In the period we are now reading about in Wild Swans, the writer's parents come under attack.

Yet they have been Communist Party supporters who have worked diligently to change China. How could it happen, that they now come under attack? What events took place to allow it?

We'll watch the Youtube documentary from 59:00 to 1:05. Listen for these events:

• A change in local powers; the old hierarchy gives way to the hard-line Revolutionary Committees.
• The rise of Mao's wife.
• The fall of Liu Shaoqi, the potentially alternative leader to Mao who had previously criticised the Great Leap Forward.

How does an idea spread?

This week, as we continue to read what happens to the family in Wild Swans, we'll watch the Youtube documentary from just before 55:00 to 59:00.

How do ideas become taken up quickly in society, and then spread to large numbers of people? How does society 'agree' to a common set of ideas? Once an idea is taken up by large numbers of people, how do those ideas become reproduced for children in the next generation? If people wanted ideas to change direction or take on new meanings, how could they impose that?

There are no final answers to these types of questions, but look around you at the society and the groups of people we know, and let's see if we can come up with some responses.

National politics affects the family

Watch a few minutes from the documentary footage on Youtube, from 44:00 to 48:00.

Who should exert control over what happens inside the family home? Anyone? No-one? You? Parents? The state? The laws of a country?

Remember how mama's hair turned grey with Mr Balls and Mr Badman? I had visions of sanctioned council troops given freedom to rifle through my knicker drawer. But still not quite so horrendous as the trials for the family in our reading this week from Wild Swans, Chapters 17 & 18.

Politics at a national level affects what happens round the kitchen table. Ladies, it is your responsibility as a member of the family and the wider society to engage with this decision-making process.

No pressure. Now should Michael Gove stay or go and what do you want for breakfast?

The Cultural Revolution touched us all

We'll read about the Cultural Revolution and the Red Guards in Wild Swans Chapters 15 and 16. Undoubtedly this is the period in China's history that most people know about in the West.

Read what Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education in the UK, wrote after visiting China in 2010:

'It's become fashionable over the Christmas holidays to refer to the Coalition as a Maoist enterprise. Not so much because the Government is inhabiting the wilder shores of the Left but because of the relentless pace of modernisation being pursued across government.

While the Opposition has nothing to say on any policy, the Government has been responding to the economic and social crises we face with big and comprehensive programmes.

And nowhere has that been more needed than in education, where I am happy to confess I’d like us to implement a cultural revolution just like the one they’ve had in China.' (28.12.10)

Your thoughts, ideas, and observations needed.

The cult of Mao begins

Chapter 14 of Wild Swans begins with the line, ''Chairman Mao,' as we always called him, began to impinge directly on my life in 1964'.

Check out Mao's Wiki profile.

Watch this documentary from 30:00 through to 35:00. This covers The Great Leap Forward ('it looks like madness but at the time it felt normal') and the famine beginning from 1958.

Stop, and move the bar to listen again from 38:00 to 44:20. This covers the period after the famine when Mao has made 'self-criticisms' about his policy and has distanced himself from the leadership, but is set to return with the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.