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

DEBATING THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION
were good for the poor people, and the first thing he said when he
recovered from a hospital operation was ‘long live Chairman Mao’
(2006: 225). Another Tibetan says that at that time people believed that
Mao was a living Buddha (2006: 268), and thinks that there are still
many Tibetans who, having been liberated by Mao’s revolution, have
the same feelings for Mao (2006: 271). A former serf declares that
without the CCP there would not have been a life for serfs like him
(2006: 292). Another interviewee, the son of a well-known living
Buddha and the most outstanding Tibetan photographer, states he
really believed in Mao and thought everything said by Mao was the
universal truth. In the 1980s when he was received by His Holiness the
Dalai Lama (outside China) he told his Holiness that it was the truth
that the majority of the Tibetans supported the CCP because the CCP
really liberated the serfs (2006: 329). The first interviewee, an ordinary
Tibetan woman in Lhasa, states that Mao helped a lot of people, that
the world cannot do without people like Mao, that Tibet used to be
unfair when some were rich while some did not have enough to eat
and that Mao’s revolution changed everything (2006: 21).
Many of the interviewees hold that there was not much ethnic
conflict in the era of Mao. One interviewee of Hui ethnic background
states that the Hans and the Tibetans were the same in making revolution
(Wei Se 2006: 181). Other interviewees affirm the idea that the
dominant discourse was class struggle and the words on every one’s
lips were qin bu qin jieji fen: whether one feels close to another depends
on class (2006: 166, 190). A Tibetan interviewee who used to be a neighbourhood
committee leader is very upset by the current Chinese policy
of giving so much privilege to Tibetans who belonged to the former
ruling class (2006: 229). Finally the majority of the interviewees, when
questioned, affirm that it was the Tibetan activists of the neighbourhood
committees, not the Red Guards, who did most of the damage in
religious destruction. These activists were mostly from poor social
backgrounds and some of them were considered by some interviewees
to be rascals, thieves and thugs.
The interview findings by Wei Se give support to scholars like
Sautman who refutes the claims of cultural genocide in Tibet (Sautman
2001, 2006) that was supposedly carried out by the Chinese. It is on
record that on 15 October 1966 the Chinese Premier Zhou tried to
persuade a group of eleven Tibetan students to go slow in destroying
the four olds because, he said, the wiping out of superstition requires
a long-term transformation; he suggested that temples and monasteries
should not be destroyed because they can be converted to
schools or store houses (Ho 2006). One example illustrates the very
delicate and yet complex situation at that time: when activists went to
destroy the Juela Temple in the autumn of 1966, the resident lama
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