hut with Japanese soldiers inside. When a bus reached the bridge, all the Chinese passengers had to get off and bow to them. If you didn’t bow they would beat you.”
00:13:14:00
“There were bombs that fell in the city.
00:13:17:00 {SOUND of bombs}
00:13:19:00 In one particular instance there was a bomb that fell downtown and just numerous people were killed. And my parents had, they walked to work and they had to walk through this bombed out area and there were, there were dead bodies everywhere.
So, I got afraid of the bombing because, of the air raid sirens, because my parents were afraid.
00:13:41:00 {SOUND AIR RAID SIREN}
00:13:51:00 But I loved, looking at the puffs of smoke created by the anti-aircraft guns up in the sky. I loved these black puffs of smoke that would appear, it was kind of like magic.”
00:14:02:00 {SOUND of air-raid sirens}
00:14:06:00 As Japan was not at war with the West, the Cosmopolitan inside the International Settlement remained a safe haven. Thousands of Chinese fled into the Settlement. But there wasn’t room for everyone.
Then, on the 8th December 1941 - the Japanese entered the Settlement.
00:14:30:00 {SOUND troops marching}
00:14:33:00 It was the day after Pearl Harbour.
00:14:35:00
“When the Japanese came they put all the foreigners into the international camps.”
00:14:44:00
Having been born in Hong Kong, Gregory Patent was a British subject and now an enemy of the Japanese state.
00:14:52:00
“One day, my mum tells me, this is about, when I was about two and a half years old, Japanese soldiers came to our apartment where we lived with my granny, knocking on the door, demanding to see British subject Gregory Patent. My parents were terrified, you know, they let the soldiers in and they pointed me out to them and then of course the Japanese saw that I was only two and a half years old. My mum being Iraqi and my father being Russian, they weren’t at war with Japan.”
00:15:21:00 {SOUND JAPANESE SOLDIERS TALKING}
00:15:25:00
“So they left me alone and they left. And my mum says they just went chuckling as they walked down the stairs about, you know, seeing this British subject that they had to leave alone, that they couldn’t put into a camp.”
00:15:37 {SOUND – harp music}
00:15:44:00
All of Gregory Patent’s relatives escaped from the camps alive but a third of more than 140,000 foreign interns were never seen or heard of again. Still, they had fared considerably better than the Chinese. By the end of World War II, around 10 million Chinese had died.
Many of the Cosmopolitan apartments lay empty but the building soon came back to life.
00:16:14:00
“After World War II what changed at the Cosmopolitan Apartments was there was this amazing influx of new nationalities and I had new friends then. One of the favourite games that we played at the Cosmopolitan was hide and seek because there were so many alleyways that we could go into and nooks and crannies and we had a lot of space and I just loved it.”
00:16:43:00
While life at the Cosmopolitan was peaceful, outside the grounds China was in chaos. War had left China in tatters and uncontrollable inflation was stoking unrest among China’s poor.
00:16:58:00 {SOUND of gunfire}
00:17:02:00 The communists were gaining ground against China’s ruling nationalist party, the Kuomintang.
The year was 1949.
00:17:11:00
“My father, my mother and my grandmother were afraid because the communists were on their way to Shanghai. So my whole family fled to Hong Kong.”
00:17:28:00 {SOUND – people hurrying along corridors}
00:17:39:00
“The communist revolution was in May. It was March when he (Tan Jing) hired a private plane and left. He took 600,000 US dollars with him.”
00:17:47:00
“My grandmother had a lot of jewelry. She made us children hide her gold bracelets all the way up our arms. She also made us wear her thick gold necklaces, so many we couldn’t raise our heads.”
00:18:09:00
One afternoon a British man living in room 704 who spoke very good Chinese…
00:18:19:00 {SOUND - PHONE RINGING}
00:18:25:00…told us, that the landlord, (Tan Jing), had called to say that the communists had arrived in the suburbs of Shanghai.”
“Late at night, around 3 o’clock, I heard the sound of gun fire.”
00:18:43:00
“I wake up and I hear gun fire and my father decides to crawl out onto our balcony to see what’s going on below.
00:18:54:00 {MUSIC}
00:18:57:00
My uncle comes into our bedroom and drags him by the legs away from the balcony because he’s afraid that my dad could get shot.”
00:19:07:00
“When I woke up in the morning, there were communist soldiers on the streets all wearing grey clothes.”
00:19:15:00
“And the communists had taken over. Overnight, China was Mao’s! Shanghai was Mao’s!”
END ACT ONE
***
00:19:20:00{MUSIC}
00:19:30:00
“We were afraid to go outside because we didn’t know who the communist army were. They didn’t come into our homes. They slept outside on the street. So we took them water to drink. We realized they were friendly so we stopped worrying.”
00:19:58:00
From a poor working class family, Zheng Shan Ming was one of the people the communists hoped to help.
00:20:07:00
“Before the communist revolution, my husband didn’t have a job. I was the only one working.
After the communist revolution we both had work and life was more settled.
In the factory we had a labour union. You couldn’t fire or replace people so easily.”
00:20:28:00 {MUSIC}
00:20:30:00
By the winter of 1949, the communist government had announced it would take over all foreign businesses. Those foreign families who had stayed until now, scrambled to get out. Gregory Patent’s family got 6 of the last 10 American visas issued before the consulate closed.
Greg’s family sailed to San Francisco and made a new life for themselves in America. But they had to leave Greg’s granny behind.
00:21:01:00
“She was going to be leaving Shanghai with my Uncle Jason and they were going to be going to Israel. So I remember saying this very tearful farewell to her at the train station and it turned out that we never saw her again.”
00:21:17:00
Gregory Patent’s family were one of the last foreign families to leave the Cosmopolitan. Many of these rooms, once full of life, fell silent.
{PAUSE}
00:21:28:00
“We saw an announcement that the landlord was looking for tenants. So we rented this house. Before the revolution people had used gold bars to buy the rental rights to these apartments, but by the time we arrived the landlord wasn’t allowed to charge such a fee.
00:21:50:00
The Tan family, now in Hong Kong, asked a close family friend to manage the building in their absence. Mr. Cai had been living in the building for several years and working for the UN. But the UN operations in China had closed down.
00:22:06:00
“Out of work, my father decided to help Tan Jing by collecting rents. But, of course, life wasn’t as good as before.”
00:22:16:00
Mr. Cai, his wife and their children were a middle class Chinese family. They weren’t sure whether they had anything to fear from the new communist government. But Cai’s children remember how he tried to get them out of China.
00:22:30:00
“Tan Jing got into trouble in Hong Kong and my father went to help him.”
00:22:36:00
“My father had taken his new girlfriend to Kowloon for a drive. It was my father’s girlfriend driving and she didn’t have a license. She hit and killed a man.”
00:22:55:00 {SOUND of car crash}
00:22:59:00
“My father helped Tan Jing get out on bail. They met in a hotel to talk about what could be done to help him.”
00:23:12:00
“Many family friends suggested he shouldn’t go to trial. They said, “you should return to Shanghai. After all, you still have so much property in Shanghai. It’s better you go back.”
00:23:25:00 {MUSIC}
00:23:28:00
But when Tan Jing returned he found that the family’s old apartment at the Cosmopolitan had been divided up and occupied by government workers.
00:23:38:00
“Because my father and Tan Jing had been friends for so many years and Tan’s mother was worried about Tan Jing returning alone, my father agreed to accompany him back to Shanghai. That had not been the plan. My father had taken my eldest sister with him to Hong Kong and my mother was supposed to follow with us but by the time my mother was ready to leave, my father had already returned to Shanghai. So we didn’t make it to Hong Kong.”
00:24:10:00
“He (the manager, Mr. Cai) was a very kind man and I remember he spoke very good English. One day, my colleague who was a member of the Chinese Communist Youth League wanted to go in and inspect the stock room. (Mr. Cai) wouldn’t let him in, so this man reported him to the police.”
00:24:44:00
It’s unclear exactly what the young man told the police but late one summer evening 1954 they came to the Cai family’s apartment.
00:24:56:00
“We were sleeping when they came to the house. It was so frightening.”
00:25:04:00
The police searched the house and arrested Mr. Cai.
00:25:08:00 {SOUND}
00:25:14:00
“Afterwards, people wrote graffiti in the laneway saying our father was a counter-revolutionary. I still don’t understand why they said that. All I know is that at that time there were a lot of mistakes made. It was just after the communist revolution, even county level officials had the power to execute people. You could just arrest whoever you wanted and kill them.”
00:25:50:00
The Cai family were forced to move out of their apartment and into one of the garages of the building.
00:25:56:00 {MUSIC}
00:26:03:00According to Mao himself, the party killed more than 700,000 counterrevolutionaries during those first few years of the revolution. Many more, like Mr. Cai, were imprisoned.
00:26:17:00
“That’s when my father married his fourth wife. The communists had prohibited polygamy so they arrested him in December 1957 and sentenced him to 15 years in prison. He was placed in Tilanqiao prison in the Hongkou District of Shanghai. They also gave two other reasons for his arrest. The first was that he had been gambling on insect (cricket) fights. The second, he was accused of stealing state treasures. That accusation referred to his antiques. Of course, he had paid for all of them. But the government said he had stolen them because he had taken them to Hong Kong, which was outside China.
00:27:17:00
Linda Tan and her sister had followed their father back from Hong Kong. Now, they found themselves alone.
00:27:24:00:
“I was very afraid. Back then, there were six categories of bad people: landowners; rich farmers; counter-revolutionaries; bad elements; the right-wing elements and criminal offenders. We were a criminal family.”
00:27:48:00 {SOUND of people laboring}
00:27:56:00
“Then, my big sister was also arrested for no reason and sent to undergo what they called reeducation-through-labor for an indefinite period of time.”
00:28:07:00 {SOUND of people laboring}
00:28:11:00
Immediate enemies now dead or imprisoned, Mao set about the task of turning China into a genuinely socialist society with a policy known as the Great Leap Forward.
00:28:22:00 {MUSIC}
00:28:25:00
He introduced vast scale farming communes and controversial Soviet agricultural policies such as planting seeds deeper into the ground and closer together. Mao believed that this would increase production and create a China without hunger. He was wrong.
00:28:44:00
“All farms became communal. We didn’t even have to pay for food. There was no incentive to work any more. As a result, we didn’t have enough food to eat. And there were no more imports.”
00:29:00:00
Mao diverted peasants from the harvest to build small backyard steel furnaces to supplement factory production.
But the low-grade pig iron the farmers were producing was useless.
Then, there was the greatest of Mao’s brainwaves – the “Kill a Sparrow” Campaign.
00:29:18:00
“At that time they were killing sparrows everywhere. Oh my god! It was chaos over all the rooftops. The sparrows disappeared.”
00:29:37:00 {MUSIC}
00:29:41:00
All sparrows should be killed to stop them eating grain. Mao failed to recognize that sparrows also eat locusts and swarms began devastating the harvest.
Several years of bad weather followed and in its wake, widespread famine. Between 1960 and ‘61, it’s estimated 20 million people died.
00:30:06:00
00:30:10:00
It was during these bleak years that the manager of the Cosmopolitan, Mr. Cai, was allowed to return home for health reasons.
00:30:19:00
“I was shocked to see how crooked his back had become.
00:30:25:00
He had been working to shore up a riverbank. He’d been carrying such heavy loads that he went from being a tall man to being short and bent.
He wasn’t home long before they rearrested him. But he was allowed home again in 1962. That time he chose to return to prison of his own accord, because our family didn’t have enough food to survive. In prison at least he would have food to eat. There was no other solution.”
00:31:11:00
It was the last time the Cai family saw their father. He died in prison a year later. 58 years old.
00:31:21:00
“The people who were local party cadres at that time have since admitted to me that a lot of mistakes were made. I asked them whether any of the children of their victims have asked to have these verdicts overturned and they said, “no way, who would dare?” So the children from these families, like us, still live in the shadow of the past.”
00:31:45:00 {MUSIC}
00:31:50:00
Linda Tan managed to rejoin her mother and younger sister in Hong Kong but was forced to leave her elder sister and her father in China.
00:31:59:00
“I felt so helpless to see my family destroyed. We had had such a happy family, so many people. But we were torn apart. Of course, I feel very sad. But there is nothing I can do.”
END ACT TWO
***
00:32:17:00{MUSIC}
00:32:20:00
Linda Tan had escaped just in time.
China was entering the bloodiest phase in its recent history. A period which would forever blight Mao’s reputation as a leader of his people. The Cultural Revolution began in the summer of 1966.
Students at schools and universities around the country were told to take the train to Beijing. They were to be christened as Mao’s Red Guards.
Among them was Zheng Shan Ming’s son.
00:32:56:00
“At that time in Beijing, the schools had stopped lessons. So the Red Guards were allowed to sleep in the classrooms.
We were all very young, interested and curious. We all went to Tiananmen Square to see Chairman Mao. There were so many people there.
00:33:30:00 {MUSIC}
00:33:34:00
In our minds Chairman Mao was like Robin Hood is in western people’s minds. He was a hero.”
00:33:42:00
“If you wanted to join the Red Guards you had to fill in an application form saying what your father and mother did for a living. We knew we wouldn’t be welcome.”
00:33:54:00
“They were a revolutionary group. People who were born in bad families could not join.”
00:33:42:00
00:34:01:00 {MUSIC}
00:34:03:00
“When we came back to school (after the summer holidays) my classmates saw that I wasn’t a Red Guard but because they liked me they gave me a red armband anyway to pretend.”
00:34:15:00 {MUSIC}
00:34:19:00
These young students were to lead China’s Cultural Revolution.
Mao instructed them to hunt down remaining class enemies including capitalists and right-wingers - and to destroy anything that represented old ideas.
00:34:34:00
“I was walking down the street one day with my sister. Some Red Guards stopped us and said, “your dress is too old fashioned, you have to take it off or you’ll be arrested. You must rip off the buttons.” I was so scared. I immediately ran back home and changed. Those buttons were traditional Chinese buttons. These kinds of things were dangerous at that time. High-heeled shoes were also risky. My mum had two pairs of very high-heeled shoes. They were lovely. She told my brother to throw them out of the window in the middle of the night.”
00:35:06:00 {SOUND – shoes out window}
00:35:10:00{SINGING}
00:35:20:00
Bai Xiao Ping’s mother was a Chinese opera singer.
Her father was a communist playwright.
In 1966 the government demanded the use of the villa where the family was living.
00:35:34:00
“At that time there was a capitalist family living in this apartment. If you wanted to live in a place, you could simply ask the capitalists to move out. We could have asked them to move out completely but my father decided that as they had a young child, we would just occupy two rooms of their apartment.”
00:35:52:00
Moving into other people’s homes or “Sweeping them out of the door with a broom” as the practice became known was commonplace during the rising disorder of the Cultural Revolution.
No less than three people were supposed to live in any one room. Multi-room apartments, like those at the Cosmopolitan, that had been designed for one family, were soon home to three or four.
The exclusive Cosmopolitan Apartments became Building 173 – open to the general public.
00:36:26:00
Red Guards posted quotations from Chairman Mao on every street and everyone had to carry Mao’s little red book of quotations.
Loudspeakers were placed at every intersection and in every park broadcasting his thought 24 hours a day.
00:36:43:00
“I helped other people to write the slogans. I had to carry a lot of posters around under my arm. My job was to pass the posters one by one to my colleague as he did the pasting. That’s the most I did.”
00:36:59:00
The Red Guards were Mao’s evangelists and they soon grew tired of preaching in public.
00:37:05:00{SOUND of violence}
00:37:09:00
They began forcing their way into people’s homes, scrawling graffiti on the walls, destroying or confiscating valuables and taking capitalists away for re-education.
00:37:20:00{SOUND of violence}
00:37:24:00
“Everyday, they would play a gong and drums when they came to search people’s houses.
00:37:30:00{MUSIC}
00:37:33:00
There was one old man, 80 years old, living in room 503. He said to me “the people playing the drums have already been to the building many times. I’ve put all my gold and valuables out on the table, I’m waiting for them, why they haven’t come yet?”
00:38:07:00 {DRUMS}
00:38:10:00
The Red Guards erected a stage on the front steps of the building. Each day they would take one of the wealthy residents down there for re-education. The other residents were expected to come and join in denouncing their neighbours. Not to attend was to risk being next.
00:38:27:00
“Each evening after dinner, I took a chair and sat downstairs in front of the building. Every night they would be made to wear very high newspaper hats. On the hats were written things like “beat the demons, beat the counter revolutionaries, beat the capitalists”. They asked them to take a broom and a gong and make noise while they walked around saying “I am a demon”. Many people had to wear big boards around their necks. That happened a lot so a lot of people living here got damaged backs.”
00:38:59:00
“When I saw the re-education session turning violent, I would stop watching. I heard about a lot of beatings during reeducation sessions, they were quite frequent, but I didn’t witness any. I don’t like blood.”
00:39:25:00 PAUSE
00:39:28:00
“The police didn’t get involved, it was chaos. They just wore those red armbands and went around causing trouble. They made lists of everyone who should be re-educated. During the re-education sessions, they would say what the person had done wrong. One of our managers had been a member of the underground communist army before the revolution. The Red Guards asked him why he hadn’t been killed (by the nationalist army). They said it must be because he was a traitor.”
00:40:12:00 {MUSIC}
00:40:14:00
The number of victims grew. It was enough to be connected with someone guilty of a crime.
00:40:20:00 {SOUND – slamming door}
00:40:23:00 Husbands disowned their wives, children their parents.
00:40:28:00
“During the Cultural Revolution we cut my father out.
00:40:33:00
Otherwise they would ask, “Why do you still have your father’s picture? Do you want to remember him? He is a counter-revolutionary. He is an anti-communist.”
00:40:44:00
Bai Xiao Ping’s family thought they’d be safe. Her father had been a devoted communist since his youth. But Bai’s father, and many like him, discovered that in the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, no one was safe. The Red Guards accused him of expressing bourgeois views in one of his plays.
00:41:02:00
“My father was being re-educated with 10 other people, all living together with him in one room. Everyday, he heard people jumping out of the building. The Red Guards would beat them with a whips and they couldn’t handle the humiliation. One handsome young actor from my mother’s Beijing opera group was beaten so much that he hung himself. It was other members of the group who carried out the beatings. They all knew Kongfu so they could easily break your legs.
Another victim was my mother’s teacher, Li Ai Zhen, a very famous and beautiful Beijing opera singer. During the Cultural Revolution, she was constantly being beaten. So one day she locked herself in a room and ate nails in an attempt to kill herself. I remember thinking that it was a worse punishment than the soldiers had suffered during the war.If people like her hadn't died, our society and country would be better off today."
00:42:15:00
“Li Chun Zhen was a piano teacher living in apartment 31. I went in. She was sitting, wearing high-heeled shoes and a red dress. It was very beautiful. She’d left a note on the table. It read simply “I am dead”.
00:42:43:00 {MUSIC}
00:42:47:00
Another one was living in the north building. He had a wife and three daughters. He was undergoing re-education at his company. He committed suicide one night by gas. In the morning his wife woke up and found him in the kitchen. He was just 45 years old.
The third one was in room 604. He was a graduate of Jiaotong university. He was teaching in a technical college. He was always very friendly to everyone. One day he went to the school and the students beat him to death. His name was Gu Zhi Xiang. I remember these three people.”
00:43:46:00 {MUSIC}
00:43:50:00
In an official quote from the national police chief: "If people are beaten to death . . . its none of our business. If you detain those who beat people to death . . . you will be making a big mistake.”
In September 1966 alone, there were 354 people murdered in Shanghai and 704 suicides.
{PAUSE}
By 1968, the victims are believed to have numbered in the millions. Mao realized that he had created a monster and that the monster had to be tamed.
00:44:30:00
“Chairman Mao ordered all of Shanghai’s young people to go to the countryside and let the poor farmers re-educate them. At least one child from each family - that was the rule. I went for my family.”
00:44:42:00
By the time Mao died in 1976, these young people had spent a decade in exile.
00:44:49:00
“We weren’t bothered when Chairman Mao died. Alive or dead, I didn’t care.
He alone started the Cultural Revolution. And the Great Leap Forward was also his fault. Life wasn’t peaceful. Now it’s over. Back then, there were so many political campaigns. Life was permanently unsettled. Now life is much better.”
END ACT THREE
***
00:45:13:00 {MUSIC}
00:45:21:00
In 1977, Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, seized the reins of power and set about repairing the damage caused by the Cultural Revolution. 00:45:31:00 {MUSIC}
00:45:34:00
He began economic reform to create jobs for the millions of uneducated young people now flooding back into China’s cities.
00:45:43:00 {MUSIC}
00:45:45:00
He introduced the One Child Policy to ensure a future where China could feed its population.
00:45:52:00 {MUSIC}
00:45:54:00
He rehabilitated political prisoners allowing many to return home to what was left of their families.
00:46:01:00 {MUSIC}
00:46:04:00
“My father and I hadn’t seen each other for 18 years by the time I finally saw him again. When we saw each other, he told me I’d got older. I thought he’d completely changed. He’d become very thin and very old, but he was in good spirits.”
00:46:19:00
“I left the house and was walking done the lane, when I heard “Old Liu, Old Liu”. “I don’t recognize you,” I said to him. He said “You don’t recognize me? Really? I am Tan Jing, it’s been 21 years, I’ve changed a lot haven’t I?” “I can’t believe it!” I said. “What’s happened? You’ve become an old man.””
00:46:47:00
Almost forty years after he’d left Shanghai, Gregory Patent returned to his childhood home as communist China reopened its doors.
00:46:57:00
“When we left Shanghai in 1950, I never expected to ever go back. The first time I went back was in 1987. I found all the places we had lived in but nothing had changed and everybody was still wearing Mao jackets, the city closed up shop pretty early at night. We were treated like celebrities because there weren’t that many foreigners visiting Shanghai. I mean every time my wife would be out in the street with our guide, all the Chinese would gather around us looking at us like we were celebrities. And I loved it, I have to say I really did love it.”
00:47:34:00
In 1991, Shanghainese were allowed to start-up their own private businesses for the first time since the communists came to power. The government soon discovered that 4 decades of communism hadn’t been enough to kill the city’s entrepreneurial spirit.
00:47:51:00
“1997, the last time we went back..we weren’t celebrities any more..uuuhh..amazing hotels that had gone up, the lights, the neon lights everywhere, the Shanghainese dressed in high fashion, the subway system well developed, the museum a delight to go into, restaurants, the highlife, the nightlife coming back. And I thought this is the way it was and I was hoping that it would, you know, this was the way Shanghai would be again and I think Shanghai is going to be the glory of China.”
00:48:26:00
But while Shanghai reclaims its past glory, Building 173 is no longer the luxurious building it once was.
Today, it’s an un-renovated, over crowded, building. Most of its residents live here because it’s cheap.
The government has hardly raised the rent since the 1950s.
The manager, Mr. Cai’s son still lives in the garage his family was forced to move into after his father’s imprisonment more than 50 years ago. Like many retirees, he spends his days playing the stock market. Making money is no longer a crime.
00:49:08:00 {MUSIC}
00:46:11:00
Old Liu’s son runs a small corner store in another of the garages. Old Liu’s wife died a few years ago but he has his son, grandchildren and great grandchildren to remember her by.
00:49:25:00 {MUSIC}
00:49:27:00
“My government pension increases every year. Now it has reached 1780 Renminbi (260 US dollars) a month. It’s plenty for me. I can’t spend it all. Life is much better than before.”
00:49:46:00
Gregory Patent is today a household name in the US for the books he’s written on baking. But he still feels a close connection to China.
00:49:56:00
“My younger son Jason became a China scholar. He married an American woman. They both moved to Beijing. They adopted two Chinese daughters. I feel as though my son Jason has completed a part of my life that I never did.”
00:50:13:00
For the first time since the communist revolution, there are once again foreigners moving back into the building. A couple recently bought and renovated part of what was Linda Tan’s penthouse apartment for half a million dollars.
00:50:31:00
“In our minds, the Cosmopolitan Apartments still belongs to our family, the Tan family.”
00:50:37:00 {MUSIC}
00:50:40:00
Linda now lives in Vancouver with her husband where they moved before the Chinese takeover of Hong Kong.
They visit their daughter in Hong Kong twice a year but Linda prefers not to return too often to mainland China.
00:50:56:00 {MUSIC}
00:50:59:00
The Tan family were never compensated for the loss of Building 173.
00:51:04:00 {MUSIC}
00:51:12:00
Building 173 is stolen property. It has also been the scene of a murder and a target for thugs.
But this volume of human history is still being written.
Three quarters of a century from now, the children of Building 173 will have very different stories to tell.
00:51:32:00 {MUSIC}
00:51:37:00 {CREDITS MUSIC}
00:52:31:00 {END}
THE END