Main Menu · Search ·Current Issue ·Contact ·Archives ·Centennial ·Letters to the Editor ·FAQs
Red Army soldiers jeer as "anti-revolutionaries," humiliated in dunce caps, are paraded through the streets of Beijing in 1967--an all too familiar spectacle throughout China during the convulsive Cultural Revolution. UPI/CORBIS-BETTMAN |
With China today luxuriating under Deng Xiaoping's slogan "To get rich is glorious," it takes some effort to recall Mao Zedong's China of revolutionary fervor and vicious class struggles that climaxed with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Yet the Cultural Revolution should not be forgotten, for it was one of the most bizarre and inexplicable events in all of Chinese--if not world--history. During its high tide, from 1966 to 1969, it seemed to the outside world that an entire nation had gone mad as the Chinese fanatically shouted slogans and viciously fought over who were the most ideologically dedicated and who were the "enemies of the people." The public drama began with half a million screaming students in Tiananmen Square, waving their little red books of Mao quotations, and Mao Zedong himself responding by accepting one of their armbands. In the months that followed, more than 11 million Red Guards poured into Beijing and students throughout the country denounced their teachers, commandeered railroad cars, and traveled about "sharing revolutionary experiences."
But soon innocent enthusiasm was replaced by vicious factional struggles that eventually permeated nearly all organizations, as every group sought urgently to sweep clean its ranks of any "monsters and ghosts"--that is, "revisionists" and "renegade capitalists." The leaders called for the eradication of the "Four Olds" (old thinking, old culture, old customs, and old habits); the revolutionaries responded by destroying art treasures and historic relics, and by launching physical attacks on educated and cultured persons who might have "bad" class backgrounds. The country was tearing itself apart: education came to a halt as schools and universities were closed and factories ceased production. Most astonishing of all, the Communist Party and the government fell into total disarray from continuous purges and factional struggles, with the losers being sent to labor camps. Then came the program of sending people "down to the countryside" to "learn revolution" from the peasants. Millions died. The human suffering was such that Hu Yaobang, the first secretary general of the party under Deng Xiaoping, later said that 100 million people--one tenth of the population--became scared victims of Mao's revolutionary policies.
As China began slowly to pull back from its follies, Sinologist Roderick MacFarquhar took up the immense challenge of trying to explain how the Cultural Revolution happened. The result is an awe-inspiring work of historical scholarship, a trilogy entitled The Origins of the Cultural Revolution. MacFarquhar felt that to understand Mao's policies and political maneuverings, one had to understand his manipulation of mass campaigns, beginning with the very first, the Hundred Flowers policy and the Anti-Rightist Campaign against the intellectuals. These form the subject of volume one, Contradictions among the People, 1956-1957, published in 1974. Volume two, The Great Leap Forward, 1958-1960, published in 1983, examined the leadership struggles which led to the rural communes, and ultimately to the worst famine in all of human history. Now we have the long-awaited, climactic, volume three, The Coming of the Cataclysm, 1961-1966, which brings the story up to the eruptions of the Red Guards and the subsequent horrors of intra-party strife, a subject MacFarquhar intends to address fully in his next book. (In the trilogy, MacFarquhar limits his analysis to intra-elite politics, and thus does not recount the boundless social and economic suffering that Mao's policies caused.)
This third volume achieves a standard of scholarship that would have impressed, indeed made envious, Leopold von Ranke, the demanding German historian who insisted that in serious historical writings, all statements of fact must have footnote references to archival sources. MacFarquhar has more than 2,000 footnotes, which refer to more than 900 different sources. Clearly he left no stone unturned to get at all the facts. While working on this last volume, MacFarquhar also taught a popular Core course on the Cultural Revolution: between 1988 and 1997, 2,754 Harvard students took it. The combination constitutes one of the most impressive linkings of research and teaching in Harvard history.
MacFarquhar traces almost day by day the interactions of the top Chinese leaders during Chairman Mao's reign, charting their personal understanding of the country's many problems, their different policy prescriptions, and their private feuding. Defying the fact that Mao's China undoubtedly had the world's most secretive political processes, MacFarquhar reconstructs what the leaders were thinking and doing by laboriously examining all available sources for clues and bits of evidence. Other China scholars at the time generally played the game of Pekingology, speculating about what was going on behind the wall of Zhongnanhai, the corner of the Forbidden City where the elite lived. MacFarquhar has gone beyond the realm of gossip by seeking to find documentary proof of what was happening. It is no criticism to note that at times the paper trail he has followed consists only of self-serving memoirs and journalistic accounts, which themselves may have been only a step removed from gossip. In his often lively footnotes, MacFarquhar makes clear the bases of his judgments about the validity of any questionable sources.
Propaganda posters plaster the shop of a Chinese businessman who has returned to Beijing from abroad, presumably tainted by foreign corruption. UPI/CORBIS-BETTMAN |
Simply put, Macfarquhar's story is that the leadership unity of the "Yan'an Round Table" was broken by a "two line struggle" between a charismatic, utopian revolutionary--Mao--and a more pragmatic group led by Liu Shaoqi. The policy clashes within the leadership group were intensified both by the dynamics of personal chemistry and by the feuding of the two top leaders' wives. Time and again Mao overrode his colleagues and took China down disastrous roads: into the Korean War, for example, and into the various mass mobilizations, from the Great Leap to the Cultural Revolution itself.
Chairman Mao is thus very much the center of MacFarquhar's analysis. Partly as a result of gaining access to more information, and partly due to the shifting perspective caused by the passing of time, MacFarquhar's picture of Mao changes from volume one to volume three. In the first book Mao is seen as an idealist, committed to a utopian vision of a rather benign Marxism; by book three, he is a far more destructive figure. As MacFarquhar himself says, "My image of Mao is now less the stern but unifying sovereign of the Round Table, more a suspicious Olympian Jove, ready to strike down with lightning bolts."
MacFarquhar provides extensive evidence that Mao had only a feeble understanding of the realities of China's situation. For example, even as the failures of the Great Leap were becoming manifestly obvious, the Chairman continued to believe it possible for China to raise its steel production from 9 million to 100 million tons in a decade, relying only on human effort and idealistic commitment, with no further capital investments. Mao pretended that he wanted to know all the facts, for he constantly called for the investigation of conditions throughout the country. Indeed, he repeatedly accused his colleagues of only "Viewing the flowers from horseback," rather than getting out and scrutinizing the details. After the Ninth Plenum, Mao issued a letter declaring, "No investigation, no right to speak." Yet, understandably, his colleagues were fearful of reporting anything that might challenge the Chairman's opinions of the moment. As the famine took its toll in the wake of the Great Leap, Liu Shaoqi spent a month and a half living in the countryside, exploring how bad conditions were, and learning what the peasants were thinking. Mao's reaction to Liu's carefully crafted report was to accept only temporarily the need to curtail his calls for revolutionary fervor--and thereafter to treat Liu as an enemy.
Government under Mao was essentially government by slogan. The main slogan for the Great Leap was "Go all out, aim high, and achieve greater, faster, better, and more economical results." The mantra for the recovery period was "Adjustment, consolidation, improvement, and fill out." During the few years between the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution--MacFarquhar's focus in volume three--the effort to achieve a degree of stability led to a flood of documents called "articles" that laid out policy principles for different fields, ranging from the Forty Articles for commerce and the Seventy Articles for industry to the Fourteen Articles for science, the Ten Articles for drama troupes, and the like. The number of articles for any given policy area was somewhat random, for the same points were made repeatedly. Given the authors' understandable fear of subsequent punishment, their language was uniformly fuzzy and ambiguous. (And indeed, during the Cultural Revolution, all of the "Articles" cited above were denounced as the work of "revisionists," deserving of harsh punishment.)
The zigs and zags of Mao-era Chinese policies were not only magnified by the ease with which the Chairman changed his mind, but also by the anxieties of his colleagues as they tried to anticipate any possible changes. The fateful rise and fall of individual leaders depended either upon their being identified with a new policy course or suffering the consequences of having been associated with policies later declared to be wrong. To make matters worse, Mao was personally incapable of sustained relationships; he would in time reject even the most loyal colleagues.
Another distinctive feature of politics under Mao was an endless sequence of conferences, meetings, plenums, and congresses, each of which called for speeches, recorded debates, drafts and redrafts of summary conclusions: documents which have become increasingly available over time and which supply much of the evidence cited in MacFarquhar's footnotes. His story thus follows the stepping stones provided by these occasions, with the tension building as the Chairman went in one direction and then another, inexorably moving toward the disasters of the Cultural Revolution.
After setting the stage by reviewing the policy discussions on what to do about the crises in the countryside caused by the Great Leap, MacFarquhar establishes the foundations for the rest of volume three with a close analysis of the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference of early 1962. There Mao, by engaging in a bit of self-criticism, seemed to signal that he was drawing back from his extreme leftist positions of the Great Leap period. The more pragmatic leaders took heart, and in subsequent conferences pushed for modifications in the commune arrangements, some modest experiments with a system of family responsibility in farming, a resuscitation of the united front with non-Party leaders, and bits of still guarded criticisms of the excesses of the recent past. But barely a year later Mao was back calling for more class struggle and a revival of the war against "revisionism," domestically and within the Communist bloc. Striving to get back in full charge, he called for a revival of his militant policies at the Tenth Plenum. That set the stage for the Socialist Education campaign, which in turn brought to fame Lei Feng, the model soldier whose Boy Scout deeds were supposed to inspire the entire country to better revolutionary conduct.
The drama in MacFarquhar's story builds as Mao perceives enemies on all sides: internationally, the forces led by both the Soviet Union and the United States (only Albania could be trusted); domestically, the threat increasingly centered in Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. Where Mao had, for example, initially praised the historian Wu Han's play, Hai Rui Dismissed from Office (about an honest official punished for criticizing the emperor's bad policies), he now saw the story as an Aesopian attack on him for his removal of Peng Dehuai, the first leader to find fault with the Great Leap. MacFarquhar skillfully tells incident after incident, all in the context of the deep suspicion and distrust Mao had created as the emotional environment for elite politics. Approaching the madness of the Cultural Revolution itself, MacFarquhar sets out markers for calibrating the destined eclipse of the pragmatists, and the rise of the fanatical Gang of Four, drunk with their ideological fantasies. Although the reader knows that the horrors of the Cultural Revolution lie ahead, MacFarquhar sustains a high degree of suspense in his telling of the story.
In this consummate trilogy, MacFarquhar has exposed the inner workings of Mao's China with a depth of detail that raises the standards for Sinological research. The picture is filled with intrigues, feuds, devious game-playing, and the masking of intentions through code words and outright lies. But there are also some sincere efforts to advance China's struggle to modernize. Although MacFarquhar is steadfast in giving Mao's side of each event, one cannot come away from the three volumes without a sad awareness of how much China suffered because of Mao Zedong's character--of how much better off China would be today if it had not had to go down the road along which the Chairman took it for so long. Many readers will certainly see Mao as a severely flawed mortal, even as MacFarquhar himself clings to a vision of Mao as Jove. The riddle of China only deepens as we contemplate the mystery of how the same people could have carried out both the Cultural Revolution and now the amazing economic reforms of the Deng Xiaoping era.