Here at Sudan the students humiliated their teachers,' she said. 'But in the high schools it was not unknown for students to beat their teachers to death.

What could be crueler? I suppose the answer was: lots of things-an intellectual forced to shovel chicken shit, a Muslim forced to keep pigs, a physicist ordered to assemble radios, an historian in a dunce cap, a person beaten to death for being a teacher.

Most intellectuals were sent into the countryside-to farms and into the mountains. They went to the most backward provinces, like Qinghai, Ningxia and Gansu. And Mongolia. Lots of intellectuals ended up in Mongolia. They had to suffer.

But these former Red Guards and the refugees from the Cultural Revolution-surely they're out of school?''No," Chen said. 'There's a whole army of night-school students.