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Circuses in Lieu of Bread
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12606 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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6 / 1987 |
2,711 Words |
| Author
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Henry A. Myers
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The Cultural Revolution pitted masses of impassioned young people against those with any sort of authority who might be denounced as hostile toward Mao Zedong's drive to establish an egalitarian, truly revolutionary China. Raging with furious intensity from 1966 to 1969, the beat of the Cultural Revolution slackened afterwards, but its fanatical, irrational impulses still found victims almost until Mao's death in 1976.
With statistics on victims extremely difficult to establish, educated guesses tend to set the toll of lives at around one million. It is certain that at least hundreds of thousands were killed, while multiple millions of lives were wrecked.
Mao's Policies
The Cultural Revolution was conducted in the name of true Marxism as opposed to bogus, Soviet-style, bureaucratic, status-conscious, revisionist Marxism. It was based on the very un-Marxist notion that changing the way people think can change their material status.
Earlier, Mao Zedong had adhered to the Marxist dictum that while consciousness-changing was of utmost importance, material conditions must be changed before people can arrive at a new consciousness. The Chinese communist manifestation of that orthodox Marxist view was the Great Leap Forward. A crash program of industrialization and modernization begun in the late 1950s, the Great Leap Forward failed miserably because of too little technological know-how. Great effort was channeled into smelting ores for steel in "backyard furnaces." Party leaders discovered too late that backyard furnaces cannot produce the quality of steel necessary for industrial machinery; the plan simply increased the chronic shortage of steel. The main legacy of the Great Leap Forward was an uncompensated drain on China's agricultural productivity, leaving China with three famine years (1959-1961). China's leaders needed to find scapegoats for the failure of their schemes.
After this disaster, Mao reversed the cause and effect relationships. If the program for speedy change of material conditions had not gotten off the ground, this might well have been due to a lack of revolutionary consciousness on the part of the people, a lack which the Cultural Revolution would mend.
At roughly the same time as the Great Leap Forward, Mao found himself reacting quite negatively to Khrushchev's de-Stalinization commitments, particularly his condemnation of Stalin's "cult of the personality." Mao saw nothing at all wrong with retaining such a cult in China so long as he himself was venerated. As the Sino-Soviet split widened in the early 1960s, Mao outdid Stalin in cultivating awe for his person. Mao's image on walls, in shop windows, and in public places became even more a part of life in China than Stalin's image had been in Russia and Eastern Europe. Where Stalin had been content to let his picture grace a quarter of a newspaper page on special occasions, Mao's picture took a whole page in Chinese newspapers on frequent occasions.
Aware of Russian disdain for Chinese backwardness, Mao attempted to make a virtue of the primitive state of Chinese economic and social development: the more nearly blank the page, the more new things that could be written on it. China would gain from its lack of preconceived notions and comfortable
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