Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
counterrevolutionaries, reactionaries, revisionists, capitalist roaders,
and the like) it was a time of enormous suffering and hardship. Mao
detested intellectuals because they thought for themselves and did
not always reverentially lap up the dogma he poured out to them. It
had been the intellectuals, after all, who had spoken out most vocifer-
ously against Mao's policies during the Hundred Flowers campaign.
Always conscious of his own lack of formal advanced education,
Mao was especially suspicious of any intellectual who had studied
abroad. During the Cultural Revolution, thousands of patriotic,
foreign-educated Chinese who had returned to China after the 1949
revolution were hunted down and sent to the countryside for back-
breaking reform through labor on farms. Hundreds of physicists and
other scientists were reduced to demeaning tasks such as shoveling
pig manure and cleaning latrines. Intellectuals in general were
referred to as the “stinking ninth category,” ninth being the last of a list
of undesirables in Chinese society that included criminals and “bad
elements.” Red Guards took special delight in bursting into their
teachers' homes in search of anything that could possibly prove them
antagonistic to Mao or pro-Western in their tastes: books, music, paint-
ings, and even Western-style clothing. People who aroused the slight-
est suspicion of the Red Guards were taken out and “struggled,” or
verbally and physically abused before large crowds of accusers
and detractors. Chinese writer Jung Chang recalls how her father, an
intellectual, was tormented but remained defiant during the Cultural
Revolution:
A standard opening was to chant: “Ten thousand years, another ten
thousand years, and yet another ten thousand years to our Great
Teacher, Great Leader, Great Commander, and Great Helmsman Chair-
man Mao!” Each time the three “ten thousand”s and four “great”s were
shouted out, everyone raised their Little Red Books in unison. My father
would not do this. He said that the “ten thousand years” was how
emperors used to be addressed, and it was unfitting for Chairman
Mao, a Communist.
This brought down a torrent of hysterical yells and slaps. At one
meeting, all of the targets were ordered to kneel and kowtow to a huge
portrait of Mao at the back of the platform. While the others did as they
were told, my father refused. He said that kneeling and kowtowing
were undignified feudal practices which the Communists were commit-
ted to eliminating. The Rebels screamed, kicked his knees, and struck
him on the head, but he still struggled to stand upright. “I will not kneel!
I will not kowtow!” he said furiously. The enraged crowd demanded,
