Rev Left Radio - Modern China Pt. 3: The Great Leap Forward & Cultural Revolution w/ Ken Hammond

Episode Date: May 23, 2024

In this episode of Guerrilla History, we get into part 3 of our 4 part miniseries on modern Chinese history featuring Ken Hammond (and guest host Breht O'Shea of Revolutionary Left Radio) with an amazing discussion of The Great Leap Forward and The Cultural Revolution!  If you haven't already listened to part 1 of the series, on the Taiping and Boxer Rebellions, or part 2 on The Chinese Revolution & Civil War, be sure to go back and check those out because we pick up right where we left off last time.  With these final two episodes in the series, we enter the period where various ideological traditions diverge in their analysis of the events, but regardless of what ideological background you come from, we encourage you to listen to these and engage with the information, as we believe the information will help you deepen your own analysis regardless of your ideological position.   Ken Hammond is Professor of East Asian and Global History at New Mexico State University. He has been engaged in radical politics since his involvement in the anti-war movement at Kent State in 1968-70.  Ken is also the author of the book China’s Revolution & the Quest for a Socialist Future. ----------------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left Radio

You don't remember den, Ben, boo? The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and welcome to this. Guerrilla History, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm one of your co-hosts,

Henry Hukimaki. Unfortunately not joined by my other co-host, Professor Adnan Hussein, who of course is a historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada, as he is still out of commission, but he will be back for the next installment of this series, he has assured me. So listeners do stay tuned to for that. I am fortunately joined by our returning guest host who has been joining me for this entire mini-series thus far. And again, listeners, if you're a long-time guerrilla history listener, he is not only going to be familiar as being a guest host of this series, but Brett O'Shea was also a co-host of guerrilla history for the first three and a half years of the show's history,

which went up until just a couple weeks ago. Hello, Brett. It's nice to have you back on the show. of course, Brett is host of Revolutionary Left Radio and the Red Menace podcast. Absolutely. I'd love to be back. Hopefully we'll make this a normal thing going forward. So, yeah, and I'm very, very excited for today's topic, as always. Absolutely. So listen, as you see, Brett has already been back three times as a guest host,

despite having only left the show about two weeks ago. So, as you can see, this was a somewhat amicable breakup. We are still friends. We didn't, like, delete his phone number in our phones. It's all good. And he will be back. No struggle sessions. No struggle sessions.

No, absolutely not. As I mentioned, this is a mini-series and we have a returning guest for it. But before I introduce our guest and the mini-series, I just want to remind listeners that you can help support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like this one by going to Patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. And you can keep up to date with what the show is putting out as well as what the hosts are putting out, individually by following us on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-L-A-U-Pod. But as I mentioned,

this is a continuation of our ongoing history of modern China miniseries featuring the one-and-only Ken Hammond. Hello, Ken. It's nice to have you back on the show again. Good to be here. Thanks for having me in. Of course. It's a pleasure, and I know that

we've really enjoyed the first two conversations of this series. And we are really, really looking forward to the conversation today. So to remind the listeners, Ken is professor of East Asian and global history at New Mexico State University, an author of the book, China's Revolution and the quest for a socialist future. And also to remind the listener, since this is part three of our mini series on modern Chinese history, we did have kind of a preamble episode or an introduction to modern Chinese history back in the fall of last year with Ken titled China's Revolution. and the quest for a socialist future. And then the first two installments of this mini-series were on the Taiping and Boxer Rebellions,

as well as the second installment being on the Chinese Civil War and Revolution. I highly recommend you pausing this episode and going back and listening to those if you have not already because we are going to be picking up more or less where we left off. Today, the topic is going to be the Cultural Revolution. Now, before we talk about the Cultural Revolution itself, I think, as again, historical and materialist, it's important for us to understand how these events feed into one another and how the material conditions of the society also feed into what unfolds and how it unfolds. So we left off in the last episode in 1949 upon the conclusion of the Chinese Revolution.

I would like before we get to the Cultural Revolution, if you can pick us up at 1949, on the success of the revolution and take us up to the Great Leap Forward, which if we were going to have another episode of this mini-series, it probably would have been on the Great Leap Forward individually, but we will try to touch on it at least a little bit in this episode. So Ken, I know a lot of people will have heard of the Great Leap Forward. Can you talk about how those conditions from 1949 until the beginning of the Great Leap Forward influenced,

not only the idea that they needed to have a great leap forward, but also the way that they visualized that unfolding and the way that it actually was implemented and unfolded. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the great lead forward is in many ways the culmination of a process of agricultural collectivization, the transformation of agricultural production from what had been a kind of commercial capitalist system where there are lots of large. landlords and, you know, they were producing grain especially for the market, you know, so there was a process of, you know, wealth extraction and all that going on, to try to transform

Chinese agriculture into socialist agriculture, collective agriculture. And so it's the great leap we can see as kind of, as I say the culmination of that. So let me fill in the background on how that developed and put that also in the context of what we call the source. struggle between two lines, which was an overall sort of dynamic within that first decade of the People's Republic from 1949 to 59 of questions about how the process of socialist construction overall in both the agricultural and the industrial sectors and across the economy, how should that process go forward? Okay. When liberation comes in 1949, of course, Communist Party finds itself in a position of embarking on this great adventure of building a new country,

building a new China. And that's a lot of the rhetoric that's used at the time. And the goal, of course, is to create a socialist and eventually a communist society in which the value, the wealth produced by the work that people perform is equitably and justly distributed among those who have produced it, rather than being siphoned off into the pockets of, you know, the owners of the means of production or something like that. But how do you do that? How do you take an economy such as that of China? And in 1949, China was, you know, devastated. I mean, there had been years of war against Japanese occupation. There had been the civil war. there was a lot of destruction. There had been a lot of looting. Foreign companies had continued to extract wealth from the country. There were millions and millions of displaced people around the country, you know, refugees from fighting in different areas, things like that. So they faced some very, very serious challenges. But there was a sense that they had a, you know, they knew where they wanted to go. They knew where they wanted to get to. But the process of building socialism, the

process of going forward. How do you develop the economy? These were things that were, you know, being going to be debated. They could draw on some experience, especially, of course, the experience of the Soviet Union. But conditions in China and the history of the revolution in China were different from those of the Soviet Union, from those of Russia. And so it was a matter of, you know, trying to figure out the best way forward. And as the 50s progressed, two basic orientations, emerged within the leadership of the party and within the party overall. Of course, the foundation in terms of the agricultural sector was land reform. Land reform was begun.

Of course, there had been experiments with that all the way back in the Jiangxi Soviet in the early 1930s, certainly during the Yanon period, and in the liberated zones in the northeast, when the revolution is approaching its victory in 1948. Land reform begins in a serious way in 1948 and is carried through across the country by the end of 1952. Land reform involved basically, you know, taking land from landowners, landlords, who had vastly more land than they could cultivate. And redistributing that excess land, landlords were left with their own plots of land. They were left with enough land to support themselves and their families. But the excess land, the land beyond what they could cultivate, the land that they had, you know, had cultivated through tenant farmers or through day laborers or through, you know, what Chairman Mao described as the agricultural proletariat, that land was then redistributed amongst those people, amongst those who had no land or who didn't have enough land to support themselves, so that there was a leveling out, a more equitable distribution of land, the primary asset,

of agricultural productivity, right? And that process, as I say, that's carried through by the end of 1952 on a nationwide basis. Parallel to that, there's also the transformation of the urban economy, the transformation of industry, transformation of banking and finance. And this was carried out in an incremental way, you know, through the 1950s where the enterprises that had been privately owned are at first brought into a kind of public-private partnership, if you will. The capitalists who owned enterprises still got income from them for a while. They still participated in management, but people, you know, either employees coming up through the ranks or cadres coming in from the party, you know, learned to run these operations, learned to manage enterprises. And over time,

the ownership of the enterprises was transferred to the state. Capitalists often stayed on in managerial roles. Some chose not to. Some chose to retire or step away, you know, take their money that they had and, you know, not be involved anymore. But it's an incremental process of the transformation of ownership into socialist ownership on the part of the urban kind of, as I say, industrial and banking and finance sectors. And that process goes on, and, you know, we can look at various aspects of that, perhaps more in the next episode, the final episode where we talk about the reform period. But it's in the agricultural sector, which is, of course, especially at the time of liberation, this was where, you know, 85 plus percent of the population lived and worked. China was still overwhelmingly an agrarian economy, a commercial capitalist agrarian economy, but, you know, a farming economy. And so what happened there was going to be critical. The production of an agricultural surplus beyond what was needed to feed people was critical for the development of the socialist industrial sector, because that was the only place where resources for investment were likely to be generated within the domestic economy. So making agricultural production more productive, more efficient, was a fundamental. challenge and a fundamental task for building the socialist economy overall.

And so by 1952, the party and the government and the people embark upon a process of agricultural collectivization. And this, again, proceeded an incremental way through the 50s. At first, they formed what were called cooperatives, APCs, agricultural producers, cooperatives. and at first these were these were very low-level things you know a few families in a village would get together and pool the tools that they had pool their labor you know uh they would each retain their their own private plots the land which had been allocated to them through land reform uh but they would cooperate they would function as a as a little collective uh to enhance productivity and that worked uh 52 53 productivity across the country rises. The harvests are bigger. There's more food available for immediate consumption so people can eat more and improve, you know, their own livelihoods. But there's also grain available now surplus grain that can be sold in the international markets to raise money that can be used to invest in capital equipment for the industrial economy. So these two tracks are running in tandem

with one another. By 54, 55, they move to what are called higher level. APCs, agricultural producers, cooperatives, where now a whole village, or maybe even a couple of villages will get together. And now they start to transform the ownership of land, not so much the ownership, but the management of land into more collective units. So all the land will be farmed as an integrated, you know, space. The little dividing areas, you know, historically If you've ever looked at images of Chinese land ownership before liberation, before land reform, even villagers that had some land, there was all these little tiny strips of land. And they were separated from one another by these built-up walkways that you could go out, you know,

to your little plot of land to work on. Now they erased those. They leveled out the land, which increased the amount of land that could be farmed, and also meant that the process of farming land could be carried out. more efficiently, more effectively. And once again, there's a jump in productivity. Harvests are bigger again. Arvests are, you know, the amount of grain being brought in. Again, more food for people to eat and more surplus to be sold to raise capital for investment in the industrial economy. Finally, by 1957 or so, moving into 58, they start to move up to another

higher level of integration to collectives, not just cooperatives, but collectives. And now the ownership of land starts to be merged, starts to come together into these collective units. And these are usually based on groups of villages, you know, larger units than the cooperatives, but still, you know, basically smaller local, local collectives. And then finally in 58, there's, in certain areas in Anhui province and Hube province in central China, there is a step towards a higher level of integration. And this is the beginning of the creation of what come to be called the people's communes. And a commune was a larger scale endeavor. Some of these could be the size of a county, right, that would encompass a number of townships, right? So you had different

levels of sort of administrative organization, right? And with the communes, the idea was that there would be a large-scale merging of productive activity, that you could mobilize labor, you could have the land in big fields rather than these tiny little plots, and you would get economies of scale that would ramp up productivity to an even higher level. And this is the point at which in the summer of 58, Chairman Mao is out, you know, not by himself, obviously, with lots of other officials doing inspections. And he sees these first experimental communes in Anhui and Hebei. And he says, people's communes are good, right?

And that becomes a headline in the national media. And all across the country now, people are like, well, let's get with this, you know. And so communes start to be. be formed. Producers' collectives start merging with one another. And pretty soon, there are, there come to be 75,000 communes spread across the country. Okay. That again increases agricultural productivity. The harvests in 58 are the biggest yet. Okay. So this is a step-by-step process of producing larger and larger units, productive units, to achieve economies of scale, to generate higher harvest, more food for people to eat, more surplus, to be sold to raise capital

for investment. It's a steady progression. But then we get, that takes us to the threshold of the Great Leap, okay, because the Great Leap is going to start in the fall of 58, 59, and into 1960. That's that's the that's the parameters of of what we normally think of as as the great lead forward. And the great lead forward again is the kind of to kind of interaction or interplay between agricultural production, the drive to enhance agricultural production and industrial development. Most industrial development of course was in big factories in the cities, the automobile industry, the railroads, the, you know, building various kinds of equipment. It's largely directed at what's called heavy machinery rather than light industry,

industry to produce more consumer goods. Certainly there's an expansion of consumer goods, but that's not the primary drive in this first decade. It's basically to build the machinery that would be needed to achieve a level of industrial, development where consumer goods could begin to be produced in greater volume, okay? But at first, you know, it's focus on building the core industrial economy. But there's also, with the Great Leap, there's a vision that goes all the way back to Marx and Engels writing in the Communist Manifesto of overcoming, as they say, overcoming

the dichotomy between rural and urban, between farming, and industrial production to try to create more integrated economic activity. And this comes to be ridiculed, you know, by the critics of China and of the Great Leap, as, you know, the backyard furnaces, the backyard steel furnaces, right? And there were problems, there were technological problems and challenges, no doubt with things like that. But the vision, the idea of this was not just, you know, building backyard steel furnaces, but it was all kinds of primary production, primary industrial production, making goods in the villages as well, setting up little factories, and eventually, after an interlude, shall we

say, that we'll talk about more. When the reform era comes, and we'll talk about this in the next episode, village township enterprises become one of the leading edges in the early development of the reform period. So this idea that gets ridiculed when it's associated with the Great Leap actually becomes fundamental to the reform period when that's getting underway in the 80s. And we can look at that when we get down the road to that episode. But that's what's involved in the Great Leap, an effort to further drive agricultural production, to further increase agricultural productivity, and to contribute to industrial development both by generating an agricultural. surplus that can be sold for capital for investment and by diversifying investment to some extent into the villages as well. That's the vision. That's the goal. You know, there's all this

rhetoric about overtaking Britain in industrial production and iron production in particular, you know, within a few years, eventually, you know, overtaking the United States, etc., etc. The great lead forward, though, runs into problems. It runs into serious problems. It's not, you know, the critics, again, you know, they talk about the greatly forward as being this sort of intentionally produced famine that, you know, Chairman Mao imposed upon the Chinese people. And this is just a nutty, you know, a characterization, you know, it doesn't make any sense on any kind of rational basis, and it doesn't accord with the factual reality of what took place. But there were very, very serious problems.

problems that emerge. And basically what happens, there's kind of two components to this. One of which is nature, you know, one of which is basically the weather. The 50s had been a prolonged period of really good weather. Agricultural productivity is enhanced through collectivization, but it's also facilitated by the fact that the weather was great. You know, they had the right amount of rain, the right amount of sunshine, the condition. The condition the material conditions for production were essentially perfect throughout that period

of cooperativization and collectivization. In 1959, the weather goes bad. There's too much rain in some areas, not enough in others. Probably, and I know the climate scientists look at all this kind of stuff, related to one of these El Nino episodes

out in the Pacific that disrupts weather patterns. We see these throughout Chinese history, throughout Asian history. You know, this is a, it's now we understand the mechanisms of this a lot better than people did at that time or earlier times. But for a variety of reasons, the weather is bad. And so that's going to put a whack on production. But the other problem comes about through what we might call the bureaucratization

of the state and the party. In 1949, when liberation takes place, the Communist Party had about a million members. By 1959, it has over 10 million members. That's a huge expansion of the party in the course of the 1950s. And this was necessary. The state, as well, goes through tremendous growth through this period, because people were needed to run the enterprises, to staff the banks, to work, you know, as managers in the agricultural sector.

The number of cadres on the ground out there across the country has to grow if, you know, the building of the socialist economy is going to be properly managed or managed at all. But that entails a lot of people coming into the party who, you know, are not necessarily fully motivated by a desire for socialism, by communist consciousness, by being devoted to Marxist theory and practice. people see the party as the guiding force of taking China forward and they want to be associated with that many of the millions of them joining the party because they want to work

for a new China. They want to work to build a better future. But others may have joined the party because they thought that was where the action was because they thought it was good for their careers because they thought that that would be materially beneficial to them. These are people that we think of as

opportunists, careerists, there were probably a lot of those that had come into the party as well. What happens, fall and winter of 58 to 59, and especially in the course of 59, is that as harvests are coming in, the central government, the planners, because it's a planned economy, have set certain targets for, you know, production. As production comes in, most places are actually meeting those targets, maybe even slightly exceeding those targets, but many cadres on the ground think, well, this figure is really good, but if I added 1%, it might look a little better, you know. And that, you know, 1%, okay, it's not a big distortion. So they do that, and it goes up to the next level, maybe from the township to the county.

And maybe a cadre there thinks, whoa, this looks really good, but it would. would look even better, and I would look even better, if it was just one percent more. So they add a percent. And then maybe it goes up to the provincial level, and maybe they add a percent. And then it goes to the national. Pretty soon, you have distortions in production figures, which are problematic in the first place, because it appears that there's more grain in the countryside than there actually is. So the procurant level is increased, which is to say the amount of grain being taken out of the countryside for the cities and the markets is increased. And that extracts more grain than is sustainable in the countryside. This is why there come to be shortfalls of food in the

countryside, because too much grain has been extracted based upon these distorted figures. The other problem is that those distorted figures then become the base for setting production targets for the coming year, for the coming harvest. So you have problems both with too much grain being taken out and with expectations being excessively raised. So the harvest, the spring harvests in 59, where the weather has been bad, are not good. The harvests decline. But, In order to meet targets, cadres, many cadres, report that they've actually hit those targets or even exceeded those targets. So once again, there's excessive procurement, right?

And now people, more and more people are going hungry, right? This is the point in the summer of 1959 when the light, you know, the light bulbs start to go on. And it happens in an interesting way, which is that a lot of people in the villages are writing to their sun. who are in the People's Liberation Army and they're stationed in various places around the country and they're writing to them and saying things are really, we're having some trouble here in the village. You know, there's not enough food.

People are hungry. Some people have died, right? That word trickles up through the command of the People's Liberation Army. And it is they who begin to report this to the broader party. They're like, well, we're hearing all this bad stuff, you know. So you have a contradiction. emerged between what people are reporting informally, you know, through these letters to their

kids in the Army. And the reports that are coming up through the bureaucratic hierarchy, right? They convene a great meeting in the summer of 1959, what's called the Lushan Plenum. Lushan is a town in central China. And the party leadership meets there. And this is where some very serious confrontations take place. Pung to Hawaii, who, was the defense minister and a marshal of the Red Army, a hero of the Korean War, as well as the revolution, becomes very critical of Chairman Mao. He associates the policies of the Great League with Chairman Mao, not incorrectly. But he goes about his criticism in a somewhat problematic way. He writes a letter

which he addresses to Chairman Mile, but he circulates it amongst a number of cadres at the plenon before he sends it to the chairman. And so, you know, he's kind of building a faction against Chairman Mao.

The chairman, when he, you know, hears about this and he hears about it before he receives the letter, he sees this as, you know, as a as undermining not just a greatly forward, but undermining his position. And so you have this political conflict that takes place at the Lushan Plenum. There's a lot of heated debate. There's a lot of discussion trying to figure out what

exactly is going on, trying to get to the bottom of things, because, you know, these reports have come in and they've been accepted, but now the understanding comes to be that they're not accurate. So how do you get accurate reports? They have to send investigators out into the countryside. And this begins a process that will culminate until 1961 of trying to get accurate figures once again. And that requires making a lot of cadres who have been reporting these, what they think of is just little distortions. They got to fess up. They got to face the reality that they have contributed to this very bad situation. Lots of people died.

Now, you hear these ridiculous figures, 20 million, 60 million people died. those are that's ridiculous but maybe 10 or 12 million people did die and that's you know that is a great disaster uh you know many good things are achieved in the great leap there's a lot of infrastructure development a lot of building of reservoirs for controlling flooding and things like that and the legacy of those achievements persists all right down to the present day so we don't want to see the great leap as a as a just a colossal failure it's not that but it is a failure in terms of of the bureaucratic distortion of the reporting of these figures and the mortality that flows from that. So we have to be, you know, we have to be honest about this. We're historical

materialists. We have to deal with those realities. But it's not, you know, a famine imposed on the Chinese people by Chairman Mao for some phrased egotistical reason, you know. It's a problem within the functioning of the party, the party as a bureaucratic organization. And Mao's been critical of that. He's been fearful of that all along. He writes, in the 50s, he writes a big critique of what he sees as the excessive bureaucratization

of the Soviet party. He's very critical of certain Soviet policies and actions, and he's fearful that that's what's going to happen in China. And now, the experience of the Great Leap demonstrates that that's exactly the danger that has to be guarded against, that the party, we think about what we talked about in the previous episode, the party and the army as instruments of the people, not the people as instruments of the party, right? But that problem, that problem of bureaucracy, that's what emerges with the Great League, and that's what sets the stage

for the struggles that are going to take place in the 1960s. Yeah, absolutely. Before we get there, I have a very small follow-up, and then I know Brett has a much bigger one than I do. Mine is mostly based on narrative and historiography, which is something that I think a lot about. And Ken, you're somebody who's intimately familiar with the state of historiography in both American academia or Western academia more generally, as well as in Chinese academic circles, which is something that I am not unfortunately privy to as I don't speak Mandarin. But what I'm particularly curious about, like I said, it's a rather small point is that when we talk about this point of inflating the numbers in terms of grain yield by a percent here, two percent

there, whatever, the reasons for why that was happening are often speculated on. And in Western historiography, there's generally two competing narratives, which is one, this culture of fear, right? You know, this is what anti-communists always point towards is that, well, of course, the people only go along with the communist regimes in these countries because there's this culture of fear that is imbued within the populace where they have to unquestioningly think what would the party like to see. And then they have to just act out of fear, you know, doing whatever they think that the party would want. And the second narrative that's often proffered in this example is that, again, with this

bureaucratization that was beginning to take place at this point, and many individuals who were present within the party at various particularly local levels, just looking to use the party as a means for, again, self-promotion in terms of making a future for themselves by utilizing the party as an instrument in doing so, that they're inflating the number. solely for selfish reasons in terms of look my local branch was able to produce this much grain and therefore it looks good for me

and perhaps I'll be promoted to the regional body rather than just my local body and then perhaps eventually I'll be able to be promoted to the national body you know this is also a very common narrative that's presented again within Western historiography and narrative of surrounding the reasons for this collapse, you know, perceived collapse of the amount of grain

that was being brought up because it looked like this much grain was coming in. And it turns out that that was not the amount of grain that was coming in. So based on your experience within being able to be immersed within the historiographic traditions of both the Western historiography and the Chinese historiography, what is the narrative within the Chinese academic historiography on on this specific reason of why these numbers were being inflated? And is there any sort of consensus between the two, you know, looking at not just anti-communist voices, but people who are genuinely trying to figure out why this is happening as to why this is happening? Yeah, you know, I think, you know, the culture of fear narrative, of course, that's not

something that really applies. I think there's more substance. to the idea that there were, you know, sort of standard bureaucratic, you know, pardon my expression, but sort of bureaucratic butt covering, you know, that that went on, that these little distortions that accumulate to become big distortions were motive, they're not motivated by fear, but they're motivated in many instances. I think by, you know, by ambition, by wanting to look good, by wanting to perform well, but also perhaps by, you know, I don't know, maybe even an element of wishful thinking or something like that, you know, that if we can just, you know, drive this process forward a little more,

you know, maybe we can achieve even greater things. I don't know. There's, you know, the party, of course, and the state, you know, they had to deal with this. And they did deal with it. In 1961, they convened a national meeting, what's called the 10,000 cadre meeting, because it was far beyond just an ordinary session of even like the Central Committee or anything. This was a huge gathering. And they thrashed out, you know, the issues, the debates, what the concept, what had actually happened? How did it happen?

Why did it happen? What could be done about it, all this? And that's, you know, those proceedings have been published and there's been lots of writing about that, lots of discussion of the Great Leap and the lessons to be learned from it. And I think, I think that, that, you know, the sort of common ground position is, is largely that this was a result of bureaucratic distortion, that this was a result of systems of reporting that that relied too much on a sort of predetermined infrastructure of information flow, that information flowed from the bottom to the top without a lot of sort of internal checking up, you know, that there was maybe too much power concentrated

in the hands of cadre up and down the hierarchy and that there needed to be more integration with the masses and more oversight on the part of the party structure as a whole, right? It's not, you know, there's not a, there's not a simple, the one-size-fits-all answer to this. And, you know, there are debates within Chinese academia about this. But it is a topic that is openly and regularly discussed, you know, it's not something that's taboo.

Again, that idea that topics like this are taboo, part of that mythology of the culture of fear, I think that that's, you know, we can just set that aside. These things are debated. There are discussions. There are historical reflections on this. But I think that it is seen as a result of the rapid development in the 50s. You know, I mean, so much had been achieved. There was this sort of inertia or momentum in development that I think that even cadres,

who weren't sort of self-interestedly distorting things, may have been swept along with a tide of enthusiasts, things like that, you know. And I think that that's more the way in which it's reflected upon now. Although there are within Chinese academic circles and certainly within Chinese political circles, you know, there are elements these days that are strongly critical of the Great Leap. see the Great Leap as an adventurous excess, you know, that's not the way that I think that that I see it, and I think that that's not the way that a lot of academics in China see it.

But there are elements within the current political leadership who look back on that as kind of a disastrous miscalculation, you know. So it's a complex historical issue that, you know, I have obviously my own view. on, but I also recognize that there are diverse positions, shall we stay, in terms of how this is presented in contemporary China. And, of course, that's part of the culture of academic debate and openness. You know, again, it's not a sort of dictatorial truth that has to be adhered to by everybody. There are differences of interpretation and opinion that continue to to animate these discussions.

Yeah, and this analysis, I think, is much more nuanced, more legitimate and more balanced than almost anything else that you hear. I mean, Henry was talking about listening to a BBC interview where just the worst sort of anti-communist nonsense is regurgitated. And I've heard it many, many times myself when I look into these things. One of the things you touched on, Ken, is the sort of always implied intentionalism. And if you Google right now, like if you're in the West and you Google, like the worst dictators of all time, a lot of times you'll see like Mao, Stalin, and then Hitler. And the implication in just that, in just that ranking is you're laying like, yeah, all these famines at the feet of these people as if they were intentional.

I'm in a high-level college graduate course right now studying just the Holocaust. And we're learning the nuances and the ideological sort of reasoning behind the Holocaust and everything that preceding. seeded it and this brutal idea of the Nazis that are going to take over Europe, maybe the world, and that certain people need to be exterminated, that's intentionalism. You know, they set up concentration camps to

intentionally kill Jewish people, intentionally killed disabled people, Roma people, etc. And so I think it is, it's Nazi apologism and Holocaust denial to say that Mao, and because of the Great Leap Forward

largely, is worse than Hitler. which you will hear all the time in American discourse around this stuff. So people listening really take this into your mind and remember this when you see that stuff because this is how you push back on it. This is real academic honesty and legitimacy about this is a tragedy. 10 to 12 million human beings died, that is a tragedy. And we should have place in our hearts and in our minds for confronting that tragedy. But to say that anybody, just on the face of it, right, just logically,

Mao and the Communist Party fought this brutal civil war fought this brutal fight against Japanese imperialism did the long march all to try to end this century of humiliation for China the people who are implying that this is intentional

think those same people who put their lives on the line to better China and create a better future for the Chinese people intentionally killed 10 to 12 million of their own people it's absolutely absurd and it's a fascist lie that should be noted. Another thing to note is, of course, development is always a brutal process, right? Marx wrote Das Kapital looking at industrialism in Europe, looking at the depravities of that process of development.

Look at the U.S., the genocide and the slavery, are part and parcel of the development of the U.S. economy, cannot be situated from that, cannot be extracted from that. The slave trade and the genocide of the indigenous peoples was much more intentional than these famines were. So I just think those are things that are certainly worth noting. But the bridge here, the bridge to the great cultural or the great proletarian cultural revolution is this thing that Ken mentioned, which is this problem with the bureaucracy. Mao was very aware of this in the Soviet Union. And the great leap forward was in lots of ways a sort of testament to that problem. And then now the question is, how do we begin to solve that problem? And I think the things that happen next with the socialist education movement and then the cultural revolution are attempts to solve this problem within socialist experimentation of this unresponsive or deeply flawed over bureaucratization of the party and of society.

So can you talk about that as the transition to these other events and just sort of the immediate fallout from the Great Leap Forward from the Thousand Codres conference? and Mao's reaction to all of that, etc., kind of take us to this next phase of Chinese history. Sure. Yeah, I mean, well, the most immediate effect comes out of the Lushan Plenum in the summer of 59, which is that the two sort of protagonists of the clash there, Pung to Hawaii, the Minister of Defense, and Mao Zedong, the chairman of the party,

and the president at that point, of the People's Republic. They are both, you know, sort of, I suppose, we could say a political compromises reach. Both of them step back, have to step back from their positions. Pung Dewe steps aside as Minister of Defense. Lin Biao is placed in that position.

Pung de Lai is put into a kind of forced retirement for a while. He eventually is given responsibility. responsibility for industrialization, industrialization into the southwest part of China. This is part of moving away from just coastal development, but trying to move industrial development into the interior. He's placed in charge of some of those programs. Chairman Mao retains his position as chairman of the party, but has to step aside as president of the People's Republic. This is when Leo Shao Chi becomes president of the People's Republic. And the chairman is directed to kind of step back from kind of the day-to-day oversight,

even of party operations. He retains the position of chairman, but he's supposed to, you know, sort of devote himself to maybe theoretical work, to, you know, to kind of a broader, a more remote, if you will, level of oversight. So there's a, you know, there's a, there's a, there's a backing away of these two leaders from, from the positions that they had, they had been occupied. The policy, there's policy changes. They move away from the, they don't dissolve the communes, but they, they devolve some of the administrative oversight down to lower levels, which is important because that does help to correct issues of reporting. It establishes greater oversight. There's this, you know, again, the bourgeois accounts of

this like to emphasize the idea that people were encouraged to develop sideline production beyond what's going on in terms of the commune, the planned production and the commune, growing their own vegetables, engaging in various other kinds of sideline production activities. And, you know, there's a revival. The weather improves. get 60. The 60s not very good weather either, but there's improvement in the harvest by 62 harvest levels are back up to what they had been in 58, which were record levels. It's not just back to some sort of average, but back to record levels of production, which then go on to continue to increase as the 60s advance. Even, you know, through the disruptions of the cultural

revolution. We hear a lot about, oh, how bad the cultural revolution was. We'll talk about that in a little bit. But agricultural production continues to increase through the 60s. So, you know, the immediate aftermath of helping to grips with the Great Leap, you know, sees some course corrections and all that. But by the time we get down to, let's say, 1962, where the economy is, you know, pretty much back on track, the chairman is still, the chairman is still concerned about this problem of bureaucratization. And at this point, he's once again anxious about what's happening out in the villages. What is the nature of the integration between the sort of ground-level, grassroots-level

cadres and the villages that they're responsible for? And this is where we get what's called the socialist education movement. and the goal, the idea of the socialist education movement is to send cadres out, and not just cadres, but actually a lot of young people get involved in this as well. Urban youth, educated youth, send them out to the villages to sort of check things out. And the idea is to investigate and see,

are the cadres behaving in a way that's integrated with the masses, or are they behaving in this, you know, commandist, as they say, way, this top-down way of kind of telling people what to do, and you better get with the program. But what happens is that when cadres and urban youth show up in the villages, when they're sent out, oh, they're given a banquet, they're given a kind of conducted tour, but the Cadres try to minimize any actual sort of information gathering. And if there are problems, if they're confronted with problems, there's a tendency to blame those on what they call rightist elements, which often are either, you know, the descendants

or the remnants of old landlord families, or perhaps people who had what was considered bourgeois education. and this is something that's called deflecting the spear point, right? Turning the, you know, the point of the campaign was to try to investigate the cadres. But the cadres try to turn that away and say, oh, look at these problem figures, you know, look at these rightists, look at these landlords, ex-landlords, look at these intellectuals, you know, and, you know, and don't look at me, right? So that's a problem, and Chairman Mao perceives that. He sees that go on. And of course, when we talk about all this, it's not Chairman Mao acting as some kind of individual. You know, Chairman Mao represents the leadership of the party, represents significant numbers of people within the party. He's not some, you know, some individualist actor. So, you know, we use him, we talk about Chairman Mao does this or that as representative figure of, of, of, of, you know, of the position within the party that he represents, that he leads, okay? So he's frustrated with this, you know, and through 63, 64, you know, he's excluded from day-to-day

oversight. He can't really manage the affairs of the party. And he feels increasingly isolated, right? And that the views that he holds and that are shared by many people are, are, are sort of being sideline, sort of being marginal. And this comes to a head in 1965. What happens is the immediate sort of precipitating event has to do with an academic debate about a play that had been written back in 1960 called Hei Re dismissed from office.

And it's a play written by a scholar, a very, very famous scholar of Ming Dynasty history named Wuhan. And Hairei was a Ming official who had confronted the Wanli emperor over certain agricultural policies, which he argued were damaging the interests of the people. He was dismissed from office by the emperor, but when problems in the agricultural sector intensified,

he was eventually brought back and proven to be right. This play was written by Wuhan, who was also, by the way, deputy mayor of the city of Beijing. So he was an important figure within the party bureaucracy. And it was performed at the Capitol Theater, the big national theater right in downtown Beijing, I think in January of 61 it was. I may have that off by a year, but it was either 60 or 61.

But that play, you know, it was performed and it was discussed a lot. And then in 65, 64 and 65, there was an academic debate about the play. And the debate centered around whether that play was a political attack on the Great League forward and on Chairman Moe. And some, you know, critics were saying, yeah, that's what it was. It was a veiled attack. This is a long-established tradition in Chinese political culture of using historical events to criticize contemporary affairs. And so this is what some people were saying, well, this is what Wuhan was doing. Others were arguing, no, no, no, it was just a historical play.

He's a historian. He wrote this play, you know? I mean, don't read too much into it. And Chairman Mao thought that this debate ought to be taken out to the menaces, ought to be taken out beyond, you know, just these little academic circles. And he wrote an article, which he couldn't get published, right? They wouldn't run it in the People's Daily or the Guangbing Daily, which is the newspaper for the intellectuals. he had one of his associates oh, boy, well, I'm forgetting the guy's name right now, but it'll come to me as we talk, I think.

Anyway, he has him write a version of it, and they can't get it published. But they do eventually get it published down in Shanghai in the Liberation paper down there. And then he tries to get it picked up by the national media, there's still resistance to this. This is in November of 1965. So this is when he begins to think about the need for what comes to be called a cultural revolution. Because he doesn't want these important political issues, these debates about the Great Leap, about the nature of the Great Leap and all this, you know, where Haire is sort of a surrogate figure for Punta, why, right? And the Wanli Emperor is a surrogate figure for Chairman Mao,

you know, basically accusing Chairman Mao of behaving like an emperor, you know, so this becomes this academic debate, but Chairman Mao says, look, let's just take this out to the masses. Why don't we have everybody involved in this? And the party is saying, no, no, no, we want to keep this to academic circles.

And that's when the decision is made to go around the party to go directly to the masses. And this starts, by the time, we're into the spring and summer of 66. You get the call, you know, for debate. You get these debates within the party leadership. You get the, what is it, the May 16th circular that calls for

debate. The party bureaucracy, the leadership, the core leadership, they try to control this. They send what they call work teams out to the academic institutions, especially in Beijing, to Beijing University, Peking University, Tsinghua University. the aerospace university, the aeronautics university, all of these areas, to try to control this discussion and this debate. But then Chairman Mao starts to call for putting up big character posters, these large posters written in big characters and big writing, in which people begin to denounce the academic leadership, not the scholars so much. but the party bureaucrats within the university who are trying to restrain debate, right?

And this is what launches, you know, the great proletarian cultural revolution. Then we start getting the Red Guards, young people, college students, high school students, but also young workers, mobilizing, forming their own organizations. And by August, September, October of 1966, the Cultural Revolution is underway. And the objective, again, is to open up debate, to talk about bureaucracy, to talk about what the problems with the Great League were, what the problems with the socialist education movement were, what the problems with party leadership, bureaucratization, top-down commandism, what are those problems?

Has the party become alienated from the masses? And if so, to the extent to which it has, how can we fix it? that. And so Chairman Mao, you know, and his supporters, they basically try to make an end run around that bureaucracy and go back to the masses and say the masses have to supervise the party. You know, the party doesn't command the masses. The party has to serve the masses, serve the people, you know, that's the spirit that needs to be revived. And that's what the cultural revolution is intended to achieve, to unleash the direct oversight of the party by the masses, right? And that's what gets underway. Yeah. And from the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural

Revolution, there is, as you just made very clear, this Mao and the Chinese leadership's interest in this sort of dialectical interplay between a hoarse, top-down leadership. You do need a communist party. You do need a Vanguard party. But it needs to be wedded to this genuine bottom up, put the revolution in the hands of the masses approach as well. And that sort of two-pronged approach where you're trying to do the best leadership you can to serve the people and put the revolution in the hands of the people is, I think, what's so important about the Chinese revolution and everything that happened after that. Now, earlier, we were talking about some lies about Great Leap Forward. And one of those lies, and I even pulled up

Wikipedia just to see because lots of people get their information from this. And I think it's a nice little condensed version of some of these narratives. But during the Great Leap Forward, in the first paragraph, it says higher officials did not dare to report the economic disaster. Again, implying this idea that Mao or the communist leadership would somehow like off with their heads or something like that, which you've already sort of addressed. And even the PLA leadership, you know, making this problem known as they saw it amongst their soldiers, I think speaks against that narrative. But on that same page regarding the cultural revolution, I'm going to read this exact quote. I just would love to get to your thoughts on this, Ken.

They say, Mao did not retreat from his policies after the Thousand Cadres Conference. Instead, he blamed problems on bad implementation and rightists who opposed him. And this is the important thing. It says he initiated the socialist education movement in 1963 and the Cultural Revolution in 1966 in order to remove opposition and reconsolate his power. So this is a great man of history theory that Mao, launch these two movements specifically and exclusively to destroy his opposition. Could you speak a little bit to that? Because I think that's another big lie that we hear quite often.

Yeah, no, that's exactly what it is. It's that great man theory of history. The idea, you know, it's always talked about the cultural revolution and this whole phase is always talked about as if somehow this one guy, Chairman Mao, you know, could just do whatever he wanted and impose this, you know, by sort of by force of will, you know, which, of course, it's just a, it's a fundamental distortion of how human history, how social life actually works. You know, Chairman Marr articulates concerns. He articulates issues which had profound resonance for millions and millions and

millions of people, right? So, you know, the idea that, oh, chairman, you know, it's this, it's this palace intrigue mentality, you know, that there's this sort of cabal at the top of the party. And all they really want is to, is their own power, you know, that they've seized control of China. And everything is about preserving their power. And so everything is about fighting between these leading individuals, right? that whether it's Leo Shao Chi or Pang De Huai or Deng Xiaoping or, you know, Lin Biao, whoever it is, that it's all about personal ambition and personal power. And they use these mechanisms to impose their will upon basically everybody else.

And that's, you know, it's just a ridiculous way of thinking about the dynamics of a country of, you know, approaching a billion people by this time. you know, maybe, maybe 800 million people, you know, that somehow one guy is able to manipulate that whole, that whole situation. It's kind of ludicrous. But that is the message that is relentlessly promoted, you know, by, you know, by bourgeois historians and all that. Yeah, you know, the, the, the, the very idea, I mean, attacking the communist, Party. He's not, you know, he's not just attacking individuals. He's calling for ordinary people to assert their power and assert their leadership, assert their supervision over the Communist Party,

the Communist Party of which he is the leader, right? And, you know, you go back and you read through various accounts, he's always talking about, criticize me, criticize us, you know. I'm going to make mistakes, and I need to know about those mistakes. And I need to know about those mistakes. mistakes. You know, the little red book, which always gets ridiculed, you know, so much. If you actually read the damn thing, it's full of self-critical discussions. It's full of him talking about the need to serve the people, the need for the party to, you know, to support the people, to be an instrument of the people, not to be the dictators, not to be, you know, the power that tells other people what to do, but the party that takes the interest of the masses and tries to find

ways to implement, right, to serve them, to address those things. So, yeah, that is, you know, that, that, that great man thing is, is definitely what bourgeois historians and politicians want us to believe. And, and of course, it's everything in our society, everything in Western, you know, bourgeois culture is, is aimed at individualism and, and, you know, not, don't be a sucker, don't be a fool, don't believe in, in, in, you know, movements and revolutions and, and leadership and stuff like that. Cynicism and passivity are the great tools that those with power use to keep others from challenging them. You know, only a sucker, you know, is going to buy into a political campaign or something. It's, you know, all politicians are corrupt. All

politicians are bad. All political systems, you know, oh my God, you know, except, of course, the ones that they control. Exactly. So that, that, that, that it's not just, you know, obscure historical debates about things. This is, this is the, the political culture, the political reality in bourgeois society, you know, and all the mechanisms of, of propaganda and social media and TV, movies, whatever, is mobilized to, to do this. And so we wind up with this image of, you know, some sort of phrased, bloodthirsty Chairman Mao, you know, allowing millions of people to starve just because he's trying to protect his own, his own bureaucratic interest when, in fact, he's fighting against the bureaucratization. He's

fighting for people to be able to have influence and control over the party that's meant to serve their purpose, serve their interests. Yeah, beautifully said. And that cynicism, that nihilism about don't trust anything. It really gets full-throated support in like paranoid reactionary and even libertarian ideologies where government as such is supposed to be seen with complete contempt and complete suspicion. They don't very often apply that skepticism towards corporate power, which is always very interesting to note.

But yeah, it's this whole thing like government in general is bad. And that's like sort of this Reagan ideology that really promoted this idea as well. But I just wanted beforehand it over to Henry just mentioned the first. fact that there, I think there's also a racist element, especially when we're talking about global South movements where they take this great man theory and really drive it home. These are brutal dictators. The people themselves are seen as mere ons with no agency. And we know as communist and socialist there is no revolution without countless amounts of people participating. And that's a little different than what we hear about the U.S.

revolution or even the French revolution in which there are certainly large figures, George Washington, Robespierre, et cetera, but almost never are the agency of the people stripped away like they are in global South movements or communist movements, right? Nobody ever talks about George Washington as this brutal dictator. It's like, oh, the American people, average people stood up and fought for their freedom against the Brits. And even in the French Revolution, which is way too left wing for most, you know, political, mainstream thinkers. Yeah, people doing the storming the Bastille and stuff, right? There's not as much of a robbing of the agency of the mass.

as there are specifically in communist and global south movements, which I think is racist and worth noting. Well, I agree with that entirely, Brett, and that's something that I've brought up on several episodes, including some which haven't been released yet, but we'll be coming out around the same time as these episodes. So, you know, we're totally on the same page there, and I'm glad that you brought that up at this juncture in the conversation. But I want to turn towards some of the major things that were happening at the beginning

of the Cultural Revolution as we got kicked off. And I'm going to throw out four for you can. You can take them however you want them. You can spend as much or as little time on any of them. But I want to kind of lump these four things together so that, one, we hit some major points, but also that we're able to get into, you know, the middle of the cultural revolution after that. These four points are bombard the headquarters, which, yeah, I know that you're going to have fun talking about. The 16 points.

the major, major rallies that Ma was hosting in Tiananmen Square with well over a million red guards that were present during the series of rallies that were being held, and then the conception of the destruction of the four olds, I think that these four things kind of really lay the groundwork for understanding what the justification and the way that the cultural revolution was going to be carried out from its inception. And then, of course, things morph over time, inevitably. That always happens. But these were kind of the first four pillars as we got underway within the cultural revolution.

So feel free to take it how you want it, Ken. I'm sorry, it's a huge question, I know. But, you know, there's a lot of stuff there. Yeah. I mean, the summer of 66, as the struggle unfolds, You know, it's a classic scenario of, you know, the, for lack of other terminology, let's say the left within the party, Chairman Mao and those who supported his positions, his views, trying to initiate a critical movement, right? And the right, if you will,

the bureaucratic core, trying to find ways to. to thwart that, you know, again, to deflect the spear point, as we said. And this is what happens when the work teams are sent out to the universities. Instead of looking at the political administration of the universities, the bureaucrats in the universities try to divert their attention to supposed rightist academics, right? You know, and not come to grips with these questions of bureaucratization and commandism within academia, you know. The, the, you know, so that's where things like bombard the headquarters come from. The idea that, that, actually, it's the headquarters that are the problem, right?

And so it's, he says it's, it's right to rebel, you know, that famous saying, what he says is it's right to rebel against reactionaries. It's right to rebel against reactionaries. It's right to rebel against reactionaries in positions of power. So he's saying, again, this is more of what we were just talking about. He's saying the Communist Party, the political cadres who are in positions of authority, need to be subject to criticism. They need to be, you know, subject to the oversight of the people who they are supposed to be serving. You know, and so it's come to a point where,

where they have so walled themselves off that it's, we got to bombard the headquarters. We got to launch these attacks, you know, and things like the 16 points and other of those early documents, that's where a lot of the struggle is going on over, you know, what are we going to criticize? What are we going to attack? What are the issues that we need to be concerned with? How are we going to take down this bureaucratic aloofness, this idea of, you know, hey, I'm in charge. Don't tell me how to do my job. You know, I'm, you know, classic, classic bureaucratic mentality, you know, I mean, really, what they really needed to do in some ways was go back and read their Max Weber on bureaucracy and figure out that this is,

this is something that's going to happen, and you need to put in place mechanisms to deal with, right? That's what, that's what this struggle is about, that they've made various efforts previously, you know, coming out of the Great Leap, the socialist education movement. And they had been thwarted, right? So now, blow it up, right? Bombard the headquarters. Take it to the streets.

Take it to these mass rallies. The mass rallies, you know, that's a demonstration. It's, you know, again, the bourgeois distortions of all this. It's portrayed as this kind of mindless adulation of Chairman Mao. You know, you get a million red guards in Tiananmen Square. They're waving their red books and everything. And it's very dramatic. It's very dramatic footage, you know.

But the point isn't the adulation of Chairman Mao. The point is to send a message that says, look at these young people. Look at the spirit that they have. Look at what they want. They want the revolution. They want us to be true to the revolution. And that's a message that's, you know, that's direct. at those, you know, at the people in power within the party, within the government, within

academia, within enterprises, you know, who are not listening, who are not listening to the masses. It's a message that says, we've got to break this down. And here are millions of young people. What are there? There's like eight of these mass rallies. You know, so probably somewhere between eight and ten million young people who've come to Beijing. Yes, they've come to see Chairman mile, but they've come to take part in the revolution. They're going out across the country. They're visiting the historical sites. They're going to Jiangxi. They're going to Yan'an. They're going to places along the route of the Long March to reconnect with that revolutionary tradition, with that revolutionary history and that revolutionary spirit. And that's the message. That's the

message is that, you know, bureaucrats wake up, you know. These are the people. These are the people that you have to think about, their future, their country, their revolution. And that's really what all of those steps in the summer of 66 are about is getting that launched. Whether it's the big character posters or bombard the headquarters or, you know, Red Guard rallies or whatever, it's all of that is part of this struggle to break out in a sense of this kind of bureaucratic. I don't really want to say straightjacket, but this bureaucratic, you know, constraint initially on these young people in academic institutions, in schools, but more broadly on the society as a whole. Yeah, well, let's get into that a little bit more than the Red Guards, for example. It seems like a large group, but of course there are divisions within what are

called the Red Guards. And there's also this idea that the great proletarian cultural revolution was on some level. Maybe people say a full-on civil war. Some people say a low-level civil war. I'm wondering if you can address this claim of whether or not, you know, that term would apply or whether there's any legitimacy to such a claim. And then maybe just like parse out who the Red Guards were, these different factions where, you know, certain Red Guards will be fighting against other Red Guards, et cetera, and kind of help us make sense of of this sort of complicated period of time? Well, it is.

It's an extremely complicated period. And, you know, the Red Guards were a spontaneous development. You know, people began to form these organizations. You have to think of it that these were young people who had grown up since liberation, right? They had grown up in the People's Republic of China. they were relatively privileged in a sense for the most part in the sense that they were students they were in school their parents were probably you know they were urban to begin with and their parents were you know were workers or maybe administrators or professionals of one type or

another they had been raised in in a culture of hope of a vision of a better future, of a socialist future? I often think, and I've had conversations about this with contemporaries of mine, people who live through this, who were Red Guards, who were in the Cultural Revolution, in China. In some ways, it's similar to the experience that people like I had growing up in America in the 1950s and the early 1960s. In that post-World War II, era. You know, fascism had been defeated. You know, World War II, the mythology, and the memory, the real legitimate memory of that when I was growing up in the 1950s, was that, you know, ordinary Americans, working class Americans had gone off and defeated fascism, defeated Hitler, defeated

Japanese militarism. Now, of course, all that gets subsumed and distorted in the context of the Cold War, but there was still, there was still a kernel of feeling about that. And there was a sense of optimism. And that, too, was warped and distorted. It was part of, you know, a white supremacist culture that was still persistent. But there was this faith growing up, this hope growing up in the 50s. We were taught in school about democracy, about American democracy, equality. Right? The civil rights movement was getting going, and to some extent, that was inspirational as well. And so we were raised with this hope, that this belief, this faith, if you will, that America was a society that had its problems, but was struggling to achieve a more just and equitable society. And then we hit the wall in the 60s, right? Vietnam, Santo Domingo, racism, poverty, we became aware of those things.

and that's what mobilized the youth movements, the student movements, the radical movements of the late 1960s. When I talk about this with my friends in China, it's the same thing. They were raised in a moment of hope, in a period of faith and belief that the revolution had succeeded,

that socialism was being constructed, and then about the time that they're teenagers or college students, they begin to see, you know, that it's not that way, that there's still tremendous poverty in the countryside, that there's still struggles going on within the party, that the party is telling people what to do

rather than saying, how can we serve you, you know? And so they have this political awakening that mobilizes millions of young people to do the right thing, to reconnect with the revolution, to launch, in a sense, a new era of revolutionary struggle, to get the party back on track, to get the process of socialist construction back in touch with the very people for whom it was meant to, you know, to serve, right?

And so it's funny. I have this sense of a kind of parallelism of young people awakening from a, not a false dream, but a dream that was not fulfilled and struggling to move in the right direction at that point. And that, I think, is a lot of what goes on with the Red Guard. But these were people who didn't have a lot of political experience, who didn't have a lot of, well, just that, didn't have a lot of knowledge of the nuts and bolts, I guess I would say, of political organizing and political activism. So they were motivated. They were impassioned, right, to struggle, to go out and follow, you know, the leaders, listen to Chairman Mao. take those critiques seriously. But there were different groupings. And what happens as we move through the fall of 66 into 67,

different groupings of people, there were different divisions within the Red Guard movement as a whole. There were some initially who were offspring of party cadre. But then there were others who were not, who came from outside the party, whose families weren't part of them. the party. There were workers' kids, especially the high school red guards, who weren't in college yet and came from working class families, right? Different divisions, different, you know, groupings within, even just within Beijing, students at Tsinghua and students at Beijing University

or students at the Aeronautics Institute or other schools maybe viewed each other with a certain distance, you know? And so unfortunately, there grows to be a lot of factionalism. Even on a single campus at Tsinghua University, which is often referred to as like the MIT of China, it's a more technologically oriented university, there were factional conflicts on campus. And some of these became quite intense. Serious fighting, homemade weapons, people, you know, beating each other. I mean, it got it got pretty wild for a while and in a sense that's because when you when you backed off the leadership of the party you created there there came to be i won't say a political vacuum but but a field of contestation if you will you know and and people staked out positions that weren't necessarily the most sophisticated the most sophisticated the most well thought out. There were certainly individual ambitions at play once again. People who became leaders of Red Guard groupings, you know, could, could themselves be vulnerable to those kinds

of individualist self-interested feelings, you know? So the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guard aspect of the Cultural Revolution, it serves a great historical purpose. which is to mobilize popular participation, to reconnect young people with the revolutionary heritage, all that traveling, you know, they made the trains free so young people could go anywhere in China for free. And they did, they explore it, they went out, and they visited these revolutionary sites and connected with that.

But it also unleashed the potential and the actuality of these factional conflicts. people, you know, there's this saying that we use a lot in China about crossing the river by feeling the rocks, you know, you know you want to go somewhere, you kind of know where it is you want to get to, but how do you get across the river? You know, the water's flowing and you can't, you can't just splash across. You have to feel your way bit by bit. And in that process, there's a, there's chaos, you know. And Chairman Mao, you know, at one point he talked about, he said, there's great chaos under heaven, the situation is excellent, you know, willing to

embrace the chaos, willing to embrace, you know, some of the disruptiveness, some of the, the literally out of control nature of the Red Guard movement for a while, because it shook things up, you know, and you can look at that, you can look at that cynically, or you can look at it, you know, in a way that accepts it as part of the complexity and the humanity of political struggle. It's not perfect. It's not, you don't just, you know, lift the blueprint out of a textbook and put it into practice. It's human. It's messy.

We have to, you know, we have to acknowledge and accept that as part of that, part of the whole dynamic that takes place. You know, the Red Guard phenomenon is actually a relative. short-lived phase of the cultural revolution. That's mostly what people talk about. But really, it's only about a year and a half, two years at the most, you know, before urban youth start to go out to the countryside, start to go down to the villages, right? And that's often portrayed is such a bad thing.

Oh, my God, these poor kids that were sent out to the countryside. But when you talk to people who live through that, And on both sides, both the young people who went to the villages and people who lived in those villages. You know, the idea, a trope you hear a lot is, oh, these were just, you know, smarty pants, urban kids who didn't know anything about farming, you know. So the peasants didn't really want them in their villages. Well, they didn't go there. They went there to some extent to take part in agricultural production. But they went there, they became the barefoot doctors.

They became teachers. They became people who helped raise the level of cultural understanding, of medical knowledge, of services in the villages. There's several wonderful books of people who came out of the villages because they had opportunities that were created by the presence of these urban youth that were sent to the countryside. Many of them, you know, after 10 years, it became possible for them to come back to the cities. lots of them stayed where they were because they'd become integrated into those rural communities, into those village communities.

Lots of went back to the cities and that was great too. But, you know, the idea of the cultural revolution as this sort of just this chaotic mishmash that didn't accomplish anything, it's just wrong. It's just wrong. It accomplished so much. But it ran its course,

you know, and eventually it achieved a lot of the things. things that it's set out to achieve in terms of forcing the party to reconnect with the masses by can let me let me spin out one one particular one one one very short um addendum you know very famously one of those examples of an urban youth who was sent to the villages was shing ping the current leader of china he was sent in i believe 1968 or 1969 to a village

he went down stayed there for a little while ran away was caught as a you know a dodger of this

of this movement the down to the countryside's movement was sent back to dig ditches for a while after digging ditches he eventually went

back to the village that he was originally assigned to and many people many Chinese people and this is kind of I guess a narrative in China

Now, I have some friends from China who I've asked about this. And feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, Ken, because you have many more contacts in China than I do. But they've told me that the narrative in China is that she's time in the village was one of the kind of foundational pillars that even today is viewed as one of the reasons why he is associated with having some sort of affinity for or connection to the rural population. in China, even though he is from Beijing. Yeah, actually, that's great that you mentioned that, because I spent a lot of time

in Shirjaj Wang, which is the capital now of Hebei province. And the village that Xi Jinping was sent down to is just, I don't know, maybe 15, 20 kilometers north of Shurajuan. And I've been out there, you know, there's another town north of their. And then the villages are a little bit further beyond that. I've talked to people there, you know, and of course, you know, these days, everybody's very proud of Xi Jinping, and I'm sure people like to associate themselves with his rights. But that is the narrative. That certainly is the narrative that he went through a learning process, imagined such a thing, you know, that maybe, yeah, he'd grown up, his father was a, you know, a cadre, he'd grown up in Beijing, he'd been in the Red Guards and everything.

Like lots of the Red Guards, you know, they went down to the countryside. It was rough, you know. It's no picnic, especially in those days, living out there in the villages. So a number of people who were like, oh, my God, I can't take this, you know. But then he gets back there, he buckles down, does the job, and it works, right? That's what sending people down was about, whether they were cadres or Red Guards or whatever. it was like, look, we made the revolution for all the people. The peasantry were the leaders of the revolution.

That was the force, the agricultural proletarians, as we talked about in the previous episode. That's the force that drove the revolution. We need to improve these people's lives. We need to work with them to improve their lives, you know? He got it, right? And millions and millions and millions of these young people got it. Whether they stayed in the villages, went back to the cities, whatever. Not everybody, you know.

I mean, again, it's that mix of humanity, you know, but once and lots and lots of these Red Guards were transformed by their experiences in the countryside. I've been in cities, a number of cities in China where there are ultra-revolution restaurants, you know, where you can go and, you know, they have the decor, they have the posters, and they kind of look like, you know, village places. And the food is, you know, rustic food and all this. And people go there because they want to reconnect with that. They want to remember that.

There's a certain nostalgia for that. Even on people who went back to the cities and, you know, maybe went on to college and had careers and all that. There's not this sense, you know, you hear this idea that the cultural revolution was this horrible trauma and nobody wants to talk about it or think about it. That's just nonsense, you know? it's a living experience people have different views some people hated it some people had a terrible time but once and lunts and lots of people learned from it grew through it and and and remember

it in very positive ways so you know we don't want to we don't want to buy into that you know 10 lost years narrative that's just that's just not the reality uh for for you know vast vast numbers of people. But let me, oh, sir, go ahead, Ken. Go ahead. Let me just talk about one thing. And then, you know, we can maybe, you know, move, move on down past, past the, the, the, the, C.R., which is the Shanghai commune. Okay. That was the question I was going to ask. Oh, okay. Okay. Well, good time. Yeah, great. You know, we always say great minds think alike.

I was going to ask what's issues of power and the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the Shanghai Commune and Revolutionary Committees. So I suppose that was where you were going to go anyway. Just go ahead, Ken. Take it how you want. In many ways, I think that's the hub. That's the nut of the cultural revolution, you know. Getting it started, the summer of 66, the Red Guards, that's great.

That's what releases the mojo, if you will. But it's the Shanghai Commune where the rubber really meets the road. And what happens is, you know, Shanghai was the largest industrial city in China. It was China's great port, goods going out, goods coming in, passing through the port. And, of course, it had this tremendous revolutionary history. It's where the party was founded. It's where the split with the Gwoldong takes place in 1927. You know, Shanghai is this amazing place in China, in Chinese, modern Chinese history.

in the fall of 66, as the cultural revolution is spreading and surging, workers in Shanghai start to mobilize. This isn't college students. This isn't high school students. This isn't red guard stuff. Certainly there are red guards in Shanghai, too. But in Shanghai, it's the workers in the factories, on the docks, in the warehouses that begin to mobilize. They're reading, you know, the newspapers, they're watching TV, listening to the radio. They're hearing what's going on. And millions of workers begin to join political organization. And by December of 66, they're raising issues.

They're raising questions about the party leadership, about the management in the factories, about management in the workplace. and a delegation of workers decides they're going to go to Beijing to see Chairman Mao and talk to the Cultural Revolution Leadership. They get on a train at the main Shanghai Railway Station

and they set off. The trains go on to Beijing. They get out to the western suburbs and the train gets stopped, gets stopped by the local party authorities. And the workers stay on the train. They say, we're not getting off. We're going to Beijing. And the authorities say, no, you're not.

This train is not going anywhere. They put it on a little shunting on a side track. And the workers stay on the train for days, right? This is called the Unding incident. And finally, the authorities blink. They don't allow the train to go on, but they allow a representative delegation of the workers to go on to Beijing.

The rest of the workers go back into Shanghai. That's December. January comes along. January 67, and we get what they call the January storm, which is workers' organizations marching, rallying, publishing their own newspapers. The organizations grow eventually there's two huge workers' organizations, each with over a million members, right? There's issues within the workers' movement.

Younger workers versus older workers, migrant workers coming in from the countryside versus workers who have a Shanghai residency permit. There's different lines of tension within the workers' movement. But overall, this is a movement for workers' democracy, for the working class, the people, to have an influence, obviously, in political power, in political leadership. February comes along. February 5th, 1967, there's a grand mobilization. The two mass movement groups merge. They go down to the Bund, which is where the waterfront in Shanghai is, where the party headquarters, the municipal party headquarters building is, and they take it over. And they dismiss the municipal party leadership, they say, thanks a lot, but we're going to take it from here. proclaimed the Shanghai Commune, inspired by the Paris Commune from 1871, which had been the subject of a mass education campaign during the course of the early months of the Cultural Revolution. Everybody read the Civil War in France, everybody read, you know, about the Paris Commune, and now the workers in Shanghai Proclaim the Shanghai Commune. They elect a communal leadership from their own ranks. It includes members of the party.

It includes members of the former municipal committee, but it also includes ordinary workers who aren't in the party, who aren't in any political organization, other than these mass movements. And they become the municipal leadership, right? Well, amongst them, there are a couple of important cadres, a fellow named John Chun Chau and a felon in Yao and a felon in Yao and Yuan. and Yaua Yian had been very close to Chairman Mao. So they go to Beijing and they meet with Chairman Mao and the Cultural Revolution Leadership Group. And it's at this point, this is mid-February, that a crucial decision, maybe the crucial decision in the Cultural Revolution is made.

Because Chairman Mao says to them, look, of course, we support the country, of course. We support the workers. Of course, the working class should be the political power in China. But you can't get rid of the party. Getting rid of the party is like cutting off your head, right? There has to be leadership. There has to be structure. So let's think of a better way to do this. How can we do this? And they talk things out and these comrades go back to Shon. High, and they have debates within the commune, and by the end of February, February 27th, I believe it is, the commune decides to dissolve itself and to replace itself with what is called the revolutionary three-and-one combination. The three-and-one combination is the party, the army, and the masses.

The Army, because the PLA was a force for stability during these years. The PLA was also heavily politicized. That's where, under Lynn Biao's leadership, the Red Book is first put together, quotations from Chairman Mao, and that had been issued initially by the political department of the PLA. So the party, the army, the masses, right? That's the three and one combination. And this is what comes to be called the Revolutionary Committee.

And this is a new form of organization. Right. The idea being, this is a mechanism through which the basic objective of the cultural revolution, the supervision of the leadership by the masses, the party leadership, the state leadership, the people in positions of power, can be supervised by the masses. Now, this is a structured form that allows that. to come into being, to come into practice. And over the following year or so, year and a half, one by one, the different provinces, the municipalities, different levels of administration throughout

the country, struggle to produce three-and-one combination revolutionary committees. And that becomes, until April of 69, the Ninth Party Congress, that becomes the sort of interim system, the interim form of organization, all across the country. That culminates with the convening of the Ninth Party Congress in April of 1969, at which a new central committee is elected, overwhelmingly composed of people coming out of the three-and-one combination. Workers are elected, peasants are elected, soldiers are elected, but traditional party cadres are also elected. The composition of the Central Committee coming out of the Ninth Party Congress is a new party.

It's a new leadership. Obviously, there's carryovers. There's some people who've been in leadership previously, but a lot of fresh faces. And that, in my perspective, that is the sort of culmination of the actual mass political phase of the cultural revolution. It carries on. There's political struggles within the party, over the party line, over, you know, modernization, science, technology, all these kinds of issues, cultural issues, the revolutionary operas, cinema, all this kind of stuff. Those struggles go on through the 70s, down until Chairman Mao passes in September of 76. But the decision, the reconstitution of the party, the re-engagement, of the party with the masses, that this kind of given its institutional instantiation, if you will, at the Ninth Party Congress, that's really, you know, 66 to 69 is really the heart of the cultural revolution. Those later phases are largely confined to struggles within the

leadership. We can talk more about those if that's what we want to get into. Yeah, I think that that is probably, I'm hyper aware of the time that we're at. So while there is many, many things that I would like to hit on here, I do think that we should turn our eyes towards the interactions within leadership. Let's put it that way. And also at the same time, I guess, this is not related, but probably something that we should hit on at some point while we're thinking. about this in the way that we're thinking about it is the excesses of the cultural revolution in this early phase. So as historical materialists, as we pointed out, we have to be acknowledged that there were excesses. We have to acknowledge that there were mistakes. Before we move

on to the kind of end stage of the cultural revolution and the going out of the cultural revolution with Mao's death and gang of four, you know, put on trial. I think it's important that we acknowledge that, yes, there certainly were excesses and mistakes that were made, but we have to analyze those in a way that it is constructive for us to thinking about the cultural revolution more holistically and also how to draw lessons from the cultural revolution. I think that this is as good at point as any to think about those before we move into that later phase of the cultural revolution. So, yeah, I guess that's kind of two prongs that are unrelated,

but both fit into this kind of point in the conversation. Yeah, well, obviously, you know, we've already talked a bit about some of the chaos associated with the Red Guards. You know, there were certainly, there were moments that got a little surreal. You know, this question of the rejection of the, the four olds, for example. You know, this idea was that part of the problem, part of the bureaucratization,

part of the way in which the party and the state leadership had been alienated from the masses, was that they sort of perpetuated old privileges, old ideas about hierarchy in society, about the idea that, you know, in imperial China, you know, you had the, the scholar officials, the literati, who were seen as a whole separate strata. They were above everybody else. And so now, you know, some intellectuals, some party figures, some state administrators, seemed to be embodying those same attitudes, old mentalities about, about, you know, who should be in charge and how they should exercise power.

So the critique of the four olds, you know, it kind of went off the rails in that it came to focus too much on surface manifestations, you know, clothing or hairdos or books that somebody was reading or something like that. Yeah, that face didn't last very long. That's a matter of maybe six or eight weeks, you know, where people were being criticized in the street for the wrong hairstyle or something like that. that did happen. That was wrong. That was bad. But it was, again, it was an excess of this revolutionary enthusiasm. And it was, in some ways, I think it was seen at the time, certainly by the leadership, as kind of the price that had to be paid to get the broader mobilization going forward, whether or not that was a wise assessment. I think that's, that's, that's, something that certainly can be debated. You know, there were other kinds of excesses. Some of the criticism sessions, the criticism sessions of even if people who deserve to be criticized got out of control.

There were people who were beaten. There were a few people even who were killed. And, you know, that probably was not a great thing. So, yeah, we certainly need to acknowledge that. the, you know, the revolution, the cultural revolution, as a revolutionary struggle, it produced casualties. And not all of those were justified, not all of those were defensible, if you will. But we need to see them in historical context, and we need to understand them as part of a human revolutionary process. It's a political struggle, a political transformation.

And as Chairman Mao said, it's not a dinner. party. It's not refined. It's not polite. And in that passion and in that chaos, there's bad things that happen. And we don't shy away from those. We don't glorify them, but we also don't say that they invalidate the enterprise, the goals. The goals were correct. The goals were good. And for the most part, the efforts to pursue and achieve those goals, you know, even as they, you know, ran over some rough ground, were well guided and well-intentioned and carried out. But there were things that were bad, that were excessive, that were inappropriate, that were destructive, that happened in the course of all that. And yes, yes, we certainly have to have to acknowledge that and be critical with that, you know. well go ahead yeah go ahead oh yeah i was just going to say like that's absolutely the principled approach to all

of this you know we're not in a we're not in a cult and if we lose our historical materialism we lose our ability to analyze the good the bad and the ugly we lose everything that is the open end of nature of socialist experimentation and the tradition that we honor you know nothing is perfect we're messy human beings this is not news to anybody um so we have to take all that on board push back against anti-communist nonsense, take stock of real failures, learn from them so they're not repeated. This is what Marxism, I believe, is all about. And the point of the theoretical contribution of the cultural revolution is still incredibly relevant. You know, despite whatever, the good, bad, and the ugly of the actual way that the great proletarian cultural revolution played out,

and there were plenty of all three, the theoretical reality is that that revolution in the superstructure, that putting the revolution in the hands of the masses, that de-burecization, that not allowing the alienation of the party from the masses to take place, those are essential lessons for any socialist movement going forward. And we can thank the Chinese people for that lesson without losing sight, again, of the excesses, of the tragedies, of the unjustly lost lives, et cetera. Now, there is no clean way to end this, because we're going to get the next episode is going to be into Dang and the reforms and modern China. And history never doesn't give us nice little chapter endings. But perhaps a good way to end this part of

the discussion is with the death of Lin Bao and then the death of Mao. And then maybe you could also touch on who the gang of four were, but not say anything much more than that because I think a good starting place for the next episode is getting into the gang of four and then getting into Deng's reforms. So can you just sort of tell us the Lin Bao incident Mao's death ended on the emergence of the gang reform?

Yeah, I agree that that you know, the sort of end game of the cultural revolution and the, you know, the wrapping up things in 1976 dovetails perfectly with where we want to start

the next session when we start looking at the emergence of the reform program and its unfolding and its dynamics going forward. I think we can leave a little bit of this discussion to be the odd ramp, if you will, for that. But, yeah, you know, at the ninth party Congress, you know, Lin Biao, who had been defense minister since 1959, who was himself a marshal of the Red Army and the People's Liberation Army and had played a heroic role in the Korean conflict. You know, he is named as Chairman Mao's close comrade in arms and successor.

He was positioned to be the individual who would lead the party should Chairman Mao, you know, exit the planet. And that's inscribed in the party constitution in 1969. And yet, by the fall of 1970, Lin Biao is dead. He goes down in a plane crash in Mongolia, in circumstances which were and it pretty much remained a little murky. But what seems to have happened to the best of what I've been able to learn from both things that I've read at conversations with people in China is that, you know, the spring of 1969 was a point at which, and we haven't really talked about the Sino-Soviet split or any of that stuff, there's so much to try to pack into these conversations.

But, you know, back in 59, because of the great leap forward and the view that the Soviet leadership had of China, which as we talked about a little earlier, was never entirely comfortable. You know, they'd been very close in the 50s, but in 59, there's a split between the Soviets and the Chinese. That leads to deepening antagonism through the 60s. And the Cultural Revolution was viewed by the Soviets with a certain amount of horror, perhaps in part, because they recognize that the bureaucratic critique

could equally well be applied to them, if not more so. By the spring of 69, that relationship deteriorates to the point where there are military clashes on the border between China and the Soviet Union. So that's a very, very scary moment. This is when there's a lot of construction of, you know, bomb shelters under Beijing and other places. And there was a real fear that there might be war. In that context, it appears, and we're pretty clear on some of this stuff, that Chairman Mao and most of those aligned with him came to view the Soviet Union, the contradiction between China and the Soviet Union as a greater problem than the contradiction

between China and the United States. The United States, of course, was bogged down in Vietnam, had other problems, domestic problems, you know, significant political unrest here in the United States. And at that point, really appeared to be a declining imperialist power. And Mao and other leaders seemed to have assessed the situation and come to the conclude that American imperialism was kind of a spent force, but the Soviet Union was a rising threat. And so what was needed was a reconfiguration of the geopolitical alignments. and that, of course, is what leads to the secret diplomacy, Kissinger going to China in the fall of 71,

and then Nixon's amazing visit in February of 72. But what seems to have been the case is that Lin Biao disagreed with that reassessment, and Lin Biao felt that American imperialism was still the primary contradiction. Of course, his whole analysis, long live the victory of people's war is premised on American imperialism as the key

negative factor in modern history. And so he seems to have decided that the chairman was wrong and was going to take China in the wrong direction. And there's

lots of stories about what actually went on. You know, did they try to blow up Chairman Mao as his residence, whatever went on. It's not clear. But Lin Bialo and some members of his family seem to have attempted to flee to the Soviet Union. They were certainly heading that way.

And the plane went down, whether the official version is that it ran out of fuel. There are those who argue that it may have been shot down. It's not clear. There's no definitive account of what happened with with Lynn Biao, except that he went down. He died in this plane crash, and that was the end of his position as his close comrade in arms and successor. But obviously, we know that China did go on to have this reconciliation with the United States, not to, you know, grasp the United States in a warm embrace, but to open up to recognizing the United States.

and being recognized by the United States as part of a process given that they had lost the not just the political agreement, but the material support that they had been getting from the Soviet Union, they needed, if they were going to continue to build the economy and advance the economy, and we'll talk about that when we look at the transition to the reform period, they needed the influx of foreign capital, foreign technology, foreign, you know, knowledge and information, and opening to the U.S. begins a process that allows that to get underway. Japan becomes the first source of foreign capital and technology and all that. But that was only possible after the opening to the United States. So there's a complex calculus involved there

of geopolitics and economics and development and all that. But that seems to be what goes on with Lin Biao and Sherman Mao at the beginning of the 70s. You know, the chairman's health is declining already by the time we see that those images of him meeting Nixon, he's clearly frail and suffering in many ways. His health continues to deteriorate. Joe In Lai, his real close comrade in arms, is himself suffering from cancer by this time. You know, there's various back and forths between the gang of four and, and Deng Xiaoping, who, you know, is purged and then brought back and then purged,

they brought back, I think, three times. The 70s are a very contentious phase. The gang of four were people who were very close to the chairman. Of course, it includes his wife, Zhang Qing, but also Yo and Yuan and Zhang Chun Chao from Shanghai, and Wang Hou Wen, who was a worker in the mass movement, at the time of the Shanghai economy, who then rises to be a political leader and winds up as, you know, the fourth member of that grouping. And they were, they were, you know, now I think they tend to be viewed as, as ultra-left. They certainly were very engaged with the critique of

bureaucracy and what they called the re-emergence of bourgeois right within the party and all this. But they, you know, they were one political position. Deng Xiaoping, you know, emerging as sort of the pragmatist, if you will, very famously talking about, it doesn't matter if the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice, all this kind of stuff. Being and being given positions by Chairman Mao, with Chairman Mao's support for modernization, for science and technology and things like that. It's a contentious period where these contradictions around the path of socialist development remain unresolved. The party has been brought back into a closer relationship with the masses, but there are still these contradictory positions, the two-line struggle, if you will, over what is the best path forward.

Those contradictions remain unresolved and in some ways can't be resolved so long. Chairman Mao is on the scene. His ability to engage with those debates and those struggles is severely compromised by his neurological degeneration. Joe N. Lai is ill with cancer in and out of the hospital. Joe dies in January of 1976. Judea, the great military leader, founder of the Red Army, dies in early July. The great Tomshot earthquake that kills several hundred thousand of people takes place later in July, and Chairman Mao passes on September 9th in 1976. It's a devastating year for the old leadership of the party and for many people in China because of the Tangshan earthquake. But that finally, in a sense, opens up the possibility of resolving

these contradictions over the best path of socialist development. And I think that's where we should leave it for now, because those are the issues that we're going to take off with in the final of our four conversations. Yeah, absolutely brilliant, Ken. I'm really looking forward to part four. Honestly, if I had known that these conversations would be this fruitful, I would have just told you. It's going to be a 10-part series. Ken, we're going to keep you forever. but we will stick to our word and for now it'll be a four-part series but we know that you have some more works that will be coming out relatively soon and you'll be back on the show to talk about those as well so don't worry listeners the next episode is not going to be the last you

hear of ken on guerrilla history brett how can our listeners find your excellent podcast and i would like to thank you again for being a guest host on the first three episodes of this mini series that we have going on it's really a great pleasure to have you back on the show. I know there was no gap between, you know, when you were an official host of the show and a guest host, but it's really, I mean, I really appreciate you coming on and doing these with us. I'll always love guerrilla history. And this, this right here was the genuinely, I do not exaggerate the best four-hour history lesson I've ever had in my life. And the absolute best analysis of China and these major events of the last century in Chinese

history that I've ever encountered. So thank you so much, Ken. thrilling to sit here and listen to you, break all this down. Fascinating stuff. As for me, you can find everything I do at Revolutionary LeftRadio.com. Yeah, or as highly recommend the listeners do that. My co-host, Adnan, again, was not able to make it to this conversation, but you should definitely follow him on Twitter at Adnan-A-Husain, H-U-S-A-I-N, and follow his other podcast, The Modulus, M-A-J-L-I-S, which is focused on the Arab world and Muslim Diasst.

It's a great show I've learned a lot from it. Make sure to subscribe to his show and not the one of the same name hosted by Radio Free Central Asia, which of course is a cutout from our friends at the CIA. Don't listen to their show. Listeners, listen to Adnance. If you don't hear his mellifluous tones, you've gone to the wrong place. Ken, how can the listeners find your excellent book? And I don't, I think that we'll just leave it at that. Yeah, well, my, the China's Revolution and the Quest for a Socialist Future is published by 1804 Books in New York, and it's available on their website, 1804books.com, and we're also working with them on a new volume that we hope to have out by the later part of this year, maybe in time for the 75th anniversary of the PRC, on China and the World, 1949 to 2024.

I didn't know whether we wanted to officially tease that project or not, which is why I said we'll leave it there. But if we want to tell the listeners what you're going to be coming back on the show to talk about, I guess this isn't going to place as any. So listeners, that preview, of course. If you've made it to the end of this conversation, you deserve a little preview. So be sure to stay tuned for that release of that book. And, of course, we'll have an episode with Ken as that release becomes more imminent.

As for me, listeners, you can find me. on Twitter at Huck 1995, H-U-C-K-1-995. You can help support guerrilla history and allow us to continue making episodes like this by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And you can follow us on Twitter, keep up with everything that we're putting out individually

as well as the show collectively at Gorilla-U-U-E-R-I-L-A-U-L-A-U-S-Pod. And until next time, listeners, and remember the next episode is going to be on the reform period of China, so you know you're going to want to stick around for that. Until next time, solidarity. Thank you.