Who was responsible for the chaos of the Cultural Revolution?

10 May 2017

Who was responsible for the chaos of the Cultural Revolution?

Mao Zedong (December 26, 1893 – September 9, 1976) :

Mao's Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) Images:

There was no question that the responsibility for the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, which lasted from May 1966 to October 1976, fell squarely on Mao Zedong’s shoulders. Professor Roderick MacFarquhar”s Week 40 series of video, lectures on the Cultural Revolution, gave us all the clues of Mao’s scheming here:

                                        The Great Famine Video 

·       The Great Famine (1959-1962), also initiated by Mao, caused some 30-40 million deaths, and Mao’s colleagues felt that maybe Mao’s hardline collectivization policies needed some tweaking. No one, of course, dared to openly criticize Mao’s thinking here, since his collectivist policies of putting the population into communes, give up their personal agrarian and other holdings, and produce industrial goods and services in the communes for the collective good of that commune etc., exacerbated the food supply situation, and serious droughts, floods and other natural calamities around this time, killed the millions.

·       Instead, Mao was paranoid, feeling that these people wanting changes were “revisionists”, now bent on”revising the holy doctrine of Lenin and Stalin” [Professor MacFarquhar’s quote]

·       The Chinese Revolution from 1949, when Mao Zedong took control of China, was based on the Soviet model, and Lenin and Stalin’s vision of Marxism. Russia to Mao, was thus “the motherland of the original revolution” [Professor MacFarquhar], and Lenin and Stalin’s policies and thinking were sacrosanct and inviolable to him.

                                             Nikita Khrushchev

·       When Nikita Khrushchev (April 15, 1894 – September 11, 1971) took over the Soviet Union after Stalin’s (1879-1953) death, he started his policy of détente with the U.S., and his policy of “peaceful coexistence” between the two nuclear powers – Russia and the U.S. – the latter mao’s arch enemy – Mao felt even more isolated, as he saw Khrushchev and his clique also betraying the theories of Lenin. When Khrushchev started criticizing Stalin for his criminal excesses during the latter’s reign, and pursued his “de-Stalinization” policies, Mao was further enraged by this about-turn.

·       So, at home, Mao began his Cultural Revolution to get rid of all these “revisionists” and suspected revisionists, since these, he claimed, had turned their backs on Leninism and Stalinism, and, instead, now splurge on the good life of the “bourgeois” and had to be gort rid of fast, before they destroyed his cherished revolution.

·       Mao started this Cultural Revolution purge by first getting rid of his top guys he suspected of “revisionist” and “deviationist” tendencies – what professor MacFarquhar termed “bombard the headquarters” – a very apt description for the other leaders of China – the “old guards” – he wanted to get rid of, including:

                                                   Liu Shaoqi

·       President Liu Shaoqi (arrested, beaten and imprisoned, died in prison in 1969);

                                                    Lin Biao

·       Lin Biao, Mao’s chosen heir-apparent, who died in a mysterious airplane crash in Mongolia on September 13, 1971, while attempting to escape to the Soviet Union – and from Mao clutches;

                                                  Deng Xiaoping

·       Deng Xiaoping (August 22, 1904 – February 17, 1997), first purged by Mao in April 1976, then bounced back in 1978 to become China’s paramount leader;

·       Plus “leaders of the various departments of the state and the party” (Professor MacFacquhar’s quote).

The Gang of Four:

                              Gang of Four on Trial: Left to Right:
                              Zhang Chunqiao, Wang Hongwen, 
                              Yao Wenyuan, Jiang Qing (20/11/1980)

                               The Gang of Four on Trial, Parts 1&2,
                               YouTube 1980.

The “Gang of Four” was Mao’s frontline group to carry out his purges. They were the master planner, implementer, and executor of Mao’s Cultural Revolution purges. This name was given to a leftist political group composed of four Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members.

                                                    Jiang Qing

The leading figure in the GoF was Jiang Qing, Mao’s third and last wife, who became a member of the politburo in 1969. Her other three associates were all high-level officials by 1976 – Zhang Chuanqiao, a vice-Minister of the State Council, Wang Hongwen, vice-chairman of the CCP, Yao Wengyuan, a Secretary of the CCP in Shanghai. They also held many position in the Party, government and even the military. They wielded significant power during the Cultural Revolution, maintaining control over man of China’s political institutions, including the media and propaganda.

Jiang Qing initially collaborated with Lin Biao – Mao’s designated heir-apparent – to advance Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and promote Mao’s “cult of personality”. Later, she turned against Lin Biao, even Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping.

Jiang Qing’s central role in China during this Cultural Revolution period saw her encouraging the Red Guards to take action against Mao’s “reactionaries” after Mao himself went on gigantic rallies to get the Red Guards – made up mostly of university students – to help f=defend the nation, himself and his leadership against these “bourgeois” elements and eliminate them.

The “Gang of Four” was finally arrested on October 6, 1976, which generally is acknowledged as the end of the Cultural Revolution.

At the Fifteenth Plenum of the Eleventh National Party Congress of the CCP, the Standing Committee declared the innocence of President Liu Shaoqui, who was persecuted to death by the Red Guards orchestrated by GoF during the Cultural Revolution.

The Gang of Four was put on a public show trial on November 20, 1980, and, when questioned by the Court prosecutor, Jiang Qing absolved herself from all the GoF atrocities, claiming “I was Chairman Mao’s dog. I bit whomever he asked me to bite!”

On January 15, 1981, the sentences were handed down: Jiang and Zhang were sentenced to death, with a two-year reprieve. Wang was sentenced to life imprisonment, and Yao received a 20-year imprisonment sentence. There was no appeal process.

On January 25, 1983, both Jiang and Zhang’s death penalty were commuted to life imprisonment. On May 14, 1992, Jiang committed suicide in a hospital, after being released on medical grounds.

The Red Guards:

The Red Guards (pinyin: Hong Wei Bing) were the storm-troopers, the shock troops that Mao unleashed in August 1966 against the party apparatus throughout China. Egged on by Jiang Qing, Mao’s third and last wife, and her Cultural Revolution Group (CRG) lieutenants, the Red Guards – consisting mostly of young university students – were given a carte blanche to purge all “anti-Party and anti-socialist bourgeois authorities” and to “drag out” and “strangle” any Provincial party leader who “stands in the way of the great Cultural Revolution.” The Red Guards then vowed to “turn the old world upside down, smash it to pieces, pulverize it, create chaos, and make a tremendous mess, the bigger the better!”

They kept their word. During the latter months of 1966, China was convulsed by a frenzy of Red Guard activities. Some nine million provincial youths came to Beijing to conduct “liaison” with Mao. At the same time, elite Red Guards from Peking University, Tsinghua, Peking Aviation Institute, and other institutions in the capital fanned out into the provinces to organize local militants for their all-out assault on the Party apparatus.

The Red Guards’ atrocities included: vandalizing bookstores, libraries, museums, churches, temples and monuments, breaking into private homes to destroy old books, Western-style clothing, paintings and art objects. The Red Guards defaced or destroyed 4,922 out of 6,843 temples, shrines and other heritage sites in China during their frenzy. Red Guards attack intellectuals, professionals, and anyone who had contacts with the West, or represented traditional Chinese culture or religion. Hundreds of thousands were beaten, tortured or sent to hard labor camps for their “bourgeois” living and thoughts.

However, serious difficulties beset the Red Guards movement from the very start:

·       The “instructions” given to the young fanatics by the Central leaders were purposely vague and all-inclusive. They were strident exhortations to “rebel” against anyone or anything the Red Guards believed to be antithetical to the new Maoist order.

·       Many Peking Red Guards who visited other cities attempted exercise control over local cultural activities, and were strenuously and violently resisted by the local, leading to fights.

·       In other provinces, officials organize theor own Red Guards for the specific purpose of defending the Party apparatus against these outsiders’ onslaughts.

By early October 1966, it was clear that the Cultural Revolution was not going according to plan. Mao then established the Revolutionary Rebel organizations, consisting primarily of workers – rather than students – in industrial, mining, Party, and governmental organs throughout the country in order to boost the Red Guards and erode the bases of support for local authorities. The “Rebels” proved that they could tear down established structures very effectively, but they were incapable of working together to build Mao’s new order.

Likewise, their “power seizures” were often accompanied by much bloodshed and violence, in almost every province and major city, like Shanghai.

A major reason for the failure of many “power seizures” was the fact that a given Rebel faction or alliance usually attempted to seize power only for itself. A second problem again centered on what Mao meant by “power seizures.” The self-seeking behavior and actions of these “revolutionary young generals” were out of control. The Revolutionary Rebels had failed, as had the Red Guards before them.

The basic problem appeared to have been Mao’s reluctance to acknowledge that much of the fighting – among the various factions of the Red Guards, and the Rebels, and between the Red Guards and the Rebels – was the result of the deep split within the ranks of the “revolutionary Left” itself.

Mao’s disillusionment with the Red Guards became apparent after their dismal, self-seeking performance during the initial “power seizures” of early 1967, and was intensified by their indiscriminate internecine warfare during the following summer. The Red Guards, as a terror device, had outlived their usefulness.

The Ordinary Chinese who sometimes betrayed their own families and colleagues:

Thousands of ordinary Chinese – professionals, bureaucrats, intellectuals and anyone – were forced to make and signed public confessions of their “misdeeds”, “deviationist” and “bourgeois” tendencies, and were also forced to implicate their family loved ones, friends, relatives and colleagues. They were the innocent ones, and definitely were not responsible for the chaos of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. They were the unfortunate victims.

There was no rule of law, as the courts, judges, law books, had all been destroyed by the red Guards, judges beaten and terrorized, and sent to hard labor camps. So these thousands of innocent Chinese of various backgrounds were forced to confess on trumped-up charges, devoid of any legal basis, and families were split up and killed. It was chaos and anarchy as the Red Guards’ activities spiraled out of control, and unfortunate families – any family – were simply targets of the Red Guards’ fury.

Does It Matter?

Yes, it mattered a great deal to every human being in China. If anything, the Cultural Revolution and Mao’s ( through his wife Jiang Qing) employment of the Red Guards to terrorize his “enemies” resulted in some 500,000 unnecessary deaths.

Worse, as shown above, the Red Guards were fighting among their different units for control of a particular locality, and fighting against the local Party officials who resented the Red Guards’ interference in their affairs and activities. Industrial production plummeted, and the economy continued its tailspin during Mao’s reign.

To a great extent, these costly failures had severely damaged the CCP’s legitimacy, and it would no longer enjoyed the trust and absolute power it had – especially during this “ten years of madness” of Mao’s Cultural Revolution and his Red Guards.

Historical and priceless relics and artifacts in museums and homes throughout China, and even in Tibet, were destroyed by the Red Guards in their frenzy to get rid of the “old order” on Mao’s authority – and these were China’s cultural heritage and could never be replaced.

What other aspects of the Cultural Revolution should we also pay attention to?

The Cultural Revolution set off by Mao was mainly his power struggle to retain his authority – and he used this forum to get rid of his enemies, and perceived enemies, labeling this clique as “revisionists” and living the “bourgeois” life. It is incredible that his charisma, and with the help of the Gang of Four (headed by his wife Jiang Qing) and their control of the state propaganda machine, was able to summon over one million students and other activists to each of his eight rallies he orchestrated in Peking.

He felt the CCP had degenerated, that it had abandoned Marxism as a theoretical guideline, and that Khrushchev’s “de-Stalinization” program, and his “peaceful coexistence” approach with his arch enemy the United States, spelt the doom of traditional Marxism as espoused by Lenin and Stalin, and branded Khrushchev a traitor to the Communist cause.

The Cultural Revolution has taught us that leaders like Mao was paranoid, and what he unleashed through his Red Guards, he was unable to control properly, and innocent thousands died at his hands.

It is thus no wonder that his actions here invited severe criticism, after the Cultural Revolution died down in 1976. Mao’s vision, his ideology, his philosophical conception, may have reflected popular sentiments in China during his reign, after a century of struggle.

Nonetheless, his glaring mistakes and the terrible costs to the nation – The Great Famine arising from his Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) program, that killed anything from 30-40 million people, and which historian Frank Dikotter asserted that coercion, terror and systematic violence were its very foundation, and it “motivated one of the most deadly mass killings in human history”, his “anti-rightists” campaign, the “Hundred Flowers Movement 1956”, and this Cultural Revolution, were designed primarily to flush out his enemies to distract for his own mistakes, and to maintain and consolidate his power and leadership forever.

These aspects of purges, killings, to flush out enemies seemed to be prevalent in Communist societies, since leaders, like Mao, had absolute control of the economy and country, and being overly paranoid, are prone to take these killing fields measures from time to time – as we see these in Russia during Lenin and Stalin times for example, Pol Pot’s “Killing Fields” in Cambodia, and even in Germany during Hitler’s time.

Present-day China obviously is uneasy with Mao’s Cultural Revolution and other excesses, and thus very little original research is possible, as government archives are as good as closed to Chinese and foreign researchers. These are areas where researchers want to pay more attention to – to find out why and how Mao went the ways he did, and that his Little Red Book may contain beautiful quotations, but not all are followed to its entirety even by himself.