The Red Flag: A History of Communism (66 page)

Local bosses reasserted their authority much as their Soviet predecessors had done in the mid-1930s: with police and paper. Passports, identity cards and files recorded details of every individual, including those essential pieces of information – class and political background. Since the revolution, people had been categorized as members of the ‘five red types’ (workers, poor and lower-middle-class peasants, revolutionary cadres, revolutionary soldiers and dependents of revolutionary martyrs), or of the ‘five black elements’ (landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements and rightists – plus, implicitly, intellectuals). When, from the mid-1960s, local parties began to take more control of the economy, these categories began to matter a great deal. A university education, a good industrial job, or the risk of being ‘sent down’ from the town to the countryside to work as a peasant all depended on which of these categories one occupied. The Chinese leadership was inadvertently creating a new Communist
ancien régime
where everybody was allocated an unchangeable status – with the ‘proletariat’ at the top and the ‘black elements’ at the bottom – at least in the towns.

Class discrimination happened to some extent everywhere in the Communist world in the early phases of the regimes, but it was more systematic in China than in the Soviet bloc. This was because both Communists
and society differed in each region. Lineage, clan and patronage were more dominant in China than in the USSR, and Communist leaders, many of them former members of the anti-patriarchal May 4th movement, believed these traditions were at the root of China’s backwardness. They therefore used rigorously imposed class labels as a way of breaking the old order. But once they became the rulers, ‘red’ clans emerged, and used the class-label system to entrench their power.

But as the
ancien régimes
often discovered, fixed, inherited status hierarchies fuelled resentment. All those who were excluded from the ‘red’ establishment – whether people with a bad class background or the migrant workers who lacked the secure jobs and welfare benefits of tenured workers – had reason to feel angry with a rigid system they could not change. The Chinese Communist Party was paradoxically creating a new alliance of revolutionary groups that had every reason to stage a revolution against the new Communist ‘class’; and the leader of that revolution was to be none other than Mao himself.

By the mid-1960s, Mao had become deeply unhappy about the policies of Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and Zhou Enlai. These leaders were, he believed, presiding over new inequalities based on class inheritance, differential wages and educational merit. Mao, in contrast, never abandoned his guerrilla socialism and his belief that China could only be revived by altruism and self-sacrifice. Mao identified his legacy with equality in China, and became more radical with age. What, he fretted, would happen after his death? Would the Communism he had created be hijacked by right-wing ‘revisionists’ within the party, as had happened in Germany in the 1890s or the USSR after Stalin? As he said to Ho Chi Minh in 1966, ‘We are both more than seventy, and will be called by Marx [i.e. die] someday. Who our successors will be – Bernstein, Kautsky, or Khrushchev – we can’t know. But there’s still time to prepare.’
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Challenges from abroad, as the Vietnam War threatened to spread to China, also convinced Mao of the need to return to guerrilla Communism. He decided that he had to root out the forces of the ‘right’, partly by purging officials at the top, but largely by changing the attitudes of the whole of society. Patriarchal hierarchy, clan domination, technocracy and money-grubbing were to give way to the reign of virtue, when people worked altruistically, for the good of all. Such were the goals of Mao’s most disastrous campaign: his ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’. As the ‘sixteen points’ that launched the campaign in 1966 declared:

In some ways, then, Mao was (unconsciously) following Stalin’s path in the 1930s. Having led disastrous economic ‘leaps’, both had been forced to restore order, which in turn entrenched officials and other leaders. Both then tried to increase their power over the party, by undermining any potential rivals in the leadership. At the same time they launched ideological campaigns, purging non-believers or ‘rightists’ from the bureaucracy – Stalin in the Terror and Mao in the Cultural Revolution. Both campaigns also rapidly escalated out of control. But Mao was much more radical in his methods and goals. Stalin preserved hierarchy, and relied on the secret police; Mao returned to the guerrilla socialism of Yan’an and mobilized the masses in the hope of creating the new socialist man. Mao, then, was not merely imposing his will on the party; he was launching, as he saw it, a Communist revolution within a Communist state – a revolution that in effect became, uniquely, a civil war
within
the Communist Party, and amongst the population as a whole.

Typically for Chinese politics, this devastating revolution from above began in a rather subtle, oblique way, on 10 November 1965. A play, the
Dismissal of Hai Tui from Office
, about the removal of a virtuous Ming dynasty official by a tyrannical emperor, became the subject of a campaign of press criticism, orchestrated by Mao and his wife, Jiang Qing. They claimed it was an Aesopian attack on the Chairman, alleging that parallels were now being drawn between Hai Tui and Marshal Peng Dehuai. They then used the case to condemn a group within the leadership whom they accused of right-wing ‘revisionism’, including Peng Zhen, the party boss and mayor of Beijing and a close ally of Liu Shaoqi, and Lu Dingyi, the head of party propaganda. Speaking in March 1966, Mao used the vivid language of ancient myth:

Soon Mao was using more radical language and levelling more fundamental criticisms at the ‘revisionists’ within the party. On 16 May, the first Cultural Revolution circular described them as ‘representatives of the bourgeoisie’ and ‘people of the Khrushchev brand still nestling in our midst’, and called for a mass campaign against them.

Naturally local party bosses became anxious, and they, with Liu Shaoqi’s support, tried to blunt the campaign, leading Mao and the radicals to raise the stakes. Mao now called for the creation of so-called ‘red guard’ groups – many made up of students – as a new vanguard to attack revisionism in the party and, more generally, the ‘four olds’ within society as a whole – ‘old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits of the exploiting classes’. In August Mao himself donned a red-guard armband, and 13 million red guards from across the country visited Beijing in eight mass rallies, all brandishing their ‘Little Red Books’ of Mao quotations.

Throughout China, young red guards – often schoolchildren – rampaged through the streets. They enforced puritanical morality, forcing women to cut their hair and remove jewellery; they changed shop-signs and street names (the British Embassy now stood on ‘Anti-Imperialism Road’, the Soviet Embassy on ‘Anti-Revisionism Road’); and they broke into ‘bourgeois’ houses and smashed or looted their belongings. Gao Yuan, the schoolboy son of a provincial official, remembered:

Mao’s Cultural Revolution, then, bore striking similarities to the Soviet ‘Cultural Revolution’ of the late 1920s, in that it combined a populist attack on ‘capitalist’ backsliders in the party with a sudden ‘leap’ to modernity. Culturally, the impact was devastating, just as the closure and demolition of churches in late 1920s Russia had been. However, cultural figures – most vocally Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing – also made serious efforts to create a new Chinese culture. Traditional opera was an early target of these cultural modernization campaigns. Jiang complained that opera, a very popular art form, was full of ‘cow ghosts and snake spirits’, and false values such as ‘capitulation’ to ‘feudal’ power-holders. She encouraged Communist writers to write new works, in which ‘emperors, ministers, scholars and maidens’ were replaced with heroic workers, peasants and soldiers.
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These revolutionary operas, though heavily influenced by Soviet revolutionary romanticism, were also saturated with older stylized models, especially in the accompanying music. In 1966 Kang Sheng declared that five ‘modernized’ operas, together with two ballet dramas and a symphony, now constituted China’s ‘eight model performances’. The magnificent eight were shown endlessly to Chinese audiences, both on stage and on film. Initially, the operas were popular; however, because relatively few were produced, audiences were soon seeing the same operas again and again, and unsurprisingly boredom set in. As the joke went, the culture of the Cultural Revolution amounted to ‘eight-hundred million people watching eight shows’.
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Though very self-consciously modern, the ‘new’ culture of the Cultural Revolution also harked back to the guerrilla socialism of Yan’an. Seven of the eight model performances concerned the Chinese revolutionary experience, and their heroes and heroines were often soldiers dressed in revolutionary-era fatigues. Indeed, military uniforms soon became the height of fashion, especially amongst the young. As one who lived through the period remembered, ‘real army uniforms were few… I was ten at that time, and pestered my mother for a uniform. All she could do was buy some wrapping cloth (a coarse cloth used for wrapping
items for the post, which didn’t need cotton coupons), and dye some for me and my brothers.’
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The Cultural Revolution’s guerrilla socialism was, then, a sharp departure from Stalinism. Society was to be completely reordered, with the virtuous at the top, not the well-educated or the well-connected. Prestige based on educational achievement was an early target. Now not only ‘feudal’ hierarchies but also ‘meritocracy’ had to yield to a type of ‘virtuocracy’.
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The ideal was now one of extreme altruism, and even the formerly lionized fictional hero Pavel Korchagin was now censured by Chinese critics for his self-indulgent romanticism and complaints about his illnesses.

The new order particularly affected schools and universities. Following Mao’s belief that merit as tested by exams merely reinforced class divisions within society, political activism was to count for more than educational achievement. Students confronted an entirely novel set of incentives, where political virtue, not intellectual distinction, would gain the rewards of prestigious urban jobs.

Students were amongst the most enthusiastic supporters of the Cultural Revolution. But towards the end of the year official attention shifted to workers, who were now encouraged to embark on vocal campaigns against their bosses. Liu Guokai, a member of a group of rebels in a Guangzhou factory, described how ‘had-it-bad’ factions (often contract workers with their poor pay and benefits) responded eagerly to Mao’s signals by rebelling against ‘had-it-good’ groups (the workers with secure jobs and their allies, the managers). On 25 December 1966 protestors closed down the Ministry of Labour in Beijing, and the next day Jiang Qing supported them, berating the Vice-Minister for treating them as the Cinderellas of the working class:

On hearing that the Cultural Revolution group now supported their cause, contract workers throughout the land rose up to demand the end of their subordinate status. They also, more generally, demanded less high-handed, more ‘comradely’ and dignified treatment by officials.
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