by Rand Paul
Ultimately, Ming’s story brightened as he escaped to America and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Medical School. He is now a prominent eye surgeon in Nashville.
The Cultural Revolution is said to have ended with Mao’s death in 1976, but Tom Phillips writes, “Dikötter believes the nightmarish upheaval also served to destroy any remaining faith the Chinese people had in their Great Teacher. Even before Mao died, people buried Maoism.”3
One can read of the millions who died during Stalin’s terror or Mao’s Great Leap Forward and still not grasp the horror of what it was like. Perhaps the best way to try to understand the magnitude of what happened as Mao strove to achieve complete socialism is to listen to the victims tell their stories.
Chen Dake was one of those caught up in the Cultural Revolution. Like Ming Wang, Chen Dake’s life was turned upside down by the Cultural Revolution. Both men were part of the mad rush to take the college entrance exam when the Cultural Revolution finally allowed the universities to reopen. It is estimated that in 1977, after a decade of closed universities, approximately 5.7 million students attempted to attend college, in one year.
Chen was accepted to Hunan Normal University to study physics. As a kid, Chen had thought he might want to study literature or history, but in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, science seemed the safer course. Chen ended up becoming a famous oceanographer who recently led a team of scientists to the South Pole.
But during the Cultural Revolution, Chen was exiled to the rice paddies of central China to do manual labor. His crime? His parents were intellectuals. While some students did attend university during the Cultural Revolution, others like Chen and Ming were banned because of their ideology.
Mao made room for “acceptable” applicants like peasants—and of course the children of government officials. An example of the politically motivated admissions process recounts a farmer named Zhang Tiesheng who was admitted to college in 1973—even though he answered not one question correctly on the chemistry and physics entrance exam.
Chen remembers the excitement and challenge of competing with the five million college applicants that had built up because of ten years of limited university access.
“I was sent to the countryside after high school and toiled in the rice fields for three years before getting back to the city and entering college,” Chen said.
“I barely had time and energy to prepare for the entrance exam, but I guess that’s probably true for almost everyone who took that exam. I remember that almost every young person in the countryside where I worked took the exam.”4
Chen recalls, as Ming does as well, that there was space for only about 5 percent of the five million applicants. To be accepted in 1977 was an extraordinary feat.
The stories of Chen Dake and Ming Wang are testaments to the power of human will in the face of nearly unimaginable hardship and terror. Ming Wang spent much of his childhood singing and dancing to the propaganda songs extolling Mao (the only music allowed) as a way to ensure that he would not be sent to a work camp.
Chen Qigang, who is now a composer living in France, also lived through the Cultural Revolution.
Chen was plucked out of middle school in Beijing and sent to a forced-labor reeducation camp in the countryside. Chen describes what happened to him:
I have always been a very direct speaker. When the Cultural Revolution was starting, I spoke out about what I was seeing. The day after I said something, a big-character poster appeared on campus overnight: “Save the reactionary speechmaker Chen Qigang.” I was so young. I didn’t understand what was going on. Yesterday we were all classmates. How come today all of my classmates are my enemies? Everyone started to ignore me. I didn’t understand. How could people be like this? Even my older sister, who was also at my school, came to find me and asked, “What’s wrong with you?” You saw in one night who your real friends were. The next day I only had two friends left. One of them is now my wife.
Chen continues,
At the time, no one really knew who was for or against the revolution. It was completely out of control. The students brought elderly people into the school and beat them. They beat their teachers and principals. There was nothing in the way of law. There was a student who was two or three years older than me. He beat two elderly people to death with his bare hands. No one has talked about this even until this day. We all know who did it but that’s the way it is. No one has ever looked into it. These occurrences were too common.
If there had been no Cultural Revolution, then I would not be who I am today. People who haven’t been through it can’t appreciate how easy everything else is. It wasn’t the manual labor. That’s a different kind of hardship. This was the worst kind of bitterness. You are constantly told: “You are against the revolution, so therefore you have no right to speak. You don’t have freedom. You will have no future in this place. You will not have a good job. Everyone looks down on you.”
That burden, that burden on your spirit, is very heavy. It was very different later when I went to France. I could have been criticized. I could have had a different opinion on something artistic. But for me that was nothing. It is nothing. Because it doesn’t affect my freedom.5
Yang Jisheng, a famous writer and historian, was in high school in 1966. He writes:
People who didn’t experience the Cultural Revolution only know that a large number of officials were persecuted, but they don’t know that the numbers of ordinary people who suffered were 10 times, a hundred times, more.
They only know that the rebels were the culprits in the Cultural Revolution, and don’t know that the rebels were active for only two years. The main culprits were the power holders in different periods. They only know that the Gang of Four and the rebels supported the Cultural Revolution, and don’t know that a large number of senior officials also supported the Cultural Revolution for some time.
Unfortunately, now there are some people doing everything in their power to cover up the mistakes of history. They treat one-sidedly extolling the achievements of the past as a “positive energy” to be exalted, and they treat exposing and reflecting on the mistakes of history as a “negative energy” to be beaten down.6
Professor Zehao Zhou is haunted by the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Zhou was an eleven-year-old when Mao decided to unleash the Red Guard to purge opposition. Zhou describes the Red Guard as “mostly brainwashed teenage hooligans, [who] stormed into any neighborhood they pleased, assaulted anyone they wanted, and tortured their victims to death with impunity—all in the name of revolution.”7
Mao encouraged the violence. “Revolution is not a dinner party! Be violent!” Mao declared.
Zhou remembers “the ‘Chinese Crystal Night’ in the summer 1966 when waves of Red Guards from different factions repeatedly stormed my ‘bourgeois neighborhood’ in the former French Concession of Shanghai over a period of weeks, terrorizing the innocent, ransacking homes and parading their victims through the streets for the purpose of public humiliation.”
Still a child at the time, Zhou could never forget the “screaming, shouting, yelling and cries for help [that] rang out all around me—nearly every household was subjected to such abuse. Chaos was the order of the day.”
As the Red Guards closed in on their house, Zhou describes his mother’s feverish destruction of any incriminating evidence. “After closing the curtains, she started to burn books, notebooks and the entire collection of family photos. I saw my mother gingerly putting one photo after another into the flames. I had never seen most of them before. The only time I got to see what my parents looked like at their wedding or how my father looked in uniform was in those fleeting moments before each photo started to curl and blacken in the flames.”8
That first summer of the Cultural Revolution, Mao started the “Destroy the Four Olds Campaign.” The Red Guard was goaded to attack anything or anyone who expressed old ideas, old habits, old customs, or old culture.
To this day it is sad to th
ink of five thousand years of Chinese artifacts being burned or destroyed. Zhou explains that “almost 90 percent of Tibet’s monasteries and temples were razed to the ground and roughly 74 percent of the historical sites in the birthplace of Confucius . . . were obliterated.”
Zhou remembers the Red Guard attacking the local Christian church. They “brought out all of its Bibles into the middle of the street, and set them on fire. That horrific moment—seeing the sky darkened by the floating ashes of burned Bibles—remains seared in my memory even now.”
Zhou ponders the ironies: “The result is a curious kind of doublethink. Mao led the country to ruin and is responsible for more deaths than either Hitler or Stalin, but he remains the political idol of millions of ordinary Chinese. The Red Guards were eventually denounced as aberrant radicals, but the ruling faction of the Chinese Communist Party is composed of a significant number of former Red Guards.”9
To better understand the Cultural Revolution, Karoline Kan interviewed her uncle Lishui, who was and is an unrepentant Red Guard. What is alarming about her description is how “normal” he seemed to her. She describes how “as a young child, when I heard him coming to visit, I would rush out of the house, climb onto his shoulders, and pull his ears.”10
Kan describes her uncle as “kind and honest” but he “says he doesn’t regret a single thing he did—not even today. . . .”
Lishui joined the Red Guard at eighteen, and astonishingly his first raid was on his grandfather’s house. When the orders came to eradicate the “Four Olds,” Lishui answered the call. What kind of fervor is enough to lead a young adult to raid his grandfather’s house?
Kan describes how “terrified of severe punishment, the old man handed over his collection of books and paintings before those young people, including his own grandsons, would find them. The Red Guards piled the books and paintings and burned them. To show his sincerity and to avoid further punishment, my great-grandfather used the fire to boil water in front of the guards.”
Kan’s great-grandfather had been educated in Confucianism and had been a village leader. Kan reports that “none of that mattered during the Cultural Revolution. My great-grandfather was forced to step on stage and accept criticism, wearing a ‘high hat,’ which looked like a dunce cap, enumerating his crimes.” Lishui, perhaps feeling guilty about harassing his own grandfather, agreed to help his grandfather avoid more punishment by writing down “self-criticisms,” a form of forced confessions. According to Lishui:
My grandfather “was old and his eyes were diseased, so he told me his stories, and I wrote them down. . . . I also guided him to write what the Red Guards would like to hear. I remember a few lines: “I was born in 1899; at eight years old I started studying the Four Books and Five Classics taught by private teachers. I will reflect deeply and profoundly on my past.”11
Like the Nazi prison guards who blithely followed their orders, it is hard to imagine how Lishui could justify committing terrorism against his own family much less still defend it fifty years later. The power of groupthink or peer pressure, especially when encouraged by the state, is somehow able to motivate “normal” people to commit what most of us would consider highly “abnormal,” abhorrent acts.
Today’s socialists who choose to write off such horror as an anomaly need to explain why history shows the same story time and time again—when governments take on sufficient power to enforce state ownership of property, the leaders ultimately become ruthless and barbaric.
Millions of people were killed under Mao. It is easy to become inured to violence when you hear such large, almost unbelievable numbers. So it is useful to meet a few of Mao’s victims.
Fang Zhongmou had been a member of the Communist Party. In fact, she had served in the People’s Liberation Army. Her enthusiasm for Mao’s regime waned, however, when her husband was charged with being a “capitalist roader,” a nonspecific accusation equivalent to being a sympathizer of capitalism. The government detained her husband on multiple occasions and made him submit to “struggle sessions.”
In the privacy of her home, Fang Zhongmou lashed out at Mao. Her family informed the authorities. Fang retaliated by burning a portrait of Mao. Her husband and son turned her over to soldiers. She was subsequently executed.12
It’s hard to imagine families turning in their family members, but this was not uncommon when everyone lived in fear of everyone else, including their own family.
Bian Zhongyun was an early victim of the Cultural Revolution. She was a vice principal at the well-known Beijing Normal University Girls High School. Mao encouraged the Communist Party youth to denounce traitors, and so they did. Bian fit the profile as an intellectual with a college degree and a well-to-do family background.
The students and the Red Guard became a mob. They harassed, beat, and tortured her. She was warned not to return to school. When she did, the student mob beat her with table legs with protruding nails. Bian died of her wounds.13
I remember the Chinese Ping-Pong players of the early 1970s, when the exchange of players between the United States and China became known as “Ping-Pong diplomacy.” But a decade or so before Ping-Pong diplomacy, three Chinese players were hounded to their deaths by the Chinese government.
Rong Guotuan, Fu Qifang, and Jiang Yongning, though they were originally from Hong Kong, competed for China in the 1950s and 1960s. Rong became the first Chinese player to win the World Table Tennis Championship in 1959. Because they had been born outside of mainland China, the hysteria of the Cultural Revolution made them suspect. They were subjected to “struggle sessions” and beatings and then accused of spying. Ultimately, all three would commit suicide, with Rong leaving a note denying that he was a spy.14
The terror was so pervasive that there likely was no Chinese citizen alive in the late 1970s who did not know of someone who had been killed, tortured, or sent to a forced labor camp. Even as Deng Xiaoping began to relax Mao’s terror, Chinese citizens still lived an uncertain existence.
Chapter 27
If No One Has to Work, No One Will
A few years ago, NPR did a fabulous story on China’s rise from the ashes of Mao’s Marxism to allow a modicum of freedom. The story takes place in the small village of Xiaogang in 1978. Several farmers have come together in a dirt-floor shack to sign a secret compact. To these farmers, this contract was dangerous. They still feared the terror of Mao and believed that if this contract were discovered, they could be executed.
The farms had been owned by the collective since private property was abolished in the 1950s. To defy common ownership of any farmland was very risky.
Yen Jingchang, one of the farmers at this secret meeting, said that “[b]ack then, even one straw belonged to the group. No one owned anything.”
One of the men present remembers a farmer asking at a local communist meeting, “What about the teeth in my head? Do I own those?” The party official responded: “No. Your teeth belong to the collective.”
Jingchang said in those days, “In theory, the government would take what the collective grew, and would also distribute food to each family. There was no incentive to work hard—to go out to the fields early, to put in extra effort.”
According to Jingchang, it didn’t matter how much effort you expended: “Work hard, don’t work hard—everyone gets the same. So, people don’t want to work.”
Since the collective farms never produced enough food, there was chronic hunger and a sense of desperation. A small group of farmers decided to act.
According to NPR, “in the winter of 1978, after another terrible harvest, they came up with an idea: Rather than farm as a collective, each family would get to farm its own plot of land. If a family grew a lot of food, that family could keep some of the harvest.”
It had been nearly thirty years since anyone had “owned” his or her labor or the fruits of their harvest. This “new” old idea went against thirty years of communist dictates, which is why the farmers met in secret to discuss a new c
ompact.
One by one they filed furtively into the agreed-upon farmer’s home. As NPR described it, this home was “like all of the houses in the village, it had dirt floors, mud walls and a straw roof. No plumbing, no electricity.”
Despite the danger, the farmers agreed to try privatizing the land—they formalized the agreement and wrote it down as a contract. One of them, Yen Hongchang, wrote out the agreement.
In the contract, the farmers agreed to apportion the land between families. The families would not get to keep the entire harvest. There still would be taxes and a portion for the collective, but for the first time in a generation, the vast amount of the harvest would go to the family that grew the crop. The more you grew, the more you and your family would profit.
The farmers were anxious about the government’s response. There were rumors that the harshness of Mao was abating, but the farmers still felt the need to include a provision in the contract that if any of them were executed the remaining farmers would take care of their children.
The contract was kept secret. NPR reported, “Yen Hongchang hid it inside a piece of bamboo in the roof of his house.”
What they couldn’t hide was the dramatically increased harvest. Farmer Hongchang estimated that the harvest was bigger than the last five years together. A miracle occurred, albeit a miracle known at least since the time of Adam Smith: incentives do matter.
As NPR reported: “Before the contract, the farmers would drag themselves out into the field only when the village whistle blew, marking the start of the work day. After the contract, the families went out before dawn.”
Yen Jingchang explained: “We all secretly competed. Everyone wanted to produce more than the next person.”
Self-interest and reward allowed the same farmers on the same land to grow five times the amount of food grown when everyone—and therefore no one—owned the land.