RICHARD CURT KRAUS
The Cultural Revolution era of 1964–76 marks the high tide of radical politics in China. The great question of the time was how to consolidate, sustain, and extend China’s revolution. For some Party leaders, this meant developing orderly routines of economic development and governance. For others, including Chairman Mao Zedong, it meant experimenting with new forms of political practice in order to avoid the ossification of the revolution into rule by a cautious Party elite. More concretely, it was a period of considerable chaos and change in daily lives, in the constitution of the political elite, and in China’s place in the world. Three periods emerge, according to political climate. First was a “prelude” to the Cultural Revolution in 1964–66, when intra-elite tensions were high, despite declarations of political unity. Second was a 1966–68 radical phase, two years of mass mobilizing politics that often stands in our memory for the whole era. Third was the late Maoism of 1968 until the Chairman’s death in 1976, a time of demobilizing the mass movement, palace intrigues, popular anxiety, and the seeds of subsequent reforms.
The “Cultural Revolution” overwhelmed the arts world, but it was not primarily an aesthetic movement. It was a political and social struggle in which culture was a visible target.
Prelude to the Cultural Revolution, 1964–1966
The “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” was Maoist China’s most sustained and disruptive political campaign. Its unpredictable twists and turns touched everyone. The Cultural Revolution is often characterized as the brainchild of an aging Mao Zedong, frustrated by resistance to his increasingly radical policies. Extreme versions of Mao-centered interpretations portray the Chairman as a political monster, inflicting the Cultural Revolution upon an innocent society. Some analysts present the movement as the whim of Chairman Mao, a personal defect of this dominant figure. While it is difficult to imagine a Cultural Revolution without Mao, the movement reflected real tensions within Chinese society.
The pre-Cultural Revolution period of political stand-off was full of radical rhetoric but quiet resistance to Mao from many of the senior leaders of the Communist Party, especially President Liu Shaoqi and Party Secretary General Deng Xiaoping. Many running the day-to-day operations of the Chinese state were skeptical about Mao’s political enthusiasms, recalling the damage of the Great Leap Forward (1958–60). In the wake of that disaster, Mao had ceded considerable power to more conservative colleagues. He retained his position as Party Chairman, but the daily running of China was in the hands of President Liu Shaoqi and the Party Secretary General Deng Xiaoping. Liu and Deng pressed for reforms such as private farming initiatives to supplement communal agriculture and a less restrictive cultural policy.
Mao believed that the Party was forgetting its revolutionary roots, that China’s revolution was incomplete, and that the apparently overthrown landlord and capitalist classes retained impressive ideological influence. Mao (and his followers) argued that even after the socialization of most private property, class remained etched in political consciousness. The rewards of high wage differentials, foreign models, and an urban-centered development were among the bourgeoisie’s “sugar-coated bullets.” Only a powerful ideological campaign could protect China’s revolutionary heritage. Mao’s ideal Party consisted of workers, peasants, and soldiers, in contrast to the Liu-Deng concept of a Party that reached out to intellectuals, technical experts, religious leaders, overseas Chinese, and former capitalists.
Mao’s approach was strikingly non-material for a lifelong Marxist. But it represented his effort to come to grips with the new dynamics of socialist China, in which formal property ownership by capitalists and landlords was an issue of the past. It served to justify a massive purge of his enemies. “Capitalist roader” was a favorite Maoist epithet that could destroy any veteran Communist who strayed from the Maoist path.
Eager to regain control, Mao began a “leftist initiative,” scolding others in 1962 for neglecting the main point of the revolution and exhorting them to “never forget class struggle.” It was, he went on, something which Communists should talk about “every year, every month, every day, at conferences, at Party congresses, at plenary sessions, and at each and every meeting.”
The upshot was a political stand-off. All leaders maintained a façade of unity, while factional tensions simmered. All honored Mao, contributing to the growth of the Mao cult which came to dominate political life. However, Mao complained later that Deng Xiaoping treated him like the corpse at a funeral, respecting his image while ignoring his opinions. Mao’s frustrations reflected sometimes vague longings within the Party for faster change, for more jobs amidst a baby boom, and for upholding the stern values of the revolution. As conservative leaders sought to sidetrack Mao’s radical impulses, the Chairman turned to four critical allies.
First, the People’s Liberation Army became the left’s model institution. Mao had purged the moderate Defense Minister amidst the controversy which followed the collapse of the Great Leap Forward, replacing him with Marshal Lin Biao, a hero of the revolution who had been politically inactive. Lin expanded the army’s political clout by championing radical initiatives. Reflecting Maoist suspicion of high-status experts in all realms of society, Lin abolished military titles and insignia, thereby slowing the professionalization of the officer corps as he summoned up memories of the more egalitarian red army of China’s revolution. Mao’s “Little Red Book” (Quotations from the Works of Mao Zedong), later made famous by the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution, was initially prepared by the army to spread revolutionary values among soldiers through political study sessions. Army political campaigns, such as the drive to emulate Lei Feng, a model soldier, spread to civilian life. Technical accomplishments, such as China’s 1964 nuclear bomb test, reinforced the army’s growing prestige.
A second favored group was poor peasants, the rural laborers who received the most revolutionary class designations in the great land reform. Mao pressed them to defend the revolution and their own improved social status, organizing them into “poor and lower middle peasant associations” to control politics in rural communities. The Dazhai production brigade, in Shaanxi province, became a national model for implementing Maoist politics, with a sternly puritanical regimen of land reclamation and political study sessions. The close connection between the peasantry and the army, which was drawn from peasant recruits, meant that the Ministry of Defense acted as the political patron of what it regarded as the broad interests of China’s countryside.
A third source of Maoist influence was a group of civilian junior officials, often too young to have played important roles in the revolution, but eager to prove themselves politically. Bureaucratic promotions were often slow, as the revolution had staffed state and Party offices with relatively young people. Some of these younger leftists concentrated around the controversial figure of Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing. Other Party leaders disapproved of Mao’s 1938 marriage to this Shanghai actress. They demanded that Jiang Qing stay out of politics, and she worked unobtrusively in cultural organizations in the 1950s. But as Mao’s anger toward his colleagues grew in the 1960s, his resentful wife became an energetic political ally. She collaborated with Lin Biao to organize a February 1966 conference on arts work in the People’s Liberation Army, declaring her new public role as Lin showed off his loyal leftist army.
The fourth group which Mao cultivated was urban youth. The most prominent program before 1966 did not seem like much of an inducement: a large-scale program to resettle urban young people to rural areas. But many volunteered to steel themselves in revolution by learning from the poor and middle-peasants. Others avoided the “down to the villages” campaign as best they could, although growing activism and radical politics among urban students affected almost all of them. When the political deadlock among adult political factions reached a crisis, Mao summoned the students into the political arena as a new force, the Red Guards.
Radical Cultural Revolution, 1966–1968
In the stand-off leading up to the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s rivals controlled Beijing and its national media. Mao’s initial political base was Shanghai, where writers associated with Jiang Qing were protected by local politicos who threw their support behind Mao. Debates were heated, yet opaque. Encouraged by Mao, critic Yao Wenyuan attacked a 1961 drama, Hai Rui Dismissed from Office. Despite its Ming dynasty setting, the play was read as a critical allegory of Mao’s purge of Defense Minister Peng Dehuai for resisting the Great Leap Forward. Its author was deputy mayor of Beijing, and this drama review signaled to the nation that Beijing’s mayor Peng Zhen could not protect his own entourage, and was thus next to be purged himself. Sowing chaos in the capital, Maoists were better able then to attack their major targets, President Liu Shaoqi and Secretary General Deng Xiaoping.
The Red Guards became the shock troops for the Cultural Revolution, which the Party Central Committee declared on May 16, 1966. Most Red Guards were urban high school students. A 16-year-old Red Guard would have been born in 1950, and personally unfamiliar with the revolution. Red Guards were not organized by the state but sprang up spontaneously, drawn into politics by controversies within their schools, and by the excitement of breaking down established routines.
Peace and economic growth had led to a large demographic increase in the numbers of young Chinese. Schools expanded, fueling ambitions for good, non-agricultural jobs. But new graduates faced limited opportunities because the 1949 revolution installed a cohort of relatively young leaders, many still on the job. Thus the political ideals of the young were joined by anxieties about their personal futures; Maoist politicians channelled this explosive combination.
Mao Zedong, although 72, reached out to China’s youth through a highly publicized swim in the Yangzi River. Millions of young people responded with a sudden fad for swimming. Well-staged mass rallies of Red Guards in Tiananmen Square continued the momentum. Mao wore the Red Guard armband and wrote his own “big character poster,” showing his respect for the tens of thousands of revolutionary declarations that young rebels pasted on public walls.
These big character posters ranged from high-blown polemics to revelations of apparently scandalous political behavior by officials under attack. Posters were supplemented by Red Guard newspapers and magazines. Maoist officials often leaked documents to Red Guards in order to damage their adversaries through new media, beyond the control of conservative bureaucrats. This information was generally accurate, although often taken out of context and given the most damaging interpretation.
The Red Guards combined political zeal with teen rebellion, breaking social barriers as they looked for ways to promote revolution. Maoists ordered China’s railroads to provide free transportation to Red Guards in the autumn of 1966, in order to encourage the “exchange of revolutionary experiences.” Whatever the political motives of adult Maoist politicians, this “revolutionary tourism” allowed young people their first opportunity to travel.
Some of the early Cultural Revolution’s shocking violence flowed from the fact that no one dared oppose the gangs of students, for fear of being labeled a counterrevolutionary. August and September 1966 saw a Red Guard rampage. In Beijing, Red Guard teams searched over 100,000 homes looking for “reactionary materials,” which might include old phonograph records, Confucian books, or private collections of art. They treated intellectuals roughly. Some Red Guards beat people with belt buckles and tortured them with boiling water. Nearly 2,000 died in Beijing, including some high officials. Red Guard humiliations induced suicides, including that of the famous novelist Lao She.
It is important to recognize internal diversity among the millions of Red Guards. The majority did not beat up anyone, and many spoke out against violence. Some Red Guards even staged mock raids on private art collections, with the connivance of the owners and museums, in order to remove fragile art treasures from harm’s way. Although all claimed to be “revolutionaries,” some were children of officials under Maoist attack, and organized themselves to protect their elite families. One notorious Beijing Red Guard unit, the “United Action Headquarters,” promoted a “bloodline” theory. Children of workers, poor peasants, and revolutionary cadres were hailed as natural revolutionaries, while children of capitalists and landlords could never overcome the stigma of their social origin. The bloodline theory avoided Mao’s single-minded concentration on “capitalist roaders” within the Party by deflecting attention to the revolution’s long-defeated class enemies.
The United Action Committee was soon suppressed, but it remained easy to scapegoat the vulnerable. Many were forced to “draw a clear line” to separate family members of bad class background or with complicated political histories. Members of the “five black categories” (landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, “bad elements,” and rightists) were avoided even more than before, even when they were not actually abused.
The heyday of the Red Guards was relatively brief. Most violence against teachers and officials occurred in August 1966. Most raids on privileged households and destruction of books and art came early in the Cultural Revolution. After using the Red Guards to disorient his rivals and shake up the country, Mao found them an awkward political tool. While Maoist leaders tried to stop the public assaults, Red Guards increasingly turned to internal conflict. Factions armed themselves with homemade weapons, later seizing Russian arms from trains on their way to Vietnam. Pitched street battles and intra-Red Guard violence tested the patience of a shaken political establishment.
The established Party organization was a shamble. An ad hoc “Cultural Revolution Group” of five Maoists supplanted normal central Party organs. They initially had a hard time extending their authority beyond Beijing. The new leadership appealed increasingly to workers and the army to restore order. The “Shanghai Commune” of January 1967 stressed proletarian power as it strengthened the political base for three radical politicians: the propaganda official Zhang Chunqiao, the literary critic Yao Wenyuan, and the factory security man Wang Hongwen, all of whom were later linked with Jiang Qing as the Gang of Four.
An alternative and longer-lasting model was the “Revolutionary Committee,” based upon a “triple alliance” of new mass organizations, army representatives, and veteran officials who had declared loyalty to the Cultural Revolution. The army worked patiently to create new Maoist local governments by forcing agreements among radical rebel groups and acceptable veteran cadres. But continuing social disorder drew the army more deeply into regional administration, despite its efforts to stand above local political disputes. Conflict in the city of Wuhan during the summer of 1967 resembled civil war. A Beijing leader sent to broker a settlement was kidnapped; he had to be rescued by troops sent by air. This steeled the army’s resolve to be tough. By mid-1968, most provinces established Revolutionary Committees. By that time, the Red Guards were relocated to the countryside, “to learn from the poor and lower middle peasants.”
Late Maoism, 1968–1976
The final stage of the Cultural Revolution was longer and quite different in political quality from its frantic, exuberant, and chaotic opening period. Mao sought to replace mass mobilization and street politics, to restore public order, and to devise a formula for continuing revolutionary ideals with less disruptive methods. Maoist suppression of spontaneous mass organizations was more violent than Red Guard brutality. In 1967–68, the Cultural Revolution Group, hoping to re-establish order, investigated an alleged, but imaginary “May 16 Conspiracy,” resulting in the arrest of leading radical figures. Millions were scrutinized and tens of thousands executed. A related campaign to “purify class ranks” between 1967 and 1969 killed even more. Maoists examined personal dossiers for problems such as relatives in Taiwan, or formerly capitalist in-laws. Newly promoted local and provincial leaders were insecure in their positions, which perhaps exacerbated the viciousness of these campaigns. The new Revolutionary Committees consolidated their power by demobilizing mass politics, beginning with organizations that resisted their legitimacy. Much violence took place in suburban or rural counties, where it was less visible than the early Red Guard violence in the cities.
The 1969 Ninth Congress of the Communist Party signaled the return to a kind of political normality. With the purge of conservative leaders, loyal Maoists gained high Party positions. Most members of the old Central Committee were not included in the new one. Twenty-five of twenty-nine provincial Party first secretaries lost their jobs. The victors included Jiang Qing and her radical civilian allies from the Cultural Revolution Group, and leaders of the People’s Liberation Army, especially the Minister of Defense, Lin Biao. Lin became Party Vice-Chairman and, as Mao’s “closest comrade in arms,” was treated as his presumptive heir.
The leftist rhetoric remained, but Maoists became less concerned with seizing power than in consolidating their victories. The Party railed against factionalism and claimed to be united. But obvious divisions split the civilian radicals, pragmatic officials under the leadership of Prime Minster Zhou Enlai, and military officers. All competed for the ear of Mao Zedong, who tried to balance the rival voices.
Mao apparently wanted to limit the army’s political power. Lin Biao (or more likely his son, Lin Liguo) organized an inept assassination plot and coup. When the plot failed, Lin Biao was put on a plane that fled China, crashing in Mongolia on September 13, 1971. Mao and the Cultural Revolution Group were stunned, and worried that the incident would break the confidence of millions of Chinese in the Cultural Revolution. The unprecedented cancellation of the October 1 (1971) National Day parade and celebration demonstrated Beijing’s disarray. It would take a year for citizens outside the political elite to learn of the scandal through carefully organized and secret Party briefings. Party leaders prepared a dossier that attempted to explain how Lin, Mao’s closest comrade, could become a traitor. They had no more success than the Warren Commission in the United States, which tried to explain the assassination of John F. Kennedy. As Mao feared, former enthusiasts for the Cultural Revolution dated their political disenchantment from the Lin Biao affair. The scandal unsettled most citizens, who retreated from the more extravagant forms of political involvement.
Mao purged Lin Biao’s top aides, thereby strengthening two competing civilian groups. The activists group, associated with Mao through his wife Jiang Qing, consolidated much of their power. One of their leaders, Wang Hongwen, became vice-chair of the Party, nominally second to Mao. But Mao also elevated a group of more moderate career officials, led by Premier Zhou Enlai. At the tenth Communist Party Congress in 1973, many former Cultural Revolution targets rejoined the Central Committee. Even Deng Xiaoping, recently denounced as “the number two person in authority taking the capitalist road,” was called back to the capital to serve as Vice-premier, assuming a leading role in economic policy. Former President Liu Shaoqi, expelled from the Party, had died under squalid conditions in 1969. But Mao had protected Deng’s Party membership and dispatched him to internal exile in Guangxi province, where he worked in a machine tool factory. By 1975 Deng was reinstated to the inner circle of power, the Political Bureau’s Standing Committee, probably as a possible replacement for Premier Zhou Enlai, who would soon die of cancer.
In the shadowy realm of elite politics, Mao’s own deteriorating health meant that he presided rather distantly amidst factional infighting. Elite rivalries played out through public political campaigns, made deliberately obscure as they targeted surrogate issues that represented conflicts among top leaders. A lengthy but puzzling “Campaign to Criticize Lin Biao and Confucius” indicated continuing uncertainty at the top of the Party. Zhou Enlai’s appeal for the “Four Modernizations” of agriculture, industry, science and technology, and national defense was more concrete, tapping the economic practicality of Deng Xiaoping and other rehabilitated old cadres.
By 1976, Mao’s Parkinson’s and heart disease disabled the one leader who could balance increasingly anxious factions. After Zhou Enlai died in January 1976, radicals seized upon April demonstrations in his memory in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to persuade Mao to purge Deng Xiaoping a second time. Minister of Public Security Hua Guofeng, who had risen with the Cultural Revolution, became new acting premier and first Party Vice-Chairman. Mao was too weak to receive foreign visitors; his voice and his handwriting had become very difficult to understand, rendering his comments ever more oracular. When a devastating earthquake killed a quarter of a million people in the north China city of Tangshan in July, people commented privately about the loss of the traditional “mandate of heaven.”
Mao’s death on September 9, 1976 triggered a confrontation between rival factions. The leading civilian radicals were arrested in a coup organized by the heads of the army and Mao’s bodyguard. The coup leaders had a majority in the Politburo, but feared that a majority of the Central Committee might support Jiang Qing and her allies. Hua Guofeng became Party Chairman. The losers were identified as a “Gang of Four”: Mao’s widow Jiang Qing, the literary official Yao Wenyuan, the Shanghai boss and deputy premier Zhang Chunqiao, and the Party Vice-Chairman Wang Hongwen. Although they were at first charged with undermining the Cultural Revolution, it soon became clear that the new leadership would ultimately disavow Mao’s final mass movement. Few were unhappy to see the imperious Jiang Qing removed. The Gang of Four, along with Lin Biao’s generals, became the public scapegoats for the Cultural Revolution.
Impacts of the Cultural Revolution
The political impact was clear at the level of elite politics, where the Communist Party establishment was left reeling, forced to share its power with radical outsiders. Yet these revolutionary impulses were halted and the old order was re-imposed beginning in 1968, albeit with striking changes in personnel. Even those targeted by the Cultural Revolution were rehabilitated within a few years of Mao’s death, if they were still alive.
Less obvious, but profound in its consequences, was the systematic victimization of a political minority. Both radicals and conservatives shared a contempt for the “five black elements.” They treated millions of people with suspicion, rendering them vulnerable to sudden injustice as political scapegoats.
The disruption of political institutions raised the importance of personal networks, as citizens sought security against unpredictable political campaigns. Networks based upon kinship, shared native place, education, or work experience became places of refuge, despite Maoism’s universalistic rhetoric and critique of personal connections. After the suppression of the Red Guards, a new cynicism encouraged gifts and bribes to secure a “back door” advantage for better housing, residence transfer, or specialized medical care. Even at the center, Mao Zedong relied upon Jiang Qing because of her personal loyalty in a duplicitous world. According to Jiang Qing, “Everything I did, Chairman Mao told me to do. I was his dog. What he said to bite, I bit.”
In culture, Jiang Qing, the former movie actress, assumed a central role in the arts, overseeing production of a series of model stage works. Mostly Beijing operas, ballets, and their film versions, these works were created and staged with China’s top arts professionals. The stories they told were revolutionary, sometimes adapted from older works, such as the ballet “White-Haired Girl.” These works continued a much longer tradition of adapting “modern”(Westernized) techniques to music and theatre. Artists feared making political errors, which slowed production of new work. In less favored cultural genres, such as painting or writing, many artists were jailed or exiled to rural areas, their voices perforce silent. For some, the Cultural Revolution provided an underground, private literary life, with access to ostensibly forbidden books and opportunities to practice calligraphy or perform. Much depended upon personal connections and happenstance. The massive transfer of Red Guards to the countryside altered local cultural conditions, and the experience had a lifelong impact on many of the urban youth, even after they returned home after the Cultural Revolution.
The economic impact of the Cultural Revolution was not so disastrous as many imagine. The Cultural Revolution initially halted economic growth in 1966. Some resisted the political disruptions, urging that young rebels get back to work, “making revolution by promoting production.” The 1968 restoration of Party authority and the dispersal of the Red Guards led to two years of extraordinary growth; by Mao’s death, China had a decade of moderate economic expansion. China’s gross domestic product increased nearly 6 percent annually. This is a slightly slower rate than during the earlier years of the People’s Republic, but is by no means an economic disaster. China grew somewhat less rapidly than Indonesia, but twice as fast as India during the same period. All three poor and heavily populated Asian nations grew more slowly than Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong, smaller states whose export-driven economies grew by 8–9 percent.
The Maoist political economy substituted China’s abundant labor for scarce capital. In the absence of sharp material incentives, it relied upon political campaigns to mobilize labor. Campaigns were effective for some purposes, but ill suited and inefficient for many. China’s economic growth was rested upon individual austerity and Spartan consumption, which freed funds for greater public investment. These investments were often inefficiently allocated. One large and secret investment program called the “Third Front” built factories and infrastructure in China’s interior. These plants, often military, were further removed from the range of US bombers and missiles based in Taiwan. Despite this investment, which often benefited old revolutionary areas, large regional gaps persisted. The service sector languished, tarnished as bourgeois (there was only one restaurant for 8,000 citizens). Ration coupons regulated the purchase of cotton, grain, meat, cooking oil, and other essential goods.
The Cultural Revolution also pursued longer-term policies to improve China’s human capital. Improved nutrition, lower infant mortality, and control of infectious disease helped increase life expectancy, which increased from only 35 in 1949, to 65 by 1980. Nearly two million peasants trained as “barefoot doctors” in an ambitious paramedic network. The barefoot doctors were neither sophisticated nor well equipped, but they were accessible and their services nearly free, as they worked alongside fellow-villagers. They were the best-known aspect of a vast increase in rural medical care. By the end of the Cultural Revolution, two-thirds of China’s hospital beds were located in the countryside.
Education was another success in many realms. Most impressive was the growth in literacy, reflecting a fifteenfold increase in rural junior middle schools between 1965 and 1976. Ninety percent of Chinese between the ages of 15 and 19 were literate in 1982. Adult literacy also increased markedly. Schools put work into the school curriculum (such as student gardens) in an effort to make the classrooms relevant to students’ lives, thereby rejecting the Confucian educational goal of producing a sophisticated elite.
Against these achievements, high schools were closed during the height of Red Guard activism, although primary schools remained open. In fact, high schools resumed by 1967, as Maoists were desperate to get the Red Guards off the streets. However, universities stopped admitting new students until 1970. Maoists suspected that universities formed a base for conservative elites, which the radicals addressed by recruiting “worker-peasant-soldier” students, a kind of affirmative action scheme. The Cultural Revolution expanded the educational opportunities for people at the bottom, but severely constricted elite access to universities.
China’s place in the world
As a self-consciously revolutionary voice in world affairs, China played the role of bad boy in international politics. Isolated by US, then Soviet pressure, China ended the period with a new and friendlier relationship to the Western powers and Japan.
The United States had not yet come to terms with China’s revolution, and in fact continued to recognize the Chiang Kai-shek government in Taiwan as the “Republic of China,” pretending that it controlled the mainland. US backing for Chiang Kai-shek kept the People’s Republic of China out of the United Nations, and generally isolated in international affairs. The United States gained military bases in Taiwan, to the great frustration of Beijing. US troops were thus closer than the bases in Japan, which followed its US patron in hostility toward Beijing. The United States also based troops in Korea after the armistice ending its war with China.
Poor relations with the West and Japan were perhaps an expected heritage of the revolution. The People’s Republic of China had formal relations with Britain, although (or perhaps because) London remained master of its colony in Hong Kong. France broke ranks with the United States to recognize Beijing in 1964, as China looked to reduce its isolation, which appeared more worrisome in light of deteriorating ties with the Soviet bloc. After the 1949 revolution, China looked to the Soviet Union to be its “elder brother in socialism.” Thousands of Soviet experts provided advice on Chinese economic projects, and even more Chinese studied Russian. Stalin’s death in 1953 made Chinese leaders feel less like younger brothers, and disagreements over development strategy festered. By the early 1960s, China’s Communist Party published a series of polemics against Moscow. Titles such as “On Khrushchev’s Phoney Communism,” drafted by Mao, asserted Chinese leadership in a world revolutionary movement that Moscow had abandoned. When Cultural Revolutionaries denounced Liu Shaoqi as “China’s Khrushchev,” he was seen as ignoring class struggle. By 1969 bad feeling spilled over into a pitched battle for control over an island at the Ussuri River border, part of what Beijing and Moscow had formerly celebrated as the world’s longest peaceful border.
It is remarkable to achieve the simultaneous enmity of both Washington and Moscow. This strategic disadvantage left China surrounded in a hostile world, with armed enemies on all sides. China possessed one military protection, the nuclear bomb which it tested in 1964. Even with primitive delivery systems, China’s bomb caused its rivals to hesitate. The United States and the Soviet Union discussed, but never implemented a joint strike on Chinese nuclear facilities. China railed against Soviet–American steps toward nuclear arms reduction, which it regarded as protecting the international status quo. Although Beijing hailed its bomb as a Maoist victory against imperialism and revisionism, in practice its military posture was defensive, relying upon a massive infantry to discourage foreign meddling.
China repeatedly appealed to third world unity against the super-powers, but did not find much success. The 1950s heritage of anti-colonialist politics which China endorsed at the 1955 Bandung Conference failed to prevent India and China from fighting a brief, but fierce border war in 1962. China looked to Indonesia as a partner, but the 1965 coup, which overthrew the Indonesian leader Sukarno, resulted in the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Indonesian leftists and overseas Chinese, and the installation of a US client regime.
On its own doorstep, China could not prevent the American military intervention in Vietnam. While China aided its neighbor, it never matched the greater material assistance offered by the Soviet Union. Soviet weapons were in fact sometimes pilfered by Red Guards from trains in transit from Russia to Vietnam. Chinese support for revolutionary and anti-colonial movements was strong on rhetoric, but weak in material terms. China expected other rebels to practice the self-reliance that the Communists had learned in their own revolution. The rhetorical exuberance was accompanied by organizational maneuvers, and China encouraged Communist parties around the world to split, typically leaving the major established Party allied to Moscow, with a smaller and weaker “Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist)” which followed Beijing’s more radical language.
China was diplomatically isolated during the 1966–68 radical phase of the Cultural Revolution. Foreign diplomats in Beijing were subjected to ill-treatment. A mob burned down the office of the British chargé d’affaires. Premier Zhou Enlai raged at those who failed to control the demonstrators, but the episode demonstrated the breakdown of central control. Unable to maintain the fiction of normal diplomatic relations, Beijing recalled all ambassadors except the ambassador to Egypt.
By 1969 and the end of the radical phase of the Cultural Revolution, China’s ambitions to break free of encirclement had obviously failed. American bombers flew across China (especially Hainan Island) with impunity to drop bombs on China’s ally, Vietnam. Although US arms drops to rebels in Tibet apparently ended in 1965, the Central Intelligence Agency continued to pay the Dalai Lama an annual retainer in order to annoy China. China’s 1969 battle with Soviet troops on the Ussuri River pushed Mao toward reconsidering his nation’s global position. Beijing could identify only a few friendly governments beyond Vietnam, North Korea, Pakistan, Algeria, and Albania. China had sought to win over the affection of the “peoples” of the world rather than their governments, but this failed to make hostile governments change their policies.
In a bold shift, Mao imagined that rapprochement with the United States would divide the two superpowers from pursuing an anti-Chinese common front. China offered the United States a reconciliation, which would smooth its pending military defeat in Vietnam. Beijing invited the American journalist Edgar Snow to stand beside Mao at the 1970 national day parade on October 1. In 1937 Snow had written the best-selling Red Star over China, which introduced the Chinese Communist movement to the world. Red-baited in the United States and driven into exile in Switzerland, Snow welcomed the visit as a personal vindication, never imagining that Mao believed he was a CIA agent all along. Other “people-to-people” diplomacy, including the visit of an American ping pong team, prepared the way for Henry Kissinger’s secret trip as National Security Advisor in July 1971. Kissinger, who travelled via Pakistan and avoided the press by feigning illness, negotiated Richard Nixon’s visit to Beijing for February 1972.
The United Nations awarded Beijing China’s seat in October 1971, signaling Mao’s strategic realignment. Third world nations had embarrassed the United States by an annual campaign to expel Chiang Kai-shek’s representatives, but had failed to win enough votes before the signals that Sino-American relations were shifting.
The secrecy and suddenness of this realignment led to bumpy transitions. Japanese politicians, loyal supporters of US anticommunism in East Asia, were humiliated when the United States abandoned its old policy without consulting them. The US puppet government in South Vietnam realized that its end was in sight. An even greater sense of betrayal and panic emerged in Taiwan, when American pretensions to support Guomindang claims to the mainland collapsed. Perhaps only a zealous anti-Communist like Richard Nixon could have overseen the rapprochement without political risk, but even he had to deal with outraged or at best highly doubtful conservative supporters. CIA counter-intelligence chief James Jesus Angleton believed that the Sino-Soviet split was only a trick by Moscow to encourage the West to let down its guard. Forces invested in the Cold War status quo dragged their heels on both sides, including Chinese Minister of Defense Lin Biao. Serious resistance from the Chinese military ended with Lin’s violent death.
China’s deal with the United States was ambiguous, but helpful to both sides. Both nations backed away from their allies in the Vietnam War and combined to oppose the Soviet Union. The United States removed both its troops and diplomatic recognition from Taiwan in 1979. China probably imagined this would lead to political unification with Taiwan. But removal of US military bases from Taiwan enabled China to redirect its own investment toward coastal regions and wind down the costly Third Front program in the interior. In an unplanned outcome, the end of US military backing for the Guomindang martial law government opened the way for Taiwan’s democratization, moving the island even further from unification.
The realpolitik of reconciliation with the United States shows how pragmatic Chinese foreign policy had become in practice, despite often flamboyant anti-imperialist rhetoric. Underscoring this unsentimental long view of national interest was China’s 1974 seizure of the Xisha islands from South Vietnam, taking advantage of the weakness of the US puppet government, and ignoring the claims of its ostensible North Vietnamese allies.
The fall of Maoism
The calculating realism of China’s foreign relations reminds us of the limits to the idealism of the most ardent Cultural Revolutionaries. The earliest academic analyses of radical Maoism depended upon documentary sources which tilted toward beliefs and ardor; later accounts by participants shifted the perspective to stress the importance of more pragmatic, often self-serving, actions.
The relationship between the 1964–76 era and the newly powerful China of the contemporary global economy is not simple. A conventional narrative dismisses the Cultural Revolution as a decade of xenophobic chaos and economic ruin, one only put right when a shrewd Deng Xiaoping recognized reality and reintegrated China with the world economy. This is too simple.
The rapid economic growth of the Deng Xiaoping era depended upon the physical infrastructure and human resources created by Mao Zedong’s regime. Mao’s radical politics were obviously a desperate effort to sustain China’s revolution beyond the lifespan of the revolutionary generation, producing a political turbulence of the kind that has followed other great revolutions. Less obvious were the contributions of modernization, ending illiteracy, combating chronic disease, and setting the foundations for industrialization. For all of Maoist China’s obvious shortcomings, the subsequent economic boom built upon its achievements. It may be tempting to view the Cultural Revolution as a lost decade for China’s development, but China enjoyed much greater international opportunities after the Cultural Revolution than before. The world economy did not need China’s huge labor pool in the 1960s. But when China turned outward after the Cultural Revolution, a rapidly expanding global economy used offshore production in China to discipline workers back home with threats of job loss, as wages stagnated and labor unions weakened.
This is not to say that Mao consciously placed China on the course it has pursued since his death. Mao worried about capitalist “representatives” who had “sneaked” into positions of power, as he explained in the May 16, 1966 “Notification” that opened the Cultural Revolution: “Once conditions are ripe, they will seize political power and turn the dictatorship of the proletariat into a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Some of them we have already seen through; others we have not. Some are still trusted by us and are being trained as our successors, persons like Khrushchev for example, who are still nestling beside us.”
But Mao had mellowed by 1973, recalling Deng Xiaoping from disgrace and making him a top economic administrator. A further continuity between the late Mao era and the present is the state-directed character of economic policy, however more liberal it has become. China’s revolution, including the Cultural Revolution, formed a long-term movement to strengthen China to compete in the broader world. Hiring out its cheap labor supply to global capitalism was a politically crafted strategy, much like earlier Maoist efforts to harness these same workers through political campaigns.
The Cultural Revolution era remains unsettling in Chinese memory. It has been the subject of thousands of stories, films, memoirs, and articles, so it is untrue that is a forbidden topic. It is more accurate to say that most Chinese treat the Cultural Revolution with caution, and that the Party remains quite sensitive to what is said. In part this is because many of China’s senior leaders were themselves Red Guards, and are both anxious about their reputations and mindful of the costs of political disorder. Caution is also increased because of the heritage of the June 4, 1989 massacre, which has made the Party even more determined to discourage the memory of political activism.
Despite the restrained discussion, Chinese representations of the Cultural Revolution era can be highly divergent. Among the most successful artistic representations the differences are noteworthy. Jiang Yang’s memoir A Cadre School Life: Six Chapters employs lapidary prose to record the everyday life and struggle of a family of prominent intellectuals forced to resettle in an impoverished countryside. In contrast, Jiang Wen’s 1994 film In the Heat of the Sun looks at the period through the eyes of a young teen, unfettered by adult controls, who enjoys exuberant self-discovery amidst the chaos. There is no consensus, but a range of voices, just as there was an array of personal experiences. As the era becomes more distant, images of the Cultural Revolution are now just as likely to be provided by pop culture phenomena such as Cultural Revolution themed restaurants as by family memories that perhaps are not often shared.