Son of the Revolution, an autobiographical novel by Liang Heng, shows the Cultural Revolution and other communist campaigns in the context of how the Chinese people faced Mao's communist China. Liang Heng was born in 1954 in Changsha, central China, five years after the Chinese Communist Revolution. Liang Heng had parents who were considered intellectuals. His father was a journalist and his mother was a member of the local police. A cadre is a high-ranking militant officer like a person. Liang Heng is the youngest child of two older sisters, while his older sister was in the Red Guard for some time. Liang Heng's mother had distant family who left for Taiwan at the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. This would put a dirty stigma and social outlook on Liang Heng's family for most of their lives. During the Hundred Flowers Campaign, Liang Heng's mother was labeled a right-wing person because she was "asked" (forced) to say things that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was doing wrong (kind of like teacher evaluations), but it was all a dirty trick. . After her mother was labeled a right-winger, Liang Heng's father separated from her mother before she went to be re-educated. When she returned home, Liang Heng's father divorced her and forbade his children from seeing her to try to distance the family from being labeled right-wing. This would not have worked, as Liang Heng's father would later be labeled an intellectual and Liang Heng would receive the stigma of being the son of an intellectual, which, contrary to what it seems, was not a good thing. Liang Heng loses his grandmother to famine during the Great Leap Forward. During the Cultural Revolution, Liang Heng's family was divided and sent to the countryside. Liang Heng eventually joined... middle of the paper......also sent to the countryside. They were told that this way they could learn from the farmers and teach them too, but the main reason was that it saved the government money because they didn't have to put them on the urban payroll or find them married housing. As Mao's health began to decline, China began to allow the outside world in, and in 1972 Nixon arrived in China. In 1973, many officials were reinstated in high-level positions, such as Deng Xiaoping. Three million people were finally “rehabilitated” in 1978 and shed their right-wing, revisionist label. The urban youth who had jumped to help Mao were now at the bottom of the totem pole and were sent to the countryside where they were treated badly. The people reported lost a lot of trust in the people around them and, years later, were continually upset and hurt. In September 1978 Mao Zedong died.