    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

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