The Cultural Revolution, 50 years on

It was, we now learn, even worse than we thought: 

Students tortured teachers and beat them to death. Workers attacked one another with screwdrivers devised into spears. Temples and libraries were razed. Millions of people were banished to the countryside for “re-education.”

The turbulence and viciousness of China’s Cultural Revolution began 50 years ago, on May 16, 1966, with a Politburo decision to create a Cultural Revolution Group that would oppose “counter-revolutionary revisionists” and create a final rupture with the old ways of the capitalist past.

Two weeks later, a People’s Daily editorial called for an attack on the bourgeoisie. “Sweep away all monsters and demons!” the state newspaper urged.

The directive launched years of social disorder, factional warfare and even cannibalism. In total, between 1.5 million and two million people died, historians estimate.

But unlike the calamities perpetrated by Stalin, Pol Pot, Franco and Hitler, the regime responsible for the Cultural Revolution remains in power. The 50th anniversary will barely be discussed in public. The Communist Party has largely maintained a historical blackout, in hopes of suppressing the blemish on its legacy. “Researchers cannot accept any interviews related to the Cultural Revolution,” one Chinese academic said this weekend.

That has presented a unique challenge to those documenting the Cultural Revolution – which is why the package sent to Song Yongyi 16 years ago, containing classified military plans in the city of Tianjin in the late 1960s, was so exceptional....

The package that he received from a Chinese high school teacher became the first of many he would acquire in the years that followed, placing him at the forefront of a small band of researchers who have dug for documents in garbage dumps, archives, private collections and blogs. They have accepted information from unannounced visitors, spent long hours digging through archival documents and sought out personal accounts of hardship.

In the process, they have brought to light a stunningly detailed account of what happened during the Cultural Revolution, when Mao Zedong subverted normal societal order, orchestrating a mass lawlessness that saw factory workers imprison bosses and students torture teachers with boiling water and nail-spiked clubs.

One of Prof. Song’s signal achievements will emerge next month, when he begins the republication, in e-book form, of a 36-volume secret report on the Cultural Revolution in the country’s southern Guangxi province.

Among the most startling revelations in its 13,000 pages is the cannibalism it documents. Whipped into a fury by the chaos of the times, Red Guards – groups of youth dedicated to removing enemies through violent class struggle – and others feasted on the hearts, livers, penises and breasts of people deemed “class enemies.” In total, 421 were eaten in at least 31 provincial counties, Prof. Song said.

“So there was a cannibalism mass movement in the remote countryside.”....

Few documents exemplify that like the Guangxi report, which was compiled in the 1980s at the direction of reformist elements inside Beijing who “wanted to see matters like the Cultural Revolution, these horrible things, get investigated,” said Prof. Song, who is now a librarian at UCLA.

The documents list “who was eaten. Who was eaten by who. The reason,” Prof. Song said. “My view is they expose the truth of Guangxi during the Cultural Revolution.”

Far more information, however, remains locked away in Chinese archives, compiled by a one-party state with a “desire to tease out information about everything and everybody – and an attempt also, clearly, to keep all of this secret,” said Frank Dikotter, a historian at the University of Hong Kong who wrote The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History.

To research his book, Prof. Dikotter spent six months in Chinese archives. Some wouldn’t let him in, or served tea before sending him on his way. Others, however, provided him documents that helped to peel back time.

Even mundane economic reports revealed the scale of dislocation beginning in 1966, as reverence for Mao grew feverish while people attacked and killed each other in efforts to wipe out “capitalist roaders.” Entire categories of people lost work overnight, including florists, fruit sellers, undertakers and dressmakers.

Toymakers curbed output as plastic became needed, instead, to make glossy covers for the Little Red Book. Factories churned out 50 million Mao badges a month, but still struggled to keep up with extraordinary demand for wearable images of the leader. So much aluminum was diverted to those badges that by 1969 Mao himself had to step in, demanding “give me back my airplanes.”

Other documents detailed the chilling treatment of ethnic Mongolians in Inner Mongolia. “Tongues were ripped out, teeth extracted with pliers, eyes gouged from their sockets, flesh branded with hot irons,” Prof. Dikotter wrote.

Let us not forget the fervour with which the young soixante-huitards waved their little red books as they sought to overthrow the hated capitalist roaders in Paris. "Beneath the streets, the beach". And, hidden behind the beach, the hard-labour camp and the charnel house.

Frank Dikotter's The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History is the third in a series which started with Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62, covering the period of the Great Leap Forward. That particular catastrophe, with something like 40 million dead, puts the Cultural Revolution in the shade as far as sheer numbers go - and had more than enough tales of cannibalism. Still, cannibalism as a desperate last-course means of survival is one thing, but cannibalism as an expression of class hatred is something else altogether - which is perhaps why the Cultural Revolution still stands out as a uniquely grotesque phenomenon. That, and the fact that so many Western leftists were foolish enough to be seduced by it.

Comments

[Whyaxye]

I well remember the Maoist student "revolutionaries" when I was at university. One of them became a well-known economics journalist for a broadsheet newspaper.

Very sobering to reflect on the fact that there has ben no regime change or major repudiation in China. Meet the new boss...

[RY]

I remember being given a,copy of the Little Red Book when I was a child. It was considered an exciting and fashionable thing. And that was by people who weren't radicals, just mainstream Labour supporters. With an intellectual interest.

The famous critique of capitalism has a lot to answer for. And the death-toll on the road to Utopia will never be properly acknowledged or mourned.

[Bob-B]

I believe Corbyn's hero Tony Benn said in defence of Mao that at least he prevented China from being occupied by the Americans. Obviously Japan with US troops present was a much worse place than China with no US troops. Or something.

[Dom]

"That, and the fact that so many Western leftists were foolish enough to be seduced by it."

And still are. Not in large numbers, and it is probably just a youthful need to appear radical, but you will find students calling themselves Maoists.

[Gene]

Back in the 1980s a guy I bought weed from (warning: Capitalist activity!) claimed to be a Maoist. Seemed to be a smart guy but didn't get the irony.