TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=93HT0328> <link 93XP0460> <link 93HT0686> <link 93HT0172> <link 89TT1661> <title> 1960s: China's Cultural Revolution </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1960s Highlights </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> China's Cultural Revolution </hdr> <body> [In October 1964, after 14 years and an investment of $200 million that was much needed elsewhere, China finally succeeded in exploding a small, crude nuclear device in the deserts of Sinkiang, becoming the world's fifth atomic "power." Then China itself exploded in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the paroxysm of violence and youthful revolt that the aging Mao Tse-tung set in motion, beginning in 1966, in order to reinvigorate his huge, impoverished country.] (September 2, 1966) It had been clear for weeks that China was heading for some sort of momentous crescendo, but no one knew exactly what to expect. Last week, as the impact of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution abruptly spilled out across the land, the nightmare of it all became chillingly clear. Mao Tse-tung aimed to blot out not only all traces of foreign influence, but to tear out China's own cultural and historical roots as well. Yearning to subject his country to the same hardships that he had endured on the Long March, Mao chose as the weapon for his campaign a new organization whose name derived from the civil war of the 1930s: the Red Guards. Originally, they were peasants who served Mao's Red army as porters and scouts. Today's Red Guards are high school and university students, often clad in military-type khaki trousers and belted jackets, and always wearing a red arm band. They seemed to be under the command of Mao's longtime ghost-writer, Chen Po-ta, 62, now a leader of the Cultural Revolution. Chen's order: "You must temper yourselves by going among the masses and getting yourselves covered over and over again with muck." The Red Guards began carrying out Chen's version of Mao's "thinking" early last week by posting along Peking's major streets a "Declaration of War on the Old World." The Guards' vow: "To mercilessly destroy every hotbed of revisionism." Down the streets they rampaged, roughing up Chinese in foreign dress, ordering shopkeepers to stop selling books except those that reflect Mao's thinking and to rid themselves of imported articles or luxury items. In the place of cosmetics, ordinary floor soap was put on sale for facial care. The transformation was often painfully crude. Kangaroo courts convened in the streets and meted out embarrassing punishment to anyone guilty of associating with foreigners. Doctors, for example, were forced to walk on their knees in the gutters because they had treated foreign patients. At Peking University, Red Guards encouraged students to spit on their professors. (January 13, 1967) Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, aimed at "purifying" Chinese Communism, erupted into strife and stridency so bitter that it produced widespread chaos and verged on civil war. The revolution that for 18 years has enchained China's 750 million people to Communism openly degenerated into a personal power struggle virtually unprecedented in history in its scope and stakes. Chinese fought Chinese in the cities, and the ubiquitous tatzebao, or posters, attacked with such catholic ferocity--condemning both Mao's enemies and his lieutenants--that there may soon be no one left undenounced in all of Red China. In the eastern Chinese city of Nanking (pop. 1.5 million), the words and pictures of violence gave way to violence itself. The Czechoslovakian news agency reported that some 500,000 workers had poured into the city, determined to wipe out Mao's local Red Guard contingent and end its harassing techniques. For four days, the two factions fought furiously in the streets. More than 60,000 prisoners were taken by both sides, and many were tortured in the best Chinese fashion. Japan's Kyodo news service reported that 54 persons were killed, 900 wounded and 6,000 arrested and the city's rail and telephone service were cut. The Great Revolution has clearly begun to devour itself. Despite the new violence and threats of more violence, however, the main war is still being fought with words--thousands upon thousands of them. Most of them deal in sharp vilification of the villains opposing Mao's revolution, or make an effort to arouse indignation and sympathy for Mao and thus broaden the base of mass support that he and Lin Piao must command to make their purge successful. President Liu Shao-chi last week was depicted in wall cartoons as Don Quixote charging against Mao's teaching. Beside him, as Sancho Panza, rode Liu's chief ally against Mao, Party Secretary Teng Hsianoping. A less kind cartoon showed Liu as a barking dog being drowned under the sun of Mao's teachings, and Liu's wife was crudely caricatured as a prostitute. That catty note may well have been the inspiration of Mrs. Mao, who likes to go by her screen name of Chiang Ching, which she acquired as a grade B bit actress in Shanghai in the 1930s. In the last two months, she has emerged from 25 years of obscurity to take over the cultural direction of the revolution. Purposely or not, the result has been that Mao and the purgers have antagonized and threatened nearly every educated man and woman gainfully employed in Red China. To the men who care about China's future and want to bring it into the modern world of comparative well-being and technology, the revolution threatens to sweep all the painful achievements of nearly 20 years into the dustbin and consign China to a dark age of mindless communal litanies and Mao sun worshiping. To the men in the governments of the provinces far from the politburo battles of Peking, the revolution brings trainloads of Red Guards usurping their authority and rocking tidy little boats that have been carefully caulked over the years. (August 4, 1967) The signs of failure and frustration abound. The Maoists have yet to restore order to China's economy, yet to persuade the majority of Red Guard youths to go back to school, yet to rein in the factional infighting that has troubled their ranks. Lawlessness and violence flare each week from Manchuria in the north to the Vietnamese border in the south. The summer harvesting has been badly, perhaps grievously, hindered. And, backed by the local populace, a regional military commander in the strategic Yangtze River city of Wuhan openly defied Peking and abducted two of its top officials. Peking's response to the "abduction" of its envoys was immediate. Peking garrison troops loyal to Mao made a rare march through the streets of the capital, brandishing placards demanding RESCUE COMRADES HSIEH FU-CHIH AND WANG-LI!, STRANGLE CHEN TSAI-TAO TO DEATH! and LIBERATE WUHAN! Radio Peking broadcast an ultimatum ordering the rebels to surrender or be wiped out by the Chinese army. Amid this show of force, Premier Chou En-lai, Peking's most experienced mediator, quietly went to work behind the scenes to negotiate with General Chen for the release of the two prisoners. He succeeded, and last week the freed emissaries returned to Peking and a hero's welcome at the airport by Maoist officials including Chou and Mrs. Mao and tens of thousands of cheering Pekingese. (December 22, 1967) The violence has not yet approached the massive defiance and anarchy of the summer and early fall, when Mao, on a tour of the provinces, was reportedly shocked into the admission that "some people say this is not a civil war, but I say it is." Still, there are new dimensions in the current strife that make it potentially even more dangerous than the old. The battles are no longer being fought just in the cities, but throughout the countryside as well. Nor is the fighting any longer confined to the ideological rivalry between pro-Mao and anti-Mao forces. It has degenerated into a sort of blood feud, curdled by the atrocities committed by each side against the other, motivated by revenge and the determination to seize--or retain--power for its own sake. The erstwhile Cultural Revolution that started it all has splintered into literally thousands of factions, each with militant followers, many equipped with heavy weapons raided from local armories. No less ominous, the hopes have been shattered that Mao's 2,700,000-man army can restore order at will. The peace imposed by the army lasted only through the harvest season--a time in China when all energies, including those of the army, must be devoted to bringing in the crops that will feed the country through the winter. The harvest is now over, and the army's control appears to be slipping as violence spreads. Despite its enormous manpower resources, the army simply does not have enough men to contain strife across a land of 750 million people and 3,800,000 square miles. (December 22, 1968) In Canton, a crowd of 300,000 turned out to give a rousing send-off to 60,000 middle-school graduates, all of them teenagers bound for China's remoter regions. In Wuhan, a similar rally was staged to bid farewell to 10,000 Red Guards from 150 local schools. In Kwei-yang, more than 20,000 students have set out for the mountains and paddylands. Since September, the Peking government has shipped more than 2,000,000 university and high school students, including thousands of young guardsmen, to the boondocks. Hundreds of thousands more of the nation's intellectual elite are scheduled to follow. Chinese broadcasts emphasize that the mass upheaval is part of Chairman Mao Tse-tung's plan for a revolution in the country's educational policies: he is said to believe that the present setup tends to perpetuate urban, bourgeois values. It is also something of a "rectification" campaign, designed to punish the young Red Guards who ran wild after Mao proclaimed his Great Proletarian Cultural in 1966. [The country finally regained a degree of control. The following year a party congress put a period to the anarchy, but the consequences of the Cultural Revolution, for the ruined economy and for ordinary Chinese whose lives were smashed (not to mention the thousands upon thousands who were killed), persisted until Mao's death in 1976.] </body> </article> </text>