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Cultural Revolution reminders from Chinese bloggers

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn, August 9, 2006 2:50 PM

Translated from yesterday's post on Wang Xiaofeng's blog:

Today

Today is August 8. For people superstitious about numbers, it's a lucky day.
But this day 40 years ago was the start of a disaster.
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution formally started on this day.
And lasted until October of 1976.

I must write something on this day.
I know many readers of my blog
Don't know anything about that time.
To such people, I say
If you do not know anything about the events 40 years ago
What use is it to know history from 400 or 4,000 years ago?

If you have the patience, listen to this whole recording.

Wang has posted an audio file of the August 1966 radio announcement about the start of the Cultural Revolution together with the words above, you can listen to it from his blog post: Today.

You can see the same announcement on the front page of the People's Daily on Bingfeng's blog, Aug 8, 1966: 《The decision about the Cultural Revolution》issued by CCP.

There are more Cultural Revolution images at Ttcen.com. Morning Sun (blocked in China) is a superb resource of Cultural Revolution texts, photos, audio and video materials about the ten years of chaos.

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Comments on Cultural Revolution reminders from Chinese bloggers

Listening to the recording yesterday, I was struck by two things:

(1) There's lots of detail on the responsibilities of most of society, but the army gets just one sentence.

(2) Broadcasting pronunciation has changed over the past decades. The announcer's accent is definitely different from today's CCTV and radio anchors. I think I like his sound better, actually.

Posted by: Joel | August 9, 2006 3:47 PM