In early 1981, when I was at Peking University, my mother came home, and said she had been lining up for fish at the market. After the rebels left, my brother and I were hiding in the bedroom because we were also afraid of our parents now: Are they the class enemy? Another night, in the building next to us there was an old scholar, he was groaning as he was being beaten. You and your brother should make a clear line from them.” My parents were taken downstairs and there was this typical rally: slogans, speeches, shouting. I remember one of the leaders, taking me aside and say: “Your parents are bad people. My little brother was so scared – he was 4 or 5. One night these rebels – Red Guards – burst into the apartment, turning everything inside out. My father was a research fellow and we lived in the apartment housing of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. In my first year of kindergarten, my teachers began to put up so-called Big Character Posters and we as little kids were asked to help carry these buckets of paste, which was used as glue to put up these posters. The principal would stand on the platform. From early June, the incidents of beating and berating teachers and the principal began. They first formed by holding secret meetings in the grounds of the Old Summer Palace. Kids from bad family backgrounds didn’t have a chance of joining. They really did see themselves as the heirs to power – that our parents won the country and so we’re the natural heirs – and this thinking has continued into the present.Īfter the Cultural Revolution broke out, they were also the ones who formed the first Red Guard group. The fact is that they were much more mature and in-the-know than us. Those chances went disproportionately to the children of officials.
Many students from bad class backgrounds like me couldn’t win acceptance to the special university preparatory classes, or membership in the Youth League. Even before the Cultural Revolution, there were divisions in our class over family background. My impression was that, in a sense, the Cultural Revolution had already begun in 1964. I could have had a different opinion on something artistic. It was very different later when I went to France. That burden, that burden on your spirit, is very heavy. You are constantly told: “You are against the revolution, so therefore you have no right to speak. People who haven’t been through it can’t appreciate how easy everything else is. If there had been no Cultural Revolution, then I would not be who I am today. We all know who did it but that’s the way it is. No one has talked about this even until this day. He beat two elderly people to death with his bare hands. There was a student who was two or three years older than me. The students brought elderly people into the school and beat them. One of them is now my wife.Īt the time, no one really knew who was for or against the revolution. The next day I only had two friends left.
How could people be like this? Even my older sister, who was also at my school, came to find me and asked, “What’s wrong with you?” You saw in one night who your real friends were. How come today all of my classmates are my enemies? Everyone started to ignore me. The day after I said something, a big-character poster appeared on campus overnight: “Save the reactionary speechmaker Chen Qigang.” I was so young. When the Cultural Revolution was starting, I spoke out about what I was seeing. I have always been a very direct speaker.
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