The Chinas Cultural Revolution (Japanese Edition)

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Maoism has clearly represented a revolutionary method based on a distinct revolutionary outlook not necessarily dependent on a Chinese or Marxist-Leninist context. Mao was born in the village of Shaoshan in Hunan province, the son of a former peasant who had become affluent as a farmer and grain dealer. He grew up in an environment in which education was valued only as training for keeping records and accounts. Rebelling against paternal authority which included an arranged marriage that was forced on him and that he never acknowledged or consummated , Mao left his family to study at a higher primary school in a neighbouring county and then at a secondary school in the provincial capital, Changsha.

There he came in contact with new ideas from the West, as formulated by such political and cultural reformers as Liang Qichao and the Nationalist revolutionary Sun Yat-sen.

Scarcely had he begun studying revolutionary ideas when a real revolution took place before his very eyes. On October 10, , fighting against the Qing dynasty broke out in Wuchang , and within two weeks the revolt had spread to Changsha. Enlisting in a unit of the revolutionary army in Hunan, Mao spent six months as a soldier. In primary school days, his heroes had included not only the great warrior-emperors of the Chinese past but Napoleon I and George Washington as well. For a year he drifted from one thing to another, trying, in turn, a police school, a law school, and a business school; he studied history in a secondary school and then spent some months reading many of the classic works of the Western liberal tradition in the provincial library.

The abolition of the official civil service examination system in and the piecemeal introduction of Western learning in so-called modern schools had left young people in a state of uncertainty as to what type of training, Chinese or Western, could best prepare them for a career or for service to their country.

While officially an institution of secondary level rather than of higher education , the normal school offered a high standard of instruction in Chinese history, literature, and philosophy as well as in Western ideas. While at the school, Mao also acquired his first experience in political activity by helping to establish several student organizations.

Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu. Moreover, he found himself at Peking University precisely during the months leading up to the May Fourth Movement of , which was to a considerable extent the fountainhead of all of the changes that were to take place in China in the ensuing half century. In a limited sense, May Fourth Movement is the name given to the student demonstrations protesting against the decision at the Paris Peace Conference to hand over former German concessions in Shandong province to Japan instead of returning them to China.

The shift from the difficult and esoteric classical written language to a far more-accessible vehicle of literary expression patterned on colloquial speech also took place during that period. At the same time, a new and very young generation moved to the centre of the political stage.

Comparative Literature Studies

To be sure, the demonstration on May 4, , was launched by Chen Duxiu, but the students soon realized that they themselves were the main actors. In an editorial published in July , Mao wrote:. The world is ours, the nation is ours, society is ours. If we do not speak, who will speak? If we do not act, who will act? Perhaps never before in human history had a political leader unleashed such massive forces against the system that he had created.

The resulting damage to that system was profound, and the goals that Mao Zedong sought to achieve ultimately remained elusive. During the summer of Mao Zedong helped to establish in Changsha a variety of organizations that brought the students together with the merchants and the workers—but not yet with the peasants—in demonstrations aimed at forcing the government to oppose Japan.

That winter he married Yang Kaihui, the daughter of his former ethics teacher. In July he attended the First Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, together with representatives from the other communist groups in China and two delegates from the Moscow-based Comintern Communist International.

Guomindang] , Mao was one of the first communists to join the Nationalist Party and to work within it. In the winter of —25, Mao returned to his native village of Shaoshan for a rest. There, after witnessing demonstrations by peasants stirred into political consciousness by the shooting of several dozen Chinese by foreign police in Shanghai May and June , Mao suddenly became aware of the revolutionary potential inherent in the peasantry. Following the example of other communists working within the Nationalist Party who had already begun to organize the peasants, Mao sought to channel the spontaneous protests of the Hunanese peasants into a network of peasant associations.

Pursued by the military governor of Hunan, Mao was soon forced to flee his native province once more, and he returned for another year to an urban environment— Guangzhou Canton , the main power base of the Nationalists. However, though he lived in Guangzhou, Mao still focused his attention on the countryside. He became the acting head of the propaganda department of the Nationalist Party—in which capacity he edited its leading organ, the Political Weekly , and attended the Second Kuomintang Congress in January —but he also served at the Peasant Movement Training Institute, set up in Guangzhou under the auspices of the Nationalists, as principal of the sixth training session.

He therefore expelled most communists from responsible posts in the Nationalist Party in May Mao, however, stayed on at the institute until October of that year. Most of the young peasant activists Mao trained were shortly at work strengthening the position of the communists. In July Chiang Kai-shek set out on what became known as the Northern Expedition , aiming to unify the country under his own leadership and to overthrow the conservative government in Beijing as well as other warlords. Chiang Kai-shek, who was bent on an alliance with the propertied classes in the cities and in the countryside, turned against the worker and peasant revolution, and in April he massacred the very Shanghai workers who had delivered the city to him.

The strategy of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin for carrying out revolution in alliance with the Nationalists collapsed, and the CCP was virtually annihilated in the cities and decimated in the countryside. In October Mao led a few hundred peasants who had survived the autumn harvest uprising in Hunan to a base in the Jinggang Mountains, on the border between Jiangxi and Hunan provinces, and embarked on a new type of revolutionary warfare in the countryside in which the Red Army military arm of the CCP , rather than the unarmed masses, would play the central role.

The first of those is the initial three years when Mao and Zhu De , the commander in chief of the army, successfully developed the tactics of guerrilla warfare from base areas in the countryside.

After the Cultural Revolution: what western classical music means in China

Those activities, however, were regarded even by their protagonists, and still more by the Central Committee in Shanghai and by the Comintern in Moscow , as a holding operation until the next upsurge of revolution in the urban centres. In the summer of the Red Army was ordered by the Central Committee to occupy several major cities in south-central China in the hope of sparking a revolution by the workers. When it became evident that persistence in that attempt could only lead to further costly losses, Mao disobeyed orders and abandoned the battle to return to the base in southern Jiangxi.

The second phase the Ziangxi period centres on the founding in November of the Jiangxi Soviet Chinese Soviet Republic in a portion of Jiangxi province, with Mao as chairman. Since there was little support for the revolution in the cities, the promise of ultimate victory now seemed to reside in the gradual strengthening and expansion of the base areas.

Mao Zedong

The Soviet regime soon came to control a population of several million. The Red Army, grown to a strength of some ,, easily defeated large forces of inferior troops sent against it by Chiang Kai-shek in the first four of the so-called encirclement and annihilation campaigns. The majority view is that, in the last years of the Jiangxi Soviet, Mao functioned to a considerable extent as a figurehead with little control over policy, especially in military matters. In any case, he achieved de facto leadership over the party though not the formal title of chairman only at the Zunyi Conference of January during the Long March.

But in the Cultural Revolution such a privileged pedigree condemned him. All it took was "some really small comment" for him to be seized and held, in a village outside Beijing. His body lies somewhere near the train tracks where he died. Xu has painted Zhou's mother, too; another of the casualties: Friends were equally keen to leave but too frightened to apply thanks to the previous decade's frequent reversals: Her father was subsequently forgiven "for his crimes, whatever they were", she says.

She wants the next generation to comprehend what happened. It's important for them to know what their ancestors went through and what was lost. When Liang Sicheng was denounced as a counter-revolutionary, he was scared to look even his wife in the eye. Lin Zhu, who had been working in the countryside at the time, rushed home to him on learning the news. Her husband sensed the horror ahead. When it lifted, Liang was dead, his health wrecked by the scores of lengthy "struggle sessions" publicly to humiliate him; by beatings from Red Guards; and by the cold, damp conditions of the building to which the family had been moved.

Lin still struggles to understand how hundreds of millions could participate in such cruelties. Some of Liang's persecutors were forced into taking part, she says; others were jealous of his success. Most were young students who did not understand his ideas. To her husband, who had loved teaching, that was particularly painful. The most important claim was that he had received a 'capitalist education'.

But I couldn't understand what Liang Sicheng had done. Together they endured six years of enforced Maoist study and public denunciations that often ran for hours. Liang's ordeal ended when he grew so sick that he could no longer rise from his bed for the struggle sessions. He died in , aged She does not blame individuals for caving into pressure to attack others, though she is adamant that she never did so. She even suggests those years helped her to grow. History doesn't repeat itself exactly… but it's possible.

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Early years

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Threads collapsed expanded unthreaded. Loading comments… Trouble loading? January to December A state of near civil war broke out as Mao attempted to have his new anti-Rightist organizations replace the old structures of political power that had been gutted by the Red Terror. His orders to do so, however, failed to specify which organization would take control where—prompting each anti-Rightist organizations attempting to outdo or simply destroy each other.

The involvement of the heavily armed Chinese military, given similarly vague orders, accelerated the killing. Atrocities also began to occur in the countryside, as the implicit authorization of violence drove pogroms and enabled the elimination of political rivals and opposition on the local level. January to June July to September The revolutionary committees were formally established as the organs of government. January to the end of While the campaign supposedly targeted corruption and counterrevolutionaries, it was intended to clearly establish public concepts of law and order with the punishment of non-political criminals.

February to Mao and the CCP campaigned to investigate the counterrevolutionaries that had supposedly caused the violence of the previous years, enabling the arbitrary elimination of any potential opponents of the revolutionary committees. Thousands of deaths occurred as a result. Overall, the dynamics of escalation during the Cultural Revolution were fed by several sources. Above all, were the policies implemented by Mao and Party leaders that authorized and encouraged use of violence.

Second, socio-economic factors created competition—incentive—within overlapping social networks, in, for instance, factories, educational institutions and rural areas. In the midst of such social turmoil, personal trauma, and the profound alternations to the Chinese political system and social structure, [xvii] mechanisms of restraint were sorely tested. Estimates of fatalities during the Cultural Revolution vary wildly — ranging between one million and 20 million though the former is probably closer to the true number than the latter.

Some sources categorize these deaths according to the time-period in which they occurred, and estimate that, in total, around 1,, casualties took place throughout the country. This tallies with official estimates of the number of non-conflict related deaths reported by a book credited to the Party History Research Institute which estimated that 1,, deaths took place in China during the Cultural Revolution. An estimated , deaths occurred during this phase.

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