by James Palmer
The most disturbing form of Cultural Revolution nostalgia is not in China. Maoism retains a powerful appeal in India, in the countryside, where a rebel movement, the Naxalites, controls entire regions, and thrives among dissatisfied youth in the cities. At the same time, the Indian police use accusations of Naxalite connections to stitch up political activists and crack heads among the poor. Among Indian students, often bitter and radicalised, the violence of the Cultural Revolution is the very point of its appeal. A Tsinghua professor visiting India in 2007 was dismayed by the number of young Indians who, after his talk, would come up to praise the Cultural Revolution for its courage in destroying the old order, attacking traitors to the nation, and tearing down corrupt officials and stagnant university authorities. He returned in the same kind of profound shock that would grip a modern German who’d just been told ‘The Third Reich, eh? Sounds like a good idea to me.’
In China, violence, once a political mainstay, has taken on different forms. Countryside thugs now beat people up for getting in the way of forced demolition programmes, or for trying to block the local village leader’s attempts (literally) to stuff the ballot box in a village election. The most politicised form of aggression is the regular beating and illegal imprisonment of people attempting to petition higher authorities.
In 2010, the most famous example of this was the attack on Chen Yulian, a 58-year-old woman petitioning the higher authorities over the death of her daughter through medical malfeasance six years earlier. Six policemen found her outside the Hubei provincial Party headquarters and proceeded to beat and kick her for sixteen minutes, which was caught on a cameraphone by passers-by. The video of the beating might not have been enough to have a public impact – but, unfortunately for the policemen, Chen was not a usual village mother, but the wife of an Hubei provincial official. When this was discovered, the police chief visited her in hospital and offered an apology, explaining – in so many words – that they would never have attacked her if they knew she was the wife of someone important.
Both the central government and local authorities have massive budgets for ‘maintaining stability’, but this kind of violence is never publicly defended, only overlooked and tacitly encouraged, especially around sensitive political events. When it comes to the public, you get defenders of many forms of authoritarianism in China – one-party systems, technocracy, censorship, even the imprisonment of dissenters – but nobody speaks out in favour of thuggery, which is seen as an endemic problem, like corruption and organised crime.13 But there’s one form of violence that wins favour among the Chinese public, at least online, and that’s against officials.
This was beautifully demonstrated in April 2010, when Chinese diplomat Yu Boren, attached to the consulate in Houston, Texas, accused the local police of roughing him up after he refused to stop when signalled to pull over. I expected it to become another excuse for nationalist posturing, of the kind common online, but instead it disappeared from the Chinese news cycle within a day. Why? Because the overwhelming reaction online was to praise the Texas police for beating up an official, and regret that the Chinese police didn’t do the same.
No evidence existed to show that Yu was in any way corrupt, but the automatic reaction of most Chinese ‘netizens’ to any story involving an official is that he must be dirty, and deserves whatever he gets. The slightest whiff of a story around an official can trigger a ‘human flesh search’ that pores over any evidence available to prove his corruption.
As Chinese political scientist Yu Jianrong put it,
You’re wearing a really nice watch. Everyone’s cell phone nowadays can take pictures, so they take a picture of you and post it on the web saying that you are one of the nation’s civil servants and are named Leader XXX. They ask, how then can this person, on the basis of their salary, afford to wear a several hundred thousand RMB watch? They start to search online and are able to search out your ancestors going back eighteen generations. They find out what your wife is doing, what your son is doing; finally they come up with this conclusion – you are a corrupt official.14
The widespread anger against officials, the feeling that anybody in office must be corrupt – all of this was as familiar in 1966 as in 2010.
What about Mao’s legacy? Unlike other former ‘princelings’, his children haven’t become prominent figures. His surviving daughters were neatly sidelined by Deng and rarely exposed to public view. In 2009, his only direct adult male descendent, Mao Xinyu, the son of the mad Mao Anqing, was given the rare honour of becoming China’s youngest major general, only nine years after he joined the army.
This was a purely symbolic gesture; his duties largely involve the maintenance of his grandfather’s archives. He wanted to study English literature, but got bullied by his mother into becoming an expert on his grandfather’s works instead. Young Chinese find him a laughable figure, since he looks like a giant cartoon baby in a soldier’s costume.
Mao’s picture still hangs over Tiananmen Square, but all the other big pictures came down in the early 1980s ‘for cleaning’ – very, very long cleaning. Statues of him stand in every university and many town squares, often with his hand out in a way that suggests he’s directing traffic.
The Maoist cult enjoyed a resurgence in the early 1990s, with the religious aspects even more heightened. Mountains that looked vaguely like his outline became tourist attractions, while his image became a brand in itself. You can still buy Mao yo-yos, Mao electronic toys, Mao teacups, glow-in-the-dark Mao clocks, Mao watches – it’s a festival of cheap tat that the Chairman himself would have loathed as a sign of consumerist decadence. Visitors to Hunan, Mao’s home province, can visit the birthplaces of Mao Zedong and Liu Shaoqi in the same day; it’s a rare pilgrimage that lets you venerate a murderer and his victim on the same tour.
Chinese banknotes, which used to include pictures of Sun Yat-Sen and other important revolutionary figures, now purely feature a rather smug-looking Mao. (At the time of writing, there was a rumour that a supposed new 500 yuan note would feature Deng. Appropriately enough, it would have five times the face value of any previous note.)
Children read Mao’s poems in school and learn his sayings, while his name is ritually invoked at political events. It looks like he’s dodged Stalin’s fate for good; permanently established as a kind of George Washington figure, associated with the struggle against the Japanese and the foundation of the nation rather than anything that came after.
The actual Maoist content in Chinese media and popular culture is tiny. Individual Chinese often come to their own harsh conclusions about him, just as others still worship him, but for the majority of the public he’s simply part of history. He’s respected as a national figure, not a Communist one. It’s highly unlikely that he’ll ever stop being held up as a hero, but it’s equally unlikely that, outside of an idealistic or angry fringe, his bloody ideology will ever have the same sway.
It’s almost impossible to estimate accurately how many people died from political violence or artificial starvation under Maoism. The figures for deaths during the Great Leap Forward, for instance, began at 17 million when knowledge of the extent of the famine first became common outside China in the 1980s; and now, based on extensive archival research by scholars like Frank Dikotter and Yang Jisheng, the figure has been convincingly pushed up to over 40 million – a figure higher, for instance, than civilian deaths worldwide in World War II.
Estimates for deaths during the Cultural Revolution alone start at around 400,000 and go up to over 10 million. Lowballing the statistics, 2 or 3 million deaths is a reasonable figure. By the standards of Chinese political violence, this would be relatively low, about the same number as died in the ‘Land Reform’ process and the persecution of Nationalists and ‘rich peasants’ in 1949 – 51 – though this figure, again, could plausibly be as high as 8 million.
Six or seven million deaths in the Cultural Revolution is possible; the rather eccentric ‘democide’ scholar R. J. Rummel, in
his idiosyncratic survey China’s Bloody Century, estimates 7,731,000. Any of these numbers exclude, of course, the millions crippled physically or mentally, not to mention the art, historical sites and religious artefacts destroyed.
The numbers for Tangshan are in a slightly more limited range. Government household surveys after the earthquake recorded the names of 242,000 deceased. This is the lowest figure possible. The survey teams were largely confined to the environs of Tangshan itself, and didn’t venture far into the massive region hit by the quake. The figure also took no account of the many outsiders to the area killed during the disaster, from migrant workers to the victims in the train station. A survey conducted in the early 1980s, using casualty estimation techniques based on projecting proportional household casualty figures to the entire region, placed the number of deaths as somewhere around 650,000, which seems a reasonable estimate.
Every 28 July, Tangshan remembers its dead. Like families returning to sweep tombs on Qing Ming, Tangshanese from all over the country return to honour the lost. Late into the night, survivors and relatives sit round fires, burning paper images of grave goods – traditionally money, today including cars, DVD players and designer clothes – for the dead, chanting prayers and telling stories. People cry in the street, letting out thirty years of grief. It’s a strange place to be as an outsider, whether Chinese or foreign; when I talked to newcomers to Tangshan, they mentioned that they avoided going out that day, unwilling to intrude on a pain they couldn’t fully know.
Except on the anniversary, very little sign of the quake is visible in Tangshan, save for the prevalence of ‘Anti-Earthquake’ squares and roads. A couple of collapsed buildings, such as the fallen dormitory in which Zhu Yinlai was once buried, are preserved as memorial sites. The most visible signs of the earthquake’s impact remain the bodies of survivors. Every so often in Tangshan, you’ll see a man with a missing arm, or a woman walking on an artificial foot. Over 6,000 survivors of the earthquake have been permanently crippled, and I went to visit some in a hospital dedicated to their care.
The home felt like a slow death. It wasn’t an unattractive building, with a set of shared dorm rooms around a grassy quad, but it was still and lifeless, a sharp contrast to the usual lively outdoor life of any Chinese community. The patients had nothing to do beyond trundle about in their wheelchairs, read old magazines and play cards or mah-jongg with each other. There were no computers, and only an ancient VCR attached to the TV. I was the only visitor whenever I went.
The patients were visibly nervous of the staff, and worried about being caught talking to me. The entire pension they received from the government, they said, went directly to the hospital, leaving them no money of their own other than whatever cash relatives provided. When I offered to bring one patient some books and English materials, she called me from a public phone a few days later and asked me not to, worried that it would make other patients jealous and resentful. There were no organised trips outside the hospital, and it was virtually impossible for them to leave the place on their own. Their wheelchairs were enormous, motor-driven affairs that gave their users a robotic quality, and nothing in China is built to be wheelchair accessible.
Other crippled victims found better lives. I met Little Ma in a park in northern Tangshan, where she was telling horoscopes, sitting in her wheelchair covered in a blanket and smiling at passers-by. I’ve never met anyone who made me feel so immediately and utterly happy; joy bubbled out of her like a spring. After being told by doctors that she would never walk again, she wanted to commit suicide, convinced that she would only be a burden to her family. Her parents and siblings encouraged her to live as close an approximation of a normal life as she could, coming with her to events to help lift her wheelchair upstairs. A few years after the earthquake, she married a man who loved her deeply and they had a son.
Feeling frustrated at home, she decided to take up Daoist fortune-telling, buying some books on palmistry and the I Ching and taking up a regular spot in the park alongside other soothsayers. ‘Seventy per cent of it is psychology’, she told me, ‘I spend most of my day listening to people. If it’s a young woman, I tell her she’ll get married and have a son, if it’s a middle-aged man I tell him he’ll be promoted at work. I just like to make people happy.’
Not being able to marry was the greatest pain for many crippled survivors. The Chinese have a pronounced fear of physical deformity or incapability, which makes finding a husband or a wife even more difficult than it is in the West for a disabled person, and there is a near-complete lack of understanding from many medical authorities about the possibility of sex. ‘I was told it was impossible, and that I should put it out of my mind entirely,’ said one survivor. Through support groups, some found their own solution. Two wheelchair-bound survivors would marry each other in a ‘sexless marriage’ – though not all of them matched the name, thankfully – providing companionship and support. Where possible, they adopted children, especially earthquake orphans.
For the thousands of children who lost their parents in the earthquake, both the government and the public stepped up. Many were taken in by immediate relatives, others adopted, often by army families. Orphanages were set up for the rest. Chinese orphanages run the gamut from the truly horrifying, like the institution a friend of mine visited as a child in Changsha where she was told not to give presents to the children because they were being punished for their sins in past lives, to the excellent, with kindly, dedicated staff and a determination to make sure the children have the same chances as anyone else.
Fortunately, the experiences of Tangshan orphans were mainly at the better end of the spectrum. Other cities set up specialised institutions to help the children, especially the Hebei provincial capital of Shijiazhuang. Not only did most earthquake orphanages have dedicated and caring staff, who became adept at dealing with the traumas of their young charges, the government supplied funds to help the orphans into adulthood.
As usual, orphans in the countryside got the shorter end of the stick, being shoved into regular homes rather than ones that specialised in earthquake survivors. Zhang Youlu and his sister spent the rest of their childhood in one such institution. ‘It was OK,’ he shrugged, ‘At least there was food every day, which was a change.’ He went on to pass the gruelling national entrance exam and go to university, eventually becoming the owner of a fine independent bookstore in Tangshan.
At first, little attention was paid to the psychological impact of the quake. Chinese mental health care is relatively primitive, and concepts of post-traumatic stress disorder highly underdeveloped in a country where anybody born before 1970 or so would be a reasonable candidate for PTSD. The government considered ‘that its attitude, policy, actions and publicity made survivors feel better. Besides, it was concluded, survivors would talk to each other and learn self-help.’15
Informal groups of survivors did comfort and aid each other, and by the mid-eighties local psychologists had made a speciality of treating quake cases. But the mental scars ran deep. After his four-day ordeal under the rubble, it took years before Zhu Yinlai could go to the toilet comfortably. Other small spaces were uncomfortable, but it was toilets, for some reason, that triggered the worst memories. His class was transferred to Beijing, and he went on to become a successful engineer, but every time the cubicle door swung closed he found himself wanting to scream and scratch in terror.
Yu Xuebing married, worked in a factory, and became, after her husband was laid off from his job in the early twenty-first century, a taxi driver to help support her family. When she turned on her TV on 12 May 2008, her immediate thought was ‘My god, it’s happened again.’ The pictures of the devastating earthquake in Sichuan that afternoon triggered flashbacks for many Tangshanese as they watched scenes of howling mothers, wrecked houses and bodies being carted from the ruins.
Sichuan’s tragedies were all too familiar to Tangshanese, even if the casualty figures, at 80,000 dead, were lower. A far more extensive and
capable media ensured that individual stories got the attention they never had after Tangshan, such as the young mother whose body was found bent over her still-living three-month-old baby, shielding him. She had typed a message on her mobile phone while dying. ‘My dear baby, if you survive, remember your mother loves you.’
The PLA’s efforts were impressive, too, rapidly flying in the kind of special equipment and heavy vehicles that had been missing in Tangshan. With the images all over the Chinese media, volunteers jumped in cars or trucks and drove straight to the disaster-struck region, bringing food, blankets, water and medicine. This time China had no hesitation in accepting foreign aid, with millions pouring in from abroad. Both companies and celebrities faced massive social pressure to donate, with those seen as stingy being panned in the media. False promises led to later scandals, such as actress Zhang Ziyi’s failure to deliver on the $1 million in funds she claimed to have raised.
Yet, as in Tangshan, the aid pooled in certain areas, leaving vast swathes untouched. Sichuan’s landscape is more mountainous and tougher than Hebei’s, so it had even more remote communities that never, in the words of one middle-aged Sichuan woman, ‘saw a mao of help for us. We just picked things up ourselves and carried on.’ Help was there for those who travelled to find it, but disaster relief efforts and reconstruction money were largely confined, yet, again, to the big towns.
According to Australian journalist John Garnault, even in the immediate aftermath of the quake the disaster relief efforts were often more about show than substance. He reported how he ‘watched People’s Liberation Army soldiers loitering aimlessly and helping themselves to goods looted from shattered shops, while the cries of trapped citizens rang out from buildings nearby’.
