1/12/73 The People's Daily praises the "revolution" of open-book exams which enthuse students, unlike the "bourgeois" obsession with memorising.
Cultural Revolution OTD 1976
7,509 posts
50th anniversary live-tweeting China's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
China 1975
Joined February 2016
- 6/4/75 Mao, who has been listening to bleak poetry on tape since Dong Biwu's death, is informed about Chiang Kai-shek. He simply acknowledges it.
- 29/12/72 Zhou Enlai shares a complex analogy from Mao about which countries are bread and which are meat (of varying succulence) in a world sandwich.
- 3/11/74 The People's Daily reports on a Shandong peasant, paralysed for 15 years, walking again following acupuncture (guided by Mao Zedong Thought).
- 1/10/75 Unable to sleep, Mao sits in bed. He murmurs to an attendant that this is his last National Day. "Long Live?" he scoffs, "Utter idealism".
- 11/4/72 Yao Wenyuan accidentally drags the arm of his big jacket over a pastry and sits silently throughout the meeting, eating cream off his sleeve.
- 21/5/75 Deng Xiaoping threatens any cadre who persists in factionalism with a posting to Urumqi or endless transfers until their wife leaves them.
- 23/9/73 The People's Daily reports on Sichuan's 20-year old slaughterhouse prodigy who overcame gender stereotypes by skinning a pig in four minutes.
- 24/7/72 Mao says that the State should deliver free contraceptives to people's homes because many are too embarrassed to go out and buy them.
- 12/11/73 Zhou Enlai jokes that German sentences can run to several pages, then explains that he was exaggerating the length of German sentences.
- 12/9/73 Mao says that Nixon talks too much and that Napoleon should have avoided decisive battles with the Royal Navy to preserve his forces.
- 5/12/74 Mao swims, as usual. When he leaves the pool, he tells an attendant that he tires too quickly now and is too weak to go swimming anymore.
- 24/2/72 Li Xiannian and Ji Pengfei take the Nixons to visit the Great Wall. Nixon says that "you would have to conclude that this is a great wall".
- 19/6/74 Jiang Qing says that "women may have daddies. Do you comrades know what a daddy is?" and explains the distinction between daddy and husband.

