In the summer of 1958, the Great Leap Forward, we graduated from high school, young students, in the middle school principal “rural areas have a vast world, agriculture has a great future,” the call, happily enrolled in the × × Agricultural College. At that time in the choice of occupation there is no difference between high and low, as long as it is to serve the people and build socialism on the line. In the choice of application for voluntary all by the school leadership arrangements, if too much attention to the choice of volunteers, fear of school leaders to the political label of ideological backwardness, by then what the university can not be tested. At that time, students also think that picking the volunteer is a very dishonorable thing, can only be blind obedience, listen to the party, do the party’s tame tool, the party pointed there to play to there, life to the party arrangements. On September 1, most of us young people from the countryside, less than twenty years old, put on our extremely simple bags and stepped into the university.
I. 1958 academic year
In 1958, the school was moved from Jinan to Tai’an countryside under the spell of the supreme leader, who said, “Higher agricultural and forestry colleges and universities should be run in the city. The people are still the same, the sky is still the same, but the “ghost” is gone. The people before us had known this day, why should we have done it in the first place? I hope that the top leaders, who are hot-headed for a while, will not easily deny the actions of our forefathers.
The Shandong Provincial Army Cadres Rapid Training Middle School, Taian Agricultural School, Taian Pastoral School and Taian Second Middle School in Taian were relocated on a larger scale, and a total blind toss from the top to the bottom was carried out. The day after we stepped into the school gate, we were engaged in moving the school. We carried the school desks and chairs, laboratory equipment, books and periodicals, and living utensils to Jinan Railway Station on our shoulders and to Tai’an by train, and then to the school. The whole school, staff, old and young family members were fully involved in the battle, forming a huge transportation team. It took a month and a half day and night and was exhausting. Several of the Taian schools mentioned above were certainly no exception. The worst part was the rainy days, when the relocated materials were in the wind and rain, crying and sighing their fate with the Lord! This is exactly “the word “break” is in the head, stand in it”. In the “unprecedented” Beijing Agricultural University and Beijing Forestry College are even more miserable.
After the school was moved, we did not have time to make any settlement, that is, we immediately put ourselves into the “national hands” to complete the battle of 10.7 million tons of steel production. The entire school yard was erected with an earthen blast furnace and rows of coke kilns, with smoke rising from the sky and motors roaring around the clock. Half of our class of 40 students went to transport iron ore (actually two people carried a basket back. No one could tell if it was iron ore and how much iron it contained), and half of them were making coke. The students who transported iron ore took 2~3 days to return, and as some students said privately, they fell asleep on the way. The coke makers worked two shifts of 12 hours. After the shift, the students went to bed in the dormitory with their faces in the dust, without washing their faces or hands, not to mention taking a shower. Some students did not even eat, but just slept.
One day, at 12 o’clock at night, the whole dormitory area boiled up, shouting, deafening, all the students were awakened in their sleep, saying that our school made the first furnace of iron, the entire school staff, all the families went to the municipal party committee to report the joy. Under the moonlight, the red flags of the school were displayed, and the trombone was sung loud and clear, and all of them embraced the municipal party committee. When we arrived at the gate of the municipal party committee, we had to wait in line, because there were too many units putting out various “satellites” and the municipal party committee was overwhelmed. We were excited until dawn, and then we returned to school. After breakfast, the students rubbed their fists and continued to “refine”, but the drowsy students from the depths of their hearts are not willing to refine a second furnace of iron. However, none of the students speak strange words, whining, the greatest skill can only be silent, gloomy speech. Because the students in high school experienced the whole group in 1957 and witnessed the battle baptism against the rightists in full swing, once a little “wind blowing”, the light ones were plucked the white flag (in fact, they were criticized), and the heavy ones were labeled as “bourgeois little rightists”, and were made objects of dictatorship. It would be even worse. We worked until the beginning of December, it was already freezing cold, and it was freezing inside and outside the house. The final result is a pile of steelmaking even the scrap iron slag, consuming a large amount of coal, the investment of human and financial resources can not be calculated, is really more than worth the loss, and finally can only end up with no end in sight. No one before the national steelmaking in the minds of the people of the country has become a memory that can never be erased.
In the next few years, the school enforced the education policy of “education must serve the politics of the proletariat and be combined with production and labor”, and “intellectuals must be combined with workers and peasants, otherwise they will achieve nothing”. We don’t understand “political service for the proletariat”, but we know a little bit about “combining with production work”, that is, manual labor every day. This is exactly what the leaders were afraid that we would become bourgeois intellectuals with “more knowledge, more reactionary” and “more books, more stupid” when we just stepped into the school. It was a great fortune that we had just entered the university and were wearing the big hat of “intellectuals” before we even attended a day of classes. So we went down on foot to the mountains, 30 kilometers away from the university, carrying small rolls on our backs. The task was to plant apple trees in the mountains. Every day, we conducted statistics on the amount of labor completed per person, quality checks, thought summaries, and carried out red flag competitions …… in a frenzy. At that time we were small children, young and ignorant, very naive and innocent-minded, with an extremely childish mentality, loving our young socialism, we just worked our asses off every day. I dug 7 apple cavities of 1 meter square in one day, which translates into 16,000 kilograms of earth and stones a day, and fought until 10 o’clock at night by moonlight every day to plant the apple trees in the cavities dug during the day and water the bottom. It is not an exaggeration to say that we have to live a starry-eyed life.
With such intense physical labor, what did we eat every day? Three times a day, we squatted on the ground and ate boiled groundnuts, drank flour soup, and ate fishy, unpalatable radish and pickled vegetables. The work we did was cattle and horses, the food we ate was pig and dog food, and the land we slept on was covered with a thin mat. We were riding on the great east wind of the Great Leap Forward! One day is really equal to twenty years.
There were female students from the city who had never suffered such hardships and had never done such strong physical work before. One afternoon in the mountains, a female student from the city said to her companion that her stomach hurt, the doctor gave her some medicine, and the captain told her to go back to the dormitory to rest. After we returned from work, she was in more severe pain, the captain asked the brigade department, let us a few male students with a small wooden board to carry her to the hospital 30 kilometers from the city, we traveled overnight, even a minute can not afford to slow down. In the early winter, after reaching the county hospital, our clothes were soaked with sweat. She stopped breathing just after arriving at the hospital.
In the spring of 1959, when we were planting trees on the mountain, a boulder rolled down from the mountain and killed the students planting trees below. It left people with too much to think about, and whose fault it was that he or she died, even the heavens can hardly answer. For reasons unknown, these two students became invisible ghosts on earth and died a long time ago, becoming “living ghost” martyrs. Their families did not receive a penny of pension. In the afterlife, they only took away a small coffin of thin board. Looking back, it really makes people infinite grief, sadness, regret, reverence. Some students whined behind our backs that we took the money to go to school, how to make us work every day! We often think that no matter how the country develops, we can’t give up studying, and all times need knowledgeable people. Relying on knowledge to change one’s fate, in those days, although it was a fantasy to talk about dreams, but it was better to have dreams than despair. In the anti-rightist, energetic socialist construction, there was no time to go to the mountain to work. Every day, we went to the mountain at dawn to plow the tree caves, and just after breakfast, we looked forward to the noon meal. When lunch was delivered to the mountain, we received 4 taels of groundnut noodle nest and a bowl of vegetable soup with our hands covered with yellow mud, gobbled it up in a few minutes, and then lay down on the slope and rested our eyes, not even having the strength to chat. In the evening, after the sunset, we descended in the dark.
An era has an era of honor and shame. We, the “intellectuals” who were sent to the countryside for labor training, should not only reform our thinking, but also look like poor peasants in appearance. We poor children from the countryside, whose parents depended on the land of the people’s commune, could hardly even fill our stomachs. In the early winter, we went to work in the mountains every morning wearing old cotton jackets, with small twine tied around our waists and scarves wrapped around our heads, looking like reformed intellectuals from content to form. At that time, whoever was most like the poor peasants, whoever took the socialist road, was the most glorious.
In 1959, when the New Year arrived, we took a half-day holiday in the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, and several of us went to the commune to get haircuts in the commune, where I bought half a catty of Shandong Bai Gan wine from the commune’s department store. After nightfall, we live in a house with eight students sitting around the wind and gas in the rural straw house on the land, with a bottle of wine you a mouthful of me a mouthful of pushing a glass, on the radish and pickles, talking and laughing, shouting, very comfortable, seems to have entered communism today, when the wine to the head, a classmate in a decadent and desperate mood said a sentence, I still can not forget, he said. “There is wine tonight to get drunk tonight, do not care to drink cold water in the morning.” This is probably the happiest voice of the students’ holiday! It was the first time in my life that I drank.
One day, the word came down that the higher-ups were coming to inspect and guide tomorrow. The brigade department instructed the squadron department to get up at six o’clock to meet the leaders, the squadron department was afraid of lagging behind and instructed the squad department to get up at 5:30 to gather, the squad department was even more afraid of lagging behind and instructed us students to get up at five o’clock to gather. As a result, we waited for more than an hour in the cold wind in the early morning, hungry and dry, purely to spoil people, which is a microcosm of the “Great Leap Forward” in the young students in the false name of the real disaster. This is a microcosm of the “Great Leap Forward” among the young students, which is a false name for a real disaster. In the first year after we entered the university, we enjoyed the “treatment” of labor reform. People today cannot understand the communist gale that blew in the 1958s!
It was hard to survive until May Day, when the school leaders let us return to school one after another. Each student made a comprehensive, profound and unrealistic ideological summary: they had transformed their minds, learned knowledge, broadened their horizons, exercised their bodies, and achieved the goal of “intellectuals” combined with “productive labor” and “combined with workers and peasants. The “combination with workers and peasants”. From May 1 to the middle of July, we had two months of basic classes in mathematics, physics and chemistry. Finally, we were able to get a place to study in the “net”. We completed the new academic year of college with great success.
II. 1959 academic year
On the eve of the start of the summer vacation, students were hopeful that the new school year would begin and we would finally be able to attend classes in a step-by-step manner. On the second day of the school year, we were still sent to the countryside for labor training. The ideological transformation of intellectuals cannot be accomplished overnight, but is long-term and arduous, and must be done constantly. We “intellectuals” who grew up under the Red Flag are no exception. We often think, “Is this how we are going to live our lives? It is really a long road and an infinite journey. We were so worried about our scientific career that we lost all confidence in it. The whole class went to support the front line of agriculture, to fight against drought and preserve seedlings, and to fight against drought and preserve a good harvest. In the countryside, I saw few members of the “one big two public” people’s commune doing farm work, and occasionally one or two people worked, but they also worked but not contributed. Three times a day, the commune members went to the communal canteen, where they had to defend their socialist positions, to get their nest eggs, and when they returned, they sat in the shade of the trees or in the foyer and chatted, while the women took a break to cool their shoes. On the ruined walls of the villages, we can still see the compelling slogans of “How bold people are, how productive the land is”, “Communism is heaven, people’s commune is a bridge” and “Overtake Britain and catch up with the United States”. The slogans of “surpassing the United Kingdom and catching up with the United States” and other false, big and empty slogans. The weeds in the field were half a man’s height, which was exactly “I would rather have the grass of socialism than the seedlings of capitalism”. And we students could only pull weeds and keep seedlings, pick water and fight drought one field at a time. Our class did all the agricultural work for the whole production team. At night, we could only chat under the dim kerosene lamp, but never talk about politics, for fear of overstepping the “thunderbolt” half a step. In those days of the Red Scare, politics was a high-voltage line that would kill you if you touched it. “Usually joke, campaign as material”, this political maxim is true. When the autumn harvest and planting were completed, it was another month and a half before we finally returned to school.
After returning to school, six days a week, one day of political study, one day of school building labor, and the remaining four days, some after-school labor and sparse, loose classes. This is the best time to learn in the autumn, the sky is high, however, the Supreme Leader in the afternoon of July 10, 1959, at the Lushan meeting he mentioned the sparrow problem, not without emotion, said: “Sparrows have now become a big problem, or to get rid of ……” Therefore, the siege of the sparrow became the overriding political task. Under this decree, the whole school was closed every afternoon to round up the little sparrows. The school roof, courtyard, open space …… covered with countless posts and flowery dummies, we students with washbasins, enamel bowls, holding fancy colored flags in our hands, students entered the position on time and surrounded the campus and dormitory area. The positions were as dense as a net and the posts as dense as a forest. At the command of the general command of the school to destroy the sparrows, knocking pots and bowls, waving flags and shouting, the sound of killing was so loud that the small sparrows who were tired and frightened fell to the ground and died. After three days of bitter fighting, the results of the battle brilliant. Sparrows are also small elves, part of the sparrows were driven to the quiet countryside, but the countryside is by no means a quiet land, nor is it a vacuum. At this point, each class of 3 to 5 people formed a fighting squad to attack the countryside. Every day at 4 p.m., we ran to the countryside, more than 10 miles from the city, on time, and hollowed out every sparrow that had slipped through the net, returning to school only at 10 p.m. Our determination was to never retreat until we had won, and it was another week of tossing and turning. In 1955, the Supreme Leader’s will was to make the little sparrow extinct. But this “wise initiative” of his has destroyed the ecological balance of nature and has been severely punished by nature for the production of agriculture and forestry.
During this period, after Peng Dehuai’s “vicious attacks” on the General Line, the Great Leap Forward and the three red flags of the People’s Commune at the Lushan Conference, in order to repel the rampant attacks of right-leaning opportunists, our school, like the situation in the whole country, launched a fervor to fully mobilize the masses on all fronts, from classes, from the whole department, from the whole school, to report and expose large and small From the class, from the whole department, from the whole school, to expose the big and small right-leaning opportunist elements, so that everyone is at risk, fearful. The secretary of the school party committee said in the mobilization meeting: to report or not to report, to expose or not to expose is a matter of position, to report and expose the right-leaning opportunists is a matter of understanding whether it is true. It can only be a messy fight, a painful moment. This part of the whole that part of the people, this wise initiative, in the country has uncovered more than 550,000 rightists, based on the purge of 3.8 million “right-leaning opportunists”, is a brilliant result. The more “right-leaning opportunists” were uncovered, the greater the revolutionary achievements would be, and the faster we would enter communist society.
As young people in our twenties, we are in need of nourishment to grow up, not to mention being in the midst of such heavy physical labor. When we were relegated to the countryside for labor and exercise, the ration supply was 30 pounds per person per month, which was not enough to eat. Since I was tall and strong, the squad leader always assigned me dirty work, and I completed it with quality and quantity. During the labor period, I once said: “let eat and work at night,” the speaker has no intention, the listener has a heart, a “firm position, a clear flag” of the students reported, I had to bow my head and bend down to confess guilt, infinite outline of a profound review. The “root of the ideology”, with a humiliated heart to say a set of falsehoods: “I am with Peng Dehuai, echoing, I oppose the three red flags, socialist countries where there are people who do not have enough to eat, I have eyes without pearls, with eyes wide open, I am an authentic right-leaning opportunist ……” or not pass. The general assembly, small meeting criticism for a week, the complete examination materials to the branch secretary. I am a poor peasant, plus I am the son of an active duty officer, the roots are right. A few days later, at the whole class book, the branch secretary also praised me: profound examination, thorough understanding, repentant performance, and continue to work hard in the future …… I was finally liberated. At that time, rightists, bad elements, right-leaning opportunists, is hanging high in the head of each student three swords, I do not know when there will be a sword shot in the head of the unlucky students, so that you can never turn over, more where there is a “moody and lively political situation”.
One of our classmates lost his bank book, the school security office also came undercover to investigate. A week later, come up with unbelievably wise decisions. To solve the case, of course, to take the mass route, let each student write a note to report the person who stole the passbook. This absurd, unbelievable “wise decision” announced, the class was silent, everyone on pins and needles, creeped out, listlessly lowered their heads in silence to think, fearful, everyone is preoccupied. But no one dares to raise the opposite opinion, not to say smooth words is very good, so they have to lower their heads in silence, to protect themselves, strict silence, but seek no fault, otherwise, the sword will fall on their heads. After some blind tossing, my class Wang × × students get the most votes, “elected”. Because this student usually good nosy, from which side to see, he is like “steal the axe”, a hundred mouths difficult to defend. Really want to add to the crime, what trouble! After being elected, the sword fell on his head, small meetings, the General Assembly criticism, under the surveillance of security personnel during the day, in the dormitory to write an examination, write confessions, not allowed to go to class. He was not allowed to go to class. Writing confessions and confessions were his daily “compulsory lessons”. He was subjected to both physical and mental persecution. His classmates also suffered from the same fate. He was not allowed to attend evening study sessions and had a big criticism meeting. Ruthless criticism, physical torture, the “elected” students stood there every night with fear and trepidation to accept the criticism, cold winter days scared dripping with sweat, has been tossed for most of the semester, the final exam of the school year, he failed four subjects, had to be ordered to withdraw from school, the sword finally saw blood, he became another of the times He became another victim of the times. The sword finally saw blood, and he became another victim of the times. (The bankbook was later found, and it was not stolen by him.
In the second semester of 1959, we were still looking forward to going through the classes in a systematic way, learning knowledge and skills systematically. Because the school had just moved, the school building had not yet been built, and classes could only be held in the large dining hall. The winter was very unbearable, and students without cotton clothes were shivering with cold, especially those from the south, who were not used to wearing cotton clothes. Family financial conditions of the better female students, usually in class, in the evening study with hot water bags in their arms to keep warm.
The school also set out to carry out educational reform, to bring down the bourgeois mode of schooling, and the teaching materials written by the “bourgeois straw professors” were not for proletarian politics, but were detached from productive labor and impractical. The class was stopped and the whole school had a big discussion on the reform of teaching, in which students wrote their own textbooks and learned by themselves. One of the discussions to the “meteorology”, “bourgeois straw professors” is “the flow of air to form the wind”, which who does not know, this course cut. East cut, west cut, in the end there are no more than a few courses left. What is even more ridiculous is that our class was given the preparation of the textbook “forest arboriculture”, the teacher had to lead the class to go to Taishan and Feedback Mountain, which are close to the school, to conduct a field survey of trees for a month, and after returning to school, the textbook prepared by the “bourgeois straw professors” was copied over, and finally the pseudo-book was given a red coloring. The gong and drums reported to the university party committee. The students were teaching the teachers, really “monks playing with umbrellas – lawlessness”.
Three, the 1960 school year
The new school year began again, but this school year did not start the next day as the previous two, the day after the start of the rural labor exercise, can always be class. But after less than a week of classes, a new political task came, which was to continue the anti-rightist tendency and to encourage the work. In order to make a big tree of the absolute authority of the Great Leader, each person must study a piece of Chairman Mao’s writings every week, and it is mandatory that each person must write an experience of not less than 1,000 words, and at the same time, they must contact their own ideological reality, dig deep into their own ideological roots, hang up and down, and make a heart to the Party. The students made it more difficult, but never dare to engage in hasty, because this is the red magic weapon to transform the thinking of the bourgeois intellectuals. We are an agricultural college, not a political college, so why take the study of Mao as the main course? Putting the main effort on this is not worth the loss. We are children, students, and not so much experience, every day, eager to find newspapers, copy newspapers, regardless of the right number or not, to make up the full length of the guidelines. The library borrowed political magazines and copied them down, or you copied mine, I copied yours. Every Saturday afternoon, each study group will evaluate how well each person has written, including whether they have taken it seriously or perfunctorily, and whether they have written neatly. Every Monday afternoon, the better one evaluated by each group is then read out in the class assembly, and then the best one of the class is evaluated and submitted to the departmental party branch. It squeezed out most of the time for studying professional courses, and it was such a reverse grunt every week, thundering. The students dared not speak out, some students in the evening study, while reading professional books will also be a book of Chairman Mao on the desk, when someone comes, quickly cover the professional book, afraid of others to be branded as not asking politics to take the road of the White Specialists. The attitude towards the study of Chairman Mao’s writings was a matter of political stance, which dared to slacken, and every day everyone was on tenterhooks, and the heartstrings that were already tense were even tighter.
As I experienced the anti-rightist movement in 1957, I saw many excellent teachers and teaching experts being beaten into rightists; I also saw the fact that the white flag was set aside in 1958; and I saw the bloody battle against the right-leaning opportunists in 1959, which made me realize deeply the truth that “trouble comes out of the mouth”. “Since then, I have been careful everywhere, not daring to say what I really mean, speaking cautiously at group meetings, thinking twice about each sentence, so the group meeting students have repeatedly criticized me for not caring about politics, depressed thinking ……
At the end of September, we went to the countryside again to support the front line of agricultural production and help farmers with the autumn harvest and autumn planting. At this time, our ration supply was reduced from 30 to 24 pounds per month. Everyone knew there was not enough to eat, and everyone dared not say there was not enough to eat. Here comes the new political slogan: “low standard, melon and vegetable generation” and the policy of walking on two legs. Only God knows, where are the vegetables and melons? Every day, the production team gave us a pot of vegetable dumplings made from acacia leaves, with very little cornmeal inside. As the weather has entered early winter, the vegetable dumplings cold, after eating my stomach can not stand, do not eat, and hunger can not stand, simply, to the back of the can not stand it, so also save the vegetable dumplings, they do not have to suffer. Some students are allergic to acacia leaves, swollen face and hands after eating, also do not eat. When the time came for the Mid-Autumn Festival, the Chinese reunion, the students were not happy and had no rice to cook. In the afternoon of the Mid-Autumn Festival, the production captain sent us a thin duck, and the class immediately boiled over, but how to do it, how to eat, and difficult. Because we were a group of children, we had been away at school and had never helped cook at home. I was taught and nurtured by my mother when I was young, and usually when my classmates chatted, I talked some more about cooking and cooking methods. The class unanimously elected me as the chief cook. I retired the duck feathers, washed, chopped the whole duck into meat, put two handfuls of salt, and cooked a large pot of duck soup. Because of the holiday students came back from work half an hour early, each of them had a bowl of hot duck soup and had a very pleasant mid-autumn festival that they would never forget. Time has passed half a century, but the scene is still vivid in my mind, as in yesterday, the memory is still fresh.
When I returned to school, I was still hungry. Due to the lack of nutrition, a large part of the students got hepatitis and swelling disease, and some of them used soy sauce to fill their hunger. One afternoon during extracurricular activities, I went to the countryside to pick up groundnut leaves and vines discarded by farmers in their fields. When I returned to school, I washed them, chopped them up, put them in a wash basin, poured boiling water over them, soaked and scalded them for 15 minutes, drained the water, and then repeated the process as if I were doing a chemistry experiment in class. Then buy 2 cents of soy sauce and pour it in, mix it up, and distribute it to the class. The students were hungry and grabbed it, and kept arguing: whose invention is this? Does it still need to be patented? This “scientific method” of filling the stomach soon spread throughout the class, and saved some people. Later, while picking up groundnut leaves, the students also did some re-harvesting of groundnuts that the farmers didn’t want. The recovered groundnuts could not be eaten raw, and the firewood for cooking groundnuts became a problem. Because I grew up in the city, I know that the construction of those linoleum, can be ignited to burn fire. I then picked up the discarded linoleum from the construction site of my school, a small piece, a small piece. Every morning, the students put the groundnuts into buckets and cooked them up, and the dormitory area was filled with smoke and smog, a busy scene of morning cooking. At that time, some students were surprised and asked me directly, “How do you know that linoleum can burn fire? During my four years in college, I “developed” two inventions, but neither of them was patented. This was a dark humor in my life that cannot be forgotten.
At that time, each student had a plan for how many meals to eat every day, and did not even dare to eat more than one grain of rice, and never dared to eat the cereal. However, it was found that a student in our class was almost always eating openly, the students became suspicious, to the branch secretary, the class leader to reflect the situation, the branch secretary, the class leader decided to go over him when he went to class, the result from his bed turned out more than 200 pounds of meal tickets. According to his confession, he stole them from the canteen one night. We picked up groundnut leaves and vines on a different path than this student did, but for exactly the same purpose. This student was expelled from school. At the same time, an even more vicious event took place. The slogan “Anti-Hunger” appeared at the entrance of our school, and on the tickets of the student cafeteria, the slogan “Rise up, fellow starving people! Get up and demand groundnuts, black buns (groundnut noodle nests), and things that will satisfy your hunger.” These two “reactionary” slogans appeared, but the majority of students brought trouble, class suspension, handwriting, investigation, prosecution, solve the case …… made the people in fear and panic, tossed a week without results. To winter break before the holidays, each person wrote two more with the same words above the note to hand in, only to end. After winter break, while we were working at the train station, this student was arrested and sentenced to 7 years in prison.
After winter break, a very honest and introverted student in our class said to me behind my back in a distraught voice, “I don’t want to go to school.” I said why? He said, “You see, those who became rightists are intellectuals, and the more you go to school, the greater the possibility of becoming a rightist, workers, peasants, where are the ones who become rightists?” I said it might be better in the future. I didn’t dare to say much in those days, and my level of political consciousness was not high. A week later, that student pretended to be sick and withdrew from school, and in 1957, during the anti-rightist movement, the supreme leader classified intellectuals as bourgeois and made the “scientific assertion” that intellectuals were part of the exploiting class. It became the eternal “sacred code” of the Chinese Communist Party for intellectuals, comparable to the Hammurabi Code of ancient Babylon 3,800 years ago. We, the young people who will become intellectuals in a few years, will also become the target of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which makes people shudder. The students felt more and more the danger of the “coming rain and wind”.
The school’s labor day coincided with the end of the month, and the month’s meal tickets would be used up. One of my classmates in the same study group was also big and stout. I had a bowl of thin porridge in the morning, two pieces of fried salted scallops at noon, and no food at night, and carried a big basket all day. At that time, even father and son can not care about it, then there is what father and son love, love of classmates! It completely led to the loss of humanity. These sad details and pathos of emotions will be passed down from mouth to mouth forever in the history books.
At the beginning of April, when spring was in full bloom, our class went to the mountainous area 30 kilometers away from the school to build a reservoir, and the specific task of our class was to transport soil and stones for a month. After this kind of training, who dares to say that we are not red intellectuals of the proletariat!
IV. 1961 academic year
This year, under the guidance of the policy of “correcting, consolidating, enriching and improving” the national economy, which was adopted and implemented at the Ninth Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, our studies were fully formalized. We were able to learn some professional knowledge seriously and practically. After the winter break, we went abroad for graduation internship. My graduation design and thesis both got full marks and were well received by the supervisor.
At the beginning of August, we happily went to our respective workplaces.
Time has passed half a century, but those scenes of riding the waves and those lessons that are engraved in our hearts still swirl in our minds from time to time, becoming a memory that cannot be forgotten at all. Learning from history, I hope those similar tragedies will not be repeated in a different way.
History is the best witness. The good thing is that history is written by the people. As Marx said, “History itself is the judge.”
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