bodyType

customContents

entityId

entityUuid

articlePageQuery

filter

article

articleBaseAdvertisingInfoArticle

articleListArticle

articleSeoArticle

hooksArticleAcknowledgementGateOverlayArticle

hooksTrackPageViewArticle

hooksContentInterestArticle

articleLinkingDataContent

hooksAmpRedirectArticle

articleSchemaContent

liveArticle

advertZone

sentiment

contentLock

topics

types

sections

paywallTypes

createdDate

publishedDate

urlAlias

moreOnThisArticles

sponsorType

commentCount

authorLocations

authors

corrections

displaySlideShow

multimediaEmbed

printHeadline

seriesContainer

articleSpeeches

socialHeadline

headline

images

flag

firstTopic

glossary

flattenTypeIds

image

relatedLinks

relatedNewsletters

__typename

sponsor

pdfFiles

seriesReverseOrder

series

disableOffPlatformContent

published

updatedDate

summary

subHeadline

body

keywords

readingTime

customTimezone

liveContents

SCMP Reporter

The Chinese authorities have banned all public events marking the 30th anniversary of the start of the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution (1966-76).

  Yet the publication last month of the English-language edition of the definitive account on the 10 years of chaos by Yan Jiaqi and Gao Gao will once again focus international attention on the worst disaster in Communist Chinese history.

  Turbulent Decade is more than a translation of the original Ten-Year History of China's 'Cultural Revolution'.

  This is because the editor and translator, D.W.Y. Kwok, one of America's foremost authorities on Chinese history, has reworked the manuscript and given it a new relevance and scholarly stature.

  Professor Kwok has also put together 81 pages of notes and bibliography.

  When Ten-Year History first came out in 1986, it was tolerated by the relatively liberal administration of party chief Hu Yaobang.

  The tome became an instant best-seller in the mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

  However, it was soon banned as the authorities feared in-depth discussions of the Cultural Revolution could lead to misgivings about the fundamental failings of the Communist system.

  And Yan, a Chinese Academy of Social Sciences scholar who signed on to the political-reform team of former party chief Zhao Ziyang , became an ideological godfather to the pro-democracy movement of 1989.

  Yan and his wife Gao, a doctor-turned-sociologist, fled to France soon after the massacre.

  The couple had spent the early 1980s collecting material, including neibu (internal) documents and first-hand interviews with participants in the 'revolution'.

  By early 1989, they had put together a roomful of new material, and had June 4, 1989 not intervened, they would have settled down to do a complete revision of Ten-Year History.

  However, they have imparted many of their new findings and thoughts to Professor Kwok.

  He has incorporated them into this English version.

  Central to Yan and Gao's argument was the belief that the 'revolution' started because of the remnant feudalism inherent in Mao's quest for a long - and unchallenged - reign.

  Refusing to give up power to capitalist roaders like president Liu Shaoqi and the latter's comrade-in-arms, Deng Xiaoping , Mao urged the Red Guards to 'bombard the headquarters' of the bureaucracy.

  Invested with the god-like authority of a dynastic monarch, Mao could, through sheer personality and Machiavellian machinations, tame and humiliate powerful generals who had shattered to smithereens the forces of the Kuomintang as well as the Japanese Imperial Army.

  There were colourful yet hand-wringing depictions of the marauding Red Guards, the 'revolutionary operas' of Jiang Qing and the shattered dreams and crippled bodies of a generation gone haywire.

  President Liu died in late 1969 like a rat, away from his family, and with 'hair unkempt and more than a foot long, nose and mouth twisted out of shape, chin blackened with blood'.

  Consider the logic of then minister of public security Xie Fuzhi.

  He had this to say to his underlings concerning the crimes of the Red Guards: 'I do not approve of masses killing people, but if the masses hate bad people so much that we cannot stop them, then let us not insist on [stopping them].'   Or the diabolic cunning of Madame Jiang in hounding to death Zhou Enlai , whom she denigrated as 'Prime Minister Confucius'.

  There is a wry pathos in the fact that a dying Mao overruled his wife and briefly rehabilitated Deng in 1974.

  'Deng Xiaoping was aware that Mao Zedong was ageing and knew, in the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, that Mao needed his help to stabilise the situation and rectify the economy,' the authors write.

  The Deng restoration, however, was brief.

  And it took a virtual palace coup d'etat by Marshal Ye Jianying and a somewhat reluctant party chairman Hua Guofang to unseat the Gang of Four.

  One of Turbulent Decade's key conclusions is that to accept the challenge of the times, the Chinese must move beyond the rule of personality to institutions with built-in checks and balances.

  'Whenever serious problems arose in China, the Chinese people always looked towards a noble and good leader as the only way to lead them in changing the present,' they write.

  Yan and Gao are convinced that the starting point of democratic politics is 'to acknowledge human imperfections' - and then to craft a system whereby such imperfections could be corrected.

  The authors are not sanguine about a quick fix to millennia of feudal mentality.

  'Many people [in China] still cherish illusions about one-party dictatorship, believing that the leadership of the Communist Party will help establish in China a 'democratic politics' that stresses 'procedures', 'responsibilities', and the rule of law,' they write.

  'The Chinese people may still have to bear a cost as heavy and serious as the Cultural Revolution.' TURBULENT DECADE, A History of the Cultural Revolution, Yan Jiaqi & Gao Gao, University of Hawaii Press 



Ten years of chaos re-examined