Former Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s recent long essay reminiscing about his mother, “My Mother”, was published in four installments in the Macau media around the Qingming Festival, and although it was banned by WeChat and the media from republishing it, it still attracted attention. This article is considered to reveal multiple layers of meaning: to defend his own reputation and that of his mother? The article reveals the conflict with the second generation of red? To express dissatisfaction with the current regime that is pulling China further and further away from his ideals? And so on. But a commentary by the major overseas foreign media outlet Dovetail chose to discuss former Premier Wen Jiabao’s relationship with the Cultural Revolution. The article is titled: “Why Wen Jiabao’s Remembrance of Mother’s Article Was Banned and Why Wen Jiabao Can’t Forget the Cultural Revolution?”
The Dovetail article writes: In his article, Wen Jiabao once again refers to the Cultural Revolution, a political movement that has affected China to this day, and mentions the disasters his family suffered during the Cultural Revolution. For example, his father left his job as a teacher in 1959 because of “historical problems” and was restricted in his use. During the Cultural Revolution, he was seized, placed under school surveillance, had his salary suspended, had large posters posted on his doorstep, and was subjected to brutal “interrogations” and beatings, and had his face swollen by the rebel faction.
The Dovetail article commented that Wen Jiabao is probably the only Chinese Communist Party leader who has repeatedly mentioned the Cultural Revolution in public. Before he left the premiership, he said publicly that the mistakes of the Cultural Revolution had not been completely removed, and that without the success of the political system reform, the tragedy of the Cultural Revolution could happen again.
In 2011, as the “Chongqing model” of Bo Xilai, the second generation of the Chinese Communist Party, came to a climax, Wen Jiabao met alone with Hong Kong political veteran Wu Kangmin in Zhongnanhai and pointed out that the difficulties encountered in China’s reform were mainly due to the remnants of feudalism and the legacy of the Cultural Revolution. Wen’s talk caused a stir after Wu Kangmin exposed it to the media.
In 2012, Wen Jiabao said in his last press conference as premier that after the end of the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese Communist Party made a historical resolution to reform and open up, but the mistakes of the Cultural Revolution and the influence of feudalism were not completely removed. Later on, problems such as unfair distribution and corruption arose. To solve these problems, not only economic reform, but also political reform, especially reform of the Party and state leadership system, is needed.
Wen Jiabao said, without the success of political reform, economic reform can not be carried out to the end, the results achieved may be lost again, the new problems can not be fundamentally solved, the tragedy of the Cultural Revolution may happen again. Reform can only move forward; there is no way out for stagnation or regression.
Two months before the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, the retiring Wen Jiabao gave a speech at Tsinghua University and mentioned the Cultural Revolution again. He openly admitted that China had taken the wrong path of the Great Leap Forward and the People’s Commune, and had made mistakes of the Cultural Revolution. Reform and opening up must continue to move forward, not backward. The future and hope of the country, as well as the future and destiny of the nation, are at stake.
According to the article, the main reason for Wen Jiabao’s repeated references to the Cultural Revolution, as well as his repeated calls for political reform, may be that, in his view, the legacy of the Cultural Revolution has become a resistance to reform in China, and without political reform, the Cultural Revolution may be repeated. Some people think that the fear of a repeat of the Cultural Revolution is just alarmist talk. However, Wen Jiabao is not the first Communist Party leader to worry about a repeat of the Cultural Revolution. Before Wen, Hu Yaobang had also worried about the reoccurrence of the Cultural Revolution.
The banning of Wen’s article shows that warning about the danger of a repeat of the Cultural Revolution is extremely dangerous in the current mainland, and even mentioning the Cultural Revolution is not in line with the “political correctness” of the Xi Jinping regime at the moment. It is funny that Xi Jinping stressed at the mobilization meeting of the Party’s history study and education that he has to clearly oppose historical nihilism, and that the CPC is not a historical nihilist and “cannot forget its ancestors and be presumptuous”. But at the same time, in the new edition of “A Brief History of the Communist Party of China (1921-2021)”, which was launched to celebrate the centenary of the founding of the CCP, the history of the decade of the Cultural Revolution is no longer a separate chapter, as it was in the past, but is only watered down and included in Chapter 6, Section 3, “The Development of Socialist Construction with Twists and Turns”. The brutal and massive Cultural Revolution launched by Mao was replaced by the word “twists and turns” and the phrase “problems in progress. If this is not “historical nihilism” in the eyes of Xi Jinping, the successor of Hu’s team, there is no such thing as “historical nihilism” anymore.
This brief history, except for the “new era of Xi Jinping,” has been diluted and vitiated, including the Cultural Revolution and other extremely important histories, highlighting the status of the “new era of Xi Jinping. The nine years of Party history since Xi Jinping came to power account for a quarter of the book. Red dance dramas from the Cultural Revolution period, such as “The White Maiden” and “The Red Army of the Maiden”, have also become important programs for the CPC’s centennial celebration. During the Qingming Festival, people found that the grave of Jiang Qing, the wife of Cultural Revolution “flag bearer” Mao Zedong, was open to the public at Beijing’s Futian Cemetery, while the grave of Zhao Ziyang, a representative of the reformists, was officially guarded. Some netizens posted a photo of a number of young people standing on the street with Mao’s quotations in their hands during the Cultural Revolution, reminding people not to go back to the past.
According to one analysis, the “Cultural Revolution 2.0” is only a means to an end, the purpose of which is to consolidate totalitarian power. Since 2020, when criticism of Hong Kong became a daily occurrence in the Chinese Communist Party’s official media, the term “Cultural Revolution 2.0” has emerged: “The first step is to make people afraid to disagree publicly, which has basically been done. The next step is ongoing, not allowing people to be silent, to start writing personal experiences, to criticize each other; the third step is to purge those who do not applaud enthusiastically, those who do not actively participate in the criticism will also be suppressed, and finally is to lock everyone inside the cage, leaving only one person standing outside to hold the key.”
In the context of today’s political regression in China, any critical reflection on the Cultural Revolution cannot escape the legal net of public opinion censorship, even if it comes from the family recollections of the former premier.
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