Rev Left Radio - The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution

Episode Date: March 27, 2024

Listen to the first installment of this four-episode series HERE Kenneth J. Hammond is Professor of History at New Mexico State University. Hammond was a student and Students for a Democratic Society leader at Kent State University from 1967 to 1970. He later (1985) completed his degree in Political Science, then studied Modern Chinese language at the Beijing Foreign Languages Normal School in Beijing. Hammond received an M.A. in Regional Studies - East Asia (1989), and a Ph.D in History and East Asian Languages (1994) from Harvard University. In 2007, Hammond was appointed director of the Confucius Institute, a cultural initiative funded in part by Hanban on the NMSU campus that is dedicated to studying and publicizing China and Chinese culture. He is the editor of the journal Ming Studies.    Follow Guerrilla History on X Follow Guerrilla History on IG Subscribe to Guerrilla History on your preferred podcast app Support Rev Left Radio    

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. As some of you may know by now, I have recently, on the best terms imaginable, stepped away from guerrilla history as the third co-host, just because I have a lot of things going on in my own life that necessitate that I, you know, focus on those stuff, school, family, etc. And it's just really hard to balance all the projects that I have. But before I did leave, or right out, after I left, I was able to at least come on as a guest co-host for this absolutely amazing series that Henry and I did with Ken Hammond on the last 200-some years of Chinese history, systematically working from the Taiping Rebellion and the Boxer Rebellion up through modern-day China, even looking into the future.

This is a four-episode series that will be coming out first and foremost on guerrilla history, so I highly encourage everybody listening to this who is at all. interested in this teaser or this history to go subscribe to guerrilla history. Make sure you keep an eye out for that series. I will also, after guerrilla history releases each episode, post them on Rev. Left. It's so good that I want to make sure as many ears as possible, listen to these episodes. It is, and I don't say this with any hyperbole, the best sort of four to five hour breakdown of modern Chinese history that I have ever, ever heard. So that is singing high praises for Ken and his scholarship and his entire life dedicated to understanding and doing political education work around Chinese history and present day Chinese society.

So here's a little teaser from I believe episode two or three in which we dive into the Great League Forward and the Cultural Revolution and so much more. And this is just a little chunk from our episode about that focused on the Cultural Revolution. I really enjoy this part of the of the conversation, but again, it's acting as a teaser for the full four episode series that is coming very, very soon. This is meant to sort of wet the beaks, if you will, of listeners for how good this series is going to be. So go subscribe to guerrilla history. Keep an eye out on guerrilla history and on Rev Left for the full series coming over the next weeks and months as we unleash these episodes on the world. And without

further ado, here is Ken Hammond's amazing breakdown of the cultural revolution. Enjoy. I mean, the summer of 66, as the struggle unfolds, you know, it's a classic scenario of, you know, 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 for, trying to find ways to thwart that, you know, again, to deflect the spearpoint, as we said. And this is what happens when the work teams are sent out to the university. 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 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 it he says it's it's it's right to rebel you know that that famous saying what he says is it's right to rebel against reactionaries it's right to rebel against reactionaries in positions of power so he's saying again this this is this is this is this is this is 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 they have so walled themselves off that it's, we got to bombard the headquarter. We've 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, 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'd made various efforts previously, you know, coming out of the Great Leap, the socialist education movement, and they had been thwarted, right? So now,

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 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 Mal. 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 directed at those, you know, at the people

in power within the party, within the government, within academia. me, yeah, 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 Mao, 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 Yenan, 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 redguard 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 but this bureaucratic you know constrain on initially on these young people in in academic institutions in schools but but more broadly on the society as a as a whole yeah well let's get into that a little bit more than the 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 this sort of complicated period of time. Well, it is. It's an extremely complicated period. And, 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. So they had been raised 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 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 inspiration.

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 an 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 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, the, the, the, the, the, the, 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 Guards. 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, and 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 other. who were not, who came from outside the party, whose families weren't part of 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 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. know. And so unfortunately, there grows to be a lot of factionalism. Even 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 pretty wild for a while. And in a sense, that's because when you backed off the leadership of the party, you created, there came to be, I wouldn't say a political vacuum, but a field of contestation, if you will. And people staked out positions that weren't necessarily 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 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 them. But it also unleashed the potential.

and the actuality of these factional conflicts. As 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 just splash across. You have to feel your way bit by bit.

And in that process, 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. the Red Guard phenomenon is actually a relatively 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 lived 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 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 that it set out

to achieve in terms of forcing the party to reconnect with the masses.