PROMINENT VICTIMS OF CULTURAL REVOLUTION ATTACKS

POWERFUL VICTIMS OF CULTURAL REVOLUTION ATTACKS

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Liu Shaoqi Important Communist party members purged during the Cultural Revolution included Deng Xiaoping and Mao's right-hand man Lin Biao. In 1966, Deng was labeled as the "No. 2 Capitalist Roader" and stripped of his position as Party General Secretary. During a humiliating self criticism session Deng was accused of being a "fascist," a "traitor" and a practitioner of cat-ism (a reference to his white cat, black cat remark). During the sessions, Red Guards shouted, "Cook the dog's head in boiling oil!" When the noise became too much, Deng used to remove his hearing aid. Deng was rehabilitated in 1973. Yao Wenyuan later admitted he was behind the trumped charged against Deng.

Fu Lei was a famous intellectual and translator. He and his wife and intellectual partner, Zhu Meifu, were brutally harassed and publicly humiliated by Red Guards in the early months of the Cultural Revolution perhaps because he translated a lot of famous Western writers. The attacks proved too much and the couple hung themselves, according to Claire Roberts, from the metal grill door frames of their bedroom with lengths of hand-woven cotton cloth from Pudong. On his desk, Fu left a package that included the rent payment for September, fees for his housekeeper and a list of items he borrowed that needed to be returned to friends. [Source: Sheila Melvin, Caixin, December 27, 2013]

Liu Shaoqi was an elite party member once declared as Mao successor but had a falling out with Mao. He and his wife, according to Mao’s doctor Dr. Li Zhisui, were "pushed and kicked and beaten by staff from the Bureau of Secretaries. Liu's shirt had been torn open, and people were jerking him by the hair. Someone held his arms behind his back while others tried to force him to bend forward from the waist in the so-called airplane position. Finally, they pushed his head until it was nearly touching the dirt, kicking him and slapping him on the face...I could not bear to watch. Liu was almost 70 years old, and he was our head of state.” Liu died in prison in 1969, deprived of food and medical treatment. His wife the highly-educated Wang Guangmei was paraded in public with a necklace made of ping pong balls. [Source: "The Private Life of Chairman Mao" by excerpts reprinted U.S. News and World Report, October 10, 1994]

Liu Shaoqi and the Cultural Revolution

Mao launched the the Cultural Revolution at least in part as a way of attacking political enemies — or at least rivals — such as Liu Shaoqi (1898-1969) and Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping. On May 16, 1966, the Chinese Communist Party released a document expressing concern that bourgeoisie and counterrevolutionaries were trying to hijack the party. The May 16 Notification, as it became known, is cited by many as the spark the Cultural Revolution. The two year period between May, 1966 and the summer of 1968 was the most active and radical period of the Cultural Revolution. The period between 1968 and 1976 was a period of recovery when members of the Red Guard were re-educated and some assemblage of order was restored. Today the Cultural Revolution is officially known in China as "Ten Years of Chaos" or "Ten Years of Calamity."

The historian Frank Dikötter described how after the the Great Leap Forward humiliation Mao feared that Liu Shaoqi would discredit him just as completely as Khrushchev had damaged Stalin’s reputation. In his view this was the impetus behind the Cultural Revolution that started in 1966. “Mao was biding his time, but the patient groundwork for launching a Cultural Revolution that would tear the party and the country apart had already begun,” Dikötter wrote.

Liu Shaoqi was accused by Mao and his loyalists as being the leading "capitalist roader". He Deng Xiaoping, and their fellow "revisionists" and "capitalist roaders" were purged from public life by early 1967 when Maoists were in full command of the political scene. Liu and his wife, according to Mao’s doctor Dr. Li Zhisui, were "pushed and kicked and beaten by staff from the Bureau of Secretaries. Liu's shirt had been torn open, and people were jerking him by the hair. Someone held his arms behind his back while others tried to force him to bend forward from the waist in the so-called airplane position. Finally, they pushed his head until it was nearly touching the dirt, kicking him and slapping him on the face...I could not bear to watch. Liu was almost 70 years old, and he was our head of state.” Liu died in prison in 1969, deprived of food and medical treatment and cremated under a false name. Liu's reputation was rehabilitated soon after Mao’s death. [Source: "The Private Life of Chairman Mao" by excerpts reprinted U.S. News and World Report, October 10, 1994]

Wang Guangmei: Liu Shaoqi’s Wife and Cultural Revolution Victim

Wang Guangmei humiliated by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution

Wang Guangmei was one of the few women on the 1934 Long March. She was born in 1921, and grew up in a distinguished and prominent Chinese family. Her father was a government minister and a diplomat. She could speak French, Russian and English and earned a degree in physics from the Catholic University of Peking in Beijing and intended to go to the United States, where she obtained a full scholarship to study Atomic Physics at Stanford University. She began woring with the Communist Party of China as a translator and met Liu when she was 24 and he was nearly twice her age. She served as his personal secretary before they were married. [Source: Wikipedia]

During the Cultural Revolution, Wang headed a work team that tried restore order among the students at Tsinghua University. The effort backfired when she came under attack by a militant opponent who accused her of being a counterrevolutionary. Wang Guangmei's public role had antagonized Mao's wife Jiang Qing, who was growing politically ambitious.

In April 1967, at Jiang's instigation, the Red Guards forced Wang to put on a tight-fitting qipao dress she had worn at a banquet in Indonesia, with silk stockings, high heels and a mocking necklace made out of ping-pong balls, as proof of her bourgeoise, counterrevolutionary attitude. She was paraded in public with the necklace made of ping pong balls and placed on a stage where she was harangued by a crowd.

Wang was put under house arrest, then imprisoned for 12 years. Her four children were also punished. Wang was kept at Qincheng Prison where she was kept in ignorance of her family's fate. After four years, her children plucked up the courage to ask Mao for permission to see their parents. It was through Mao's terse consent, "their father is dead but they may see the mother", that Wang learned of her husband's death. Wang was released from prison in 1979 — just as Jiang Qing and the Gang of Four were put on trial for the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. Later Wang received compensation for her suffering and later held several prestigious academic positions. She died in 2006.

Persecution of Famed Architect Liang Sicheng

Liang Sicheng (1901-1972) is known as the father of modern Chinese architecture. His wife Lin Huiyin is equally well known. Their appreciation of China's ancient buildings and their devotion to preserving Beijing's heritage have made them highly respected by conservationist and architects today, but not so much so by the Chinese Communist Party. Tania Branigan wrote in the The Guardian: After the Communists came to power Liang and Lin helped design the new national emblem and were asked to invent a new style of Chinese architecture. Among Liang’s most famous designs is the Monument to the People’ Heroes that stands at the center of Tiananmen Square. In the end Liang’s ideas where incompatible with those of the Communists. Liang tried by persuade Mao Zedong to save Beijing’s towering walls, which encircles the capital. The request was rejected and the walls were torn down and replaced with a quasi ring road. [Source: Tania Branigan, The Guardian, January 30, 2012]

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Bo Yibo, father of Bo Xilai,
Cultural Revolution victim Liang was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution.:“When Liang Sicheng was denounced as a counter-revolutionary, he was scared to look even his wife in the eye. Lin Zhu, who had been working in the countryside at the time, rushed home to him on learning the news. "He said, 'I've been waiting for you and missing you every day, but I'm afraid to see you,'" she told The Guardian. Her husband sensed the horror ahead. Beijing's Tsinghua University — one of the country's top institutions — was already covered in posters attacking professors. Lin Zhu said, Back then, I thought this was like a dark cloud that would soon pass. I didn't realise it would cover the country for the next 10 years." When it lifted, Liang was dead, his health wrecked by the scores of lengthy "struggle sessions" publicly to humiliate him; by beatings from Red Guards; and by the cold, damp conditions of the building to which the family had been moved. [Source: Tania Branigan, The Guardian, February 24, 2012]

Lin still struggles to understand how hundreds of millions could participate in such cruelties. Some of Liang's persecutors were forced into taking part, she says; others were jealous of his success. Most were young students who did not understand his ideas. To her husband, who had loved teaching, that was particularly painful. "He wrote confession letters, one after another, but didn't know what he had done. The most important claim was that he had received a 'capitalist education'. No one could tell us what proletarian architectural design was — and you were too afraid to ask." As the movement escalated, Lin considered demands to join it: "I thought probably I would be beaten to death by the Red Guards. Maybe my children would desert me and my friends would keep their distance. But I couldn't understand what Liang Sicheng had done. I couldn't go against my conscience by leaving him."

Together they endured six years of enforced Maoist study and public denunciations that often ran for hours. "Because it was all day long, the brain sort of became numb," Lin recalls. "Normally he was not beaten up at those sessions, but sometimes they would come and beat us at home." Liang's ordeal ended when he grew so sick that he could no longer rise from his bed for the struggle sessions. He died in 1972, aged 70. In later years, Lin worked with her husband's accusers; some, quietly, apologised. She does not blame individuals for caving into pressure to attack others, though she is adamant that she never did so. She even suggests those years helped her to grow. "Whatever happens, whatever comes, I'm not afraid any more. It made me stronger and made me think," she says. But she fears that intellectual life in China has never fully recovered — and she worries the country could see another such movement. "Many of us are concerned about whether we can avoid a similar disaster in future. History doesn't repeat itself exactly — but it's possible."

Paralysis Of Deng Pufang, Deng Xiaoping’s Son

Deng Pufang

Deng’s son, Deng Pufang, was harassed by Red Guards for refusing to "expose" his father and for being disloyal to Mao Zedong. In 1968, he wrote a suicide note, leaped from a third-floor window to escape torture, and was paralyzed from the waist down. Now he is China's most influential advocate for the disabled. Deng younger brother was driven to suicide by Red Guard attacks. Deng himself was put under house in Beijing for two years and then sent to Jiangxi province where worked in a tractor-repair factory and was confined to an infantry school, a fate that could have much worse. Later he said, "Chairman Mao protected me." Later, Mao uncharacteristically apologized to Deng for the ordeal.

Tristan Shaw wrote in Listverse: “In 1967, while serving as the Communist Party’s general secretary, Deng was denounced as a capitalist roader and removed from his position. He then spent the next two years under house arrest in Beijing, forbidden to leave or see his children. While the worst thing that most of his children suffered was being forced to work in the countryside, Deng’s oldest son, Pufang, became paralyzed after an encounter with the Red Guards. In 1968, a group of Red Guards captured Pufang on the campus of Beijing University and tortured him for the sole reason of being his father’s son. [Source: Tristan Shaw, Listverse, June 24, 2016 -]

“After clubbing him, the Red Guards locked a dazed Pufang in a fourth-story room. Pufang has never been able to remember what happened next. Either his torturers pushed him out an open window or he attempted suicide by jumping out the window himself. “Fortunately, Pufang survived the fall. But he did break his back and become paralyzed. Since the Dengs were political pariahs, Pufang was denied the treatment he needed. By the time some specialists finally examined him in 1974, Pufang was already permanently paralyzed.-

“While still bound to a wheelchair today, Pufang has worked tirelessly the past few decades for the rights of the handicapped in China. In 2003, he was awarded the United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights for his humanitarian efforts.”-

Murder Of Bian Zhongyun, Principal at a Prestigious Beijing School

Tristan Shaw wrote in Listverse: “One of the earliest victims of the Cultural Revolution was Bian Zhongyun, a 50-year-old vice principal at the prestigious Beijing Normal University Girls High School. In June 1966, some of the school’s students began to criticize school officials and organize revolutionary meetings. Bian’s college degree and bourgeois background made her a natural target for the revolutionaries, although many of them were ironically from privileged families themselves. Over the next two months, Bian was repeatedly harassed by her students and even beaten during a meeting. [Source: Tristan Shaw, Listverse, June 24, 2016 -]

“On August 4 of that summer, Bian was tortured and warned not to come to school the next day. But she decided to come in that morning anyway. It was a courageous decision that would cost Bian her life. First, her teenage students beat and kicked her. Then they whacked her with nailed-filled table legs. The attack was so terrible that Bian soiled herself and was knocked unconscious before dying of her wounds. Nobody was ever punished for her murder, and even today, the perpetrators have yet to step forward.-

“In January 2014, Song Binbin, a famous Red Guard and one of Bian’s students at the time she was killed, made a public apology for her death. Although Song claimed that she had no direct part in Bian’s beating, she felt guilty for not being able to stop it. Some critics, however, felt the apology was insincere and that Song had a larger role than she was willing to admit. Bian’s husband, Wang Jingyao, was also not impressed with the apology. In one interview, he said that Song was a “bad person,” although he believed that the Communist Party and Mao Tse-tung were also responsible.”

Husband’s Account of Bian Zhongyun’s Murder

Moments before an execution

Bian Zhongyun was a deputy principal at the Experimental High School Attached to Beijing Normal University, in Beijing, China. She had been a Chinese Communist Party member since 1941, and worked at an editor for the People's Daily before working for the the high school. She was the first victim of the Cultural Revolution 's "Red August" in 1966, when she was beaten to death with wooden sticks by a group of students led by Red Guard leader Song Binbin whp accused Bian of being a "counter-revolutionary revisionist". [Source: Wikipedia]

David McKenzie and Steven Jiang of CNN wrote: “Wang Jingyao and his wife, Bian Zhongyun, “both joined the Communist Party in the heady post-revolution years. Wang was a historian at the Chinese Academy of Science. Bian became a respected educator at an elite Beijing middle school. They dreamed of helping the Party build a new China. But just a few years later, Party loyalty proved no protection for Bian. As the madness of the Cultural Revolution engulfed Beijing, she became the first victim. "We trusted the Party, but no one ever thought it would become a party that murders people," says Wang. [Source: David McKenzie and Steven Jiang, CNN, June 5, 2014 ^^]

“The trouble started in the early summer at Bian's school in Beijing. Led by their leader Song Binbin, the students labeled Bian as a counter-revolutionary and "opposing Chairman Mao," according to historian Wang Youqin, who attended the school at the time. Soon the attacks got physical with Bian and other teachers put through so-called "struggle-sessions." "Students ran onto the stage to strike Bian with iron-clad wooden training rifles. Each time Bian fell to the floor, someone would douse her with cold water and drag her upright again by the hair to endure further criticism," says Wang. “Bian reached out to the Party to stop the beatings but she got no reply. Despite the obvious risks, Bian kept returning to the school. Perhaps she felt there was nowhere to hide. ^^

“On the afternoon of August 5, 1966, the beatings reached their awful climax. 'We couldn't stop the beatings'. The students of '66 are now in their 60s. I meet a group of them in a teahouse in Beijing. They have had careers and full lives but all seem haunted by the bloody events of that August. “Liu Jin was a student leader at the school when the Red Guards targeted Bian. “I didn't know what to do," she says, "I blame myself for not stopping it." "We couldn't stop the beating, because it would have been doing something against the trend. I respected Ms. Bian, but I was too afraid to say anything," says Feng Jinglan, another former student.^^

“The mob beat Bian for three hours. They used the legs of their school desks spiked with nails. “She looked miserable. I could never forget this. She lay on the ground, her eyes were blurry, she was foaming at the mouth," recalls Liu. She says they carried Bian in a wheelbarrow to a hospital across the street from the school. Wang Jingyao got the news about his wife in a phone call from the school. “They told me that she was injured and I should go. So I went with my four children," says Wang, "I remember that hospital very clearly." Sensing the worst, Wang took a camera. He took pictures of his mortally wounded wife as evidence. The images are haunting and graphic. In one, his four children stand over their mother who lies on a gurney still clutching her handbag.“I laid a cloth over her face so my youngest wouldn't see. She had already passed," says Wang.^^

Lack of Justice for the Murder of Bian Zhongyun

Bian Zhongyun

David McKenzie and Steven Jiang of CNN wrote: ““No charges, no justice. The authorities quickly cremated the body and no one has ever been charged despite, presumably, hundreds of witnesses. “Instead of condemning the murder, Mao seemed to embrace it. Just days later, he held a mass rally for the Red Guards in Tiananmen Square where Song Binbin presented a Red Guard armband to the Chairman. The official sanction of the violence was complete. After Song Binbin presented the armband to Mao, the number of murders increased massively," says Wang Youqin, who has obsessively tracked the killings by interviewing hundreds of family members. "The Red Guards killed almost 2,000 people in the first two weeks alone." She says they only stopped when the Beijing municipal government eventually called them to halt in September. The Cultural Revolution would drag on for a decade. [Source: David McKenzie and Steven Jiang, CNN, June 5, 2014 ^^]

“Song Binbin, Liu Jin and a handful of former classmates publicly apologized for the killing of Bian. “I participated in the revolution voluntarily, no one forced me," says Liu, "but after Bian's death my faith was turned. I had to question my beliefs." All of the former students we interviewed said they were powerless to stop the killing. Song declined to be interviewed. But their apologies haven't led to a widespread reckoning with the past. And few, if any, believe the Communist Party will tackle the issue.^^

“There is hardly a person within the Cultural Revolution whose hands are not dirty in some way. It is socially and politically explosive and that is why the apologies are not likely to go much further than they have already," says Dikköter. For Wang Jingyao, they are too little, too late. He says he still wants justice for his wife's murder. “I can't accept them, the so-called apologies are hypocritical and not sincere. They just want to cover up their involvement," he said, "they just want to slip away unpunished and turn this page over."” ^^

Execution Of Fang Zhongmou

Tristan Shaw wrote in Listverse: “Fang Zhongmou, a Communist Party member and veteran of the People’s Liberation Army, felt proud when her two older children got caught up in the furor of the Cultural Revolution and became Red Guards. Fang’s enthusiasm, however, began to wane after her daughter got sick and died following a trip she made to see a Mao Tse-tung rally in Beijing. Her husband was then accused a few months later of being a capitalist roader, a vague Maoist slur which referred to somebody who was working to betray the ideals of the Communist Party and lead China to a capitalist system. [Source: Tristan Shaw, Listverse, June 24, 2016 -]

“Due to a past accusation of her father being a Nationalist spy, it wasn’t long before Fang was suspected of being a dissident as well. Like her “capitalist-roader” husband, she was put in detention multiple times and subjected to struggle sessions by the authorities. While home one day in 1970, Fang angered her husband and her son Zhang Hongbing after criticizing Mao Tse-tung.-

“Fang’s family duly reported her to the authorities, and she set the family portrait of Mao on fire in retaliation. She was then taken away by a soldier but not before Hongbing beat her on orders from his father. For the crime of “attacking Chairman Mao Tse-tung,” Fang was executed by firing squad on April 11, 1970. Neither Hongbing nor his father attended the execution.-

“In the years following his mother’s death, Hongbing realized what a terrible thing he and his father had done. With the help of his uncle Feng Meikai, Hongbing was able to influence his province’s legal system to clear his mother’s name in 1980. He has since become a lawyer, active in raising awareness of the Cultural Revolution’s victims and fighting to have his mother’s grave turned into a memorial.”-

“Ping-Pong Spies” Commit Suicide

Rong Guotuan

Tristan Shaw wrote in Listverse: “Rong Guotuan, Fu Qifang, and Jiang Yongning were three of the biggest names in Chinese ping-pong during the 1950s and 1960s. Rong was especially popular, and he was considered a national hero for being the first Chinese to win the World Table Tennis Championships in 1959. Despite playing for the Chinese, all three men had originally come from Hong Kong, which at that time was controlled by the British. [Source: Tristan Shaw, Listverse, June 24, 2016 -]

“As foreigners, the three ping-pong greats were deemed untrustworthy by their countrymen during the Cultural Revolution, and they were all accused of being spies in 1968. Fu was subjected to struggle sessions and beatings by his own teammates, and he eventually committed suicide on April 16 of that year. Jiang would hang himself a month later. His hobby of reading newspapers, along with a childhood picture he had of himself wearing a Japanese flag during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, was enough to convince the authorities that Jiang was a Japanese spy.-

“Given the humiliating accusations against him, Rong decided to follow in Fu’s and Jiang’s footsteps. Early in the morning of June 20, Rong wrapped a rope around the branch of an elm tree and hanged himself. In his pants pocket, Rong left a note that pleaded for his innocence. “I am not a spy,” he wrote, “Please do not suspect me. I have let you down. I treasure my reputation more than my own life.” The National Sports Commission remained unconvinced, however, insisting that the three men were operating a Hong Kong spy network.” -

Lin Zhao, the Christian Revolutionary and Her Blood Letters

Ting Guo wrote in the Los Angeles Review of Books: “On May 31, 1965, 33-year-old Lin Zhao was tried in Shanghai and sentenced to 20 years of imprisonment. She was charged as the lead member of a counter-revolutionary clique that had published an underground journal decrying communist misrule and Mao’s Great Leap Forward, a collectivization campaign that caused an unprecedented famine and claimed at least 36 million lives between 1959 and 1961. “This is a shameful ruling!” Lin Zhao wrote on the back of the verdict the next day, in her own blood. Three years later, she was executed by firing squad under specific instructions from Chairman Mao himself.[Source: Ting Guo, Los Angeles Review of Books, China Channel, May 19, 2019]

“Lin Zhao’s father committed suicide a month after Lin’s arrest, and her mother died a while after her execution. In Shanghai, where I grew up and where Lin was tried, imprisoned and killed, the story (the sort told only in private) goes that Lin’s mother was asked to pay for the bullets that killed her daughter. It is also said (in private) that in the years that followed, at the Bund, the former International Settlement on the Huangpu River, one could see Lin’s mother crying and asking for Lin’s return.

“Throughout Lin’s imprisonment, where she was subjected to extreme torture, she wrote thousands of letters and essays in her own blood. Those letters are now kept at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University. Lin’s story has and continues to touch and change lives. Gan Cui, Lin’s fiancé, spent four months hand-copying Lin’s blood letters when they first became available to Lin’s siblings, her only remaining family. These hand-copied documents later provided the historical and autobiographical material for Hu Jie, the director of the 2004 documentary Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul, who quit his job and used his personal savings to make the documentary.

“Blood Letters: The Untold Story of Lin Zhao, a Martyr in Mao’s China” was written by Lian Xi, a professor or world Christianity at Duke Divinity School who decided to write the book watching, Hu Jie’s 2004 film “Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul”. He said “I watched it and was speechless by the extremity of what she endured as a political prisoner. Later I came upon her prison writings, especially her blood letters to her mother, in which she detailed her unbending resistance under the bleakest circumstances imaginable. Reading them, you peer into the boundaries of the human spirit and see its radiance.

Lin was the first person to openly challenge Mao’s authority since 1949. As Lian Xi records in his book, Lin wrote an appeal to the United Nations in 1966 asking to testify in person about her torture and about human rights abuses in China. The UN never received the appeal – none of Lin Zhao’s letters reached beyond the prison walls in her lifetime. Lin Zhao’s choice to write in her own blood was initially a matter of necessity. When she was handcuffed and deprived of writing instruments, the only way for her to write was to poke her own fingers and compose blood-inked protest poems. However, blood writing for her was also an extreme form of protest, which is why she later continued it after pen and paper were returned to her. During her last months in prison, not knowing that her initial 20-year sentence had been secretly changed to the death penalty, she produced a stream of blood letters to her mother to protest her mistreatment in prison and to attest to her Christian faith and her undying hope for freedom.

Book: Blood Letters of a Martyr, a biography of Lin Zhao by Lian Xi

Death Of Lao She

Lao She

Lao Sheis widely regarded as one of the greatest authors of modern Chinese literature. and was considered one of China’s best hopes for the Nobel Prize in Literature. His 1937 novel Rickshaw Boy, the tragic story of a poor rickshaw puller in Beijing, is so popular that there’s a statue of the main character on the main business district of Beijing. He was widely admired as the “people’s artist. Zhou En-lai, China’s first premier, asked him in 1949 to come back to China after he had moved to New York three years earlier. [Source: Tristan Shaw, Listverse, June 24, 2016 -]

On August 23, 1966, as the Cultural Revolution gained momentum, Lao She and 20 other writers were transported to Beijing’s Temple of Confucius, where a mob of 150 teenage girls beat them with bamboo sticks and theater props in a brutal struggle session. Later that night, after the writers were taken to the city’s Culture Bureau offices, Lao She was beaten for hours without end after he refused to wear a placard that said he was a counterrevolutionary. Finally, around midnight, the mob stopped and Lao She was allowed to go home. The next day he left his house in the morning. Later his body was found in a lake. Some say the humiliation Lao She suffered during his struggle session drove him to kill himself. His wife Hu Jieqing believed that he was murdered. The exact circumstances surrounding Lao She’s struggle session are still not clear. It’s uncertain who organized the session and whether Lao She attended voluntarily or against his will. It has been suggested the whole event was set up three younger writers who disliked him.

Image Sources: Poster, Landsberger Posters http://www.iisg.nl/~landsberger/. photos: Everyday Life in Maoist China.org everydaylifeinmaoistchina.org , Ohio State University ; Wiki Commons, History in Pictures ; YouTube; Rong Guotuan: China Daily; Bian: CNN; Deng Pufang: China Digital Times.

Text Sources: New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Times of London, National Geographic, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Reuters, AP, Lonely Planet Guides, Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

Last updated August 2021