(Clearwisdom.net) In order to eliminate the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) evil specter, I am writing down a few real-life stories as evidence to expose some of the CCP's crimes committed throughout history.

I did not experience the "Great Leap Forward" and the "Great Cultural Revolution" political movements, but my grandmother and father were witnesses of those eras. Although she has already passed away, the stories my grandmother told me still often ring in my ears. During the "Great Leap Forward" in 1958 and the grave nationwide famine in 1960, people had to flee their homes to look for food, and many died in the wilderness. The death toll was astronomical. My ancestors lived in Hebei Province. At that time, the bark of the trees in the village had all been eaten. The eatery of the commune provided people with paste from rotten potatoes and rough ground millet husks (not chaff). Yet, people were still hungry. At that time, a ladle of one liang (50 grams) was used to fill up a rice bowl. The maximum amount for a person was seven liang. The eatery manager often said, "If you don't work hard, you can only have 7 liang of paste to eat!" People even ate Guanyin Soil [a kind of white clay eaten by famine victims to appease their hunger] and rotting coal. Rotting coal was soft and sticky when chewed, and quite a number of people survived by eating it.

At that time, my grandmother lived a hard life raising my father and his siblings. My father nearly starved to death. His elder sister was still young and her squirming black and blue intestines could be seen through the skin of her abdomen.

One day, my grandmother and a few women were grinding rotten potatoes and millet husks for the eatery. They planned to pile up the finished powder on the ground before packing it into sacks. They started to clear away a space with a broom by sweeping the earth to the side. But a village cadre saw the scene and kicked the earth back. Because my grandmother and her workmates were classified as of the "landlord class," to avoid trouble, none of them dared say a word.

At that time, bean cake and alfalfa were food for domestic animals, not human beings.

One autumn, there was a big harvest of potatoes. A woman working in the field was so hungry that she pressed a potato into the ground with her knees. She planned to get it at midnight. However, a cadre saw this, and hit the woman on the head with big potatoes. The woman fainted, and died two days later after she was taken back home. No one dared to talk about it.

Nowadays people like to praise the good social morality of that period of time. In fact, it was formed under terrifying suppression, not because people really had high moral standards. My grandmother told us that although those were almost all bumper harvest years, nobody knew where the food went, and people had nothing to eat. Every day, people were required to recite, "Prepare for war and prepare for famine, beat down American imperialism and beat down Soviet revisionism!" In the 1980s, people found a lot of food covered with green moss in the caves. They finally realized that their food supplies had been hoarded in sealed caves during those years.

People at that time usually had no physical strength because of hunger. Many starved to death. Their family members pulled their dead bodies outside and covered them with a few spades of soil. Sometimes, the dead body was not fully covered and was half exposed. Almost every day one would see starved bodies. There was a woman who gave birth to a baby. She had no food for herself, and couldn't breast feed the baby; thus the baby died. The woman said to her baby's body, "My child, you are not skinny. As your mother, I hate to throw you away, let me eat you." And indeed she did so. Later, whenever she felt hungry, the woman went to places where people were buried at midnight to cut meat from the dead bodies. She survived this way. In 1988, when my grandmother went back to visit her hometown, she found this woman still alive. From this story, I have a new understanding of the old folks' saying, "When no food is available, even one's own child cannot escape. With no wood to burn, even an ivory bed cannot escape."

It was a time of extremely tight social control. In the evening, when people went to bed at home, there was often someone eavesdropping on their conversations outside their windows. I had a classmate named Zhang in junior high school. His grandfather's brother was sentenced to eight years in prison for speaking only one sentence expressing disbelief in Mao Zedong.

Because my grandmother has already died, and people of her age have already either passed away or moved away, I could not verify the dates and names in the above stories. However, they were all personal experiences of my grandmother. She often mentioned them to us. Due to my grandmother's wise decision and resolution, her children were able to escape, and survive on potherbs and vegetable roots.

When I was young, my grandmother often told me, "People praised the CCP, but I shall never do so in my whole life because it has brought us great disasters. The CCP claimed that in the old days, people were slaves and now they have become masters. Who believes that? On the contrary, people are now really slaves!"

People in the two generations before me have suffered persecution by the CCP, and now I do too. Yet, many people are still unaware of it, and have muddled thoughts. I wrote these stories to let more people see clearly the truly harmful nature of this evil party. To put it plainly, a society controlled by the CCP is a society that will stop at nothing to take advantage of people.

Posting date: 3/23/2005
Original article date: 3/23/2005
Category: Open Forum
Chinese version available at http://minghui.ca/mh/articles/2005/3/2/96398.html

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