I once recalled the story of the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer who, after lamenting that he had not spoken-up when the Nazis came to arrest other opponents, concluded with the line "when they came for me, there was no one left to speak." China in the years of Mao Yang-jin, usually called the Lesser Mao outside of China, was the place where Bonhoeffer's reflection became a metaphor for our lives. There are some who speculate that, had the Lesser Mao not mis-ruled in his Great Uncle's name, we might have been a billion by the end of the twentieth century, or close to that number. If, as some say, that around two hundred million died between 1975 and 1982, and we add to those the uncounted millions who died in the period of chaos afterward, and those who as a result of this were never born, then we say that more were either killed by his hand, or in the consequence of it, or were never born to a number somewhere near the total number of Americans and Soviets combined who lived in that period.
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By the year 2000 the majority of the Chinese population were under twenty or over eighty, with a great gap in between. Most of the people born between these generations had been killed over the two decades of terror and chaos. (A few lucky ones managed to flee). Almost all of our young people were raised in state orphanages. The concept of family has all but been destroyed on the mainland because so few of the young have ever experienced what a family is. If you meet a Han Chinese of middle age, then the odds are highest that the person had been living in Hong Kong, Taiwan or abroad during this period. Fifty years after the Great Helmsman's Revolution the generation of the revolutionaries and the generation of their children were so reduced that the survivors were regarded with awe, as the supermen who had survived a great storm. Those who had not been driven mad by their experiences, were so scarred inside that they were damaged as humans. I am one of those, perhaps not mad, but I wonder what I might have been had I not steeled myself through the madness.
I once asked a friend what we could call this period, meaning what symbol we could use to describe this time of horrors. He drew a skull. It was correct: the Years of the Skull.