Essential Reading On The 50th Anniversary Of China's Cultural Revolution
On May 16th, 50 years ago today, Mao Zedong's Chinese government directed its people to overthrow the "bourgeoisie threatening to seize political power from the proletariat." This order marked the beginning of the 10-year-long violent class struggle known as The Cultural Revolution. The upheaval resulted in the torture, imprisonment, public humiliation, and displacement of those labeled part of the bourgeoisie. The persecuted included artists, professors, intellectuals, land-owners, political critics and everyday people caught in the fray — eventually leaving between 400,000 to several million dead.
The current Chinese government remains silent on Chairman Mao, but here's what you should read about the failed political project that was The Cultural Revolution.
The Rise Of Mao And The Death Of The Four Olds
The South China Morning Post recounts the rise of Mao Zedong and the dire effects of his political campaign.
In Beijing, Red Guards declared war against the "Four Olds" – old customs, old culture, old habits and old ideas – destroying cultural artefacts and persecuting intellectuals in a massive campaign that quickly spread across the nation. In the capital alone, almost 5,000 – or more than 70 per cent – of the city's some 6,800 cultural artefacts were destroyed in August and September 1966.
Chinese Media Stayed Silent On The Anniversary And Commenters Were Censored
[T]he People's Daily, mouthpiece of the ruling Communist Party, carried no articles about the anniversary in either Chinese or English. The state-run Global Times ran just five paragraphs of an AFP story about the popularity of Cultural Revolution memorabilia, but without including any political context. Asked about the anniversary at a regular press briefing Monday, Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei offered only a single sentence in response: "The Chinese government already made the correct verdict on it long ago."
Stories From Those Who Witnessed And Survived The Cultural Revolution
The New York Times has the story of a man who's father was killed by merciless beating, along with a collection of other stories of torture and humiliation.
Ms. Liu and her husband had been taken by Red Guards, and he was accused of being a "class enemy," she told Mr. Chen. The family of Mr. Chen's father had once owned about three acres of land, enough to label the father a landlord, anathema to the revolution. The teenage mob threw the couple into the back of a truck and took them to a school where they were beaten with military-style leather belts, the favorite punishment tool of Red Guards; a jump-rope twisted into a whip; and shoes with nails jutting out, Ms. Liu later said.
Inside The Cowshed: Tales From A Chinese Labor Camp
During The Cultural Revolution, Ji Xianlin's college campus was turned into a labor camp. Years later he wrote about his experience. Longreads has excerpts from his full memoir titled "The Cowshed."
I wouldn't have believed I could do such unimaginably base things until I actually did them. I lost all sense of shame, as well as my sense of right and wrong. Just recalling those times makes me shudder. I used to wonder how one could morally corrupt a person, and assumed that some are simply innately depraved. Now I know from personal experience that the truth is far more complex, but that no one can be held responsible for another's evil.
What Newly Released Documents Reveal About The Violence Of The Cultural Revolution
Historian Frank Dikötter talks to Fresh Air about what recently opened archives reveal about the Cultural Revolution.
If you look at the south of China, in particular Guangxi province, which is not all that far away from where I live in Hong Kong, there you see that throughout 1967 but also '68, there are factions in the countryside that start not just eliminating each other physically, but literally in a couple of small towns they start ritualistically eating each other.
[NPR]
What The Cultural Revolution Looked Like In Tibet
The cultural revolution swept across all of China and into the areas of other nations that China had conquered — including the Tibetan capital of Lhasa. Foreign Policy has collected a series of photos documenting what the cultural revolution looked like as throngs of citizens joined the campaign's marches, struggles and demonstrations.
How Mao Failed, And China Came To Succeed
Roderick MacFarquhar writes about what steps led to Mao's failure, and how China managed to rise afterward.
Mao faced a nightmare situation of his own devising. He had disgraced a large proportion of the old CCP leadership. He had tried to rear a new generation to take their place, but they had failed him. The People's Liberation Army (PLA) was the only national institution still fully functioning…Moreover, at the congress, Mao had taken the unprecedented step of writing the name of his favorite marshal, Lin Biao, into the party constitution as his successor. Since Lin had no constituency in the party, he would have to rely on the PLA, exemplifying Mao's long-held belief that "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."
How The Cultural Revolution Is Preventing Chinese Democracy
The violence of the Cultural Revolution, and the many officials it claimed as victims, may explain why China's liberalization of the economy has not gone hand-in-hand with greater democracy. To Westerners, the students protesting in Tiananmen Square in 1989 may have seemed a million miles from the Red Guards who had assembled there more than two decades earlier screaming Maoist slogans. But to China's leaders, there has always been a connection: that the Cultural Revolution was a kind of "big democracy" (as Mao called it) in which ordinary people were given the power to topple officials they hated.
Could The Cultural Revolution Happen Again?
It is hard to imagine another Cultural Revolution on a similar scale in a modernized and globalized China. However, the seeds of Cultural Revolution have yet to be fully eliminated. Just four years ago, the then-Chinese premier Wen Jiabao warned another Cultural Revolution could happen again without successful political reform. Without valuing the rule of law, democracy and human rights, the risk of another Cultural Revolution remains.
