Guards. These torturous physical abuses often left
people permanently handicapped or mentally insane.
What made it even more excruciating was that
daughters and sons were required to “cut lines” or
disclaim their “politically faulty” parents, and display
their revolutionary loyalty to Chairman Mao and the
Chinese Communist Party. In order to survive the
political environment and ensure personal
advancement, friends, relatives and spouses had to
inform against one another - forced to write fabricated
confessions against beloved family members under
threat of mistreatment, such as verbal abuse, sleep
deprivation, and beating. China’s youth was drastically
hurt by the Cultural Revolution, which denied
educational opportunity and left them inadequately
educated, with physical damage and psychological
trauma. From the late 1960s until the end of the
Cultural Revolution, urban students were sent away to
rural farms to be reeducated by doing backbreaking
manual labor.
With traumatic nightmares and haunting memories
of political persecutions, as well as bloody military
fights among different Red Guard factions that
sometimes split families, some expatriate Chinese
writers f