In 1966, a group of high school students from the prestigious high school affiliated with Qinghua University, all children of elite cadres, visited Chairman Mao Tse-tung, their parents' colleague and boss, and complained to Mao about the college entrance examinations. As the parents of many of those kids became senior Communist cadres because of their valor in the battlefield, they often had little literacy and could not help their children in their academic work, therefore the latter often found it hard to compete academically with students whose parents were educated professionals. After hearing their complaint, Mao wrote those high school students, in his famous calligraphic handwriting: "To rebel is justified." This at once became the justification to attack one's teachers and disregard authority. Overnight, these students became the first Red Guards--to defend Chairman Mao against the capitalist-roaders within the Communist Party who tried to use school teachers to infiltrate capitalism into China. These and other high school students started to sew red cloth armbands with the words Red Guards on them. They were followed by industrial workers, office workers, teachers and the army.

On May 16, 1966, Chairman Mao wrote a famous treatise "Bombard the [capitalist] headquarters." This usually was interpreted as the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. It started with revolutionary committees replacing municipal and eventually provincial governments, governments that supposedly worked for the senior Communist clique of capitalist roaders, headed by Liu Shaoqi, chairman of the republic, and Deng Xiaoping, his assistant. It soon became a grassroots movement that enveloped the whole country, not even sparing the remote communes. The Chinese, by now seasoned participants in mass political movements, nonetheless were often taken aback by the scale of the movement, which was the most thorough in investigating the "class enemies of the people" and "capitalist-roaders" than any of the previous political movements. The ferociousness of the movement was foremost made possible by the participation of the Red Guards, absent from previous revolutions. Often young, ambitious, naive, and excited, they seemed to find an outlet, though often a sadistic one, for their pent up frustrations over their parental, school, and other forms of authorities. They ransacked people's homes, interrogated suspects, often kicking and beating them in the interrogation.

The Cultural Revolution, like earlier political movements, also became an opportunity for many who could otherwise not advance. Since the Communist Party readily accepted personal accusations based often on heresay, a party secretary, a factory CEO, and other high ranking Communist leaders could easily be brought down, while those who accused them would often take their position. On the other hand, another group who often invented rumors and exercised personal attacks were those related to the accused. They were sometimes overzealous in attacking their relatives or others to prove their "revolutionary nature" and to, in response to the Party's call, 'draw a clear line" between them and the capitalist-roader relatives. This was the background against which the story of Mayor Yin unraveled.

The author:

Chen Jo-hsi is a Chinese novelist who was born in Taiwan and received graduate education in the United States. From 1967-1973, she and her husband, fired by patriotism, decided to go to settle down in Communist China, and plunged right into the Cultural Revolution. All the stories in this collection are reflections of their stay in China. After 1973, she and her husband as well as two children went to settle down eventually in Canada.

Through the stories, Chen always implied aTaiwan born, American educated status in her protagonists, although they could be both men and women.

Main plot:

Mayor Yin was a former Nationalist (Kuomingtang) officer who defected to the Communists during the civil war (1945-49), after which he was made mayor of a town in Hsingan county in Shensi Province. During the Three Year Famine(1959-62) he allowed a more flexible policy to let peasants keep some produce in order to prevent starvation, a policy that came under criticism during the Cultural Revolution because it originated from the "capitalist roader" country chairman Liu Shaoqi. (12-13) His life might have been spared had not the overzealous Beijing Red Guards wanted to execute him for shooting a soldier who wanted to defect.

Traditional virtues:

Mayor Yin was depicted with traditional Communist virtues to contrast with the Cultural Revolution's fixation with one's historical past--something that one could not change, but something that made one a suspect element within Communist China. Mayor Yin did not seek personal gain, but sought the welfare of the soldiers when he turned to the Communists. (p.8) His selflessness led him to seek his mother classified as a rich peasant (which would lead to discrimination and a series of other adverse consequences later on).(8-9, 22)

Honesty of the country/mountain people:

Lao Yin, straightforward, tell the truth matter of factly.(10) Mayor Yin, meanwhile, was baffled by the Cultural Revolution and the criticism of himself. In Communist China, people always tried to discern the real meaning of each political movement the way we try to master new technology here: the internet, Oncourse, different software applications, for instance. The gap between political sensitivity in the city and in the remote countryside was bridged here with the arrival of the Red Guards from the city. (18-21, 26)

The role of the Red Guards from the cities

Hsiao Wu in this story played an instrumental role in the execution of Mayor Yin. His hyper activism was related to his own kinship with the mayor. In the Cultural Revolution, a slogan went "the dragon begets dragon, the phoenix begets phoenix, and the son of the rat digs a hole in the ground," meaning relatives had a decisive influence on one, therefore if a relative was a "counter-revolutionary," one would also come under suspicion. Although Hsiao Wu seemed to have protected himself then, his later fall out of favor was also typical of the fickleness of fate among many in the Cultural Revolution. The same opportunism that pushed them to frame others was often used by others to frame them.