Fear was never absent in the building up of Mao’s cult. Many people had been reduced to a state where they did not dare even to think, in case their thoughts came out involuntarily. Even if they did entertain unorthodox ideas, few mentioned them to their children, as they might blurt out something to other children, which could bring disaster to

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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

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I was extremely curious about the alternatives to the kind of life I had been leading, and my friends and I exchanged rumors and scraps of information we dug from official publications. I was struck less by the West’s technological developments and high living standards than by the absence of political witch-hunts, the lack of consuming suspicion,

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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.

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It was a time when telling fantasies to oneself as well as others, and believing them, was practiced to an incredible degree. Peasants moved crops from several plots of land to one plot to show Party officials that they had produced a miracle harvest. Similar “Potemkin fields” were shown off to gullible—or self-blinded—agricultural scientists,

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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

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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

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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

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Lame Man Tang was soon arrested. By the beginning of 1968, a new, fourth stage of the Cultural Revolution had started. Phase One had been the teenage Red Guards; then came the Rebels and the attacks on capitalist-roaders; the third phase had been the factional wars among the Rebels. Mao now decided to halt the factional fighting. To bring about

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