![]() ![]() The handcuffs became a part of me for the next one hundred days and nights. Afterwards, they untied me and handcuffed me instead. This struggle session lasted for two hours. It was knotted in such a way that a slight movement of my hands would cause intense pain. It was connected to a loop around my shoulder and underneath my armpits. The officer screamed again: "Are you guilty?" I replied firmly again, "No." Two people then used a rope to tie my hands back tightly. Immediately two people jumped on me and cut off half of my hair. "I did not commit any crimes," I asserted firmly. Their real motive was once again to force me to admit all my alleged crimes. It then dawned on me that this session was in fact prearranged. In the session the officer suddenly asked me whether I had committed my alleged original crime leading to my 8-year sentence. Without any investigation, the officer assembled the entire camp to start a struggle session against me. Immediately, an inmate accused me of giving something out of it to another prisoner. Two years after I had been in this new camp, I received a parcel from my family. the Cultural Revolution began and I was transferred to another labor camp. Chinese Communists resisted this at first, because struggle sessions conflicted with the Chinese concept of saving face, but struggle sessions became commonplace at Communist Party meetings during the 1930s due to public popularity. The term refers to class struggle ostensibly, the session is held to benefit the target, by eliminating all traces of counterrevolutionary, reactionary thinking. Struggle sessions developed from similar ideas of criticism and self-criticism in the Soviet Union from the 1920s. Two Chinese citizens are branded capitalist roaders and subjected to public torture and humiliation by citizens. During the 1950s when the CCP began the Land Reform movement, poorer peasants seized the land from their landlords, who were given the title of exploiting class (剥削階级), and an estimated 2 million landlords were swiftly executed after being subjected to a struggle session. In general, the victim of a struggle session was forced to admit to various crimes before a crowd of people who would verbally and physically abuse the victim until he or she confessed.ĭuring Mao's rule, the Chinese people were forced to attend many different types of struggle sessions, sometimes consisting of 100,000 people. Therefore the extreme punishment.A struggle session was a form of public humiliation used by the Communist Party of China to enforce a reign of terror in the Mao Zedong era to shape public opinion and to humiliate, persecute, and/or execute political rivals, so-called class enemies. Your unacceptable thoughts may have contaminated other generations who were too close to you. Your family would be damned by the politically correct for the next three succeeding generations. ![]() But usually your punishment was to be sent to the gulags. The communist party god may forgive you, and let you go. Make sure you swear that you will never ever entertain a thought that is counter to the prevailing thoughts. Make sure you curse yourself and beg and please for forgiveness from the “proletariat” and the infallible communist party. No matter the charge was laid and you were automatically guilty. Or maybe you just ticked off the wrong person. Or maybe you didn’t make your quota on your work team. They came up with these charges because someone heard you complain that the government made mistakes. You would be subjected to “criticism/self criticism” time: they would criticize you and you were expected to agree with the mob and criticize yourself. They would scream at you that you were a “running dog of capitalism” or that you were an “imperialist” or that you were “rightist”. Of course your relatives and neighbors would join in, because they would not want to fall into disfavor with the politically correct mob. There you and others equally accused of imaginary crimes were screamed at (and beaten) by the Red Guard. If the Red Guard (the youthful fans of Chairman Mao who believed in his infallibility) thought that you were “counterrevolutionary” or that you were not radical enough, they would surround your house and drag you out into the town square. During the Cultural Revolution of Communist China (1966-1976), a favorite tactic of Mao’s fanatical followers was the “struggle session”. ![]()
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