Xiu Xiu's Influence

If I were a young Chinese girl (born in 1975 in Beijing) who was confronted with the Tiananmen Square demonstrations after hearing Xiu Xiu's story, how would I react?

Xiu Xiu's generation grew up in the 1960s, in the midst of the Cultural Revolution. The film shows how idealistic young people soaked up the ideals of the revolution. Waving Mao's little red books and singing revolutionary songs, youth like Xiu Xiu seemed feverish to want to break with old traditions, old customs and old behaviour, to move China into the glorious future promised by Mao. Before Xiu Xiu understood the reality of the re-education campaign, she and her friends were excited about being send to the countryside, they board the buses laughing and full of expectaqtions. When my generation was born, the Cultural Revolution was dead and by the time I became a teenager, Mao was dead and Deng Xiaoping was beginning to reform China's economy and opened a window to the West.

In 1989, when students questioned the high unemployment rate that Deng's modernization of the unprofitable state-run businesses brought, the rapidly increasing cost of living and high corruption among party members, I would have been thirteen, just a little younger then Xiu Xiu. I think that the idealism of Xiu Xiu's generation had evaporated and many young people of my age were looking to the consumerism of the West. Had I been a little older and experienced more of the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, I believe I would have joined the students' demonstrations. But as a 13-year old I don't think I would have had the political knowledge, experience and drive to participate. Xiu Xiu's story probably would have seemed utterly old-fashioned, a morality tale I would not have understood. I would not have understood how the reality of re-education, the removal from everything Xiu Xiu had ever known and had loved (the cultural amenities of city live, her family, her dreams), her experiences of corruption and isolation, could change a young girl to the point where she sees no way out but death.