Text Prison
In the afternoon of June 9, 1966, the General Party Branch of Wuhan No. 28 Middle School, where I studied, organized a school-wide criticism of Mr. Peng Danian. The reasons for criticizing him were, firstly, that he had launched a rampant attack on the Party in 1957 in the name of giving opinions and had worn the label of “rightist”, which was removed in 1960, making him a “rightist with his hat off”; secondly, that he had used this time to criticize The second was that this time he was using the criticism of the “three villages” to write big-character posters to launch another rampant attack on the Party, and that it was not enough to criticize him. So, my classmates and I actively participated in this “struggle”.
I remember that at the beginning of 1966, under the arrangement of the school leadership, teachers and students gradually made the class struggle the main course and the culture course the secondary course, and studied the works of Mao Zedong more actively and diligently. Since the criticism of “Yanshan Night Talk” in April, the culture class had become less and less interesting to the students, and the criticism activities became more and more frequent, and the smell of gunpowder became stronger and stronger. In late May, the school changed from having only one large criticism meeting every Saturday afternoon to having only criticism meetings on Fridays and Saturdays without classes, with class meetings being the main focus of discussion.
In June, the political air got hotter and hotter and started to glow. During the first week, the People’s Daily published editorials almost every day, such as “Sweeping away all the bullies and snakes and gods”, “The great revolution that touches people’s souls”, and so on, as well as Nie Yuanzi’s big-character poster. My classmates and I thought that the long-awaited Revolution had finally arrived, and that China was too big to accommodate a peaceful desk! Therefore, we all rubbed our fists together and felt that the country was counting on us. A strong ambition rose in my heart like a blaze. I made up my mind that I would exercise myself in this movement and become a revolutionary fighter of the new generation of proletariat.
Soon, the “opportunity” came!
That morning, as usual on campus, teachers were teaching and students were listening. 99.9 percent of the people did not expect that a stormy class struggle was brewing in the background.
The fourth class in my class was physics, and the teacher, named Peng Danian, gave us a review lesson. He had a good reputation among the students because he was white and fat, kind and gentle in tone, and he taught effectively and could mingle with the students. I didn’t like mathematics and chemistry much because the calculations were too troublesome, especially the formulas that I couldn’t remember; however, I was interested in the non-calculated parts of physics and chemistry classes.
While the class was in progress, suddenly, the secretary of the General Youth League Branch of the school came and called away the class chairman; after a while, the class chairman came again in a hurry and called away Liu, the secretary of the league branch, and the two of them left in a hurry. This, I did not care, anyway, is the leadership again to arrange the big criticism of things.
That day, Mr. Peng finished his lecture and thought he was satisfied, so he assigned homework and left happily.
I went to school after my nap, and when I arrived at the back door of the school, I only heard a lot of noise and saw people moving around in the classrooms. As soon as I entered the school, I felt that the atmosphere was not right, everywhere was serious and busy. In the office, the teachers were rushing to write big-character posters; when I came to the class, I saw “resolutely criticize the anti-Party and anti-socialist black words” written on the blackboard, and I saw my classmate Lv Mou angrily writing “Peng Danian is an old rightist” on the blackboard in seven big words. I was astonished: Oh my God, scolding the teacher! Did the class struggle come to our school specifically? I hurriedly asked others what was going on.
I heard that it was like this: Peng Danian took the opportunity to criticize the “three villages” to curse the Communist Party. The word “party” was written, and the word “brother” was deliberately written out. I heard the school leader say that this is to slander our party is no brother party, and Chairman Mao said “our friends all over the world”, he is not intentionally anti-party anti-Mao Chairman? If the workers and poor peasants write, it is generally a slip of the pen; but Peng Danian is a rightist, the nature is different, it is not accidental, is his “rightist” nature of the big exposure. This “class analysis”, of course, I fully accept.
At that time, the analysis of the problem was often based on your family origin or political identity to qualify. If your family origin was working class or poor peasants, it was okay to say the wrong thing, just criticize a few sentences; if your origin was not bad, if you said the wrong thing, the criticism was harsher, and some of them were recorded in the file; if your origin was not good, you were from a family of “five types of elements”, there were capitalists, police officers who had held false positions such as the Kuomintang, and Kuomintang officers and soldiers who had defected or revolted. If you are from a family of “five types of elements”, capitalists, police officers and soldiers of the Kuomintang who have held false positions, and those who have defected or revolted to the Kuomintang, and those who are used by internal control, you will have to hold a criticism meeting if you say something wrong, and you will have to make a review, cry and scold yourself, and afterwards your review will be entered into the file and become a burden for your life.
After the criticism of the “three villages” baptism, I “know” class enemies engaged in anti-Party anti-socialist activities are often playing the red flag against the red flag, saying revolutionary words, shouting revolutionary slogans but doing counter-revolutionary activities. In my opinion, isn’t Peng Danian like this? I want to join this fierce class struggle in time and fight face to face with the class enemy!
I began to write a critique, but what to criticize? I couldn’t think of anything from Mr. Peng’s usual remarks, but I knew that Mr. Peng also had a large-character poster entitled “Recapturing the Victory of the Proletarian Cultural Revolution”. “Only the landlords and bourgeoisie! So this big-character poster of his is secretly speaking for the class enemy. The analysis here, I am so happy! Let’s criticize this word “seize”. After I finished writing it, I handed it over to the student council – the president of the student council was my classmate Zheng Bo Kang – in the hope that I would be allowed to speak on stage, of course.
The assembly started at 4:00 pm. While the electric bell was ringing, a student, Hu, according to the arrangement of the leadership, ran to the gatehouse and pounded on the steel plate hanging under the eaves (the plate is used in place of the electric bell in case of a sudden power failure). The atmosphere in the school was suddenly more tense. Students from all classes, each impassioned and angry, converged on the main playground at a near trot.
Amidst a chorus of hateful slogans, several students carried wooden sticks – used for artistic gymnastics – and escorted Mr. Peng to the podium. Mr. Peng’s face was white, trembling like chaff, and he could barely get up the steps, but was later pushed and dragged up by the escorting students, and escorted to stand on the right corner of the podium, bent over at about ninety degrees.
One by one, the students went up to the stage, waving their fists, staring, raising their voices, and excitedly reading out their criticism; the teacher representatives also spoke, and they seemed more excited than the students, some teachers shouted slogans not with one arm raised, but with two arms raised, and also bounced a few times. The conference went on for more than two hours, Mr. Peng never raised his head, nor did he straighten his back. Finally, the conference moderator told Mr. Peng to roll down to write a confession. Mr. Peng did not have time to “roll” miles, was an angry student grabbed off the podium and escorted away.
That night, Mr. Peng in the teachers’ dormitory on the second floor of a dormitory to write confessions. The students took turns on duty in groups of four, each holding a wooden stick, watching the class enemy intently, not allowing him to talk and move around. It was not until after the clock had turned that the school secretary, Mr. Yin Yetao, came and asked the students to remember Mao’s teaching that they should “not mistreat their captives” and to allow Mr. Peng to sleep for a while. Only then did Mr. Peng get into bed, but he was not allowed to put down the mosquito net, so he had to sleep with a sheet over his head. I saw Mr. Peng sobbing with my own eyes. Someone yelled at him: “Don’t be a ghost!”
The next morning, the students who were supervising him picked him up and asked him to read the large-character posters exposing and criticizing him. He stammered and cried, and his face was covered with tears and sweat. The students were not satisfied, so they spontaneously dragged him to the cafeteria, made him bow his head and bend over, and then beat him up. After the fight, he was escorted to the building where the junior high school students were attending classes and locked up in a small office on the second floor to continue writing confessions. Two students from each of the two classes in the second year of high school worked every two hours, and two students from each class were responsible for supervising him, paying close attention to and recording his every move; if there was anything unusual, revolutionary action was taken immediately.
I was on duty for one class. I saw Mr. Peng wiping his eyes while writing the confession, I could not help but feel compassion. But I immediately “realized” that this was petty-bourgeois warmongering at work, so I “reminded” myself to be more vigilant and not to be confused by the superficial phenomena of the class enemy. Now that I think about it, I really don’t know what to say.
In those days, some teachers said in front of us that they had been aware of Mr. Peng for a long time, and found that this person was not right, and they were secretly watching out for him.
Some years later, I think, when a person is innocently abandoned by the group, the situation is extremely miserable, others are often eager to “clear” the line with him out of self-preservation motives, slanderers, insults, stones, fists and kicks, one is “awake”, one is “smart”, is this awareness, or cowardice, or cruelty?
The political nature of Mr. Peng’s mistakes is determined without regard to the legal basis. Other people have also made mistakes, not saying that they intended to “launch an attack on the party”, so why did they say that Mr. Peng? The “reason” at that time was too simple and “sufficient”: because he was a so-called “bourgeois rightist”, his class nature was reactionary, so his slip of the pen was not accidental, but a result of his class nature. It was a big exposure of his class nature.
This argument is the so-called “class analysis method” which was very popular back then, that is, “characterization in the first place, analysis in the second”. The basis of qualification was family origin, political status and official conclusions. Mr. Peng was once branded as a “rightist” and had to carry this status for the rest of his life, which led to negative perceptions of his words and actions. This is quite absurd, but it was a common perception and social psychology at that time.
Also: Mr. Peng was branded as a “rightist” in 1957, and the Communist Party removed his “hat” in 1960, which meant that he was no longer treated as a “rightist”. However, in 1966, he was still treated as a political “rightist”. The sad and hateful thing is that they went back on their words like that and didn’t care.
That struggle was the first time in my life that I personally participated in the “class struggle” and was no longer a spectator. At that time, I felt so good!
However, I didn’t know that this event would change the entire trajectory of my life, because on the 13th, a working group was sent from above, and the school never opened again. It was not until 12 years later, in the second half of 1978, that I was lucky enough to be admitted to the correspondence university sponsored by the correspondence section of Wuhan Normal College, which belonged to the “five major students” (vocational university, industry university, electric university, correspondence university, night university). Alas!
Criticizing the class teacher
After the criticism of Mr. Peng, I, like many students, felt that I was not satisfied and wanted to do something more.
In the afternoon of June 13, the working group came to the school. We felt that a new struggle was about to take place. A few students and I spent the night talking in the messenger room, still full of energy. In the morning, our class invited a person from the working group to the classroom to listen to the students’ opinions. We had quite a lot of opinions, mainly focused on the class teacher Shu Xianlong.
We had learned a “skill” by criticizing the so-called “reactionary rhetoric” of Yanshan Night Talk and Sanjia Village during the official nationwide campaign. The “skill” is to find political problems in a sentence or even in a word in a sentence. Mr. Shu himself did the same thing.
There is this story: my classmate Qiaoqiao failed to enter high school in 1964, and voluntarily sent down to Yangxin County half (side) of the mountain farm, wanting to put into the fierce class struggle and hot production struggle in the countryside to exercise themselves and reform their worldview. However, when I arrived there, I saw that it was not the same thing, every day was work – cooking – work again – cooking again – sleep at night. The monotony of sleeping at night was so great that they were very discouraged; more people complained that they were not well-born, that they had come to this place where ghosts do not come to the door and birds do not lay eggs, and that their whole life was over, so girls often cried and boys sighed.
Qiaoqiao wrote to me and other close classmates to tell them about their inner misery. When I saw her negative mood, I wrote back to her and said, “Not all people who go to the countryside are good, some are sincere, some are half-hearted, and some are forced. You are sincere, don’t be influenced by those who are half-hearted and forced.”
I made my point to my high school classmates as well. I thought I was very analytical, but I was criticized by Mr. Shu, who said that all those who went to the countryside were responding to Chairman Mao’s call and were therefore revolutionary, and that to divide them into categories was to fail to see their essence, to be inflammatory, and to objectively undermine the descent to the countryside. This “grand theory” made me confused and unable to distinguish right from wrong.
Mr. Shu also organized to criticize some of the things I said that he thought were wrong. For example, I said, “You have to look at the whole situation and the essence of a person. The red flag floats in the sky, it is inevitably dusty, can you say that the red flag is not red?” I never thought in my wildest dreams that Mr. Shu would say that I had slandered the dictatorship of the proletariat and that it had deteriorated when it got dusty. I said I didn’t mean that. I meant that we should look at the essence of people. He didn’t listen to my complaints and organized a meeting with my classmates to criticize me. He repeated the same thing many times in class later. I was extremely unconvinced inside.
How boring and absurd it should be for a class teacher to engage in class struggle in the field of thought against a student whose worldview is in the process of formation, and to repeat the same old arguments again and again!
I’m not the only one who has done this kind of boring and absurd things. He can also make a few sentences out of what other students have said to criticize a group. A student in my class named Hu wrote in his essay, “The older generation is always dying, so if we don’t study well, how can we take over the revolutionary class in the future (to wit)”. Mr. Shu actually “found” a “major” problem, that is, slandering the old revolutionary generation, and took it out in front of the class to criticize, so that the Hu classmates blushed. Mr. Hu argued with Mr. Shu in front of the class and got into an argument.
Mr. Shu couldn’t stand up, so he teamed up with the political science teacher Liao to give Hu a “failing grade” in his political science class. This “failing” was a very big deal back then, which meant that Hu Tongxue’s thinking was “problematic” and belonged to the category of “dangerous elements”. This is what suppressed Hu Tongxue, and gave us students a deterrent. In this way, he was quite antagonistic to many students emotionally.
Mr. Shu’s treatment of students was, first of all, influenced by the general political climate of the time – the revolutionization of ideology in the early 1960s, the need to focus hard on the class struggle, and especially the need not to relax the class struggle in the ideological field. He probably thought that he was grasping the class struggle in the ideological field by grasping the students’ words and criticizing them, so he was happy to do so, almost pathological. Then there is the connection with his political experience.
Before the “anti-rightist” period in 1957, Mr. Shu spoke more casually, jokingly saying that “Mao Zedong looks like a granny”, “Liu Shaoqi looks like a monkey”, and “Zhou Enlai is a beautiful man”. “Zhou Enlai is a beautiful man” and so on. These words will not be put to him now, but in those days were considered a major political issue. He was severely criticized, but was lucky not to be classified as a “rightist”. Since then, he has been very “careful” about what he says. However, as an intellectual, he had a good nature to make comments, but he was forced by the repressive political environment to speak out, which was quite painful for a young intellectual; at the same time, he wanted to rebuild a “good” image in the eyes of the leaders with a “good” performance.
So, he needs to find the object of criticism to vent his inner repression and to fight for performance in front of the leaders. I and some of my classmates became such unlucky people. In this way, he will inevitably “feud” with us students. Usually, we do not have the opportunity, but when the campaign comes, we will “go after” him. I’m not at liberty to say what other students thought, but I wanted to get back at him. I wanted to “prove” with facts that he was the real “reactionary”.
He often said: “If you have any comments, you can raise them. We definitely do not grasp the braid, do not deduct the hat, do not beat the stick. When he spoke, he had a mysterious and unpredictable smile on his face. We were afraid of him, afraid that he would catch the pigtails to rectify himself and affect the future promotion; because since 1963, the education department has increasingly emphasized the “implementation of the class line”, that is, in terms of joining the league, promotion, etc., the policy is tilted to students with good family background and good political performance.
For this reason, it was necessary to consider making good relations with him. However, also follow him “learned” this hand, is to seize the chicken scratch and then randomly analyze, on the line, no mistake can make mistakes, small mistakes can be made into big mistakes.
The most impressive one was when he inspired us to criticize a student essay titled “Friendship”. The essay was said to have been written by a female student in Shanghai. Mr. Shu mimeographed many copies and sent them to all the students in my class, handing them to us and telling us to read them first to see what problems we could find.
My classmates and I were too stupid to see the problem in any way. With a smug smile on his face, he said, “This article is about two good friends who are going to separate, and one of them gives the author ‘me’ a pot of flowers, which is a symbol of friendship. Isn’t it? Later, the potted flower was hit by a storm and the author ‘I’ saved the potted flower. Isn’t that right?” My classmates and I all nodded “Yes.”
Then Mr. Shu asked us seriously, “In our country, which class of friendship is the one that gets hit?” At this point, my classmates and I realized that only the friendship of the landed bourgeoisie would receive a blow in our country! And so, the “reactionary” nature of the article was finally “seen” by us!
Thus, we learned how he – not only he, but also the society – picked up the problems. In the future, we used his methods against him and made him suffer enough.
When the Cultural Revolution Working Group came to our school, it did not come out at first to organize any criticism meetings or fight meetings, but it never stopped the large-character posters of students criticizing teachers, the large-character posters of teachers exposing school leaders and the large-character posters of teachers exposing each other.
Seeing the working group enter the school, my classmates were very happy because the “opportunity” to fix Mr. Shu had come. Since we could criticize Mr. Peng, we could naturally criticize Mr. Shu.
There was a “basis” for criticizing Mr. Shu. For example, he said that after the death of the good soldier Wang Jie, who was a “Lei Feng type”, “he will be revolutionary even when he is in his coffin”, “every nail of Wang Jie is revolutionary For example, he said that after the death of the good soldier Wang Jie, “even if he dies, he will be revolutionary” and “every nail of Wang Jie is revolutionary”; “speculation is bad, but what is wrong with speculating on revolutionary opportunities”; “President Hu Chi Minh is almost 70 years old and he is not married, what am I afraid of if I am not married”; etc.
After the criticism of the “three villages”, we “learned” to observe and analyze the so-called reactionary speech, so we “analyzed” what he said on the line and felt that he was even more reactionary. We denounced his “reactionary” remarks to the working group and posted them in the cafeteria (in the cafeteria, because one wall was not “fully” utilized and many students and teachers were eating in the cafeteria) with the “striking” title “Shu”. The title was “Shu Xianlong is the executioner of the youth”. He could only stare in disbelief in the face of our large-print posters.
The “problems” revealed by the teachers were even more powerful. In that particular political climate, everyone defended himself, and the “best” way to defend himself was to fabricate other people’s charges, and the bigger the better, so that the struggle would be directed to the “sinner”, and he could escape.
Here is a point to mention: Mr. Shu and other teachers of some so-called political, ideological problems, how others will know it? This is because the school administration provided or “leaked” them. How did the university get hold of this information? It turns out that at that time there was an official activity called “heart-to-heart with the Party”. Originally, it was good to reflect one’s thoughts to the Party and seek guidance from the Party to improve one’s ideological awareness. This is also what the party organization says. Ordinary teachers in our school wrote down their various ideas on material paper and gave them to the Party General Committee.
However, things are not as good as the good and simple people think. The party organization often transcribes just a few words from the heart-to-heart materials after people have crossed their hearts and stuffs them into a file bag – and this becomes evidence that you can hardly defend or deny! Slick people know how to write so that the party organization can’t catch them; however, those who are too honest are out of luck because of this.
Teachers revealed that the first sentence of Mr. Shu’s opening speech of Chairman Mao at the first National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, “Gentlemen delegates,” had a grammatical error, and that “gentlemen” could not be used after “gentlemen”. “, but people are used to it, so it’s not a mistake. This sentence now seems to be no problem at that time is very important ah – how dare to attack the great leader Mao does not know grammar! It was also found that he had said “Chairman Mao looks like a granny” and so on, which was a “shocking case”! Mr. Shu was thus put on the “trial” of history!
On the basis of the people’s posting of large-character posters exposing various problems, the working group began to organize a criticism meeting a month or so later, and the first to bear the brunt was my class teacher, Mr. Shu Xianlong.
In the small criticism meeting, somehow it was “discovered” that he was a “rightist” who had slipped through the net during the “anti-rightist” campaign in 1957! So, when they criticized him, they all called him “Shu Xianlong, a rightist” in the same breath. He was trembling, and his face showed a frightened and helpless look. What alarmed him the most and made the participants “furious” was the “revelation” of a female teacher. The female teacher angrily approached him to “expose” him, saying that he boasted that he “could read Chairman Mao’s works backwards” and questioned, “Everyone reads Chairman Mao’s works in a straightforward manner, but you prefer to read them backwards! What do you mean by that?” At this point, sweat ran down his face in an instant.
In fact, he was bragging in front of other teachers that he could read Mao’s writings “backwards and forwards”, just to win the favor of the leaders. However, in the era when class struggle was the platform and the string of class struggle had to be tightened at all times, a word without a problem could be found “problematic”. As long as you were watched by the leaders, it was very easy to fabricate a charge. That’s how Mr. Shu’s words were “caught”.
Mr. Shu’s wretched face, I sat in the first row, I saw clearly. When I thought of the fierce way he usually lectured people, I couldn’t describe how happy I was.
After the mini-criticism session, one day in June 1966, in the auditorium of a unit next door to my school, the working group organized another large criticism session.
At that time, Wuhan was hot, always between 37 and 38 degrees, and the heat was suffocating. But Mr. Shu was shivering on the stage.
The conference was chaired by Zhao, a military cadre, and the working group sat behind the scenes. Many students have spoken, including me, naturally. In the course of my speech, whenever I want Mr. Shu to answer the questions I raised, the stage will sound the “speak quickly, speak quickly” reprimand. I was so excited that my face was sweating. When I looked at Mr. Shu, I saw that he was sweating too. I was so happy, I thought, “You have a day, too!
Later, the team leader picked up the microphone and said, “Now take this bad guy down and make him give a full confession.”
Mr. Shu lifted up his gray face and looked like he couldn’t tell the difference between north and south, so he walked straight ahead and almost fell off the stage. A member of the working group pulled him and dragged him backstage.
Parading in the street
One afternoon in late August, I came to school and heard the noise. When I looked, I saw that students from some classes were escorting teachers who had been judged by the working group to be problematic around the school, shouting slogans as they walked. I went to the second floor of the school building and saw a group of students from junior class (3) carrying a female teacher by her limbs and yelling to carry her into their classroom.
The students of the second year (2) class pushed Mr. Peng, who was cleaning the classroom, to his knees, and put a torn and dirty paper basket on his head. Mr. Peng did not say a word and held up his hands in a surrendering manner. A few students from this class and other classes rushed up and gave him a good old fist, hitting his head and back and chest. Mr. Peng could not dodge, but only grunted.
My class is a sophomore (1) class, naturally “not willing to be left behind”, ready to pull Mr. Shu out of the street parade.
The next day early in the morning, the students arrived. Around eight o’clock, Zheng called Mr. Shu, who was working, and “announced” to him with a grimace: in view of his serious crimes against the Party and socialism, the school’s Cultural Revolution Committee and the cultural revolution group of the sophomore (1) class decided to drag him to the society for criticism. Mr. Shu’s face was pale and trembling, and he looked around at the frosty students and bowed his head without saying a word.
Someone brought a paper basket buckled on Mr. Shu’s head, and tied the paper basket with a hemp rope, then crossed the rope ends from the face to under the ears around the back of the head, tied a knot, and then around the front of the neck, tied a knot, the excess rope held by the escort.
The team went out of the school gate, four students with wooden sticks on either side. Along the way, Zhang shouted slogans, students tried their best to follow, pedestrians or look or follow, some people also asked the parade is what people, what is the crime, and some people rushed into the team to give Mr. Shu a slap. The escort sometimes stopped, and sometimes did not stop.
Soon we arrived at Mr. Shu’s house. Neighbors and others came to watch, pointing and chattering. Mr. Shu was standing on a bar stool. A student revealed his “crime” to the onlookers. People listened, some with serious expressions, some angry, some nodding their heads.
Zheng and Zhang took some of their classmates into his house, and someone escorted his mother out and pushed her to stand on a bench as well. The mother and son were ordered to take off their socks, but were not allowed to look up. His mother and son obediently complied. Some students brought out some of Mr. Shu’s problematic books – threadbare books and books with yellowed pages – and piled them on the road, where Zhang struck a match and burned them. Then Zhao and Zhang led the procession away.
By this time, it was already noon. That day is really strange, the heat is surprising, the sun like a viper letter licking people, licking people’s skin pain; air hot, so hot that people sweat, sweating like rain; tar ground is almost on fire, wearing rubber-soled sandals can also feel the unbearable heat. Mr. Shu walked barefoot, but did not feel as if. I think he must have been in pain because he kept clenching his lower lip.
In the vicinity of the Hendari watch store on Jianghan Road, a person among the onlookers on the roadside handed Zheng a gold-colored dress. Zheng shook open a look, it turned out to be a Taoist priest wearing a robe, laughing, and tense face told Mr. Shu to put on. Mr. Shu hesitated, but saw people around him were heckling him, so he obediently took the robe and hurriedly put it on. The onlookers were laughing, and Zheng, Zhang and his classmates were laughing. I laughed so hard I clapped my hands and stomped my feet.
The procession continued until one or two o’clock in the afternoon, the “street parade” was over.
We, the students who were provoked out of our minds by the word “revolution” and destroyed our class teacher, Mr. Shu, were a microcosm of what was happening in schools throughout China at that time. In Wuhan, there were many such cases.
During the criticism of the so-called “bourgeois reactionary line,” I realized that it was wrong to point the finger of struggle at Shu, and even more wrong to drag him out to the streets, but I still thought that he deserved to be criticized for his reactionary remarks.
It was not until eight years later, during the “criticism of Lin and Confucius”, when my students put up large-character posters for me to count all the ways in which I had engaged in the “return of the revisionist line”, that I understood once and for all how absurd, terrible, and hateful it was for students to fight against their teachers.
The absurd, terrible and hateful thing is that the teacher-student relationship is tense to the point of saber-rattling, incompatible, how can education continue in a healthy way? How can education continue in a healthy way? How can education produce normal students if it cannot continue in a healthy way? How can a nation stand on its own in today’s world without a normal offspring?
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