With this kind of abuse being repeated over and over, night after night, my father was eventually nearing breakdown. Some people became very riled-up and out of control that they would spit at him and beat him. People shouted over and over: “Beat down Liu Shibao! Beat down Liu Shibao!” Some people made up false stories about my father, making people hate him. During the meetings my father had to kneel for over three hours while people berated him loudly and violently. The criticizing meetings were organized by a Cultural Revolution Leading Committee, a special governing agency of the Communist Party. My father was labeled a “history counterrevolutionary” and was required to have that title pinned to his clothes on a card at all times, in public and at home. Several hundred villagers were also ordered by authorities to attend and to “struggle” with the “struggle target” or “class enemy” by verbally, and sometime physically, abusing him or her. This cruel and destructive movement in total lasted for 10 years and spread all over the country.įrom that day on, my father was ordered to attend nightly public criticism meetings, also called “struggle sessions” (Pi Dou Da Hui or Pi Pan Da Hui in Chinese). This was in the third year of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a political movement launched by the Chinese communist party (CCP) in May 1966, to control and purge the educated elite, including teachers and scientists, through terror and persecution. I realized that many village people, including some students, had posted these. Scared and confused I walked around the campus and saw more of these posters everywhere, all over the school. They were all attacking my father, saying things like: “Overthrow counterrevolutionary Liu Shibao!” As a fourth grader I could already read all the Chinese characters, and I was startled by the content of those posters. Instead, the walls were covered with posters filled with Chinese brush characters in black ink. But when I walked into my classroom, there was nobody there-no teacher, no students. As usual, I walked the two miles of snow-covered mountain road to school. One day, an event at school caused an unforgettable blow to my soul. I was attending the village elementary school. We never saw the sun or the moon all winter, while enduring freezing cold days and nights of up to -30 degrees Celsius (-22 degrees Fahrenheit). It continued snowing every day, covering the village. It was an unusually cold winter in the year of 1968, when I was 11 years old. My parents had no income, so my mom raised a few chickens to sell eggs so she could buy paper and pencils for me to go to school. Since my father had never farmed before, we could not grow enough food on the countryside paddies, and we suffered much hunger during those years. My father was a university professor and suddenly had to become a farmer to support the family-my parents, grandmother, younger sister and myself. The area we were sent to was poor and undeveloped, without transportation or electricity, and there were no jobs. When I was six years old, in 1963, during a period called “Socialist Education Movement” just prior to the Cultural Revolution, our family was banished to a small village in northeastern China because my father had received a few years of Japanese education during World War II. For me, the eldest son, the suffering and stress is still ever-present in my mind-as intended by this regime that uses extreme brutality to make examples of people in order to spread fear and subjugate the masses. Although the central figure of this story is my father, the things perpetrated upon him affected our entire family. Life for Chinese people was bitter when the state-initiated “class struggle” swept through our country like a wildfire of violence, lasting ten long years. I grew up in communist China during the Great Cultural Revolution. The names have been changed to protect family members still in China. The account was prepared and edited as an exclusive memoir to be published in The Epoch Times. The story that follows is his personal experience, that of his mother and father, and of Chinese communism, from the Cultural Revolution to today. (Jean Vincent/AFP/Getty Images) Yukui Liu is a doctor of Chinese medicine now living in the United States. This poster, displayed in late 1966 in Beijing, shows how to deal with a so-called 'enemy of the people' during the Cultural Revolution.
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