What would you think of the Cultural Revolution if you were an ordinary Chinese like me and my families?

(There are many comrades in the west who respect Chinese people's experiences and opinions on the Cultural Revolution. Critics in this article are not targeting them.)

Many people in the west like expressing their personal opinions on one of the major events in the history of the People’s Republic of China, namely the Cultural Revolution. Either they take the Cultural Revolution as an example of the "brutality" of the "authoritarian regime" in PRC, or they brand it as a good example of class struggle against bourgeoisie.

Their opinions may vary significantly, but there is one thing in common: none of them take opinions of us ordinary Chinese people seriously, as if we Chinese people who have experienced this event personally don't have the agency or capacity to make sound judgements by ourselves. However, the reality is that "only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches", only we ordinary Chinese people whose lives were significantly impacted by the Cultural Revolution can judge this event fairly.

As voices of Chinese people are still not very present on western platforms, I want to share some opinions and stories of my families on the Cultural Revolution here.

(By ordinary Chinese people, I mean Chinese peasants and workers. Based on my experiences and experiences of Chinese people I know, although Chinese people can have very different opinions on other political issues, most of us share very similar opinions on the Cultural Revolution.)

Cultural revolution: your sin is your past that you can not change

In my childhood, I always heard my grandma talking about how sorry she felt for my great uncle who dreamed of becoming a soldier but could not get the recommendation to serve in the army because our family was classified as “upper-middle peasants”. As a kid, I understood neither why our family was classified as "upper-middle peasants" although my grandma told me that our family never had enough food to eat, nor why a random classification could determine one's future.

Two decades later, I finally find out answers to these questions. Together with these answer, I also find out that my uncle was not alone, many Chinese people had similar experiences and their lives were fundamentally changed during the Cultural Revolution.

The Cultural Revolution was romanticised by many western marxists as a class struggle launched by the popular class against the bourgeois class. However, as long as one has basic knowledge of Chinese history, one will know that the land reform (土改) was accomplished before the founding of the PRC and the three socialist transformations of agriculture, handicrafts, capitalist industry and commerce (三大社会主义改造) was accomplished by 1956. The political power of the bourgeois class had already been completely expropriated a decade before the Cultural Revolution. In other words, the bourgeois class did not exist at the time when the Cultural Revolution was started. So where did the classifications like "landlord" or "upper class peasants" come from?

Unlike many western marxists claim, during the Cultural Revolution people were not classified into different classes based on the ownership of means of production and the actuall material conditions, but based on one's past before the founding of PRC. For example, as my mom told me, one family in her village was labelled as "landlord" because they were landlord before the land reform. The whole family was forced to wear dunce cap (戴高帽子) in regular struggle sessions (批斗会) for their sin of being landlord in old semi-feudal China. The children in this family were forced to do the heavist agricultural tasks and had no chances to study at universities no matter how good their grades were.

Undoubtedly it is unfair to punish a person for his/her wrongdoing in the past for a second time when this person has already been punished once for the same wrongdoing.

This also contradicts with a basic materialist dialectics that everything is ever-changing and nothing is constant. As people's consciousness is continuously changing, people who belonged to the bourgeois class before 1949 can improve their consciousness and become as progressive as people who were poor peasants before the land reform. So it's wrong to treat people from the old bourgeois class as "permanent enemies".

Moreover, this betrays Mao's principle of "Unity, criticism, and Unity". In the eve of the founding of the PRC, Mao Zedong adopted this principle and united all democratic forces regardless of their past wrongdoing in order to build the new country with collective efforts. The trend of blaming people for their past during the Cultural Revolution was a wrong deviation of Mao's Thought.

Cultural revolution: even without learning ABC, one can still be successor of socialism

As the name "the Cultural Revolution" suggests, one of the main groups that were targeted and heavily criticised during the Cultural Revolution was the cultural and educational group, or using the Cultural Revolution term "the stinking old ninth (臭老九), including teachers, academics, artists, writers, journalists and everyone else working in cultural industry. According to the data published by Chinese Academy of Sciences, 1909 families in the entire academy had their homes ransacked and 229 people were persecuted.

With the reputation of intellectuals being denounced, a trend of anti-intellectualism spread over the whole country. Students who refused to study were taken as good examples and praised for their "revolutionary anti-bourgeois" spirits. For example, a famous student Zhang Tiesheng (张铁生) submitted an empty paper in the university entrance exam. In Henan, my home province, a student called Zhang Yuqin (张玉勤) wrote a poem "even without learning ABC, one can still be successor of socialism" in an English exam. As my aunt told me, "people regarded education as useless. At school we only did physical agricultural work and played games".

The negative impact of the anti-intellectualism on people's attitude towards education continued even after the Cultural Revolution. My mom, who started school after the end of the Cultural Revolution, said that "no one in my village treated children's education seriously, especially for girls. If your grandparents could take my education as seriously as I do for you, I would definitely not quit school so early. Now I understand how important education is. And if I had studied English seriously, I could travel abroad alone without you worrying about me".

One of the most serious consequences of the Cultural Revolution is that, as Deng Xiaoping put it, "for ten years it was made impossible to train people". No socialism can be built without skilled people with sufficient knowledge, especially in backward third world countries like PRC. The trend of anti-intellectualism promoted during the Cultural Revolution is not helping Chinese people moving towards socialism, but dragging us backward further away from socialism.

Cultural Revolution: pauperism

Similar to the trend of anti-intellectualism, or in other words "the lesser knowledge one has, the more honor one has", there is another trend during the Cultural Revolution, pauperism, or in other words "the poorer one is, the more glorious one is". This trend also reflects the material conditions during the Cultural Revolution. Since the task of developing productive forces was almost completely ignored and many people with essential knowledge in technology and industrial production were denounced, people's living standard, which was already low, dropped further.

Many western marxists romanticise this trend and claim that everyone being equally poor is socialism. However, for ordinary Chinese people who experienced poverty and starvation, their flat belly and bony body tell them that pauperism is not socialism. As my grandma said, "we followed Mao to fight against Japanese devils and Chiang Kai-shek, many of us sacrificed our lives voluntarily because we believed that socialism will give us a dignified life with enough food. But after the Great Leap Forward (大跃进) and the ten years of the Cultural Revolution, we became as poor as before the revolution. People were starving while the Gang of Four chanted "being poor is glorious". We the masses couldn't care less about being glorious, we only cared about having enough food to feed our children".

No one knows pauperism better than ordinary Chinese people who experienced semi-feudal China, anti-imperialist war, internal war, the Great Leap Forward (大跃进) and the Cultural Revolution. Memories of starvation are still vivid for many families so we greet each other with "have you eaten (你吃了吗?)".

What Deng Xiaoping said "pauperism is not socialism" is not a bourgeois ideology, but the most sincere voice from the bottom of the hearts of millions of Chinese people who suffered heavily from extreme poverty and starvation. Ordinary Chinese people want a dignified and prosperous life where they no longer have the fear of being hungry and poor.

That's why it is not one single person, or as western marxists call him “the traitor of socialism”, Deng Xiaoping, but millions of Chinese people who refused the Cultural Revolution and chose the path of Reform and Opening-up based on thorough analyses about the material conditions and the primary contradiction in PRC after Mao Zedong passed away. It is not a betrayal of our socialist revolution, but a manifestation of the faith of Chinese people towards marxism and communism.

Conclusion

Having examined several negative consequences of the Cultural Revolution, it's crystal clear that it was a temporary mistake in the history of the PRC. As stated in "the Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the People's Republic of China" in 1981,

the history of the "Cultural Revolution" demonstrates that the principal arguments advanced by Comrade Mao Zedong in launching the movement accorded with neither Marxism-Leninism nor the actual conditions in China. The assessments regarding the class situation in the country at that time, as well as the political situation of the Party and the state, were entirely erroneous.

But it should neither be regarded as an individual mistake made by one single person, Mao Zedong, nor be viewed as a continuation of CPC's "authoritarian rule". It is a collective mistake made by the whole CPC in a specific historical period as a result of treating marxism as dogma, lacking sufficient experiences in building socialism, and lacking a mature legal system to safeguard people's democracy. But thanks to the collective efforts of comrades in the CPC and Chinese people, thanks to the guidance of marxism, we corrected this mistake, reversed our direction from backwards to forwards and found a correct path towards a socialist/communist future.