荒诞者共和

By Wang Shuo
Translated by John Crespi
TIME MAGAZINE
Issue of Nov 11, 2002

[Wang Shuo is a best-selling novelist whose books, including Please Don't Call Me Human and Playing for Thrills, explore the darker side of Chinese society. Know a little bit more about him and his novels in English translation at No Exit Press]

This is an essay from TIME's Special Issue on China, titled "The New Cultural Revolution". In the issue there includes also: Let One Hundred Cultures Bloom, The Middle Kingdom, A Different Party Line, Back-Alley Blues, and many others. Old articles, but worth reading.

Chinese culture sounds like it's vibrant and refined. One problem: it doesn't exist

I think it was rocker Cui Jian who mouthed the phrase Chinese culture to me while talking about his music during a party at some German guy's place in Beijing. Another Chinese friend of mine, his breath reeking of booze, leaned over and asked me, "What's Chinese culture?" Being well stewed myself at the time, I didn't say anything. But if you're going to make me answer, all I can tell you is, "I don't know."

You'll hear foreigners say that Chinese culture is Confucian culture. What is Confucian culture? In the official media it's the Doctrine of the Mean: elders and juniors each in their places; being tolerant and restrained and yielding; doing unto others and all that. All of which just tells you how to avoid getting the short end of the stick in the world's most crowded of crowds: keep your head low and you'll survive. Then there's the philosophy for retirees: Taoism, unity of heaven and man, becoming one with nature. Sounds great, and every Chinese person can rattle off a couple of paragraphs of the stuff. But if you'll excuse me, I have to say that the one line of Confucius you just can't beat is: "I've never seen the man who loves virtue as well as sex." In the end, this philosophy is about telling people to act one way or another. Give someone a chance, and his first instinct is to go straight for the sex. Or the money. That includes me.

I was born under Maoist rule, and the first time I heard the word culture was in "Cultural Revolution." Our only cultural sage, the writer Lu Xun, who had been dead for 10 years by then, taught us "Don't forgive anyone" and "A perfect fly is still just a fly." If only we had listened.

Just look at what passed for culture at the time, and see how little it's changed today. Back then, children sang, "Mommy and daddy can't compare with Chairman Mao, the greatness of heaven and earth can't compare with the great kindness of the Party." The slogan board on the door of the police headquarters read in big red characters, "Resolutely support the righteous anti-imperialist, anticolonial struggles of all the peoples of the world." The slogan on the door of the crematorium read, "Increase production, decrease population." It's been more than 20 years since those days. Now the slogans are new, but they're still a series of orders. "Open a bottle of Hennessy and let the good times roll." "Your choice, Sprite." In the stores and restaurants, you see, "The People's Police advise you to keep an eye on your wallet and other personal articles." In the public toilet the sign reads, "Please urinate in the trough, please flush after defecating." Jiang Zemin says, "Represent advanced culture."

A friend of mine says Chinese people are the smartest. I ask my friend, "But what culture do they possess?" Beyond firecrackers and paper—things the Chinese invented—look around at what we wear, the things we use. Flushing toilets, televisions, cars and toothbrushes. Which did the Chinese invent? All we can talk about is the Great Wall. What greatness comes from China? Architect I.M. Pei. Author Gao Xingjian. Musician Yo-Yo Ma. Movie director Ang Lee. Actor Jackie Chan. None lives in China.

I love my country. I really do. Maybe, like so many people, I love it too much. A guy who once wrote propaganda for the Party, Qu Xiao, returned from a labor reform camp and said, "A son never thinks his mother ugly, and a dog doesn't mind if its owners are poor." He's still loyal! When I heard that, I felt like I had just gulped down a fly. I don't feel loyal to anything.

If by culture you mean a spiritual font or a shared sense of values, then I have to say that this is something I can't see in China—past or present. Here in Beijing I've got to shove others out of the way just to make it across the street. I stare suspiciously at any stranger who gets too close to my briefcase. I don't lend money to friends. I never buy history books written by Chinese because I don't believe them. (I have comforted myself with the thought that mistrust is itself a form of belief.) Looking into the future I often slip into a sense of dread, yet I don't know where to turn for support. I'm like a savage in a benighted age, alone and helpless in a land with no culture.

Beijing’s Bloody August
By Geremie R. Barmé
Copyright © Geremie R. Barmé

This August is the 40th anniversary of the start of Cultural Revolution. Below are two first person accounts beginning of the decade of chaos, translated and with an introduction by Geremie R. Barmé, published here with his permission.PDF version of the text
Recently, I was commissioned to review Mao’s Last Revolution, a co-authored work by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals (Belknap Press, 2006). It is a weighty tome on the history of the Cultural Revolution, and the opening paragraphs of my review read:

‘On 18 August 1966, Mao Zedong reviewed a mass gathering of zealous young people in Tiananmen Square. At the last moment he donned a PLA uniform and, although it didn’t quite fit his bulky frame, it marked both to his audience of over a million Red Guards, and to his colleagues standing on the rostrum with him, that the old guerilla leader was launching a new campaign. It would become a war of all against all, a civil conflict unlike any other that China had experienced.

‘In Chinese, August 1966 is known as ‘Red August’, hong bayue. For the supporters of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, red symbolized revolution and the revitalization of the ardour for uncompromising and radical change. Their battle cry was “to rebel is justified”. For those who were the victims of the opening salvos of this political movement, however, those harrowing summer weeks of verbal abuse, ransacking and murder were “bloody August”, a prelude to the long years of confusion and devastation that were to follow.’

The review ends with a quotation from a former Red Guard on the subject of the slogan ‘to rebel is justified’ (zaofan you li). I took the quote from an oral history interview conducted by the writer Sang Ye and published in his book 1949, 1989, 1999 (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1999). Much of that book, translated and edited, recently appeared in English under the title China Candid: the people on the People’s Republic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006, , available on Amazon.com)). Unfortunately, due to the length of the manuscript I was obliged to edit the original down, and roughly a third of Sang Ye’s interview material was not included in the published English book.

The following two contrastive interviews with former Red Guards were not included in the English-language version of Sang Ye’s book. Given the fact that it is forty years since the ‘Red August’ of 1966, it would seem timely to make them available to interested readers. The translations and notes are mine, although I would acknowledge the editorial contribution of Miriam Lang.

I

He had been a founding Red Guard at Tsinghua University Middle School. Later he would become an executive working in the Shenzhen office of a multinational company. She (her interjections are marked by parentheses) was a university lecturer in Chinese. —Sang Ye

We were both in our mid teens when the Cultural Revolution was launched. We were extremely idealistic about the future of China and the fate of humanity. Don't forget, we were born the same year that the People's Republic was founded and grew up with the party’s education. It was an education that left an indelible mark on the way we think. We were as young as New China. Just like China after entering the phase of socialist construction, we experienced a period of great idealism too; we too followed a tortuous path, and each twist and turn has left its mark on us.

Take the years after 1957, for example. The party's policies started deviating from the correct course, especially when an emphasis was placed on class contradictions and struggle. Because the party had evolved in an environment of extreme class antagonism there was a great sensitivity to the issue of class. Add to that the fact that there were severe differences of opinion between the established socialist countries like the Soviet Union and the newly-socialist nations like China on how revolution was to continue under the conditions of socialism, and what was to become of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Our party placed a particular emphasis on class contradictions and struggle. So the concept of never forgetting class struggle had a profound impact on us.

It was in this kind of environment that after 1964 both the leadership and the students in our school—that is Tsinghua University Middle School—were tirelessly discussing class struggle. When the Cultural Revolution began there was a widespread awareness that we couldn't take anything for granted, despite the fact that the proletariat was ostensibly in political control. There was a general sense of political crisis and now it had reached explosion point.

We wanted our party to be more pure so that it could avoid the pitfalls of the Soviet revisionists. That was the innocent and naïve motivation behind our involvement in the Cultural Revolution. From the very outset we showed ourselves more willing and able than others to respond to Chairman Mao and the party's various appeals. The leadership at all levels saw things differently from us and the older cadres disagreed with the way the masses were being incited to carry out the Cultural Revolution; they felt this mass movement was a betrayal of the party's traditions. They couldn't understand why the masses were being incited to oppose the leadership rather than relying on the democratic mechanisms within the party, that is allowing the party leaders to decide everything and be done with it. We, on the other hand, felt as though a new age was dawning; it was very exciting and the revolutionary situation was excellent. At the start of the Cultural Revolution all the students at my school influenced each other, or rather infected each other, forged connections; and in our enthusiasm we set up the Red Guards.

Honestly, there was nobody else behind it. The idea didn't come from an older cadre or a high-level official; it was entirely our own doing.

(The notion that some high-level cadre told us to set up the movement is just a myth. Like so many things said about those days, it has no basis in fact. Even some so-called Cultural Revolution specialists still claim that the Red Guards were established at the behest of Chairman Mao or Jiang Qing. There's even one school of thought that identifies Wang Renzhong as the central party leader behind it. That just isn't true. Having said this, it is a fact that after the Red Guards were established various people got involved and exploited the movement for their own ends. But that's another story.)

I'd like to say a few words about our school and the kind of environment in which we were living and studying. From this it will be evident why the Red Guard movement appeared there. Our school emphasized the overall development of the individual—moral, intellectual and physical. Added to that was that fact that from 1960 enrollment was opened to students from any school in the city. In other words, only the crème de la crème were chosen. The school was a long way from the city center so everyone boarded there, including first-year students. That meant that people in the same class did everything together, studying, eating and sleeping. They were in constant contact with each other. Tsinghua and Peking Universities were nearby, and so was No. 101 Middle School. So there was a lot of contact between students at all of these schools.

(No. 101 was a school that had started out as a Communist Party kindergarten established in Yan'an. From the 1940s it was a ‘horse-back cradle’ for the revolutionary successors of the party. The children of Chairman Mao and many important central party leaders were sent there; some of them were still there right up to the time of the Cultural Revolution.1 The entrance exam standards were also very high.)

That's one aspect of the situation. Another was that the school leadership at that time included people who believed in educational reform, and they wanted their students to excel in every aspect of their activities. They favored a heuristic method of education, 2 and they encouraged students to discuss and debate issues amongst themselves and also to take part in various extramural activities. So the atmosphere was extremely lively; it wasn't just a bunch of people with their heads stuck in books. Frankly, if you got into Tsinghua Middle School that pretty much meant that you were on your way to university.

(Later on, as part of an experiment in educational reform, they set up preparatory classes for college. They wanted to give people a specialized training so they'd be ready for university. Those preparatory classes became a breeding ground for future Red Guard leaders.)

And that brings us to the third characteristic of our school: the class background of the students. Because they got in on the basis of exam results and they had to be good all-rounders; that meant that a lot of people had been student cadres in their old schools. As a result they had already developed their own ideas about things and were confident about expressing them. This made the school environment even livelier. Equally important was the fact that there was also a relatively large percentage of children from intellectual and cadre families. That's because they grew up in a positive social environment and had a strong educational atmosphere at home.

(However, our school was not a school for high-level cadre kids. It was definitely not a Chinese version of the elitist schools they had in Japan that allowed commoners to compete in the entrance exams but would accept all the children of the nobility. At that time in China people were very unhappy about the fact that cadres’ children tended to be concentrated in particular schools—but those had a different system for recruiting students from the one ours did. But since ours wasn't an ordinary high school—we ate and lived there, and we had lots of extramural activities—that meant families had to spend more on their children's education. That was inevitable.)

Given such an environment it was only natural that our students would be particularly idealistic. Generally speaking, we felt obliged to show an interest in the affairs of the nation and politics, and we believed we should be concerned for its future, or rather that we should feel a sense of responsibility for it.

We all got involved in heated discussions from the time of the publication of ‘A Critique of the Newly-written Historical Play The Dismissal of Hai Rui’ in November 1965, 3 right up to the denunciation of the ‘Three-Family Village’ in March-April the following year. 4 The general consensus was that the issues involved were more than just academic, and that this was more than a series of denunciations of bourgeois ideology within the cultural sphere. We were convinced that they were questions of major importance for the political fate of the nation; they touched on issues of crucial significance for the political life of people throughout China.

(At the time this view was diametrically opposite to that of our school leadership and the Beijing Municipal Committee—and even of Party Central itself, that is Liu Shaoqi's headquarters. All of them emphatically claimed that these were academic debates that should not be crudely simplified or turned into a metaphysical discussion. They warned against deviating from the matter at hand and extending the terms of reference of the discussions. To this day I'm still not sure whether or not they realized that this ‘academic debate’ was setting the stage for the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. But to be honest, at the time I never thought the movement would become so frenetic, or have such a massive impact on China and the rest of the world—and transform the lives of a whole generation.)

Anyway, given these sentiments some of us felt that the party leadership at school was incapable of keeping up with the unfolding situation. They were too rightwing, too soft. So the students voiced their criticisms and the authorities responded by drawing on the experiences they'd had during the Anti-Rightist Movement of 1957 [when criticisms of the party leadership had led to a wide-ranging purge]. They decided that students would not be permitted to criticize the party leadership at will, and they took the kind of action that had worked in the past. Initially, they cautioned us. ‘What you're doing is very dangerous’, they said. ‘You should be mindful of the lessons of history. During the struggle against the rightists in 1957 many students had expressed their dissatisfaction with the party and its work. As things turned out, however, people who had voiced their criticisms ended up being classified as rightists themselves.’

Their cajoling only served to make the situation more explosive. We were confident that truth was on our side, and nothing could scare us off. We searched through party journals and newspapers, as well as other propaganda materials, for ideas that could support our stance. The general tenor of propaganda at the time just happened to be in line with our position. People's Daily and Red Flag were putting out articles almost every day with big bold headlines that read ‘Never Forget Class Struggle’. You can easily imagine what was in them. Of course, we drew support from them and we believed that our struggle with the school leadership was following the general pattern of contradictions [as outlined by Chairman Mao], and would inevitably end in victory for us. So from the very outset we spontaneously developed links between students in different grades who felt the same, so we could act together.

A significant day in the history of these events was 29 May 1966. On that day a number of key activists in both the senior and junior sections of our high school got together to discuss the situation and our strategy to deal with it. Our school was next to the Yuanming Yuan [the Garden of Perfect Brightness], 5 and we often used to go there after class had finished. We'd wander around there and talk about anything we needed to discuss, or just chat together. We had our meeting there on 29 May, so it came to be known as the Yuanming Yuan Meeting. The date became known as the day on which the Red Guards were founded.

Up until 29 May no big-character posters had appeared in our school. 6 Some students in the junior years had suggested posting attacks on the school authorities, and we had debated the issue but decided against it. At the time I had argued that a poster campaign was not the best strategy at this juncture. On the night of 1 June, in response to an instruction from Chairman Mao, Central People's Radio had broadcast the big-character poster written by people at Peking University who had rebelled against their Party Committee. The broadcast gave full support to the poster, which Chairman Mao praised as ‘the first Marxist-Leninist big-character poster to appear in China.’ 7 This development had an extraordinary impact on me. Now I was convinced that our rebellion was an inevitable expression of the contradictions between the students and the party committee. Things were clearly developing faster and in a more positive direction than any of us could have expected. Our immediate response was to put up our own big-character poster and to adopt formally the name [Chairman Mao's] Red Guards.

Here I must emphasize the fact that, although we decided on the name Red Guards that day, the expression had been around for some time. During the denunciations of the ‘Three-Family Village’ in March and April, we had all put up a series of mini-posters which we signed in a lot of different ways. One of our group, a student by the name of Zhang Chengzhi, put up a mini-poster and signed it ‘A Red Guard’. 8 At the time he explained to us what he meant by this name and I thought it was perfectly suited to our situation. Although there were a lot of other names current among the students—things like ‘Red Descendants’ and ‘Soldiers for the Annihilation of the Bourgeoisie’, and so on and so forth—‘Red Guard’ was the best. So from that time we generally agreed that all like-minded students, that is people who were critical of the school leadership, should use ‘Red Guard’ to sign their mini-posters, followed by their real name. Thus, ‘Red Guard Zhang Chengzhi’, or ‘Red Guard Pu Dahua’. Although we'd all agreed on it we didn't actually use the term all that much, in particular because we were already losing interest in writing mini-posters, and we didn't really have any other opportunities to use the name.

When we put up our own big-character poster on 2 June, it was a perfect opportunity to use it. We signed the poster ‘Red Guards’ and then added our real names. After it went up people who agreed with our views also signed their names on it. Soon the poster had the signatures of over one hundred Red Guards.

As for the contents of the poster, there really wasn't very much to it. Basically, we stated our position and announced that our basic principle was that we would do whatever Chairman Mao and Party Central called upon us to do, and that we would enthusiastically participate in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

Our views were well known within the school and had been at the center of controversy for some time. The leadership had even held a special meeting to discuss us. So by this stage it was completely obvious what we really thought and what our intentions were. Naturally, that meant that anyone who signed our poster was critical of the school leadership and of some actions by some party organizations. Those who weren't didn't sign. Some of them were strongly opposed to our point of view—real hardcore opposition—and they put up their own big-character posters attacking us. They were pretty cutting, things like, ‘We are more than aware of what type of people you are and what you are really up to. You have been secretly engaged in underground activities for ages, hatching furtive plots and plans. You Red Guards are wildly ambitious and your real aim is to overthrow the party committee’, and so on and so forth.

(One of the things these people said left a deep impression on me. It was: ‘You have repeatedly claimed that there is an ever-present danger that the bourgeoisie will stage a comeback in China. You're absolutely correct, and you people are the cause of the danger’.)

Of course we tried to explain ourselves and present our own point of view.

(We tried to explain that our sole desire was to protect Chairman Mao with our lives, oppose and prevent revisionism, and persevere with the revolution. We said that we would fight anyone at all who diverged from the proletarian revolutionary line. We were prepared to take on anyone and everyone who was opposed to Chairman Mao. We were determined ‘to overcome all obstacles and stop only when world revolution was victorious.’ We were extremely confident; we felt as though we could somehow determine the fate of the nation. The things we wrote at the time were pretty histrionic.)

As things developed the debates became more heated and we even started doing things like putting crosses through the names of our opponents on the posters. That's when outsiders who supported us, for example, students from Peking University High School and No. 101, decided to come to our campus as a gesture of solidarity. At first the school authorities locked the school gates to prevent them from coming in, but that only served to stir things up even more. Our supporters who had been locked out didn't leave; they stationed themselves outside the school and chanted: ‘We're Red Guards too! We're Red Guards too!’ Who would ever have thought that that was how the term ‘Red Guards’ started to circulate outside our school?

The story of the birth, evolution and eventual demise of the Red Guard movement is long and involved. After the term ‘Red Guard’ began its journey outside the school in June 1966, the leaders in charge of the day-to-day supervision of work in Party Central—in other words, Liu Shaoqi—sent out work teams to occupy the school and suppress the movement. However, Chairman Mao personally wrote to us to express his warm support and to reiterate the principle that ‘revolution is not a crime; rebellion is justified.’ 9 In particular he emphasized that ‘rebelling against reactionaries is justified.’ Before long all kinds of Red Guard groups had been set up throughout China, and Red Guards moved out into the society at large to take part in the movement ‘to obliterate thoroughly and rebuild staunchly’ 10... ... and so on and so forth. That's about all I can really say about the early days of the Red Guard movement.

Everything is a process. As I said earlier, differences of opinion among ourselves eventually led to factional in-fighting. As the Cultural Revolution progressed all kinds of mass organizations called themselves Red Guards, while we, the original Red Guards, fragmented and regrouped. The situation in our school was the same as everywhere else: there was violence and conflict between the two main factions.

(Nowadays some people take the term ‘Red Guard’ to connote something very negative, as though Red Guards were all murderers, some kind of oriental fascists. That's obviously quite unfair. It's tragic both for us personally and for the Red Guard movement as a whole. I will admit that in the organizations that sprung up all over China calling themselves Red Guards there were hooligans, lunatics, ambitious schemers and plotters, and that they did a lot of bad things. I also concede that there were people in the old Red Guards—that is students at our school—who committed errors during the Cultural Revolution. Perhaps one could even call them crimes. I have to live with that fact. However, at the inception of the Cultural Revolution we, and our classmates, were true path-breakers. We were absolutely sincere in our devotion to the Communist Party, the nation and the people. We established the first group of Red Guards in China—in the world, for that matter—in good faith. Over a quarter of a century has passed, and from our present perspective it is irrelevant whether or not the founders of the Red Guards killed people, or smashed and looted and destroyed things. The heavy cross that we bear has been imposed upon us as a matter of political expediency, and we are carrying the weight of other criminals. It will be our burden forever. So, in retrospect what I have to affirm solemnly is that what I did in the spring of 1966 I did in good conscience and faith for the sake of the ideals I once held so dear.)

People like us—especially a person like me who made a bit of name for themselves in the early days of the Cultural Revolution and was later jailed—have weathered many of the vicissitudes of life. That period had a profound and long-lasting impact on us. If you ask me to consider the past and think about the future, then I can claim to speak on behalf of the majority of the old Red Guards when I say that we still care about the fate of our party and our nation, and still care about the grand enterprise of our people.

II

Another Red Guard from more humble origins eventually became the proprietor of a Beijing fashion boutique. —Sang Ye

I was in my third year of junior high school when the Cultural Revolution got going. It was No.27 High School, a real dump. I don't care what other people say about why they got involved; I know I became a Red Guard just for the hell of it, to have a chance to lash out and rebel. Up till then alley-kids like me were always treated like dirt. 11 But, fuck, when the Cultural Revolution came along, I was suddenly one of the five red categories, a child of the workers and peasants who had been oppressed by the revisionist line in education. Under revisionism I'd been forced to learn my lessons off by heart; ten long years and they still wouldn't let me pass. Now that I had the chance I was going to get out there and fuck with them, wasn't I?

I didn't even wait for old man Mao to review the first batch of Red Guards. I joined a Mao Zedong Thought Brigade set up in the Western City. Later on the Red Guards in the high schools fell into two factions. We were in the 4.3 faction. 12 They were all much the same thing; the manifestoes had lots of articles in them and no one could remember what they were. But one line that Chairman Mao had taught us summed it up for everybody: ‘In the final analysis, the innumerable truths of Marxism may be expressed in one sentence: “to rebel is justified”.’

I took part in pretty much all the big events: being reviewed by Grandad Mao in Tiananmen, destroying the four olds, the great link-ups, armed struggle: 13 anything that involved beating people up and smashing things and taking stuff. Man, it was fantastic! Me and my buddies got baseball bats and worked our way up the street from south to north. We must have busted every damn shop sign along Xidan. Just try doing that today! The cops'd be all over you after the first hit. But back then, they didn't dare. We were fuckin' Red Guards; we were destroying the four olds! Rebellion is justified! Breaking into the Nationalities Palace, putting the British Rep Office under siege, man I was there for all of it. How could you miss it? It was full on. Then the British place was torched. They never found the guy who lit the fire. If they could get their hands on him today he'd be finished. Burning up foreigners? Talk about big time! They'd execute the guy three times over. But back then foreigners weren't worth a hair on your dick; they were the object of revolution.

I wasn't all that involved with beating people up; too late to be in on that really. The first time was in August, a good two months later than most. By then beating people to death wasn't really what people were doing any more. I remember it really clearly because it was the first day Chairman Mao reviewed the Red Guards at Tiananmen. 18 August. I was unlucky, though; I didn't get to catch a glimpse of him because I was too well behaved. We were supposed to meet at our school first, so that's where I went. But our school was way over to the west of Tiananmen, and the Red Guard groups were all moving from east to west. They went past Tiananmen, and saw Mao, and then moved on towards Xidan in the west, and then they dispersed. There were marshals all over the place to stop people going back towards Tiananmen. So there's old Grandad Mao over in the square and there's me stuck in Xidan. I could see fuck all. All I could see was everyone really happy because they'd seen him. I was so pissed off. I'm a loser, too obedient, so I've always missed out.

Later I got to see him a few times but he was always so far away he didn't quite seem real. Seeing him in the Mausoleum is better. But at the time I was still incredibly excited. I'd seen the Red Commander-in-Chief and that was the only thing that mattered. No bullshit; how many people got to see Chairman Mao when he was alive? Heaps of people are still lining up to see his body now. I reckon they should set up a company and sell tickets, charge out-of-town people ten yuan a pop to see him. They say his kids don't have it so good nowadays. So maybe the Chairman should help them make a few bucks.

But that was a real bad day. That fucking shit of a class monitor came and put on this big act of reading the big-character posters. I couldn't stand her, so I went over and gave the cunt a few slaps around the face. After all, there she was, presenting herself to me on a platter. You could get away with beating up anyone, like it was for free, as long as they were class enemies. You could beat them to death and no one would care. She didn't have a fucking clue why I'd hit her, and she caved in immediately. ‘I'll confess, I'll confess. I'm guilty, I'm guilty. But it wasn't me who made you repeat a year; it was so and so. He didn't let you pass. It wasn't up to me.’ She was scared shitless, and started selling out other people just like that. Typical fucking intellectual. As soon as I hit her all these other people gathered round. Some of them hated her too, for other reasons, so they got stuck into her as well. We struggled her for a while before we let her go home.

Even now I don't feel bad about it. Big deal. That slut had treated me badly in the past, always punishing me, and making me stand for hours in detention. I still wouldn't apologize. She was over forty then, so I guess she'd be long gone by now. I was only doing my job. If she wants to pay me back she can complain to the manager, Chairman Mao. Anyway, I did my ten-year stint in the countryside after that. About the only thing I didn't experience was death. And, damn it, but those old poor peasants were mean bastards. They really fucked me over. I reckon ten years in the countryside evens the score.

Then came the revolutionary link-ups. What that meant was free travel. If you showed your Red Guard ID you could go on the train for free—anywhere you wanted, within China that is. But you couldn't really call it a free ride. It was standing room only—not even that—people got crushed to death. And nowhere you went was as good as Beijing. All those shit-holes everywhere else. Poor as dirt. It was a real eye-opener, though. I was a bit of an innocent then, and I didn't have much of a clue about anything. The first time I saw a real airplane was at a mass rally at the Capital Airport when they expelled the Soviet diplomats. It was mainly university students who were behind that; I just went along to get a look at the planes.

Society's never fair. Even in the chaos of the Cultural Revolution the Red Guards were divided into different classes. Look at the kids in ‘United Action’. They were from 1 August High School, all privileged kids; they wore real army uniforms; they had black leather shoes, all shining, that's if they weren't wearing snow white sandshoes. They all sped around on brand new ‘Forever’ brand pushbikes, too. When a pack of them went riding past it was like the Praetorian Guard. They really were in your face. They were all from high-level cadre families, or army brats. How could alley-scum like me compete with that? In the Cultural Revolution they were still the ruling class. Our rebellion was a joke; sure it felt good, but we were only the shit-kickers for those people. You've got to face the facts.

Who are ‘the people’ anyway? Morons like me: we're the people. The majority. The Cultural Revolution created chaos among the people; they let us fight it out amongst ourselves. Take that teacher I hit, for example, or a rightist, or some capitalist. In reality, they were all just common people. The peasants screwed me over for ten years, but in the end they're just like me, cannon fodder. Think back to when the Communists and Nationalists were fighting it out with each other. The ones who did all the fighting were the common people. Anyone with money and power never had to get their hands dirty. Sure the Communists eliminated eight million Nationalist bandits. Big fucking deal! Chiang Kai-shek got off scot-free; so did [his son] Chiang Ching-kuo. Who ended up dead? The people, that's who.

So if you ask me I reckon the Cultural Revolution was just a fucking sham. Old Mao was feeling a bit insecure up there in Party Central. He wanted to screw Liu Shaoqi, but Liu was no loser. So Mao got everyone fighting among themselves: students beating up teachers, workers beating up factory heads, party members beating up party secretaries. After that the students, workers and party members turned on each other. In the end, even old grannies and aunties were at each other's throats. The place turned into something out of the Three Kingdoms, with Liu Shaoqi stuck in the middle of it all. 14 Old man Mao was never afraid of chaos; he was a hero born of disorder. The only time he felt at peace was when all under heaven was in a state of chaos, and he was the only one who could stay on top of it all. Forget about Liu Shaoqi; even a dozen US presidents rolled into one couldn't have kept a lid on it. Just take a look at what the Chinese can get up to when they're aroused: no one would want to touch the place with a barge pole.

Of course, I didn't understand all of that at the time. But I reckon I still would have got into it even if I had. Look at me now. I started out with nothing and, fuck, here I am—a small capitalist, you might say. I've got myself a car and everything. And I reckon I'm shit-hot, too. But what about those people from ‘United Action’? Man, they've been driving around in Mercedes Benzes for years, and it has to be the right model and the right year, and they have to have a chauffeur! My hat's off to them, man. The country belongs to them. Their families founded New China—the generals, the government ministers, and now they're claiming their inheritance. I'm telling you, you just have to accept it. But I'm still pissed off as hell because it's so fucking unfair. If things go on like this it'll end up like the Manchu-Qing dynasty, won't it? 15

If you ask me to look back on it from my present perspective, I don't think it was all that different from today. If a time comes when rebellion is justified again, I might be too old to get involved but believe you me I'm going to encourage my son to get out there and fuck them over a bit.

You don't get anything if you don't rebel. You don't get anything if you do rebel either, but you've still got to do it whenever you get the chance. For us ordinary people that is the only truth we believe in.

Footnotes
1: No. 101 was next to the Yuanming Yuan, or Garden of Perfect Brightness, an extensive Manchu-era imperial garden palace that had lain in ruins since the 1860 sacking by Anglo-French forces. See below.
2: qifashi jiaoyu, as opposed to tianyashi jiaoxue, a 'duck-stuffing' or forced-feeding method of teaching.
3: Yao Wenyuan's denunciation of the historian and Beijing party bureaucrat Wu Han's play about the Jiajing emperor's dismissal of the upright late-Ming dynasty minister Hai Rui marked the public escalation of the secretive political maneuverings that would eventually turn into the Cultural Revolution. The play was construed as being a defence of Peng Dehuai, a prominent party leader who was dismissed from his post by Mao Zedong for his criticisms of the Great Leap Forward.
4: The 'Three-Family Village' refers to the three writers Wu Han, Deng Tuo and Liao Mosha and their supposedly anti-Maoist essays. Eventually, these essays, which appeared from late 1961 to mid 1964, were attacked for 'using history, general knowledge and popular topics as a screen, drawing on historical incidents to mock the present and making oblique attacks to launch a vicious and thorough-going attack on the great Communist Party.'
5: The Garden of Perfect Brightness was a Manchu-Qing palace garden used by the imperial family from the early-eighteenth century until its destruction in 1860 following the Arrow War at the hands of an Anglo-French military force. In the twentieth century the destruction of the gardens was regarded as being emblematic of the decline and national humiliation of China at the hands of the imperial powers.
6: The authors of big-character posters or dazibao used Chinese writing brushes and ink to write essays and denunciations on sheets of paper that were then pasted on walls. First popularized during the years 1957-58, big-character posters were an instant form of unofficial mass communication and protest used throughout the Cultural Revolution. They were banned by government order in the early 1980s.
7: The Peking University big-character poster was written by a group of teachers in the university Philosophy Department and it launched an attack on the party leaders led by Liu Shaoqi.
8: Zhang, a Hui-Muslim, would eventually become a noted novelist and essayist who kept faith with his Cultural Revolution-era ideas which became intertwined with various elements of Sino-Islamic thought from the 1980s. See, for example, Geremie R. Barmé, In the Red, on contemporary Chinese culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp.304-309.
9: geming wu zui,. zaofan you li, a quotation from Mao Zedong's letter to the Red Guards. The second part of the quote comes from Mao's ‘Speech at the Meeting Sponsored by All Circles in Yan'an to Celebrate the 60th Birthday of Stalin,’ in which he said, ‘In the final analysis, the innumerable truths of Marxism may be expressed in one sentence: “to rebel is justified”.’ Although broadcast on national radio and printed in the press, Mao’s ‘letter’ was never received by the Red Guards at Tsinghua Attached Middle School.
10: da po da li, that is to obliterate the old totally and to establish the new firmly.
11: In this context, alley-kids hutong chuanzi indicates young people who grew up in the older and poorer parts of Beijing and were regarded as being ill bred, uneducated and unemployable.
12: The '4.3 Faction' appeared in April 1967, named after a meeting on 3 April (literally the 4th month 3rd day, and thus 4.3), encouraged by the radical central party leaders as a force to counteract the 'old Red Guards.'
13: po sijiu, da chuanlian, wudou, the hallmarks of the Red Guard movement (1966-68).
14: A reference to the conflict between the kingdoms of Wei, Shu and Wu in the third century CE, and the machinations and betrayals that the contestation involved.
15: The corrupt and bureaucratically top-heavy Manchu-Qing dynasty collapsed in 1911 ushering in an era of revolution.

Circular of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution

May 16, 1966

[This circular was seen by mainstream chinese historians as the official document which triggered off the beginning of the ten-year turmoil]

To all regional bureaus of the Central Committee, all provincial, municipal and autonomous regional party committees, ail departments and commissions under the Central Committee, all leading party members' groups and party committees in government departments and people's organizations, and the General Political Department of the PLA:

The Central Committee has decided to revoke the 'Outline Report on the Current Academic Discussion made by the Group of Five in Charge of the Cultural Revolution' which was approved for distribution on 12 February 1966, to dissolve the 'Group of Five in Charge of the Cultural Revolution' and its offices, and to set up a new Cultural Revolution group directly under the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau. The outline report by the so-called 'Group of Five' is fundamentally wrong. It runs counter to the line of the socialist cultural revolution set forth by the Central Committee and Comrade Mao Tse-tung to the guiding principles formulated at the Tenth Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee of the party in 1962 on the question of classes and class struggle in socialist society. While feigning compliance, the outline actually opposes and stubbornly resists the great Cultural Revolution initiated and led personally by Comrade Mao Tse-tung, as well as the instructions, regarding the criticism of Wu Han, which he gave at the work conference of the Central Committee held in September and October 1965 (that is, at the session of the Standing Committee attended also by the leading comrades of all the regional bureaux of the Central Committee).

The outline report by the so-called 'Group of Five' is actually an outline report by P'eng Chen alone. He concocted it according to his own ideas behind the backs of Comrade K'ang Sheng, a member of the 'Group of Five', and other comrades. In handling such a document regarding important questions which affect the overall situation in the socialist revolution, P'eng Chen had no discussion or exchange of views at all within the 'Group of Five'. He did not ask any local party committee for its opinion; nor, when submitting the outline report, did he make it clear that it was being sent to the Central Committee for examination as its official document, and still less did he get the approval of Comrade Mao Tse-tung, Chairman of the Central Committee. Employing the most improper methods, he acted arbitrarily, abused his powers, and, usurping the name of the Central Committee, hurriedly issued the outline report to the whole party.

The main errors of the outline report are as follows:

1. Proceeding from a bourgeois stand and the bourgeois world outlook in its appraisal of the situation and the nature of the current academic criticism, the outline completely reverses the relation between the enemy and ourselves, putting the one into the position of the other. Our country is now in an upsurge of the great proletarian Cultural Revolution which is pounding at all the decadent ideological and cultural positions still held by the bourgeoisie and the remnants of feudalism. Instead of encouraging the entire party boldly to arouse the broad masses of workers, peasants, and soldiers, and the fighters for proletarian culture so that they can continue to charge ahead, the outline does its best to turn the movement to the right. Using muddled, self-contradictory, and hypocritical language, it obscures the sharp class struggle that is taking place on the cultural and ideological front. In particular, it obscures the aim of this great struggle, which is to criticize and repudiate Wu Han and the considerable number of other anti-party and anti-socialist representatives of the bourgeoisie (there are a number of these in the Central Committee and in the party, government, and other departments at the central as well as at the provincial, municipal, and autonomous region level). By avoiding any mention of the fact repeatedly pointed out by Chairman Mao, namely, that the key point in Wu Han's drama Hai Jui Dismissed from Office is the question of dismissal from office, the outline covers up the serious political nature of the struggle.

2. The outline violates the basic Marxist thesis that all class struggles are political struggles. When the press began to touch on the political issues involved in Wu Han's Hai Jui Dismissed from Office, the authors of the outline went so far as to say: "The discussion in the press should not be confined to political questions, but should go fully into the various academic and theoretical questions involved". Regarding the criticism of Wu Han, they declared on various occasions that it was impermissible to deal with the heart of the matter, namely, the dismissal of the right opportunists at the Lushan plenum in 1959 and the opposition of Wu Han and others to the party and socialism. Comrade Mao Tse-tung has often told us that the ideological struggle against the bourgeoisie is a protracted class struggle which cannot be resolved by drawing hasty political conclusions. However, P'eng Chen deliberately spread rumours, telling many people that Chairman Mao believed political conclusions on the criticism of Wu Han could be drawn after two months. P'eng Chen also said that the political issues could be discussed two months later. His purpose was to channel the political struggle in the cultural sphere into the so-called pure academic discussion so frequently advocated by the bourgeois politics and opposing giving prominence to proletarian politics.

3. The outline lays special emphasis on what it calls 'opening wide'. But playing a sly trick it grossly distorts the policy of 'opening wide' expounded by Comrade Mao Tse-tung at the party's National Conference on Propaganda Work in March 1957 and negates the class content of 'opening wide'. It was in dealing with this question that Comrade Mao Tse-tung pointed out: 'We still have to wage a protracted struggle against bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology. It is wrong not to understand this and to give up ideological struggle. All erroneous ideas, all poisonous weeds, all ghosts and monsters, must be subjected to criticism; in no circumstance should they be allowed to spread unchecked.' Comrade Mao Tse-tung also said, 'To "open wide" means to let all people express their opinions freely, so that they dare to speak, dare to criticize, and dare to debate.' This outline, however, poses 'opening wide' against exposure by the proletariat of the bourgeoisie's reactionary stand. What it means by 'opening wide' is bourgeois liberalization, which would allow only the bourgeoisie to 'open wide', but would not allow the proletariat to 'open wide' and hit back; in other words, it is a shield for such reactionary bourgeois representatives as Wu Han. The 'opening wide' in this outline is against Mao Tse-tung's thought and caters for the needs of the bourgeoisie.

4. Just when we began the counter-offensive against the wild attacks of the bourgeoisie, the authors of the outline raised the slogan: 'everyone is equal before the truth'. This is a bourgeois slogan. Completely negating the class nature of truth, they use this slogan to protect the bourgeoisie and oppose the proletariat, oppose Marxism-Leninism, and oppose Mao Tse-tung's thought. In the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, between the truth of Marxism and the fallacies of the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting classes, either the East wind prevails over the West wind or the West wind prevails over the East wind, and there is absolutely no such thing as equality. Can any equality be permitted on such basic questions as the struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, the dictatorship of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie, the dictatorship of the proletariat in the superstructure, including all the various spheres of culture, and the continued efforts of the proletariat to weed out those representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the communist party and who wave 'red flags' to oppose the red flag? For decades the old-line Social Democrats, and for over ten years the modern revisionists, have never allowed the proletariat equality with the bourgeoisie. They completely deny that the several thousand years of human history is a history of class struggle. They completely deny the class struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, the proletarian revolution against the bourgeoisie, and the dictatorship of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie. On the contrary, they are faithful lackeys of the bourgeoisie and imperialism. Together with the bourgeoisie and imperialism, they cling to the bourgeois ideology of oppression and exploitation of the proletariat and to the capitalist system, and they oppose Marxist-Leninist ideology and the socialist system. They are a bunch of counter-revolutionaries opposing the communist party and the people. Their struggle against us is one of life and death, and there is no question of equality. Therefore, our struggle against them, too, can be nothing but a life-and-death struggle, and our relation with them can in no way be one of equality. On the contrary, it is a relation of one class oppressing another, that is, the dictatorship of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie. There can be no other type of relation, such as a so called relation of equality, or of peaceful coexistence between exploiting and exploited classes, or of kindness or magnanimity.

5. The outline states: 'It is necessary not only to beat the other side politically, but also, by academic and professional standards, truly surpass and beat it by a wide margin.' This concept which makes no class distinction on academic matters is also very wrong. The truth on academic questions, the truth of Marxism-Leninism, of Mao Tse-tung's thought — which the proletariat has grasped — has already far surpassed and beaten the bourgeoisie. The formulation in the outline shows that its authors laud the so-called academic authorities of the bourgeoisie and try to boost their prestige, and that they hate and repress the militant newborn forces representative of the proletariat in academic circles.

6. Chairman Mao often says that there is no construction without destruction. Destruction means criticism and repudiation; it means revolution. It involves reasoning things out, which is construction. Put destruction first, and in the process you have construction. Marxism-Leninism, Mao Tse-tung's thought, was founded and has constantly developed in the course of the struggle to destroy bourgeois ideology. This outline, however, emphasizes that 'without construction, there can be no real and thorough destruction'. This amounts to prohibiting the destruction of bourgeois ideology and prohibiting the construction of proletarian ideology. It is diametrically opposed to Chairman Mao's thought. It runs counter to the revolutionary struggle we have been waging on the cultural front for the vigorous destruction of bourgeois ideology. And it amounts to prohibiting the proletariat from making any revolution.

7. The outline states that 'we must not behave like scholar-tyrants who are always acting arbitrarily and trying to overwhelm people with their power' and that 'we should guard against any tendency for academic workers of the left to take the road of bourgeois experts and scholar-tyrants'. What is really meant by 'scholar-tyrants'? Who are the 'scholar-tyrants'? Should the proletariat not exercise dictatorship and overwhelm the bourgeoisie? Should the academic work of the proletariat not overwhelm and eradicate that of the bourgeoisie? And if proletarian academic work overwhelms and eradicates bourgeois academic work, can this be regarded as an act of 'scholar-tyrants'? The outline directs its spearhead against the proletarian left. Obviously, its aim is to label the Marxist-Leninists 'scholar-tyrants' and thus to support the real, bourgeois scholar-tyrants and prop up their tottering monopoly position in academic circles. As a matter of fact, those party people in authority taking the capitalist road who support the bourgeois scholar-tyrants, and those bourgeois representatives who have sneaked into the party and protect the bourgeois scholar-tyrants, are indeed big party tyrants who have usurped the name of the party, have no contact with the masses, have no learning at all, and rely solely on 'acting arbitrarily and trying to overwhelm people with their power'.

8. For their own ulterior purposes, the authors of the outline demand a 'rectification campaign' against the staunch left in a deliberate effort to create confusion, blur class alignments and divert people from the target of struggle. Their main purpose in dishing up the outline in such a hurry was to attack the proletarian left. They have gone out of their way to build up dossiers about the left, tried to find all sorts of pretexts for attacking them, and intended to launch further attacks on them by means of a 'rectification campaign,' in the vain hope of disintegrating their ranks. They openly resist the policy explicitly put forward by Chairman Mao of protecting and supporting the left and giving serious attention to building up and expanding their ranks. On the other hand, they have conferred on those bourgeois representatives, revisionists, and renegades who have sneaked into the party the title of 'staunch left', and are shielding them. In these ways, they are trying to inflate the arrogance of the bourgeois rightists and to dampen the spirits of the proletarian left. They are filled with hatred for the proletariat and love for the bourgeoisie. Such is the bourgeois concept of brotherhood held by the authors of the outline.

9. At a time when the new and fierce struggle of the proletariat against the representatives of the bourgeoisie on the ideological front has only just began, and in many spheres and places has not even started — or, if it has started, most party committees concerned have a very poor understanding of the task of leadership in this great struggle and their leadership is far from conscientious and effective — the outline stresses again and again that the struggle must be conducted 'under direction', 'with prudence', 'with caution', and 'with the approval of the leading bodies concerned'. All this serves to place restrictions on the proletarian left, to impose taboos and commandments in order to tie their hands, and to place all sorts of obstacles in the way of the proletarian cultural revolution. In a word, the authors of the outline are rushing to apply the brakes and launch a counter-attack in revenge. As for the articles written by the proletarian left refuting the reactionary bourgeois 'authorities', they nurse bitter hatred against those already published and are suppressing those not yet published. But on the other hand, they give free rein to all the various ghosts and monsters who for many years have abounded in our press, radio, magazines, books, text-book, platforms, works of literature, cinema, drama, ballads and stories, the fine arts, music, the dance, etc., and in doing so they never advocate proletarian leadership or stress any need for approval. The contrast here shows where the authors of the outline really stand.

10. The present struggle centres on the issue of implementation of, or resistance to, Comrade Mao Tse-tung's line on the Cultural Revolution. Yet the outline states: 'Through this struggle, and under the guidance of Mao Tse-tung's thought, we shall open up the way for the solution of this problem (that is, "the thorough liquidation of bourgeois ideas in the realm of academic work").' Comrade Mao Tse-tung opened up the way for the proletariat on the cultural and ideological front long ago, in his On New Democracy, Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art, Letter to the Yenan Peking Opera Theatre after Seeing the Performance of 'Driven to Joint the Liangshan Rebels', On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People, and Speech at the Chinese Communist Party's National Conference on Propaganda Work. Yet the outline maintains that Mao Tse-tung's thought has not yet opened up the way for us and that the way has to be opened up anew. Using the banner of 'under the guidance of Mao Tse-tung's thought' as cover, the outline actually attempts to open up a way opposed to Mao Tse-tung's thought, that is the way of modern revisionism, the way for the restoration of capitalism.

In short, the outline opposes carrying the socialist revolution through to the end, opposes the line on the Cultural Revolution pursued by the Central Committee of the party headed by Comrade Mao Tse-tung, attacks the proletarian left and shields the bourgeois right, thereby preparing public opinion for the restoration of capitalism. It is a reflection of bourgeois ideology in the party, it is out-and-out revisionism. Far from being a minor issue, the struggle against this revisionist line is an issue of prime importance having a vital bearing on the destiny and future of our party and date, on the future complexion of our party and date, and on the world revolution.

Party committees at all levels must immediately stop carrying out the 'Outline Report on the Current Academic Discussion made by the Group of Five in Charge of the Cultural Revolution'. The whole party must follow Comrade Mao Tse-tung's instructions, hold high the great banner of the proletarian Cultural Revolution, thoroughly expose the reactionary bourgeois stand of those so-called 'academic authorities' who oppose the party and socialism, thoroughly criticize and repudiate the reactionary bourgeois ideas in the sphere of academic work, education, journalism, literature and art, and publishing, and seize the leadership in these cultural spheres. To achieve this, it is necessary at the same time to criticize and repudiate those representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the party, the government, the army, and all spheres of culture, to clear them out or transfer some of them to other positions. Above all, we must not entrust these people with the work of leading the Cultural Revolution. In fact many of them have done and are still doing such work, and this is extremely dangerous.

Those representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the party, the government, the army, and various cultural circles are a bunch of counter-revolutionary revisionists. Once conditions are ripe, they will seize political power and turn the dictatorship of the proletariat into a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Some of them we have already seen thorough, others we have not. Some are still trusted by us and are being trained as our successors, persons like Khrushchev, for example, who are still nestling beside us. Party committees at all levels must pay full attention to this matter.

This circular is to be sent, together with the erroneous document issued by the Central Committee on 12 February 1960, down to the level of county party committees, party committees in the cultural organizations, and party committees at regimental level in the army. These committees are asked to discuss which of the two documents is wrong and which is correct, their understanding of these documents, and their achievements and mistake.

by John Roderick
Published 13 August 2006
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

[AP Special Correspondent John Roderick reported for the AP for 39 years, mainly in Asia]

Forty years ago, Chinese communist chairman Mao Zedong launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. It's an unpleasant anniversary that official Beijing will not celebrate and most Chinese would rather forget.

Mao's objective: to purge the party of its moderate, pragmatic faction, which he said was leading China away from Marxism and toward capitalism and to make himself unassailable leader.

The bloody, chaotic decade between 1966 and 1976 which ensued was among the most violent, divisive and shameful in China's long, illustrious history.

It erupted in the summer of 1966 when Mao called on the youth to mount a new revolution. Before it ended with his death in September 1976, untold thousands died and millions were tortured, imprisoned or humiliated, mostly by those young shock-troops, the Red Guards.

China was at its most isolated. The fewer than a dozen Western correspondents in Beijing were hobbled by fear of expulsion if they displeased their communist hosts. Americans were excluded due to Cold War enmity.

The daily reporting of these events by a small band of American "China watchers" in Tokyo and in the British colony of Hong Kong was a product of resourcefulness, imagination and hard work. I was one of them.

We were assisted in separating fact from fiction throughout the continuing turmoil by an unlikely source: the U.S. government.

At the same time that the U.S. was feeding American correspondents truths, half-truths and lies at the daily "five o'clock follies," the Vietnam war briefings in Saigon, it made available to China watchers a vast store of information on the turbulent state of Chinese affairs.

It arrived sporadically by mail. Inside the packets were page after page of reports culled from radio broadcasts, newspapers and secret agents operating inside the mainland. They were translated by scores of interpreters in the enlarged U.S. consulate in Hong Kong.

American reporters were "China watchers" from a distance because Beijing, angry at U.S. refusal to recognize the People's Republic in 1949, said we were no longer welcome. When Zhou Enlai invited Western reporters to return to Beijing in 1956 Washington refused to let us go.

With Europeans, Canadians and Australians in Beijing when the cultural purge broke, Americans were the odd man out.

Being excluded turned out surprisingly to be a plus. Unlike our Western colleagues in Beijing, we were free to write what we pleased without worrying about official displeasure and had ready access to the valuable consulate files and other information, which they did not.

It was a heady experience. We would write stories about purges of senior politicians and other unreported events three months old in China but new to the rest of the world and see them lead page one of American newspapers the next day.

The raw news was often readily available. Each side in the chaotic struggle published pamphlets, put up wall posters or went on the stump in the war to win the minds of the masses. If one side suppressed the news, the opposition dug it up and broadcast it.

Interpreting it was the challenge. Aside from U.S. government translations, we interviewed returning travelers, commissioned others to write stories for us and carefully monitored the Chinese and English versions of the communist New China News Agency.

Reading the wooden, official prose of the New China News Agency was a test of endurance. One had to remain alert throughout the exercise because buried deep in the text sometimes lay guarded clues to an important development-the promotion, demotion or death of a high-ranking official.

The tragedies of the Cultural Revolution touched me personally. Allowed back into Beijing in 1971 with the U.S. pingpong team, I found the delightful capital that I had known in the 1940s reduced to a gray, grim city wracked by fear and uncertainty.

I was dismayed to learn some of my Chinese friends had been punished for knowing me, now a hated American.

Even from afar, when I learned that leaders such as President Liu Shaoqi, former defense minister Peng Dehuai and the colorful general He Long were tortured and killed, my heart sank.

I had gotten to know many of them in the 1940s, during seven months reporting for AP in Yanan, their revolutionary capital next to the Gobi desert. I saw them not as communists but as humans driven by a desire to end poverty, plagues, famines and inequality in China - goals which had turned to ashes under Mao's imperial, intolerant and vindictive rule.

Those objectives have nearly come true as a result of the two-and-a-half decades of free-market reforms enacted by those pragmatists in the party who survived Mao's purges.

Enjoying an economic boom unparalleled in history and anticipating the international acclaim it expects from the 2008 Beijing Olympics, it is no wonder that China wants to forget the sordidness and pain of the Cultural Revolution.

The Communist Party has a more pressing reason to ignore it. Recalling its terrors and inhumanity would call into question the integrity of Mao himself, still regarded as the father of communist China.

The author Ji-li Jiang, whom I met recently, had been a teenager in Shanghai when Mao launched his radical movement. She and her family suffered because of their landlord origins, but still she kept her faith in Mao, until after his death.

"We finally learned that the whole cultural revolution had been part of a power struggle at the highest levels of the Party," she wrote in her 1997 memoir "Red Scarf Girl." "Our leader had taken advantage of our trust and loyalty to manipulate the whole country. This is the most frightening lesson of the Cultural Revolution."

Chinese Title: 革命不该被纪念
by Ma Jian (马建)
(Ma Jian is the author of the acclaimed memoir 'Red Dust' (红尘) and of the novel 'The Noodlemaker' (面条师傅), among other books. After many years in exile, he recently returned to China.)

Published: May 2006
Project Syndicate Commentary
[Project Syndicate is a not-for-profit international association of quality newspapers devoted to:
1. bringing distinguished voices from across the world to local audiences everywhere;
2. strengthening the independence of printed media in transition and developing countries;
3. upgrading their journalistic, editorial, and business capacities.]

Forty years ago Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution. The Propaganda Department of China’s ruling Communists have now issued an order banning any kind of reviews or commemoration of this disaster as part of the Party’s bid to make the Chinese forget about that lost decade.

But in condemning the Japanese for neglect of the Nanjing massacre during the Second World War, Chinese officials proclaim that forgetting the past betrays the people. But. for the Chinese, the Cultural Revolution was itself a betrayal, one that continues to this day. All the terrible events since then – the Tiananmen Square massacre, persecution of Falun Gong, and repression of civic activists – are the evil fruit of that un-cleansed original sin.

The Cultural Revolution marked the climax of class extermination practiced by the Party during the 1960’s. The survivors of all the previous political movements, now enthralled by Mao’s personality cult, were free of all constraint, able to kill and seek revenge with impunity. As Mao summed up this psychological state: “Now is a time of upheaval, and I’m just happy about the chaos.” In his instruction called “Regarding Biting Incidents,” Mao asserted: “So what? Good people get to know each other by biting each other and it serves bad people right if they are bitten by good ones…”

Friends of my generation invariably comment when I mention that I was born on August 18: “Hey, that was the anniversary of Chairman Mao first receiving the Red Guards.” But the following months and years have been selectively forgotten, particularly by the Red Guards themselves. These are people who, like the Hitler Youth, turned over their bloody page of history and never looked back.

According to Wang Youqin (王友琴), author of Victims of the Cultural Revolution (文革受难者), after Mao received the Red Guards and instructed them in the “militant fight,” more than 1,700 people were beaten, drowned, or scalded to death. Another 100,000 were driven from their homes.

Within months, an all-out movement, under the banner of “revolutionize Chinese culture” and dedicated to the aim of “breaking away from old culture, old traditions, old thoughts, and old customs,” was raging throughout the country. Those who had been born “landlords, rich farmers, reactionaries, bad elements, and rightists” were among the first to be victimized. Desperate to save their lives, families voluntarily smashed their properties and pulped their ancient paintings and calligraphy.

Episodes of “burning books and burying intellectuals alive” had occurred before, but none was more radical than the destructive force unleashed by Mao. Soon, ancient sites would be ruined. Corpses of historic figures, such as Zhang Zhidong, a high-ranking official in the Qing Dynasty, were exhumed, with the decaying bodies left hanging in trees.

Eventually, anybody – from the President to average citizens – could be criticized, labeled an “ox-demon and snake-spirit,” persecuted, and listed for death. People killed others to safeguard Mao, and those who were executed shouted “Long Live Chairman Mao” on their way to death.

In Guangxi province, where some of the worst violence occurred, nearly 100,000 people were killed during July and August 1968. In the official “Memorabilia of the Cultural Revolution in Guangxi” (广西文革大事记), many infants appear on the death list. The author Zheng Yi (郑义) reported that in Wuxuan County alone, more than 100 people were eaten, because devouring enemies was the only way to prove one’s love for Mao. Livers, eyes, or brains were removed while victims were still alive.

Mao set off yet another wave of persecutions in 1968. In countless “suicides,” many people were simply bitten to death, or took their own lives when the suffering became too much to bear. In Beijing, deaths occurred mostly in areas wuth trees and lakes. Wang Youqin reports that on November 4, four bodies were found floating in the lake of the Summer Palace. A total of 63 people were killed at the prestigious Beijing University.

Mao died aspiring to exterminate Chinese culture. His Cultural Revolution alone killed as many as two million people, shattered traditions, uprooted spiritual and ethical values, and tore apart family ties and communal loyalties. People who experienced it seal off the memory, for the pain, worse than a bullet to the heart, overwhelms souls.

Worst of all, Mao’s crimes against civilization, unlike those of, say, Hitler, are ongoing. The Communist Party still uses his brainwashing methods, and his legacy continues to be officially revered. His portrait and body remain on display in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, and his face appears on banknotes in the wallet of every Chinese, many of whom saw parents, children, and other loved ones die under his knife.

The Chinese people, unsurprisingly, regard politics with a mixture of caution and dread. Public figures spend a lot of time and effort to avoid offending the Party, openly endorsing indifference as the foremost tool of survival. Last month, I watched a TV show featuring Han Meilin (韩美林), a famous painter. In his closing remarks, he announced his words of wisdom to viewers: “Long live those who don’t care!”

Han Meilin was badly persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. His declaration was greeted by a roar of applause from the studio audience.

Original Chinese Article