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Circuses in Lieu of Bread
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12606 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1987 |
2,711 Words |
| Author
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Henry A. Myers
Henry A. Myers teaches political theory and the history of
ideas at James Madison University. He is the author of
Medieval Kingship (Nelson-Hall, 1982) and one of the
editors of The Global Experience: Readings in World
Civilization (2 vols., Prentice-Hall, 1987). |
The Cultural Revolution pitted masses of impassioned young people against those with any sort of authority who might be denounced as hostile toward Mao Zedong's drive to establish an egalitarian, truly revolutionary China. Raging with furious intensity from 1966 to 1969, the beat of the Cultural Revolution slackened afterwards, but its fanatical, irrational impulses still found victims almost until Mao's death in 1976.
With statistics on victims extremely difficult to establish, educated guesses tend to set the toll of lives at around one million. It is certain that at least hundreds of thousands were killed, while multiple millions of lives were wrecked.
Mao's Policies
The Cultural Revolution was conducted in the name of true Marxism as opposed to bogus, Soviet-style, bureaucratic, status-conscious, revisionist Marxism. It was based on the very un-Marxist notion that changing the way people think can change their material status.
Earlier, Mao Zedong had adhered to the Marxist dictum that while consciousness-changing was of utmost importance, material conditions must be changed before people can arrive at a new consciousness. The Chinese communist manifestation of that orthodox Marxist view was the Great Leap Forward. A crash program of industrialization and modernization begun in the late 1950s, the Great Leap Forward failed miserably because of too little technological know-how. Great effort was channeled into smelting ores for steel in "backyard furnaces." Party leaders discovered too late that backyard furnaces cannot produce the quality of steel necessary for industrial machinery; the plan simply increased the chronic shortage of steel. The main legacy of the Great Leap Forward was an uncompensated drain on China's agricultural productivity, leaving China with three famine years (1959-1961). China's leaders needed to find scapegoats for the failure of their schemes.
After this disaster, Mao reversed the cause and effect relationships. If the program for speedy change of material conditions had not gotten off the ground, this might well have been due to a lack of revolutionary consciousness on the part of the people, a lack which the Cultural Revolution would mend.
At roughly the same time as the Great Leap Forward, Mao found himself reacting quite negatively to Khrushchev's de-Stalinization commitments, particularly his
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