April 12, 2002

Documenting a Nation's Madness, One Tale at a Time

By BETH McMURTRIE

One August afternoon in 1966, Youqin Wang watched in shock as her 10th-grade classmates began torturing five of their school administrators. On the playground of the elite Girls Middle School, attached to Beijing Teachers University, she saw these students, who had declared themselves among Mao Zedong's Red Guards, splash black ink on the adults and hang large wooden boards scrawled with "counterrevolutionary" around their necks.

Ms. Wang, who was 13 at the time, slipped out of the

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