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

THE BATTLE FOR CHINA’ S PAST
Cultural Revolution document, the ‘Shiliu tiao’ (the 16 Articles) and
was stressed in speeches from time to time by various leaders.
Neither the so-called 1967 January Storm (yiyue fengbao) that originated
in Shanghai and encouraged the Rebels to take over power
from the CCP apparatus, nor the suppression of the so-called 1967
February Anti-Cultural Revolution Current (eyue niliu) were meant
to include physical fighting and certainly not physical elimination,
though both did lead to violence of various kinds.
Much of the violence, brutality and destruction that happened
during the ten-year period was indeed intended, such as the persecution
of people with a bad class background at the beginning, and later
action against the Rebels, but the actions did not stem from a single
locus of power. To use ‘Storm Troopers’ in reference to the Red
Guards, for instance, is conveniently misleading. There was no such
singular entity as the ‘Red Guards’ or the ‘Red Guard’. First, we must
differentiate between university students and school students. It was
the latter who invented the term ‘Red Guards’ and who engaged in
acts of senseless violence in 1966. We should also note the difference
between schoolchildren in Beijing, where many high-ranking CCP
officials and army officers were located, and those in other places
such as Shanghai, the home town of three of the so-called ‘Gang of
Four’ radicals. It was not in Shanghai, the supposed birthplace of the
Cultural Revolution radicals, but in Beijing that schoolchildren beat
up their teachers most violently. It was also in Beijing (in 1966) that
the children of high-ranking CCP members and army officials formed
the notorious Lian dong (Coordinated Action) and carried out the socalled
‘Red Terror’ in an effort to defend their parents. What they
were doing was exactly the opposite of what Mao wanted, to
‘bombard the capitalist roaders inside the Party’, that is, parents of
the Lian dong Red Guards. Lian dong activists behaved like those of
the Storm Troopers, but these were not Mao’s Storm Troopers. Mao
supported those Rebels who criticized CCP officials including the
parents of the Lian dong Red Guards. These facts can easily be
confirmed by documentary evidence; yet the post-Mao Chinese political
and elite intelligentsia either pretend not to see them or choose to
ignore them.
Violence such as the Qingli jieji duiwu (Cleaning up the Class Ranks)
movement in 1968 was premeditated, but this movement was not
meant to result in the physical elimination of ‘class enemies’, though
this clearly happened in some places. In any case, much of the violence
that took place during the later 1960s was not initiated by either the
Red Guards or the Rebels. In fact many of the Rebels became victims
themselves, in campaigns such against the May the Sixteenth Elements
(Yang and McFadden 1997).
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