Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

If he was to get the population to act, Mao would have to remove authority from the Party and establish absolute loyalty and obedience to himself alone. To achieve this he needed terror—an intense terror that would block all other considerations and crush all other fears. He saw boys and girls in their teens and early twenties as his ideal agents.

I was extremely sad to see the lovely plants go. But I did not resent Mao. On the contrary, I hated myself for feeling miserable. By then I had grown into the habit of “self-criticism” and automatically blamed myself for any instincts that went against Mao’s instructions. In fact, such feelings frightened me. It was out of the question to discuss t

Mao offered a magic cure to the peasants: “doctors” who could be turned out en masse—barefoot doctors. “It is not at all necessary to have so much formal training,” he said. “They should mainly learn and raise their standard in practice.” On 26 June 1965 he made the remark which became a guideline for health and education: “The more books you read,

He encouraged the Red Guards to pick on a wider range of victims in order to increase the terror. Prominent writers, artists, scholars, and most other top professionals, who had been privileged under the Communist regime, were now categorically condemned as “reactionary bourgeois authorities.” With the help of some of these people’s colleagues who

The whole nation slid into doublespeak. Words became divorced from reality, responsibility, and people’s real thoughts. Lies were told with ease because words had lost their meanings—and had ceased to be taken seriously by others.

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

With the help of dictionaries which some professors lent me, I became acquainted with Longfellow, Walt Whitman, and American history. I memorized the whole of the Declaration of Independence, and my heart swelled at the words “We hold these truths to be selfevident, that all men are created equal,” and those about men’s “unalienable Rights,” among

One day, after warning us for the umpteenth time against the road taken by Russia, our politics teacher said: “If you aren’t careful, our country will change color gradually, first from bright red to faded red, then to gray, then to black.” It so happened that the Sichuan expression “faded red” had exactly the same pronunciation (er-hong) as my nam

The need to obtain authorization for an unspecified “anything” was to become a fundamental element in Chinese Communist rule. It also meant that people learned not to take any action on their own initiative.