CFR-scholar Ian Johnson describes how oral history changes the perception people have about the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, now documents and interviews emerge on the internet, he tells at the Manchester China Institute.
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| Kaiser Kuo |
The Civil War that followed not long after the Japanese surrender in August 1945 was arguably touch-and-go for the CCP as well, and depended very much on the dispositions of external powers, most notably Stalin’s Soviet Union and the U.S. It’s too much to go into here, but it was by no means a foregone conclusion that the CCP would emerge victorious in that fight.
Believe it or not, the Cultural Revolution also nearly brought on the collapse of the Party. People don’t remember it this way, necessarily; they conjure up images of throngs of identically-dressed Red Guards in Tiananmen all holding aloft Mao’s Little Red Book and imagine that this was the Party in absolute ascendancy. It was Mao who was in the ascendant — not the Party. Mao Zedong had turned the forces of his zealous young revolutionaries against the Party itself, and against any manifestation of its institutional authority, whether in the bureaucracy, in industry, in educational institutes, in hospitals, or even in the villages. It was actually a grim time for the Party — not its day in the sun.
More predictions in SupChina.Finally, there was of course 1989. It’s hard to say just how close the Party might have come to “collapse” in May and June of 1989. But it’s clear that there were deep schisms within the Party leadership about how to respond to the student-led protests of that year. And individual decisions made by individual unit commanders in the 38th and 27th Armies appear, sent in to quell the “turmoil” eventually, appear to have made the difference between the “successful” quashing of the student and, by mid-May, also working-class demonstrators, on the one hand; and what just might have been civil war.
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| Ian Johnson |
Obtaining this sort of material can be a laborious process, as I found when I went with a Chinese scholar of the Cultural Revolution to explore the Panjiayuan antiques market on Beijing’s east side. Most of this vast market is given over to selling reproductions of Ming vases and Chairman Mao statues, but one row of 50 or so stalls has something more valuable: old books, magazines, newspapers, and handwritten material of all kinds—diaries, notebooks, and sometimes even just loose sheets of hastily scribbled notes.
We spent a Saturday morning rummaging through notebooks filled with math and physics equations, as well as a draft of an unfinished novel from the 1950s. Four hours later, the researcher had spent $500 of his own money on hundreds of sheets of paper, diaries, and jottings from government officials. He would spend the week digesting them and then come back the next Saturday for more sinological scavenging.
All this paper was the detritus disgorged by the dying and dead men and women who won China’s civil war, founded the People’s Republic, grew up as the flowers of the nation, were persecuted, and then regained power; their scribblings are now being thrown out by their children or grandchildren. Sold mostly as scrap paper, some of them have been identified by crafty garbagemen as valuable and offered to the Panjiayuan merchants. In the past, so many diaries and notebooks were thrown out that Western libraries built entire collections based on them. Now, as the older generations fade, the flood is slower but it still casts new light.
Best of all, local historians continue to defy the government by plowing through this material. Many cannot get their work past the censors, so they self-publish online. Their work is sometimes censored, but an amazing amount still gets through. In May, on the first day of this year’s anniversaries for the Cultural Revolution, I opened my WeChat social media account and found half a dozen unofficial articles commemorating the dead and condemning the culpable. I also found a new edition of the biweekly underground journal Remembrance, with over 80 pages of articles on Mao, his security chief, the students, and the youth. With much still to be learned, the period of the Cultural Revolution continues to fascinate and reveal itself as a touchstone for understanding China’s past and its present.Much more in ChinaFile.
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| Zhang Lijia |
Three people contacted by The Globe and Mail for this article declined to talk, citing worries about surveillance. One person postponed an interview by two days, after authorities told him to stay home. Police physically blocked another couple from leaving their home to meet friends for a regular monthly meeting this week. They met The Globe and Mail at a tea house instead, and frequently looked out the window to uniformed police standing outside.
“What the government is doing is disgraceful, trying to silence people,” said Zhang Lijia, a Beijing-based author and cultural observer.
“It’s such a major event which has shaped China, and they don’t allow people to discuss it because they don’t want open discussion of anything negative associated with the Chinese Communist Party.”
More in the Globe&Mail.That has cut off most avenues of discussion outside the home.
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| Ian Johnson |
Q. Why was it so important?A. This was the aftermath of the Great Leap Famine [considered one of the worst famines in history, with around 30 million deaths]. Mao blamed the famine on bad officials in local areas who were corrupted by remnant Nationalist forces and by landlords. He said some places didn’t do land reform well and that’s why the famine happened. It’s because of impurity in local village organization — that was Mao’s rationalization. Around this time, the early 1960s, there was a resurgence of religious practices and economic activity — things that look like capitalist buying and selling of goods. Villages are making money on the side outside the socialist economic plan.
So Mao declared “we can never forget class struggle” and started the Four Cleanups. It was traumatic. Outside work teams went to villages, investigated local officials and violently punished people they considered class enemies.
Q. It’s not something we hear about too much.A. That’s because it was rural, and rural people don’t get to tell their stories. We should have been talking about this 50-year anniversary two years ago.
Q. What’s another reason for not liking the anniversary this year?A. It was really a three-year period. The Red Guards were part of it, but there was more violence in 1968-69, when Mao sent the army and tried to restore order by setting up Revolutionary Committees. But my pessimistic expectation is the anniversary will mostly focus on Red Guard chaos narratives, and suffering of elite intellectuals.
Q. Intellectuals write history.A. Intellectuals write books and their experiences do matter. But we tend to forget how the majority of people lived.
Q. Who else do we need to hear about?A. We don’t hear too much about the “rebels.” They were workers in factories, not Red Guards, and they got a seat at the table when the Revolutionary Committees were set up in 1968. They ran factories and many workplaces along with the army. They were the ones who got scapegoated at the end of the Cultural Revolution. They’re not super literate or well-connected enough to get their stories out, and their stories are embarrassing to the officials who used them and survived and did well after the Cultural Revolution. They’re called “Gang of Four elements.” We don’t know much about them at all.
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| Zhang Lijia |
Despite the authorities' effort to keep the lid firmly in place, more and more information is coming to light. Last May, a well-respected academic, Qin Hui, published an essay entitled The Rejection of the Cultural Revolution is not Thorough and the Truth Still Needs to be Further Revealed, on a liberal intellectual website, Aisixiang.
Qin detailed the horrors that took place in Southwest China's Guangxi province in 1967, horrors too deplorable to describe, including cannibalism. In dozens of cases, even the wives and daughters of the accused were not spared. They would be raped first. After their murder, their breasts and private parts were cut out and sometimes their livers were eaten. All in the name of the revolution. Qin's piece is still being circulated widely among netizens, together with other articles shedding light on the turbulent decade.
I welcome articles like Qin's and the debates they have sparked as the anniversary is approaching. I hope they will push the Chinese people to ask some hard questions: Why did the Cultural Revolution take place? What happened exactly? Why did so many people participate with religious zeal? What did it say about the national characteristics of the Chinese people? What lessons can be learned from the catastrophe? And, more importantly, what can be done to prevent it from happening again?
More in Al Jazeera.I, for one, will never forget about the Cultural Revolution, for the sake of my family as well as for the nation. Without confronting the past and learning the lesson, the "China Dream" - the country's drive towards national rejuvenation - will, sadly, remain a dream.
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| +Ian Johnson |
In downtown Beijing, just a little over a mile west of the Forbidden City, is one of China’s most illustrious high schools. Its graduates regularly attend the country’s best universities or go abroad to study, while foreign leaders and CEOs make pilgrimages to catch a glimpse of the country’s future elite.
Founded in 1917, it has been lavishly rebuilt over the past few years, with a sleek new gym, dining hall, and classrooms—a monument to a rising country. But to many Chinese people of a certain age, the Experimental High School Attached to Beijing Normal University conjures up another image—that of a group of fanatical girls torturing their vice-principal to death.
For years, the event has been of interest to foreign scholars of the Cultural Revolution; it is a Lord of the Flies story that has attracted academics investigating female violence, filmmakers trying to document the mindset of violent Red Guards, and researchers trying to piece together how many people were killed, by whom, and how. In China, the story is more veiled. In official accounts it is usually mentioned as an example of the chaos that the country should avoid, and it is heavily censored to conceal the fact that many of the young women were children of the Communist elite, and today are prominent members of society. But this is changing, part of a broader movement intended to shift discussion of sensitive questions from the private into the public sphere. Led by samizdat publications like the online journal Remembrance,* accounts of violence—including the vice-principal’s killing—are being published and passionately debated. More remarkably, people are even apologizing publicly for their actions, setting off long-overdue discussions about how China should deal with its violent past, especially when many of the victims are dead. Is it best to forget, which the country has largely done, or is there merit in digging up the past? And is it possible to have a cathartic confrontation with the past in a country with no real public sphere?
Ouyang Xiang, son of a denounced former Party secretary in Heilongjiang province, being persecuted during the Cultural Revolution for sending an unsigned letter to the local revolutionary committee in his father’s defense, Harbin, November 1968. The sign around his neck bears his name and the date of his offending letter. When he tried to shout ‘Long live Chairman Mao,’ his mouth was stuffed with a glove. Several days later he was pushed out of a third-story window; the official report called his death a suicide |
| +Lijia Zhang |
The internet has been alive lately with the news that Chen Xiaolu, the son of Marshal Chen Yi, made a public apology to the teachers he had attacked during the Cultural Revolution. I was talking about the news with two American visitors as I showed them around the National Museum of China, just off Tiananmen Square. Tucked away in a corner we noticed that this major historical event is represented by one photo – Mao Zedong receiving the Red Guards – and a one-sentence caption: "A catastrophe mistakenly launched by the leaders."
On October 7, 57-year-old Chen, together with some former Red Guards classmates, visited Beijing No 8 High School and apologised to the teachers who had been labelled "supporters of capitalism". He expressed remorse for causing their suffering. In August, Mr Chen, who worked as a political adviser, also published a formal apology in the school’s alumni blog in which he claimed responsibility for sending some staff and fellow students to labour camps.
It is encouraging to see a string of individual confessions in recent years. Just in June, a 61-year-old retired official, Liu Boqin, paid for an advertisement in the magazine Yanhuang Chunqiu to apologise for the violence he had committed as a 14-year-old. "The chaos of the Cultural Revolution was not an excuse for my evil deeds," read the apology.
Earlier this year, a 60-year-old lawyer, Zhang Hongbing, fought a legal battle in a bid to preserve his mother’s tomb in their hometown in the central province of Anhui . Her public humiliation and execution was the result of his own denunciation of her.
In May 2010, another 60-year-old, Wang Jiyu, haunted by guilt, confessed in the same magazine that as a quick-tempered 16-year-old, he had killed another teenager from a rival Red Guards group.
There are quite a few similar cases. But Chen’s case has drawn the widest attention thanks to his family background: his father was one of the 10 marshals who led the revolution.
To apologise, especially in such an open fashion, is uncommon in Chinese culture. So why has this new trend emerged? As Chen explained in his apology, his victims were getting old and if he hadn’t taken action, it might have been too late. As they reached their autumn years, these former activists began to reflect on their painful past.
Most web users applauded Chen’s courage and honesty. Some saw this trend as a sign of the awakening of the nation’s consciousness and encouraged other perpetrators to come forward and apologise. Others even go as far as urging the government to do the same: to reflect on the Cultural Revolution and make a public apology to the Chinese people.
Responding to this call, the government-run Global Times newspaper published an editorial which argued that the time for the whole nation to reflect on the era has passed, as there are more urgent issues to deal with.
Really? I don’t think so. The authorities have not confronted the traumatic episode. After the official "catastrophe" verdict in 1981, the government urged people to forget it for fear that this dark page might damage its reputation and threaten its legitimacy. There is no official museum to commemorate it; books on the excesses of violence during the period are banned; and textbooks, like museums, gloss over it.
Last March, the outgoing premier, Wen Jiabao , warned that the historical tragedy could repeat itself. The shot was aimed at Bo Xilai , the now disgraced politician who had launched campaigns in Chongqing that resembled some aspects of the Cultural Revolution.
Wen certainly had reasons to worry. The negative impact of the movement is still lingering. The so-called strike-hard campaign, for example, where criminals got speedy and heavy sentencing, is essentially the Cultural Revolution in its style.
If the authorities allowed large-scale and open discussion, young people would understand what happened exactly and could draw lessons from it.
A thorough reflection on the Cultural Revolution would likely lead to discussion of the mechanism to prevent such tragedy, which means the introduction of the rule of law and de-centralisation of power. These are things our leaders are probably not ready to grant to the people.
Without true reflection, China will miss a good opportunity to heal properly, to purify its soul and to grow stronger. That’s the only way to prevent the ghost of the Cultural Revolution from haunting the country ever again.The article was first published at the South China Morning Post and can be found at Zhang Lijia's website.
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| Zhang Lijia |
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| Zhang Lijia |
Our leaders are probably worried that the shameful past may damage the regime’s credibility. Perhaps inspired by the ongoing debate, scholar Wang Lixiong published a piece last month in Aisixiang, a leading intellectual website, titled “What has the Cultural Revolution brought to China?"
He argues that no matter how powerful a movement might be – even one that “shook Heaven and Earth” like the Cultural Revolution – if change merely involves changing one group of bureaucrats for another, without genuine reform of the dictatorial system itself, then there will be no political progress.
I am delighted by the outpouring of opinions from both ordinary netizens and prominent intellectuals such as Wang.
This month, a new generation of leaders led by Xi Jinping will take the reins of power at the 12th National People’s Congress. My hope is that they’ll listen to such voices, squarely confront the legacy of the Cultural Revolution, and then draw lessons from it. This means enacting genuine political reform, rule of law and relaxing media control – the best way to prevent the Cultural Revolution from happening again.More in this pdf file from the South China Morning Post.
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| Zhang Lijia |
Several things particularly don’t ring truth. First of all, the tale of her teacher being ‘quartered by four horses’. One only heard the brutal method of killing from ancient books but no one has ever such it be practiced in modern ear. It sounds too implausible.
In a radio interview, Ms Fu claimed that she saw with her own eyes how babies were being ‘tossed into the river’. Impossible. Infant infanticides did take place and still do, less commonly, in the countryside, but they are never being carried out in public. I don’t think false memory should take the blame. You may get the publication wrong or the dates wrong but one never forgets a dramatic event such as witness a brutal killing...
There are enough mis-understandings and myths about [the Cultural Revolution]. Ms Fu’s tales could only add the confusion. Fang Zhouzi pointed out that such fabricated stories can only fool laowai – foreigners. They can probably please them as well. Hence the effort to self-victimize and self-dramatize.More on Zhang Lijia's weblog, including John Kennedy's blog in the South China Morning post.
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| Li Lili |
"Sometimes you need to swim against the current," she told me. "Even if everyone is going in one direction in a bad way, you do what is right and moral. Even if that means going against everyone else.. Never forget that."He retells her suffering from the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, and her special relationship with former colleague and now Mao's wife Jiang Qing.
Not only did Li Lili teach me always to stay optimistic and never to sacrifice morality despite facing evil; she also taught me to make sure to give back to one's homeland and to take care of the poor. Although she and her husband spent several years in the U.S. and Europe in the 1940s, she returned to China after the founding of the People's Republic, at Zhou Enlai's behest, to help rebuild the film industry...
Although Li Lili is most famous for her acting, I remember her for far more. She taught me never to sacrifice ideals and morality, even when the world around is crazy and evil reigns. If she could maintain her resolve to do the right thing and help people through torture and tragedy, then anyone can do so in less trying circumstances. It is our duty.Commercial
Shaun Rein Fantake via Flickr
