The Red Flag: A History of Communism (67 page)

The Cultural Revolution reached the countryside last of all, though the inhabitants of some villages had experienced the ‘remoralization’ of politics as early as mid-1965. When Chen village, in Guangdong province, was visited by party ‘work teams’ from the towns sent to spread Mao’s radical message, individual piece-rate wages gave way to a work-points system designed to encourage collective labour and reward. At the same time local political structures, based on kinship networks and family favouritism, were shaken up. One such network was that of Chen Qingfa, nicknamed ‘Hot Sauce’ after his temper and his willingness to resort to physical violence during an argument. However, rural power structures did not really change until the most radical phase of the Cultural Revolution in 1967. In Chen village, Qingfa’s rival, Chen Longyong, with the help of radical urban students sent to the countryside, seized control and imposed a terrifying reign of virtue. Longyong, who rejoiced in the nickname ‘Old Pockmark’, came from a more modest background than Qingfa, and had the support of poorer peasants excluded from village politics. He was also more puritan in his lifestyle and morals. He decried clannishness; he zealously organized collective labour and was more respected than the luxury-loving Qingfa. But the Cultural Revolution allowed him to wage a moralistic terror against ‘bad’ people, including Qingfa and even some of the radical students, and he soon alienated many of the villagers. They may have found Qingfa’s rule corrupt, similar to the gentry of old, but they also found it more ‘human’ than Longyong’s harsh and vengeful behaviour.
⁹³

Mao and his allies, however, did not always find it so easy to replace the Qingfas with the Longyongs. Local bosses successfully protected themselves by deflecting the Cultural Revolution campaigns away from themselves and on to ‘class alien’ outsiders – much as their Soviet predecessors had done in 1937. Mao’s attacks on the ‘bourgeoisie’ were deliberately misinterpreted as a campaign against the ‘black’ bourgeois classes – who had long suffered discrimination – rather than one against their own class of newly bourgeois ‘red’ groups. So, for instance, worried local bosses set up their own red guards, made up of ‘red’ students (i.e. those of ‘good’ class backgrounds, like Gao Yuan), to persecute the old ‘black’ bourgeoisie and their offspring. The campaigns of class discrimination were pursued with fanatical consistency. Visitors to restaurants were forced to complete questionnaires on their class origins, whilst bourgeois surgeons were afraid to operate on proletarians in case the procedure went badly and they were accused of ‘class revenge’.
⁹⁴

Party officials justified these highly self-interested distortions of Mao’s campaigns by reinterpreting Mao’s warnings of revolutionary decay using the dogma of ‘blood pedigree theory’. Blood pedigree was the notion that virtue was not only a class-specific but also an exclusively inherited characteristic. The ‘red’ classes and their children were genetically good, whilst the ‘black’ classes were forever tainted across the generations. Class was reinterpreted as something akin to caste or race. The theory was summed up in a verse couplet:

This, of course, was the exact opposite of what Mao had in mind. He and his radical supporters condemned blood pedigree theory as ‘feudal’, and stated that class was about attitude, not blood. It was, Mao insisted, possible for the ‘black’ classes to be more virtuous and ‘proletarian’ than the ‘red’ ruling groups; indeed, he argued, it was the ‘reds’ who were fast becoming a new privileged class, similar to the old bourgeoisie. However, Mao – like Trotsky – never categorically declared that the party elite had become a new bourgeois class, for to do so would have been tantamount to calling for a full-blown revolution against the Communist Party, endangering the entire regime.
⁹⁶
Mao was, therefore, always studiedly ambiguous; though he encouraged the ‘black’ classes, he never wholly disowned the ‘reds’.

Such equivocation contributed to chaotic civil war, with both sides insisting that only they were following the true will of the Chairman. The former bourgeoisie, allied with underprivileged workers and other stigmatized ‘blacks’, advanced their claims to revolutionary virtue by forming their own red guards. An Wenjiang, the son of a lowly seaman who was studying at Fudan University, Shanghai, decided to join one of the rebel red-guard groupings to counter the violence of the establishment red guards – known as ‘Scarlet Guards’:

On 24 August 1966, An’s red guards were thrilled when a large poster with Mao’s declaration ‘Bombard the Headquarters’ (of the Communist Party) appeared on the campus. As he remembered, ‘we regarded it as a victory for our rebel groups’ for it was a call to attack the elite, and ‘near midnight, 1,400 of us marched off in high spirits to invade Shanghai’s drama academy at the invitation of its rebel minority’. Two days later, however, the establishment Scarlet Guards staged a massive 40,000-strong rally, claiming Mao supported them. An decided to go to Beijing by train ‘to see Chairman Mao and understand the real situation’. He was assured by the red guards of Peking University that the Chairman was indeed on the rebels’ side, and he returned to Shanghai, full of radical zeal.
⁹⁸

This civil war dynamic soon spread throughout China as rival red guard units fought for dominance. Most institutions and workplaces – schools, universities and factories – had their competing red guards. As Mao later recalled, ‘Everywhere people were fighting, dividing into two factions; there were two factions in every factory, in every school, in every province, in every county… there was massive upheaval in the country.’
⁹⁹
The young were most active in the red guards, but much of the urban population was sucked into the revolutionary turmoil. By the end of 1966 the ‘blacks’ were in the ascendant, but the ‘reds’ continued to defend themselves.

Mao understood perfectly well that the Cultural Revolution was generating extreme violence, and saw that Beijing and the central party were losing control. Nevertheless he would not retreat, determined as he was to foment a real revolution from below against the party bureaucracy, not merely a purge from above. For once perfectly unambiguous, Mao, entertaining guests at his birthday party on 26 December 1966, proposed a toast: ‘To the unfolding of nationwide all-round civil war!’
¹⁰⁰
This heartless insouciance was also evident in Mao’s justification of the chaos and violence that engulfed China: ‘it’s a mistake when good people beat up on good people, though it may clear up some misunderstandings, as they might otherwise not have got to know each other in the first place.’
¹⁰¹
For Mao, disorder was less dangerous than allowing the old elite to remain in power.

The most decisive signal that the tide had turned against the ‘reds’ and in favour of the radicals and the ‘blacks’, was the ‘January Storm’ of 1967 in Shanghai. Here, unusually for China, the rebels were not students like An Wenjiang, but largely unprivileged workers. The local party had amassed battalions of red guards to oppose them, but the 800,000 members they claimed to have could not defeat the rebels. On 30 December 1966 some 100,000 rebels attacked 20,000 establishment red guards and after four hours’ fighting were victorious. On 5 February Mao approved the end of the local party’s power, and its transfer to a new organization – the Shanghai People’s Commune, modelled on the Paris Commune of 1871.

The January Storm buffeted the whole country. The young Gao Yuan, a child of the party establishment, now became a victim of the violence he had previously meted out to others. When he awoke one morning and went out to buy food, he was shocked to see notices posted around the town centre, declaring that ‘the time is ripe to seize power from the counter-revolutionary Party Committee and government’ – an elite that included his father. The rival ‘black’ red guard group, the so-called ‘Mao Zedong Thought Red Guards’, broke into his house and held his father in the painful ‘jet-plane’ position for two hours – kneeling down, his arms outstretched and a red guard foot on his back. They then ceremonially ‘crowned’ him with the cap of an old-style feudal official, as worn by actors in traditional operas, to symbolize his ejection from office.
¹⁰²
Across the land, political factions subjected their enemies to similar public humiliations, torture and even death. Meanwhile in Beijing a secret police-style organization established by Mao, the Central Case Examination Group, investigated and purged the so-called enemies of the Cultural Revolution Group. Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping were now denounced as ‘China’s Khrushchevs’.

The high point of Mao’s radicalism came in the summer of 1967, when, realizing that the conservatives were winning, he ordered local military authorities to ‘arm the left’. The results were predictable: the casualties in local battles between conservatives and radicals rose to the thousands. By the end of August Mao had begun to accept that the ‘great chaos’ had become too dangerous, and he launched a new campaign to ‘support the military and cherish the people’ – using the army, which had previously allowed the radicals free rein, to restore central
control. Mao toured China establishing new revolutionary committees, thus restoring the shattered party organization, but it was a lengthy process. Competing factions had to be united and radical red guard movements suppressed. The army itself now embarked on a campaign of purging and killing – rather more systematically than the red guards had. This was the period when the Cultural Revolution was at its most bloody and brutal. It was only in September 1968 that the last of the stabilizing revolutionary committees was put in place.

Alongside political centralization went a restoration of cultural order – especially when it came to the thorny question of Mao’s own cult. As was often the case in Communist regimes, Mao’s cult had emerged during periods of threat, when the leadership needed to consolidate its power – in Yan’an in the early 1940s, and during the leadership crisis surrounding the Great Leap Forward. However, with the Cultural Revolution the leadership began to lose control of a cult that was becoming ever more extravagant – far outstripping that of Stalin.
¹⁰³
As political power crumbled, rival red guards outdid each other to show loyalty to the Chairman, and competitive sycophancy pushed the cult to extreme levels. In some places life became dominated by expressions of loyalty to the Chairman: ‘Quotation gymnastics’ were held, in which participants competed to show their knowledge of
Quotations from Chairman Mao
, and many meetings began with a ‘loyalty dance’. Some rural expressions of devotion had even more explicitly ritual or religious overtones, with the building of ‘Quotation Pagodas’ housing ‘instruction tablets’. Mao’s words were being treated as if they were Buddhist sutras. The Cultural Revolution leadership in Beijing disapproved of the uncontrolled use of the cult, recognizing that it was really being used to further the ambition of local bosses, and so ultimately weakening Mao. As Kang Sheng explained:

Soon, the army made serious efforts to control the cult, imposing rigid codes and practices on its use and thus depriving it of spontaneity. The new ‘three loyalties and four boundless loves’ movement encouraged revolutionary committees to establish strict liturgies, setting out precisely how citizens should show their devotion to Mao. Most extraordinary were the authorities in the Hebei city of Shijiazhuang, who prescribed a detailed set of rituals for all shop sales staff. Before shops opened in the morning, they were to ‘seek instruction’ from the Chairman’s works and in the evening they were to ‘report back’ on the day’s events before a portrait of the Chairman. They were also given a catechism of Mao’s quotations, suitable for opening conversations between salesperson and customer. A sales-clerk welcoming a worker customer, for instance, might say, ‘Vigorously grasp revolution’, whilst the customer would respond, ‘Energetically promote production’, completing the quotation; an elderly person, on the other hand, would be greeted with the phrase ‘Let us wish Chairman Mao a long life!’, and would be expected to reply, ‘Long live Chairman Mao! Long live, long live!’ Naturally these rituals caused deep anxiety, for punishments could be harsh for those who made mistakes. One teacher from Fucheng County in Hebei Province was sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment because he had initially written in his diary that a Mao quotation had given him ‘boundless energy’, and then changed the phrase to ‘very much energy’.

In the cities, the ‘three loyalties and four boundless loves’ movement ended in June 1969, and by then the worst of the violence was over. Nevertheless many remained in prison or exiled to the countryside until the official end of the Cultural Revolution, with Mao’s death in 1976. Estimates suggest that at least a million people died and many more suffered through torture or humiliation in the Cultural Revolution. The lives and the prospects of millions of others were blighted, as a generation of youths was deprived of education. Feng Jicai, the son of a former banker, stressed the long-lasting psychological damage wrought by the persecutions: