Introduction
You may wonder how an entire nation can turn on itself overnight. In 1966, China's Cultural Revolution plunged millions into ideological chaos where loyalty to Chairman Mao superseded family ties.
You face a profound moral dilemma when your personal ambitions collide with sudden political disgrace. Ji-li Jiang's memoir explores how a promising student must navigate impossible choices when her family's bourgeois background brands them as class enemies.
The book traces this descent through eight structured stages. You will witness the early political crackdowns, the destruction of traditional culture, and the devastating pressure of schoolyard betrayals.
- How do children survive ideological fanaticism without losing their humanity?
- What happens when a legal system vanishes and neighborhood raids become law?
- Can you maintain integrity when the state demands you betray your parents?
1. The Early Crackdown and Political Background
High-status career and educational opportunities in communist China were entirely dependent on an individual's family class background, regardless of personal talent or achievement.
Ji-li Jiang serves as the da-dui-zhang and leads forty students in Ji-li's classroom. Her mother gave birth to three children born to Ji-li's mother in three years. Comrade Li from the Central Liberation Army Arts Academy selects Ji-li to audition for a prestigious dance training class.
Ji-li is selected to audition for the Central Liberation Army Arts Academy after demonstrating her martial arts back bends, but her father forbids her from attending out of fear that a failed background investigation will expose the family's hidden political problems.
A political background investigation into ancestral and family class status prevents ambitious children from advancing when the state uncovers historical flaws.
2. The Campaign to Destroy the Four Olds
Chairman Mao initiated the movement to clear out pernicious feudal and bourgeois influences from society. Citizens and student activists targeted shop signs, traditional practices, and superstitious rituals to build a socialist society.
The Cultural Revolution launched a massive campaign to eradicate old ideas, culture, customs, and habits, transforming public spaces and targeting traditional symbols.
Ji-li and her friends watch young men and crowds enthusiastically smash and hack down the huge wooden sign of the Great Prosperity Market on Nanjing Road. The shop sign claimed thirty years of prosperity before destruction.
Student activists took on the role of cultural enforcers, patrolling public streets to eliminate bourgeois clothing and fashion items deemed contrary to proletarian ideals. High school student inspectors measured the width of trousers and inspected shoes on the street, cutting open garments considered too tight or Western-influenced with scissors.
High school student inspectors stop a man on the street for wearing tight pants and champagne shoes, force him to stand in his socks, and cut open his trousers with scissors.
You encounter restrictions on everyday items during this period:
- sixty-three picture books rented for thirty fen;
- thirty fen paid by Dad for picture book rentals;
- eight inches minimum leg width for women's pants;
- nine inches minimum leg width for men's pants.
3. Writing Da-Zi-Bao and School Betrayal
Formal schooling was indefinitely suspended during the Cultural Revolution so that students could focus entirely on political criticism through handwritten posters.
Educational institutions halted regular classes and provided rolls of white paper, brushes, and ink. Students filled classrooms, corridors, and school yards with large posters attacking the traditional education system and their teachers. It was seventeen years after Liberation that schools were declared revisionist.
All school classes are suspended indefinitely, and students are directed to write big posters criticizing the educational system.
Family members and relatives of those with bourgeois tendencies were publicly targeted and forced to self-denounce to demonstrate revolutionary loyalty. Student groups marched to the homes of suspected class enemies, pasted critical posters on their doors, and compelled them to read the accusations aloud to crowds.
A student group led by Yin Lan-lan marches to the home of Jiang Xi-wen, Ji-li's relative, and forces her to paste a da-zi-bao on her door and read its insults aloud with twenty students marching to the house.
The political climate fostered an environment where academic relationships and personal interactions were reframed as corrupt bourgeois conspiracies. Students turned against their teachers and peers, authoring accusatory posters that reinterpreted normal academic mentorship and assistance as illicit favoritism.
Ji-li discovers a da-zi-bao on the school playground questioning the relationship between her and her math teacher, Ke Cheng-li, accusing him of favoritism because she won contests and received notebooks after Du Hai scored twenty-six out of a hundred on an arithmetic test.
4. Red Successors and Neighborhood Raids
Political purity and class background became mandatory criteria for student leadership positions during the Cultural Revolution.
When Ji-li was nominated to be a Red Successor, her classmates invoked family class status to disqualify her. They revealed that her grandfather was a landlord and her father was labeled a rightist.
Du Hai publicly announced in the classroom that Ji-li's grandfather was a landlord and her father a rightist. The class erupted, leading to Ji-li fleeing the room.
The political system held children personally accountable for the alleged historical crimes and class statuses of their ancestors. Students with non-red family backgrounds were told they needed ideological remolding and were subjected to intense peer criticism.
Yin Lan-lan and other Red Successors forced Ji-li to stay after school in the gym to criticize her for having a landlord grandfather and an extravagant lifestyle.
Radical educational reforms abolished traditional entrance exams and teacher assignments, replacing them with chaotic residential-based placements. Teacher Gu secretly assigned Ji-li and An Yi to Shi-yi Junior High. A later city directive invalidated teacher assignments and reassigned all neighborhood students to Xin-zha Junior High.
The "Destroy the Four Olds" campaign led to widespread neighborhood raids, confiscation of valuables, and intense public anxiety.
Red Guards and zealous neighborhood activists ransacked the homes of former capitalists and landlords. They confiscated wealth, antiques, and luxury items while using drums and gongs to signal targets.
A search party from a factory raided old Mr. Rong's house at Number Eleven. They confiscated a mahogany four-poster bed and trunks of gold bars.
Families hastily terminated domestic help to avoid being accused of exploiting the working class. Mom and Dad dismissed Song Po-po, leaving her with a small bag and a heavy heart. The children took over household chores like marketing and cooking.
Families systematically altered or destroyed valuable heirlooms and luxury items to prevent them from being identified as forbidden cultural relics. Four trunks were part of Grandma's dowry.
To hide these items, you could follow practical survival steps:
- Paint red leather dowry trunks with dark dye to hide their original appearance.
- Cut up silk gowns into pieces for quilt covers and cushions.
- Repurpose old clothing ties into household mops.
Dad painted Grandma's red leather dowry trunks dark burgundy. Mom and Grandma cut up ancient silk gowns embroidered with gold dragons to make quilt covers and mops.
5. Public Humiliation and House Searches
Public rituals of humiliation and arbitrary house searches were instituted to terrorize targeted families and eliminate any remaining bourgeois possessions.
People from the Five Black Categories were forced to gather twice a day at the neighborhood propaganda wall to bow before Chairman Mao's portrait, wave the Precious Red Book, chant slogans, and confess their guilt before being made to sweep the streets. Aunt Xi-wen and other landlords or rightists were forced to perform Morning Repentance and Evening Report daily while watched and taunted by neighborhood children and the Neighborhood Dictatorship Group.
To fulfill Morning Repentance and Evening Report, you had to follow these mandatory rules:
- Gather at the foot of the propaganda wall in the morning and evening
- Bow in front of Chairman Mao's picture
- Wave copies of the Selected Quotations from the Writings of Chairman Mao in the air
- Chant Long life to Chairman Mao three times
- Confess guilt one by one
- Sweep assigned parts of the alley twice a day
The Neighborhood Dictatorship Group maintained constant surveillance over black category families, suggested names to party committees, recorded visitors, supervised street sweeping, and patrolled day and night. Six-Fingers, the chairman of the Neighborhood Dictatorship Group, acted as an aggressive enforcer, detaining a ragpicker for accidentally tearing a newspaper picture of Chairman Mao and presiding over the public punishments.
Individuals labeled as counterrevolutionaries or capitalists were subjected to extreme public degradation, such as kneeling on washboards or being beaten, leading many to take their own lives to escape further torment. Old Qian was forced to kneel on a sharp washboard in the burning sun for refusing to lend his bicycle, and An Yi's grandmother jumped out of a window to her death after witnessing the escalating persecutions.
Fearing sudden raids by Red Guards, families established visual signals like hanging mops on balconies, hid in parks during high-risk hours, and burned old photographs, long gowns, and items deemed representative of old customs. Ji-li's parents burned family photo albums containing pictures of people in old-fashioned long gowns and fur coats in a tin washbowl inside the bathroom at night.
When protecting your home from sudden raids, you relied on specific survival strategies:
- Leave a designated sign, such as a mop on the balcony, to signal whether Red Guards are present
- Take children to spend the day in empty parks to avoid being at home during sweeps
- Inspect photo albums and possessions to remove items categorized as four-olds
- Burn unauthorized pictures and materials in private spaces like the bathroom and flush the ashes away
Red Guards ransacked homes of black status families under the guise of searching for weapons or four-olds, turning drawers upside down, tearing through clothing, and seizing items like stamp albums. Red Guards searched Ji-li's apartment, destroying her butterfly collection and confiscating her treasured stamp album while treating it as bourgeois xenophilia. The initial search downstairs lasted thirty minutes before the Red Guards moved upstairs, stripping away six years of time Ji-li spent collecting canceled stamps for her album.
6. Detention and Educable Children
Family members faced sudden detention and false confessions under extreme psychological pressure, while children were offered an alternative path through political zeal.
Traditional education in junior high schools was largely replaced by political study, military training, and practical work. Physics, chemistry, and biology were discarded in favor of Fundamentals of Industry and Agriculture.
A teacher brought the wrong handouts to class, accidentally preparing a lesson on raising pigs instead of rice growing. He stood awkwardly on the platform before dismissing the class.
Adults associated with the arts or local institutions were systematically targeted, held in political study classes, cut off from their salaries, and pressured to implicate friends and colleagues.
Ji-li's father, Jiang Xi-reng, was detained before the Chinese New Year and put to hard labor carrying concrete pipes at the Children's Art Theater without being allowed visitors or food packages.
Detainees under political investigation often confessed to false crimes because of severe psychological pressure and physical abuse. Under the slogan of leniency to those who confess, and severity to those who resist, suspects broke down under physical and psychological torture.
Uncle Fan returned home severely beaten and bruised. He eventually confessed to listening to foreign radio broadcasts simply because he could no longer stand the abuse.
Children from politically compromised families could still find a future if they chose to break with their relatives and follow the Communist Party. Teachers and authorities framed family background as an unchangeable burden. Students labeled as black whelps from a black family were offered an alternative path through political zeal and personal achievement, designating them as educable children.
Teacher Zhang encouraged Ji-li to overcome her family background by accepting the political assignment of working as a guide for the school's Class Education Exhibition. Students were conscripted into intensive manual labor projects to create elaborate political propaganda displays. Key students were organized into propaganda groups to construct visual exhibits celebrating the revolution, which required exhausting all-night labor sessions and meticulous craftsmanship.
Students spent hours gluing dyed millet grains onto a huge sheet of paper to create a massive three-dimensional portrait of Chairman Mao for the Class Education Exhibition. Students spent six hours just to finish two eyebrows and the ears of the millet-grain portrait of Chairman Mao.
Public revolutionary enthusiasm and strict adherence to Party duties frequently masked deep private grief, family illness, and emotional trauma that members could not share due to strict ideological expectations. Even students who achieved high political status and held leadership roles often bore severe personal and family hardships in private.
Chang Hong, a prominent Red Guard Committee member, privately confessed her deep anguish over her brother. Her younger brother was eleven years old and suffered from severe daily epileptic seizures.
7. Exposing the Half-City Jiangs
Public media exposure destroyed family standing, forcing children to choose between loyalty to their disgraced parents and revolutionary demands.
An article published on the front page of the Workers' Revolt revealed that the Jiang family was a wealthy landlord family from Nanjing. The Workers' Revolt published an article stating that the Jiang family owned over thirty-three hundred acres of land and lots of businesses, earning them the nickname Half-City Jiangs.
When you went to the police registration office to change your surname, Officer Ma explained that revolutionary action required making a clean break with your black family and siding with Chairman Mao against your parents. Ji-li visited Officer Ma at the police registration office to change her surname, but fled when she realized it meant turning against her mother and father.
Chairman Jin and the Revolutionary Committee replaced Ji-li in the Class Education Exhibition at the last moment due to her political situation, and Bai Shan returned her dictionary to her outside the hall. Thin-Face and officials from her father's theater tried to force Ji-li to testify against her father at a public struggle meeting and provide details of his rightist mentality. Thin-Face told Ji-li that she must choose between breaking with her family and following Chairman Mao or becoming an enemy of the people by supporting her father.
Students were sent to help with the double rush, which involved rush harvesting the first crop of rice and immediately planting the second crop under harsh weather and exhausting physical conditions. You followed specific steps during the rural labor:
- Hold the sickle in the right hand.
- Grab six plants with the left hand.
- Cut the plants at the roots.
- Take one step forward.
Ji-li cut rice in the flooded paddies, suffered a gash on her leg, and eventually fainted from exhaustion and illness while operating a thresher.
A critical letter written by Mom and Uncle Tian to the Municipal Party Committee complaining about the Rebels' torture and illegal actions in the theater was discovered after being hidden in a cat's litter box. Thin-Face and his crew searched the Jiang apartment, found the letter exposed by Little White the cat, and classified Mom as a landlord's wife while forcing Grandma to sweep the alley at four thirty in the morning when the truck left with their possessions. After losing their home, furniture, and status, Ji-li realized that her life was no longer defined by political achievements like becoming a Red Guard, but by her promise to take care of her mother, grandmother, brother, and sister. Ji-li watched her grandmother sweep the pavement every day and resolved to hide her own fears and tears to support her family.
8. Reflections on the Cultural Revolution
Decades later, survivors reflected on the mass brainwashing, the failure of the legal system, and the eventual emigration and recovery of the lost generation.
Chairman Mao controlled everything citizens read, heard, and learned in school. Dissent was unimaginable, and even victims of persecution blamed external factors rather than Mao. When Ji-li asked An Yi's mother if she hated Mao after being forced to climb a factory chimney, she replied that she believed the movement was necessary to prevent capitalism and only realized she was deceived after Mao's death.
The Cultural Revolution was fundamentally a high-level Party power struggle that succeeded because a weak legal system allowed a small group or single person to hijack an entire country. People woke up only after Mao's death in 1976. Nearly all of the author's contemporaries were sent to the primitive countryside for ten years of reeducation, returning with few skills, broken beliefs, and wasted youth. Chang Hong worked for many years on a state-run farm near Mongolia, where her brother died and she met her husband before they returned to Shanghai.
Aside from a few extreme cases involving murder, almost no revolutionaries were punished for their actions because they believed they were acting for Mao. In 1980, Ji-li's father was cleared of being an escaped landlord, and his Antirightist Movement charges were reversed. Grandma died in 1992 at the age of ninety-eight.
Seeking the freedom to think, speak, and write without fear of government arrest, Ji-li emigrated to the United States in 1984 at age thirty to start a new life from the bottom. She graduated from the University of Hawaii in 1987. During her first years in the U.S., Ji-li was continually astonished by public celebrations like the Waikiki Beach Halloween parade where people mocked the president without fear. Unable to forget her homeland despite personal suffering, she founded East West Exchange to foster cultural understanding and bridge relations between the United States and China.
10 Key Ideas
- High-status career and educational opportunities in communist China were entirely dependent on an individual's family class background, regardless of personal talent or achievement.
- The Cultural Revolution launched a massive campaign to eradicate old ideas, culture, customs, and habits, transforming public spaces and targeting traditional symbols.
- Formal schooling was indefinitely suspended during the Cultural Revolution so that students could focus entirely on political criticism through handwritten posters.
- Political purity and class background became mandatory criteria for student leadership positions during the Cultural Revolution, leading to widespread neighborhood raids, the confiscation of valuables, and intense public anxiety.
- Public rituals of humiliation and arbitrary house searches were instituted to terrorize targeted families and eliminate any remaining bourgeois possessions while forcing them to rely on secret safety measures and visual signals.
- Family members faced sudden detention and false confessions under extreme psychological pressure, while children labeled as black whelps from a black family were offered an alternative path through political zeal and personal achievement as educable children.
- Key students were organized into propaganda groups to construct visual exhibits celebrating the revolution, which required exhausting all-night labor sessions and meticulous craftsmanship like gluing millet grains onto portraits of Chairman Mao.
- Public media exposure destroyed family standing through articles in the Workers' Revolt, forcing children to choose between loyalty to their disgraced parents and revolutionary demands.
- Chairman Mao controlled everything citizens read, heard, and learned in school through mass brainwashing that left victims blaming external factors rather than Mao for the failure of the legal system.
- Seeking the freedom to think, speak, and write without fear of government arrest, Ji-li emigrated to the United States in 1984 at age thirty to start a new life from the bottom and eventually founded East West Exchange to foster cultural understanding.