Struggle session
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An application of Marxist dialectic, the struggle session became notorious during the Chinese Cultural Revolution as a means of gaining political power and humiliating -- sometimes murdering -- one's personal enemies. Although these took place in great numbers all over China, all with the noble goal of uprooting the old order and replacing it with a new, purified socialism; in nearly every case the object achieved was petty and base.
The term refers to class struggle; obstensibly, the session is held to benefit the target, by eliminating all traces of counterrevolutionary, reactionary thinking.
Many who survived the Cultural Revolution tell their tales today; such stories bear a depressingly proletarian resemblance to one another.
... the Cultural Revolution began and I was transferred to another labor camp.... Two years after I had been in this new camp, I received a parcel from my family. Immediately, an inmate accused me of giving something out of it to another prisoner. I was dragged to the office. Without any investigation, the officer assembled the entire camp to start a "struggle session" against me. In the session the officer suddenly asked me whether I had committed my alleged original crime leading to my 8-year sentence. I was stunned. It then dawned on me that this session was in fact prearranged. The parcel was only a pretense. Their real motive was once again to force me to admit all my alleged crimes. "I did not commit any crimes," I asserted firmly. Immediately two people jumped on me and cut off half of my hair. The officer screamed again: "Are you guilty?" I replied firmly again, "No." Two people then used a rope to tie my hands back tightly. It was connected to a loop around my shoulder and underneath my armpits. It was knotted in such a way that a slight movement of my hands would cause intense pain. This struggle session lasted for two hours. Afterwards, they untied me and handcuffed me instead. The handcuffs became a part of me for the next one hundred days and nights.... [1]
A few people were picked out to confess their crimes against the people, and the people supposed to punish the offenders. The Chinese would taunt the people being "struggled." They'd make them denounce the Dalai Lama. They said things like, "If the Americans are so strong, where are they? Call them, see if they'll come and help you." Or they'd tell monks to call the deities they believed in to come and help them. Sometimes people were "struggled to death." My mother was also killed during a struggle session.... [2]
You Xiaoli was standing, precariously balanced, on a stool. Her body was bent over from the waist into a right angle, and her arms, elbows stiff and straight, were behind her back, one hand grasping the other at the wrist. It was the position known as "doing the airplane." Around her neck was a heavy chain, and attached to the chain was a blackboard, a real blackboard, one that had been removed from a classroom at the university where You Xiaoli, for more than ten years, had served as a full professor. On both sides of the blackboard were chalked her name and the myriad crimes she was alleged to have committed....
The stool on which You Xiaoli stood was balanced in turn on an ordinary wooden chair, and underneath the chair was a heavy wooden desk, the kind professors in China stand behind while lecturing. Both chair and desk had also come from a university classroom.
The scene was taking place at the university, too, in a sports field at one of China's most prestigious institutions of higher learning. In the audience were You Xiaoli's students and colleagues and former friends. Workers from local factories and peasants from nearby communes had been bused in for the spectacle. From the audience came repeated, rhythmic chants.... "Down with You Xiaoli! Down with You Xiaoli!"
"I had many feelings at that struggle session," recalls You Xiaoli. "I thought there were some bad people in the audience. But I also thought there were many ignorant people, people who did not understand what was happening, so I pitied that kind of person. They brought workers and peasants into the meetings, and they could not understand what was happening. But I was also angry."
After doing the jet airplane for several hours, listening to the endless taunts and jeers and the repeated chants calling for her downfall, the chair on which You Xiaoli had been balancing was suddenly kicked from under her and she tumbled from the stool, hitting the table, and onto the ground. Blood flowed from her nose and from her mouth and from her neck where the chain had dug into the flesh. As the fascinated, gawking audience looked on, You Xiaoli lost consciousness and was still.
"They left her there to die," says one of her colleagues.... [3]
Lately, the term "struggle session" has come to be applied to any scene where victims are publicly badgered to confess imaginary crimes under the pretext of self-criticism and rehabilitation.
