![]() That zero-sum view is distorting China’s relations with the outside world, including with the United States. Mao and his generation, who grew up amid scarcity, saw no room for power-sharing or for pluralism he called for “drawing a clear distinction between us and the enemy.” “Who are our enemies? Who are our friends?” This, Mao said, was “a question of first importance for the revolution.” China today, in many respects, bears little comparison with the world that Mao inhabited, but on that question Xi Jinping is true to his roots. Xi, in his constant moves to identify enemies and eliminate them, has revived the question that Lenin considered the most important of all: “ Kto, Kovo?”-“Who, whom?” In other words, in every interaction, the question that matters is which force wins and which force loses. He was responsible, he was the mastermind, but in order to reach that level of social destruction-an entire generation has to reflect.”Īnd yet there are deeper parallels between this moment in China and the time in which Xi came of age, as a teen-ager in the Cultural Revolution, which illuminate just how enduring some of the features of Mao’s Leninist system have proved to be. If you look at them, you wonder, What the fuck were you doing in that situation? It was everyone else’s fault? You can’t blame everything on Mao. Earlier this year, Bao Pu, a book publisher raised in Beijing and now based in Hong Kong, said, “Everyone feels he was a victim. One explanation is that the events of that period were so convoluted that many people feel the dual burdens of being both perpetrators and victims. But such gestures are rare, and outsiders often find it hard to understand why survivors of the Cultural Revolution are loath to revisit an experience that shaped their lives so profoundly. In January, 2014, alumni of the Experimental Middle School of Beijing Normal University apologized to their former teachers for their part in a surge of violence in August, 1966, when Bian Zhongyun, the deputy principal, was beaten to death. ![]() Nonetheless, in recent years, individuals have tried to reckon with the history and their roles in it. In March, in anticipation of the anniversary, an editorial in the Global Times, a Party tabloid, warned against “small groups” seeking to create “a totally chaotic misunderstanding of the cultural revolution.” The editorial reminded people that “discussions strictly should not depart from the party’s decided politics or thinking.” The Communist Party strictly constrains discussion of the period for fear that it will lead to a full-scale reëxamination of Mao’s legacy, and of the Party’s role in Chinese history. In examining the legacy of the Cultural Revolution, the most difficult measurement cannot be quantified so precisely: What effect did the Cultural Revolution have on China’s soul? This is still not a subject that can be openly debated, at least not easily. When Xi Zhongxun-the father of China’s current President, Xi Jinping-was dragged before a crowd, he was accused, among other things, of having gazed at West Berlin through binoculars during a visit to East Germany. The taint of foreign ideas, real or imagined, was often the basis for an accusation libraries of foreign texts were destroyed, and the British embassy was burned. May 16th marks the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the Cultural Revolution, when Chairman Mao launched China on a campaign to purify itself of saboteurs and apostates, to find the “representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the Party, the government, the army, and various spheres of culture” and drive them out with "the telescope and microscope of Mao Zedong Thought.” By the time the Cultural Revolution sputtered to a halt, there were many ways to tally its effects: about two hundred million people in the countryside suffered from chronic malnutrition, because the economy had been crippled up to twenty million people had been uprooted and sent to the countryside and up to one and a half million had been executed or driven to suicide. She recalled her conversation with a scientist who said that he was grateful to Mao Zedong for removing him from his campus and sending him, as Mao did millions of other intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution, to toil on a farm. ![]() At a state banquet, he was seated near the actress Shirley MacLaine, who told Deng how impressed she had been on a trip to China some years earlier. In 1979, three years after the end of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping visited the United States. Photograph by Universal History Archive / UIG via Getty The Cultural Revolution, which began fifty years ago next week, wasīrutal on a scale that can’t be compared with China today.
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