Thread by @robkhenderson

Mao enacted a campaign called "Recalling Bitterness" to battle "lukewarm attitudes" about the socialist revolution

The regime forced people into rituals describing how bad life was before they had been "liberated," aim was to reshape memories of the past
tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.11…

The communist regime appointed writers and artists to retell stories about class struggle "to suit the needs of different political agendas"

Officials of the state would often manipulate these stories, "there was a gradual blurring of the boundary between history and fiction"

Lin Biao (Minister of Defense) stated that "If the past bitterness is not understood, the present sweetness will be unknown. Some might regard today's sweetness as bitterness." The regime aimed to energize grievances to ensure revolutionary fervor did not die

Mao blamed the Great Famine (30M~ starved to death) and its resulting resentments among the survivors on a lack of revolutionary spirit among the people

Regime officials held meetings encouraging peasants to describe how much better life was now compared to "pre-liberation," hoping to convince them that "successes outnumbered failures."

"Only poor peasants were allowed to speak; former landlords and rich peasants were silenced."

Some communist officials would whisper disagreements about Mao's belief that "hatred and struggle" was a permanent and absolute pattern in class relations, and Mao's methods of relentlessly highlighting, distorting, and politicizing peasants' past suffering

The regime would collect "bitterness" reports from peasants which were carefully approved by high-ranking officials for dissemination. Even then, the recollections of bitterness were pretty mundane. Nothing comparable to starving to death or being tortured in a detention center

Important to remember the bad old days

Officials "reiterated the necessity of educating youths who had not experienced life in the old society. Due to their lack of life experiences in the dark old society...young people were vulnerable to the corruption of bourgeois ideology"

Regime newspaper said peasants were "deprived of the opportunity to learn 'correct' and 'scientific' historical knowledge and were largely misled by folklore fabricated by the exploitative class"

Regime viewed historical knowledge as an arena to wage war against "reactionaries"

The regime fabricated stories and published them as fact, including a bizarre myth about a female tenant-farmer locked in a landlord's "water dungeon"

In these stories, landlords & capitalists "were portrayed as extremely brutal and inhumane, particularly to women and children"

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