Written by Edie Christian

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The twentieth century was arguably defined by the ideological struggle between communism in the East, and capitalism in the West. Second only to the Soviet Union (1917 – 1991), the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was one of the largest communist superpowers in the world. Established by the 1949 Revolution, the PRC was spearheaded by Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Mao Zedong, who ushered the country under the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution lasted from 1966 until Mao’s death in 1976, with the aim of purging bourgeois elements from Chinese society — this period quickly descended into a decade of violence and persecution, explicitly ordered by the ruling figures in the Chinese government. 

Prior to the advent of communism, China had been ruled by dynasties rooted almost entirely in Confucianist philosophy. Thought to have been born in 551 BC, Confucius advocated for primarily ethical principles such as morality, justice, and a respect for elders and authority; these traditional values became innately entwined with Chinese society. Mao saw the traditions of Confucianism as a threat to communism. His subsequent hatred of these traditions escalated dramatically during the Cultural Revolution into a violence towards anything that predated him. Furthermore, the famine that arose from the 1958 Great Leap Forward (China’s first economic five-year-plan) resulted in the deaths of over thirty million. The subsequent resigning of Mao as President—although he remained chairman of the CCP—signified that Mao was losing respect in government, and therefore needed to re-establish himself. As well as this, the growing tensions of the Cold War and international struggle between capitalism and communism resulted in a worsening paranoia surrounding bourgeois elements, both in the CCP and wider Chinese society — the amalgamation of these factors paved the way for the inception of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. 

Mao’s first declaration of the revolution condemned the party for having been invaded by ‘representatives of the bourgeoisie’ and ‘counter-revolutionary revisionists’. Countless Red Guards (a paramilitary student organisation controlled by Mao) assembled in ‘criticism sessions’ to attack both these revisionists and the Four Olds of Confucianist thought: customs, culture, habits, and ideas. The main agent of the early Cultural Revolution was China’s young people — one of Mao’s first actions was to shut the schools, urging Red Guards to spend their time attacking traditional values instead. Symbols of ancient China such as churches, shrines, and homes were destroyed, and the chaos quickly escalated. Party officials, teachers, and parents—who were seen as positions of authority and therefore traditional—were publicly shamed and beaten during ‘struggle sessions’. These included the denunciation of class enemies, with the aim to create a feeling of crusade amongst the spectators. Many were even murdered or forced to commit suicide; the death toll from the Cultural Revolution is a highly classified state secret in China, although estimates range from five hundred thousand to two million.  

The ostensible aim of the revolution was to solidify the status of communism on the world stage, but a key factor was to strengthen Mao’s own position. Cults of personality, in which leaders are deified and seen as infallible, were central to communist states in the twentieth century. The Maoist cult proliferated during the Cultural Revolution with the ubiquitous wearing of Mao badges, as well as the distribution of his ‘Little Red Book’, which contained extracts from his writings and speeches. It became a virtual requirement to own and carry a copy as a symbol of revolutionary thought. It was produced by Mao’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA), and some estimate its publication to be in the billions of copies, making it one of the most mass-produced pieces of propaganda of all time. As the Red Guards descended into further disorder, they divided into distinct Maoist factions — historians have described this period as a ‘state of virtual civil war’, so much so that Mao recognised its severity in 1968. The youth were subsequently sent to the countryside for ‘re-education’, with Mao ordering the army to retake control and turning China into a quasi-military dictatorship until around 1971. From 1971 to 1976, the Revolution wound down, culminating in Mao’s death and the succession of Deng Xiaoping as leader. The Cultural Revolution ultimately failed; the Chinese economy was severely damaged, with Deng’s government placing a specific focus upon education and economic development and moving away from revolutionary fervour for the first time since 1949.  

The short-term effects of the Cultural Revolution were undoubtedly horrific — millions of people were imprisoned, tortured, and killed, as well as countless books burned, and private collections destroyed. In the long term, Mao’s legacy is difficult to evaluate; he is still loved and respected by many Chinese as their liberator from Japanese occupation and Western imperialism following the nineteenth-century Opium Wars. Whilst the CCP conceded that the Cultural Revolution was a ‘grave blunder’, Deng Xiaoping stated in 1981 that Mao’s “contributions to the Chinese revolution far outweigh his mistakes” — over eighty-five per cent of respondents in a 2013 poll agreed. It is a generally accepted truth that the Party is unable to cut Mao off completely without undermining their own authority, as well as raising questions about leaders’ inability to stop him. Whilst he has been credited with improving literacy rates and the status of women, his economic incompetency and deification resulted in the deaths of millions and the cultural destruction of China. 

It has been argued that current President of the PRC Xi Jinping has contributed to the suppression of this history in order to avoid the bitterness and anger that might arise. In this way, its replacement has been described as a ‘small nostalgia industry’ — this is certainly reflected in the recent growth of Maoism amongst young people who focus on its theoretical idealism rather than its applied brutality. A study by the Washington Post analysed the collective memory of Maoist China and found that many share a vision of the period as a ‘bygone halcyon era’. Maoist nostalgia is found to perhaps arise from the idea that Chinese society has ‘lost a sense of purpose under market capitalism’ — although people are individually nostalgic, the government has rewritten the narrative by withholding statistics and disallowing citizens from writing detailed accounts of the period. The Chinese have railed against Western criticism of this official censorship and drawn comparisons with the American slave trade and British colonialism. In these situations, there was no official rewriting of the narrative, but Branigan argues that, in its arrogance, the West ‘rarely noticed there was something to forget’ through its exportation of ‘our greatest sadism’. It could be argued that during the Cold War, it was the Americans that were the chief architects of proxy wars in Korea (1950 – 1953) and Vietnam (1955 – 1975) by funding and fighting for the less popular and more corrupt Democratic candidates. Furthermore, Western countries have committed similar atrocities. These are outsourced to other countries, more subtly censored, and are carried out in the name of capitalism; this arguably makes them a less likely target for worldwide condemnation than the Cultural Revolution in China. 

Overall, the ‘ten years of chaos’ that was the Cultural Revolution destroyed the historical and cultural aspects of China. It was only with Deng Xiaoping’s complete policy reversals that China has economically recovered, but Mao is still a controversial and divisive figure. Instead of being universally abhorred for his exploitation of communist theories to create a lawless paramilitary organisation resulting in millions of deaths, many view him as a saviour who ended China’s ‘century of humiliation’. The rule of Xi Jinping immediately began with a harsh anti-corruption crackdown, leading scholars and the public to draw comparisons between Mao and Xi. The party’s app ‘Study the Great Nation’, launched in 2019, aims to spread Xi’s ideology, and has subsequently been dubbed the ‘Little Red App’, in reference to Mao’s book. Whilst the Maoist nostalgia reflects a rationalisation of collective trauma, his brutality and cult of personality during the years of the Cultural Revolution must not be forgotten in order to prevent a historic recurrence. 

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Bibliography

Branigan, Tania. “Mao’s Legacy Is a Dangerous Topic in China.” Foreign Policy, May 6, 2023. https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/05/06/mao-culturalrevolution-china-xi/. 

Ding, Iza, and Jeffrey Javed. “Why Maoism Still Resonates in China Today.” The Washington Post, May 29, 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/05/29/why-maoism-still-resonates-china-today/. 

Griffiths, James. “China Still Carrying Maoist Scars.” CNN, May 13, 2016. https://edition.cnn.com/2016/05/12/asia/china-cultural-revolution-dikotter/index.html. 

Mishra, Pankaj. “What Are the Cultural Revolution’s Lessons for Our Current Moment?” The New Yorker, January 25, 2021. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/02/01/what-are-the-cultural-revolutions-lessons-for-our-current-moment. 

Paul, Pamela. “Opinion | The Decade That Cannot Be Deleted.” The New York Times, May 18, 2023, sec. Opinion. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/18/opinion/columnists/cultural-revolution-china-censor.html. 

Phillips, Tom. “The Cultural Revolution: All You Need to Know about China’s Political Convulsion.” The Guardian. Guardian Media Group, May 11, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/11/the-cultural-revolution-50-years-on-all-you-need-to-know-about-chinas-political-convulsion. 

Zhiyue, Bo. “Mao Zedong: Savior or Demon?” Thediplomat.com, December 28, 2015. https://thediplomat.com/2015/12/mao-zedong-savior-or-demon/. 

Featured Image Credit: 中国人民邮政, The “Long Live the Overall Victory of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” Cultural Revolution Stamp (Second Draft) Canceled and Issued by the People’s Republic of China, Original Stamp Number: Wen 14, Image Name: Workers, Peasants, Soldiers and Maps, Size: 60mm × 40mm, Face Value: 8 Points., 1968, 1968, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Unissued_Wen14,_Long_Live_the_All-round_Victory_of_the_Proletarian_Cultural_Revolution_(Draft_2),_1968.jpg.