Cultural Revolution

Variously tender and tough-minded, Xiao-Yen Wang's loosely autobiographical The Monkey Kid traces episodes in the life of a spirited nine-year-old girl growing up in the midst of the Cultural Revolution. Set in a 1970 Beijing of stark, slabby apartments, dingy side streets and doctrinaire schools, it celebrates independence and self-will, depicting how Chairman Mao's regimental reforms impacted on one child and her family. Fu Di, a beguiling actress with short pigtails and a supremely effective, natural style, stars as Shi-Wei, whose playfulness belies a hard home life: With her father shipped to the country and her mother often away, the girl and her 11-year-old sister fend for themselves, cooking meals, doing homework and reporting dutifully to school.

The voice was hollow and haunting, calling out to Yang Rui in her dream like a faceless stranger whispering through a heavy fog. "Zhang hei hei!" - "Zhang is black! Black!" Yang woke with a start and lay in bed wondering. Who was talking to her? Zhang is not an unusual name in China, but she didn't know anyone who had it. And "Black!" What nonsense was that? For days, the voice echoed in Yang's mind as she went about her barnyard chores on a vast commune in northeastern China.

The wife of a Dickinson College librarian has been released from custody in Beijing, more than three months after she and her husband were detained by Chinese officials on accusations of spying. Helen Yao was freed last Tuesday and arrived Friday in Carlisle, Pa., she said in a telephone interview yesterday. Her husband, Yongyi Song, is still being detained. Yao, who speaks limited English, said she was happy to be home and had missed her daughter and friends. "I feel tired," she said.

You would think that a period piece that celebrates the accomplishments of a Chinese-born-and-trained ballet dancer would have a ready-made audience in the country where it was filmed and set. But "Mao's Last Dancer" won't be showing in Chinese cinemas any time soon. (The film opens today in Philadelphia at the Ritz Five.) "The Chinese government doesn't want anyone reminded that Chairman Mao was a lunatic," chuckled Bruce Beresford, the film's blunt Australian director. "China stopped making movies about the Cultural Revolution as if they want to forget it," said Joan Chen, the Chinese-born actress who plays the mother who gives up her son to be raised and trained by the state during China's turbulent Cultural Revolution of the '60s and '70s.

The old guard gathered yesterday to mark the Chinese Communist Party's 65th anniversary, in what appeared to be a last hurrah for those being pushed aside so young technocrats can lead a "new revolution" of economic change in China. Most of the 20,000 at the celebration in the Great Hall of the People have retired from leading posts in the party, government and army under Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping's abolition of life tenure, the official news agency Xinhua reported. The tone of the gathering was set by General Secretary Hu Yaobang, who said in a major speech published in newspapers yesterday that an aging and confused Mao Tse-tung brought "catastrophe" to China by launching the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution.

[Sony founder Akio] Morita . . . was more than just a spectacularly successful businessman; in many ways, he was a Promethean exemplar who wrested the torch of technological innovation from the Western world - which had unleashed on [Japan] the most terrifying and subjugatory of its inventions in the form of the atomic bomb . . .. The Walkman and the other electronic products pioneered by Sony ushered a cultural revolution whose battlefield was the microchip. No longer would technology, with its attendant dreams and nightmares, remain the unquestioning creature of an Occidental Prospero; the so-called Orient had cast aside the mask of sloth and superstition fashioned for it by the West to lay competitive claim to the rewards and hazards of technological innovation and enterprise.

In the Cultural Revolution we were naive and easily fooled . . . The students this time are not being easily manipulated . . . Deep down this is different from the Cultural Revolution because it is about principles, about the whole system and not just between individual leaders. - Former Red Guard Zhang Wei Twenty-three years ago, the winds of student protest howled through China like a typhoon. Unleashed by Mao Tse-tung himself, who fretted in his later years that he was losing control of his country and his revolution, young Red Guards raged through the countryside and city streets.

DENG XIAOPING: 84 years old; a hero of the communist revolution, he dominates the party and government even though, since 1987, he has held only one formal post: chairman of the Central Military Commission. The post reflects a key to his influence, his grip on the military. Humiliated by radical Red Guards during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution sparked by Mao Tse- tung, Deng came back to lead the party and China toward free-market economic reforms and a measure of political liberalization.

Xie Xide, a Chinese physicist, weathered her country's convulsive, anti- intellectual Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s to become president of Fudan University in Shanghai, one of the most prestigious schools in the People's Republic of China. Today, said Xie, 66, her country is banking on a young generation of intellectuals to build its future. But problems such as widespread illiteracy, the loss of library materials destroyed in the Cultural Revolution, and student impatience for democratic reforms continue to challenge a smooth modernization, she said.

It's possible that those reptilian embryos, the ones in the Alien movies, those slimy, spew-yellow coils of extraterrestrial gristle that latch onto your face, are there for more than shock value. It's conceivable, as writer and publisher E. Michael Jones believes, that they are a cynical crypto- leftist metaphor for the human fetus - the unborn as indefensible monster. It's also conceivable that the O.J. Dream Team will go pro bono and that Le Bec-Fin will open a lunch counter at Wawa.

There is a rumor in my mother's family that we are direct descendants of Genghis Khan, the 13th-century Mongol conqueror. In reality, we are most likely related to Khan's General Subutai, a military genius who orchestrated the Mongol's clean sweep of 32 nations. With cunning, diplomacy, and the use of huge stone-throwers, Subutai is said to have overrun more territory than any other general in history, and, along with Genghis Khan, paved the way for the opening of direct contact between East Asia and the West.

Daniel K. Gardner is a professor of history and the director of the program in East Asian studies at Smith College and the author of ChinaMusings.com Mao Tse-tung, Confucius, and Louis Vuitton have been mixing it up lately on China's most renowned stage: Tiananmen Square. For decades, Mao's portrait has hung over the Tiananmen Gate, at the entrance to the Forbidden City, even as his embalmed body has lain in the mausoleum built immediately after his death in the center of the square.

You would think that a period piece that celebrates the accomplishments of a Chinese-born-and-trained ballet dancer would have a ready-made audience in the country where it was filmed and set. But "Mao's Last Dancer" won't be showing in Chinese cinemas any time soon. (The film opens today in Philadelphia at the Ritz Five.) "The Chinese government doesn't want anyone reminded that Chairman Mao was a lunatic," chuckled Bruce Beresford, the film's blunt Australian director. "China stopped making movies about the Cultural Revolution as if they want to forget it," said Joan Chen, the Chinese-born actress who plays the mother who gives up her son to be raised and trained by the state during China's turbulent Cultural Revolution of the '60s and '70s.

Pulling open a heavy glass door, Terri Sun enters the cool marble lobby of Phoenixtec Power Co., one of many new factories in this runaway metropolis near Hong Kong. She hurries past a bank of clocks set for Tokyo, Beijing, New Delhi, Paris, and Cleveland - the last a nod to the factory's new owner, the Eaton Corp. Terri has a long day of meetings. She needs to talk to the plant manager, a transplant from Taiwan; an Eaton colleague from New Jersey; and the on-site Chinese controller.

When the earthquake hit, Paula Silver felt the table rattle and the room sway in Chongqing. Then a Chinese colleague told everyone to flee. "Suddenly, I hear lots of screams and running, and so I figure we ought to run," said Silver, a Widener University administrator who was in China last month as part of an educational exchange program. "I'm not quite sure why we're running. And then it occurs to me: They think the building's going to collapse. " Fortunately for Silver, the Chongqing buildings didn't suffer serious structural damage in the May 12 disaster.

BEIJING - A cacophony of piano music spills from the 14 lesson rooms at the Piano City music store as a big digital clock in a waiting area counts down the time on lessons. On this Sunday, more than 100 students will file in and out for music lessons, including 11-year-old Jesse Cheng. Her parents say families in China are keen to train their children in music, especially piano or violin, to give them an edge in life. "This may be helpful in the future," said Frank Cheng, who owns an information-technology company.

In a hilltop mansion on this tiny tourist island off the southern port of Xiamen, Yin Chengzong, 67, plunges into the Yellow River Concerto on his Steinway grand piano. Almost 40 years ago Yin, with three others, composed this anthem of the Cultural Revolution, universally maligned by Western critics but deeply beloved by millions here. As he plays, a student from Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music - back home in China for a month of study with Yin - waits for a lesson. So does a 14-year-old Beijing boy, whose father calls Yin "a master of Chinese piano.

Twenty-five years ago this month, America tuned out. A midnight-blue-and-silver brick with astonishing sound debuted in July 1979. Called the Soundabout, Sony's TPS-L2 cassette player was an investment at $199.95. It didn't record or come with a speaker. But it was sociable: Two could listen at once through a pair of headphone jacks, and an orange button called the Hotline let you talk over the music. Quickly, Sony scrapped the name, and went with what it called the pocket-size player in the Japanese market: Walkman.

A MONTH AGO, the Chinese government, infamous for its "one-child policy," reported the largest gender disparity among newborns of any country in the world - parts of the country are reporting birth ratios of 144 boys for every 100 girls. Parents who want to know the sex of their baby can visit a clinic and plunk down four dollars. If they already have one girl, allowing them to try for a second pregnancy, and they discover their next child will also be a girl, they abort the female fetus 92 percent of the time.

The playwright Amiri Baraka was there. The TV personality Tavis Smiley was there. The singer Jill Scott was there. And the rhythm of repetition, spoken and sung, was in the air. The gathering of about 100 people on a North Philadelphia lot shortly after noon yesterday suggested that poetry lives not only in books and memories. They were there to honor Sonia Sanchez, 67, the nationally acclaimed poet, activist, and professor emeritus of English and women's studies at Temple University.