Who Were the Victims of the Cultural Revolution?
In the epilogue of Anne Thurston’s superb compilation of the harrowing stories of the victims of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, one of her informants, Song Erli, describes the upheaval as “a revolution by the people, a revolution crushed by the combined efforts of the army, Mao, Lin Biao and the Gang of Four” (p. 296). Earlier in the volume, where Song Erli (a brilliant university student whose parents had been branded “rightists”) relates in considerable detail his experiences and his bitter fate as a “revolutionary rebel” during the days of the Cultural Revolution, he states: “The army was the greatest perpetrator of atrocities during the Cultural Revolution. Most of the cruelty happened after 1967” (p. 197). Song Erli’s account, as related to Thurston, reveals two fundamental truths about the Cultural Revolution, both of which have been largely ignored by Western scholars and both of which the leaders of the post-Mao regime in Beijing have taken great pains to expunge fr
In the epilogue of Anne Thurston’s superb compilation of the harrowing stories of the victims of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, one of her informants, Song Erli, describes the upheaval as “a revolution by the people, a revolution crushed by the combined efforts of the army, Mao, Lin Biao and the Gang of Four” (p. 296). Earlier in the volume, where Song Erli (a brilliant university student whose parents had been branded “rightists”) relates in considerable detail his experiences and his bitter fate as a “revolutionary rebel” during the days of the Cultural Revolution, he states: “The army was the greatest perpetrator of atrocities during the Cultural Revolution. Most of the cruelty happened after 1967” (p. 197). Song Erli’s account, as related to Thurston, reveals two fundamental truths about the Cultural Revolution, both of which have been largely ignored by Western scholars and both of which the leaders of the post-Mao regime in Beijing have taken great pains to expunge fr
