Civilian Participants in the Cultural Revolution

Being Vulnerable and Being Responsible

Francis K. T. Mok, Francis Mok

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429960437
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In the ten years of the Cultural Revolution, political persecutions, violation of rights, deprivation of freedom, violence and brutality were daily occurrences. Especially striking is the huge number of ordinary civilians who were involved in inflicting pain and suffering on their comrades, colleagues, friends, neighbors, and even family members. The large-scale and systematic form of violence and injustice that was witnessed differs from that in countries like Chile under military rule or South Africa during apartheid in that such acts were largely committed by ordinary people instead of officials in uniforms. Mok asks how we should assess the moral responsibility of these wrongdoers, if any, for the harm they did both voluntarily and involuntarily.

After the death of Chairman Mao, there was a trial of the Gang of Four, who were condemned as the chief perpetrators of the Cultural Revolution. Besides, tens of millions of officials and cadres who were wrongly accused and unfairly treated were subsequently cleared and reinstated under the new leadership. However, justice has not yet been fully done because no legal or political mechanism has ever been established for the massive number of civilian perpetrators to answer for all sorts of violence inflicted on other civilians, to make peace with their victims, and to make amends. The numerous civilians who participated need to come to terms with the people they wronged in those turbulent years. Justice in general and transitional justice in particular may still be pursued by taking the first steps to clarify and identify the moral burden and responsibility that may legitimately be ascribed to the various types of participant.

This book will be of interest to anyone who studies the Cultural Revolution of China, especially those who are concerned with the ethical dimension.

1 Introduction

1.1 The civilian participants

The Cultural Revolution of China that lasted for almost a decade from 1966 to 1976 was arguably the most pervasive, fanatic, and chaotic political movement in contemporary China. The general view is that it was informally kicked off by Chairman Mao in June 1966 through an editorial in the People’s Daily and ended following his death and the subsequent arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976. According to Xu You-yu, an active participant in the Cultural Revolution himself, tens of millions of people joined the movement as Red Guards (not including those who were called borderline participants). The upper limit was 30 million and the lower limit was 10 million.¹ Shortly after the Cultural Revolution, Hu Yaobang, then General Secretary of the Communist Party, was quoted as saying that one-tenth of the population, which is about a 100 million people, was victimized from the commencement of the anti-Rightist campaign in 1957 to the end of the Cultural Revolution.² Victims were not confined to those with suspicious backgrounds (such as having affiliations with the previous Kuomintang regime) but also senior carders and leaders of the ruling party. Top leaders who were purged include Peng Zhen, former Mayor of Beijing, Deng Xiaoping, former General Secretary of the Party, and Liu Shaoqi, former President of the State. And over 70 per cent of the members and alternate members of the Central Committee of the Party were either purged or severely criticized.³ According to Chairman Mao, the Cultural Revolution was necessary because there was a constant need to “struggle against and crush those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road, to criticize and repudiate the reactionary bourgeois academic ‘authorities’ and the ideology of the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting classes.”⁴ Upon his incitement and mobilization, from party leaders and cadres, senior bureaucrats, school principals and teachers, to ordinary workers and peasants, almost everybody had become a potential class enemy conspiring to bring back capitalism, and therefore may be subject to severe scrutiny, criticism, and indictment by the masses. In those turbulent years, political persecutions, violation of rights, deprivation of freedom, violence and brutality, loss of privacy and individuality, were daily occurrences.

The Cultural Revolution stands out as a worthwhile target for examination not because of the viciousness of the leaders, sheer size of the number of victims, or the extended period it lasted. What is most striking is that it was very much a kind of oppression inflicted by the ‘people’ against the ‘people.’ As compared with political oppressions and persecutions in other totalitarian countries, the Cultural Revolution in China was not exactly a conflict between the state and the people; nor was it a simple case of dictatorial regime trying to suppress a dissenting minority. What we witnessed instead was that a massive number of ordinary civilians, bearing no official title and not wearing any uniform, under the banner of revolutionary struggle against class enemies, were mobilized to inflict harm and suffering on one another, many of whom were their fellow comrades, colleagues, friends, neighbors, and even family members. The immense hatred and hostility they demonstrated in interrogating and torturing their acquaintances who, almost overnight, became counter-revolutionaries was something very hard to explain and justify. As we all know, when the revolution was over, the key perpetrators and their allies were tried in an open court and then given prison sentences; many victims were rehabilitated and compensated; the party leadership was reshuffled; what followed was a dramatic change of national policy from political mobilization to economic development. However, there was no formal mechanism to document, not to mention investigate, what the ordinary participants had done in the name of revolution; and no official platform for them to tell and to reflect on the harm they inflicted on one another. To most civilians, life was back to normal as if what they had done, especially their eager participation in indicting class enemies, did not matter. But as the key actors of the revolution, under what circumstances and on what ground they committed those terrible deeds should always be our concerns in understanding the Cultural Revolution. As a result, the primary aims of this book are the roles of those civilian participants, their vulnerabilities in living under a fanatical political setting, and above all, their responsibility in acting under extraordinary circumstances.

1.2 The normative question

It was near the 50th anniversary of the commencement of the Cultural Revolution when I started preparing for the publication of this book. Even after almost half a century, I have no difficulty in identifying books, dissertations, articles, and reports devoted to the study of what had happened during the Cultural Revolution, why those terrible events multiplied and proliferated, how violence was spread and escalated and how official doctrines were followed or reinterpreted in different regions of the country. They are too numerous to document here. From the recent publications we can easily find works on the internal dynamics within the top echelons of the party, among the different Red Guard factions, and between the leadership and the Red Guards. For example, MacFarquhar and Schenhals⁵ explored the role of Chairman Mao in the revolution and with special emphasis on his relationship and tensions with the Gang of Four and other senior party leaders such as Deng Xiaping and Zhou Enlai. Andrew Walder⁶ tried to explain the intense conflicts among different Red Guard factions in Beijing with reference to their differences in social and economic background. And Daniel Leese⁷ traced the history of the emergence of the cult of Mao and how massive worship of the great leader was used to mobilize young participants in joining the revolution. Whereas Brown and Johnson⁸ chose to shift the focus from key leaders and prominent political events to the grassroots level and local experiences and tried to capture how local people negotiated their limited space and freedom in a society governed under tight and rigid ideology. Some others tried to provide an alternative account of the Red Guards and the Cultural Revolution which is different from the stereotype. For example, Yang,⁹ instead of reinforcing the stereotype of young Red Guards indoctrinated by official ideologies, provided an alternative portrayal of Red Guards, arguing that the chaos engendered by political movements unexpectedly granted them access to politically incorrect materials and certain space for critical reflections. By focusing on cultural history of the Cultural Revolution and examining various cultural forms (e.g. film, music, opera, literature, dance), Clark¹⁰ also tried to reject the conventional description of this period as chaos and destruction and claimed that it could be characterized as a period with innovation and creativity. While many works are about Cultural Revolution in major cities, there are some focusing on what happened in the rural areas of China such as Tibet,¹¹ Hunan and Guangxi.¹²

The above can certainly contribute to our understanding of both the wider social, political, and cultural context under which civilians were driven to the revolution and the interactions among the plurality of actors (leaders, perpetrators, followers, victims etc.) in the revolution. And they would be extremely useful in addressing the empirical question of who did what to whom and how as well as the explanatory question of what social, political and cultural factors are most adequate in accounting for the fanatic and violent participation by civilians. However, what is under-explored in the study of the Cultural Revolution is the normative question of the kind of moral judgment that may be passed on to the perpetrators and their followers. By moral judgment we may mean two related issues: the first is the simpler issue of moral rightness and wrongness of the revolution; the second is the more complicated question of whether the participants should be held responsible for the wrong they had done. There are two possible reasons why the normative question has often not been taken seriously. First, from the official viewpoint, the moral question was straightforward and had already been settled. According to the political verdict made by the Chinese Communist Party, the Cultural Revolution initiated by Chairman Mao was based on “entirely erroneous appraisal of the prevailing class relations and political situation.”¹³ Such an erroneous appraisal resulted in the mixing up of “right and wrong on a series of important theories and policies,”¹⁴ which further led to confusion between the people and the enemy. More importantly, the party judged that “Lin Biao, Jiang Qing and others” took advantage of those errors made by Comrade Mao Zedong and “committed many crimes behind his back, bringing disaster to the country and the people.”¹⁵ Following the death of Chairman Mao, the chief architect of the revolution, in 1976 and the open trial of the Gang of Four in 1980 (together with another 12 persons), who were identified as the principal culprits responsible for the chaos and catastrophe brought by the revolution, the party easily assumed that the case may come to a full stop. By letting the chief perpetrator who already died and a handful of conspirators to share a big bulk of the blame and responsibility, both the new leadership and the society at large who had just recovered from the revolution could be spared the embarrassing and burdensome assessment of the moral and legal debt to be shouldered by the numerous participants who were not as culpable as the Gang of Four and their close allies. To put aside or simply forget about the moral talk appeared to be the most convenient and safe option for everybody. It explains why many Chinese may want to believe that the moral question had been adequately dealt with by early 1981 when the verdict of the trial of the Gang of Four was announced.¹⁶ However, we should bear in mind Rainer Baum’s warning that the support and endorsement we gave to the Nuremberg trials should not be mistaken for a “false alibi” for the average German.¹⁷ While it is entirely just to blame and punish the Nazi leaders, it should not be deduced that the remaining Germans are consequently exempted from any legal, political, and moral claims made against them by the surviving Jews. By the same logic, the fact that Chairman Mao and the Gang of Four may be held morally and legally responsible should not infer that the responsibility of other civilian participants can thereby be exonerated.

The second reason why there was no in-depth discussion of the moral question is what Jin Qiu described as the prevalence of the “theme of victim.”¹⁸ In reviewing the extensive literature (both fictional and factual accounts of personal experiences) on the Cultural Revolution, she found that in most accounts the participants of the Cultural Revolution

blame oppressive outside agents for their own behavior. Mao is portrayed as a chief villain along with his ‘assistants’ … Everyone else appears to be a victim. Few former Red Guards and those who abused others came out to admit their own misdeeds and to apologize to those mistreated. Even those who once performed as agents of victimizers and who obviously benefited from the system still portray themselves as victims …¹⁹

As obedient and loyal subjects under the charismatic leadership of Chairman Mao, it is understandable that participants were easily convinced that what they had done was nothing but enthusiastic responses to the appeals made by their immortal and omnipotent leader. Hiding inside the identity as victim²⁰ seemed to be the most convenient way by which they could retain their innocence and alienate themselves from their suspicious past. If they believed that they were essentially ‘victims,’ they would naturally find the moral question straightforward and unproblematic. However, as we will see more clearly in the cases discussed in subsequent chapters, the dividing line between victims and victimizers was anything but sharp in the Cultural Revolution. Just the opposite, it was quite common for those involved, either voluntarily or involuntarily, to assume dual identities as both victims as well as victimizers in different stages of the movement. As acknowledged very honestly by Zhu Xiaomei, a world-famous Chinese pianist whose music education and career were shattered by the revolution, “the Cultural Revolution took away my status of innocent victim and made me an active participant in its crimes.”²¹ It is exactly this dual identity that makes people concerned morally perplexed in accounting for the roles they played in the revolution.

If the trial of top leaders cannot serve as an ‘alibi’ for the average civilian participants and those who participated, in one way or another, cannot always take an identity as victim for granted, it will make much sense to have a thorough evaluation of the actions (and inaction) committed by different types of civilian participants from the moral point of view. On the one hand, they were incited, manipulated and ev...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Cultural Revolution and its aftermath
• 3 The complexity of moral responsibility: multiple dimensions of responsibility ascription
• 4 Moral responsibility of the sincere participants in Cultural Revolution: examination of peculiar cultural context as an excusing factor
• 5 Coercive environment as an excusing factor in responsibility ascription: a critical assessment
• 6 The moral responsibility of bystanders in the Cultural Revolution: an examination of the morality of inaction
• 7 Conclusion: the relationship between human vulnerability and moral responsibility
• Bibliography
• Index