Balzac And The Little Chinese Seamstress Analysis

Picture China during 1966. You are one of the many high-class civilians experiencing the conflict of the time period, where the government-initiated “class struggle” sweeps through China like a wildfire of violence. You notice a crowd of intimidating young soldiers called “The Red Guard” towering over a kneeling old woman. The Red Guards strike her with canes and violently scream, “Beat the counterrevolutionary! Beat the counterrevolutionary!” while burning down her only known home. They tie her arms and legs and load her onto a truck, where her she is escorted to the outskirts of the town.

Among several others, you are later driven by the Red-Guard and sent to “Re-Education Camps”, a set of poor, undeveloped villages located on Chinese boundaries.

While providing vivid background information, the narrator explains that he “had not enjoyed the privilege of studying at an institution for advanced education. When we were sent off to the mountains as young intellectuals we had only the statutory three years of lower middle school (7)”. During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Communist Party and People’s Republic of China created “re-educated camps”, which were ‘prisons’ where civilians with jobs (mostly teachers, doctors, and writers) were forced into other labor—their views were seen as “counter-revolutionary” and denounced by members of the Red Guard, a group supporting the People’s Republic of China (“China’s Re-Education Camps”). The camps decreased China’s literacy rate substantially, as people lost access to education and freedom of speech and thought. In addition, the narrator encounters his friend’s mother and describes his discovery of Western books. The mother replies by saying “Books? Certainly not, (85)” and ends the conversation. During the Cultural Revolution, book censorship occurred. Any work of literature which disagreed/did not follow Mao Zedong’s communistic teachings was burned, and people owning any similar items were persecuted.