Designed as part of Chairman Mao’s fourth “Great Leap Slightly Sideways”, the Xandong Peasant Battery Collective was a brave but ultimately futile attempt to harness static electricity.  

In its first months of operation 14,000 schoolgirls wearing acrylic cardigans powered a nearby hospital’s iron lung machine for six hours a day. However the schoolgirls proved restive and skittish, and the child in this photograph, Ling Liu, was snapped just as she broke the connection for the fourth time that day.  

Liu was sent for reeducation, and committed suicide in 1976 by pressing her tongue to Hunan Province’s massive Western Disco Dancing Feverish Boogie Night-Time reactor – a 300 megawatt generating facility powered by 2.4-million salsa dancers in lycra pants.