The summer of 1966 marked the beginning of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in China. Angry masses of youth foaming at the mouth from the radical brainwashing of Mao’s Little Red Book brought scores of teachers to the center of Peking University, blackened their faces, and forced them to wear dunces’ caps. Similar scenes reverberated across China as Mao escalated his rhetoric to violence. Those with counterrevolutionary ideas were purged, art that could be perceived to undermine Mao was destroyed, and those who performed or created it were sent to labor camps or killed. Academics either conformed to the tenets of Maoism or suffered persecution, sexual molestation, or death.
It all began, in part, because of a poster.
The Chinese understand that unfettered power relies on the complete control of the ideological and educational roots of the people. In 1965, Mao attempted to ban an opera he viewed as critical of him. Much to his frustration, he was stymied by Peng Zhen, the head of overseeing culture and the Five Man Group (the informal group tasked with exploring the possibility of cultural revolution).
At the May 1966 Politburo meeting, Peng was deposed and dismissed, and the Five Man Group was disbanded, freeing Mao to move against his remaining enemies in the Communist Party and initiate his own version of a cultural revolution.
On May 25, 1966, Nie Yuanzi, a party activist and philosophy administrator at Peking University, and six other party functionaries authored and put up a “big-character poster” (called a dazibao) on campus denouncing the university’s administration as furthering the aims of the bourgeoisie.
Mao seized on the message and ordered it to be read over the national broadcast and reprinted in the People’s Daily. In the coming weeks and months, Mao sought to purge dissent and purify the ideological foundation of China into his cult of personality. Leveraging Nie’s message into a broader call to rebellion, Mao used his Red Guard, a group of militant radicals mostly composed of students, to dismantle higher education and reshape art and literature to support his aims of control.
The 45-year-old Nie became a leading figure among the Red Guard, despite her being two decades older than most fanatics in the movement.
Yet, her 15 minutes were soon spent. “That poster brought me tremendous fame and prominence,” she told the Chinese website of the New York Times in 2016, “yet it also brought endless pain and torment for the rest of my life.” Nie soon became disillusioned with the cause and tried to quit her position in the Red Guards in August 1967. She was accused of disloyalty by Jiang Qing, Mao’s radical conspirator wife.
Nie was later detained and jailed, forced to work in labor camps until the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976. Under Deng Xiaoping, Nie was jailed again in 1983 as a counterrevolutionary and sentenced to 17 years in prison for the suffering she wrought on others during her time in the Red Guard. She was later released on medical parole.
While in her memoirs — published in Hong Kong in 2005 and reprinted again in 2017 — she acknowledges the role she played, she nevertheless maintained throughout her life that she was a pawn caught in the hands of a masterful propagandist. Others, however, tell a different story. Historian Andrew Walder has offered a persuasive case that Nie, a careerist apparatchik married to a party official 23 years her senior, was an active participant in the scheme to overthrow the university leadership. And in his best-selling memoir about his imprisonment at Peking University during the revolution, Ji Xianlin provided an eyewitness account of Nie’s cruelty.
Until her death on Aug. 28 at age 98, Nie was socially ostracized both for her part in sparking Mao’s purge and for recanting against a post-Mao Chinese state that still seeks to instill totalitarian-like control over its people. She lived humbly, relying on the charity of friends and family.
Yet Nie remained feisty, resolute to make China, typically mum on the period in their history, address and heal from the harsh and horrific acts of the Cultural Revolution.
Whether history perceives her as a useful fool or complicit revolutionary, the message she gave during a 2006 New York Times profile is an important one: “Democracy should be really promoted so that each person can express their opinions about state affairs and the work of others. Even if an opinion is not correct, it must be allowed, and allowed to be contradicted. Even today, posters should be allowed.”
It all began with a poster.
Tyler Grant is a lawyer in New York, a published poet, and a Washington Examiner contributor.
