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The girl with the red armband pushed the prisoner through the frenzied crowd into a familiar space at No. 651 Nanjing Road, a basketball court that now, in early 1967, was being used as a "people's tribunal" for the dispensation of mob justice. "Enemy of the people!" screamed the young athletes, shoving and punching the prisoner as he stumbled past. "Spy! Traitor! Counterrevolutionary!"
The prisoner's head was crudely shaved. His hands were tied behind his back. And his dark eyes seemed so filled with fear that several of the young athletes in attendance had a hard time believing he was Zhu Yong. Could this hunched figure really be the powerful party secretary who, just months before, had ruled over the sports institute with an iron fist? Zhu, who had been locked up in solitary confinement for several months, knew there was no escape from the ritualistic humiliation of these "struggle sessions." All the middle-aged party leader could hope for was to survive. "Enemy of the people, confess your crimes!" The voices came from all around him, and one of the loudest belonged to the girl in the armband, a voice he had heard many times — thin and high, but now chillingly hard. It was the voice of Fang Fengdi.
Da Fang was barely 17, but she seemed transformed. Her lively banter was gone, supplanted by fervent recitations from Mao's Little Red Book. Her hair had been cut very short in a display of revolutionary ardor. Her usual sports garb had been replaced by a baggy dark Mao suit and black cloth shoes. The only splash of color on her was the red armband, which bore three characters that struck fear in millions of Chinese: Hongweibing. Red Guard.
Da Fang had enlisted as one of Mao's "little revolutionary generals," the shock troops who would carry out the most extreme acts of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The decade-long cataclysm, which Mao had launched in 1966, produced cruelty and oppression on a horrific scale. Thousands of intellectuals, former capitalists and people with ties to the West were beaten to death. Millions more were imprisoned and tortured, while tens of millions were forcibly displaced to the countryside for "re-education" through hard labor.
Like many Chinese, Da Fang is loath to talk about her role during that tumultuous period. "The Cultural Revolution really didn't affect me very much," she says while sitting in her son's house in Houston, Texas, looking out at the fountains bubbling in the man-made lake outside. "We had to stop our basketball training and focus on other things for a while. But I came from a workers' family, so it didn't have much impact on us." In a narrow sense, she's right. Her family belonged to one of the "five red categories" (workers, soldiers, poor peasants, martyrs and communist cadres), so Da Fang was spared the persecution visited upon the "five black categories" (landlords, rightists, capitalist roaders, counterrevolutionaries and rich peasants). But according to her friends and former teammates, the Cultural Revolution would shape her life and personality — and the future of her only son.
During the early days of the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards rampaged through Shanghai, shutting down schools and universities, demolishing temples and monuments, ransacking the homes of capitalists and intellectuals. The young zealots eliminated anything with a trace of decadent foreign influence, from women's cosmetics to French bakeries to classical music.
Competitive sports, another insidious legacy of Western domination, were similarly consigned to the trash heap. Training stopped; competitions were canceled. The Red Guards plowed under athletic fields, shut down the national sports commission and imprisoned its chairman, Mao's old confidant Marshal He Long. The best coaches and athletes were attacked for their supposed obsession with medals, a counterrevolutionary crime that even had a name: jinmao zhuyi, or trophyism. Table-tennis star Rong Guotuan, whose 1959 world championship victory had set off celebrations across China, found one way to escape continual beatings and humiliation: he hanged himself in his jail cell.
Nearly all of Da Fang's older teammates were trundled off to factories, most of them never to play basketball again. In some ways, being banished to the labor camps was better than staying behind at No. 651 Nanjing Road. The Red Guards imprisoned Zhu and some three dozen other top coaches and administrators in makeshift jails on the second floor. At night the captors harangued their former bosses to keep them from sleeping. During the day, Red Guards forced them to read Mao's Little Red Book, write self-criticisms and face the terrifying specter of "struggle sessions."
Da Fang was one of the Red Guards the old leaders feared most. As an acolyte of the so-called Strong Wind Rebels, who took over the institute, the 17-year-old became a leader of the basketball section. Her group of Red Guards had one primary task: to investigate, punish and re-educate the "bad elements" among their former coaches and leaders. "Da Fang seemed especially eager to improve herself as a revolutionary," says one of her former teammates. "Some of us wanted to join the Red Guards to avoid trouble, because anybody who wasn't with them was considered an enemy. But Da Fang was a true believer. And true believers, you know, were capable of anything."