In Our Time - The Cultural Revolution

Episode Date: December 17, 2020

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Chairman Mao and the revolt he led within his own party from 1966, setting communists against each other, to renew the revolution that he feared had become too bourgeois and to remove his enemies and rivals. Universities closed and the students formed Red Guard factions to attack the 'four olds' - old ideas, culture, habits and customs - and they also turned on each other, with mass violence on the streets and hundreds of thousands of deaths. Over a billion copies of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book were printed to support his cult of personality, before Mao himself died in 1976 and the revolution came to an end.The image above is of Red Guards, holding The Little Red Book, cheering Mao during a meeting to celebrate the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution at Tiananmen Square, Beijing, August 1966 WithRana Mitter Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China and Fellow of St Cross College, University of OxfordSun Peidong Visiting Professor at the Center for International Studies at Sciences Po, ParisAndJulia Lovell Professor in Modern Chinese History and Literature at Birkbeck, University of LondonProduced by Simon Tillotson and Julia Johnson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programmes. Hello, in 1966, Chairman Mao began the Cultural Revolution, an uprising with its own party, setting communists against each other with mass violence on the streets

and the overthrowing of his enemies. universities closed the students forming redguard factions to attack old ideas, old culture, old habits, old customs and each other to renew the revolution Mao feared was now two bourgeois Over a billion copies of Chairman Mao's little red book were printed to support his culture personality And hundreds of thousands were killed Before Mao himself died in 1976

And the revolution was cancelled With me to discuss the cultural revolution are Rana Misa, professor of the history and politics of modern China and fellow of St Cross College University of Oxford, Son Pé d'Aidong, visiting professor at the Centre for International Studies at Cience Poe, Paris, and Julia Lovell, professor in modern Chinese history and literature at Birkbeck University of London. Julia Lovell, let's look at some of the context before the Cultural Revolution. There was a Great Leap Forward. Can you tell us about that and why that matters?

The Great Leap Forward was a radical campaign launched by Mao in 1958 to accelerate China's industrialisation and enable China to catch up economically with the UK and the US. Now, the theory was that workers in China could be mobilised through frenzied indoctrination to work enormously long hours to increase crops and industry without new capital investment. And underpinning this campaign was crash collectivisation into communes containing tens of thousands of people, which were in turn supposed to lead to economies of scale that would generate surpluses to feed the cities and drive industrial growth. Now, Mao was very eager to increase food surpluses to sell abroad to earn foreign exchange for weapons and other industries. But the

results of the Great Leap Forward were tragic. Local officials were desperate to please party bosses and they handed over huge amounts of grain to the government. So people at the grassroots were left with almost nothing to eat. And historians estimate that 30 to 40 million died in the nationwide famine that resulted. 30 or 40 million? 30 or 40 million died in the famine. And Mao himself, despite receiving intelligence that people were starving, he refused to row back from the Great Leak Forward until 1961.

Now, the Great Leak Forward is a really important part of the backstory to the Cultural Revolution for a few reasons. First, it revealed Mao's eagerness for radical solutions and his impatience to accelerate the communist revolution. It shows also his faith in the power of the masses. He believed that they could be mobilised to do anything. And third, after the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP, and Mao had to acknowledge the famine in 1961, Mao took a backseat from day-to-day running of the country and two of his close comrades, Liu Xiauchi and Dong Xiaoping, took over economic policy and they allowed a partial return to private farming and markets, the kind of economic solutions that Mao hated. But Mao was plotting a comeback and the cultural revolution is

that comeback. There's one more question I want to ask you. Does Russia play a part in this at all? The communist neighbour of China, the two great communist states, does Russia play a part in this? Relations with the Soviet Union are another vital part of the context of the Cultural Revolution because Mao saw the Cultural Revolution as crucial for the success not only of China's Communist Revolution but also of global revolution and naturally his attitude to the Soviet Union shaped his view. Up to about 1956 the Soviet Union was a key ally to the People's Republic of China, the PRC. but after that the two states moved apart

till they became bitter enemies. When was that? His quarrel was with the way that Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin's successor, denounced Stalin's tyranny in the secret speech of February 1956. So the relationship begins to fall apart from then on. There were two things in particular that Mao disliked about de-Salinization. One was Khrushchev's repudiation of, the personality cult around Stalin. And the other thing Mao hated was Krishov's denunciation of Stalin's

radical collectivization through coercion and terror of the late 1920s. This was a policy that Mao would copy in the Great Leap Forward. And Khrushchev also changed Soviet foreign policy. He moved it towards so-called peaceful coexistence with the US. So Mao hated all this and he called the Soviets revisionists. Ron, around a minute, what was the status of Mao Zedong in the early 1960s? And was it changing and how was it changing? In retrospect, we can see that the early 1960s mark several moments when Mao clearly felt himself to be sidelined by his colleagues in the CCP, in the Chinese Communist Party, and was moving to place himself back at the forefront of Chinese politics.

Because the Great League Forward, as Julie has said, was such a disaster, so many deaths and the policy was essentially reversed, China even brought back a certain amount of semi-capitalist markets, or at least that's the way that Mao would have seen it under the leadership of Liu Xia Qi and Deng Xiaoping. They basically wanted to put Mao out to a ceremonial position, but one where he couldn't actually interfere with direct politics very much anymore. He basically wasn't having any of it. So in 1962, he launched something called the Socialist Education Campaign, which was meant to be a sort of ideological revival, basically getting to the youth of the country, getting to the workers of the country, telling them that the values of socialism were something that really had to be valued and that they should learn from various texts and that they should put them into practice in their everyday lives.

And then this was added to two years later in 1964 with a new campaign which concentrated on a different part of Chinese society and that was the army, the People's Liberation Army, which of course had been formerly known as the Red Army. It was the force that had brought Mao and his followers to power in 1949 as part of this big peasant revolution, you know, literally coming out of the countryside. And this campaign was being used to remind people that the army stood very much at the base of the party's power. As part of that, the party also did quite a lot of propaganda work to create new, attractive, charismatic characters who people could fall behind.

And one who became very famous, and even turns up now and then in Chinese propaganda today, was a man named Le Feng, who was a model soldier who basically, It was said that he had been killed in an accident at work. And after he died, they claimed they'd found his diary, which was filled every single day of it was filled with praise of Chairman Mao. And they put forward Lefung as the example of a model worker who really was the kind of dedicated communist who everyone else should aspire to be. He was nicknamed the Rustless Screw because, you know, he kept turning without having any sign of slowing down. And this was promoted by the defence minister at the time, a man called Lin Biao, who would later become very important in the case. Cultural Revolution, but he was very much behind Mao. He did not want Mao to be sidelined. So he was happy to help Mao with this education campaign in the army. And then there's a final

turning point, which in retrospect, I think we can see as the moment that the cultural revolution was really being primed to begin. And that happened on the 10th of November, 1965. Mao found that he was unable to get his own messages about the need for a much more ideological turn to society in the newspapers in Beijing, the capital, because basically the other leaders were trying to stop him from actually saying anything about this. So in Shanghai, you know, the other major city of China, he managed to get a review of a play, a play called Highway dismissed from office. Many people including Mao felt this was a sideways reference to a man named Pang Del Huai, the previous defence minister before Lin Biao, who had dared to tell Mao the truth about what was happening during that horrific great leap forward famine and had been sacked for his troubles. And basically by taking up this play and doing a savagely negative review of it, Mao and his followers were saying that this kind of ideological revisionism would no longer be permitted.

So that theatrical review actually marked the beginning of a major political event. And does it mark the beginning of the culture of personality of Mao, which became massive? This is something that did not begin just in the Cultural Revolution. Mao's prime status in Chinese communism as this key figure, is something that actually emerges, well, quite early on, actually even during World War II, when the Chinese Communist Party was based at Yanan in these sort of cave dwellings in northwest China,

away from the Japanese. But it doesn't really take off in a major way in which Mao moves from being, you know, first among equals, as you might say, to being this towering, you know, really religiously godlike figure. And it was these moves in the early 1960s that put together that personality cult. Thank you.

Sanpé-dong, what was it that Mao Zedong wanted from the Cultural Revolution? Mao wanted to reassert his control over the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP, by launching mass campaign during the Cultural Revolution. Imagine that China or the CCP is a big tree. In Mao's eyes, he is the only person who can uproot the tree, turn it upside down, and the diagnosis 8. And China, the CCP and the Chinese people must take his prescribed medicine, no matter they were sick or not. What did he want? You wanted to abolish old ways, didn't he?

Those revolutionary slogans, but the reality is another thing. That what he said wasn't necessarily what he did, is that what you're saying? That just give you one simple example, you know, All the culture, all the capitalist or bourgeois things attacked tremendously during the Cultural Revolution by Red Guards. But actually Mao himself and his wife, they watched Hollywood movies during the Cultural Revolution very frequently. When would they know people when they might be saying something wrong in the eyes of the revolution? People could never know. This is exactly the art of communist revolutions, including the Cultural Revolution.

I mean, uncertainties by design massive violence and terror are secret weapons of the communist revolution. No one is safe under authoritarian regimes. No one should feel safe. So political uncertainties by designed massive violence and terror made it's difficult for Chinese people to know whether they were in the right side or the wrong side. This is why Jacques Malé Duban stated, the revolution swallows its own children. Thank you. Julia, Julia Lovell, the Red Guards have been mentioned. Can you tell us about them?

And what did they do? Between 1965 and 1966, Mao built a power base around himself of personal loyalists, including his wife, Zhang Qing. And by 1966, this has given Mao and his allies the power to start purging people that he accused of bourgeois revisionism. So Mao's political message in wanting to start the cultural revolution is the party is full of traitors at the highest level. And the only person you can trust is Mao and the people he trusts. So in July, he comes back to Beijing after a time away from the capital to sort of take control of this new campaign that he's fermenting. And the Red Guard movement began around the same time in Beijing in the summer of 1966. It became subsequently infamous for terrorising urban populations all over China

until the movement was suppressed in 1968. Who were the Red Guards? The Red Guards began on school and university campuses, with attacks on their teachers and the party organisation within these institutions. And these attacks had been approved by Mao. So Mao had decided that his shock troops for attacking his enemies within the party should be young people, students. So these are people who'd been born around 1949,

who had grown up within the propaganda education systems of the PRC. And they'd been thoroughly indoctrinated. in his cult. And so in August, Mao publicly approved of the Red Guard. So he famously said to rebel is justified and that the Red Guard should bombard the headquarters, the headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party, as he meant. And classes were cancelled so students could focus on making cultural revolution.

So Red Guards pasted posters everywhere, denouncing traitors and reactionaries. and by early August students were starting to beat their teachers. The first teacher was killed quite soon after that and many others followed. And from the middle of August, Mao intensified Red Guard fever by hosting a series of huge rallies at Tiananmen Square in Beijing. He stood on a platform waving at millions of students, all shouting long-lived chairman Mao and waving their Mao Bibles, the little red books.

And it's at this moment, in fact, that Lim Biao, who's one of Mao's chief allies and the Minister of the Defence, it's at this point that Lim Biao told young people to destroy old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits, so to destroy the four olds. And anyone deemed to have, quote unquote, bourgeois habits, which could include keeping a pet or wearing tight trousers. You know, anyone with these kind of suspect habits could be arrested or beaten or worse. One of the things that is most notable and paradoxical about the Red Guard movement is that many of the most violent, the most enthusiastic youths for the cultural revolution were actually the ones who had come from families that had been considered actually to be of lower status in the revolutionary hierarchy. In other words, people who had actually kids who came from bourgeois backgrounds or professional backgrounds or people who had been associated with the old nationalists of Chiang Kai Shek prior to the 1949 revolution. And the reason for that, actually if one thinks about it, is somewhat logical because in the first 17 years the revolution, those people had been told that they did not have the right kind of red revolutionary credentials.

And therefore, when this moment came 17 years in, when the leader of the country was telling them that everything that their communist peers had been doing was actually wrong and had to be overthrown, it was the people who had done badly out of the system who often had the most motivation to overturn it. And again, you know, we've heard rightly about, you know, torture of teachers and people wearing foreign clothes. Winkle-picker shoes were another thing that people tended to pick out in some cities as an example of bourgeois backsliding. But just to give an idea of the massive scale of violence, in December of 1966, the first year of the Cultural Revolution, if you were looking at the wrong moment on Kangping Road in the center of Shanghai, in a major street in China's second biggest city, you would have seen 120,000 rare. guards from two rival factions battling for four hours for control of that part of the city. I mean, other red guards actually decided that their major target was going to be the army itself, the People's Liberation Army. And in 1968 in the city of Nanying down in the southwest of China, the red guards bombed

the riverfront. And essentially, we know that about 50,000 people were left homeless because so many buildings were destroyed during this Red Guard versus Army battle. Even more terrifying in the city of Changchun, some red guards and the so-called revolutionary masses managed to get some radioactive material from a research lab and were experimenting with creating their own private atomic bomb. Can I come in now, bring in pedon? Mao sent many of the red guards into the countryside.

Was it because he realised at a certain stage that he could no longer control them? For Mao, he always has some ways to control the social groups. Right? Actually, you know, the Red Guards were part of the educated youth generation, who were set down by Chairman Mao to the countryside in the 1960s and 70s. And what did he hope to achieve by that, Pedro? He said, oh, you know, those kids, they knew very little or nothing about the reality of the whole society. And they made chaos in big cities. Now it's the time to send them to the countryside

and learn from their folks who carried out the hard labor works in the countryside. One of the things that I think is worth noting is that although the moving down of this huge number of urban youth to the countryside, and one set of figures says that we're talking about 16.5 million youths being sent. I mean, it's a huge number, is that there was a genuine ideological thrust on the part of Mao to actually try and, as he saw it, educate these youths. So while there was clearly a very pragmatic, even cynical element of wanting to get rid of the troublesome youth and send them out of the cities where they were causing trouble to the countryside where they could do less,

I think it's also worth noting that there is a genuine element that you can see all through his life in Mao's thinking that the revolutionary, a revolutionary in China, a revolutionary in China, had to learn from the peasantry, had to understand what they'd gone through, feel the dirt under their fingernails. Of course, this was actually in some ways more aspiration than reality, because sending a load of quite soft city-yudes to the countryside, most of them actually ended up hating it, and most of them were not actually very good at any of the agricultural tasks they were sent to do. It is not easy for those urban youths to cope with this set-down movement.

You can imagine a 13-year-old British case, named Elsa of London who was sent to a remote village. She didn't know how to cook. She didn't have any idea of how to wash clothes without washing machines or anyone's help. She didn't like local food, which were totally different from what she used to eat. She had to carry out hard manual labor which she had never done in her previous life. She loved reading, but except the mouse little red, and other communist revolution works, she could barely get access to reading materials

in her leisure time. She would never go back to city if she married a local person. The risk of being harassed or even ripped by local quarters and a countryman was always part of her everyday life. So he starts the Cultural Revolution, he sends a lot of the red guy, after a year or two, sends a lot of the red gas to countryside. A lot of them can't cope, don't like it. Slaughterers are going on in the cities.

Where is it with this cultural revolution? How's it going? One of the striking features of this first two years of the cultural revolution is that Mao knows how to destroy, but he doesn't necessarily know how to build something in the place of what he has destroyed. And what comes through in his own utterances and actions and the kinds of support that he gives to different actors within the Cultural Revolution in this early period

is he really does not seem to have thought through the implications of many of his actions. A good example of this is that the Red Guard movement and the rebellion spreads to Shanghai in the autumn winter of 1966. And in 1967, there's this famous, early 1967, there's this famous overthrowing of the party government in Shanghai. And in its place, it's founded the so-called Shanghai commune,

so named after the famous Paris commune of the late 19th century. And now, although in theory, this is the kind of realization of the kind of mass, democracy, mobilisation of the masses that Mao seems to have wanted in the summer of 1966, he's actually horrified because he sees that this action is going to completely invalidate the disciplined, militarised party organisation that, of course, he spent his whole life working to build and he says in this very anguished way, you know, I don't care if the party organisation, you know, I don't care if the party in charge is the nationalist or a religious sect or the communist party,

but there has to be a party of some sort. Can I come to join something else, Rana? How was this having an effect, or was it having an effect, outside China? The 1960s was a year of protests around the Western world, where was Russia and all of us? Can you give us a pencil sketch of what effect this had on the rest of the world, if any? The Cultural Revolution in China was actually something that attracted huge, huge attention all around the world. And, you know, everywhere from the streets of Paris, where you had, you know, pictures of Chairman Mao being held up by students. Also, Berkeley and California

was another place where people looked at this. But the issue was that people didn't really understand in any detail what was going on at the grassroots in the Cultural Revolution, because, of course, very few people could get into China, and most of those were not the kind of people who would be involved in those sorts of student demonstrations. So on the one hand, you had all sorts of people, you know, radicals, particularly in Western capitals, who were becoming increasingly impatient with what they saw as the constraints of their own bourgeois societies and saw Mao as very different from, you know, the Soviets

who of course were also opposed to Western capitalism, but were seen as stolid and kind of neo-imperialists in their own way because they were controlling Eastern Europe. And Mao seemed like a much more sort of radical and refreshing character from the point of view of those observers. On the other side, we also now know that diplomatic missions, and there were some in China, at that time were becoming increasingly alarmed at what they saw.

I mean, this was the era when the small British mission in Beijing was essentially besieged during that time and actually part of it was burnt down to the ground. And the Soviets who, of course, were no longer allied to the Chinese, as Julia was saying earlier, but still maintained a diplomatic presence, a small one in Beijing, found themselves, you know, basically being insulted, even I think having things thrown at them when they went through the streets of Beijing. And all of this got back to Moscow, got back to the major camps, and people found themselves essentially saying, we have no idea what's going on.

Because the cultural revolution was, and I think in some ways, remains politically unique. It's a political event unlike any other that's happened in any other communist society. And at the time, the rest of the world found it exciting or found it terrifying, but it found it above all baffling to interpret. Pedon, can I like to ask you? In 1971, Lin Bayo was killed in an air crash. Why was that important? Oh, that's for many educated use, all the ordinary Chinese people. That accent was a big political signal, which told them that the revolutionary promise was not there.

because they knew very well before the crash of Lin Biao in 1971, everyone knew Lin Biao was chairman Mao's successor and the most friendly friend within the Chinese Communist Party system. But he became a traitor that make people realize what they have the knew about the revolution was not true. So do you think, come back to you, Julia, for a moment, do you think that Lin Bauer was killed in an air crash? Was that deliberate?

It's absolutely right that Lin Biao is one of Mao's key allies in launching the cultural revolution. He has a really important role to play, also in building the Mao cult in the early 1960s. After all, he's the one who creates and edits the Mao Bible, the little red book. And he becomes Mao's second. and in command in July

1966, and he's the one who really ousts Liu Shao Chi as Mao's sort of heir apparent. But it seems to be that sort of by 1969, Mao has begun to distrust Lin Biel. We think because of Lin's power over the army, it's really important to point out that despite Mao's utopian idea about the Cultural Revolution as mass democracy,

Actually, the most important political upshot of the Cultural Revolution by 1969 is the strengthening of the military. So by this point, China has effectively become a military dictatorship. So Lin being Minister of Defense, being head of the army, has a huge amount of power. So trust was breaking down between Mao and Lin by the early 1970s. And as Paedong says, there's this dramatic and mysterious place. crash in September 1971 when Lin Biao and members of his family die when the plane goes down heading towards China's great enemy, the Soviet Union. There are rumors that Lin and his son had been plotting to assassinate Mao and that Lin fled when the

conspiracy was revealed. We still don't know exactly what happened but I think what we can say is that their impact is clear. So after Lin Biao fled and died the credibility of Mao and the Cultural Revolution took a major hit. You know, Mal was supposed to be a godlike figure. How could he have made such a mistake as to select as his heir, a traitor and a would-be murderer? And Lin Biao was one of the chief architects of the Cultural Revolution. He'd now been killed. How could we trust him? So many were shocked and revolted. But also others felt relief, I think. You know, perhaps this exhausting cultural revolution was going to come to an end. Richard Nixon's visit in 1972, Rahnemite, much made of, turning in an opera amongst other things,

did that have anything to do with ameliorating the Cultural Revolution, bring it into the wider world? What was the real consequence of that as far as you're concerned? It's a really important turning point, and it does mark an important moment in the ending of the Cultural Revolution. Essentially, after the death of Lin Biao, the former Foreign Minister, we've mentioned, Chinese domestic and foreign policy was in turmoil, but there was also a big problem, that the relationship with the Soviet Union had become more and more brittle. In fact, there was the danger actually of a war breaking out on the Osuri River, on the border between the Soviet Union and China in 1969.

While that had calmed down a bit by the early 1970s, it's now clear that various figures, including quite likely Mao himself, may have thought that moving towards opening diplomatic relations with America, which had been frozen ever since the revolution of 1949, was now a good move not only in its own right, also because both the Americans and the Chinese distrusted the Soviets more than they distrusted each other. But of course by doing that, it was opening the way for China to reenter the wider world.

It had of course entered the United Nations where it hadn't held the China seat that had been with Taiwan. So it entered the United Nations in 1971 that year before. And then the opening to America came as another sign that that slow but steady move towards opening to the outside world would take place. It wasn't straightforward because various people including Jiang Qing, the wife of Mao, were actually very against the idea of opening up. And we think that figures like Joe Enlai, the Prime Minister, who's generally considered

to be more pragmatic, were much more in favour of the opening to the outside world. But we do also know that Jiang Qing took one advantage of the opening to America, which is apparently she asked for a copy of the Hollywood film The Day of the Jackal to be supplied so that she can watch it in her private cinema, or at least so it's reported. And you can certainly in retrospect to see it as an important. moment for the opening up of China to the world. Pédon, the goal of a cultural revolution was to root out bourgeois practices, as I understand it, and corruption. Did that, did they succeed with that? Did Mao succeed with that, Pedon?

No, it didn't and will not. How could you root out Prussia's practices in China if Chairman Mao, his wife and some of Chinese elites watch the Hollywood movies during the Cultural Revolution, as we already discussed. And how could you crack down Western and Chinese classical novels if people practiced a series of smart underground cultural activities? And how could you ban capitalist clothing if people wore them under Mao suits or military uniforms which were popular and legitimate outfits in the Mao era? So, I mean, in terms of corruption, my research shows that the national-wide corruption after 1949 came from the set-down movement. Let's take Elsa's case as an example.

If she was born in an elite family, her parents could make every policy reasonable excuse to keep her in her home city. If she was set to the countryside, her parents could make every policy reasonable excuse to keep her home city. her parents would use their personal connections, Guanxi, to transfer her to a better place with a better life situation if all these ways didn't work out, her parents would try very hard to eventually bring her back to city as soon as possible. Of course, before going back to her home city, she would be nicely treated in the countryside thanks to her parents' personal connection so as for ordinary educated use they would save money from their everyday

expenses to buy gifts and offer to local cordes who had the power to allow them to go back to their home's place if Elsa had nothing to offer she had to give herself to local cordes as a sexual bribe julia lobel how did the um Cultural Revolution, or did it affect the Cold War? The Cultural Revolution can be seen as the beginning of the end of the Cold War. In a couple of ways. First of all, the Cultural Revolution weakened the global communist movement because this campaign was so focused on attacking the revisionism of the Soviet Union.

So the Cultural Revolution led to the splintering of communist parties all over the world, but especially in the developing world, which split into pro-Soviet and more radical pro-Maoist groupings. But even in Europe, the region of strongest Soviet influence, even in Eastern Europe, some national parties took the opportunity to distance themselves from Moscow's control.

And when you have this extraordinary spectacle from the early 1970s of both the Soviet Union and China separately trying to make up with the US, when you have this unedifying scene of communist superpowers fighting with each other and considering the leader of the capitalist world a lesser enemy, this inevitably devalues communism as a global ideology. And there's one other impact which I'd mention.

The Chinese under Mao through the 1960s denounced the Soviets for compromising with the US. They accused the Soviets of being the servants of imperialism. The Soviets then felt compelled to be far more energetic and generous in aiding anti-colonial, post-colonial insurgences in the developing world. And you could argue that Soviet aid budgets then become very overstretched at the expense of the domestic economy back in the Soviet Union. And dissatisfaction at the failings of the domestic economy in the 1980s severely weakened the Soviet regime at home in the run-up to the communist collapse between 89. and 91. So there's a long-range impact too. Rana, how is the Cultural Revolution seen now in China? The Cultural Revolution came to an end with the death of Mao in 1976

and some of its major perpetrators, the so-called Gang of Four, were put on trial in 1981, the same year that it was officially rejected by the Chinese Communist Party. They put out a formal statement, a very rare thing on one of their own policies, saying it had been a mistake. But now, you know, more than 40 years later, I think there's an ambivalence in China about it. Very large numbers of people, particularly those who are in the middle classes and what Mao would have called the bourgeois, see it as the most horrific time in recent Chinese memory. If they're old enough to remember it, then I've heard plenty of people.

One friend of mine has basically told me about how the house that she lives in is next door to the one that essentially her grandfather was picked up by, you know, guards and taken away. And she never saw him again in 1968. So that's a commonplace in the collective memories of many, many, families. But more interestingly, in terms of paradox, many people who are far too young to remember the Cultural Revolution have started to feel very nostalgic for that era because they've created a sort of invented version of the Cultural Revolution in their minds where the violence never really took place. But instead, the ideological purity of Mao is seen as a contrast to what

they regard as the sort of rather degenerate capitalist consumerism of today's China, which of course is run by a Communist Party, but it is a highly market. democratized economy. And these so-called neo-Maoists, who Julia, of course, has written about, operate on the internet. They have their own magazines. They have plenty of very lively and often very angry discussions. And those groups have actually managed to create quite a following for themselves, in which they argue that actually the problem with today's Chinese Communist Party is not that essentially it's, you know, veering, it's too dictatorial or too authoritarian. They argue that it's not really Maoist enough and that going back to the

some of the values of the cultural revolution is something they ought to do. And you find actually that that is a more widespread view in China than you might expect, even though the mainstream, I think, is still to reject the cultural revolution as a time of real horror. Pejong, what's your view of the longer-term impact of the cultural revolution? As a Chinese, I would like to divide the long-term impact of the cultural revolution into three layers. I mean three castrations. Please forgive me for using this word. Firstly, institutional castrations.

You may know there were power struggles between two party lives. Liu Xiaou was originally groomed as Mao's successor. He died under harsh treatment during the Cultural Revolution. Lin Biel's accident was another case in point. China will never be a free society if we don't build institutional pillars of respecting and protecting market economy, individual property rights, separation of powers and freedom sought. Secondly, spiritual castrations. People always say intellectuals are the social conscience of a society. How can you expect a society is an open society? if its intellectuals have to kneel down before power for bread.

When Chairman Mao's personal opinions became the only truth, many individuals didn't believe they could also have their own opinions, and it continues after the Mao era. Thirdly, cultural castrations. After the successive social campaigns of the Mao era, in particular the Cultural Revolution, it has become a new normalcy that right and wrong actually has no longer important. What's important?

Leaders or those who have power or big money, their opinions or attitudes matter. Thank you very much. Finally, Rana, do you think in some way this was a great energizer? Because of this, even the collapse of it, the confusion of it, the turmoil, the millions and millions of people, people killed and so on. Just a couple of generations on, really. There we go. It's this enormous, in economic terms, empire. I think in the end, I can't call it an energizer because while there was a huge amount of political energy placed into the culture revolution, and it is a unique historical event, I think there's nothing really to compare with it that I can think of. The level of

destruction, both in terms of people's lives, I mean, you know, more than one and a half million, maybe more like 2 million who were killed and something close to 30 million being persecuted during that time. So the energy was being turned in an almost entirely malevolent direction, I think, particularly on the bourgeois side. And the other reason I would say is that one legacy of the cultural revolution has been a politics which we see today in China, which is terrified above anything else of mobilisation from below. People sometimes accuse the current Chinese Communist Party of wanting to bring back Maoism. I don't think that's really true. But one of the elements that definitely don't want to bring back is that idea that you might stir up the masses,

stir up the students, stir up the workers, and get them, you know, essentially rioting in the streets. And the level of control in Chinese politics today, I think, is in some ways, the longest and most severe reaction to the era of the Cultural Revolution. So if anything, I would say that the Cultural Revolution in the long term has been a damper of political energy. It has not been an enabler of it. Finally, then, Julia, would you agree with that? I would also add that the cultural revolution, for example, in economic terms, serves as a negative example within post-Mao China. I once had a conversation with a former Red Guard, who later became a diplomat in the Post-Mao Ministry of Foreign Affairs Corps. And he said to me that, you know, to understand how China comes out of the cultural revolution,

China has a saying that things turn into their opposite when they reach an extreme, i.e. that the cultural revolution expressed to many Chinese people the bankruptcy of the idea of absolute political puritanism, this idea of absolute egalitarianism, of economic outcome that Mao so fetishize. And so the negative example, the catastrophes of the cultural revolution, according to this former Red Guard, told the Chinese people very plainly that they needed to walk a different road. And in some ways, he almost seemed to be implying

that he was thanking the Cultural Revolution for turning China onto a road of economic reforms, whereas the Soviet Union in the 1980s did not have that same sort of specter of political catastrophe and so did not feel impelled to reform with the intensity that China did. Well, thank you very much. Thanks to Julia Lovell, Sun Pendong and Rana Mitter. We take a break on Christmas Eve and we'll be back on New Year's Eve to discuss eclipses in astronomy, history and myth. Thanks for listening. podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Anything that was not said that you would like to have been said?

I'd add one sort of element. I think it was just because we had to slightly skate over the second half of the Cultural Revolution to get to the end. In a sense, it's not the one where the showy stuff happens. You know, the Red Guards is really what you might call the marquee element of the Cultural Revolution. But actually the number of deaths in the second part from 1969 to 76, when the People's Liberation Army are really in charge of China actually sees more deaths and more destruction in some ways than even the Red Guard phase. And Deng Xiaoping, who's thought of at least in the later period

as this great moderate, actually shows a really kind of savage hand at that time. He's put in charge of part of China in 1975. And when there's a small village in Yunnan, which rises up against his rule, he basically sends in the troops and shoots 1,000 1,000000 people dead. So if you're wondering where Tiananmen Square in 1989, came from. Actually looking at Deng Xiaoping back in 1975 in the Cultural Revolution is quite a good place to see the beginning of some of that horrific experience. Julia? I'd say a few words about the impact on China's economy because the Cultural Revolution

really transformed the economy. That's what I was trying to get it in a rather clumsy way when I said did it energize it. It was the economy around Shanghai. But as long as you bring it to bear on this, it'll get out all the same. Could you talk about that? Well, as you would expect, a huge amount of political chaos is very destabilising to industrial and agricultural production, which in the most turbulent phases of the cultural revolution decreases by about 10%. But there's an even bigger sort of physical impact on the economy. So in 1964 as part of Mao's ongoing war with the Soviets and the Americans, he starts to argue very seriously that the Soviets and Americans are about to bomb China and that China needs to protect its industry,

which is at that point very much centred in the developed East. So factories on the East Coast were told to pack up and rebuild in the poor, isolated west of the country. And so between 1966 and 1975, the so-called third front, which is what this project is called, swallowed up almost half of national investment. And economists broadly agree that this was a huge misuse of capital. And one economist has argued that industrial output was up to 15% below what it would have been in the 1980s if the third front, which of course was driven by political considerations, hadn't happened.

But you also get at that time at the beginning of the 1970s the beginnings of the market economy. And people tend to use a shorthand that China's market economy sort of emerged in 1978, you know, when Deng Xiaoping took over China. But actually, we know that Joe Enlai, the prime minister, was sort of turning either a blind eye or at least a sort of benevolent smile towards the emergent or particularly agricultural markets by the early 70s, simply because actually the planned economy wasn't working. And the experience of the Great Leap Forward, which we started with, reminded people that starvation was a real possibility and that somehow people had to be fed and that markets were one way to do that. So China's market revolution, you know, it changes the world, actually begins during the cultural revolution itself. I would like to see a few words about the Western youths who identified themselves with the Red Guard and Mao. the 1968. So I think, you know, the issue lies not in the phenomenon itself, but beyond it, and it has been long in the making. When things become bad, when social problems and conflicts

turn critical, people tend to search and find new resources not only from their own history, but also from exterior. This was part of the story of revolutionary identification with a cultural revolution in the turbulent 1968 in many Western countries. However, our Chinese proverb has well said, mirror flower water moo, meaning flower in the mirror, mu on the water. You can feel the huge tension between imagined China and the real China. In 1974, how long Bacht traveled in China as part of a small delegation of distinguished leftist French philosophers and the literary figures.

They arrived in China just as the last stage of the Cultural Revolution was getting on the way. Poor Holong, he was honest about what he saw in China. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you, Julia. Thank you, Péodong, thank you, Rana, and I hope you enjoy what you hear when it comes on Earth. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Hello, Louis Thruh here.

And I just wanted to hijack this podcast to tell you that I'm back with another series of my podcast, grounded with Louis Theroux. In case you hadn't noticed, COVID hasn't gone away, and because of travel restrictions, neither have I. So I've rounded up the likes of Michaela Cole, Frankie Boyle, Oliver Stone, Sia and FCA Twigs for another set of eclectic and thought-provoking conversations. Yes, I'm still grounded with me, Louis Theroux, available on BBC Sounds.