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41 The End of the ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ In the annals of our country 1976 was a most unsettled year. Early on Premier Zhou Enlai and Marshal Zhu De both died, after which the great earthquake at Tangshan occurred, in which some 200,000 residents died. Following this Mao Zedong, after a long period of illness and every medical effort to save him, departed this life. Just as Jiang Qing and the others in the ‘Gang of Four’ hatched their plan to seize power, Hua Guofeng and Ye Jianying moved quickly to launch a surprise attack and arrested them all, thus crushing their plot, to the huge relief of the whole People. After the 3rd party plenum, Deng Xiaoping was again returned to power and Hu Yaobang was selected as general secretary of the CCP. Bold and resolute action had overturned chaos and restored order. The unjust and mistaken cases were reviewed. The whole nation gave a collective sigh of relief as the ten years of disorder came to an end. The great damage the ‘Cultural Revolution’ caused our country must be thoroughly investigated by history. Right now, however, I wish to set down my own thoughts relating to this unprecedented and unrepeatable human disaster. During my time with the war criminals we were all long-term prisoners and thus had no contact with the outside world—in fact we were particularly isolated. It was only after I was transferred to Xinxiang that I got to meet some younger and newly imprisoned people and through them learnt more about what had been happening on the outside and got fairly up-to-date information. At the beginning of the mighty and historically unprecedented ‘Great Cultural Revolution’ we were permitted to read the newspaper, which read: “The situation is excellent; not just good, but excellent.” At first we believed this, but then we doubted it. We mouthed the word ‘excellent’, but in our hearts wondered how this could be so since our personal experience told us that the situation was not good. 266 The Memoirs of Jin Luxian As I have explained above, in 1965 the government had arranged for the war criminals, along with the translation team, to tour the new construction projects, universities and research institutes of Beijing. We were very well treated, received by leaders and hosted by them. Then, at the start of the ‘Cultural Revolution’ we were transferred to the Fushun War Criminal Management Centre, where things were quite different. While escorting us the Liberation Army had loaded weapons and sent us to a small station, which was deserted except for soldiers, all armed to the teeth. This made me realise that class warfare had started up again and what was ‘excellent’ about that? Our food also was worse. Later on we found that our individual food allocation had been cut from 20 yuan to 8 yuan and that was really not ‘excellent’. At Fushun we did no translation and were not permitted to take out books. Each of us was issued with a ‘Little Red Book’ of Mao Zedong’s sayings and all other books were banned. Political study was resumed with vigour and we did endless self-criticisms, while being required to expose and betray others. There was nothing to do, so our minds were full of thoughts and imaginings! Before leaving Qincheng we had gone out to do janitorial work and seen the big character posters saying: “Strike down the slogans of Liu Shaoqi”. Others had said: “Strike down the slogans of the prison leaders”, which left us completely confused. The Red Guards appeared and struck down feudalism, capitalism and revisionism and seized power everywhere, sweeping away class enemies of all descriptions, smashing the ‘four olds’, destroying cultural assets, national treasures , creating revolutionary uproar, making brutal attacks, arresting people everywhere, making them suffer, doing everything on a huge scale. It really was a world-shattering change. Everything was taken to its extreme and then returned to its diametrically opposite expression, so that the ‘Great Cultural Revolution’ in turn became the anti-cultural revolution. Day and night we had to learn the ‘Little Red Book’ by heart. At one’s first breath on waking up, one had to dash to the exercise ground to pay respects to Chairman Mao. The last thing before bed, one had to make self-criticisms. We had to confess our sins to Chairman Mao, all of which resembled our religious ceremonies. It appeared to me that a new religion...

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