On the Ground in China

Greetings Readers,

Much has happened in China since my last post. After our unfortunate series of disasters, I thought things were looking up for our great nation. Then, the Gang of Four launched the Cultural Revolution. My family was lucky enough to survive the Cultural Revolution relatively unscathed, but it was not easy. I am finding it hard to return to normal life in my community after this time of great turmoil. 

I am grateful to have recently received a copy of Son of the Revolution by Liang Heng and Judith Shapiro, a memoir that describes Liang’s experience during the cultural revolution which happened to occur during the most formative years of his life. His story was touching and compelling, and I am sure it will resonate with many Chinese people. There was one quote that really stood out to me.

“The desire to live came strong then, stronger than the desire to die. I remember Father excitedly recording the peasant boy’s folk song by torchlight, still a man of letters even in the midst of greatest trouble. I thought of Mother and Waipo, waiting for me in Changsha, and Liang Wei-ping sharing her rice baba among the peasants. The hoodlums had cared for me so well on the streets, and Teacher Luo had forgiven me so graciously for the caricatures I had drawn of him. There was so much good in this crazy world, but so much more that was impossible to understand” (Liang 207). 

This quote comes immediately after he had thoughts of suicide after he received word that he was being investigated for counterrevolutionary behavior and assumed he would be jailed. Those that he considered to be friends had turned on him in the name of revolution, and likely out of fear. I am struck by this positive sentiment as he is being struggled against. The reminder of the good in the world, and hope for the future. 

The quote is followed by anger at the Revolution for giving the people so little when they “had sacrificed everything for it” (Liang 207). This notion is in line with most tales we hear of the Cultural Revolution. The injustice of it all, the harm it did to our country. However, I remind you, my readers, that we managed to bring ourselves out of this chaos. Liang Heng’s reasons to live in a dire situation can be echoed in the memories of our families and communities.  His positivity resonates with me. There was so much darkness during the Cultural Revolution, and much of it is expressed in this memoir. However, during his darkest hour, Liang Heng uses both the positivity he found and the anger over injustices during the Cultural Revolution to power through. After the night that he considered suicide, he thought: “if I was to live, it would no longer be numbly and aimlessly. I would live bravely” (Liang 207).

The Chinese people have been brave to make it through and survive. To do what was asked of us and listen to our leaders. Where did that get many of us? I interviewed two men living in a small village during the Cultural Revolution. The first was the son of a former landlord. He told me about how the Red Guards and his fellow peasants treated him. Li Maoxiu was “tied up, hung up, and beaten. One afternoon, [he] passed out four times. [He] stopped breathing” (China: A Century of Revolution- The Mao Years, 1:17:00). He was forced to cut ties with his father to distance himself from the landlord class. He was extremely saddened by this, but it was necessary for the survival of himself and his family. 

The second interview was with a former Red Guard. He described to me the acts of violence he participated in against counterrevolutionaries. “I put them on a truck and told them to kneel down. I whipped them with a leather belt. There were men and women. Most were women. We beat them hard. I had a kind of animal instinct. I used to enjoy beating people” (China: A Century of Revolution- The Mao Years, 1:20:00). People throughout China were beaten, paraded around, and killed. Estimates are showing that at least 400,000 people were killed (China: A Century of Revolution- The Mao Years, 1:18:30) in this violence instigated by the Gang of Four. 

This violence and fear forced us to struggle against our neighbors and created a sense of competition in which every man fought for himself. How is society supposed to return to how it used to be after relationships have been ruined? No matter what class each of us journalists comes from, we all were impacted by the Cultural Revolution. We all experienced immense periods of fear and hardship. We lost connections with those around us and lost pieces of ourselves. The quote from Liang Heng in Son of the Revolution can serve as a reminder of our humanity during a time when the Gang of Four sought to tear us apart. 

 

Thank you for reading,

 

Miao Kuo shuo

The amazing country we live in is a result of one man’s blood, sweat, and tears. Comrades, despite the fact he is no longer with us, we must keep in mind the revolutionary experiences he has benevolently gifted us through his reforms. We cannot let work accomplished in the past decades since the great victory of the Chinese Communist Party over the corrupt nationalists go to waste just because we no longer have our guiding light. 

The last act taken while Chairman Mao was alive was the Cultural Revolution. Two of the goals were to close the gap between the countryside and educate the new generation about the revolution and indate them with revolutionary experiences. Both of these were a great success, as expected of plans made by Chairman Mao. May he rest in peace. 

The next generation, despite not living through Yenan formed the Red Guard and enacted Mao’s vision, rooting out the capitalist pigs from the party. This made it easy for Chairman Mao to dispatch them to the countryside in order to learn from the peasants why Chairman Mao fought so hard. The educated youth had to suffer ostracism from the local peasants, hunger, and revolutionary living conditions that were a far cry from the stable conditions found in the cities they came from. All this was to forge their fighting spirit the only way Chairman Mao knew how. 

All of this was made possible by the peasant families who took in these young intellectuals for revolutionary training. As you all know, taking on another mouth is no small feat for a household, but as we are all filled with revolutionary spirit, the Peasants found a way. At times, this caused conflicts stemming from the mistrust between the revolutionary peasants and the intellectual students stemming from mistrust due to the Young intellectuals being branded as the children of banished cadre members or being the reason extra food went missing; however, it is just a byproduct of the situation we are facing as a nation. 

However, despite the education of the new generation, the gap between cities and the countryside did not shrink. The countryside has seen massive changes under the leadership of Chairman Mao, but the countryside also had the most to grow when compared to the cities. Cities had preexisting facilities, health care, and businesses that were folded well into new party policies. The countryside went through many plans, such as land reform all the way to the Great Leap Forward. The countryside was also hit with many natural disasters all while doing its best to support the needs of those in the cities. That being said, Chairman Mao introduced Barfoot doctors as a way to supplement the countryside’s lack of health care so peasants could get much-needed medical attention, as well as forged new instructors to create the necessary farming implements for peasants to use on a larger scale. Maos for planning has helped the quality of life in the countryside skyrocket and boosted the morale of the people but has not gotten rid of the gap between the standard of living in the cities and the standard of living in the countryside. However, I am sure that there is a plan in the works to address that issue more thoroughly.

 

Hi all,

In my ever-increasing age, I no longer wish to provide the public with key information. When I started writing these posts, I thought I had an opportunity to do some good, really make a change, and help the CCP and Mao to build this new communist utopia. I think that a lot of people felt this way and we have been taken for fools. Land reform was a bloody mess, the great leap forward introduced a need for citizens and friends to lie and incriminate their fellow man just so they wouldn’t be struggled against, and the cultural revolution was just a way for the intellectuals like many of the people reading this right now and for cultural heritage to be suppressed. I am willing to give up on the party but I haven’t known anything else, I was just 20 when the CCP started with the long march to Yenan. I had the extreme honor of interviewing with a journalist friend of a friend named Liang Heng, who is preparing to release a memoir of his time under the reign of the CCP. While it was a short interview, he did give me one piece from his memoir that I thought had some significance. He was talking about the Red Guard changing the names of the streets when he told me, “All this was extremely confusing, especially for the old people, and everybody was always getting off at the wrong bus stop and getting lost. To make matters even worse, the ticket-sellers on the buses were too busy giving instructive readings from the Quotations of Chairman Mao between stops to have much time to help straighten out the mess.” (Heng 68). This quote given to me was very powerful for the understanding of the cultural revolution for a number of reasons. When he speaks about the confusion that people were feeling it goes deeper than just the changing of the street names. The constant shifts from political ideals to what Mao wanted to do to the different campaigns and policies, were enough to cause the masses to stop understanding what they were supposed to do, what they were supposed to comply with, and what false narratives they were supposed to believe. The statement where he says the ticket people were too busy reading from the Little Red Book was interesting because that could be because they were also nervous about slipping up and not knowing what to say or believe the next time a Red Guard member talked to them, everyone knows what they would do to you if you said something not in line with Mao’s teaching and were labeled a rightist. Or are they too busy praising Mao and not paying attention to the many changes that are being constantly made to the world around them, to just care how the changes are affecting real people in everyday life? This quote also shows how the party wanted to control not just the actions of the masses but the thoughts of the masses. If people are seeing Mao’s teaching during every waking moment, even during their commutes to their party-ordered work units, then they can’t stop to think about how many changes are happening, let alone how rapidly they are occurring and why the party can’t seem to make a policy decision and stick with it. I do give some praise to the party for their ability to pull this off. The revolution has been headlined by a changing of ways, out with the old and in with the new. But this has been in the works since the great leap. They systematically removed those from society who didn’t believe in the party or who were not willing to conform and formed their thoughts and actions to what they wanted them to do and think. It makes sense that people couldn’t see this happening, all the people who warned them are gone and this constant change of policies and enemies has been the way of decades. The Cultural Revolution has been characterized by the systematic eradication of Chinese culture, customs, and beliefs. It has been a period marked by a relentless pursuit of ideological purity. This quote is important to understanding the cultural revolution because it exemplifies the extreme measures taken by the party to inculcate the ever-changing Maoist beliefs in the population, including utilizing public transportation (and every part of a citizen’s waking life) as a venue for ideological indoctrination.

Dear Comrades and Fellow Reporters,

As I take a moment to write this farewell message memories come rushing back connecting my life as a farmer, with the journey that brought me into the world of journalism. China, our homeland has undergone changes from the tumultuous 1930s to the recent conclusion of the Cultural Revolution. These past years have been filled with upheaval and resilience. We have sailed through times in Yenan reported on Land Reform and observed the passion of the Great Leap. Now as we say goodbye to our role as keepers of history it becomes our duty to capture and document the essence of this period that has shaped our nation. I stand united with you in mourning for our Chairman Mao while finding solace in putting an end to the chaos caused by the Gang of Four.

Now as we pass on this responsibility to a generation there is one task, at hand. Uncovering and presenting layers upon layers of insight into the Cultural Revolution for our readers. During this pursuit Liang Heng, the son of the Liang Shan graciously shared a manuscript that chronicles his familys experiences during that time. I was deeply moved by Liang Hengs memoir titled “Son of the Revolution” which provided an poignant account of those times. As I delved into Liang Heng’s memoir “Son of the Revolution ” there was a passage, on page 82 that caught my attention. It beautifully captures the essence of the Cultural Revolution revealing its fervor and chaotic nature; “We all had to be revolutionaries tearing down the world demolishing the values and completely transforming ourselves from head to toe.” This quote vividly portrays the ideology that fueled the Cultural Revolution. It represents a determination to erase the past establish an order and conform to the prevailing beliefs of that time. The relentless pursuit of change even if it meant dismantling standing traditions and historical legacies was a fundamental principle, during that turbulent era. To truly grasp the nature of the Cultural Revolution it is crucial to understand the meaning behind this quote and to acknowledge the diverse experiences shared by individuals, like Liang Heng. It encompasses their struggles, sacrifices and deep yearning for autonomy amidst an overwhelming wave of ideological fervor.

As we take a moment to reflect on our roles, as storytellers and hand over the responsibility to a generation of journalists it becomes crucial for them to truly understand the core of our history. By delving into memoirs like Liang Hengs and other narratives they have the opportunity to untangle the intricacies of our past and pave the way for a future, in our China.

 

It has been my pleasure.

 

Yours Truly,

Zeng Yongzheng

Dearest readers and friends at our publishing company,

 

What a journey we have been through in the past decades. As I read through all of my past journal entries during the Cultural Revolution, I recall that my original goal in taking up this post here was to record this pivotal moment in China’s history. I believe that not only I, but all of us have succeeded in that, and that it has amounted to many more than just one moment. With the Gang of Four put away for good now, we can all finally take a breath of fresh air and return to honest, personal journalism. 

Not only journals, but other writings are beginning to come out recording the memories of our nation’s tumultuous journey, particularly through the Cultural Revolution. My fellow reporters and I have received early copies of Liang Heng’s memoir Son of the Revolution, which was painful yet poignant to read. Though we can all relate to it, it pained me to read about the Cultural Revolution through the perspective of a child. While many of us had seen our way through the beginnings of communism and maintained some semblance of independent thought, this whole generation of youth that they call The Lost Generation, quite aptly, has grown up indoctrinated into the Cult of Mao. 

One of the most powerful sections of Liang Heng’s Son of the Revolution was pages 206-207 in “Interrogation” in which the author had contemplated suicide after many accusations and the prospect of being struggled against. The fact that one could become so hopeless as to consider taking their own life for being labeled as politically undesirable shows the absurdity of the Cultural Revolution, and how it did almost the opposite of what Mao had promised with communism. Communism promised a building and bolstering of community and rights, yet it destroyed every unit of society, sowing discord in every aspect of life from the family to the school. As Liang Heng considered living through whatever pain he may endure, he became fully disillusioned with the party as he questioned every unnecessary moment of suffering that had happened to his family members and those around him in the name of revolution. Regarding such suicidal ideation, I think back to the story of Li Lili and her husband. An acclaimed actress of pre-revolutionary times, Jiang Qing harbored jealousy and hatred against her former co-star, blaming her for her lack of success on the screen. Jiang Qing had her and her husband tortured for personal reasons to the point that Li Lili’s husband killed himself. Yet the stories of her husband and Liang Heng are not unique. No one has escaped suffering in the Cultural Revolution. What was meant to cleanse Chinese society of abuse, inequality and hierarchy only created a new form of each sin. Yet we as a people, as a nation, can move past this.

 My 同士,

With the passing of our leader, Mao Zedong, I feel as if I have lost our emotional support. We have shown our contribution and loyalty to him in everything in our lives. And now that the politics of the Gang of Four is over, it feels like an era has ended. It has been many years since I started writing this blog, but as I look back into the past, the political stress on us has been immense. One of my friends told me that after the oppressive rule by the Gang of Four, her mother was sentenced innocent after the end of Gang of Four, but was never able to meet her. This is because she has gone to far places to protect herself instead of being with her mother and being suspected. I hope society will change and there will be no such sad farewells.

You are probably aware of the difference between rural and urban areas, which used to be very large, and the Cultural Revolution, which aimed to reduce this gap and produce a successor to the revolution. It was a political struggle that mobilized the masses, but it is ambiguous whether the goal of this Cultural Revolution was achieved. Because the sacrifices were too much, it was a movement that directly mobilized the Red Guards and changed established notions of what was possible. Today, I want to talk more about this movement. The cultural heritage related to religion was destroyed, and those with wealth, such as intellectuals and landowners, were expelled. In other words, the most peaceful people in this period were poor peasant families. Also, the Red Guards, who were ardent Maoists, were ordered to attend the Down to the Countryside Movement, in which they were instructed to go to the countryside and farm. This plan was an apparent failure. Some young people successfully learned the importance and difficulties of farming, but many ran away or died from the harshness of the work.

Our life at this time was fear and trembling, as we fell upon each other and were always on the lookout to avoid suspicion of treason. Even young people who were optimistic about such revolutions were sometimes considered traitors within a day. I was told that one young student, especially those whose fathers were suspected of being not loyal to Mao, were told by their classmates, “You sons of Reactionary Capitalist stinking intellectuals,” and their families were torn apart. (p. 51) In some cases, the mother was cut off to prevent harm to the whole family. At school, “Those students who had the right to wear the Pioneers’ triangular red scarf received much more praise than those who didn’t, no matter what their grades;” (p. 16). In a world where one never knows when one might be labeled an insurgent and face the worst possible consequences, there is always a sense of uncertainty. Under these circumstances, I do not fully agree that the Cultural Revolution was a success.

Thank you for reading,

My Dear Readers,

 

First and foremost, I must express my terrible grief over the passing of our great leader Chairman Mao. I hope that we can come together as a people to keep ourselves strong in this time of national sadness.

Over the past four decades, I have attempted to inform you on all of the important events we have lived through as citizens of the great nation of China. I fear that I am growing too old to retain my post for much longer, and this will likely be the last report of my career. For this last report, I have been assigned to cover the difficult topic of the Cultural Revolution. I will do this by evaluating the success of the Cultural Revolution’s goals. The objectives of the Revolution were to bring the people of the countryside and those in urban areas closer together and to create a new generation of revolutionaries to succeed the generation of liberators. In order to evaluate these goals, I will refer to the manuscript of the Cultural Revolution memoir by Liang Heng, as he was someone who lived through each important phase of the Revolution.

If one of the major goals of the Cultural Revolution was to close the gap between the rural and urban populations, it both succeeded and failed. During the revolution, tens of millions of urbanites, re-educated cadres, and educated youth were “sent down” to the countryside to learn from the peasants and contribute to the revolution from the countryside. Liang Heng’s older sisters are both sent as educated youths before eventually he and his father are sent following his father’s re-education as a rightest intellectual (Liang, 161). In a theater production Liang Heng attended, he described the educated youth being portrayed as going down to the countryside and being welcomed with open arms by the peasants, signifying the union between the two different parts of the population (Liang, 162). While Liang Heng said that he was excited to go to the countryside, he acknowledged that he knew they were going to a poor area, and that they would have to work hard to make a living (Liang, 162). In describing the feelings he had when first departing, Liang Heng captures the point of the cultural revolution, with the excitement of the urbanites to join the peasants.

While the purpose was to bring the people together, it was difficult in practice as the urbanites that were relocated to the countryside had no experience, and were not easily able to contribute to the rural way of life. Liang Heng recalled that the peasants viewed them as more mouths to feed which would not help to lighten the workload (Liang, 170). This shows the great flaw in this goal of the Cultural Revolution. While it technically brought the people closer together by forcing members of the urban population to relocate to the countryside, it actually made things more difficult as they were not suited to help with rural work.

The other goal of the Revolution to create a new generation of revolutionary successors was more successful as the new generation was sent through a process of hardship similar to the generation of liberators before the civil war and the ensuing Communist Party victory. The Red Guards that carried out the revolution were devoted to Chairman Mao and wanted to improve the future of China under his guidance. Mao himself encouraged the Red Guards, telling them that a “Revolution is justified” (Dietrich, 184). The following violence was seen as justified by the Red Guards as they attacked the old ways, spurred on by the Chairman’s encouragement (Dietrich, 187). Through violence and persecution of targeted groups, the revolutionary forces staged their claim as the successors of the revolutionaries of the past. The violence of the Cultural Revolution created a conflict like the civil war had, creating more hardships for the new generation to weather and further mold them into the future of the Communist Party.

My friends, the Cultural Revolution was a time of great trouble for our nation. With people from the cities and countryside mixing and slowing down production, food scarcity made things even more difficult. The violence of the revolution only made people fear the government, and created more division, while also giving young revolutionaries a chance to make an impact on the future. After all that has transpired in the last decade and beyond, I hope for a quiet period for at least the near future, so I may enjoy my retirement without worry. Thank you for sticking with me for this long. I hope I have given you insight into all that our great nation has gone through.

 

As always, stay safe,

孙诚

In 1977, as the Cultural Revolution came to an end, we, the Comrade reporters who have witnessed decades of tumultuous change in the People’s Republic of China, reflect on the impact of this monumental period on our nation. While we continue to mourn the loss of our beloved Chairman Mao, we also share the collective relief that the oppressive reign of the Gang of Four has come to an end.

One of the key goals of the Cultural Revolution was to bridge the gap between the urban and rural areas of China. The idea was to diminish the disparities in living standards, education, and access to resources between these two distinct segments of the population. To achieve this goal, various policies and movements were initiated during the Cultural Revolution.

Land Reform, which had begun before the Cultural Revolution, aimed to redistribute land from landowners to the peasants, thereby reducing inequality in rural areas. The Cultural Revolution reinvigorated this process and sought to empower peasants by encouraging them to speak out against oppressive landlords. In some cases, it was successful in reducing the concentration of landownership and wealth, though the results were mixed and often depended on local conditions.

The “Down to the Countryside Movement” was another significant policy during the Cultural Revolution. It involved sending educated urban youth to rural areas to learn from peasants and contribute to agricultural production. This was intended to not only narrow the urban-rural gap but also to cultivate revolutionary successors among the youth. Many urban youth were indeed sent to the countryside, and they experienced life and work on farms firsthand. Some of them gained a greater understanding of the challenges faced by rural populations and the importance of agricultural labor.

However, the success of this effort also varied. While some urban youth were positively impacted and learned valuable life lessons, many faced hardships and struggled to adapt to the grueling rural lifestyle. In some cases, the program disrupted their education and personal development. The extent to which it closed the urban-rural gap and created revolutionary successors is a matter of debate.

In conclusion, the Cultural Revolution did make efforts to address the disparities between urban and rural areas and sought to create revolutionary successors from the urban youth. However, its success in achieving these goals was mixed, with both positive and negative outcomes. As China moves into a new phase of its history, we, as veteran reporters, leave the task of further analysis and reflection to the younger generations. The legacy of the Cultural Revolution remains complex and multifaceted, and only time will reveal its lasting impact on our great nation.

Dear Comrades,

I know you all haven’t heard from me for a while, but I need to update you of the impact of the Cultural Revolution. It is 1977, and the revolution has come to an end, and I am in tears that our beloved Chairman Mao has passed away. In his book, Son of the Revolution, Liang Heng discusses the changes caused from the Cultural Revolution. Although I strongly suggest everyone read this book, to quickly grasp the meaning of this revolution, I will provide you all with this single quote.

The reading describes the event when Heng’s father frantically defended himself in an argument with his son, saying: “It’s because I’m none of those things that I believe the Party and Chairman Mao. I’ve done nothing to wrong you. You can continue to participate in the Revolution. If you want to, you can break off with me. Go live at school if you like. But I’ll tell you one thing. No matter how you hate me, I’ve always been loyal to Chairman Mao. And I’ve always supported the Party and Socialism.”

It is this quote that sums up the Cultural Revolution. From an emotional standpoint, this quote outlines the feelings the revolution incited, including fear, guilt, and betrayal etc. Fear of being labeled a rightist, or a defector of the party. Guilt, as in this case the father was guilty about his past statements about the party. The son demanding answers is also guilty about a member of his family having a troubled past, and if he is a reflection of his fathers outrageous bourgeoisie actions. This also reaffirms the increase for the emotion of betrayal, in the sense of betraying the traditional family unit, and relationships. The father here, understands that his son is considering moving out, and cutting off all contact with his father. This was a period of great uncertainty, where even one’s closest people around them were not to be trusted, which led to feelings of betrayal becoming contagious.

This quote also emphasized the meaning of a revolution. Revolution stems from revolutionary, a descriptive word for producing of immense change. The immense change, was the separation from the Confucius ideas of respecting your elders, maintaining a close family unit, instead it introduced the concept that the party is always the priority, being you are a shell of the party. Individualism no longer existed, and everyone was expected and needed to be loyal to the party, and that meant commonly betraying others, living in fear, being guilty for past actions or actions of others close to you etc. Indeed, This was a true revolution.

Tongzhimen,

I feel incredibly lucky to still have a platform like this to speak to you all about what is happening in China. To be involved in the cataloging of the many accomplishments of our late Chairman Mao was such an honor and has made it so important that I stay up-to-date on what is happening in our country and its Communist Party. My status as a long-time reporter has given me early access to an upcoming memoir by a man named Liang Heng about his and his family’s experiences during the Cultural Revolution. 

I feel that it would be a disservice to the country to not explicitly call out the Cultural Revolution as the period of terror that it was and for this reason I implore all of you to get your hands on Son of the Revolution when it comes out to understand, if one does not already, the violence and struggle our people had to endure because of this campaign. The Liang family began as faithful to and productive within the Communist Cause but slowly fell apart physically and emotionally because of this campaign. Liang Heng’s father was particularly loyal to his country and its government and remained so until his death, despite having been struggled against and demoted himself. The example of Liang Heng’s father encapsulates how the Cultural Revolution has decimated an entire generation of those loyal to the Cause; people who tried to do everything right and live according to the teachings of Chairman Mao were left behind, if not directly attacked, by the very country they were devoting their lives to serving. 

A particular moment that struck me while I was reading the memoir was from the time that Liang Heng and his father spent in the countryside after his father was sent there to work as a cadre for re-education purposes. He threw himself into the responsibilities associated with this job and tried his very best to serve the people whose lives he was overseeing. Determined to guide the masses into a communist lifestyle, “Father” probably thought himself ready for anything… leading to his devastation when orders were coming through that he knew would directly harm the peasants he was living with. Can raising and selling livestock for a few eggs really be an example of treacherous capitalist tendencies? Should these peasants, with their limited furniture and back-breaking labor, really be punished for trying to survive? Surely they could not be equated to the landlords we suffered under so many years ago, nor could they be included in Mao’s “Four Olds.” To his credit, Liang Heng’s father tried pleading with his higher-ups and stayed sure that Chairman Mao never meant “‘for his policies to harm the peasants,’” but his opinion was ignored and these peasants suffered as a result.

This moment struck me because it demonstrates how the Cultural Revolution punished even the most loyal of communists, people who just wanted to realize Mao’s vision of helping the peasant masses. Essentially, nobody was safe from being struggled, regardless of how deserving one actually was. All Liang Heng’s father wanted to do was help his people and he was ignored in the name of pursuing misguided plans pertaining to eliminating capitalism; surely there were more threatening and pressing issues than poor peasants trying to survive and pay off their debts. The flawed extremism and promotion of violence that marks the Cultural Revolution turned us against one another and distracted us from what really needed to be done. I hope that we as a country can learn from this chaotic period in our history to make sure we channel our energy toward helping those in need and only targeting those who actually seek to undermine our communist vision.