A large concrete star guards the entrance to Fan Jianchuan’s Educated Youth Museum in Anren, an hour outside of Chengdu. On each side of the star is a plaque, memorializing ten young women who burned to death in their dorm in 1971. The plaques show the school reports that all educated youth and Red Guards filled out before they were sent down to the countryside, stating their hometown, age, positive attributes, reason for joining the Party, as well as their own negative traits and areas for improvement. They’re all young girls, none over 18, and passionate about the Revolution.<\/p>\n
“The resplendent red sun rises in the east. The first year of the great 1970s is past, now we welcome the beginning of 1971,” writes Fan Jin Feng in her report. “I will summarize my efforts to study Mao Zedong Thought during 1970 below, but first let me mention my deficiencies, speaking out of turn in class, for example. This is one of my deficiencies. But I have also done well in some areas …”<\/p>\n
You can’t help but wonder who she could have been, had she not been sent to Yunnan to serve the Revolution.<\/p>\n
No Red Guard set the fire, for all we know, yet still the whole museum leaves the impression that no matter how these children died, it was the Revolution that ate them. The entire museum is devoted to the 20-some million urban youth that were sent down to the country during Mao’s last ditch effort to indoctrinate the country. Several installations, including most of the second floor, show the tragic, heroic faces of young people drowning in a flash flood trying to bring grain to peasants, burning to death in a brush fire in Mongolia, or just sleeping in their dorm rooms, dreaming red dreams.<\/p>\n
The images conjure up feelings of strong\u00a0bonds, revolutionary joy and, above all, tragic waste. The beautiful, intelligent, ardent faces, all young, all dead before their time in accidents or disasters, are an ironic symbol for the whole era. The best of the nation becoming martyrs of the revolution, or worse, living on knowing all they did during the Red Era, the dreaded Cultural Revolution, was for naught.<\/p>\n