Surviving re-education in China’s Cultural Revolution
Witness History
BBC
4.4 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 19 March 2024
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 1968, Jingyu Li and her parents were among hundreds of thousands of Chinese people sent to labour camps during Mao Zedong’s so-called cultural revolution.
The aim was to re-educate those not thought to be committed to Chairman’s Mao drive to preserve and purify communism in China.
Jingyu’s parents – both college professors - were put to work among the rice and cattle fields, and made to study the works of Chairman Mao. Fearful for their daughter’s safety, they disguised six-year-old Jingyu as a boy.
Over the next six years, the family were sent to four different camps. Not everyone could cope, as Jingyu tells Jane Wilkinson.
(Photo: Reading Mao's little red book in 1968. Credit: Pictures from History/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and trust me you'll get there in a moment but if you're a comedy fan |
| 0:05.2 | I'd really like to tell you a bit about what we do. I'm Julie Mackenzie and I commission comedy |
| 0:10.1 | podcast at the BBC. It's a bit of a dream job really. Comedy is a bit of a dream job really. |
| 0:13.0 | Comedy is a fantastic joyous thing to do because really you're making people laugh, |
| 0:18.0 | making people's days a bit better, helping them process, all manner of things. |
| 0:22.0 | But you know, I also know that comedy is really |
| 0:24.3 | subjective and everyone has different tastes. So we've got a huge range of comedy on offer from |
| 0:29.8 | satire to silly, shocking to soothing, profound to just general pratting about. |
| 0:35.0 | So if you fancy a laugh, find your next comedy at BBC Sounds. Hello, welcome to the Witness History podcast from the BBC World Service with me Jane Wilkinson. |
| 0:52.0 | This is a story about the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao Zedong's 10-year drive to |
| 0:58.7 | purify and preserve communism in China. |
| 1:01.9 | It's also the story of how the lives of one particular family |
| 1:05.8 | were changed forever because of it. Some details are distressing. |
| 1:11.8 | For China, 1966 has been the most dramatic year, the year of greatest political upheaval |
| 1:17.6 | since Mao Zedung came to power 17 years ago. |
| 1:22.1 | All this in the name of Cultural Revolution, which seems to have thrown the lives of 700 |
| 1:26.6 | million people, one quarter of mankind, into confusion. |
| 1:31.0 | Among those 700 million mentioned in that BBC report were Jing Yu Lee's family. |
| 1:36.0 | In the 1960s both her parents taught engineering at a college in Beijing |
| 1:41.0 | then known as P King. One day, Jing Yu's mother visited a |
| 1:45.4 | local village with her students and was shocked by what she found. So she saw |
| 1:50.5 | people fell and then just like never got up. They died because there's such a lack of food. |
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