Clairvoyant, Alain Peyrefitte found that ” there China of Mao, it was not hell ». The cultural revolution which covered the decade 1966-1976 nevertheless revealed, in addition to the criminogenic nature of the regime, the Maoist regeneration project which damaged Chinese society for a long time. The nature of this tragedy is today concealed by the power which, after having exhibited its supposed fruits, has since cast a prudish veil to the point of criminalizing any attempt at critical examination.
Despite these epistemological obstacles, the scale of the crimes committed during the Cultural Revolution is now documented. The Sinic version of communism presents different traits from Stalinism with which it breaks for reasons that are basically more doctrinal than geopolitical. Against the deadly bureaucracy which encysted the Soviet system, Mao defended the idea of “permanent revolution” by which, disorder is not a transitional stage towards the construction of socialism but a mode of government which is sufficient in itself.
Maoism politicizes, in fact, the entire social field by categorizing and conflictualizing it by making it the place of permanent tension, even an insurrection. The cultural revolution is therefore in no way a historical anomaly but the very expression of Maoist revolutionary power which still inspires its far-left heirs. What if La France insoumise was more like Mao than Maduro?
Purification logic
The cultural revolution is part of the logic of purification carried out since the communist takeover in 1949. The masses are called to cleanse the party of “bourgeois” and its executives “revisionists”. The cultural revolution is thus preceded by several mobilizations, which quickly become a mode of government, such as the “Yan’an rectification” against the intellectuals, the collectivizations of 1955, the Hundred Flowers of 1957 or even the Great Leap of 1957-58. All these operations ended in failure and millions of victims. In 1965, claiming an American threat to Vietnam, Mao galvanized the masses against Western imperialism. The polarization opposing the conflicting ideology of Mao and the supporters of order was deployed across the country from May 16, 1966. Slyly, Mao did not trigger the movement but exploited it thanks to the Red Guards.
Former executives engage in pathetic self-criticism before being subjected to degrading work
Mao wants to reconnect with revolutionary aesthetics, manipulating a youth hypnotized by the sallies of the Grand Helmsman. The Red Guards bask in the thrill of transgression when Mao, quietly retired to his villa, asks them to “bombard the staffs” when in reality they are only the zealous auxiliaries of the army and the police. Drunk with unprecedented power, the youth are touring the country, taking over schools and factories from which they drive out the leaders, thinking of erasing the past “stinking” by burning charters, books and archives but ends up self-mutilating in endless Byzantine conflicts.
This protected youth is jubilant at the humiliations that they can, without risk, inflict on party executives who play the “game” to avoid the purge. Wearing a shameful cap, former executives engage in pathetic self-criticism before being subjected to degrading work. The trap set by Mao closes on his cadres who lose themselves in baseness and internal rivalries. The cultural revolution will have nothing cultural but it must be given the veneer, mobilizing here a few servile thinkers, there a little red book, soon to be learned by heart under penalty of forced labor.
In August, the staging of a 73-year-old Mao returning to Beijing by swimming across the Yangtze like the ecstatic parades of millions of Red Guards must arouse the admiration of the “proletarian revolution”. The Western intelligentsia is won over. Media, students and left-wing intellectuals, but also progressive Christians dazzled by this new evangelization, joined Alain Peyrefitte to celebrate the awakening of China.
A racial dimension
The mass repression which exposes cities to the worst atrocities escapes the useful idiots of “the cause of the people”. Since the famine of 1959, Mao has incorporated the loss of millions of these fellow citizens into his political strategy if the revolution demands it. But the revolutionary decade saw the development of unprecedented violence, including cannibalistic practices observed in the provinces of Sichuan and Guangxi. The purges intensify at the top of the state while the trivial ambitions of Mao’s succession become evident.
The economic benefits of this tragic sequence are still debated, famine is still endemic and inequalities have widened like never before, burying the egalitarian communist promise. The cultural revolution will have brutalized more than 115 million Chinese forced to exhibit external signs of support for the Chinese leader under penalty of violence.
The racial dimension of the cultural revolution cannot be underestimated. From 1949, class labels categorize society in order to discriminate against it. These “statutes”red or black, are based on the ” blood “ of the father who will fuel a permanent climate of tension at school, in the factory and even within the family. Only the “good red breed” had the right to lead the insurrection in 1967 against the “five black categories” – landowners, big peasants, counter-revolutionaries, “right-handed” and bad elements. The civil war, amplified by this racialization of factions, becomes excessively radicalized.
Non-Chinese historiography has demonetized the thesis of a people forced into bestial fury by the tyranny of a single
Culture is always put forward to designate a common base capable of linking beings. The cultural revolution aspired, on the contrary, to a project of social unity which resulted in breaking the marital and filial bond which undermined the family for a long time. Femininity, considered counter-revolutionary, is to be erased by wearing pants modifying the gait and short hair so as not to betray one’s sex. Natural hierarchies are subverted by students who slash their professor before devouring them during ritual banquets.
Like a taste of LFI
The society of distrust founded on lies and the unusual debasement of a population sacrificing to the infantilizing cult of “beacon of humanity”. The cautious articles on the human and social toll of the cultural revolution were obviously accused by the useful idiots of being the work of authors paid by the CIA. Author of Chairman Mao’s new clothes (1971) and Chinese shadows (1974), the renowned sinologist Simon Leys had to confront the cultists of Saint-Germain-des-Prés who were furious that their living god was being tarnished in this way.
Non-Chinese historiography has demonetized the thesis of a people forced into bestial fury by the tyranny of one person. As was the case with Nazism, Chinese totalitarianism on the contrary relied on a large part of its population and zealots inhabited by a deep social resentment of class hatred. The Maoist New Man was a conscious actor in the cultural revolution. The bad guys wanted to make a mistake. In reality, Mao deliberately maintained chaos not to exercise power but to make it the exercise of power itself. The establishment of institutions should never exhaust the recourse to action. Everything must be politicized and conflicted to maintain the revolutionary momentum… like a foretaste of LFI.
The disappearance of Mao followed by the trial of the gang of four put an end to the dramatic experience of the cultural revolution in 1976. Despite the evidence of this failure, the regime survived and cultural Maoism continued to prosper in the West, well beyond the clothing fashion of Collar Mao, to irrigate the “ leftism » policy. The legacy of the Cultural Revolution should worry us. It testifies to the ease with which a society is ready to abdicate its freedoms to sink into voluntary servitude. We are never very far from it.
