Saw this post (https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4110233) about China’s Cultural Revolution and remembered my project to transcribe my copy of “A Concise History of the Communist Party of China” (ISBN 978-7-5117-3978-0). The book is an English translation of the Chinese book 中国共产党简史, translated by the Institute of Party History and Literature of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, and published by the Central Compilation & Translation Press. There is another English edition published by ACA Publishing Limited which I have not read, but I assume it’s basically the same.
The Chinese edition is available to read online at one of the CPC’s online learning platform 学习强国: https://article.xuexi.cn/articles/pdf/index.html?art_id=1514845518710518863
The book has 10 chapters and around 700 pages, each chapter has around 5 to 10 sections for a total of 70 sections. I’m thinking of posting one section at a time every 5 days so as to not overwhelm some readers, and to get the entire book posted over the span of a year. This can change accordingly as we progress. I am typing the contents out manually into LibreOffice Writer so that they can be exported as a pdf or epub document.
This first post will be special and start from the part about the Cultural Revolution, this is not the entire section but a good enough excerpt to summarize the Cultural Revolution. The next post will start from Chapter I and continue in the order as written in the book.
(On the issue of copyright, I am certainly violating some laws but…)
Chapter VI
Explorations and Setbacks in Socialist Development
3. Socialist Development amid Twists and Turns
The Occurrence of the Cultural Revolution and Difficulties in All Aspects of Work
(pg. 264-267)
The Cultural Revolution was set in motion in 1966, just as China was overcoming grave economic difficulties, completing a readjustment of its economy, and launching its Third Five-Year Plan for national economic development.
The occurrence of the Cultural Revolution was due to complex social and historical reasons of both domestic and international nature. For a long time after the founding of the People’s Republic, China faced a severe external environment. The imperialists were hostile to China and imposed a blockade on it for a long period, having pinned their hopes for “peaceful revolution” on the PRC’s third and fourth generations. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union also put great pressure on China, following the deterioration of Sino-Soviet relations. Such an external environment had a great impact on the Party’s well-founded judgements regarding the domestic political situation and its determination of the central tasks and policies of the Party and the state. Having coming through a long and brutal war, the CPC transitioned immediately into the stage of socialism, without having first gained a proper understanding of how to carry out socialist development in a country that was economically and culturally underdeveloped, or having made adequate ideological preparations for such an undertaking. In the period of revolutionary war, the Party had accumulated a great deal of experience in class struggle, experience which people applied and copied all too easily when it came to judging and handling the new problems of socialist development. As a result, they saw problems that were unrelated to class struggle as being part of the class struggle. They viewed the class struggle as being dominant when it was in fact much more limited, and they continued to resort to large-scale political movements as the solution to this problem.
In May 1966, the enlarged meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee adopted the “May 16 Circular,” which pointed out that “the bourgeois representatives who have infiltrated the Party, the government, the army and various cultural circles are a group of counter-revolutionary revisionists who, once conditions are ripe, will seize power and change from the dictatorship of the proletariat to the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.”
In August, the 11th Plenary Session of the Eight Party Central Committee adopted the Decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, proposing that “the focus of this campaign is to rectify those in power in the Party who have taken the capitalist road.” The convening of these two meetings signified that the Cultural Revolution had begun in earnest. Following this, the country was engulfed by the Red Guard movement.
From January 1967 onward, the Cultural Revolution entered the stage of an all-out grab for power, and began to move very quickly toward a phase of “overthrowing all,” and even full-scale civil war. Around February, Tan Zhenlin, Chen Yi, Ye Jianying, Li Fuchun, Li Xiannian, Xu Xiangqian, Nie Rongzhen, and other revolutionaries of the older generation moved to sharply criticize the erroneous practices of the Cultural Revolution at different meetings. However, their actions, which were labeled the “February adverse current,” were suppressed and attacked.
By September 1968, revolutionary committees had been established nationwide. To some extent, this helped stop the anarchism that was rampant in the early days of the decade-long Cultural Revolution. In October, under extremely abnormal circumstances within the Party, the enlarged 12th Plenary Session of the Eight CPC Central Committee announced the decision to “expel Liu Shaoqi from the Party forever and remove him from all posts he holds in and outside the Party.”
The Ninth National Congress of the CPC, convened in April 1969, further systematized and legitimized the erroneous theory and practice of the Cultural Revolution. Between 1970 and 1971, a plot to seize supreme power was carried out by a counter-revolutionary group led by Lin Biao, which culminated in the staging of a counter-revolutionary armed coup. The incident signaled the failure of the Cultural Revolution in both theoretical and practical terms.
In 1972, Zhou Enlai issued a repudiation of ultra-Left thinking, which led to significant improvements in all areas of work. The Tenth Party Congress held in August 1973 continued to affirm the political and organizational lines of the Ninth Congress. After the Tenth Congress, Jiang Qing, Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao, and Yao Wenyuan formed the Gang of Four that would attempt to seize supreme power of the Party and the state.
In January 1975, the First Session of the Fourth NPC reaffirmed the goal of achieving the modernization of agriculture, industry, national defense, and science and technology in the 20th century and appointed Zhou Enlai as premier and Deng Xiaoping as first vice premier. This gave Chinese officials and people who had suffered during the repeated upheaval hope for the Party and the state.
The main considerations in launching the Cultural Revolution were to prevent the restoration of capitalism and seek China’s own way of building socialism. As a leader of the ruling proletarian party, Mao Zedong constantly observed and thought about the real life problems of the emerging socialist society. He paid great attention to strengthening the Party and the people’s power, which had been developed with such difficulty, remained highly alert to the danger of capitalist restoration, and made continuous explorations and struggled tirelessly to eliminate corruption, privilege, and bureaucratism in the Party and the government. However, a weak understanding of the laws of socialist development and an accumulation of “Leftist” mistakes in theory and practice meant that many of the right socialist development ideas were never implemented, which eventually resulted in civil unrest.
The Cultural Revolution lasted for ten years and caused the Party, the country, and the people to suffer the longest, most extensive, and most costly setback since the founding of the People’s Republic. The Party’s organization and state power were brutally persecuted, and democracy and the rule of law were trampled on, as the entire country sank into a grave political and social crisis. The Cultural Revolution was in no sense a revolution or a period of social progress. It was a period of civil strife that was erroneously initiated by the leadership and exploited by counter-revolutionary groups, with disastrous effects for the Party, the country, and the people. It left behind extremely painful lessons.
During the Cultural Revolution, the Party and the people never stopped fighting against “Leftist” mistakes. It was the resistance of Party members, workers, peasants, PLA members, intellectuals, and cadres at all levels that limited the damage of the Cultural Revolution. Progress was still made in some important areas of socialist development, and the nature of the Party, the people’s political power, the people’s armed forces, and society as a whole remained unchanged.
I’m skimming through the book now, it seems like the author is one of those people I haven’t seen before, he downplays the pre-Cultural Revolution period to sing praise of the Cultural Revolution. Those who view the Cultural Revolution positively usually view the period from 1949 up to the Cultural Revolution favorably too, this author is certainly different in this regard. But I can see how this mindset could have formed, because he pits Mao Zedong against the Chinese government when discussing the poor treatment of rural areas especially regarding education, describing CPC officials as no different from those in feudal era, and painting the CPC as falling towards the capitalist road if not for the Cultural Revolution. What is familiar is how he critiques the post-Cultural Revolution period led by Deng Xiaoping. He also describes Communist leaders including both Mao and Deng as being very dictatorial, which I have huge problems with. But really I get the overall feeling that the author is saying that the CPC and hence the Chinese government is dictatorial/authoritarian, and only during the Cultural Revolution started by Mao that there was some democracy. Here’s a paragraph that very clearly shows his point:
I do agree with the point that the rural population have not benefited as much as the urban population, and this gap only widened with Reform and Opening Up. The rural population was the foundation of China’s socialist revolution, they were also key to Reform and Opening Up. There is a common sentiment among Chinese leftists that not enough has been done for the rural population despite their huge sacrifices and contribution. Underdevelopment in rural areas and among the farmers is still a problem today, 三农问题 (issues relating to agriculture, rural areas and farmers) and more recently 乡村振兴 (rural revitalization) are important topics of the CPC. But most talking points I’ve heard blame Reform and Open Up and not pre-Cultural Revolution, and this author basically makes it seem like throughout the entire history of the PRC, the period of the Cultural Revolution was the only time when rural areas were most respected.
Again, I have only skimmed through the book, which is a case study of one county in China, and I am not opposed to refuting talking points that paint the Cultural Revolution as all bad, but I will oppose anyone who paints it as more good than bad.
On Lemmygrad I’ve mostly said negative things about the Cultural Revolution, but I did not mention what I liked about it. Leftist slogans appeal to me, whether they’re from the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution, as I’m an idealist at heart. Although I envision myself supporting and maybe even participating in the Red Guard Movement during Cultural Revolution if I was growing up in that period, I see the whole ordeal as very anarchist. I like the idea of 上山下乡, sending urban intellectual youth into rural areas to integrate with the masses, in fact Xi Jinping and many other prominent Chinese leaders were “victims” of this “anti-intellectual” movement, and Xi Jinping said he did benefit from it in an old interview in 2004 (https://video.sina.com.cn/view/247178189.html).
I originally said the book gives an alternative view.
From the Preface:
IMO it’s actually relevant to the situation in the West right now where inequality is increasing and the masses have less and less political representation.