Content Warning: This section depicts death by suicide.

In 1967, the Chinese Cultural Revolution is in its second year. Two groups of communists face off against each other. The groups are divided into young and old revolutionaries, and the older group feels “anxious” about their younger counterparts. They fear that the young revolutionaries are “crazier than crazy” (4). The older revolutionaries have guns, but the younger revolutionaries have explosives. They could blow everything up whenever they please. On the roof of a nearby building, an attractive young revolutionary teenager waves a flag. A shot rings out, and she falls dead. The woman dies believing that she’s “passionately sacrificing herself for an ideal” (5).

During this time, a group of revolutionary students from the Tsinghua University in Beijing rise up against their lecturers, accusing the faculty of being “bourgeois reactionary academic authorities” (6). Amid the mass campaign of public shaming and torture, many lecturers, professors, and teachers have either renounced their beliefs or “chosen to end their lives” (7). Ye Zhetai is a physics professor with an outstanding reputation. He refuses to cow to the revolutionaries and cooperate with the Cultural Revolution. One technique the revolutionary students use is the struggle session, a violent public spectacle that coerce supposed enemies of the revolution into cooperation.