This is the story of my life under the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
I was born in Beijing on June 28, 1945, into a Manchu family of the Yellow Banner. I am a Rooster according to the Chinese zodiac and a Cancer according to Western astrology. The Rooster is known for self-assurance and ambition, displaying dedication and discipline towards tasks, often striving for excellence in its endeavors. Cancers are highly intuitive, daring, and candid.
I had a very happy childhood thanks to the unconditional love and care of my parents, sisters, and brother. I was an accomplished middle schooler and high school student. In 1966 I was twenty-one years of age and in my third year at the Beijing Foreign Trade Institute (now known as the University of International Business and Economics). I had been assigned there by the government authorities to study English so that I could become a translator. Life seemed to be blossoming in front of me. Then it was interrupted unexpectedly and crudely.
It was early June. As usual, the school’s loudspeaker sounded on time, but the particularly serious tone of the broadcaster brought everyone to a halt. It turned out that Nie Yuanzi, who was the Communist Party Committee Secretary of the Philosophy Department of Beijing University, had posted a large-character poster criticizing the leadership of her school’s Party Committee. The Chinese Central People’s Broadcast Station repeated from time to time the entire contents of this big-character poster. Students who were sensitive to politics immediately understood what this was about. In the past few months the People’s Daily had published a series of lengthy articles criticizing the “Three Family Village,” three prominent critics of Mao Zedong’s economic policies.
Although I was twenty-one, I was still a naïve girl, unconcerned with politics. I did not realize there were conflicts within the Communist Party, which had been in power since 1949 after defeating the Kuomintang nationalists. I was only interested in learning English. Suddenly our whole school was like ants on a hot pot! Students were running around, but none went to the classrooms. Some students got together to talk about what was happening; some even found old newspapers, brushes, and ink to write their own big-character posters. I was lost. I asked in a loud voice, “Why not go to the classroom to start class?” A classmate scolded me disapprovingly: “Didn’t you see what has happened? You still want to go to class to study?”
At eight o’clock, when the teachers came to the school for classes, no one said a word. The whole school had become a boiling pot of porridge. In less than two hours, a large poster questioning the direction of the Party Committee of the Foreign Trade Institute was posted. Later, unexplained accusations, such as “wrong educational line” and “school of revisionism,” were aimed at the leadership of the school. The quiet campus became a political battlefield, with students divided into two factions: the rebels and the royalists.
Those who wrote big-character posters to expose their teachers were the rebels. Most of the student leaders were the royalists. These were the students who had previously been selected by the school’s administration to oversee their peers’ participation in academics, sports, and recreational activities. Both factions would later form their own Red Guards organizations. The two factions wrote big-character posters against each other and debated political issues that they themselves were not clear about. This became daily life. My dream of becoming an interpreter was put aside. The sixteen high achievers in my English class, myself included, who had been selected from the preparatory course, and who had loved each other and helped each other, now suddenly split into two hostile factions. Seven male and two female students became rebels. Six others, females plus one male, were called royalists. I was in the latter group. The whole school became a sea of big-character posters.
Why had our school suddenly adopted a revisionist educational line, I wondered, the white capitalist road, and how had we become the seedlings of revisionism? Big-character posters attacking individuals appeared, one after the other. Although my family was Manchu, the so-called nobility in pre-1911 China, so far I was not criticized. My father had once held the yellow umbrella of the imperial palace for the last Qing Dynasty emperor (He was six and the emperor was four!). However, in more recent times he had worked as a curator in the Forbidden City and was considered working class. Besides, our family no longer owned any private property; neither did we have relatives living abroad. (Families who had relatives living abroad were accused of being spies, especially those with relatives living in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and the United States.)
However, my immunity from criticism was not to last. I later learned from my sister that when she came to my school to search for me during the Cultural Revolution, she saw posted on the school gate a big sign: “Down with the hardcore traitor Li Chongjun, a revisionist seedling!” What I remember most about the incident was that I was criticized for not doing enough chores at home; I was so spoiled rotten that even my handkerchief was washed by my mother. Naturally, I was embarrassed after reading the poster. I thought, “What does my family life have to do with you?” Meanwhile, no one in the whole school dared to study English, my subject. In fact, all classes were cancelled. Students either went outside to read the big-character posters of other schools or stayed inside and wrote their own.
Beyond our school the whole of society had changed overnight. Many leaders were labeled as “taking the capitalist road.” Individuals with “problematic” family backgrounds, those who had overseas relations or property or had participated on the Kuomintang side in the Chinese Civil War—even primary and secondary school teachers who were conscientious workers—all had become the targets of the renewed revolution. Any student had the right to go to a teacher’s house and “raid the house” at will. Teachers were subject to insults, teasing, and even physical torture; they were forced to wear tall hats and big signs around their necks. It was a daily occurrence to see teachers on their knees being beaten or having their hair shaved into a yin-yang symbol, one half bald. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution provided many people with the opportunity to vent their personal anger and seek revenge on those whom they had disliked in the past.
My mood grew more somber by the day. I was looking forward to an end to this chaotic life, but contrary to my hopes on August 5, 1966, Mao Zedong wrote his first big-character poster, “Bombard the Headquarters,” rallying the country’s youth against his “bourgeois” rivals in the Communist Party. The rebels cheered after listening to it; my heart sank and my hopes flagged. I realized that this phase of the revolution would not end soon; it was just starting, and I didn’t know whether I would be able to resume my studies again.
Soon afterwards Mao Zedong received the Red Guards at the Tiananmen Tower. Both factions in our school had set up their own Red Guards organizations. Neither of them paid attention to the other, and they all went to Tiananmen Square. I also followed the crowds. In the distance, I saw the tall figure of Mao Zedong waving to people. Many were so excited that they cried. My mood was dark and sullen. After returning to school, I felt depressed and couldn’t stand the atmosphere, so I took time to go home to visit my mother and played with my nephews and nieces. I wanted to go back to normal life.
In the following months a very small number of teachers became supporters of the rebels; most of the teachers became the targets of the rebel dictatorship. They were detained at school and called bulls, ghosts, snakes, and monsters. I could not stand to see that the teachers, who were respectable and knowledgeable, were now prisoners. I also could not stand to see that the crazed students, who owed so much to their teachers, seemed to have changed their human nature. I always found excuses to avoid participating in meetings criticizing the teachers and was simply thankful that no one bothered me.
However, I will never forget one meeting when we were told that everyone had to attend; no one could be absent. Six female classmates, myself included, nervously arrived at the balcony at the top of our classroom building and sat down in seats in the last row. The atmosphere that day was very tense.
With a shout from the individual who was in charge, more than a dozen teachers were marched in. Teacher Zhang Yinyu, who taught our class, was among them. One by one they bowed their heads and stood in the front of the group. Boards covered with characters hung from their necks; I didn’t have the heart to look at what was written on them. Although thousands of people during the Cultural Revolution were insulted, beaten, and even killed, this was the first time I had seen with my own eyes the humiliation of the teachers who had had such prestige in the past and who had imparted so much knowledge to us.
I couldn’t listen to the speakers. I only remember that one student started to slap our teacher’s face. His actions shocked the audience, but not even one individual dared to stop him. On the contrary, several students stepped forward and began to imitate his behavior. I left the scene in anger. Since I had no overseas relations and my family was propertyless and blameless, I felt I had nothing to be afraid of. If my sudden departure from the meeting was questioned, I would just claim that I suddenly felt ill.
I went back to my dorm. Without telling anyone, I simply left the western suburbs, where our school was now located, and rode my bike back to my home in the city. I took my nieces and nephews to Lake Houhai for a few hours to calm down. I was planning to stay at home for a few days, and if anyone questioned me, I would say I was sick. This seemed a credible excuse because although I was good at sports, I appeared very vulnerable in health.
The second day I planned to go to the grocery store on Drum Tower Street. Just as I stepped out of the gate of our yard, I saw an individual a short distance away, pushing a coal cart. It was rare to see anyone pushing carts on the road. More surprising was that the man wore thick glasses and looked like my teacher, Zhang Yinyu. I made up my mind to greet him and called him “Teacher Zhang” in a loud voice.
It should have been a consolation for him to hear his student greet him, I naively thought. But as we were walking towards each other, getting closer and closer, he seemed to avoid looking at me, as if ashamed. He quickly turned his head and pushed the cart forward. In that instant, I saw that his cheeks under his glasses were not only black and purple but also swollen. What had happened? Why had he deliberately avoided me? I stood dumbfounded in the street. For the first time in my life I saw a person’s face swollen and dark purple with bruises! Wouldn’t he want to hear one of his distressed students greet him as a teacher now?
For many years, I could not forget the terrible shock of that encounter. Then more than twenty years later, Teacher Zhang came to visit me in my home in the United States. Several times I wanted to mention the encounter but couldn’t. I let the heavy stone sink in my heart forever, or so I thought. However, later a neighbor suggested that he was trying to protect me. Had it been discovered that I talked to him, I might get in trouble. When decades later I learned of his death, I wanted to hug him and thank him for protecting me.
The flames of the Cultural Revolution were spreading beyond Beijing. In this early phase of the Cultural Revolution, urban students were encouraged to travel to smaller cities and provinces beyond the capital to engage with their peers and discuss revolutionary ideas. To encourage participation in this scheme, the students—in college, high school, and even primary school—were offered free transportation to different locations. When they arrived, there were reception teams waiting to arrange their lodging and offering them free food. Students in Beijing were pouring out of the city. Various groups walked to Yan’an, Jinggangshan, and Hunan. I didn’t have the courage or physical strength to join them. However, with our classmates gone and students from other places occupying our school, two female classmates and I decided to take the train south to Guangzhou, naively thinking that the twice-a-year Guangzhou trade fair would be a place to practice our English.
When the three of us arrived at Beijing Railway Station, it was crowded with students like ourselves going off to spread the revolution to the provinces. It was easy enough to find the train to Guangzhou. However, we could not get close enough to board the train. If we lost this opportunity, we would never get to Guangzhou. We three decided to give it a try. We held hands and pressed towards the nearest carriage. The seats were already full of people, so we squeezed into the luggage compartment. There were no seats, no toilets, and everyone was sitting on the floor. Soon, the floor of the carriage was full of people, and even more people were squeezing in. “Close the door!” someone shouted. It was hot and stuffy. We were all looking forward to an early departure.
After three days and three nights, our train arrived in Guangzhou. Along the way, whenever the train stopped, we were busy looking for toilets and trying to find food peddlers. Once the train entered Hunan province, the door to the luggage compartment was opened. At long last we could breathe some fresh air. That was the first time I had seen the landscape of the south with my own eyes, the pavilions, small bridges, flowing water, green fields, and red soil that I had loved as a child in pictures.
When we arrived in Guangzhou, we were greeted enthusiastically and sent by the local Red Guards to the South China Normal University. On the streets of Guangzhou, there was green grass and flowers everywhere. We had never seen such tall trees with red flowers. Although it was autumn, it felt like summer. All three of us had been labeled as conservative royalists at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. Now no one knew our backgrounds or any details of our lives. This anonymity was a saving grace! We took the bus for free to go read the big-character posters in various schools. We also climbed beautiful Baiyun Mountain, the White Cloud Mountain. I doubt that the Red Guard leaders intended it, but we found a way to make our assignment as enjoyable as possible.
After a month of sleeping on floors every night, and with very little money in my pocket, I decided to return to Beijing. I also worried that my mother might be concerned about me. It was early winter in Beijing. We had just returned from the sunny south, and Beijing was not only cold but was enveloped by a gloomy atmosphere. My classmates had also returned from their journeys to spread the revolution. Some had walked to Yan’an and some had taken the train to Xi’an. I had no classes to attend, but I did not dare continue to study English on my own. Whoever dared to learn a foreign language might run the risk of being labeled as a capitalist and revisionist. Wearing that heavy “hat” would be like carrying a big black cauldron on my back and being unable to lift my head.
From the summer of 1966 to 1968, the country was in turmoil. Today this person was pulled out, and tomorrow that person was criticized. Even those darlings of the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, the ultra-radical “May16 elements,” suddenly became labeled as counter-revolutionary conspirators. These former leaders became targets for arrest; many were repudiated. There were beatings, murders. There was no standard for who was right or wrong.
Regarding the future of our school, the administrators received an order from above called “Going back to Classrooms and Making Revolution.” At least it brought us back to the classroom. Teacher Zhang also returned although he was much “quieter.” The only thing that hadn’t changed was his seriousness about teaching and his passion for English literature, especially Shakespeare, which he had acquired years before while studying engineering at Cambridge University. (Incidentally, this was not the first time he had been persecuted for his political views. Upon returning to China from Cambridge in the early 1950s, he was appointed Chief Engineer of the Bank of China. However, he only held that prestigious job until 1957 when he was labeled a “rightist” and was sent to Inner Mongolia to herd sheep and later to Shandong province to carry rocks in a mine. He told me later that he was almost crushed.)
According to the study schedule before the Cultural Revolution, Teacher Zhang was supposed to teach us the works of the great British writer Shakespeare. Now all the teaching materials became English translations of Mao’s “Three Articles.” Sadly, I remembered Teacher Zhang from the early days of our class when he delivered “To be, or not to be” in an authentic English accent with great passion. In fact, his performance inspired me to study Shakespeare when I later moved to the United States and enrolled for my master’s degree at Humboldt State University of Arcata, California. There I had the good fortune to be advised by and to study under Professor Jack Turner, another Shakespeare lover and scholar.
This all lay in the future. When graduation time arrived, students were required to fill out allocation forms specifying where they preferred to work. (No more voluntary tourism to see the country; we had entered the “forced rustication” phase of the Cultural Revolution.) The limited choices ranged from the National Defense Science and Technology Commission to the various industrial ministries, down to the various trading companies throughout the country. When I learned the Fourth Ministry of Industrial Machinery oversaw electronics production, I applied to work there. I had assumed that I would be working close to my family in Beijing, so as soon as the allocation results came out, I was dumbfounded. It turned out that the Ministry oversaw electronics projects in many remote locales, not just in major cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Nanjing.
I was assigned to Kaili in Guizhou province! It was the most remote, the poorest, and the farthest away of all the places. Worse, I had to go to an army-run farm in a salt flat near Weifang in Shandong province before going to work in Guizhou.
I had heard about Guizhou and Shandong, but where were Kaili and the salt flats? How would I tell my mother and my elder second sister, who was expecting her second child?
With an apprehensive heart, I returned home where my mother and my eight months-pregnant sister were waiting for me. When I told them about the assignment, they couldn’t say a word. I was also speechless. After a long time, my sister said to me abruptly, “Don’t go. Tell them you are not going there! I’ll support you for the rest of your life!” My mother realized this was not a reasonable option and after dinner, when we were alone, said to me very seriously, “You can’t rely on your sister for a lifetime. Your road must be walked by yourself.”
In fact, I chose to go my own way no matter how difficult it was. I had to grit my teeth and go to the outside world with my head held high. I did ask for and received approval to report to work later, so that I could help my mother with my sister and her newborn. When my sister’s contractions began in the fall of 1968 and there were no taxis to be had, I rode a bicycle to Jishuitan Hospital with her sitting on the back rack. Through the dark Lake Houhai district we went! The next morning my niece Jing-jing was born. Almost immediately I had to board the train going south to Shandong province without even waiting for my sister to reach her Man Yue, the tradition of remaining at home for one month after a mother gives birth.
Before leaving Beijing, I went to say goodbye to Hou Yulan, the only junior high school classmate with whom I still had contact. Riding a bicycle on the familiar roads, I realized how every street was known to me. I was born and grew up in the city. My father once told me, “Our ancestors have been here for more than three hundred years.” Now I was going to become an outsider. I never imagined that I would be kicked out of beautiful Beijing and sent to a remote part of the country that I knew nothing about. Tears burst from my eyes. My heart ached.
Hou had not gone to high school and was already married with children. As soon as she heard what my fate was, she became very concerned and offered to help me. “When you take the bus to Beijing Railway Station, I will ride the tricycle of the shop where I work to bring your luggage to the railway station,” she said decisively. She also stuffed a big bag of food for me and helped me board the night train to my remote destination. Later, she confessed to me that as she watched the train departing, she cried and cried as she thought how I had had such an easy life until then and now I would be going alone to a remote mountainous area to do menial labor. Hou Yulan, where are you now? I do miss you!
As the train was leaving Beijing Railway Station, the radio played the music of “The East Is Red.” Nearly everyone inside the train stood up and took out “The Little Red Book” of Chairman Mao’s quotations and put it on their chests, as officially required. I didn’t join in but simply let my teardrops run like broken beads falling on the cloth bag sewn by my mother to hold my yueqin (a Chinese stringed instrument). This was the first time I had left home, left my dear mother, my dear sister, my newborn niece, and my friends.
When I finally arrived at my destination, I followed the address on my letter to the army farm reception point in Weifang. The reception staff put me on a bus, and two hours later I arrived at the army farm on the salt flat in Shouguang county, Shandong province. For a year and a half, I planted rice in the growing season and dredged the irrigation canals after the harvesting, a shovel and basket my only tools. When I finally made it to the electronics factory, my job was to translate English-language computer manuals into Chinese. I knew nothing about computers and struggled with my dictionary to translate the technical terms. My engineer partner knew no English. This was my life for seven years.
Why did Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party and the number one leader in China, launch the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-76)? By this point even Mao’s own comrades-in-arms had begun to criticize his economic and social policies. (The Great Leap Forward, 1958-1962, whereby Mao hoped to catch up with or even surpass the West, had led to widespread famine and death.) With his influence in decline, he sought to reignite revolutionary zeal, mobilizing the malleable youth of the country, and to purge his rivals. As the Chinese saying goes, he “turned one hand to make clouds and another to make rain.” One month you were encouraged to put forward your suggestions as to how to improve the work of the Communist Party; another month you were labeled an anti-communist element and were sent to a labor camp.
Estimates of deaths during China’s Cultural Revolution vary but generally range from 500,000 to as high as 2 million. Many who were not killed in massacres suffered all sorts of humiliations. I have told you about the treatment of teachers. Wives and children of out-of-favor politicians were not immune. I saw with my own eyes how Wang Guangmei, the wife of Liu Shaoqi (a former president who was purged), was humiliated by the rebel students at Qing Hua University. They tricked her by saying that her youngest daughter had been injured and was in the hospital. When she arrived, she found herself at a mass meeting of over a thousand people where she was forced to wear a Chinese traditional dress (qipao), high heeled shoes, and a ridiculous necklace of ping-pong balls. Greatly disturbed by her humiliation, I left before the meeting started.
My own family members also suffered. My eldest sister had been the head administrator of a kindergarten for sixteen years. She was devoted to her work and respected by all. One day a two-year-old child died during nap time. Nobody knew why. My sister was detained right away. The working group of the school asked her what had happened and why. Because she could not provide any definitive answers, she was prevented from returning home and was forced to remain at school to write our family history and her own biography, reporting frequently to the authorities. Eventually, an autopsy found that the child had suffered from congenital heart disease. My sister was “cleared” and was allowed to go home.
Her husband, my respected brother-in-law, was not so lucky. Before 1949, he had worked in a power plant in Tianjin while dating my eldest sister, who worked in Beijing. For some reason he had borrowed a Kuomintang officer’s uniform to take a photo. Someone saw this photo and reported it to the authorities. He was detained right away by the rebels at his power plant. They suspected him of having joined the Kuomintang but never having reported it. When he told them the story of the photo and denied having been a member of the nationalist party, they refused to believe him. By beating him every evening until he passed out, they forced him to say he was an officer of the Kuomintang, even a spy. Because they could not find any hard proof of their accusation and because his kidneys were damaged from the beatings, they finally allowed him to return home. He died at the age of 61.
My second sister’s husband was very close and dear to me. He led me through the door of the Peking Opera, which would become a lifelong interest and hobby. Besides being a professional Peking opera singer, my brother-in-law was appointed Director of the Personnel Department of the Ningxia Peking Opera Troupe, a regional branch of the famous company. It was common at the time for the leaders of all working groups to be questioned, criticized, and repudiated. Of the seventy-five-member Troupe, only eight were considered royalists. My sister and brother-in-law were two of that minority. One day the rebels of the Troupe copied other organizations and summoned all the leaders. They hung a big board from the neck of each leader with a thin rope. Each board bore an accusatory name — capitalist-roader, counter-revolutionary, revisionist, bad person. The leaders were forced to line up and were pushed into the street to be humiliated. They were brought to a big meeting where they were forced to kneel down in front of the crowd. My apolitical brother-in-law, solely because of his leadership of the personnel department, was subjected to this treatment. When I heard the story later, I asked whether he had been beaten. He smiled bitterly and replied, “Luckily, they only shouted at us.”
Nevertheless, my sister and her husband and their children had to escape to Beijing to live with my mother and me. One of the other royalists, a Mr. Xu, warned my brother-in-law and my sister that the rebels planned to break my brother-in-law’s leg. They had no choice but to flee. I still remember that scene when Mr. Xu came to our home. It was a dark night. He ran the risk of endangering himself to inform us. My sister persuaded him to stay with us for the night, worrying that he might have been followed. The next morning, at 5 am, my sister woke me and asked me to accompany her to see Mr. Xu off at the No.5 bus station. I was twenty-one. I had never felt unsafe in my whole life. I grew up in that one night. I didn’t understand why people could be so cruel. I knew some of the rebels in the Ningxia Peking Opera Troupe. They were nice people and good friends of my sister’s family. I was also touched deeply by Mr. Xu’s behavior. What a kind and honest gentleman!
Later when everything calmed down, my sister’s extended family went back to their home in Yinchuan, the capital of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. My sister had hidden a big basket of our family’s Qing Dynasty porcelain in an alley to escape destruction by the Red Guards. Upon retrieving the basket, she discovered that the porcelain had been smashed to pieces. Traditional Chinese culture suffered along with the population. A great number of valuable artifacts, historic buildings, and religious sites were systematically destroyed by the Red Guards.
Maybe that is one of the reasons why today I like porcelain so much. Not only do I treat my guests with beautiful porcelain cups and saucers, plates, and tea pots, I use them every day. Perhaps it is to show that those terrible days did not defeat me.
Yili Olson is an immigrant from China who has written a chronicle of her experience in China’s Cultural Revolution to coincide with its sixtieth anniversary.
After laboring on the farm and factory during the Cultural Revolution, the author later landed a job as an interpreter in Beijing. In 1987 she came to the United States to study business at San Francisco State University with $200 in her pocket. She worked with NAS member Lydia Schulman on excerpting this narrative from a longer memoir.
Photo by《人民画报》 – 《人民画报》1967年, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65485686