He has since become a lawyer, active in raising awareness of the Cultural Revolution’s victims and fighting to have his mother’s grave turned into a memorial.įrom ordinary peasants to high-ranking party members, nobody in China was truly safe during the Cultural Revolution. With the help of his uncle Feng Meikai, Hongbing was able to influence his province’s legal system to clear his mother’s name in 1980.

In the years following his mother’s death, Hongbing realized what a terrible thing he and his father had done. Neither Hongbing nor his father attended the execution.

For the crime of “attacking Chairman Mao Tse-tung,” Fang was executed by firing squad on April 11, 1970. She was then taken away by a soldier but not before Hongbing beat her on orders from his father. While home one day in 1970, Fang angered her husband and her son Zhang Hongbing after criticizing Mao Tse-tung.įang’s family duly reported her to the authorities, and she set the family portrait of Mao on fire in retaliation. Like her “capitalist-roader” husband, she was put in detention multiple times and subjected to struggle sessions by the authorities. Her husband was then accused a few months later of being a capitalist roader, a vague Maoist slur which referred to somebody who was working to betray the ideals of the Communist Party and lead China to a capitalist system.ĭue to a past accusation of her father being a Nationalist spy, it wasn’t long before Fang was suspected of being a dissident as well. Fang’s enthusiasm, however, began to wane after her daughter got sick and died following a trip she made to see a Mao Tse-tung rally in Beijing. Fang Zhongmou, a Communist Party member and veteran of the People’s Liberation Army, felt proud when her two older children got caught up in the furor of the Cultural Revolution and became Red Guards.

Communist struggle session