This is a historical cycle, and also our destiny.
Guo Degang, in his performance, borrowed a few lyrics from old songs, and thus ended up on the ideological trial bench.
There is nothing new under the sun; as long as the photo hangs on the city wall, we are indeed all of the same generation.
60 years ago in 1966, the movie “Railway Guerrillas” and the song “Play My Beloved Soil Pipa” were undoubtedly “great poisonous weeds”. Jiang Qing personally defined them in “Talks on the Issue of Film”: they failed to write about Chairman Mao’s strategy of guerrilla warfare and promoted individual heroism.
As for the lyric “The sun in the west is about to set”, it was further accused of “viciously attacking the great leader Chairman Mao with vulgar songs”.
That’s natural. Chairman Mao can only be the “East is Red, the Sun Rises”. How dare you describe him with “the sun setting”? What are your intentions?
Based on these few lyrics, the original author of the novel and screenwriter of the film, Liu Zhixia, was branded as an “anti-revolutionary revisionist element”, “leader of the Shandong literary and art black line”, and “Soviet revisionist spy”. He was put in a cowshed, paraded, beaten, his war diaries were confiscated, and unable to bear the torture, he tore his bedsheets in the middle of the night and escaped from the third floor, hiding at the home of Liu Guiqing, the prototype of Fang Linsao.
The lyricist Lu Mang and the composer Lu Qiming, both old soldiers of the New Fourth Army, were also criticized and interrogated.
On screen, Qin Yi, who played Fang Linsao, was criticized for labor reform; Feng Zhe, who played Political Commissar Li Zheng, died in a cowshed in 1969 at the age of 48; Deng Nan, who played Lu Han, committed suicide by jumping into a river in 1968; the director Zhao Ming was detained and re-educated for a long time… A creative chain, almost no one emerged unscathed.
These are bloody lessons: when a lyric, an image, can be casually branded with the crime of “insinuation”, when “mass举报” (reporting) becomes the bugle call for struggle, everyone can only fill the millstone of struggle with their own bodies.
The only lesson we learn from history is that we never learn from history.
60 years later, on the evening of July 24, 2026, at the Zhongnan Theater of Wuhan People’s Art Theater, Guo Degang, in his performance of “Ji Gong Huo Fo” at the Qilin Theater Club, made a joke – “The sun in the west is about to set, the Forbidden City is quiet, play my beloved soil pipa…”
Laughter from the audience, an uproar online. Some righteous masses wrote举报 letters: tampering with revolutionary songs, distorting red classics, not reporting for approval.
Thus, a new round of the “setting sun” public case begins.
Tragically, those who persecuted Liu Zhixia sixty years ago and those who reported Guo Degang sixty years later use the same grammar. They dig for political stance in a lyric, use “red” as a club, and practice encirclement and suppression in the name of the masses.
The difference is that a dozen years ago, it might have just been criticism, but now the authorities will surely treat it as a grave enemy.
Liu Zhixia was later rehabilitated, and “Railway Guerrillas” returned to the ranks of classics, but the beatings he endured and the lives lost by the Feng Zhes cannot be recovered.
So this is an exact replica of the cycle.
It’s not the same person reborn, but the same muscle memory that holds up the banner of justice and uses word-parsing to sentence people to death, always peeking out from the gaps of relaxation.
60 years ago, it branded the author of a revolutionary song as a Soviet revisionist spy; 60 years later, it sends the person who changed the lyrics of a revolutionary song into a case notification.
The sun clearly sets every day, setting into Weishan Lake, and also setting into the Forbidden City; it is inherently blameless.
The guilty ones are those pairs of tense eyes, always lurking in the dark, counting “What do you mean by that sentence?”.
Alas, if Liu Zhixia were alive today, he probably wouldn’t understand why history has turned back after going in a circle.
Of course, history hasn’t circled back; it’s just that some people have never moved on.
The pitiable one is not Guo Degang, but that revolutionary masses who wrote the举报 letter.
He thought he was defending history, but in reality, he was just adding a line to the unfinished critique manuscript for the cowshed of 60 years ago.
One cycle, one reincarnation. We are like donkeys with their eyes covered, pushing a millstone; no matter how fast or how hard we run, we are always going in circles.
When a color becomes taboo, we will forever be trapped in the Three Gorges of history. Believing we are full of righteousness, believing we are defending something, is actually paying tribute to Jiang Qing.
Of course, there are indeed people paying tribute to Jiang Qing now.
From now on, the sun in the east can only set in the east.
Of course, following the lead from above, even a car company is playing this game. “A Giant of Fearful Laughter Cannot Tolerate a Cicada…“
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