CHAPTER 7: WHOSE IDENTITY, WHOSE CONSTRUCTS AND WHOSE INTEREST? THE SYNTHESIS OF PRIMARY AND SECONDARY DATA IN
4.7 China’s Cultural Revolution
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but other players and powers interpreted this interest in opposite ways.38 Another episode during which China sought to rid itself of malcontents and preserve a pure identity was referred to as the Cultural Revolution – another controversial period that tainted China’s identity and antagonized many politicians, some within China itself.
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Khrushchev had denounced as a regrettable legacy of the Stalinist era was being cultivated in China but cleverly laced with communist vocabulary. Mao was scathed by the criticism elicited by the Great Leap Forward and had to turn to impressionable youths (Lynch 2004) to play a more authoritative role in sustaining his idea of a permanent revolution. The most obvious method of instituting a socialist country with the hope of engendering communism was to purge, from the ranks of the CCP, those who were denounced as capitalist roaders and/or revisionists.
Mao accused the Soviet Union of revisionism which he thought might ultimately lead to capitalism. The Cultural Revolution was thus partly aimed at fighting revisionism in China and obliterating possible conditions for its future emergence (Ahmad 1967).
Prior to the effective onset of the Cultural Revolution, Mao maintained the view that though the masses were the ultimate arbiter of leadership in communist countries, they still needed central leadership to guide them. Implicitly, this meant Mao still believed in collective and correct leadership. However, still harbouring the humiliation of criticism or reluctance to espouse his thought by certain CCP members, in 1965 Mao made a complete turn and averred that the masses can still make history without centralized leadership as a conduit. Mao was obliquely hinting that, albeit purging certain or all high ranking members of the CCP, presumably except him, class struggle could still be sustained. One of the most senior CCP members to help Mao on this quest was his fervent follower Lin Biao. He also enlisted the force of Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, Wang Hongweng and Mao’s wife Jian Qing. These formed the infamous Gang of Four (a term coined by Mao himself) that was used to great effect in denouncing perceived anti- Maoists and driving a good number to either death or suicide (Lynch 2004).
The purge was far-reaching and some high ranking members of the CCP fell victim. Many of these, like Deng Xiaoping, were accused of being “capitalist roaders” (Harvey 2008). Thus while intellectual reasons like Mao’s understanding of class struggle might have played a part in providing grounds for the Cultural Revolution, “political and psychological” (Schram 2002:475) influences on Mao, especially his interests to purge his critics were far more significant. Mao seemed resolved to destroy the structure of the party for which he had dedicated more than forty years just to liquidate his enemies, both real and imagined. The Cultural Revolution went on to divide people into two groups, the radicals who sought the institution of doctrinaire socialism and the revisionists who hankered for some change which effectively meant a different
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interpretation of Marxism-Leninism from the one Mao professed. The Red Guards40 were unleashed on people that Mao and his acolytes thought represented the old order and whose character was not fecund for socialist progress (Hutchings 2001).41 Thus, in addition to some members of the CCP, intellectuals and artists were also victims of the Cultural Revolution. Mao regarded intellectuals and artists as the national bourgeoisie which had sided with landlords and non-communists. However, he thought that they could still be converted because they were “less feudal than the landlord class and not so comprador” (Mao 1965:155). Mao’s brand of socialism was from thence almost taken as divine fiat. Every other sector of the country, including economic progress, had to take a back seat to Mao’s ideology.
The Cultural Revolution also traversed the Sino-Soviet split, and as has been said earlier, the Cultural Revolution was also aimed at forestalling the importation of post-Stalinist leadership style and interpretation of Marxism-Leninism of the USSR in China. The excesses that started during the Great Leap and continued during the Cultural Revolution were similar to Stalin’s Gulags and showed just how ready Mao and his close followers were to jettison anything in favour of ideology. Furthermore, the eventual rapprochement between China and the United States that begun in 1971 and culminated in President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 was a curious product of the Cultural Revolution, the Sino-Soviet split and the Taiwan question.42 On one side, this development could be seen as China’s instinctual desire to antagonize the Soviet Union.
The attitude that China took towards the Soviet Union during this time was interpreted by the South African Communist Party as an affront on the Soviet Union which was the bulwark of the international struggle against imperialism (African Communist 1979:6). This development could also be interpreted as China’s toning down on ideological sentiment. This perspective brings an
40 This was a group of youth who were organised with Mao’s urging and encouragement to defend socialist China against reactionaries. They took up regalia similar to that of the military and they organised other youth to rebel against who they considered as reactionaries. Students were also influenced by this group to rise against their teachers.
41 This in effect meant the obliteration of China’s civilization. The reasoning behind the Revolution was that a pure revolution could only be founded after the elimination of vestiges of pre-communist China. With the purges of party members that followed, it could be argued that the old order that Mao and Red Guards wanted to be rid of had taken a broader proportion – it now included the order that the CCP had hitherto maintained (Schram 2002:476)
42 The third, and not less important factor in the improvement of Sino-American relations was the decision of the United States in 1971 to support the PRC’s bid to assume the permanent seat of the UN Security Council.
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interesting dimension to what exactly the Cultural Revolution was supposed to be. Was it aimed at enforcing China’s identity as a pure socialist state and fulfil the interests of ending imperialism and defeating capitalism? Or was the Cultural Revolution really aimed at destroying Mao’s nemeses locally but being open to external powers that did not cause an immediate threat to Mao’s monopoly of power? Or, did the rapprochement mean that China had realized the value of interacting with the United States (see Rosen 2016), a country it had initially referred to as a capitalist country with its paper tigers (atomic bombs)? It was clear that the Cultural Revolution was aimed at obliterating opposition to Mao’s thought. The rapprochement with the United States was partly aimed at mutual recognition between the parties involved as significant players in global affairs. It was also arguably China’s way of deepening Sino-Soviet animosity. China incurred the ire of certain movements because of its improved relations with the United States.
The South African Communist Party accused China of having “abandoned the fight to end capitalist exploitation of the human and material resources of the world and thrown in its lot with forces of imperialism, colonialism and racism” (African Communist 1979:6). This statement was in a way accusing China of being a revisionist state, the same imprecation that China had directed at the Soviet Union.
A possible explanation of the confusion engendered by China during the Cultural Revolution is that a country’s identity and interest cannot be frozen into an unchanging category. The fact that China during Mao emphasized socialist ideology cannot be controverted. During the Cold War this fact put China effectively in the same bloc as the Soviet Union. This occasioned certain intersections of interests. However, on a domestic front, Mao was smarting from the broadsides launched against him after the Great Leap forward. To Mao’s disposition, this criticism was associated with taking an anti-socialist route and hence the Cultural Revolution had to rescue the communist revolution from peril. International factors, like the Taiwan question and China’s fight to gain the permanent seat of the United Nations Security Council meant that China had to court certain powers, from Africa included, that could play a pivotal role in isolating Taiwan and acknowledging China as the de jure representative of the Chinese people. This last question explains China’s curious international relations. In 1972 China managed to get its permanent seat at the United Nations Security Council but the Taiwan question persists to date and has been used as the lynchpin of China’s diplomatic relations with any nation.
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In sum, the Cultural Revolution was a period that had numerous consequences on China, both nationally and internationally. At a national level, the era of the CCP as a collective and central Party was vastly undermined by the activities of the Gang of Four and the Red Guards. CCP members such as Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping who had mustered the courage to voice concerns about the excesses of the Red Guards and the extent to which universities had been disturbed were ostracized as harbouring bourgeoisie and capitalist tendencies, a serious charge in a system that claimed to be fiercely defending socialist ideals (Lüsted 2010).
Education and other activities that were seen as vestiges of a corrupt past were disrupted and destroyed by the Red Guards. The role of censorship given to Mao’s wife - Jian Qing - was used to stifle anything that could not be directly linked to socialism or had no value in a proletarian society. Creativity was thus stifled and, ironically, instead of enhancing Chinese culture, Jian’s severe censorship destroyed it. In retrospect the Cultural Revolution could be judged as China’s self-inflicted disaster engendered by a helmsman’s unremitting pursuit for absolute personal power. The destruction wrought by the Red Guards was to such an extent that by 1970 industry in China was acutely affected. There was a growing realisation that the Red Guards had to be tamed and that defending the revolution, whatever that meant, had to be done by the People’s Liberation Army – the PLA – who were real soldiers.
On an international level, the period of the Cultural Revolution served to present China as a bellicose country and a Marxist-Leninist extremist. Mao’s own insistence on anarchy rather than order and war rather than peaceful coexistence between the socialist East and the capitalist West undermined China’s standing in the eyes of certain global players, including some who shared China’s resentment towards capitalism and imperialism. By taking a hardline approach towards imperialism and capitalism, China was openly advising those that were fighting against these two things to do it in a classical Marxist fashion – by employing violence. A number of organisations in Africa that were fighting colonialism during the 1960s were not persuaded by Mao’s insistence on violence and what Chou En-Lai might have meant when he declared Africa ripe for revolution. As aforementioned, South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) and Zambia’s UNIP were not formatively inclined towards violent struggle. Indeed, the ANC’s option for violent struggle in 1961 was taken after almost half a century of non-violent advocacy. This fact
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exposes what could safely be called a fundamental difference between Mao’s predisposition to violent struggle and the inherent non-violent nature of certain liberation movements.
Even though ideological sentiment does not currently play the pivotal role that it once played during Mao’s time in China’s international relations, a significant part of the international system still retains the picture of China that it had taken up during the Cultural Revolution. This is a picture of country that denies its people basic human rights, democracy as understood in the West, and harbours a deep skepticism of the world outside China. Even though some of these traits might be discernible to many an observer, even more than four decades after the Cultural Revolution, China has undergone some marked changes, mainly economic, from the Maoist era.
With the immense power that Mao wielded over China, the most important break from his past was his death, which came in September of 1976. The ensuing sections of this chapter look at China after Mao and how it has postured itself on the international scene.