Violence during The Cultural Revolution

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution Many still find it incomprehensible

Some believe it was all due to some peoples unending thirst for power

Demonstrated pervasive immorality in Chinese society

Ten years of Great Disaster

Consequences:
One million deaths Numerous cultural relics were destryoed People died of beating, torture, execution, murder
Numerous highly respected intellectuals, scholars, writers were beaten to death or forced to take their own lives

Those engaged in violence were victims of it Widespread and endless generational and transgeneratioal revenges made the Communist state a vengeance state

Causes of Revolution
Three levels of analysis:
Permissive: sanctioned by CCP leaders Proximate: Maos charismatic authority and political ideology
Maos ideology supported and legitimized violence Maos distinction between friends and enemies, good classes and bad classes provoked social conflicts in society

Immediate: outbreak of violence took place under different circumstances

One common reason: revenge

Forms of Violence (I)

Public struggle session:
Places where the accused were struggled against:
the work unit of the accused (ordinary people) Huge, opened stadiums (famous people, e.g., Liu Shaoqi)

Participants:
Accusers: whoever believed Mao and his ideology; whoever wanted be recognized as good people Spectators: whoever wanted to be entertained by such spectacle (renao, excitement)

Process of struggle:
The accused was forced to endured verbal attack by colleagues, students, friends, relatives Subordinates were pitted against superiors, students against teachers, friends against friends, colleagues against colleagues, spouse against spouse

Forms of Violence (II)

Red Guards devastated Chinese society

Red guards: school students, most of them teenagers, 13 to 19 Engaged in sacking, looting, beating, killing and warring with one another Destructed public and personal properties, and anything regarded as representing the Four Olds, or feudal Whoever classified as: landlords, reactionaries, counterrevolutionaries, rightists, bad elements, traitors, spies, capitalist-roaders, all of them ox ghosts and snake spirits

Victims of Red Guards violence

Forms of Violence (III, IV)

Violence against the self

Self-criticism, including false confession Self-destruction Suicide
Suicide

due to depression and despair Suicide due to fear Suicide in order to protest against an unjust government

Violence by the state

The state engaged in violence
PLA

intervened to end factional fighting between rival Red Guard groups Some 12 million young people were rounded up and sent to the countryside to study (xuexi)

Revenge as a Motivation for Violence

Traditional Chinese ethic of reciprocity gave

way to Maos theory of vengeance
Confucian ethic: recompense injury with justice Represented the value of Confucian ru and junzi
(noble persons, gentlemen), which was viewed as unheroic

Maos ideology: Recompense injury with injury Represented the value of xia (knight-errant, roving
swordsman), which was viewed as heroic

Revenge during the Cultural Revolution

Class vengeance
Proletariats (peasants, workers) sought vengeance for harm inflicted upon them by party members

The Cultural Revolution and Mao

New Book:
Mao: the Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday.

New Assessment of Mao:

Beginning line: Mao Zedong, who for decades held absolute power over the lives of one-quarter of the world's population, was responsible for over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth-century leader."

As someone who has been fascinated with Mao's story since high school in the 1970s, when the country was first opening up again after the Cultural Revolution, Zhang, and her husband,
have reduced him [Mao] to a bloodthirsty, power-obsessed egotist, someone who never believed in communism, nor in anything else, and this from the very first pages of the book.

Flaws of the Book-- Why?

One reviewer (Howard W. French*) says:
Their [authors] act of literary violence, which bears the whiff of revenge, is built on compelling if sometimes disjointed anecdotes told for page after page about this great and terrible man. Readers who are even slightly inclined toward the subject are likely to find the book, for all its weightiness, hard to put down.

Flaws of the Book, Why?

Another reviewer (Marjorie Kehe* ):
Compelling as its narrative is, this book has its flaws. For one thing, the repulsion its authors feel for Mao is too clearly on display, evident in tone and occasional descriptors like "the beady Mao."