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ON June 1, 1966, the People’s Daily, the official organ of the Chinese Communist Party, published an editorial titled ‘Sweep away all monsters and demons!’ which called upon citizens to expose all elements of the bourgeoisie who were determined to “deceive, fool and benumb the working people in order to consolidate their reactionary state power”.
In his recently published book The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, Frank Dikotter, chair professor of humanities at the University of Hong Kong, describes this official appeal as “the opening shot of the Cultural Revolution”, although that peculiarly devastating phenomenon is generally accepted to have been launched a couple of weeks earlier.
It represented what could be described as Mao Zedong’s last stand. No one can be entirely sure exactly what Mao had in mind when he decided to unleash nationwide chaos almost 20 years after he had led the communists to power in Beijing. Purging counter-revolutionaries from the party as well as society at large was the official explanation, but the identity of the purported enemies within could change from one day to the next.
Ultimately, up to two million people are believed to have perished as a consequence of the Cultural Revolution, which effectively continued in some shape or form until Mao’s demise in 1976. They included two of Mao’s designated successors: Liu Shaoqi, who was formally the nation’s president until 1968, but died the following year while under house arrest; and Marshal Lin Biao, a key protagonist in the campaign, who was killed in a mysterious air crash in 1971.
The Cultural Revolution represented what could be called Mao’s last stand.
Many of the Cultural Revolution’s other victims were publicly humiliated and sometimes beaten to death by self-ordained keepers of the revolutionary flame, on account of alleged ideological deviations or simply for having a ‘black’ background, which often implied no more than descent from land-owning families in the pre-revolutionary era.
Students in schools and universities took up cudgels — in all too many cases literally — against their teachers. Writers and intellectuals were targeted in what could be seen as a kind of precursor to the Khmer Rouge’s elimination of the intelligentsia in Cambodia in the mid-1970s.
Inevitably, the chaos offered an opportunity for personal scores to be settled at a variety of levels. Rumoured allegiances and ancestry often sufficed as grounds for victimisation. Even Mao himself seemed to be settling scores.
Ever since Josef Stalin had been denounced in 1956 by his successor, the Chinese leader had become increasingly paranoid about his legacy being muddied by a local Nikita Khrushchev — and through much of the Cultural Revolution, it was common for party personnel who had fallen out of favour to be dismissed as “little Khrushchevs”.
Khrushchev’s overthrow in 1964 led to no reassessment of Beijing’s designation of Moscow as a revisionist stronghold, and subsequently the two communist powers almost came to blows. Mao’s personality cult, meanwhile, went beyond anything Stalin had managed to achieve in his heyday: Mao Zedong Thought, briefly relinquished in the late 1950s as an official doctrine, was re-cultivated with a religious zeal, with the so-called little red book, formally titled The Quotations of Chairman Mao, serving as a biblical text.
(One of the more bizarre episodes related to the deification of Mao was the cult of the mango, sparked by the chairman’s re-gifting in 1968 of mangoes presented to him by Pakistan’s foreign minister to workers who had subdued students at Beijing’s Qinghua University.)
Back in the day, elements of the international left were enthused by what they mistakenly perceived as chiefly a campaign of ideological purification — possibly a demonstration of the concept of a permanent revolution. Today, hardly anyone outside China would be inclined to defend the Cultural Revolution, but there is some evidence of ambivalence within the country itself.
Its 50th anniversary has largely gone unmarked, although the People’s Daily declared last month: “There will not be a re-enactment of a mistake like the Cultural Revolution.” It designated the Communist Party’s official critique of the process in 1981 as “unshakably scientific and authoritative”. Earlier in May, however, the Great Hall of the People in the Chinese capital hosted what has been described as a “Mao-themed extravaganza”, echoing to songs and slogans associated with the Cultural Revolution.
Opinion is divided on whether the show was endorsed by President Xi Jinping, whose images featured prominently alongside those of Mao, or was, in fact, intended to embarrass him.
Although the cult of Xi is considered to be unprecedented in what could be described as post-communist China — inaugurated in the years after Mao by Deng Xiaoping, who was lucky to have survived the Cultural Revolution after being condemned (perhaps not particularly inaccurately, given his subsequent predilections) as a “capitalist roader” — it is generally felt that it would be impossible in this day and age to revisit so grievous a calamity.
That seems like a reasonable assessment. Yet in key respects China remains an unpredictable giant.
Published in Dawn, June 1st, 2016
