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“We Thought Mao Was Doing a Wonderful Thing”
Chinese Propaganda Poster by Source, Fair use.
Fifty years ago yesterday is generally considered the date that Mao Zedong initiated China’s Cultural Revolution. Over the next three years, two million Chinese may have died in the upheaval, with millions more punished and/or internally exiled. While the worst of the violence was over by 1970, aspects of the Cultural Revolution lasted until 1976 when Mao died and the Gang of Four (which included his wife) were deposed. Having only a few years earlier (1958-61) subjected to populace to the madness of the Great Leap Forward — which led to 20 to 40 million deaths from starvation and regime-inspired violence — Mao feared his subjects were beginning to show too much personal initiative and losing their revolutionary ardor to achieve the Communist state. Or, as Zhou Enlai, Mao’s comrade, observed, “Every time the situation improves a little, the people move back towards capitalism”.
The Cultural Revolution was Mao’s way of shaking things up, particularly with those he thought might thwart progress; mid-level officials at the city, village, and province levels, the military; those related to the former pre-1949 capitalist classes; and, most of all, educators. In preparation, 60 million copies of Mao’s Little Red Book were distributed. Realizing that young students were the most impressionable and easily manipulated, Mao and his comrades created the Red Guards, whom they then let loose on the country to indulge in an orgy of harassment, public humiliations, torture, and murder. Mao’s instructions were to attack the “four olds:” old ideas, old culture, old habits, and old customs.
As Frank Dikotter, a professor of history at Hong Kong University and author of The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History 1962-76, observes in the Daily Mail:
Higher education was a particular target. Professors were spat upon and made to wear placards around their necks identifying them as ‘imperial spies.’ Lecturers were beaten with nail-spiked clubs, made to crawl over broken glass and had boiling water poured over them.
‘There were even cases of people being buried alive,’ writes Dikotter. Pensioners and those on sick leave were flung out of the cities, along with China’s ‘most eminent scientists, physicians, engineers and philosophers, who were made to clean toilets. ‘What stinks is not so much the excrement as your own ideology,’ intellectuals were told.
A ‘counter-revolutionary’ came to mean anyone who ‘likes freedom’ — freedom of speech, movement, expression. It was a death sentence to be found listening to a foreign radio station. Military drills were held in the middle of the night. ‘Class enemies’ had their tongues ripped out or eyes gouged from their sockets. The offspring of former landlords or vaguely bourgeois sorts were electrocuted. Children were hung from their feet and whipped. In the district of Wuxuan, 60 people had their heads bashed in with hammers.
From Hansimann Files.
Yet, there are those for whom it was all worthwhile. The Telegraph (UK) recently ran an article that features the quote heading this post. It’s from Michael Crook, who was a 15-year-old Briton in 1966, living in China where his Communist father had moved before World War II. His father had fought for the Communists during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and served as a Soviet spy in order to unmask Trotskyites in the communist ranks (who were then promptly executed). Speaking to The Telegraph, Crook still doesn’t think the Cultural Revolution was so bad:
“We all thought it was a wonderful thing that Mao was launching,” Mr Crook, now 64, told the Telegraph, in his first interview with a British newspaper. “It would guarantee that China would take the socialist road.”
While mistakes had been made during the Mao period, he argued, the free-market economics on which China has since prospered had led to just as much upheaval, creating a “tremendous imbalance” between rich and poor. “Letting greed drive development – well that certainly does bring about development – but it also brings about polarisation, so what price social harmony?” he said.
From nybooks.com.
What can be said about such an appalling person? It reminds me of the last century of Western “idealists,” who first thought the Russian Bolsheviks, then the Chinese communists, then the Vietnamese communists, then the Cuban communists, then the Nicaraguan communists and — most recently — the Venezuelan Chavistas would herald new dawn for humanity. They so prided themselves on their idealism that they constantly looked ahead and towards the horizon, never bothering to look down and notice they were wading through a blood-filled swamp.
Reading Crook’s words reminds me of the passage in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago in which he relates the sorrowful tale of the Baltic-White Sea Canal built in the early 1930s. Stalin demanded the building of a canal that would allow the passage of Soviet naval vessels from one sea to the other in order to avoid the Arctic Ocean, setting a 20-month deadline for completion. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners were assigned to its construction. The canal was dug by hand without any mechanical equipment under terrible physical conditions and brutal oversight from abusive guards; 250,000 died during its construction. The canal was poorly designed and never functioned as planned. Solzhenitsyn is unsparing in his portrayal of this debacle and, near the end of the chapter, recounts a visit he made to the canal in 1966 as he was completing the book and of the official tour he took:
“It’s so shallow,” complained the chief of the guard, “that not even submarines can pass through it under their own power, they have to be loaded on barges, and only then can they be hauled through.”
And:
And what about the cruisers? Oh, you hermit-tyrant! You nighttime lunatic! In what nightmare did you dream up all this? And where, cursed one, were you hurrying to? What was it that burned and pricked you – to set a deadline of twenty months? For those quarter-million men could have remained alive. Well, so the Esperantists stuck in your throat, but think how much work those peasant lads could have done for you! How many times you could have roused them to attack – for the Motherland, for Stalin! “It was very costly,” I said to the guard. “But it was built very quickly!” he answered me with self-assurance. Your bones should be in it!
For those who grew up during those years in China and are now in their 50s and 60s, the fear of returning to those days of chaos and disorder remains and is why they value the relative stability of modern China, even with its repressions.
A few years ago, a Chinese friend gave me a book called Red Memory, published in China and containing propaganda posters from the 1950s, 60s and 70s and subtitled “Posters of Cultural Revolution”. The English language introduction reads, “We hope that such crazy and flimflam years will never come again“.
From Red Memory.
This post was cross-posted at on my blog.
Published in History
I’d add to that The Private Life of Chairman Mao, which was written by one of his doctors. Very revealing of Mao as an awful human being.
Another very good book on the subject by someone who suffered through and survived the Cultural Revolution: Life and Death in Shanghai by Cheng Nien
I only wish that we could somehow exile all Marxists and send them to a Socialist/Communist country of their choice. If they love Marxism so much, why do they have to stay here and ruin the U.S. for the rest of us?
Those who have read Mancur Olsen’s Rise and decline of Nations should consider this turmoil and destruction in terms of Olsen’s cleaning out all the cliques, interests, organizations, encrustations and stagnant accumulations that cause civilization to stagnate and die. We’d expect a period of very rapid growth following such a cataclysmic period. The long term will be very different as it always is. Mao seemed to understand this, but then Marxism is a little subset of Olsen’s broader theory of collective action that pertains to a specific period of European history. Just a thought upon reviewing this history.
This is is the inescapable logic, isn’t it? They have a theory that inequality is the most serious flaw in the human project and the cause of all our woes. Yet, the death toll inequity is never brought up.
And, of course, the terrible and blatant inequity that arises between the elites vs. the people is especially damning and proves the lie that is communism.
The simple beauty of the idea is that it gives tyrants more sustained years in control than any other dictatorships that have been accomplished in the modern era.
The Wikipedia article lists two sources for the death toll of the canal project which they state is 12,000-25,000 people. One is “official” and the other is an American author. Either of these numbers is incredible for a 20 month project in the 20th century but either is a fraction of the claim above. I wonder what is right?
For comparison, I did some cursory checking into the Panama Canal death toll (construction of which lasted much, much longer) and there are claims of death tolls as high as 25,000 or so although Wikipedia says many fewer deaths. Most during the early French period and most of those due to disease.
However, the use of slave labor vs. voluntary labor is a substantial differentiation in any case. Also, I would guess that since the Panama Canal is 3 times deeper than the white sea canal, it was much, much more dangerous to build.
You have to appreciate the logic. The only way to achieve true equality – kill everybody.
I second mjsl’s (#32) recommendation of Life and Death in Shanghai. Cheng was the wife of a Shell(?) engineer, who was a target of the Red Guards.
You see some of that Maoist-style denigration of disfavored groups in the tweets of Bernie Sanders.
Yesterday, he wrote, “Fraud is the business model on Wall Street. It is not the exception to the rule. It is the rule.” I’m sure he would love to see Wall Streeters tarred and feathered, with his tweet printed on signs around their necks.
(The tweet infuriated me. I replied [from @_johnny_dubya_], “I have worked on Wall St. for most of my career, and your statement is nothing but a hateful g*******d lie.”)
True. But some people die in the beds while still on top before the whole edifice tumbles. For these people, that’s winning.
There was a survey that came out not long ago (I don’t have the link handy) that said that while “socialism” is slightly more favorable among millennials than “capitalism,” “free markets” still outpolls “state run economy” by an almost 80-20 margin.
Honestly, if I could trust that the left were acting in good faith (a huge “if” mind you) then I think moving toward the actual Scandinavian model by growing the welfare state in exchange for taking a sledgehammer to the regulatory state would be an acceptable compromise. As you say, though, trusting the left at this point is a fool’s game.
I wouldn’t. Part of the reason the Scandinavian system works for the Scandinavians is that those countries are small and the people trust each other. I doubt it would scale to a country the size of America, in terms of either population or geography.
Even better restrict the welfare state to scandinavian descendants. Then we’d have the best of both worlds. They learned to work and cooperate or starve and freeze to death for thousands of years. So they’re ready, the rest of us not so much.
Excellent book. I read it in college and it left quite an impression on me.
How come an appreciation for communism is tolerated but an appreciation for fascism is not? It boggles my mind that such a horrible ideology is returning to polite society.
Here’s why. President Obama speaking to students in Argentina, March 24, 2016:
Now, what would have been the reaction if he had said “you’re some crazy communist or fascist” and later referenced fascist theory as well as socialist and capitalist?
He’s a symptom, not the cause. The tolerance of communism, coupled postmodern nonsense, is what enabled him to say that.
Also, that quote was probably the most morally repugnant thing a US President said in the past century. Possibly ever.
There’s no excuse. Obama is old enough to know better.
Absolutely.
Did you know that Instapundit linked to this post?
Just saw the link about an hour ago. I’ve been an Instapundit reader since 2001.
You’ve come full circle.