HONG KONG, July 28, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – Exiled to the Gobi Desert at the age
of 15, Weijian Shan’s days were marked by gnawing hunger and back-breaking
forced labour. But his sense of hope was kept alive by an unlikely source —
insecticide manuals.
Now one of Asia’s top financiers and the head of Hong Kong-based private
equity firm PAG, Shan told AFP that reading — virtually anything he could
get his hands on — effectively saved his life, providing “an escape” from
the harsh realities of Mao Zedong’s oppressive regime.
“I feel like I have lived 5,000 years,” Shan said, with his recently
published memoir, “Out of the Gobi”, recounting a life that mirrors China’s
shape-shifting trajectory and offers lessons, he hopes, for young pro-
democracy protesters in Hong Kong.
“We were all deprived of a formal education for 10 years,” he said,
referring to China’s “Lost Generation” — young men and women who were
banished to Inner Mongolia in 1969 and expected to transform an arid
landscape into fertile fields.
“I didn’t completely give up,” he said. “I read whatever I could —
sometimes insecticide manuals, sometimes dictionaries.”
Yanked out of school in Beijing at the age of 12 during the Cultural
Revolution, Shan, like millions of youth, was gripped by revolutionary
fervour.
They were promised helicopters, plenty of food and special uniforms, and
urged to leave home and “receive re-education” from the peasantry.
The helicopters never materialised, food and water were always in short
supply, and the sickles and shovels deployed by Shan and others did little to
improve harvests, which fared worse each year.
Shan also baked bricks, cut reeds and dug canals — working for 31 hours
straight on one occasion only to discover that his labour was futile because
the waterway’s course had been miscalculated.
His rudimentary training as a “barefoot doctor” proved more useful — he
saved the life of a seriously ill child and diagnosed his own insomnia as a
symptom of malnutrition.
Books were forbidden but Shan devoured everything from chemistry textbooks
to medical manuals in secret, and got into trouble for reading Karl Marx’s
“Civil War in France” because his company commander thought it was a novel.
– US journey –
His memoir is unflinching about the toll on his peers, including one whose
life fell into ruin following his conviction for “counter-revolutionary
crimes”.
And they were not the only ones who suffered, he said, pointing to the
violence that gripped China in the 1960s and 1970s and destroyed its
institutions.
In a particularly horrifying vignette that he insists was not an isolated
case, he describes witnessing a group of schoolgirls beating an elderly
teacher to death with leather belts for being a “class enemy”.
“We were told repeatedly to ‘take root in the Gobi’, to live there for the
rest of our lives, so there was no hope,” he said.
But following Mao’s edict to reopen universities, Shan was allowed to
return to Beijing to attend college and study English. He had spent six years
in the Gobi.
Then life took a stunning turn — as ties between Beijing and Washington
eased, Shan became one of the first students sent by Communist China to the
United States.
He went on to finish a doctorate, studying economics under future Federal
Reserve chief Janet Yellen, who in a foreword to his memoir, recounts her
amazement when she realised that Shan had taught himself “all the math he
knew… by candlelight”.
– ‘Open the door’ –
Now 65, Shan believes his life holds lessons for young people,
particularly in his adopted home of Hong Kong, where fears about Beijing’s
increasing control over the city have prompted huge protests and violent
clashes with police.
“When I went to the US, China’s door had opened just a crack… but (as
years passed) it opened further,” he said.
“Once the door opens, it opens wider and wider,” he said, adding that the
all-or-nothing approach adopted by Hong Kongers demanding universal suffrage
risked closing off any possibility of compromise and change.
“Why not start with something… so the door is opened?”
Having lived through a cataclysmic era in China, he said, “what is
important for my generation is not to have history repeated”.
With a Chinese translation underway, people in the mainland will soon be
able to read his story, possibly with some portions censored to manage
“sensitivities”, he said.
But some enterprising Chinese readers have already got their hands on
pirated editions, he said.
He added: “If people want to read my book — pirated or not — I don’t
mind. If you don’t take lessons from the past, there is a risk of repeating
history.”