Imagine a time traveller from Mao Zedong’s China – say a Red Guard – landing in a Chinese city today, nearly half a century since Mao’s death in 1976 brought the Cultural Revolution to an end. Picture her in baggy unisex khaki and blunt bob, gaping at women her age prancing past in heels and short skirts. See her take in the soaring buildings, bustling shopping centres and pumping night clubs.
She looks at a newspaper. Some things make sense: ‘America’s democracy is in decline,’ one headline declares. There are familiar reports on model workers and the same sort of photos of leaders visiting factories and welcoming foreign presidents. But what’s this about weight management clinics, plastic surgery and young people looking for romance? She cannot make sense of half of it. And what, China has officially expressed its condolences over the death of a…Pope? What is this brave new world?
Mao’s portrait still watches over Tiananmen Square. But billboards that once trumpeted his quotations now promote mascara and luxury cars. Everyone still carries a Little Red Book, but this one is on their phones and is a social media platform where influencers hype lipsticks and chat about fitness and international travel. ‘Comrade’ signifies gay.
Her generation sacrificed their youth fighting to prevent China from taking the ‘capitalist road’. Now, appearances would suggest, the country is speeding down the capitalist freeway.
The Party certainly has a different focus. Mao fostered chaos, telling China’s young people that ‘to rebel is justified’, and encouraged them to attack their teachers and other authorities. Xi Jinping seeks stability, and tells the young to calm down and respect their elders. At school, our Red Guard would have studied a passage from the ancient historian Sima Qian about an ancient rebel who had only to ‘wave his arms in the air’ for the whole country to join him in rebellion. Xi, whose own family was victimised by Mao’s Cultural Revolution purges, ordered the textbook changed. Students today study Sima Qian’s biographical sketch of a Han general famous for following orders instead.
Mao believed that the Party justified its absolute rule by ‘liberating’ China from imperialist and other forms of exploitation, putting the country on its unique path towards communism. The Party under Xi seeks to legitimise its ongoing rule by claiming that only it can guide China into an era of national rejuvenation. Patriotic fervour has replaced revolutionary fever.
Yet there are striking continuities in style, which when it comes to governance, has much to do with substance as well. Like Mao, Xi has concentrated power into his own hands. He arguably is more autocratic than Mao because whereas Mao tolerated different factions within the highest circles of power, Xi has purged or demoted his political enemies and surrounded himself with yes-men and loyalists. Like Mao he is the subject of a personality cult, and his Thought has been consecrated as gospel. If his personality cult is neither as spectacular nor ardently subscribed to as Mao’s was, that’s not for want of trying on the part of hard-working propagandists.
What’s more, Xi has abolished the two-term limits established by the immediate post-Mao leadership to prevent just such a situation in which someone might try, like Mao, like an emperor, to rule for life. The post-Mao leadership wanted to ensure an orderly process for succession. Mao’s death resulted in infighting, a planned coup and a countercoup that saw his widow and her ultra-radical group arrested and China put on the path to reform. There’s no guarantee, however, that these things end well.
Mao fostered chaos, telling China’s young people that ‘to rebel is justified’. Xi Jinping seeks stability
The problem for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is that it has never fully reckoned with its Maoist past. It is haunted by it in ways that might sabotage all it has done to guide the nation towards prosperity and strength.
The CCP has an uneasy relationship with history. It can’t maintain, as it does, that it has always been ‘Great, Glorious and Correct’ if people know about the not so-great, positively inglorious and derangedly unsound parts of its past – like the Cultural Revolution, or even the fact that Mao, the hero, the national saviour pushed the country into disaster, and kept pushing.
In 1981, under Deng Xiaoping, the Party officially repudiated the Cultural Revolution, declaring it to have been ‘catastrophic’. Mao was responsible, sure, but he’d been bamboozled by ‘counter-revolutionaries’. The Party then closed the book. Nothing more to see here, it told its people. ‘Look to the future’ was the slogan of the day. Move on.
The Party progressively censored the Cultural Revolution’s history and closed the archives. It refused pleas by prominent public figures in the 1980s to establish a museum, lest they forget. As time passed, the truth about the brutal ‘struggle sessions’, epic street battles fought with machine guns and tanks, the mass murders of whole families with ‘bad class backgrounds’, the persecution and maiming and slaughter, and by the end, the death of nearly two million people – all this history has slowly slipped from view in China itself. What’s left is relatively anodyne. Images of exuberant, fresh-faced Red Guards waving their Little Red Books make it all look like a lot of fun.
China today is a complicated place, paradise for some and hardscrabble for others. There’s a yawning gap between rich and poor, soaring youth unemployment, persistent corruption, worker exploitation and traumatic memories of Covid lockdowns. Unmoored from its true history, the Cultural Revolution has become the object of a strange nostalgia. It’s not surprising that some have romanticised the Cultural Revolution as a more innocent, idealistic, egalitarian time.
Mao’s collected works reached the bestseller list again last year. Neo-Maoism is on the rise. On the eve of Mao’s birthday in 2023, thousands of young people marched in Shaoshan, his birthplace holding signs with Cultural Revolution slogans and chanting ‘to rebel is justified’. If many were surprised, one Chinese commentator warned that they were not such outliers as you might think. It’s impossible to say. But it’s pretty clear that if the Party fails to learn from history and fails to let history be taught in the first place, the shadow of the Cultural Revolution will continue to lay heavily on China into the future.
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