On May 16, 1966, the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee promulgated the May 16 Circular, marking the beginning of the decade-long Cultural Revolution. Scholars observe that this catastrophe, which resulted in the deaths of at least millions of Chinese, is being redefined in a distorted way in China today, fifty-five years later.
On May 16 of this year, fifty-five years after the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, China passed the anniversary in an unusually peaceful manner. Originally planned commemorative activities by Maoist leftist groups were temporarily cancelled under official pressure. Instead of reflective commentary on the historical anniversary, the official media circulated online videos of several Chinese campuses, businesses, and public events that featured loyalty dances and red songs.
Observers blame the new edition of “A Brief History of the Chinese Communist Party,” which was just released in April, not only for the “new era” of Xi’s nine years in power, which takes up a quarter of the party’s 100-year history, but also for the downplaying of the Cultural Revolution and the historical mistakes of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
On April 20, Zhuang Rongwen, vice minister of the Central Propaganda Department and director of the Internet Information Office, gave a positive assessment of the history of the Cultural Revolution from 1949 to the end of 1976 at a conference on Party history education, calling it “the 27 years of great achievements in socialist revolution and construction.”
A “complete rejection” of the Cultural Revolution?
In 1981, the Sixth Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China adopted the Resolution on Several Historical Issues of the Party since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China. The resolution proposed that the “Cultural Revolution” and the “theory of continuing revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat” should be completely rejected, and also concluded that the “Cultural Revolution” was a revolution that was wrongly launched by the leaders, exploited by counter-revolutionary groups, and caused a lot of damage to the Party. It also concluded that the Cultural Revolution was a civil strife wrongly started by the leaders and exploited by counter-revolutionary groups, which brought serious disasters to the Party, the country and the people of all nationalities, and caused comprehensive and serious harm.
“The 1981 resolution put the blame on the Gang of Four and spared the real culprit, Mao Zedong.” Cai Xia, a former professor at the Party School of the CPC Central Committee, told the station that Mao Zedong retired to the second line after the policy mistakes of the Great Leap Forward and the Great Famine, and was resentful before launching the Cultural Revolution to liquidate dissidents and consolidate his position of power.
Cai Xia said that in the process of reflecting on the history of the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese Communist Party has been avoiding three major issues: first, the responsibility of Mao Zedong himself, second, the fundamental problem of the CCP’s ideology and theory, and third, the institutional problem of centralized rule.
“Officials and scholars have deliberately avoided a key question: How could the Cultural Revolution be started by Mao alone and continue to cause such a decade of devastation?” Cai Xia asked.
The Chinese Communist Party’s New Discourse on the Cultural Revolution
Scar literature and brief folk reflections
In the early 1980s, as Chinese society gradually emerged from the Cultural Revolution, there was a rise in scarred literature. From writer Bai Hua’s Bitter Love and Liu Xinwu’s The Class Teacher to the film Farewell My Concubine, which also used the Cultural Revolution as a backdrop and won the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film in the United States, all of these films depict, from a literary or artistic perspective, how the Chinese Communist Party wiped out traditional art, disintegrated family ties, and extinguished humanity during the Cultural Revolution.
(Fragment of the Red Guards in Farewell My Concubine: “If the enemy does not surrender, let him perish! If the enemy does not surrender, let him perish!”)
“Scar literature is folk up, because by so great a catastrophe, people’s own reflection, shaking the whole nation to think about this issue,…… naturally also touches on the indictment of the system, which the Chinese Communist Party can not tolerate.” Cai Xia analysis, when the civil reflection continues, the government’s ban also came. Officials and folk are unable to thoroughly reflect on history, “the Cultural Revolution is what has made it possible for so many years to lurk in the party with Chinese society.”
Wang Youqin, who has been documenting the stories of Cultural Revolution survivors since 1978 and published The Victims of the Cultural Revolution: A Search for the Persecuted, Imprisoned and Killed in 2004, has firsthand experience of the constant repression she faces when trying to document history through the power of the private sector.
“I have made thousands of interviews with victims of the Cultural Revolution …… For me, this is the main part and the main scene of the Cultural Revolution. If you ignore this part, this history has a big bias.” Wang Youqin is now a professor at the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago. She told us that the website she hosts, “Memorial Garden for the Victims of the Cultural Revolution,” was banned in China, and so was her book.
In the preface to her book, renowned historian Yu Youshi praised her for her “great project of saving memories,” and Wang often receives letters of thanks from Chinese readers or family members of Cultural Revolution victims. In recent years, however, there have been a number of online attacks that have deliberately accused her of fabricating her story. Wang Youqin says she does not want to pay attention to them.
Wang’s research identifies two spikes in deaths during the Cultural Revolution: the Red Guard killings in the summer of 1966 and the Revolutionary Committee killings in the winter of 1968.
She writes that these deaths followed a consistent pattern, for example, death in violent “criticism sessions” or death in “cowsheds” under “isolation and censorship. These patterns of death are clearly linked directly to the steps of the Cultural Revolution. Their deaths were not isolated cases nor were they accidental; they were killed as part of the specific deployment of the Cultural Revolution.
“This mass persecution of human beings was in fact the most dominant scenario of the Cultural Revolution. The brutalization of a large number of human lives was the most dominant evil of the Cultural Revolution.” Wang Youqin wrote.
“The Cultural Revolution was a great revolution of cultural life, not only a disaster for people, but also a disaster for Chinese culture.” Rong Wei, a curator of contemporary Chinese art, also recalls with emotion the destruction of the temple of the Great Buddha in his hometown of Putuo Mountain, Zhejiang Province, during the Cultural Revolution, “Now the atmosphere of the Cultural Revolution in China is getting more and more intense, and it is a retrograde step, a reversal of history.”
A “criticism meeting” during the Cultural Revolution in China (online photo)
Behind the Redefinition of the Cultural Revolution?
“Whenever the regime is in internal or external difficulties, the CCP will definitely sacrifice the class struggle. The aim is to create enemies and tensions within the regime in order to suppress speech. The CCP cannot tolerate people looking back at this period of history. Looking back at this period of the Cultural Revolution will be associated with the present, because all history is a kind of care for the current problems.” Cai Xia analyzed that when “history” becomes a tool for the CCP to consolidate power, it is natural to repeatedly define historical events in this way.
Five years ago, the official media reported on the 50th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution, and the People’s Daily wrote in a long article that “the mistakes of the Cultural Revolution must not be allowed to repeat themselves”; a few years before that, Liu He, a current member of the Central Political Bureau, Vice Premier of the State Council, and Director of the Office of the Central Leading Group for Financial and Economic Affairs, published an article in “China’s Economic 50 look at 30 years” that “without reflecting on the disaster of the Cultural Revolution, it would not be possible to have today’s history. Without the reflection on the disaster of the Cultural Revolution, China’s growth miracle would not have been possible today”, a long article reviewing the lessons of the Cultural Revolution.
But this day, fifty-five years after the Cultural Revolution, when the “Battle Hymn of the Red Guards” is blaring in Chinese folklore and the red armband on the left arm has become an alternative fashion amidst the frolics, such reflective articles are no longer seen.
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