Blog post #6

Hi all,

In my ever-increasing age, I no longer wish to provide the public with key information. When I started writing these posts, I thought I had an opportunity to do some good, really make a change, and help the CCP and Mao to build this new communist utopia. I think that a lot of people felt this way and we have been taken for fools. Land reform was a bloody mess, the great leap forward introduced a need for citizens and friends to lie and incriminate their fellow man just so they wouldn’t be struggled against, and the cultural revolution was just a way for the intellectuals like many of the people reading this right now and for cultural heritage to be suppressed. I am willing to give up on the party but I haven’t known anything else, I was just 20 when the CCP started with the long march to Yenan. I had the extreme honor of interviewing with a journalist friend of a friend named Liang Heng, who is preparing to release a memoir of his time under the reign of the CCP. While it was a short interview, he did give me one piece from his memoir that I thought had some significance. He was talking about the Red Guard changing the names of the streets when he told me, “All this was extremely confusing, especially for the old people, and everybody was always getting off at the wrong bus stop and getting lost. To make matters even worse, the ticket-sellers on the buses were too busy giving instructive readings from the Quotations of Chairman Mao between stops to have much time to help straighten out the mess.” (Heng 68). This quote given to me was very powerful for the understanding of the cultural revolution for a number of reasons. When he speaks about the confusion that people were feeling it goes deeper than just the changing of the street names. The constant shifts from political ideals to what Mao wanted to do to the different campaigns and policies, were enough to cause the masses to stop understanding what they were supposed to do, what they were supposed to comply with, and what false narratives they were supposed to believe. The statement where he says the ticket people were too busy reading from the Little Red Book was interesting because that could be because they were also nervous about slipping up and not knowing what to say or believe the next time a Red Guard member talked to them, everyone knows what they would do to you if you said something not in line with Mao’s teaching and were labeled a rightist. Or are they too busy praising Mao and not paying attention to the many changes that are being constantly made to the world around them, to just care how the changes are affecting real people in everyday life? This quote also shows how the party wanted to control not just the actions of the masses but the thoughts of the masses. If people are seeing Mao’s teaching during every waking moment, even during their commutes to their party-ordered work units, then they can’t stop to think about how many changes are happening, let alone how rapidly they are occurring and why the party can’t seem to make a policy decision and stick with it. I do give some praise to the party for their ability to pull this off. The revolution has been headlined by a changing of ways, out with the old and in with the new. But this has been in the works since the great leap. They systematically removed those from society who didn’t believe in the party or who were not willing to conform and formed their thoughts and actions to what they wanted them to do and think. It makes sense that people couldn’t see this happening, all the people who warned them are gone and this constant change of policies and enemies has been the way of decades. The Cultural Revolution has been characterized by the systematic eradication of Chinese culture, customs, and beliefs. It has been a period marked by a relentless pursuit of ideological purity. This quote is important to understanding the cultural revolution because it exemplifies the extreme measures taken by the party to inculcate the ever-changing Maoist beliefs in the population, including utilizing public transportation (and every part of a citizen’s waking life) as a venue for ideological indoctrination.