ABSTRACT
Liu Shaoqi and his wife, Wang Guangmei, had been an important political figure in her own right. Both had allegedly become enemies of the revolution—like countless "cows, ghosts, snakes, and monsters" who would be attacked during this phase of the Chinese revolution, the last insane act of Mao Zedong's career, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. In places around the country, villagers began meetings performing the loyalty dance to tunes like "Sailing the Seas Depends on the Great Helmsman, Making Revolution Depends on Mao Zedong's Thoughts." In truth, what was being performed in China during these years was a death dance. As the tempo of the death dance sped up, mindless violence and brutality became the beat. Red Guard youths tortured and beat people, especially teachers, principals, intellectuals, and those with bourgeois backgrounds—sometimes to death. Mao and the radicals had to pull back in order to stop the Cultural Revolution's death dance from ending in death for the national polity.
