Part I of this first-hand account of China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR, 1966-1976) covered the origins of a village metal shop that made products to improve conditions for fishermen, tractor drivers, and textile workers. It also opened the story of an industrial breakthrough by a collective led by a worker with little formal education.
This memoir shows the need for further advances in the international revolutionary movement. Wages and profits must be eliminated, along with the special oppression of women. Above all, we must create a worker-run society based on one unwavering principle: From each according to commitment, to each according to need.
The defeat of the GPCR and the reversal of the Chinese revolution signaled the end of the old communist movement. These setbacks plunged the international working class into the Dark Night we have struggled through for more than two generations.
But Dark Night will have its end. World War I gave rise to the Bolshevik Revolution. World War II gave birth to the Chinese Revolution. The Progressive Labor Party, organizing across all borders, plans to make the next imperialist war the last one, with worldwide communist revolution.

In the summer of 1973, shortly after graduating from high school, I was one of fourteen young people hired temporarily for the contract for the two huge ventilation blowers. Based on Wang Xuejin’s innovative idea, our first job was to make an underground blacksmith furnace. Then we made a frame to hold a big ring of thick sheet metal, with a horizontal bar over the top. By pushing the bar, we could turn the ring around.
Opposite the furnace, Wang made a huge cast-iron mold with just the right curve. After heating part of the ring, we turned the horizontal bar to move the metal plate being shaped back and forth to the mold. Two workers struck the heated metal with large wooden hammers. Then we repeated the process. Along with Wang and two other senior technicians, the young temporary workers worked in three shifts, around the clock. We were able to complete the two horn-shaped parts in a matter of weeks.
When the technicians from Qingdao came back to gauge our progress, they were shocked to see what we had accomplished. They said that Wang’s idea was brilliant and Wang was a genius.
For two months the seventeen of us worked continuously on the two blowers, and eventually finished them ahead of schedule. Working with Wang and others, I learned a lot in that time. Upon finishing the job, I joined the other temporary workers to return to work in the fields. But one month later, I was rehired as a permanent worker. The factory leaders wanted me to learn how to operate one of the new lathes the factory had assembled.
The usual training time for a lathe operator was three months. But after one week, I was able to run it on my own. My teacher, Guan Xuming, the leader of the lathe unit, was pleased with my progress and commended me to Zhao Licheng, the village party leader in charge of industrial operations.
I was on the job for two months when one of my coworkers collapsed and was rushed to the hospital. Zhao Youshou was in his forties, and the doctors determined that he needed a blood transfusion for an operation on his stomach. It was a busy time, and most people in the village were out harvesting the fall crops and planting the winter wheat.
I went to the hospital with twenty others to donate blood. As it turned out, I was the only one with a matching blood type for Zhao. The doctor took 750 cc’s of blood from me for the operation — I felt dizzy, and my friends had to wheel me home. But I was very happy that Zhao’s life was saved.
A Factory Education
I stayed home for one week. When I returned to work, I was transferred from the lathe to assembling the transmission boxes for the fishing boats. I had a lot to learn. The most essential parts were various gears. To resist wearing, the surface of the gears needed to be as hard as possible, but not to the point they would break too easily. I checked out several books from the local library about gear manufacture in other countries, including the U.S., Germany, and Japan. I experimented with different heating methods and coolants, tested the results, and after discussions with many colleagues settled upon the best methods for making the gears.
In my first month on the job, we made seven transmission boxes. In the second month, the five of us made 14 units; in the third month, 21 units; in the fourth month, 28 — one unit a day. The entire factory watched our progress with excitement. We tested the units in the yard day and night before delivering them to the government. The job was on my mind all the time. I even found a solution to one technical problem while I was dreaming!
Our team earned a lot of profit for the factory that year; we created value calculated at 13 cents per work point. Each worker in our village made 1.3 yuan a day, comparable to the earnings of urban industrial workers. We also got grain, vegetables, fruits, and cooking oils from the collective at a much lower price. Everybody in the village was happy.
Each year the village chose model workers, including one person designated as standard-bearer. Wang Xuejin was one of those who’d previously received this special honor. This year I was chosen.
It was also the time to elect the next year’s factory leadership team. I was only 19 years old, but the village Party committee asked me to be a candidate for factory manager. I was elected. The former manager, Guan Dunyan, was transferred to lead a group of welders in assembling overhead steel cranes in Qingdao.
A Step Toward Collectivity
My new position was challenging, but the Party committee and many workers in the factory encouraged and helped me. My job was made easier by the factory’s distribution system. Manager or not, everybody working in the factory earned a set amount of work points. It was a time rate — men generally got ten points a day, women eight points a day, children five points. Individuals’ daily point rates could be adjusted at the annual team meetings, but never more than plus or minus 20 percent of the basic rate.
A productive year in the factory would raise the value of our work points and be reflected in the end-of-year distribution. Everybody worked to advance the collective benefit rather than individual interests.
As the manager of a factory with 173 workers, I went to work earlier than everybody else and usually came back home later. I had to make sure all the equipment was functioning in the factory and that every worker was assigned the right job and had the appropriate tools. Whenever there was a problem in any unit, the leaders came to me.
During the decade of the Cultural Revolution, there were more than ten thousand high school graduates in the commune who were eligible to take the college entrance examination. When the news reached my village that I had passed, many of my friends were excited for me. In fact, I was torn.
Fu Xisan, an old colleague of mine from the factory advised me not to go. It was more exciting to be a factory manager than a teacher, he said. He added that his third daughter, who’d worked with me on the transmission boxes, was in love with me. I’d been secretly admiring her as well. If I stayed in the village, Fu said, he would allow his daughter to marry me. But if I went to college, everything was off.
On March 8, 1978, I left the village to study English at Qufu Teachers College.

In Part III, the author returns to his village and sees the dramatic repercussions of the reversal of the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution.