A struggle session was a form of public humiliation used by the Communist Party of China in the Mao Zedong era to shape public opinion and to humiliate, persecute, and/or execute political rivals and class enemies. In general, the victim of a struggle session was forced to admit to various crimes before a crowd of people who would verbally and physically abuse the victim until he or she confessed.
During Mao's rule, the Chinese people were forced to attend many different types of struggle sessions, sometimes consisting of 100,000 people. During the 1950s when Mao Tse-Tung's Government began the Land Reform movement, poorer peasants seized the land from their landlords, who were given the title of exploiting class (剥削階级), and an estimated 2 million landlords were swiftly executed after being subjected to a struggle session.
Read more about Struggle Session: Etymology, Origins and Purpose, Accounts of Struggle Sessions, Victims of Struggle Sessions, Disuse After 1978, See Also
Famous quotes containing the words struggle and/or session:
“As regards the celebrated “struggle for life,” it seems to me for the present to have been rather asserted than proved. It does occur, but as the exception; the general aspect of life is not hunger and distress, but rather wealth, luxury, even absurd prodigality—where there is a struggle it is a struggle for power.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“The bar is the male kingdom. For centuries it was the bastion of male privilege, the gathering place for men away from their women, a place where men could go to freely indulge in The Bull Session ... the release of the guilty anxiety of the oppressor class.”
—Shulamith Firestone (b. 1945)