China’s Cultural Revolution: A Half Century On

Fifty years ago Mao assembled the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party and announced a new political agenda, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. His justification for the movement was given in the May 16 notice, a circular composed under his personal supervision, in which the case was made that counter-revolutionaries had infiltrated the government and society with the intention of staging a coup.

“Some of them we have already seen through,” the notice said, “others we have not.”

Having planted the seeds of paranoia, Mao had prepared the way for revolution. His adherents practically clawed over each other in order to prove their fanatic loyalty. In one instance, when a villager seemed unimpressed by a mango that Mao had touched, he was dragged aside and shot. It may seem incredible that so many would throw themselves so fully behind such a terrible leader, but economic oppression can often be a potent agent. One century before Mao’s May 16 circular, China had experienced the bloodiest civil war in human history when half a million people pledged allegiance to Hong Xiuquan, who, after repeatedly flunking the civil service exam, read a little Christian scripture and came to the conclusion that he was Jesus Christ’s younger brother.

Russia fell for Stalin, as they’ve fallen for Putin today. Even in neighboring democratic South Korea, recent polling data shows that locals still think highly of Park Chung-hee, and in the United States, all you need is the pinch of the 2008 financial crisis and, eight years later, the nation appears half-ready to elect Donald Trump.

Still, Mao was arguably worse than any of them, or indeed, all of them. His policies led to the deaths of some 45 million people, he hammered the economy into the ground, he turned an education system that churned out Confucian scholars into one that manufactured communist sycophants, and he all but obliterated China’s glorious cultural traditions. But worse than destroying ancient Buddhist temples or sending Daoist monks to labor camps, Mao pulled the very fabric of Chinese society apart. Neighbors were pressured to inform on each other. Friends spied on friends. In some cases, children murdered their own parents.

“History is a religion to the Chinese,” says Zheng Wang, a regular Diplomat contributor. And like a religion, it’s highly redacted, which is why otherwise rational individuals will tell you that Jesus came to America in the 1800s, a new star appeared in the sky when Kim Jong-il was born, or that Mao was a benevolent leader who was forced to make some difficult decisions. Chinese still recall with bitter fury, for instance, the horrors of the Nanjing Massacre, which, according to the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, left about 200,000 dead. But other atrocities are forgotten or outright denied. The Cultural Revolution isn’t the only piece of Chinese history to suffer such a fate. In The Tibetan Independence Movement, Jane Ardley writes that in 1950 there were 600,000 Tibetan monks, and by 1979 most were “dead, disappeared, or imprisoned” – yet such information is scarcely known, as Beijing actively restricts access to it even while it rails against Japan for not fully coming to terms with its wartime crimes in school textbooks.

Walter Duranty, the Pulitzer-prize winning journalist who was the Moscow bureau chief of The New York Times from 1922 to 1936, was also a pro-Stalin loyalist who, when confronted by Stalin’s atrocities, famously wrote, “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.” Indeed, I’ve heard Chinese utter these exact words when discussing Mao.

With the passing of the 50th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution, Western media have been paying a lot of attention to how little attention China gave it. Partly this is because Chinese censorship has created a world in which Chinese are not fully aware of what took place, or on what scale. Also, a remembrance of things past would not only persuade more Chinese to despise Mao, but would show them how little they’ve progressed in terms of leadership. As Teng Biao recently wrote for Foreign Policy, President Xi Jinping circulated an internal communiqué, Document No. 9, which “warned about the dangers of press freedom,” and has also stressed the need for patriotism in art. Teng continues:

But if one defines the Cultural Revolution by its strict one-party rule, total control of the media, thought control, religious oppression, and suppression of dissent, then today differs only in degree.

He further notes that thousands of human rights activists have been imprisoned, civil society groups have been quashed, hundreds of human rights lawyers have been silenced, NGOs have been crushed, churches have been destroyed, Falun Gong practitioners have been brutally persecuted, and “feminist activists, defenders of labor rights, Internet celebrities, and journalists who have dared to speak out have all been attacked.”

And, Teng adds, this is not to mention the cruelties that have been inflicted upon Uyghurs, Tibetans, and the people of Hong Kong.

Also like Mao, Xi has cultivated a cult of personality. His nickname, Xi Dada or Big Daddy Xi, was included in one song that advised, “if you want to marry, marry someone like Big Daddy Xi.”

But Xi’s cult of personality is arguably a matter of pragmatism, not egotism. As Ting Shi wrote for Bloomberg in February 2015, “iconic status would give Xi the popular support to remodel the country while tackling unpopular issues such as pollution and property speculation.”

Meanwhile, China may not be opening up at its painful history, but the country’s leaders have already gone some length toward denouncing Mao and his legacy. Deng Xiaoping famously declared, “Mao was 70 percent wrong and 30 percent right.” And this month, an opinion piece in the People’s Daily argued that “the ‘Cultural Revolution’ … was completely wrong. It is not and can not be a revolution or social progress in any sense.”

As for Xi’s cult of personality, there’s progress there, too. The nickname Big Daddy Xi was recently banned and a Maoist performance celebrating communist culture was mostly shunned. But China’s Century of Humiliation has sensitized it to shame at Western hands, and Beijing isn’t likely to stand red-faced before the West again, certainly not about its own past, and certainly not if it doesn’t have to.