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In Our Time: History
The Cultural Revolution
00:48:09
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Mao's uprising against his own party from 1966-76
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- [00:00]
Rana Mitter
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk.
- [00:07]
Melvin Bragg
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- [00:36]
Melvin Bragg
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- [00:38]
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- [00:41]
Melvin Bragg
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- [00:43]
AM PM Advertiser
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- [00:52]
Melvin Bragg
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- [00:53]
AM PM Advertiser
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Melvin Bragg
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- [01:09]
Julia Lovell
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- [01:13]
Host (Melvin Bragg or unnamed host)
Downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter bcinartime. I hope you enjoyed the programs. Hello. In 1966, Chairman Mao began the Cultural Revolution, an uprising with his own party setting Communists against each other with mass violence on the streets and the overthrowing of his enemies. Universities closed the students forming Red Guard factions to attack old ideas, old culture, old habits, old customs, and each other to renew the revolution Mao feared was now too bourgeois. Over a billion copies of Chairman Mao's Little Red Book were printed to support his cult of personality, and hundreds of thousands were killed before Mao himself died in 1976 and the revolution was cancelled. With me to discuss the Cultural Revolution are Rana Mitta, professor of the History and Politics of Modern China and Fellow of Saint Cross College, University of Oxford Son Peidong, Visiting professor at the center for International Studies at Sciences Po, Paris and Julia Lovell, professor in Modern Chinese History and Literature at Birkbeck University of London. Julia Lovell let's look at some of the context. Before the Cultural Revolution, there was a Great Leap Forward. Can you tell us about that and why that matters?
- [02:29]
Julia Lovell
The Great Leap Forward was a radical campaign launched by Mao in 1958 to accelerate China's industrialisation and enable China to catch up economically with the UK and the us. Now, the theory was that workers in China could be mobilised through frenzied indoctrination to work enormously long hours to increase crops and industry without new capital investment. And underpinning this campaign was crash collect into communes containing tens of thousands of people, which were in turn supposed to lead to economies of scale that would generate surpluses to feed the cities and drive industrial growth. Mao was very eager to increase food surpluses to sell abroad, to earn foreign exchange for weapons and other industries. But the results of the Great Leap Forward were tragic. Local officials were desperate to please party bosses and they handed over huge amounts of grain to the government. So people at the grassroots were left with almost nothing to eat. And historians estimate that 30 to 40 million died in the nationwide famine that resulted.
- [03:43]
Host (Melvin Bragg or unnamed host)
30 or 40 million.
- [03:44]
Julia Lovell
30 or 40 million died in the famine. And Mao himself, despite receiving intelligence that people were starving, he refused to row back from the Great leap forward until 1961. Now, the great Leap Forward is a really important part of the backstory to the Cultural Revolution for a few reasons. First, it revealed Mao's eagerness for radical solutions and his impatience to accelerate the Communist revolution. It shows also his faith in the power of the masses. He believed that they could be mobilized to do anything. And third, after the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP and Mao had to acknowledge the famine in 1961, Mao took a back seat from day to day running of the country. And two of his close comrades, Liu Xiaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, took over economic policy. And they allowed a partial return to private farming and markets, the kind of economic solutions that Mao hated. But Mao was plotting a comeback and the Cultural Revolution is that comeback.
- [04:51]
Host (Melvin Bragg or unnamed host)
There's one more question I want to ask you. Does Russia play a part in this at all? The communist neighbor of China, the two great communist states, does Russia play a part in this?
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Julia Lovell
Relations with the Soviet Union are another vital part of the context of the Cultural Revolution, because Mao saw the Cultural Revolution as crucial for the success not only of China's communist revolution, but also of global revolution. And naturally, his attitude to the Soviet Union shaped his view. Up to about 1956, the Soviet Union was a key ally to the People's Republic of China, the prc. But after that, the two states moved apart till they became bitter enemies.
- [05:34]
Host (Melvin Bragg or unnamed host)
When was that?
- [05:36]
Julia Lovell
His quarrel was with the way that Nikita Khrushchev started. Stalin's successor denounced Stalin's tyranny in the secret speech of February 1956. So the relationship begins to fall apart from then on. There were two things in particular that Mao disliked about de Stalinisation. One was Khrushchev's repudiation of the personality cult around Stalin. And the other thing Mao hated was Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin's radical collectivisation through coercion and terror of the late 1920s. This was that Mao would copy in the Great Leap Forward. And Khrushchev also changed Soviet foreign policy. He moved it towards so called peaceful coexistence with the us. So Mao hated all this and he called the Soviets revisionists.
- [06:26]
Host (Melvin Bragg or unnamed host)
Rana ran a mitter. What was the status of Mao Zedong in the early 1960s and was it changing? And how was it changing?
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Rana Mitter
In retrospect, we can see that the early 1960s mark several moments when Mao clearly felt himself to be sidelined by his colleagues in the ccp, in the Chinese Communist Party, and was moving to place himself back at the forefront of Chinese politics. Because the Great Leap Forward, as Julia has said, was such a disaster. So many deaths and the policy was essentially reversed. And China even brought back a certain amount of semi capitalist markets, or at least that's the way that Mao would have seen it under the leadership of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. They basically wanted to put Mao out to a ceremonial position, but one where he couldn't actually interfere with direct politics very much anymore and he basically wasn't having any of it. So in 1962 he launched something called the Socialist Education Campaign, which was meant to be a sort of ideological revival, basically getting to the youth of the country, getting to the workers of the country, telling them the values of socialism were something that really had to be valued and that they should learn from various texts and that they should put them into practice in their everyday lives. And then this was added to two years later in 1964, with a new campaign which concentrated on a different part of Chinese society. And that was the army, the People's Liberation army, which of course had been formed, formerly known as the Red Army. It was the force that had brought Mao and his followers to power in 1949 as part of this big peasant revolution, you know, literally coming out of the countryside. And this campaign was being used to remind people that the army stood very much at the base of the Party's power. As part of that, the Party also did quite a lot of propaganda work to create new attractive, charismatic characters who people could fall behind. And one who became Very famous and even turns up now and then in Chinese propaganda today, was a man named Lei Feng, who was.
- [08:20]
A model soldier, who basically, it was said that he had been killed in an accident at work. And after he died, they claimed they'd found his diary, which was filled. Every single day of it was filled with praise of Chairman Mao. And they put forward Lei Feng as the example of a model worker who really was the kind of dedicated communist who everyone else should aspire to be. He was nicknamed the Rustler Screw because, you know, he kept turning without having any sign of.
- [08:47]
Slowing down. And this was promoted by the Defense Minister at the time, a man called Lin Biao, who would later become very important in the Cultural Revolution. But he was very much behind Mao. He did not want Mao to be sidelined. So he was happy to help Mao with this education campaign in the army. And then there's a final turning point which, in retrospect, I think we can see as the moment that the Cultural Revolution was really being primed to begin. And that happened on the 10th of November, 1965. Mao found that he was unable to get his own messages about the need for a much more ideological turn to society in the newspapers in Beijing, the capital, because basically the other leaders were trying to stop him from actually saying anything about this. So in Shanghai, the other major city of China, he managed to get a review of a play, a play called Hai Rui Dismissed from Office. Many people, including Mao, felt this was a sideways reference to a man named Peng Dehuai, the previous Defence Minister before Lin Biao, who had dared to tell Mao the truth about what was happening during that horrific Great Leap Forward famine and had been sacked for his troubles. And basically, by taking up this play and doing a savagely negative review of it, Mao and his followers were saying that this kind of ideological revisionism would no longer be permitted. So that theatrical review actually marked the beginning of a major political event.
- [10:06]
Host (Melvin Bragg or unnamed host)
Does it mark the beginning of the cult of personality Mao, which became massive?
- [10:11]
Rana Mitter
This is something that did not begin just in the Cultural Revolution. Mao's prime status in Chinese communism as this key figure is something that actually emerges, well, quite early on, actually, even during World War II, when the Chinese Communist Party was based at Yenan in these sort of cave dwellings in northwest China, away from the Japanese. But it doesn't really take off in a major way in which Mao moves from being, you know, first among equals, as you might say, to being this towering, you know, really religiously godlike figure. And it was these moves in the early 1960s, that put together that personality, culture.
- [10:48]
Host (Melvin Bragg or unnamed host)
Thank you, son Peidong. What was it that Mao Zedong wanted from the Cultural Revolution?
- [10:55]
Son Peidong
Mao wanted to reassert his control over the Chinese Communist Party, the ccp, by launching mass campaign during the Cultural Revolution. Imagine that China or the CCP is a big tree in Mao's eyes. He is the only person who can uproot the tree, turn it upside down and diagnose it. And China, the CCP and the Chinese people must take his prescribed medicine, no matter they were sick or not.
- [11:30]
Host (Melvin Bragg or unnamed host)
What did he want? He wanted to abolish old ways, didn't he?
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Son Peidong
Those revolutional slogans. But the reality is another thing that.
- [11:40]
Host (Melvin Bragg or unnamed host)
What he said wasn't necessarily what he did. Is that what you're saying?
- [11:44]
Son Peidong
They just give you one simple example. You know, all the culture, all the capitalist or bourgeois things attacked tremendously during the Cultural Revolution by Red Guards. But actually, Mao himself and his wife, they watched Hollywood movies during the Cultural Revolution very frequently.
- [12:07]
Host (Melvin Bragg or unnamed host)
When would they know people when they might be saying something wrong in the.
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Son Peidong
Eyes of the revolution, people could never know. This is exactly the art of communist revolutions, including the Cultural Revolution. I mean, uncertainties by design. Massive violence and terror are secret weapons of the Communist Revolution. No one is safe under authoritarian regimes. No one should feel safe. So political uncertainties by designed massive violence and terror made it difficult for Chinese people to know whether they were in the right side or the wrong side. This is why Jacques Mallet Dubain stated the revolution swallows its own children.
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Host (Melvin Bragg or unnamed host)
Thank you, Julia. Julia Lovell the Red Guards have been mentioned. Can you tell us about them and what did they do?
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Julia Lovell
Between 1965 and 1966, Mao built a power base around himself of personal loyal, including his wife Jiang qing. And by 1966, this has given Mao and his allies the power to start purging people that he accused of bourgeois revisionism. So Mao's political message in wanting to start the Cultural Revolution is the party is full of traitors at the highest level, and the only person you can trust is Mao and the people he trusts. So in July, he comes back to Beijing after a time away from the capital to sort of take control of this new campaign that he's fomenting. The Red Guard movement began around the same time in Beijing in the summer of 1966. It became subsequently infamous for terrorizing urban populations all over China until the movement was suppressed in 1968. Who were the Red Guards? The Red Guards began on school and university campuses with attacks on their teachers and the party organization within These institutions and these attacks had been approved by Mao. Mao had decided that his shock troops for attacking his enemies within the Party should be young people, students. These are people who'd been born around 1949, who had grown up within the propaganda education systems of the prc, and they'd been thoroughly indoctrinated in his cult.
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In August, Mao publicly approved of the Red Guard, famously said to rebel is justified, and that the Red Guard should bombard the headquarters, the headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party, as he meant, and classes were cancelled so students could focus on making Cultural Revolution. So Red Guards pasted posters everywhere denouncing traitors and reactionaries, and by early August, students were starting to beat their teachers. The first teacher was killed quite soon after that, and many others followed. From the middle of August, Mao intensified Red Guard fever by hosting a series of huge rallies at Tiananmen Square in Beijing. He stood on a platform waving at millions of students, all shouting Long live Chairman Mao. And waving their Mao Bibles, the Little Red Books. And it's at this moment, in fact, that Lim Biao, who's one of Mao's chief allies and the Minister of the Defence, it's at this point that Lim Biao told young people to destroy old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits. So to destroy the four olds and anyone deemed to have bourgeois habits, which could include keeping a pet or wearing tight trousers, you know, anyone with these kinds of suspect habits could be arrested or beaten or worse.
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Rana Mitter
One of the things that is most notable and paradoxical about the Red Guard movement is that many of the most violent, the most enthusiastic youths for the Cultural Revolution were actually the ones who had come from families that had been considered actually to be of low status in the revolutionary hierarchy. In other words, people who had actually, you know, kids who came from bourgeois backgrounds, professional backgrounds, or people who've been associated with the old Nationalists of Chiang Kai Shek prior to the 1949 revolution. And the reason for that, actually, if one thinks about it, is somewhat logical because in the first 17 years of the revolution, those people had been told that they did not have the right kind of red revolutionary credentials. And therefore, when this moment came, 17 years in, when the leader of the country was telling them that everything that their communist peers had been doing was actually wrong and had to be overthrown. It was the people who had done badly out of the system who often had the most motivation to overturn it. And again, we've heard rightly about torture of teachers and people wearing foreign clothes. Winkle picker shoes were another Thing that people tended to pick out in some cities as an example of bourgeois backsliding. But just to give an idea of the massive scale of violence In December of 1966, the first year of the Cultural Revolution, if you were looking at the wrong moment on Kamping Road in the center of Shanghai, in a major street in China's second biggest city, you would have seen 120,000 Red Guards from two rival factions battling for four hours for control of that part of the city. I mean, other Red Guards actually decided that their major target was going to be the army itself, the People's Liberation Army. And in 1968, in the city of Nanning, down in the southwest of China, the Red Guards bombed the riverfront. Essentially. We know that about 50,000 people were left homeless because so many buildings were destroyed during this Red Guard versus Army battle. Even more terrifying in the city of Changchun, some Red Guards and the so called revolutionary masses managed to get some radioactive material from a research lab and were experimenting with creating their own private atomic bomb.
- [18:18]
Host (Melvin Bragg or unnamed host)
Can I come in now? Bring in Pedong. Mao sent many of the Red Guards into the countryside. Was it because he realized at a certain stage that he could no longer control them?
- [18:28]
Son Peidong
For Mao, he always has some ways to control the social groups, right? Actually, you know, the Red Guards were part of the educated youth generation who was sat down by Chairman Mao to the countryside in the 1960s and 70s.
- [18:50]
Host (Melvin Bragg or unnamed host)
And what did he hope to achieve by that Pedo?
- [18:52]
Son Peidong
He said, oh, you know, those kids, he.
- [18:57]
They knew very little or nothing about the reality of the host society, and they made chaos in big cities. Now it's the time to send them to the countryside and learn from their folks who carried out the hard labor works in the countryside.
- [19:22]
Rana Mitter
One of the things that I think is worth noting is that although the moving down of this huge number of urban youth to the countryside, and you know, one set of figures says that we're talking about 16 and a half million youths being sent. I mean, it's a huge number, is that there was a genuine ideological thrust on the part of Mao to actually try and, as he saw it, educate these youths. So while there was clearly a very pragmatic, even cynical element of wanting to get rid of the troublesome youth and send them out of the cities where they were causing trouble, to the countryside where they could do, I think it's also worth noting that there is a genuine element that you can see all through his life in Mao's thinking that.
- [20:02]
A revolutionary in China had to learn from the Peasantry had to understand what they'd gone through, feel the dirt under their fingernails. Of course this was actually in some ways more aspiration than reality because sending a load of quite soft city youths to the countryside, most of them actually ended up hating it. And most of them were not actually very good at any of the agricultural tasks they were sent to do.
- [20:22]
Son Peidong
It is not easy for those urban use to cope with this set down movement. You can imagine a 13 year old British kid named Elsa of London who was sent to a remote village. She didn't know how to cook. She didn't have any idea of how to wash clothes without washing machines or anyone's help. She didn't like local food which were totally different from what she used to eat eat. She had to carry out hard manual labor which she had never done in her previous life. She loved reading, but except Mao's Little Red Book and other communist revolution works, she could barely get access to reading materials in her leisure time. She would never go back to city if she married a local person. The risk of being harassed or even ripped by local quarters and the countrymen was always part of her everyday life.
- [21:25]
Host (Melvin Bragg or unnamed host)
So he starts the Cultural Revolution, sends a lot of the Red Guards after a year or two, sends a lot of the Red Guys to countryside. A lot of them can't cope, don't like it, slaughters are going on in the cities. Where is he with this Cultural Revolution? How's it going?
- [21:40]
Julia Lovell
One of the striking features of this first two years of the Cultural Revolution is that Mao knows how to destroy, but he doesn't necessarily know how to build something in the place of what he has destroyed and what comes through in his own utterances and actions and the kinds of support that he gives to different actors within the Cultural Revolution in this early period is he really does not seem to to have thought through the implications of many of his actions. A good example of this is that the Red Guard movement and the rebellion spreads to Shanghai in the Autumn winter of 1966. And in 1967 there's this famous early 1967 there's this famous overthrowing of the party government in Shanghai. And in its place is founded the so called Shanghai Commun.
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So named after the famous Paris Commune of the late 19th century. Mao, although in theory this is the kind of realisation of the kind of mass democracy mobilization of the masses that Mao seems to have wanted in the summer of 1966, he's actually horrified because he sees that this action is going to completely invalidate the disciplined militarized party organization. Of course, he spent his whole life working to build. And he says in this very anguished way, you know, I don't care if the party in charge is the Nationalists or a religious sect or the Communist Party, but there has to be a party of some sort.
- [23:38]
Host (Melvin Bragg or unnamed host)
Can I come to you on something else, Rana? How was this having an effect, or was it having an. An effect outside China? The 19th century was a year of protests around the Western world. Where was Russia and all this? Can you give us a pencil sketch of what effect this had on the rest of the world, if any?
- [23:56]
Rana Mitter
The Cultural Revolution in China was actually something that attracted huge attention all around the world and, you know, everywhere from the streets of Paris where you had, you know, pictures of Chairman Mao being held up by students. Also Berkeley in California was another place where people looked at this. But the issue was that people didn't really understand in any detail what was going on at the grassroots in the Cultural Revolution, because, of course, very few people could get into China, and most of those were not the kind of people who would be involved in those sorts of student demonstrations. So on the one hand, you had all sorts of people, you know, radicals, particularly in Western capitals, who were becoming increasingly impatient with what they saw as the constraints of their own bourgeois societies and saw Mao as very different from the Soviets, who, of course, were also opposed to Western capitalism, but were seen as stolid and kind of neo imperialists in their own way, because they were controlling Eastern Europe. And Mao seemed like a much more sort of radical and refreshing character from the point of view of those observers on the other side. We also now know that diplomatic missions, and there were some in China at that time, were becoming increasingly alarmed at what they saw. I mean, this was the era when the small British mission in Beijing was essentially besieged during that time, and actually part of it was burnt down to the ground. And the Soviets, who of course, were no longer allied to the Chinese, as Julia was saying earlier, but still maintained a diplomatic presence, a small one in Beijing, found themselves basically being insulted, even, I think, having things thrown at them when they went through the streets of Beijing. And all of this got back to Moscow, got back to the major capitals, and people found themselves essentially saying, we have no idea what's going on, because the Cultural Revolution was, and I think in some ways remains politically unique. It's a political effect unlike any other that's happened in any other Communist society. And at the time, the rest of the world found it exciting or found it terrifying, but it found it above all baffling to interpret.
- [25:52]
Host (Melvin Bragg or unnamed host)
Pedong, can I like to ask you. In 1971, Lin Ba Yeo was killed in an air crash. Why was that important?
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Son Peidong
Oh, that's for many educated youths, all the ordinary Chinese people, that accent was a big political signal which told them that the revolutional promise was not there because.
- [26:22]
They knew very well before the crash of lin Biao In 1971, everyone knew Lin Biao was was Chairman Mao's successor and the most friendly friend within the Chinese Communist Party system. But he became a traitor that make people realize that what they have they knew about the revolution was not true.
- [26:52]
Host (Melvin Bragg or unnamed host)
So do you think to come back to you Julia, for a moment, do you think that Lin Bao was killed in an air crash? Was that deliberate?
- [26:59]
Julia Lovell
It's absolutely right that Lim Biao is one of Mao's key allies in launching the Cultural Revolution. He has a really important role to play also in building the Mao cult in the early 1960s. After all, he's the one who creates and edits the Mao Bible, the Little Red Book. And he becomes Mao's second in command in July 1966. And he's the one who really ousts Liu Shaoqi as Mao's heir apparent. But it seems to be that by 1969, Mao has begun to distrust Lin Biao, we think because of Lin's power over the army. It's really important to point out that despite Mao's utopian idea about the Cultural Revolution as mass democracy, actually the most important political upshot of the Cultural revolution by now 1969 is the strengthening of the military. So by this point, China has effectively become a military dictatorship. So Lin, being Minister of Defense, being head of the army, has a huge amount of power. So trust was breaking down between Mao and Lin by the early 1970s. And as Peidong says, there's this dramatic and mysterious plane crash in September 1971 when Lim Biao and members of his family die when the plane goes down heading towards China's great enemy, the Soviet Union. There are rumors that Lin and his son had been plotting to assassinate Mao and that Lyn fled when the conspiracy was revealed. We still don't know exactly what happened, but I think what we can say is that their impact is clear. So after Lin Biao fled and died, the credibility of Mao and the Cultural Revolution took a major hit. Mao was supposed to be a godlike figure. How could he have made such a mysterious stake as to select as his heir a traitor and a would be murderer? And Lin Biao was one of the chief architects of the Cultural Revolution. He'd now been killed. How. How could we trust him? So many were shocked and revolted, but also others felt relief. I think, you know, perhaps this exhausting Cultural Revolution was going to come to an end.
- [29:18]
Host (Melvin Bragg or unnamed host)
Did Richard Nixon's visit in 1972. Rana met him. Much made of turned in an opera amongst other things. Things did that have anything to do with ameliorating the Cultural Revolution, bring it into the wider world? What was the real consequence of that, as far as you're concerned?
- [29:35]
Rana Mitter
It's a really important turning point and it does mark an important moment in the ending of the Cultural Revolution. Essentially, after the death of Lin Biao, the former Foreign minister we've mentioned, Chinese domestic and foreign policy was in turmoil, but there was also a big problem that the relationship with the Soviet Union had become more and more brittle. In fact, there was the danger actually of a war breaking out on the the Ussuri river on the border between the Soviet Union and China in 1969. While that had calmed down a bit by the early 1970s, it's now clear that various figures, including quite likely Mao himself, may have thought that moving towards opening diplomatic relations with America, which had been frozen ever since the revolution of 1949, was now a good move, not only in its own right, but also because both the Americans and the Chinese distrusted the Soviets more than they distrusted each other. But of course, by doing that, it was opening the way for China to. To reenter the wider world. It had of course, entered the United nations, where it hadn't held the China seat that had been with Taiwan. So it had entered the United nations in 1971, that year before. And then the opening to America came as another sign that that slow but steady move towards opening to the outside world would take place. It wasn't straightforward because various people, including Jiang Qing, the wife of Mao, were actually very against the idea of opening up. And we think that figures like Zhou Enlai, the Prime Minister, who's generally considered to be more pragmatic, were much in favor of the opening to the outside world. But we do also know that Jiang Qing took one advantage of the opening to America, which is apparently she asked for a copy of the Hollywood film the Day of the Jackal to be supplied so that she could watch it in her private cinema, or at least so it's reported. And you can certainly retrospect see it as an important moment for the opening up of China to the world.
- [31:19]
Host (Melvin Bragg or unnamed host)
Peidong the goal of the Cultural Revolution was to root out bourgeois Practice, as I understand understand it, and corruption. Did they succeed with that? Did Mao succeed with that pedo?
- [31:32]
Son Peidong
No, it didn't and we are not. How could you root out pushing practices in China if Chairman Mao, his wife and some of Chinese elites watch the Hollywood movies during the Cultural Revolution as we already discussed? And how could you crack down Western and Chinese classical novels if people practiced a series of smart underground cultural activities? And how could you ban capitalist clothing if people wore them under Mao suits or military uniforms which were popular and legitimate outfits in the Mao era? So I mean in terms of corruption, my research shows that the national wide corruption after 1940, 1949 came from the sat down movement. Let's take Elsa's case as an example. If she was born in an elite family, her parents could make every policy reasonable excuse to keep her in her home city. If she was sent to the countryside, her parents would use their personal connections, Guanxi, to transfer her to a better place with a better life situation. If all these ways didn't work out, her parents would try very hard to eventually bring her back to city as soon as possible. Of course, before going back to her home city, she would be nicely treated in the countryside thanks to her parents personal connection. So as for ordinary educated youth, they would save money from their everyday expenses to buy gifts and offer to local caudries who had the power to allow them to go back to their home place. If Elsa had nothing to offer, she had to give herself to local cordiers as a sexual bribe.
- [33:35]
Host (Melvin Bragg or unnamed host)
Julia Lobel how did the Cultural Romance Revolution or did it affect the Cold War?
- [33:40]
Julia Lovell
The Cultural Revolution can be seen as the beginning of the end of the Cold War in a couple of ways. First of all, the Cultural Revolution weakened the global communist movement because this campaign was so focused on attacking the revisionism of the Soviet Union. So the Cultural Revolution led to the splintering of communist parties all over the world, but especially in the developing world world, which split into pro Soviet and more radical pro Maoist groupings. But even in Europe, the region of strongest Soviet influence, even in Eastern Europe, some national parties took the opportunity to distance themselves from Moscow's control. And when you have this extraordinary spectacle from the early 1970s of both the Soviet Union and China separately trying to make up with the US when you have this unedifying scene of communist superpowers fighting with each other and considering the leader of the capitalist world a lesser enemy, this inevitably devalues communism as a global ideology. And there's one other impact which I'd mention the Chinese under MAO through the 1960s denounced the Soviets for compromising with the US. They accused the Soviets of being the servants of the of imperialism. The Soviets then felt compelled to be far more energetic and generous in aiding anti colonial post colonial insurgencies in the developing world. And you could argue that Soviet aid budgets then become very overstretched at the expense of the domestic economy back in the Soviet Union. And dissatisfaction at the failings of the domestic economy in the 1980s severely weakened the Soviet regime at home in the run up to the communist collapse between 89 and 91. So there's a long range impact too.
- [35:34]
Host (Melvin Bragg or unnamed host)
Rana, how is the Cultural Revolution seen now in China?
- [35:40]
Rana Mitter
The Cultural Revolution came to an end with the death of Mao in 1976 and some of its major perpetrators, the so called Gang of Four, were put on trial in 1981, the same year that it was officially rejected by the Chinese Communist Party. They put out a formal statement, a very rare thing, on one of the own policies, saying it had been a mistake. But now, you know, more than 40 years later, I think there's an ambivalence in China about it. Very large numbers of people, particularly those who are in the middle classes and you know, what Mao would have called the bourgeois, see it as the most horrific time in recent Chinese memory. If they're old enough to remember it, then. I've heard plenty of people. One friend of mine has basically told me about how the house that she lives in is next door to the one that essentially her grandfather was picked up by by guards and taken away and she never saw him again in 1968. So that's a common place in the collective memories of many families. But more interestingly, in terms of paradox, many people who are far too young to remember the Cultural Revolution have started to feel very nostalgic for that era because they've created a sort of invented version of the Cultural Revolution in their minds where the violence never really took place. But instead the ideological purity of Mao is seen as a contrast to what they regard as the sort of rather degenerate capitalist consumerism of today's China, which of course is run by a Communist Party, but it is a highly marketized economy. And these so called neo Maoists, who Julia of course has written about, operate on the Internet, they have their own magazines, they have plenty of very lively and often very angry discussions. And those groups have actually managed to create quite a following for themselves in which they argue that actually the problem with today's Chinese Communist Party is not that essentially it's you know, veering, it's too dictatorial or too authoritarian. They argue that it's not really Maoist enough and that going back to some of the values of the Cultural Revolution is something they ought to do. And you find actually that is a more widespread view in China than you might expect. Even though the mainstream, I think, is still to reject the Cultural Revolution as a time of real horror.
- [37:44]
Host (Melvin Bragg or unnamed host)
Pei Dong, what's your view of the longer term impact of the Cultural Revolution?
- [37:49]
Son Peidong
As a Chinese, I would like to divide the long term impact of the the Cultural Revolution into three layers. I mean, three castrations. Please forgive me for using this word. Firstly, institutional castrations. You may know there were power struggles between two party lives. Liu Shaoqi was originally groomed as Mao's successor. He died under harsh treatment during the Cultural Revolution. Limbiao's accident was another case in point. China will never be a free society if we don't build institutional pillars of respecting and protecting market economy, individual property rights, separation of powers and freedom sought. Secondly, spiritual castrations. People always say intellectuals are the social conscious of a society. How can you expect a society is an open society if its intellectuals have to kneel down before powerful bread? When Chairman Mao's personal opinions became the only truth, many individuals didn't believe they could also have their own opinions. And it continues after the Mao era. Thirdly, cultural castrations. After the successive social campaigns of the Mao era, in particular the Cultural Revolution, it has become a new normalcy that right and wrong actually has no longer important. What's important? Leaders or those who have power or big money, their opinions or attitudes matter.
- [39:43]
Host (Melvin Bragg or unnamed host)
Thank you very much. Finally, Rana, do you think in some way this was a great energizer because of this, even the collapse of it, the confusion of it, the turmoil, the millions and millions of people killed and so on. Just a couple of generations on, really. There we go. It's this enormous, in economic terms, empire.
- [40:04]
Rana Mitter
I think in the end, I can't call it an energizer because while there was a huge amount of political energy placed into the Cultural Revolution, and it is a unique historical, I think there's nothing really to compare with it that I can think of the level of destruction both in terms of people's lives. I mean, you know, more than one and a half million, maybe more like 2 million who were killed and something close to 30 million being persecuted during that time. So the energy was being turned in an almost entirely malevolent direction, I think, particularly on the bourgeois side. And the other reason I would say is that one legacy of the Cultural Revolution has been a politics which we see today in China, which is terrible, terrified above anything else, of mobilization from below. People sometimes accuse the current Chinese Communist Party of wanting to bring back Maoism. I don't think that's really true. But one of the elements that they definitely don't want to bring back is that idea that you might stir up the masses, stir up the students, stir up the workers, and get them, you know, essentially rioting in the streets. And the level of control in Chinese politics today, I think, is in some ways the longest and most severe reaction to the era of the Cultural Revolution. So if anything, I would say that the Cultural Revolution in the long term has been a damper of political energy. It has not been an enabler of it.
- [41:17]
Host (Melvin Bragg or unnamed host)
Finally then, Julia, would you agree with that?
- [41:20]
Julia Lovell
I would also add that the Cultural Revolution, for example, in economic terms, serves as a negative example within post Mao China. I once had a conversation with a former Red Guard who later became a diplomat in the post Mao Foreign Ministry of Foreign Affairs Corps, and he said to me that to understand how China comes out of the Cultural Revolution, China has a saying that things turn into their opposite when they reach an extreme, I. E. That the Cultural Revolution expressed to many Chinese people the bankruptcy of the idea of absolute political puritanism, this idea of absolute egalitarianism, of economic outcome that Mao so fetishize. And so the negative example, the catastrophes of the Cultural Revolution, according to this former Red Guard, told the Chinese people very plainly that they needed to walk a different road. And in some ways, he almost seemed to be implying that he was thanking the Cultural Revolution for turning China onto a. A road of economic reforms, whereas the Soviet Union in the 1980s did not have that same sort of specter of political catastrophe, and so did not feel impelled to reform with the intensity that China did.
- [43:00]
Host (Melvin Bragg or unnamed host)
Well, thank you very much. Thanks to Julia Lovell, Sun Pedong and Rana Mitter. We take a break on Christmas Eve and we'll be back on New Year's Eve to discuss eclipses in the astronomy, history and myth. Thanks for listening.
- [43:14]
Julia Lovell
And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few.
- [43:17]
Melvin Bragg
Minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.
- [43:20]
Host (Melvin Bragg or unnamed host)
Anything that was not said that you would like to have been said, I'd.
- [43:25]
Rana Mitter
Add one sort of element. I think it was just because we had to slightly skate over the second half of the Cultural Revolution to get to the end. In a sense, it's not the one where the showy stuff happens. You know, the Red Guards is really what you might call the Marquis element of the Cultural Revolution. But actually the number of deaths in the second part, from 1969-76, when the People's Liberation army are really in charge of China, actually sees, you know, more deaths and more destruction in some ways than even the Red Guard phase. And Deng Xiaoping, you know, who's thought of at least as in the later period as this great moderate, actually shows a really kind of savage hand at that time. He's put in charge of, you know, part of China in 1975. And when, you know, there's a small village in Yunnan which rises up against his rule, he basically sends in the troops and shoots, you know, one and a half thousand people dead. So if you're wondering where Tiananmen Square 1989 came from, actually looking at Deng Xiaoping back in 1975 in the Cultural Revolution is quite a good place to see, you know, the beginning of some of, some of that, you know, horrific experience.
- [44:24]
Julia Lovell
Julia, I'd say a few words about the impact on China's economy, because the Cultural Revolution really transformed the economy.
- [44:32]
Host (Melvin Bragg or unnamed host)
That's what I was trying to get in a rather clumsy way when I said, did it energize it? It was the economy around Shanghai, but still, as long as you bring it to bear on this, it'll get out all the same. Could you, could you talk about that?
- [44:43]
Julia Lovell
Well, as you would expect, huge amount of political chaos is very destabilizing to industrial and agricultural production, which in the most turbulent phases of the Cultural Revolution decreases by about 10%. But there's an even bigger sort of physical impact on the economy. So in 1964, as part of Mao's ongoing war with the Soviets and the Americans, he starts to argue very seriously that the Soviets and Americans are about to bomb China and that China needs to protect its industry, which is at that point very much centered in the developed economies east. So factories on the east coast were told to pack up and rebuild in the poor isolated west of the country.
- [45:36]
Between 1966 and 1975, the so called third front, which is what this project is called, swallowed up almost half of national investment. And economists broadly agree that this was a huge misuse of capital. One economist has argued that industrial output output was up to 15% below what it would have been in the 1980s if the third front, which of course was driven by political considerations, hadn't happened.
- [46:05]
Rana Mitter
But you also get at that time, at the beginning of the 1970s, the beginnings of the market economy. And people tend to Use a shorthand, that China's market economy sort of emerged in 1978, you know, when Deng Xiaoping took over China. But actually we know that Zhou Enlai, the Prime Minister, was sort of turning either a blind eye or at least a sort of benevolent smile towards the American emergent or particularly agricultural markets by the early 70s, simply because actually the planned economy wasn't working. And the experience of the Great Leap Forward, which we started with, reminded people that starvation was a real possibility and that somehow people had to be fed and that markets were one way to do that. So China's market revolution, you know, it changes the world, actually begins during the Cultural Revolution itself.
- [46:46]
Son Peidong
I would like to see a few words about the.
- [46:52]
Western youth who identified themselves with a Red Guard and MAO in the 1969. 68. So I think the issue lies not in the phenomenon itself, but beyond it. And it has been long in the making. When things become bad, when social problems and conflicts turn critical, people tend to search and find new resources not only from their own history, but also from exterior. This was part of the story of revolutionary identification with a Cultural Revolution in the turbulent 1968 in many Western countries.
- [47:40]
However, our Chinese proverb has well said. Mirror, flower, water, water, moon, meaning flower in the mirror moon underwater. You can feel the huge tension between imagined China and the real China. In 1974, Hollenbach traveled in China as part of a small delegation of distinguished leftist French philosophers and literary figures. They arrived in China just as the last state of the Cultural Revolution was getting underway. Poor Holland. He was honest about what he saw in China.
- [48:21]
Host (Melvin Bragg or unnamed host)
Thank you very much indeed. Thank you Julia. Thank you Pedong. Thank you Rana. And I hope you enjoy what you hear when it comes on Earth In.
- [48:29]
Melvin Bragg
Our Time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson.
- [48:32]
Louis Theroux
Hello, Louis Theroux here and I just wanted to hijack this podcast to tell you that I back with another series of my podcast, Grounded with Louis Theroux. In case you hadn't noticed, Covid hasn't gone away and because of travel restrictions, neither have I. So I've rounded up the likes of Michaela Cole, Frankie Boyle, Oliver Stone, Sia and FKA Twigs for another set of eclectic and thought provoking conversations. Yes, I'm still grounded with me, Louis Theroux. Available. Available on abc. Sounds.
- [49:20]
Melvin Bragg
What do you think makes the perfect snack?
- [49:22]
AM PM Advertiser
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- [49:26]
Melvin Bragg
Could you be more specific when it's cravenient?
- [49:28]
AM PM Advertiser
Okay, like a freshly packed baked cookie made with real butter available right down the street at am, pm. Or a savory breakfast sandwich I can grab in just a second at am, pm.
- [49:36]
Melvin Bragg
I'm seeing a pattern here.
- [49:38]
AM PM Advertiser
Well, yeah, we're talking about what I.
- [49:39]
Melvin Bragg
Crave, which is anything from am, pm.
- [49:41]
AM PM Advertiser
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Melvin Bragg
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