Original Article: Sufferings in Past and Good Times at Present

Original Article: Sufferings in the Past and Good Times at Present

1970s. China.

During the Campaign of Criticizing Lin Biao and Confucius, there was an indispensible educational program. Elder people were invited to tell stories to young students about their sufferings in the old society of China before the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949, and to convince the youth of the good living standard the Communist Party brought about.

This is because that Lin Biao used as his motto Confucius’s saying: Restrain yourself to achieve your goals, or literally meaning: Restrain oneself to restore to Rituals of Chou Dynasty. Restore to the past? An easy interpretation for the ordinary people was that Lin wanted to bring the Chinese society from the then socialistic back to the capitalistic.

During one of the events, we had three speakers. Each of them told us their sufferings in the past, such as hunger, toiling labors for little income, illness and poverty. However, things did go astray sometimes.

One of the speakers mentioned that he suffered the most from hunger in 1961, when each person had a ration of 140g of crop food each day. Another one asked the audience: “In the past, when I was working for the landlord, I could enjoy salty boiled soybeans all the time; but I have not been able to have some bean curds for years. Where has the Party taken the beans to?” Each time when something like this happened, the organizer would tell the speaker, “Please have some boiled water, over there, please …”. Apparently the speakers did not realize the embarrassment they created. “I am okay, I can continue without water”. “I am not thirsty, and I am not tired”.