The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A People's History Part 2
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Photo: The aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre, 1989 To this day the Chinese government states this did not happen.
The Black Years (1968-1971)
The first phase of the Cultural Revolution came to an end in the summer of 1968 as new, so-called ‘revolutionary party committees’ took over the party and the state. They were heavily dominated by military officers, concentrating real power in the hands of the army. They represented a simplified chain of command that Mao relished, one in which his orders could be carried out instantly and without question. Over the next three years they turned the country into a garrison state, with soldiers overseeing schools, factories and government units. At first, millions of undesirable elements, including students and others who had taken the Chairman at his word, were banished to the countryside to be ‘re-educated by the peasants’. Many had no fixed abode. In some provinces, this was the case for roughly half of all exiled students, as they were forced to live in caves, abandoned temples, pigsties or sheds. Most went hungry. Sexual abuse was rife: thousands were raped by local bullies in the province of Hubei alone, including girls as young as 14. Besides students, entire families, in particular the most destitute and vulnerable ones, seen as a burden on the state, were removed to the countryside and left to their own devices.
Then followed a series of brutal purges, used by the revolutionary party committees to eradicate all those who had spoken out at the height of the Cultural Revolution. The talk was no longer of ‘capitalist roaders’, but of ‘traitors’, ‘renegades’ and ‘spies’, as special committees were set up to examine alleged enemy links among ordinary people and party members alike. Anyone with a foreign link in their past became suspect. In Shanghai alone, close to 170,000 people were harassed in one way of another. More than 5,400 committed suicide, were beaten to death or executed. In Guangdong province as a whole, one estimate puts the body count at 40,000. In Inner Mongolia, close to 800,000 people were incarcerated, interrogated and denounced in mass meetings. Torture chambers appeared across the province. Tongues were ripped out, teeth extracted with pliers, eyes gouged from their sockets, flesh branded with hot irons. Although less than 10 per cent of the population in Inner Mongolia were Mongols, they constituted more than 75 per cent of the victims.
After a nationwide witch-hunt came a sweeping campaign against corruption, further cowing the population into submission, as almost every act and every utterance – inadvertently poking a hole in a poster of Mao, questioning the planned economy – became potentially criminal. In some provinces up to one in 50 people were implicated in one purge or another.
These years were also the high point of a huge industrial project called the Third Front. It aimed at nothing less than the building of a complete industrial infrastructure in the country’s interior. Paranoid about a possible enemy attack from either the Soviet Union or the United States, the one-party state carried out a colossal programme to move about 1,800 factories to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the hinterland, far away from the populated plains in the north of the country and the provinces along the coastline. Since about two thirds of the state’s industrial investment went to the project between 1964 and 1971, it constituted the main economic policy of the Cultural Revolution. It is probably the biggest example of wasteful capital allocation made by a one-party state in the 20th century. In terms of economic development, it was a disaster second only to the Great Leap Forward.
Self-reliance also become the guiding principle in the countryside, as everybody had to emulate Dazhai, a people’s commune located on a sterile plateau of loess in north China. Dazhai, in effect, was a return to the spirit of the Great Leap Forward, as everything in the village was collectivised once again. The Dazhai model was imposed by the army, as soldiers whipped up the workforce, using the villagers as foot soldiers to increase output. In a province like Zhejiang, a quarter of all production teams reverted to the radical collectivisation of the Great Leap Forward: pigs were slaughtered, private plots confiscated, every tree deemed collective property. Under the threat of war with either the Soviet Union or the United States, the emphasis was on grain and terraced fields appeared everywhere in imitation of Dazhai. Neither climate nor topography mattered, as lakes were filled, forests cleared and deserts reclaimed in desperate attempts, from the Mongolian steppes to the swamps of Manchuria, to emulate Dazhai. Dogmatic uniformity was imposed across the country.
Mao was wary of the military, in particular Lin Biao, who had taken over the ministry of defence in the summer of 1959 and pioneered the study of Mao Zedong Thought in the army. Mao had used Lin Biao to launch and sustain the Cultural Revolution, but the marshal in turn exploited the turmoil to expand his own power base, placing followers in key positions throughout the army. He died in a mysterious plane crash in September 1971, bringing to an end the grip of the military on civilian life. The army was in turn purged, falling victim to the Cultural Revolution.
The Grey Years (1971-1976)
By now, the revolutionary frenzy had exhausted almost everyone. Even at the height of the Cultural Revolution, many ordinary people, wary of the one-party state, had offered no more than outward compliance, keeping their innermost thoughts and personal feelings to themselves. Now many realised that the party had been badly damaged by the Cultural Revolution. In the countryside, in particular, if the Great Leap Forward had destroyed the credibility of the party, the Cultural Revolution undermined its organisation. In a silent revolution, millions upon millions of villagers surreptitiously reconnected with traditional practices as they opened black markets, shared out collective assets, divided the land and opened underground factories.
Take, for instance, Yan’an. Set amid dusty, sandstone-coloured hills in northern Shaanxi, it was one of the most hallowed places in communist propaganda, where Mao and his guerilla fighters had established their temporary capital during the Second World War. When a propaganda team arrived in Yan’an in December 1974, it found a thriving and sophisticated black market. One village had abandoned any attempt to wrench food from the arid and parched soil, specialising in selling pork instead. In order to fulfil their quota of grain deliveries to the state, they used the profit from their meat business to buy back corn from the black market. Local cadres supervised the entire operation. Elsewhere in the province, entire people’s communes had divided up collective assets and handed responsibility for production back to individual families. In many cases, local cadres took the lead, distributing the land to farmers. Sometimes a deal was struck between representatives of the state and those who tilled the land, as the fiction of collective ownership was preserved by turning over a percentage of the crop to party officials. Across the country, from north to south, people raised ducks, kept bees, grew fish, baked bricks and cut timber, always in the name of the collective. In parts of Zhejiang, by late 1971 some two thirds of all villagers were independent – or ‘go-it-aloners’ as they were known at the time. Much of this was done with the tacit consent of the local authorities, who rented the land to individual households in exchange for a portion of the crop.
Many did so out of sheer necessity, in order to stave off the starvation caused by the planned economy. But in less deprived regions, too, the market thrived. In the county of Puning in Guangdong, around 30 markets covered the needs of more than a million people. They attracted local farmers, artisans and traders, each with goods in their hands, on their back or in a cart. Pedlars offered colourful illustrations from traditional operas, books from the imperial and republican eras and collections of traditional poetry that had escaped the clutches of the Red Guards. There were itinerant doctors offering their services.
Storytellers used wooden clappers to mark the most dramatic moments of their stories. Blind people sang traditional folk songs for a few alms. Touts stood outside restaurants selling ration coupons. In some markets, organised gangs travelled up and down the coast, going all the way to Shanghai to trade in prohibited goods. A few went as far as Jiangxi to procure tractors, acting on demand from local villages keen to mechanize.
Photo: Mao swimming in the Yangtze River
Some wealthier villages not only planted profitable crops for the market, but also began establishing local factories. There were also underground factories, dispensing altogether with the pretence of collective ownership. In Chuansha, just outside Shanghai, where villagers were mandated by the state to grow cotton, the industrial portion of total production reached 74 per cent by 1975, a rate of growth far superior to the years of ‘economic reform’ after 1978.
Even before Mao died in September 1976, large parts of the countryside had already abandoned the planned economy. It was to be one of the most enduring legacies of a decade of chaos and entrenched fear. No communist party would have tolerated organised confrontation, but cadres in the countryside were defenceless against a myriad of daily acts of quiet defiance and endless subterfuge, as people tried to sap the economic dominance of the state and replace it with their own initiative and ingenuity.
Deng Xiaoping, assuming the reins of power a few years after the death of Mao, briefly tried to resurrect the planned economy. In April 1979 he even demanded that villagers who had left the collectives rejoin the people’s communes. But soon he realised that he had little choice but to go with the flow. By 1980, tens of thousands of local decisions had placed 40 per cent of Anhui production teams, 50 per cent of Guizhou teams and 60 per cent of Gansu teams under household contracts. The people’s communes, backbone of the collectivised economy, were dissolved in 1982.
Not only did the vast majority of people in the countryside push for greater economic opportunities, but they also escaped from the ideological shackles imposed by decades of Maoism. Endless campaigns of thought reform during the Mao era produced widespread scepticism even among party members themselves. The very ideology of the party was gone and its legitimacy lay in tatters. But political freedoms were not to follow. The leaders now lived in fear of their own people, terrified of allowing them to speak again, determined to suppress their political aspirations. In June 1989, Deng personally ordered a military crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing, as tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square. The massacre that followed was a display of brutal force and steely resolve, designed to send a signal that still pulsates to this very day: do not query the monopoly of the communist party of China.
Frank Dikötter is the author of The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962-1976 (Bloomsbury, 2016).
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