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

DEBATING THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION
this kind. However it is important to determine, first, whether the
destruction was universal and, second, whether it was the official
policy of the Cultural Revolution to destroy physical objects. Despite
every effort by the Chinese authorities to denounce the Cultural Revolution,
no evidence has ever been put forward to support charges that
physical destruction was officially organized or sanctioned. On the
contrary, the official policy at the time was to protect cultural relics
from wanton destruction. For instance, on 14 May 1967 the CCP central
committee issued a document entitled Guanyu zai wuchanjieji wenhua da
geming zhong baohu wenwu tushu de jidian yijian (Several suggestions for
the protection of cultural relics and books during the Cultural Revolution)
to protect traditional cultural institutions and relics. It is
noteworthy, as well, that archaeological discoveries of historical significance
such as the Terracotta Army and Mawangdui tombs in Hunan
province made during this period have been well-preserved. In fact the
number of archaeological discoveries (including the Terracotta Army
discovered in 1974) was very high and their preservation was swift and
effective during the period.
It has to be pointed out that tension between maintenance and
destruction of tradition has existed in China for thousands of years; it
is not just the so-called communist regime that had to face this
problem. Two examples will be sufficient to illustrate this point. First,
many aspects of Chinese tradition were abandoned or destroyed by the
Chinese themselves but preserved in a modified way by the Japanese
instead. Second, since the May Fourth Movement at the beginning of
the twentieth century, anti-tradition has been held up as a beacon for
modernization for ‘progressive’ Chinese of all political persuasions.
This is generally understood to be the ‘Enlightenment’.
It is true that the leaders of the PRC, in general, and of the Cultural
Revolution, in particular, did encourage a more radical ideology of
anti-Chinese tradition. However, they tried at the same time to
preserve some aspects of it. It was Mao who said the Chinese traditional
medicine was a treasure house that needed to be exploited (Mao
1958). It was during the Cultural Revolution period that Chinese medicine
was intensively supported by official policies. The use of
acupuncture-induced anaesthesia was promoted during the Cultural
Revolution and many foreign visitors were invited to observe the use
of surgical operations at that time.
It was among the Mawangdui discoveries that the earliest known
account of the medical properties of the plant qinghao was unearthed,
along with other cultural relics. The Chinese worked from 1967
onwards to screen ‘a broad range of compounds drawn from traditional
medicine’, but it was in 1971 that they developed an unusual
extraction method that isolated what is called qinghaosu (artemisinin),
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