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I was in Beijing and my high school actually was the birthplace of the Right Guard movement. | |
That's a Qinhua Fujian, this high school affiliated with the Qinhua University. | |
And from the very beginning of the Right Guard movement, a person like me was a target of the movement. | |
So the reason I was exploring new classes in a socialist system is related to that background. | |
And then I went to the countryside. | |
So concretely, I went to Heilongjiang province, which is actually my farm was very close to Suh Wen Yunin, so just twenty miles from Suh Wen Yunin. | |
So I spent ten years there in the farm. | |
Since I thought as a teenager, I thought I understood urban situations in a socialist economy, but I didn't understand rural and 80% of Chinese were in rural areas. | |
So then I voluntarily went to the farm at the end of 1967. | |
And then because of my research on the classes in the socialist system, I became a counter-revolutionary and I was under arrest. | |
After more than a year of imprisonment, the punishment was changed That experience helped me a lot in understanding the nature of totalitarianism. | |
Totalitarianism means that they does not allow for existence of any organization. | |
So internally and also externally. | |
And that is why under this kind of regime, it's impossible. | |
possible to transform peacefully into democracy because democracy has to have a civil society. | |
Civil society means independent organizations, means citizens have to organize themselves. | |
Only when citizens organize themselves, they have the power. | |
So when no one can organize anything, then no one has power. |