The long shadow of the Cultural Revolution
Roderick MacFarquhar says that even today, as a group of new leaders prepares to take charge in China, Mao's Cultural Revolution and the reactions to it continue to shape national politics
Let me begin with what for most Western scholars is a truism: No Cultural Revolution, no reform. In other words, without the disasters that occurred in the first 30 years of the People's Republic, and particularly in the last 10 years of Mao Zedong's life, we wouldn't have seen the amazing economic growth of the subsequent 30-plus years.
So why was there a Cultural Revolution? The great analyst of Mao's thought, Professor Stuart Schram, once said it was one possible outcome of Mao's beliefs but not an inevitable one. What I try to analyse in my three volumes just published in Chinese is how the possible became the necessary from Mao's point of view.
I am not going to detail the horrors of the famine of the Great Leap Forward, but rather to describe how it fitted into the process that led to the Cultural Revolution.
In 1961, as the famine persisted, Mao presided over the drafting of a plethora of plans for running the economy and society on more sensible lines. None had any effect because the tide of leftism was still strong and people were frightened of being called right opportunists. In 1962, Mao and his colleagues decided to take the unprecedented step of holding a massive meeting of officials to try to convince them not to hold back from taking the emergency measures.
The last week of the conference unleashed a torrent of criticism from the lower ranks as to what had gone wrong with the Great Leap Forward. After it was over, Mao absented himself, leaving his colleagues to handle the crisis.
The active members of the Politburo Standing Committee - Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Chen Yun and Deng Xiaoping - seem all to have agreed that some form of family farming under the aegis of the collective would be necessary to give peasants the incentives they needed.