The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  Challenges from abroad, as the Vietnam War threatened to spread to China, also convinced Mao of the need to return to guerrilla Communism. He decided that he had to root out the forces of the ‘right’, partly by purging officials at the top, but largely by changing the attitudes of the whole of society. Patriarchal hierarchy, clan domination, technocracy and money-grubbing were to give way to the reign of virtue, when people worked altruistically, for the good of all. Such were the goals of Mao’s most disastrous campaign: his ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’. As the ‘sixteen points’ that launched the campaign in 1966 declared:

  Although the bourgeoisie has been overthrown, it is still trying to use the old ideas, culture, customs and habits of the exploiting classes to corrupt the masses, capture their minds and endeavour to stage a comeback. The proletariat must… change the mental outlook of the whole of society.84

  In some ways, then, Mao was (unconsciously) following Stalin’s path in the 1930s. Having led disastrous economic ‘leaps’, both had been forced to restore order, which in turn entrenched officials and other leaders. Both then tried to increase their power over the party, by undermining any potential rivals in the leadership. At the same time they launched ideological campaigns, purging non-believers or ‘rightists’ from the bureaucracy – Stalin in the Terror and Mao in the Cultural Revolution. Both campaigns also rapidly escalated out of control. But Mao was much more radical in his methods and goals. Stalin preserved hierarchy, and relied on the secret police; Mao returned to the guerrilla socialism of Yan’an and mobilized the masses in the hope of creating the new socialist man. Mao, then, was not merely imposing his will on the party; he was launching, as he saw it, a Communist revolution within a Communist state – a revolution that in effect became, uniquely, a civil war within the Communist Party, and amongst the population as a whole.

  Typically for Chinese politics, this devastating revolution from above began in a rather subtle, oblique way, on 10 November 1965. A play, the Dismissal of Hai Tui from Office, about the removal of a virtuous Ming dynasty official by a tyrannical emperor, became the subject of a campaign of press criticism, orchestrated by Mao and his wife, Jiang Qing. They claimed it was an Aesopian attack on the Chairman, alleging that parallels were now being drawn between Hai Tui and Marshal Peng Dehuai. They then used the case to condemn a group within the leadership whom they accused of right-wing ‘revisionism’, including Peng Zhen, the party boss and mayor of Beijing and a close ally of Liu Shaoqi, and Lu Dingyi, the head of party propaganda. Speaking in March 1966, Mao used the vivid language of ancient myth:

  The central Party Propaganda Department is the palace of the Prince of Hell. It is necessary to overthrow the palace of the Prince of Hell and liberate the Little Devil… The local areas must produce several more [monkey kings] to vigorously create a disturbance at the palace of the King of Heaven.85

  Soon Mao was using more radical language and levelling more fundamental criticisms at the ‘revisionists’ within the party. On 16 May, the first Cultural Revolution circular described them as ‘representatives of the bourgeoisie’ and ‘people of the Khrushchev brand still nestling in our midst’, and called for a mass campaign against them.

  Naturally local party bosses became anxious, and they, with Liu Shaoqi’s support, tried to blunt the campaign, leading Mao and the radicals to raise the stakes. Mao now called for the creation of so-called ‘red guard’ groups – many made up of students – as a new vanguard to attack revisionism in the party and, more generally, the ‘four olds’ within society as a whole – ‘old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits of the exploiting classes’. In August Mao himself donned a red-guard armband, and 13 million red guards from across the country visited Beijing in eight mass rallies, all brandishing their ‘Little Red Books’ of Mao quotations.

  Throughout China, young red guards – often schoolchildren – rampaged through the streets. They enforced puritanical morality, forcing women to cut their hair and remove jewellery; they changed shop-signs and street names (the British Embassy now stood on ‘Anti-Imperialism Road’, the Soviet Embassy on ‘Anti-Revisionism Road’); and they broke into ‘bourgeois’ houses and smashed or looted their belongings. Gao Yuan, the schoolboy son of a provincial official, remembered:

  With a red flag reading ‘Red Guard’ fluttering at the head of our column, we set out for the centre of town. Most of us carried the little red book, as we had seen the Beijing Red Guards doing in pictures in the newspapers… As we marched, we bellowed the new ‘Song of the Red Guards’:

  We are Chairman Mao’s Red Guards,

  Tempering ourselves in great waves and winds;

  Armed with Mao Zedong thought,

  We’ll wipe out all pests and vermin.

  … we reached three elaborately carved marble arches that straddled the street. The [Qing-era] triple archway had stood there for two hundred years… Although I had happy memories of playing under the shadow of the arches, I did not feel too bad about destroying them. Of all 24 Chinese feudal dynasties, I disliked the Qing most… it was under the Qing that the Western powers had begun to subjugate China with opium and gunboats… To the clamour of ‘Smash the four olds’ the resplendent structure came down and smashed into a pile of broken stone.86

  Mao’s Cultural Revolution, then, bore striking similarities to the Soviet ‘Cultural Revolution’ of the late 1920s, in that it combined a populist attack on ‘capitalist’ backsliders in the party with a sudden ‘leap’ to modernity. Culturally, the impact was devastating, just as the closure and demolition of churches in late 1920s Russia had been. However, cultural figures – most vocally Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing – also made serious efforts to create a new Chinese culture. Traditional opera was an early target of these cultural modernization campaigns. Jiang complained that opera, a very popular art form, was full of ‘cow ghosts and snake spirits’, and false values such as ‘capitulation’ to ‘feudal’ power-holders. She encouraged Communist writers to write new works, in which ‘emperors, ministers, scholars and maidens’ were replaced with heroic workers, peasants and soldiers.87 These revolutionary operas, though heavily influenced by Soviet revolutionary romanticism, were also saturated with older stylized models, especially in the accompanying music. In 1966 Kang Sheng declared that five ‘modernized’ operas, together with two ballet dramas and a symphony, now constituted China’s ‘eight model performances’. The magnificent eight were shown endlessly to Chinese audiences, both on stage and on film. Initially, the operas were popular; however, because relatively few were produced, audiences were soon seeing the same operas again and again, and unsurprisingly boredom set in. As the joke went, the culture of the Cultural Revolution amounted to ‘eight-hundred million people watching eight shows’.88

  Though very self-consciously modern, the ‘new’ culture of the Cultural Revolution also harked back to the guerrilla socialism of Yan’an. Seven of the eight model performances concerned the Chinese revolutionary experience, and their heroes and heroines were often soldiers dressed in revolutionary-era fatigues. Indeed, military uniforms soon became the height of fashion, especially amongst the young. As one who lived through the period remembered, ‘real army uniforms were few… I was ten at that time, and pestered my mother for a uniform. All she could do was buy some wrapping cloth (a coarse cloth used for wrapping items for the post, which didn’t need cotton coupons), and dye some for me and my brothers.’89

  The Cultural Revolution’s guerrilla socialism was, then, a sharp departure from Stalinism. Society was to be completely reordered, with the virtuous at the top, not the well-educated or the well-connected. Prestige based on educational achievement was an early target. Now not only ‘feudal’ hierarchies but also ‘meritocracy’ had to yield to a type of ‘virtuocracy’.90 The ideal was now one of extreme altruism, and even the formerly lionized fictional hero Pavel Korchagin was now censured by Chinese critics for his self-indulgent romanticism and complaints about his illnesses.

  The
new order particularly affected schools and universities. Following Mao’s belief that merit as tested by exams merely reinforced class divisions within society, political activism was to count for more than educational achievement. Students confronted an entirely novel set of incentives, where political virtue, not intellectual distinction, would gain the rewards of prestigious urban jobs.

  Students were amongst the most enthusiastic supporters of the Cultural Revolution. But towards the end of the year official attention shifted to workers, who were now encouraged to embark on vocal campaigns against their bosses. Liu Guokai, a member of a group of rebels in a Guangzhou factory, described how ‘had-it-bad’ factions (often contract workers with their poor pay and benefits) responded eagerly to Mao’s signals by rebelling against ‘had-it-good’ groups (the workers with secure jobs and their allies, the managers). On 25 December 1966 protestors closed down the Ministry of Labour in Beijing, and the next day Jiang Qing supported them, berating the Vice-Minister for treating them as the Cinderellas of the working class:

  She said: ‘The Ministry of Labour is simply the Ministry of the Lords. Even though the country has been liberated for so many years, the workers are still suffering so much; it is unbelievable. Does your Ministry of Labour know about this or not? Do you mean to say that contract workers are the offspring of a stepmother? You, too, should work as a contract worker.’ Saying this, Jiang even burst into tears.91

  On hearing that the Cultural Revolution group now supported their cause, contract workers throughout the land rose up to demand the end of their subordinate status. They also, more generally, demanded less high-handed, more ‘comradely’ and dignified treatment by officials.92

  The Cultural Revolution reached the countryside last of all, though the inhabitants of some villages had experienced the ‘remoralization’ of politics as early as mid-1965. When Chen village, in Guangdong province, was visited by party ‘work teams’ from the towns sent to spread Mao’s radical message, individual piece-rate wages gave way to a work-points system designed to encourage collective labour and reward. At the same time local political structures, based on kinship networks and family favouritism, were shaken up. One such network was that of Chen Qingfa, nicknamed ‘Hot Sauce’ after his temper and his willingness to resort to physical violence during an argument. However, rural power structures did not really change until the most radical phase of the Cultural Revolution in 1967. In Chen village, Qingfa’s rival, Chen Longyong, with the help of radical urban students sent to the countryside, seized control and imposed a terrifying reign of virtue. Longyong, who rejoiced in the nickname ‘Old Pockmark’, came from a more modest background than Qingfa, and had the support of poorer peasants excluded from village politics. He was also more puritan in his lifestyle and morals. He decried clannishness; he zealously organized collective labour and was more respected than the luxury-loving Qingfa. But the Cultural Revolution allowed him to wage a moralistic terror against ‘bad’ people, including Qingfa and even some of the radical students, and he soon alienated many of the villagers. They may have found Qingfa’s rule corrupt, similar to the gentry of old, but they also found it more ‘human’ than Longyong’s harsh and vengeful behaviour.93

  Mao and his allies, however, did not always find it so easy to replace the Qingfas with the Longyongs. Local bosses successfully protected themselves by deflecting the Cultural Revolution campaigns away from themselves and on to ‘class alien’ outsiders – much as their Soviet predecessors had done in 1937. Mao’s attacks on the ‘bourgeoisie’ were deliberately misinterpreted as a campaign against the ‘black’ bourgeois classes – who had long suffered discrimination – rather than one against their own class of newly bourgeois ‘red’ groups. So, for instance, worried local bosses set up their own red guards, made up of ‘red’ students (i.e. those of ‘good’ class backgrounds, like Gao Yuan), to persecute the old ‘black’ bourgeoisie and their offspring. The campaigns of class discrimination were pursued with fanatical consistency. Visitors to restaurants were forced to complete questionnaires on their class origins, whilst bourgeois surgeons were afraid to operate on proletarians in case the procedure went badly and they were accused of ‘class revenge’.94

  Party officials justified these highly self-interested distortions of Mao’s campaigns by reinterpreting Mao’s warnings of revolutionary decay using the dogma of ‘blood pedigree theory’. Blood pedigree was the notion that virtue was not only a class-specific but also an exclusively inherited characteristic. The ‘red’ classes and their children were genetically good, whilst the ‘black’ classes were forever tainted across the generations. Class was reinterpreted as something akin to caste or race. The theory was summed up in a verse couplet:

  If the old man’s a hero, the son’s a good chap,

  If the old man’s a reactionary, the son’s a bad egg.95

  This, of course, was the exact opposite of what Mao had in mind. He and his radical supporters condemned blood pedigree theory as ‘feudal’, and stated that class was about attitude, not blood. It was, Mao insisted, possible for the ‘black’ classes to be more virtuous and ‘proletarian’ than the ‘red’ ruling groups; indeed, he argued, it was the ‘reds’ who were fast becoming a new privileged class, similar to the old bourgeoisie. However, Mao – like Trotsky – never categorically declared that the party elite had become a new bourgeois class, for to do so would have been tantamount to calling for a full-blown revolution against the Communist Party, endangering the entire regime.96 Mao was, therefore, always studiedly ambiguous; though he encouraged the ‘black’ classes, he never wholly disowned the ‘reds’.

  Such equivocation contributed to chaotic civil war, with both sides insisting that only they were following the true will of the Chairman. The former bourgeoisie, allied with underprivileged workers and other stigmatized ‘blacks’, advanced their claims to revolutionary virtue by forming their own red guards. An Wenjiang, the son of a lowly seaman who was studying at Fudan University, Shanghai, decided to join one of the rebel red-guard groupings to counter the violence of the establishment red guards – known as ‘Scarlet Guards’:

  Before the movement, I had been quiet, obedient, and almost shy in class, but only because my free and reckless nature had been suppressed. Given the opportunity, I grew radical, daring, and enthusiastic… I can’t deny there was a selfish element, a desire to show off, in my becoming a rebel leader, but it was mostly a conviction that the son of a working-class man should be allowed to participate in revolution.97

  On 24 August 1966, An’s red guards were thrilled when a large poster with Mao’s declaration ‘Bombard the Headquarters’ (of the Communist Party) appeared on the campus. As he remembered, ‘we regarded it as a victory for our rebel groups’ for it was a call to attack the elite, and ‘near midnight, 1,400 of us marched off in high spirits to invade Shanghai’s drama academy at the invitation of its rebel minority’. Two days later, however, the establishment Scarlet Guards staged a massive 40,000-strong rally, claiming Mao supported them. An decided to go to Beijing by train ‘to see Chairman Mao and understand the real situation’. He was assured by the red guards of Peking University that the Chairman was indeed on the rebels’ side, and he returned to Shanghai, full of radical zeal.98

  This civil war dynamic soon spread throughout China as rival red guard units fought for dominance. Most institutions and workplaces – schools, universities and factories – had their competing red guards. As Mao later recalled, ‘Everywhere people were fighting, dividing into two factions; there were two factions in every factory, in every school, in every province, in every county… there was massive upheaval in the country.’99 The young were most active in the red guards, but much of the urban population was sucked into the revolutionary turmoil. By the end of 1966 the ‘blacks’ were in the ascendant, but the ‘reds’ continued to defend themselves.

  Mao understood perfectly well that the Cultural Revolution was generating extreme violence, and saw that Beijing and the central p
arty were losing control. Nevertheless he would not retreat, determined as he was to foment a real revolution from below against the party bureaucracy, not merely a purge from above. For once perfectly unambiguous, Mao, entertaining guests at his birthday party on 26 December 1966, proposed a toast: ‘To the unfolding of nationwide all-round civil war!’100 This heartless insouciance was also evident in Mao’s justification of the chaos and violence that engulfed China: ‘it’s a mistake when good people beat up on good people, though it may clear up some misunderstandings, as they might otherwise not have got to know each other in the first place.’101 For Mao, disorder was less dangerous than allowing the old elite to remain in power.

  The most decisive signal that the tide had turned against the ‘reds’ and in favour of the radicals and the ‘blacks’, was the ‘January Storm’ of 1967 in Shanghai. Here, unusually for China, the rebels were not students like An Wenjiang, but largely unprivileged workers. The local party had amassed battalions of red guards to oppose them, but the 800,000 members they claimed to have could not defeat the rebels. On 30 December 1966 some 100,000 rebels attacked 20,000 establishment red guards and after four hours’ fighting were victorious. On 5 February Mao approved the end of the local party’s power, and its transfer to a new organization – the Shanghai People’s Commune, modelled on the Paris Commune of 1871.