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

In the days after Mao’s death, I did a lot of thinking. I knew he was considered a philosopher, and I tried to think what his “philosophy” really was. It seemed to me that its central principle was the need—or the desire?—for perpetual conflict. The core of his thinking seemed to be that human struggles were the motivating force of history, and

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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