America’s Cultural Revolution

Featured

Oct 10

If you want to understand our contemporary politics and culture, you must have a working knowledge of the major revolutions of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. The most conspicuous are the American Revolution (1765-1783), the French Revolution (1789-1799), and the Russian Revolution (1917-1923). Each of these events helps us to understand the modern world, but one may be more important than another at a particular moment in time. Often neglected is the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), and it is this horrid event that may tell us the most about our current struggles.

Two books provide an authoritative and disturbing account of the disastrous Chinese Revolution; both authors lived through, and survived, the Cultural Revolution. The first book, Wild Swans, allows the reader to draw his or her own conclusions as to whether an echo of the abuses and tactics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution have reappeared in 21st century America. For those unconvinced, Mao’s America connects the dots. Both books are hard to put down.

Wild Swans has been translated into 37 languages and has sold 13 million copies. It has won numerous awards, though it is banned in mainland China. Author Jung Chang begins her book by explaining that she was motivated to write after her father, like many others, was driven insane by mental and physical persecution during this time. The book is a biography of Chang’s grandmother and mother before she adds her own autobiography.

Her grandmother was the concubine of a warlord in the early 20th century. At age 15, her mother became a member of the Chinese communist party, and Chang herself lived through the Cultural Revolution, for a while serving as one of Mao’s youthful “Red Guards” who carried out much of his brutality.

The decision to write Mao’s America was initially less purposeful and more serendipitous. It occurred in 2020 in Loudoun County, Virginia, at a concerned parents meeting with the local school board. Hundreds of parents attended the meeting which had been grudgingly scheduled by the school officials because parents had become disturbed by the incursion of neo-Marxist Critical Race Theory (CRT) in the area schools. Though attendees were initially promised two minutes each to address the board, at the last minute that time was cut to 60 seconds, which posed a real challenge for Xi Van Fleet as English was her second language.

Nonetheless she reorganized her thoughts and drew a persuasive parallel between the schoolhouse CRT in the classroom and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Her remarks were video-taped and, as they say, “went viral.” That, in turn, prompted numerous invitations for interviews, and for more formal speeches. Ultimately, she was urged to write a book which became Mao’s America.

Even if the reader only accepts half of Van Fleet’s argument, the book is nonetheless deeply troubling.

The Cultural Revolution was conducted almost single-handedly by Mao Zedong, who, after defeating the Chinese Nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek in the Chinese Civil War, became the founding father of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), from 1949 until his death in 1976. Beginning even before the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, and in a pitiless attempt to modernize China in his image, Mao collectivized the country’s agricultural sector, as Stalin had done in the Soviet Union. Under Mao, it is estimated that as many as 45 million died, many of them from starvation, far more than those who died under Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture.

As Mao became uncertain of his power, he conducted the Cultural Revolution as a means of maintaining and solidifying his political control of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and, by extension, the country. This spawned confusion, bloody chaos and political instability. Mao was a master at brainwashing Chinese citizens, especially the young, and in dividing Chinese society against itself. Not only that, but, as it became tactically advantageous, he would arbitrarily realign those divisions so that former friends became enemies and former enemies, friends. At one point, it was children against their parents; later he encouraged high school and university students to turn on their teachers and professors. In one period of ingenious trickery, Mao convinced those troubled by his revolution to speak their mind; but, when enough discontent had been voiced, Mao mounted a campaign against those naïve enough to have criticized his regime, denouncing them as “rightists” and “ox devils and snake demons.”

All of these episodes involved psychological and physical persecution; many were tortured to death while others committed suicide. One of Mao’s tools were “struggle sessions” which involved dunce caps, public humiliations and brutality. Yet another humiliation occurred when individuals were ordered to engage in self-examination and public “self-criticisms,” often multiple times.

The Cultural Revolution became an opportunity to destroy as much of China’s cultural heritage as possible by burning sacred books, by the destruction of priceless historical artifacts, and by razing public monuments to Buddha and Confucius. Christian churches were torched. Artists, writers, and scholars were denounced, persecuted, and often brutally tortured. This attack on beauty extended to farcical extremes as school children spent hours uprooting grass and flowers, leaving their fingers cut and bleeding. Such landscaping “luxuries”—and even pets—were “bourgeois habits” and could not be tolerated. Van Fleet explained that Mao campaigned against what he called “The Four Olds”: “Old ideas, old traditions, old customs, and old habits.”

Schools carried out intensive brainwashing, “helping” pupils to recognize—and hate—"class enemies.” Children were encouraged to denounce their parents. The nation was aggressively fed disinformation. As Chang explains, “people had been reduced to a state where they did not dare even to think in case their thoughts came out involuntarily.” Both men and women were forced into conformity in their featureless attire and bland haircuts.

At various points, untold numbers of Chinese citizens were sent to rural areas to work with peasants for “thought reform” to extinguish any ideas of capitalism. They were often prohibited from returning to cities for years. The conditions, however, for urban Chinese were made worse than that of the peasantry, and many died of malnutrition and lack of medical care. Daily requirements included carrying buckets of human excrement to the fields, sometimes for several miles, to be used as fertilizer.

Van Fleet argues, and her contention is supported by Chang, that there are eerie parallels between the Cultural Revolution that both of them were forced to endure. Van Fleet argues that most of what she experienced in China she sees here, at least in an embryonic state. The American public is divided in alarming ways but those divisions may shift over the space of only a few months. Free speech has become a dangerous activity if one values employment, reputation, and friendship. Individuals are singled out and subject to cancellation, this time with the help of social media. Students, especially at elite universities, have become “weaponized” so that protests are too often conducted with no tolerance for disagreement. They seem unable to see the complexity of social problems, nor are even aware that someone might reasonably hold another position. Ironically, the faculty who have taught them are finding themselves subject to abuse by those same students they have encouraged. Public monuments are destroyed. Traditional religions, while once well-regarded, maybe disrespected if not scorned. No one is safe.

Should you want to know even more details about Mao, you can pick up the exhaustive biography Mao: The Unknown Story, also written by Jung Chang (2006). You might also watch the first episode of the new TV series “3 Body Problem” that depicts a “struggle session” at a Beijing university where a physics professor is brutally beaten by Red Guards in front of a jeering crowd for his refusal to renounce Western scientific accepted theories and replace them with mindless governmental ideology. He is shocked when even his wife denounces him in her own struggle to survive. His persecutors become enraged when he mentions the Big Bang Theory because, as a young atheistic Red Guard screams, “That would mean that God exists!!!” The scene is so brutal that some have said that the series producers should have provided a viewer warning.

Several years ago, I visited Mao’s enormous mausoleum, the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall on the south side of the immense Tiananmen Square. Mao’s crystal coffin is mechanically lowered into a freezer at the end of each day and resurfaces for viewing the following morning. Opposite the Mausoleum is an outdoor portrait of Mao that hangs above the entrance gate to the Forbidden City. The portrait measures 16 by 20 feet and weights 1.5 tons; if it should suffer damage, or just need cleaning, a spare stands at the ready in storage.

Mao is a difficult topic in China. He modernized China’s military at a remarkable pace as he relentlessly badgered and manipulated the Soviets for arms and eventually the technology to construct a nuclear arsenal. But this was accomplished by selling enormous quantities of China’s agricultural produce, driving the country to yet another famine, this time so severe that millions more perished. Some struggled to stay alive by eating grass and leaves; there are published reports of parents killing their children and surviving on their remains. In all, Mao was responsible for far more deaths than Stalin and Hitler combined, but he candidly said that if half of China should die, it would be worth it for him to achieve his self-aggrandizing goals.

Van Fleet warns that Mao left China economically, psychologically, and spiritually bankrupt. She cautions the same may happen here. Accordingly, Jung Chang’s and Xi Van Fleet’s books are well worth the time for Americans concerned for their future.

Discussion Questions

1. Why did Mao provoke such atrocities in China?

2. Are there enough similarities between China Cultural Revolution and contemporary U.S. politics to be worried?

3. Upton Sinclair’s well known book is It Can’t Happen Here. But could it?

Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
A Touchstone Book, 2003
Jung Chang
$38.96
524pp

Mao’s America: A Survivor’s Warning
Xi, Van Fleet
Center Street, 2023
$23.75
320pp