

In 1966, when Mao Zedong reasserted his control of the Communist Party, he set in motion a decade of chaos and torment in China. Fifty years on, the consequences of that era still affect all levels of society. We reached out to our readers online, in English and Chinese, and asked them to share their families’ stories about how they were affected by the Cultural Revolution. Our correspondents also talked to academics and writers who witnessed the Cultural Revolution. Here are their stories.

  1. Photo
    Chen Qigang in Beijing last month. Credit Adam Dean for The New York Times
    Chen Qigang, 64
    Mr. Chen, a composer who now lives in France, was a student at a middle school in Beijing when the movement began. He spent three years in a re-education labor camp outside the city.

    I have always been a very direct speaker. When the Cultural Revolution was starting, I spoke out about what I was seeing. The day after I said something, a big-character poster appeared on campus overnight: “Save the reactionary speechmaker Chen Qigang.” I was so young. I didn’t understand what was going on. Yesterday we were all classmates. How come today all of my classmates are my enemies? Everyone started to ignore me. I didn’t understand. How could people be like this? Even my older sister, who was also at my school, came to find me and asked, “What’s wrong with you?” You saw in one night who your real friends were. The next day I only had two friends left. One of them is now my wife.

    At the time, no one really knew who was for or against the revolution. It was completely out of control. The students brought elderly people into the school and beat them. They beat their teachers and principals. There was nothing in the way of law. There was a student who was two or three years older than me. He beat two elderly people to death with his bare hands. No one has talked about this even until this day. We all know who did it but that’s the way it is. No one has ever looked into it. These occurrences were too common.

    If there had been no Cultural Revolution, then I would not be who I am today. People who haven’t been through it can’t appreciate how easy everything else is. It wasn’t the manual labor. That’s a different kind of hardship. This was the worst kind of bitterness. You are constantly told: “You are against the revolution, so therefore you have no right to speak. You don’t have freedom. You will have no future in this place. You will not have a good job. Everyone looks down on you.”

    That burden, that burden on your spirit, is very heavy. It was very different later when I went to France. I could have been criticized. I could have had a different opinion on something artistic. But for me that was nothing. It is nothing. Because it doesn’t affect my freedom.

  2. Dai Jianzhong, 66
    Mr. Dai, a sociologist in Beijing, attended Tsinghua University High School, where the first Red Guard groups were formed.

    My impression was that, in a sense, the Cultural Revolution had already begun in 1964. Even before the Cultural Revolution, there were divisions in our class over family background. Many students from bad class backgrounds like me couldn’t win acceptance to the special university preparatory classes, or membership in the Youth League. Those chances went disproportionately to the children of officials. The fact is that they were much more mature and in-the-know than us. They really did see themselves as the heirs to power – that our parents won the country and so we’re the natural heirs – and this thinking has continued into the present.

    After the Cultural Revolution broke out, they were also the ones who formed the first Red Guard group. Kids from bad family backgrounds didn’t have a chance of joining. They first formed by holding secret meetings in the grounds of the Old Summer Palace. From early June, the incidents of beating and berating teachers and the principal began. The principal would stand on the platform. “Stand up!” they’d yell. He’d stand up. “Head down!” He’d lower head. They’d press his head down further. Then it took off from there.

  3. Photo
    Zha Jianying at her home in Beijing, this month. Credit Li Qiang for The New York Times
    Zha Jianying, 56
    The author of several books about contemporary Chinese culture, Ms. Zha grew up in Beijing and now splits her time there and in New York.

    I was 6. In my first year of kindergarten, my teachers began to put up so-called Big Character Posters and we as little kids were asked to help carry these buckets of paste, which was used as glue to put up these posters. My father was a research fellow and we lived in the apartment housing of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

    One night these rebels – Red Guards – burst into the apartment, turning everything inside out. My little brother was so scared – he was 4 or 5. I remember one of the leaders, taking me aside and say: “Your parents are bad people. They are the class enemy. You and your brother should make a clear line from them.” My parents were taken downstairs and there was this typical rally: slogans, speeches, shouting. After the rebels left, my brother and I were hiding in the bedroom because we were also afraid of our parents now: Are they the class enemy? Another night, in the building next to us there was an old scholar, he was groaning as he was being beaten. And then the next morning he was dead. They just carried him away.

    In early 1981, when I was at Peking University, my mother came home, and said she had been lining up for fish at the market. It was a long line, and she realized the man standing in front of her looked familiar. She checked him out, and sure it was the leader of the Red Guards who had come to our house. “Do you remember me?” she said loudly. Then, she started telling everyone on the line: “YOU are one of the rebels who came to my house to ransack it.” In the period after the Red Guards burst into our apartment, my mother had been interrogated daily and forced to do different kinds of labor because she was considered a black guard. So in front of this man, she recounted the whole thing in public with him there. She may have cursed him, saying: “Shame on you.” Finally the man just left.

  4. Zhang Lifan, 65
    Mr. Zhang is a businessman who previously worked as an academic researcher and still writes history. He was a student at Tsinghua University High School.

    Violence became widespread after August 18, 1966, and everywhere on the streets you could see people surrounded by crowds, bowed over and being beaten and struggled against. There were no standards. I saw a university student being beaten by a female Red Guard, and the people around told her to stop. And then this Red Guard said self-righteously, “Chairman Mao told me to beat him!”

    At Tsinghua High School I also saw students and teachers who were beaten up, or had their hair shaved off. At that time, all this was done by those who were “born red.” If you came from a bad family background, you didn’t qualify to join the Red Guards.

    My father was also beaten up by them, and he was covered in injuries, and they were afraid that if someone of his standing died that would be bad, so they sent him to Peking Union Medical College Hospital. But the hospital said they didn’t treat this kind of cow demon and snake spirit, so he wrote a note to Premier Zhou Enlai explaining that he’d been beaten up and the hospital wouldn’t treat him. Later he was taken into the emergency section for treatment, so it looks like Premier Zhou did send instructions.

    Zhang Lifan’s father was Zhang Naiqi, a democratic politician who stayed in China after 1949 and was persecuted as a “Rightist” in 1957. He was again persecuted during the Cultural Revolution and died in a hospital in 1977.

  5. Photo
    Wu Qing in Beijing this month. Credit Li Qiang for The New York Times
    Wu Qing, 78
    Ms. Wu, a human rights activist and retired professor, was teaching at a university in Beijing when the movement began. Her parents were prominent intellectuals.

    I knew I would become a target because of my parents. My daddy served in the Kuomintang government and later was labeled a rightist. My mom had been labeled a reactionary writer, an unpunished rightist, and a running dog of the imperialists.

    But nothing happened to my parents until July or August 1966, when the Red Guards went to my home. My parents were forced to kneel on the ground for over three hours. At the time, my sister’s son was only a little over 2 months. The auntie was carrying him and she had to kneel down. It was feeding time, and they refused to let him be fed.

    They searched our home and took everything away. They were like robbers, they went in and took whatever they wanted. Then they locked the rooms. My parents stayed in a room smaller than 10 square meters. The students took away the cutting knives. They were afraid that my parents would commit suicide.

    Then Minzu University held an exhibition. The Red Guards put all the things they had collected from the different families together and said they were all my parents’ stuff. They called it: “Exhibition of the Bourgeois Life of Wu Wenzao and Xie Bingxin.” There were pieces of gold, jade, silver and a lot of stuff. My parents had to stand outside of the exhibition every day for 10 days carrying a blackboard around their neck.

    At the time, I was at my school. I couldn’t leave because there were struggle sessions against me. There were close to 80 in total. They said that because of my family background I could never love socialism and the Communist Party. The students couldn’t support me in public. But sometimes after the struggle sessions, they would come up to me when there was no one else around and apologize and say they were forced to do it.

    I never told my parents what happened to me. We never talked about it.

    Struggle sessions, when people were accused of political crimes, publicly humiliated and subject to verbal and physical abuse by a crowd, were a frequent occurrence during the Cultural Revolution.

  6. Photo
    Yang Jisheng in Beijing in 2013. Credit Sim Chi Yin for The New York Times
    Yang Jisheng, 75
    Mr. Yang is a historian who was a student at Tsinghua University High School in 1966.

    People who didn’t experience the Cultural Revolution only know that a large number of officials were persecuted, but they don’t know that the numbers of ordinary people who suffered were 10 times, a hundred times, more.

    They only know that the rebels were the culprits in the Cultural Revolution, and don’t know that the rebels were active for only two years. The main culprits were the power holders in different periods. They only know that the Gang of Four and the rebels supported the Cultural Revolution, and don’t know that a large number of senior officials also supported the Cultural Revolution for some time.

    Unfortunately, now there are some people doing everything in their power to cover up the mistakes of history. They treat one-sidedly extolling the achievements of the past as a “positive energy” to be exalted, and they treat exposing and reflecting on the mistakes of history as a “negative energy” to be beaten down.

  7. Fuxian Yi, 46
    Mr. Yi, a demographer, works at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Mr. Yi was born in a village in Qianyang County, Hunan Province.

    The Cultural Revolution was without question a disaster for China, but far less damage was done in those 10 years than in the Great Leap Forward or 40 years of family planning.

    In the countryside where I am from, there was relatively speaking less suffering, and there was even good from it. Young urbanites “sent down” to teach us raised the educational level. My elementary school teacher in the village was a “sent down youth” from a local city in Hunan. She was a very good teacher.

    Infant mortality was high and life expectancy low, and the “barefoot doctor” system that spread at that time brought down mortality fast, by introducing things like basic hygiene. A grandfather in my extended family had eight children in the 1940s and ’50s. Only one lived. My uncle had eight children in the 1950s and ’60s. Four lived. My own older brother and older sister died a few days after birth, but by the time I was born, in 1969, the infant mortality rate had fallen. So I lived.

  8. Tang Jinhe, 71
    Ms. Tang, a former engineer who studies the history of the Cultural Revolution at Tsinghua University, was a student there when the movement began. She now lives in Hong Kong.

    When my second son was 3 years old in 1976, the sun was going down. He watched it going from the balcony and asked his father, who’d come out from cooking in the kitchen, “Baba, what’s the sun?”

    His father answers: “It’s a giant ball of fire.”

    He sat there and thought for a long time and then went inside and said, “Baba, you’re a reactionary.”

    His father said: “Hey, why did you call me a reactionary?”

    He answers: “Because the sun is Chairman Mao, but you said it was a giant ball of fire.”

    His father said, “Oh. I get it, but saying that Chairman Mao is the sun is a metaphor.”

    He said: “What’s a metaphor?” And his father said: “How can I explain to a 3-year-old what a metaphor is?”

    The boy said: “Baba, you’re a reactionary.”

    His father said, “I was wrong. The sun is Chairman Mao. You don’t understand what a metaphor is, so forget it.”

    The boy said: “That’s still wrong. I heard you say that the sun is a giant ball of fire.”