You are sitting at the dining table, in your special red chair, with an indispensable cup of tea in hand. You're daughter is sitting across from you, panicking about her next exam and gulping down a quick glass of orange juice before she dashes off to school.
Sound like a normal morning?.
Wait for the harsh knock at the door, signalling the arrival of brutal communist revolutionaries, guards of a harsh dictator who have come to destroy you're home, you're family and everything that you believe in, before carting you off to a repulsive detention centre where you will be tortured for six and a half years.
Still sound like a normal morning?.
For Nien Cheng, author of life and death in Shanghai, a book that offers a rare insight into the Chinese Cultural Revolution, this IS a normal morning. As it was and would be for hundreds of thousands of others when, in 1966, brutal dictator, Mao Tze-Tung threw the red flag' of communism over China.
No communist state can survive without using violence against its opponents or evolve in any significant way without losing its very principles and ideals. These types of states are centred on the premise that they have the only answers to everything and these answers are correct for ever. It is unfortunate for China and the newer generation of Chinese that the communist regime has not evolved and the ignorance of party members still results in mass murder, wrongful imprisonment and the oppression of the majority of the population.
I could never begin to understand the extent of the oppression people live with all over the world. I can only imagine being unable to express my opinions, my beliefs and being tortured or killed if I did. This happened to millions.
During the past century, violent revolutions have exposed Lenin, Hitler and Stalin. It is hard to say who was worse. Each rode revolutionary movements to power and then committed mass genocide in the name of racist or Marxist ideology.
