The destruction of Maoist imagery by Wu Dawang and Liu Lian is a turning point in their affair: what begins with a threatened report to Security becomes a shared, deliberate rejection of the revolutionary symbols that organize their lives. The objects’ changing status—from official decoration, to evidence of political danger, to material the lovers can deface—makes private desire visible as a challenge to public ideology. Yet Wu’s decision to preserve the Serve the People! sign leaves their revolt deliberately unresolved.

Accident and Threat

The episode begins when Wu reaches into Liu’s wardrobe for his uniform. A plaster statue of Mao Zedong falls out with the clothes and shatters on the floor. Wu stands stunned by the breakage; Liu immediately goes to the telephone and asks whether the Head of Security is still in the barracks. The accident has made a politically dangerous object into possible evidence, and Liu’s first response is to turn that danger into an official report.

Wu recognizes what is at stake and rushes to stop the call. As Liu struggles to get the receiver back, he keeps her away from the telephone and returns her to the bed. He then tramples the fragments, including the statue’s head, reducing them further rather than leaving the breakage intact as an unmistakable accident. The destruction is now his action as well as the mishap that triggered it: he tries to prevent the episode from becoming a report to Security, even as his response deepens the political transgression.

The Accident Revealed as a Test

After the confrontation, Liu explains that she placed the statue beneath Wu’s clothes because she knew he would knock it down when he dressed. The fall was not simply bad luck but a staged test, designed to force into view what Wu would do when an official symbol threatened to expose them. Her explanation changes the meaning of the broken statue: it has served as a trap, and the danger of reporting has been part of the couple’s encounter from the start.

Liu then makes the rebellion unmistakable. She removes a portrait of Mao from the wall, crumples it, tears it up, and stamps on the pieces. She challenges Wu to report her too: he broke the statue accidentally, she says, whereas she has destroyed an image deliberately. Her act turns the lovers’ shared vulnerability into a chosen political risk. Wu had first tried to silence the threat of Security; Liu now makes the threat part of an explicit demonstration of trust and defiance.

Systematic Destruction and the Sign That Remains

The destruction spreads through the house. Liu and Wu search for objects connected to Mao and the revolutionary leadership, defacing or destroying the pictures, bowls, vessels, cabinets, and chairs they find. Liu smashes the rice bowls decorated with Mao’s image; Wu breaks an aluminium pot covered in the Chairman’s quotations. Their actions reach beyond the original accident: the household’s political decoration becomes a collection of things they can locate, alter, and discard.

The contrast between those objects and the affair’s emblem gives one sign a different fate. When Liu takes up the Serve the People! sign in the dining room, a talismanic object that has repeatedly witnessed their relationship, Wu stops her and places it carefully back on the table. He says that he wants to keep it. The sign is not spared because its official language has been accepted at face value: in their private story, the slogan has already acquired an intimate function. Wu’s choice preserves the object that connects their affair to the political principle whose symbols they are otherwise destroying.

Admission and Significance

After the destruction, Wu makes the admissions Liu demands, repeating both that she is an extraordinary counterrevolutionary and that her love for him exceeds his for her. The paired declarations draw the episode’s opposing registers together: the language of political condemnation becomes a form of intimate affirmation, while their deliberate damage to revolutionary images establishes the real risk behind the performance.

The scene therefore does not end with a clean separation between public ideology and private life. Maoist images are systematically defaced, but the lovers retain the slogan sign that has accompanied their relationship. Its survival complicates the apparent rejection: the affair has repurposed the language of service even as the lovers rebel against its material emblems. The episode’s central reversal is likewise concrete: the fallen statue first threatens to expose them, then becomes the occasion for a jointly enacted defiance.