THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION
A People’s History, 1962-1976
Frank Dikotter
Bloomsbury Press
396 pages; $32
A "people's history" suggests an alternative to an official history. But there is no official account of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. After Mao Zedong died, the Chinese people cut a tacit deal with the Communist Party: Raise our living standards and we will allow you to stay in power; we will not ask questions about the nightmare we endured.
Frank Dikotter's gripping, horrific and at times sensationalistic The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962-1976, the third volume of his work on the Mao years, challenges the Chinese people to address those missing years. Drawn from hundreds of English-language and Chinese eyewitness accounts, newly available archival records, online Cultural Revolution documentary projects and foreign and Chinese scholarship, the book paints such a damning portrait of Communist Party governance that if it were circulated in China, it could undermine the current regime.
Mr Dikotter, a professor of humanities at the University of Hong Kong, divides the period into four phases. The first is the 1962-66 lead-up to the Cultural Revolution, when Mao contemplated his return to the political stage. Relaxed policies under the leadership of Liu Shaoqi had helped the country partially recover from a famine that had killed millions. Mao, fearing the return of revisionism and sidelined by his own party, signalled his reassertion of control.
What Mr Dikotter calls the "Red Years" from 1966 to 1968 saw the worst of the urban violence. Student Red Guards were organised to defend Mao against his enemies. They attacked their teachers (humiliations, beatings, torture and suicides are described in wrenching detail) and raided homes in search of bourgeois "articles of worship, luxury items, reactionary literature, foreign books, concealed weapons, hidden gold, foreign currency, signs of a decadent lifestyle, portraits of Chiang Kai-shek." Then new factions targeted elite party members, along with intellectuals, artists and writers and miscellaneous class enemies, until competing groups were fighting one another in the streets.
Mao eventually brought in the military to quell factional violence, but China descended further into civil war as the army, too, sought revenge. The country became a dictatorship under the command of Mao's chosen successor Marshal Lin Biao. Another wave of purges and counter-purges ensued.
During what Mr Dikotter calls "The Black Years" from 1968 to 1971, the Cultural Revolution moved to the countryside, as former Red Guards were rusticated by the millions to "learn from" the peasants and prepare for war with the Soviet Union along the border. Mr Dikotter describes the experience as an unremittingly terrible time of suffering, hunger, rape and abuse. Yet the rustification has produced hundreds of memoirs, many of which testify that for some young people, the time in the countryside was more nuanced or even bittersweet than he indicates. The rusticated youth, arguably, helped China break with its Maoist past, for they later became known as the "awakened generation" and the "thoughtful generation" as they gradually inherited the leadership of the country.
The period ended when Lin Biao died on September 13, 1971, in a plane crash in Mongolia. He is alleged to have tried to flee after conspiring to assassinate Mao.
Mr Dikotter paints the "Gray Years" from 1971 to 1976 as a time when consumer goods were in such short supply that hunger, even famine, was widespread. Mao, in failing health, relaxed state interference in daily life. Elite-level power struggles continued, but as Mr Dikotter describes it, the extreme policies of the Mao period essentially fizzled out.
Some may disagree with Mr Dikotter's argument that Maoism died out primarily through widespread passive resistance and noncompliance; there were important policy experiments in decollectivisation underway at the time, and the eventual dissolution of the people's communes came as a carefully considered decision by policy elites who prevailed after Mao died.
At times, Mr Dikotter's account focuses on the sensational rather than the nuanced. Some discussion of how reliable his disparate sources are would have been welcome. Cultural Revolution memoirs may emerge from understandable pain and the desire for revenge. They are by their nature subjective and selective. Yet attributions in the text are sparse .
That said, this book is a significant event in our understanding of modern China. For Mr Dikotter, the Cultural Revolution represented Mao's attempt to put himself at the centre of global Communism. In his efforts to purge the party's highest echelons, Mao unleashed the people of China against one another, with the result that the roles of victim and victimizer became entwined. This, perhaps, is the best explanation for why so many Chinese people have chosen to be complicit in the party's historical amnesia. Mr Dikotter's account chronicles not only the Chinese people's bad behaviour and suffering during the Cultural Revolution but also their disparate and creative responses to the upheavals and violence. Beaten down and often near starvation, people at the grass roots played a significant role in ending one of history's worst convulsions.
©2016, New York Times News Service
