History Matters — The Cultural Revolution

The Cultural Revolution by Frank Dikotter

It might be irony, or it might just be hypocrisy, but the life arc of Mao Zedong demonstrates the hollow lie of Marxism. Marxism claims that historical forces mold society according to inescapable economic laws. Individuals cannot stop the inevitable development of society according to these laws. The best that individuals can accomplish is to be crushed if they stand in the way of those laws.

Mao’s life contrasts with the theory of Marxism. Mao’s life mattered. He took control of the Chinese Communist Party, preserved the Communist army in an epic retreat, won a civil war against non-Marxists, and ruled China as the Chairman of the Communist Party. Because of his rule, forty to sixty million Chinese died in a famine, and many more died in civil wars. Mao’s life mattered in a way that Marxist theory disallows.

Nothing shows this more than the Cultural Revolution, which was all about Mao. The Cultural Revolution was started by nothing less than Mao’s concern that he was being made irrelevant to his revolution. He feared that his legacy would follow that of Stalin, who had been a demigod until Kruschev revealed Stalin’s atrocities in the Secret Speech.

The deposition of the memory of Stalin ruptured Chinese-Soviet relations. Even worse was the advice that high-level Soviets gave to their opposite numbers in the Chinese Communist Party that they should do the same thing to the still-living Mao. Relations between Russia and China soured. Russia withdrew its advisors. Russia and China moved to a war footing, even fighting several battles in 1960. China prepared to fight a two-front war by relocating industry to the interior of China as part of the “Third Front” building program. This program was yet another wastefully inefficient project that required slave labor to locate manufacturing away from transportation and resources.

But that was in the future. In the interim, Mao feared that one of his successors would do the same to his legacy. Many of the leaders of the Communist Party had shown that they were willing to question Mao’s decisions about the Great Leap Forward and Mao’s agricultural policies, which had led to the death of millions. In Beijing and the provinces, relationship networks were forming that did not depend on Mao. Mao felt that this indicated a Chinese future that would not include him either.

The course of the Cultural Revolution was also closely tied to Mao. It was Mao who gave students the green light to be radicalized. As happened during the Trump years, where protests against racism broke out exclusively in Democrat-controlled areas because protesters had some assurance that there would be no police crackdown on the protests, Chinese students understood that they were protected. Mao and the Communists told the students to sweep out the old and continue the Revolution. These students were the second-generation of Communism. They were Communist royalty and felt that they had a legacy to uphold.

They began their mission of advancing the Revolution by forming the Red Guards. The Red Guards attacked the things closest to them, and most defenseless, their own teachers. As with the Left in America today, casual statements that did not toe the ideological line became the basis of torturing older professors and destroying their own campuses.

The Red Guard phase began in 1966. It was over by 1968. By the time it was over, leading experts in Mathematics were carrying buckets of manure in re-education camps, and universities with enrollments of thousands had enrollments of hundreds. The university’s physical infrastructure was destroyed, leaving it a ghost town.

The wanton fouling of their own nests seems to be hardwired into the left’s DNA.

Mao despised the intellectual class. Perhaps it was because of China’s long tradition of Confucianism, in which individuals advanced in imperial service through examinations. Maybe education was associated with elite control at the expense of the lower classes, unlike in the West, where education was a tradition that freed individuals from poverty.

The Red Guards ran riot for around a year. During this time, they were permitted to use the train system free of charge. Dikotter’s description of the Red Guards’ gangs traveling through China conveys a sense of wild potential declining into squalor. At the end, hundreds of thousands of Red Guards were assigned to “learn” from Chinese peasants. Perhaps Mao was expressing his contempt and suspicion for the educated in this liquidation of his former tools. Sent to rural communities where they had no skills, the former students were a burden on the peasants. They also knew that they had suffered a demotion in status and opportunity.

One of the things that Mao, or his side, insisted on was that the “red diaper babies” would not become an aristocracy. These elites were not permitted to stigmatize and ostracize the children of the losers of the Revolution, who had been denominated the “Black classes.” Children of landlords and other class enemies were required to be allowed to join the Red Guard. Was this an example of Mao’s efforts to break down any group that might form an autonomous power base?

Meanwhile, a bizarre civil war broke out throughout China as “rebels” fought “royalty.” The “royalty” was the local party operation; the rebels were Red Guards, deposed party leaders, and local workers who saw an opportunity to seize power. These clashes involved actual battles between tens of thousands of Chinese Communists armed with guns, artillery, and spears. Each side claimed to be closer to Mao. Mao did not send in the army. He seemed content to permit the bloodletting. Whichever side lost was branded the “Capitalist roader,” and the side that won was deemed to be the side favored by Mao.

Mao’s “cult of personality” exploded. There were Mao buttons and Mao statues. The slightest imperfection in, or accidental damage to, a statue sparked a witch hunt to ferret out the person who had committed lese majeste against Mao. Non-Communist books were burned. Streets and businesses were renamed according to Communist themes; the number of “Red Flag” restaurants became too numerous to count.

In this environment of hysterical conformity, the only thing that seemed safe was Mao himself. This was the period when “Mao’s Little Red Book,” containing the quotations of Chairman Mao, emerged as a focus of study and veneration. The People’s Liberation Army first produced the book as part of its indoctrination program, but with the moral panic of the cult of Mao, the Red Book became universal.

All of this is perverse for Communism. Marxists are supposed to be opposed to fascism with its insistence on the Leader principle, but Communism has demonstrated itself quite adaptable to the cult of personality. This feature blurs the line that American leftists try to draw between “fascism” and “leftism.” The blurring reached absurd levels when Mao demonstrated his virility by swimming across the Yangtse River. At this point, it seems quite evident that Mao was putting far more faith in an individual than the forces of history.

Mao was able to reconstruct the provinces’ dependence on Beijing and on himself. The army was an essential part of centralized state control because it was a national institution. The problem that the Party had with relying on the army is that the army is ultimately not the Party. Loyalty networks flow differently in the military than in the Party. The Party could well find itself pushed aside in a military coup.

Mao was able to leverage his unique cult of personality against the army during this latter phase of his life. He had appointed Lin Biao as his successor. Biao was a military man and was supported by the military. Biao maintained a position of slavish deference to Mao, but a system based on a continuing personal relationship with a mercurial, aging despot is unstable. Mao promoted this instability to his own advantage by publishing a critique of a statement made by Biao about a ‘theory of genius.” Biao’s son decided that his father’s position was threatened and plotted Mao’s assassination. The attempt failed, and Biao fled to Russia by plane, only to crash in Mongolia. The generals who had supported him were purged.

The lesson, once again, is how it was Mao’s personality and personal relations with Mao that were driving Chinese politics and culture.

With Biao gone, power shifted to the party as Madame Mao and her allies utilized revolutionary committees to extend centralized power to the provinces. To balance Madame Mao’s power, Deng Xiaoping, a Mao supporter, was brought back into power, and Zhou Enlai sustained his own cult of personality while remaining slavishly loyal to Mao.

Zhou and Mao both died in 1976. With power up for grabs, Deng won the coin toss, and Madame Mao was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Frank Dikotter’s narrative of the Cultural Revolution is very intense and detailed. The period is insane. Dikotter’s focus on particular facts comes close to forcing the reader to live the insanity of the period.

However, Dikotter doesn’t really provide an overarching explanation for the period. The reader can infer larger themes from the massive detail of the facts, but Dikotter offers very few insights into what motivated Mao or what plans he had in his madness. It may be that Dikotter doesn’t think Mao intended to do anything other than cause chaos and suffering for the sake of causing chaos and suffering. If that is Dikotter’s intent, then he has succeeded.

I found that a good supplement to Dikotter was the Very Short Introduction to the Cultural Revolution by Richard Curt Kraus.

The Very Short Introduction provides the explanations missing from Dikotter’s book. This helps the reader to categorize and understand the facts being marshalled. The risk of this approach is that these explanations are an artefact of the writer’s own agenda. There were several points at which I suspected Kraus was more favorable to Mao and the Cultural Revolution than Dikotter. Thus, Kraus offers a lower estimate of the deaths in the Great Famine than is normally given. Likewise, Kraus has a final chapter that sums up the results of the Cultural Revolution, including its economic benefits. These benefits may exist, and it is always worth hearing from contrarians, but finding economic benefits from this period is like finding a pearl in a barrel of marbles.