It was a courageous decision that would cost Bian her life.įirst, her teenage students beat and kicked her. But she decided to come in that morning anyway. On August 4 of that summer, Bian was tortured and warned not to come to school the next day. Over the next two months, Bian was repeatedly harassed by her students and even beaten during a meeting. In June 1966, some of the school’s students began to criticize school officials and organize revolutionary meetings.īian’s college degree and bourgeois background made her a natural target for the revolutionaries, although many of them were ironically from privileged families themselves. One of the earliest victims of the Cultural Revolution was Bian Zhongyun, a 50-year-old vice principal at the prestigious Beijing Normal University Girls High School.
Photo credit: GiaHoi Publisher via YouTube In 2003, he was awarded the United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights for his humanitarian efforts.
While still bound to a wheelchair today, Pufang has worked tirelessly the past few decades for the rights of the handicapped in China. By the time some specialists finally examined him in 1974, Pufang was already permanently paralyzed. Since the Dengs were political pariahs, Pufang was denied the treatment he needed. But he did break his back and become paralyzed. Either his torturers pushed him out an open window or he attempted suicide by jumping out the window himself.įortunately, Pufang survived the fall. Pufang has never been able to remember what happened next. In 1968, a group of Red Guards captured Pufang on the campus of Beijing University and tortured him for the sole reason of being his father’s son.Īfter clubbing him, the Red Guards locked a dazed Pufang in a fourth-story room. While the worst thing that most of his children suffered was being forced to work in the countryside, Deng’s oldest son, Pufang, became paralyzed after an encounter with the Red Guards. He then spent the next two years under house arrest in Beijing, forbidden to leave or see his children. In 1967, while serving as the Communist Party’s general secretary, Deng was denounced as a capitalist roader and removed from his position.
Not even Deng Xiaoping, the high-ranking leader best remembered for his post-Mao capitalist reforms in China in the 1980s, was safe from the revolution’s purges. He has since become a lawyer, active in raising awareness of the Cultural Revolution’s victims and fighting to have his mother’s grave turned into a memorial.įrom ordinary peasants to high-ranking party members, nobody in China was truly safe during the Cultural Revolution. With the help of his uncle Feng Meikai, Hongbing was able to influence his province’s legal system to clear his mother’s name in 1980. In the years following his mother’s death, Hongbing realized what a terrible thing he and his father had done. Neither Hongbing nor his father attended the execution. For the crime of “attacking Chairman Mao Tse-tung,” Fang was executed by firing squad on April 11, 1970. She was then taken away by a soldier but not before Hongbing beat her on orders from his father. While home one day in 1970, Fang angered her husband and her son Zhang Hongbing after criticizing Mao Tse-tung.įang’s family duly reported her to the authorities, and she set the family portrait of Mao on fire in retaliation. Like her “capitalist-roader” husband, she was put in detention multiple times and subjected to struggle sessions by the authorities. Her husband was then accused a few months later of being a capitalist roader, a vague Maoist slur which referred to somebody who was working to betray the ideals of the Communist Party and lead China to a capitalist system.ĭue to a past accusation of her father being a Nationalist spy, it wasn’t long before Fang was suspected of being a dissident as well. Fang’s enthusiasm, however, began to wane after her daughter got sick and died following a trip she made to see a Mao Tse-tung rally in Beijing. Fang Zhongmou, a Communist Party member and veteran of the People’s Liberation Army, felt proud when her two older children got caught up in the furor of the Cultural Revolution and became Red Guards.
0 kommentar(er)
