A Reflection on the Cultural Revolution

My Dear Readers,

First and foremost, I must express my terrible grief over the passing of our great leader Chairman Mao. I hope that we can come together as a people to keep ourselves strong in this time of national sadness.

Over the past four decades, I have attempted to inform you on all of the important events we have lived through as citizens of the great nation of China. I fear that I am growing too old to retain my post for much longer, and this will likely be the last report of my career. For this last report, I have been assigned to cover the difficult topic of the Cultural Revolution. I will do this by evaluating the success of the Cultural Revolution’s goals. The objectives of the Revolution were to bring the people of the countryside and those in urban areas closer together and to create a new generation of revolutionaries to succeed the generation of liberators. In order to evaluate these goals, I will refer to the manuscript of the Cultural Revolution memoir by Liang Heng, as he was someone who lived through each important phase of the Revolution.

If one of the major goals of the Cultural Revolution was to close the gap between the rural and urban populations, it both succeeded and failed. During the revolution, tens of millions of urbanites, re-educated cadres, and educated youth were “sent down” to the countryside to learn from the peasants and contribute to the revolution from the countryside. Liang Heng’s older sisters are both sent as educated youths before eventually he and his father are sent following his father’s re-education as a rightest intellectual (Liang, 161). In a theater production Liang Heng attended, he described the educated youth being portrayed as going down to the countryside and being welcomed with open arms by the peasants, signifying the union between the two different parts of the population (Liang, 162). While Liang Heng said that he was excited to go to the countryside, he acknowledged that he knew they were going to a poor area, and that they would have to work hard to make a living (Liang, 162). In describing the feelings he had when first departing, Liang Heng captures the point of the cultural revolution, with the excitement of the urbanites to join the peasants.

While the purpose was to bring the people together, it was difficult in practice as the urbanites that were relocated to the countryside had no experience, and were not easily able to contribute to the rural way of life. Liang Heng recalled that the peasants viewed them as more mouths to feed which would not help to lighten the workload (Liang, 170). This shows the great flaw in this goal of the Cultural Revolution. While it technically brought the people closer together by forcing members of the urban population to relocate to the countryside, it actually made things more difficult as they were not suited to help with rural work.

The other goal of the Revolution to create a new generation of revolutionary successors was more successful as the new generation was sent through a process of hardship similar to the generation of liberators before the civil war and the ensuing Communist Party victory. The Red Guards that carried out the revolution were devoted to Chairman Mao and wanted to improve the future of China under his guidance. Mao himself encouraged the Red Guards, telling them that a “Revolution is justified” (Dietrich, 184). The following violence was seen as justified by the Red Guards as they attacked the old ways, spurred on by the Chairman’s encouragement (Dietrich, 187). Through violence and persecution of targeted groups, the revolutionary forces staged their claim as the successors of the revolutionaries of the past. The violence of the Cultural Revolution created a conflict like the civil war had, creating more hardships for the new generation to weather and further mold them into the future of the Communist Party.

My friends, the Cultural Revolution was a time of great trouble for our nation. With people from the cities and countryside mixing and slowing down production, food scarcity made things even more difficult. The violence of the revolution only made people fear the government, and created more division, while also giving young revolutionaries a chance to make an impact on the future. After all that has transpired in the last decade and beyond, I hope for a quiet period for at least the near future, so I may enjoy my retirement without worry. Thank you for sticking with me for this long. I hope I have given you insight into all that our great nation has gone through.

As always, stay safe,

孙诚