173. Chairman Mao & the Cultural Revolution

[Music] On the 19th of August 1966, posters went up across Beijing, declaring war on the past. We want to take to task and smash all old ideas, old culture, old customs, old habits, the poster read. Barbers, tailors, photographers, book peddlers, and others who are at the service of the bourgeois class, none of these are exceptions. We want to rebel against the old world. The next day, roving gangs of youthful enthusiasts for this message read guards, as they were called. Began roaming across the Chinese capital, attacking anything that smacked off the old way of doing things, old street names, barbershops, high heels, all were targeted by the red guards. A few days later in Shanghai, the red guards there started attacking flower beds, cats, Dominic in view of our forthcoming programme that we have on pigeons. Racing pigeons were targeted. You're absolutely incredible on this pigeons issue. Well pigeons keep cropping up in history and they cropped up in the cultural revolution, which of course is what I'm describing. In due course, ancient monuments were targeted, classical literature, paintings and temples. This in turn was part of an even broader convulsion that affected the whole of China for years and years. I'm quoting here from Frank DeCurter, who's book the Cultural Revolution, is a brilliant guide to it. He writes that between one and a half and two million people were killed. But many more lives were ruined through endless denunciations, false confessions, struggle meetings and persecution campaigns. Dominic, as a representative of the bourgeoisie, a historian, writing for the Daily Mail, how do you think you would have done in the cultural revolution? Yeah, I think my time would have been up on day one, Tom. I mean, not least I've just had a haircut as you can tell. The list does not see this. So this business about barbers would have been very bad news for me because I'm very clearly a man who's just been to the barbers. What is it about barbers? That's the peculiar thing. Anyway, I think that cultural revolution is such an unbelievably colorful and fascinating topic. But it's also probably the single most we've done. I don't know how many podcasts we've done. The best part of 200 podcasts now, Tom. I think this is the single most depressing horrific story we've done because to me, as a Western bourgeois outsider, it seems to represent the ultimate descent into, to me, it seems like mindless barbarism. But of course it isn't because there were interesting political shenanigans and ideological kind of maneuverings behind it all. And that's the fascinating thing that actually this is rooted in often quite cold-blooded political calculation. Do you think that for a historian, it has a kind of particular horror, simply because of the attack on the past. And a question I would love to put to probably the greatest contemporary historian of China that we have here in Britain, Rana Mitter, who is professor of the history and politics of modern China at Oxford, author of a bitter revolution, China's struggle with the modern world. But more recently, two brilliant books on China and the Second World War, one detailing the war with Japan, one on China's relationship to the Second World War, also a presenter for free thinking on Radio 3. And also very much arrival podcasts now. So we're very pleased to get him on ours. Rana, thanks so much for joining us. Could I just put to you that question, as a historian of China, do you find the spectacle of destruction that the cultural revolution unleashed against the monuments and the records and the traditions of China? Do you find it upsetting? Tom, thanks so much for a great question. I have to say before I even answer that question, I must also express my delight at being on a legendary podcast, which I've had recommended not least by a diplomat from a major anglophone country who took me by the arm when I was having a drink with him in London and saying you have to listen to Tom and Tom's podcast. And if that is the one that we're all listening to as well. So great to actually be beyond. I think you're absolutely right. But those of us who actually apply history for a trade, those who actually care very much about the preservation of the past, the interpretation of the past, saving what has survived from the rough and tumble of everyday life, perhaps are particularly devastated by one of the things that emerged during the cultural revolution, which was the way in which systematically and methodically pretty much every aspect of what was considered to be an unclean and problematic past, the past that essentially dated from before the revolution was essentially taken out of out of circulation, destroyed, smashed in some cases, violent. In other cases, almost more chillingly methodically, you could find Lama temples in Tibet, for instance, which were taken apart almost brick by brick and the bricks reused for more mundane uses, you know, pig pens or factories or whatever it might be. So the sense of the past not only should be left behind, but should be erased almost to invisibility, that is indeed something very chilling about the heart of that cultural revolution idea. And one of the reasons I think historians do find it very, very troubling to contemplate. So Rana, set the scene for us because a lot of our listeners won't be, well, I think I speak for lots of people of my generation, we didn't do any Chinese history at school or university. So there's been a revolution, Mao and the communists have taken part at the end of the 1940s, and then they're coming off the back of an equally ghastly experience, which is that the great leap forward, Mao's collectivisation of agriculture and arguably is that the greatest famine in world history, the greatest man made famine? Must be up there, and we're talking about 20 to 30 million deaths caused by the great leap forward, so it's huge in number, sure. And after that Mao had, so Mao, who was the sort of great Helmousman, who had, you know, the hero of the revolution, he had taken a bit of a back seat, is that right? That he had been sort of pushed into the shadows a little bit, and is there some degree to it's the cultural revolution? It is basically his great attempt to put himself back a centre stage and to sort of reclaim leadership of the party. The cultural revolution can be read in several ways, Dominic. One is that we have a leader, who, as you say has been sidelined and is trying in some ways to place himself at the heart of events again, but I think it's also important not to underestimate this, it's not just a power play. If it had been a power play, then China could have had what's happened in hundreds of countries around the world over the years, and that is a military coup, you know, you basically get your mates in the army to kick out the leaders and instead, you know, put your own supporters in, and that's not what happened. In other words, it is also a genuinely ideological movement. It's a terrifying movement, in my opinion, but it is not one that is inauthentic. So let me just say a word or two about how China got to where it was in the summer of 1966 when the cultural revolution broke out. Essentially, the turmoil of the early 20th century, the invasion by various foreign countries, the parts of China's territory, the placing of China under essentially a sort of economic, sort of semi-colonialism. China was never a full colony unlike India, but there were various aspects of its own policy, particularly tariff reform, that it was not allowed to carry out autonomously. So that led to a lot of resentment. You then get the invasion by Japan during World War II, which creates huge turmoil, refugee flight, death and destruction, and then a civil war between the rulers of China in the early 20th century, the nationalists, under Changkha Shek, and the communists who come to be ruled by, or ruled over by Mards Adol, the man who become known as Chairman Mao. And eventually, the communists through a combination of superior military tactics, a radical social policy, at least in the short term, does attract a lot of people, and also support from the Soviet Union, manages to overcome internationalist opponents, and place itself in power in 1949, in the words that have echoed down since, uttered by Mao and by others, the Chinese people had stood up, and they had created this new communist state. So that carried on really for 17 years or so, the years of first of all of massive land reform, tremendous violence, as well as reconstruction of society. And then the great leap forward you mentioned, which essentially is a failed economic experiment that tries to boost China's productivity, but ends up with a horrific situation that leads to millions of people starving to death in the countryside. So at the beginning of the 1960s, Mao, who is the leader of the revolution, has been slightly sidelined by his colleagues, not officially shamed or disgraced in any way, but basically made it clear, it's been made clear that they want to see a little bit less of him around. And this is something that really hurts the self-esteem. He regarded himself not without justification, as the ideological mover and shaker behind the communist coming to power in the first place, and being moved aside, was not something that he wanted to really do. But beyond that, and this gets to the heart, I think, of the ideology of the cultural revolution. By the early 1960s, Mao had become convinced that the revolution had lost its fire. He saw the Soviet Union where Stalin had died, and Christchurch had basically moderated the Soviet Union from its original, very radical revolutionary positions in various ways. And he said to himself that he didn't want the same sort of thing to happen in China. Because Mao is identifying himself with Stalin right and Stalin's policies, and then after Stalin's death, Stalin gets denounced by Christchurch, and so is it right that Mao is anxious about the same fate beforeling him? That's exactly right. Essentially, the relationship between Mao and Stalin was a very dysfunctional one. They both admired each other, and also didn't trust each other, or any further they could to throw each other. But that having been so I think Mao always admired Stalin's decisiveness and his radicalism, and also actually his sort of violent disregard for individual human life. They had that very much in common between the two of them. So the discrediting of Stalin, by Christchurch in the Soviet Union was seen by Mao as a deeply hostile act towards him in China as well. And as a result of that, by the time you get to the early 1960s, Mao is beginning to feel all around him, not just that he's under pressure, that he's being encircled essentially by people who want to move him aside, but beyond that also that the Chinese revolution is in danger of becoming the kind of bourgeois revisionist revolution as he would put it that he saw in the Soviet Union. And that's the source of his anxiety. Just a question about Mao. We've had a couple of questions from our listeners about this. So David Palmer asks a question about, so after the failure of the Great League forward, I mean Mao is what? His late 60s early 70s at this point. Why don't the other Chinese leaders, especially when he then launches the cultural revolution and there's all this chaos? Why don't they just get rid of him? What's the problem? One thing which I think is in some ways difficult to recapture in the present day, but it's really worth understanding is how central Mao made his own personality to the success of the Chinese revolution as a whole. We tend to think of the cultural revolution and of course we'll talk about this in more detail, I'm sure in just a few minutes, as being the apotheosis, you know, the absolute final peak point of China of Mao's declaration of his own cultural personality, almost a godlike figure. But that didn't start in the 1960s. It really began in the 1940s in a period known as the rectification movement when essentially, acolytes, people who wanted to come and become part of the communist revolution, were made to undergo a training program in which they were both in a pressured psychologically very strongly to become part of the party, but also made to read a selection of books and of 22 key texts. 18 were by Mao. In other words, he was very much placing his own thought, not just communist thought in general, but the center of the project. And for people who had gone through that process over, you know, on and off, something like 20 years, simply moving someone of that level of standing out of the way was not like basically kind of moving a middle manager or even the kind of senior CEO of an executive position out to a kind of honorary chairmanship. So this is very like how I and a lot of listeners feel about Tom Holland in this podcast. Yes, Tom Holland thought. Well, I'm not going to want to pull down the statue of Chairman Tom. I think I'm not worthy of that. But run, I mean, basically, so it's Marxism. So you can't get rid of Marx, Leninism, you can't get rid of Lenin and Mao Zedong thought and therefore you can't get rid of Mao Zedong. And so that's a kind of the package that has been sold to the Chinese. Is that right? It is very much the package that's been sold to the Chinese, but it's worth remembering what Maoism is and someone else who I hope if you haven't already done you'll have on the podcast at some point Tom is the one of the story in Julia Lovell, whose recent book on Maoism makes a really strong point about Mao Mao's thought, which is that it's not definable, not quite in the way that Marx is, to particular books or particular texts which all build towards a particular end point. Instead, you could look at Maoism, not quite as a smogous board. I think that's probably a bit too Scandinavian for it, but maybe some kind of dim sum menu of a particularly kind of fiery chili flavored sort. In other words, there are different things that make up what Maoism is. Yes, it's about peasant revolution. That's the thing that people tend to think of, I think. Yes, it's about the use of armed guerrilla tactics to overcome your enemy, but it's also about certain philosophical ideas such as the glorification or violent renewal. In other words, the use of violent change as a positive good in its own right. One of the reasons he liked that was not just because he took a certain joy, I think, in seeing things being overturned, but also because the confusion, philosophical tradition against which he was reacting very strongly was much more about being sort of laid back, about being scholarly, about being kind of gentle in many senses. He wanted to put forward a philosophy which rejected those principles, and that drove him for much of his life. So that's the famous political power growing out of the bar of a gun. Well, that phrase about the gun in some ways does bring out that idea of violent change. In fact, the second half of that sentence is also worth noting, which is that is why the party must always control the gun and the gun must never control the party. In other words, it's really also a statement in that case about restraining violence as well as using it, but the word of point about violent change is certainly well worth noting. Yes. And, run also on the subject of, you know, Mao's perception that the revolution has run out of fire. I mean, he is putting his finger there on a problem that all revolutions face, which is that inevitably you overthrow one elite, and the revolutionaries who have done that come to constitute another elite. Is that the issue that he's kind of focusing in on? It isn't. It isn't. It isn't, of course, the only occasion that happened. The Yugoslav Marxist theorist, G. Lass, was the man who thought up the idea of the new class. In other words, the Communist bureaucrats who get so far ahead in the system, they really like a sort of new bourgeoisie. And in this particular case, Mao, I think, had a very similar idea. He referred, for instance, to the health ministry, which he felt was dealing purely with the needs of urban dwellers. And not nearly enough about the peasantry by referring to it as not the ministry of health, but the Ministry of Urban Gentleman's health, thereby sort of giving them, you know, a rather sort of a scornful eyebrow in terms of who they're actually looking at. And that led, of course, the policy that you probably will remember of barefoot doctors. In other words, peasant, who had given very basic medical training, and then made to go out to the countryside in an attempt to break down this idea of that the health service purely being the preserve of bureaucratic elites. I don't know whether you know, kind of Andrew Lansley or one of the other. Yeah, as well. Okay. But as thought of barefoot doctors as a solution to the problem, problem bear, but certainly it was on Mao's mind. And as a result, because of what he would have seen as the bourgeoisification, if that's the right word, of the revolution 17 years in, he also, this is one of the most curious things about the culture revolution, when he decided to inspire large parts of society to rise up against it, he was actually able to get an awful lot of adherence from people who had been sidelined in the previous 17 years. But many of those were actually people who came from what were known as bad class backgrounds. In other words, if you were actually a bourgeois from the old society, you might have been so badly treated in the 17 years of the communist revolution that you would actually find yourself being on the front lines for the cultural revolution. So what goes around comes around exactly that's so one last question before we get into the sort of narrative, the cultural revolution. This is obviously the age of the sinusovia split. And China is isolated. Russia is the Soviet Union rather is sort of moving slowly towards Daytonk, particularly when Nixon comes in in January 1969. Do you think the cultural revolution is also driven by a kind of paranoia about encirclement abroad and the Soviets have left the true path of communism and all that sort of thing. I mean, there's a genuine fear of attack and stuff. The culture revolution is one of the single most xenophobic periods of Chinese history. It's a period when almost any association with foreignness, whether it's knowing a foreign language or wearing clothes that are perceived to be foreign, and foreign could be Soviet, as you pointed out, to the long as well as as well as American in that case. Because of course the sinusovia split meant that there was a Russian diplomatic presence or a Soviet diplomatic presence in Beijing, but it was very, very coldly handled. And in that case, it was certainly very, very much part of the atmosphere that any involvement with foreigners was politically dangerous. And as a result, the fear of foreigners and what they might be at least in theory going to do to China became part of the political language of the time as well. So the idea that certainly the American backworld was hostile and just waiting to destroy communism if they were allowed into China was a large part of it. But actually by that stage, by the mid-60s, the fear that it was the Soviet Union that was in fact going to attack China had become a really overwhelming fear in the minds of at least some of the of the leadership. And that of course eventually, as we'll probably touch upon, leads to a reprash a reprashable with America halfway through the culture revolution. But that certainly was an obvious before it had even begun. So, Raleigh, the actual events in the culture revolution, it's signaled in a kind of strange way by Mao going for a swim in the yaksi. So what is going on there? So this is where Mao himself actually, through much of his life, used physical exercise as a means of sending a political signal. And this was partly because of the many influences on him, Marxism, Chinese traditional philosophy, the kind of sort of what you might call fan-fake novels at the time, you know, the outlaws of the marsh, these classic Chinese novels of daring do. He read all of those, loved all of those. But one particular influence, which actually was a very big factor in East Asian philosophy in general in the 20th century, was social Darwinism. In other words, this now, obviously completely discredited idea, that somehow races compete with each other in the way that the species compete with each other in terms of evolution. And Mao basically bought this, as many intellectuals that I indeed very, very strongly. And therefore decided that physical strength on a personal basis was a really important way of indicating both how you felt towards your country and how in general how countries could arm themselves against outside occupiers. Should you feel that there's any kind of, I'm sure it wouldn't be the case, middle-aged spread, a peer in the other Dominic or Tom, where you are, I can see actually. A battle is lost, wrong. I can see your tracky top from where I have on the video, actually, I don't know, so I wonder whether actually there might be something there. You might feel worse, then try out the Chairman Mao personal exercise plan. That's one of the first things. The first things that he actually wrote down that we have as one of his written works, which is in the complete works very early on. Before he became a Marxist, I won't give you the full thing now, but let's just say it involves a lot of up and down squat. and butter thrusts are also brilliant as well. - I'm not gonna do it on the podcast. - Now, I have to say that had the culture revolution started with a bit of squatting and thrusting, that would have been even more fascinating in various ways. But as you say, it was actually going for a swim in the Yanksie as a kind of show of strength was one of the signals at the beginning. Along with a few other things that in retrospect, you can see the wind, the direction the wind was going. So one actual other item, which might not in normal terms, seemed to be a particularly important element was a theater review. I mean, you know, we normally expect the kind of theater pages of stuck in the second part of the newspaper and why would you care about that? But in this case, a play by the playwright and scholar, Wuhan, which was called a highway dismissed from office. And this was basically from a metaphor, I wonder if I'm gonna put it, it was a story dating from the Ming dynasty, you know, hundreds of years before, about a righteous official who had been sat from his job. And various people around Mao thought that this was being used as it probably was as an analogy for a much more recent event, which was during the terrifying Great Leap Forward, the firing of the then defense minister, Pung Duhui, great communist general, brilliant on the battlefield, but he had dared to speak truth to power. He had told Mao about the starvation in the countryside and as a result, was basically kicked out of office. So this play, its performance, was basically seen as a dig at Mao and an official review appeared of this play, which was pretty much attributed to Mao and his faction saying, "How dare some counter-revolutionary make this case for an official who has been rightly dismissed from his post?" So we could see that this sense of deep resentment was beginning to emerge in the areas where Mao had some control over the media and the propaganda machinery in China. - So how do you go from a guy having a swim and a theater review to loads of people rushing around, closing down barbershops and pulling up flower beds? - More than that, I mean, that's pretty good. - I know, but that kind of initial, we've got to get rid of all the four-olds, all that kind of stuff. 'Cause it happens quite quickly, doesn't it? - It does happen quickly. So the very first thing I think to be aware of, as far as we can tell, is that when Mao started the culture revolution, he didn't know he was starting the culture revolution, by which I mean, he didn't know he was about to launch what turned out to be 10 years of extraordinary turmoil, political violence, destruction of lives and property and heritage and all of these things. Originally, it was meant to be a summer project for some students. I mean, personally, I'd rather just send them off to do Gweddenbrookam, or whatever. He had different ideas. In other words, the sentiment that we talked about before, the idea that the revolution is losing its fire and it's the young people who need to renew it. And you know, we talked about the 1960s here. I mean, 1968 in Paris, just a couple of years later, saw a very different manifestation of a similar sort of sentiment that somehow the youth were the most radical part of society and they had to rise up against their elders to make society better. The difference in the case of China, apart from the fact it's happening a couple of years earlier, is that it's the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party who's actually essentially shaking the situation up from the bottom. So his thought was, if we can basically get China's youth, particularly the educated youth, the students in universities and high schools to come out over the summer and basically start attacking whether physically or verbally the seniors and supposed superiors in society who think they know what they're doing, who think they've got it all worked out, but actually need to be taught a lesson. That will be a good softening up in terms of my own Mao's campaign for regaining a level of power within the top leadership. And the idea was that the students would do this over the summer. Now they go back to school in the autumn period. So it would be something that basically lasted a few weeks, maybe even a few months. And nobody I think was surprised as Mao himself when the whole thing turned out to have this huge raging fire behind it that took it to a level beyond what I think even he himself would have expected. So it started small but then became large. - Well, that then raises a really interesting question because like so many revolutions or so many movements, there is always this, I mean, it's such a sort of a level question, I suppose. Is it top down or is it bottom up? And obviously there's a tension, but the bottom up nature of it, so the students taking things into their hands, but I suppose on a different level, you would talk about local elites or local groups, taking things into their hand, maybe not directed by the center. How, what is there? What are the ingredients? What is it in 18 year old minds or experiences that drives them into this, I hate to sound like writing a column in a mid market newspaper, but this orgy of violence. I mean, where does that come from? It's not just because they're told to, right? Surely I'll talk about Britain's biggest selling newspaper. (laughing) Say you just a chance to do sales for them. - I think the words are the most beloved newspaper. Full of much-loved columnists, don't they? - Absolutely, just to drive with the phrase, "Enemies of the People", was that culture revolution or a mid market, anyway? - We won't go down there. - Brian, we won't go down there. - Yeah, we kicked off the podcast if you don't believe. - Absolutely, well of course, one of the things about the culture revolution, of course, was misbehavior, was absolutely the center of it because one of the major points was that it gave people a chance to kick back against authority. So, not still questioned on it about, what is it that motivates 18-year-olds, and maybe 17-year-olds and 16-year-olds too? Being told by the ruler of the country, that the most important thing you have to do is tell all the people who think they're so superior, they know more than you, they can tell you what to do. - So including their teachers, right? - Especially their teachers. - Particularly their teachers, absolutely. Or in the case of Mao, other members of the Politbuyer, I mean, the same point is being used at a rather different level. That in other words, the structures of authority that have built up over the last one of 17 years at that point, since 1949, have to be overturned. That's the motivation. And then if you think about at the grassroots, what it is that might motivate people to rebel, think about all the things that essentially animate, most people in any society, in the war in povrish parts of society, there are people who felt that the revolution hadn't given them a good deal. They thought that level was gonna change, and actually didn't change, all that much, they didn't get that better job, or they didn't get the factory form and position. Lots of reasons to be resentful about against the next level of the elite above you, in that particular case. Beyond that, you also have the very long lasting, existing, vicious in society. Let me give you one example. It's always fascinated me, and it's one that's sort of hard to pin down, because it involves talking about things that people are very sensitive about in China, but since we're not in China, we'll make the point more explicitly here. So lots of people in, let's say, Southwest China, cities like Chundu, Chongqing, and they're in Sichuan province, and surrounding. Had been associated with the predecessor party, the nationalist party, the Gormindang, which Changkha Shek had run, until they were most deeply kicked out to Taiwan in 1949. But of course, the vast majority of Chinese, so it supported the Gormindang to not get to go to Taiwan. That was about two or three million people who did that, but millions of others had to remain behind in China. And many of them essentially were treated very badly, not least because they were thought to come from bad class backgrounds, but it became a sort of hereditary thing. So you might be a former nationalist official and be treated badly, but it also meant that your kids would be treated badly, and they would have grown up in high school, essentially at a level at which they would be regarded as a slightly alien, slightly, not at the center of the project. So for those people being told the age of 17, it's time to basically kick back against everything you've been told. It led to the bizarre phenomenon by which in many places, the most red of the so-called rebel groups, the ones who were pushing back against the social structures, actually came from class backgrounds that previously would have been regarded as dark or black or inappropriate in some ways. And the reasons for that was that there was this whole group of people, millions of them, who had very good reason to be resentful against the existing structure. And we're just looking for any excuse, basically, to overturn it. Students with their teachers, workers with their managers, how brutal is this process in the opening weeks of the cultural revolution? - Some of the most brutal acts seen under the rule of Mardzadong, and he saw plenty of brutal acts going on, took place during the first phase of the cultural revolution. The one that perhaps has become the most famous is what's known as the airplane position, because it basically involves being paraded, if you were a teacher or a bureaucrat or someone who's regarded as being needed to be cut down to size. In front of a probably screaming crowd of people who you previously been in a drawer, could be school children, could be factory workers, whatever. And a group of such people would be forced to stand on a stage. They might have signs placed around their neck, saying, "You know, I'm a bourgeois backslider, I'm a snake demon, I'm a cow demon." One of these rather superstitious sounding terms, that actually were used to attack people during that time. But they were then forced to stand with their hands outstretched to their full length. They're looking a little bit like a mascot of an aeroplane. And if you try doing that, I mean, if you try this at home, don't try out for very long, because it's a very, very painful position to be in. Obviously, it's fine if you start to get a bit sore and you can just sit down and rub your arms. But if you're being forced to stand there for hours and hours on end, while people are screaming at you and shouting at you and telling you the worst person in the world, while you're unable to move or basically, wiggle at all, it's an absolutely torturous position to be in. The aeroplane position became one of the best known forms of torture. I think there's no reason to avoid that term. In terms of how the lessons, the revisionist lessons were supposed to be taught to these teachers and bureaucrats and others in society who needed to be reeducated. Right. I think that-- I mean, that's a kind of unsettling and menacing moment, which we should perhaps take a break for a bit of capitalism. And when you've had your dose of capitalism, please come back and we will plunge into the absolute more of the cultural revolution. We'll see you back in a few minutes. What stinks is not so much the excrement as your own ideology. That was the red guards to cleaners Beijing University who complained having to clean up after the huge numbers of students who had flocked to Beijing on the invitation of Chairman Mao and the sheer volume of excrement deposited into the university toilets had made them all seize up. And Rana, you talked earlier, you made a lesion to the Duke of Edinburgh scheme. Then obviously it's going to turn out clearly. Well, there is a slight sense in which for students, this is all I mean huge fun because he in the early weeks of the cultural revolution Mao basically issues an invitation doesn't he to students from across China to come to Beijing and he's astounded by how many turn out. Is that a million people? Is it Rana? Is that an excitation? No, it's more than that over time. It's a million who can fit it's heightened to Tiananmen Square in the centre of Beijing, managed to get them in at the corners in the side streets and so forth. But no, it's absolutely astonishing phenomenon. By the way, that that that that notice about need to clean up the the the excrement. I guess if it would turn into Western band, it would be called rage against the latrine. Oh, very good. Very good. Very good. Just thought I had to get that one in there. There's a there's a chapter title waiting to be written. I have to say Chairman Mao dearly loved a a poo joke. He was very, very keen on on fecal humor and used it extensively just just also throwing that in there. There's a phenomenon called Trunlean. It literally just means exchange. But for people who are now in China in let's say 60s 70s 80s. In other words, people who were teenagers or relatively, you know, young men and women during the cultural revolution. This phenomenon, Trunlean, exchange is probably the thing that they remember most strongly if they weren't persecuted. Because it was basically the first chance that many of these young people had to essentially not not exactly see the world, but see China and to talk to each other. Train travel was made free for them throughout China during the period of the cultural revolution. It was like basically the world's most ideological interrail past. I'm showing my age by talking about interrail because as someone pointed out to me the other day, these days young people fly assuming they're actually allowed to travel anywhere. But essentially, you know, China's youth were given this free pass to get on trains. I probably leave the toilets pretty horrific as well if it came came to that. And just basically hang out with each other. You know, they would eat drink. They would meet people from all over the country. It was a astonishing experience. It was a chance for them to basically learn about who they were, who their revolutionary counterparts were. And then, of course, as a culmination, go up to Beijing, where they would essentially worship at the near-god-like altar of Chairman Mao, Mardzadung. And so these gatherings in hundreds of thousands of millions that you're talking about Dominic. Absolutely. On a regular basis, if you were really lucky, you would get into one of those mass rallies with Mao, perhaps this sort of very distant figure right at the end. You could see sort of waving, wearing, of course, a green red guard uniform in sympathy with the green drab uniforms that all of these young red guards were supposed to wear. And very well, this term red guard, Hong Wiping, was the one that was generically used for all the sort of young people who became Chairman Mao's, you know, was personal red guard. But the idea was also that it was a militarization of society. In other words, you had to think of yourself not as a student, not as a scholar, not as a shop worker, but as a soldier. And these young troops coming and gathering in the square at the heart of Beijing, they were transformed. It was a religious experience. There's no other way to describe it. There's one amazing case recorded of a young man who, you know, goes to one of these rallies. He's so moved that he writes in his notebook, today I saw Chairman Mao for the first time. I have changed my life to make today my birthday. In other words, that is a story of rebirth in almost Christians order way, except obviously this theology is not Christian. Just on the worshiping, I mean, I know I'm jumping ahead by a couple of years, but I just wanted to read an extraordinary thing. So Mao was given 40 mangoes, wasn't he in 1968 by the Pakistani foreign minister. And one of the mangoes was sent to the Beijing textile factory. And I'm just reading, workers read out quotations from Mao and celebrated the gift, altars were erected to dismay the fruit prominently. When the mango peel began to rot after a few days, the fruit was peeled and boiled in a pot of water, workers then filed by and each was given a spoonful of mango water. And I could read much more about this mango business, creation of replicas of mangoes, centre factories around the country and so on. I mean, that's clearly a religious relic. And I'm just wondering, Tom will love this question. So I thought I'd ask him instead of him to stop him talking. So, Rana, how much is there a kind of religious impulse behind this? Because of course, the smashing of the delirious, depraved, sinful, old world, the erection of new gods, all of that, I mean, that feels very, you know, not just Protestant reformation, but akinata and it feels like something that is deeply rooted in human history. Look, Dominic, that's absolutely right. If it's absolutely right, it's very, very religious in the way in which it manifests itself. And actually, one of the ways in which it's been very productive is for anthropologists who study religion, amongst other things. And that analysis of mouse traveling mangoes, as he put it, is written brilliantly by the anthropologist Adam Chao, who I highly recommend if people want to read more about that, particularly bizarre phenomenon of the holy mangoes of Mao and how they moved around China. But it's worth thinking for a second, what kind of religion we're talking about here, because of course, the religion of China, to quote Max Weber for a moment there, the sociologist, is a very syncretic thing. And many different aspects of that Chinese religious tradition come into this sort of Mao worship that we see in the cultural revolution. So first of all, there is a Christian element because of course, Christian missionaries had been a very central presence to China ever since the mid 19th century. And of course, a much earlier revolution, the Typing revolution of the late 19th century was based on, you know, essentially the delusions of a man who thought he was Jesus's younger brother in southern China. So that traditional Christian millenarianism and kind of exuberant politics has a history there. But also these traditions go back in Buddhism as well. Buddhism of course is a religion, can be a religion of peace and nirvana and introspection. But it can also be a highly millenarian sort of enterprise, which at many points, certainly in the 18th and 19th century, gave opportunities essentially for politically radical groups to rise up and use the idea that, you know, the Queen Mother of the West was coming back and it was time to send off in the take of arms on her behalf as a means of mobilizing the wider population. And all those religious traditions sit in what is created in the cultural revolution. But one thing to add, finally to that, because I think it's important to get an understanding the nature of the cultural revolution. You can't do any of these things unless you have some level of popular enthusiasm that wants to take it up. Early in the 20th century, you get various quite sterile political movements in China. There's a thing called the new life movement, which Chang Kai-shek, Christ Implement, not least, as you will know, Tom, because you read it one of your recent brilliant books, Chang Kai-shek, of course, is the only Christian leader that China's ever had at the top level because he was a Methodist, as well as being a Confucian and somewhat Buddhist, which was an interesting combination. And here's a attempt to try and have a sort of moral revival in 1930s China with what he called the new life movement, which has a very Christian feel to it. It was just a flop. It didn't take off. People didn't buy it at all. Whereas the cultural revolution put forward in a combination of highly political ideological language and religious language, as we've been talking about, takes off like wildfire amongst the population. It's genuinely popular during that period. But it still seems strange to me. So we've got a couple of questions on this. We've got Hemingway. The cultural revolution seems so utterly radical. Is it unique to Chinese culture? And then Super-Sixth, I'll say obvious question. What's the cultural revolution change or continuity? Is there a tradition of such circumstances in China elsewhere? And I hear what you're saying about Buddhism. And I hear what you're saying about Christianity. And of course Marxism itself is very much in the kind of Christian tradition of apocalyptic demands for change and self-purification. So that's also clearly a crucial part of it. But still, China is a country that is fabulously ancient. Its civilization is one that has traditionally been rooted in respect for elders, for the inheritance of the classics. I don't speak Chinese, but from what I gather reading about Chinese, it's an incredibly subtle nuanced language that in which the blaring of slogans is quite alien to its traditions. Speaking of someone very ignorant to Chinese culture, but it does seem odd that China, of all the civilizations, should have produced this incredibly iconoclastic movement. Let me say two things off the back of that, Tom. The first is about the uniqueness, or otherwise, of the cultural revolution as a political phenomenon. And I think there is an argument that should be said very, very carefully, because as historians, we all know that very few things are ever done for the first time, even when they're done for the first time. But if you look at one of the great books on this subject, which is "Mouse last Revolution" by Rodentwick Farquhar, the late Harvard scholar, and Michael Schernauss, who's based in Sweden, based on a fantastic way to documentary experience, and pretty much on the first page, they argue that actually the cultural revolution is a unique phenomenon. No such phenomenon took place in any other communist society, and probably not in any other society either, because it involves the overthrow of an existing bureaucratic communist order by the leader of that party against itself, so to speak. It's a very, very odd combination of circumstances. But having said that, I am going to mention a historical precedent, which I think does provide some of the reasons that China, as opposed to any other other country as you rightly pointed out should have this turn against its own past. And that comes from a phenomenon that actually Mao was very aware of because it helped to make him in the early 20th century in China. That was the May 4th movement, named off for student demonstration that took place just outside, actually just outside the forbidden city in the center of Beijing, where Tiananmen Square now is on 4th of May 1919. Now I won't go to huge detail about this, I've written about it at elsewhere, but essentially it's a nationalist student demonstration that protests against China's weakness in the world at that point when it's being exploited by, as they put it, imperialists from outside and warlords from inside. And instead advocated that as they put it, Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy needed to come to China and basically transform it. And in that movement, in the May 4th movement, and the associated new culture movement, you have a phenomenon in which a lot of China's young intellectuals, including Mao, who's very young at that time, look at their own past, they look at the philosophy of Confucianism, they look at the religious traditions of China, they look at what's come from China's past and say, what has this given us? We're sitting here in the early 20th century and we see the British, selling opium all over the place, foreigners are running riots in our country, the entire country, we threw over through the last emperor, we became a republic in 1912, and yet the entire country is driven by internal civil warfare. So why on earth should this Chinese tradition have anything to teach us? And as a result, and in contrast with other Asian nationalist societies at that time, such as the actions of Nehru and Gandhi in India or the major restoration in Japan, China's intellectuals, in many cases, take the very radical path of deciding they're going to reject almost everything about their Confucian philosophical past, the great early 20th century writer Luzhian, basically broke short stories accusing Confucianism of being the same as cannibalism, he is really, really strong indictment. Now all of this movement, the May 4th movement, all of this anti-traditional, anti-confucian thought, would have been running around in the mind of Mao, who was fiercely, fiercely opposed to that tradition. And when you get to the culture revolution 50 years later, at a time when Mao is in complete control of the country, having that sense that maybe the problem was not that the May 4th movement had rejected tradition, but it hadn't gone quite far enough in removing every single aspect of it, might have felt like the unfinished business of 50 years previously when he was a young radical man in Hunan province. So essentially, it's the very antiquity of Chinese civilization that generates the kind of explosive reaction against it. In the minds of those who wanted to tear it down, the answer is yes. If you think about again, going back to Mao's early writings, when he's not writing about personal exercise plans and the butter thrusts, he also wrote a series of essays, very, very kind of fiercely argued and felt, about a young woman called Miss Zhao, who basically took her own life because she was being forced into a marriage she didn't want to accept. And Mao used this metaphor of the Chinese society at the time, the Confucian society, being a sort of iron cage, which was impossible to break out of. Lu Shun, the writer, I mentioned used a similar sort of metaphor, the iron house, but the idea was the same. In other words, that the forces of tradition, the forces of the past that were binding China were so strong, I mean, iron as that metaphor, that you had to do something radical, you had to break them, you had to melt them, you had to smash them, they weren't going to simply give way because you sort of gently wiggled your way out. And that mindset, I think, explains a lot of the anger and, you know, radical rejection that you see in what ultimately becomes the cultural revolution. Rana, you mentioned used the word, I don't know where they used it deliberately, but you used the word cannibalism earlier on. And I wanted to give some, so, you know, we've talked a lot about the ideas behind it, but the sheer violence. Now, I know we're sort of conflating many years into into a, into a single thing, probably wrongly, but you know, you have a place like, I think, is it Guangxi, where there is, there, what to my mind seems a colossal amount of ritual cannibalism as part of the cultural revolution people eating the hearts, the livers, the genitals of those who have been disgraced as identified as class enemies and all that sort of thing. I mean, this is a long way from Beijing. It's hierarchical, isn't it? The top revolutionaries kind of get the the heart and the liver, and the work has just get to peck on bits of leg. And this is a long way from Beijing, it's in the, it's hundreds of miles away in the far south of China. So that seems to be kind of bottom up as it were. What's going on there? What explains the sheer, okay, so I can understand, you know, students like the fact that they can go to Beijing, they can do train travel, they can have a go at their teachers. That all makes complete psychological sense. But the sheer ferocity of the violence, what explains that? So let's take the cannibalism example first, Guangxi province, as you say, in this sort of far southwest of China. Much of the evidence that you're talking about comes from, I think a book called Scarlet Memorial by the Cidoninosphere named Jun Yi, Chinese researcher, I think, didn't for good reasons want to give his name. And I think there's no reason to think that at least some portion of what's written there is not accurate. There are certainly cases that wouldn't record it there and other times of people engaging extreme behavior. It's worth noting that cannibalism as an idea as a trope is something that sits very, very, you know, deeply in Chinese culture. Whenever you read accounts, you know, way back into domestic history, the Ming dynasty, even before that song dynasty, of when things have gone horribly wrong, when chaos had come to China, the idea that people have been forced to eat each other or chosen to eat each other, recurs over and over again as an image of humanity finally finding itself at its ultimate extreme. How many of those are meant to be literal is not always clear. It doesn't mean that they're not, but it does also mean that one has to sort of understand that it's sort of a literary class. But the wider point I think is an important one. And first of all, you mentioned that you shown the author I mentioned, did use the idea of cannibalism as a metaphor in his case actually for Confucianism. In this case, of course, it's the ultimate anti-confucianism. It does also bring up the idea of do people commit utterly extraordinary acts of violence against each other? On that, I think, you know, the case is absolutely clear and without any dispute. The example that I bring up because again, in some ways, in terms of its potential outcome, it was almost more terrifying, if you can imagine, imagine such a thing, which was again, in some of the cities of the southwest, the local youth breaking into the local arsenal and the military barracks, and hijacking tanks, and basically these sort of teenagers having taken care of. Wow, that is a student protest. That is a student protest, you know, with the ammunition all provided. And this was basically the end result in some case. In another case, there's some evidence that some of the red guards decided to nip it and again in the shades of today in Ukraine, decided to nip into a kind of an experimental station and try and make their own nuclear bomb, which would have been perhaps a rather explosive way, literally to end the cultural revolution. It didn't come to anything fortunately, but the thought was there. So in terms of people really pushing away at the edge of what would have been considered reasonable, the cultural revolution has plenty of examples. We should kind of look to how this plays itself out because we're running out of time, but essentially, the other thing to bear in mind is that there are multiple factions. So there are, with the red guards we've talked about, the students, there are various factions within the party, the Communist party, and then the army isn't there. And in due course, the army essentially steps in. And basically transforms, uses the cultural revolution to transform China into something approximating to a military dictatorship, is that right? Yes, that's broadly right. I mean, if we're going to periodize the cultural revolution, the first phase, 1966, when it breaks out to 1969, is the classic phase that people think of in newsreel or photographs, the red guards, the red guards, everything. Absolutely, you know, now receiving parades of screaming, you know, adoring teenagers in Tiananmen Square. That pretty much comes to an end after that, when Mao himself becomes to realize that actually three years of this is probably an awful destruction of society. And as you say, the army who are always very much behind, you know, all of these actions and very much on Mao's side were brought in to shut this down. But that then essentially puts the army in charge of the cultural revolution. And Lin Yao, the Minister of Defence, who, you know, is very much at Mao's side, is in charge of doing that. There's then a sort of upheaval within the top leadership. And even now we don't have the full details of quite what happened. But suddenly, in 1971, it was announced that Lin Yao had tried to sort of flee Beijing after attempting a coup against Mao and had been overthrown and died in an air crash in out of Mongolia hall, all places. Actually, in a British tried and jet, if you want the details. So there is this sort of feeling that actually there's an awful lot of turmoil at the top. And it's not quite clear where it was going to end up. That was also the era when the visitor of Rich Nixon was being discussed. That's also during the cultural revolution. And that shows the kind of factionalism that you were talking about there, Tom. There's a group led by Jo and Li, the Prime Minister of China, essentially, who wants to bring in the Americans because he realizes that China can't stay isolated from the Western world forever. And they also need foreign investment. They actually do talk about that in private, as a means of repairing the damage that's been done by the cultural revolution. And then there's the group known later on, not at the time, but later on as the gang of four Mao's wife, Junting, and three others who are absolute hard-line radicals. They say, no, on earth, you think you're talking about that in the Americans into China. So all these palaces and intrigues about what happens next in geopolitics are going on while in wider China, there's less overt violence on the streets and the way that there was in the Red Guard period. But actually, lots of scores being settled and people being either arrested or executed. And essentially, as you say, sort of military control during much of the remaining period. from 1969 all the way up to the end of the culture revolution with Mao's death in 1976. Just a quick question if I can jump in on Chu and Li. So when Nixon comes to China, he incursus meant a lot of time in Mao and they spent a lot of time with Zhu as well. And they seem to get on very well with Zhu and Li. Zhu and Li is to Westerners. He looks like the number two man because he's very well known. His adopted son and daughter are both tortured to death while this is going on during the cultural revolution. So I mean, that's just a bizarre thing to be happening to me as an outsider. I mean, that people who appear to be so powerful within the party, within the apparatus are just sort of meekly standing by while their family members are being destroyed. I mean, this is after the Red Guard period. So what explains all that is that because they're so frightened of the army or frightened of losing their place because of the palace intrigues or what? And one other example, the Dominic Deng Xiaoping, who goes on to become the paramount leader of China during the reform period from 1978 onwards. His son, Dong Pufang, was chucked out a window by Red Guards and he has remained in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. And you know, that's Deng Xiaoping, who eventually would become the overall ruler of China. It's still hard even when you talk to people and they're still plenty of them alive, although they're often quite reluctant to talk in detail either because as victims, they still feel very traumatized or because as perpetrators and there are plenty of those people too, they really don't want to talk about what they were doing 50 years ago. So it's difficult to get into what you might call the emotional landscape of how people felt and what they thought they were doing. But in answer to the question of why such senior, well-connected people might essentially sit back and do so little, I think there are two factors, which almost rub against each other. One was the unpredictability of the time. You did not know when you might suddenly shift from being someone who was ranked at the top level in the Politburo to being like Yoshichi, the president of the People's Republic of China, who was basically you know, kidnapped, taken off and left to die of neglect of his medical condition in a windowless basement in the city of Kaifeng in central China. And that was the president of the People's Republic of China. You'd imagine it would have been like for some kind of middle-level bureaucrat in a city. Beyond that though, I just remind you of what I was saying earlier, of understanding quite how pervasive the legend, the myth, the cult, whatever you want to call it, of Mao was. Again, you know, says Al-Jussman, he spoke about before, he talked about charisma as a quality. And charisma, in the proper sense, the ability to create this sort of wider sense of motivational power, a coercive power, Mao had it in spades. You know, none of the other leaders of that sort had it in quite that way. Yoshichi certainly didn't, he was a graveyard credent. Even figures like Don't Shopee didn't really have it in quite that sort of a way. But Mao was able to create a sort of transformative narrative with himself at the centre, which beguiled even his closest followers. And those people, even like Jo and Li who suffered so badly, found themselves, it seems, unable to resist. But Rana, when Mao dies, are you talked about the Ganger 4, and they get brought to trial, and they get convicted. And the most prominent member of the Ganger 4 is Jiang Qing, a Madame Mao, a former actress, a kind of homicidal evita. And she's a very bad person. She's a very bad person. I would say that the Pyroen regime was responsible for quite a few deaths as well, but not quite that many. Not quite that many. The, the downfall of Madame Mao, is that seen as a kind of signal that Mao's magic has kind of been dispelled. And is one of the long-term effects of the cultural revolution actually to kind of make Maoism defunct as a philosophy within contemporary China? Yeah, because we had to just jump in on that. I think we had a few questions about that, whether the whether the cultural revolution actually paved in a weird way, paved the way for Dung Jiao Ping's reforms, for the openness, for the capitalism, all of that kind of stuff, whether those things might not have happened, had the cultural revolution, as Tom says, almost slightly delegitimized radicalism. I think the best way to describe the treatment of Mao after his death and after the end of the cultural revolution, which came to an end very quickly when his successor Huagua Fong basically had the the Ganger 4 arrested in in 1976. The best way to talk about it might be the sterilization of Maoism. Explain what I mean by that. When Madame Mao, when Jiang Qing was put on trial, she tried to blame it all on her late husband saying, I was just Mao's little barking dog, why are you blaming me? And that's actually a perfect, you know, just a thing to say in a sense, had he not permitted the Ganger 4 to do what they were going to do than they wouldn't have been allowed to do it? But that of course wasn't what the post-Mao party wanted to hear. They did come up with a resolution through the party that grudgingly admitted blame and put some of the blame on Mao, but in the end his charismatic quality as a leader was something they wanted to preserve. And therefore, they wanted to try and create a version of the cultural revolution, which is still essentially the official version in which it was condemned as a terrible deviation and error and crime. They didn't cover that over, but essentially argue that Mao himself was not ultimately to blame and it can be blamed on these figures such as the Ganger 4. And a certain amount of limited pathways were given to enable people to try and get their feelings out. One example that sort of blossom from that 97 to the early 80s was a a genre called scar literature, Shanghai Monshire, in which some frankly in literary terms not very very good, but certainly in emotional terms, very powerful short stories about people suffering under the cultural revolution were permitted for a official publication and discussion and became part of a sort of healing of wounds at these relatively speaking during that period. But even during that time, the live rail of the conversation was blaming Mao centrally and personally for what went on. Instead, finding figures like the Ganger 4 as a sort of group of scapegoats, who say it was all them, somehow the rest of society got led astray, became the default mechanism. And since, as you said, China moved on pretty quickly towards much more kind of market oriented economy, after a while people really didn't want to spend too much time thinking about the horrors of that period anyway. And rather one last question on Gichen Ping, who of course, the paramount leader of China today, he got caught up quite unpleasantly in the cultural revolution, didn't he? And I wonder, could you just say what happened to him? And what do you think the long-term impact of that might be on his character and therefore perhaps on contemporary China? Absolutely. It's become quite well known as part of the personal narrative of Gichen Ping that he spent time in Shanxi province in sort of Northwest China. Very traditional communist heartland, actually, must be said, during his teenage years because his father, C. Junshun, who was one of the major military figures in Mao's China, fell out of political favour. And I think two things have come from that. One that is pretty negative, I think, and one that might be considered more positive. The negative is this. If you want to characterize Gichen Ping's politics, I think they are highly ideological and he is reinventing Chinese politics for what he can perceive as a global role. But it's also driven above anything else by a desperate fear of disorder and chaos. Because he and his generation too, I think, look back to the 60s and 70s and see a China which they perceived as having been allowed to basically spin out of control. The fact it was the communist party that did it is neither here nor there in this case. It's the idea that if you leave China leeway, it will turn into a cultural revolution yet again. And that's one of the reasons I think for the obsessive level of surveillance, control and the lockdown management that you see in the Chinese Communist Party of today as led by Xi. It is a reaction amongst other things against the cultural revolution. But I sit at the end on a partial positive and I will. You can argue strongly that on everything from repression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang to the crackdown on Hong Kong, a great deal of Xi Jinping's politics have been about the suppression of civil liberties. I think that's not really in doubt. But you can also argue that there is one strand that is authentic, which is a continuous obsession also with economic inequality and poverty. And a lot of people, probably he himself, would argue that that period of several years spent in one of the most dirt poor, desperate parts of China that as he would have seen even after 20-25 years of the communist revolution had not levelled up to use a phrase that is perhaps current in the different sort of politics that was still very, very desperately impoverished, may have put this sense in his mind that if he was going to do one thing in terms of China's economy, it would be to try and make sure that it had more of a both poverty reduction element and also an egalitarian element in terms of economics than perhaps his predecessors as party chairman had put forward. And those things I think can both in a fairly direct way be attributed to his personal experience during those years of the cultural revolution. Fascinating. Thank you so much, Rana. I mean, it's an amazing topic and I know some of our listeners will say, oh my god, there's so much more you could have talked about. I mean, we could of course, but that's an absolutely wonderful overview. Tom, do you not agree? I mean, I learned a huge man. And you didn't get to talk about Christianity, which gave me a lot of satisfaction. No, but Rana did. Yeah, but Rana did. But Rana did. That gave me a lot of satisfaction. Rana did it with so much. He did it. He did it. He did it. So much sort of more succinctly than I'm used to on this podcast. Tom. Yes. Yes. Yes. Okay. Rana, thank you enough. That was absolutely brilliant. And I hope we can persuade you to come back. Oh, it's up now. Other aspects of China, because there's so much to discuss. Dominic and Tom, it'd be the pleasure to worship at the author of Cult of Personality at the podcast with the most. And I very much hope this is just a conversation laid down for now and to be picked up on a future occasion. It's a great pleasure. Definitely. If you're going to talk like that you can definitely come back. Thanks so much for that. 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