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ROBERT
JAY
LIFTON
My work with Chinese was done in Hong Kong, in connection
with a study of the process of "thought reform" (or "brainwashing")
as conducted on the mainland. I found that Chinese intellectuals of
varying ages, whatever their experience with thought reform itself,
had gone through an extraordinary set of what I at that time called
identity fragments - of combinations of belief and emotional involve–
ment - each of which they could readily abandon in favor of an–
other. I remember particularly the profound impression made upon
me by the extraordinary history of one young man in particular:
beginning as a "filial son" or "young master," that elite status of an
only son in an upper-class Chinese family; then feeling himself an
abandoned and betrayed victim, as traditional forms collapsed during
civil war and general chaos, and his father, for whom he was to long
all his life, was separated from him by political and military duties;
then a "student activist" in rebellion against the traditional culture
in which he had been so recently immersed (as well as against a
Nationalist Regime whose abuses he had personally experienced);
leading him to Marxism and to strong emotional involvement in the
Communist movement; then, because of remaining "imperfections,"
becoming a participant in a thought reform program for a more
complete ideological conversion; but which, in his case, had the op–
posite effect, alienating him, so he came into conflict with the reform–
ers and fled the country; then, in Hong Kong, struggling to estab–
lish himself as an "anti-Communist writer"; after a variety of
dif–
ficulties, finding solace and meaning in becoming a Protestant convert;
and following that, still just thirty, apparently poised for some new
internal (and perhaps external) move.
Even more dramatic were the shifts in self-process of a young
Japanese whom I interviewed in Tokyo and Kyoto from 1960 to
1962. I shall mention one in particular as an extreme example of this
protean pattern, though there were many others who in various ways
resembled him. Before the age of twenty-five he had been all of the
following: a proper middle-class Japanese boy, brought up in a
professional family within a well-established framework of dependency
and obligation; then, due to extensive contact with farmers' and
fishermen's sons brought about by wartime evacuation, a "country
boy" who was to retain what he described as a life-long attraction to
the tastes of the common man; then, a fiery young patriot who
"hated the Americans" and whose older brother, a kamikaze pilot,
