Chapter 22 Chapter 4 The Cultural Revolution

The core issue of the Chinese revolution in the 20th century was the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.Until the 1890s, among the influential ancient kingdoms in the world, the Chinese Empire was the most stable one.The political order imposed on the Chinese public by the empire that has now evolved into what is known as the People's Republic lacks the kind of liberties enjoyed by our citizens.There is no doubt that old China imposed some restrictions on despotism, but how such restrictions worked in the revived state is uncertain.Now, the influence of China's Cultural Revolution is fading and disappearing from the front pages of newspapers.Scholars and journalists are making mature judgments about Mao's authoritarian status in the revolution and the quality of life that the new order brought to the Chinese people.Many Chinese, like survivors of a tornado attack, have never been able to figure out what hit them.But at least for now, a string of flashbacks and lighter encounters with outsiders have given us a clearer picture of the revolution.

Back in the late 1950s, Mao's Great Leap Forward eluded us, especially Cold War Americans, incomprehensible. The China Quarterly, published in London in 1960, became a pioneer in scholarly discussion of Mao's revolution. It took Roderick MacFarquhar, the first editor-in-chief of China Quarterly, eight years to make the magazine famous, and then he devoted himself to researching "culturalism" at Columbia University and the Royal Institute of National Studies in London. Cause of the Great Revolution.From 1966 to 1969, Mao first broke and then rebuilt the state regime he created, which shook the land of China and shocked the people of the world.Thus, China's "Cultural Revolution" was a great revolution comparable to the revolutions of 1789 and 1917.In these revolutions, regimes were dissolved and then re-established.The first part of the trilogy written by Mr. MacFarquhar was entitled "The Origin of the Cultural Revolution—Contradictions among the People: 1956-1957". After the book was published in 1974, as a representative of the Labor Party, McFarquhar Member of Parliament for 5 years.He said: "The moderate socialism in Britain in the 1970s is far from being comparable to China's utopian communism." However, his experience in the House of Representatives clearly gave him a deeper understanding of leaders and followers, ideology and policies. And - in his own words - the interplay between "politicians and bureaucrats...conscience and compromise".The second part of the trilogy, like his masterpieces of diplomatic history describing the causes of the 1914 war (masterpieces that would not have been possible before the rapid development of communications), uses a lot of information about who said what when and where. The material of the words.MacFarquhar examines the profusion of publications and subsequent rehabilitative efforts during Mao's final decade (1966-1976) to identify the roots and shifts of Maoist policies that led to disaster.No one in the world has made such an incisive and comprehensive summary of the Great Leap Forward.

Chairman Mao's weakness is that he always wants to do what he does best - mobilize the masses to attack the status quo.The result was a tragedy in three acts: the first act was the anti-rightist movement in 1957, which knocked down many enlightened people and experts in China; the second act was the Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 1960, which destroyed the economy; The scene is the Cultural Revolution after 1966, which attacked intellectuals and the Chinese Communist Party.Mao's overall influence after 1956 undoubtedly set China back, although China also achieved some achievements during this period.The Chinese Communist Party now agrees with this view, which, despite its embarrassment, is correct after all.The position of Mao's victims who are now in power is so solid that they can make judgments about this period of history.

Mr. MacFarquhar made a special and extensive analysis of China's decision-making process.The leaders of the Chinese Communist Party are very busy. They are always on tour in various places, but they are constantly consulting with each other.When they saw that China's agriculture was unable to support Soviet-style heavy industrialization, they visited various places in early 1958 and formulated a plan to use China's greatest wealth—manpower—to achieve Chinese-style breakthroughs and realize economic modernization. In January 1958, Mao first consulted with local officials in Hangzhou near Shanghai, then went to Guangxi and Guangdong in the south, and then returned to Beijing; in February, Mao went to the northeast; in March, he went to Sichuan in the southwest; in April , Mao inspected Wuhan and Changsha in central China, and later went to Guangdong; in May, he returned to Beijing to officially launch the Great Leap Forward with his deputy Liu Shaoqi.

At these consultations, both Mao and his colleagues in the Politburo presented their views, which enabled MacFarquhar to keep track of his policy developments.He found that Mao was always in a dominant position, pushing for big innovations with risks.For example, communes arose because the newly established agricultural production cooperatives had an average of only 164 peasant households per commune in 1957, which was insufficient to mobilize the required manpower to build dams, embankments, canals, and other water conservancy facilities.To this end, agricultural production cooperatives began to merge into larger organizations. The 1958 consultations encouraged this practice, but did not name the organizations at the time.

In April 1958, 27 agricultural production cooperatives in Henan Province formed a strict labor organization with 9,369 peasant households.In June of the same year, Mao suddenly began to demand that the commune be regarded as the basic organization of China, and that "agriculture, industry, commerce, culture, education, and the militia be integrated into one, that is, all the people are soldiers."At the end of August, the Politburo held a meeting in the seaside resort of Beidaihe. In the absence of experience, the commune was formally regarded as a multi-functional army of 10,000 people to build China's new countryside.As MacFarquhar pointed out, they completely ignored the "ideological and internal implications" of this utopian leap forward.Because this leap forward communalizes the life of the Chinese people, which is unprecedented in the communist world.Moscow later condemned the practice.

Mao and his colleagues fell into utopian mania in the summer of 1958. There were also international reasons: Khrushchev met Mao on July 31, and the two leaders failed to reach an agreement on cooperation between the two navies off the coast of China. On August 23, Mao alone decided to start shelling the KMT troops on Kinmen Island.This move intensified the confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States. Gromyko flew to Beijing. After Mao gave up his risky plan to regain the Golden Gate, the Soviet Union publicly expressed its willingness to support China.However, "the seeds of mutual resentment between Moscow and Beijing had been sown," and Mao and his colleagues were more convinced that they should act on their own.

Utopianism quickly gained the upper hand.Concessions on the Quemoy issue were overshadowed by a huge "all soldiers" campaign to organize militias.By January 1959, China had armed a total of 220 million people, but not many of these people had weapons and even fewer had ammunition.At the same time, everyone enjoys the "supply" system, eats in the cafeteria, and everyone works voluntarily without receiving materialistic "bourgeois" wages.Education must be combined with manual labor, and factories must be combined with schools, in order to cultivate what Liu Shaoqi called red and professional "proletarian intellectuals."This nationwide frenzy reached a point of insanity in the great iron and steel smelting movement.MacFarquhar cited vivid examples in the book to illustrate the production fever that swept hundreds of millions of people at the end of 1958.In this production frenzy, even the necessary cooking utensils were thrown into the blast furnace and melted down; communal agricultural production was militarized like a war; food production was doubled again and again (the result was that the quota of food handover increased, so that the peasants themselves lacked rations); deep plowing destroys the soil.There are other follies, too, including the sparrow eradication campaign.Much of the crop that was ready to be harvested had to rot in the fields because people were too busy to harvest it.

By mid-1959 it was evident: inflated production figures; the failure of the Great Steelmaking Campaign; the destruction of agriculture; exhausted and malnourished farmers.The climax of MacFarquhar's dramatic work is "Moon on Lushan Mountain", describing the Lushan Conference held in July 1959.At that meeting, General Xiao and leader of the PLA, General Peng Dehuai (who never flattered Mao), laid the blame on the Great Leader.Mao counterattacked in self-defense, leaving General Peng in limbo.All members of the Politburo were implicated in this crisis, and they could only choose Mao between Mao and Peng.The result was a continuation of the Great Leap Forward in a "spirit of revival," compounding the disaster and making it a harbinger of the post-1965 Cultural Revolution.

What is the source of all this?Such frivolous romanticism is unlikely to mobilize the enthusiasm of the American farmers in Fargo, Verciszno, or Provo.The Great Leap Forward was such a strange joy of revolutionary fervor that it was so incredible that one wanted solid history books linking it to precedents in Chinese history.Regrettably, the institutional history of China remains underdeveloped, and the great tradition of governing the state (that is, how bureaucrats used to organize and manipulate the people) is neglected, and historians are now rushing to study social history, arguing that this Research is better suited to current requirements.

To analyze the Great Leap Forward from the perspective of system and history, we must first start with the study of the history of dynasties related to economy.These historical works record in detail how the new regime, after unifying China, generally used forced labor to build large-scale public facilities (often using people to exhaustion), such as implementing the "equal land system" among farmers, and organizing them into mutual supervision. , Mutually responsible groups.There are no less than dozens of ingenious methods used by the dynasties of the past dynasties, including the "Yongfeng Granary" in various places and the use of soldiers to open up wasteland on the border.Although these methods have historical records, no one has studied them.How well these ingenious methods of academics and administrators work in practice remains a largely unanswered question.These scholars and administrators represent the indisputable prerogative of the rulers, and they organize the lives of the people by their own actions, enacting laws and regulations, exhorting moral suasion, and giving due punishment. We know that Mao admired Qin Shihuang who "burned books and buried scholars".According to historical records, after 1368, the first emperor of the Ming Dynasty planted many trees in the court, and asked the ministers to strike them ceremonially.In fact, he had become paranoid, killing important officials and terrorizing scholars.I think Mao, who is proficient in history, obviously inherited the spirit of many of his predecessors, and he often used their methods, but Mao still had some new ideas, and he did it more hastily. MacFarquhar concludes with a set of dire figures showing that the Great Leap Forward did build heavy industry, but at a huge human cost, especially among farmers. In 1960, the harvest was bad and the death rate doubled. "Because of the Great Leap Forward, 16.4 to 29.5 million more people died during the Great Leap Forward".The direct cause of this catastrophe is the "Mao factor... because without Mao, there would be no Great Leap Forward,... there would be no communes,...the Great Steelmaking Movement,...the Great Leap Forward revival".Politicians familiar with historical records will say that this is enough, but historians may also add: If there is no imperial autocracy in ancient China, there would be no Mao. This review is of the second volume of The Origins of the Cultural Revolution by Roderick MacFarquhar, The Great Leap Forward: 1958-1960 (New York, Columbia University Press, 1983), published in The New York Review of Books, January 19, 1984.