According to Roderick McFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, the cultural revolution was more political than properly cultural and must be replaced in the history of communisms. The movement escaped its main instigator, Mao, and led China to an unforeseen reform of mentalities.
On July 8, 1966, Mao announced his wife his desire to create “ A great disorder under the sky “To create a” Large order under the sky ». The cultural revolution was launched. It was the initiative of Mao. This is the thesis developed by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals in a very documented work which undertakes to replace the cultural revolution in the long time in the history of China. Where Jung Chang and Jon Halliday proposed in their biography of Mao (Mao, the story unknownGallimard, 2006) A rather psychological vision of the cultural revolution, the two authors, both eminent sinologists, highlight a political and military version of the event.
We must first salute a rare success, that of a style of works still rare in France. These are large Anglo-Saxon surveys carried out in a journalistic mode by researchers or newspaper correspondents abroad-Roderick MacFarquhar had at the time observed part of the events on site-but not reluctant to rely on the most sharp learning, nor to embrace large geostrategic or historical perspectives. We can thus classify the work of Macfarquhar and Schoenhals, translated to Gallimard editions, in the line of those of Simon Leys (The new clothes of President Mao. Chronicle of the “cultural revolution”Arlea, 2009) or more recently of the book devoted by Francis Deron, journalist in the world who disappeared this summer, in Cambodia (The trial of the Khmer RougeGallimard, 2009).
A political revolution
The interest of the book is first due to the documents, almost all unpublished in French, which it now provides us with. We will cite the Resolution on party historydocument developed in 1981 by the Chinese Communist Party and passed here in the investigation, but also a large number of regional and local testimonies, as well as interviews. It is also necessary to read for this purpose the many comments which accompany the references in note. The collected documentation is not intended to shed light on points of detail but provides essential answers to fundamental questions. The book, for example, offers new lighting concerning two of the most important protagonists of the period. Zhou Enlai, long considered in the West, and in particular in France, as a “ moderate “, Appears as one of Mao’s seides for which he accomplishes without flinching the worst abuses, as shown by the book that Gao Wenquian devoted to him. As for Deng Xiaoping, who later hired the turning point from China to capitalism, the biography devoted to her by his daughter and who is still waiting to be translated allows us to decrypt the stormy relations he had with Mao.
Macfarquhar and Schoenhals offer a resolutely political reading of the cultural revolution. What the title explains: the cultural revolution would be the last major revolutionary project of Mao. It was indeed a question of responding in advance to any risk of the influence of Chinese communism on the revisionist model put in place in USSR From the coming to power of Khrushchev. To this was added the analysis of the inner situation and Mao’s desire to silence the criticisms formulated within the same of the party following the big leap forward.
If China therefore responds, in broad outline, to the diagram of a classic communist state until 1966, the cultural revolution was a major upheaval. The offensive, which began in February 1965 at the instigation of Mao with an attack orchestrated from Shanghai against a Beijing intellectual close to the circles of power, took its real boom in the spring of 1966 with the creation of a “ Cultural revolution document writing group ». However, we must be careful not to reduce the cultural revolution to an internal war in the party, which would oppose the different clans between them. It is a real civil war that is triggered. It is first born from the conviction specific to Mao according to which it is up to the masses to bring out the revolutionary forces within them. The party administrative apparatus, usually mobilized, is kept away. Then gradually sets up a form of dialectical relationship between power and the new revolutionary forces, between Mao and young people, students and especially college students, who entered dance on May 4, 1966 at the University of Beijing. Marked by the appearance of hundreds of Dazibaos in all schools and cultural establishments in the territory, the revolution was led by “ work teams »Dispatched to educational places and responsible for arouing criticism of the teaching teams in place. The violence of the movement of the Red Guards, which remains the mark of the cultural revolution, also has its origin in the idea that terror would operate among the population as a catharsis. “” The world is as much yours as ours, but basically, it is to you that it belongs », According to an adage borrowed from the small red book of Quotes from President Mao.
A generational overbidding
What was played between summer and autumn was therefore the authorization given to youth to emancipate from their elders by way of violence. By its radicalism, this generation sought to compete with the heroism of the one who had preceded it. The cultural revolution gave rise to the worst abuses. In one month, 77,000 inhabitants of Beijing were driven out and forced to return to the village of their ancestors. Innocent people suffered torture or were pushed to suicide for ideological reasons, mainly teachers or education executives. Two -thirds of the country’s monuments were destroyed. The leave given to the Red Guards in July 1968 did not end the horrors. The follow-up of the cultural revolution turned out to be even more deadly than the period of the Revolution itself had been. Even reported in the years that followed cases of cannibalism in Guangxi and in Yunnan which cannot be explained other than by the barbarism of a youth delivered to itself, out of any social or political standard. Even partial estimates show a possible number of persecution amounting to 36 million people and 1.5 million killed.
The cultural revolution was never a mass movement. The embarrassment in which the party dignitaries were placed in the face of a movement whose initiative and conduct escaped them – when he did not devour them, like Chen Boda, one of his first initiators – reads in the hesitations that surround his extension to factories and countryside. The power taken by the radicals within the party aroused not only a strong concern among the former dignitaries but even more a disorganization of all the levels of decision. China of the cultural revolution and the years that followed appeared as a paralyzed country. Mao had not launched a traditional political force to the party, but rather a generational overbidding movement to which the absence of political and even civic experience could not bring any brakes. The large herd’s headline was in direct contact with the telluric youth forces. He had in turn, to get rid of it and try to slow down the movement, take draconian measures at the origin of an unexpected evolution, and in contrast to the doctrine which he had always defended, imposing, for a time, the authority of the army on that of the party.
In addition to its documentary wealth, one of the interests of the work is therefore to describe with great precision the ways by which totalitarianism is installed or strengthens within Chinese society. So the links between President Mao and the youth are reminiscent of those described by Ian Kershaw when he evokes the mobilizing themes that the Nazis developed to the German youth. At the end of this exciting investigation, we can nevertheless risk sending a reproach to the authors: that of not having led a more in -depth reflection on the relationships between “ culture And revolution. Admittedly, we understand, to read them, that culture was initially only a minor pretext for the triggering of events. But how to interpret the fact that the trigger event came from a charge launched against a specialist in the Han dynasty, while Mao-himself keen on history-owned in his library several thousand volumes on the classical history of China ? We have the feeling that it is missing in the first part of the book a chapter that could have enlivened us on the role devolved to culture in the actions carried out, but also on the image that Mao and some of those around it made the future of the country.
The cultural revolution was not only a circumstantial episode ; It influences the course of the history of China during the second XXe century. We understand from the analysis of Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals how, by definitively giving leave to a Chinese way of communism, it extends its consequences until today. It is indeed the failure of the cultural revolution which led China, under the direction of Deng Xiaoping, to embrace the Western model of economic development. Hence the idea that the cultural revolution was the source of an upheaval of much more important mentalities than Mao had imagined. If the two authors are careful not to predict the future, the feeling of history on the move which inhabits the book makes it a precious guarantee for intellectuals and all observers of Chinese political life, and even more no doubt for future historians of this country to which it is dedicated.