The school was definitely the center of all activities. Not only academic life, but also social and political affairs are largely held within the school grounds. Students rarely visited each other's homes because there was little to set one home apart from another. Much more common was a group outing to a nearby park or to the movies (20 cents for the most expensive seats). Sports played a very important role, and the school grounds were alive with activity from soccer to ping-pong until night fall. No nightlife existed, and even if it had, nobody would have been able to take time away from the heavy homework load.

All of these activities, including studies, took second place to politics. Young Pioneer meetings, discussions on politics and the Marxist classics, reports on current affairs by the Party secretary of the school, group readings of People's Daily (Renmin Ribao) editorials--these were frequent activities, and attendance was enforced by social pressure.

When a political movement became a nation-wide campaign, such as the "Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom" campaign, or the "Anti-Rightist" movement, or the steel drive, even classes would go by the boards; the schools joined factories and offices and farms in round the clock activity.

The "Hundred Flowers" campaign took its name from a speech by Chairman Mao in which he called for public criticism of all aspects of the revolution: "...let a hundred flowers bloom, let a thousand ideas compete."

During this movement, students wrote criticism of the school administration and pasted them up on the walls around the school grounds. After a few days, every inch of open space in the school was covered over more than once, and people began to climb on ladders to paste up criticisms. The soccer field was draped with clothslines to supported the flood of messages. When the public address system announced the location of especially good suggestions, the students and teachers crowded around from all over the school. The administration officials spent hours going from poster to poster, taking notes.

During the steel campaign, we dug up the basketball courts to make small furnaces, and students worked alongside teachers in shifts, day and night. I remember pulling a cart-load of scrap iron from a railway siding to the school (probably about ten miles), catching a few hours of sleep on a desk, and then taking my turn at the furnaces. The slogan then was "in the furnace we temper steel, outside we temper people."

Regular Work Program

In calmer times, students were still required to take part in manual labor, though not at such a frantic pace. One of the six school days every week was spent in a local factory, doing some unskilled task. My class was set to work polishing shutter pieces for a local camera assembly plant.

When digging of the Peking-Tientsin canal reached a point a few blocks away from our school we spent our work days with pick and shovel and bamboo carrying-poles. Later, we went to plant trees as part of a barricade against the fierce winds of North China, helped the people in a nearby village clear their fields of corn stalks, and finally spent a week in a commune, helping farmers dig a reservoir that would double as a fish-breeding pond.

This account may have painted a grim picture for Harvard students: the long hours, the hard work, and the strait-laced morals. What is missing is the exuberance of a whole society making itself anew, the almost frantic enthusiasm with which the Chinese go about their tasks. This must be lived to be appreciated; to my fellow students in Peking the hardships were the joys of creation