Mao’s Cultural Revolution: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra
""‘What was the Chinese Cultural Revolution?’
‘The question of what the Cultural Revolution actually was, is one of the most intriguing questions in really modern world history. Because, well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna push the boat out, I'm gonna say that I don't think there is any phenomenon anywhere in the world in the 20th century, which is quite like the Cultural Revolution. Just to describe very briefly what happened, essentially, for 10 years between 1966 and 1976, in the People's Republic of China, there was essentially an uprising against the Communist Party organized by the leader of the Communist Party, Chairman Mao, Mao Zedong, in which he mobilized groups and society, particularly China's youth, some of China's workers and political allies, in a set of moves, which at a very basic level was partly about gaining more power for himself and marginalizing his enemies, but also had a really strong ideological purpose. And that ideological purpose was to renew the Chinese revolution which he had founded, he had led, he had declared in 1949…
17 years on in 1966, he felt that revolution had lost its fire, it had lost its spark, it no longer had that sense of inspiration it had had before, after 17 years of communist rule. So he led a revolution against his own party while still staying in power… It was accompanied by immense violence, perhaps that's the thing that people remember most about the Cultural Revolution in retrospect, in which the actions against rival political leaders were not just taken with, you know, arrests and being taken away to dungeons, but rather with public humiliation in which people were beaten in the streets, they were forced to confess their own supposed political crimes, and China's youth in particular were mobilized to actually join in the millions in China streets, in almost godlike worship of Chairman Mao. So there's a touch of the religious cult, in the midst of something that was a sort of political coup, and also a kind of revolution within the revolution...
As a result of exaggerated figures on agriculture, Mao basically started exporting grain outside China while leaving the peasants to starve in the countryside. So by the end of the 1950s, early 1960s, 10s of millions of Chinese were starving to death through actions and inaction of their own government. And when Mao was told about it, he essentially said, well, let's just, you know, keep, keep going. It was unconscionable, really. And his colleagues, people like the President of the Republic, supposed to the chairman of the party, Liu Xiaoqi, some of the up and coming senior leaders, people like Deng Xiaoping, who would become the paramount leader of China a few years after Mao's death. These people looked at what was happening and finally came to Mao in the early 60s and said, look, this has got to stop. This cannot go on. You cannot keep starving people in the countryside. We need to reintroduce proper systems of economic supply and control.
And Mao was basically sort of moved out slightly. He wasn't fired. He couldn't possibly, he was, you know, the most prestigious figure in the revolution. But he was given some grand titles and slightly moved to a more separated position. And he was very angry with this. He never acknowledged that he had done anything wrong. And he started to essentially form a new alliance with Lin Biao, the defense minister of China, and essentially used not only the Defense Ministry, but also the Army as a way of building up an alternative power base. And meanwhile, he was plotting, that when his moment came, there would be a reckoning for Liu Xiaoqi, for Deng Xiaoping, for the other civilian party leaders who he felt had put him out to grass. And he had no interest in being put out to grass, he wanted to come back, and not only come back in power, but also renew the revolution. And that, of course, was the staging ground for the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in 1966...
There's all this astonishing records that we still have, of young people making their way to Tiananmen Square, you know, this huge, great square in the center of Beijing, just to get a glimpse of Chairman Mao, at peak. Some people say that nearly a million people may have been in or near the square. We have records of one young Red Guard, I think probably in his late teens at that point, saying, I saw Chairman Mao in the distance today. I'm so excited. That I'm going to redefine my own birthday, I'm going to make this my birthday and you know almost sounds like a kind of Christian metaphor in a sense about being reborn because of seeing your, your Savior. But of course, this wasn't a religious figure, this was the leader of the Chinese Communist Party that the Red Guards were worshipping. So, in a sense, you might say, the youth shock troops of China. That's the way to think about the Red Guards, who had their peak from 1966 to 69. Finally, when they got out of control, even Mao decided it was too much to have them rampaging through the streets. And they were essentially shut down by the army, and many of them sent off to the countryside for their own reeducation...
In the longer term, even medium term, it became very clear to many of his colleagues that China couldn't carry on that way, destroying everything, creating very little. And some of the more moderate members leadership, particularly the Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, started maneuvering, even in the late 1960s, early 70s in various directions that would turn China away from that inward looking arena. So the famous opening to America and the visit of President Nixon in 1972, often forgotten that happened during the last years the Cultural Revolution, it was still going on when he was there, but it welcoming the Americans showed that the moderates in the leadership had managed to push in a different direction.
The Cultural Revolution, that leads us to the question of the international reaction, because I think it's fair to say the Cultural Revolution was the single most isolated time that China has ever had in the modern era. It had diplomatic relations in a proper sense with almost no countries at all, the one exception being tiny Albania in in Eastern Europe. The reason being that of course, it still hadn't opened up to the Americans, at least not until the later years of the Cultural Revolution when Nixon visited in 1972. So the West was off limits pretty much. But then it quarrelled with the Soviet Union in the early 60s. So both the Soviets and the Eastern European bloc were out of reach for for China. They had some relations with the third world as it was then known. So places in Africa, Southeast Asia, but even there relations were a bit wary.
There are very few foreigners in China during the Cultural Revolution. So very few outsiders had much of a vision of what was going on other than these kind of bits of film footage of young Red Guards worshipping Mao and these propaganda posters with pictures of men and women with rifles and fierce expressions in their eyes, but what it all meant was really, really hard for them to work out. So that being the case, at the time, actually, the international reaction for the most part was bafflement, because they really could not work out what on earth was going on in China, but they were very worried that it might spill over into something you know, genuinely dangerous for the rest of the world…
There was certainly a strand of left oriented thinking in the Western world, and also parts of the Global South, the non western world, that really admired that type of violent Maoist Cultural Revolution. Whether it was you know, students in Paris 1968. I mean, the Beatles rather satirized this, a famous song called Revolution… you shouldn't go around carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, that won't do any good anyhow, which I think was meant to be a sort of slight dig at the kind of students who would do exactly that. But the idea of overturning all of society, you know, smashing the old cultures and putting something new in their place, was very exciting to many young people in Europe in the 60s, who sort of saw themselves as being in some ways hemmed in, by the constraints of bourgeois society.
And it's also fair to say that in parts of Africa, for instance, where many of the countries were just decolonizing finally, the idea of a an unapologetic, highly non western style of government seemed at least inspiring to some, even if the specific methods of the Cultural Revolution were not very attractive to many people outside because in the end, the kind of disruptive violence that we've talked about, wasn't really very helpful way in terms of constructing a society as many of these post colonial countries really wanted to do...
Crimes could be anything from having learned English, which became illegal, as opposed to what, actually no foreign language is really permitted by that that that stage. English was particularly heinous, I think it's fair to say, or wearing foreign clothes. You know, if you had some sort of leather as opposed to cloth shoes that might get you into into trouble…
China has always had prison camps called laogai, reform through labor. But actually, the the frightening thing about the Cultural Revolution was that you didn't have to go to special camps on the edge of town to see it. It could be happening right in front of you, you know, this was being done in people's workplaces, in people's schools, people being paraded and forced to confess their crimes in front of their peers. So in that sense, it may be, it's more like the French Revolution, the idea that not only do you create terror, but you have to show terror in the face of the wider crowd, to make it clear that the state and its revolution cannot be, you know, countermanded in any way whatsoever…
Mao, at one point, I was told that, you know, one city I think, in fact, I'm sure, Chengdu, young Red Guards hijacked tanks and started firing at each other on the street, that sort of mini civil war and, whether it's this story or similar stories to it, we're not quite sure. But Mao was told at one point that this sort of thing was happening. And he replied, apparently, the situation is totally chaotic and out of control. Everything is excellent. In other words, it's worth remembering that Mao always had this streak of revolutionary anger and desire to overturn everything. Some of his communist colleagues, despite being communist revolutionaries, were quite sort of pragmatic machine politicians, Liu Xiaoqi, Chen Yin…
The Cultural Revolution was hugely disruptive for minority groups in China. Tibet is perhaps one of the best examples because Tibet has always been a deeply religious society, Tibetan Buddhism, of course, at the center of that. One of the most horrific things was the destruction of temples and monasteries in Tibet during the Cultural Revolution. And it's worth noting that this doesn't just mean sort of smashing them into pieces and frenzied violence. In many cases, they were carefully deconstructed and taken off to build secular buildings instead. So the kind of fierce, slow, pointed, deconstruction of religious buildings as part of the Cultural Revolution, to make it clear, the revolutionaries’ utter contempt for the religious traditions of that particular area. And since Tibet, in particular had this very strong still does this very, very strong Buddhist faith, this was a particularly heartbreaking gesture from the point of view of the local Tibetan population...
You will still find people of a certain age in their 60s and 70s, in China, who were in the Cultural Revolution as teenagers, and some of their memories are more positive, than you might think. And these are the reasons. The first one is that for some young people, particularly coming from less privileged parts of China, it was their first chance to actually kind of meet each other, to travel around, to actually kind of see how big China was and inhabit that sort of feeling of revolutionary inspiration. They were being told by the leader of the country that they the youth, were the, you know, inspiring force that was going to renew China. That's gonna make you feel pretty big about yourself. And people still have some warm memories, even though they saw that the aftermath was was pretty disastrous. Also, as I've said, part of the economic shifts that would turn China into the powerhouse of, you know, the world economy in the 1980s, and 90s, were being laid down in the Cultural Revolution, not entirely all for economic reasons.
Mao became increasingly convinced, with some justification, that there might be a war about to break out. Not with America, but with the Soviet Union, particularly in 1969. And he had a lot of industry moved down to the far southwest so that if there was a sort of massive attack on the northern border, then China could continue industrial production, at least down in the south… the moving of the industrial plant meant that there was more opportunity to actually develop industry in that part of China, that probably wouldn't have happened without the war scare of the Cultural Revolution. But that having been said, the central policies of the Cultural Revolution were a sort of strange, contradictory set of ideas that massive violence, lack of interest in education, because universities and schools were essentially shut down for most of the Cultural Revolution, and a kind of inward looking xenophobia could be a powerful revolutionary combination. It didn't take very long, I think, even during the Cultural Revolution itself, to see that that was a deadly formula in terms of China's development. It's one of the reasons why, even if people feel nostalgic about certain aspects of the Cultural Revolution now and then, very few people would ever advocate any return to the actual policies of the Cultural Revolution...
The Cultural Revolution promised a great deal in terms of changing gender and norms and I think delivered relatively little. On the plus side, assuming that your interests are in greater equality, which I hope that most of us would be, you could argue that the fact that for instance, fashion became essentially a taboo and everyone had to wear, you know, sort of these blue or green uniforms that are all very similar and quite militarized, would mean that in some ways, you know, the the kind of gender norms of society around kind of fashion and appearance were being flattened out. However, this didn't mean in practice that actually the differential positions of men and women were, in most cases particularly well, reoriented. So, think about these famous Cultural Revolution posters, if you haven't seen any just Google Cultural Revolution posters, and you'll, you'll find plenty of them online. Look at the images, almost all of them are gendered male. So for instance, you'll see plenty of young women and they're all kind of screaming, and they're holding bayonets or rifles, and they're wearing military uniforms. You will search a very long time, in fact, I think you may search forever and not find any similar Cultural Revolution poster of a young man feeding a baby with a milk bottle, for instance. Now that really would be a reorientation of gender norms in the Cultural Revolution, you won't see it.
If you look at what we now know from archival materials, about the way in which people actually behaved during the Cultural Revolution, it was clear that political crimes were often very different from men and women and in women, in women's cases, their sexual histories would quite often be used, essentially, as accusations against them in a very, very patriarchal, and pre modern sort of way. So you might have the appearance of the Cultural Revolution. But in practice, in many cases, the old patriarchal norms came out again. However, one thing that I think we could say off the back of that is that, it is the case that during the Cultural Revolution, the number of women in lower level party cadre positions, seems to have increased quite significantly, and then went down again from the 1980s onwards. And ever since then, as anyone who looks at Chinese politics, you know, even from outside can see, the position of Chinese women in politics has been a very minority position, certainly compared to the dominance of men, despite one or two prominent counter examples. And even during the Cultural Revolution, it's worth noting that when we talk about the top leadership, the only prominent female participant is the one who happens to be married to the chairman as well. So again, that's not a great recipe for greater gender equality...
You literally get cases where people will be yelling quotes from Mao at each other as a means of trying to win a particular sort of either rhetorical, or in some cases genuinely violent argument...
Chinese history textbooks, for the most part, do not spend much time talking about aspects of modern Chinese history, where China is essentially the author of its own problems, there's plenty of discussion about the evils of imperialism… there's plenty of discussion of kind of Cold War imperialism by the Western countries against China, particularly the United States, but China's own sort of self destruction, Cultural Revolution, and of course, Tiananmen Square in 1989. These are subjects that are either downplayed, or in the case of 1989 Tiananmen Square, not mentioned at all. So in that sense, it is something that is there in the sort of the shadows, everyone knows about it, it's talked about, but the details and the causation are not things that are discussed in any very great detail. It's not completely ignored. But it's not a major part of the way in which the state thinks about its own history.'"
