Frequently in crowded buses, trains, and shops I would hear women yelling abuse at men and slapping their faces.

Sometimes the man would shout a denial and an exchange of insults would ensue. I experienced many attempted molestations. When it happened, I would just sneak away from the trembling hands or knees. I felt sorry for these men.

They lived in a world where there could be no outlet for their sexuality unless they were lucky enough to have a happy marriage, the chances of which were slim. The deputy Party secretary of my university, an elderly man, was caught in a department store with sperm oozing through his trousers. The crowds had pressed him against a woman in front of him. He was taken to the police station, and subsequently expelled from the Party. Women had just as tough a time. In every organization, one or two of them would be condemned as 'worn-out shoes' for having had extramarital affairs.

These standards were not applied to the rulers. The octogenarian Mao surrounded himself with pretty young women. Although the stories about him were whispered and cautious, those about his wife and her cronies, the Gang of Four, were open and uninhibited. By the end of 1975, China was boiling with incensed rumors. In the mini-campaign called "Our Socialist Motherland Is Paradise," many openly hinted at the question which I had asked myself for the first time eight years before: "If this is paradise, what then is hell?"

On 8 January 1976, Premier Zhou Enlai died. To me and many other Chinese, Zhou had represented a comparatively sane and liberal government that believed in making the country work. In the dark years of the Cultural Revolution, Zhou was our meager hope. I was griefstricken at his death, as were all my friends. Our mourning for him and our loathing of the Cultural Revolution and of Mao and his coterie became inseparably interwoven.

But Zhou had collaborated with Mao in the Cultural Revolution. It was he who delivered the denunciation of Liu Shaoqi as an "American spy." He met almost daily with the Red Guards and the Rebels and issued orders to them.

When a majority of the Politburo and the country's marsh Ms tried to put a halt to the Cultural Revolution in February 1967 Zhou did not give them his support. He was Mao's faithful servant. But perhaps he had acted as he did in order to prevent an even more horrendous disaster, like a civil war, which an open challenge to Mao could have brought on. By keeping China running, he made it possible for Mao to wreak havoc on it, but probably also saved the country from total collapse. He protected a number of people as far as he judged safe, including, for a time, m?

father, as well as some of China's most important cultural monuments. It seemed that he had been caught up in an insoluble moral dilemma, although this does not exclude the possibility that survival was his priority. He must have known that if he had tried to stand up to Mao, he would have been crushed.

The campus became a spectacular sea of white paper wreaths and mourning posters and couplets. Everyone wore a black arm band a white paper flower on their chest, and a sorrowful expression. The mourning was par fly spontaneous and partly organized. Because it was generally known that at the time of his death Zhou had been under attack from the Gang of Four, and because the Gang had ordered the mourning for him to be played down, showing grief at his death was a way for both the general public and the local authorities to show their disapproval of the Gang.

But there were many who mourned Zhou for very different reasons. Ming and other student officials from my course extolled Zhou's alleged contribution to 'suppressing the counterrevolutionary Hungarian uprising in 1956," his hand in establishing Mao's prestige as a world leader, and his absolute loyalty to Mao.

Outside the campus, there were more encouraging sparks of dissent. In the streets of Chengdu, graffiti appeared on the margins of the wall posters and large crowds gathered, craning their necks to read the tiny handwriting. One poster read, The sky is now dark, A great star is fallen… Scribbled in the margin were the words: "How could the sky be dark: what about "the red, red sun"?" (meaning Mao). Another graffito appeared on a wall slogan reading "Deep-fry the persecutors of Premier Zhou!" It said: "Your monthly ration of cooking oil is only two liang [3.2 ounces]. What would you use to fry these persecutors with?" For the first time in ten years, I saw irony and humor publicly displayed, which sent my spirits soaring.

Mao appointed an ineffectual nobody called Hua Guofeng to succeed Zhou, and launched a campaign to 'denounce Deng and hit back against a right-wing comeback." The Gang of Four published Deng Xiaoping's speeches as targets for denunciation. In one speech in 1975, Deng had admitted that peasants in Yan'an were worse off than when the Communists first arrived there after the Long March forty years before. In another, he had said that a Party boss should say to the professionals, "I follow, you lead." In yet another, he had outlined his plans for improving living standards, for allowing more freedom, and for ending political victimization. Comparing these documents to the Gang of Four's actions made Deng a folk hero and brought people's loathing of the Gang to the boiling point. I thought incredulously: they seem to hold the Chinese population in such contempt that they assume we will hate Deng rather than admire him after reading these speeches, and what is more, that we will love them!

In the university, we were ordered to denounce Deng in endless mass meetings. But most people showed passive resistance, and wandered around the auditorium, or chatted, knitted, read, or even slept during the ritual theatrics.

The speakers read their prepared scripts in flat, expressionless, almost inaudible voices.

Because Deng came from Sichuan, there were numerous rumors about him having been sent back to Chengdu for exile. I often saw crowds lining the streets because they had heard he was about to pass by. On some occasions the crowds numbered tens of thousands.

At the same time, there was more and more public animosity toward the Gang of Four, also known as the Gang from Shanghai. Suddenly bicycles and other goods made in Shanghai stopped selling. When the Shanghai football team came to Chengdu they were booed all the way through the game. Crowds gathered outside the stadium and shouted abuse at them as they went in and came out.

Acts of protest broke out all over China, and reached their peak during the Tomb-Sweeping Festival in spring 1976, when the Chinese traditionally pay their respects to the dead. In Peking, hundreds of thousands of citizens gathered for days on end in Tiananmen Square to mourn Zhou with specially crafted weaths, passionate poetry readings, and speeches. In symbolism and language which, though coded, everyone understood, they poured out their hatred of the Gang of Four, and even of Mao. The protest was crushed on the night of 5 April, when the police attacked the crowds, arresting hundreds. Mao and the Gang of Four called this a "Hungarian-type counterrevolutionary rebellion." Deng Xiaoping, who was being held incommunicado, was accused of stage-managing the demonstrations, and was labeled "China's Nagy' (Nagy was the Hungarian prime minister in 1956). Mao officially fired Deng, and intensified the campaign against him.

The demonstration may have been suppressed and ritually condemned in the media, but the fact that it had taken place at all changed the mood of China. This was the first large-scale open challenge to the regime since it was founded in 1949.

In June 1976 my class was packed off for a month to a factory in the mountains to 'learn from the workers." When the month was up, I went with some friends to climb the lovely Mount Emei, "Beauty's Eyebrow," to the west of Chengdu. On our way down the mountain, on 28 July, we heard a loud transistor radio which a tourist was carrying.