More than thirty years have passed, and those who have experienced the Cultural Revolution may not necessarily remember how they spent the decade. But one thing is certainly not forgotten, whether he was a Red Guard, a rebel, a worker propaganda team (short for workers’ propaganda team for Mao Zedong Thought), or a capitalist (short for the party’s capitalist road to power), a conservative, or a loose cannon, whether he was a prominent figure or a “cow and snake god” who was criticized and beaten, no one There is no one who has not told a lie or done something against his will.
A large country of 800 million people, almost everyone to say what they want or do not want to say, do what they want or do not want to do against their hearts, in human history is unique, called “unprecedented” or unprecedented. However, this was the reality in China in the 1960s and 1970s, and it is the duty of this generation to face this phenomenon and to remember the lessons it has taught us.
The human distortion of the times
It should be admitted that many of the things that seem to be true today were taken as true by the majority of people back then; many of the things that seem to be foolish and harmful today were taken as good back then; this was especially true in the pre-Cultural Revolution period. What they did not understand, what they had never heard of, or what they were sure was wrong, they generally thought was only a temporary, local phenomenon, the result of not following Chairman Mao’s instructions, or even their own prejudice that their bourgeois worldview was not well reformed.
If the previous movements had more or less a certain scope and a certain ideological color, the scope of the Cultural Revolution could be said to have no limits, so the whole China was already hardly a paradise. All classes, strata, interest groups, and social groups had been hurt or struck to varying degrees, and virtually no one could exist outside the movement in complete freedom. Yet hundreds of millions of people have thrown themselves into this “Revolution” with frenzied enthusiasm.
A friend of mine who was a teacher in a middle school was designated as a “leftist” by his school’s party branch at the beginning of the movement, and he joined the “core group” and participated in the uncovering of a number of “cattle and snakes”. But a few days later, he was arrested as a “gangster” by a group of students who opposed the party branch. So he spent the daytime working with the “bullies and snakes and gods” he had uncovered, receiving criticism and scolding, while at night he discussed with the core group members how to criticize the bullies and snakes and gods tomorrow (in fact, he himself) and how to take the movement deeper. Although others may not be as typical as he was, it was common for him to be the “driving force of the revolution” and the “object of the revolution” all rolled into one. In this sense, everyone is playing a double role and has a double personality.
Dual personality is not a product of the Cultural Revolution, it has a long history in China; nor is it a speciality of China, it cannot be said to be absent in any country in the West or the East; but it is not so widespread as in China during the Cultural Revolution.
Confucianism’s cultivation of the body was originally intended to stimulate and cultivate normal humanity and to limit and overcome inhumanity and animalism. This process, though not without difficulty and pain, was acceptable to most people. The goal, although noble and the requirements, although strict, did not leave the basic needs of human beings. But later on, when the requirements are raised higher and higher and completely divorced from human nature, they become hypocritical dogmas. If people had the freedom of choice, they could certainly ignore these dogmas and maintain their own nature.
Unfortunately, when Confucianism, especially the theory of “the preservation of the Divine Principle and the extinction of human desires”, became the official code of conduct, there was no longer any room for the legitimate existence of human nature, and people were forced to accept standards as their code of conduct that were actually impossible to achieve, and to respond to external pressures with hypocrisy and falsification.
For example, filial piety is a natural part of human nature, and it is a natural virtue to honor the elderly and respect relatives. However, the filial piety advocated by Confucianism has gradually evolved into various cruel and inhumane rules, even forcing people to make meaningless sacrifices like the “Twenty-four Filial Virtues”. Since it was impossible to openly oppose such filial piety, all kinds of false acts and statements of filial piety emerged, so that a dual personality emerged in filial piety, on the one hand a true affection for loved ones and, on the other hand, a response to rituals. Those who are truly filial to their parents often act contrary to the “filial way”, while those who treat their parents falsely can perform the rituals of filial piety with great success.
Under the guidance of the wrong line, Marxism in China is increasingly being led to one-sidedness and extremes, becoming empty slogans and esoteric dogmas that are detached from reality and contrary to human nature. The lines, guidelines and policies based on this “Marxist theory” are of course neither in line with China’s national conditions nor understandable to the people. However, as long as they are presented under the banner of Marxism and Mao Zedong Thought, and come from the mouth of the Party leaders, they will gain the status of absolute correctness, resulting in the phenomenon of “implementing those who understand, and those who do not understand”. But common sense and conscience make people have doubts, and they will hesitate in the implementation, and as a result, they can only say false things and do things against their will.
Similarly, the “role models” set up or cultivated according to this fake Marxism, whether they are deified leaders or infinitely exalted heroes, are already unattainable idols for the general public. Their behavior is not only impossible to learn, but even unbelievable. But “loyalty depends on action”, and learning is a concrete manifestation of whether to be revolutionary or not, so we can only endlessly “fight selfishness (heart) and criticize revisionism (orthodoxy)”, until “a fierce fight against the word selfishness a flash of thought “, constantly saying false things about themselves and repeating one movement of learning, criticism and struggle after another.
The Pan-Politicized Standard of Right and Wrong
The second is the absolutization and infinite expansion of political criteria and class analysis. Politics is extended to all fields and becomes the only criterion for judging right and wrong, and everything in the world is left with only two types: revolutionary and counter-revolutionary. Individual judgment and thought and feeling must not only be completely subordinated to politics, but also transformed in response to political changes. To discuss the plundering of materials by the Soviet Red Army in the northeast is “anti-Soviet”, enough to qualify as a rightist, because at that time the politics had to be “lopsided” and the Soviet Union was the “big brother”. When it came to the anti-revisionist struggle, anyone who said good things about the Soviet Union or Soviet experts became a “glorified Soviet revisionist”, which was also a serious crime. When Lin Biao became the “deputy commander-in-chief”, anyone who said that his dignity was not good and suspected that he was weak and sick was an active counter-revolutionary who “hit the proletarian command”; once something happened to Lin Biao, even the evaluation of the Pingxingguan Campaign became a problem.
Class has completely replaced human nature, and different classes must make different value judgments on the same thing. The proletariat is patriotic when it comes to hygiene, but the bourgeoisie is rotten in its way of life when it comes to cleanliness. The poor peasant’s son studies hard for the revolution, the landlord’s daughter excels surely for restoration purposes, and it is the landlord class that uses culture to take back their lost paradise.
Since everything should be analyzed by class, the class enemy will not be humane and will certainly engage in sabotage, so the vicious landlord is “Huang Shiren” and the kind landlord is “Smiling Tiger”, and is more deceptive. The “class enemy” labor is not serious natural confrontation, dry hard must also be creating the illusion of waiting for an opportunity to counterattack; if the suicide is more resilient, unrepentant, self-dead to the people.
According to this logic, as long as a person becomes a “class enemy”, it is impossible to have any merits and strengths, you have to completely clear the line with him, even if it is husband and wife, father and son, teachers and students, subordinates, friends. Such a political standard and class analysis, not to mention the people, even high-level officials are unable to grasp, as long as a little human nature will not be able to draw a line, must have a dual personality.
The blocked information media
Furthermore, the strict control of information and the one-sided propaganda of the outside world make people completely ignorant of the truth and impossible to recognize falsehoods, instead they devoutly believe in falsehoods and believe in lies. For a long time, the only way for cadres and intellectuals to understand the world was through the carefully cut Reference News and the situation reports given by leading cadres at all levels. At the height of the Cultural Revolution, all we saw and heard was how the people of the world supported China’s Cultural Revolution, how they loved Chairman Mao, how they tried to learn Mao Zedong Thought, how they fought against their own country’s The “imperialist and anti-revisionist” struggle, naturally will add a little more fervor.
During the “three years of natural disasters”, I listened to a report on the situation, the city’s leading cadres in the report gave an example, a Soviet song and dance troupe to visit a food factory, once into the production of canned luncheon meat workshop, everyone take a deep breath, because they have not eaten meat for a long time. The factory gave them canned meat, the director to “singing actors should not eat more fat” as a reason to decline, when a member of the troupe reported: “I am a horn player, it does not matter.” Immediately after hearing this, we felt a great sense of satisfaction and pride: despite our difficulties, we were still able to ration a few taels of meat each month, while the Soviet Union could not even smell the meat in the country.
An old lady in Shanghai, who often receives foreign guests, answered a question from a Swedish guest with a question that she could live and learn. When the Swede asked her how life was before the founding of New China, she replied without hesitation, “It was the same as you are now!” The guest was astonished to hear that the standard of living of the Chinese working people before the founding of New China was so high. The accompanying leader was naturally very embarrassed and annoyed with the grassroots cadre. To the guest’s confusion and the leader’s displeasure, the old woman was justified: “Didn’t you say that the guest was from a capitalist country and belonged to the ‘two-thirds’ that had not yet been liberated?” It would not even occur to her that she had told a lie or a falsehood.
“One Finger” and “Nine Fingers”
Since the emergence of the theory of “one finger” and “nine fingers,” the individual’s ability to judge independently and the possibility of telling the truth have ceased to exist. Although this theory can be satisfactorily explained from the philosophical point of view of phenomena and essence, in practice it has become a means to conceal the truth, to make a mockery of it, to confuse right and wrong, and to do whatever one wants. Because except for the top leaders and central authorities, even governors and ministers can only hear and see “one finger”, not “nine fingers”, and know more than the phenomenon, not the essence, not to mention the general cadres and The general public.
Under the exercise of successive campaigns, everyone has learned this simple arithmetic: for 800 million people, 80 million people is just a finger. If people died of starvation during the “Three Years of Natural Disasters”, if people died in the “Cultural Revolution”, if people were arrested, fought and shot in various campaigns, would it be more than 80 million? Is it not just “a finger”? It will never be the essence of the problem.
What’s more, China has an inexhaustible supply of examples and models that can be used at any time to prove the existence of the “nine fingers”. Although such typical and sample survey materials are not quantitative analysis by convention, but can be used to represent the essence. If someone suggests that the number is too small, it only reveals that they are not on the revolutionary side, because new things are always a minority at the beginning, and the essence does not necessarily have a quantitative majority, and the truth is sometimes in the hands of a few.
You say that it is impossible to have 10,000 pounds of grain per acre, but it is clearly published in the newspaper that the yield of a certain place has exceeded 100,000 pounds, not only with photos to prove it, but also with the arguments of scientists. You say that the “Cultural Revolution” has affected production, the satellite in the sky, hydrogen bomb explosion, the Yangtze River Bridge opened to traffic is not true? You say that students do not study, the quality is too low, please look at the level of a few outstanding students, to prove that the quality of students now has long exceeded the 17 years before the Cultural Revolution.
Italian photographer Antonioni’s documentary “China” exposes his reactionary stance despite the fact that it is all factual: why leave the huge 10,000-ton ships made in China untouched, but film small wooden boats in the Huangpu River? Why didn’t he take interest in the typical characters we had prepared, but had to choose his own subjects?
However, it is not so easy to change your position, because the only source you have to know the truth about the “nine fingers” and to understand what the “essence” is is the official figures, which are either not available at all, or are surprisingly different from the facts. The only source for understanding the “essence” is the official figures, which are either not available at all or are alarmingly different from the facts. I once witnessed famine victims in Anhui near Shanghai’s North Railway Station recklessly stuffing their mouths with looted biscuits and doughnuts, but was told they were landlords who would not accept reform. I learned from relatives and teachers that many people had died of starvation in Anhui, but concluded that this was just “a finger”. It was not until the early 1980s, when I was involved in writing a series of books on China’s population, that I learned from the National Bureau of Statistics that the number of people who died unnaturally during the “three years of natural disasters” was 18 million.
Because of this, people often questioned their own class standpoint and ideological approach, why they did not consciously eulogize the good situation like the working people, but were as uncomfortable with new things as their class enemies, accusing the revolutionary cause of this and that? The lesson can only be that what one sees and hears is “a finger” and “phenomenon”, which cannot be taken seriously, while what one cannot see is “nine fingers”, the The “essence” is what one cannot see. For example, Lin Biao’s sick state was only a phenomenon, a “one finger”, but his health and eternal health was the essence, a “nine finger”, because it was declared at that time that according to the doctors’ thorough examination, there was nothing wrong with his whole body organs and he was expected to live beyond 100 years old.
Such “essence” and “nine fingers”, except for those who are qualified to announce this “very good news”, the general public is the proletariat consciousness is high is never seen, naturally only convinced. Naturally, they are only convinced. If there is even the slightest doubt, it must be a sign that the bourgeois worldview has not been transformed so well that the position is unstable.
Do not think that the author is mentally unbalanced, this is exactly the mode of self-censorship back then, and a means to criticize others.
A lawless system of social functioning
When deceit and sophistry did not help, the only way to make people consciously tell lies and maintain a dual personality was to rely on violent repression, using the “iron fist of the dictatorship of the proletariat”. As the Cultural Revolution progressed, the number of targets was rapidly increasing. People’s beliefs had been greatly shaken by the drastic change of policies and the exposure of old and new contradictions. Especially after the Lin Biao incident, Mao’s “far-sightedness” and “insightfulness” were doubted, even though it was evidenced by the “letter to Comrade Jiang Qing” conveyed as a central document. The Cultural Revolution
By the end of the Cultural Revolution, few people probably told the truth at all. The folk song “Two people tell the truth, three people tell lies, and four people tell jokes” vividly illustrates the nature of speech in different situations. The difference is that in the past, it was unconsciously said, is not aware that they are saying falsehoods, at this time is knowingly false and say it, consciously say good falsehoods. The reason is also simple: the power of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” has become omnipresent and can be used at will.
As early as the 1950s, the criticism of the “Hu Feng counter-revolutionary group” already set a bad example of publishing private letters. During the Cultural Revolution, personal privacy was gone, and letters and diaries were naturally written in black and white, with ironclad evidence; it was the “stinky wives” and “sons of bitches” who were tempted to extract confessions under torture and “draw a clear line “The temptation to make a “revelation” is also 100% conclusive evidence. Since the space for telling the truth has nearly disappeared, how can we survive without telling lies?
The right to remain silent has also been abolished, and if falsehoods are not told properly, it is suspected of being a “fake revolution”, so not telling falsehoods is naturally the same as counter-revolution. In the anti-right movement, there were rightists who didn’t say a word, rightists who didn’t post a big-character poster, and that was nothing new. People who usually did their work in a disciplined manner, were careful and cautious, and did not speak when they could, could be treated as class enemies who were cleverly concealed and deeply buried in the Cultural Revolution to “dig deep and investigate”. The dictatorship of the proletariat had penetrated into the streets, families, poor and remote areas, idle people, churches and temples, minority areas, Hong Kong and Macao, and foreign institutions, etc. How easy was it to find places where people could keep silent?
Even the right to die has been taken away. Everyone knows that suicide is “self-extinction from the people”, “treason”, “unrepentant”, “stubborn resistance to the end “Not only will there be no chance of rehabilitating or clearing the name, but it will also extend the scourge to family members and grandchildren. I asked some old intellectuals who were persecuted during the Cultural Revolution whether they had ever thought of committing suicide, and many of them replied that they wanted to commit suicide but did not dare to. One teacher whose whole family was isolated or criticized said that the message they passed to each other at that time was never to commit suicide. This was the root of the tragic incident in which the young pianist Gu Shengying, along with his mother and brother (his father had long been in prison), turned on the gas and committed suicide – they had to choose to die together as a family so as not to drag others down with them.
If the punishment for criminal offenders is more or less measured, the crackdown on speech and ideological offenders can be completely arbitrary, according to the needs of the revolutionary situation. People who are just criticized for their actions today may be sentenced to death and immediate execution tomorrow. The discussion of cases and the execution of “existing counterrevolutionaries” naturally frightened people into examining their own words and actions in light of their “crimes.
The generalization of dual personality reached its climax during the Cultural Revolution, and also contributed to the Cultural Revolution, which deepened and prolonged the poisonous flow of the Cultural Revolution. But the tragic significance of the dual personality is not limited to the Cultural Revolution, nor is the poisonous effect on Chinese people limited to political life. “After the Cultural Revolution, people often describe their behavior as “having palpitations” or “having palpitations”. But there is another phenomenon that results from a long-term dual personality: the person’s heart palpitates even when no threat exists, and does not know that it is palpitating.
I am reminded of a completely real example: my late teacher, Mr. Tan Qichang, received several letters from one of his students in the mid-1980s, almost in the same format, in which the researcher, who was nearly 70 years old, began with a paragraph praising the good situation under the leadership of the Central Committee of the Party, followed by a second paragraph praising the correct leadership of the Central Committee of the Society (Jiu San Society, of which both Mr. Tan and he were members), and a third paragraph praising the achievements of the research projects under the teacher’s leadership. The third paragraph is to praise the achievements of the scientific research project under the leadership of the teacher, and then indicate his active participation in the attitude, the letter is written more than half before turning to the main topic, and finally a few clichés are inevitable. It is noteworthy that this is a very strict and practical scholar who is working under illness, and Mr. Tan has been his teacher for forty years, and there was no political pressure between them at that time.
After more than thirty years, have we said goodbye to the era of dual personalities?
(From Ge Jianxiong’s “Traces of History”, published by Guangdong People’s Publishing House in 2015)
Recent Comments