"Two days after the last visit, the guard appeared in my cell and handed me four pieces of bread for four days’ food. I figured that I would be sent to a farm that would take four days of travel. Most likely, it would be the White Lake Farm in Anhui Province. Not long after, the cell’s door was opened. I was handcuffed with another female inmate, my left hand restrained with her right hand. We were transported to a ship dock and boarded on a cargo ship. We were put in the bottom deck with no window. About five hundred female inmates had to sit and lie on the floor like sardine fish. There was no bathroom or toilet facility. In the middle of the room, there was a large container for our human disposals. We had to step on bodies to get to the middle, and the waiting time was at least twenty minutes. The container was filled very soon. Human waste was spilled and soaked into the comforters of those unfortunate ones who slept next to the container. Each of us had only four pieces of hardened and molded bread. I wanted to eat the bread with water, but I tried my best to limit my water intake in order to avoid going to the toilet. In addition to starvation, thirst, and exhaustion, I finally experienced the suffering of controlling the urge to go to the toilet. I literately had to crawl over layers of human bodies to reach the disposal container. I can only find one way to describe living with five hundred inmates without bathing for days as being in hell. "
Rose Hu, “Joy in Suffering”
"I didn’t want to give Ah Fang another opportunity to escape, so I had her taken directly to the storeroom; where I locked her up with a new group of a dozen or so holdouts. The other women in the group behaved as I had come to expect.** Separated from their husbands, bullied into submission, so distraught that they were often unable to eat or sleep. I let them one by one into the clinic as they wept.** . . “No exceptions to the one-child quota are allowed.”
“The universities were pacified by Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams. The team that took control of my school consisted of thirty soldiers and was commanded by a retired army lieutenant who had risen through the ranks.”
“In reflecting on the first two years of the Cultural Revolution, Mao must have been pleased with how many of his Jovian shafts had struck home. The teenage Red Guards he had incited to anarchy in mid-1966 had destroyed his enemies outside the Party. … The Rebels of early 1967 had attacked his enemies within the Party,** torturing and imprisoning **tens of thousands of so-called capitalist-roaders.”
“The Shenyang provincial Party newspaper had even reported cases of cannibalism in the countryside. . . Had Chairman Mao admitted China faced a serious food shortage, I later realized, and asked for emergency assistance from international agencies, millions of lives could have been saved. Yet rather than reveal China’s problems – and his own incompetence as a leader – he tried to cover up the famine, in effect condemning many of his countrymen to a slow agonizing death. Mao was not only inept, he was cruelly indifferent to the sufferings of my people.”
"According to figures later published by the State Statistical Bureau, the population of China declined from 672 million in 1959 to 658 million in 1961, but the actual number of deaths was more than twice as high. Millions of children were stillborn or died and never entered on the census lists. Millions more perished in 1962 and 1963, weakened by years of progressive malnutrition. In 1963 the median age of those dying was only 9.7 years old, down from 17.6 years old before the Great Leap Forward.
To put it another way, more than half of those who died in China that year were children under ten."
Comrade Chi An, “A Mother’s Ordeal”
“As the violence escalated and the scope of the Cultural Revolution expanded to include an ever increasing number of class enemies, a new slogan was coined to emphasize the undesirability of children of capitalist families. . . In short, since the parents were class enemies, the children would naturally be class enemies too.”
“We go by the teachings of our Great Leader Chairman Mao. His words are our criteria. He says a certain type of person is guilty, and you belong to that type, then you are guilty. It’s much simpler than depending on a law book.” he said.
"One young man had arranged a set of four Kangxi winecups in a row and was stepping on them. I was just in time to hear the crunch of delicate porcelain under the soul fo his sow. . . The young ma whose revolutionary work of destruction I had interrupted said angrily, “You shut up! These things belong to the old culture.”. . . Another Red Guard Said, “The purpose of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is to destroy the old culture. You cannot stop us!”
“In 1956 Mao Zedong launched the campaign “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom and Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend.” The Party secretaries in every organization, and even Mao himself, urged people to offer frank and constructive criticism of the Communist Party. Believing the Party sincere. . . tens of thousands of intellectuals and more than a million Chinese in eveyr walk of life poured out their grievances and suggestions. But Winnie and Henry refrained form speaking out. They escaped persecution when Mao swung his policy around in 1957 and initiated the anti-Rightist Campaign. Many of them lost their jobs, becoming nonpersons, and were sent to labor camps; others had their pay reduced or were demoted in rank. The treachery of Mao Zedong in repeatedly inviting frank and constructive criticism and then harshly punsihing those who gave it completely cowed the Chinese intellectuals, so that China’s cultural life came to a virtual standstill.”
Nien Chang, Life and Death in Shanghai
