Chronicling the unpleasant truths of the Chinese Revolution and its aftermath

I have been a man of the book during the pandemic. Many of you have been reading too. I know that from thoughtful notes you have sent.

Here’s both an invitation to readers and a warning: “The World Turned Upside Down” by veteran Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng, which I just finished, is the most difficult book I have read in years. It’s the history of the cultural revolution of 1966-1976 in which, under the direction of Mao Zedong (1893-1976), millions of Chinese men, women and children were humiliated, beaten or murdered, typically in public.

Many of the humiliated and beaten were sent to re-education camps to mend their ideological ways. The dead were buried in mass graves, thrown down wells or tossed into a nearby river. The number of total deaths is disputed, as the Chinese government has never released statistics — and may not know the true number. Two million dead is a low estimate.

Obviously, the subject matter is difficult. But China in the cultural revolution takes on a dreamlike quality, the repetitive violence Yang catalogs stretching credulity. Could this have happened? It did, and is recorded chapter by chapter in “The World Turned Upside Down,” via Mao’s own description of the cultural revolution.

To the extent the cultural revolution is known in Western popular culture, it’s through variations of a single photograph. Mao, at Tiananmen Square, greeting thousands of students, workers and party members who are cheering wildly while waving little red books — their copies of “The Quotations of Chairman Mao.”

Yang says “Mao aroused surges of ardor that dwarfed a papal appearance at the Vatican.” Close to 370 million copies of the quotations were published in a single year.

The cultural revolution was the product of Mao’s fear, if not paranoia. He worried that the communist party was becoming ossified and selfish careerists were taking over. The Russian example unnerved him. After Stalin died in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev denounced his crimes and announced revisions to communist orthodoxy. Would Mao’s successors denounce him and go down the revisionist road? In 1964, Khrushchev was removed from power by Kremlin rivals. Would Mao fall to a plot?

To stifle those in China who would go down a revisionist road in the company of bourgeois elements, capitalistic lackeys, foreign invaders and what Mao called, with his flair for imagery, “ox demons and snake spirits,” the maximum leader attacked those most dangerous to orthodoxy and to him — the elites in the party, at schools and universities, in cultural institutions like the theater and the opera. Teachers, physicists and sopranos had become too comfortable — take away their homes and send them to the farm to harvest rice!

There were people who benefited from the upheaval, usually those who joined Mao in attacking, sometimes literally, elites and bureaucrats who administered the complex society in which elites thrived. But Mao’s ideological assault crushed the economy. Teachers, physicists and sopranos made poor farmers. And those who replaced them in the classroom, in the lab and on the stage were inferior or incompetent.

If you are wondering about “ox demons and snake spirits,” it’s my impression they were any deviants from the party line. Mao wrote a lot of traditional poetry, most of it formulaic and predictable. He was no Walt Whitman.

Communist power was centralized in Mao, the Great Helmsman. This meant the murderous rampages could be sustained for years and the faltering economy endured. But Mao remained capable of rational calculation, too, as when he invited President Richard Nixon to spend a week in China in 1972. Nixon in China was good for national morale and China’s standing in the world.

By 1976, the Chinese people were exhausted. The death in January of Zhou Enlai, who had negotiated Nixon’s visit, sparked mourning demonstrations that became violent outbursts against the government. Mao knew he had to relent. After he died in September, his successors called quits to the cultural revolution.

In Yang’s assessment, the elites and bureaucrats who survived the upheaval came out of it stronger than ever. And power, wealth and opportunity was further centralized in their children.

Let me close with two quotes and a paraphrase from “The World Turned Upside Down.”

From the preface: “In 1966 and the nine years that followed, nearly every person in China became embroiled to some extent in the Cultural Revolution, an experience that left a permanent mark on the lives, fates, and souls of every participant.”

The last sentence of the book: “Sudden change is dangerous, and peaceful change is more appropriate.”

The paraphrase is from midway in the volume. Lin Bao, a general who for a time was Mao’s designated successor, told a colleague that in the Chinese communist system, it was impossible to accomplish anything of significance without lying.

Yang Jisheng’s “The World Turned Upside Down” has never been published in China.

Michael Carey is an occasional columnist and the former editorial page editor of the Anchorage Daily News.

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