Withered Flowers

Withered Flowers reflects the whole process of the Socialist Education Movement, also called “four clean-ups” movement, in the early sixties. Mao Zedong intended to use the Socialist Education Movement to strike at his political enemies, the capitalist-roaders. However, the movement met with strong resistance from Mao’s political opponents and thus it ended up in failure. The novel, through vivid, faithful and in-depth description of the complete progress of the Socialist Education Movement step by step, succeeds in presenting to the readers a panorama of the Chinese socialist countryside at that time. It also brings to light a full picture of how the work teams dispatched by the Communist Party committees at various levels ruthlessly persecute the ordinary production team cadres, and the miserable and tragic lot of the daughters and daughters-in-law of the former landlords and rich peasants. The Socialist Education Movement was a historical period not to be ignored during Mao’s twenty-seven-year rule over China. As its scale was so large, its time was so long, its struggle was so relapsing and its targets of struggle were so vast in number, it was only next to the Cultural Revolution. That people have not attached due importance to it is because the countless people who were hurt and seriously humiliated in the movement were the insignificant production team cadres. As a matter of fact the Cultural Revolution may be regarded as the continuation of the Socialist Education Movement whereas the Socialist Education Movement, the skirmish of the Cultural Revolution. There has never been a literary work that so systematically and fully reflects the Socialist Education Movement so far, and thus this novel is all the more rare and valuable.