SOS Chapter 48

The Destruction of Family

We have no way to count how many people have been killed in the CCP's political campaigns. Among the people, there is no way to do a statistical survey because of information blocks and barriers among different regions, ethnic groups, and local dialects. The CCP government would never conduct this kind of survey, as that would be like digging its own grave. The CCP prefers to omit the details when writing its own history.

The number of families damaged by the CCP is even more difficult to know. In some cases, one person died and the family was broken. In other cases, the entire family died. Even when no one died, many were forced to divorce. Father and son, mother and daughter were forced to renounce their relationships. Some were disabled, some went crazy, and some died young because of serious illness caused by torture. The record of all these family tragedies is very incomplete.

The Japan-based Yomiuri News once reported that over half of the Chinese population has been persecuted by CCP. If that is the case, the number of families destroyed by the CCP is estimated to be over 100 million.

Zhang Zhixin [25] has become a household name due to the amount of reporting on her story. Many people know that she suffered physical torture, gang rape and mental torture. Finally, she was driven insane and shot to death after her tongue was cut. But many people may not know there is another cruel story behind this tragedy�even her family members had to attend a "study session for the families of death row inmates."

Zhang Zhixin's daughter Lin Lin recalled that in the early spring of 1975,

A person from Shenyang Court said loudly, "Your mother is a real die-hard counterrevolutionary. She refuses to accept reform, and is incorrigibly obstinate. She is against our great leader Chairman Mao, against the invincible Mao Zedong Thought, and against Chairman Mao's proletariat revolutionary direction. With one crime on top of another, our government is considering increasing the punishment. If she is executed, what is your attitude?" I was astonished, and did not know how to answer. My heart was broken. But I pretended to be calm, trying hard to keep my tears from falling. My father had told me that we could not cry in front of others, otherwise we had no way to renounce our relationship with my mother. Father answered for me, "If this is the case, the government is free to do what it deems necessary."

The person from court asked again, "Will you collect her body if she is executed? Will you collect her belongings in prison?" I lowered my head and said nothing. Father answered for me again, "We don't need anything."� Father held my brother and me by the hands and we walked out of the county motel. Staggering along, we walked home against the howling snow storm. We did not cook; father split the only coarse corn bun we had at home and gave it to my brother and me. He said, "Finish it and go to bed early." I lay on the clay bed quietly. Father sat on a stool and stared at the light in a daze. After a while, he looked at the bed and thought we were all asleep. He stood up, gently opened the suitcase we brought from our old home in Shenyang, and took out mother's photo. He looked at it and could not hold back his tears.

I got up from bed, put my head into father's arms and started crying loudly. Father patted me and said, "Don't do that, we cannot let the neighbors hear it." My brother woke up after hearing me cry. Father held my brother and me tightly in his arms. This night we did not know how many tears we shed, but we could not cry freely. [26]

One university lecturer had a happy family, but his family encountered a disaster during the process of redressing the rightists. At the time of the anti-rightist movement, his wife was dating someone who was labeled a rightist. Her lover was later sent to a remote area and suffered greatly. Because she, as a young girl, could not go along, she gave her lover up and married the lecturer. When her beloved one finally came back to their hometown, she, now a mother of several children, had no other way to repent her betrayal in the past. She insisted on divorcing her husband in order to redeem her guilty conscience. By this time, the lecturer was over 50-years old; he could not accept the sudden change and went insane. He stripped off all his clothes and ran all over to look for a place to start a new life. Finally, his wife left him and their children. The painful separation decreed by the Party is a problem that can't be solved and an incurable social disease that could only replace one separation with another separation.

Family is the basic unit of the Chinese society. It is also the traditional culture's last defense against the Party culture. That is why damage to the family is the cruelest in the CCP's history of killing.

Because the CCP monopolizes all social resources, when a person is classified as being on the opposing side of the dictatorship, he or she will immediately face a crisis in livelihood, be accused by everyone in society, and stripped of his or her dignity. Because they are treated unjustly, the family is the only safe haven for these innocent people to be consoled. But the CCP's policy of implication kept family members from comforting each other; otherwise, they too risked being labeled opponents of the dictatorship. Zhang Zhixin, for instance, was forced to divorce. For many people, family members' betrayal�reporting on, fighting, publicly criticizing, or denouncing them�is the last straw that breaks their spirit. Many people have committed suicide as a result.