Epoch Times - How I Became a Target of China’s Red Guard: Chenggang Xu
Aired: 2025-08-26
Duration: 02:53


=== Citizens Organizing for Power (02:52) ===

[00:00:00]  I was in Beijing and my high school actually was the birthplace of the right guard movement.
[00:00:10]  That's a Tsinghua Fujong, this high school affiliated with Tsinghua University.
[00:00:17]  And from the very beginning of the right guard movement, person like me was a target of the movement.
[00:00:26]  So the reason I was exploring new classes in a socialist system is related to that background.
[00:00:38]  And then I went to the countryside.
[00:00:42]  So concretely, I went to Heilongjiang province, which is actually my farm was very close to Seoul Union, just 20 miles from Seoul Union.
[00:00:59]  So I spent 10 years there in a farm.
[00:01:03]  Since I thought as a teenager, I thought I understood urban situations in a socialist economy, but I didn't understand rural.
[00:01:16]  And 80% of Chinese were in rural areas.
[00:01:20]  So then I voluntarily went to the farm at the end of 1967.
[00:01:29]  And then because of my research on the classes in a socialist system, I became a counter-revolutionary and I was under arrest.
[00:01:42]  After more than a year of imprisonment, the punishment was changed to hard labor under monitoring until the end of the Cultural Revolution.
[00:02:00]  That experience helped me a lot in understanding the nature of totalitarianism.
[00:02:09]  Totalitarianism means that they does not allow for existence of any organization.
[00:02:19]  So internally and also externally.
[00:02:23]  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.
[00:02:36]  Civil society means independent organizations, means citizens have to organize themselves.
[00:02:44]  Only when citizens organize themselves, they have the power.
[00:02:48]  So when no one can organize anything, then no one has power.