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Morning Sun | Interviews
Interviews in Morning Sun include:
Intergenerational and family stories
Wang Guangmei and Liu Ting, the
widow of China's State President, Liu Shaoqi, the main target of the
Cultural Revolution, and his daughter. This is the first time Wang Guangmei,
a major Communist Party figure at the center of power in China who was
famously denounced during the Cultural Revolution and jailed for many
years, is interviewed in-depth about the Great Leap Forward and her
experiences in the Cultural Revolution.
Yu Luowen discusses his older brother, Yu Luoke, an
extraordinarily prescient critic of the Cultural Revolution and political
manipulation in China, who was executed in 1970 for his ideas. Refused
entry to university because his parents had been capitalists, Yu Luoke
became a worker. His essays on equality and the right to revolution
made him famous in 1967, but they were later denounced by the authorities.
More incriminating were a series of scathing comments about the unfolding
political drama and its follies that Yu Luoke wrote in his personal
diary in mid-1966. (Only short excerpts of his diary have been published
to this day, for it was confiscated by the authorities and has never
been returned to his family.)
Li Rui and his daughter Li Nanyang. Li Rui, the Communist
Party veteran who drew international attention for his recent call for
political reform at the 16th Party Congress, was at one time Mao’s
secretary. As an idealistic youth, he traveled to the Communist base
at Yan'an in the late 1930s, and he first suffered revolutionary persecution
there during the early 1940s. As one of Mao's secretaries, he briefly
had access to the inner circle of China’s ruling elite in the
1950s, but his criticisms of the Great Leap Forward led to his denunciation
and exile. His daughter, Li Nanyang, was discriminated against in school
because of her father’s downfall. A sincere believer in the ideals
of the revolution, Li Nanyang rejected her father as an enemy of the
Party; it was many years before the two could reconcile.
A conversation with a founding member of
the Red Guard movement
Luo Xiaohai was one of the most
prominent of a small group of high-school students who founded the Red
Guards in 1966. He was the author of major essays that encouraged student
rebellion and provided some of the most vituperative language for the
movement. His writings received Mao's personal support. This is the
first time he has spoken at length about his involvement in the Cultural
Revolution, a complex tale of revolutionary idealism and disillusionment.
Inspired by radical Mao Thought to rebel against aspects of the socialist
state, Luo Xiaohai was also a vocal critic of the violence that erupted
in the Red Guard movement. His inner experience of revolution and its
betrayal led him to become one of the first among his generation of
high-school students to question not only the Cultural Revolution, but
the socialist system itself.
One of the most controversial Red Guards
Song Binbin, the young female
student who first pinned a Red Guard armband on Mao Zedong in 1966,
signaling the Chairman's support for the Red Guards. In the interview
granted to the makers of Morning Sun, Song recounts for the
first time how the Communist media fabricated a name for her in order
to whip up popular frenzy for the Cultural Revolution, and how the resulting
rumors about her have affected her life ever since.
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