His name is Luoke Yu. He was humiliated in front of 100,000 audience before execution during Cultural Revolution. His crime was to oppose China’s version of #CriticalRaceTheory-The Birth Theory. It believes if either parent is in a privileged class, the child is born privileged.

If the child is labeled as privileged (oppressing class), he/she will be banned from opportunities of higher education, decent jobs, and even marrying someone from the preferred class (oppressed class). Basically, he/she is serving a life sentence.

“Great harm came to our family… because of what my brother wrote during the Cultural Revolution,” the martyr’s brother later said.

The debate over inherited class identity was a big thing in the Cultural Revolution,” he said.

“It was about equality and human rights,” he said.

Yu’s ideas were revolutionary and utterly subversive in that context. In essence, he was calling on people to rise up and fight for equality. These ideas struck a chord among people who had suffered discrimination or persecution because of their family background back then.