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Society & Culture

China’s Cultural Revolution Turns 50

May 17, 2016
  • Tom Watkins

    President and CEO of the Economic Council of Palm Beach County, FL

Chairman Mao turned the masses of people against the then political establishment when he proclaimed, “A revolution is not a dinner party, it is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.” (“Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan” (March 1927), Selected Works, Vol. I, p. 28.)

Cultural Revolution survivor, Rae Yang captures in her riveting book, Spider Eaters: A Memoir, the bitterness they were forced to swallow during this decade of madness.

Today, the Chinese Communist Party is still not willing to give up the narrative that the Chairman was “70 percent right and 30 percent wrong.”  Regardless of this interpretation of history, the Cultural Revolution made up a huge part of the 30 percent that was wrong during Mao’s reign in China.

If hindsight is 20/20, the intervening half century serves to remind us that the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) was an epic, violent insurrection in China’s history. It stalled the fortunes of China for a decade. It embodied Mao’s proclamation that “Even the smallest spark can create a raging forest fire.” In some ways, he was responsible for lighting China afire during this tumultuous era. Aided by his closest sycophants, including his wife Jiang Qing and defense minister Lin Biao, Mao wrought havoc on the then-party leadership and his fellow Chinese citizens as a means of asserting his authority and to appeal to “the masses.”

Wag the Dog strategy?

To ‘wag the dog’ is to divert attention from what would otherwise be of greater importance – instead attracting attention to something of lesser significance, forcing the less significant event into the limelight. Mao created his own 20th century “Wag the Dog” moment when he used the Cultural Revolution to divert the nation’s attention away from the human tragedy of his most recent political failure, The Great Leap Forward.

Three decades later, U.S. President Bill Clinton was accused of his own “Wag the dog” moment when he authorized retaliatory missile strikes in Afghanistan and Sudan to avenge the Aug. 7,1998 United States embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania – drawing attention away from his Monica Lewinsky sex scandal.

Chinese Communist Party leader, Mao Zedong came to believe that the party leadership in China was moving too far in a “revisionist” direction, with an emphasis on knowledge and expertise rather than on Communist ideological purity. The Cultural Revolution set out to change the direction of the nation. The stated goal was to reinforce Communism in China by removing any traces of capitalist, traditional, and cultural elements from Chinese society. But by Mao imposing his Maoist orthodoxy within the Party and on the nation, he created instead pure bedlam, chaos, and destruction.

China Today – a Leader Shaped By the Cultural Revolution

Like many young people in the ’60s during the Cultural Revolution, teenager Xi Jinping was sent to the countryside. Part of the fifth generation of Chinese leaders, Xi was born in 1953 – the same year I was born – and sent to Shaanxi province, a poor region in northwestern China.

Like Deng Xiaoping, the “Paramount Leader of China” in 1978, credited with opening the world to China after Mao’s death, Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun, was purged three times by Mao, serving as deputy prime minister from 1959 until 1962 – his falling out with Mao for the first time.  The elder Xi is credited with the creation of the first Special Economic Zone in Shenzhen, which grew from a small fishing village near Hong Kong to a bustling super modern city and manufacturing center.

As a “Chinese princeling” and the son of revolutionary hero and former Mao Zedong comrade, Xi Zhongxun, he has become the first princeling to lead China.

President Xi was described in a 2011 Washington Post column as “pragmatic, serious, cautious, hard-working, down to earth and low-key” … and “a problem-solver and a leader.” He has needed all these skills and more to manage and lead modern day China, maintain a mandate from heaven and not slip back into the nightmare of the 60′s.

Xi Plays Peking Duck With Cultural Revolution

Don’t expect any ceremony or notice of the passing of the half century point since the torrential Cultural Revolution by any leader in China today. Many would like to like to bury their heads in the Gobi sands and forget it.

Yet, this past year, Yu Youjun, a former governor of Shanxi Province and party secretary of the Ministry of Culture argued that “the soil for the Cultural Revolution is still fertile, especially when the people have no reasonable and profound knowledge of it.” He added: “It may partially recur, under certain historical conditions.” He concluded, “These efforts to close the Chinese mind are also linked to a feverish personality cult that is being erected around President Xi Jinping.”

In its article, “Beware the Cult of Xi,” the current edition of The Economist points out President Xi is “Chairman of Everything”, wearing many crowns: “He is not only party leader, head of state and commander-in-chief, but is also running reform, the security services, and the economy.”

Is the “collective leadership” – in vogue since the death of Mao – giving way to a 21st century “cult of Xi”? It has been said that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely—today, Xi holds the absolute levers of power in modern China.

Power to the People

Like other leaders before him, China’s President Xi Jinping understands the biggest problem for himself and the Communist Party is to become divorced from the people. As President of a country that is home to one-fifth of all humanity, Xi currently presides over the current ethnic unrest, environmental genocide, an aging society and a slowing economy. Certainly Xi’s hands are full of challenges.

President Xi foreshadowed his governance style in a book compiled by China’s State Council Information Office of China, the CCCPC Party Literature Research Office and China International Publishing Group, Xi Jinping: The Governance Of China, a book that attempts to recount the ways in which he remains married to the people.

President Xi may even have ripped a page from the book of Deng Xiaoping who once said, “Why was our party so powerful in the past? In the war years, we often said that if the party member made up 30 percent of an army company, that company must be very good and have a strong fighting capacity. Why? Because party members were invariably the first to charge and the last to withdraw on the battlefield, the first to bear hardship and the last to enjoy comforts in daily life… Now some Party members are different. They join the party in order to be first to enjoy comforts and last to bear hardship.”

Xi is pulling the reins of power tighter than anyone since Mao, trying to jerk the country into yet another change paradigm. Perhaps he should consider the great political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli who centuries ago wrote: “There is nothing more difficult to manage, or more doubtful of success, or more dangerous to handle than to take the lead in introducing a new order of things.”

Machiavelli reminds us that change agents “… Have enemies in all those who are doing well under the old and only lukewarm defenders in all those who do well under the new order.”

It remains to be seen whether Xi invokes Mao in order to maintain power. I think not.

Chinese society is vastly different today than in the Mao era – the group-think psychosis of the turbulent 60′s seems unfathomable today. China’s society has changed so fundamentally that Xi must govern differently.

In Deep China, Harvard University’s Arthur Kleinman investigates the emotional and moral lives of the Chinese people as they adjust to the challenges of modernity.  His book explores how the Chinese people changed over the period of dramatic transformation from Mao’s era into the “reform and opening up” period. As he points out, few countries have been through such epic disruption. During the Cultural Revolution madness, the Chinese people appeared robot-like, with a God-like worship of Mao. Today, their lives, are exponentially different and better – making them less likely to seek a deity in a mortal political leader.

In his February 2016 article in The Diplomat, “Why Xi Jinping Can’t Be a 21st Century Mao Zedong,” Kerry Brown stresses  “The Chinese people, not just the landscape and the material world they inhabit, are fundamentally different now. They speak a different language, act in different ways, and view the world differently than the generations that preceded them. They may physically inhabit the same country, but spiritually and mentally they live in another realm.” He concludes that the statements about Xi Jinping being a “new Mao” are senseless.

We can only hope that Brown is correct in his assumptions. One Cultural Revolution in China was one too many.As the civilized world reminds us about the Holocaust, we must “never forget” the ten-year reign of terror, The Cultural Revolution, that Mao unleashed on his Chinese people between 1966-76.

Never forget.

To learn of the horror, terror and lessons of the Cultural Revolution, I suggest you being with the gripping memoir by Rae Yang, “Spider Eaters.”

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