Philip Wen
Beijing: Today marks the 50th anniversary of the start of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. From what would become known as the “May 16 notification”, Chairman Mao plunged China into a decade of brutality and upheaval in the name of purging bourgeoisie and traditional cultural elements and consolidating Mao Zedong Thought as the dominant ideology.
Tens of millions identified as “rightists” or class enemies were subjected to violent struggle sessions, systematic harassment, abuse and forfeiture of property.
As many as 1.5 million were killed or driven to suicide, unable to withstand the torture. Tens of millions were uprooted and sent down to the countryside. Some 200 million were left malnourished as the economy collapsed.
“It does harken back to Mao, this personality cult”: souvenir plates bearing images of Chinese President Xi Jinping and Mao Zedong at a shop near Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Photo: AP
The legacy of one of China’s darkest decades has bled through subsequent generations of Communist Party leadership. Deng Xiaoping’s son, Deng Pufang, was left paraplegic after falling from a four-storey building while being interrogated by Red Guards.
Current leader Xi Jinping’s older sister died in the mayhem. His father, a war-time hero, was subject to public humiliation, struggle sessions and repeated beatings. And Xi himself, then a teenager, was paraded in the streets as an enemy of the revolution, berated by his own mother, and almost thrown in prison for being the offspring of bourgeoisie party elite. He was famously sent down to a rural backwater in Shaanxi province – his old cave dwelling now a popular tourist attraction.
“I always had a stubborn streak and wouldn’t put up with being bullied,” Mr. Xi recalled in an interview in 2000. “I riled the radicals, and they blamed me for everything that went wrong.”
In the context of 2012, with convulsive political tumult shrouding an imminent once-in-a-decade leadership transition, Wen Jiabao’s words into his final news conference as premier represented an elegant yet excoriating final nail in the coffin for Bo Xilai, whose brand of neo-Maoist “red nostalgia” whipped Chongqing into nationalistic fervour –and manoeuvred himself into position as a pretender to the throne. The Communist Party machine instead backed Xi Jinping and Bo Xilai was swiftly sacked, charged with corruption, and eventually jailed for life.
Pausing frequently for effect and with his voice quivering with emotion, the grandfatherly figure Wen warned urgent political reforms within the Communist Party were paramount in order for both China’s economy and society to continue to modernise and open up.
Failure to do so, he said, would mean “the new problems that have popped up in China’s society will not be fundamentally resolved”.
“And such historical tragedies as the Cultural Revolution may happen again.”
While Wen Jiabao’s final address at the 2012 National People’s Congress repudiated Bo’s legacy and foreshadowed his political execution, it was also tinged with apology and regret.
The Wen and Hu Jintao era had by then already been widely dismissed as the “lost decade”, with both men lacking the necessary personal clout to either curb institutionalised corruption or push through necessary reforms to put the economy on a more sustainable footing.
“I feel truly sorry,” he said. “Due to incompetent abilities and institutional and other factors, there is still much room for improvement in my work.”
The message, implicitly, was for Xi to push on where he had fallen short.
Before his elevation into power, the expectation was that Xi’s personal experiences in his formative years under Mao’s rule would, as Wen had earnestly urged, prompt him to learn from the mistakes of the past and plot China on a continued course of reforms and liberalisation, both in its economy and its society.
But 40 years on from his death, Mao remains central to the Communist Party’s narrative of ruling legitimacy. His embalmed body lies in state in a mausoleum overlooking Tiananmen Square, while his portrait smiles over the Forbidden City and graces every Chinese banknote.
By Mao’s own measure, the mass campaign was his greatest achievement after leading the Communists to victory over the Japanese and the Kuomintang government which was exiled to Taiwan.
“It goes to the core of Maoism because Mao himself considers the Cultural Revolution one of his best achievements – you have to deal with that,” says Monash University historian Warren Sun.
Xi Jinping and his father Xi Zhongxun, a war hero who later suffered during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Photo: Supplied
Xi has steered clear of refuting Mao’s legacy and instead in landmark remarks made in 2013, implored the party to reconcile what he referred to the “first 30 years”, leading up to 1978, and the following 30 years, marked by Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening up and the explosive growth that followed.
“The dictator, who caused his own father so much suffering, and who had such an impact on his own early life, may not be a person Xi harbours fond memories of,” Kerry Brown, professor of Chinese Studies at King’s College, London, writes in his new book CEO, China, which catalogues the rise of Xi Jinping.
“But the propagandist, the master of Chinese symbolic politics, the person in modern China who could be said to have most truly understood where power was located, how to use it and how to keep it – his was an inheritance worth tapping into.”
The early hope from more liberal elements within the Communist Party was that Xi would display a greater reformist bent after taking necessary steps to consolidate his power, including through a shock-and-awe anti-corruption campaign that has served to purge his rivals and appease public anger that official graft had gone too far.
But China’s slowing economy, and the manifest social problems it threatens to entail, has heaped pressure on the Xi administration. Radical reforms, particularly in a monolithic state-owned sector laden with vested interest groups, have remained difficult to push through.
Paranoid about the infiltration of Western influence and the ability for the internet and social media to disseminate unfiltered information at warp speed, Xi has doubled-down on the government’s control of its people, coming down harder on dissent than any of his recent predecessors.
“The problem is connected with the threat to the political regime,” says Mao Yushi, an internationally renowned veteran economist, who at 87, remains a prominent liberal intellectual. “China’s rapid economic growth since reforming and opening up has protected the Communist Party’s political legitimacy, now that there is no high growth, what can Xi depend on?”
Lawyers, intellectuals, activists, journalists and, most recently, foreign NGOs have come under pressure in a pervasive crackdown. Foreign criticism, whether of China’s island-building program in the South China Sea, the government’s chequered human rights record, or controversial ethnic minority policies in Xinjiang and Tibet, are all cast as a plot by a cabal of Western “hostile foreign forces” designed to undermine China and perpetuate US hegemony.
The creation of various party sub-committees, reporting directly to him, has centralised decision-making on matters pertaining to the economy, national security, cybersecurity and the military.
But perhaps the most stunning characteristic shared with Mao has been a growing personality cult around Xi fanned by the central propaganda department, which has produced some jarring results: newspaper front-pages dominated by Xi’s every move, saccharine music videos professing love and loyalty to the leader.
“It does harken back to Mao, this personality cult, the concentration of power by casting aside the collective leadership … now his style is quite dictatorial, demanding loyalty ideologically,” says Sun, the historian. “He’s anti-Western, dismissive of universal values and he also rules by fear, in the form of the anti-corrupt campaigns and cracking down on dissent and tightening the control on media, education, culture – all this does harken back to Mao’s practice.”
Now approaching his 90s, Mao Yushi’s body may have slowed but he recalls vividly the turmoil from the day he and his family were identified as rightist counter-revolutionaries at the start of the Cultural Revolution. Then an engineer at a state railway authority in Beijing, he would later be sent to hard labour at a factory in central Shanxi province.
His wife, Zhao Yanling, says Red Guards harassed them in their home on a daily basis. “When we were down to our last 50 cents, I asked my son if he knew how to buy meat from the market, he said yes and went,” she told Fairfax Media from the couple’s Beijing home.
“So I started cooking it, and the aroma from the meat, it smelt so good. But the Red Guards walked in and said ‘f—, what, are you eating again?’. I threw the meat into the coals and said, ‘no, we’re not eating anything’. We had to sneak around like a thief.”
The hordes of young Red Guards returned days later and shaved the heads of their whole family.
“What does that signify? It’s to defile you. It’s to tell everyone that your family belonged to one of the ‘five-category elements’ [landlord class, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, rightists and other bad elements], you can be beaten at will, abused at will.”
For a government fond of elaborate observations of anniversaries – the 70th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II last year was marked with a military parade of unprecedented scale in Beijing – Monday’s milestone will slip past quietly with little official recognition. After the fall of the Gang of Four, the party and much of the Chinese public have elected to move on, as market-oriented economic policies ignited an all-out pursuit of material wealth.
But just last week, ahead of Monday’s sensitive anniversary, a Mao-themed revival show – staged at the Great Hall of the People sparked controversy for its renditions of revolutionary “red songs” harking back to the days of Mao, with giant images of Mao and Xi projected on stage.
It drew sharp criticism from even Xi’s long-running supporters, including Ma Xiaoli, whose father Ma Wenrui was close to Xi’s late father, Xi Zhongxun. The extravaganza was so over the top Ma speculated it was staged by political rivals to undermine the Chinese President.
“We must raise our strong vigilance against the comeback of the Cultural Revolution and [against] extreme leftist ideology making waves again,” she wrote, accusing the show of “taking a step back in history”.
But rather than rejecting Mao Zedong’s methods, Mao Yushi says Xi has actively sought to embrace, what after all, had been brutally effective methods of propaganda control and inspiring loyalty and adulation.
“Though Mao killed tens of millions, he is still seen as a saviour, people idolise him till this day. Xi is learning from him,” he says.
Brown, meanwhile, says that Xi’s tactic has been to restore the party to its idealistic roots, to cleanse its elite leaders in order that they can perform their function as leaders, rather than wealth dispensers, and to do this “through a mixture of managed crisis and fear”.
“This, in essence, is his political program. And it is why Mao is still of immense importance for him.”
