Cultural Revolution’s Scars Mark China

It is 30 years since they came for Madame Li and her husband in the dead of night, kicking a hole in the door. She grabbed their legs, dragging them away. Armed with a rolling pin, she eventually chased them off. But that was only the beginning.

Mao Tse-tung launched his crusade to overturn the last vestiges of capitalism and feudalism, and vanquish his rivals, in the spring of 1966. The chaos spun to an exhausted, devastated halt 10 years later.

Many of the wounds have closed, but none have fully healed.

With his call to “hold high the great banner of the Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” Mao unleashed a reign of mass terror and destruction that left at least 1 million people dead and sanctioned the persecution and torture of 30 million more, including Madame Li.

Today in China there is little public discussion about this upheaval that rent the fabric of one of the world’s oldest civilizations.

No special events were planned to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution’s start: It fell too awkwardly close to another sensitive episode in Communist Party history--the June 4, 1989, suppression of the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement.

Schools dismiss the Cultural Revolution as a “mistake” of Mao’s dotage. Filmmakers and publishers are advised to steer clear of the subject.

In private circles, though, memories are fresh. Many Chinese feel they should stay that way.

“You don’t want to forget the past. To forget the past is to lose control over the future,” economist Yu Guangyuan wrote in the forward to his 1995 work, “The Cultural Revolution and Myself,” one of the few recently published on the topic.

Madame Li left the hole in her front door unrepaired for almost 30 years as a reminder of what had happened.

“I wanted it there where people could see it,” said the 71-year-old veteran soldier, a decorated hero of three wars whose persecution left her too cautious, even today, to allow her full name to be published.

At the beginning, no one could foresee that the Cultural Revolution would spin so violently out of control, she said.

The political storm had been brewing for months. On May 16, 1966, Mao issued a call to arms against the “bourgeois” forces he accused of conspiring to overthrow the Communist Party.

On May 25, Nie Yuanzi, a philosophy teacher at Beijing University, put up a “big character poster” calling on all revolutionary intellectuals to go into battle. On June 1, Mao publicly praised Nie’s poster and had it published in the Communist Party’s leading newspaper, the People’s Daily.

The revolution was underway.

Within two weeks, students at Beijing University and Qinghua University, China’s two most prestigious institutes of higher learning, had painted tens of thousands of posters attacking the establishment.

Student Red Guards smashed their way through China’s cities and temples, under orders to destroy the four “olds”: habits, ideas, customs and culture.

On Aug. 18, 1 million Red Guards crammed into Beijing’s vast Tiananmen Square in mass hysteria, waving copies of Mao’s “Little Red Book” of quotations. Girls fainted in adulation when Mao appeared on the rostrum.

It was an age of drab gray living standards and Technicolor politics. Political enemies were labeled monsters, capitalist running dogs, cows, snakes, demons and ghosts.

Anyone accused of having been associated with things feudal, old or foreign was persecuted. Doctors, teachers, artists and other intellectuals, labeled the “stinking ninth category,” were ridiculed, beaten, marched through the streets wearing dunce caps.

Those who survived the beatings and did not commit suicide were exiled to the countryside, ordered to sweep streets, clean toilets or perform other menial labor.

Rival student and worker factions clashed in urban battles in which thousands are said to have died. Millions of students commandeered trains to traverse the country for revolutionary revival meetings.

At its most nightmarish, reports say, in 1967 in southern Guangxi province, a government cafeteria began serving human flesh after Communist Party officials ordered that class enemies be eaten.

For two years, before an alarmed Mao finally called in the army to restore order, the Red Guards ruled the streets, destroying everything and anyone who did not serve the cause of revolution as they saw it.

President Liu Shaoqi was one of the most prominent of Mao’s targets. He died alone in a basement prison cell, deprived of medical care.

Deng Xiaoping, China’s 91-year-old patriarch, now retired from government, was a Mao protege. He survived two Cultural Revolution purges and returned to power as China’s top leader in the late 1970s. His hardships during the decade left him with a deep loathing for any mass movement and probably provoked his order to the army to shoot unarmed protesters during the 1989 Tiananmen pro-democracy protests.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Mao sent millions of youths to the countryside, where they languished for years. But the political purges and persecution did not end until the ultra-leftist Gang of Four--led by Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing--was arrested Oct. 6, 1976, almost a month after Mao’s death Sept. 9 at age 83.

During the Cultural Revolution, 77 million Chinese youths left school. A decade of scholarship and culture was lost.

Many victims still work with or live near the people who harangued, spit on and bit them during struggle sessions in the 1960s.

The official verdict is that the Cultural Revolution was a catastrophe brought on by Mao’s “mistakes” during his old age. Almost all purged from the party or humiliated during the decade were eventually reinstated and “rehabilitated.”

Of the millions who joined in the persecutions, only 10 top power brokers were jailed. All were convicted in 1981 after a lengthy show trial.

The government tried to compensate for the damage by restoring and reopening churches and temples and returning hundreds of millions of dollars worth of seized property.

But nothing can be done to restore the lives lost, the opportunities foregone, the souls seared by the terror.

Madame Li’s youngest child, a girl aged 11 at the time the “struggle committee” came to attack her family, was psychologically traumatized. She never recovered, never went to work, never married.

Unable to overpower her or win her to their side, Madame Li’s tormentors took away her salary and medical care. Her husband was sent to a distant farm labor camp; unable to attend school, her older daughter and son enlisted in the army.

Fearless, she refused to give in. “I wouldn’t support the leftists. I disagreed with the persecution of good people,” she says. “Anyway, everyone must die sometime. The question is whether the death means something or not.”

Gravely ill with anemia, she only managed to survive with the help of kind neighbors and, eventually, by seeking Premier Chou En-lai’s intervention.

Like Madame Li, many Chinese believe that the Cultural Revolution was far too successful in wiping out much that was good of China’s traditions: the concept of right and wrong, courtesy, filial piety, kindheartedness.

In the last year, President Jiang Zemin has launched a cultural movement of his own--one apparently intended to fill the spiritual vacuum left by the decade, although its aims seem the antithesis of Cultural Revolution iconoclasm.

Jiang’s “spiritual civilization” campaign to remake China in a cleaner, politer image seems intended to promote the Confucian values of propriety, order, respect for elders and tradition that were reviled as feudal and bourgeois during the Cultural Revolution.

In place of the model commune Dazhai is Jiang’s prototype community of Zhangjiagang--a glistening east China city where, according to the state-run media, no one ever throws litter or spits on the streets.

But Communist Party leaders now rarely comment on the Cultural Revolution itself. Scrutiny of the party’s record then could invite questions about the Tiananmen crackdown and other embarrassing episodes since it seized power in 1949.

“The people of my generation all came out of the period of the Cultural Revolution, and we indeed suffered from that disaster,” Cui Tiankai, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said in a recent briefing.

“The conclusion about the Cultural Revolution has long been made. Moreover, we believe we should look forward instead of living in the past.”

But many intellectuals, as a class the key victims of political persecution throughout the ages, feel more must be done to ensure the memories do not fade.

“Nowadays, many young people have no idea what the Cultural Revolution was all about,” said Yu, the economist and author. “China certainly cannot afford to forget the lessons the Cultural Revolution taught.”

Revered novelist Ba Jin, who was labeled a class enemy, banned from writing and forced to clean drains during the Cultural Revolution, has called for a museum similar to the Auschwitz Memorial Museum that documents Nazi atrocities.

“We should earnestly learn lessons from this bitter experience,” Ba said. “The 10-year calamity taught people to be silent, but the 10-year blood debts force the silent people to cry out.”

The magazine China Youth Newspapers and Periodicals Panorama reported in January that such a museum was to be built in Shanghai’s newly developed Pudong industrial district. But Shanghai officials contacted by telephone said they had not heard of that plan.

The era has become part of China’s cultural landscape.

Cultural Revolution restaurants cater to the nostalgia of middle-age Chinese who were sent to the countryside in the late ‘60s.

Mao’s “Little Red Book” is a souvenir item hawked to foreign tourists. His deteriorating corpse still on display in his mausoleum in Tiananmen Square, Mao has become something of a folk hero. Laminated portraits of the chairman adorn many a Chinese taxi dashboard.

Many Chinese believe the tendency toward Cultural Revolution-style extremes is latent in their national character. It’s a tendency to go overboard without thinking, which Yu describes as “Ah Q’ism”--based on the 1930s allegory by respected novelist Lu Xun, “Ah Q,” about a man who never thinks for himself.

Some fear that leftist ideologues could regain at least some control if there is no smooth transition after the ailing Deng dies. Hundreds of thousands of people who took government and party posts during the Cultural Revolution remain in place and many are resentful of economic policies that have allowed some people to get rich while others struggle.

But few Chinese today believe their nation would again lurch into the extremism of the Mao Tse-tung era. China is no longer shut off from the rest of the world and neither Jiang nor his peers have the charisma or power to command such a crusade.

In today’s profit-oriented China, pragmatism rules.

“The majority of people learned the lessons from the Cultural Revolution,” Madame Li says. “No one would accept that sort of thing now.”