Wikipedia Deep Dive

Struggle session

12 min read

Imagine being dragged in front of a crowd of hundreds—maybe thousands—of people who once respected you. Your students. Your colleagues. Your neighbors. They force you to kneel. Someone shoves your head down while wrenching your arms behind your back and up toward the ceiling, a position called "jetting" because it makes your body look like an airplane. The pain is excruciating. People you've known for years take turns screaming accusations at you. Some spit. Some throw things. The session might last hours.

This was the struggle session, one of the most psychologically devastating weapons in the arsenal of Maoist China.

The Architecture of Public Humiliation

Struggle sessions—called pīdòu dàhuì in Chinese, which roughly translates to "criticism and struggle meeting"—were orchestrated public spectacles designed to break individuals and bind communities to the state through shared violence. The term combines pīpàn, meaning "to criticize and judge," with dòuzhēng, meaning "to fight and contest." Together, they convey something like "inciting the spirit of judgment and fighting."

These weren't spontaneous mob actions. They were carefully choreographed performances with staging, scripts, and planted agitators who knew exactly when to whip the crowd into greater fury. The targets had already been selected. The outcome was predetermined. The audience was there to participate in a ritual of collective condemnation.

The most common victims were labeled "class enemies"—a deliberately vague category that could encompass almost anyone. Landlords. Intellectuals. Former business owners. People who wore glasses. People who spoke foreign languages. People whose parents had been wealthy. The accusation didn't need to be true. It just needed to stick.

The Physical Vocabulary of Degradation

The sessions developed their own brutal visual language. Victims wore tall dunce caps, sometimes several feet high, bearing their names crossed out with red X marks—the traditional Chinese symbol for death or elimination. Signs hung around their necks proclaimed their supposed crimes.

Hair shaving was common, but not the clean kind. The tormentors would shave only part of the head, creating what was called yīnyáng tóu—the yin-yang head—a deliberately humiliating asymmetry that marked victims visibly for weeks afterward.

Then there was "jetting," perhaps the most physically punishing of the standard techniques. Guards would force the victim to bend forward at the waist while pulling their arms up and back behind them, sometimes for hours. The position—reminiscent of the medieval torture called strappado—causes intense shoulder and back pain and can result in permanent injury. The name came from the victim's silhouette, which looked vaguely like a jet aircraft.

But the physical pain was almost secondary. The real damage was psychological.

Why Struggle Sessions Worked

The genius—if such a dark word applies—of the struggle session lay in its ability to accomplish multiple political goals simultaneously.

First, it demonstrated the party's absolute power. Anyone could be targeted. No status, no achievement, no personal connection provided protection. The message was clear: resistance is futile, and the party will destroy you publicly if necessary.

Second, it neutralized potential rivals and critics. Once someone had been "struggled against," their reputation was shattered. Even if they survived, they could never again command respect or organize opposition.

Third—and this is the most insidious part—it made everyone complicit. When you're in that crowd shouting accusations, raising your fist, perhaps even striking the victim, you've crossed a line. You've participated in violence. You've invested in the system. You can't easily oppose a regime whose crimes you've personally helped commit.

The Communist Party of China in those years represented only a tiny fraction of China's population. Struggle sessions helped transform passive acceptance into active collaboration.

Designed to Shatter Trust

What made struggle sessions uniquely corrosive was their attack on intimate relationships. The sessions were typically held in workplaces, schools, and local meeting halls—places where victims would face people they knew personally.

Students were expected to denounce their teachers. Children were manipulated into exposing their parents. Spouses were pressured to betray each other. Friends were forced to compete in proving their loyalty by delivering the harshest accusations against someone they had loved.

This wasn't incidental. It was the point.

By weaponizing personal relationships, struggle sessions systematically destroyed the social fabric. If your own child might denounce you tomorrow, whom can you trust? If your spouse might be forced to testify against you, what can you safely say at home? The result was a society atomized into suspicious, isolated individuals whose only safe relationship was their public loyalty to Chairman Mao and the party.

From Soviet Criticism to Chinese Spectacle

The roots of struggle sessions trace back to the Soviet Union in the 1920s, where "criticism and self-criticism" became a standard Communist Party practice. The idea was that party members should publicly acknowledge their errors and submit to collective judgment.

Chinese communists initially resisted importing this practice. It conflicted with a deeply rooted Chinese cultural concept: "saving face." Public humiliation was considered one of the worst things one person could inflict on another. The social shame could follow a family for generations.

But by the 1930s, the practice had taken hold within Chinese Communist Party meetings. And the party discovered something: the very power of "face" in Chinese culture made public humiliation an extraordinarily effective weapon. What might be merely embarrassing in another context became existentially devastating in China.

The Land Reform Rehearsal

The struggle session found its first mass application during the Land Reform Movement of the late 1940s and early 1950s. In areas controlled by the Communists during the Chinese Civil War, the party encouraged peasants to "speak bitterness"—to publicly accuse landlords of past wrongs, real or invented.

These sùkǔ sessions, as they were called, served as auditions. The most dramatic accusations, the most emotionally compelling testimonies, would be incorporated into larger, scripted "mass accusation meetings." Party cadres coached participants on what to say and when to say it. The best performers got featured roles.

Then came the escalation. Party officials pushed peasants to move from words to actions—to strike the landlords, to participate directly in violence. This wasn't uncontrolled mob justice. It was carefully managed complicity. By inducing peasants to bloody their own hands, the party ensured their loyalty. They had nowhere else to go.

The violence spiraled. What began as public accusation sessions evolved into mass killings. Estimates of landlords killed during Land Reform vary widely, but most historians agree the number reached into the millions.

The Anti-Rightist Campaign

In 1957, Mao Zedong launched what became known as the Hundred Flowers Campaign, appearing to invite open criticism of the Communist Party. "Let a hundred flowers bloom," he declared, "let a hundred schools of thought contend."

Some intellectuals took the invitation at face value. They criticized bureaucratic inefficiency, party privilege, and restrictions on free expression. They had no idea they were walking into a trap.

Within months, Mao reversed course and launched the Anti-Rightist Campaign. Those who had spoken up were now labeled "rightists"—enemies of the revolution who had revealed their true colors. Struggle sessions became the primary tool for their destruction.

At least 550,000 people were officially designated rightists, according to statistics the party itself released after Mao's death. Many historians believe the real number was far higher. Victims lost their jobs, were sent to labor camps, or were "struggled against" repeatedly until they broke—or died.

The lesson was clear: even when the party invites criticism, offering it is suicide.

The Cultural Revolution: Struggle Sessions Unleashed

Everything before 1966 was prologue.

The Cultural Revolution, which Mao launched to regain power after the disasters of the Great Leap Forward, transformed struggle sessions from a political tool into something approaching a national sport. For a decade, from 1966 to 1976, they became a ubiquitous feature of Chinese life.

Mao's weapon was the Red Guards—bands of young people, mostly students, who were encouraged to attack anyone deemed insufficiently revolutionary. Their targets were the "Five Black Categories": landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements, and rightists. But in practice, anyone could be accused of being a "class enemy" if they somehow offended Maoist orthodoxy.

Schools became slaughterhouses. Teachers and professors faced daily struggle sessions conducted by their own students. Intellectuals were labeled fǎndòng xuéshù quánwēi—"counter-revolutionary academic authorities"—and subjected to systematic torture. They were even called "Stinking Old Ninth," placing them at the bottom of a nine-category hierarchy of class enemies, below even landlords and capitalists.

The statistics are staggering. According to one source citing classified official data, nearly two million Chinese were killed during the Cultural Revolution, and another 125 million were either persecuted or "struggled against." Even if these numbers are significantly overstated, the scale of violence was almost incomprehensible.

Red August

August 1966 in Beijing became known simply as Red August. It was the opening crescendo of Cultural Revolution violence, and it demonstrated what struggle sessions looked like when all restraints were removed.

Lao She, one of China's most celebrated writers, was dragged to a struggle session at a Confucian temple on August 23rd. He was beaten for hours. The next day, his body was found floating in a lake. Whether he committed suicide or was murdered remains disputed.

Chen Mengjia, a brilliant archaeologist and paleographer who had helped decipher ancient Chinese bronze inscriptions, was repeatedly "struggled against" for the crime of having studied abroad and opposing simplified Chinese characters. He hanged himself in September.

Zhou Zuoren, a major literary figure and brother of the even more famous Lu Xun, was repeatedly harassed by Red Guards. He wrote to local police requesting euthanasia. They never replied. He died the following May.

These weren't nobodies. They were among China's most accomplished intellectuals. Their prominence made them targets, not shields.

When Leaders Became Victims

The Cultural Revolution eventually consumed even senior Communist Party leaders. Liu Shaoqi, who had been President of China and Mao's designated successor, was labeled "the biggest capitalist-roader" and subjected to brutal struggle sessions. He died in 1969 under house arrest, denied medical care, lying in his own waste on a concrete floor.

Deng Xiaoping, who would later lead China's economic transformation, was also "struggled against" and purged. He survived, partly through luck and partly through political skill, but his son Deng Pufang was thrown from a window during a struggle session and left permanently paralyzed.

Peng Dehuai, the marshal who had commanded Chinese forces in the Korean War, was struggled against more than a hundred times. He died in 1974, his body covered with wounds from repeated beatings.

The revolution devoured its own.

The End of an Era

Mao died in September 1976. Within weeks, the so-called Gang of Four—radical leaders who had driven the Cultural Revolution's worst excesses—were arrested. A period of reassessment began, known as Bōluàn Fǎnzhèng, roughly "eliminating chaos and returning to normal."

Deng Xiaoping, survivor of multiple purges, emerged as China's paramount leader by December 1978. One of his first acts was to prohibit struggle sessions and other forms of violent political campaigns. The party's focus would shift, he declared, from "class struggle" to "economic construction."

The struggle session didn't entirely disappear from Chinese life, but it ceased to be an instrument of state terror. The party never fully acknowledged the magnitude of what had happened—to do so would undermine its legitimacy—but it quietly buried the practice.

The Iconic Image

Today, the struggle session has become perhaps the single most recognizable visual symbol of the Cultural Revolution. When filmmakers want to immediately signal that era to audiences, they show a struggle session: the kneeling victim, the dunce cap, the sign with the crossed-out name, the raised fists, the screaming crowd.

Two acclaimed Chinese films brought these images to international audiences: Farewell My Concubine in 1993 and To Live in 1994. Both were banned or heavily censored in mainland China precisely because of their unflinching depictions of Cultural Revolution violence.

In 2024, Netflix's adaptation of Liu Cixin's science fiction novel The Three-Body Problem sparked controversy by opening with a brutal struggle session scene. The fictional physicist Ye Zhetai is beaten to death by Red Guards in front of his daughter at Tsinghua University—one of China's most prestigious institutions.

The scene may have been inspired by a real person: Ye Qisong, an actual physicist who founded Tsinghua's Department of Physics and was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. He shares the same family name as Liu's fictional character.

Chinese social media criticized the scene for showing China in a negative light. But Liu Cixin himself had approved the depiction. He had originally intended to open his novel the same way, moving the scenes to the middle of the book only on his Chinese publisher's advice to avoid government censorship.

When asked why the Cultural Revolution features so prominently in a science fiction story, Liu's answer was revealing:

"The plot required a scenario where a modern Chinese person becomes completely disillusioned with humanity, and no other event in modern Chinese history seemed appropriate except the Cultural Revolution."

The Struggle Session's Echoes

The struggle session wasn't unique to China. Similar practices emerged wherever Communist parties took power. Cuba developed "acts of repudiation"—organized mobs that would surround the homes of people trying to emigrate and hurl insults and objects at them for hours.

George Orwell anticipated the psychology in Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949, the same year the People's Republic of China was founded. His "Two Minutes Hate" captures the deliberately induced collective rage, the way authoritarian systems channel fear and aggression toward designated enemies.

Some observers have drawn uncomfortable parallels to contemporary online dynamics: the pile-ons, the demands for public apology and self-criticism, the career destruction, the way participation in denunciation signals tribal loyalty. The comparison is imperfect—Twitter mobs don't physically torture people—but the psychological mechanisms of public humiliation and forced confession resonate across contexts.

What the struggle session revealed, more than anything, was the terrifying plasticity of human social behavior. Given the right circumstances—ideological fervor, institutional pressure, fear of becoming a target oneself—ordinary people will do extraordinary violence to their neighbors, their teachers, even their own parents.

That's perhaps the most important lesson the struggle session has to teach: not just what Maoism did to China, but what any society might become when it decides that some people are enemies who deserve destruction, and that destroying them publicly is virtuous.