Villagers concede his “mistakes”–the politically correct term for the famines and massive violence he caused–but they prefer to remember the “good things.” He was one of them, he inspired them and spoke for them. Most of all, he knew how to tap their immense power. Perhaps that is why today’s leaders in Beijing still fear Mao. Thirty years ago he ignited his most violent campaign of all, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The ensuing decade of chaos provided the negative inspiration for Deng Xiaoping’s reforms. Deng and others who were persecuted during the Cultural Revolution now wear their scars as a badge of honor. But China’s new leaders have prohibited any serious attempt to come to terms with the upheaval itself.
The Cultural Revolution began with a power struggle. Mao’s leadership had been challenged by the Communist Party Congress; in May 1966 he struck back. He attacked moderates for lacking revolutionary zeal, then targeted his rivals in the leadership. He called on millions of patriotic youths to form the Red Guards, “bombard the headquarters” of government and dislodge his opponents. What followed was a reign of terror. Marauding Red Guards hunted down “class enemies,” smashed Buddhist temples and other so-called symbols of feudalism and effectively paralyzed China’s government. The country sank close to civil war – and worse. Some Red Guards units engaged in ritual cannibalism. The bouts of violence faded away only after Mao died in September 1976.
Party scholars concluded in 1981 that Mao committed “gross mistakes” that brought China to the brink of ruin. But the official verdict also hailed Mao as a hero whose record was “70 percent positive.” Future scholars had to walk a narrow line. They could publicize their personal suffering, but any study of the Cultural Revolution’s deeper causes was taboo. Today, scholarship remains in limbo. Even anecdotal research stops at the doors of the party: scholars are barred from a vast communist archive, apparently for fear that scrutiny would reveal the party’s central role in the horrors.
What are China’s leaders so afraid of? Seven years ago students occupied Tiananmen Square, trying to incite political change. To a Beijing leader, many Tiananmen battle cries–“Oppose official corruption! Clean up government!”–can only sound scarily like the slogans Mao used to send students into the streets a generation ago. Could something like the Cultural Revolution ever happen again? Artist Feng Jicai finds echoes of the past in everything from his countrymen’s lack of respect for laws to renewed idol worship in the countryside. Others worry about a return of political upheaval: Beijing’s neoconservatives play on Maoist issues like the income gap between rich and poor, rampant corruption and the excesses of the new rich. Many survivors of the revolution worry that young people will never learn from the past. The children of killers and victims alike now attend schools in which the disaster merits barely one page of a textbook.
Scholars at universities across China have requested approval for symposiums or other events to mark the Cultural Revolution. They were reportedly advised–or ordered–to refrain. Instead, state propagandists are urging scholars to focus on an-other date–the 60th anniversary of the end of the communists’ heroic Long March. In that episode, Chairman Mao led his rebels in a retreat across southwest China to Yanan. They survived to win their revolution in 1949. The commemoration, a Chinese editor said, “will dramatize the need for patriotism.”
The people of Gushuicun will welcome the celebration. The village was a communist outpost during Mao’s 13 years in Yanan. Perhaps that is why Gushuicun’s peasants worship Mao. Or perhaps their collective memory has failed. Whatever the reason, the Cultural Revolution haunts them still.
