Tiger Woman on Wall Street: Winning Business Strategies from Shanghai to New York and Back

CHAPTER 3Growing Up Under Mao

China, 1949–1976

IF CHINESE PEOPLE TOOK PSYCHOLOGY SERIOUSLY, DAD AND most others of his generation would probably have been diagnosed with some sort of anxiety disorder brought on by the traumas of living through one of the most terror-filled times in Chinese history: the Cultural Revolution.

The revolution began in the summer of 1966 as an attempt by Chairman Mao Zedong to reorganize and recentralize power within the government and shore up support among the people. He piggybacked off a student movement at the time, encouraging the antibourgeois beliefs of these passionate students. Within a year, the student movement had transformed into a national mindset in which anyone with “bourgeois” or “anti-Communist” backgrounds ...