The famous historian Gao Hua has been dead for many years, and I have only recently seen two of his lectures, one on Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the other on the September 13 incident.
When Gao Hua came to CUHK, I had tea with him and chatted with him, not knowing at the time that I would miss these two excellent lectures.
Gao Hua’s talk on the Cultural Revolution was very important, and he had a lot of information at his disposal, as well as a lot of unique research insights. He not only analyzed the historical and political background of the Cultural Revolution, but also the internal power struggles within the Chinese Communist Party and the social and cultural phenomena of that time. He looked at the Cultural Revolution from all angles, unlike ordinary people who simplify the Cultural Revolution as a struggle between Mao and Liu.
Mao Zedong’s life was a life of endless struggle, fighting against the sky, the earth and people, and enjoying himself immensely. Mao Zedong was a megalomaniac, a sadist, a voluntarist, a peasant’s fantasy, extremely self-centered and cruel. He knew dialectics, was good at sophistry, had great courage, but was also clever, and was a shameless man. Mao is an extreme phenomenon in Chinese culture, but it is a pity that no one has yet studied his personality and psychology properly.
Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution, of course, not just to bring down Liu Shaoqi, but to create a new form of society that would open the way to communism. His ambition was to become the third generation of the great leaders of the world communist revolution, following Marx and Lenin.
If it was only to bring down Liu Shaoqi, he would have accomplished it at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. He himself told Liu Shaoqi that he could crush him to death with the lifting of a finger. Not only did Liu Deng and a whole bunch of other old revolutionaries fall, but the entire Communist regime collapsed, but he didn’t care.
After overthrowing Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, he destroyed the national bureaucracy, and then established a revolutionary regime called the “Three Combinations”, in which military representatives, old cadres and rebels shared power to avoid a return to revisionism. His communist road was based on this ideal of creating something out of nothing behind closed doors.
Bringing down Liu Deng was not the ultimate goal of the Cultural Revolution; bringing him down was merely a way to remove a roadblock to his political ambitions. He is already an emperor, and his power is so great that he wants to be famous for a thousand years.
If young people in Hong Kong want to know more about the CCP, they should watch the video of Gao Hua’s lecture.
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