Fan Shen’s doubts surrounding the communist regime begin, as he writes, because of an incident that occurs when two factions of the Red Guard confront each other at a University in Beijing. His childhood best friend, Baby Dragon, had contacted his sister who headed one of the conflicting groups, and, as a result, Fan Shen finds himself battling against “Mao’s Vanguards”. After seeing Dragon Sister and her men ransack Li Ling’s house for being too anti-communist, Fan Shen reveres “The United Red Action Committee” and their members as being the most communist group of the Red Guard that he has ever seen, but after the skirmish in the University the group is arrested for being “scheming enemies of the Great Leader.” Despite the fact that this …show more content…
I was beginning to doubt that the Great Leader was as great as I thought; he did not even know his most loyal Red Guards and he arrested them as enemies.” Furthermore, his distrust of the Party was worsened by an event that happened a short time after. His parents, who had been high ranking officials during the initial revolution which established the regime’s control, were arrested on the belief that they had assisted his anti-revolutionary aunt. In reality, they had turned her into the cold despite the fact that she was a member of their family. For two months, Fan Shen was forced to live as an outcast and provide for both his sister and himself. Reflecting on these two months he writes, “ Why [Mao] had to sacrifice the lives of his most devoted followers, who worshipped him like a god, is a puzzle for which I still do not have an answer. But one thing I knew for sure: I no longer cared about the meaningless revolution.” As a result of the torture and degradation of Fan Shen’s most significant communist influences, he loses the illusion that the the Party protects those who are devoted to it, and these instances lead him to understand how his ambition to learn and grow as an individual will make him more of a target than any other naïve follower of the …show more content…
After experiencing 4 years of back-breaking, repetitious labor and starvation in the farm commune, Shen begins working in an aircraft factory. Initially he writes that he is “confident that I would make something out of myself before long and would rise far above the ordinary rank of assembly worker”, but after a series of suspicious deaths including that of his roommate, Bean Sprout, he attempts to escape the mandatory factory work by officially joining the Communist Party. Throughout his experiences in his childhood and at the farm he had learned that he needed to seem fully dedicated to the Red ideology, so he begins to spend almost half of his time writing a pro-communist journal with the sole purpose of the Party officials seeing it. However, his plans to save himself from the dubious factory are ended when he is almost sexually assaulted by the official in charge of his acceptance. Additionally, Fan Shen is sent to prison to testify against his friend, Fountain Pen, but throughout the weeks of prisoner treatment he is able to resist giving up any incriminating information. Unfortunately, his resistance to comply with the officers in the prison does not save his friend’s life, and at the end of his imprisonment he writes, “ It was ironic, I thought later, that I should
Jonathan Spence tells his readers of how Mao Zedong was a remarkable man to say the very least. He grew up a poor farm boy from a small rural town in Shaoshan, China. Mao was originally fated to be a farmer just as his father was. It was by chance that his young wife passed away and he was permitted to continue his education which he valued so greatly. Mao matured in a China that was undergoing a threat from foreign businesses and an unruly class of young people who wanted modernization. Throughout his school years and beyond Mao watched as the nation he lived in continued to change with the immense number of youth who began to westernize. Yet in classes he learned classical Chinese literature, poems, and history. Mao also attained a thorough knowledge of the modern and Western world. This great struggle between modern and classical Chinese is what can be attributed to most of the unrest in China during this time period. His education, determination and infectious personalit...
In The Color Purple the realities of an abusive upbringing are deeply explained to the reader. Celie, the main character, is taught the importance of being strong and standing up for herself through Shug Avery. She portrays strength and independence that women have. In The Color Purple, Shug Avery teaches characters to hold the vigor and autonomy that is hidden somewhere inside of them.
The novel 'Mao's Last Dancer', is a gripping story about the author, Li Cunxin and his story to success as a professional ballet dancer in communist China. The story shows how hard work, determination and hardships lead to the achievement of goals. Throughout the book, Li suffers from a number of physically and mentally challenging struggles that test him and push him to become stronger and more determined. Both mental and physical struggles are equally as difficult to overcome and both play a big part in different stages of Li's life.
Teenager, an age of rebellions is offered the perfect opportunity: to falsely testify against their parents, and became the educable children of Chairman Mao. But for many, the choice is not easy. Specially for the kid from "black" family, similar to main character Jiang; they have to choose between siding with their family, consider a disgrace, going against Chairman Mao's idea, or to be an honorable red guard,and side with the communist party."' Why don't you stay home with him? In case...' 'I've thought about that.' She looked away from my face to the litter on the table. 'But we can't allow personal matters to interfere with revolutionary duties. Especially for an important political assignment like the exhibition.'"(205). That's the idea chairman Mao encouraged, and it clearly separate family from politics. From this other girl point of view, she valued her policies and belief overtook her love for her brother. The action of this girl makes a strong contract to Ji-Li, bother third action define who they are.
A young socialist group was created by the name “Red Guards” are hunting down “capitalist-roaders” who are guilty of the “Four Olds” which is old customs, old habits, old thoughts, or old culture. This is shown when the village chef comes for Fugui to get rid of the puppets because everyone knows that they are part of the old culture and though the puppets remind Jiazhen of her son Yongqing, the family burns the puppets. The audience is shown that the Communist party has infiltrated people’s houses and propaganda is even in the marriage song between Fengxia and Erxi. It is known that by this time the Revolution is at it’s strongest. Education is depicted to not matter and that proves to cause a disaster as later in the film during Fengxia’s childbirth the doctors are all gone and only the students are left. It is noticed that these students are all young woman and the Communist party is trying to make gender roles equal for these young woman, however it is clear that since the doctors were the only ones educated to help this puts the death of Fengxia who dies of blood loss after giving birth to her son Mantou. Fengxia who is mute and considered back in China as a disability in Chinese culture as a “dishonor” since disabilities was considered that no doctor or nurse would that treat them, manly because they did not know how. This part in the film is symbolic to this part of China during that time as it shows both children, Youqing and Fengxia victims of the Communist Party polices. At the end, when Erxi buys a box full of young chicks for his son, which they decide to keep in the chest formerly used for the shadow puppet props. Implies the history of Puppetry in Chinese culture such as it was made for an emperor who had lost a loved one and so an Official made a shadow puppet of her and when presenting it to the emperor he was overjoyed that he could see his loved one again.
Mao believed that “Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.” (reading packet, 12) What this means is that force is absolutely necessary and the outcome of force is violence. Mao is in total agreement with the violence and sees the people opposing the movements he is favoring as “paper tigers”. As in, at first, these rebels might seem terrifying, but in reality, they are helpless and harmless.
The story of Fan Jin reveals the difficulty of social mobility. By depicting Fan’s twenty-four-year in taking the basic examination and his personal poverty, the author indicates how hard it can be for a low-level people to achieve his success. Additionally, the description of people around Fan Jin vividly demonstrates the contempt for people who are without power and wealthy and the adulation to people who are with wealth and political rights. Last, but not least, Wu obtains a strong desire to irony the imperial examination system. Therefore, he describes the mental disorder of Fan Jin in order to depict the nature of the examination – to let people have more knowledge or to let people have psychiatry- and the content of exanimation in order to reveal the useless of the personnel selection
There is no better way to learn about China's communist revolution than to live it through the eyes of an innocent child whose experiences were based on the author's first-hand experience. Readers learn how every aspect of an individual's life was changed, mostly for the worst during this time. You will also learn why and how Chairman Mao launched the revolution initially, to maintain the communist system he worked hard to create in the 1950's. As the story of Ling unfolded, I realized how it boiled down to people's struggle for existence and survival during Mao's reign, and how lucky we are to have freedom and justice in the United States; values no one should ever take for
...ear and listen. That’s why most of the Chinese youth were inspired to join the army due to the books that were sold and the song that was written just for the Red Guards army. The book’s name is “Little Red Book.” The song’s name is “Red Guard Song.” For the members, the “Red Guard Song” reminds them of their purpose of why they joined the Red Guards. To add on, two young women had wrote their own memoirs to explain what their life was when the Cultural Revolution was happening and how their life was changed when they joined the Red Guards and started to rebel against their parents and their own teachers. As they grew older, they soon realized that everything that they’ve been doing the whole entire time was wrong and regret joining the Red Guards. They realize that all these time, they were killing innocent people that clearly was doing nothing to harm the country.
The Red Guard strove to remove and destroy the Four Olds, foreign influence, enemies of the Party and the current societal structure by persecuting those who supposedly perpetuated them. All vestiges of outdated customs, habits, culture and ideas were to be destroyed, since the movement represented “a triumph of youth over age, of ‘the new’ over ‘the old.’” To do so, the Red Guard wrecked thousands of art collections and the contents of libraries, and changed “reactionary” street signs. They persecuted members of the public who attempted to stop them or refused to give up the Four Olds. Those who had foreign ties, like businessmen, missionaries, or who had western education were also persecuted to prevent backwards or rightist ideologies from spreading into the new Chinese society. Chinese intellectuals were also hounded for the same reason: to prevent free thought. The messages of the movement were “negative—against the established authority, against the Party, against the military” and the outdated structures of the older generation. To destroy the established order, the Red Guards attacked educational and political institutions that were enemies of Mao and the party, and created general havoc within China. The Red Guard targeted teachers, education policies, and universities to change the core of education and the qualities that it had extolled. Members of the general public and even party officials themselves were attacked, to remove the “capitalist roaders” with bourgeois tendencies from society. Mao hoped that in this chaos a new communist China would emerge.
In the very beginning, Ji Li is confidently dedicated to the revolution, but then slowly starts to discover the despicable truth. Ji-Li thinks, " We thanked heaven that Chairman Mao had started this Cultural Revolution… otherwise we would not have even known we were in trouble. What a frightening idea." (38). This quote depicts Ji-Li's thoughts on Chairman Mao as she started off in the beginning; an exemplary student and daughter of Chairman Mao. Her first carefree opinion is quickly countered when she is told she cannot participate in the audition. "'Ji-Li, the fact is that our family will not be able to pass the investigation'…For a long time I did not speak. ‘Why?' I whispered at last." (9). When she is told at this early point in the revolution she would not pass the audition, she is only getting an insidious whiff of what is to come, but has not experienced anything that would be wrong with her family, the revolution, or otherwise the world up until then. Although small, her first glimpse at the tormenting trials that are to come start to penetrate into her oblivious mind, and make her start to think...
The great inventor Albert Einstein once said, “Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value.” In The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck, Wang Lung does the opposite. At the beginning of the novel, when he is still a young man, Wang Lung is an individual who is very moral and has a strong sense of his values, most of which are traditional family values that have been passed on for generations. He worships the gods of the fields, has a good sense of filial piety, and knows his place in society - a lowly, uneducated farmer. However, when he becomes a man of great wealth and power, he lets other’s influence his values.
Adeline doesn’t get much support from her family, except for two, Aunt Baba and Yeye. With the constant depressing situations in the book, Adeline has been blessed with two people who actually care. Aunt Baba and Yeye actually want to encourage Adeline to do her best because unlike the other members in her family, they do not treat her as just an unwanted child. In the novel, Chinese Cinderella, by Adeline Yen Mah, Adeline is greatly supported by Ye Ye and Aunt Baba although out the book and I do not believe that she would've succeeded without them.
Qu Yuan went on to wander around aimlessly through life, moving from place to place, watching helplessly as the Qin began to take over his. home. I am a sassy. To see his people suffering made him so distraught over time. he withered away, becoming frail and old.
...ng the time of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, mayhem was a part of everyday life. Mao Zedong encouraged rebellious actions from the Red Guards, and rewarded those who shone as leaders. He also targeted his political rivals by provoking the Red Guards to follow his ideas, and annihilate all remnants of china?s old culture. After the revolution ended, the Red guards received the disciplinary actions they deserved, and the tortured victims finally inadvertently received the vengeance they deserved.