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Who Were the Victims of the Cultural Revolution?
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12605 |
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Book World
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6 / 1987 |
4,054 Words |
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Maurice J. Meisner
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In the epilogue of Anne Thurston's superb compilation of the harrowing stories of the victims of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, one of her informants, Song Erli, describes the upheaval as "a revolution by the people, a revolution crushed by the combined efforts of the army, Mao, Lin Biao and the Gang of Four" (p. 296). Earlier in the volume, where Song Erli (a brilliant university student whose parents had been branded "rightists") relates in considerable detail his experiences and his bitter fate as a "revolutionary rebel" during the days of the Cultural Revolution, he states: "The army was the greatest perpetrator of atrocities during the Cultural Revolution. Most of the cruelty happened after 1967" (p. 197).
Song Erli's account, as related to Thurston, reveals two fundamental truths about the Cultural Revolution, both of which have been largely ignored by Western scholars and both of which the leaders of the post-Mao regime in Beijing have taken great pains to expunge from the official record (and indeed the unofficial records) of the "decade of catastrophe." The truths, simply put, are these: first, while persecutions and killings came from a variety of political quarters during the Cultural Revolution, it is clear that the greatest toll in human lives was taken by the People's Liberation Army in its various campaigns of repression of "ultra-lefists" in 1968 and after. Second, although the victims of the Cultural Revolution were many and varied, the great majority of those killed during the upheaval were the young people who were the first and most ardent to heed Mao Zedong's call to "dare to rebel" against established authority.
Thurston seems to be aware of these elemental (if officially unacknowledged) facts of the history of the Cultural Revolution--and she takes note of them. In commenting on Song Erli's account, she observes, "It is true that the story of the massive persecutions against [the youthful "revolutionary rebels"] is not well known in the West" (p. 197). And she later notes, "That the military was a major actor in the struggle for power and held in its hands the preponderance of force enabled it ultimately to enforce its will with a particularly efficient and orderly brutality" (p. 288). But the dominant impression this book conveys to the reader serves to reinforce the generally accepted view of the Cultural Revolution as primarily a story of intellectuals victimized by radical Maoist-inspired Red Guards. Intellectuals were indeed among the principal victims, and a few comments might be made about how they came to be victimized before turning to the larger (and largely untold) story of the role of the army in the unsavory events of the Cultural Revolution.
On the Persecution of Intellectuals
Reasons why intellectuals were singled out as enemies during Mao's final revolution are not difficult to find. In a movement that was defined as an ostensibly "proletarian" struggle against "the bourgeoisie," intellectuals seemed the most obviously bourgeois group in a society that in fact no longer had a bourgeoisie. Intellectuals, after all, were separated from the masses of workers and peasants by virtue of their knowledge and their relatively privileged material status, however paltry their privileges actually were. Moreover, they were perceived as the main source of ideological impurity, the bearers of both traditional Chinese culture (condemned as "the four olds") and Western cultural influences, now condemned wholesale as "bourgeois." Thus for those seeking out the bourgeoisie
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