KMT

The KMT is invoked in the novel less as an organization whose structure or activities are described than as a charged political label. During the Cultural Revolution, that label is turned against Master Rong: accusations of KMT loyalty and espionage are presented as established facts, then used to justify her public humiliation and confinement. The account does not establish that she belonged to the KMT. Instead, it makes visible the difference between political affiliation and an accusation imposed on someone by others.

A political label turned against Master Rong

In 1966, a big-character poster accused Master Rong of still loving her former boyfriend. The allegations then widened: her supposed devotion to him was treated as proof that she loved the KMT, and she was called a KMT whore and a spy. The account presents these claims as part of an attack, not as verified information about her loyalties. Their force lies in how readily a private attachment is recast as political evidence.

At first, a couple of dozen students attempted to surround Master Rong’s house. They shouted but did not break in, and the chancellor arrived in time to persuade them to leave. Master Rong initially thought the episode might be over. A little more than a month later, however, the accusation returned with far greater force. This shift—from a hostile poster and a failed attempt to surround her home to a mass seizure—shows how the KMT label could move from public denunciation into direct punishment.

From denunciation to detention

On the later occasion, a crowd of a couple of hundred people arrived. Important university figures, including the chancellor, had been arrested; the crowd entered the house, seized Master Rong, and dragged her out. She was made to wear a dunce’s cap marked KMT Whore and placed among those designated for public struggle. The political charge thus became a visible mark imposed on her body, making the accusation part of the spectacle staged for the surrounding population.

After the public parade, Master Rong was imprisoned in a women’s lavatory with a chemistry professor accused of immoral conduct and bourgeois corruption. During the day, the women were taken out and beaten; at night, they were returned to their makeshift prison to write self-criticisms. Later, half of Master Rong’s head was shaved in a yin-yang style. Her mother saw her being struggled against and fainted. These details establish the consequences of the KMT accusation within the episode: it was not merely an insult but one element in a campaign of public degradation, violence, and confinement.

The charge rejected

At a struggle session outside the chemistry department, Master Rong and her colleague stood on the steps in tall dunce’s caps, with heavy placards around their necks. About two hundred students and professors sat before them as selected speakers alternated denunciations with interrogations. By four in the afternoon, the two women could no longer stand and had to kneel. The carefully organized gathering made the accusation into a public performance, with Master Rong displayed as an example to others.

A jeep bearing military number plates interrupted the session. Three men entered, and the short man in their midst announced that they had come to take Rong Yinyi away. When a Red Guard objected that she was a KMT whore and could not be removed, the man rejected the insult’s logic, challenged the guard, and insisted that she was leaving with him. His response does not supply a biography of the KMT or establish Master Rong’s political history; within the scene, it refuses to let the slur settle her identity and breaks the immediate sequence of punishment.

What the novel establishes—and leaves open

The KMT’s significance here is therefore tied to the use of political language against Master Rong. The narrative records how a claim about her former boyfriend was converted into allegations of KMT sympathy and espionage, and how those allegations accompanied her arrest, struggle session, and detention. It also records a direct challenge to the label at the moment she is taken away. None of this confirms that she was a KMT member, a spy, or an agent of the organization.

That limit matters to the episode’s account of persecution: the accusation is shown through the actions it enables, while its factual basis remains unsubstantiated. The KMT is not depicted conducting the events or directing the crowd. It functions in this passage as the name attached to a political smear, a word that turns a personal history into supposed proof of disloyalty. The rescue scene contests that imposed identity, but the novel does not use it to resolve every question about Master Rong’s past.