The shrine to the Cultural Revolution (and the wrong end of the Mao Trail)
Tucked away in Guangdong Province, on the fringe of Chinese society, with a semi-abandoned air is a “shrine to the Cultural Revolution,” which, although it sounds nice, actually tore China's villages, towns and families apart a generation ago.
You might expect long patient lines of several thousand visitors clutching their digital cameras (like at Tiananmen). Instead, here there is just one lone watchman and a handful of school children. The building presents a traditional Chinese face to the world, with a facade topped with green glazed pan-tiles with curly ends. The words “Never let the tragedy of the Cultural Revolution repeat itself!” in Chinese script surmount two fine portraits of an imperial looking Mao. It is situated on a peaceful hillside, alongside shrines to other Communist icons, such as Deng Xiaoping, who was one of the first victims of the purges.
The middle of the wall holds a quotation from an official document agreed on at a party conference in 1981, one supposedly settling all the serious historical problems since the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. The wall states: “History has already judged that the so-called Cultural Revolution was an internal riot launched by the leader of China. It was made use of by the anti-revolutionaries who brought severe disasters upon the Party, the whole nation and the Chinese people.”
Nothing but the faint sound of birds nesting on surrounding hilltops disturbs this Mao site—part museum, part monument—a first careful acknowledgement of one of the darker chapters in China's recent past.
Inside the circular pavilion that is the site's centerpiece, the walls are lined with a series of grey slate tiles, each depicting a scene from the Cultural Revolution. The first one quotes a 72-year-old Mao incanting: “Under heaven, all is chaos.”
The panels then function like a newsreel as the events unfold. There are images of the rallies in Beijing that August, with millions of fervent people waving their Little Red Books in adulation. Then the pictures record the full “madness” of the times. In one panel, they show the Beijing Garden where Rong Guotuan, then China's world champion table tennis player, was hung to death.
The Cultural Revolution was a period in which a faction centered around Mao's wife, but calling in support Mao himself, attempted to outmaneuver reformists in the party (like Deng) by unleashing the power of individual communists throughout the country. Mao symbolized this reinvigoration of the revolutionary spirit in 1966, by undertaking his famous swim in the mighty Yangtze River.
But in the anarchy that was created, self-proclaimed guardians of the revolution were able to report, punish or even kill anyone else. And an estimated one million people were swept away on a wave of destruction, particularly the intellectuals, the doctors, and even Mao's favorite workers, the teachers. During this period, the Great Helmsman himself, as the images in the shrine make clear, diminished from the brilliant political philosopher seen in the pithy sayings of the Little Red Book, to an elderly relic, inarticulate and irrelevant.
The memorial is a private initiative of the former mayor of Shantou, Peng Qi An, and is largely privately funded, albeit with support from, amongst others, the City Council. Peng lost his own brother to a revolutionary mob in the years of turmoil.
The Chinese people have suffered greatly under foreign invasions, both Western and Japanese. The invaders set up trading zones by armed force, massacring many Chinese people with impunity, robbing the country of its treasures.
Since World War II the US and its allies have waged proxy wars against China on several occasions, most notably in Korea and Vietnam, and came within a few hours of launching a nuclear attack on the Chinese. Instead, the US has used chemical and biological weapons against the Chinese mainland, albeit covertly. Unable to collapse the regime by military means, it has chipped away at it, using the techniques of internal dissent, and by appropriating the language of human rights and democracy to advance its agenda.
Disinformation pointThe famous novel Wild Swans by Jung Chang claims to expose “the horrors of life under Maoism,” as the London Sunday Times put it. The book is not only the “biggest grossing nonfiction [well, it's only docu-fiction anyway] in publishing history” but also the book of which “even Mrs. Thatcher confessed she was a fan.” Books like this are part of the Cold War being waged between the West and Communist China. Wild Swans is essentially a weapon.
To many Westerners Mao is perceived as a kind of cross between Stalin and Hitler, and China itself is seen as something between a vast Gulag and a political prison. Wild Swans is grist for the mill. The London Sunday Times describes how Jung Chang's youthful experience as a farm worker, village doctor and electrician (or in the “forced labor” camps as the paper puts it) was so awful that it gave her breast cancer some twenty years later when she came to write about it.
Yet in her book, the worst moment she remembers is “standing on the street corners with an umbrella hoping an old lady would pass so that I could escort her home.” Apparently this was madness, this thinking of the community rather than just of herself. She seems to have recovered nicely from the atrocity though, in her luxurious home in London's Notting Hill Gate.
Since Wild Swans is a mish-mash of self-serving half-truth and innuendo, it is as well that it is classified as a biography. We all like to see ourselves a little better than we really are. And many of us evidently need to see others as a little worse than they really are too. Her next book, Mao: the Unknown Story, on the other hand, tried to pass itself as serious history, and came heavily criticized by “day-job” historians. They pointed out that the long but non-specific lists of sources for various groundbreaking historical discoveries (for instance, they claim that the “Long March” was completely unnecessary) fell woefully below the standard rightly required for even a work such as No Holiday.
Ironically, as Jung Chang was given a scholarship by this poor nation to travel and to study abroad, she benefited from Maoism. But doubtless she would enjoy this late addition to the Mao Trail. Not quite so well supported, and perhaps not so obviously part of Mao's biography, it sheds light on what happened during that other “30 percent of political errors” which occurred in steering the Middle Kingdom from abject poverty and ruination at the hands of the Western and Japanese invaders, to relative prosperity and independence.
There is a small risk of becoming interested in bad novels about the Cultural Revolution.