Remembering Jin Xunhua,

undated; ca. 1969

A lady wearing a Red Guard armband seated at a table and about to write a pledge on a sheet of paper on which the title reads: "I resolve" (決心書). A People's Daily newspaper is at her elbow and on the wall behind her is a portrait of a man with his arm raised. On the wall at the upper right are written saying of Chairman Mao. The portrait is said to resemble images of the Jin Xunhua 金訓華 (d. 1969) (cf. stamps, issued 1970). As described in W. J. F. Jenner, The Tyranny of History: The Roots of China's Crisis (1994): Being Chinese in the twenty years from 1956 involved making conscious choices to do things the hard way, like the city kids sent to remote parts of the countryside at the end of the 1960s who deliberately did farm work with their bare hands instead of using tools, who did not rest from the midday sun in summer and who gloried in making the most meaningless of sacrifices. Few can have been more pointless than the self-destruction of Jin Xunhua, a former Red Guard who drowned in August 1969 in a vain attempt to recover from a swollen river a floating telegraph pole that was no longer part of a communication network but was simply a length of driftwood. The incident was given the full treatment by the propaganda authorities, who made no attempt to hide what by any standards but Maoist ones would have been a waste of a young life. They turned it into an act of martyrdom. It was almost as if the very disproportion between the possible gain and the actual loss was something admirable in itself and another sign of national moral superiority: nowhere else in the world could match the pure revolutionary dedication of China’s proletarian youth armed with the invincible thoughts of Mao Zedong.