Red Color News Soldier: Questions Book Report

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5. I was surprised at the idiosyncrasies of Zhensheng's self-portraits. His stance and defiant expression shows that China was not ideologically homogenous at the time. People like Zhensheng found a way to express dissent and anger, even if they often faced repercussions for their brave actions.

6. The Cultural Revolution was not fully extinguished until 1976, after a prolonged power struggle within the Chinese government. This illustrates the vulnerability of ordinary people's lives in a dictatorship: one minute it was 'counterrevolutionary' to support certain politicians, like Deng Xiaoping, and then, not so long afterwards it was considered patriotic to support Deng.

7. The role of women was surprising -- in the countryside, women were often required to labor as hard as their male counterparts, including pulling wheelbarrows to irrigate a field.

8. Early on in the Revolution, children supported the actions of the People's Liberation Army. This made me wonder if typical childhood and adolescent rebellion was articulated through political rhetoric -- dislike of teachers and older people was covered up by calling these individuals 'counterrevolutionary.'

9. Although many of his photographs were censored, Zhensheng's ability to photograph such negative images of the Revolution, such as the photographs of the 'denunciations' in public, is testimony to his bravery and commitment to tell the story of the Cultural Revolution in photographs.

10. The Revolution is a demonstration of how something with some legitimate grassroots support -- such as a dislike of local corruption -- can be turned into something evil, toxic, and self-serving by authorities, through terror and psychological manipulation.

Q4. What did you learn about the Cultural Revolution from this type of text that you might not have from a more traditional text?

The humanity of the supporters and the victims of the Cultural Revolution were revealed through the photographs.

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Seeing the vulnerable faces of people who were denounced as counter-revolutionaries and the seemingly blind hatred of their fellow citizens was saddening and troubling. Words alone could not express their emotion. These images showed me that politics is always about human beings. It is so easy to be caught up in a mass movement or a mass feeling and to demonize other people, but political actions have a real (often unpredictable) impact others. Yet even in the midst of political turmoil, life still goes on. Zhensheng's photographs of the natural world, his changing personal style in his self-portraits, and the small, humble details that individuate different characters show that even though the subjects were living through a historical event, they were still fundamentally people 'just like you and me' -- the viewers.

But the images of collective denunciation, and mass political demonstrations (including the ritualized dances, waving of banners with slogans, and symbolic wearing of similar, peasant clothing) show quite vividly how a mentality of groupthink was created during the Cultural Revolution. These images suggest that it was joyous to be the same as everyone else and to think the same, as an antidote to people's confusion under difficult circumstances. Questioning the Cultural Revolution meant social banishment from the comfort of the collective. The sameness of the figures in panoramic views, contrasted with the quirkiness of many of the portraiture (particularly the self-portraiture) shows the strength of the individual endures, in contrast to the face of the collective, but sustaining that individuality can be a struggle. Zhensheng's individuality clearly lived on in his art.

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