The Class of '77: How My Classmates Changed China

By Jaime FlorCruz

Jaime FlorCruz was a student leader in the Philippines when he arrived in 1971 to take a look at Mao's "New China". On the same day, the Marcos government declared a state of emergency and Jaime was stuck - if he returned he could be jailed, so he stayed in China, and ended up being one of the famous Class of '77, the first intake of students in

• Language: English
• Publisher: Earnshaw Books Ltd
• Release date: Jul 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9789888769490

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Advance Praise for

Class of ‘77

The Peking University classmates of Jaime FlorCruz gave him a front-row seat in the tumultous political arena of China’s post-Mao era. The Class of ’77 is unique for FlorCruz’s memorable first-hand accounts of knowing some of China’s movers and shakers in their youth.

—Melinda Liu, Newsweek China correspondent

Jaime FlorCruz captures the flavor and drama of his own experience in this fascinating land, the look and feel of countryside and campus, and the whole crazy, compelling sweep of China’s recent history.

—Donald Morrison, former TIME International Editor

Just after setting foot in China, Jaime FlorCruz realized his life was about to change. It was 1971 and the Cultural Revolution was roaring through the land, but Jaime embraced his new homeland and went on to serve as China bureau chief for TIME and CNN. And he was always generous with his information – Mao’s wife killed herself ? Yesterday, Jaime said. Yet another FlorCruz scoop. This memoir tells us how he did it.

—Ed Gargan, former New York Times correspondent and author of China’s Fate

Only Jaime FlorCruz could write this sweeping memoir: a radical student exiled in Maoist China during the Cultural Revolution, his heart broken by not one but two Chinese lasses, eventually heads CNN’s Beijing bureau.

—Jan Wong, author of Red China Blues

Having served as president of the Foreign Correspondents Club of China, the Beijing bureau chief of TIME magazine and of CNN, Jimi has long been an inspiration to many young China-based foreign correspondents. He has spent more than four decades in China and understands the country inside out, and this book masterfully tells the story of how he came to grips with the dragon.

—Benjamin Lim, The Straits Times, Global Affairs Correspondent

The Class of ‘77

By Jaime A. FlorCruz

ISBN-13: 978-988-8769-49-0

© 2022 Jaime A. FlorCruz

HISTORY / Asia / China

EB147

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in material form, by any means, whether graphic, electronic, mechanical or other, including photocopying or information storage, in whole or in part. May not be used to prepare other publications without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information contact [e-mail]

Published by Earnshaw Books Ltd. (Hong Kong)

To my father Cenon, who encouraged me to seek education wherever the search took me.

To my mother Lourdes, who reluctantly woke me up to catch my flight to China, not knowing we wouldn’t see each other again for many years.

To my wife Ana, son Joseph and daughter Michelle, who accompanied me on my remarkable China journey.

To my three granddaughters Jayden, Jazelle and Jolie, children of Janet Correa and Joseph, who inspired me to finish this book so that they may know more about their Lolo Jaime.

Prologue

In 1971, I journeyed into the People’s Republic of China on what was supposed to be a three-week study tour. I was a student activist in the Philippines and knew little about China. I never imagined it would be another twelve years until I was able to go home again to the Philippines or that I would spend most of my life in Communist China.

I went when Chairman Mao was in power, and the tumultuous Cultural Revolution was still in progress. Over the next fifty years, I had a ring-side seat to the most remarkable economic and social transformation in human history. I watched the rise of China under Deng Xiaoping and his successors from the ashes of the Cultural Revolution, and witnessed its transformation from one of the poorest, most isolated countries in the world to a renascent global power.

I started my journey as a student and ended as head of TIME Magazine and of CNN in China. But what really transformed my life was being part of Peking University’s rightfully famous Class of ’77.

This is my story—and our story. This is the story of the Class of ’77.

1

Through The Gate

On a sunny, nippy day in October 1977, I walked into the West Gate of Peking University with much anticipation. The palace-style portal, painted in vermillion, evokes the university’s long and storied past. A big plaque hangs in the middle of the gate with the name of the university carved in four Chinese characters, Bei Jing Da Xue—Peking University—in the calligraphy of Chairman Mao. I was there to enroll as a freshman in the Class of 1977.

I proceeded to look for the Foreign Students Office, my first stop to register. I crossed a small stone bridge over a moat dotted by lotus plants. Cicadas were chirping, frogs croaking. Yellow leaves blown off by the brisk autumn wind covered the sidewalks of the narrow road. A stone statue of Chairman Mao towered in front of quaint old buildings painted in red and white and topped with pagoda-style roofs. Further down, behind the traditional-style buildings, was the charming Weiming Lake.

Days earlier, I made a special trip to the Youyi (Friendship) Photo Studio, near Tiananmen Square, to get ID photos taken, then proceeded to the Capital Hospital for a medical checkup. I also made photocopies of my diploma and transcripts from the Beijing Languages Institute, where I had recently completed a three-year course in Chinese language and translation. Peking University required all of them for enrollment.

Cai Huosheng, a stocky fifty-something staff officer of the Foreign Students Office, greeted me at the door.

You’re the only student we are enrolling from the Philippines this year, he said, as I handed him the required documents. Welcome. Welcome.

He volunteered to show me around for orientation. We walk past the Library and a classroom building, where scores of students are on a break. Most wore blue and green Mao jackets and baggy pants. They were lined up on the sidewalk doing calisthenics in synch with the staccato music blaring from the university’s PA system. It was the same prescribed group exercise that we used to do in the Beijing Languages Institute. I noted that the students were mostly older, looking to be in their late twenties and early thirties. Some wore PLA military uniforms.

"They are the gong-nong-bing students, Teacher Cai explained, referring to the Worker-Peasant-Soldier college students on campus. They may be the last batch of that cohort."

When the Cultural Revolution started in 1966, all universities were closed, and the gaokao, the national college entrance exam started in 1952, was abruptly scuttled. Some schools, like Peking University, reopened in 1970, but only to enrollees recommended by their work units—the people’s communes, factories and the military—based on their work attitude and political correctness. Based on this recommendation system, those who had bad family background need not apply. Tests, deemed elitist, were taboo.

By the summer of 1977, about a year after Mao’s death, the news came that the gaokao examination for college entry would resume. Because there was little time to prepare for the first nationwide college entrance exam since 1965, the planned tests were moved back to November and December 1977. That meant my Class of 1977 cohorts would not be able to enroll until Spring 1978, after they had passed the gaokao.

Meantime, you may get started by taking up core subjects with the Worker-Peasant-Soldier class, Cai advised.

The next day, I was back in Peking University, carrying my hardcase luggage containing all my possessions. This time, I walked into the South Gate, close to Building 26, the three-story dormitory building reserved for male foreign students. The grey-colored brick structure would be my home for the next four years.

Teacher Cai met me there and led me to Room 346. I was assigned to stay in this ten-square-meter room furnished with two wooden beds, a closet as well as a pair of worktables and chairs. I was also given a wash basin, a towel, and a thermos bottle.

The communal washroom and toilet are right next door, Teacher Cai said. I felt like an army recruit receiving the standard issues. You will share this room with a Chinese student who is also enrolled in the history department. He can help you with class work.

Meantime, I awaited the arrival of my Class of 1977 cohorts with keen anticipation.

Cai handed me my student pin and ID card. The red plastic cover was embossed in gold with the four characters in Mao’s calligraphy for Peking University. It identified me as Ji Mi (literally, Lucky Rice), a student from the Philippines in the history department. It was issued on October 8, 1977 by the Peking University Revolutionary Committee.

I felt a sense of triumph. For years, I had wanted to get into Peking University. Founded in 1898 as the first national university in China’s modern history, it is also known as the Harvard of China. It enjoys an excellent reputation as an institution of higher education and research. Finally, it was happening, and I would be a part of The Class of 1977.

Deng Xiaoping, purged by Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution and rehabilitated as Vice Premier in 1977, had pushed to restore the college entrance exam. Many in the leadership supported the idea, but others had qualms.

China in 1977 was in a state of flux. On September 9, 1976, Chairman Mao passed away at age 84. Weeks later, the radical faction of the Gang of Four, led by his widow Jiang Qing, were arrested by Deng Xiaoping’s loyalists in the Communist Party and the military. Deng, whom Mao had vilified and purged from top posts, made a political comeback, promising massive changes. What was in store after Mao? No one knew for sure.

There was elation mixed with jitters. Days after the news of the Gang of Four’s downfall spread in the Chinese capital, many of my Chinese friends gathered with family and friends to share celebratory meals. Some set off fireworks, others opened bottles of Er Guo Tou, a cheap liquor made of sorghum, to cheer the end of the Maoist era.

There were early signs that things were starting to look up. There was a significant increase in the variety of food available, although truckloads of cabbage—staples for Beijing residents through winter—were still to be seen everywhere. In a few places in central Beijing, propaganda billboards and signages, mostly hortatory quotations from Mao, the Great Helmsman, had been quietly pulled down or replaced. Still, a huge concrete billboard, painted in bold Chinese characters, stood at the corner of the National Art Museum: Educated youth must go down the countryside to get reeducation from the poor and lower middle peasants.

Year 1977 was a cathartic year of change. Once a stagnant country, China in that year began to percolate with pent-up energy and unfulfilled ambitions. The 1977 gaokao was hugely symbolic of that historic turnaround. That generation of exam-takers, hungry for knowledge and seeking a better life, would soon ignite decades of growth, turmoil and reform. Most entrants were young people whose schooling had been disrupted by the Cultural Revolution. Many had endured hardships in factories or in the countryside. Some were languishing in boring clerical jobs in the bureaucracy. That year, 5.7 million people sat through days of competitive exams. Only 4.8 per cent of them passed. That was the first generation of college students in twelve years who were admitted based on academic merit. It was the first time that they were given the chance—for some, the last chance—to change their destiny. Most were already in their twenties, or even thirties. Some already had children. Years later, thanks to their grit, intellect and resilience, many of this generation joined the elite in politics, education, military, business, art and culture. They took up the responsibility to help China avoid dystopia and instead enter a period of rejuvenation.

They became known as the Class of ’77.

In the four years I spent studying at Peking University, I met many outstanding members of this cohort. They eventually became shock-troops of Deng Xiaoping’s reform and pioneers of China’s modernization drive and would form the backbone of China’s professional contingent in different walks of life. Some would work within the system; others would work to overturn the system. If I had been in the wrong place at the wrong time on August 21, 1971, this time I was in the right place at the right time, seated in the front-row witnessing a superpower’s awakening and rise.

Our schoolmates at Peking University followed many different trajectories. My classmate Bo Xilai, like me a history major, would become a political superstar touting a Maoist revival, if only in spirit, having led one large city and a huge province to economic development success. Wang Juntao, an enfant terrible of the Physics department, was twenty-two years old at the start of classes, one of the youngest enrollees and a whiz at nuclear science. But his passion proved to be politics, and he evolved quickly into an evangelist of democracy. Also in Bo’s and Wang’s batch at the university was Li Keqiang, later to become China’s premier, the second-most powerful person in the country, at least in name. Bo would soar incredibly high and then suffer a scandalous collapse. Li remained in power by maintaining, for the most part, a colorless public persona as he imposed technocratic discipline on the country. And Wang ended up in jail, and then exile in the United States. Each was an example of what Wang declared was our school’s spirit: Conquer or die.

More than school spirit, there was an energizing force behind the particular class that Wang, Bo, Li and I belonged—the Peking University Class of 1977. The stories of Wang, and Bo, and Li are bound up in the saga of the university and of the fate of China itself and beyond. This shared mission—to take part in China’s renewed quest to modernize—is key to understanding Li Keqiang and his path to power. It explains the impetus behind Bo Xilai’s spectacular rise and fall. It is why Wang Juntao lives in exile in the United States. It is how a man with the surname FlorCruz ended up as one of the most visible foreign journalists operating in China.

But to understand the Class of ’77, one also has to know what came to an end the year before. In 1976, China was still staggering from the cataclysm of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which Mao Zedong unleashed in August 1966. On one level, it was Mao’s attempt to convert people’s feudal or bourgeois thinking into a new, proletarian mindset. But its real purpose was to purge from the Communist Party leadership all the so-called capitalist roaders and revisionists— that is, those who opposed Mao’s authority and policies. Millions of teenage Red Guards ravaged the country, following Mao’s admonition to bombard the headquarters and root out class enemies. They targeted party officials, government bureaucrats and intellectuals. They inflicted detention, torture and death on millions of innocents. Meanwhile, Mao’s radical ideologues instructed ordinary Chinese to study a pocket-size red book, the Quotations from Chairman Mao, which they memorized and recited like an all-purpose mantra. Defense minister Lin Biao, Mao’s designated successor, compared the Little Red Book, to a spiritual atom-bomb.

The tumultuous campaign ripped apart the fabric of Chinese society and tradition. A country that honored elders for their instruction and the past for its wisdom was torn asunder by the Red Guards, the youthful bands of marauders empowered to inflict the latest ideological innovation concocted by Mao, founder of the People’s Republic who ruled the realm like an infallible god-king. At its hysterical peak, the Cultural Revolution turned into a nationwide witch-hunt of class enemies. Children turned on parents; friend on friend; neighbor on neighbor—all in the name of Maoist rectitude, all to prove that the accuser was Redder than Thou.

The result was close to self-destruction. As radical Red Guards rampaged across the country, schools, universities and research centers closed down. Farmers and workers were swamped with incessant political and ideological campaigns at the expense of production. The economy teetered on the brink of collapse. Living standards fell. Many Chinese lost their lives in factional fighting, political persecution, famine and starvation.

By the summer of 1971, China was just beginning to recover from the chaos that the Cultural Revolution created. Chairman Mao, desperate to pull back from anarchy, had dispatched People’s Liberation Army officers to take control of local governments, factories, schools and farms. He reined in the Red Guards by sending them to farms and factories for reeducation through labor. He allowed the radical phase of Cultural Revolution to peter out. Meanwhile, Zhou Enlai, Mao’s primus inter pares who served as China’s premier running the government, started the long, slow process of putting the house back in order. He called back some de-frocked scholars, scientists, technocrats and cadres from the reform-through-labor farms to resume work. He re-opened some schools and universities. He resumed unofficial talks with the United States and other Western countries.

The first targets of the mob had been the Chairman’s political rivals, who were publicly humiliated, assaulted and, sometimes, killed or forced to commit suicide. But very quickly, every level of Chinese society was scoured for enemies of Mao Zedong’s totalitarian philosophy. The universities were shut down or became showcases of mind-numbing propaganda and political sloganeering. Vast numbers of China’s best and brightest were sent into internal exile in the countryside, compelled to learn from a peasantry that was extolled for its very lack of urbanity. Already poor, China had become an enormous prison for its own people, an ever more impoverished, economic dead zone, isolated from the rest of humanity, just as North Korea is today, but, with nearly a quarter of the world’s population at the time, entirely more immense.

By 1976, ordinary people were longing for a final end of the Maoist madness. And the year promised—at least to the superstitious—to be portentous. It was the Chinese Lunar Year of the Fire Dragon, which comes once every six decades. The dragon, already the symbol of the country’s imperial past, combined with the unpredictable element of fire to become an augury of tumult. Past years of the fire dragon had seen Chinese politics transformed. Would the same happen in 1976? In fact, the country would literally tremble.

In 1976, I was closing in on the fifth anniversary of an involuntary stay in the People’s Republic, prevented by politics and bureaucracy from returning to my homeland, the Philippines. My aim, as the Chinese say, was to turn a bad thing into a good thing, transform adversity into opportunity. I seemed to be doing well on the turnaround process. By mid-July, I had completed a three-year course in Mandarin and translation at the Beijing Languages Institute. While I waited to know what my next career move will be, the government, which closely watched the movements of all foreigners as well as citizens, moved me from the school’s dormitory to the Peace Hotel on Goldfish Lane, a building that had once been the residence of a prince from the last imperial dynasty. In the labyrinth of chambers where nobles once lived, I was assigned a single room just off the main courtyard.

There was little palatial about the accommodation, however, despite the building’s pedigree and its proximity to the Forbidden City, the extravagant fortress that was once the heart of the empire. The walls of the Peace Hotel were brick plastered over with a mud-and-hay mixture and a coat of grayish paint. A decade of the Cultural Revolution had ensured that almost everything was drab and utilitarian. But the hotel was, however, more comfortable than the communal facilities I had shared with other foreigners at the Language Institute’s dormitory. My new lodgings had a large writing

Reviews for The Class of '77

[J · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

a great memoir of a top 中国通, now the philippine ambassador to china. a must read for all china-watcher and observer.