The Cultural Revolution
At this moment of
potential national emergency, Mao chose to smash the Chinese state
and the Communist Party. He launched what he hoped would prove a
final assault on the stubborn remnants of traditional Chinese
culture—from the rubble of which, he prophesied, would rise a new,
ideologically pure generation better equipped to safeguard the
revolutionary cause from its domestic and foreign foes. He
propelled China into the decade of ideological frenzy, vicious
factional politics, and near civil war known as the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
No institution was
spared from the ensuing waves of upheaval. Across the country,
local governments were dissolved in violent confrontations with
“the masses,” urged on by propaganda from Beijing. Distinguished
Communist Party and People’s Liberation Army leaders, including
leaders of the revolutionary wars, were purged and subjected to
public humiliation. China’s education system—so long the backbone
of the Chinese social order—ground to a halt, with classes
suspended indefinitely so that the younger generation could wander
the country and follow Mao’s exhortation to “learn revolution by
making revolution.”19
Many of these
suddenly unconstrained youths joined factions of the Red Guards,
youth militias bonded by ideological fervor, operating above the
law and outside of (and often in explicit opposition to) ordinary
institutional structures. Mao endorsed their efforts with vague but
incendiary slogans, such as “To rebel is justified” and “Bombard
the headquarters.”20 He approved their violent attacks on the
existing Communist Party bureaucracy and traditional social mores
and encouraged them not to fear “disorder” as they fought to
eradicate the dreaded “Four Olds”—old ideas, old culture, old
customs, and old habits—that, in Maoist thinking, had kept China
weak.21 The People’s
Daily fanned the flames by editorializing “In Praise of
Lawlessness”—an explicit, government-sanctioned rebuke to China’s
millennial tradition of harmony and order.22
The result was a
spectacular human and institutional carnage, as one by one China’s
organs of power and authority—including the highest ranks of the
Communist Party—succumbed to the assaults of teenage ideological
shock troops. China—a civilization heretofore known for its respect
for learning and erudition—became an upside-down world, with
children turning on parents, students brutalizing teachers and
burning books, and professionals and high officials sent down to
farms and factories to learn revolutionary practice from illiterate
peasants. Scenes of cruelty unfolded across the country, as Red
Guards and citizens allied to them—some simply picking a faction at
random in the hope of surviving the storm—turned their fury on any
target that might conceivably augur a return of the old “feudal”
order to China.
That some of these
targets were individuals who had been dead for centuries did not
diminish the fury of the assault. Revolutionary students and
teachers from Beijing descended on Confucius’s home village, vowing
to put an end to the old sage’s influence on Chinese society once
and for all by burning ancient books, smashing memorial tablets,
and razing the gravesites of Confucius and his descendants. In
Beijing, Red Guard assaults destroyed 4,922 of the capital’s 6,843
designated “places of cultural or historical interest.” The
Forbidden City itself was reportedly saved only by Zhou Enlai’s
personal intervention.23
A society
traditionally governed by an elite of Confucian literati now looked
to uneducated peasants as its source of wisdom. Universities were
closed. Anyone identified as an “expert” was suspect, professional
competence being a dangerously bourgeois concept.
China’s diplomatic
posture came unhinged. The world was treated to the nearly
incomprehensible sight of a China raging with indiscriminate fury
against the Soviet bloc, the Western powers, and its own history
and culture. Chinese diplomats and support staffs abroad harangued
the citizens of their host countries with calls to revolution and
lectures on “Mao Zedong Thought.” In scenes reminiscent of the
Boxer Uprising seventy years earlier, throngs of Red Guards
attacked foreign embassies in Beijing, including a sack of the
British mission complete with the beating and molestation of its
fleeing staff. When the British Foreign Secretary wrote to Foreign
Minister Marshal Chen Yi, suggesting that Britain and China, “while
maintaining diplomatic relations . . . withdr[a]w their mission and
personnel from each other’s capital for the time being,” he was met
by silence: the Chinese Foreign Minister was himself being
“struggled” against and could not reply.24 Eventually all but one of China’s
ambassadors—the able and ideologically unimpeachable Huang Hua in
Cairo—and roughly two-thirds of embassy staffs were called home for
reeducation in the countryside or participation in revolutionary
activities.25 China was actively embroiled in disputes
with the governments of several dozen countries during this time.
It had genuinely positive relations with just one—the People’s
Republic of Albania.
Emblematic of the
Cultural Revolution was the “Little Red Book” of Mao quotations,
compiled in 1964 by Lin Biao, later designated as Mao’s successor
and killed while fleeing the country in an obscure airline crash,
allegedly after attempting a coup. All Chinese were required to
carry a copy of the “Little Red Book.” Red Guards brandishing
copies conducted “seizures” of public buildings throughout China
under the authorization—or at least toleration—of Beijing,
violently challenging the provincial bureaucracies.
But the Red Guards
were no more immune to the dilemma of revolutions turning on
themselves than the cadres they were supposed to purify. Bonded by
ideology rather than formal training, the Red Guards became
factions pursuing their own ideological and personal preferences.
Conflict between them became so intense that, by 1968, Mao
officially disbanded the Red Guards and placed loyal Party and
military leaders in charge of reestablishing provincial
governments.
A new policy of
“sending down” a generation of youths to remote parts of the
countryside to learn from the peasantry was enunciated. By this
point, the military was the last major Chinese institution whose
command structure remained standing, and it assumed roles far
outside its ordinary competencies. Military personnel ran the
gutted government ministries, tended fields, and administered
factories—all in addition to their original mission of defending
the country from attack.
The immediate impact
of the Cultural Revolution was disastrous. After the death of Mao,
the assessment by the second and third generations of
leaders—almost all of whom were victims at one time or another—has
been condemnatory. Deng Xiaoping, the principal leader of China
from 1979 to 1991, argued that the Cultural Revolution had nearly
destroyed the Communist Party as an institution and wrecked its
credibility at least temporarily.26
In recent years, as
personal memories have faded, another perspective is beginning to
make a tentative appearance. This view acknowledges the colossal
wrongs committed during the Cultural Revolution, but it begins to
inquire whether perhaps Mao raised an important question, even if
his answer to it proved disastrous. The problem Mao is said to have
identified is the relationship of the modern state—especially the
Communist state—to the people it governs. In largely
agricultural—and even incipient industrial—societies, governance
concerns issues within the capacity of the general public to
understand. Of course, in aristocratic societies, the relevant
public is limited. But whatever the formal legitimacy, some tacit
consensus by those who are to carry out directives is needed—unless
governance is to be entirely by imposition, which is usually
unsustainable over a historic period.
A challenge of the
modern period is that issues have become so complex that the legal
framework is increasingly impenetrable. The political system issues
directives but the execution is left, to an ever larger degree, to
bureaucracies separated from both the political process and the
public, whose only control is periodic elections, if that. Even in
the United States, major legislative acts often comprise thousands
of pages that, to put it mildly, only the fewest legislators have
read in detail. Especially in Communist states, bureaucracies
operate in self-contained units with their own rules in pursuance
of procedures they often define for themselves. Fissures open up
between the political and the bureaucratic classes and between both
of those and the general public. In this manner, a new mandarin
class risks emerging by bureaucratic momentum. Mao’s attempt to
solve the problem in one grand assault nearly wrecked Chinese
society. A recent book by the Chinese scholar and government
advisor Hu Angang argues that the Cultural Revolution, while a
failure, set the stage for Deng’s reforms of the late 1970s and
1980s. Hu now proposes using the Cultural Revolution as a case
study for ways in which the “decision-making systems” in China’s
existing political system could become “more democratic,
scientific, and institutionalized.”27