While the young teenage Xi Jinping was travelling with his mates in south China, terrible things were happening to his father. His father was being forced to attend numerous public gatherings orchestrated for self-criticized and public humiliation or even to be beaten. Such public self-criticism sessions for veteran cadres were common throughout China at that time. Such ‘struggle sessions’ were developed in the Soviet Union as early as the 1920s as a way to purge political opponents under the rubric of the ‘class struggle’. Mao effectively used this device of manipulating the mob, as have many others throughout history.
The former but now disgraced Vice-premier, Xi Zhongxun now found himself on the top of the ‘Capitalist Roadster’ list, the term invented to denounce those who had betrayed socialism, meaning Mao. Xi Zhongxun’s name was still in the memory of many people, but the Red Guards made sure that memory was not a good one. The Red Guards didn’t forget that Mao had said: “Using novels to fight the Party is a new invention”, his indirect but pointed criticism of Xi Zhongxun for having authorized the publication of The Biography of Liu Zhidan.
Xi Zhongxun was brought to the city of Xian where he used to be head of the province. In the ancient city of Xian where the Terracotta Warriors were later to be unearthed, Xi had to endure more public assaults. The northwest people of the area seemed to be every bit as brutal as their soldier ancestors, the armies of Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China.
Nowadays there is a picture of Xi Zhongxun on the Internet showing him standing on the back of a truck being driven through the crowds. Hanging on the front of his chest is a sign with his name. He was tortured by the Red Guards quite badly in Xian. This time he was close to death. Clearly the rather civilized house arrest of Xi Zhongxun since 1962 was being replaced with public brutality in the service of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Purge was now being enhanced with persecution.
Among the veteran cadres, the country’s President Liu Shaoqi, having been named the top enemy of the people and the socialist cause suffered the most. He became so ill from the constant public verbal and physical assaults that he didn’t recover and soon died anonymously in 1969. His death was not even told to the family for some time afterwards.
Similarly in 1967 Xi Zhongxun was tortured nearly to death. The news somehow reached his old colleague, Premier Zhou Enlai. Having sympathy for him and still with some power in his grasp, Zhou Enlai ordered an airplane to be dispatched to bring Xi Zhongxun back to Beijing for medical treatment. Xi was temporary put in jail, ostensibly as protective custody for his personal safety. This temporary arrest turned out to last for the next eight years.
But in this way, Premier Zhou Enlai saved Xi Zhongxun’s life. His heart was still on the side of the old veterans. Mao knew that. That was why he never trusted his Premier. He rather relied on his wife, the infamous Jiang Qing, than his loyal Premier. Today many Chinese would like to assert that Mao actually disliked his wife and protected Zhou which is just an empty wish of millions of Chinese to rewrite the memory of this brutal time with gentler brush strokes. Whatever good Zhou Enlai was able to do for the country as a whole, and unfortunate loyal citizens like Xi Zhongxun, he likely did on his own without any explicit or implicit aid from Mao.
The last academic semester of 1966 ended for most school children like a gigantic display of Chinese fireworks, with explosive, noisy, colorful and demonic glitters. Over a year’s break had now gone by in total chaos. All the schools and universities had been closed down. Not all students had the luxury of a travel holiday, and left largely to their own devices or manipulated by factions of the Red Guard, hooliganism was rampant. Something had to be done. Students had to return to study. So Mao said: “Continue Revolution by going back to schools.” But there was no going back to school. The education system was in shambles. The chaos on the street now moved into the classroom.
In her village, little Peng Liyuan was old enough to go to school. But even far from Beijing in rural areas, school was not the same as before. There was no joy in young children going off to school as before. On the contrary, school had become very uncomfortable. Not much real learning was going on.
Class started for Peng Liyuan at 8 A.M. The first thing students did in assembly was to sing The East is Red, a song to praise Mao.
“The east is red,
The sun is rising.
In China emerged Mao Zedong.
He serves the people for happiness
And he is a big saviour of the people.”
Day in and day out, Peng Liyuan and her fellow students had to sing the same song of praise. To worship is not a strange thing for any nation. But how they worship varies and always turns out to be very peculiar from an outsider’s view.
To worship Mao during the Cultural Revolution through songs of praise has its odd side. We have to point out that the Chinese had no historical or cultural tradition of singing together in unison of prayer. The Buddhists don’t gather and sing. Using a choir and making it a routine ritual for everyday life was absolutely new to the Chinese people. Oddly enough, this taken-for-granted communal behavior found everywhere in the Christian individualist world had no parallel practice in collectivist Communist China. It must have seemed strange indeed to now be singing songs of praise together regularly and religiously.
After the morning song, instead of studying science or literacy the first class turned out to be reading Mao’s works, specifically his famous Little Red Book, fully titled Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong. The book easily fits into the palm of one hand with 274 pages of cryptic political doctrine. It’s hard to think that young school children like Peng Liyuan could understand these quotes, but as millions of other Chinese children had to do, she had to know them by heart and study them with the utmost seriousness. Alongside Lenin and Engels, this was only the third official publication on Marxism allowed in the entire country for three years. Demand was so enormous that hundreds of new printing houses had to be hurriedly built just to keep up with it.
In fact Peng Liyuan and her schoolmates needn’t go to the school to learn Mao’s words. Now in every corner, in every family’s home, Mao’s Little Red Book could be seen. On the radio, in newspapers, on any wall along street, in buses, in shops and restaurants, even on stamps, in every possible place there was no way of avoiding Mao’s phrases. Very soon nearly everyone could remember every page of that Little Red Book as the goal had been set for 99% of the entire Chinese population to read it.
To study Mao’s words was not a task the school children were allowed to mess about with. But how could the young children sit for hours upon hours and listen to this tedious political teaching? Imagine young school children having to memorize and endlessly discuss the following quote from Mao?
”Revisionism, or Right opportunism, is a bourgeois trend of thought that is even more dangerous than dogmatism. The revisionists, the Right opportunists, pay lip service to Marxism; they too attack ‘dogmatism’. However, what they are really attacking is the quintessence of Marxism. They oppose or distort materialism and dialectics, oppose or try to weaken the people’s democratic dictatorship and the leading role of the Communist Party, and oppose or try to weaken socialist transformation and socialist construction. After the basic victory of the socialist revolution in our country, there are still a number of people who vainly hope to restore the capitalist system and fight the working class on every front, including the ideological one. Moreover, their right-hand men in this struggle are the revisionists.”
Soon the students lost their patience. All schools lost a sense of discipline; the classroom became as chaotic as a Chinese tea-house. Boys and girls walked in and out of classrooms freely; the teachers had no power to control them and they were constantly afraid of being physically threatened or attacked by the more rowdy students.
Very little academics were occurring in the schools at all. Peng Liyuan’s math studies were a disaster. Her math teacher just wished she could make as much efforts for math as for singing, for in all this chaos, Peng Liyuan had found her refuge in the most important part of the Communist Party propaganda machine