Blog #6 The End of an Era

Dear Tongzhimen, 

It has been many years since I started reporting to you as a young student, and I have come to give my final report on our Cultural Revolution, the Gang of Four, and the effect of their horrid crimes in the past few years. Although our great Chairman Mao intended for the urban youth, who were in desperate need of revolutionary education, to become one with the peasantry and end our cultural divide, it did not come to fruition. This is by no fault of his own, of course. Instead, deep-seated cultural divides and fervent chaos launched by Jiang Qing and others are to blame. 

Years ago, during one of my family’s daily Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong readings, I recall being struck by this quote: “How should we judge whether a youth is a revolutionary? How can we tell? There can only be one criterion, namely, whether or not he is willing to integrate himself with the broad masses of workers and peasants and does so in practice. If he is willing to do so and actually does so, he is a revolutionary; otherwise he is a non-revolutionary or a counter-revolutionary.” Back then, I was eager to support Mao’s decision in 1968 to send our youth to the countryside to do what I did all those years ago and integrate themselves into our revolutionary mindset. Since then, I have had the fortune to speak to those who experienced this journey, such as fellow journalist Liang Heng, who has illustrated the reality of the Cultural Revolution that I did not experience in his memoir, soon to be released. 

As an old woman in the city of Beijing, I was lucky to be relatively unaffected by the campaign. Sure, my neighbors, sister-in-law, and nephew were accused of being counter-revolutionary and sent to the countryside, but I was left unscathed. Meeting with Liang Heng was a huge wake-up call into the shortcomings of the campaign. He was initially untrusting of me due to my lack of struggle during the last decade, but he soon told me about his experiences and let me read his memoir pre-release anyway. During the revolution, Liang Heng and his father were split up from their family, struggled against, and were sent to live and learn from the peasants due to their counter-revolutionary ideals. Right off the bat, Liang described to me the obvious divide between the peasantry and the unwelcomed outsiders. As a child, he was spit on, called a “stinking intellectual’s son,” and his new peers were told “to avoid becoming friends with us at all costs, lest we contaminate them with our “bad thought.” Growing up, this same divide was constantly present in Liang’s life. He couldn’t play basketball for the country, court the girl he liked, or support his family because of their counter-revolutionary intellectual background and their time spent in the countryside. 

It is sad to see this anti-intellectualism is still around decades after I experienced it in Yenan. I believe this deep-rooted anti-intellectual mindset that has been cultivated in China is one of the main catalysts to the failure of the Cultural Revolution, specifically its goal to bridge the gap between peasant and urban populations. It seems as if Liang Heng is one of millions of comrades who have been negatively affected by the destructive overly-political culture of the sixties. Luckily, times are changing, and hopefully for the better this time. Farewell to my loyal readers. 

Your Devoted Comrade,

Cui Shuli