Born Red

A Chronicle of the Cultural Revolution

Yuan Gao

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 1987
• ISBN:
  9780804765893
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

Born Red is an artistically wrought personal account, written very much from inside the experience, of the years 1966-1969, when the author was a young teenager at middle school. It was in the middle schools that much of the fury of the Cultural Revolution and Red Guard movement was spent, and Gao was caught up in very dramatic events, which he recounts as he understood them at the time. Gao's father was a county political official who was in and out of trouble during those years, and the intense interplay between father and son and the differing perceptions and impact of the Cultural Revolution for the two generations provide both an unusual perspective and some extraordinary moving moments. He also makes deft use of traditional mythology and proverbial wisdom to link, sometimes ironically, past and present. Gao relates in vivid fashion how students-turned-Red Guards held mass rallies against 'capitalist roader' teachers and administrators, marching them through the streets to the accompaniment of chants and jeers and driving some of them to suicide. Eventually the students divided into two factions, and school and town became armed camps. Gao tells of the exhilaration that he and his comrades experienced at their initial victories, of their deepening disillusionment as they utter defeat as the tumultuous first phase of the Cultural Revolution came to a close. The portraits of the persons to whom Gao introduces us - classmates, teachers, family members - gain weight and density as the story unfolds, so that in the end we see how they all became victims of the dynamics of a mass movement out of control.

Foreword

Gao Yuan’s chronicle takes us through the first violent years of China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Like Anne Frank’s diary of the Holocaust closing in around her or the story of Dith Pran’s journey through the killing fields of Cambodia, it offers a voice that speaks to us of the human anguish of inhuman events.

The immediacy of Gao’s account of his experiences as a Red Guard in the Cultural Revolution brings us as close as we are likely to get to the political vortex that turned millions of teenagers into the agents of national madness. His description of how the movement gripped him and his schoolmates reveals, as no scholarly analysis can, the fury that brought China to the brink of civil war. Through his eyes we see how ideological expletives gave way to deadly explosives as the weapons of revolutionary conflict. His witness to the unspeakable violence that the young rebels inflicted on one another and their teachers evokes images of the children run amok in Lord of the Flies. The graphic depictions of brutalities committed in the name of idealism may at times shock us—yet they are also needed reminders that noble rhetoric can often be a mask for ignoble deeds.

But Born Red is so much more than the recollection of a political nightmare. It is a deeply personal narrative of an adolescent torn by conflicting loyalties as he is called upon to join in the destruction of the world that has nurtured him. Some of the book’s most powerful moments tell of family ties and friendships sundered by class struggle; yet it is just such bonds that ultimately provide the only safe harbor as the storm of the Cultural Revolution rages beyond reason. Gao’s saga also provides tribute to the durability of cultural traditions at a time when nihilism appeared triumphant: we can almost smell the dumplings cooking and hear the firecrackers popping as Lunar New Year festivities unfold even while Red Guards desecrate ancient artifacts in the name of revolutionary purity.

For readers already familiar with the Cultural Revolution, Gao Yuan’s memoirs need no further introduction. But for those who come to this book with less background in contemporary Chinese history, it is helpful to set more fully the context of events that Gao describes.

The origins of the Cultural Revolution are to be found in Mao Zedong’s perception that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the mid-1960’s was drifting away from the road to socialism down which the country had embarked after its founding in 1949. Mao had been the preeminent leader of the Chinese revolution since the 1930’s, when he had become the principal architect of the strategy of peasant insurrection that had brought the Communists to power. Since Liberation he had not only retained his leading position as Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), but had also come to see himself as the guardian of the ideals for which the revolution had been fought.

As Mao surveyed the situation in China in the 1960’s he saw much that clashed with his notions of what a revolutionary society should be: a tracked educational system that provided better opportunities for the children of intellectuals and officials than for the offspring of the working classes; a cultural life dominated by traditional themes and forms rather than revolutionary content; economic policies emphasizing individual prosperity instead of the collective good; and a Communist Party that had transformed itself from a servant of the people into an elite organization managing society in a bureaucratic manner. He was alarmed by corruption and self-seeking among cadres, a bias in social programs that favored urban dwellers and neglected the welfare of the peasantry—the very class that had been the lifeblood of the Chinese revolution—and the ideological softness of China’s young people, who had grown up in relatively good times and knew of the hardships of life before Liberation only through books and the tales of their elders. If such trends continued, Mao thought, China would experience a return to the dark days of the past—a “restoration of capitalism”—and all the sacrifices and struggles of the past would have come to naught.

How had the PRC reached such a juncture? Mao concluded that many Chinese Communists had succumbed to the ideological disease of “revisionism,” that is, they were revising the fundamental principles of Marxism-Leninism, retaining the shell of doctrine to justify their continuing political domination and to preserve the special status and perquisites that they and their families enjoyed. The Chairman had a long-standing fear that the CCP would lose its revolutionary spirit once it had come to power and settled down to the mundane tasks of governance and modernization. In the mid-1950’s he dissented from the view of some of his senior colleagues that with the completion of land reform, the collectivization of agriculture, and the nationalization of the country’s major industries the Party could shift its attention from radical change to economic development.

Mao came to believe that even though landlords and capitalists had been eliminated as functioning social classes, the influence of their feudal and bourgeois ways still permeated Chinese society; unless “class struggle” continued against the remnants of reaction, the revolution would be lost, defeated not by the invading armies of imperialism or by a counterrevolution of the defeated classes of the past, but by the political degeneration of “capitalist roaders” lurking in the body and the soul of the Party. This conviction would later take the form of the “theory of continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat,” the guiding doctrine of the Cultural Revolution, which encapsulated Mao’s view that only by persisting in the ideological battle against the new bourgeoisie and by constantly remaking social institutions and human values could socialism in China survive.

Gao Yuan’s family bore the practical brunt of Mao’s theories of revisionism: his father, veteran Communist Gao Shangui, came under brutal Red Guard attack at the start of the Cultural Revolution for paying too much attention to economic matters while ignoring class struggle and revolutionary politics in carrying out his duties as head of a county government.

Mao’s fears about the threat posed to socialism by internal enemies found political expression at several points before the Cultural Revolution. In 1957, the CCP waged a fierce “anti-Rightist campaign” against intellectuals and others judged to have revealed their diehard opposition to socialism during the Hundred Flowers period, when they took too literally the Party’s invitation to offer professional advice and constructive criticism as an aid to national development. Millions were adversely affected: some were sent to prison, others were put to work in factories or on farms to remold their bourgeois thoughts through hard labor, and still others had their career prospects—and those of close relatives—ruined by being branded as “Rightists,” conservatives who had to be closely monitored to prevent their corrosive influence from diverting the course of the revolution.

In the midst of the Great Leap Forward (1958-60)—Mao’s grand design to achieve rapid economic growth through the mobilization of China’s enormous reservoir of human labor and attain true communism through radical social engineering—the Chairman wrathfully rejected the warnings of Defense Minister Peng Dehuai that the movement’s extravagant targets and precipitous methods were courting calamity. Mao accused Peng and several other prominent leaders of attempting to sabotage the Great Leap by denigrating the revolutionary spirit of the masses. A vituperative media campaign against “Right opportunism” accompanied a purge of Party cadres deemed to have been less than completely enthusiastic about the Leap. A resurgence of radicalism (along with abysmal weather conditions and the withdrawal of Soviet aid) did, indeed, undo the economy, plunging China into an industrial depression and rural famine now believed to have claimed as many as 30 million lives.

And again in the early 1960’s, when China was just beginning to recover from the agonies of the Great Leap Forward, Mao, although somewhat chastened by the disaster, still pressed his claim that class struggle against the enemies of socialism should remain the Party’s first priority. A “Socialist Education Movement” was launched in 1963 to ferret out bourgeois tendencies among lower-level cadres, and the less-than-thorough manner in which the campaign was conducted fed Mao’s growing suspicion that the poison of revisionism had infested the highest ranks of the country’s leadership.

The Soviet Union also figured prominently in the genesis of Mao’s concern about the rightward drift of China’s development, a concern that would eventually culminate in the Cultural Revolution. The Sino-Soviet alliance began to unravel in the late 1950’s as the two major Communist powers diverged sharply in their positions on a number of important issues. China bristled at what it considered the heavy-handed way in which Moscow sought to maintain control of the socialist bloc and at the compromises the Soviets were willing to make with imperialism simply for the sake of peaceful coexistence. The Russians, for their part, were appalled by what they saw as the PRC’s reckless foreign policy and were increasingly skeptical of Mao’s unorthodox brand of communism, manifested most clearly in the Great Leap Forward. (Such conflicts echoed the tensions of the 1920’s and 1930’s when the Russians, as proponents of the doctrine that Communist movements by definition had to be based in the cities among the industrial proletariat, were dismayed to see the Chinese revolution under Mao’s direction turning to the countryside and the peasantry.)

Ultimately, Mao deduced that Soviet deviance in foreign policy matters could only be traced to even more profound deviance in ideology and domestic politics: under Khrush-chev the Soviet Union had forsaken socialism for a brand of capitalism in which the Communist Party had become a new ruling class. For Mao the question was, Would China follow a similar political trajectory?

Thus, by the mid-1960’s, events both at home and abroad had led Mao to the conclusion that without decisive remedial action, socialist revolutions inevitably degenerated into revisionism. There was little he could do about Soviet revisionism other than to orchestrate an international propaganda campaign against “Khrushchev’s phony communism” and the “great power chauvinism” of the Russians—an endeavor in which he was enthusiastically joined by his closest comrades in the CCP leadership. Within China, though, Mao still commanded the power and the prestige to stem the tide of revisionism. His solution was the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution—but, in this case, some of his closest comrades would eventually become his targets. Only when the revisionists had been removed from power, Mao believed, could the PRC resume its march toward socialism and communism.

The Cultural Revolution, then, was intended to clear the way for a more egalitarian and participatory society. Through mass political struggle and ideological transformation, bourgeois bureaucracy would give way to proletarian democracy, self-interest to self-sacrifice, and cultural elitism to populism in the arts. Radical organizational changes would redistribute power, while adjustments in the flow of resources would greatly reduce individual and group income inequalities, regional economic disparities, and the gap between city and countryside. Such a revolution would, it was promised, unfetter the productivity of the masses and open the door to a new era of abundance for all. These ideals, hammered home at every opportunity, were instrumental in attracting adherents to the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, both within China and among many foreign observers who were fascinated by the “Maoist” model of development.

Mao had two other motivations for launching the Cultural Revolution. First was a concern about the youth of China. Mao believed that they could become worthy successors to the revolution only if they themselves participated in making revolution. This perception was critical to the decision to fight the early rounds of the Cultural Revolution in the schools and to the emergence of the Red Guards as one of Mao’s main allies in his struggle against the Party bureaucracy.

Second, although the Cultural Revolution was a battle of ideas, it was also a power struggle. In the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward, Mao had voluntarily stepped back from day-to-day decision-making within the Party hierarchy, choosing instead to concentrate on ideological questions and broader policy matters. But by 1965 he felt slighted by other top leaders: they paid him lip service as Chairman of the Party and proclaimed symbolic allegiance to his theories as their guiding philosophy, but they ignored his counsel and circumvented his authority. Mao saw the Cultural Revolution, then, as an instrument through which he would reestablish his personal dominance in Chinese politics.

Both of these underlying motives for the Cultural Revolution themselves derived from Mao’s preoccupation with revisionism : an untempered youth would provide a breeding ground for the spread of bourgeois ideology, while the same leaders Mao perceived as snubbing him were also those whom he believed were leading China down the road to capitalism.

The Cultural Revolution itself was an enormously complex event—or, more precisely, series of events. Although some argue that the movement ended with the demobilization of the Red Guards and the reassertion of political order by the army in 1968—69, the official Chinese assessment now considers the Cultural Revolution to have lasted for an entire decade, 1966—76. There is merit to this view since it took the full ten years to work out all the contradictions unleashed by Mao’s campaign, although the event said to mark the formal end of the Cultural Revolution—the arrest of the Gang of Four in October 1976—ironically paved the way for a complete repudiation of the movement by those now in power in Beijing.

The first tremor of what was to become the political earthquake of the Cultural Revolution was felt in the fall of 1965, when Mao sanctioned a scathing press denunciation of revisionist trends in Chinese culture. This attack initially appeared to be only another installment in the Party’s periodic upbraiding of intellectuals seen to have taken liberalization too far. But Mao quickly became disgruntled by the efforts of officials charged with overseeing cultural policy to define the critique as merely an academic debate and to obscure the deeper ideological and political implications of deviant trends among China’s intelligentsia.

This evasiveness on the part of high-ranking cadres hardened Mao’s view that the Party could not cleanse itself. Instead, he would have to turn to the people to bring the Party back into line with its own ideals. Nothing short of a mobilization of the masses against the organizationally strong but ideologically rotten bulwark of the Communist Party would put an end to revisionism. It would be a “revolution from below,” although one inspired by and ultimately subservient to the man who stood at the pinnacle of power.

By the spring of 1966, the Cultural Revolution was a full-scale national movement in which counterrevolutionaries within the Party, along with “representatives of the bourgeoisie” in academic and cultural circles, had been identified as the targets of attack. This was the beginning of the mass phase of the Cultural Revolution—and the beginning point of Gao’s narrative—in which power at the center passed into the hands of radical ideologues and anarchy prevailed below as the institutions of order were either paralyzed by the hunt for revisionists or stood by in tacit support of local rebels.

The centerpiece of this period was, of course, the emergence of the Red Guards, a generic label for the vast array of student groups that took up Mao’s call to battle against the enemies of socialism. The Red Guards first appeared spontaneously on Beijing campuses to resist the efforts of school authorities (acting in accordance with the instructions of high Party officials) to limit the scope of the burgeoning Cultural Revolution to criticism of a few scholars and academic bureaucrats. As word of the rebellion by Beijing students spread, Red Guard organizations quickly sprang up all over China.

A major Party meeting in August 1966 sanctioned the mass uprisings that were becoming the main thrust of the Cultural Revolution (a nice piece of historical irony, since many of the leaders present at that meeting would later come under attack by the very masses they had authorized to rebel). The Red Guards received Mao’s personal blessing to continue their efforts to expose revisionism at eight dramatic rallies attended by some thirteen million youths in the capital between August and November of that year. Thus, the Red Guards became one of the pillars of the Maoist alliance in the first phase of the Cultural Revolution. They were joined by elements of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), which, under the command of Lin Biao, had been fashioned into what Mao considered the only remaining repository of revolutionary virtue among the established institutions of society, and by a coterie of radical ideologues that included Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, and Mao’s long-time personal secretary, Chen Boda, who is one of the few national leaders to figure prominently in the events described by Gao Yuan.

The rapid expansion of the Red Guard movement revealed that Mao’s call to make revolution had struck responsive chords among China’s youth. Some responded out of blind faith in the man they had been indoctrinated to love since childhood. Others saw the movement as a chance to vent simmering frustrations about inequities in the educational system or about clogged channels of mobility after graduation. Still others used the Red Guards as an instrument of vengeance against teachers they disliked or classmates they envied. And many, intoxicated with power and uninhibited by authority of any kind, simply went along for the thrill. As Born Red tells so dramatically, few of the youthful participants really understood the ideological meaning of the Cultural Revolution, and in their hands the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie degenerated into gang wars, joyrides, souvenir hunts, and orgies of destruction.

Among the issues that propelled the Red Guard movement into the violent factionalism that ultimately proved its undoing was the question of class origin. Children from “bad” classes (e.g., former landlord or capitalist families), regardless of their own political credentials, were definitively excluded from joining the Red Guards, and indeed often became targets of attack; the sons and daughters of intellectuals also frequently suffered ostracism or physical abuse, especially if their parents had been denounced. Rebel groups were themselves divided by the family backgrounds of their respective memberships. The offspring of workers, cadres, and soldiers were pitted against one another as each faction claimed that only its class status was pure enough to embody Chairman Mao’s sacred cause. They fractured and fought over who were the true rebels and who were merely “royalists” out to protect their parents and their parents’ patrons from the rightful wrath of the revolutionary masses.

During all of 1967 and the first part of 1968, the conflagration of local rebellion spread throughout China, burning with ever-greater intensity as internecine Red Guard warfare responded to the leadership struggles in Beijing. Factions of factory workers and military units also joined the fray, thereby greatly escalating the tempo of violence. “Power seizures” rooted out suspected revisionists of both large and petty stripe, and left authority in the hands of rebels who often had little in mind except vengeance against their opponents. Efforts to restore order proved abortive as Mao’s political whirlwind took on a momentum of its own.

By mid-1968, Mao became frustrated by the persistence of turmoil and discord, and he ordered the PLA to restore peace in China’s cities. (The violence of this phase of the Cultural Revolution was largely an urban affair, barely touching the countryside.) In any case, the Red Guards had largely served one of his purposes in the C...