Around the same time we started to rehearse another model ballet and this time I was chosen to be the main character. The ballet was called The Children of the Meadow, a Lei Feng type of story about the new generation of children under Mao and their devotion to his cause. Some dancers from the Central Ballet of China came to teach us the steps and I was awe-struck by the dancers' technical abilities. Even the "little bouncing ball" himself was there, a dancer from the Central Ballet of China known for his incredibly fast turns and jumps. He was such an inspiration-I vowed to reach his standard one day too.

We rehearsed one act of this ballet for several months and then performed it initially in our academy theatre. I received some encouraging comments about my performance-my biggest fan was one of the chefs from our canteen! I had no idea about different aspects of performing and no stage fear at all. But this changed quickly when, a week later, we were bussed to an industrial city near Beijing called Tangjing to perform for the public. During the opening night performance my brain went completely blank. I couldn't think. I didn't know what I was doing on stage. I couldn't even remember what happened afterwards. All I could remember was that I had forgotten the steps. My partner looked at me and I realised I was just standing on stage doing absolutely nothing. That was my first stage fright, at age fourteen, and I would never forget it.

After that performance the head of our ballet department Zhang Shu spearheaded an important project which we began in 1976. We were to create a full-length ballet, our academy's first such project, and everyone was excited about the auditions. The story was about a teenage brother and sister whose parents were captured by the Guomindang army and hanged on an old symbolic tree called Hai Luo Sha. The ballet was named after the tree. After the parents' death the two brave young children were separated and joined different factions of the Red Army. At the end of the ballet they came back with Mao's armies, reunited, and killed the murderers of their parents.

I was overwhelmed and utterly surprised to be chosen as first cast for the lead role. All of a sudden I was the envy of the entire academy. The pressure was immense but the opportunity for me to dance in a new creation was beyond my wildest dreams.

The choreography took over six months. We rehearsed every afternoon. Day in and day out we repeated many new steps and sweated over many movements, only to find out it wasn't what the choreographers had in mind. I changed three to four soaking wet T-shirts every day. My legs started to cramp. Out of compassion one of the choreographers brought me cups of warm sugared water to replenish my lost energy. Sugar was such a rarity in China -an immense treat.

There was no doubt this role was technically very demanding. I worked hard but different choreographers had choreographed different sections of the ballet and I had to listen to three different people's instructions at once! It was so confusing. The ballet underwent changes right up to the last minute and on the opening night, in front of thousands of eyes, my nerves turned my muscles numb. My whole body trembled. My legs felt weak. I was exhausted even before the curtain went up. On my grand entrance I was supposed to perform this explosive series of giant leaps but my legs felt like noodles dangling in the air. The second half of the ballet went better but the difficult dancing parts were mostly in the first half and, naturally, the person who played Chairman Mao received most of the applause.

I was disappointed with myself beyond description. I had let the whole academy down. I had let Chairman Mao and Madame Mao down. I went to all three choreographers and apologised. I went to Zhang Shu the next day and asked him what I could do for my nerves. "Experience, only experience will help you," he said.

The end of this year was the first and only time that we went to see the army stationed outside Beijing: there were several elite divisions and about ten of us were assigned a soldier each as our mentor to accompany and instruct us every day. Their daily schedule was strict and we had to keep up with them. At five o'clock we were dressed, washed and outside in line on the parade ground within five minutes. Our Beijing Dance Academy 's strict schedule meant that we had met that kind of efficiency before, but still, waking up at five was hard. We jogged and practised our morning routine before breakfast and practised our dancing on any flat surface we could find. Then we joined some of the soldiers' training activities for the rest of the day. We learnt how to walk, turn, stop and run the military way. We even learnt how to fall and crawl under imaginary tanks and enemy gunfire. Many of us had bruises all over after those first few days. We learnt how to hold guns too-important for our political ballets, we were told. We spent days at target practice and my eyes became so tired, but again I thought of the bow-shooter that Teacher Xiao had told me about and I was determined to practise hard.

Grenade throwing was one activity I wasn't good at, no matter how hard I tried. We practised with fake grenades at first but after a few days my shoulder joints were swollen with nagging pain. On the day we were scheduled to throw the real grenades we first had to throw a fake one so our throw could be measured. I pumped myself up with courage. I imagined a group of enemies standing in front of me. This was a life and death situation. I gathered all my strength and threw the fake grenade out with all my might.

It fell way short of the target, embarrassingly short. It didn't even carry over twenty yards. But I wasn't the only one-many of my classmates also failed to reach the required distance. The academy officials wisely cancelled our real grenade-throwing event, just in case.

Apart from the gun shooting I didn't really enjoy my military experience at all. I spent the whole time longing to return to our academy routine. I wanted to get back to my leaps and pirouettes.

This was the same year that I was elected as one of the three Communist Youth Party committee members and vice-captain of my class. Then one day a Communist Party official at the academy called me into his office. "Cunxin, you have done a good job at the Communist Youth Party. You have set a wonderful example for all the students. Although you are still too young to join the party, we would like you to start thinking about it now. Communist Party members are the purest and strongest communist believers. We believe you have that mental strength. The party would like to educate you to become a true Communist Party member, to carry the party's torch, to raise the country's flag every day, every hour, every minute. The responsibilities are enormous but Communist Party members are a glorious breed of human being."

I nodded dutifully and left his office confused. To join the Communist Party was every young person's dream. But when I heard his words about a glorious breed of human being I began to wonder. I thought of the Communist Party members I knew: some were special people like Teacher Xiao and Zhang Shu. But there were also some I didn't want to be in the same company with, such as some of the political heads. And besides, with my increased interest in ballet I had little time for long meetings. Lately I'd even started speeding up the meetings I chaired at the Communist Youth Party and I'd even been considering relinquishing some of my responsibilities. When I asked Teacher Xiao and Zhang Shu about this conflict between the endless meetings and my dance practice, both of them advised me not to give up my political position. It was important for my artistic future, they said. Later, much later, I was to discover their advice had been right.

Soon after Zhou Enlai's death, there was a massive earthquake in the coal-mining city of Tangshan, about a hundred miles east of Beijing. Officially, over two hundred thousand people were killed and over a hundred and fifty thousand injured. There were rumours that this earthquake was an unlucky sign, a sign of hard times and unrest ahead. It happened in the middle of a long, hot summer, while we were preparing for our mid-term exams. Millions of victims were homeless and all the hospitals in many cities were filled. Several older buildings fell down in Beijing too. Our academy was considered an old building, so we had to vacate it and live temporarily in tents in Taoranting Park. Tremors went on for two whole days. Torrential rain poured down relentlessly. Shops in Beijing ran out of plastic covering for people to use as temporary shelters. We left our building in such a hurry that many students didn't even bring their clothes. It was wet and freezing at night and we had very little food: biscuits and dried bread for two days.