In the midst of all this hardship she is given a choice: she can publicly denounce her family, break ties with her imprisoned father and her grandmother and mother and be restored to favored group status, which would lead to her social acceptance and all the rights and privileges of a party member, or she can remain loyal to her family and suffer with them and continue to face unknown danger and loss. She is denounced by other students and goes from a life of comfort to severe want and poverty. She herself, a gifted student, is denied opportunities to advance and participate in normal school activities. Ji-li watches as her family and others around them are publicly humiliated, robbed, imprisoned, and sent to labor plantations in the countryside. ![]() According to party doctrine, all landlords are bad, as are their children and their grandchildren. It is no consolation to her that he was a good man and a self-made man. Ji-li, an ardent young communist, is initially shocked and disgusted to find out that her grandfather had been a landowner. So instead of seeking individual guilt and instead of treating individuals as if they have any inherent dignity whatsoever (both of which are bourgeois ideas after all), the communists assigned all their subjects to various groups, based on their family’s history, and reduced the identity of every individual to their group membership.Ĭompletely stripping a whole group of people of their rights and dignity and allowing others to harm and rob them without punishment leads to predictably horrible consequences. But as you can imagine, it is impossible in a population of hundreds of millions to know who is loyal and who is not. Mao Zedong lunched the Cultural Revolution to purge China of all people and elements holding China back from becoming a communist paradise. In response they do what all socialist and communist movements have done to distract the people from their incompetence, they find a scapegoat. But because their government, like all socialist and communist movements, did not pay attention to economic and anthropologic realities, things were not going as well as the communists hoped. When the story begins, Mao and the Chinese Communist Party have already been in power for nearly two decades. ![]() ![]() In Red Scarf Girl Ji-li Jiang recounts her experience of living through Mao’s Cultural Revolution as a young girl.
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