China: Youth and the Cultural Revolution

For an alternative view of the role of the Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution, consider these excerpts from "Evaluating the Cultural Revolution and its Legacy for the Future." www.mlmrsg.com It describes the positive role of the Red Guards in the initial stages of the Cultural Revolution, as well as their limitations.

"On May 25, 1966 a dazibao (big character poster) at Beijing University lambasted the university president and two close associates of Peng for suppressing political debate. Mao announced his support for the rebels’ dazibaos and called on millions of students at secondary schools, institutes and universities to join the Red Guards to “rebel against reactionaries.” The view of Mao and his supporters was that, in a socialist society, new generations have to experience the process of revolution themselves, to think through for themselves what kind of society they want, who opposes that vision, and how to struggle against those forces..

During the rest of 1966, over a million students, largely middle school students from other areas, were in Beijing at any given time. They rebelled against authoritarian teachers and a revisionist educational system that was geared to produce experts with low political consciousness. Rightist administrators and teachers were paraded in the streets with dunce caps and subjected to public criticism meetings and all-night “struggle sessions.”

Red Guard organizations changed the old imperial names of streets and stores and searched homes, temples and churches for evidence of counter-revolutionary activities, hoarding wealth, and the practice of feudal customs. This was not mindless violence that was portrayed in the Western press, but a political movement to uproot the old ideas and customs of the exploiting classes. However, there were excesses, including serious physical attacks on people in relatively privileged positions, which Mao and others in the party leadership recognized and sought to correct.

In order to provide guidance to the unfolding mass upsurge, a nine-member Central Cultural Revolution Group (CCRG) was formed under Mao’s leadership. It included Mao’s secretary Chen Boda, Minister of Public Security Kang Sheng, Mao’s wife Jiang Qing, and two leftists from Shanghai, Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan. Together with Defense Minister Lin Biao and Premier Zhou Enlai, these forces made up the “Left Alliance” that led the early stages of the Cultural Revolution.

In the summer of 1966, State Chairman Liu Shaoqi, Party Secretary Deng Xiaoping and other high-ranking leaders of the party who were coming under fire by rebel Red Guard organizations dispatched work teams to universities and factories. These work teams organized sections of the masses to attack the rebels and stifled political debate for 50 days. They told students that “wall posters should not be put up in the streets,” and that “meetings should not hinder work or studies.” The work teams also organized “loyalist” Red Guard groups. [FN: While most Red Guard organizations targeted revisionist authorities and feudal customs, rival groups of Red Guards, often children of high-ranking party cadre, organized themselves to defend their privileges and the positions of their parents. In many schools and campuses, sharp struggle broke out between revolutionary and “loyalist” Red Guard organizations.]

Mao returned to Beijing in August from an inspection trip in the provinces, which he often undertook prior to a major struggle in the party. The party leadership, under pressure from members of the CCRG, withdrew the work teams and renewed its support for the rebels. The “16 Point Decision” of August 8, 1966 issued by the party’s Central Committee defined the principal target of the Cultural Revolution as party leaders taking the capitalist road—or “capitalist roaders.” It went on sale in music shops, as part of a set of 33-rpm vinyl discs that included a studio recording of a People’s Daily editorial titled, “Become Acquainted with the Sixteen Points and Put the Sixteen Points to Use.”

In the fall, Mao and the CCRG encouraged rebel Red Guard organizations to “take Beijing to the rest of the country.” Large groups of Red Guards fanned out to other cities and to the vast countryside to “exchange revolutionary experiences.” A peasant from Liu Ling village in Shaanxi Province describes how the Cultural Revolution was brought to his village:

"It was in the autumn of 1966 that the Red Guards came here…. They read quotations and told us about the Cultural Revolution in Beijing and Shanghai. Never before had we had so many strangers in the village. They asked us about our lives, they wanted to learn from us. They asked us how we were managing things in the brigade…. We went on reading the quotations after they’d gone. We read, and compared the quotations with what was being done here at Liu Ling village, and came to the conclusion that a lot of things needed changing."

After news of the 16 Point Decision reached the villages of Shandong Province, east of Beijing, Red Guard organizations began to form in the middle schools. Soon thereafter, mass associations independent of local party control were organized by peasants, artists, and employees in factories, commercial establishments and even in the Public Security Bureau. In some villages, nearly all the adult population belonged to one association or another. This process empowered peasants and workers to criticize the “local emperors” (revisionist party leaders) at mass meetings and through dazibaos plastered all over the villages.

At the same time, in Shanghai, China’s industrial center, a powerful political force was stirring. The Workers General Headquarters (WGH) under the leadership of a young textile worker, Wang Hongwen, had built up strength in hundreds of factories criticizing revisionist management practices that stifled the initiative of the workers. In the course of several days in January 1967 known as the “January Storm,” these rebel workers seized power from Shanghai’s party apparatus. The mass “struggle rally” at which the Shanghai party committee was brought down was the first to be shown live on television. In a desperate ploy to hold onto power, which was repeated throughout the Cultural Revolution, revisionist party leaders organized conservative factions among the workers to defend their positions and privileges. They also stirred up a wave of “economism,” which attempted to sabotage the rebellion by granting tens of thousands of workers big wage increases and years of back pay.

After a short-lived experiment with a “commune” form of organization (modeled after the Paris Commune of 1871), the Shanghai workers formed one of the first “revolutionary committees” composed of members of the workers’ mass organizations, revolutionary party cadre and political cadres of the People’s Liberation Army. The Shanghai Revolutionary Committee took charge of key government agencies and direction of industrial and transport work. Workers Propaganda Teams, which included members of the PLA, were dispatched to universities and schools and resolved factional disputes in factories. WGH-sponsored militia had branches in virtually every factory in Shanghai.

Revolutionary seizures of power took place in other parts of China throughout 1967, removing revisionist party officials in some areas, and putting them on the defensive in others. However, in many areas intense factional fighting developed, with a confusing array of “rebel forces” each claiming to support Mao and defend Mao Zedong Thought. After ultra-left and conservative forces alike raided PLA armories, tens of thousands of casualties resulted. In Wuhan, rightist army commanders violently suppressed rebel mass organizations and kidnapped members of the CCRG who were sent to resolve the crisis. These developments threatened to derail the Cultural Revolution and push the country into chaos.

Mao and the broad Left Alliance that was leading the Cultural Revolution called on the People’s Liberation Army to intervene and support the Left forces. In Wuhan, several divisions of the PLA surrounded the army mutineers and forced their surrender. In August 1967 many mass organizations were disbanded in an attempt to halt factional fighting.

By 1968, three-in-one revolutionary committees had been organized in all of the provinces, with the PLA playing an important role. The revolutionary committees helped reconstitute the party, bringing in new revolutionary activists, including large numbers of women, in the following years. The number of CCP members grew from 17 million in 1962 to 28 million in 1973.

The initial upsurges of the Cultural Revolution, which brought tens of millions of people into political motion, cleared the way for path-breaking social transformations. Universities were opened up to workers and peasants. Women broke into skilled higher paid jobs in industry and into positions of leadership. Workers helped to manage factories, and cadre worked on shop floors. Doctors settled down in the countryside and trained 750,000 “barefoot doctors”--thereby narrowing the gap between urban and rural medical services. (See pages 23-51 for discussion of these transformations.)

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After the passage of 40 years, it is important to avoid an idealized picture of the Cultural Revolution. Such a view does not come to grips with the immense difficulties the Cultural Revolution had to overcome, and it does not lead to a deeper understanding of the factors that led to its eventual defeat. In addition, such a view cannot pass on important lessons that will help future socialist societies deal with new and complex conditions.

In order to understand the inability of the Cultural Revolution to consolidate its achievements, two kinds of questions must be addressed. The first concern the objective factors, internal and external to China, that existed in the 1960s and 1970s. The second set of questions concern shortcomings in how it was conducted and unintended but still negative consequences.

To begin with, the Cultural Revolution was an uphill battle. The Chinese revolution had gone through an extended period of new democratic revolution beginning in the 1920s. Even taking into consideration the social transformations in the liberated areas and after nationwide victory in 1949, it was not possible to completely eradicate feudal and bourgeois ideology in a few years, or even in one or two generations. The deep roots of Confucianism, especially its reverence for established authority, was a major target of the revolutionary forces in both the opening and later stages of the Cultural Revolution. “It is right to rebel against reactionaries!” was not a semi-anarchist slogan but a call to break the stranglehold of thousands of years of ideological indoctrination and to prevent a new class of Confucian sages—dressed up as Marxist-Leninists—from usurping power.

In addition, there was a relatively short period of socialist construction before the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. Much of that was conducted on the basis of the experience of building socialism in the Soviet Union, which had many weaknesses even prior to the rise of Khrushchev and state capitalism in the mid-50s. As noted earlier, by the early 1960s, much of the top CCP leadership was implementing a pro-Soviet revisionist line with Chinese characteristics, and their network of party and government officials was firmly entrenched at all levels. On the eve of the Cultural Revolution, this was the situation faced by Mao and other revolutionary party leaders--as well as tens of millions of workers and peasants who had been told that their party would always stay red.

International conditions were an important part of the objective situation for the Cultural Revolution. In 1966, the situation in the world was favorable for such an unprecedented revolution within a socialist society. It was no exaggeration to say that revolution was the main trend in the world and imperialism was on the defensive.
U.S. imperialism—the chief enemy of the proletariat and oppressed peoples of the world—was bogged down in South Vietnam due to the heroic struggle of the Vietnamese people, and national liberation struggles were on the rise in Asia, Africa, Latin America and within the imperialist countries. The Chinese Communist Party had launched a bold challenge to the revisionist Communist Party of the Soviet Union and to its undisputed leadership over the international communist movement.

However, just three years into the Cultural Revolution, the military intervention of the Soviet imperialists in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the threat of a Soviet nuclear attack on China in 1969 produced a radically different international playing field for the People’s Republic. As described in more detail in our paper on Chinese foreign policy during the Maoist era, this forced Mao and the party leadership to make an opening to the West in order to avoid fighting on two fronts. This shift also provided a political opening to and strengthened the position of pro-Western sections of the leadership.

When combined with the political defection of Lin Biao and other leaders of the Cultural Revolution such as Chen Boda, these events led to a shift to the right on the part of a large number of party and government officials grouped around Premier Zhou Enlai. With Zhou’s backing, many revisionist leaders who had been knocked down in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution were rehabilitated after making perfunctory “self-criticisms,” including Deng Xiaoping. This set the stage for a full-scale counter-attack on the Cultural Revolution.

Perhaps most importantly, the Cultural Revolution was an uphill battle because of a lack of historical experience. Just as Lenin, Stalin and the Soviet Union had no prior experience to draw on in building a socialist society in the 1920s and 30s, Mao had to develop a new understanding of the persistence of class struggle in socialist society, how capitalism can be restored, and a political line and mechanisms for keeping China on the socialist road. In launching the Cultural Revolution, Mao and the other revolutionaries in the CCP were moving into uncharted political territory.

Below are a number of specific problems faced by the Cultural Revolution, and shortcomings in how it was carried out.

(1) At times, factionalism—in the sense of groups placing their own narrow interests above political principle-- was a difficult problem to resolve. First, it must be said that what may have appeared to be factional power grabs were often examples of acute class struggle between revisionist party officials who formed conservative factions among the masses to defend their privileged positions on the one hand, and mass organizations of revolutionary workers, peasants and youth on the other.

In the course of the Cultural Revolution, rightist and leftist groupings all claimed to be following “Chairman Mao’s revolutionary line.” In this complex and often confusing situation, party members and the masses of people could only distinguish between correct and incorrect lines—between the socialist road and the road back to capitalism—by engaging in political and ideological study, discussion and struggle. In many cases, disputes between leftist groupings had to be resolved by the intervention of the People’s Liberation Army, which brought new problems. Further advances in the Cultural Revolution and consolidation of its achievements would have required a higher level of political consciousness and willingness to put collective interests first in order to reduce the level of unprincipled factional struggle.

Based on their own experience, many readers of this paper know how hard it can be to figure out how best to struggle for revolution in situations where there isn’t much in the way of historical experience. During the course of the Cultural Revolution, it is understandable that there would be great tumult and uncertainty, and even dedicated revolutionary activists inevitably made mistakes.

(2) The unleashing of millions of Red Guards in the spring of 1966 to criticize the Four Olds and revisionist party officials brought with it a set of unanticipated problems. Many Red Guard organizations ignored the policy of using reason, not force, in conducting political struggle. Mao rejected the slogan adopted by some of the Red Guard groups, “doubt everything and overthrow everything.” He repeatedly stated that 95% of the people could be united in the course of the Cultural Revolution, and that the method of political education, of “curing the disease to save the patient,” should be applied with people who had made mistakes.

Behind some of these ultra-leftist Red Guard groups were several members of the CCRG led by Wang Li who were calling for the overthrow of the majority of top state personnel. In 1967, the Minister of Coal suffered a fatal heart attack at the hands of these “rebels” and the Minister of Railways disappeared altogether. Their ultimate target was Premier Zhou Enlai, who was playing an important role in support of the Cultural Revolution at that time. Wang Li and his allies were also behind the burning of the British embassy in Beijing in 1967. It turned out that their ultra-leftist activities were being coordinated by the secret “May 16th Group,” which was dissolved, and its leaders were expelled from the party.

In addition there were cases when different Red Guard groups were consumed with fighting each other. One famous example of student factionalism and its successful resolution concerns Tsinghua University, China's preeminent school of science and engineering. Two factions of Tsinghua students, each claiming to uphold Mao Zedong Thought, had armed themselves and clashed for months, paralyzing the campus. In July 1968, Mao, the CCRG and the Beijing Municipal Revolutionary Committee decided that the situation had gone too far. They contacted a group of revolutionary workers at the Hsinhua Printing Plant to put out a call for the formation of Workers Propaganda Teams to go to Tsinghua, armed only with Red Books and the slogan, "Use Reason, not Violence."

On July 27, over 30,000 unarmed workers entered the campus, with columns assigned to surround buildings occupied by the armed student factions. As the workers successfully persuaded some students to lay down their arms, the largest armed faction launched an attack on the workers with spears, rifles and grenades. By the following morning, five workers lay dead and more than 700 had serious wounds. Nevertheless, the workers did not retaliate against the students, and in less than 24 hours most of the students surrendered, while a few die-hards fled the campus.

Due to the political weaknesses of many Red Guard organizations, Mao and the Central Cultural Revolution Group began to rein them in during late 1966. Over the next few years, 17 million educated youth, including many Red Guards, were sent to the countryside to work alongside, learn from and use their skills to serve the peasants. Many had a hard time adjusting to rural life, but significant numbers of urban youth decided to settle down, started families and contributed their skills and education to the socialist development of the countryside.

(3) In spite of the August 1966 directive that the principal target of the Cultural Revolution was high-ranking party officials taking the capitalist road, intellectuals, especially those trained in the pre-Liberation era, were repeated, high-profile targets.

At some points, nearly all teachers, writers and other intellectuals came under fire from Red Guard groups.
When the policy on intellectuals was applied in a more focused way, rightist intellectuals were challenged and criticized in public. Some were sent to work in the countryside, where they did manual work and lived with peasants for the first time in their lives. In the course of political discussion and struggle, many intellectuals were won over to the goals of the Cultural Revolution and returned to their positions with a new outlook.

In addition to remolding and winning over as many of the intellectuals as possible, one of the goals of the Cultural Revolution was to develop working class intellectuals from the workers, peasants and soldiers. The first contingent of 200, 000 proletarian intellectuals were graduated in 1974. However, this success story was halted by the defeat of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. One year later, nationwide admission examinations were reinstituted, with a predictable impact on the numbers of workers and peasants attending universities.

Of course, there is some truth in the dozens of books written by intellectuals and other relatively privileged groups who suffered during the Cultural Revolution—though it is questionable whether being deprived of their normal life style or leaving a comfortable city job to work on a commune qualifies as "suffering." But in evaluating these accounts, it is worth remembering that history gets written by the victors. Many of the accounts of persecution and torture of intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution are as useful and reliable as seeing the pro-slavery movie, “Birth of a Nation,” as a guide to the history of the Civil War and Black Reconstruction in the U.S.

Entirely missing from this one-sided view of the Cultural Revolution are the accounts of barefoot doctors who brought health care to millions in the vast Chinese countryside for the first time, of workers who devised new techniques for raising production on a basis of self-reliance, and of educated youth whose lives were enriched by the years they spent in the countryside.

Some of the rare examples of such counter-narratives about the Cultural Revolution published in the West in recent years include Mobo Gao’s Gao Village, Dongping Han’s The Unknown Cultural Revolution, and Some of Us: Chinese Women Growing Up in the Mao Era. In one account from the latter book, a young woman from Beijing describes the eight years she spent in a remote village in northeastern China:

"I learned to do all kinds of farm work and considered myself a good farmer. I planned and arranged farm activities year round (of course, with help from my peasant partner) and took the lead in doing them. I adopted the local dialect and the peasants’ ways of living and chatting to the point that I could pass as a northeasterner…. Yes, I had changed. I discarded the vanity and sense of superiority typical of city folks and became more down to earth. My life in the countryside changed my way of looking at the world and at life."

The MLMRSG cites with seeming approval the fact that, during the Cultural Revolution, educational administrators and teachers alleged to be "rightists" were "paraded in the streets with dunce caps". This is portrayed as a healthy rebellion by students against authorities who were "suppressing political debate". But the use of public humiliation as a tactic against alleged "rightists" was itself a way of suppressing free political discussion.

The Cultural Revolution was launched by Mao as a way of making a comeback after losing much of his power. Mao had been discredited by the disastrous mistakes he made in the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s. These mistakes caused him to lose influence amongst the Communist Party leadership.

However there was no open admission of mistakes, nor open criticism of Mao at that time. The cult of Mao was maintained. This meant that Mao was able to use his prestige to launch the cultural revolution a few years years later.

Academics and teachers were amongst the targets of the cultural revolution, perhaps because Mao saw them as supporters of his opponents within the CP.

Many of them may have had faults such as authoritarianism towards students, attitudes of superiority towards workers and peasants, etc. But public humiliation is not the right cure for these faults. And teachers may also have been targeted, not because of their faults, but because they were potentially articulate critics of Mao's policies.

MLMRSG portrays Mao's opponents as "a new class of Confucian sages - dressed up as Marxist-Leninists". But if we want to make analogies with China's past, we could also compare the adulation of Mao by the Red Guards with the glorification of the emperors by their subjects.

In reality, both Mao's leading supporters and opponents were part of the Communist Party bureaucracy. At a certain point in the struggle, Mao used his prestige, and radical-sounding rhetoric, to mobilise students to attack his opponents. But when the students got out of hand Mao was forced to compromise with his opponents.

At around the same time Mao showed his opportunism by doing a deal with US imperialism. Anti-Soviet rhetoric was used to justify a right turn in foreign policy.

Chris Slee

I probably understated the destructive impact of the Cultural Revolution in my essay (above). The Wikipedia entry on the Cultural Revolution is worth checking out, as it catalogues many excesses; deaths, use of torture and humiliation, and other outrages. I believe it fair to say that China looks back on this episode with great regret at the destruction and disruption caused, and at the lost opportunities, particularly for China's youth.

I live in Perth, Western Australia, and our city these days receives many visitors from the People's Republic of China. A year or so ago I was waiting at a train station and I began conversing with a young Chinese woman from the PRC who spoke excellent English and proved to be very well-versed in her country's history, politics and culture. I asked this person for her opinion of the Cultural Revolution, and she was uniformly negative about it, and in fact clearly had quite strong opinions about it. I asked her for her view of Mao's role, pointing out that it had been his policy to launch the Cultural Revolution. She didn't say anything directly in criticism of Mao, but made it very clear that she thought the whole episode had been an ummitigated disaster.

The official CCP line is, as I understand it, to criticise Mao's role in the Cultural Revolution, while recognising that Mao had made a constructive contribution earlier in his career. I am looking forward to seeing the film recently released in China to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the 1949 Revolution. The positive benefits of the revolution still persist in China. The country remains unified and at peace, and even if the economy has developed strong capitalist features, its dynamism is clear. Personally, I resent and reject the absurd opportunism and inconsistency of the West's attitude to China, which oscillates entirely in accord with the strategic requirements of imperialism. Thus, during the first Cold War, China and Mao were anathema in the West: then during the modus vivendi between the USA and China in the 1970s, Mao was feted as a great statesman. Now, once again, there are no words dark enough to describe him as a historical figure.

But the 'Great Leap Forward' and the Cultural Revolution are two policy areas that led to catastrophe for China, and Mao's instrumental role in both these areas of post-revolutionary policy in China will surely forever tarnish his reputation in China and abroad.

- Graham Milner