February 12, 2019
Dear Friends and Family,
This is Segment 15 of the Socialism series, and the first of four segments on China. Segment 15 focuses on the years 1949 – 1976 when Mao Zedong was Chairman. Chairman MAO was a Marxist advocate and attempted to institute the hallmarks of Socialism/Communism: centralized control, central planning, collectivism via communes under totalitarianism. Chairman MAO came into power via revolution.
There were two prominent socialistic efforts in his regime: (1) The Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 1962, when he attempted to rapidly transform the country from an agricultural economy to a socialist society via industrialization and collectivism and (2) The Cultural Revolution (1966 – 1976) which was a successful effort to reestablish MAO’s power after the Great Leap Forward failure by elimination of many of his rivals.
There is a PDF attachment that maybe of interest: It is titled “The Great Leap Forward and contains excerpts from the 142-page book The Great Leap Forward by MAO Min. This author has written 33 books, but I could find little about the individual or maybe collection of individuals. This particular book recounts discussions at a Communist Party meeting held during the Great Leap Forward period. It appears to have been translated from Chinese as it reads a little rough and reads as though the author(s) had some direct connections with the upper echelons of the Communist Party. I found the way they interacted within the group most interesting.
My Takeaways:
The Great Leap Forward (1958 – 1962): MAO followed the Marxist handbook extremely well. He started with revolution. He nationalized what industry that existed as China at the time was primarily an agrarian society. He confiscated privately owned farms and collectivized much of the peasant labor force into 25,000 communes and forced the remaining peasant labor force to produce steel in rather primitive steel mills. He installed a Dictatorship of the Proletariat, wherein he was the dictator and instituted centralized planning. Further, the wealthy landowners were moved to tiny shacks or beaten to death; art and literature were banned; and the Party created a classless society by dictating the clothes one wore, the city one lived in, the job one held, the person one married, and what one ate.
The central planners establish production quotas for both steel and grain for each local area. The agricultural quotas were substantially higher than historical output with the assumption that people would love commune living and hence would produce more. Therefore, food rationing was not part of the centralized plan. The implementation of the plan was fairly classic of socialistic societies. People didn’t like the communes and had no incentive to produce, so production was far less than historical output and much less than the over-established quotas; food was free and unrationed, so consumption was greater than planned; local officials were fearful so they falsified production reports so it appeared they made quota, therefore central planners assumed a surplus existed which they moved to storage where it rotted. The end result: Over 30 million people died of starvation.
The Cultural Revolution (1966 – 1976): Albeit the unaffected people of China knew little if anything about the Great Famine (still don’t to this day), many in the Communist Party did. So, Chairman MAO needed to return to a position of power and maintain it. MAO did so by enlisting young radical students, some no older than fourteen, and giving them license and encouragement to denounce all authority. They formed “Red Guard” groups around the country which spread into the military, urban workers, and to some degree into Party leadership. Violent struggles erupted throughout the country. Millions suffered a range of abuses included sustained harassment, public humiliation, imprisonment, torture, and sometimes execution. By all accounts 1.5 to 2 million people were killed. Additionally, as reported, the revolution resulted in a loss of cultural and spiritual values, loss of status and honor, loss of career, loss of dignity, and loss of trust predictably in human relations as people turned against each other.
Next:
The next segment will focus on China’s Economy Today. The first excerpt starts out with, “The crest of a transformation in China is one hundred times the scale and ten times the speed of the first Industrial Revolution which created Britain.”
Happy Learning,
Harley
P.S. Interestingly, we have just finished learning about five Communist/Socialist countries: Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, China, and North Korea. In transitioning to a socialistic society all of these country’s efforts included: confiscation of property, centralized planning, erosion of civil liberties, and a dictatorship (each step prescribed in Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto). In each case, this led to economic collapse and a shortage of food. With that as background I found the New York Times fact checking of President Trump’s statement on Venezuela in last week’s State of the Union address of extreme interest.
Dear Friends and Family,
This is Segment 15 of the Socialism series, and the first of four segments on China. Segment 15 focuses on the years 1949 – 1976 when Mao Zedong was Chairman. Chairman MAO was a Marxist advocate and attempted to institute the hallmarks of Socialism/Communism: centralized control, central planning, collectivism via communes under totalitarianism. Chairman MAO came into power via revolution.
There were two prominent socialistic efforts in his regime: (1) The Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 1962, when he attempted to rapidly transform the country from an agricultural economy to a socialist society via industrialization and collectivism and (2) The Cultural Revolution (1966 – 1976) which was a successful effort to reestablish MAO’s power after the Great Leap Forward failure by elimination of many of his rivals.
There is a PDF attachment that maybe of interest: It is titled “The Great Leap Forward and contains excerpts from the 142-page book The Great Leap Forward by MAO Min. This author has written 33 books, but I could find little about the individual or maybe collection of individuals. This particular book recounts discussions at a Communist Party meeting held during the Great Leap Forward period. It appears to have been translated from Chinese as it reads a little rough and reads as though the author(s) had some direct connections with the upper echelons of the Communist Party. I found the way they interacted within the group most interesting.
My Takeaways:
The Great Leap Forward (1958 – 1962): MAO followed the Marxist handbook extremely well. He started with revolution. He nationalized what industry that existed as China at the time was primarily an agrarian society. He confiscated privately owned farms and collectivized much of the peasant labor force into 25,000 communes and forced the remaining peasant labor force to produce steel in rather primitive steel mills. He installed a Dictatorship of the Proletariat, wherein he was the dictator and instituted centralized planning. Further, the wealthy landowners were moved to tiny shacks or beaten to death; art and literature were banned; and the Party created a classless society by dictating the clothes one wore, the city one lived in, the job one held, the person one married, and what one ate.
The central planners establish production quotas for both steel and grain for each local area. The agricultural quotas were substantially higher than historical output with the assumption that people would love commune living and hence would produce more. Therefore, food rationing was not part of the centralized plan. The implementation of the plan was fairly classic of socialistic societies. People didn’t like the communes and had no incentive to produce, so production was far less than historical output and much less than the over-established quotas; food was free and unrationed, so consumption was greater than planned; local officials were fearful so they falsified production reports so it appeared they made quota, therefore central planners assumed a surplus existed which they moved to storage where it rotted. The end result: Over 30 million people died of starvation.
The Cultural Revolution (1966 – 1976): Albeit the unaffected people of China knew little if anything about the Great Famine (still don’t to this day), many in the Communist Party did. So, Chairman MAO needed to return to a position of power and maintain it. MAO did so by enlisting young radical students, some no older than fourteen, and giving them license and encouragement to denounce all authority. They formed “Red Guard” groups around the country which spread into the military, urban workers, and to some degree into Party leadership. Violent struggles erupted throughout the country. Millions suffered a range of abuses included sustained harassment, public humiliation, imprisonment, torture, and sometimes execution. By all accounts 1.5 to 2 million people were killed. Additionally, as reported, the revolution resulted in a loss of cultural and spiritual values, loss of status and honor, loss of career, loss of dignity, and loss of trust predictably in human relations as people turned against each other.
Next:
The next segment will focus on China’s Economy Today. The first excerpt starts out with, “The crest of a transformation in China is one hundred times the scale and ten times the speed of the first Industrial Revolution which created Britain.”
Happy Learning,
Harley
P.S. Interestingly, we have just finished learning about five Communist/Socialist countries: Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, China, and North Korea. In transitioning to a socialistic society all of these country’s efforts included: confiscation of property, centralized planning, erosion of civil liberties, and a dictatorship (each step prescribed in Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto). In each case, this led to economic collapse and a shortage of food. With that as background I found the New York Times fact checking of President Trump’s statement on Venezuela in last week’s State of the Union address of extreme interest.
SOCIALISM – SEGMENT 15
CHINA: UNDER STRICT COMMUNIST RULE (1949—1976) - EXCERPTS
Mao Zedong
When he became Chairman in 1949, Mao Zedong was already a figure of almost mystical stature, having led the Red Arzy since 1934. He was an ideologue and whilst his impatience at the pace of reform led to decisions that often brought disaster skillfully maneuvering by the party, meant that he remained a heroic figurehead. The Cultural Revolution of 1966-76 was, at the expense of millions, a calculated attempt to make Mao a deity. The years after his death saw a diminution of his status, but since the 1990s his popularity has revived. Once again Mao is considered by millions to be weida – Great.
Source: DK Eyewitness Travel CHINA
The Communist Revolution (1945 – 1949)
The Maoist revolution (Communist revolution) unified the country, broke the entrenched interests, divided up the land, and supplied financial and human capital. Until that time China scorned technology and business, and operated under a stifling system of guild rules, and that was not even the worst of it. One of the biggest problems was simply that China in the nineteenth century was terribly corrupt and unstable. Rebellions, famines, mass migrations, floods, and warlords swept across the country, knocking down those who tried to set up small businesses. For example, it would have been foolish to set up a factory to manufacture cotton gins. Before a person could recoup his investment, the factory would have been seized by some warlord. The Communist Revolution changed everything. It ushered in a strong central government and did away with the guilds and the Confucianism that were strangling businesses, and that turned out to be a big step forward.
The most important entrenched interest that the Communists cleared away was perhaps that of the landowners. The land reform that followed Liberation was one of the most important things that have happened in the Chinese countryside in the last 4,000 years. Wealthy landowners were dragged before struggle sessions, denounced, and spat upon by landless peasants, and their land was divided up along with their livestock and their clothing, even their homes. If they were lucky, the landowners were moved into tiny shacks and allowed to wade into the rice paddies and farm tiny plots. If they were not so lucky, they were beaten to death. For all its cruelty, the Communist Revolution laid the groundwork for the economic revolution that came later.
During the Maoist era, classic poetry and novels are banned, traditional landscape painting and Piking opera are in disgrace, and the best-seller is Mao’s little red book of quotations. Revolutionary exhortations boom over the loudspeaker to wake people up in the morning and follow through the day. The Communist Party determines everything: the clothes you wear, the city you live in, the job you hold, the amount of rice you eat, the clinic you go to, the person you are allowed to marry, even the kinds of activities for which you “volunteer.” Such totalitarianism grew out of a Chinese imperial tradition that recognized no place for individual rights. Obligations – to one’s father, husband, or emperor – were absolute. For centuries, the patriarch was the tyrant of the family, allowed even to kill his children. And the emperor was the tyrant of the nation, allowed even to kill his subjects. The result was that everyone tried to blend in according to the social norms; otherwise the authorities would “shoot the bird that flies in front of the flock.”
Then Mao went even further in subordinating the individual. People were supposed to become virtually identical: They dressed alike in Mao suits, put their hair in the same way, rode the same bicycles, shared a faith in Communism, and – like parrots – spewed forth the same lines over and over. The party even advised people how often to have sex: “very often” for newlyweds, meaning once every three to seven days, and once every week or two for everyone else. The party controlled absolutely everything, from the kindergarten curriculum to the crops grown on each plot of land.
Source: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power: CHINA WAKES by Nichols D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn
The Great Leap Forward
Mao announced the initiation of the Great Leap Forward at a meeting in January 1958 in Nanjing. The main idea was that rapid development of both the agricultural and industrial sectors could and should take place in parallel. The hope was to industrialize by making use of the massive supply of peasant labor and avoid having to import heavy machinery. To realize this, Mao proposed merging the existing collectives into huge People’s communes. Private land plots were abolished and communal kitchens were introduced. In August 1958, it was determined that the people’s communes would become the primary form of economic and political organization throughout rural China. Amazingly, considering the massive nature of social change proposed, by the end of the year approximately 25,000 communes had been set up, each with an average of 5,000 households. The communes were essentially to be self-sufficient with wages and money replaced by “work points.” Mao saw grain and steel production as the two main elements of economic progress. He projected that sometime within 15 years of commencement of the Great Leap, China’s steel production would surpass that of Great Britain. However, output consisted of low-quality lumps of pig iron which was of negligible economic worth.
Mao’s utopian expectations collapsed with the failure of the Great Leap Forward, which caused one of the worst human tragedies in 20th century history. It is estimated that 20-30 million people starved to death in a nationwide famine from 1959-1961, and for the first time in Communist China’s history, the legend of Mao’s “eternal correctness” was questioned.
Source: Tiananmen Square by Charles River Editors
Then, in 1958, came Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward, designed to allow China to catch up with the West. Instead, it provoked the worst famine in world history. In many villages, life had never been so tough, even under the landlords. Peasants lived, if the survived at all by eating leaves, bark and grass. Parents sometimes had to choose which of their children to feed; they did not have enough to feed them all. Demographic evidence suggests that across China about 30 million people died in the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward. Never before had so many people died in one country for any reason, whether because of war or natural disaster. The Chinese Communist famine was roughly three times as bad as the worst famine in world history. Mao managed to kill almost 5% of his subjects, a figure equivalent to the entire population today of the state of California.
Source: China Wakes by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn
Incredible, the author Yang said. “This is a rare thing in history, but the authorities have somehow covered up such an important event, so that not many people know about this piece of history. People have passed the story down, but young people these days find it hard to believe.
To this day, Beijing has not produced an official public report of the tragedy and its death toll. Even to ask the question itself was political dynamite, because of where the answer would lead – to Mao and his fellow leaders, and their direct responsibility for the deaths of tens of millions of their citizens. Mao had ordered Chinese farms to be collectivized in the late fifties and forced many once productive peasants who had grown grain to put their energy into building crude backyard blast furnaces instead. As part of this “Great Leap Forward”, Mao’s acolytes predicted food production would rocket up to surpass output in advanced western countries. By this time, the brutal political controls reinforcing the emerging personality cult around Mao had started to take hold. Promoted as a ‘brilliant Marxist’ and ‘an outstanding thinker’, the chairman had taken on an infallible God-like aura.
The new rural communes began reporting huge fake harvests to meet Mao’s political imperative for record grain output. The lies were reinforced, if necessary, with state terror orchestrated by slavish officials who feared political death if they deviated from Mao’s diktats. Anyone who questioned the size of the harvests reported to Beijing was labeled a ‘rightest’. Many were beaten to death by armed militias deployed by local officials to enforce their production. The food simply ran out in some areas. Even granaries that did have food were shut and their life-saving contents kept in storage. To have handed out the grain in these cases could perversely also have been labelled a political mistake, because the size of the stockpile contradicted the harvest reported to Beijing.
One of the most remarkable things about the great famine was that for twenty years no one was sure that is had even taken place. Under totalitarian rule in Mao’s time, however, the government had the tools at its fingertips to enforce silence about even a mammoth famine, and to control any lingering debate about it. China had no independent media or civil society to press for information. The peasants who were the famine’s main victims were powerless and distant from the political power centers. The Party controlled who researched what, and where they travelled.
In the twenty-first century, large-scale cover-ups of the scale the Party had managed with the famine are well nigh impossible. China is wired up through mobile phones and the internet as well as being plugged into the global economy. Any food problems or restrictions on travel would show up in multiple markets outside the country in an instant.
Source: The Party – The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers by Richard McGregor
The huge famine in the late 1950s and early 1960s was named “the three years of natural disasters,” so it seems that the blame lay with the flooding and drought rather than Mao’s mistakes. China has never acknowledged the scale of the death toll, so most Chinese have no idea that the famine was the worst in history. Indeed, since the famine is almost never mentioned in the books or the press, some younger Chinese do not know very clearly that it happened.
Source: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power: CHINA WAKES by Nichols D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn.
The Cultural Revolution
Mao’s efforts to instill a new social order in people’s hearts and minds reached new heights when the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” began in the summer of 1966. Mao initiated the Cultural Revolution for two interrelated purposes. First, he hoped that it would allow him to find new means of promoting the transformation of China’s party, state, and society in accordance with his ideals. Second, he sought to use it to enhance his much-weakened authority and reputation. Both in real life and in Mao’s conceptual realm, those two purposes were interwoven – for Mao believed that his preeminent leadership would best guarantee the success of his revolution. By carrying out the Cultural Revolution, Mao easily achieved the second goal, making his power and authority absolute during the Cultural Revolution years (1962 -1976). But the Cultural Revolution failed to bring him any closer to achieving the first goal. Although the mass movement release by the Cultural Revolution destroyed Mao’s opponents and for a period, the “old” party-state control system; it proved unable to create the new form of state power that Mao so much desired for creating a new society.
The post-Mao leadership made strenuous efforts to redefine the essence of Maoism. While claiming that Mao’s thought was not merely Mao’s creation but the contribution of the Party leadership’s collective wisdom, the CCP discarded Mao’s ideal of transforming China into a land of universal justice and equality and abandoned Mao’s practice of striving for revolutionary changes “all under heaven.” The greatest achievements of Mao’s revolution, according to the post-Mao CCP leadership, lay in the fact that it unified China, industrialized the country, and revived its greatness in world affairs.
Source: Tiananmen Square by Charles River Editors
On June 1, 1966, an incendiary editorial in the People’s Daily exhorted readers to “Sweep Away All Monsters and Demon!” It was opening shot of the Cultural Revolution, urging people to denounce representatives of the bourgeoisie who were out to ‘deceive, fool and benumb the working people in order to consolidate their reactionary state power’. As if this were not enough, it soon came to light that four of the top leaders in the party had been placed under arrest, accused of plotting against the Chairman. The mayor of Beijing was among them. He had tried, under the very nose of the people, to turn the capital into a citadel of revisionism. Counter-revolutionaries had sneaked into the party, the government and the army, trying to lead the country down the road to capitalism. Now was the beginning of a new revolution in China, as the people were encouraged to stand up and flush out all those trying to transform the dictatorship of the proletariat into a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
Who, precisely, these counter-revolutionaries were, and how they had managed to worm their way into the party, was unclear, but the number-one representative of modern revisionism was the Soviet leader and party secretary Nikita Khrushchev. In a secret speech in 1956 that shook the socialist camp to the core, Khrushchev had demolished the reputation of his predecessor Joseph Stalin, detailing the horrors of his rule and attacking the cult of personality. Two years later, Khrushchev proposed ‘peaceful coexistence’ with the West, a concept that true believers around the world viewed as a betrayal of the principles of revolutionary communism. Mao, who had modeled himself on Stalin, felt personally threatened by de-Stalinization.
In communist parlance, after the socialist transformation of the ownership of the means of production had been completed, a new revolution was required to stamp out once and for all the remnants of bourgeois culture, from private thoughts to private markets. Just as the transition from capitalism to socialism required a revolution, the transition from socialism to communism demanded a revolution too: Mao called it the Cultural Revolution. But behind all the theoretical justifications lay an ageing dictator’s determination to shore up his own standing in world history. Mao was sure of his own greatness, of which he spoke constantly, and saw himself as the leading light of communism.
The Chairman’s first attempt to steal the Soviet Union’s thunder was the Great Leap Forward in 1958, when people in the countryside were herded into giant collectives called people’s communes. By substituting labor for capital and harnessing the vast potential of the masses, he thought that he could catapult his country past its competitors. Mao was convinced that he had found the golden bridge to communism, making him the messiah leading humanity to a world of plenty for all. But the Great Leap Forward was a disastrous experiment which cost the lives of tens of millions of people.
The Cultural Revolution was Mao’s second attempt to become the historical pivot around which the socialist universe revolved. Like many dictators, Mao combined grandiose ideas about his own historical destiny with an extraordinary capacity for malice. He was easily offended and resentful, with a long memory for grievances. The Cultural Revolution, then, was also about an old man settling personal scores at the end of his life. These two aspects of the Cultural Revolution – the vision of a socialist world free of revisionism, the sordid, vengeful plotting against real and imaginary enemies – were not mutually exclusive. Mao saw no distinction between himself and the revolution. He was the revolution. An inkling of dissatisfaction with his authority was a direct threat to the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The Cultural Revolution erupted in the summer of 1966, it took on a life of its own, with unintended consequences that even the most consummate strategist could not have anticipated. Mao wished to purge the higher echelons of power, so he could hardly rely on the party machine to get the job done. He turned to young, radical students instead, some of them no older than fourteen, giving them license to denounce all authority and ‘bombard the headquarters. The Chairman urged the population at large to join the revolution, calling on all to ‘seize power’ and over through the ‘bourgeois power holders’. By January 1967 the chaos was such that the army intervened, seeking to push through the revolution and bring the situation under control. As different military leaders supported different factions, all of them equally certain they represent the true voice of Mao Zedong, the country slid into civil war.
The first phase of the Cultural Revolution came to an end in the summer of 1968 as new, so-called ‘revolutionary party committees’ took over the party and the state. They were heavily dominated by military officers, concentrating real power in the hand of the army. Over the next three years, they turned the country into a garrison state, with soldiers overseeing schools, factories and government units. At first, millions of undesirable elements, including students and others who had take the Chairman at his word, were banished to the country side to be ‘re-educated by the peasants’. Then followed a series of brutal purges, used by the revolutionary party committees to eradicate all those who had spoken out at the height of the Cultural Revolution. The talk was no longer of ‘capitalist roaders’ but of ‘traitors’, ‘renegades’ and ‘spies’, as special committees were set up to examine alleged enemy links among ordinary people and erstwhile leaders alike. After a nationwide witch-hunt came a sweeping campaign against corruption, further cowing the population into submission, as almost every act every utterance became potentially criminal.
By now, the revolutionary frenzy had exhausted almost everyone. Even at the height of the Cultural Revolution, many ordinary people, wary of the one-party state, had offered no more than outward compliance, keeping their innermost thoughts and personal feelings to themselves. Now many of them realized that the party had been badly damaged by the Cultural Revolution. They used the opportunity quietly to pursue their lives, even as the Chairman continued to play one faction against the other during his final years in power. In the countryside in particular, if the Great Leap Forward had destroyed the credibility of the party, the Cultural Revolution undermined its organization. In a silent revolution, millions upon millions of villagers surreptitiously reconnected with traditional practices, as they opened black markets, shared out collective assets, divided the land and operated underground factories. Even before Mao died in 1976, large parts of the countryside had abandoned the planned economy. It was to be one of the most enduring legacies of a decade of chaos and entrenched fear. The gradual undermining of the planned economy was an unintended outcome of the Cultural Revolution. Another was the destruction of the remnants of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought. By the time Mao died, not only were people in the countryside pushing for much greater economic opportunities, but many had also broken free of the ideological shackles imposed by decades of Maoism. Endless campaigns of thought reform produced widespread skepticism even among the party members themselves.
But there was also a much darker heritage. Even if, in terms of human loss, the Cultural Revolution was far less murderous than many earlier campaigns, in particular, the catastrophe unleashed during Mao’s Great Leap Famine, it left a trail of broken lives and cultural devastation. By all accounts, during the ten years spanning the Cultural Revolution, between 1.5 and 2 million people were killed, but many more lives were ruined through endless denunciations, false confessions, struggle meetings and persecution campaigns. Anne Thurston has written eloquently that the Cultural Revolution was neither a sudden disaster nor a holocaust, but an extreme situation characterized by loss at many levels, ‘loss of culture and of spiritual values, loss of status and honor, loss of career, loss of dignity’, and, of course, loss of trust and predictability in human relations, as people turned against each other.
The combined total of their choices ultimately pushed the country in a direction very much at odds with the one envisaged by the Chairman: Instead of fighting the remnants of bourgeois culture, they subverted the planned economy and hollowed out the party’s ideology. In short, the buried Maoism.
Source: The Cultural Revolution by Frank Dikotter
Mao launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966 to destroy the party’s incipient bureaucratism and restore its revolutionary nature. “Bombard the headquarters,” Mao advised, and millions of Red Guards took him at his word. Young people attacked their teachers, forcing them to knell on glass and confess their errors. Children denounced their parents, and young cadres tortured and humiliated their leaders. For a time, cars were instructed to go forward at red lights and to stop at green, because red was a revolutionary color signifying action. The Red Guards raided offices and published many secret documents usually in attempts to discredit one leader or another. Often, they did not even know what the documents were. But people copied them down from the wall posters or picked up copies of newsletters in which documents were reproduced. The classified information that was published during the Cultural Revolution showed the Chinese people how totalitarian, how cruel, how inhumane the regime was. None of us had known. But then everything came out.
Source: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power: CHINA WAKES by Nichols D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
CHINA: UNDER STRICT COMMUNIST RULE (1949—1976) - EXCERPTS
Mao Zedong
When he became Chairman in 1949, Mao Zedong was already a figure of almost mystical stature, having led the Red Arzy since 1934. He was an ideologue and whilst his impatience at the pace of reform led to decisions that often brought disaster skillfully maneuvering by the party, meant that he remained a heroic figurehead. The Cultural Revolution of 1966-76 was, at the expense of millions, a calculated attempt to make Mao a deity. The years after his death saw a diminution of his status, but since the 1990s his popularity has revived. Once again Mao is considered by millions to be weida – Great.
Source: DK Eyewitness Travel CHINA
The Communist Revolution (1945 – 1949)
The Maoist revolution (Communist revolution) unified the country, broke the entrenched interests, divided up the land, and supplied financial and human capital. Until that time China scorned technology and business, and operated under a stifling system of guild rules, and that was not even the worst of it. One of the biggest problems was simply that China in the nineteenth century was terribly corrupt and unstable. Rebellions, famines, mass migrations, floods, and warlords swept across the country, knocking down those who tried to set up small businesses. For example, it would have been foolish to set up a factory to manufacture cotton gins. Before a person could recoup his investment, the factory would have been seized by some warlord. The Communist Revolution changed everything. It ushered in a strong central government and did away with the guilds and the Confucianism that were strangling businesses, and that turned out to be a big step forward.
The most important entrenched interest that the Communists cleared away was perhaps that of the landowners. The land reform that followed Liberation was one of the most important things that have happened in the Chinese countryside in the last 4,000 years. Wealthy landowners were dragged before struggle sessions, denounced, and spat upon by landless peasants, and their land was divided up along with their livestock and their clothing, even their homes. If they were lucky, the landowners were moved into tiny shacks and allowed to wade into the rice paddies and farm tiny plots. If they were not so lucky, they were beaten to death. For all its cruelty, the Communist Revolution laid the groundwork for the economic revolution that came later.
During the Maoist era, classic poetry and novels are banned, traditional landscape painting and Piking opera are in disgrace, and the best-seller is Mao’s little red book of quotations. Revolutionary exhortations boom over the loudspeaker to wake people up in the morning and follow through the day. The Communist Party determines everything: the clothes you wear, the city you live in, the job you hold, the amount of rice you eat, the clinic you go to, the person you are allowed to marry, even the kinds of activities for which you “volunteer.” Such totalitarianism grew out of a Chinese imperial tradition that recognized no place for individual rights. Obligations – to one’s father, husband, or emperor – were absolute. For centuries, the patriarch was the tyrant of the family, allowed even to kill his children. And the emperor was the tyrant of the nation, allowed even to kill his subjects. The result was that everyone tried to blend in according to the social norms; otherwise the authorities would “shoot the bird that flies in front of the flock.”
Then Mao went even further in subordinating the individual. People were supposed to become virtually identical: They dressed alike in Mao suits, put their hair in the same way, rode the same bicycles, shared a faith in Communism, and – like parrots – spewed forth the same lines over and over. The party even advised people how often to have sex: “very often” for newlyweds, meaning once every three to seven days, and once every week or two for everyone else. The party controlled absolutely everything, from the kindergarten curriculum to the crops grown on each plot of land.
Source: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power: CHINA WAKES by Nichols D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn
The Great Leap Forward
Mao announced the initiation of the Great Leap Forward at a meeting in January 1958 in Nanjing. The main idea was that rapid development of both the agricultural and industrial sectors could and should take place in parallel. The hope was to industrialize by making use of the massive supply of peasant labor and avoid having to import heavy machinery. To realize this, Mao proposed merging the existing collectives into huge People’s communes. Private land plots were abolished and communal kitchens were introduced. In August 1958, it was determined that the people’s communes would become the primary form of economic and political organization throughout rural China. Amazingly, considering the massive nature of social change proposed, by the end of the year approximately 25,000 communes had been set up, each with an average of 5,000 households. The communes were essentially to be self-sufficient with wages and money replaced by “work points.” Mao saw grain and steel production as the two main elements of economic progress. He projected that sometime within 15 years of commencement of the Great Leap, China’s steel production would surpass that of Great Britain. However, output consisted of low-quality lumps of pig iron which was of negligible economic worth.
Mao’s utopian expectations collapsed with the failure of the Great Leap Forward, which caused one of the worst human tragedies in 20th century history. It is estimated that 20-30 million people starved to death in a nationwide famine from 1959-1961, and for the first time in Communist China’s history, the legend of Mao’s “eternal correctness” was questioned.
Source: Tiananmen Square by Charles River Editors
Then, in 1958, came Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward, designed to allow China to catch up with the West. Instead, it provoked the worst famine in world history. In many villages, life had never been so tough, even under the landlords. Peasants lived, if the survived at all by eating leaves, bark and grass. Parents sometimes had to choose which of their children to feed; they did not have enough to feed them all. Demographic evidence suggests that across China about 30 million people died in the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward. Never before had so many people died in one country for any reason, whether because of war or natural disaster. The Chinese Communist famine was roughly three times as bad as the worst famine in world history. Mao managed to kill almost 5% of his subjects, a figure equivalent to the entire population today of the state of California.
Source: China Wakes by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn
Incredible, the author Yang said. “This is a rare thing in history, but the authorities have somehow covered up such an important event, so that not many people know about this piece of history. People have passed the story down, but young people these days find it hard to believe.
To this day, Beijing has not produced an official public report of the tragedy and its death toll. Even to ask the question itself was political dynamite, because of where the answer would lead – to Mao and his fellow leaders, and their direct responsibility for the deaths of tens of millions of their citizens. Mao had ordered Chinese farms to be collectivized in the late fifties and forced many once productive peasants who had grown grain to put their energy into building crude backyard blast furnaces instead. As part of this “Great Leap Forward”, Mao’s acolytes predicted food production would rocket up to surpass output in advanced western countries. By this time, the brutal political controls reinforcing the emerging personality cult around Mao had started to take hold. Promoted as a ‘brilliant Marxist’ and ‘an outstanding thinker’, the chairman had taken on an infallible God-like aura.
The new rural communes began reporting huge fake harvests to meet Mao’s political imperative for record grain output. The lies were reinforced, if necessary, with state terror orchestrated by slavish officials who feared political death if they deviated from Mao’s diktats. Anyone who questioned the size of the harvests reported to Beijing was labeled a ‘rightest’. Many were beaten to death by armed militias deployed by local officials to enforce their production. The food simply ran out in some areas. Even granaries that did have food were shut and their life-saving contents kept in storage. To have handed out the grain in these cases could perversely also have been labelled a political mistake, because the size of the stockpile contradicted the harvest reported to Beijing.
One of the most remarkable things about the great famine was that for twenty years no one was sure that is had even taken place. Under totalitarian rule in Mao’s time, however, the government had the tools at its fingertips to enforce silence about even a mammoth famine, and to control any lingering debate about it. China had no independent media or civil society to press for information. The peasants who were the famine’s main victims were powerless and distant from the political power centers. The Party controlled who researched what, and where they travelled.
In the twenty-first century, large-scale cover-ups of the scale the Party had managed with the famine are well nigh impossible. China is wired up through mobile phones and the internet as well as being plugged into the global economy. Any food problems or restrictions on travel would show up in multiple markets outside the country in an instant.
Source: The Party – The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers by Richard McGregor
The huge famine in the late 1950s and early 1960s was named “the three years of natural disasters,” so it seems that the blame lay with the flooding and drought rather than Mao’s mistakes. China has never acknowledged the scale of the death toll, so most Chinese have no idea that the famine was the worst in history. Indeed, since the famine is almost never mentioned in the books or the press, some younger Chinese do not know very clearly that it happened.
Source: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power: CHINA WAKES by Nichols D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn.
The Cultural Revolution
Mao’s efforts to instill a new social order in people’s hearts and minds reached new heights when the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” began in the summer of 1966. Mao initiated the Cultural Revolution for two interrelated purposes. First, he hoped that it would allow him to find new means of promoting the transformation of China’s party, state, and society in accordance with his ideals. Second, he sought to use it to enhance his much-weakened authority and reputation. Both in real life and in Mao’s conceptual realm, those two purposes were interwoven – for Mao believed that his preeminent leadership would best guarantee the success of his revolution. By carrying out the Cultural Revolution, Mao easily achieved the second goal, making his power and authority absolute during the Cultural Revolution years (1962 -1976). But the Cultural Revolution failed to bring him any closer to achieving the first goal. Although the mass movement release by the Cultural Revolution destroyed Mao’s opponents and for a period, the “old” party-state control system; it proved unable to create the new form of state power that Mao so much desired for creating a new society.
The post-Mao leadership made strenuous efforts to redefine the essence of Maoism. While claiming that Mao’s thought was not merely Mao’s creation but the contribution of the Party leadership’s collective wisdom, the CCP discarded Mao’s ideal of transforming China into a land of universal justice and equality and abandoned Mao’s practice of striving for revolutionary changes “all under heaven.” The greatest achievements of Mao’s revolution, according to the post-Mao CCP leadership, lay in the fact that it unified China, industrialized the country, and revived its greatness in world affairs.
Source: Tiananmen Square by Charles River Editors
On June 1, 1966, an incendiary editorial in the People’s Daily exhorted readers to “Sweep Away All Monsters and Demon!” It was opening shot of the Cultural Revolution, urging people to denounce representatives of the bourgeoisie who were out to ‘deceive, fool and benumb the working people in order to consolidate their reactionary state power’. As if this were not enough, it soon came to light that four of the top leaders in the party had been placed under arrest, accused of plotting against the Chairman. The mayor of Beijing was among them. He had tried, under the very nose of the people, to turn the capital into a citadel of revisionism. Counter-revolutionaries had sneaked into the party, the government and the army, trying to lead the country down the road to capitalism. Now was the beginning of a new revolution in China, as the people were encouraged to stand up and flush out all those trying to transform the dictatorship of the proletariat into a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
Who, precisely, these counter-revolutionaries were, and how they had managed to worm their way into the party, was unclear, but the number-one representative of modern revisionism was the Soviet leader and party secretary Nikita Khrushchev. In a secret speech in 1956 that shook the socialist camp to the core, Khrushchev had demolished the reputation of his predecessor Joseph Stalin, detailing the horrors of his rule and attacking the cult of personality. Two years later, Khrushchev proposed ‘peaceful coexistence’ with the West, a concept that true believers around the world viewed as a betrayal of the principles of revolutionary communism. Mao, who had modeled himself on Stalin, felt personally threatened by de-Stalinization.
In communist parlance, after the socialist transformation of the ownership of the means of production had been completed, a new revolution was required to stamp out once and for all the remnants of bourgeois culture, from private thoughts to private markets. Just as the transition from capitalism to socialism required a revolution, the transition from socialism to communism demanded a revolution too: Mao called it the Cultural Revolution. But behind all the theoretical justifications lay an ageing dictator’s determination to shore up his own standing in world history. Mao was sure of his own greatness, of which he spoke constantly, and saw himself as the leading light of communism.
The Chairman’s first attempt to steal the Soviet Union’s thunder was the Great Leap Forward in 1958, when people in the countryside were herded into giant collectives called people’s communes. By substituting labor for capital and harnessing the vast potential of the masses, he thought that he could catapult his country past its competitors. Mao was convinced that he had found the golden bridge to communism, making him the messiah leading humanity to a world of plenty for all. But the Great Leap Forward was a disastrous experiment which cost the lives of tens of millions of people.
The Cultural Revolution was Mao’s second attempt to become the historical pivot around which the socialist universe revolved. Like many dictators, Mao combined grandiose ideas about his own historical destiny with an extraordinary capacity for malice. He was easily offended and resentful, with a long memory for grievances. The Cultural Revolution, then, was also about an old man settling personal scores at the end of his life. These two aspects of the Cultural Revolution – the vision of a socialist world free of revisionism, the sordid, vengeful plotting against real and imaginary enemies – were not mutually exclusive. Mao saw no distinction between himself and the revolution. He was the revolution. An inkling of dissatisfaction with his authority was a direct threat to the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The Cultural Revolution erupted in the summer of 1966, it took on a life of its own, with unintended consequences that even the most consummate strategist could not have anticipated. Mao wished to purge the higher echelons of power, so he could hardly rely on the party machine to get the job done. He turned to young, radical students instead, some of them no older than fourteen, giving them license to denounce all authority and ‘bombard the headquarters. The Chairman urged the population at large to join the revolution, calling on all to ‘seize power’ and over through the ‘bourgeois power holders’. By January 1967 the chaos was such that the army intervened, seeking to push through the revolution and bring the situation under control. As different military leaders supported different factions, all of them equally certain they represent the true voice of Mao Zedong, the country slid into civil war.
The first phase of the Cultural Revolution came to an end in the summer of 1968 as new, so-called ‘revolutionary party committees’ took over the party and the state. They were heavily dominated by military officers, concentrating real power in the hand of the army. Over the next three years, they turned the country into a garrison state, with soldiers overseeing schools, factories and government units. At first, millions of undesirable elements, including students and others who had take the Chairman at his word, were banished to the country side to be ‘re-educated by the peasants’. Then followed a series of brutal purges, used by the revolutionary party committees to eradicate all those who had spoken out at the height of the Cultural Revolution. The talk was no longer of ‘capitalist roaders’ but of ‘traitors’, ‘renegades’ and ‘spies’, as special committees were set up to examine alleged enemy links among ordinary people and erstwhile leaders alike. After a nationwide witch-hunt came a sweeping campaign against corruption, further cowing the population into submission, as almost every act every utterance became potentially criminal.
By now, the revolutionary frenzy had exhausted almost everyone. Even at the height of the Cultural Revolution, many ordinary people, wary of the one-party state, had offered no more than outward compliance, keeping their innermost thoughts and personal feelings to themselves. Now many of them realized that the party had been badly damaged by the Cultural Revolution. They used the opportunity quietly to pursue their lives, even as the Chairman continued to play one faction against the other during his final years in power. In the countryside in particular, if the Great Leap Forward had destroyed the credibility of the party, the Cultural Revolution undermined its organization. In a silent revolution, millions upon millions of villagers surreptitiously reconnected with traditional practices, as they opened black markets, shared out collective assets, divided the land and operated underground factories. Even before Mao died in 1976, large parts of the countryside had abandoned the planned economy. It was to be one of the most enduring legacies of a decade of chaos and entrenched fear. The gradual undermining of the planned economy was an unintended outcome of the Cultural Revolution. Another was the destruction of the remnants of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought. By the time Mao died, not only were people in the countryside pushing for much greater economic opportunities, but many had also broken free of the ideological shackles imposed by decades of Maoism. Endless campaigns of thought reform produced widespread skepticism even among the party members themselves.
But there was also a much darker heritage. Even if, in terms of human loss, the Cultural Revolution was far less murderous than many earlier campaigns, in particular, the catastrophe unleashed during Mao’s Great Leap Famine, it left a trail of broken lives and cultural devastation. By all accounts, during the ten years spanning the Cultural Revolution, between 1.5 and 2 million people were killed, but many more lives were ruined through endless denunciations, false confessions, struggle meetings and persecution campaigns. Anne Thurston has written eloquently that the Cultural Revolution was neither a sudden disaster nor a holocaust, but an extreme situation characterized by loss at many levels, ‘loss of culture and of spiritual values, loss of status and honor, loss of career, loss of dignity’, and, of course, loss of trust and predictability in human relations, as people turned against each other.
The combined total of their choices ultimately pushed the country in a direction very much at odds with the one envisaged by the Chairman: Instead of fighting the remnants of bourgeois culture, they subverted the planned economy and hollowed out the party’s ideology. In short, the buried Maoism.
Source: The Cultural Revolution by Frank Dikotter
Mao launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966 to destroy the party’s incipient bureaucratism and restore its revolutionary nature. “Bombard the headquarters,” Mao advised, and millions of Red Guards took him at his word. Young people attacked their teachers, forcing them to knell on glass and confess their errors. Children denounced their parents, and young cadres tortured and humiliated their leaders. For a time, cars were instructed to go forward at red lights and to stop at green, because red was a revolutionary color signifying action. The Red Guards raided offices and published many secret documents usually in attempts to discredit one leader or another. Often, they did not even know what the documents were. But people copied them down from the wall posters or picked up copies of newsletters in which documents were reproduced. The classified information that was published during the Cultural Revolution showed the Chinese people how totalitarian, how cruel, how inhumane the regime was. None of us had known. But then everything came out.
Source: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power: CHINA WAKES by Nichols D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| 15_soc_two_great_leap_forward.pdf |