Anti-anti-parents

Luo Yang, a 25-year-old primary school teacher in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province, withdrew from the anti-parents group three days after entering and finally joined the anti-anti-parents group on August 6.

"The two landmark groups are two sides of the same coin," Luo said. "They both spark discussion about the deeper problems in the evolving parent-child relationship which is the fundamental unit of a transforming Chinese society."

"The larger picture behind the anti-parents trend represents the innate desire in an increasingly pluralistic society that human beings should develop in free, healthy and diverse directions after years of political, economic and cultural repression," said Zheng Xinrong, a sociologist at Beijing Normal University.

"Such a demand inevitably opposes a manipulative, unscientific and unitary style of education.

"The conflict between these two fundamental paradigms will eventually break open and fuel a systemic revolution."

Without love, such a revolution could prove a Pandora's Box, warned 54-year-old Liang Yixin, the oldest member of the anti-parents group.

She has tried many times to publicize her story online, but her posts are usually deleted for containing sensitive words like "Chinese Communist Party," "politics" and "revolution."

During the political campaign to purge China of capitalists in 1957, Liang's father was denounced as a rightist for a "bourgeois" marriage: He had married younger than the legal age.

To prove her political purity and correctness, Liang's mother divorced her husband and then waged "class struggle" on her own children.

Liang, her elder sister and brother spent most of their childhood reciting Mao Zedong quotations or being slapped about by a mother desperate to rid her family of that time's ultimate social stigma.

"She pulled a long face all day and humiliated us whenever we made any little mistakes. She beat us and even burnt us with fire tongs," said Liang, sobbing.

"She would kick us out of bed while we were fast asleep. If she found us studying at the desk, she would kick us away saying these things were her property, belonging to her and she was confiscating them back from us.

"She even locked up our food and clothes if we offended her."

On Liang's 16th birthday her mother discovered she had been secretly reading The Gadfly, a novel by Ethel Lilian Voynicha and condemned it as "vulgar and erotic."

She grabbed the book, tore it up and trampled over the ripped-up pages.

"In those years of fanaticism, I was not only discriminated against by others but also dictated to by my own strong mother, a devoted Maoist," said Liang, today a psychology lecturer in Hengyang, a prefecture-level city in Hunan Province.

"She was like a walking loudspeaker and I always felt like I was being seized and pilloried in front of the public.

"Inhuman political faiths enflamed persecution within households. It wasn't rare to see families becoming enemies in this absurd age. Just imagine what these broken-hearted parents brought down upon their children."