China's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) brought a "decade of disasters" to the Chinese people and was perhaps the most catastrophic event in all of China's history as one of the world's oldest and most enduring civilizations. Forced separation of families, dismissal from jobs, loss of status, public humiliations, trials of innocent people, massive movements of people, a breakdown in the economic life of rural and urban areas, continual uncertainly about the next purge or victim, destruction of property, and even death were the order of the day. Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution left a traumatized generation in its wake.
Enemies of the People: The Ordeal of the Intellectuals in China's Great Cultural Revolution by sinologist Anne F. Thurston makes a major contribution to the study of this catastrophic event. Only a decade after it has ended are we in the West beginning to understand its immense impact. Thurston uses interviews with survivors of the Cultural Revolution to unravel the complex and confusing story of a society gone amok. The almost fifty interviews were conducted using "nondirected, empathetic, and client-oriented" methods to elicit the personal stories of individuals and their families. These personalized accounts bring to the reader both the drama and the tragedy of a movement which literally turned a society upside down.
One can identify with the stories of You Xiaoli, Li Meirong, Bai Meihua, and Song Wuhao (their names, of course, have been changed to protect them). They become swallowed up in events not of their own making and confront one personal crisis after another. The narration contains heroic stories of courage and determination, but the senselessness of the Cultural Revolution entitles it to no heroes or martyrs in the traditional sense. It was a gigantic brutalization of the Chinese people in their homeland.
Mao's Responsibility
The basic facts--the who, what, when, where of the Cultural Revolution--can be pieced together in a chronology, but ascertaining the complex motivation behind it is a more difficult, even impossible task. The true reasons behind the Cultural Revolution may never be known, although one of the most obvious reasons was Mao Zedong's desire to preserve his power. There is no doubt that Mao Zedong bears responsibility for the Cultural Revolution.
Born of a peasant family in Hunan, Mao attended the first meeting of the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai in 1921 and became actively involved in bringing Marxism to China. He consolidated his position as a leader of the Chinese Communist Party during the Long March in the 1930s when the communists escaped annihilation by the Chinese Nationalists under Chiang Kaishek. Mao, strong in his role as party leader, later took over the entire China mainland officially when he proclaimed the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC) on October 1, 1949.
Mao was not a kindly mandarin. From his days at Yenan, the early capital of the Chinese communists, he demonstrated skill and ruthlessness in dispatching enemies. In fact, the roots of the Cultural Revolution, albeit on a much smaller scale, can be traced to policies Mao began in the 1930s and 1940s and the rectification movement in Yenan. Innocent people suffered persecution. The political campaigns launched by Mao--before control on the mainland and
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