The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

particularly respected party members. Fangpu had broken this taboo.
Had he gone too far?
A few days after the appearance of Fangpu’s poster, some strangers
arrived on campus from Beijing. They were part of “work teams” sent
to schools around China to help supervise and maintain some
discipline over the bourgeoning Cultural Revolution. The work team at
YMS ordered Fangpu to publicly apologize to Secretary Ding. At the
same time, however, they lifted the ban on posters that criticized
teachers. As in schools around China, they also suspended all classes
and exams at YMS. Students were to devote themselves to making
revolution, under their watchful eye.

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Suddenly feeling free of the yoke of the past and all the habits of
obedience drummed into them, the students at YMS began to brazenly
attack those teachers who had demonstrated less than revolutionary
zeal or had been unkind to students.
Jianhua felt compelled to join the campaign, but this was difficult—
he happened to like almost all of his teachers. He did not want to seem,
however, like a revisionist. Besides, he respected the wisdom and
authority of Mao. He decided to make a poster attacking Teacher Wen,
who had criticized him once for not being sufficiently interested in
politics, which had bothered him at the time. He made his criticism of
her as gentle as possible. Others took this up and went further with
their attacks on Teacher Wen, and Jianhua felt bad.
To satisfy the students’ growing anger, some teachers began to
confess to some minor revolutionary sins, but this made the students
feel they were hiding even more. They had to apply more pressure to
get them to reveal the truth, and a student nicknamed “Little Bawang”
(bawang meaning “overseer,” referring to his love of giving orders)
had an idea on how to do this. He had read Mao’s description of how
during the revolution in the 1940s peasants had captured the most
notorious landlords and paraded them through their villages with
enormous dunce caps on their heads and heavy wooden boards—with
inscriptions describing their crimes—hung around their necks. To
avoid such public humiliation, certainly the teachers would come clean
and confess. The students agreed to try this, and their first target for
such treatment was to be Teacher Li, Jianhua’s favorite.
Teacher Li was accused of faking his switch to communism. Stories
began to come out of his telling other teachers about his visits to
brothels in Shanghai. Clearly he had a secret life, and Jianhua now felt
disappointed in Li. China before the communist revolution had been a
cruel place, and if Li was working to bring that back, he could only hate
him. Unwilling to confess to any crimes, Li was the first to be paraded
through school with the dunce cap and board around his neck. Along
the way some students poured a bucket of poster paste over his head.
Jianhua followed the parade from a distance, trying to repress his
uneasiness at the humiliation of his teacher.
Led by Little Bawang, the students imposed the same fate on more
teachers, the dunce caps becoming unbearably tall and the boards
heavier. Imitating their revolutionary brothers and sisters in Beijing,

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the students initiated “struggle meetings” in which they forced certain
teachers into the jet-plane position—a student standing on either side,
pushing teachers to their knees, pulling their hair back with a jerk,
then holding their arms out and back, like the wings of a jet plane. It
was a most painful position, but it seemed to work, as after an hour or
two of this, with students jeering at them, many teachers began to
confess. The students were right in their suspicions—the school had
been teeming with revisionists, right under their noses!
Soon the students’ attention turned to the vice principal, Lin Sheng,
who they discovered was the son of a notorious landlord. He was the
third-highest official at school, which made this bit of news all the
more salacious. Jianhua had been sent to his office once for
misbehavior, and Sheng had been quite lenient with him, which he had
appreciated at the time. The students locked Lin Sheng in a room,
where he was to stay between the struggle meetings, but one morning
Jianhua, serving as the guard on duty, opened the room to discover the
vice principal had hung himself. Once again Jianhua struggled to
repress his discomfort, but he had to admit the suicide made it seem as
if Lin Sheng was indeed guilty of something.
One day, in the midst of all this, Jianhua ran into Fangpu, who was
bursting with excitement. Since his forced public apology over his
poster attacking Ding, he had been laying low. He had spent his time
devouring the writings of Mao and Marx and plotting his next move.
Word had come from Beijing that the work teams were to be
withdrawn from all schools. Students were to form their own
committee, choose a school official to be its head, and run the school
itself through the committee. Fangpu planned on becoming the
student leader of the committee. And he was going to wage open
revolution against Secretary Ding. Jianhua could only admire his
bravery and persistence.
Through Little Bawang, who had forced more and more confessions
from teachers, Fangpu learned that Secretary Ding had had affairs with
at least two female teachers, revealing his audacious hypocrisy. He was
the one continually ranting against Western decadence and was always
admonishing the male and female students at Yizhen to keep their
distance from each other. Bawang and Fangpu ransacked his office and
found that he had been hoarding food coupons and possessed a fancy
radio and bottles of nice wine, all hidden away.

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Now posters attacking Ding filled the walls. Even Jianhua felt
indignant at his behavior. Soon Ding Yi was paraded through school
and then through the town of Yizhen, on his head the most enormous
dunce cap, decorated with drawings of monsters, and a very heavy
drum hung around his neck. As he drummed with one hand while
holding the cap with the other, he had to chant, “I am Ding Yi, ox
demon and snake spirit.” Citizens of Yizhen, who knew Secretary Ding,
gaped at the spectacle. The world had indeed been turned upside
down.
By the middle of the summer, most of the teachers had fled. When it
came time to form the committee to run the school, only a few
remained to serve as chairman of the committee, and with Fangpu as
the student leader, a little-known and rather harmless teacher named
Deng Zeng was named chairman. Now the work team left YMS, and
Deng and the committee were in charge.
And as the students progressed in making revolution, Jianhua
began to feel increasingly excited. He and his friend Zongwei carried
old spears and swords as they patrolled the school looking for spies,
and it was just like in the novels he loved to read. He and the other
students marched in columns into town, waving enormous red flags,
carrying large posters of Chairman Mao and copies of his little red
book, chanting slogans, banging on drums, and crashing cymbals. It
was so dramatic, and it felt like they were indeed participating in
revolution. One day, they marched through Yizhen tearing down store
and street signs that were vestiges of prerevolutionary China. Mao
would be proud of them.
In Beijing, some students had formed groups to support and defend
Mao in his Cultural Revolution; they called themselves Red Guards,
and their members wore bright red armbands. Mao gave his personal
approval to this, and now Red Guard units began to appear in schools
and universities around the country. Only the purest and most fervent
revolutionaries could be admitted to the Red Guards, and competition
was fierce to join their ranks. Because of his father’s illustrious past,
Jianhua became a member of the Red Guards, and now he basked in
the admiring glances of fellow students and local citizens who noticed
the bright red armband that never left him.
There was one wrinkle, however, in these exciting events: On a visit
home to see his family in the nearby town of Lingzhi, Jianhua

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discovered that local students had accused his father of being a
revisionist. He cared more about farming and economics than about
making revolution, said the students. They had gotten him dismissed
from his government position; he had had to suffer through various
struggle meetings in the jet-plane position. The family was in disgrace.
Although he loved and admired his father and worried for him, he
could not help but feel anxious that, if news of this disgrace reached his
school, he might lose his red armband and be ostracized. He would
have to be careful when talking about his family.
When he returned to school several weeks later, he noticed some
radical changes that had already occurred: Fangpu had consolidated
power. He had formed a new group called the East-Is-Red Corps; he
and his team had kicked out Chairman Deng and were now running
the school themselves. They had started their own newspaper, called