Julie Gouss's Profile

At present, our objective is to struggle against and crush those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road, to criticize and repudiate the reactionary bourgeois academic "authorities" and the ideology of the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting classes and to transform education, literature and art, and all other parts of the superstructure that do not correspond to the socialist economic base, so as to facilitate the consolidation and development of the socialist system.

Elsewhere, the 10 years of the Cultural Revolution also brought the education system to a virtual halt. The university entrance exams were cancelled during this period, not to be restored by Deng Xiaoping until 1979. Many intellectuals were sent to rural labour camps, and many of those who survived left China shortly after the revolution ended. Many survivors and observers suggest that almost anyone with skills over that of the average person was made the target of political "struggle" in some way. According to most Western observers as well as followers of Deng Xiaoping, this led to almost an entire generation of inadequately educated individuals. However, this varies depending on the region, and the measurement of literacy did not resurface until the 1980s.^[21] Some counties in the Zhanjiang district, for example, had illiteracy rates as high as 41% some 20 years after the revolution. The leaders denied any illiteracy problems from the start. This effect was amplified by the elimination of qualified teachers—many of the districts were forced to rely upon chosen students to re-educate the next generation.^[21]

In the end, Luo and the narrator discover the true potency of imaginative literature and why it is hated and feared by those who wish to control others, for the Little Seamstress, transformed by her contact with Balzac, comes to understand her own sexual power and leaves the Phoenix of the Sky for the city. ''Had we ourselves,'' the narrator asks, ''failed to grasp the essence of the novels we had read to her?''

Still, Dai delivers an important message: any system that fears knowledge and education, any system that closes the mind to moral and intellectual truth, is evil and will prove in the end to be impotent. This is brought beautifully home to us when the narrator meets a doctor who has also read Balzac. Their brief conversation makes the narrator weep, and it takes him a moment to understand why: ''It was hearing the name of Fu Lei, Balzac's translator -- someone I had never even met. It is hard to imagine a more moving tribute to the gift bestowed by an intellectual on mankind.''

Mao's Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966 and continued until the dictator's death a decade later. It was intended to stamp out the educated class and directed specifically against the ''Four Olds'': old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits. The urban bourgeoisie were deemed enemies of the people, and so-called young intellectuals -- that is, youths who had attended secondary school -- were sent to the country to be ''re-educated'' by the supposedly virtuous peasantry. Between 1968 and 1975, some 12 million youths were thus ''rusticated.''

Their re-education is entrusted to a group of illiterate former opium farmers, whose wisdom is guaranteed by their peasant status. No books (except for scientific works and those by Mao and his cronies) are allowed in their village, nor any ideas that don't emanate from the ruling Communists, nor any Western music.