Cultural Revolution (China)

(Facts drawn from Wikipedia. Opinions my own.)

Launched in 1966 in China, the Cultural Revolution continued until 1976 when Mao Zedong died. Mao Zedong (born 1893) who founded the People’s Republic of China in 1949 and served as its leader until his death, led China and its political-social thought for 27 years in the post-war twentieth century. His political social thought was dominated by the spread of communism across China. Originally inspired by Marxist-Leninist thought, under his leadership Mao Zedong sought to make China a communist country through efforts directed around agriculture, land redistribution and industrialization. A whole society was taken to bits and pieces and redrawn per his thought process.

Central amongst these thought proliferations was Cultural Revolution. Where other ideas were about spread of Chinese communism, Cultural Revolution was about actively purging the capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese society.

There are ideas which are absorbed by a society and a society begins to shift and align itself according to these new ways of thinking. Generally speaking, ideas of capitalism, about interest of the enterprise and the entrepreneur, about interest of land, labour, capital and enterprise is an idea borrowed from natural movement of things – about pursuit of self interest and the solutions found in market economy. It does not need force, it needs good institutions and then it spreads of its own accord. On the other hand, ideas which restructure society forcefully always need force to keep it in its unnatural shape of sameness of a kind. Communism is one such idea. Where things because they tend to defy the basic tenet of nature of self-interest, flow against the grain of nature, and hence always require an artificial way of maintaining balance. Some such rebalancing effort was visible during Cultural Revolution, where a lot of the institutions were violently broken down and rebelled against.

There were four olds (old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits), five black categories (landlords, rich farmers, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements, right-wingers), and intellectuals. It is as if some evil force descends on a country and led it against the wisdom of ages, wisdom of people, and the wisdom of learning. It is not about going against ideas of yore or categories of capitalism, as long as there is an open free argument, but it is the going against everything and breaking it to an end which is not clear, to resort to violence and low means that itself takes away from whatever cause the cultural revolution was pursuing.

Over the course of Cultural Revolution, it is said that 1-2 million people died, tens of millions were persecuted and a lot of damage and destruction was done to historical sites and artifacts.

Time and again the portions of the world have fiddled with the root idea of communism in its different forms, and time and again the world has come to realise the weakness of a system which is against the very grain of nature. The system can work along with self-interest or apply an inordinate amount of force to go against self-interest by choking it in levels and levels of committees and bureaucracies, by tying the free individual into a random cage of mass interest. What gets forgotten is that people are still the same, the underlying is still self-interest driven being. The being in power is still the being in power. The spirit of community of common property, of general progress that communism at its pure root signifies gets smothered in practice because it is human managed.

It is not to deny the underlying problem of inequality and oppression. But communism or socialism is not the answer. It has to be state institutions letting market economy operate freely but with a very clear focus and effort towards continuously lifting up the median line, towards welfare. Violence and breaking things down is not the answer. It leads to no good ends.

**

What happened after? Eventually with the death of Mao Zedong, the revolution came to an end. In 1978, Deng Xiaoping became the leader and initiated reform and opening up of the country.

In 1981, the CCP publicly acknowledged failures of the Cultural Revolution, declaring it "responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the people, the country, and the party since the founding of the People's Republic."

**

Stepping further out. The country was in huge flux, in waves and waves of unsettled history, new ideas of communism and socialism taking roots in a poor China allowing people like Mao Zedong to exercise thought control over masses and masses of people. Cultural Revolution is just one aspect. Before that, the Great Leap Forward led to the death of 15-55 million people in what was perhaps the largest famine in human history.

The moment self interest is asked to be sacrificed, one stops treating people with dignity and instead think of them as featureless resource to be used, it leads to massive individual pain and dissonance which is largely unaccounted for amongst all these calculations of deaths and injuries. The heartburn that people carry is yet to be reckoned with.

The true power of a political leader is perhaps measured in their patience with dissent. The moment the powerful try to turn down or throw dissenters away violently, one knows that the power is held by shreds. Or the person in power is just a mediocre human being hungry and greedy for power, not a great leader.


****

Later: following from NYRB - see how the world around one becomes absurd:

"The words had already been overtaken by events, for it was in the afternoon of August 5 that we have the first recorded details of the death of a teacher at the hands of students. The students were girls at a prestigious middle school not far from Party headquarters at Zhongnanhai, who had formed their own Red Guard organization to “answer the call” of Chairman Mao. The teacher they beat to death was named Bian Zhongyun. Bian was a fifty-year-old mother of four (three girls and a boy), who had been at the school ever since the Communists took over the country in 1949, and had risen steadily to her current position as assistant principal. She had joined the Communist Party secretly in Sichuan province back in 1941, and in the job at her school had encountered a wide range of elite pupils including the daughters of Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, and Deng Xiaoping.

From June 1966 onward Red Guard units composed of female students began to accuse Bian of a battery of crimes, many of which were written out on big character posters. They charged her with engaging in counterrevolutionary activities while serving on the Beijing municipal Party committee, planning to foment a military coup, working against the class lines laid down by the Party, and lacking due respect for Mao Zedong. (This last charge arose from an incident in March 1966, when Bian briefed her students on earthquake drill, and emphasized the importance of leaving the school buildings as quickly as possible. When one of the students asked if it were not equally important to save the portrait of Mao that hung in the schoolroom, Bian apparently failed to answer with the correct level of enthusiasm.)"