21
21
c olleagues, and wrote confessions, hoping to get off the hook. It didn't
work.
The students at Democracy Street Primary School created a new
form of school assembly. Its star attraction was "the jet plane." A teacher
was interrogated at great length in private and forced to "admit" his
crimes. Then he was taken onstage before a student audience and
kicked in the back of the knees until he fell down. One student grabbed
him by his hair and pulled back his head. Others lifted his arms and
yanked them behind him. Then they held the hapless instructor in this
contorted position for hours. When it was over, most teachers couldn't
walk. To make the humiliation a bit more permanent, students shaved
their erring teachers' heads.
Among their teachers the diligent students "discovered" the vilest
of the vile. Says Gao Yuan, they uncovered "hooligans and bad eggs,
filthy rich peasants and son-of-a-bitch landlords, bloodsucking
capitalists and neobourgeoisie, historical counterrevolutionaries and
active counterrevolutionaries, rightists and ultrarightists, alien class
elements and degenerate elements, reactionaries and opportunists,
counterrevolutionary revisionists, imperialist running dogs, and spies."13
The students armed themselves with wooden swords and hard-
ware. At night, they imprisoned their teachers in their bedrooms.
Another instructor of the Democracy Street Primary School was driven
past endurance. This one hung himself.
Now that they had practiced on their teachers, the students were
urged to take their cultural cleansing further and form organized
units--Red Guards--to root out revisionism in the towns. Like young
monkeys raiding an elder, ten and fifteen year olds rampaged into the
cities looking for officials who had strayed from the strict Maoist line.
They sniffed out "ox ghosts and snake spirits" among the municipal
authorities, subjected magistrates, mayors and local party heads to
interrogations, beatings and head-shavings, and marched miscreants
through the streets wearing dunce-caps that were sometimes 30 feet
high. Needless to say, the officials under attack had provided the
<< < GO > >>
21
21
c olleagues, and wrote confessions, hoping to get off the hook. It didn't
work.
The students at Democracy Street Primary School created a new
form of school assembly. Its star attraction was "the jet plane." A teacher
was interrogated at great length in private and forced to "admit" his
crimes. Then he was taken onstage before a student audience and
kicked in the back of the knees until he fell down. One student grabbed
him by his hair and pulled back his head. Others lifted his arms and
yanked them behind him. Then they held the hapless instructor in this
contorted position for hours. When it was over, most teachers couldn't
walk. To make the humiliation a bit more permanent, students shaved
their erring teachers' heads.
Among their teachers the diligent students "discovered" the vilest
of the vile. Says Gao Yuan, they uncovered "hooligans and bad eggs,
filthy rich peasants and son-of-a-bitch landlords, bloodsucking
capitalists and neobourgeoisie, historical counterrevolutionaries and
active counterrevolutionaries, rightists and ultrarightists, alien class
elements and degenerate elements, reactionaries and opportunists,
counterrevolutionary revisionists, imperialist running dogs, and spies."13
The students armed themselves with wooden swords and hard-
ware. At night, they imprisoned their teachers in their bedrooms.
Another instructor of the Democracy Street Primary School was driven
past endurance. This one hung himself.
Now that they had practiced on their teachers, the students were
urged to take their cultural cleansing further and form organized
units--Red Guards--to root out revisionism in the towns. Like young
monkeys raiding an elder, ten and fifteen year olds rampaged into the
cities looking for officials who had strayed from the strict Maoist line.
They sniffed out "ox ghosts and snake spirits" among the municipal
authorities, subjected magistrates, mayors and local party heads to
interrogations, beatings and head-shavings, and marched miscreants
through the streets wearing dunce-caps that were sometimes 30 feet
high. Needless to say, the officials under attack had provided the
<< < GO > >>