KeXu

The Cultural Revolution
Ke Xu

One thing people of my age in China will never forget is the Cultural Revolution which I personally went through.

The Cultural Revolution, formally known as The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was launched by Chinese Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong in 1966 to renew the spirit of the Chinese. During the early 1960s, tensions with the Soviet Union convinced Mao that the Russian revolution had gone astray. Fearing that China would develop along the lines of the Soviet model and concerned about his own place in history, Mao threw China into turmoil in a monumental effort to reverse the historic processes underway.

Programs carried out by his colleagues to bring China out of the economic depression for which Mao was partially responsible, also made Mao doubt their revolutionary commitment and also resent his own diminished role within the party leadership. He especially feared urban social stratification in a society as traditionally elitist as China.

Thus Mao set four ultimate goals for the Cultural Revolution: to replace his previously designated successors with leaders more faithful to his current thinking; to rectify the Chinese Communist Party; to provide China's youths with a revolutionary experience; and to achieve some specific policy changes so as to make the educational, healthcare, and cultural systems less elitist. He initially pursued these goals through a massive mobilization of the country's urban youths. They were organized into groups called the Red Guards, and Mao ordered the party and the army not to suppress the movement.

All schools, colleges, and universities were closed down to allow students time to participate in the campaign. Then the Red Guards were encouraged to attack all traditional values and "bourgeois" thinking and to test party officials by publicly criticizing them. Mao believed that this measure would benefit both the young people and the party cadres that they attacked. The movement quickly escalated; many elderly people and intellectuals were not only verbally attacked but were physically abused. Many died.

By the time the Cultural Revolution started, I was only ten, in the 5th Grade, and too young to be accepted by any Red Guards organizations. I was so jealous of those bigger kids who could get out of the control of their parents, wear army uniform and red bands and travel all over the country free, spreading Mao’s thoughts and gaining great experiences in participating in an unprecedented revolution which would transform the world.

I truly enjoyed the fun of not having to go to school at the beginning. No classes, no books, no homework. I had a lot of time to kill away. The longest vacation I had ever had since I started to go to school. I could stay in bed for as long as I wanted without having to get up early to catch the first class in the morning which usually started at 8:00, which I really hated since it was often still dark outside in winter. I got up at about 10 o’clock, ate something my mom had cooked for me and then went to streets to read “big Character posters” which were handwritten, wall-mounted posters using large-sized Chinese characters, used as a means of protest, propaganda, and popular communication. Big-character posters were ubiquitous across China since then until 1976 when the Cultural Revolution was over. They were used for everything from sophisticated debate to satirical entertainment to rabid denunciation; being attacked in a big-character poster was often enough to end one's career. Some people who attacked people using this form were in turn attacked by others later. In fact, the big-character-posters were so popular then that they boomed the stationary businesses that became one of the major sources of revenue for the government. Thousands of tons of paper were consumed every day which gave rise to another business: the recycling of used paper.

After the initial excitement I had in enjoying the fun of not having school, I soon felt bored with staying home having nothing to do. I started contacting my friends who lived in the same neighborhood and then went out with them. When my parents saw me hanging around with other kids on the streets, they became worried and decided to give me something to do to kill away the too much time I had. My dad started to teach me cooking. The first thing I learned to cook was fish. My dad was very good at fishing, and he was lucky to be removed from his position without being put to jail by the Red Guards. If the Cultural Revolution did anything good to my family at all, that would be it gave my dad several months of “vacation” during which he often went out fishing with me. We rode bicycles to suburban areas looking for small rivers to catch fish. My dad knew different ways of fishing. We used fishing rods, nets, or sometimes when the river dried up and became very small, we jumped into the river, built a dam in the middle of the river, drained out the water on one side of the river to catch the fish, and then the other side. It was a lot of fun. I remember once there was a big fish which was so smart that when we finished draining the water from one side, it jumped over the dam into the water on the other side. When we drained water of the other side, it jumped over the dam back to the first side. By then we were too tired and had to give up. We were not able to catch that smart fish eventually.

Every time we went out fishing, we would most likely bring home some fish, which would give me another chance to learn how to cook fish. My dad wrote a recipe for me with detailed step-by-step instruction. He was also a very patient teacher and gave me a lot of chances to experiment and make mistakes and then learn from my own mistakes. When I look back now, it was then that I felt my dad was the closest to me. Other times he was just an ordinary dad typical at that time, always too busy to take care of me and my sister and brother. Every time we had problems at school, it was always my mother who went to the school and waited in the long line for her turn to be “educated” by our teachers. I didn't realize until now I have become a parent myself, how hard it must have been for my mother, a teacher herself, to meet her naughty children's teachers with the kind of forced smile.

The second thing I learned was hand-wash my own clothes. My mom taught me how to do it. This skill actually helped me a lot since I had to depend on myself a few years later when I was sent to the countryside and worked and lived with the farmers.

By the end of year of 1967, many top government leaders of the country were removed from their leading position, including President Liu, Shao Qi, Mao's designated successor until that time, and Party General Secretary Deng Xiaoping. Governments at all levels were paralyzed. The Red Guards splintered into zealous rival factions, each purporting to be the true representative of Maoist thought. Mao's own personality cult, encouraged so as to provide momentum to the movement, assumed religious proportions. The resulting anarchy, terror, and paralysis completely disrupted the urban economy. Industrial production for 1968 dropped 12 percent below that of 1966.

In February 1967 many remaining top party leaders called for a halt to the Cultural Revolution, but Mao and his more radical partisans prevailed, and the movement escalated yet again. By the summer of 1967 disorder was widespread; large armed clashes between factions of Red Guards were occurring throughout urban China. Then the armed forces had to be called in to help maintain the order of the country.

By the fall of 1967, all schools were finally re-opened. After one year’s hanging around, I was so glad that I could get back to school. But I was soon disappointed to find out that most of the courses available primarily focused either on the need of the Revolution, such as writing an essay to debate on a certain political issue or on the too narrowly specified practical skills needed by local industries or agriculture, such as how to manufacture chemical fertilizer used for the local crops. All these were part of the curriculum which aimed at preparing us to become future revolutionary successors or “useful” skilled workers or farm workers.

I got bored with the lessons and started to cut classes again. Sometimes I went out with my friends fishing, or watching adults play basketball or football, or painting. The only thing I learned from school during that period of time as I can recall now was perhaps painting. Since there was a constant need for each class to regularly publish wall-mounted student newsletters, the head teach of my class picked a few students to work for the newsletter. When he accidentally found out about my interest in playing with colors, I was chosen to work for this newsletter.

Remember I mentioned earlier that fine arts (drawing) was one of the subjects I hated most in elementary school? Now things totally changed and I fell in love with painting. The reason was quite simple: I had a nice teacher (the class head teacher)who gave me enough opportunities to practice and kept encouraging me. The teacher himself was an art lover only he didn’t have a chance to become an artist. So he did everything he could to create a relaxing environment for me to create. Nobody told me how to paint. I just learned it from the newspapers and journals, or from the posters on the streets. He provided me with the resource books, paint, and place – his own home. His kitchen became my studio and his bowels and plates became my color mixing trays. The walls, floor, and sometimes even his bed was covered with my paintings. I never imagined at that time that painting should later become a skill I could depend on for living when I was sent to work with the farmers in the countryside.

A couple of years later when my school's dancing team decided to stage a show, contemporary ballet "Red Detachment of Women", I was assigned a job assisting my fine arts teacher designing and painting the stage setting. I worked very hard on the project and learned a lot from the teacher. When the rehearsal was over and the show started to be staged, I got another assignment to be in charge of the slide projector at the back of the stage. It was a hot summer and I had to kneel on the floor near a projector as hot as a smoking grill throughout the show. Nobody else would do it even if the job was paid for. But I did it for nothing and yet truly enjoyed that. Many years later when I talked about my high school life with my former classmates, among a few things that we believed we did learn from the school, this was one that we can still remember.

By the time I finished high school in the summer of 1973, we became an unwelcome labor force too large for the country's job market to digest. The past seven years of the Cultural Revolution had almost paralyzed the country's industry, drained its revenue, and brought the nation to the very brink of bankruptcy. We became unemployed. No job, no school. All colleges and universities remained closed since they had been shut down in 1967. Once again, I was home having nothing to do, or wandering on the streets with my friends, feeling disillusioned about the Cultural Revolution, which, after its initial excitement, left us nothing but a bleak prospect of the future. People depicted us as "gold fish in the fish tank, with a bright future, but no way out."

The government soon found a "solution" to the problem. We were all sent to the countryside to live and work with the farmers, to be "re-educated" by the local farmers, to join them in an effort to build a "socialist new countryside". Millions of school graduates, former "Red Guards", packed up and took trains, buses to the countryside, totally unaware of what was waiting for them ahead of them. Many of those from major cities were sent to remote regions such as Xing Jinag, Gansu, Qing Hai, Inner Mongolia, Yun Nan, or Hei Long Jiang. The state policy then was that parents from each family in the city were allowed to pick only one child from all children to stay in the city. All the rest of them had to go to the countryside. Since the early 1950's, Chinese citizens in the city had been given a different identity from those living in the countryside. People holding a countryside ID couldn't live and get a job in the city since, without a city ID, they couldn't get food and other daily necessities which were provided on the basis of ID origin. Once you lose your city ID, you can only stay in the countryside, which was poorer and disadvantaged in many ways.

The majority of these young people worked and lived in the countryside until after the end of the year of 1976, when the Cultural Revolution was over. They spent the best part of their life fighting physical hardships and emotional stress. Those working the in the poorest part of the country was making only 8 Chinese cents a day, an equivalent of one US penny. After their long battle to get back to the cities after 1977, the country was still suffering from the economic depression. Most of them, with little or no education or skills, and the excessive supply of labor force, couldn't find a decent job when they got home, and ended up becoming workers in community-run small factories, or even street peddlers or flea market vendors. Those who married the local farmers were not allowed to go back to the city, thus creating many sad stories of husband wife divorce or break-ups.

Being the eldest son of my family with a brother and a sister, I was of course to be sent to the countryside first. My brother joined me two years later. We were both lucky and didn't have to go to very poor regions or remote areas. In stead, we went to a village in the suburban area of my town. During the first 6 months after I started to work in the village, I didn't live in the village. In stead, I rode bicycle to work and went back home every day after the work in the Fields was finished. It was a 30-minute bicycle ride from my home to the village. The work was physically demanding and I got back home very exhausted. The village where I worked was not very poor and I could make about one Chinese dollar (12 US cents) a day which was well above the average income level of the whole country then. Even though, my income was barely enough to cover my living expenses and I still need my parents' support. I actually only worked for about 6 months in the fields with the villagers before I got a job to work in the village management office. I became an editor for the village newsletter, a messenger for the village leaders, and a security guard at night. I moved to live in the village management office. I was lucky to get this job since it became increasingly harder financially for my parents to support both my bother and I after he joined me. I was very fortunate to have have met all the nice people in the village. The villagers were very friendly to me, teaching me how to do all sorts of work in the fields. Even if they were poor, they sometimes invited me to lunch at their home. I am still in contact with some of them after so many years. I will never forget those who helped me out when I desperately needed that help.