China: A new museum paints a grim picture of China's Cultural Revolution, reports Clifford Coonan.
The frightened figure in the picture is a Chinese opera star. His hair is grasped tightly in a Red Guard's fist as he is being denounced during the Cultural Revolution, the ideological frenzy which destroyed millions of lives in China between 1966 and 1976.
The image is one of hundreds of engravings on grey tablets that make up China's most controversial exhibition - the first Cultural Revolution Museum, near Shantou in the southern province of Guangdong.
The Cultural Revolution was one of the darkest periods of recent Chinese history. In 1966, chairman Mao Zedong's Communist Party ordered a return to ideological roots, prompting a frenzy that led to thousands of deaths and many more lives destroyed over 10 years.
There has never been a proper assessment of what happened during the Cultural Revolution and children are taught little about it in school. Parents are unlikely to tell them of what they went through.
It remains a deeply divisive and thorny issue in China to this day. The Communist Party still does not accept responsibility for what happened and the museum in Shantou's Chenghai District was built without official backing.
A quote from the party's Central Committee, reprinted at the museum, acknowledges only that errors were made.
"History has judged the Cultural Revolution as a mistake by the leaders that brought great disaster to party, nation and people."
The museum is in a classical Pagoda-style building, and the hundreds of engravings come from a 1995 book called Cultural Revolution Museum published by Yang Kelin in Hong Kong.
There are shocking images of teachers and intellectuals in hats being led out by farmers, pictures of children and their dead parents, of farmers attaching revolutionary messages to large Buddha statues.
In one picture, fresh-faced Red Guards surround a disgraced official, while in another a "rightist" is being carried out in a basket, having suffered a beating.
Another chilling sight is a picture of Shang Guanyunzhu, a Shanghai actress, said to have had an affair with Mao. She committed suicide by jumping out a window to escape the hectoring by Red Guards.
A tablet further along shows a huge demonstration in Beijing in 1966, when millions of young people waved their Little Red Books of Mao's thoughts.
Mao, the man they used to call The Great Helmsman, is the central figure in the exhibition and he is shown in a state of creeping decrepitude in the years between 1966 and his death in 1976.
The official Communist Party line is that Mao was 70 per cent good and 30 per cent bad, but a succession of critical biographies of Mao have painted a different picture, culminating in the damning new biography of Mao by Wild Swans author, Jung Chang, and Jon Holliday.
However, Mao's face still stares out prominently across Tiananmen Square from the Forbidden City, at the heart of the capital, Beijing. He also features on many of the country's banknotes.
Many senior leaders suffered during the Cultural Revolution, including the man generally referred to as the architect of China's policy of opening up to the world, Deng Xiaoping.
The museum is the brainchild of Ren Zhongyi, a senior Communist Party official who has been party secretary of the rich province of Guangdong, where Shantou is found.
There is a big quote from Ren on the outside of the building: "With history as a mirror, under no circumstances must we allow the tragedy of the Cultural Revolution to be repeated." Another driving force behind the museum is Ba Jin, one of the most important Chinese authors of modern times.
"Every town in China should establish a museum about the Cultural Revolution," the 100-year-old author says in a quote printed at the museum.
Museum caretaker Du Mubo (65) says there are about 100 visitors a day during the week and several hundred on weekends and holidays.
"All kinds of people come here. I lived in a village nearby. I wasn't a Red Guard and I didn't know any. I was just a farmer. But China's very different now," says Du.
In a sign of how controversial the issue remains in China, in late 1999, Song Yongyi, a US-based academic, was arrested while researching the Cultural Revolution and charged with stealing state secrets. He was only released a year later after an international outcry.
One visitor, who asked not to be named, said she was born in 1966 and was too small to know what was going on.
"But this museum is very meaningful. We need more places like this so Chinese people can know our country's history," she said.