In fact, from its founding in 1921, the Chinese Communist Party has been a hothouse of rivalry, intrigue, factionalism, and murderous violence.
By that time, the Party itself was smoldering.
In due course, Mao had to call in the firefighters-the regime’s bureaucratic apparatus and armed forces. Mao’s decision to summon “the masses” to join his political campaign proved dangerous one can summon and incite a mob but, once raging, it can be like a California brushfire, apt to go off in unpredictable directions. Yang lays out what can happen when a fearful regime exists in a perpetual state of war with the people it wants to control. The 1960s Cultural Revolution was arguably his way of destroying the opposition that had been revealed in the ’50s-not only among the people, but within the Communist Party itself. But in the late 1950s-after calling for a “hundred flowers to bloom” in the nation’s discourse-he was taken aback by the unpopularity of his reforms. Within a decade Mao launched the Great Leap Forward, collectivizing farms and rationing produce. The Communists’ People’s Republic of China (PRC), set up in 1949, was in a hurry to consolidate its power. But then Yang has a complicated story to tell. Their version is much reduced from Yang’s original even so, it is over 700 pages. First published in Chinese in Hong Kong in 2016, it is now available in English thanks to the efforts of journalist Stacy Mosher and the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater professor Guo Jian. Yang’s latest book, The World Turned Upside Down: A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, provides the definitive history of Mao’s 1960s enthusiasm-when “only” a million or so died. By Yang’s estimate roughly 36 million died of starvation-arguably the greatest single crime in the history of the world. In Tombstone (2012) Yang wrote the definitive account of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” famine of the 1950s (see my review of it: “Blood-soaked History,” CRB, Spring 2013). China’s Cultural Revolution doubtless provides a cautionary tale, but such comparisons are both too pat and cloud our appreciation of the true horror. Today, however, references to mid-’60s China have become a shorthand and unconsidered way of talking about the breakdown of civility, tolerance, and order on American campuses, and the outbreaks of violence in many American cities. These atrocities were inspired by a vaguely defined ideology called the Thought of Mao Zedong, encouraged and enabled by the man himself.Īt the time these crimes were properly likened to the Hitler Youth rampages.
But it is also notorious for its images of students and supporters running amok, trashing college campuses and government offices, humiliating, maiming, and murdering teachers and officials, and driving others to suicide. In America, the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath are remembered for the antic words and phrases which have become part of our language-Capitalist Roaders, Little Red Book, Red Guards, Gang of Four. He graduated from college in 1966 just as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was beginning to convulse his country. Journalist Yang Jisheng has bravely covered abuses in China for almost 60 years.
0 kommentar(er)
