Jaivin Bombard the Headquarters!

The Cultural Revolution in China
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-913083-71-7
Verlag: Old Street Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 2, 128 Seiten

Reihe: Great Events

'Excellent... surefooted and perceptive, enlivened by a wealth of vignettes and anecdotes which bring to life the dramatic and frequently horrific events that have played a seminal role in forming Chinese society as it exists today' PHILIP SHORT, author of Mao: A Life Mao launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966 to purge his critics and blood a new generation of fighters. Ten years later, almost two million people had been killed and much of China's heritage, from precious manuscripts to ancient temples, had been obliterated. The shadow of these terrible years lies heavily over the twenty-first-century nation. The history of this period is so toxic that China's rulers have gone to great lengths to bury it - while a few brave men and women risk their freedom to uncover the truth. For as both they and the Party know, to grasp the history of the Cultural Revolution is to understand much about China today. Bombard the Headquarters! is not just Mao's story. It's the unforgettable stories of countless individuals, mass manias, of sacred mangos, and spectacular falls from grace. At once rigorous and readable, brief yet teeming with colourful detail, this is a marvel of historical storytelling. 'A beautifully concise account that makes sense of a hugely complex event in modern Chinese history. Linda Jaivin puts her formidable, deep experience both of Chinese history and language to excellent use, conveying in 100 pages what most would struggle to achieve in a thousand' KERRY BROWN, author of China Incorporated

LINDA JAIVIN is the acclaimed author of The Shortest History of China and The Monkey and the Dragon, as well as other works of non-fiction, novels, essays and literary translations from Chinese. She has lived in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Beijing, and has been writing about Chinese politics, culture and history for more than four decades.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Jaivin, Linda

Leseproben

Part One

1949–1966: The Buildup

Throughout history, reactionary forces threatened with extinction have waged a final, desperate struggle against the revolutionary force.

Mao Zedong

It wasn’t the first time Mao had threatened to blow up the Party over which he presided.

After the Communists established the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Chiang Kai-shek fled with his government, army and followers to Taiwan. Decades of misrule, endemic corruption, foreign invasion and civil war had left China with a shattered infrastructure and dysfunctional bureaucracy. Its people were traumatised and poverty was widespread. Eighty percent of the population over the age of 15 was illiterate. There was an urgent need for hospitals, clinics and schools. Mao wanted to transform both the material conditions of the country and its ideological superstructure while eliminating all resistance, even passive resistance, to the new regime, and quickly.

Legacy of misrule

The Communist Party had developed two basic models for revolutionary action, both of which required mass participation and promoted ideological indoctrination. The first emerged from its land reform campaigns of the late 1940s, when activists had mobilised poor and landless peasants not just to seize and redistribute land held by wealthy landholders, but to hold public ‘struggle sessions’ where they ‘spoke bitterness’ (sùku) about the past and confronted landowners over the exploitation of their labour. If they beat and sometimes even murdered their former oppressors, well, such was the nature of class struggle. Revolution, Mao had famously remarked, was not a dinner party.

The second model was that of the thought reform campaign, aimed at eliminating ‘erroneous thinking’ among the Party membership, educated people and government workers. This involved a rigorous and often brutal process of ‘criticism and self-criticism’, also known as ‘struggle’ (dòuzheng). The first years of the 1950s saw the completion of land reform across the country and a series of thought reform campaigns to eliminate bureaucratism and other old ways of thinking and doing things.

In 1956, Mao called on the people to tell the Party how they thought it was doing: ‘Let one hundred flowers bloom!’ Although taken aback by the avalanche of criticism that followed, he may well have intended, as the Chinese saying has it, to ‘lure the snakes out of their cave’. One year later, he launched the Anti-Rightist Campaign. Overseen by Party General Secretary Deng Xiaoping, it consigned hundreds of thousands of people to labour camps, many for answering the call to speak out the year before, and created a new category of political enemies: ‘rightists’.

The Great Leap Forward

In 1958, Mao launched his most ambitious campaign to date, the Great Leap Forward. The idea was that radical collectivisation and mass mobilisation would propel China straight into true communism. Its economy would surpass Great Britain’s and catch up with that of the United States. The whole country was organised into People’s Communes. Even ploughs and the water buffalo that pulled them became communal property. The Party ordered the citizenry ‘go all out and aim high’ to quadruple agricultural and industrial production, encouraging measures such as the extremely dense planting of single crops and the sacrifice of family woks and metal window frames to ‘backyard furnaces’ to produce steel.

Mao excoriated the scientists and other experts who predicted catastrophic economic collapse – correctly, as it turned out. Realising that the only welcome news was good news, local officials and state media boasted of fancifully high harvests and industrial output. In the summer of 1959, the Party convened at the mountain retreat of Lushan. There, Peng Dehuai, defence minister and Mao’s ally of three decades, warned of the ‘winds of exaggeration’ and impending food shortages, saying politics shouldn’t override ‘economic principles’. Mao was livid. Though theoretically part of a collective leadership, he was used to calling the shots. He sacked Peng Dehuai and threatened that if the People’s Liberation Army was unhappy about his decision then he, Mao, would raise a new army and overthrow his own government. He replaced Peng with the wily military man Lin Biao, of whose loyalty he felt assured.

The mass famine that ensued would claim tens of millions of lives by 1961, killing somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of the entire population of 650 million. Natural disasters contributed to the death toll, as did a rancorous split with the Soviet Union under Khrushchev that saw the Soviets halt all aid to China, but the Great Leap Forward had clearly propelled China towards disaster. Mao, personally insulated from the worst effects of famine by the Party’s system of ‘special provisions’ for its leaders – and spared the worst news by subordinates who understood the price of truth-telling – remained unmoved. Finally, other members of the Chinese leadership took matters into their own hands.

Mass famine

1960–61: Capitalist Roaders, Soviet Revisionists and an Incident on a Train

In 1960, Deng Xiaoping learned that the provincial Party secretary of Anhui province, faced with potentially ten million deaths in his province alone, had assigned parcels of communal land to individual peasants. After providing the state with their assigned quota of grain, farmers could keep any excess for personal consumption or trade at local ‘free markets’. They could even raise a pig or two for consumption and sale.

Deng, President Liu Shaoqi and others began promoting Anhui’s ‘field responsibility system’ more broadly, helping to mitigate the famine. Limited financial incentives were introduced to the industrial sector as well. The economy began slowly to recover. Questioned if such a policy could still be called socialist, Deng Xiaoping allegedly replied: ‘It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white. If it catches mice, it’s a good cat.’ This would later be cited as proof that Deng was a ‘capitalist roader’.

Under pressure, Mao initially agreed to the field responsibility system, although he felt that it betrayed his revolutionary vision. He also believed that the quotidian tasks of government were subsuming the Party’s revolutionary spirit. If revolution was not a continuous process, he argued, it would become inert and the triple evils of ‘feudalism, capitalism and revisionism’ would take root once more.

When Mao spoke of revisionism, he was talking about Khrushchev, who had denounced Stalin’s personality cult, promoted the principle of collective leadership, freed victims of Stalinist purges from labour camps and reinvigorated the Soviet Union’s consumer economy. Such policies offended Mao ideologically as much as they threatened him personally. In the 1950s, the Party had promised its citizens that ‘the Soviet Union’s today is our tomorrow’. Yet by the start of the 1960s, the Soviet Union of the day had come to represent Mao’s worst nightmare. He would not tolerate ‘Khrushchevs’ and ‘phony communism’ within the Party he had helped to found.

Worse still, Khrushchev preached peaceful coexistence with the United States – those American imperialists whom Mao considered the ‘sworn enemies of the people of the world’. In the early 1950s, Washington had signed a mutual defence treaty with Chiang Kai-shek, who continued to threaten to ‘retake the mainland’ from Taiwan. By the 1960s, the US army had military bases in South Korea, Japan and the Philippines. It trained and armed Tibetan guerrilla fighters and provided them with bases in Nepal. The Americans were increasingly involved in Vietnam as well. And now Russia and India were becoming friendly. ‘Peaceful co-existence’ sounded to Mao more like the encirclement of China by hostile forces.

Sworn enemies

Early in 1961, Mao turned his focus on his enemies within. Travelling south in his special railway carriage, he stopped in Wuhan to meet with the city’s Party secretary. While he was out and about, members of his entourage and train crew took a stroll. In his memoir, The Private Life of Chairman Mao, Mao’s personal physician Li Zhisui recalled that among their number were several of the young women whom Mao kept around for his sexual pleasure. Mao had been an early champion of women’s rights, even appropriating a woman’s voice in a 1919 essay to complain: ‘The shameless men, the villainous men, make us into their playthings…’2 His behaviour was often at odds with his ideals, however, and his proclivities had long been a source of tension between him and his fourth wife, Jiang Qing. They were also an open secret among his entourage.

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