The Cultural Revolution } 261
investigation, and often “struggle” by radical youth. Gangs of radical youth
were given free reign by China’s internal security forces (as noted earlier,
firmly under the control of Mao’s ally Kang Sheng) to ransack private resi-
dences looking for foreign-language books, musical recordings, pictures, or
clothing. If such were found, their possessors would typically be called to
account by radical youth gangs, the incriminating items destroyed, and the
culprit subjected to “struggle” in the form of verbal abuse or physical assault.
On streets, young people with Western-style long hair were subject to forced
haircuts. Young men wearing “Western-style” tight pants had those trousers
slit open by Red Guard scissors. European classical music was banned as
bourgeois and counterrevolutionary. An atmosphere of terror came to per-
vade China. Even Chinese scientists who had studied abroad or merely knew
foreign languages or had foreign-language materials came under suspicion.
Contacts with foreigners were even more strictly monitored than they had
been in the 1950s. The number of foreigners allowed into China fell to prob-
ably a few thousand—resident and visiting foreign communists and pro-
gressives, some students from Africa studying agriculture or revolution, and
a few carefully selected and carefully escorted “foreign guests” invited to
China out of calculation that doing so would help achieve China’s interna-
tional objectives. Foreigners in China had already become scarce since the
uprooting of the large Western presence in China in the early 1950s. By the
mid-1960s, with the departure of Soviets and East European advisors, they
became even scarcer.
To a very substantial degree, China’s isolation of 1966–1976 was
self-imposed, not imposed by hostile foreign governments. Isolation from
outside influences went hand in hand with sustained propaganda, intense
criticism, and struggle for ideological transformation. The objective was to
create a new communist person who would, finally, make possible the real-
ization of the Marxist utopian vision. The isolation of China kept out ideo-
logically pernicious influences, whether Western or Soviet, and was part of a
vast totalitarian effort to transform the thinking of ordinary Chinese. China’s
Maoist leaders, starting most importantly with Mao himself, believed that the
mentality of Chinese had to be reformed (sixiang gaizao) to become unsel-
fish and collective-oriented rather than selfish and individualistic. The way of
thinking of Chinese had to be remade so that they would work long and hard,
diligently and creatively, not for individual gain but for the sake of the revolu-
tion, Chairman Mao, and communism. Only in this fashion could the equal-
itarian, collectivist, altruistic, and classless society envisioned by communist
theorists over the years be realized.^3 The whole of Chinese society became a
Socialist Education Movement on a vast scale.
The key internal component paralleling China’s external radicalism was
the purge from institutions of power of all opponents of Mao and his revo-
lutionary policies. As discussed earlier, following the economic collapse of