Cultural Revolution

"I should remind you that Chairman Mao dedicated most of his life to China, that he saved the party and the revolution in their most critical moments, that, in short, his contribution was so great that, without him, the Chinese people would have had a much harder time finding the right path out of the darkness. We also shouldnt forget that it was Chairman Mao who combined the teachings of Marx and Lenin with the realities of Chinese history—that it was he who applied those principles, creatively, not only to politics but to philosophy, art, literature, and military strategy. Yes, before the 1960s—or, better, up until the late 1950s—some of Chairman Maos ideas were, for the most part, correct. Furthermore, many of his principles brought us victory and allowed us to gain power. Then, unfortunately, in the last few years of his life, he committed many grave errors—the Cultural Revolution, above all. And much disgrace was brought upon the party, the country, the people."

"It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Mao’s contributions to China after 1956 were unsuccessful by his own standards and destructive in ways that he surely did not imagine. During both the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, the destructive aspects of Mao’s initiatives far outweighed any outcomes that could be construed as positive. The Cultural Revolution succeeded in its agenda of destroying the structure of China’s party-state, and in sidelining the many officials who might have harbored inner doubts about Mao’s vision, but it created nothing lasting in its place. During the Cultural Revolution Mao tried repeatedly to put a positive face on each unexpected and unwanted development, asserting that out of disorder a greater order would eventually be born. But the public celebrations of the “great victories” of the Cultural Revolution, accompanied by the escalating intensity of the cult of Mao, all turned out to be as hollow as Mao’s earlier insistence that the accomplishments of the Great Leap were “nine fingers” and the shortcomings “one finger.” As Mao’s health failed during his final two years, he appeared to resign himself to the fact that his legacy was far from assured, and that powerful forces in the leadership and in society at large were arrayed against it."

"The living legacy of the Cultural Revolution, in other words, is a communist party that has survived the transition to an utterly transformed economic system that bears little resemblance to the Soviet model; however, it has done so by holding on tightly to a somewhat modified but fundamentally unreformed version of Soviet-style political dictatorship. This outcome, of course, was not at all what the initiators of the Cultural Revolution intended; in almost every sense, it is the virtual opposite and is impossible to square with any version of Maoist ideology. China today is the very definition of what the Cultural Revolution was intended to forestall. It is a caricature of a Maoist’s worst nightmare: the degeneration of the Party into a capitalist oligarchy with unprecedented levels of corruption and inequality. This does not mean simply that the Cultural Revolution failed to achieve its goals; it actually created political circumstances that facilitated the turn to market reform and enhanced the regime’s prospect for survival, making China’s trajectory so different from that of the Soviet Union."

"Maos last decade was as full of confusion and surprises as the 1790s in France. In size and complexity the Cultural Revolution was of course a much bigger event than the French Revolution. At any rate, it will be studied from many angles for a long time to come. Probably its most arresting feature in retrospect was its disastrous attack on learning and intellectuals in the very land that had exalted scholarship and invented civil service examinations thirteen hundred years before. In fact, the two were not unconnected—learning was attacked in China because it seemed to be so entrenched in the establishment. This historical circumstance makes the Cultural Revolution hard to understand without reference to history."

"The Cultural Revolution shows that the scope of the possible is determined by the presence or absence of pluralization. Yet we have to reckon with the historical reality that dismissal took a devastating form alongside an exceptional process of pluralization. How can we define our relation to this historical experience, that is, the experience of saturation and exhaustion of the party-state, which cannot simply be revived? Furthermore, how do we orient ourselves to the present, framed by the seeming impossibility of pluralization? Above all, is it possible to invent new ways of doing politics? In the absence of an answer, we are left only with the grim necessity of finding ways to refuse the logic of the governmental sensibility, the alternative being at best the foreclosure of any possibility of pluralization, or at worst the revival of ever more morbid forms of dismissal. Thus the search for a new historical mode of politics that can refuse dismissal is pressing. Because we will probably be defeated, now more than ever."

"“人生七十古来稀”，我八十多了，人老总想后事。中国有句古话叫“盖棺定论”，我虽未 “盖棺”也快了，总可以定论吧！我一生干了两件事：一是与蒋介石斗了那么几十年，把他 赶到那么几个海岛上去了；抗战八年，把日本人请回老家去了。对这些事持异议的人不多，只有 那么几个人，在我耳边叽叽喳喳，无非是让我及早收回那几个海岛罢了。另一件事你们都知道， 就是发动文化大革命。这事拥护的人不多，反对的人不少。这两件事没有完，这笔“遗产”得交 给下一代。怎么交？和平交不成就动荡中交，搞不好就得“血雨腥风”了 。你们怎么办？只 有天知道。"

"Any reasonable thesis raised about the Cultural Revolution will be met with an equally reasonable rebuttal; any historical account will be criticized by someone as one-sided, because most of the people who experienced the Cultural Revolution are still alive and well, and their different roles and situations during the Cultural Revolution gave them different perspectives and experiences. The criticisms of these participants are very valuable and push researchers ever closer to historical truth, but this invaluable resource for contemporary history presents its own difficulties."

"Yet unity was to prove an elusive goal, and the nature of the victory was difficult to define. The Cultural Revolution had begun with a wholesale attack on the Communist Party; it ended with the resurrection of the Party in its orthodox Leninist form, albeit shorn of Maos more prominent opponents. In 1966-67 a massive popular movement had flourished on the basis of the principle that "the masses must liberate themselves"; by 1969 the mass movement had disintegrated, and selected remnants of it had been absorbed by old bureaucratic apparatuses."

"Mao died aspiring to exterminate Chinese culture. His Cultural Revolution alone killed as many as two million people, shattered traditions, uprooted spiritual and ethical values, and tore apart family ties and communal loyalties. People who experienced it seal off the memory, for the pain, worse than a bullet to the heart, overwhelms souls. Worst of all, Mao’s crimes against civilization, unlike those of, say, Hitler, are ongoing. The Communist Party still uses his brainwashing methods, and his legacy continues to be officially revered. His portrait and body remain on display in Beijings Tiananmen Square, and his face appears on banknotes in the wallet of every Chinese, many of whom saw parents, children, and other loved ones die under his knife."

"During the Cultural Revolution, people were “rebelling,” whereas before that people were "making revolution." However, after the end of the Cultural Revolution, people avoided talking about rebelling, or simply forgot that part of history. Everyone has become a victim of that great catastrophe known as the Cultural Revolution and has forgotten that before disaster fell upon their own heads, they, too, were to some extent the assailants. The history of the Cultural Revolution is thus being continually revised. It is best that you do not try to write a history, but only to look back upon your own experiences."

"The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution failed for different reasons. First, the discontents of the younger generation whom Mao mobilized proved to be far more furious than he had supposed, and the young were soon joined by other alienated groups, of which the most important were the millions of casual (as opposed to established) workers in State industry. Second, the threatened Party leaders fought back by force and fraud, most obviously through the creation of sham Red Guard organizations. The resulting chaos ensured that the Party’s authority was eventually restored by the PLA, with the support of Mao himself. Yet neither of these campaigns proved to have been entirely futile. It is seldom recognized that the ideological condemnations of senior Party leaders published by the Red Guards were almost always accompanied and illustrated by condemnation of the policies of those they opposed. These indictments in policy terms, put together, show that one of the objects of the Cultural Revolution was to re-establish the Great Leap strategy, shorn of the excesses which had prejudiced it. And in 1970, Maos commune and brigade enterprises, the heart and soul of the strategy, were re-established. This time they succeeded. By the time Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978 they had become indispensable and were soon to become the fastest growing sector of the economy, expanding at rates of up to 33 per cent per annum."

"China, despite many imperfections in its economic and political system, has been the most rapidly growing nation of the past three decades. Chinese poverty until Mao Zedongs death had nothing to do with Chinese culture; it was due to the disastrous way Mao organized the economy and conducted politics. In the 1950s, he promoted the Great Leap Forward, a drastic industrialization policy that led to mass starvation and famine. In the 1960s, he propagated the Cultural Revolution, which led to the mass persecution of intellectuals and educated people—anyone whose party loyalty might be doubted. This again led to terror and a huge waste of the society’s talent and resources. In the same way, current Chinese growth has nothing to do with Chinese values or changes in Chinese culture; it results from a process of economic transformation unleashed by the reforms implemented by Deng Xiaoping and his allies, who, after Mao Zedongs death, gradually abandoned socialist economic policies and institutions, first in agriculture and then in industry."