cities ‘down to the countryside’. For most
of them, education had come to a halt in
the heady summer of 1966. Though those
days had offered unprecedented power
and freedom – to travel, to criticise and to
act – many of them came to find that their
lives were wrecked as badly as those of
their victims.
The course of the Cultural Revolution
was byzantine in its twists and turns, but
Mao Zedong achieved his core aims: those
who he believed had been opposing him
within the party were removed from office
and disgraced. However, the violent energy
that was unleashed threatened to tear the
country apart, and order had been secured
only by bringing in the army. In 1971 that
order was threatened when Lin Biao – by
then Mao’s anointed heir-apparent – was
killed in a plane crash in Mongolia; it was
claimed that he had been planning a coup,
but balked and fled, dying when his plane
ran out of fuel.THE BLAME GAME
The paralysing stasis that followed the
exhausting events of 1966–69 ended only
with the death of Mao in September 1976.
Within a month his successor, Hua
Guofeng, arrested the leading figures in the
Cultural Revolution Group, including Jiang
Qing. Many surviving targets of the
movement, including Deng Xiaoping, were
later rehabilitated and regained power.
In 1981 the party issued a ‘Resolution’ on
party history. This concluded that the
beliefs of Mao that inspired the Cultural
Revolution were “entirely erroneous” and
“conformed neither to Marxism-Leninism
nor to Chinese reality”. Much of the blame
was laid on Lin Biao, and on a ‘Gang of
Four’ including Jiang Qing, though the
responsibility of Mao Zedong was also
acknowledged. Even so, it was famously
concluded, his contributions to building
socialism in China had been seven-tenths
positive and only three-tenths negative.
Meanwhile, there has never been any
meaningful calling to account of the
perpetrators of the terrible violence
wreaked during the Cultural
Revolution. Their victims were
rehabilitated – but the dead can never
be brought back to life. ßALAMY/GETTY IMAGESConflict and kitsch: Mao’s global legacy
Peruvian children sit near
school walls daubed with
slogans by Maoist Sendero
Luminoso insurgentsA porcelain
figure of Mao
flanked
by uniformed ‘Red
Guards’ in
a Beijing store
in 2012. Often
kitsch or ironic, Mao
iconography remains
popular todaymao chic
permeated
western culture,
with mao badges,
mao caps and
mao suits worn as
style statements,
not simply
political ones
The Cultural Revolution both appalled and enthralled
observers overseas. As it first unfolded it was the
subject of intense but puzzled scrutiny by expert
China-watchers, but in the days of destructive rage
in late August 1966, when reports emerged of Red
Guard attacks on temples and churches, it garnered
wider public attention.
Maoist rhetoric, and the style and iconography of
the Cultural Revolution, were widely adopted across
the radical left in western Europe, North America and
Japan. Radical students in West Germany, the Black
Panthers in the US and hard-left factions in Italy all
took Maoism seriously as a political programme,
though the established international communist
movement remained loyal to Moscow. Mao chic
permeated further into popular culture, with Mao
badges, Mao caps and Mao suits worn as style
statements, not simply political ones.
The Cultural Revolution also came to the streets of
European cities with a series of violent incidents in
which Chinese diplomats and students clashed with
security forces in Paris, London and Moscow.
The most significant set of events outside China took
place in Hong Kong where, from May 1967, local
communists organised a violent and sustained
challenge to British rule. By the end of that year 51
people had lost their lives in
a series of violent
confrontations, shooting
incidents at the border and a
bombing campaign. The
British authorities enacted
emergency regulations to
suppress leftist publications,
and several editors and
journalists were jailed. In
response, in August 1967
Red Guards burned down the
British mission in Beijing,
manhandling the diplomats
who were then prevented
from leaving the country for
a year.
The Cultural Revolution
and Mao’s political thought
had a violent trajectory that
diverged from the course of
events in China. From
1970, Europe faced the terror campaigns of the
Baader-Meinhof gang and the Italian Red Brigades.
In 1980 the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path)
movement led by Abimael Guzmán, who had beentrained in Cultural Revolution-era China, launched a
bloody Maoist insurgency in Peru. By the time
Guzmán was captured and jailed 12 years later,
more than 50,000 were dead. A bloody 10-year civilwar fomented by
Maoist rebels in Nepal only ended in 2006. And the
Naxalites, a Maoist group with origins in a 1967
uprising in West Bengal, still present a significant
security threat to the Indian state.
In China itself the Cultural Revolution remains in
political limbo. The 1981 ‘Resolution’ remains the
public verdict, but there
has been no detailed
examination of the course
of events, despite brief
official endorsement of
‘scar’ literature, a genre of
memoirs that emerged in
the 1970s dealing with the
effects of the revolution.
That openness did not
last. Today, archives remain
closed and most histories
and museums gloss over or
simply ignore the years
between 1966 and 1976. At
a grass-roots level, informal
initiatives document victims’
stories, but the topic remains
so politically sensitive that
there seems little chance of
any loosening of political
control. Most young Chinese
know very little about the Cultural Revolution. The
leadership’s legitimacy today is grounded in its
nationalist credentials, and in its handling of the
economy. Its dark past remains hidden.ROBERT BICKERS IS PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT THE
UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL AND AUTHOR OF THE SCRAMBLE
FOR CHINA (PENGUIN, 2012)HISTORY