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c olleagues, and wrote confessions, hoping to get off the hook.  It didn't

work.

The students at Democracy Street Primary School created a new

form of school assembly.  Its star attraction was "the jet plane."  A teacher

was interrogated at great length in private and forced to "admit" his

crimes.  Then he was taken onstage before a student audience and

kicked in the back of the knees until he fell down.  One student grabbed

him by his hair and pulled  back his head.  Others lifted his arms and

yanked them behind him.  Then they held the hapless instructor in this

contorted position for hours.  When it was over, most teachers couldn't

walk.  To make the humiliation a bit more permanent, students shaved

their erring teachers' heads.

Among their teachers the diligent students "discovered" the vilest

of the vile.  Says Gao Yuan, they uncovered "hooligans and bad eggs,

filthy rich peasants and son-of-a-bitch landlords, bloodsucking

capitalists and neobourgeoisie, historical counterrevolutionaries and

active counterrevolutionaries, rightists and ultrarightists, alien class

elements and degenerate elements, reactionaries and opportunists,

counterrevolutionary revisionists, imperialist running dogs, and spies."13

The students armed themselves with wooden swords and hard-

ware.  At night, they imprisoned their teachers in their bedrooms.

Another instructor of the Democracy Street Primary School was driven

past endurance.  This one hung himself.

Now that they had practiced on their teachers, the students were

urged to take their cultural cleansing further and form organized

units--Red Guards--to root out revisionism in the towns.  Like young

monkeys raiding an elder, ten and fifteen year olds rampaged into the

cities looking for officials who had strayed from the strict Maoist line.

They sniffed out "ox ghosts and snake spirits" among the municipal

authorities, subjected magistrates, mayors and local party heads to

interrogations,  beatings and head-shavings, and marched miscreants

through the streets wearing dunce-caps that were sometimes 30 feet

high.  Needless to say, the officials under attack had provided the

21

21

c olleagues, and wrote confessions, hoping to get off the hook.  It didn't

work.

The students at Democracy Street Primary School created a new

form of school assembly.  Its star attraction was "the jet plane."  A teacher

was interrogated at great length in private and forced to "admit" his

crimes.  Then he was taken onstage before a student audience and

kicked in the back of the knees until he fell down.  One student grabbed

him by his hair and pulled  back his head.  Others lifted his arms and

yanked them behind him.  Then they held the hapless instructor in this

contorted position for hours.  When it was over, most teachers couldn't

walk.  To make the humiliation a bit more permanent, students shaved

their erring teachers' heads.

Among their teachers the diligent students "discovered" the vilest

of the vile.  Says Gao Yuan, they uncovered "hooligans and bad eggs,

filthy rich peasants and son-of-a-bitch landlords, bloodsucking

capitalists and neobourgeoisie, historical counterrevolutionaries and

active counterrevolutionaries, rightists and ultrarightists, alien class

elements and degenerate elements, reactionaries and opportunists,

counterrevolutionary revisionists, imperialist running dogs, and spies."13

The students armed themselves with wooden swords and hard-

ware.  At night, they imprisoned their teachers in their bedrooms.

Another instructor of the Democracy Street Primary School was driven

past endurance.  This one hung himself.

Now that they had practiced on their teachers, the students were

urged to take their cultural cleansing further and form organized

units--Red Guards--to root out revisionism in the towns.  Like young

monkeys raiding an elder, ten and fifteen year olds rampaged into the

cities looking for officials who had strayed from the strict Maoist line.

They sniffed out "ox ghosts and snake spirits" among the municipal

authorities, subjected magistrates, mayors and local party heads to

interrogations,  beatings and head-shavings, and marched miscreants

through the streets wearing dunce-caps that were sometimes 30 feet

high.  Needless to say, the officials under attack had provided the