The Struggle Continues

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The Struggle Continues

  After Liu was taken out of the ‘people’s team’ and declared to be the first ‘black gang’ in the commune, he was criticized and ‘struggled against’ every day.

  The Cultural Revolution in the countryside began from ‘Breaking the Four Olds’, while ‘Breaking the Four Olds’ from changing the names of the villages. Usually, the names of the villages followed the historic tradition, those from their ancestors. But now, it was in the Cultural Revolution, they thought the names should be changed, because they learned that many names in Beijing had been changed. For example: the Peking Union Medical College Hospital had been changed into Anti-imperialism Hospital because it was established by USA; and The Hospital of the Friendship between Soviet and China had been changed into Anti-revisionism Hospital because it was established by the ex-Soviet. There were thirty natural villages in the commune. Every village got a revolutionary name. Once one of them changed its name, they would announce the good news to the commune.

Generally, the rite is as the following: taking Dong’an village for example: it changed its name from Dong’an to Dong Fang Hong (The east is red). The villagers would be organized to have a parade from the village to the commune, beating gongs and drums. After they arrived at the courtyard of the commune, they sang songs composed of Chairman Mao’s quotations and read the quotations loudly. The leader of the village would announce the action of changing the name, and then put a bulletin of the good news on the wall. And the next program would be to struggle the black gang – Liu Peng. In addition, many black gangs appeared, especially, from the primary and middle schools – the head and some of the teachers in charge such as deans of studies, became members of the ‘black gangs’.

In the village it was said that there were no ‘capitalist roaders’ so all the ‘four kinds of elements’ (landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries and the bad elements), and even their sons and daughters, at last, the grandsons and daughters became the targets of the movements.

Generally, there were two kinds of struggle to criticize the targets.

The first was ‘the meeting from criticizing and denouncing’. Usually, there was a stage in the front of, and over the stage there was a horizontal scroll on which the title and name of the target were written down, for example, ‘The Meeting of Criticizing and Denouncing Element of Black Gang Liu Peng’, and Liu’s name was written in a special way – being turned upside down with red crosses on the characters.

The process of a ‘criticizing and denouncing’ meeting was as follows: At the beginning, the mass who attended the meeting were to do ‘Three Things’: the first was to wish Chairman Mao a long, long life and to wish Vice-Chairman Lin Biao health forever, waving the little red of Mao’s Quotations above the head. The second was to sing the song ‘The East is Red’ which said that Chairman Mao was the great liberator of China, and the song ‘Sailing on the sea, depending on the great helmsman’. And the third was to read Chairman Mao’s quotations. In fact, during this period of time, people had to perform this ceremony whenever they did anything, at least twice a day – after getting up and before going to bed.

Finishing the ‘Three Things’, the chair of the meeting would declare: “Seize the element of black gang (or the landlord, rich peasant, and so on) and bring him to the stage.” Then the target(s) would be caught with his or her arms held by the Red Guards and brought to the stage. The Red Guards would keep the target(s) in the ‘jet plane’ posture: he had to bow his head at an angle of more than 90 degrees and his arms were force up and backward. Usually, a high paper hat with his title and name was put on the target’s head and a board with the same writing was hung around his neck by a strip. However, as the movement became more extreme, the board was made heavier and heavier by adding some bricks on its top and the strip was changed into thin wire.

The people would go on the stage to criticize and reveal the crimes of the targets. The speakers would often stop to shout slogans during the speech and the organizers were also expected to shout slogans to interrupt the speech or to prompt the speaker when he or she forgot his or her words. All the speeches would be full of the terminology of class struggle and Chairman Mao’s quotations while no one care about truthfulness or logic.

After the criticizing, the ‘struggle’ followed. The target would be beaten by the Red Guards and other people who wanted to join in, until the target could not support himself. At last, two Red Guards would hold the target’s arms and put a foot on his back or shoulder, forcing him to show his face to the audience. It was called ‘beating the class enemies down and putting a foot on them.’ The successful meeting would be ended by the slogans, the quotations and the song ‘Sealing on the sea, depending on the helmsman.’

The second kink of struggle was the small struggle meeting or interrogation. In fact, it was illegal punishment; this was worse for a target than was the larger meeting. Its two aims were to punish the target or to compel him to admit the crimes which were placed on him by others, or both these aims. At times it was just for fun or for personal vengeance. Besides beating, making the target no sleep for days was one of the torments.

There were many other ways to punish the target besides the struggle meetings. The most important of these was to parade the targets through the streets to expose them before the public (You Jie) and to stand or kneel on the ground. ‘You Jie’ was very common at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. In the cities, the targets wearing a high paper hat and board, were put on the back of a truck under a Red Guard escort and taken along the street. But in the countryside, the targets could only walk on the street under Red Guard escort and sometimes there might be drums and gongs to attract the villagers’ attention. The team could be stopped by any body and anybody could beat, spit on or curse the targets.

After the struggle and punishment, the target had to do the hardest and most dirty work such as digging a hole for pig manure, cleaning toilets, delivering bricks and son on. The targets would be treated as an animal, not a pet but as a slave such as existed a hundreds years ago. He would be put into a small room which called the ‘cowshed.’

If a target was a worker of a teacher, he might be removed form the factory or school in which he worked or he might be taken by the Red Guards to the place where he was born. If the target was a peasant, his workpoints night be reduced from two-thirds to one-third.

The Liu’s incident in the commune had two results: one was that anybody can be taken from the people’s team and claim he was an ‘element’ of black gang or any other title and put into proletarian dictatorship; another was to break the ‘Four Olds’.

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