Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0081/00818.txt

Text File | 1991-06-24 | 31KB | 472 lines

$Unique_ID{COW00818}
$Pretitle{260}
$Title{China
Chapter 1B.   The Cultural Revolution Decade, 1966-76}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Rinn-Sup Shinn and Robert L. Worden}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{party
political
mao
deng
cultural
mao's
chairman
revolution
national
hua}
$Date{1989}
$Log{}
Country:     China
Book:        China, A Country Study
Author:      Rinn-Sup Shinn and Robert L. Worden
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1989

Chapter 1B.   The Cultural Revolution Decade, 1966-76

     In the early 1960s, Mao was on the political sidelines and in
semiseclusion. By 1962, however, he began an offensive to purify the party,
having grown increasingly uneasy about what he believed were the creeping
"capitalist" and antisocialist tendencies in the country. As a hardened veteran
revolutionary who had overcome the severest adversities, Mao continued to
believe that the material incentives that had been restored to the peasants and
others were corrupting the masses and were counterrevolutionary.

     To arrest the so-called capitalist trend, Mao launched the Socialist
Education Movement (1962-65; see Glossary), in which the primary emphasis was on
restoring ideological purity, reinfusing revolutionary fervor into the party and
government bureaucracies, and intensifying class struggle. There were internal
disagreements, however, not on the aim of the movement but on the methods of
carrying it out. Opposition came mainly from the moderates represented by Liu
Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, who were unsympathetic to Mao's policies. The
Socialist Education Movement was soon paired with another Mao campaign, the
theme of which was "to learn from the People's Liberation Army." Minister of
National Defense Lin Biao's rise to the center of power was increasingly
conspicuous. It was accompanied by his call on the PLA and the CCP to accentuate
Maoist thought as the guiding principle for the Socialist Education Movement and
for all revolutionary undertakings in China.

     In connection with the Socialist Education Movement, a thorough reform of
the school system, which had been planned earlier to coincide with the Great
Leap Forward, went into effect. The reform was intended as a work-study
program-a new xiafang movement-in which schooling was slated to accommodate
the work schedule of communes and factories. It had the dual purpose of
providing mass education less expensively than previously and of re-educating
intellectuals and scholars to accept the need for their own participation in
manual labor. The drafting of intellectuals for manual labor was part of the
party's rectification campaign, publicized through the mass media as an effort
to remove "bourgeois" influences from professional workers-particularly, their
tendency to have greater regard for their own specialized fields than for the
goals of the party. Official propaganda accused them of being more concerned
with having "expertise" than being "red" (see Glossary).

The Militant Phase, 1966-68

     By mid-1965 Mao had gradually but systematically regained control of the
party with the support of Lin Biao, Jiang Qing (Mao's fourth wife), and Chen
Boda, a leading theoretician. In late 1965 a leading member of Mao's "Shanghai
Mafia," Yao Wenyuan, wrote a thinly veiled attack on the deputy mayor of
Beijing, Wu Han. In the next six months, under the guise of upholding
ideological purity, Mao and his supporters purged or attacked a wide variety of
public figures, including State Chairman Liu Shaoqi and other party and state
leaders. By mid-1966 Mao's campaign had erupted into what came to be known as
the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the first mass action to have emerged
against the CCP apparatus itself.

     Considerable intraparty opposition to the Cultural Revolution was evident.
On the one side was the Mao-Lin Biao group, supported by the PLA; on the other
side was a faction led by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, which had its strength
in the regular party machine. Premier Zhou Enlai, while remaining personally
loyal to Mao, tried to mediate or to reconcile the two factions.

     Mao felt that he could no longer depend on the formal party organization,
convinced that it had been permeated with the "capitalist" and bourgeois
obstructionists. He turned to Lin Biao and the PLA to counteract the influence
of those who were allegedly "`left' in form but `right' in essence." The PLA was
widely extolled as a "great school" for the training of a new generation of
revolutionary fighters and leaders. Maoists also turned to middle-school
students for political demonstrations on their behalf. These students, joined
also by some university students, came to be known as the Red Guards (see
Glossary). Millions of Red Guards were encouraged by the Cultural Revolution
group to become a "shock force" and to "bombard" with criticism both the regular
party headquarters in Beijing and those at the regional and provincial levels.
Red Guard activities were promoted as a reflection of Mao's policy of rekindling
revolutionary enthusiasm and destroying "outdated," "counterrevolutionary"
symbols and values. Mao's ideas, popularized in the Quotations from Chairman
Mao, became the standard by which all revolutionary efforts were to be judged.
The "four big rights" -speaking out freely, airing views fully, holding great
debates, and writing big-character posters (see Glossary)-became an important
factor in encouraging Mao's youthful followers to criticize his intraparty
rivals. The "four big rights" became such a major feature during the period that
they were later institutionalized in the state constitution of 1975 (see
Constitutional Framework, ch. 10). The result of the unfettered criticism of
established organs of control by China's exuberant youth was massive civil
disorder, punctuated also by clashes among rival Red Guard gangs and between the
gangs and local security authorities. The party organization was shattered from
top to bottom. (The Central Committee's Secretariat ceased functioning in late
1966.) The resources of the public security organs were severely strained. Faced
with imminent anarchy, the PLA-the only organization whose ranks for the most
part had not been radicalized by Red Guard-style activities-emerged as the
principal guarantor of law and order and the de facto political authority. And
although the PLA was under Mao's rallying call to "support the left," PLA
regional military commanders ordered their forces to restrain the leftist
radicals, thus restoring order throughout much of China. The PLA also was
responsible for the appearance in early 1967 of the revolutionary committees, a
new form of local control that replaced local party committees and
administrative bodies. The revolutionary committees were staffed with Cultural
Revolution activists, trusted cadres, and military commanders, the latter
frequently holding the greatest power.

     The radical tide receded somewhat beginning in late 1967, but it was not
until after mid-1968 that Mao came to realize the uselessness of further
revolutionary violence. Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, and their fellow
"revisionists" and "capitalist roaders" had been purged from public life by
early 1967, and the Maoist group had since been in full command of the political
scene.

     Viewed in larger perspective, the need for domestic calm and stability was
occasioned perhaps even more by pressures emanating from outside China. The
Chinese were alarmed in 1966-68 by steady Soviet military buildups along their
common border. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 heightened Chinese
apprehensions. In March 1969 Chinese and Soviet troops clashed on Zhenbao Island
(known to the Soviets as Damanskiy Island) in the disputed Wusuli Jiang (Ussuri
River) border area. The tension on the border had a sobering effect on the
fractious Chinese political scene and provided the regime with a new and
unifying rallying call (see The Soviet Union, ch. 14).

The Ninth National Party Congress to the Dem