This is a copy of original tape recordings made by the late comrade Rob Dawber from BBC Radio Four, as China’s revolutionary events of 1989 that centred on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square unfolded:
Tag Archives: Maoism
A contemporary history of China (Part III): precarious power
Introduction
The post-1979 era of ‘opening and reform’ opened China’s economy to global capital. Since then the State has been managing this process to ensure its own political legitimacy and stability. As such it fuels a populist nationalism, embedded with anti-American and anti-Japanese feeling, and a neoconservative nostalgia for the past. Moreover, although Confucianism was rejected under Mao, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has since pursued a spiritual moralisation and harmonisation programme known as ‘new Confucianism’, in which “Confucius [has been] turned, through an extraordinary sleight of hand, into an advocate of profit and economic growth” (Mitter, 2005, page 295).
From the early 1990s, the pace and intensity of economic growth in China has been extraordinary. There has been a dramatic proliferation of rural migrants and consumer goods into the urban domain – stirring up two phenomena. On the one hand, there is the significant growth of labour unrest, which is the only political force capable of threatening State power. See my pieces, Chinese workers fight for democracy and China’s new worker militants, for more on this. On the other hand, there is a crisis of culture, particularly among China’s new (sociological) middle class. Wang (in Rosen, 2004) refers to an apolitical, material-seeking, ‘post-communist personality’ that rejects life under Mao and reflects the CCP’s drive for wealth. This, I suggest, operates in contradictory conjunction with what Yang (in Schein, 1999) identifies as a micro-political, ‘counterstate individualism’ expressed through consumerism.
History redux: the case of Shanghai
The city of Shanghai is worth briefly exploring to grasp the contemporary nature of a rapidly globalising, developing and urbanising China.
The city’s evolution is commonly identified through three main periods, commencing with the 1842-1945 imperial era. From a fishing village, the Nanking Treaty of 1842 established Shanghai as a major treaty port, attracting an influx of foreign capital and key imperial powers to transform it into a major financial and trade centre of the Far East and one of the leading cities in the world. Under the treaty-port system the city was divided into two wealthy foreign-run districts (which developed, at that time, the most advanced urban amenities in Asia, with the exception of Tokyo) and an impoverished Chinese municipality. These socio-economic districts, to this day, are apparent in the urban landscape: with the Western-style boulevards of the International Settlement and French Concession, known then and now as the ‘high corner’, and the industrial centres and shantytowns of the Chinese municipality, the ‘low corner’ (Wu, 1999, 2002; Wu and Li, 2005).
During this imperial era, Shanghai gained a reputation as ‘the Paris of the East’, ‘the bright pearl of the Orient’ and ‘the paradise of adventures’, and the Shanghaiese as natural entrepreneurs (Farrer, 2002; Zhang, 2002). Bickers (2004: 39-40) comments of the high corner of Shanghai in 1919:
This was a rhapsody to light, to modernity, style, display and opulence. […] Shanghai was not only a city of wealth, but a city unashamed of displaying wealth. […] East didn’t meet West in Shanghai: Russia met Britain, Japan met Portugal, India met France, and all met in China. And China met China there too. New China met ‘Old China’ […].
Furthermore, Shanghai had the repute as ‘the whore of Asia’ (Farrer, 2002) – with foreigners in the city sensitive to its association with bars and brothels.
In marked contrast then, the subsequent 1949-1976 Maoist era saw the end of this so-called Western decadence as the city’s doors were closed. Shanghai became one of China’s major industrial bases and ‘cash cows’ (meaning a significant proportion of its annual revenue was siphoned off for central government). The establishment of a number of work-units (compact, self-contained areas in the city) typified where many ordinary Shanghaiese both worked and lived.
The post-1979 opening and reform era has been shaped by a decentralisation (not a decline) of state power, the emergence of non-state economic players, and a new economic structure based on tertiary industries and a rationalised selection of primary ones (Han, 2000; Wu, 2003a). While the engines of the country’s early economic growth during the 1980s were the special economic zones (SEZs) in southern China, Shanghai itself was held back until the beginning of the 1990s (central government preferring instead to maintain the city as a reliable cash cow). In response to the international fallout of the 1989 military suppression of the Tiananmen Square uprisings, i.e., the easing of foreign capital to China, the CCP reasserted its commitment, symbolic and real, to opening and reform by announcing in 1990 the designation of its largest SEZ at that point in Pudong, east of Shanghai’s Huangpu River. This was twinned with the state’s ambition to make Shanghai China’s first global city (an international economic, financial and trade centre) (Han, 2000; Wu, 2003a).
View from Shanghai over to Pudong. (Photograph by Bassi)
Since the 1990s Shanghai has undergone an economic and building boom, which, in scale and pace, has arguably been exceptional in the history of global capitalism. The dominant symbols of the city are those of Western cultural commodities (Wu, 2003b). The city’s government has drawn upon the past imperial discourse of Shanghai as ‘Paris of the Orient’ in order to promote the place globally as a reawakening hub of entrepreneurialism, which is rediscovering and rekindling its internationalism and cosmopolitanism and restoring its place in the world order (Wu, 2003a, 2003b). Sensationalist journalism in the 1990s pitched the city as the ‘Far Eastern Promise’, ‘The Shanghai Bubble’ and the ‘Field of Dreams’ (Wu, 2003b). The target for its economy is to develop the largest trade and retail centre in China, as well as real estate, information services and tourism (Han, 2000). Shanghai has been marketed as a city of work and a city at play (Wu, 2003a), with the local government strategy to “create an internationalized and attractive image to global capital” (He and Wu, 2007:207). One consequence being that “the demand for pursuing exchange value overwhelms the demand for maintaining the everyday use value of old urban neighbourhoods”, so, notably, residential displacement (of poor people) from the inner city to the suburbs has been vast (Han, 2000; He and Wu, 2007:207; Zhang, 2002). Another consequence is the acute exploitation of labour-power, in particular, of the city’s millions of rural migrants.
The Old City, Shanghai. (Photograph by Bassi)
Rural migrants and the hukou
Rural migrants, because of the hukou or household registration system, work without basic legal rights and welfare benefits in China’s cities, since the hukou restricts such rights and benefits to one’s place of origin. The Financial Times (2013) estimates that there are 260 million rural migrant workers in China’s cities, which brings the total proportion of the population living in cities to 52.57%. 35.29% of the population have urban hukou. The idea of scrapping the hukou is resisted by local and central government as it is seen as economically burdensome. Minor reform to the hukou has led to some concessions, but this literally comes at a cost (for example, access to schooling at a fee higher than for city residents). The hukou effectively makes rural migrants second-class citizens and especially precarious workers. This has not stopped significant numbers of rural migrants from protesting for better conditions of existence.
China Labour Bulletin reports that the workers’ movement in China, during the period of 2009-2011, was revitalised by a new generation of migrant workers demanding better pay and working conditions:
These young activists have not only won noticeable concessions from their employers, they have also forced the government and trade unions to reassess their labour and social policies.
In December 2013 the CCP detailed a plan to ‘abolish’ the hukou, which is part of its wider ambition to drive forth with urbanisation in order to boost domestic demand for goods and services as both export-led growth and investment in infrastructure have slowed. However, while:
… China will continue to emphasize the growth and development of “small cities” by removing hukou restrictions for these underdeveloped areas. … “megacities” like Beijing and Shanghai will likely continue to have strict limitations on hukous in a bid to fight overcrowding and rising housing costs. (Tiezzi, 2013)
Conclusion
As China’s economy has grown, so too has both inequality and the visibility of inequality, such that anger against the super-rich and Party corruption is commonplace. In addition to an increased militarisation of labour movement unrest, political protests around land grabs, lack of affordable housing, environmental damage (albeit with an element of NIMBY-ism), and unsafe food and water are on the rise. The Party clings to power by relying on a combination of nationalism and economic growth (the latter of which has been decelerating of late). The omnipresence of the totalitarian hand of the State continually threatens the closure of outlets of resistance. Today’s China (like yesterday’s China) is one where the Party can ‘make disappear’ its critics. And yet the struggle continues, courageously unabated.
References:
Bickers, R. (2004) Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai. London: Penguin
Farrer, J. (2002) Opening Up: Youth Sex Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press
Han, S. (2000) ‘Shanghai between State and Market in Urban Transformation’ Urban Studies 37(11): 2091-2112
He, S. and Wu, F. (2007) ‘Socio-spatial impacts of property-led redevelopment on China’s urban neighbourhoods’ Cities 24(3): 194-208
Hornby, L (2013) Human cost of China’s hukou system. Financial Times, November 8.
Mitter, R. (2005) Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Rosen, S. (2004) ‘The state of youth/youth and the state in early 21st-century China’ in Hays Gries, P. and Rosen, S. (eds.) State and Society in 21st-century China: Crisis, contention, and legitimation. London: Routledge
Schein, L. (1999) ‘Of cargo and satellites: imagined cosmopolitanism’ Postcolonial Studies 2(3): 345-375
Tiezzi, S. (2013) China’s New Urbanization Plan. The Diplomat, http://thediplomat.com/2013/12/chinas-new-urbanization-plan/
Wu, F. and Li, Z. (2005) ‘Sociospatial Differentiation: Process and Spaces in Subdistricts of Shanghai’ Urban Geography 26(2): 137-166
Wu, F. (2003a) ‘The (Post-) Socialist Entrepreneurial City as a State Project: Shanghai’s Reglobalisation in Question’ Urban Studies 40(9): 1673-1698
Wu, F. (2003b) ‘Globalization, Place Promotion and Urban Development in Shanghai’ Journal of Urban Affairs 25(1): 55-78
Wu, F. (2002) ‘Sociospatial differentiation in urban China: evidence from Shanghai’s real estate markets’ Environment and Planning A 34: 1591-1615
Wu, F. (1999) ‘City profile: Shanghai’ Cities 16(3): 207-216
Zhang, T. (2002) ‘Urban Development and a Socialist Pro-Growth Coalition in Shanghai’ Urban Affairs Review 37: 475-499
A contemporary history of China (Part II): post-Mao
Introduction
It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice. Deng Xiaoping
In the second of three articles overviewing a recent history of China, I review the era of Deng Xiaoping.
That the successor to Mao Zedong as head of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was to be both a pragmatist and a loyal Party official, who had been there right from the start of the CCP’s rule, is telling in terms of China’s modern political economy. Deng Xiaoping launched the era known as ‘opening and reform’, which in the 1980s laid the foundations for what was to become a phenomenal pace and rate of economic growth from 1990 onwards. Deng also oversaw the brutal suppression of China’s democratic revolution. ‘Opening and reform’ meant economic opening and reform, with little or no political concessions; and yet such opening and reform created conditions and spurred aspirations for political change.
The era after Mao’s death marked a dramatic new period for China – one of incredible change. The backdrop to this was the legacy of Mao: the Anti-Rightist Movement that shutdown the Hundred Flowers Campaign, the epic failure, farce and mass death of the Great Leap Forward, and the political terror and annihilation of the Cultural Revolution. The promise to transform a country with one in four of the world’s population into an economic powerhouse, and for the benefit of all, failed spectacularly. Deng Xiaoping represented a turn in the CCP toward a form of economic realism and political idealism: the country’s economy would be reformed and opened up to outside world trade while the political authority of the Party remained absolute.
The Democracy Wall Movement
The first indication of the tension and struggle embedded in China’s new political economy was demonstrated in the Democracy Wall of Beijing that began in the summer of 1978.
As a vent to the ordeal of and anger about the Cultural Revolution, the Democracy Wall Movement of 1978-79 was, literally, a wall for people to publically put up their democratic opposition. The Wall included Huang Xiang’s poem, “The Fire God Symphony”:
Why can one man control the wills of millions of people
Why can one man prescribe life and death everywhere
Why should we bow and worship an idol
Letting blind faith confine our will to live, our thoughts and emotions
[…]
Let man be restored to his dignity
Let life become life once again
Let music and virtue be the soul’s inner essence
Let beauty and nature be man’s once again (Source: http://diogenesii.wordpress.com/tag/huang-xiang/)
The movement was fuelled by ambiguous reports in the Party newspaper, People’s Daily, which implied it had Deng Xiaoping’s support. Deng officially took post in December 1978.
By the end of January 1979, Deng had made plain his ambition to modernise China by making it part of the world economy. He became the first CCP leader to visit the United States. Concurrently, as the Democracy Wall Movement spread to other cities in China, he commissioned its shutdown. Huang Xiang later reflected on the movement’s significance:
We “set fire” on Wangfujing Avenue in Beijing. Myself and my three friends, Li Jiahua, Fang Jiahua, and Mo Jiangang, put up my poem “The Fire God Symphony” in big character posters. This first batch of posters lit a spark for seeking enlightenment and freedom in Communist China. We founded and published the first independent periodical ever, called Enlightenment, and staged a poetic campaign to advocate human rights and freedom of expression. (Source: http://diogenesii.wordpress.com/tag/huang-xiang/)
One Child Policy
The everyday, pervasive level of China’s political economy, i.e. the degree to which it seized control of people’s lives, is best illustrated by the introduction of the One Child Policy in 1979. The One Child Policy was essentially the State regulation of women’s bodies, and the motivation was essentially political economic in that the population needed controlling to minimise social, economic and environmental resource problems.
In crude terms, the policy was a success in curbing population growth. However, it has fuelled a war on women and girls: China’s sex imbalance ratio is extraordinary and alarming, with evidence of female foeticide and infanticide, and the mistreatment and abandonment of girls. In an article by The Economist (2010) titled “The worldwide war on baby girls”, it is noted that by 2020 China will have 30 to 40 million more young men (of 19 or under) than young women, which would be the equivalent of the entire young male population of the USA.
Bedrock of China’s economic growth
The designation of four Special Economic Zones (SEZs) in southern China – Xiamen, Shantou, Shenzhen and Zhuhai – ultimately provided the key to China’s economic success. Within these four SEZs infrastructure was rapidly put in place and capital investment from foreign companies flowed in, with the pull of government financial incentives and cheap and ‘docile’ (i.e., unorganised) labour. In-migration from the vast rural hinterland was driven by the promise of better wages and living conditions. Trade in the 1980s was mostly with Taiwan and Hong Kong. These four SEZs boomed, in particular, Shenzhen. The CCP proceeded to open its coastal areas to 14 more SEZs. In brief, China commenced its export-led economic growth, which, while in the 1980s was modest, paved the way for a staggering pace and rate of growth by the 1990s.
(Image source: http://chineseposters.net)
A balancing act
Two things illustrate the spin by the Party of ‘socialist’ ideals and capitalist realism: the Campaign Against Spiritual Pollution and the question of Hong Kong. The unease of some within the CCP with the so-called marriage of socialism and capitalism and with the material-seeking, money-orientated youth of Hong Kong, spurred the 1983 Campaign Against Spiritual Pollution. This was, effectively, a well-publicised clampdown on smuggling, pornography, and prostitution. That said, coming at a time when the SEZs were attracting in foreign investment, and given a consequence of the campaign was to deter much of this investment, the campaign was phased out.
(Image source: http://chineseposters.net)
By the time Britain’s post-colonial lease on Hong Kong expired in 1987, Deng had declared “One Country, Two Systems” in order to manage the innate contradictions of its political economy. But appeasing Party hardliners was one thing, the aspirations of students and workers was another.
1989 Tiananmen
The full story of the Tiananmen revolutionary uprising cannot be covered here, suffice to say that it remains the greatest challenge to CCP rule to date. The protests, which started in Beijing and centred on Tiananmen Square, escalated and spread to other cities.
Whilst students led an encampment in Tiananmen Square, it was ultimately the intervention of the working class that made a difference. As Harry Glass notes in a former Workers’ Liberty publication:
At the beginning of the protests in May 1989, students did not generally seek working class support, confining the workers’ headquarters to the far side of the square until the end of the month. But as the students were pulled towards the internal machinations of the ruling party, backing the “reformist” faction within the bureaucracy, the workers struck out on the road to independence. One of the first signs came on 15 May, when 70,000 steelworkers at the Capital steel plant struck in solidarity with the Beijing democracy movement. In fact, 1989 marked the rebirth of the working class as a powerful force in Chinese politics. The Beijing Workers Autonomous Federation began organising on 17 April, before coming out publicly on 18 May. Workers’ federations spread across many major cities, and incorporated steel workers, builders, bus drivers, machinists, railway workers and office staff. A small core of around 150 activists managed to register 20,000 workers in those five weeks, including workers in state-run factories such as Shougang (Capital Iron and Steel) and Yanshan Petrochemicals. They denounced the Communist regime as “this twentieth century Bastille, the last stronghold of Stalinism”. (Source: http://www.workersliberty.org/node/2202)
For those who remember it, the coverage of the Tiananmen Square uprising left an impression of student radicalism – notably, the iconic image of the student standing in front of the tank – yet the legacy of Tiananmen was most deeply felt within the workers’ movement. After the announcement of martial law and the bloodstained massacre (the precise number of which will never be known, but was certainly hundreds, possibly thousands), the student movement declined while the workers’ movement grew.
General article source:
Zeitgeist Films (2007) “China: A Century of Revolution”.
A contemporary history of China (Part I): the Mao years
Introduction
During this and the following two articles, I will be overviewing a recent history of China. I begin with the Mao years, then move on to the era of Deng Xiaoping (known as ‘opening and reform’), and finish with the period of China’s global ascent.
Knowledge of China’s past is crucial for understanding the country’s present. To illustrate this interrelationship, let’s remind ourselves of the case of British citizen Akmal Shaikh. In 2007, Akmal was arrested by the Chinese authorities for drug smuggling (specifically, heroin), and was sentenced to death despite the fact he was mentally ill. The representation of the case in China by the Party-controlled media recalled the nineteenth century Opium Wars between the British Empire and China’s Qing Dynasty, which involved the British trading of opium, from India, within China. The story tragically played out: this time, China was not to be humiliated; so, in spite of the British government’s plea for clemency, the Chinese state executed Akmal Shaikh in 2009.
The Second Opium War (Wikimedia Commons)
Akmal Shaikh 1956-2009 (Image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akmal_Shaikh)
The birth of Communist China
The so-called People’s Republic of China was declared in 1949 and marks the contemporary history of China as a one-party totalitarian nation-state, controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
During the 1950s, the conditions of existence in the countryside (where the majority of the population resided) and in the cities was organisationally transformed by the CCP, in an effort to economically develop and exert political control within all arenas of everyday life (from work to leisure to home). Agricultural land in the countryside was bloodily ‘redistributed’ from landlords to peasants through cooperatives and collectives, and cities were ordered into work units and neighbourhood units. On the question of ownership, the State owned everything. Layers of Party bureaucracy proliferated and corruption thrived.
“Enemies Without Guns” was an early Party propaganda campaign that illustrates the pervasive affect the bureaucratic State was able to exert on its population: breeding distrust amongst neighbours, and breaking down potential camaraderie among the working class and peasant masses. The Party encouraged the population to anonymously submit the names of those who they suspected were linked to, for example, money, foreign devils and/or the rival Nationalist Party, into designated post boxes.
Alongside early rural land reforms and urban industrial projects, which sought to launch China (then home to one in four of the world’s population) into a global superpower, was the omnipresence of the State. Effort towards economic modernisation would go hand-in-hand with political repression – the defining feature of China’s political economy.
Geopolitics
The relationship of the United States to Taiwan is critical and is based on America’s historical support for the Nationalist Party, during the early twentieth century years, to take political control of China. The 1910s to the 1940s were shaped by a struggle between the Nationalist Party, headed by Chiang Kai-shek, and the Communist Party, led by Mao Zedong. The Nationalist Party fled to Taiwan when Mao took power in 1949. Taiwan has since benefited from US military aid, which is an ongoing source of annoyance for the CCP. But moreover, any desire by the Chinese state to act on its claim that Taiwan is part of China has long threatened to draw the United States into war.
Tibet is another major geopolitical tension and conflict. The CCP launched a military offensive on the region of Tibet in 1950, claiming the area was a part of China mainland. Tibetan uprising to CCP rule in 1959 was brutally crushed and caused international condemnation. It’s worth noting that the spiritual leader of Tibet, the Dalai Lama, calls for the political demand of autonomy not a separate nation-state. The CCP remains un-negotiable.
While I was over in Shanghai in 2008, a local contact of mine relayed a story to me. He’d gone to a Björk gig that year, and at the end Björk had shouted, “Tibet! Tibet!”. His point to me, “this is not how we do politics in China, she should not have said that.” It surprised me that a liberal-minded Shanghaiese had such an opinion. But a combination of two things were at play, a proud sense of nationalism (a tremendously pervasive force in China) and a perception that politics beyond the State is foolish and dangerous.
The Hundred Flowers Campaign and Anti-Rightist Movement
While most intellectual life was controlled by the CCP, a momentary opening was created by Mao Zedong’s instruction in 1956 for the country’s citizens and intellectuals to constructively criticise the Party, known as “A Hundred Flowers to Bloom in the Arts and a Hundred Schools of Thought to Contend in Science”. What it released was a huge wave of criticism against Party bureaucratic inefficiency and corruption. Walls of universities were plastered with such criticism.
In 1957 Mao declared those he had encouraged previously to criticize the Party as Enemies and Rightists, and he appointed Deng Xiaoping to head the subsequent “Anti-Rightist Movement”. Not simply a curiously ironic affair, this effectively silenced China’s key intellectuals for decades.
Visiting China in the years 2007-2013, a frequent general observation was drawn by various of my contacts (working in the fields of academia, teaching, and business): Chinese students and graduates struggle with a sense of critique, i.e., of questioning things. Without doubt, the silencing of the country’s intellectuals decades previously has left a legacy on education, in which only a few brave teachers and students precariously and innovatively dare to question.
The Great Leap Forward
The launch of the “Great Leap Forward” in 1958 signified Mao’s ambition to equal the West in industrial output within fifteen years. What it actually was was a huge propaganda campaign with ludicrous and counterproductive initiatives and targets that – in combination with natural disaster – literally starved to death millions.
(Image source: http://chineseposters.net/)
People were told to convert scrap iron and steel into pots, and so the countryside was marked by rows of giant furnaces that made piles of pots which were useless and cracked easily. And yet it went on. To meet targets, Party bureaucrats inflated the figures for the actual production of grain thus too much grain left the countryside, generating a food crisis while grain lay stored in excess in the cities. One propaganda slogan, “The corn will grow higher the more you desire”, accentuates the farce.
(Wikimedia Commons)
There was little to no questioning of the Great Leap Forward as a consequence of the Hundred Flowers Campaign and Anti-Rightist Movement.
Author of “Mao’s Great Famine: The Story of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe”, historian Frank Dikötter argues that the Great Leap Forward, with a death toll of 45 million, “ranks alongside the gulags and the Holocaust as one of the three greatest events of the 20th century…. It was like Pol Pot’s genocide multiplied 20 times over” (cited in Akbar, 2013).
The Cult of Mao, the Cultural Revolution, and the close of the Mao years
By 1964 the infamous little Red Book, a book of Mao quotes, was produced and widely distributed. Its reach cannot be underestimated, both within China and globally. And what it came to symbolise was the cult of Mao, that is, his status as a living god and the irrational fervour that went along with that. In this climate, Mao decided that the Party itself had become an impediment to genuine revolution, and in May 1966 he launched a campaign that called on the youth to attack the Party and steer it onto the path of true revolutionary politics; the “Cultural Revolution” was born.
(Image source: http://chineseposters.net/)
The fever-ridden young Red Guards were instructed to destroy the “Four Olds”: “Old Ideas, Old Culture, Old Customs, Old Habits”. In other words, the very cultural and historical fabric of Chinese society was devastated – museums, libraries, temples, street signs, and so on. By 1967 the Cultural Revolution descended into factional warfare, with a splintler from the Red Guards forming, known as the Rebels (supported by Mao). By the summer China was in civil war.
Echoing the destiny of the participants of the Hundred Flowers Campaign who became labelled Enemies and Rightists, the youth that Mao had encouraged to take the banner as authentic revolutionaries were ordered to disarm and, by the end of 1968, were sent to the countryside to be re-educated by authentic revolutionaries. They became known as the “Sent-down Youth”.
It is estimated that thirty six million people were harassed during the Cultural Revolution and up to one million killed (Branigan, 2013):
They beat her, bound her and led her from home. She knelt before the crowds as they denounced her. Then they loaded her on to a truck, drove her to the outskirts of town and shot her. Fang Zhongmou’s execution for political crimes during the Cultural Revolution was commonplace in its brutality but more shocking to outsiders in one regard: her accusers were her husband and their 16-year-old child. More than four decades on, Fang’s son is seeking to atone by telling her story and calling for the preservation of her grave in their home town of Guzhen, central Anhui province, as a cultural relic. […] “My mother, father and I were all devoured by the Cultural Revolution,” said Zhang, 60, who is now a lawyer. “[It] was a catastrophe suffered by the Chinese nation. We must remember this painful historical lesson and never let it happen again.”
In addition to the political and everyday human horror is the cultural vacuum left by the Cultural Revolution. What does culture actually mean in China today? It is hardly surprising that one of the country’s main contemporary crises is that of culture.
The question of Mao’s successor arose in the early 1970s, with the deterioration of his health. There was popular distrust of the vying for power by the Gang of Four (who led the Rebels faction during the Cultural Revolution, and included Mao’s wife). After Mao’s death in 1976, the Gang of Four were arrested. Mao’s successor was to be a pragmatist, but nonetheless someone who was there right from the start, Deng Xiaoping.
Article source:
Zeitgeist Films (2007) “China: A Century of Revolution”.
References:
Akbar, A (2013) “Mao’s Great Leap Forward ‘killed 45 million in four years’”. The Independent, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/maos-great-leap-forward-killed-45-million-in-four-years-2081630.html
Branigan, T (2013) “China’s Cultural Revolution: son’s guilt over the mother he sent to her death”. The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/27/china-cultural-revolution-sons-guilt-zhang-hongping
Anaemic On A Bike 