Blog Assignment #5

I was born in China, a land which is full of conflicts and contraries. We have only one party, the Chinese Communist. I always thought that what people tld me was exactly what happened in the history. I did not realize that there may be different versions of history untill I have met my high school history teacher. He was born in the 1960s in China, which is the worst decade in Communist China. Because of the Great Porletarian Cultural Revolution, he lost the chance to get educated. during the ten years revolution, he was forced to stay at home to work at his scholl age instead of get trained. Fortunately,the political movement came to an end at his 30s, and he took the Unversity Entrance Examination. Finally, he got his bachelar degree in Shanghai . At that time, people who graduated from college could usually get a promising job. However, the moment he thought that everything would turn bright, another movement spread over the whole China. At that time, as a graduated student, he simply thought that ideology and truth was everything. He took a part in the movement, even though the party promised that it was free to say anything, he still got caught and was send to the jail as a rebeliant.

On my history text book, I could only see some description about the Great Porletarian Cultural Revolution and nothing about the second student movement in the 1980s. Most of teenagers of my age have no idea about the Student Revolution in the 1980s. And our teachers before never talked about it, neither do our parents. When it comes to the 1960s, text book tells us that it was a mistake and nothing more. We did not know exactly what it is like, all the information we got about the terrible 10 years revolution is that the Mao made a wrong decision and the whole nation fell in a great depression. No conclusion could be made about the two movements. And that was the biggest our current history text book has, according to my history teacher's words.

He always told us that people did not wirte history, in turn, it was history made people. Only because of some mistakes that the history book seldom mentioned, he and his peer lost their happiness that they were supposed to have. I felt pretty sorry about what happened on him, but I also realized that history is not what people did, it was what been said by peopel who is in power.

Lisha