true that, a cultural revolution must happen in every socialist country to solidify the dictatorship of the proletariat and the power of the Communist Party
A cultural revolution, yes, but the Cultural Revolution, no. It was at best a deeply utopian project and thereby bound to end in catastrophe. More pessimistic interpretations are that ideology not grounded in any material analysis of how enduring change arises lead to young Han Chinese in their little Red Guard cliques to enact terroristic acts of chauvinism (though they also nailed some people who had it coming).
I mean come on, there's a reason that China was left in chaos and everyone leading the CR after Mao's death was put in jail, and it's not that Deng was a liberal. There are ideas within the project that have reason, and the desire to destroy "the Four Olds" comes mostly from a good place, but you can't just invent such a completely new society by burning the old one down. You need to understand why these things persist -- what real problems they ameliorate that caused them to come into existence in the first place -- and then build superior solutions to those problems, not just burn down temples and call monks reactionaries.
I really sympathize with Mao as I understand him (less so with some of the Red Guard), but over time as he was Chairman he seemed to forget how long some things take to do well.
The idea that the CR was a total era of chaos with young red guard indiscriminately destroying everything is highly exaggerated.
During this time, food production increased (after the drought of the first two years), and industrial infrastructure was built at a level not yet seen in Chinese history. Rural people built machines and factories and schools. It increased the quality of life for the majority of people in China in nearly every way. Food consumption only went down for city dwellers, and they didn't lower to poverty levels. When the time came, Deng gave the rural people shock therapy, selling off the factories they built with their own labor largely without party support, and then he claimed the economic miracle that ensued.
Characterizing the red guard as Han terrorists also isn't fair, especially in light of the Tibetan red guards and their role in the revolution.
Overall, the CR was an incredibly creative moment. These people were not locusts descending on the country, destroying things. They were revitalizing the country both materially and spiritually.
I'm perfectly fine with critiques calling the project utopian or unsustainable, but the project could have been redirected, reformed, worked with, etc. It could have taken a very different form. I disagree that the only way forward was to completely throw the model out.
Rural people built machines and factories and schools
By a conscription characterized (not disingenuously) as re-education, including having children as factory workers.
It increased the quality of life for the majority of people in China in nearly every way.
On average and over time, yes, but see the previous point (along with the more frivolous purges). It's rather impressive how the net growth remained positive, since there were several negative vectors added at the same time.
When the time came, Deng gave the rural people shock therapy, selling off the factories they built with their own labor largely without party support, and then he claimed the economic miracle that ensued.
I'm not familiar with the level of party support he had and it certainly is true that he sold off factories (and occupation of land, etc.), including to foreign capital, but I don't think it's proper to call it "shock therapy" -- or if you insist on doing so, then it is difficult to call what happened in Yugoslavia and the USSR "shock therapy", since they have points of comparison but are plainly not the same thing. Deng (not entirely unlike Lenin and co. with the NEP) was seeking to make use of predictable elements of market dynamics and the desire of foreign capital to get cheap manufacturing to develop the domestic forces of production rather than merely gut the country's wealth by selling everything off at gutter prices.
I repeat, thanks to our correct policy, the people allowed us a deferment of payment and credit, and this, to put it in terms of NEP, is a promissory note. But this promissory note is undated, and you cannot learn from the wording when it will be presented for redemption. Therein lies the danger; this is the specific feature that distinguishes these political promissory notes from ordinary, commercial promissory notes. We must concentrate all our attention on this, and not rest content with the fact that there are responsible and good Communists in all the state trusts and mixed companies. That is of no use, because these Communists do not know how to run the economy and, in that respect, are inferior to the ordinary capitalist salesmen, who have received their training in big factorics and big firms. But we refuse to admit this; in this field communist conceit—komchvanstvo,* * Literally, “comconceit”. —Ed to use the great Russian language again—still persists. The whole point is that the responsible Communists, even the best of them, who are unquestionably honest and loyal, who in the old days suffered penal servitude and did not fear death, do not know how to trade, because they are not businessmen, they have not learnt to trade, do not want to learn and do not understand that they must start learning from the beginning. Communists, revolutionaries who have accomplished the greatest revolution in the world, on whom the eyes of, if not forty pyramids, then, at all events, forty European countries are turned in the hope of emancipation from capitalism, must learn from ordinary salesmen. But these ordinary salesmen have had ten years’ warehouse experience and know the business, whereas the responsible Communists and devoted revolutionaries do not know the business, and do not even realise that they do not know it.
Of course, this isn't how it ended up going; Lenin's health put him to retirement and then death soon after and Stalin pretty quickly changed plans (not without his own reasons). My point is that I think Deng wasn't engaging in roaderism despite what you seem to suggest with "shock therapy" and Deng himself of course reviled the idea of being compared to Khrushchev :
Fallaci: In short, anyway, you prefer Stalin to Khrushchev.
Deng: I just told you that the Chinese people would never do to Chairman Mao what Khrushchev did to Stalin!
Fallaci: What if I told you that in the West they call you the Chinese Khrushchev?
Deng: [He laughs]. Listen, they can call me anything they like in the West, but I know Khrushchev well; I dealt with him personally for ten years, and I can assure you that comparing me to Khrushchev is insulting.
Perhaps Deng made errors. Perhaps his judgement was skewed by chauvinism or greed or something else, but he was no Khrushchev or Gorbachev or Yeltsin or Ante Marković or whoever you like. He was interested in advancing the national sovereignty of the PRC and clearly did more good than harm, though he wasn't infallible.
Characterizing the red guard as Han terrorists also isn’t fair, especially in light of the Tibetan red guards and their role in the revolution.
At that point one needs to talk about the CR in different places, since obviously Tibetan Red Guards were very important in Tibet, but they were a tiny minority in "China proper" and the PRC overall. Then again, I wonder what things looked like in Xinjiang, since there certainly was destruction of mosques, but that could have been done by Uighur chauvinists just as the destruction of Mahayana Buddhist temples was usually done by Han chauvinists.
Despite all by bitching about Deng, I don't think his path was an unreasonable plan for transition. Although, I think there were many excesses and problems that came with it.
The only thing I want to push back on here is the idea of conscription and child labor. The education system was explicitly meant to graft on to the material conditions of the villages in which it was located. This meant adding engineering and farming into the curriculum. Most people found the traditional education curriculum to favor theoretical over practical knowledge. Socialist education in general has an emphasis on practical application, so this naturally involved students spending time in factories and in fields, but this was not how the majority of their time was spent. This experience gave them technical know how and real world knowledge that they could leverage in their university courses (which also had technical work as a prerequisite for admission). Connecting students to their community also had the effect that students would return to their rural hometowns after university to help develop the area with their new skills. This is a stark contrast to the brain drain happening in rural areas now.
It was really closer to public schooling with vocational elements that ensures students actually knew how to do the jobs they would eventually enter.
Ironically I'd say that's the part I'm the most confident on, since I'm going off of the direct testimony of a Marxist who lived through the period and was one of those children -- along with his siblings, cousins, neighbors, etc. He mostly views it like the stereotypical sort of trauma rationalization "it fucking sucked, but I like to think that I got something out of it anyway". He thinks the principal made sense but perhaps there was a better way to approach it, probably including by lightening the workload of children a bit.
Of course, if I remember your username, you probably also know people who experienced it, so perhaps you have contrary testimony.
He thinks the principal made sense but perhaps there was a better way to approach it, probably including by lightening the workload of children a bit.
Sure, I'm not dogmatic. I'm always down to change approaches.
since I’m going off of the direct testimony of a Marxist who lived through the period and was one of those children
My source is Dongping Han. He lived through the CR himself, and his book compiled hundreds of testimonies from rural people and their feelings at the time. He argues that the time is remembered overwhelmingly positively, and people felt excited and politically empowered in a way thay never felt and haven't since.
He even provides a neat "where are they now" segment for the young red guards who went through the school system and how they feel about it.
rationalization “it fucking sucked, but I like to think that I got something out of it anyway"
Despite that fact that this person may not have seen the benefit, it really did go a long way in combating brain drain and developing the countryside. Education jumped from 30% to 90%. Without this school / work program, the poor kids would just end up working 100% of the time like they did before and after the CR. I'm not saying this person's experience doesn't matter. I'm just saying that the benefits may not have been personally apparent.
you probably also know people who experienced it, so perhaps you have contrary testimony.
No, actually. I don't know anyone who experienced it themselves (I know someone who participated in the tiannamen protests tho). I have met many of the children of people who lived through the CR. They tend to argue that the CR was a complete disaster. However, it's worth pointing out that the people I come into contact with are of an educated intellectual class who were the direct target of the CR. They tend to have a big time "egg monopoly" bias when speaking of the time. I can't ask how rural people felt because I can't meet them, and they often speak different dialects. However, I have visited the city that is the subject of Han's book, and they are still living in poverty there.
Anyway, I'd love to hear more about that testimony or others you've collected if you want to DM me sometime. I think that stuff and era are super interesting.
My source is Dongping Han. He lived through the CR himself, and his book compiled hundreds of testimonies from rural people and their feelings at the time. He argues that the time is remembered overwhelmingly positively, and people felt excited and politically empowered in a way thay never felt and haven’t since.
I think there's a big difference between people looking back in retrospect and what people on the ground thought in 1976. I would argue that by 1976, the Chinese masses were largely sick and tired of the Cultural Revolution. One major sign would be the Tiananmen Incident of 1976, where there were massive protests because the Gang of Four tried to ban public mourning of Zhou Enlai. 1976 was when Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, and Mao died as well as a giant earthquake where more than 300000 people died. A conservative reversal was inevitable, which was why there were massive parades when the Gang of Four were arrested and the Cultural Revolution is over. The Cultural Revolution more or less ended when it was supposed to.
In many ways, I see similarities between the end of the Cultural Revolution and the end of zero-Covid in China. They might look back at it decades later and say to themselves, "Damn, we really had something good going," but at the very moment, enough of Chinese society supported the end. You can't plan society exclusively in a paternal "you hate this now, but you'll thank us decades from now." That shit doesn't even work for raising a child, so how would it work for the masses?
Dongping Han's "The Unknown Cultural Revolution." I really highly recommend it. Way better than Gao's in my opinion. Gives a great look at what life on the ground was like.
Also, the cultural revolution is the basis for a lot of the really generative ideas in the New Left, stuff like progressive education, radical democratic controll of the economy, etc.
You need to understand why these things persist – what real problems they ameliorate that caused them to come into existence in the first place – and then build superior solutions to those problems, not just burn down temples and call monks reactionaries.
:this: :this: :this:
History is impossible to change overnight. The vestigial remnants of society, no matter how much we want to change it, will still be around for a while. Note that I say a while and not forever. It is possible to change history, even for the better, but it takes a very long time and a concerted effort over several generations.
There have been some beneficial effects of the CR (gender equality initiatives, local power mobilization, strengthening ideological commitment within the party and scaring the actual capitalist roaders and wannabe Yeltsins/Gorbachevs into compliance, yada yada) but yeah, the idea that it could have ultimately ended any other way is silly.
You are right but, by the same token, we can say the CR hurt some of those apparent strengths because the CR needed to be dismantled, so gender equality for example made progress that was founded on the CR but when the CR was ended and most of its policy reversed, gender equality suffered a backslide. A project that was less utopian could have preserved those gains by virtue of not half-destroying the country and needing to be combated.
The cultural revolution was good and necessary and needed to be reformed and expanded.
true that, a cultural revolution must happen in every socialist country to solidify the dictatorship of the proletariat and the power of the Communist Party
A cultural revolution, yes, but the Cultural Revolution, no. It was at best a deeply utopian project and thereby bound to end in catastrophe. More pessimistic interpretations are that ideology not grounded in any material analysis of how enduring change arises lead to young Han Chinese in their little Red Guard cliques to enact terroristic acts of chauvinism (though they also nailed some people who had it coming).
@stinky
I mean come on, there's a reason that China was left in chaos and everyone leading the CR after Mao's death was put in jail, and it's not that Deng was a liberal. There are ideas within the project that have reason, and the desire to destroy "the Four Olds" comes mostly from a good place, but you can't just invent such a completely new society by burning the old one down. You need to understand why these things persist -- what real problems they ameliorate that caused them to come into existence in the first place -- and then build superior solutions to those problems, not just burn down temples and call monks reactionaries.
I really sympathize with Mao as I understand him (less so with some of the Red Guard), but over time as he was Chairman he seemed to forget how long some things take to do well.
Mao did specifically call china's cultural revolution a failure, so yeah.
The idea that the CR was a total era of chaos with young red guard indiscriminately destroying everything is highly exaggerated.
During this time, food production increased (after the drought of the first two years), and industrial infrastructure was built at a level not yet seen in Chinese history. Rural people built machines and factories and schools. It increased the quality of life for the majority of people in China in nearly every way. Food consumption only went down for city dwellers, and they didn't lower to poverty levels. When the time came, Deng gave the rural people shock therapy, selling off the factories they built with their own labor largely without party support, and then he claimed the economic miracle that ensued.
Characterizing the red guard as Han terrorists also isn't fair, especially in light of the Tibetan red guards and their role in the revolution.
Overall, the CR was an incredibly creative moment. These people were not locusts descending on the country, destroying things. They were revitalizing the country both materially and spiritually.
I'm perfectly fine with critiques calling the project utopian or unsustainable, but the project could have been redirected, reformed, worked with, etc. It could have taken a very different form. I disagree that the only way forward was to completely throw the model out.
By a conscription characterized (not disingenuously) as re-education, including having children as factory workers.
On average and over time, yes, but see the previous point (along with the more frivolous purges). It's rather impressive how the net growth remained positive, since there were several negative vectors added at the same time.
I'm not familiar with the level of party support he had and it certainly is true that he sold off factories (and occupation of land, etc.), including to foreign capital, but I don't think it's proper to call it "shock therapy" -- or if you insist on doing so, then it is difficult to call what happened in Yugoslavia and the USSR "shock therapy", since they have points of comparison but are plainly not the same thing. Deng (not entirely unlike Lenin and co. with the NEP) was seeking to make use of predictable elements of market dynamics and the desire of foreign capital to get cheap manufacturing to develop the domestic forces of production rather than merely gut the country's wealth by selling everything off at gutter prices.
Quoting Lenin :
Of course, this isn't how it ended up going; Lenin's health put him to retirement and then death soon after and Stalin pretty quickly changed plans (not without his own reasons). My point is that I think Deng wasn't engaging in roaderism despite what you seem to suggest with "shock therapy" and Deng himself of course reviled the idea of being compared to Khrushchev :
Perhaps Deng made errors. Perhaps his judgement was skewed by chauvinism or greed or something else, but he was no Khrushchev or Gorbachev or Yeltsin or Ante Marković or whoever you like. He was interested in advancing the national sovereignty of the PRC and clearly did more good than harm, though he wasn't infallible.
At that point one needs to talk about the CR in different places, since obviously Tibetan Red Guards were very important in Tibet, but they were a tiny minority in "China proper" and the PRC overall. Then again, I wonder what things looked like in Xinjiang, since there certainly was destruction of mosques, but that could have been done by Uighur chauvinists just as the destruction of Mahayana Buddhist temples was usually done by Han chauvinists.
I think this is a reasonable line.
Despite all by bitching about Deng, I don't think his path was an unreasonable plan for transition. Although, I think there were many excesses and problems that came with it.
The only thing I want to push back on here is the idea of conscription and child labor. The education system was explicitly meant to graft on to the material conditions of the villages in which it was located. This meant adding engineering and farming into the curriculum. Most people found the traditional education curriculum to favor theoretical over practical knowledge. Socialist education in general has an emphasis on practical application, so this naturally involved students spending time in factories and in fields, but this was not how the majority of their time was spent. This experience gave them technical know how and real world knowledge that they could leverage in their university courses (which also had technical work as a prerequisite for admission). Connecting students to their community also had the effect that students would return to their rural hometowns after university to help develop the area with their new skills. This is a stark contrast to the brain drain happening in rural areas now.
It was really closer to public schooling with vocational elements that ensures students actually knew how to do the jobs they would eventually enter.
Ironically I'd say that's the part I'm the most confident on, since I'm going off of the direct testimony of a Marxist who lived through the period and was one of those children -- along with his siblings, cousins, neighbors, etc. He mostly views it like the stereotypical sort of trauma rationalization "it fucking sucked, but I like to think that I got something out of it anyway". He thinks the principal made sense but perhaps there was a better way to approach it, probably including by lightening the workload of children a bit.
Of course, if I remember your username, you probably also know people who experienced it, so perhaps you have contrary testimony.
Sure, I'm not dogmatic. I'm always down to change approaches.
My source is Dongping Han. He lived through the CR himself, and his book compiled hundreds of testimonies from rural people and their feelings at the time. He argues that the time is remembered overwhelmingly positively, and people felt excited and politically empowered in a way thay never felt and haven't since.
He even provides a neat "where are they now" segment for the young red guards who went through the school system and how they feel about it.
Despite that fact that this person may not have seen the benefit, it really did go a long way in combating brain drain and developing the countryside. Education jumped from 30% to 90%. Without this school / work program, the poor kids would just end up working 100% of the time like they did before and after the CR. I'm not saying this person's experience doesn't matter. I'm just saying that the benefits may not have been personally apparent.
No, actually. I don't know anyone who experienced it themselves (I know someone who participated in the tiannamen protests tho). I have met many of the children of people who lived through the CR. They tend to argue that the CR was a complete disaster. However, it's worth pointing out that the people I come into contact with are of an educated intellectual class who were the direct target of the CR. They tend to have a big time "egg monopoly" bias when speaking of the time. I can't ask how rural people felt because I can't meet them, and they often speak different dialects. However, I have visited the city that is the subject of Han's book, and they are still living in poverty there.
Anyway, I'd love to hear more about that testimony or others you've collected if you want to DM me sometime. I think that stuff and era are super interesting.
I think there's a big difference between people looking back in retrospect and what people on the ground thought in 1976. I would argue that by 1976, the Chinese masses were largely sick and tired of the Cultural Revolution. One major sign would be the Tiananmen Incident of 1976, where there were massive protests because the Gang of Four tried to ban public mourning of Zhou Enlai. 1976 was when Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, and Mao died as well as a giant earthquake where more than 300000 people died. A conservative reversal was inevitable, which was why there were massive parades when the Gang of Four were arrested and the Cultural Revolution is over. The Cultural Revolution more or less ended when it was supposed to.
In many ways, I see similarities between the end of the Cultural Revolution and the end of zero-Covid in China. They might look back at it decades later and say to themselves, "Damn, we really had something good going," but at the very moment, enough of Chinese society supported the end. You can't plan society exclusively in a paternal "you hate this now, but you'll thank us decades from now." That shit doesn't even work for raising a child, so how would it work for the masses?
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Dongping Han's "The Unknown Cultural Revolution." I really highly recommend it. Way better than Gao's in my opinion. Gives a great look at what life on the ground was like.
Also, the cultural revolution is the basis for a lot of the really generative ideas in the New Left, stuff like progressive education, radical democratic controll of the economy, etc.
:this: :this: :this:
History is impossible to change overnight. The vestigial remnants of society, no matter how much we want to change it, will still be around for a while. Note that I say a while and not forever. It is possible to change history, even for the better, but it takes a very long time and a concerted effort over several generations.
There have been some beneficial effects of the CR (gender equality initiatives, local power mobilization, strengthening ideological commitment within the party and scaring the actual capitalist roaders and wannabe Yeltsins/Gorbachevs into compliance, yada yada) but yeah, the idea that it could have ultimately ended any other way is silly.
You are right but, by the same token, we can say the CR hurt some of those apparent strengths because the CR needed to be dismantled, so gender equality for example made progress that was founded on the CR but when the CR was ended and most of its policy reversed, gender equality suffered a backslide. A project that was less utopian could have preserved those gains by virtue of not half-destroying the country and needing to be combated.
True. If anything, it empowered some rightist elements who associated the positive social aspects of the CR with... everything else.
There were massive parades when the Gang of Four got arrested. This is what happens when you unironically call funerals "bourgeois decadence.".
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