Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

In January 1969, every middle school in Chengdu was sent to a rural area somewhere in Sichuan. We were to live in villages among the peasants and be “reeducated” by them. What exactly they were supposed to educate us in was not made specific, but Mao always maintained that people with some education were inferior to illiterate peasants, and needed

To arouse the young to controlled mob violence, victims were necessary. The most conspicuous targets in any school were the teachers, some of whom had already been victimized by work teams and school authorities in the last few months. Now the rebellious children set upon them. Teachers were better targets than parents, who could only have been att

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

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

This was a key invention of Mao’s—to involve the entire population in the machinery of control. Few wrongdoers, according to the regime’s criteria, could escape the watchful eyes of the people, especially in a society with an age-old concierge mentality. But the “efficiency” was acquired at a tremendous price: because the campaigns operated on very

That night, as I lay in bed listening to the gunshots and the Rebels’ loudspeakers blaring out bloodcurdling diatribes, I reached a turning point. I had always been told, and had believed, that I was living in a paradise on earth, socialist China, whereas the capitalist world was hell. Now I asked myself: If this is paradise, what then is hell? I d

It was in Deyang that I came to know how China’s peasants really lived. Each day started with the production team leader allocating jobs. All the peasants had to work, and they each earned a fixed number of “work points” (gong-fen) for their day’s work. The number of work points accumulated was an important element in the distribution at the end of

In the early 1950s, a Communist was supposed to give herself so completely to the revolution and the people that any demonstration of affection for her children was frowned on as a sign of divided loyalties.