The Battle For China's Past

Mao and the Cultural Revolution

Mobo Gao

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781783716012
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'Asia

--Shows that the Mao era was benficial for most Chinese citizens-- "A powerful mixture of political passion and original research, a brave polemic against the fashionable view on China.... Aims a knockout blow at Jung Chang's recent book on Mao, which Bush and the conservatives rave-reviewed." Gregor Benton, Professor of Chinese History, University of Cardiff "This important book opens a much needed window onto Chinese perceptions of the country's post-Mao direction.... Highlights the renewal of popular support for socialism and the growing opposition to contemporary state policies."
Martin Hart-Landsberg, Professor of Economics, Lewis & Clark College, Portland, Oregon Mao and his policies have long been demonised in the West, with the Cultural Revolution considered a fundamental violation of human rights. As China embraces capitalism, the Mao era is being surgically denigrated by the Chinese political and intellectual elite. This book tackles the extremely negative depiction of China under Mao in recent publications and argues most people in China, including the rural poor and the urban working class, actually benefited from Mao's policy of a comprehensive welfare system for the urban and basic health and education provision for the rural, which is being reversed in the current rush towards capitalism. By a critical analysis of the mainstream account of the Mao era and the Cultural Revolution and by revealing what is offered in the unofficial e-media debates this book sets the record straight, making a convincing argument for the positive effects of Mao's policies on the well-being of the Chinese people.

1	Debating the Cultural Revolution

Introduction: who is writing history and who are the Chinese?

Total denegation of the Cultural Revolution has been China’s official policy since the death of Mao, and the Cultural Revolution has been condemned as a ten-year calamity for the Chinese people. But who are the Chinese that the history of the Cultural Revolution is written about and who is writing this history? As I discuss in other chapters in this book, most memoirs, autobiographies and biographies about the period are written by a section of the political and/or elite intelligentsia who were the political targets of the Cultural Revolution. This section of the political and intelligentsia elite often claims to be ‘the Chinese’ and is usually referred to as ‘the Chinese’. How about the ordinary Chinese, the urban workers and rural farmers who make up the majority of the people in China? How do they remember the Cultural Revolution? This chapter aims to look into some of these questions.

Let me start with an account by Sun Ge of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences to illustrate the issue. A couple of years back Sun (2007) gave a talk on the Cultural Revolution in South Korea. She thought she did a good job by presenting a balanced and fair view of how it unfolded. When she finished a student from China in the audience asked Sun a very pointed question: ‘What is your family background?’ Sun admitted that both her parents were intellectuals who were victimized during the Cultural Revolution. Then the student said: ‘So no wonder. My father used to be the production team leader in my village. He still recalls the Cultural Revolution with fond memories because that was his most brilliant (canlan

) years. Those were years when the farmers felt proud and elated (yangmei tuqi

).’ Sun was shocked by the encounter and by the realization that there could be views of the Cultural Revolution that were so different from hers.

Let me explain the difference by recalling an exhibition about the Cultural Revolution organized by Stevan Harrell and David Davies at the Burke Museum of Washington University (Seattle) in 2002, because it is very relevant to the question of who the Chinese are that we refer to when we talk of the Cultural Revolution. The title of the Seattle exhibition, ‘Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times’, is an apt description of the items on display and of the theoretical orientation of the exhibition itself: the life of China’s ordinary people during a period of intense ideological ferment. Items such as cloth buttons, stamps, dresser drawers, and rice, oil, and meat coupons were indeed artefacts of daily life; and yet the way these ordinary objects were made expressed extraordinary ideological content. The resulting combination of the ordinary and the extraordinary is clearly illustrated by, for instance, the message ‘the masses of people have unlimited creative powers’ that appeared on a bus ticket, an envelope that had the slogan ‘increase vigilance to defend the Motherland’ written on it, a mirror table that carried the reminder ‘never forget class struggle’, and cigarette packages that instructed smokers to ‘support agriculture on a great scale’.

The Seattle exhibition deliberately avoided any interpretation or evaluation of the items on display or of the Cultural Revolution itself. Thus the display items were accompanied by little in the way of commentary; the objects themselves were expected to speak to the audience. As if to further distance itself from evaluation, the exhibition presented the recollections of two people who voiced opposing positions on the Cultural Revolution. The first recalled the Cultural Revolution with nostalgia, saying that Mao’s ideals were good for ‘us average people’, while the other indignantly condemned the Cultural Revolution as ‘barbaric’ and a period of ‘red terror’. That the exhibition did not take a conspicuous stand against the Cultural Revolution clearly annoyed many visitors, if comments left in the guest book are any indication. Some accused the exhibit of trying to be ‘politically correct’; others were frustrated that they left without any clear understanding about whether the Cultural Revolution was good or bad; some registered their complaints that the exhibition was too positive about the Cultural Revolution. One unhappy visitor wrote two sentences in Chinese characters in the guest book, the first of which declared that: ‘The ten years of the Cultural Revolution were a disaster for the Chinese people.’

Along similar lines a couple of visitors, who identified themselves as ‘American physicians’, wrote that when they visited China they heard people describe their experiences of the Cultural Revolution as ‘terrible’. Those American physicians suggested other visitors to read Jung Chang’s Wild Swans and Nien Cheng’s Life and Death in Shanghai. This is interesting and instructive because it indicates that Jung Chang and Nien Cheng are standard references when the Mao era and the Cultural Revolution are under consideration. It probably did not occur to those visitors that the exhibition was not meant to show that the claims of people like Jung Chang and Nien Cheng had any legitimacy. The Chinese hosts of visiting American physicians might not view the Cultural Revolution in the same way that an urban worker or a rural farmer would; nor would anyone classify Jung Chang and Nien Cheng as ordinary. Visitors to the exhibition who came to Washington from China, either as tourists, students or migrants, and who complained (in Chinese) that the exhibition was biased cannot be ordinary Chinese either. These visitors used the general term Zhongguo renmin (the Chinese people) as if their views represented those of everyone else in China. They wrote that they themselves or family members or friends of theirs had suffered an injustice because they were ‘sent down to the countryside’ during the Cultural Revolution. As the majority of Chinese live and work in the countryside – and did so before and during the Cultural Revolution – should not these critics pause and reflect before they declare that life in the countryside was inhumane?

The haojie discourse and the Cultural Revolution

It is therefore not surprising that some visitors questioned the moral legitimacy of a Cultural Revolution exhibition. One visitor asked whether one could imagine an exhibition like this for Hitler, Stalin, or Pol Pot. The assumption, of course, is that the Cultural Revolution was a type of holocaust and that Mao was a monster like Hitler. This is an important question – one that has to be faced by Western and Chinese academics alike. The label Shi nian haojie is frequently used to refer to the Cultural Revolution in the Chinese media, in conversations and even in official Chinese documents. Shi nian means ten years, referring to the standard official Chinese periodization that the Cultural Revolution lasted ten years. Haojie is ambiguous because it can be a modern term for ‘holocaust’ or a traditional term to mean ‘great calamity’ or ‘catastrophe’. Though ‘holocaust’ is not usually explicitly used in the West to refer to the Cultural Revolution, the sections of the Chinese intelligentsia and political elite who go out of their way to denounce the Cultural Revolution seem to be inclined to exploit the ambiguity of haojie to denigrate the Cultural Revolution. The CCP, under the direction of Deng Xiaoping, adopted a resolution in 1981 on the history of the Mao era. In the resolution the Cultural Revolution is not referred to as a ten-year haojie; but, by judicially declaring that the ten years of the Cultural Revolution were the period when Mao deviated from Mao Zedong Thought, the resolution opened a door for total denigration.¹

In her writings, Vera Schwarcz (1996 and 1998) specifically draws our attention to the meaning of ‘holocaust’ in haojie when she talks about the burden of the memory of the Cultural Revolution. Schwarcz herself does not think a comparison of the Holocaust with the Cultural Revolution is appropriate. In this connection it is worth noting that an edited volume by Law (2003) is titled The Chinese Cultural Revolution Reconsidered: Beyond Purge and Holocaust. The book does not set to prove the thesis that the Cultural Revolution was a holocaust, but contains criticism that make implicit assumptions in that direction. More recently, in one of the most popular electronic publications produced by Chinese dissidents, Cai Yingshen states that Mao was China’s Hitler and that the Cultural Revolution was the same as Nazi fascism (Cai 2002). In Wild Swans, Jung Chang puts the Red Guards on a par with Hitler’s Storm Troopers.

The post-Mao Chinese authorities have been telling the Chinese and people all over the world that the Cultural Revolution was ten years of calamities and that China’s economy was brought to the brink of collapse during that period. However, when they first started their journey to abandon the Chinese revolution they could not afford to be seen as throwing away the whole package of China’s revolutionary legacy. Their way of getting around this dilemma was to claim that the period of the Cultural Revolution, when most of them were out of favour, was an aberration and that the ideology of the Cultural Revolution, if there is any for them, was misguided. Along similar lines, most of the Chinese elite intelligentsia, who possess a dignified a sense of owning Chinese history, keep repeating that the Cultural Revolution was the darkest age of Chinese history (Ji Xianlin 1998).

The story propagated by the Chinese authorities and elite intelligentsia spreads fast and wide among the non-academic community in the West. This of course has much to do with the legacy of the cold war, and the relentless push of democracy and a human rights agenda after it. It was evident at the symposium sessions that took place during the Seattle exhibition that once the ‘holocaust’ meaning of haojie was accepted, anyone trying to say anything different about the Cultural Revolution ran the risk of being accused of holocaust denial. At least two visitors accused the Burke Museum exhibition of being ‘politically correct’ though the ‘political correct’ line both in and outside China is actually to condemn the Cultural Revolution.

There’s no doubt that many suffered and died during the ten-year period. Some committed suicide, others died in factional fighting or after being tortured. Some died because of the harshness of their circumstances, and the lives of others were shortened as a result of their experiences during the Cultural Revolution. I myself was put under house arrest when I was only a teenager and had to face struggle sessions every night for two weeks for what now seem ridiculous reasons. My whole family was affected as a result (Gao 1999a). Denunciation and condemnation of the Cultural Revolution by those who suffered in one way or another is understandable and can be an individual’s way to cope and heal the emotional trauma. However, to participate in the official project of reducing every thing to the label of ‘ten years of calamities’ is another matter.

Here I give just one example. One recent piece on the widely read Chinese-language electronic journal Huaxia wenzhai (Chinese Digest), which regularly publishes documents and writings on the Cultural Revolution, featured a partial list of well-known people who died during the so-called Cultural Revolutionary period of 1966–76. The author asserts that all of the people on his list died as a result of persecution during the Cultural Revolution (Dai Huang 2002). Along with such names as Liu Shaoqi, there were also Zhu De, the legendary Red Army commander, and Xu Guangping, widow of Lu Xun, who had been hailed as a cultural icon by Mao and his followers. There is no evidence that either Zhu De or Xu Guangping was persecuted at that time. But the widely accepted assumption is that because the Cultural Revolution was a ten-year catastrophe any well-known personality who died during the period must have died from persecution.

Violence, brutality and causes

Certainly there was violence, cruelty and destruction, but how should we interpret what happened during that period? Were all the acts of violence organized and intended by official policies, as was the case during the Nazi Holocaust? Was there a plan to physically exterminate a group of people, as in Hitler’s gas chambers? The violence, cruelty, suffering and deaths that occurred during the initial years of the Cultural Revolution were caused by different groups of people, for different reasons. Some conflicts were of a class nature, others were social in character; some of the violence involved personal grudges, in other cases the violence was due to blindness, ignorance and stupidity.

The fact that there was no planned policy for violence can be seen in the sequence of events in those years. Recognizing the terrible consequences of the ‘Red Terror’ in 1966 – when in Beijing homes were raided, people judged to be class enemies were beaten up, and detention centres were set up – and determined to stop further terror of this kind, the central committee of the CCP approved a decree drafted by the CCP of the Beijing Municipality and issued it to the whole of China on 20 November 1966. The zhongyao tonggao (important notification) decreed that no factory, mine, school, administration or any other unit should be allowed to establish a detention house or makeshift court to persecute anyone. Any violation of the decree would be a violation of the law of the state and of disciplines of the CCP and would be punished accordingly (Xiao Xidong 2002). It is true that documents like this did not stop the violence completely; it is also true that verbal provocations, gestures and instructions by Mao and other leaders incited a new type of violence in early 1967 and at later times. Yet the official policy was clear: yao wendou bu yao wudou (engage in the struggle with words but not with physical attack). This policy was recorded in an official Cultural Revolution document, the ‘Shiliu tiao’ (the 16 Articles) and was stressed in speeches from time to time by various leaders. Neither the so-called 1967 January Storm (yiyue fengbao) that originated in Shanghai and encouraged the Rebels to take over power from the CCP apparatus, nor the suppression of the so-called 1967 February Anti-Cultural Revolution Current (eyue niliu) were meant to include physical fighting and certainly not physical elimination, though both did lead to violence of various kinds.

Much of the violence, brutality and destruction that happened during the ten-year period was indeed intended, such as the persecution of people with a bad class background at the beginning, and later action against the Rebels, but the actions did not stem from a single locus of power. To use ‘Storm Troopers’ in reference to the Red Guards, for instance, is conveniently misleading. There was no such singular entity as the ‘Red Guards’ or the ‘Red Guard’. First, we must differentiate between university students and school students. It was the latter who invented the term ‘Red Guards’ and who engaged in acts of senseless violence in 1966. We should also note the difference between schoolchildren in Beijing, where many high-ranking CCP officials and army officers were located, and those in other places such as Shanghai, the home town of three of the so-called ‘Gang of Four’ radicals. It was not in Shanghai, the supposed birthplace of the Cultural Revolution radicals, but in Beijing that schoolchildren beat up their teachers most violently. It was also in Beijing (in 1966) that the children of high-ranking CCP members and army officials formed the notorious Lian dong (Coordinated Action) and carried out the so-called ‘Red Terror’ in an effort to defend their parents. What they were doing was exactly the opposite of what Mao wanted, to ‘bombard the capitalist roaders inside the Party’, that is, parents of the Lian dong Red Guards. Lian dong activists behaved like those of the Storm Troopers, but these were not Mao’s Storm Troopers. Mao supported those Rebels who criticized CCP officials including the parents of the Lian dong Red Guards. These facts can easily be confirmed by documentary evidence; yet the post-Mao Chinese political and elite intelligentsia either pretend not to see them or choose to ignore them.

Violence such as the Qingli jieji duiwu (Cleaning up the Class Ranks) movement in 1968 was premeditated, but this movement was not meant to result in the physical elimination of ‘class enemies’, though this clearly happened in some places. In any case, much of the violence that took place during the later 1960s was not initiated by either the Red Guards or the Rebels. In fact many of the Rebels became victims themselves, in campaigns such against the May the Sixteenth Elements (Yang and McFadden 1997).

Constructive policies

All the documentary evidence (more details in later chapters) suggests that the initial intention of the Cultural Revolution by Mao, the Chairman of the CCP, was to teach an ideological lesson to the officials within the CCP. Emotional humiliation was intended, but physical violence was not. While the Cultural Revolution radicals wanted to stir up more movements for change, the pre-Cultural Revolution establishment wanted to maintain the status quo. As Mao’s plan of regenerating the CCP unfolded, new developments emerged and unforeseen violence of one kind led to another. If anything the CCP under the leadership of Mao, and chiefly managed by Zhou Enlai, tried hard to control violence. Eventually the army had to be brought in to maintain order. By 1969, a little more than two years after the start of the Cultural Revolution the political situation was brought under control and China’s economic growth was back on track.

From then on, new socioeconomic policies were gradually introduced and these had a positive impact on a large number of people; these policies were intentionally designed. These included the creation of a cheap and fairly effective healthcare system, the expansion of elementary education in rural China, and affirmative-action policies that promoted gender equality. Having grown up in rural China, I witnessed the important benefits that these policies had for the rural people. When the post-Mao regime under Deng Xiaoping reversed the Cultural Revolution policies on these issues, the systems and practices that had benefited the vast majority of China’s rural people were allowed (and, in some cases, pushed) to disintegrate. In terms of health...