Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century Read Online Free PDF Page B

the groundwork for a concerted opposition to the regime. In retrospect, this can be seen as a crucial precondition for what was to follow. 18 But it certainly didn’t look that way at the time. The socialist system, after all, had weathered far more serious challenges in the past.
    M atters looked radically different in another part of the communist world. While the leaders of the USSR found themselves confronting the symptoms of stagnation at home, the People’s Republic of China faced the opposite problem. The Chinese entered the 1970s in a state of upheaval.
    In 1966, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Mao Zedong had launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. In 1960, prompted by Nikita Khrushchev’s anti-Stalinization policies, Mao had broken off relations with Moscow, denouncing the Soviets as “revisionists” and declaring, even more provocatively, that the Kremlin had embraced “state capitalism” (an allusion to Khrushchev’s tentative efforts to loosen central planning).
    The Russians had also roused Mao’s ire by criticizing his utopian plans for the wholesale introduction of communal agriculture at the end of the 1950s, the so-called Great Leap Forward. The disruptions caused by this hasty attempt to reengineer Chinese agriculture resulted in nationwide famines that ultimately killed some 45 million Chinese from 1958 to 1961. For Mao, Moscow’s attacks on his policies were further proof that the Soviets were backsliding, exemplified by an ossified, bureaucratic mind-set that amounted to a wholesale rejection of Stalin’s revolutionary achievements. Mao insisted that China set itself apart by embracing the principle of “continuing revolution,” renewing itself through repeated assaults on the remnants of the privileged classes. As Mao saw it, his views were under attack at home as well. Even though he still stood at the center of an all-encompassing personality cult, he saw many enemies among his own comrades at the top of the party. There was no question that the catastrophe of the Great Leap had cost him some political capital within the leadership; in the wake of the great famine, some of his high-ranking colleagues—most notably Liu Shaoqi, chairman of the People’s Republic, and DengXiaoping, CCP general secretary—had modified some of Mao’s most foolhardy reforms, thus ameliorating the crisis. This was something that Mao was not prepared to forgive, and he was eager to unleash a purge that would enable him to get the upper hand on his domestic opponents. His already rampant paranoia was reinforced by Khrushchev’s downfall in 1964, the victim of an internal Kremlin coup. If the Soviet leader’s enemies could band together to take him down, what was to stop Mao from meeting a similar fate? 19
    The Cultural Revolution was his attempt to regain the initiative. Seventeen years of tough communist rule had left society seething with resentment, and through a carefully orchestrated effort Mao now directed these pent-up frustrations against the party establishment and anyone else who could be labeled an enemy of change. Urged on by Mao and his allies, mobs of radical young students and workers, organized into detachments known as “Red Guards,” began to launch assaults against officials, intellectuals, or anyone with alleged connections to the “bourgeoisie” or nefarious foreign powers. Between 1966 and 1976, millions of people were tortured, killed, or driven to suicide on the slightest of pretexts. Countless cultural artifacts and cultural monuments were destroyed as part of a frenzied campaign to vilify the past.
    Many of the victims were tried-and-true Communists. Mao skillfully directed the vicious passions of the Cultural Revolution against his own foes within the party. The ranks of the purged reached to the highest levels of the state. Liu Shaoqi, who had become chairman of the party in 1959, was arrested and tortured, finally dying from abuse in 1969. Millions of others