An incredibly moving story out of the Guardian this morning. More than 40 years ago, during the height of the Cultural Revolution, Zhang Hongbing, only 16, denounced his mother for criticizing Mao Zedong. His mom, Fang Zhongmou, was tortured and summarily executed. She was only 44.

Tania Branigan reports:

In 1968, Fang fell under suspicion due to her father. Two years of investigation, detention and uncertainty tormented her: “Why don’t they just make a decision on me?” she asked.

“Her father’s death, her husband’s persecution, her daughter’s death – everything that happened made her suspicious of the Cultural Revolution … She was sick of [it],” said Zhang.

Eventually conditions improved and she was allowed to sleep at home. Then, one evening, her zealous son accused her of tacitly criticising Mao. The family row spiralled rapidly: Fang called for the return of purged leaders and attacked Mao for his personality cult. “I warned her: ‘If you go against our dear Chairman Mao I will smash your dog head,’” Zhang said, at times reading from his father’s testimony. “I felt this wasn’t my mother. This wasn’t a person. She suddenly became a monster … She had become a class enemy and opened her bloody mouth.”

Fang’s brother begged her to take her words back, warning she would be killed. “I’m not scared,” Fang replied. She tore down and burned Mao’s picture.

When her husband and son ran to denounce her, “I understood it meant death,” Zhang said. In fact, he added, he called for her to be shot as a counter-revolutionary. He last saw her as she knelt on stage in the hours before her death.

It’s a harrowing tale, and a valuable lesson — one that Zhang hopes people of his generation will confront, lest future generations are doomed to repeat their mistakes.

“My mother, father and I were all devoured by the Cultural Revolution,” said Zhang, 60, who is now a lawyer. “[It] was a catastrophe suffered by the Chinese nation. We must remember this painful historical lesson and never let it happen again.”

Yes, never again. We can start with a national catharsis, if the government ever feels the country is strong enough to withstand such an honest historical appraisal without tearing apart at the seams. We’ll wait.

China’s Cultural Revolution: son’s guilt over the mother he sent to her death (The Guardian)

We’re all suckers for a good story. In recent years, we’ve seen the authors of too-good-to-be-true memoirs exposed (James Frey, Greg Mortensen, etc.), and now we’re seeing this with a notable businesswoman from China.

In Bend, Not Break, Ping Fu details her eventful life. During the Cultural Revolution, she was separated from her parents at age 8, then tortured and raped and assigned to work. In college, she wrote her thesis on female infanticide caused by the One Child Policy, which subsequently led to her deportation (the word she uses in the book) at the age of 25. (She wound up at the University of New Mexico.) Since, she’s become a successful entrepreneur as CEO of Geomagic, a pioneer in 3D printing. She’s even a member of President Obama’s National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Her incredible journey has led major publications like Inc., Daily Beast and Forbes to write about her.

But how incredible is her story, really?

Incredible in the truest since, as in not believable. Among those who have called her out include Fang Zhouzi, a notable fraud buster who’s exposed personalities such as Tang Jun (former president of MSN China) for credential fraud and accused Han Han (blogger, author, race-car driver) for plagiarism. SCMP has an excellent summary of Fang’s arguments. And several other publications — such as Forbes and Daily Beast – have been forced to publish follow-ups to their own initial, skepticism-free stories.

The accusations have led Ping to write a commentary in the Huffington Post that makes her seem even more of a liar. For one of her falsified accounts, she cites “emotional memory,” claiming:

When I was young, these are the stories being told to us and in my nightmares they come back again and again. That time was so traumatic. I was taken away from my parents.

And here’s what she told the Guardian:

But she now accepts that her imagination may have played tricks. “Somehow in my mind I always thought I saw it, but now I’m not sure my memory served me right. I probably saw it in a movie or something, and I acknowledge that’s a problem.”

Seems like she’s claiming that some of her stories are manifestations of her imagination. Shouldn’t that make these stories fiction? We get that witnessing the Cultural Revolution was extremely traumatic, but exaggerating helps no one. In Ping’s case, she purposefully deceived for the sake of strengthening herself — like a carpetbagger, profitting off collective tragedy.

Unfortunately, we are all too often deceived. We want to believe in success against all odds. These stories inspire us, and tragedy sells. For authors, it’s easy to sensationalize when they know that they’re just giving people what they want. Unfortunately for Ping Fu, as she’s learning, it seems the people don’t want the story she’s peddling.

In Foreign Policy’s introduction to its latest slideshow of rare photos from Tibet during the Cultural Revolution, the line that jumps out to me is the last one: “This installment of FP’s Once Upon a Time series shows the Land of Snows from a long-forgotten period, when Tibet’s enemy wasn’t China, but itself.”

The line, I’m sure, was born out of evidence suggesting Tibetans were not mere victims to the Chinese destruction of their country. This is true in one sense: Tibetans participated in the Cultural Revolution. They participated, and continue to participate, in the very institutional bases of the revolution: the school systems, the police force, the government offices, and so forth. Melvyn Goldstein, in On the Cultural Revolution in Tibet (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009; chapter one is available here), quotes a Tibetan who says:

[I]n August 1966 the Red Guards were everywhere in the whole country, and Lhasa didn’t want to be left behind. Therefore we formed our own Red Guard organizations…. Most of the students in my school were Tibetans. It was a concern that the Tibetan students might get into trouble, for they didn’t know the right [ideological] direction. Therefore, the Party Branch at the Lhasa Middle School decided to select a few young teachers to join the Red Guards, working as leaders. I remember I used to lead students to “destroy the four olds.”

But rather than making the distinction between an enemy within and one without, I think it’s more useful to consider the period from a ground-level, Tibetan perspective. Writer Tsering Woeser (the FP photos are from her father) offers a glimpse.

The Chinese title of her book is Killing and Plunder (杀劫). The pronunciation of this title, sha jie, is a homophone with the Tibetan word for revolution (གསར་བརྗེ་), pronounced sar jé. She adds that the Tibetan word for culture (རིག་གནས་), pronounced rik né, is somewhat homophonous with the Chinese word for humanity (人类), pronounced ren lei. (See this Danwei article.) So what was the Great Cultural Revolution in Tibet? It was the Great Killing and Plundering of Humanity. It was a tragedy – an orgy of violence and pain – just as it was in the rest of China, but particularly painful due to Tibet’s exceptionally strong connection with its culture and history.

The most moving and powerful images in Foreign Policy’s slideshow depict the mistreatment of monks and nuns, who were and are the most revered members of Tibetan Buddhist society. The tragedy of the Cultural Revolution in Tibet was not just in the bouleversement of long-held values and destruction of relics, but the trauma of religious conversion: when the Buddha and the Dharma were replaced by a peculiar new god and scripture in Mao and his Little Red Book.

William is a Tibetologist on course to receive his doctorate in Tibetan and Chinese religions at the University of Virginia. He can be reached at wam6n@virginia.edu.

When Tibet Loved China (Foreign Policy; photos by Tsering Dorjee, published in his daughter Tsering Woeser’s book Forbidden Memory: Tibet During the Cultural Revolution)

We are, in spite of everything (slower Internet, mostly), looking forward to the upcoming National Congress that starts next Thursday, because it means we’ll get to see silliness such as pictures of photojournalists taking pictures (WHO WATCHES THE WATCHERS’ WATCHERS???), and there’s always the chance that someone will literally die out of boredom.

One thing we are most definitely not looking forward to, however, is this, via Shanghai Daily:

Workers and retirees have been mobilized to help maintain order and security before and during the meeting.

Wearing a red armband with characters “security patrol,” a photographer surnamed Chen is looking for business near a giant flower basket installed at the center of Tian’anmen Square, a must-see spot for many tourists.

Uhhhhhhhhh. You know, China had people running around with red armbands once. A lot of people still alive, living here, remember that time, actually. It was not swell.

“I have been taking shots for tourists for five years, and I am willing to be a security volunteer,” Chen said. “With this armband, I am authorized to stop bad behavior among tourists.”

Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Not comforting.

Yang Liping, 56, has been volunteering for a year, following retirement. Other than a red armband, Yang also wears a red vest and a red hat. On the back of the vest are characters, indicating that she is from the Beijing Association of Security Volunteers.

Let me get this straight: you’re using “security volunteers” culled from a population that is OLD ENOUGH to actually have LIVED THROUGH the Cultural Revolution, and not only that, but might have ACTUALLY BEEN RED GUARDS?

Look, this… how do I put this… Germans aren’t seeking out blond-haired, blue-eyed 90-year-olds and having them adorn black boots, black uniforms and Sam Browne belts, you get my drift?

“It’s an honor to be a volunteer, as I can do something that is helpful for society, such as patrolling around the subway exits and offering aid to those in need,” she added.

“Oh, and not murdering anyone,” she said. Then, with a wink, she added, “Hopefully.”

(H/T Alicia)

Sunday marked the 36th anniversary of Mao Zedong’s death, and if there’s one thing we know the old Chairman would never, ever approve of, it’s the senseless beating of people who voice opinions contrary to his own.

At Zijingshan People’s Square in Zhengzhou, Henan province, the man you see getting slapped around apparently took an anti-Mao stance, which is not something you normally want to do around elders who continue to wear badges of Communist dogma in their hearts — holdovers from the Cultural Revolution — but definitely not something to do amid a celebration of Mao’s life. Groupthink is alive and well. Youku video for those in China after the jump.

The NY Times’s photography blog, Lens, has just published 20 stunning pictures from the Cultural Revolution, a “panoramic view” that includes Little Red Books, an execution, and an elongated dunce cap. The images were taken by Harbin photojournalist Li Zhensheng, “perhaps the most complete and nuanced pictorial account of the decade of turmoil ignited by Mao Zedong,” says NYT.

That is where he did his life’s work documenting the Cultural Revolution, taking the “positive” propaganda images of masses whipped up in revolutionary fervor for the newspaper, and also the “negative,” more nuanced, questioning pictures. He snipped those frames off his film and hid them under the parquet floorboards of his house until the revolution ended. He did not show these pictures in China until the late 1980s. Even today, given the sensitivities that linger over the Cultural Revolution in China, his work is more often seen overseas rather than at home.

Li, 72, has a book of works called Red-Color News Soldier, and he’ll be part of a major photo exhibition at London’s Barbican Art Gallery starting on September 13. We’ve included a few more pictures after the jump, but do check out the complete collection on Lens. There’s also an interview with Li that adds context to the images and the era.

After Mao’s death

(H/T The Peking Duck)