1. In the summer of 1967, a rumor circulated in the streets of Hohhot that the II-VI ticket had the head of a reactionary figure hidden in its pattern.
This is still true! So people all over town got nervous and opened their wallets to find the II-VI tickets and shined them in the sun, everyone looking nervous and surreptitious. Someone said, “Ahhh! As if!” Others say, “Why didn’t I see that coming?” So people were always filled with a kind of euphoria of discovery as well as an inexplicable fear when they repeatedly looked at the II-Dollar ticket.
One day, I also brought home a II-VI-yuan note to show my mother and sister, and my mother said it didn’t look like one, and my sister said it looked like one, so I was even more mystified. I wondered, if the II-VI RMB really did conceal a rebellious content in the pattern, wouldn’t that be a rebellious bill? In the past few years, there have been a number of cases in which the government has been unable to find out about the problem, such as the case of the “two-hundred-and-fifty-five” bankruptcy.
The two-hundred-and-twenty-five dollar bill was a mere muddle, like a cloud in the sky, which can look like anything you want it to look like. It is not the end of the story.
Not long after the II-VI incident, rumors began to spread that there was a hidden “anti” in the cigarette packet design of Daqing Mountain cigarettes. As a result, the city became excited about a cigarette packet. People immediately searched for a cigarette pack, took it apart, and laid it on the table to look at it repeatedly. What a resemblance! People who thought they could see the way out were hot and cold, and their traits were indescribable.
I also took out a magnifying glass at home and scrutinized the cigarette packs, but after a long day’s work, I still couldn’t see anything. The whole city was buzzing about the incident, and no one dared to sell Daqing Mountain brand cigarettes anymore.
Soon after, rumors spread that three brands of cigarettes had been named as counter-revolutionary, insinuating a covert attack. Among them were the “Yu Ye Brand” cigarettes produced by the Qingdao Cigarette Factory, which resembled a map of Taiwan; the “Camel Brand” cigarettes produced by the Qingdao Cigarette Factory, which had a five-pointed star on the camel’s neck and a dark red color, symbolizing the metamorphosis of the color of the camel’s neck; and the pouch on the camel’s back, which symbolized the Japanese sun flag. Ningbo Cigarette Factory produces the “Sea Wheel” brand of cigarettes, a white ocean liner that came from Taiwan to attack the mainland. The white color symbolizes the United States, and the smoke from the chimney symbolizes the west wind.
Next, a common cigarette produced in Shanxi province was found to have a problem with the pattern on the cigarette box, which supposedly hides a reactionary slogan that reads “Long Live the Landlord” somewhere on the pattern. At Xiangfan Cigarette Factory in Hubei province, the cigarette pack of “Wild Geese” is decorated with winter reeds with geese flying above them. Some people found “enemy intelligence” on the cigarette labels. For geese fly south in winter when there is a northerly wind, but in this painting they fly north. The geese are flying north, which undoubtedly implies a flight to the Soviet Union.
Similarly, in the case of the galloping horse at the top of the museum in Inner Mongolia, because the head was pointing south, the Red Guards said that the author meant to run to Taiwan; I thought, “What if it was going north? They also say they want to run to Susie; what if the horse’s head is up? It must be said to be running into space, trying to escape from the socialist motherland.
3. The cigarette case controversy is finally over. We soon heard that the painting “Chairman Mao Goes to An Yuan” also hid a reactionary content, which we did not dare to say, but only said that the content was in the lower right color line of light and shade, about visible. So we got busy again, looking at the painting over and over again, and the more we looked at it, the more obsessed we became, the more we saw. Many people said they saw it, but I never understood it, perhaps because I am not very sensitive to color.
Since then, people have become allergic to almost all printed materials, and they won’t stop looking at any piece of printed material they get their hands on. Reading, examining and scrutinizing printed materials has become a subconscious action. Whether it was posters or stamps, as soon as you had them in your hands, you had to shine them in the sun.
It is said that the “revolutionary masses” all over the country found “anti-labeling” in cigarette boxes, wrapping paper, decorative patterns on newspapers and magazines, and shoe soles at ……. 4.
4. At that time, I heard people returning from Beijing say that in Beijing, someone could read the words “Kai-Shi crossed the sea” from the sole of a pair of plastic sandals, which made people smack their heads. A plastic sandal produced by a plastic factory in Yanbei was also found to have the character “Mao” on the sole of the sandal. So the factory shut down production, and organized workers to work overtime to eradicate the grain on the soles with knives to purge the counter-revolutionary poison, and the remaining sandals were sold.
Shortly afterwards, we heard that workers’ pickets in Hohhot arrested many “current counterrevolutionaries” and “cow ghosts and snake spirits” in the streets. They stopped pedestrians, asked them to take off their shoes, and carefully examined the patterns on the soles of their shoes. “Or some pattern reminiscent of a political symbol. So these people had the bad luck to be arrested and paraded through the streets. It was so frightening to all of them that they dared not wear a pair of shoes until everyone in the family was sure there was nothing wrong with them. In those days, almost every family checked the soles of their shoes under the electric light after dinner, and all the people at my father’s workplace took off their shoes during office hours and checked each other carefully for fear of bringing bad luck.
In 1966, Zhejiang Province began to deal with some “counter-revolutionary trademarks” and many trademarks were banned. One day, people suddenly thought that the color of the shoe polish of the Oriental Red brand was black, which was a red flag against a red flag, implying that the East was black. The shoe polish was discontinued and the person concerned was arrested.
6. Soon, I heard that the logo of the permanent bicycle was very reactionary. There were two artistic words “permanent” and two circles, and a big mouth was trying to eat the five-pointed star on it. So the students took a screwdriver and went around to pry the logo off the bicycles. At that time, any bicycle that didn’t have a logo on the front of the bicycle, without asking, was a Forever brand. Some owners were afraid of prying, so they covered the front of their bicycles with red paint or wrapped them in handkerchiefs, but to no avail, the dolls did not miss anything.
7. On August 22, 1966, the Heilongjiang Daily used a photo of the stage backdrop of the “Summer in Harbin” concert to promote the main theme and highlight the glorious image of the great leader in the first half of the sixth page. The photo is of a huge red flag with a relief figure of Mao in the center and a sharp arrow at the top of the flagpole. The editor of the reprint had no idea that the arrow would “pierce” the Great Leader’s skull when viewed through the lens of the newspaper, and that he would be branded a “current counterrevolutionary.
If you look at these two additional pages alone, no matter how you turn them over, you will not find the slightest trace of “counter-revolution. However, in those years when “class struggle was the guiding principle”, I don’t know who invented the strange trick of “seeing through the newspaper”. Perhaps some of the Red Guards were too tightly tensed against the enemy struggle, or perhaps they had nothing better to do than eat, or maybe they were just stupid, but they held the newspaper in front of the sun every day, and finally found out the “new trend of the class struggle”.
On August 25, 1966, Shaanxi Daily published an article on the third page entitled “Imperialism and all reactionaries are paper tigers” to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the publication of Mao Zedong’s “Conversation with American Journalist Anna Louise Strong”. On page four was a picture of “Chairman Mao reviewing the capital’s one million revolutionary troops. The disaster came from heaven.
In the afternoon of that day, more than 20,000 “revolutionary teachers and students” from Xi’an Jiaotong University, the Highway Academy, and other institutions gathered and surrounded the Shaanxi Daily, denouncing the “imperialists” and “reactionaries” in the headline of the third page of the paper, “Imperialism and all reactionaries are paper tigers. The words “paper tiger” were aimed at the center of the head of the fourth version of Mao’s statue, and the words “reactionary” were aimed at the head and neck of Chen Boda (then head of the Cultural Revolution Section of the Central Committee). This was “a vicious insult to our great leader, great commander-in-chief, and great helmsman Chairman Mao Zedong, by means of stealthy substitution”, “a rampant attack on our proletariat”, and “a well-planned and well-planned attack on the proletariat”. Counter-revolutionary Incident”.
Faced with the aggressive attack of the rebellious teachers and students, the Northwest Bureau and the Shaanxi Provincial Party Committee was under tremendous pressure, and had to organize “revolutionary students, revolutionary workers, and revolutionary cadres” to form the Shaanxi Provincial Party Committee under the strong request of the rebellious teachers and students to form the “Shaanxi Daily” to issue leaflets. “On December 14, Shaanxi Daily was forced to review its printing of leaflets, and on the same day, the Shaanxi Provincial Committee also made a public review.
After the Cultural Revolution, a senior editor of the People’s Liberation Army Daily (PLA) recalled that at that time, the newspaper “when there was a picture of Chairman Mao on one page, it had to make sure that no one pointed a gun in Chairman Mao’s direction on the other pages, and even when the words ‘Chairman Mao’ appeared on the text, it had to pass through the light…”. To see if there were any derogatory words in the same place on the second edition of ……, we had to make a perspective box for the newspaper, a glass table, and a few electric lights under the table. After the proofs came out, the first, second and third editions were placed on a glass plate, and the electric light was turned on underneath the glass plate for perspective to check for derogatory words before and after Chairman Mao’s picture and name. After strict inspection, no derogatory words were printed.”
9. At that time, I once grabbed a leaflet from the street, which was even more bizarre. It may be reproduced in full.
It is extremely urgent to tell the readers of the book nationwide how reactionary the cover of “The Song of Ouyang Hai” is!
The novel “The Song of Ouyang Hai” is another great triumph of Mao Zedong Thought, another resounding triumph of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and a glorious spectrum of proletarian heroes. The cover of the book was righteously exposed by an air service department.
1. the entire graphic is a map of China, but Taiwan Province is missing.
2. a sinister fascist dog’s head on a horse’s ass and body.
3. Ouyang Hai has a bayonet stuck in his head towards the capital, Beijing.
4. Ouyang Hai has the flag of the Chinese Communist Party under his right foot.
5. The Chinese flag under the horse’s hind right foot.
6. behind the horse is a poisonous snake.
7. In the middle of the horse (body) is the pagoda of Yan’an, but on the pagoda is the bald head of Chiang Kai-shek.
8. a horse’s ass with a tattered Tiananmen Square.
9. horses with China written on them.
10. a dog’s head with Chiang Kai-shek on the belt buckle.
11. There is a so-called beautiful woman lying on Ouyang Hai’s body.
We hope that the revolutionary masses will continue to expose their reactionary problems and restrict the Xinhua Bookstore to issue a notice within 48 hours to the masses who bought Ouyang Hai’s Song to tear up and destroy this cover, and restrict the publisher to issue a new cover of Ouyang Hai’s Song within five days and give it to the masses who bought Ouyang Hai’s Song, with the Xinhua Bookstore and the publisher solely responsible for any unexpected problems.
The book of Jin, Xie Xuan’s biography: “When I heard the wind and the crane, I thought the king’s division had arrived.” Fu Jian and Fu Rong ascended the city to look at Wang Shi, and saw that the troops were in perfect order and the soldiers were elite; they also looked north to see that the grass and trees on Bagong Mountain were in human form.
Epilogue.
Today, the catastrophe that “touched people’s souls” is seen as a “living paper play” with more black humor than an absurdist drama. The Beijing Municipal Administration for Industry and Commerce recorded in detail the “People’s Letters” from Shandong, Anhui, Shaanxi, Sichuan, Hunan, Liaoning and other parts of the country in “Information on Trademark Issues in the City during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” dated August 26, 1966.
Five Star Beer, which was familiar to old Beijing, was designated by Zhou Enlai as a state banquet wine in 1959. But in the opinion of Feng Xuehu, who worked in Yinchuan’s Fanxiu Associated Society during the Cultural Revolution, the logo of Five Star Beer was suspected of “negative political influence”. “The five gold stars must represent the Party and the four classes, just like the national flag, and should not be on a blue background. The outer corners of the four stars are exactly twelve, just like the national flag of the Kuomintang; the frame of the word ‘Beijing’ in the lower part of the logo looks like a fascist hat emblem. Punching the hole for 1018, was the capital fired upon? A pair of clips hold the five stars, representing our country to change colors.”
Hebei Chengde Supply Agency Li Guocai noticed that on the waistband of the three-star pencil, the “cat-shaped beast” actually occupies a prominent position, and the five-pointed star not only dwarfs the five-pointed star, but also uses a black background to deface the national emblem. What’s worse, the cat’s tail is curved in a two-shape, an obvious allusion to the second National Games and its athletes.
The parrot brand matches were bombarded because the parrot is an animal kept by the landlord, and the color symbolizes the “blue sky and white sun”. The parrot was still stepping on a piece of yellow. Counting twelve horns, it goes without saying that it represents the KMT emblem. This was not necessarily a bad thing, but unfortunately there was a red patch on the lower left side of the “party emblem”, and the nature of the problem immediately became serious.
In the eyes of two employees of the management office of the Beijing Thermal Power Company, the “Capital People’s Republic of China” advertisement had five sins: “Tiananmen Square, lights, flags, and the national emblem should be red. Does the use of gray-green mean that our country has changed its color? It is very untidy under the Tiananmen Square, like water and fog, does it mean that it is flooded? In ‘Long Live the People’s Republic of China’, the word ‘long live’ (in traditional Chinese) is masked, leaving only the word ‘艹止’, an allusion to the 20 years since the founding of the People’s Republic of China? The white trim of the four characters of the capital city’s Renmin Dan looks like a mourning dress. The ‘Beijing Public-Private Partnership Tong Ren Tang’ near Tiananmen Square is a demonstration against the Party Central Committee.”
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