Battle for China's Past : Mao and the Cultural Revolution

DEBATING THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION
which regularly publishes documents and writings on the Cultural
Revolution, featured a partial list of well-known people who died
during the so-called Cultural Revolutionary period of 1966–76. The
author asserts that all of the people on his list died as a result of persecution
during the Cultural Revolution (Dai Huang 2002). Along with
such names as Liu Shaoqi, there were also Zhu De, the legendary Red
Army commander, and Xu Guangping, widow of Lu Xun, who had
been hailed as a cultural icon by Mao and his followers. There is no
evidence that either Zhu De or Xu Guangping was persecuted at that
time. But the widely accepted assumption is that because the Cultural
Revolution was a ten-year catastrophe any well-known personality
who died during the period must have died from persecution.
Violence, brutality and causes
Certainly there was violence, cruelty and destruction, but how should
we interpret what happened during that period? Were all the acts of
violence organized and intended by official policies, as was the case
during the Nazi Holocaust? Was there a plan to physically exterminate
a group of people, as in Hitler’s gas chambers? The violence, cruelty,
suffering and deaths that occurred during the initial years of the
Cultural Revolution were caused by different groups of people, for
different reasons. Some conflicts were of a class nature, others were
social in character; some of the violence involved personal grudges, in
other cases the violence was due to blindness, ignorance and stupidity.
The fact that there was no planned policy for violence can be seen
in the sequence of events in those years. Recognizing the terrible
consequences of the ‘Red Terror’ in 1966 – when in Beijing homes
were raided, people judged to be class enemies were beaten up, and
detention centres were set up – and determined to stop further
terror of this kind, the central committee of the CCP approved a
decree drafted by the CCP of the Beijing Municipality and issued it
to the whole of China on 20 November 1966. The zhongyao tonggao
(important notification) decreed that no factory, mine, school,
administration or any other unit should be allowed to establish a
detention house or makeshift court to persecute anyone. Any violation
of the decree would be a violation of the law of the state and of
disciplines of the CCP and would be punished accordingly (Xiao
Xidong 2002). It is true that documents like this did not stop the
violence completely; it is also true that verbal provocations, gestures
and instructions by Mao and other leaders incited a new type of
violence in early 1967 and at later times. Yet the official policy was
clear: yao wendou bu yao wudou (engage in the struggle with words
but not with physical attack). This policy was recorded in an official
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