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Reassessing the Cultural Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Lucian W. Pye
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Two decades after Mao Zedong ignited the Great Proletarian Revolution there is still no satisfactory accounting for the upheaval which Beijing now says caused millions of deaths and left some 100 million people scarred victims. Ordinary imagination cannot grasp what took place during those “10 bad years of great disaster” (shinian haojie) as the Chinese now call them. Since so much at that time defied conventional theories of politics, outsiders quickly put the phenomenon out of mind once the turmoil ceased. For the Chinese, however, it has not been so simple. Those who personally suffered have tended to summarize the story according to their individual tragedies. Chinese seeking a larger perspective are caught between the inexplicableness of its causes and the incalculability of its consequences.

Type
20 Years On: Four Views on the Cultural Revolution
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 108 , December 1986 , pp. 597 - 612
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1986

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References

1. The impossibility of establishing exact casualty figures for such a disaster results in ritualistic numbers becoming the standardized ones, based at best on remarks by officials who may or may not have much statistical evidence. (See, for example, Huo-cheng, Li, “Chinese Communists reveal for the first time the number 20 million deaths for the Cultural Revolution,” Ming Bao (Daily News), 26 10 1981, p. 3Google Scholar; and cited inLiu, Alan P.L., How China is Ruled (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1986, p. 56)Google Scholar; Other great tragedies of modern China–like the Taiping Rebellion, land reform, the Great Leap – have also been dehumanized by the debatable quality of their casualty figures.

2. Lifton, Robert J., Revolutionary Immortality: Mao Tse-tung and the Cultural Revolution (New York: Vantage Books, 1968)Google Scholar;Solomon, Richard, Mao's Revolution and the Chinese Political Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971Google Scholar).

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9. Jin, Ba, Random Thoughts, transl. by Barme, Geremie (Hong Kong: Joint Publications Co., 1964), p. 76Google Scholar; I am indebted to Merle Goldman for bringing to my attention Ba Jin's views.

10. Published by G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1972.

11. Frolic, B. Michael, Mao's People (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980)Google Scholar;

12. Raddock, David, Political Behavior of Adolescents in China: The Cultural Revolution in Kwangchow (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1977)Google Scholar;

13. Bennett, Gordon A. and Montaperto, Ronald N., Red Guard: The Political Biography of Dai Hsiao-ai (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co., 1982)Google Scholar;

14. Published by Random House, New York, 1983.

15. Goldman, Merle, “Wenhua dageming de fei xiaoji yingsheng,” (“The nonnegative influence of the Cultural Revolution”), in Zhishi fen:i (The Chinese Intellectual), Spring 1986, pp. 47–49Google Scholar;

16. Heng, Liang and Shapiro, Judith, After the Nightmare (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1986), p. 5Google Scholar;

17. Thurston's book length study will appear in the winter of 1986/87, but she has produced two instalment articles, “Victims of China's Cultural Revolution: the invisible wounds,” Pt I, Pacific Affairs, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Winter 1984–1985), pp. 599–620CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Pt II, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Spring 1985), pp. 5–27.

18. Ibid. Vol. 57, pp. 605–606.

19. Ibid. Vol. 58, p. 20.

20. Isaacs, Harold R., Re-Encounters in China (Armok, NY: M. E. Sharp, 1985)Google Scholar;

21. Heng, Liang and Shapiro, Judith, After the Nightmare, pp. 238–39Google Scholar;

22. The failure of western analysts, including tour guided visitors, to appreciate how bad the “revolutionary committees” actually were resulted in a general tendency to assume that the Cultural Revolution had ended around 1969. For the Chinese, however, the troubles continued until Mao's death.

23. “The reign of virtue: some broad perspectives on leader and party in the Cultural Revolution,” CQ, No. 35 (07–09 1968), pp. 1–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar;

24. Gold, Thomas B., “After comradeship: personal relations in China since the Cultural Revolution,” CQ, No. 104 (12 1985) pp. 657–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar;

25. Ibid. p. 669.

26. The irony of the post-Cultural Revolution mood in China is that the very responses which have energized the “reforms” have also made it possible for children of high officials to exploit, for material benefit, their situation. Similarly, a-political but ambitious college graduates now routinely join the Party in order to get ahead. On the frustrating ambivalences of go-getting Chinese towards the shameless ways of gaoganzidi in lording it over the common herd, see: Liang Heng and Judith Shapiro, After the Nightmare, pp. 130–48.

27. For a summary of the problems inherent in a modified market economy which protects inefficiencies, see: Hong, Yeung Wai, “China's troubling mercantilist bent,” The Asian Wall Street Journal, 12 05 1986, p. 12Google Scholar;