History background for Where Dreams Begin / The Youth Memories

The drama starts in December 1975.

photo from the collection "Remembering Zhou Enlai in Tiananmen  1976"

That was one month before the death of PRC Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, whose mourning sparked the first unrest among the youth, who wanted to shake off the yoke of the Gang of Four’s political activism (led by Jiang Qing, infamous wife of Mao who acted increasingly as his mouth piece during the Cultural Revolution, using the brainwashed Red Guards as their henchmen. They tried to keep power after the death of Mao in September 1976 but were arrested, convicted and Jiang Qing spent the rest of her life in prison).

picture from a Powerpoint presentation (7 slides)

Also, it is worth to know that the Tangshan earthquake in July of that year 1976 did shake Beijing too ; it is shown in the movie Sunflower (one of my favorite because it also deals with the rise of contemporary art in China, around a painter modeled loosely on Zhang Xiaogang).

Zhang-Xioagang-Bloodline-Series-Big-Family-No.-2-1996

picture from a 2016 feature in Quartz; Image: Briony Lin - This exhibit from the Jinchuan museum of the Cultural Revolution, near Chengdu, is uncannily similar to the protagonists in episode 1 of WDB/TYM  :-)

We briefly see a mention of May 7th Cadre School in Ep2. This was one of the maoist "social experiments" between 1968 and 1978 to "redress the disconnect between the bureaucracy and the common people" by sending educated people to be "reeducated" in the rural "communes" when schools and universities had been closed. A directive issued by Mao on October 4, 1968, described cadre training like this : “Sending the masses of cadres to do manual work gives them an excellent opportunity to study once again; this should be done by all cadres except those who are too old, too weak, ill or disabled."

(Above: Advance courageously along the great and glorious road of Chairman Mao's '7 May Directive' )

These were the heydays of the fantasy production figures when the communes vied to look good on paper while many or most were starving because everything had to be decided after political meetings where the old village cadres or the young Red Guards were more concerned by fighting "feudalism" and age-old ways of doing things than really do agriculture and efficient manual work.

A barefoot doctor teaches about family planning in Beijing in 1973

It was also the period when TCM was most promoted and used by "barefeet doctors" in lieu of modern health care ; it worked, sort of, surprisingly well sometimes, for not too severe illnesses and injuries, but of course, many did not survive, especially if they fell foul of leaders and ventured to object to directives.

Deng Pufang, son of Deng Xiaoping, was thus targeted and thrown from a window at Beida university where he had been a student until 1968. He spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair ; with the change in the Four Modernizations and the 10 year Plan and goals to the 2000s from 1978, following the ousting of the Gang of Four, and the economic U-turn initiated by Deng Xiaoping, Deng Pufang became the chairman of the Disabled Peoples Federation.

The "iron bowl" promise of the danwei ,and the evolution from danwei to private housing (Youtube)

In those years "Each and every citizen of the People's Republic of China was assigned to a unit that would provide for his/her work, social, and cultural needs." The word danwei 单位 , is still in use as "work unit", although it is not often like before a workplace and housing spatial unit.

The communes and "producer cooperatives" survived after the end of the Cultural revolution, although often barely recognizable behind the walls of the mushrooming cities and suburbs in the 1980s. They were formally replaced by "townships" (all level xiang 乡 or urban zhen 镇) in 1983. In the 2000s, the "cooperative units" with their "production brigades" were mostly forgotten as a thing of the past. The old "villages" (xiāngcūn 乡村, or 农村 nóngcūn) may have later evolved and mushroomed into for example hi tech urban districts like Zhongguancun 中关村 in Beijing, a technology hub famous for computer and tech companies office buildings and sales centers.

The area is the hometown of Chinese unicorns like ByteDance, Xiaomi, Didi, and Meituan. 

Click on links for more interesting information !

EPISODE 1 * "How Pavel met Tonia" is a reference to a novel that everybody knew by heart then, which also sat on Song Qingling's shelf in the mansion she was housed in  Shichahai on the banks of the BJ lake, at the time (it also sat on Doris Lessing's shelf back when she lived in Rhodesia. The book was known in many countries)
--  Pavel and Tonia are the couple in " How the Steel Was Tempered or The Making of a Hero",  a socialist realist novel written by Nikolai Ostrovsky.
With 36.4 million copies sold, it is one of the best-selling books of all time and the best-selling book in the Russian language.  That novel was adapted to movies that were screened extensively in many countries and the book of course was not banned during the Cultural Revolution.

How the steel was tempered 1942 Soviet Movie (Youtube, full) and discussion (Youtube 8'50)

1973 movie version (auto translated subtitles: click on picture for link to Youtube full movie)

How The Steel Was Tempered钢铁是怎样炼成的 (to read the novel in English from the Chinese English learners site !!  I know, the original is in Russian, but for that version, I advise the courageous hunters to have fun tracking it down and adding in reply, if they so wish, lol)

Wow, thank you so much for the information! I can know enjoy the drama even more 

Thank you so much! I shall bookmark this :)

I don't think there is a cultural reason for lining the pillowcase with a white towel.  

In homes before the 1960s, not only in China, there were lots of furniture that got a decorative (lace or such) or protective cloth cover, usually white. In this instance perhaps the idea was to protect the pillow better from dirt or sweat.  That's my hypothesis.