![]() The youths went into ancient temples and smashed sacred relics in order to bring China into a new age free of old ideas. Young people in military uniforms and red armbands dragged their teachers and their neighbors into the streets and publicly beat and humiliated them in an attempt to eradicate the country of traitors to the party. Under the guise of purging the Communist party of bourgeois attitudes and complacency, Chairman Mao Zedong mobilized the youth to reassert his power in China. In the decade between 19, China was in the throes of a passionate cultural upheaval. Lately, the term "struggle session" has come to be applied to any scene where victims are publicly badgered to confess imaginary crimes under the pretext of self-criticism and rehabilitation."The Cultural Revolution," the Chinese Communist party wrote just five years after Communist leader Mao Zedong's reign had ended, "was responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the party, the state and the people since the founding of the People's Republic." They brought workers and peasants into the meetings, and they could not understand what was happening. But I also thought there were many ignorant people, people who did not understand what was happening, so I pitied that kind of person. "I thought there were some bad people in the audience. ![]() "I had many feelings at that struggle session," recalls You Xiaoli. "Down with You Xiaoli! Down with You Xiaoli!" From the audience came repeated, rhythmic chants. Workers from local factories and peasants from nearby communes had been bused in for the spectacle. In the audience were You Xiaoli's students and colleagues and former friends. The scene was taking place at the university, too, in a sports field at one of China's most prestigious institutions of higher learning. On both sides of the blackboard were chalked her name and the myriad crimes she was alleged to have committed. It was the position known as "doing the airplane." Around her neck was a heavy chain, and attached to the chain was a blackboard, a real blackboard, one that had been removed from a classroom at the university where You Xiaoli, for more than ten years, had served as a full professor. Her body was bent over from the waist into a right angle, and her arms, elbows stiff and straight, were behind her back, one hand grasping the other at the wrist. You Xiaoli was standing, precariously balanced, on a stool. The handcuffs became a part of me for the next one hundred days and nights. Afterwards, they untied me and handcuffed me instead. This struggle session lasted for two hours. It was knotted in such a way that a slight movement of my hands would cause intense pain. It was connected to a loop around my shoulder and underneath my armpits. The officer screamed again: "Are you guilty?" I replied firmly again, "No." Two people then used a rope to tie my hands back tightly. Immediately two people jumped on me and cut off half of my hair. "I did not commit any crimes," I asserted firmly. Their real motive was once again to force me to admit all my alleged crimes. It then dawned on me that this session was in fact prearranged. In the session the officer suddenly asked me whether I had committed my alleged original crime leading to my 8-year sentence. Without any investigation, the officer assembled the entire camp to start a struggle session against me. Immediately, an inmate accused me of giving something out of it to another prisoner. Two years after I had been in this new camp, I received a parcel from my family. the Cultural Revolution began and I was transferred to another labor camp. ![]()
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