“I just wanted to write down what I experienced in those 10 years of cultural revolution. Everything I had been taught told me that Chairman Mao was closer to us than our mums and dads. It was the summer of 1966 and Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution – a catastrophic political convulsion that would catapult China into a decade of heartbreak, humiliation and deadly violence – was under way. Red Guards marauded across the city, ransacking and looting homes and staging public “struggle sessions” in which victims were savagely beaten, tortured and sometimes killed. But its main goal was to educate those who had not lived through the horrors of the Cultural Revolution and had not been allowed to learn about them at school, where the topic remains largely taboo.

Source: The Guardian May 07, 2016 17:34 UTC