#we are learning about the treaty of versailles in history and thought i should make this post

[incaseimakeit-daily]

"WOA, that sounds very good. what song is this?"

"oh ! it's blackboxwarrior - okultra. it's by my favorite music artist, his name is -

[fedonciadale]

I know that a lot of dany stans think that we unfairly criticize her against her male counterparts, but i don't think that's true. We compare her to Mel and Stannis because they all burn people. How is it right that Dany can crucify people when not everyone who she crucified is guilty. Why is collective punishment ok just because the people being punished belong to one class instead of the other. I thought collective punishment of a group whether or not they are guilty was wrong.

Dear nonny,

I do think these were the other parts of your ask?

I go by the belief that if you break it you have to fix it.  Dany broke Astapor and she has to fix it.  The slaves didn’t initiate the revolt, Dany did.  The slaves opinions didn’t even come into question.  They had no say in the matter.  Slavery is wrong but shouldn’t we consider the slaves opinions before we do something.  Instead of saying the slaves messed up in ruling, maybe we should be saying Dany messed up in not considering their opinions before changing their lives drastically.

I don’t know what a 14 year old boy in Astapor did (except be born into the Ghiscari nobility) that would warrant their death.  Isn’t it wrong to kill somebody just because they were born in their position without considering their actions.  And Dany had all the power in Mereen yet she condoned the torture of the wineseller’s daughter in front of her parents just to give names and we don’t even know if the wineseller was even guilty.  Isn’t torture wrong.  Good guys don’t torture.  Full stop.

I think there are three aspects to your asks, the one is the question whether punishment should be applied collectively, and the other question is, if violence and brutality and overriding of people’s wishes can be used, if an unfair system needs to be abandoned, and the third is, if it is allowed to use unjust measures like tortures in a situation of need. All of these are pretty interesting moral dilemmas to be honest and therefore it is no surprise that Da€nerys fans and antis fight so much about this.

Since it is long, I put it under the cut.

As for collective punishment: You know, I probably should say, that I am sort of emotionally invested in this subject. The question of collective guilt and punishment affects me personally in a way. I am from Germany, after all, and if the allies had decided to collectively punish the Germans after WW II my country would be very different from what it is now. If a decent American soldier had not decided to spare the life of a twelve year old boy he had caught stealing ammunition I wouldn’t exist.

Yes, many things went wrong in cleaning up after 1945, but I hold to the belief that although politics came into it and disrupted the persecution of Nazis in the beginnings of the cold war, it was the right decision of the Western allies to not judge collectively. People got a trial and had the chance to defend themselves, so that actually guilty people were executed. A lot got away, that’s true and a shame but it was done in the right spirit if you take my meaning. Judgement at Nuremberg is a very good film about this.

It was also decided to make an effort and help to rebuild Germany. That was in hindsight also a good decision and an occasion where people actually learned from history. After WW I the allies had named Germans as the party responsible for the war (the first time in history a peace treaty identified a guilty party) and although the actual money the Germans had to pay was not that crippling the psychological effect was disastrous and the Versailles treaty was a contributing factor to the failure of the German Weimar republic. That led to the paradox situation that although the German guilt in WW II was about a billion times worse than in WW I, the treatment they got afterwards by the allies was far better. And in a way there is something like a collective guilt, because you could not live in Germany between 1933 and 1945 and not become guilty in one way or another, just living in a system like that, it is impossible to not become an accomplice in one way or other. And yet there were people who commited atrocities and others who just duck their heads and looked away - and although the last one is a coward’s choice, none of us who are lucky enough to not live in a system like that can really say, what we would have done in a life-threatening situation, where a joke could put you in jail for years.

So, for the record, the slavery system in Essos is bad, but there are people who are more guilty than others. There probably were slaves who had arranged a niche for themselves within the system. Respected household slaves, teachers maybe, who were never hit. There probably were nice masters, and then there were the masters who crucified children so that Da€nerys would be discouraged from attacking. So if D stans say, they don't care that D gave the masters no trial, because they were all bad, they want to go the easy path. In a way in such a system being a master probably meant that you were guilty of some crimes (if not the order for crucifying children). Now, if you look at a system like that and are enraged about it, collective punishment seems an easy solution. Just make an end to it.... That's D's instinct. And it is something that most people can relate to. Just kill these evil people. Seems like a neat solution - only it is not.

This leads me to the second aspect : is it allowed to use violence to override an unjust system? And here the answer is equally difficult and complex. History teaches us that sometimes violence is needed to bring an end to an evil system or more accurately that violence can disrupt an evil system and change things thoroughly. Take the French revolution: Les aristocrats à la laterne or in English : Hang 'em high those bloody lords. A very bloody revolution followed by a dictatorship and more than twenty years later people were so tired of revolution and war and their thirst for peace was so great that they gladly succumbed to a restauration that ensured peace and yet restored much of the system people thought they had abandoned. So, while violence does have an effect, the question is will it last? The question is, is it worth it?

As for the people of Astapor liberated against their will. Is this a good action? Again I would cite my own country as an example. In hindsight the allies liberated Germany in 1945, although the Germans at that time did not feel liberated nor had they asked for it (apart from some obviously). But it could only become a liberation in hindsight because the process of democratisation of Germany was not something the Germans had to do all on their own. I hope this makes sense. Originally it was not a liberation but became one after democracy had stabilised.

As you wrote: the liberation of Astapor alone is useless if you do not take responsibility. And D fails the people of Astapor. She tries to do it right in Mereen, but she gets easily frustrated with the fact that she can't change the system overnight. And that is when she presses again for fast change. She wants the terror of the harpies to stop, all to understandable. And then she uses methods of terror herself to fight terror. The old dilemma of how to act against terror, the third aspect. Again using the same seemingly effective methods is tempting. You seem to get results, but you stoop down to the same level and this is problematic for legitimacy. Can a state forbid its subjects to kill and in turn kill people? Can a state forbid torture and allow torture to be used against his enemies? The answer is pretty easy. It is no. Because to do so is tyranny and arbitrary. And a just system has to have a reliable judicial system. Rule of law is the key aspect here.

So, GRRM does play with these moral dilemmas and it is interesting that the last one is really the easiest. D should not have allowed the torture of the wine seller's daughters (regardless if they are children or not - which is not clear on the books), not if she wants a system of justice and peace in the long run. You just do not allow for exceptions. In the show the trial of Massador is used for this dilemma. Barristan persuades D to punish Massador as he is guilty, but as soon as Barristan is killed D is after revenge again, feeding a random master up the dragons.

As for the liberation of Astapor and Mereen: once she decided to liberate them she has a responsibility - a responsibility she fails to acknowledge and to act upon, and if she leaves Essos in the books like she does in the show, she permanently fails the Essosi.

Collective punishment might be understandable, but it's not justified nor is it effective in the long run. Destruction of an old system (break the wheel) is easily done, building a new one is the difficulty. Hard work D is not prepared for, neither to do it nor to even think about it.

GRRM is really clever. He sets up D against a system that we can all agree upon is bad, a system that historical experience shows us should be quickly abandoned by force, because we know if it happens as a slow process it will take centuries. We as the audience are so ensorcelled by this tale of a relatable fight against an evil system that we forget that a bad system is not abolished over night and we forgive D for her 'who thinks about long term consequences when there are people who are slaves' attitude. It is only if we look closer that we see all the flaws in her actions. We see how the collective punishment makes her a tyrant, how she does not take responsibility and last how she retaliated in Mereen instead of adhering to the rule of law.

I must admit that I would get along better with D stans of they would say things like : she is not a peaceful ruler, maybe even not a ruler, but she is a catalyst of change and we need change, because the system needs to change. I could understand that, although I would still be on the side of the difficult path of long-term reform instead of bloody revolution.

In addition I would argue that there is another layer to D, if you look closely. Many who criticise her probably would agree with my points above, but I think she doesn't even have good intentions, not even originally. Her aim was always to restore her family's legacy and to get the throne, to rule, to be exceptional. There are reasons in her childhood why she is like that, but she doesn't free the slaves because she is an abolitionist. She frees slaves to disrupt the system so she can be on top - profiting from people reselling themselves into slavery in Mereen really shows how serious D is about what many people and in particular her stans think is her agenda.

Thanks for the ask!

[evangelineartemiasamos]

I would LOVE to hear your opinions on Hybern if you ever feel interested in writing it all out

Why, thank you for asking anonym^^

I think that Maas put zero thoughts into Hybern. Literally. She needed an enemy, she made them former slavers who want slaves again and to destroy any doubts about them, she has them boast about (sexual) violence at any chance. The king doesn’t even have a name which is hilarious, and calling the pro-slavery faction in the old war “loyalists” without ever explaining what the term means or who they were “loyal” to is extremely lazy.

The country of Hybern doesn’t get much of a description at all, not even when the inner circle goes there in acomaf. Literally “nothingness”, bleakness, cliffs, a barren land, an off-white castle, that’s it. I wonder how Hybern could have gathered the forces, goods and money to raise an army to attack Prythian. Hybern doesn’t trade, out of spite because of the treatry against slavery, so how did they recover from the loss of forced work? How do they nurture their population? How did they, without trade, prosper as a nation? Have they advanced technically? Have they found more productive ways to live since they had to change their way of life profoundly? Why are they still bothered by something that happened 500 years ago? How do they have enough workers to conscript a considerable number of them for the army?

Is it all magic? And if it is, why has Hybern such greater magic than Prythian faes?They’ve only had the cauldron for a short time, so is it like the king magicked food and weaponry from the cauldron and conscripted his soldiers last minute? IDK, Maas never explains this and I think I already thought more about Hybern than her.But this would explain a lot. There might have been propaganda as well. “Fight now, and you’ll never have to work again!” Or something. “Hybern deserve better!” I suppose mostly lesser fairies have to do most of the work since the end of slavery, as it happened in Prythian. This would give a chance for an interesting development, but I’ll come to that later.

The Hybern army consists of carousing, violent drinkers. They do not prepare themselves for battle but party instead and this “fun” includes torturing humans. As I said above, this is obviously for showing how evil they are, which again transmits the image they aren’t people but monsters who should be killed. But this also means they are bad soldiers. This colludes with my assumption above, that the Hybern soldiers were recruited last minute and aren’t disciplined and are only in to finally abuse some humans again. But you can’t win if you party the night before the fight, even less so if your soldiers are hardly trained. And the king is supposed to be insane. All in all, this portrays them as a force that is, if not easy, but still certainly to be defeated. After this information was stated in the book, I could no longer take the war any seriously.

The time Tarquin kills the surrending Hybern soldiers is just the peak of the iceberg. The Hyberns aren’t people, they are evil and must be killed, don’t ever feel bad for killing any of them, war crimes don’t exists and ransoming prisoners isn’t a possiblity. Sigh. This states how little Maas knows about medieval warfare. War prisoners are a thing, they’re useful bargaining chips and are often incarcerated for years. But even the end of the book, all of the Hybern army die, no matter how they came to be in that army or if they are ready to surrender once the king is defeated. Which is kinda the point of killing the leader, right? So you might negotiate with someone more open to peace?? But Feyre has magical knowing powers and insists they would all continue to fight to the death because they “felt wronged”, wtf is wrong with you, Feyre? Give them a chance to surrender, and many will say yes. Unless their officers force them to go on which doesn’t change how wrong it is to not even offer them the change when their commander is gone, their super weapon is stolen and their allies have deserted while another aerial army has arrived to wreak havok. But no, let Amren kill them all …

You know, I see Hybern kind of like Nazi Germany, however Maas has intended them. We learn so much of our past in school, so the connection came automatically. Germany lost in WW 1 and had to bear hard consequences due to the contract of Versailles which wore very hard on the population. But the country still managed to install a democracy for the first time, even though it was barely able to funtion. The frustration over the contract of Versailles, the political chaos, the Great Depression of 1929 and the growing fascist movements paved the way for Hitler’s Machtergreifung (rise to power, but Machtergreifung is the idiomatic term) 1933 and with a lot of propaganda, instigation and justifying of national superiority, WW 2 and the Holocaust happened. You should know about this. But all in all, the similarity should be clear: frustrated war losers rise up again to take what they think should be theirs. And I think, given that such stories are actual histories of actual people, you can’t write a story that dehumanizes a fantasy people written as nazis into monsters, even if they did evil things. That’s a toxic way to think because it isn’t a solution for real life conflicts. Enemies are people. Soldiers are people. Nazis are people. They should face justice and punishment but writing them as monsters you can kill with no remorse erases the complexicity of warfare and politics.

If you destroy Hybern as it happened after the first war, they’ll still feel wronged. It is necessary to negotiate and to help those who are left behind, to really start to have diplomatic relations and fucking PEACE. But the book doesn’t give an answer again, all that is talked about in the meeting after the battle is Prythian, their treaty with the humans, and gossip. No one gives a shit about Hybern when now is exactly the time to talk with those governing the island to sign a peace treaty, ask for reparations, set up a new government, exchange ambassadors and all that stuff I only think off the top of my head right now. It’s gross how Maas ignores this necessity and has her characters only talk about themselves. It’s the final nail in the coffin to confirm that Hybern is only there to be an enemy, not a country.

But there would be great potential and if Maas has any inspiration, she should write about Hybern in the sequels. The biggest chance is to give power to the lesser fairies, which I have suggested are the working class in Hybern. Tarquin hints at justice and equality for them in acomaf but this is never mentioned again while it should be considered. The inequality of lesser fairies is just another fantasy version of racism and white supremacy: Maas says lesser fairies exist, but they don’t matter in the story, as if no marginalized people matter to her.

The lesser fairies should take over Hybern. A huge part of the Hybern population has been killed in the war and that has to change the nation massively. New people have to be put in ruling and administrative positions, possibly a lot of the intellectuals are gone, probably many male citizens as well, and all in all the country is to be shaped anew - at best into an ally. But this requires communication and I need to see it.

…..

If I even read the sequels, that is.

TBH, anonymous asks make me a bit uncomfortable because I never know if you will ever read this post, buried by new ones, or if you’re even on tumblr. I hope you find the chance anyway.

@acourtofmalesandfemales @punitivepunning @throne-of-no @raven-reyes-reads

[tenyearsapeasant]

38. Newspapers and Broadcasts

"Media," when translated into Chinese, is literally "the medium for spreading." It includes newspapers, magazines, books, and other "planar media", as well as news broadcasts, television, movies, blogs, microblogs, WeChat, etc. Its definition will surely expand in the future.

When I was a peasant in Libeishang, my main media contact with the outside world was through the newspaper and news broadcasts.

1. The newspaper

For as long as I can remember, my family had ordered newspapers in Shanghai. It was either the Liberation Daily or the People's Daily. I had even made an extra large mail slot to make it easier for the postal worker to deliver the paper. This mail slot was used from 1962 all the way until the building was demolished in 2006.

When I moved to Jiangxi, my mom advised me to order a newspaper when I got there. If I read it often and thought about it, I wouldn't say anything wrong. No wonder she was always poring over the newspaper at home - she had to teach my father what to say when he went to work the next day.

After I had settled into Libeishang, I went to go find the Lugang postman, Old Xu. I wanted to order a subscription to the Jiangxi Daily. Old Xu said, "The higher ups just announced that each production team needs to order a copy of the Jiangxi Daily. It costs 12 yuan a year, and the production team is supposed to pay for it. We plan to deliver them to the residences of sent-down youth if possible, and the higher-ups seem happy with that course of action."

Perfect! I would be able to read the news in just a few days. Newspapers that had been read found another important use as toilet paper. We Chinese have a tradition of respecting paper that has words on it, but these were desperate times. If we didn't use the newspaper we'd have to learn the ancient practice of using bamboo strips, rocks, or straw instead. The only thing to remember was to make sure that there were no pictures of our leaders on the paper - that could be very problematic if someone were to report it.

The Jiangxi Daily. The heading uses the calligraphy of Chairman Mao.

After a few months, the only villager who could read the paper complained. He said that us sent-down youth were monopolizing the newspaper. I agreed, so I went to the store and bought some wire. Then I asked the villager Zhang Meifa to help make a clip for the newspaper. I put up the paper by the storehouse, so that anyone could stop by and read it. I was responsible for changing it out every day.

That villager was quite pleased, and went to read the newspaper almost every day. He'd sometimes come visit me to talk about current events. Even though I had only a few years of schooling myself, I was disappointed by his understanding. Many events were very difficult to explain to him.

I didn't expect the other villagers to start making fun of him after a month. They said that, just because he could read a little, he thought he was so much better than everyone else. They said he was pretending to read the newspaper every day, just to show off. His wife said they were running low on firewood at home - he should be spending that time gathering firewood instead of reading the paper. At some point this got to him, and he got in an argument with someone. Then he stopped reading the newspaper.

Since no villagers were reading the Jiangxi Daily anymore, hanging it up by the storehouse was not particularly helpful. The villagers suggested I just take it down.

In about 1975, Old Xu told me that production teams could choose to order Reference News. This was a Chinese newspaper, an "internal publication." It had lots of international news, but individuals were not eligible to order it. Only offices could order it, as a group. In Shanghai, my father's office had a subscription. He'd often bring it home during lunch-time, and bring it back to the office in the afternoon. I could only skim it during his lunch breaks.

I told Old Xu, the villagers were already upset about being forced to pay for the Jiangxi Daily. Since the Reference News had to be ordered by the production team, and I was the team leader, would it be possible for me to pay for it myself? Old Xu agreed to my proposal.

The Reference News; the calligraphy of Lu Xun graces the heading.

From the Reference News, I could see the news printed by foreign newspapers such as the New York Times. I could also see headlines from Pravda, and many other countries' newspapers besides. All in all, despite being heavily filtered by the Chinese government, it still reflected the state of the world somewhat accurately.

2. Magazines

Magazines are quite similar to newspapers. As I was growing up, my mother ordered several subscriptions for me: Children, Children's Times, and Youth Literature and Art. When I think of these magazines now I feel a rush of nostalgia.

In 1975, after learning the basics of agricultural machinery repair in Lugang, I bought a few books on the subject in Shanghai. Not long later, I felt that I needed to keep up with new developments in the field, so I went to find Old Xu. I asked if he could help me order a subscription to Agricultural Mechanics. This was a monthly magazine. When I went back to Shanghai, I went to Lugang Commune and canceled my subscription.

Later, when I got to Shanghai, I began to read Dushu (trans: Reading, one of the most influential literary magazines in China), which was also a monthly magazine. I was one of its earliest subscribers. After I moved to America, I asked my little brother to continue my subscription. When my friends visited Shanghai, I would ask them to bring my backlog back to America. I keep it by my pillow and read it every night. There were a few articles about the new advances in astrophysics that took me several tries to understand.

Dushu magazine, first published in 1979.

Telegraphs could also count as "media." I remembered an article about when the victors of World War I wanted to give the German-occupied province of Shandong to the Japanese at the Treaty of Versailles. As a weak country, the Chinese delegate was unable to influence the matter. He told Liang Qichao, who was outside the meeting area. Liang Qichao then ran to the telegram station and sent a long, eloquent telegram back to China. This kicked off the May Fourth movement.

In the following decades, many major political and military figures in China would publish long telegrams in the newspapers.

Even during the Cultural Revolution, people would send "tribute telegrams" to Chairman Mao, reporting good tidings. These would be simultaneously published in papers. And after Chairman Mao's passing, people sent "mourning telegrams" to Beijing to show tsuccessor loyalty. I never really figured out if you were supposed to go to the newspaper or the telegram office first. And if you were posting the message in a newspaper already, why even send a telegram?

For most people, telegrams were fast but expensive. Each character was three cents, with an additional half a cent for coding the characters into numbers. So they were only used for urgent situations. For example, "For Some Name at Some Address, Some Road, Shanghai mother gravely sick return quickly" was eighteen characters. That would be sixty-three cents, plus a twenty cent flat fee. It came out to eighty-three cents, which was ten times more than the eight cents it took to send a piece of mail. But the telegram could arrive the next day.

A telegram envelope from the 1970s.

There were nearly ten families living in our building in Shanghai. In the seventies, we sent over a dozen children to various villages. Latermy little brother told me that every year the telegrams would come pouring in before the new year. If you heard a motorcycle, odds were that it was someone delivering a telegram. The contents were mainly about when and where to pick them up at the train station.

When I went back to Shanghai, I never sent my parents a telegram. I would bring all my luggage back on my own with my carrying stick so I could surprise them!

3. Radio broadcasts

The leader of the sent-down youth in Libeishang was Cui Yinghui. He was very smart. He had a perfect score on his middle school placement test; before the Cultural Revolution, during "educational reform", he even taught Chinese to other classes as a seventh grader. He was famous throughout the school for his academics.

During the Cultural Revolution, he was quite ambitious, and joined the biggest Red Guard group in his school. He worked alongside a group of smart and hardworking high schoolers. According to him, when they met, they were afraid of being overheard by other groups. So they took chairs to the middle of the sports fields and met there. There was nowhere to hide, and they could know exactly who was listening.

In the village, he was also very active. Soon after we received our resettlement fees, he took out three months' worth and bought a radio from the general store for thirty-five yuan. This was the first radio in Libeishang history.

That night, we four boys huddled around the off-white radio, twiddling the tuner and scanning for radio stations.

The one with the best signal was the one run by the People's Liberation Army in Fujian. This station had to be quite strong to send messages across the strait to Taiwan. Among other things, this often broadcast parents who were on the mainland asking tsuccessor children to come back for dinner. I thought to myself, if my father had gone to Taiwan in 1949, maybe my mother would be on the radio right now asking for his return. But then I wouldn't even be here to listen, since I was born in 1950.

The Central People's Broadcast and the Jiangxi People's Broadcast were also quite clear. Of the Shanghai stations, we could only occasionally make out whatever was at 990 kHz.

Surprisingly, we could also hear the Voice of America broadcast. This was an enemy station. "Receiving enemy broadcasts" was disallowed - if someone caught us, we could go to jail. The signal in Libeishang was very good, since, unlike in Shanghai, there were no specialized jamming stations.

Outside of the Voice of America we received two other enemy broadcasts.

One was the Sound of Free China, broadcast by the Republic of China in Taiwan. The signal was not particularly strong. Despite imposing martial law himself, Old Chiang Kai-shek was still claiming to represent "Free China". This channel was unique in that, every once in a while, it would ask someone in some region to take down a series of numbers. This was obviously some sort of coded message for American or Taiwanese spies in China.

Were there really this many spies in China? I thought this might just be a bluff by Old Chiang. But many years later I read something about the KMT war hero Dai Li. He was tsuccessor head of intelligence. In the fifties, several years after his death in a plane crash, KMT operatives allegedly extracted his family members and brought them to Taiwan. I guess spies really did exist! Later I learned that, even before the revolution, the KMT spies were very effective. They were able to target Chairman Mao's residence for bombing, and ambush Zhou En-lai's caravan.

The other enemy station was one that only broadcast from 7:30 to 8:30 at night. This was the Voice of the PLA, had quite a weak signal, and had different frequencies night to night. This radio station kept talking about the "Mao-Lin cadre" as the "Bureaucratic military establishment." It spent a lot of time defending the disgraced Liu Shaoqi.

We also received the Soviet broadcast, Sound of Peace. It was very clear. Once considered a "friendly station," as relations with Russia deteriorated it became an "enemy station." Despite criticizing the Cultural Revolution, it seemed to take a warmer tone than other stations.

In any case, we couldn't receive many stations in Libeishang, and about half of those were enemy stations. When we first heard these broadcasts it was very exciting and novel, and we would listen until late at night. We knew this was forbidden, so we were always a little scared when we were listening. We sat in silence while we listened, and never discussed what we heard afterwards, as if it hadn't happened at all.

After a few days, both because the novelty had worn off, and because staying up late was beginning to affect our work, we cut back drastically. After Cui Yinghui left, I bought a nice radio from Shanghai and brought it back to Libeishang. I only listened to it occasionally, mostly to tune in to the Voice of America.

The Voice of America was broadcast for a large part of the day, and had a large variety of content. Not only did it have news and interviews, it had the "900 sentences in English" educational program that later swept the nation. This program was where I heard of the radio announcers Zhou Youkang and He Lida. The news was also reported in Cantonese.

In the middle of September of 1971, I turned on my radio. I heard a report from the Voice of America that there had been an incident at a military airport near Hangzhou. The artillery company tasked with defending the airport was now pointing its guns at airplanes within the airport, and no airplanes had flown at all in Chinese airspace for several days. Something important must have happened within the Chinese government.

If this was all true, then something very big was happening.

After about ten days, I heard a rumor that Lin Biao wanted to usurp power, and ended up dying in an accident.

Though I knew something was coming, I was still shocked by the news. Vice-Chairman Lin Biao was Chairman Mao's designated successor. It had been written into law already. His previous successor, Liu Shaoqi, had been purged only five years prior - what happened with Lin Biao? Chairman Mao was already 78, and Lin Biao was only 64. And his ascension was already in law. There was no reason for him to jump the gun.

A few weeks later, we all congregated in the Lugang Commune to listen to a reading of the official documents. They announced that Lin Biao had committed the treasonous crimes of opposing Chairman Mao, opposing the party, and betraying the country. I heard that in some other places, the militia stood guard outside the meeting-rooms where this was read.

Soon, it was the end of the year. A party official in Lugang told me something about the Lin Biao incident.

The story went that after the official line was announced, even the old ladies in the villages knew that Lin Biao was a bad man. When two of them were chatting, one said, "Have you heard of Lin Biao?"

The other replied, "Yes, he's a bad man, I think he was the Vice Premier."

"No, I think he was the Vice Chairman. He did many bad things, have you heard?"

"I heard he stole three chickens (trans: three chickens, 三只鸡, san zhi ji, sounds like the Trident plane (三叉戟, san cha ji) that Lin Biao was on)."

"No, I heard he stole a whole flock! (trans: a flock, 一群, yi qun, sounds like Lin Biao's wife Ye Qun 叶群)."

The thrilling political machinations at the nation's top level had become the butt of a joke for those at the bottom level.

From another point of view, this sort of satire would not have been possible, let alone popular, even a few years earlier in the Cultural Revolution. This would have easily gotten you labeled a "counter-revolutionary." But the existence of this joke showed that the people had begun to tire of constant political turmoil.

When the Gang of Four was destroyed in October of 1976, I first heard about it through the Voice of America. It reported that, despite not having official confirmation, there were already celebratory parades springing up in the streets of Beijing.

Later, the Voice of America interviewed a founder of the CCP, Zhang Guotao, who was living in Canada. He asked if this would cause a split in the party. His response was that the earlier split was because they were too young, and the party itself was too young. Now that the party had matured, it would not split.

Two years after the destruction of the Gang of Four, the Voice of America ran an analysis on who would be the new Premier. They believed that Li Peng and Tian Jiyun were most likely, and gave the edge to Li Peng. At the time, neither of them were famous or high-level party officials, so the Voice of America ran profiles on both. Later, Li Peng did become the premier. I guess the American intelligence agents were pretty good at their jobs.

Beginning in 1974, Shanghai assigned a large number of party officials to support its various sent-down youth across the country. They were stationed in the various prefectures. A party official by the name of Chen was assigned to Yongfeng. He was a member of the public security bureau in the Hongkou district of Shanghai.

One day in 1976, he came to Libeshang looking for me. After some chitchat and dinner, he formally suggested that I should go to Shaxi Production Brigade to lead a sent-down youth farm. I was skeptical. First, bundling all the sent-down youth together might make it easier to administer, but could we really understand the people in village that way? Besides, I was already deeply familiar with Libeishang, and had no desire to switch villages. So I found all sorts of excuses.

I told him that there was a local saying that "the Jiangxi soil is light; if you walk five li (trans: a mile and a half) you'll hear eighteen different languages." For example, Ma Liping's village, Gaokeng, was about five kilometers away and the dialect was already noticeably different. If I went to Shaxi, ninety kilometers away, I would surely have trouble understanding the local villagers. Would he really make me re-learn a local dialect from scratch?

This was the first reason I found. It seems kind of childish or unreasonable now.

People are hard to persuade, and I didn't really want to persuade him. We talked until eleven at night, him always attacking and me always defending. In the end he was unable to persuade me. He was tired, and I let him sleep on my bed. I went to the next door over.

He saw my radio, and turned it on. Suddenly the Voice of America was playing. After a few minutes he turned it off.

A transistor radio much like Jianfeng's.

I found it hard to sleep after that.

Many sent-down youth listened to the Voice of America broadcasts. It was common knowledge, we just didn't talk about it. The Lugang Commune even accidentally re-broadcast it once, making the entire commune "receive enemy broadcasts." No punishment came of that incident. Besides, ever since President Nixon visited China in 1972, relations with America had been warming up.

But Mr. Chen was a member of the public safety bureau. Did he know that many people listened to this broadcast? Would he confront me about it tomorrow, or use it as leverage to force me to go to Shaxi?

The next day, when he got up, I had already made breakfast. He didn't say anything, and left after breakfast. I sighed with relief.

In 1989 there was a great deal of political turmoil in China. From the beginning of martial law in Beijing to the massacre, the situation was in chaos. It was hard to know which of the many rumors were true. AT this time, many families in Shanghai would get their news from the Voice of America. They seemed only to fear that others wouldn't know this, and turned up the volume. Maybe they were sympathetic to the students' cause, and used this as a small act of political expression.

After arriving in America, I found that the American people don't know that the Voice of America even exists. It's a government-run radio station, and many major broadcasts in America are run by private corporations. When the Voice of America was created, these corporations were worried about their market share. So they lobbied in Congress until a law was passed.

The law stipulated that the Voice of America would only be broadcast outside of the United States, with the purpose of spreading American values and allowing the people of the world to understand the truth about current events.

American natives were thus unable to hear the Voice of America.

4. Wired broadcasts

Around 1972, we began to receive another kind of broadcast in Libeishang. In contrast to the wireless transmissions of radio, these were wired. The Lugang Commune set up a wired transmission station, and requested every household in the commune to install a loudspeaker in their home for one yuan and fifty cents.

Hooking up the loudspeakers was not difficult. We chopped down twenty or so cedar trees and stripped off their bark. Then we dig pits every fifty to sixty meters and set the poles. We bought two big spools of wire - over two hundred yuan - from the store in Lugang and attached to the broadcasting station. We then nailed it to the telephone poles all the way back to Libeishang, and attached it to a terminal on each family's speaker. The other terminals we just connected into the ground.

A speaker for the wired broadcast.

Because the wire was bare, when it rained the sound would be quieter, and there would be some static noise. The villagers said it was the sound of the rain.

The speakers would come on every night at seven. First, the song "The East is Red" would play. After that introduction, the announcer would announce, in Shanghai-tinted Mandarin, "This is the Lugang Commune broadcast station. We are beginning broadcasting now. Next, please enjoy some music about the revolution." Then "The Dan Flowers Bloom a Bright Red in the Mountains," a folk song about the successful conclusion of the Long March, played. The broadcast station rarely had their own programs. They mostly either played revolutionary music, or re-broadcasts from Yongfeng or Jiangxi or Central stations. When it was done, the announcer would say, "This is the Lugang Commune broadcast station. Today's broadcast ends here."

Unfortunately, most villagers in Libeishang couldn't understand Mandarin. So the broadcast didn't reach many people.

Once during a rainstorm, there was a loud thunderclap which broke some households' loudspeakers. Since they couldn't understand it anyways, they didn't spend the money to buy replacements. The new ones were over twice as expensive. In the end over half of the speakers had broken.

5. Floating balloons

Speaking of enemy broadcasts and media warfare, we once received a special kind of media in Libeishang. These were floating balloons from Taiwan.

Some time after the destruction of the Gang of Four, my friend Zhang Shouren came up to me with two sheets of paper. He had a strange expression on his face as he said, "Look, Old Xia, I found these in the fields." These were about four by six inches each. The paper was thick and glossy.

On one there was a caricature I'd never seen before. Chairman Mao had been drawn like a pig, ferocious and repulsive. On the other was written "The Mao-Zhou conflict is beginning again." There were two groups of people depicted beneath it, all of whom were very ugly. On the left was Hua Guofeng leading Wang Dongxin and others, while on the right Ye Jianying was leading Deng Xiaoping and the rest. The two groups were arguing about something.

I went to the production brigade, curious to know more. The secretary said that they'd received many of these over the past few days. Yushan Production Brigade and Cunqian Production Brigade also had received these. He then asked me what I knew about this.

I said that I knew that we were still at war with the KMT in Taiwan. The artillery in Fujian would still fire frequently. I had heard that they would launch balloons with propaganda, which would then float over here and release their leaflets. I heard that the big balloons could carry several hundred pounds!

Later, I learned that we sent balloons to Taiwan, too. Beyond propaganda, we also would send small bottles of Maotai liquor. The idea was to get them to drink the Maotai and become homesick. The Taiwanese balloons once made it to India, which raised ire about a Republic of China invasion of India.

I had only ever seen Chairman Mao depicted with a benevolent smile. I had never imagined that our enemies would draw him in this way. That night, I dreamed of that piece of paper, and woke up in a cold sweat with my heart pounding. I thought about it some more. Hadn't I only seen dehumanizing pictures of Chiang Kai-shek? Beyond being ugly, he also always had a bandage on his head.

Only after communications resumed between the two sides did I learn that Chiang Kai-shek was actually quite good-looking. I had read some numerology book which started off like this: "Southerners who look like northerners are prized; men who look like women are prized." It only got to various divinations about how to get a government position or how to get rich later. I analyzed the two leaders with this framework. Mao and Chiang were both southerners, but they were tall like northerners. But Mao was also a man with feminine features, so he was one notch above Chiang in that respect.

Over a month later, villagers were still finding these sheets of paper in the fields and turning them in to me. This damnable paper was such high quality! It had been sitting in water for over a month but was still as good as new, the pictures still clear as day.

I don't know how the quality of our own propaganda stacked up. I'm sure it wasn't worse.