Don’t mention the Cultural Revolution

Recently, Premier Wen Jiabao mentioned the unmentionable: the Cultural Revolution. Although he did so within the context of laying the groundwork for the sacking of Bo Xilai, the Party Secretary of Chongqing who was aiming for promotion to the Standing Committee of the Politburo, normally this historical event is never referred to in public.

Why then, did Wen refer to it?

Bo Xilai’s populist style of leadership was the reason why. Bo has reminded the current leadership of something that they have preferred to forget: Chairman Mao’s leadership style, and the disastrous effect that it had on Chinese people and the nation's development.

This is the real reason why Bo is being investigated. The damning allegations of his ex-Police Chief Wang Lijun, and the alleged criminal behaviour of his wife Gu Kailai are just excuses for the purge.

Why so much anxiety over a leadership style?

Mao Zedong, the founder of modern China in 1949 was an autocrat who behaved more like a traditional Chinese emperor than the head of a collective, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). He morphed into a charismatic leader of a popular movement, the Cultural Revolution (1967-1975), which used his political idea of continuing revolution as the means to impose a pure form of communism on Chinese society.

In reality however, the Cultural Revolution was Mao’s vehicle for recapturing the power that he had lost after he had been politically sidelined following the failure of his Great Leap Forward: a policy which ruined the economy and starved an estimated 30 million peasants to death.

But the Cultural Revolution unleashed forces that were difficult to control. The youthful and politically naive Red Guards, whom he had incited, convulsed the country in an orgy of political correctness and violence as they carried out his instructions to destroy China’s cultural heritage.

Government administration broke down, schools and universities closed, and mobs ruled. The peasant class was idealised, and anyone with an independent thought in their head was persecuted. Intellectuals, teachers, administrators, monks and the like, bore the brunt of this exercise in extreme political fundamentalism.

The population was terrorised, victims suicided or were incarcerated in China’s gulags, and traditional Chinese society was debased as neighbors, friends, and family members were coerced into informing on each other. One estimate says that half a million people perished during this cataclysm.

This convulsion lasted until Mao died in 1975. Since then, the CCP has done everything it can to excoriate the Cultural Revolution from history. It does not want Chinese people to know how Communist ideology fuelled this mass distortion of reality and its consequences.

And generally speaking, the CCP’s cover-up of the Cultural Revolution has been successful. History textbooks gloss over this catastrophic event, and the history museum in Beijing allocates one line of text and one photo only to the memory of this painful period in China's history.

However, those who were there will never forget. But getting these survivors to talk about their experiences is another matter. During my eight years as an expatriate in China, very few Chinese friends or acquaintances voluntarily referred to the Cultural Revolution. 

I learned not to enquire about this traumatic historical memory. It is politically incorrect to mention, there is national shame (even from the victims), and the walls have ears.

If I raised this matter with younger generations, I soon earned that I knew more about this phenomenon than they did. Their education system had made sure of that. And just as there have been persons in China who have been politically airbrushed from history (such as ex-President Liu Shaoqi & Nobel literature prize-winner Gao Xingjian), this historical event in has also been scrubbed from the record.

But the Cultural Revolution is China's skeleton in the closet. The CCP can never hope for legitimacy while it continues to hide its brutal past. And it can never lead China towards a more civil society if it cannot draw lessons from the past and learn from them.

My guess however, is that this will never happen under the present leadership. Too many of China’s leaders are too close to the sins of the past to want to open up this giant can of worms. The truth has consequences, and in one-way or another, they are all implicated.

Sooner or later however, someone from the leadership group of the CCP will have to confront the truth, and apologise to the nation for the sins perpetrated under the name Communism: beginning with an honest appraisal of the Cultural Revolution; the shooting of China’s youth in Tiananmen Square; the persecution of harmless members of Falun Gong; the abuse of human rights; and the cancer of corruption which goes all the way to the top. 

This would open the way for governmental reform and the restoration of traditional Chinese values to their rightful place in modern Chinese society.

In the meantime, Bo Xilai’s leadership style in Chongqing has forced one member of the Standing Committee to mention the unmentionable, that the Cultural Revolution was in fact a major disaster for China, and that any return to a populist style of leadership today would be equally disastrous.

Although nobody believes that China would ever return to those bad old days, the fact that the left wing faction is flirting with populism as a means of capturing power today (just like Mao did in 1967), let alone plot to achieve it (the Zhang Zemin-Zhou Yong Kang-Bo Xilai faction's alleged plans for a coup) is a worry. These things can get out of control.No wonder Bo Xilai is being targeted. Zhou Yong Kang is next. 

Premier Wen has opened the debate. Let’s see if he is all talk or not. This is serious.