China's Cultural Revolution

In 1958, Communist China – the full name is “The People’s Republic of China” – was barely nine years old when its founder, Mao Zedong, decided to rapidly change it from an ancient agricultural society to a modern industrial state.

If the project was outsized and over-ambitious, so was its author: Mao, in addition to being a revolutionary, a warrior, and an ideologue, was an unabashed advocate of violence and one of the most powerful and prolific dictators of the 20th Century. In his book, Red Star Over China, Edgar Snow, who knew Mao well, described his achievements as “perhaps unique...in China’s 3,000 years of written history.”

Mao’s attempt to order a quick transformation of a country of 1.4 billion was also unique, but it turned out to be a catastrophic failure. By 1976, when he died, his modernization campaign resulted in the annihilation of an estimated 30 million to 45 million of his countrymen.

Mao’s first step was to launch a so-called “Great Leap Forward,” a 1958 program that called for a drastic state seizure of China’s farms and boosting of industrial production. The venture, which happened to coincide with three years of drought, was brutally executed by Communist Party cadres with complete disregard for its enormous human and economic costs.

The result of “Great Leap Forward” was a 25 percent decrease in China’s grain production. When the Communist enforcers confiscated the meager harvests to feed the party elites and workers in the cities, there ensued a mass starvation that wiped out entire populations of thousands of villages. In 1961, the program was abandoned after ruining China’s precarious economy and without accomplishing any of its objectives.

According to Chinese official archives, the total death toll of the “Great Leap Forward” was 15 million, but Western experts have put the carnage up to three times as high. One of them, Dutch historian Frank Dikötter, wrote that “coercion, terror, and systematic violence were the foundation of the Great Leap Forward” and it “motivated one of the most deadly mass killings of human history.”

To restore his prestige as a reformer, Mao launched in 1966 another, even more ambitious program for changing China. He accused his alleged party enemies of sabotaging his drive to modernize the country, and called on the Chinese youth to carry out a cultural revolution by defeating “diehard bourgeois elements” and enforcing the ideological purity of his regime.

The Red Guards and the Little Book of Mao’s Thoughts

Mao’s call to “rebel against the system” fell on the receptive ears of a generation of Chinese that, as a result of aggressive propaganda, worshipped him as a leader of superhuman wisdom, abilities and powers. Within days after he spoke, a group of middle school students in Beijing took the name of “Chairman Mao’s Red Guards” and started a movement that was rapidly embraced by millions of youngsters who followed Mao’s bidding with a fanatic obedience and energy. Dressed in old military fatigues and wearing red armbands, the zealots poured out of their homes and classrooms and set out to purge China of “revisionists” and anyone else they deemed to be “backward” or insufficiently enthusiastic about their leader. Their ideological guidebook was a slender collection of Mao’s maxims that captured the violent spirit of his rule. Titled “The Little Book of Mao’s Thoughts,” it became the second most widely printed work after the Bible, and included Mao’s most prominent teachings. For example:

“Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun;”

“Communism is not love. Communism is a hammer which we use to crush the enemy;”

“Politics is war without bloodshed, while war is politics with bloodshed;”

“War can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun,” and

“The atom bomb is a paper tiger which the United States reactionaries use to scare people. It looks terrible, but in fact it isn’t.”

Armed with this list of unquestioned verities, tens of millions of these crusaders roamed the cities and countryside, persecuting the intelligentsia and denouncing what had remained of China’s ancient culture. University teachers, prominent scientists, artists and other members of the hated “elites” were marched out of their offices and homes to be executed or sent to do forced labor on the collective farms.

Millions of others were subjected to a wide range of abuses including public humiliation, arbitrary imprisonment, torture, sustained harassment, and seizure of property. A large segment of the urban population was forcibly displaced, most notably by their transfer to rural regions during a phase of the “Cultural Revolution” called “the Down to the Countryside Movement.” Historical relics and artifacts were destroyed, and cultural and religious sites were ransacked.

Praised by Mao, who mingled with about one million of the “Red Guards” when they came to meet him in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, the youngsters became increasingly belligerent and blind to China’s realities. At the height of their rampage, they even looted the barracks and seized the weapons of a Chinese army unit they regarded as “unreliable.”

An estimated 11 million strong, the “Red Guards” eventually proclaimed as their goal, “First, [to] make China red from inside out, and then [to] help the working people of other countries make the world red...And then, the whole universe.”

Aftermath

Obsessively secretive, no Chinese regime has allowed a full disclosure of the enormous human and material damage done by the “Great Leap Forward” and the “Cultural Revolution.” Mao officially ended the latter in 1969, but the “Red Guards” really ran out of steam only after Mao’s death in 1976.

Regarding a retribution for the crimes of the era, official annals mention that thousands of the former “Red Guards” were sent out for “reeducation by the peasants” – an inadequate but in a way fitting punishment for what had been done to millions of alleged “bourgeois revisionists.”

In his book China’s Fate, Edward A. Gargan, a journalist and expert on China, summed up the results of the Red Guard’s decade-long rampage like this:

“At the end of the Cultural Revolution, China was, simply put, a police state in which the Chinese people had no individual rights, no control over their lives, over what they could read, where they worked, where their children went to school. Worse, the state sought to control the very substance of what people thought.”

The grapes of wrath planted by Mao’s blunders ripened in the spring of 1989, when a new generation of Chinese youth launched a massive movement demanding democracy – only to be defeated in a blood bath on June 4, known as “the massacre on the Tiananmen Square.”