"Disasters also impacted our remote village.": A View from Shandong Province

Interviewer: Hi. Thank you for accepting my interview. Please first tell me when you were born.

Interviewer: You don’t need to say the exact year; just the decade will do.

I was born in the 1950s.

Interviewer: Could you tell me where you lived between 1966 and 1976?

I was in Shandong Province.

Originally, it was called Ye County, and now it is Laizhou City, a county-level city of Yantai City.

I lived in Dongsong Village in Ye County.

[The characters in the name are] “dong,” [东] as in “east” and “song,” [宋] as in “Song Dynasty.”

Interviewer: Thank you. Since you were born in the 1950s, you should have many memories of the Cultural Revolution.

Interviewer: If I limit you to about ten minutes, in other words, during the first ten minutes of the interview, what do you most want to share with us?

I lived in a remote village in Shandong Province, one of the most grassroots level places.

Also, I myself was born into an impoverished peasant family.

I experienced the Cultural Revolution from when I was in elementary school – around the fifth grade – up through junior high school and into the second year of high school.

When I was in high school, in 1972, Deng Xiaoping started the “right-deviationist reversal-of-verdicts trend”—the so-called “right-deviationist reversal-of-verdicts trend.”

So we experienced this trend, as well as its later revival.

As for my personal memories, the Cultural Revolution deeply affected rural areas.

Rural areas were not, as some have said, only mildly impacted by the Cultural Revolution.

I have memories of the violent struggle, and I also remember some other things happening that were really inhuman.

What left the deepest impression on me was the Dongsong Middle School located at the east end of the village.

At that time, there was a Dongsong Middle School, which was actually a high school.

We had a teaching director who was struggled against by his students not long after the Cultural Revolution started.

After several struggle meetings, he chose to hang himself.

I was a middle school student at that time; upon hearing the news, I ran with some neighbors and kids to the scene to see him.

As I watched, some people released his dead body from the tree and covered it with a piece of newspaper, on which they wrote in large characters, “[Because he] killed himself to avoid the punishments from the people, even death is not enough.”

Up until now, these horrifying memories are still very clear.

At my elementary and middle schools, I also had classmates who rebelled -- especially against the teachers.

My class monitor at the time had the surname "Cheng."

One time Teacher Cheng came to my house.

I was always a child who studied hard; when the Cultural Revolution began, I didn’t participate and became what was called a “bystander.”

Teacher Cheng visited my home and said to my mom, “Your child is a good boy; don’t let him go bad and rebel like the other kids.”

Teacher Cheng was struggled against many times by my classmates.

During the struggle meetings, we all pumped our fists in the air and chanted the slogan “Down with so-and-so.”

We started from “Down with Liu Shaoqi!”, “Down with Deng Xiaoping!” and continued level by level, from top to bottom -- from the leaders in our village,

to the team leader, to the teachers at our school.

I have a middle school classmate whose father was a disabled serviceman. He had once fought in North Korea.

Because he has this particular identity, his words always had power in our village.

When the Cultural Revolution started, he joined the rebellion as well, seizing power from the village leaders and secretaries.

Later, as the Cultural Revolution went on, he was beaten down by another faction.

We students went along to attend the struggle meetings, his son included.

His son was in the same class as I was, and he also pumped his fist in the air and chanted slogans to bring down his father.

If he hadn’t, it would have been hard for him to survive at school.

I also have memories about the violent struggles. In our village, peasants were also divided into two factions.

One had a larger number of people. Its counterpart was associated with a large work unit for a state-run enterprise.

One night, all of a sudden there was a rumor in the village that people from the state-run unit were coming with trucks full of people to massacre the mainstream faction in our village.

Ordinary people were probably going to be caught up in it and hurt as well.

So every household was told to close their doors to prevent ordinary people from being hurt.

I followed [the others] to close the doors.

Even now, I still remember how my heart was pounding.

So, in my impression, the Cultural Revolution –

Interviewer: -- also came to your village.

Yes, disasters also impacted our remote village.

Interviewer: How far was your village from the county seat?

20 li. [6.2 miles]

Interviewer: Fairly close, right?

But at that time, a distance of 20 li [6.2 miles] still created a natural feeling of isolation.

Interviewer: The rebellions you talked about, such as the clash of the two factions, were all spontaneous among the local people, right?

Interviewer: As far as you remember, were there outside influences that came in?

As I remember, [the only outside influences] might be the high school students who came to our middle school to “network.”

Interviewer: They were all local students? They didn’t have any influence from the national “networking”?

Some Red Guards among the high school students went to Beijing to “network.”

And there were a few who had received Chairman Mao’s inspection at Tiananmen Square.

Interviewer: [Laughs.] They carried back the “sparks of revolution”!

After they came back, they became the famous people of the time.

They were giving talks everywhere you looked, reporting on what they saw and heard at Tiananmen Square.

Actually, none of them got the chance to shake hands with Chairman Mao.

Still, just because they went to Tiananmen Square and saw Chairman Mao, they seemed to become heroes and came back [to the village] to do propaganda work.

I don’t have any impressions of outsiders coming to agitate our local villagers, only those of high schoolers coming to the middle school to agitate.

It truly had an effect.

I have another interesting memory about the time when we were making “big-character posters” about our teachers.

When we first starting putting up “big-character posters,” we needed paste. At that time,

food in the village was in short supply, so teachers called on us to “economize when making revolution.”

That was also a slogan during the Cultural Revolution. How did we do this?

Well, although actively participating in the Cultural Revolution and making “big-character posters” was correct, -- which our teachers had no choice but to emphasize –

[they also reminded us] we shouldn’t use paste, since it was made from wheat.

So, based on the teachers’ suggestion, we got mud from the pond at the end of the village to use as paste for the “big-character posters.”

Interviewer: Did it work?

Yes, it did. But even a gentle breeze would blow it away, leaving blotches of mud on the walls throughout our village.

So, that was us writing “big-character posters” and “economizing when making revolution” – totally ridiculous.

Interviewer: Thank you very much for sharing these stories of your local situation.

There’s more! I just want to say a few more sentences.

Even among the peasants, there were cases where family members belonged to different factions, making the family relationship very anxiety-ridden.

[For example], the wife belonged to one faction, while the husband belonged to another, and the couple didn’t talk at home.

The Cultural Revolution mobilized people, indeed!

What Chairman Mao said at that time truly corresponded with the reality.

The masses were mobilized, which [I think] was a saddening social phenomenon.

Interviewer: Thank you.