50 years later

[Randy W]

in the SCMP

Cultural Revolution, 50 years on – the pain, passion and power struggle that shaped China today

http://multimedia.scmp.com/cultural-revolution/images/article/311re-lie-huan-hu-shanghai-poster.jpg

May 16, 2016, marks the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

On this day 50 years ago today, China issued a top directive calling on its people to rid society of “members of the bourgeoisie threatening to seize political power from the proletariat” – marking the start of a decade-long violent class struggle.

For 10 tumultuous years from 1966, the country underwent massive sociopolitical upheaval that saw countless politicians and intellectuals driven to their deaths, civilians killed in armed conflicts, and cultural relics and artefacts destroyed. The official death toll numbered more than 1.7 million.

We detail the birth of the movement – Mao Zedong’s brainchild – and how the hardline political campaign shook the nation even as its effects rippled across the globe.

Former Red Guards and rebels share their personal accounts of the difficult decade that the country and its people are still struggling to come to terms with half a century on. Clicking the link below will open the website in a new window.

Click here to view our multimedia series.

 

Edited May 15, 2016 by Randy W (see edit history)

[danb]

Randy, Thanks for posting this article. It is a long one. Never knew if the cultural revolution was discussed by Chinese media. Wasn't even sure if it was discussed at all. Here is a link to a short article about an official view of the CR:

 

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/chinese-state-media-breaks-silence-on-cultural-revolution/ar-BBt8nwT

[Randy W]

The South China Morning Post is a Hong Kong paper, and so is out of reach of the Chinese censors.

 

There was this in the Shanghaiist -

 

Maoists forced to travel to Hong Kong to commemorate 50th anniversary of Cultural Revolution

 

http://shanghaiist.com/attachments/alexlinder/mao_hk_march.jpg

 

 

 

While Mao himself has been deemed "70% right and 30% wrong," his body still lies embalmed in the middle of Beijing. Meanwhile, Beijing has branded his Cultural Revolution a "10-year catastrophe" that they will not repeat, but refuse to discuss it openly.

 

Therefore, while the Chinese government has been more than happy to pull out the big guns to celebrate other anniversaries, there has been no public commemoration for the moment on May 16, 1966, when Mao issued a notification that officially launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

 

. . .

 

Experts believe that Maoists are growing in strength and number in China as Beijing plays a dangerous game of cultivating a cult of personality around Xi Jinping, while also eliminating neo-Maoist competitor demagogues like Bo Xilai.

[Randy W]

A couple of new articles

 

in the LA Times

 

'Official' cause of death: Suicide. But one researcher uncovers how victims of China's Cultural Revolution really died

Among the first to perish in the purges was Wang’s high school principal, Bian Zhongyun. She was pummeled with baseball bats and table legs and scalded with boiling water. Even as she lay unconscious on the steps outside a dormitory building, some students kicked her, accusing her of playing dead. By the time she was transported to the hospital, her body was already in rigor mortis. Wang learned all this from Bian’s husband, who saved Bian’s blood-soaked clothes.

Over the years, Wang has expanded her inquiry to include several hundred more educators targeted during the Cultural Revolution. In the late 1990s, while teaching Chinese at Stanford University and publishing her interviews with victims’ families, Wang said, she was stalked by former Red Guards threatening to harm her. She didn’t relent, but relocated to Chicago to take up a teaching job. In 2000, Wang launched the website and listed about 800 dead for whom she has names and family testimony, or any shred of information she had managed to glean. Every week she’d receive emails or letters from victims’ families — until the Chinese government blocked the site a year later. In 2004, she published a book in Hong Kong detailing the deaths.

And over the last decade, her three-bedroom condo on the campus of the University of Chicago has morphed into a full-blown repository. Neatly labeled binders of interview notes were shelved above bound volumes of fraying pages of People’s Daily from the 1960s. Every summer, Wang travels back to Beijing to teach Mandarin while continuing to seek details of the deaths. So far, she has conducted more than 1,000 interviews with family members of the victims.

 

 

 

in the NY Times

 

The Cultural Revolution in Tibet: A Photographic Record

They belonged to a variety of professions in the old Tibet: monks, officials, merchants, physicians, officers, estate overlords and so on. The settings included struggle sessions at mass assemblies, in the streets and at local neighborhood committees that methodically conducted their sessions by turns. The time frame was from August to September 1966. After that, the division between the factions led each to conduct its own separate struggle sessions. The people attacked in these sessions were incorporated into the “monsters and demons” unit, where they were ordered to attend long-term labor and study sessions at their assigned neighborhood committee.

What’s most interesting about these victims is that most were members of the upper class whom the Communist Party from the 1950s to the eve of the Cultural Revolution had designated as “targets to be won over.” And since they did not follow the Dalai Lama and flee the country during the 1959 uprising, the party rewarded them with many privileges. In other words, they were partners of the party. One of them, a monk, even served as an informant for the military.

But after the Cultural Revolution began they were labeled “monsters and demons” and suffered humiliating attacks. In the end they were overtaken by madness, illness and death. Some died during the Cultural Revolution, others afterward. Most of the victims died. Of the few who survived, some went abroad. Some, however, remained in Tibet, where they took up the party’s offer and joined the system to regain their high status.