My hometown, Ding Fan Village, is an ordinary village in Wanrong County, Shanxi Province, Wang Ya Commune (now Gao Cun Township), belonging to the loess plateau with ravines and gullies, 10 miles from Gao Cun, where the commune is located, 30 miles from Xiedian Township, the county seat, and more than 100 miles from Yuncheng City, which is remote, inconvenient in transportation and closed to information. The village has more than four hundred families, more than four thousand people, there is a small school. When the “Cultural Revolution” broke out, I was in the third grade of primary school, and I had a deep impression of it.
The principal of our primary school was surnamed Wang, about 50 years old, strapping, kind-eyed and easy-going. The first big-character newspaper that appeared in the school, and also the first big-character newspaper I saw during the Cultural Revolution, was to expose and criticize Principal Wang. Interestingly, the author of the broadsheet was the school’s Dean of Academic Affairs, who worked with Principal Wang day in and day out.
Both Principal Wang and the Director of Academic Affairs were public teachers, and their families lived in a neighboring village more than 10 miles away, so the two leaders lived alone. Principal Wang lived in a single room at the west end of the school, with a conference room in the middle, and the Dean of Academic Affairs’ room at the east end through the conference room.
One morning, students came to the school one after another after breakfast and suddenly found a piece of pink paper posted on the wall outside the conference room, with the words written with a brush, dragon and phoenix dancing, and the bold title was particularly eye-catching: “My first big-character newspaper”. Out of curiosity, students and individual teachers have gathered around, the younger students can not recognize a few words, some older students read aloud while reading. The content of the newspaper is not complex, mainly criticized the principal of Wang conservative thinking, slow action, only focus on grasping the teaching, did not actively lead the whole school teachers and students into the “cultural revolution” movement, resulting in a dead school, and so on, the end of the signature of the director of academic affairs.
The more teachers and students gathered around, the more they read the big-character newspaper, some agreed, some whispered, but also argued with each other. At this moment, the Dean of Academic Affairs was squatting on the steps under the eaves, a cigarette in his mouth, having a look at the black and oppressive crowd attracted by the big-character posters, with a smug look on his face. Suddenly, next to the Director of Academic Affairs, Principal Wang’s dormitory door opened. He looked grave, footsteps slowly walked out, without saying a word, to meet the astonished eyes of the crowd, walked in front of the large-character newspaper. The students and teachers gathered in front of him automatically gave up a place for him, President Wang said, took out his notebook and pen, spread them on his knee, and carefully copied the big-character newspaper word by word ……
In the afternoon, all the teachers and students of the school lined up and gathered in the square in front of the big-character posters for a meeting. The principal of Wang spoke, very emotional, incoherent said: today, our school posted the first big-character newspaper, this, this, very good, is a very good thing, showing that some of our comrades are very politically sensitive, have vision, can find problems, point out the problem. This big-character newspaper involves my problem, I myself make a statement, humbly accept, seriously review, in the future to strengthen political learning, improve ideological awareness, follow the revolutionary situation, I hope that the majority of our revolutionary teachers and students actively involved in the tide of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution ……
From that day on, the normal teaching order of the school was disrupted. Teachers and students copied and wrote large-character posters, naming and revealing various problems, targeting not only the school leadership, but also each other, exposing, smearing, maliciously slandering and even attacking each other. Overwhelming and colorful broadsheets were plastered all over the walls of every classroom in the school.
Later, I read the Great Leader’s “Artillery attack on the headquarters – a big-character poster of mine” in the newspaper, and upon comparison, I found that the big-character poster written by the Director of Academic Affairs was an exact imitation of the Great Leader in terms of tone and use of words. Why did the Dean of Academic Affairs take the lead in jumping out and writing a big-character newspaper to expose Principal Wang without any regard for his feelings? The development of the situation soon gave an answer.
In our elementary school, there were 300 to 400 students in grades 1 to 5, and only a dozen public and private teachers combined. Fearing that he would be criticized by the revolutionary teachers and students, the Director of Education took a pre-emptive measure by dressing up as a revolutionary rebel and attempting to shift the direction of the struggle to Principal Wang so that he could get away. However, his plan failed in the end.
The “Cultural Revolution” movement in the school was “launched” by the head teacher’s big-character posters, and “Red Flag” and “Lighthouse” were set up among the teachers. “Several rebel teams from Jinggangshan made red flags, wore red armbands, and led their own teams to seize Principal Wang and the Director of Educational Affairs and criticize them at any time. The criticism involved Principal Wang’s crime, which was nothing more than repeating the contents of the Education Director’s Da Zi Zi Pao, saying that he did not actively study Chairman Mao’s writings, resolutely implemented Liu Shaoqi’s reactionary bourgeois education line, and focused on intellectual education rather than moral education, aiming to turn students into bourgeois “sheep” and so on.
At a general meeting to criticize Principal Wang and the head teacher, a teacher took the stage and dropped a bombshell. Principal Wang came from a family of landlords and had been subjected to struggles during the land reform. One weekend, this teacher returned to school on a bicycle, passing by Principal Wang’s village and meeting him on the way. Principal Wang hosted him at his home for tea and idle chit-chat, inadvertently pointing to a courtyard house adjacent to his home and saying, “Look, that courtyard house, which also belonged to our family before the liberation, was given to poor peasants by the Agricultural Society during the land reform.” The teacher “escalated the matter to the next level” and criticized: more than 10 years after the founding of New China, Principal Wang, as the son of a landlord, was still thinking of his family’s property, and was keeping an account of the changes in the world in his heart, hoping at any time that the U.S. imperialists and the Kuomintang reactionaries would fight back and restore capitalism in China, so as to regain his lost property and live a new life. The decadent life of the old society, with its extravagant drinking and drinking, drunkenness and dreaming of death, makes us poor peasants suffer twice and suffer twice again. His impassioned exposé at once ignited the anger of the students and teachers in the audience, and they all shouted the slogan: “Don’t forget the bitterness of the classes, remember the blood and tears of revenge.” “Down with the capitalist Wang!” The headmaster, who was standing on the desk being criticized, was livid, his legs trembling, and his head, which had been hanging low, was getting heavier and heavier.
The headmaster of the school, who had stolen a chicken and failed to steal the rice, also failed to escape the criticism of the rebels. It turns out that his family is also a landlord or rich peasant components, the crime is not only similar to the headmaster Wang, a teacher revealed that he and a female teacher in the school there is improper relationship. Immediately, the meeting hall was in an uproar, people were very interested in this kind of scandal, gushing about it and spreading it widely, making the Dean of Academic Affairs notorious. After repeated criticism, the two “capitalists” were stripped of all their duties and “stepped aside” to be supervised and reformed by the revolutionary teachers and students, and the leadership of the school was controlled by the revolutionary rebels.
Teachers and students studied Mao’s selections every day, recited quotations, copied and wrote large-character posters, held assemblies for criticism, and participated in criticism meetings held by the Commune and other brigades.
One day, a few senior students were working on making Chairman Mao’s quotations on the walls of their classrooms. They first shoveled out a box on the dirt wall, then smeared it with mud and ash, and when it was dry, they wrote a quotation from Chairman Mao with a brush. Principal Wang, who was hiding in his own dormitory, looked out of the window and saw that the students were not very good at this work, their hands and feet were in a mess, and the plaster was splattered all over their bodies, so he came out and asked for help. With the consent of the students, Principal Wang happily did the work. He was very good at wiping the wall, standing on the table with his legs apart, one hand holding the mud board, the other hand holding the mud knife, dexterous, systematic, clean and neat, and in no time he wiped a good quotation board. The students praised him for his good work, and Principal Wang was delighted to finally get a chance to repent of his sins, and was very busy and happy thereafter. Unexpectedly, one time the quotation board was too high for Principal Wang to reach while standing on the table, and his students put a bench on top of the table to serve him. Principal Wang pedal on the bench operation, shivering legs, did not wipe a few, not paying attention, from the stool planted down, fell to the swollen face not to say, a leg also fractured. Because he was “capitalist”, could not be sent to the county hospital in time to do surgery, only in the village health clinic simple bandage, was sent home. When we saw him again a few months later, Principal Wang, who was strapping in stature, walked with a limp and looked much older. Later, Principal Wang and the teaching director were transferred to other village schools to teach, and I never saw them again.
The school’s newspaper fever gradually spread to the village, the production team members, of course, mainly poor peasants, one by one, leaving the farm work, dance, to the brigade, production team cadres and other people to post the big-character posters. The content of the newspaper has a reflection of a cadre to take advantage of the power to eat more than occupy, a cadre to reveal the existence of historical problems, a cadre to reveal a cadre to retaliate against the poor peasants, but also to expose a cadre of men and women style problems, can be described as a variety of, have everything. The newspaper was posted on the wall of the supply and marketing agency in the center of the village, and it was covered with flowers and greenery, just pasted with a layer, which was soon covered with a new layer. The supply and marketing agency in front of the original is the members of the leisure place and information distribution center, weekdays people come and go, especially lively, now add fresh big-character newspaper, onlookers of the crowd is endless stream, noisy abnormal.
In the overwhelming number of big-character newspapers, suddenly there are two big-character newspapers implicated my father, which brought great fear to our family, but also laughable.
My family consisted of four people: my father, my mother, my sister and I. My father was a doctor and the head of the main health post. My father, a doctor and head of the brigade’s health clinic, had already been falsely accused by the rebels of being a “historical counterrevolutionary”, kicked out of the clinic, returned to work in the production team, and joined the ranks of the “land-rich anti-bad-right” activists to be supervised and reformed. Her mother was a housewife and a member of the production team. After graduating from high school, my sister worked as a private teacher in her village school.
The first big-character newspaper was an exposé of the criticism of Feng Moumou, the then Party branch secretary of the brigade, and the rebels weaved together his so-called ten crimes, one of which was: “relaxing the strings of class struggle, confusing the class line, colluding with Feng Moumou, a member of the Black Five, and seriously obstructing poor peasants from listening to Chairman Mao’s voice from the Party Central Committee”. Listen to it! Is it scary?
The specific charges of this crime were revealed a year ago, Gao Cun Commune allocated to our brigade 10 cable radio speakers, commonly known as radio boxes in the countryside. However, the “capitalist” Feng so-and-so withheld these speakers, and not only did he not distribute them to the poor peasants and farmers in the village in time, but also gave one of them to the “historical counterrevolutionaries”, my father. When I first read the big-character newspaper, I thought it was a bad crime.
But the truth was that the commune had to sell 10 horns to its members for 5 yuan each, which was not a small amount at that time, as most of them were too expensive to buy, so they didn’t sell a few horns after taking them back to the village, and there are still a few horns left in the main storehouse. My family is small, and my father works in a health clinic to earn a salary, so my economic conditions are a little more generous. The key was my fascination with cable speakers. I was particularly curious about how a small box could contain so many little people who could tell news, stories, songs, operas and comedians. Every day when I came home from school, I ran to the production team headquarters to listen to it, often forgetting to go home for dinner. When I heard that the main production department sold loudspeakers, I pestered and cried and asked my parents to buy one. My parents, who were not very educated, doted on me and thought that listening to the horn would be good for their son’s extracurricular knowledge, so they spent 5 yuan to buy a horn from Feng Mou, the secretary of the brigade’s Party branch. My father asked a carpenter in the village to make a wooden box, painted it green, put it in, took the wire and connected it to the antenna and ground wire, and installed it on my bed for me to listen to. At that time, the cable radio broadcast three times a day, morning, noon and night, and each time the overture was “The East is Red,” which began with “news and newspaper summary programs,” then local news and cultural programs, and finally the weather forecast. It was such a simple thing, I never thought it would become a big evidence that the village clerk and my father were “hooking up”.
The other big-character poster was written by a schoolboy and posted on the school wall. I had been branded as a “son of a dog” because of my father’s history, and I was in the “other book” of students, so I lost the right to write a big-character poster. The teacher, like a classroom assignment, required the other students to write one or two pieces of Da Zi Zi Pao each week. The students scratched their heads and dug their brains out, piecing together a big-character newspaper to submit to the teacher. The student, unable to find any material, wrote a large-character poster saying, “My father cleans the streets every morning, not after dawn, but before dawn, when the revolutionary masses cannot see. Moreover, when he cleaned, he only cleaned the front of his house, but the rest of the house was sloppily cleaned. The big-character newspaper revealed that the reason my father did this was purely because he loved to save face, couldn’t let go of the stink of being a doctor, was antagonistic to the Party and the poor middle peasants, and didn’t honestly accept the supervision and reform of the poor middle peasants, etc. My father swept the streets.
My father swept the streets, which was the obligatory work ordered to a dozen or so Black Five members of the village who wore hats after the brigade rebels took power, just like the rightist Qin Shutian played by Jiang Wen in the movie “Furong Town”. The rebels divided a section of the street for each of the Black Five and asked them to clean it every morning before their members went to work on the ground. My house is located in the middle of the village, on the main street, and the section of the street they assigned to my father to sweep was right in front of my house. The street is next to a large pond that holds water in the village. My father had been a doctor for many years and had developed a habit of hygiene. He noticed that every morning at dawn, members of the community would come home from the pond to use the water for cooking. If he sweeps the street at this time, is bound to get dust on the face, debris flying, inevitably will splash down to members of the bucket of water, extremely unhealthy. In view of this, he got up at dawn every day, in advance of sweeping the street, by the time people up on the pond to pick water, the street has been dusty. I never thought that the father’s “good intentions”, but fell a “not honestly accept the supervision of the poor peasants reform” charge. I’m sorry.
My father, mother and sister were very worried, and discussed over and over again how to deal with this disaster that had fallen from the sky. I was very much to blame myself, I should not be so capriciously fond of listening to the horn, and brought my father an unwarranted sin.
The first big-character newspaper was not aimed at my father, but at Feng So-and-so, the “capitalist”. In the “bayonet sparring” debates that followed, Feng repeatedly explained to the rebels and the revolutionary masses, and he even took out the back-linked invoice of the radio horn that my father had purchased and testified. However, the rebels continued to be unforgiving and made repeated troubles, finally seizing his power and ousting him from power. On the first day of the Spring Festival that year, bright red couplets were put up on the doors of every house in the village, but the rebels put up a pair of couplets written in black on white paper on Feng’s door.
Epithet: callous to the poor and peasants.
Down the line: Be filial sons and grandsons of class enemies.
horizontal marker: recognize enemy as friend
As a result of the second large print, the head of the rebellion summoned my father to the brigade headquarters, where he was sarcastic, ridiculously critical, and severely reprimanded for half a day. My father obediently didn’t dare to make a sound, let alone any explanation, only to bow his head and confess his guilt.
The first thing you need to do is to take the initiative to come to my house and explain that your child is ignorant and stupid. The company has been in the process of developing the new product for the past few years, and has been working on the development of the new product. In fact, he knows nothing, is completely instigated by others. She said home, but also ruthlessly beat his son a …… my mother listened, although the heart is not happy, still tolerant said: his aunt, don’t, don’t hit the child, it also blames the child, the teacher let write a big-character newspaper, the child can not help, don’t over-blame him.
The mother of the student personally came to the door “to apologize”, finally gave a bit of comfort to the parents as “birds of a feather”.
“The Cultural Revolution” ten years, the list of absurd things is too long to list, making up random writing of big-character posters, posting big-character posters, is only one of the examples. The people who wrote the broadsheets, without doing in-depth investigation, without using factual evidence, simply by virtue of personal subjective imagination, judgment and likes and dislikes, arbitrary, to catch the wind and shadow, false rumors and false accusations, recklessly exposing, jumping to conclusions, the above-mentioned, randomly labeling. The many people who have been attacked by the broadsheets have hardly had any opportunity to explain or defend themselves, nor has any organization stepped in to do justice to the situation. As a result, the minor ones spread rumors and slander, damaging the reputation of others; the serious ones list the charges, subjecting the person concerned to criticism, beating, scolding, imprisonment, maiming, sentencing, wrongful suicide and persecution to death. I don’t know how many people’s minds have been maimed and killed by the absurd big-character newspaper, how many innocent lives have been maimed and killed, and how many false cases of injustice have been caused to society. However, the big-character newspaper was the great leader of the so-called “four great inventions” as “big sound, big release, big-character newspaper, big debate,” the so-called “four great inventions”, rampant in the land of China for many years, in 1975 was also grandly written into the Constitution of the Republic, until 1982. Repealed when the Constitution is again amended.
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