BY ED FELIEN
While all this was happening in the U.S., the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was going on in China.
Reports were scattered, mixed and fragmentary, but it seemed that at a Chinese Communist Party Congress in Wuhan in July of 1966, Mao was told by the Central Committee that his ideas were outmoded and impractical, and “What difference does the color of the cat matter as long as it catches mice?” They wanted him to retire and continue writing poetry but stay out of the way of the practical matters of running the country. “It was better to be expert than red.”
In April Nieh Yuan-tzu, a graduate student in philosophy at Beijing University, wrote a big character poster and put it up at the university. It criticized the faculty and administration for favoring Party cadre for admission, thereby discriminating against peasants and workers. This favoritism could ultimately create a new hereditary ruling class similar to Russia. She was, of course, severely criticized for her action. The Party bosses controlled the newspapers and the radio stations. Education and social behavior were still strictly regimented by Confucian values. The Mandarin bureaucracy was almost 2,000 years old and rigid in its assertion of authority. Nieh Yuan-tzu was not showing proper respect.
About 5,000 young people were going to participate in the annual race to swim across the Yangtze at Wuhan. Mao always enjoyed swimming, and he said he’d join them. He left the Party Congress, jumped in the water and swam with the young people across the river. The width of the river at that point is about a mile, but the current had taken him 10 miles downstream. He got to the other side, got out of the water, and said, “Nieh Yuan-tzu is right. Bombard the headquarters.”
That was the moment the Cultural Revolution began. Quotations from Chairman Mao were published in a Little Red Book. People were encouraged to stop production in industry and agriculture and study Mao Zedong Thought. Was their work contributing to the revolution, or was it continuing feudal and bourgeois values? Just because something had been done in a certain way for thousands of years no longer made it the only way that it could or should be done. Question authority! People were encouraged to do six months work and six months study. People who worked in the city were encouraged to work for six months in the country.
Of course there were excesses. Probably the worst were committed by reactionaries who “waved the Red flag,” denouncing others while protecting their own privileges. All Party cadre were asked to do public self-criticism.
But this was not new. Mao had done this before. In fact, he did it with predictable regularity. In 1935 on the Long March, retreating from the Kuomintang forces, Mao insisted on holding a Party Congress in which the policies of Party and the Soviet advisors were severely criticized. At this congress the Party elected Mao chairman.
In 1942, in the middle of the war against the Japanese occupations and the civil war with Chiang Kai-Shek, Mao became alarmed that Party cadre were becoming left dogmatic. Rather than working with peasants to make rural villages more democratic and equalitarian, they were issuing orders. They acted like they were superior to the peasants and were guilty of commandism. In each village when the Red Army came, they held a meeting of all the villagers, and let the villagers decide what to do with the chief landlord. Sometimes they executed him. Sometimes they pinched him and screamed at him. And sometimes they shared the land with him. But cadre often made mistakes because they did not understand the conditions of the village. Sometimes they would kill an ox and divide the meat among the village, when that ox was the only way the village could plow the ground. Mao ordered all Party cadre to construct a gate in each village. Each cadre was to stand in the gate and make a good self-criticism. If the cadre was sincere and the village believed him and accepted his self-criticism, then the cadre could go through the gate and continue doing political work in the village. An amazing account of this process is detailed in the last section of William Hinton’s book “Fanshen.” Mao’s analysis is in “Rectify the Party’s Style of Work.”
In 1957 Mao published “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People.” This long essay contained the section “Let a Hundred Flowers Blossom, Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend.” For six months, Mao said, Party cadre should be still and take criticism. In the larger essay Mao outlined the kind of criticism he thought was effective. It should be based on Unity, Criticism, Unity. It should begin by establishing a basis for unity that both sides agree to. Criticism should then assume those basic shared values, and the conclusion of criticism should lead to a greater unity on a new and better basis.
The Party Congress in the middle of the Long March, the critique of left dogmatism in “Rectify the Party’s Style of Work” and the Hundred Flowers period were the theoretical precedents for the Cultural Revolution. The West was horrified at the chaos and anarchy: “Why, people were taking the government into their own hands.” But it was just that chaos and anarchy that Mao believed would be a tonic to purge the Party of authoritarianism and old-fashioned ideas. And this concept doesn’t originate with Mao. Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to John Adams, had said, “God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion.”
Every 10 years Mao organized grassroots rebellions against the Chinese Communist Party government that challenged every political post in the country.
