China is in the grip of a cultural revolution (but it has nothing to do with Mao)

Niall Ferguson says for all the dire warnings about a revival of Cultural Revolution madness in today’s China, in truth, people are more preoccupied with post-reform changes

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Mannequins from the 1960s and 1970s are displayed at a private museum in Anren, Sichuan province, along with other memorabilia from the Cultural Revolution. Photo: Reuters

Published: 11:37am, 25 May 2016Updated: 11:37am, 25 May 2016

Some weeks it is hard to know what to worry about most. Terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists? Mass migration triggered by war and misery across the Muslim world? Or how about the political reactions to these threats, from Donald Trump to Brexit?

And yet all this could easily pale into insignificance if the world’s most populous country were to repeat its own history. Any crisis in China has the potential to affect a staggering number of people. So when China watchers worry, we all need to pay attention. The Economist recently used the headline “Mao, diluted” to characterise the personality cult around President Xi Jinping ( 習近平 ). Others go further. “Not since the 1970s when Mao still reigned and the Cultural Revolution still raged,” wrote Orville Schell in The New York Review of Books last month, “has the Chinese leadership been so possessed by Maoist nostalgia.”

Having just spent two weeks in Beijing, however, I am relieved to report that I saw scarcely any sign of “Maostalgia”. There is a kind of cultural revolution going on, no question. But it is not one that looks back with any fondness to the craziness of the 1960s.

Cultural Revolution, 50 years on

Of course, I can see why people might worry. Since Xi became general secretary of the Communist Party in 2012, there have been numerous nods to the bad old days. A year after coming to power, he approved Document No 9, which bans the discussion of seven taboo subjects in universities, including Western democratic ideas. Shortly before I arrived in Beijing, there was a concert in the Great Hall of the People that featured the song Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman – a Cultural Revolution classic.

A man walks past a security guard holding a prong for restraining attackers near a poster of Mao Zedong and Cultural Revolution banners at a curio market in Beijing. Photo: AP

Cultural Revolution was wrong: party mouthpiece breaks Chinese media silence over 50th anniversary

Yet no one I met in Beijing showed the remotest sign of wanting to revisit that era. Quite the reverse. And no wonder. Over roughly 10 years of insanity, between 1.5 and 2 million people lost their lives.

Last week, I sipped tea with an elderly woman who had been subjected to the signature torture of the Red Guards – to stand for hours with her knees bent and her arms stretched behind her. Like everyone who remembers those dark days, she could think of nothing worse than a new Cultural Revolution.