CULTURAL Revolution

beyond the may sixteenth notice

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As argued by Jonathan D. Spence in his introduction to Li Zhensheng’s visual chronicle, the more time that passes since the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the more difficult it becomes to understand. It is generally understood that the Cultural Revolution, led by Mao Tse-tung, began in 1966, with the May 16th Notice. The official initiation also coincided with the birth of the Red Guards, and the launch of the Campaign to Destroy the Four Olds. This periodisation is problematic considering Mao’s destruction by separation campaign began as early as 1957.

Beyond the May 16th Notice

May 16, 2016

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Throughout the 1950s, Mao had sought to establish China as a global power, asserting himself as an international communist leader. The denunciation of Stalin’s “cult of personality” and his “terrorisation” of artificially created “enemies of the people” in Khrushchev’s Secret Speech of 1956 was seen as a direct attack on the Maoist state. In this speech, from which the Chinese delegates were pointedly excluded, Khrushchev described such actions as “glaring violations of revolutionary legality.”

Macfarquhar and Schoenhals reject attributing the “turmoil of the Cultural Revolution” to Mao’s perception of events in the Soviet Union. However, the rise and subsequent fall of Khrushchev targeted Mao’s insecurities over “Soviet-style revisionism” spreading to China. Mao specifically warned against the great “dangers” of “revisionism”, which could “poke holes” in the “armour of the communist movement.”

For Mao, revisionism meant “not distinguishing between the enemy and us, or between classes… Revisionism is not wanting struggle and not wanting revolution.” Mao’s emphasis on “distinguishing” between “us” and the ideological Other created a series of opposing binaries which defined the cultural revolution. And thus, Mao created a sustainable source of state enemies against which to direct his great revolutionary struggle.

Mao’s creation of an enemy of the people highlights the difficulty of applying a western conception of the “individual” when understanding the recreation of group identities during the Cultural Revolution. The “individual” is complex in Chinese anthropology, which only truly emerged in the post-Mao years. According to Lei Xie, fa is the Chinese concept of law as a political and administrative tool to maintain social order and stability, not a mechanism for the realisation of individual rights. The perpetuation of the Party Line as the official code of social order justified attacks on individual rights according to the Chinese conception of law, negating “revolutionary legality.” Mao sought to “deepen the communist revolution” and “purge all enemies” by reemphasising constant “class struggle”, within which, according to Chang and Halliday the masses were mere “numbers” divided into opposing groups: “us” and “them.”

This article is an extract from a dissertation completed at the University of Exeter in 2013. The opinions expressed in this article in no way reflect the opinion of any unit of the Chinese government. For a downloadable version, and complete list of references, click here.

Image credit: whitechapelgallery.org

Written by Abbey Heffer

Modernity sets itself apart from an Other which it labels tradition [but] the modern not only invented tradition, it depends on it.

In smashing the old political structure, [the revolution] could do very little to create a new political system.

The redefinition of Chinese society along Mao’s insistence on continued class struggle sought to prevent “deviations from revolutionary goals” and to legitimise a “dramatic deviation” from a pre-revolutionary past. The Cultural Revolution became a series of violent campaigns fighting to promote a new social order, distinct from the old. Criticism of post-1949 ideology – the “new” communism – was considered revisionist and subversive to the government; however, affiliation with pre-1949 ideology – Confucianism or bourgeois “old” traditionalism – was considered reactionary, rightist or worse.

The Cultural Revolution represented a complete ideological break with a non-communist past, necessitating the complete reversal of pre-liberation roles as they were perceived.

The Cultural Revolution enforced a series of contrasting ideological binaries, in order to destroy those associated with “old” habits. It allowed for the expression of anti-feudalistic roles but the very opposition of “feudalist” and “communist” caused complications and contradictions.

In creating an opposition between “old” and “new”, the Cultural Revolution became dependent upon the existence of the “old.” Elements of the “old”, therefore, persisted and the “new” remained “incomplete.” This same is true of creating a “new” national identity, the process was incomplete, causing confusion and complication. In order to understand a “new” national identity, its relationship with the “old” must first be investigated. Similarly, in today’s China, the relationship with Mao-era politics needs to be fully interrogated before any significant departure from past error can be achieved. As another year passes since the officially accepted start of the Cultural Revolution, it seems the country is only small steps closer to consolidating and overcoming the traumas of a particularly violent time in its modern history.

Chang and Halliday tend to over-emphasise the criminality of Mao’s character, at the expense of a more critical engagement with their sources. However, they highlight the most significant consequence of Mao’s ideological warfare: the separation of individuals into categories of political correctness. This dehumanisation of the population entered into the Cultural Revolution framework during the “Hundred Flowers” movement of 1957, and the subsequent “Anti-Rightist Campaign.” According to Kau and Leung, the “hundred flowers” policy allowed Mao to locate contradictions that existed under his leadership, and process them “specifically as contradictions internal to ‘the people.’”

These internal contradictions translated as individuals classified as Other: enemies of the people. Attacks on the Other could be legitimised as removing contradictory elements in order to promote a “flourishing… socialist culture.” Mao’s “retreat to the ‘Second Front’ focusing on theoretical and ideological issues” led to his confirmation in 1962 that the “Party’s basic line” was on-going “class struggle.”

Upon liberation the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) held “full political power”, but lacked “power to make an overnight transformation of Chinese culture.” Therefore, the early years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) were not characterised by a satisfyingly conclusive break from the “old.” Even in the arts, there was evidence of conservative cultural backtracking during the 1950s, as seen in a revival of interest in “the established glories of Chinese tradition.” As Mao stated, “the ‘dead’ still dominate in many departments.” Mao believed the Party was neglecting its ideological path, and that the “current situation” needed rectification. Repetition by Mao of words like “rotten”, “dead” or “decay” to describe the situation supports this.