"Oh no," they said.

"The weather could not have been better and there was plenty of grain in the fields. But that man' they pointed to a cringing forty-year-old 'ordered the men away to make steel, and half the harvest was lost in the fields. But he told us: no matter, we were in the paradise of Communism now and did not have to worry about food.

Before, we had always had to control our stomachs, but then we ate our fill in the commune canteen; we threw away the leftovers; we even fed the pigs with precious rice.

Then the canteen had no more food, but he placed guards outside the store. The rest of the grain was to be shipped to Peking and Shanghai there were foreigners there."

Bit by bit, the full picture came out. The cringing man had been the leader of the production team during the Great Leap. He and his cronies had smashed the peasants' woks and stoves so they could not cook at home, and so the woks could be fed into the furnaces. He had reported vastly exaggerated harvests, with the result that the taxes were so high they took every morsel of grain the peasants had left. The villagers had died in scores. After the famine, he was blamed for all the wrongs in the village. The commune allowed the villagers to vote him out of office, and labeled him a 'class enemy."

Like most class enemies, he was not put in prison but kept 'under surveillance' by his fellow villagers. This was Mao's way: to keep 'enemy' figures among the people so they always had someone visible and at hand to hate. Whenever a new campaign came along, this man would be one of the 'usual suspects' to be rounded up and attacked afresh. He was always assigned the hardest jobs, and was allocated only seven work points a day, three fewer than most of the other men. I never saw anyone talking to him. Several times I spotted village children throwing stones at his sons.

The peasants thanked Chairman Mao for punishing him. No one questioned his guilt, or the degree of his responsibility. I sought him out, on my own, and asked him his story.

He seemed pathetically grateful to be asked.

"I was carrying out orders," he kept saying.

"I had to carry out orders… Then he sighed: "Of course, I didn't want to lose my post. Somebody else would have taken my place.

Then what would have happened to me and my kids? We probably would have died of hunger. A production team leader is small, but at least he can die after everyone else in the village."

His words and the peasants' stories shook me to the core. It was the first time I had come across the ugly side of Communist China before the Cultural Revolution. The picture was vastly different from the rosy official version.

In the hills and fields of Deyang my doubts about the Communist regime deepened.

I have sometimes wondered whether Mao knew what he was doing putting the sheltered urban youth of China in touch with reality. But then he was confident that much of the population would not be able to make rational deductions with the fragmentary information available to them.

Indeed, at the age of eighteen I was still only capable of vague doubts, not explicit analysis of the regime. No matter how much I hated the Cultural Revolution, to doubt Mao still did not enter my mind.

In Deyang, as in Ningnan, few peasants could read the simplest article in a newspaper or write a rudimentary letter. Many could not even write their own name. The Communists' early drive to tackle illiteracy had been pushed aside by incessant witch-hunts. There had once been an elementary school in the village, subsidized by the commune, but at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution the children abused the teacher to their hearts' content.

They paraded him around the village with heavy cast-iron woks piled up on his head and his face blackened with soot. Once they almost fractured his skull. Since then, no one could be persuaded to teach.

Most peasants did not miss the school.

"What's the point?" they would say.

"You pay fees and read for years, and in the end you are still a peasant, earning your food with your sweat. You don't get a grain of rice more for being able to read books. Why waste time and money?

Might as well start earning your work points right away."

The virtual absence of any chance of a better future and the near total immobility for anyone born a peasant took the incentive out of the pursuit of knowledge. Children of school age would stay at home to help their families with their work or look after younger brothers and sisters. They would be out in the fields when they were barely in their teens. As for girls, the peasants considered it a complete waste of time for them to go to school.

"They get married and belong to other people. It's like pouring water on the ground."

The Cultural Revolution was trumpeted as having brought education to the peasants through 'evening classes." One day my production team announced it was starting evening classes and asked Nana and me to be the teachers. I was delighted. However, as soon as the first 'class' began, I realized that this was no education.

The classes invariably started with Nana and me being asked by the production team leader to read out articles by Mao or other items from the People's Daily. Then he would make an hour-long speech consisting of all the latest political jargon strung together in undigested and largly unintelligible hunks. Now and then he would give special orders, all solemnly delivered in the name of Mao.

"Chairman Mao says we must eat two meals of rice porridge and only one meal of solid rice a day."

"Chairman Mao says we mustn't waste sweet potatoes on pigs."

After a hard day's work in the fields, the peasants' minds were on their household chores. Their evenings were valuable to them, but no one dared to skip the 'classes." They just sat there, and eventually dozed off. I was not sorry, to see this form of 'education," designed to stupefy rather than enlighten, gradually wither away.

Without education, the peasants' world was painfully narrow. Their conversations usually centered on minute details of daily living. One woman would spend a whole morning complaining that her sister-in-law had used ten bundles of feather fuel for cooking breakfast when she could have made do with nine (fuel, like everything else, was pooled). Another would grumble for hours that her mother-in-law put too many sweet potatoes in the rice (rice being more precious and desirable than sweet potatoes).

I knew their restricted horizon was not their fault, but nonetheless I found their conversations unbearable.

One unfailing topic of gossip was, of course, sex. A twenty-year-old woman called Mei from the Deyang county town had been assigned to the village next to mine.

She had allegedly slept with a lot of city youths as well as peasants, and every now and then in the fields someone would come up with a lewd story about her. It was rumored that she was pregnant, and had been binding her waist to hide it. In an effort to prove that she was not carrying a 'bastard," Mei deliberately did all the things a pregnant woman was not supposed to do, like carrying heavy loads.

Eventually a dead baby was discovered in the bushes next to a stream in her village. People said it was hers. Nobody knew whether it had been born dead. Her production team leader ordered a hole dug and buried the baby. And that was that, apart from the gossip, which became even more virulent.

The whole story appalled me, but there were other shocks. One of my neighbors had four daughters four dark-skinned, round-eyed beauties. But the villagers did not think they were pretty. Too dark, they said. Pale skin was the main criterion for beauty in much of the Chinese countryside. When it was time for the eldest daughter to get married, the father decided to look for a son-in-law who would come and live in their house. That way, he would not only keep his daughter's work points, but would also get an extra pair of hands. Normally, women married into men's families, and it was considered a great humiliation for a man to marry into a woman's family. But our neighbor eventually found a young man from a very poor mountain area who was desperate to get out and could never do so except through marriage. The young man thus had a very low status. I often heard his father-in-law shouting abuse at him at the top of his voice. To torment the young man, he made his daughter sleep alone when the whim took him. She did not dare to refuse because 'filial piety," which was deep-rooted in Confucian ethics, enjoined that children must obey their parents and because she must not be seen as being keen to sleep with a man, even her husband: for a woman to enjoy sex was considered shameful. I was awakened one morning by a commotion outside my window. The young man had somehow got hold of a few bottles of alcohol made with sweet potatoes and had poured them down his throat. His father in-law had been kicking his bedroom door to get him to start working. When he finally broke the door down, the son-in-law was dead.