Lilie Nie interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 17th December 2008

0:09:07 Born in Shenyang in 1954; father was a journalist on 'People's Daily' and mother researcher on Japan; she followed my father to Beijing and joined the research institute in 1964; elementary school was in Shenyang, then in Beijing near to my house; in 1966 when the Cultural Revolution started my education almost stopped although I entered junior high school; at fifteen I went to work in a factory and stayed there until I was twenty-three; then I entered People's University of China; after the Great Leap Forward the Three-years Natural Disaster (actually, a shortage of food which was caused by the Government’s policy) happened when I was five or six; because my father worked in the Provincial Government at that time and had a reasonable position, my family had enough to eat, but I remember seeing neighbours whose bodies were swollen from lack of food; Liaoning might have been less severely affected than other parts of China as the soil is good and there are plenty of grain; much depended on whether the cadre of a province did what the Party wanted and gave a lot of the grain to the central Party; it is said that in Sichuan at that time maybe 10,000,000 people died because the cadre wanted to follow Mao Tse-Tung and took lots of food from the peasants; in Liaoning, the cadre did not do that to any great extent and protected the people; I think Mao knew what was happening; in 1959 in the famous Lushan meeting Peng Dehuai criticised Mao, but Mao attacked him, exiled him to the countryside and denied him any occupation; Mao never forgave any who criticized him at that time

5:37:20 During the Cultural Revolution I was initially an elementary school student so not in the Red Guard; even in the elementary school we read the 'Red Book' (The Chairman Mao Analects); at that time I was in the fifth class; the sixth class were our leaders and we followed them; they criticised our teachers and cut the hair off the woman President of our school; I remember a friend, a sixth year girl, who cut off her hair; I can't remember feeling anything at that time but felt it was part of the revolution and was the correct thing to do; Mao Tse-Tung had indicated that we should follow him and support the revolution; at that time all of us loved him; every day we sang the songs of praise to him and danced, and it was heartfelt; until almost the end of the Cultural Revolution I was a worker in Beijing; my parents had been sent to the countryside but then returned to Beijing; every weekend I would go to see them but neither had a job after coming back; they used to meet with old friends and all of them would criticise the Gang of Four, and have some complaints about Mao Tse-Tung; I could feel a tension in my factory; I couldn't say he was false but I did have doubts about him; looking back now I think it a very complicated problem; as an individual he had great ability, a poet of genius and in some of his ideas; he was able to unify all sorts of people in fighting the Japanese; the creation of the new China was a great achievement; thereafter he felt of himself as the Emperor and concentrated all the rights into his own hands; this kind of thinking is detrimental to China even now

11:28:02 I worked in a computer factory from 1970; in 1978, I went to the People's University of China in Beijing to read philosophy; it was very hard for me because I had only five years of education before the Cultural Revolution; at the beginning I had to remember so many abstract concepts with which to think; I trained my memory at that time; I found the second and third years boring; before I entered university I had so many questions about Chinese society and wanted to know why the Cultural Revolution had happened, why we had so many social problems, and as an individual why my fate was at the mercy of society; the philosophy I learnt could answer none of my questions; we still learnt that socialism was absolutely right and capitalism absolutely wrong; this did not conform to the reality I was seeing so I decided to change my subject; in my third year I heard that sociology courses would start again in China and I was interested in it; I tried to find some books and was attracted to social research; after graduating from the People's University of China I started to do a post-graduate degree in sociology; this was a three year course leading to a Master's degree and I did it at Peking University

16:08:13 Before I entered Peking university I had heard of Fei Xiaotong; I first saw him when he lectured us on methodology and of sociological research; he was not so methodical in teaching us, but he was a warm person; when you talked with him he always listened carefully and gave thoughtful responses; he was a kindly old man in his seventies by then; he had been sent to the countryside in Hubei Province for three years, 1969-1972, but apart from that he had continued in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution cleaning toilets; as a famous Rightist, he and his group were expected to go and learn from soldiers and peasants as well; although he didn't give me any advice beforehand, I decided to do similar research to his on factories in the countryside; I went to Jiangsu Province to do research and stayed there for three months in 1984; during that time Professor Fei came to Jiangsu with some senior students, and they asked me to report on my research to Professor Fei; he was very interested in my work and was persuaded by the senior students to take me as his student and he agreed; from a worldwide perspective I think he was very important as he was one of the first generation of anthropologists in China and acted as a bridge between the Eastern and Western countries in the academic world; he introduced Chinese peasant life to Western society; he had his limitations but these were mainly due to the Chinese social system; I read an interview of him done by Burton Pasternak at New York University in which he described what it had been like to be labelled a Rightist; I felt very sad after reading this as it showed the fate of a Chinese intellectual; he loved new China, the Communist Party, and the people, and couldn't understand how they could treat him like this; he wondered whether he was wrong, or all the society; decided it must be him but couldn't see in which part he had been wrong; he decided to study Marx and Engels, especially the Marxist view of history; feel he was not wrong and that if you try to purge your mind you will lose your soul; feel that the experience of exclusion from social life for about twenty years, may have had a big influence on his way of thinking, although he retained his warm personality; he kept silent if he sensed danger, and was not prepared to sacrifice himself, though some intellectuals chose to fight or committed suicide

26:21:18 After doing a Master's Professor Fei advised me to go to Japan; he said that there were not enough teachers with the knowledge to teach sociology or anthropology in China at that time; he sent his students all round the world, firstly to America, then Britain, France and Australia; I was the first that he sent to Japan to Professor Nakane; I was keen to see another society so I agreed; I studied anthropology under Professor Chie Nakane; I had learnt Japanese as a foreign language from my first year at university so I knew some language before I went there; my father and mother came from Liaoning, old Manchuria, and my grandfather had been killed by the Japanese, but they didn't talk about this within the family; by the 1970's there was a strong feeling that China and Japan should cooperate; in 1972 they established diplomatic relations; in my factory at the time there was a big meeting where we heard Chou En-lai's speech on why we should give up our rights to claim compensation from Japan and become friends; because of this I had no negative feelings about Japan when I went there

29:46:14 Before I went to Japan, my father, as a journalist, had been to Japan, and had lived there for two years 1976-1978; I knew a lot about Japan through him; I was aware that it was more developed than China so was not surprised; at that time people in China watched Japanese TV dramas; what did surprise me was that Japan could keep so many of its traditions; I am not so familiar with Shanghai, but I had the feeling of a 1930's, 1940's Shanghai atmosphere; for the first year there Professor Nakane was my supervisor for a PhD; my first impression of her was her elegance and seriousness; I always felt the strain of being with her and not wanting to let myself down in front of her; I tried to work very hard and to impress her; after my first year Professor Ito Abiko became my supervisor who was much easier to get on with; he allowed me to research on my own and was very supportive; after the first year I kept in contact with Professor Nakane and continued to visit or send her flowers on her birthday for some years; Professor Fei also visited Japan several times and I accompanied him to meet with her; I like her work; even now I still use her work as a textbook in my university; last year I organised an open lecture and introduced her work to the ordinary citizen

37:10:06 My PhD was on Liaoning Province on the theme of kinship; I did my fieldwork in a village of about nine-hundred people, almost all of whom were Liu, so just one lineage; I lived there almost a year; Chinese kinship is very different from Japanese; China's is patrilineal and has a rigid principle, emphasising the same blood and bone; in Japan there is no rigid principle and the emphasis is on the 'ie', the home not descent; also Chinese lineages formed the village and they lived together; in Japan the kinship group is formed by different descent and is based on place; as far as gender relations are concerned, on the surface they are similar but different at the fundamental level; in local society from the Edo period women were very free and also had sexual freedom with men before marriage; in China, women had little freedom and had no sexual freedom with men; honour is very important, and even now after the socialist period it is being revived; young women are no longer wanting fame for themselves but just to marry successful men

42:54:05 I started my recent research by accident; I was asked by Japanese lawyers to help with their research on an infected area in Hunan Province, Changde Prefecture; it was an area where disease agents had been dropped by the Japanese during World War II; on 4th November 1941, a single Japanese aircraft flew over the town of Changde and dropped 36kg grains which were combined with plague-infected fleas, the first patient appeared eleven days after, then plague spread to the countryside very quickly; over four hundred villages were infected at that time and the plague continued until 1945 in that area; 

[I went to there do this research from 1998 till 2006, interviewed the victims and collected the historical materials in the local Archives. The approach of the research mainly is, to record and represent the damage caused by germ warfare based on the living memory and oral history of the individuals, to understand the war damage in the social context, and to analyze the mechanism of indirect destruction caused by the war.]

according to Chinese researchers, the Japanese carried out this biological warfare over ten provinces in China; they had started this research from 1932 and had established an immunology department in the Army College in Tokyo; after that they established more units in Manchuria, Beijing, Guangdong and Singapore, which had research and manufacturing sections; they investigated the tolerance of the fleas and also did human experimentation on Chinese, Koreans, Russians and Mongolians; according to historians over three thousand people were sent to these experimental centres; I know an old soldier who was in the manufacturing section of one of these units; his name is Shinozuka; he went to China several times to apologize and the Chinese respect him very much for that; I have been attacked on some right-wing web sites in Japan for the work I am doing but I am not worried by that

50:03:21 Now I am wanting to work on totalitarianism in Chinese society; want to look at the 'hero' phenomenon as from the beginning the Chinese Revolution had this kind of hero spirit; the Red Army was few in number but they found very strongly against the Kuomintang; as a political control system, the Chinese Communist Party also established the hero-person model for people to learn from; also Professor Fei went to the army to learn; the theme is the same; I experienced the use of the hero-model from my nursery school; we always tried to learn from our heroes

52:47:00 From Tokyo Woman’s Christian University, for eight months have been at Clare Hall, Cambridge, and attached to the Department of Social Anthropology; my aim has been to enjoy being in a Western society and have explored museums, churches and castles etc.; life is very different and I have been able to talk with many others in Clare Hall who have come here from abroad; I have very much enjoyed being here; also an important task has been to practice my English, both spoken and written