Cultural Revolution

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution ({{zh-stpl|s=无产阶级文化大革命|t=無產階級文化大革命|p=wú chǎn jiē jí wén huà dà gé mìng|l=Proletarian Cultural Great Revolution}}; often abbreviated to 文化大革命 wén huà dà gé mìng, literally "Great Cultural Revolution", or simply 文革 wén gé, literally "Cultural Revolution") in the People's Republic of China was a revolutionary upsurge by Chinese students and workers against the bureaucrats of the Chinese Communist Party. It was launched by Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong in 1966 to secure Maoism (known domestically as Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse-tung Thought) in China as the state's dominant ideology and eliminate political opposition. Though Mao himself officially declared the Cultural Revolution to have ended in 1969, the term is today widely used to also include the period between

Effect

The effects of the Cultural Revolution directly, or indirectly touched essentially all of China's populace. During the Cultural Revolution, much economic activity was halted, with "revolution" being the primary objective of many. The start of the Cultural Revolution brought huge numbers of Red Guards to Beijing, with all of their expenses paid by the government, and the railway system was in turmoil. Countless ancient buildings, artifacts, antiques, books, and paintings were destroyed by Red Guards. By December 1967, 350 million copies of Mao's Quotations had been printed.

Related Topics:
Economic - Red Guard - Railway - Quotations

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Elsewhere, the ten years of Cultural Revolution also brought the education system to a virtual halt. The university entrance exams were cancelled during this period, only restored by Deng Xiaoping, in 1977. Many intellectuals were sent to rural labor camps. Many survivors and observers suggest that almost anyone with skills over that of the average person, was the target of political "struggle" in some way. According to most Western observers as well as followers of Deng Xiaoping, this led to almost a generation of inadequately-educated individuals.

Related Topics:
Education - University - 1977 - Intellectual

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Mao Zedong Thought had become the central operative guide to all things in China. The authority of the Red Guards surpassed that of the army, local police authorities, and the law in general. China's traditional arts and ideas were ignored, and was Mao praised for doing so. People were encouraged to criticize cultural institutions, and to question their parents and teachers, which had been strictly forbidden in Confucian culture. This was emphasized even more during the Anti-Lin Biao; Anti-Confucius Campaign. However, no matter how much or how far the generations of one's parents and their ancestors could be questioned, one thing definitely could not, and these were the "thoughts of Mao Tse-tung".

Related Topics:
Mao Zedong Thought - Law - Confucian

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The Cultural Revolution also brought to the forefront numerous internal power struggles within the Communist party, many of which had little to do with the larger battles between Party leaders, but resulted instead from local factionalism and petty rivalries. Members of different factions often fought on the streets, and political assassination, particularly in the more rural provinces, was common. One example, given by the writer Patrick French in his book Tibet, Tibet, is of the 'Big' and 'Small' factions in the Wuxuan county of the Guangxi Zhang Autonomous Region, which fought gun battles and threw bombs on the streets. The leader of the Small Faction, Zhou Weian, was eventually murdered in 1968, and his eight-month pregnant widow, Wei Shulan, forced to kneel under his dismembered body and denounce him; a typical example of the climate of the times.

Related Topics:
Wuxuan - Guangxi - Zhou Weian

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There was devastating damage done to China's historical reserves, artifacts and sites of interest, as these were thought to cause "old ways of thinking". Many artifacts were seized from private homes, and often destroyed on the spot. There are no records of exactly how much was destroyed. Western observers suggest that much of China's five thousand years of dynamic history was in effect destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, in a short period of ten years, and such destruction of historical artifacts cannot be matched anywhere else in the world, at any time. Religious persecution, in particular, intensified during this period, as being opposed to Marxist-Leninist, and Maoist thinking. Some temples, however, such as the Longxing Temple near Shijiazhuang, survived because of the protection of local party members, who sometimes sent units of the PLA to protect the Temple from mobs of Red Guards.

Related Topics:
Religious persecution - Shijiazhuang

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The effects of the Cultural Revolution were particularly devastating as to China's 56 ethnic minorities and their cultures. This supposedly stemmed from Jiang Qing's personal animosity towards, and contempt for ethnic minorities. "The centrality of the Han ethnic group" was a major theme throughout this period (similar to the Aryan super-man, in Nazi Germany). In Tibet, over 2,000 monasteries were destroyed, often with the complicity of local ethnic Tibetan Red Guards. In Inner Mongolia, many were executed during a ruthless witchhunt to find members of the allegedly "separatist" Inner Mongolian People's Party, which had actually been disbanded, decades before. In Xinjiang, Koran books of the Uighur people were burned, and Muslim imams were reportedly paraded around with paint splashed on their persons. In the ethnic Korean areas of northeast China, some killings occurred, and language schools were destroyed. In Yunnan Province, the palace of the Dai people's king was torched, and an infamous massacre of Hui Muslim people, at the hands of the People's Liberation Army, called the "Shadian Incident", claimed over 1,600 lives, in 1975. It is ironic that all this activity and violence was directed at so-called "foreign influences", when the driving force behind Maoist thinking, which was the doctrines of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, had come into China, from "foreign out-siders" themselves.

Related Topics:
China's 56 ethnic minorities - Jiang Qing - Han - Tibet - Monasteries - Tibetan - Red Guards - Inner Mongolia - Witchhunt - Separatist - Inner Mongolian People's Party - Xinjiang - Koran - Uighur - Muslim - Imams - Korean - Yunnan - Dai - Hui - People's Liberation Army - Shadian Incident - 1975

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The Cultural Revolution also caused external effects. Workers in Hong Kong went on strike, Quotes from Chairman Mao was published in many languages, to be circulated in many African and other third-world or developing countries, and China's image was considerably damaged in much of the West. "Revolutionary" movements in several African countries, often resulting in considerable damage, were inspired by the Cultural Revolution; it was also one of the models for Cambodia's Year Zero, under Pol Pot. The Cambodian genocide, which began in 1975, and has been called "the Killing Fields", can be directly attibuted to the influence of Chairman Mao, and the Cultural Revolution.

Related Topics:
Hong Kong - Strike - Africa - Third-world - Developing - Year Zero - Pol Pot - The Killing Fields

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Millions in China had their human rights reportedly discarded during the Cultural Revolution. Forced displacement of millions of people occurred. During the Cultural Revolution, young people from the cities were forcibly moved to the countryside. Once there, they were forced to abandon all forms of standard education, for the propaganda teachings of the Chinese Communist Party.

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Crimes against the government were brutally, and publically punished. People were forced to walk through the streets naked, were flogged publicly, or forced, some report, to sit in the jetliner position for hours. Many deaths occurred in police custody, although they were often covered-up as "suicides". People had to carry two or more copies of Mao's Little Red Book, to avoid being accused of not supporting Mao. Numerous individuals were accused, often on the flimsiest of grounds, of being foreign spies; to have, or have had, any contact with the world outside of China, could be extremely dangerous. Accusations were often based upon 'symbolic' language or gestures, such as the omittance of certain strokes from a written character, or the placing of a picture of Mao in a subordinate position in a room. This paranoia may in part have derived from the tradition of Chinese revolutionaries, who used code-words and symbolic gestures in communication.

Related Topics:
Jetliner position - Suicide

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Some commentators argue that the Cultural Revolution years saw the Chinese people leave behind many uncritical habits of conformist and authoritarian thinking. This can be seen in the words of some of the student leaders of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. According to student leader Shen Tong in his book, Almost a Revolution, the trigger for the famous hunger-strikes of 1989 was a "dazibao", the big-character poster (leaflet) brought to fame in the Cultural Revolution as a means of public political discussion, and subsequently outlawed, after the Cultural Revolution. When students organized demonstrations in their millions, not seen since the Cultural Revolution, youths from outside Beijing rode the trains into Beijing, and relied on the hospitality of the train workers and Beijing residents, just as their counter-parts had ridden the trains freely, during the Cultural Revolution. Also, as in the Cultural Revolution, students formed factions, with names similar to those of Red Guard factions, using the term "Headquarters" for instance, and according to Shen Tong, these factions even went to the extent of kidnapping members of other factions, just as they did in the Cultural Revolution. Finally, in some small minority of cases, some of the student leaders of 1989 had been youth activists in high school during the Cultural Revolution. It was as a result of the Cultural Revolution, that criticism of high-level authority in public became more thinkable than ever in the PRC, although criticism of Mao Zedong still remained entirely off-limits.

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Estimates of the death toll, civilians and Red Guards, from various Western and Eastern sources are about 500,000 in the true chaos years of 1966–1969. However, these figures are increasingly being challenged, since many deaths went unreported, or were actively covered up by the police or local authorities. The true death toll may range from hundreds of thousands to a few million, but the state of Chinese demographics at the time, combined with the reluctance of the PRC to allow serious research into the period, means that the real figures are unlikely ever to be known.

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World reaction

The reaction abroad was mixed, and inevitably, tied to political movements of the time. The opposition to the Vietnam War fostered a sympathy for communist revolutions, and many Western observers, predominantly on the Left of the political spectrum, were sympathetic with the Cultural Revolution. Reports of violence and excess were often explained away with excuses, or dismissed as 'rightwing propaganda'.

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An example of the political atmosphere among Left-leaning intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution can be gleaned from a debate in 1967, where Noam Chomsky, during a discussion with Susan Sontag and Hanah Arendt http://www.chomsky.info/debates/19671215.htm on "The Legitimacy of Violence as a Political Act?", said "... take China, modern China; one also finds many things that are really quite admirable. ... But I do think that China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step." Reactions were muted, or non-existent among many on the Left, once the full extent of the destruction became known.

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Sympathies for the Cultural Revolution were also famously denounced by John Lennon of the Beatles, in the song "Revolution", showing that the issue was of some controversy in the late 1960's West. However, the following "Imagine", confirmed Lennon's sympathies for the Socialist movement in general, and for Communism in particular.

Related Topics:
John Lennon - Beatles - Revolution

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Surprisingly (or perhaps, not so surprisingly), several self-described "Maoist" political parties survive today, in France and elsewhere.

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Historical views

Today, the Cultural Revolution is seen by most people inside and outside of China, including the Communist Party of China and Chinese democracy movement supporters, as an unmitigated disaster, and as an event to be avoided in the future. There are no politically significant groups within China that defend the Cultural Revolution, aside from the still-ruling Communist Party. However, there are many workers and peasants in China who, left behind by economic liberalization and the widening rich-poor gap, feel nostalgia towards the Cultural Revolution (as well as the Maoist Era in general), during which the proletariat was glorified. Author Gao Mobo has written essays praising the Cultural Revolution, as a "golden age" of urban and rural development.

Related Topics:
Communist Party of China - Chinese democracy movement - Proletariat - Gao Mobo

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Among those who condemn the Cultural Revolution, the causes and meaning of the Cultural Revolution remain highly controversial. Supporters of the Chinese democracy movement see the Cultural Revolution as an example of what happens when democracy is lacking, and place responsibility for the Cultural Revolution at the hands of the Communist Party of China. Similarly, human rights activists, and conservatives in the West also see the Cultural Revolution as examples of the dangers of statism. Briefly put, these views of the Cultural Revolution attribute its cause to "too much government, and too little popular participation".

Related Topics:
Communist Party of China - Human right - Statism

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By contrast, the official view of the Communist Party of China sees the Cultural Revolution as what can happen when one person establishes a cult of personality, and manipulates the public in such a way as to destroy party and state institutions. In the view of the Communist Party, the Cultural Revolution is an example of too much popular participation in government, rather than too little; and that it is an example of the dangers of anarchy rather than statism. The Communist Party also strongly de-emphasises the extent of Mao's involvement in the creation of the Cultural Revolution, preferring to shift most of the blame onto the Gang of Four, as the convenient culprit. The consequence of this view, is the consensus among the Chinese leadership that the lesson of the Cultural Revolution is that China must be governed by a strong party institution, in which decisions are made collectively and according to the rule of law, and in which the public has only limited input.

Related Topics:
Cult of personality - Anarchy - Statism - Rule of law

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These contradictory views of the Cultural Revolution were put into sharp relief during the Tiananmen Protests of 1989, when both the demonstrators and the government justified their actions as being necessary to avoid another Cultural Revolution.

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Despite some knowledge of the Cultural Revolution by many Chinese, there has not been a single museum dedicated to its events on the mainland, until recently. In mid-2005, a privately-funded museum opened in Guangdong province, created by Peng Qi'an, 74, a former deputy mayor of Shantou. Peng himself was almost executed during the Cultural Revolution, and survived only due to a last-minute reprieve. He stated that he wanted future generations of Chinese to realise how large an impact the period had on China, and how far ordinary Chinese suffered. However after its opening, authorities made it clear that open discussion of the issues it raises were still not on the official agenda.

Related Topics:
Guangdong - Shantou

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