Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
Fifty years ago this August, the cataclysmic madness known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution began to unfold in China. By the time it ended a decade later, it had taken millions of lives and ruined many millions more.
Books were burned, people tortured, “bourgeois” art destroyed, universities shut down, and students and professors banished to the countryside to work and be “re-educated” into a proper understanding of Marxist Mao-Zedong-Thought by peasants.
The Cultural Revolution continued until Chairman Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, and it left in its wake a country torn by violence and poverty.
China’s Communists were already engaged in a doctrinal war with the Soviet Union as to the proper course of Communist development. Mao worried that, if left unchecked, China’s party apparatchiks would also follow the Soviet model, which he considered a betrayal of the tenets of Marxism-Leninism.
Believing that China’s Communist leaders were taking the party, and China itself, in the wrong direction, Mao decided to call on the nation’s youth to purge the “impure” elements of Chinese society and revive the revolutionary spirit that had led to the formation of the People’s Republic of China.
Mao ordered a massive assault on the institutions built by 17 years of Communist rule, including the intellectual and social remnants of the past.
The full-scale beginning of the terror began at a meeting of the Eleventh Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee of the Communist Party that began on August 1, 1966, when Mao accused party leaders of bourgeois values and lack of revolutionary spirit.
On Aug. 12 it passed a document calling for “a great revolution that touches people to their very souls and constitutes a deeper and more extensive stage in the development of the socialist revolution in our country.”
Charged with being “capitalist roaders” and “revisionists,” President Liu Shaoqi and other Communist leaders were removed from power. Liu died in prison three years later.
Soon, students formed paramilitary groups called Red Guards and attacked and harassed academics and intellectuals. A personality cult quickly sprang up around Mao, as mobs began to wave the famous “Little Red Book” of Mao’s sayings while creating bedlam throughout the country.
The book, Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, included statements on subjects such as class struggle, “correcting mistaken ideas” and the “mass line,” a key tenet of Maoist doctrine.
The Red Guards were determined to destroy the “four olds -- old habits, manners, custom, and culture.” They set out to eradicate the old culture by force in order that a new “proletarian class nature” might emerge.
The Red Guards splintered into zealous rival factions battling for ideological dominance, and many Chinese cities reached the brink of anarchy. Many engaged in witch hunts or the settling of personal scores.
The resulting paralysis completely disrupted the urban economy. In many regions, the People’s Liberation Army was forced to restore a semblance of order.
Mao’s radical allies, who became known as the Gang of Four, led by Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, wanted to push even further to the left and to continue purging “class enemies.”
However, the Tangshan earthquake of July 1976, which killed 240,000, provided proof for many Chinese that those in power had lost the “mandate from heaven.”
Indeed, the Chairman died in September 1976 and a more moderate group, led by Deng Xiaoping, who had himself been purged during the first phase of the Cultural Revolution, ousted and imprisoned the Gang of Four, setting China on the road it would henceforth follow.
At least 1.5 million people were killed during the Cultural Revolution, though some estimates, including deaths from starvation, run much higher. Millions of others suffered imprisonment, seizure of property, torture or general humiliation.
Individuals who experienced the Cultural Revolution while in their teens and early twenties were denied an education and suffered from that deficiency for their entire lives.
In 1981, the Communist Party declared that the Cultural Revolution was “responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the country, and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic.”
A social movement had degenerated into chaos. It took many decades for China to recover from the mass hysteria and tragedy.
Yet, as the Australian author and critic Clive James recently observed sarcastically, there are still some professors in western universities who think that Communists like Mao “must have been serious about bettering the lot of mankind because they killed so many of their own citizens.”
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