| Time | Text |
|---|---|
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Citizens Organizing for Power
00:02:52
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| I was in Beijing and my high school actually was the birthplace of the right guard movement. | |
| That's a Tsinghua Fujong, this high school affiliated with Tsinghua University. | |
| And from the very beginning of the right guard movement, 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 Seoul Union, just 20 miles from Seoul Union. | |
| So I spent 10 years there in a 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 a socialist system, I became a counter-revolutionary and I was under arrest. | |
| After more than a year of imprisonment, the punishment was changed to hard labor under monitoring until the end of the Cultural Revolution. | |
| 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 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. | |