The Cultural Revolution Series: An overview

The period from 1966 to 1976 is known in Chinese history as the Cultural Revolution. A time of turbulence, violence and change, the Cultural Revolution has affected, if not defined, the course of China's development.

Who were calling the shots? What were the triggers? How were ordinary people's lives affected? How has China responded to the events of the Cultural Revolution? These are questions that The Cultural Revolution Series wants to find answers to by interviewing both Western and Chinese experts on the period.

In the first part of our series, Dr. Rana Mitter, a professor at the Institute for Chinese Studies at the University of Oxford, gives us a glimpse into the Cultural Revolution. Dr. Mitter has received numerous awards for his books and research about China.

Radio 86: What time frame does the Cultural Revolution cover?

Dr. Mitter: I would say that the standard time frame is from 1966 to 1976. The phase that people tend to associate with the Cultural Revolution -- the teenagers on the street, the Red Guards, the really violent part of the Cultural Revolution in the open -- is really the first three years, up to 1969.

What led to this?

What were the causes of the Cultural Revolution? There's a variety of things. By 1966, Communist China had been established for 17 years, after the Revolution of 1949 and in various ways, Chairman Mao, the ruler of China, felt disturbed, not just about his own personal position but also with the wider state of China. He had been involved in trying to introduce higher-level socialism in China at a very speedy rate, leading to the so-called Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s. His attempt to try and increase China's agricultural and industrial production beyond what was possible triggered a massive famine that may have killed tens of millions of people. We don't have the full numbers.

A cult of personality was organized around Mao Zedong. (Image: Radio86)By the early 1960s, Mao was still on top, but in some ways, he's been a little bit sidelined by his colleagues who were wary of his revolutionary fervor. At the same time, he also worried in his own mind about China's youth. He thought that the generation that had been born in or after 1949 would never have known anything except Communist rule, and they might become complacent, they might become a little less keen on the Revolution than his generation who had obviously lived through the period beforehand.

For a combination of reasons, some of which had to do with trying to restore his own personal position and some of which had to do with trying to revive the revolutionary fervor in China, he decided to launch this very unusual campaign, which would actually be a call to China's youth and ordinary people to rise up against the Party itself.

It was a revolution against the Communist Party?

Yes, this is an absolutely unique event in really 20th century world history. There's been lots of other dictators but no other dictator has actually asked his own people to rise up against the party structure which he's in-charge of. It sounds paradoxical, but that's what Mao did.

After the Great Leap Forward, how was his call to revolt received?

But the Cultural Revolution was able to succeed because despite that, Mao still had massive prestige. He was far far more prominent in the leadership than any of the other figures that were there. It wasn't like Stalin's Russia, where Stalin was really all-dominant. There was still a lot of autonomous powers that some of Mao's colleagues in the Politburo had but at the same time, it was clear that particularly with the wider population, Mao's position was way above the others. Not least because in the 1950s onwards, his army chief, Lin Biao, had started to organize a cult of personality around him, so you saw Mao's picture wherever you went in China.

In 1920, Mao was said to have developed this "theory of violent revolution." Did it have anything to do with the idea of the Cultural Revolution?

Absolutely. Throughout his life, one of Mao's major concerns was to throw off the expectations of the traditional Confucian Chinese world. Amongst those were the ideas that order, harmony, stability and society were important. He felt that China needed an injection of dynamism to shake it up and make it fit for the modern world. And as part of that, he said that violence could be transformative, it could be a positive thing that could help move society forward. That theory was very much put to the test in the Cultural Revolution. Clearly there was a great deal of violence in the Communist Revolution over the whole course of the 20th century, but the Cultural Revolution is perhaps the point at which it was most openly glorified as being a good thing in itself.

Did Mao's background have anything to do with him using the peasantry as his base of support?

Oh yes, very much so. One of the great myths is that Mao was the inventor of the peasant revolution in China, that the other earlier Communists thought of a Soviet-style revolution and he turned in the other way.

Actually, there are other Communists, who have now become less well-known, who even as early as the 1920s were talking about the importance of rural revolution. Mao was clearly the most theoretically sophisticated figure to take the peasant revolution as an idea and move it forward. That's something that you get happening from the early 1930s onwards.

And it was clear that because he had come from that background, I think it's fair to say, his observation of the way in which peasant society worked -- and he wrote a lot of very detailed, very rigorous reports about the nature of peasant society in China -- clearly, his own background had given him insights that the urban Chinese simply didn't have.

How would you characterize the Cultural Revolution? I had interviewed someone about this period and one of the things he mentioned was that his parents had always said that life in the Cultural Revolution was much better than life before.

Much better than life before... Well, depends where you're looking from. I think if you are coming from the middle-classes, if you're an intellectual, if you're bourgeois and you were living in the cities, then the Cultural Revolution was a very destructive thing because Mao demanded that action be taken against all those who were in a privileged position.

At the same time, it's clear that for some parts of the community, particularly perhaps in the rural areas where there was interest in things like new, more rural-oriented health care, the Cultural Revolution might bring improvements rather than problems with standards of life.

Overall, though, if you look at the effects on the economy and the breaking-up of society, things like the shutting down of schools for many years, I think it has to be argued that the overall effects of the Cultural Revolution was damaging to China, not positive.

What are the Red Guards and what was their role in the Cultural Revolution?

Mao in 1927. He joined revolutionary groups in his youth. (Image: Wikipedia)Well, I would say that the Red Guards again are one of the central phenomena of the first three years, let's say, between 1966 and 1969, after which they were actually forced to be sent home by Mao.

Essentially, they were the shocktroops of the Cultural Revolution. Mao appealed directly over the heads of his party to the youth of China, as the force that would revive China and give it a revolutionary vigour.

In doing this, he was recalling his own youth. When he was in his teens and 20s, he had taken part in revolutionary groups, written in magazines, traveled to Beijing to take part in the so-called May Fourth Movement of the 1910s, 1920s when many of China's youth grows up in demonstrations and demanded what they called "Science and democracy," as the two things that would help to reform China.

Mao thought about all those experiences half a century later during the Cultural Revolution. He wanted the younger generation also to have these experiences but he added his own obsessions as well. One of them was the idea that violence is transformation, that change through violence was essential to a true revolutionary experience. That's one of the reason why the Red Guards were encouraged to be so violent.

What was self-criticism?

Self-criticism was a technique that was used essentially not just to get people to say what they've done, but also to get them to admit that they felt sorry about it and that they were therefore, ideologically, kind of converting to the right point of view. What was generally done was for people to be confronted with various crimes they had supposedly committed, not necessarily crimes that we would recognize in those terms, and then write out confessions in their own language, saying they had done this and that they were deeply sorry and that they would move into a better mode of behavior.

What was behind the idea of re-education?

The idea was that essentially students living in the cities were too soft -- they've had an urban lifestyle, they had no idea about what life in the countryside was. By sending them out to the countryside, they would learn skills about how the vast majority of their fellow country people lived. But, because they had no training in farming, they often weren't very welcome visitors. The peasants thought they had to feed them as well as themselves. So, while this policy was intended to try and educate the youth, it may have actually ended up just annoying a lot of peasants.

It was based essentially rather on Mao's romanticized idea from his youth of how the countryside worked, but he didn't pay much attention to the realities.

Oh, he was absolutely in the center of it. Mao was the one really charismatic leader in China, you might say in the 20th century. He was able to draw people to him and explain to them often very complex ideas in language which they were able to understand and follow. There were lots of other powerful and significant figures in Chinese politics but Mao's charisma definitely was a very powerful part of what made the Cultural Revolution successful.

How is the Cultural Revolution being viewed now by Chinese scholars?

Most Chinese scholars would regard the Cultural Revolution as being a destructive period, not least because in China itself, it's now officially been declared, in the words that they used, "Ten Years Disaster." It would be politically quite difficult to argue that the Cultural Revolution was a good idea.

In recent years, though, there have been a certain number of people both in the academy and in politics who have argued that there were some aspects of the culture at that time -- for instance, the idea of greater equality -- that the China of today, which is very consumerist and which is becoming very unequal, might want to pay attention to and try to think about as a positive things.

How is Mao seen now by the Chinese people?

It's an ambivalent relationship. On the one hand, they see him as a great leader who helped to unify China, who made China a strong nation in the international community. On the other hand, they recognize that some of his policies, particularly the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, brought immense destruction to China. But they do see both sides. A formulation the Party used, and which quite a lot of people seem to find quite handy, is that Mao's achievements were 70 percent good, 30 percent bad. Now, that's contentious in a variety of ways, not least of which is that it's very difficult to use percentages to sum people up in that way. At the same time, it does express that ambivalence that Chinese even today have about this leader.

How would you describe China after the Cultural Revolution?

I'd say that Chinese politics since 1976 has been one long reaction against the Cultural Revolution. China nowadays is an internationalist state. It's very keen on stability. It's very keen on being a cooperative member of the world community. It's very commercially-oriented. All of these things are an absolute repudiation of everything the Cultural Revolution stood for.

I think even the current generation of leaders, who of course all remember the Cultural Revolution very well, it's only about 40 years ago, after all, are desperately concerned to make sure that no such phenomenon could possibly ever happen again. That for instance is the reason why cults of personality were essentially banned in China from the 1970s onwards. Deng Xiaoping really insisted that there should not be statues and so forth put up around China of him because it will create a cult of personality. The leaders that followed, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, have not been allowed to develop cults of personality either.

Given what China has been through, does it make its development even more impressive?

A poster from the Great Leap Forward, urging people to make steel. (Image: Wikipedia)Yes. It's economic development obviously started from a very low base, partly because the economy was quite limited in various ways during the Mao era. At the same time, it's unarguable that the reversal of those Cultural Revolution policies into what we see in China today has led to a very powerful economic growth. The downside is that perhaps the paranoia that comes from worrying about the effects of the Cultural Revolution has been a damper on more liberalization. Have you not had the Cultural Revolution, the leadership might have felt able to open up more and more quickly.