From the International Herald Tribune:
The first was an ambitious college professor whose “big character poster,” displayed on the grounds of Beijing University, was said to be the spark that set off a prairie fire of violent purges and denunciations, which quickly spread from the campus across the entire nation.
Her opposite number in the history of China’s most self-destructive hour, the Cultural Revolution, was a student of German at Beijing’s elite Foreign Language Institute. She was selected to attend one of the earliest mass rallies of the period at Tiananmen Square, when the cult of Mao Zedong was being whipped into a frenzy, and all the talk was of class warfare. [Full text]
For more on Nie Yuanzi, see here.
