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The Cultural Revolution at 40
Liu Xiaobo is a literary and political critic and current President of the Chinese chapter of PEN.
By Liu Xiaobo
Mao’s Cultural Revolution was launched 40 years ago this month, yet, despite 20 years of economic liberalization, its wounds remain a taboo subject. Today’s rulers dare not face up to their own experiences or moral responsibility. So, three decades after the Cultural Revolution ended, the national self-examination that China requires has not yet begun.
Of course, the Communist Party has deemed the Cultural Revolution a “catastrophe,” a judgment supported by mainstream opinion. But China’s rulers permit discussion of the Cultural Revolution only within this official framework, suppressing any and all unofficial reflections. The generalized official verdict, and the use of Lin Piao (once Mao Zedong’s Vice President and designated heir, who rebelled against him) and the “Gang of Four” as scapegoats, obscures the crimes of Mao and the Party, as well as the entrenched flaws in the system.
The Cultural Revolution’s major figures, who wrought so much mindless violence, thus either maintain their silence or offer spurious self-defenses. Most victims also use various excuses to bottle up their memories. Those who both persecuted and were persecuted are willing to talk only about their being victims.
For example, the fanatical Red Guard movement swallowed up almost every youth of the right age. Yet all but a few old Red Guards remain silent, saying, “it is not worth remembering.” During the Cultural Revolution’s early days, the Beijing-based Allied Movement, formed by the children of party cadres, committed horrendous acts of violence, operating under the slogan, “If the father is a hero, the son is a good man; if the father is a reactionary, the son is a turtle egg.”
But the memoirs of these rebellious vanguards of yesteryear highlight only their youthful passion and pure idealism, or their sufferings and those of their parents. They do not mention their own barbaric assaults, vandalism, and looting, or their kangaroo courts. The revolution’s veterans refuse to discuss their arrogant presumption of “natural Redness,” or to mention that they rebelled because they wanted power. Worse still, they express no remorse toward their victims.
The Cultural Revolution swept up all of China. So many people suffered that it is difficult to count the number of victims accurately. This is all the more true of the persecutors. Yet few reflect and apologize. The terror of the Red Guards, the armed fights between the rebellious sects, the teams established to “cleanse” the social classes, and all the bloody massacres are simply left to rot in China’s memory. The official ban blocks reflection, but human weakness and careerist self-interest among those who participated buttresses the official ban.
Consider Ye Xiangzhen, the daughter of senior general Ye Jianying, who once discussed her family’s Cultural Revolution experiences on television. During the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, she played a dual role: daughter of a Chinese field marshal and leader of the rebels at the School of Art in the capital. She complained that she was “too famous,” “too active,” and “too stressed” at the time, and she provided extensive details about how Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, persecuted the Ye family and how the Ye children went to prison. But she had only 58 words to say about her career as a Red Guard leader – no details or explanation of how she joined, which activities she participated in, and whether she was involved in “physical struggles” or persecuted others.
To call for those people who applied violence and persecuted others to examine themselves and repent is not intended to mete out legal responsibility and moral judgment. But it would at least restore the truth about the Cultural Revolution, summarizing its lessons in order to avoid repetition. More positively, restoring truth would counter the traditional Chinese instinct to blame all disasters on external forces, and might lead to a spiritual epiphany for a people struggling to find value in the emerging new China.
The person with the most responsibility for the catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution is, of course, Mao, yet he remains China’s savior. The children of Mao’s senior cadres who enjoyed the greatest fame during the Cultural Revolution are now the principal beneficiaries of today’s economic reforms.
But this continuing silence by the guilty only transfers the costs to society as a whole, with Chinese life distorted by the weight of lies and evasions. As one generation after another continues to live in denial, the lies will corrode everything they touch. The Chinese people will no longer know what is personal honesty or historical truth, and they will repeatedly abuse, miss, or forsake historic opportunities.
As long as the Cultural Revolution remains unaccounted for, it will not have ended. If historical truth is not restored, the lessons cannot be learned. No amount of material prosperity can make China a healthy society without this necessary reckoning with the past.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2006.
www.project-syndicate.org
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probable drug type action
Angela Ryan: "There are different ways of attacking. Covert, economic, restricting technological transfers, trade limiting, supporting internal unrest, huge support by proxy wars for opposing regimes, and probable drug type action but that is impossible to find evidence about."
Probable drug type action included (I'm thinking the Bulgarians here), there is nothing in your list that hasn't been used by communists to subvert western democracies.
How come all this is so reprehensible when used against the commies, who were historically the most murderous, paranoid political movement of the last 100 years with the possible exception of Nazism?
If western governments worked at overthrowing communist dictatorships, I say "good on them and congratulations on a job well done."
My only misgiving is that western governments cannot most probably take credit for the failures of communism, which are essentially the result of its own inner contradictions and shortcomings.
Discussing communism's "virtues" is a bit like discussing the "virtues" of Spanish slave traders in the New World or the Visigoths when they sacked Rome.
I suppose they must have had some virtues, but on balance what kind of an idiot would bother trying to find them?
As for any "probable drug type action" affecting Communists in the '60s and '70s, it was mostly sucked right through a tube from a Mr Juicy bottle in the room at the back of Party Headquarters in Dixon Street.
Juntas and communistos love the drug pull and profits
C Parsons: "..If western governments worked at overthrowing communist dictatorships, I say "good on them and congratulations on a job well done.".."
What if the people were better off than they had been under the previous regime? Health, education, social security, civil security (policing), more equal justice, better relative income, etc?
What if the western government is using such to overthrow a democratically elected government?
What if the western government actively overthrows a democratically elected government and replaces it with a military junta?
You know where this is going. Communist bogeyman rhetoric is too simplistic to describe the actions of the last century by various western governments. Those which benefited the powerful governments were encouraged economically and militarily. Those that did not were subverted by the same.
The divide tended to be communist vs "capitalist"/military junta fascists; but I suspect this was more due to trading and military Alaine blocks that developed, as seen when China came in from the cold despite being Communist and with the record you described in 1971, favored nation and military support by 1980; in exchange for aid with Afghanistan Mujahadeen support with Pakistan - bet Taiwan loooooved that. Burma I don't know much about, though they're are not Communist, but military junta fascist, non?
You are very hard on the Visigoths. I hear they had lovely animal skins and played beautiful drums made of humanchildskullshumanchildskulls. Seriously, sacking of an empire like Rome was a huge loss, there went a bureaucracy for the world that wasn't seen again until the British empire and then the Indian government and then Centrelink..
There will always be super rich, so communist sharing of wealth may be good when there is not much else to go around, to avoid having super poor. It would never work here as we would have superbludger because our beaches are too nice. Hmmm, maybe communism is good.
I do think that a communist state supporting the poor,old and vulnerable is to be prefered to a military junta where there are superaffluent and no sfety net for any of the others. What do yo think?
Again, as I have said before I think the US system is the best, if it had better protection for the poor and vulnerable,a nd not had the election colleges.
Angela, You made this
Angela,
You made this statement "and probable drug type action but that is impossible to find evidence about". As you state it is impossible to find evidence of such how on earth can you make such an assertion?
Do you alone have knowledge of such activity? And how do you know if there is no evidence?
Communism in itself is a highly workable model for any country, just as democracy is. The problem with both is they fail when people actually try to practice what is in the books. Animal Farm, some are more equal than others as usual.
It is not the political strategy that fails, it's people, but only since the dawn of time so all is not lost right?
Not great, proletarian, cultural or a revolution
It is true to say, as Liu Xiaobo does:
The Maoist terror of the 1960s was in many respects the counterpart of Stalin’s terror of the 1930s, and one is tempted to look for common causes and origins. Neither would have been possible without the centralisation of political and economic decision making which was the heart of the communist system.
The Chinese and Russian communist parties formed and grew for a common reason. They faced ruthless autocracies that had led their subject peoples disastrously in war and with great corruption and repression in peace. There are those, such as Gerard Henderson, whose writings lead to the conclusion that oppressed peoples should never revolt, lest they bring on an even worse regime than they have already. Transpose this into the debate running on Webdiary at The nightmares that fill the Baghdad night and you have one offered answer: Far better for the Iraqis to wait, however long, for a rise of liberalism and democracy in their country, than for the tyrant Saddam to be overthrown by (say) a communist-led insurgency, never mind an invading army. To the Iraqis under Saddam, the Cubans under Batista, the Chinese under Chiang Kai Shek and the Vietnamese under Ngo Dinh Diem, there could only be one message: cop it sweet until something better turns up.
Of the communist-led revolutions of the 20th Century, the Russian Revolution of 1917 was a response to WW1; that led by Tito in Yugoslavia a response to WW2, and the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions were a response both to imperialism (in its colonialist form in Vietnam) and WW2. The Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions were never communist led, and were independent uprisings against local US-favoured gangster regimes. However, the leaderships of all of them finished up favouring what we might call the Stalin model of socialism, under which both economic and political decision making was carried out by one pyramidal hierarchy. Growing economic complexity made this increasingly difficult, leading rapidly to an ad hoc alternative of centralised politics with decentralised economics. Economically, these societies now consist of a large number of smaller hierarchies, while little has changed politically. Cuba’s economy has been severely distorted and disadvantaged by the US trade embargo that has been in place since 1959.
Ominously, centralised authoritarian politics with decentralised economics is also a basic description of fascism. All that is needed for the full transition is a racist, xenophobic ideology in place of the moth-eaten “Marxism-Leninism”, which is now grossly inappropriate to the economies of these countries. Such a movement could arise should China’s economy go into crisis before political decentralisation occurs.
The Cultural Revolution, in my view, was a religious movement with similarities to the millennialist cults of the Middle Ages in Europe and German Nazism of the Twentieth Century, but without the expansionist motivation of the latter. Where the Nazis’ demons were the varieties of ‘sub-human’ untermensch, which in their view had both robbed Germany of victory in WW1 and blocked the Germans’ ‘rightful’ expansion to the east, the Maoist ones were those (inside the communist party and out) who questioned Mao’s clairvoyance and challenged his omnipotence. This led to a massive encouragement to the whole society to dumb down. The Orwellian Red Guards pilloried scholars, writers and independent thinkers, while at the same time confining their intellectual activity mostly to phrase chanting from Mao’s Little Red Book. Never mind Marx and his fellow humanists, they did not even read the complete works of Mao himself; understandably, because like the Bible, they were open to varieties of interpretation. Mediaeval Catholicism had the same problem.
The collapse of Mao’s economic brainchild, the Great Leap Forward of 1958-60 brought on a crisis for centralised economic planning in China and though all the facts on the matter are not out, one would assume that Mao came under pressure from his Central Committee to move out of the limelight and make way for others. But communist leaders, however installed, have shown a uniform reluctance to relinquish power. Part of the reason at least lies in the simple fact that all have come very close to death at the hands of enemies in the course of their lives, and have made many enemies in the course of leading revolutionary wars and expropriating the propertied classes.
Mao was once captured by Kuomintang troops, and was being marched away to execution when he made a break for it and escaped into a river (he was reportedly a strong swimmer). Stalin did time in a Tsarist prison, and had a personality disorder which manifested as severe paranoia. Lenin and Ho Chi Minh were hunted by Tsarist and French colonial police respectively. Castro was captured by Batista’s police, and could well have been executed for subversion. Their obsession with holding onto power is thus understandable, though not by such or any argument excusable.
The present military buildup in China could well presage a transition by that country to something more akin to traditional fascism, even though it is hard to see a switch to an aggressive, expansionist foreign policy not being met with dissension at home and alliance-fostering resistance abroad. Having decentralised economics to the extent they have, the Chinese communists can grimly hold onto centralised political power or initiate a transition to decentralised politics, bringing them more into line with western political economy. That move is one they are obviously reluctant to make. Apart from other considerations, there are a lot of people out there with scores to settle.
a kind of mega-Kristallnacht purge
Angela Ryan: "And please, "what phase was China under attack"? Are you serious? Anyone would think you never read a bit more broadly than the telegraph page three."
Come to think of it, even Mao didn't pretend to launch the Cultural Revolution because Communist China was "under attack" by foreigners.
He claimed China was "under attack" from within.
It's just pitiable that a grown person like Angela would still have to excuse the brutal misconduct of long vanished communist governments by claiming they were "under attack".
I mean, did West Germany launch wave after wave of hysterical political persecution and engineered paranoia on the scale of the Cultural Revolution when the Berlin blockade was on?
Or when the Socialist Apartheid Wall went up in 1961?
No. It did not.
And not just because such things were widely excused - even applauded - by ignorant beatnik prose-poets, nudists, bongo drummers, fruit juice enthusiasts and other Left "intellectuals" at the time
What kind of a political philosophy could indeed "justify" something like the Cultural Revolution - a kind of mega-Kristallnacht purge of ones own citizens - because it was "under attack" from any quarter?
A deeply paranoid, failed political philosophy, I'd say.
reds under the beds blues down the loos
Who supported the White Russians, who supported the KMT? Who supported the Tibetans? Who repeatedly dropped Partisan behind the eastern Block to start rebellion in communist controlled countries for decades straight after ww2?
Who supported the new Taiwan regime (that colonised the original peoples), arming in to the teeth including nuclear weapons? Who had economic embargo upon certain communist states and their subsidiaries? Who dared lend money to such governments? WB?IMF?
Who still forbids arms transfers and even then with specific limitations-Israel couldn't even sell it's own engineering to China recently .Who supports "opposition leaders" and pays huge amounts via covert funding into prodemocracy movements? Who destabilises currencies,causes runs on banks? Where does a country deal to sell it's product if the biggest economies shut it out? If the universities cannot teach, if the tourists cannot visit, if the industrialists and traders cannot set up business?
There are different ways of attacking.Covert, economic, restricting technological transfers, trade limiting, supporting internal unrest, huge support by proxy wars for opposing regimes,and probable drug type action but that is impossible to find evidence about.The history of Opium shows how such can be used and was, against the Chinese in the past.Until 1971 China was under attack,as was Soviet Russia and it's satellites andproxy nations."Reds under the beds" here and "blues down the loos" there. After the clandestine visit by Kissinger in 1971 things dramatically changed.The falling out with the Soviets and leaving, and then proper diplomatic contacts opening with the USA changed China's direction and it's prosperity.The various clandestine organisations previously supported had finding cut,such as Tibetan.
The essential ops begun and training of Chinese in such intelligence gathering for the US was essential after the US lost Turkey (invasion of Cyprus) bases ops sites.that nice little area of China just north of Kashmir was valuable.The Chinese were essential for data and intercepts of Soviet messages.Things just got sweeter and sweeter after that.Communism or not, and better for the people of China.Banking systems, loans, exchanges of education and students, business opportunities, trade and exploitation of the Cheap China workforce wth no environmental limits.Now 50% if US foreign debt is due to US company sales to the US of goods made in China.
As to the Beijing Massacre, I suspect it was an example of a "SorosStyle" engineered movement (like the tulip etc in ex Soviet states) going too far too quickly. There may have been Soviet influence too, in 1989, or just the old guard gasping and giving one last grab, like the anti Gorbachov short revolution.I had just left Russia then without realising how close i came to seeing tanks in action again.
Do not misunderstand what i say, I have a great dislike for communist systems and never want to live in one again, personally I prefer a Liberal socialism, even like a Menzies Model.... but to rant and rage against communist systems when many have worked better than the regime before for the majority of people, putting all in a grey world but with food and education and health usually is a little blind and ignorant.
Certainly there were pogroms and starvation,just as there are with far right wing leaderships.To repeatedly harp upon certain communist regimes and their failures without mentioning for balance the appalling deeds of so many military dictators supported by our allies is lacking in balance. Minds can be like that.Add to that the lack of basic needs for people in nonsocialist nations and I have no difficulty supporting the socialist above the Far-rightwing Fascist.Nash all you like about that, it is an easy choice. All regimes have the potential for dreadful deeds and that is why open and accountable govenment with free and independent media is so essential.
Forgive my ignorance
Angela wrote: "As to the Beijing Massacre, I suspect it was an example of a 'SorosStyle' engineered movement (like the tulip etc in ex Soviet states) going too far too quickly." Is this a reference to Tiananmen Square? And what's a "Soros Style" engineered movement? The reference to tulips lost me too.
the Flower revolutions of exSoviet states, a la Soros et al
There are many references to George Soros' actions and he was proud of the achievements of his group at a recent meeting earlier this year, and quoted in a paper (but I forget that source, because already knowing the details I didn't save it).
Here are some basic summaries of US action via various NGOs in the exSoviet territories and most were given flower names:
"But while the gains of the orange-bedecked "chestnut revolution" are Ukraine's, the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes. ..."..."
They emerged from the anti-Milosevic student movement, Otpor, meaning resistance. The catchy, single-word branding is important. In Georgia last year, the parallel student movement was Khmara. In Belarus, it was Zubr. In Ukraine, it is Pora, meaning high time. Otpor also had a potent, simple slogan that appeared everywhere in Serbia in 2000 - the two words "gotov je", meaning "he's finished", a reference to Milosevic. A logo of a black-and-white clenched fist completed the masterful marketing.
In Ukraine, the equivalent is a ticking clock, also signalling that the Kuchma regime's days are numbered.
Stickers, spray paint and websites are the young activists' weapons. Irony and street comedy mocking the regime have been hugely successful in puncturing public fear and enraging the powerful.
Last year, before becoming president in Georgia, the US-educated Mr Saakashvili travelled from Tbilisi to Belgrade to be coached in the techniques of mass defiance. In Belarus, the US embassy organised the dispatch of young opposition leaders to the Baltic, where they met up with Serbs travelling from Belgrade. In Serbia's case, given the hostile environment in Belgrade, the Americans organised the overthrow from neighbouring Hungary - Budapest and Szeged.
In recent weeks, several Serbs travelled to the Ukraine. Indeed, one of the leaders from Belgrade, Aleksandar Maric, was turned away at the border.
The Democratic party's National Democratic Institute, the Republican party's International Republican Institute, the US state department and USAid are the main agencies involved in these grassroots campaigns as well as the Freedom House NGO and billionaire George Soros's open society institute.
US pollsters and professional consultants are hired to organise focus groups and use psephological data to plot strategy.
The usually fractious oppositions have to be united behind a single candidate if there is to be any chance of unseating the regime. That leader is selected on pragmatic and objective grounds, even if he or she is anti-American. "
.....it goes on with more detail. You can see the pattern.
And this article is even damning of the apparent altruistic motives of Mr Soros, noting the economic spin offs for the new power group:
"..........Generous George Soros stepped in to pay the salaries of the new president’s ministers and policemen in Georgia. Oddly enough, Mr Soros’s business partner, Kaka Bendukidze, became economy minister in Georgia. Mr Soros owns 10% of Bendukidze’s Russian-based energy and engineering conglomerate OMZ.
Does George Soros have similar partners in waiting for Ukraine? Unfortunately, Transparency International, another Soros-funded NGO which exposes the hidden ties of business and politics around the world never reports on its patron’s activities.
Competitors at home, Bush and Soros always seem to be on the same winning side abroad...."
It is standard to support opposition groups who may show better favour to one's nation. After Putin arrested Khodorsky he then kicked out the Soros group, similar vein methinks:
"...The Soros Foundation is heavily involved in promoting civil society and the development of democratic ideas, chiefly in former Soviet bloc countries. But it is sometimes accused of interfering in countries' internal affairs.
Soros' activities in Russia have been effectively frozen since the seizure of the foundation's Moscow premises in early November in a complicated property dispute that some have linked to political motives.
Former Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze, who was forced to resign after a wave of street protests by the opposition in November, accused Soros of orchestrating the campaign that led to his downfall. ..." (AFP).
Also much along the same lines in more detail in Connie Bruck's, "The World According to Soros", The New Yorker, 23-Jan-1995.
Actually in checking for these details I came upon a little point that had eluded me before. Kravchuk, a fluent Ukrainina speaker and nationalist was beaten by Kuchma in 1994 and I had not realised that the latter was a Soros man. Looking at the way Kuchma treated the people as far as democracy goes it seems that for a prodemocracy altruistic advocate he was a bad choice. If the aim was to promote the role of the Russian mafia, one couldn't have chosen better.
Complicated but interesting.
I wonder how history will record all this.
Business as usual
Angela Ryan: "And please, "what phase was China under attack"? Are you serious? Anyone would think you never read a bit more broadly than the telegraph page three."
Actually, the question was: "During what phase of the cultural revolution was China "under attack" by the west? "
China being "under attack" your excuse for its failed revolution and the "excesses" of the cultural revolution.
Perhaps you were too busy mopping up Mum's spittle to bother supplying an historical reference.
Or just don't have one, more than likely.
Odd that Britain didn't have to resort to a "cultural revolution" when it was having the beejeesus bombed out of it in 1940. That is, actually "under attack".
Is that something that only happens when gigantic, sprawling communist dictatorships are being "attacked" in the pages of New Republic or The Telegraph, is it?
The main source of actual attack against China in the Sixties was from its comradely and fraternal Socialist neighbours on its Soviet border. Practically broke out into open warfare in the mid Seventies as I recall.
But, hey? Embarassing track record a problem?
I know! Just lie through your teeth. That's how "denial" works, after all. Or "post modernism" as they call lying htese days.
Anyway, it's perhaps historically inaccurate to refer to any communist nation's methodical butchery of its own citizens as an "excess".
Usually, that's just business as normal in the workers' paradises you have so devotedly served over the years.
PS: I didn't know you had a job at council? Waste department?
Denial. The highest stage of socialism
Angela Ryan: "I wonder if the excesses of countries whose dogma was in conflict with the established "west", such as communism, would have descended into such extreme suppression and intolerance of moderation, if they had not been constantly under economic and covert and diplomatic attack."
During what phase of the cultural revolution was China "under attack" by the west?
And why did so many psuedo-intellectual wankers in the West then openly side with, and express support for the monstrous excesses of the cultural revolution at the time?
The most ludicrous exemplar here in those days was the "artist" Brett Whitley who turned his admittedly normally second-rate doodling over to the service of the Maoist mass murderers, much to the acclaim of the trendy set.
The second-rate doodles were further reduced to third-rate doodles now liberally sprinkled with mindless Maoist slogans.
They'd look funny in a retrospective, these days, so I cannot imagine we'll ever see them again.
Pity really. It would help put his "genius" into perspective.
Now, here's a question;
I wonder if there is any limit to the capacity of blinkered, ignorant Marxist dupes to ceaselessly rationalise away the record of implaccable failure, catastrophic human damage and boundless misery inflicted in the name of their tedious, political teleological fanatsies?
I fear the answer is "No, there isn't".
The dimwits and willingly lickspittles in the West who blinkered themselves to what was happening in China in the 1960s merely moved on later to glorify the "achievements" of Vietnam, Kampuchea and Laos in the 1970s, just as they had crawled and lied and brown-nosed for East Germany, Cuba, North Korea and the USSR in the 1950s.
Today, they're in love with the Iraqi "resistance", al Quaeda, "revolutionary" Iran and the aptly named FARC drug peddlers of Latin America.
Mark my words, even as we speak they're doubtless wondering how to blame the East Timor crisis on Israel and the West, and that will before they can even work out which "side" in East Timor they should be supporting.
Losers.
Hard day at the Council?
oh land of the free,what would he think of us.
I wonder if the excesses of countries whose dogma was in conflict with the established "west", such as communism, would have descended into such extreme suppression and intolerance of moderation, if they had not been constantly under economic and covert and diplomatic attack.
I notice how quicky our own and our ally's "freedoms" and "free speech and association" disappear with the carbungles of secret detention without trial ,and torture now occurring without accountability. Reading essays such as this ten years ago would have been so easy to respond to with honest zeal in defence of western ways and condemning Communism. However, now it is clearer that it is not communism per se but the totalitarianism of power and lack of accountability that accompanies governments who use security issues to remove freedoms from their people to supervise their secret actions against the real or invented enemy.
This should be a warning to us. Already if this journalist criticises our government or a military action he can get seven years for sedition; or if he still visits Australia he could be picked up by ASIO for interrogation, and no reporter can legally report it; he could be renditioned to a country which does torture favours and no one can report it here; or he could be held in revolving detention and no-one need ever know.
What does he think, I wonder, of our laws now?
Cheers, oh land of the "free".