“With Machine Guns Pinning You Down on Three Sides, You’re Allowed to Head off in Only One Direction”

According to The Encyclopedia of Human Behavior, brainwashing is defined as “a set of intensified propaganda techniques implemented under the circumstances of exerting pressure on someone.” Here, “exerting pressure” is a totally essential precondition. Just as I explained in Section 2.8, were it not for all sorts of tangible and intangible external pressure coming from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), it would have been impossible for a large-scale thought-remolding campaign to have occurred.

During the political campaign to “peacefully remold industry and commerce,” the CCP put forward the following slogan: “With machine guns pinning you down on three sides, you’re allowed to head off in only one direction.” In fact, the CCP adopted the same kind of strategy in their campaign to remold the thought of the intelligentsia. (In Section 2.4-2.6, I have already explained the various types of pressure wielded by the CCP.) The intelligentsia en masse discovered that unless they accepted the CCP's ideology and remolded themselves accordingly, they would have no other way out of their quandary. This situation differed substantially from what happened during a change of the ruling imperial dynasty in Chinese history. In the case of a dynastic change, people merely needed to shift their loyalty to a new political regime, that is, to the new dynasty. Other than that, they could pretty much continue to do what they had already been doing in the other aspects of their life. In contrast, the CCP revolution was a huge, earth-shaking change. In order to adapt yourself to the New Era, you had to make a full-scale adjustment. Seen from this perspective, the reason most of the intelligentsia expressed a willingness to accept thought remolding in the early 1950s was not so much their having been inspired by the “new truth” as their merely having sensed society's cataclysmic change and exerted themselves mightily to adjust to this sort of change.

A thin volume published in Beijing in April 1950, How My Thought Has Been Transformed [Wode sixiang shi zenyang zhuanbian guolaide], collected the essays written by a group of well-known figures within the intelligentsia, including Pei Wenzhong, Zhang Zhizhong, Luo Changpei, Xiao Qian, Li Ziying, Feng Youlan and Xie Fengwo.