BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Cultural Revolution
"‘The results of the Great Leap Forward were tragic. Local officials were desperate to please party bosses. And they handed over huge amounts of grain to the government. So people at the grassroots were left with almost nothing to eat. And historians estimate that 30 to 40 million died in the nationwide famine that resulted… and Mao himself, despite receiving intelligence that people were starving, he refused to rollback from the Great Leap Forward until 1961.
Now, the Great Leap Forward is a really important part of the backstory to the Cultural Revolution for a few reasons. First, it revealed Mao's eagerness for radical solutions and his impatience to accelerate the Communist Revolution. It shows also his faith in the power of the masses, he believed that they could be mobilized to do anything. And third, after the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP and Mao had to acknowledge the famine in 1961, Mao took a backseat from day to day running of the country and two of his close comrades, Liu Xiaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, took over economic policy and they allowed a partial return to private farming and markets, the kind of economic solutions that Mao hated. But Mao was plotting a comeback. And the Cultural Revolution is that come back’...
‘Older culture or the capitalist or bourgeois things attacked tremendously during the Cultural Revolution by Red Guards. . But actually Mao himself and his wife, they watched Hollywood movies during the Cultural Revolution very frequently’
‘When would they know, people, when they might be saying something wrong in the eyes of the Revolution?’
‘People could never know. This is exactly the art of Communist Revolutions, including the Cultural Revolution. I mean, uncertainties by design, massive violence and terror, our secret secret weapons of the Communist Revolution. No one is safe. Under authoritarian regimes, no one should feel safe… This is why Jacques Malais du Bain [sp?] stated that revolution swallows its own children.’...
'Keeping a pet or wearing tight trousers, you know, anyone with these kinds of suspect habits could be arrested or beaten, or worse'...
‘One of the things that is most notable and paradoxical about the red guard movement is that many of the most violent, the most enthusiastic youths for the Cultural Revolution, were actually the ones who had come from families that were had been considered actually to be of lower status in the revolutionary hierarchy. In other words, people who had actually, you know, kids who came from bourgeois backgrounds, or professional backgrounds, or people who'd been associated with the old nationalists of Chiang Kai Shek prior to the 1949 revolution. And the reason for that actually, one thinks about it is somewhat logical, because in the first 17 years, the revolution, those people have been told that they did not have the right kind of red revolutionary credentials. And therefore, when this moment came 17 years in, when the leader of the country was telling them that everything that their, you know, their communist peers had been doing was actually wrong and had to be overthrown, it was the people who had done badly out of the system, who often had the most motivation to overturn it…
Just to give an idea of the massive scale of violence, in December of 1966, the first year of the Cultural Revolution, if you were looking at the wrong moment on Kangping Road, in the center of Shanghai in a major street in second, China's second biggest city, you would have seen 120,000 Red Guards from two rival factions battling for four hours for control of that part of the city. I mean, other Red Guards actually decided that their major target was going to be the army itself, the People's Liberation Army and in 1968 in the city of Naning down in the southwest of China, the Red Guards bombed the riverfront. And essentially, we know that about 50,000 people were left homeless, because so many buildings were destroyed during this red guard vs army battle. Even more terrifying, in the city of Chang Chun, some Red Guards, and the so called revolutionary masses, managed to get some radioactive material from a research lab and were experimenting with creating their own private atomic bomb’...
'The Cultural Revolution in China was actually something that attracted huge attention all around the world. And, you know, everywhere from the streets of Paris, where you had, you know, pictures of Chairman Mao being held up by students, also Berkeley in California was another place where people looked at this. But the issue was that people didn't really understand in any detail what was going on, at the grassroots in the Cultural Revolution, because of course, very few people could get into China. And most of those were not the kind of people who would be involved in those sorts of student demonstration, demonstrations. So on the one hand, you had all sorts of people, you know, radicals, particularly in western capitals, who were becoming increasingly impatient with what they saw as the constraints of their own bourgeois societies and saw Mao as very different from the Soviets. So of course, were also opposed to Western capitalism, but was seen as stolid and kind of Neo imperialists in their own way, because they were controlling Eastern Europe. And Mao seemed like a much more sort of radical and refreshing character from the point of view of those observers.
On the other side, we also now know that diplomatic missions and there were some in in China, at that time, were becoming increasingly alarmed at what they saw. I mean, this was the era when the small British mission in Beijing was essentially besieged during that time and actually part it was was burnt down to the ground. And the Soviets who of course, were no longer allied to the Chinese, as Julia was saying earlier, but still maintained a diplomatic presence, a small one in Beijing, found themselves you know basically being insulted even I think, having things thrown at them when, when they went through the streets of Beijing. And all of this got back to Moscow, got back to the major capitals, and people found themselves essentially saying, We have no idea what's going on, because the Cultural Revolution was, and I think, in some ways, remains politically unique. It's a political event, unlike any other that's happened in any other communist society. And at the time, the rest of the world found it exciting, found it terrifying, but it found it above all baffling to interpret.’...
‘Various people including Jiang Qing, the the wife of Mao, were actually very against the idea of opening up… Jiang Qing took one advantage of the opening to America, which is apparently she asked for a copy of the Hollywood film The Day of the Jackal to be supplied so that she can watch it in her private cinema at least. So it's, so it's reported’...
‘How could you ban capitalistic clothing if people wore them under Mao suits or military uniforms which were popular and the legitimate outfits in the Mao era?’...
‘Many people who are far too young to remember the Cultural Revolution have started to feel very nostalgic for that era, because they've, they've created a, create a sort of invented version of the Cultural Revolution in their minds where the violence never really took place. But instead, the ideological purity of Mao is seen as a contrast to what they regard as the sort of rather degenerate capitalist consumerism of today's China, which of course is run by a Communist Party. But it is a highly marketized economy'...
‘One legacy of the cultural revolution has been a politics which we see today in China, which is terrified above anything else of mobilization from below. People sometimes accuse the current Chinese Communist Party of wanting to bring back Maoism. I don't think that's really true, but one of the elements that they definitely don't want to bring back is that idea that you might stir up the masses, stir up the students, stir up the workers and get them you know, essentially rioting in the street. And the level of control in Chinese politics today, I think is, in some ways, the longest and most severe reaction to the era of the Cultural Revolution. So if anything, I would say that the Cultural Revolution in the long term has been a damper of political energy. It has not been an enabler of it’...
‘I would like to say a few words about the western yous who identified themselves with the red guard and Mao in the 1969, err 68. So I think, you know, the, the the issue lies, lies not in the phenomenon itself, but beyond it, and it has been long in the making. When things became, become bad. When social problems and conflicts turn critical, people tend to search and find new resources not only from their own history, but also from exterior. This was part of the story of revolutionary identification with rev-, cultural revolution in the turbulent 1968 in many Western countries. However, our Chinese proverb has well said mirror flower, water moon, meaning flower in the mirror, moon on the water. You can feel the huge tension between imagined China and the real China. In 1974, Roland Barthe travel to China as part of a small delegation of distinguished leftist French philosophers and literary figures. They arrived in China just as the last stage of the Cultural Revolution was getting on the way. Poor, Roland. He was honest about what he saw in China.’"
