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Throughout history Chinese scholars and mandarins had traditionally taken up fishing when they were disillusioned with what the emperor was doing. Fishing suggested a retreat to nature, an escape from the politics of the day. It was a kind of symbol for disenchantment and noncooperation.
By the beginning of 1961, tens of millions of deaths had finally forced Mao to give up his economic policies.
For my father and mother, as for many others, the regime seemed to be showing it could correct and learn from its mistakes and that it could work—and this restored their confidence in it.
a child, my idea of the West was that it was a miasma of poverty and misery, like that of the homeless “Little Match Girl” in the Hans Christian Andersen story. When I was in the boarding nursery and did not want to finish my food, the teacher would say: “Think of all the starving children in the capitalist world!”
In keeping with Chinese tradition, he gave a name to each of my brothers which represented his ideals: Zhi, meaning “honest,” to Jin-ming; Pu, “unpretentious,” to Xiao-hei; and Fang, “incorruptible,” was part of Xiao-fang’s name. My father believed that these were the qualities
Lei Feng was a soldier who, we were told, had died at the age of twenty-two in 1962.
Before he took any action, Lei Feng always thought of some words of Mao’s.
The cult of Mao and the cult of Lei Feng were two sides of the same
To fill us with hatred for class enemies, the schools started regular sessions of “recalling bitterness and reflecting on happiness,”
Mao was sowing the seeds for his own deification, and my contemporaries and I were immersed in this crude yet effective indoctrination.
He enabled the Chinese to feel great and superior again, by blinding them to the world outside.
In the learn-from-Lei Feng years it was hammered into children that our first and only loyalty should be to Mao.
One day in 1965, we were suddenly told to go out and start removing all the grass from the lawns. Mao had instructed that grass, flowers, and pets
Such self-examination and self-criticism were a feature of Mao’s China. You would become a new and better person, we were told. But all this introspection was really designed to serve no other purpose than to create a people who had no thoughts of their own.
In 1964, Mao drew up a list of thirty-nine artists, writers, and scholars for denunciation.
He branded them “reactionary bourgeois authorities,” a new category of class enemies.
“those in power following the capitalist road,” and declared war on them. They became known as “capitalist-roaders.”
In order not to let a single one of his enemies escape, he resolved to overthrow the entire Communist Party. Those faithful to him would survive the upheaval.
Starting in June 1966, the People’s Daily showered the country with one strident editorial after another, calling for “establishing Chairman Mao’s absolute authority,” “sweeping away all the ox devils and snake demons” (class enemies), and exhorting people to follow Mao and join the vast, unprecedented undertaking of a Cultural Revolution.
“The Little Red Book.” Everyone was given a copy and told to cherish it “like our eyes.”
Mao wanted the Red Guards to be his shock troops.
“We vow to launch a bloody war against anyone who dares to resist the Cultural Revolution, who dares to oppose Chairman Mao!”
Mao understood the latent violence of the young, and said that since they were well fed and had had their lessons stopped, they could easily be stirred up and use their boundless energy to go out and wreak havoc.
“smash up the four olds”—defined as “old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits.”
wave of beating and torture swept the country, mainly during house raids.
Mao let all this happen in order to generate the terror and chaos he wanted.
was taken out with several dozen other children to change street names to make them more “revolutionary.”
A Sichuan teahouse is a unique place. It
Details of a Sichuan teahouse
popular Red Guard slogan went: “We can soar to heaven, and pierce the earth, because our Great Leader Chairman Mao is our supreme commander!” As this declaration reveals, the Red Guards were not enjoying genuine freedom of self-expression. From the start they were nothing but the tool of a tyrant.
This teahouse, like all the others in Sichuan, was shut for fifteen years—until 1981, when Deng Xiaoping’s reforms decreed it could be reopened.
Books were major targets of Mao’s order to destroy.
The country lost most of its written heritage. Many of the books which survived later went into people’s stoves as fuel.
By then “denunciation meetings” were becoming a major feature of the Cultural Revolution.
I was, according to the “theory of bloodlines,” born bright red, because my father was a high official.
At the time, the Red Guards divided pupils into three categories: “reds,” “blacks,” and “grays.”
“Founding Declaration of the First Brigade of the First Army Division of the Red Guards of the Number Four School” (all Red Guard organizations had grand names), “Solemn Statement” (a pupil announced he was changing his name to “Huang the Guard for Chairman Mao”), “More Than Gigantic Wonderful News” (a member of the Cultural Revolution Authority had just given an audience to some Red Guards), and “The Latest Most Supreme Instructions” (a word or two by Mao had just been leaked out).
Mao’s instruction to exterminate grass had led to a constant demand for manpower because of the grass’s obstinate nature.
This fortuitously offered a form of punishment for the newly created “class enemies.”
Making the pilgrimage to Peking was very much encouraged—and food, accommodations, and transport were all free.
At Peking Station huge slogans welcomed us as “Chairman Mao’s guests.”
Mao had said that one purpose of traveling was to “exchange information about the Cultural Revolution.” That was what we would do: bring the slogans of the Peking Red Guards back to Chengdu.
All songs except these and a few in praise of Mao were banned, like all other forms of entertainment, and remained so for the ten years of the Cultural Revolution.
Because Mao called for girls to be militant, femininity was condemned in the years when my generation was growing up.
capitalist-roader was supposed to be a powerful official who was pursuing capitalist policies. But in reality no officials had any choice about which policies they pursued.
all unit leaders across China, big and small, were summarily denounced by people under them as capitalist-roaders for implementing policies that were alleged to be “capitalist” and “anti-Chairman Mao.”
was from this time that I developed my way of judging the Chinese by dividing them into two kinds: one humane, and one not. It took an upheaval like the Cultural Revolution to bring out these characteristics in people, whether they were teenage Red Guards, adult Rebels, or capitalist-roaders.
it was easy to select a quotation of Mao’s to suit any situation, or even both sides of the same argument. Mao knew that his vapid “philosophy” was boomeranging on him, but he could not intervene explicitly without losing his mystical remoteness.
Detention was now called “Mao Zedong Thought Study Courses.”
Starting from June 1966, there was no schooling. The teachers either had been denounced or were organizing their own Rebel groups.
that we had had enough of being Red Guards. Children in condemned families were supposed to “draw a line” between themselves and their parents, and many did so.
