Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Old Street Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Great Events
- Sprache: Englisch
'Excellent... surefooted and perceptive, enlivened by a wealth of vignettes and anecdotes which bring to life the dramatic and frequently horrific events that have played a seminal role in forming Chinese society as it exists today' PHILIP SHORT, author of Mao: A Life Mao launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966 to purge his critics and blood a new generation of fighters. Ten years later, almost two million people had been killed and much of China's heritage, from precious manuscripts to ancient temples, had been obliterated. The shadow of these terrible years lies heavily over the twenty-first-century nation. The history of this period is so toxic that China's rulers have gone to great lengths to bury it – while a few brave men and women risk their freedom to uncover the truth. For as both they and the Party know, to grasp the history of the Cultural Revolution is to understand much about China today. Bombard the Headquarters! is not just Mao's story. It's the unforgettable stories of countless individuals, mass manias, of sacred mangos, and spectacular falls from grace. At once rigorous and readable, brief yet teeming with colourful detail, this is a marvel of historical storytelling. 'A beautifully concise account that makes sense of a hugely complex event in modern Chinese history. Linda Jaivin puts her formidable, deep experience both of Chinese history and language to excellent use, conveying in 100 pages what most would struggle to achieve in a thousand' KERRY BROWN, author of China Incorporated
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 194
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
praise for linda jaivin
On Bombard the Headquarters!
‘Excellent… a powerful account of a truly extraordinary period in recent Chinese history, surefooted and perceptive, enlivened by a wealth of vignettes and anecdotes.’philip short, author of Mao: A Life
‘Linda Jaivin expertly and concisely dissects the origins and the gruesome trajectory of China’s Cultural Revolution – Mao’s ego, the Party’s compliance and the ideological mass hysteria that left perhaps 1–2 million ordinary Chinese citizens dead.’ paul french, author of Midnight in Peking
‘Beautifully concise… makes sense of a hugely complex event in modern Chinese history, conveying in 100 pages what most would struggle to achieve in a thousand.’ kerry brown
‘Essential… this brilliant short history is a great start for anyone who wants to understand a central decade in the Maoist epoch whose catastrophic legacy endures to this day. A tour de force.’ jianying zha, author of China Pop
On The Shortest History of China
‘Brings together statesmen, court chronicles, poetry, fiction, mythology, painting, pottery, pop music and myriad other sources to construct a fascinating portrait of a superpower. Essential reading.’ julia lovell
‘For anyone who wants to understand China’s long past in a very short time, this is a must-read.’ xinran
Bombard the Headquarters!
The Cultural Revolution in China
Linda Jaivin
For Geremie
Table of Contents
A Cultural Revolution Timeline
Cast of Characters
* * *
Party Leadership in early 1966
Mao Zedong | Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, founder of the People’s Republic of China
LiuShaoqi| President of the People’s Republic, Mao’s chief political target in the Cultural Revolution
LinBiao|Marshal of the People’s Republic, Vice Chairman and Mao’s chosen successor
Zhou Enlai | Premier of the People’s Republic and first foreign minister
DengXiaoping|Vice Premier, Liu Shaoqi ally. Will survive purges to lead the Reform Era
Tao Zhu | Head of Central Propaganda Department, fourth in Party hierarchy in May 1966, soon purged
*
Gang of Four
JiangQing| Mao’s fourth wife (m. 1939), political operator and advocate for radical revolutionary culture
Wang Hongwen | Youngest member, worker. Reaches third place in Party hierarchy in 1973
Yao Wenyuan | Author of 1965 attack on playwright Wu Han that paves way for Cultural Revolution
Zhang Chunqiao | Member of the Cultural Revolution Group, 1967 Shanghai Commune organiser
*
Red Guards and Rebels
KuaiDafu| Influential leader of Tsinghua Uni Red Guard faction
Nie Yuanzi | Author of big-character poster at Peking Uni that inspires ‘Bombard the Headquarters’
Song Binbin | Leader of high-school Red Guards who murder their teacher in August 1966 xi
*
OtherNotables
ChenBoda| Head of Cultural Revolution Leading Group, Mao’s political secretary, ally of Lin Biao
Chen Zaidao | Regional PLA commander, leader of Million Heroes in Wuhan Incident
KangSheng|Mao’s trusted and powerful head of security, leading member of Central Case Investigation Group
HuaGuofeng| Mao’s successor, ends Cultural Revolution with help of Ye Jianying and Wang Dongxing
Qi Benyu | Propagandist, member of Cultural Revolution Leading Group, aide to Jiang Qing
Wang Dongxing | Military commander, chief of Mao’s personal bodyguard
Xie Fuzhi | Minister for Public Security from 1959–1972, member of radical faction
Ye Jianying | Defence Minister from 1975, supports Hua Guofeng in coup that ends Cultural Revolution
*
ProminentVictims
LaoShe| Beloved novelist and dramatist, People’s Artist, victim of Red Guard violence
Ulanhu| First Party Secretary of Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region
Wang Guangmei | Wife of Liu Shaoqi, Party veteran humiliated at mass struggle session on Jiang Qing’s orders
WuHan| Deputy mayor of Beijing, historian. Author of the controversial HaiRuiDismissedfromOffice(1961)
YuLuoke| Activist and author of ‘On Class Origins’, executed in 1970
ZhangZhixin| Party member and strident critic of Mao and the Cultural Revolution, executed in 1975
*
Prologue
A revolution is not a dinner party... A revolution is an act of insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.
MaoZedong
Tensions were running high on 5 August 1966. Mao Zedong and his fellow Communist Party leaders were meeting for the fifth day in a row in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People. On the first day, Chairman Mao had continually interrupted the speech of the Party’s number two leader, President Liu Shaoqi. On the fourth day, the two had quarrelled, Mao shouting at Liu from his seat right next to him. Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was finally under way and the country’s youth had responded to it with ferocious enthusiasm – and then, while Mao was away in the south, Liu had gone about trying to calm them down. ‘You have established a bourgeois dictatorship in Beijing!’ Mao accused.
At 72, the Chairman was the only delegate to have attended the founding congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. Visionary, ruthless, shrewd and determined, he had weathered hardship, war and power struggles to lead that Party and then the country itself. Now, seventeen years after the birth of the People’s Republic, it seemed to him that the revolution had lost its dynamism and the Party was stagnating. Keeping the revolutionary spirit alive meant incessant class struggle and the purging of footdraggers, insubordinates, opportunists and saboteurs. The display of Mao’s fearsome temper would have filled many of the other 139 delegates with dread, especially when he went on to state darkly that there were ‘evil elements’ in that very room.1
'Evil elements' in the room
A copy of the Beijing Daily lay on the table before him. Mao picked up a pencil and dashed off some thoughts in the 2margins. He handed it to a secretary, who tidied his words into a short text. Mao made a few more amendments. Two days later his call to arms, ‘Bombard the Headquarters – My Big-Character Poster’, was printed and circulated to his fellow Party leaders.
But what did Mao even mean by ‘bombard the headquarters’? He was the leader of the Party – he wasthe headquarters. Or was he? As he saw it, Liu Shaoqi, along with Vice-Premier Deng Xiaoping, the Party’s general secretary, had been undermining him for years. They had become a defacto‘opposition headquarters’ within the Party. It was time for the gloves to come off.
Return of the big-character poster
‘Bombard the Headquarters’ began by praising another recent big-character poster, or dàzìbào. A dàzìbàowas a political statement writ large in brush and ink and posted in a public space. Big-character posters were typically vitriolic in tone, characterised by militaristic language, the ridicule of enemies and rhetorical questions posed in a mood of high dudgeon. In the 1930s and 1940s they had promoted resistance to the Japanese invasion. There was a brief flourishing of dàzìbàoin the mid-1950s, when Mao called on people to tell the Party what it could do better (‘Let a hundred flowers bloom!’), only to dispatch many of those who tried to do so to labour camps. As a political tool the big-character poster had vanished after that – until the 45-year-old Party Secretary of Peking University’s Philosophy Department, Nie Yuanzi, pasted one onto a wall of her campus on the afternoon of 25 May 1966.
A Party member since 1938, Nie had been fighting with university administrators for years over their reluctance to follow Mao’s instructions to ‘integrate theory and practice’ and send students to farms and factories where peasants and workers could teach them about real life. Not highly educated herself, she was also unhappy with the way the university prioritised academic achievement over political activism, particularly when it came to promotions – such as one for which she had been overlooked. Her poster, co-signed by several others, claimed that the ‘soaring revolutionary spirit’ of the people was being suppressed by a ‘sinister, anti-Party, anti-socialist gang’. It concluded: 3
Resolutely, thoroughly, totally and completely wipe out all ghosts and monsters and all Khrushchevian Counter-Revolutionary Revisionists and carry the socialist revolution through to the end. Defend the Party’s Central Committee! Defend Mao Zedong Thought! Defend the Dictatorship of the Proletariat!
Nie’s complaint about university authorities paying lipservice to Mao’s teachings mirrored Mao’s own frustrations with Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and others he accused of mouthing revolutionary slogans while shackling the Party with bureaucracy. Mao felt that Khrushchev had betrayed Stalin’s legacy in the Soviet Union by introducing a kind of Communism Lite. Now, he believed, Liu, Deng and others were attempting to do the same in China.
Stalin's legacy betrayed
Although a voracious reader and autodidact, Mao distrusted establishment intellectuals no less than Nie. His antipathy had deep roots in the humiliation he’d felt after first arriving in Beijing decades earlier to work in the library at Peking University, where the elite had mocked him for his thick provincial accent and earthy, peasant manners. For years, Mao had been calling for a cultural revolution against ‘bureaucratism’, compromise and complacency. Nie, for one, had been listening. Mao ordered the text of her dàzìbàoto be broadcast and published nationally on 1 June, extending its influence well beyond the university gates. Nie herself would go on to play a major role in the unfurling chaos of the next ten years.
After praising Nie’s big-character poster, Mao’s ‘Bombard the Headquarters’ went on to accuse ‘some leading comrades’ of
…standing with the reactionary bourgeoisie, enforcing bourgeois dictatorship and shooting down the dynamic movement of the Great Cultural Revolution. They reverse right and wrong, confuse black and white, besiege and oppress revolutionaries, silence dissent, inflict white terror, and feel smug about it. They promote bourgeois arrogance and deflate the proletarian morale of the proletariat. Should this not wake us up?
4Ominous accusations
‘White terror’ was a serious accusation. The phrase was normally used to describe the brutal persecution of Communist Party members, allies and sympathisers by the anti-communist Kuomintang (KMT) Party three decades earlier. The leader of the KMT and later president of the Republic of China, Chiang Kai-shek, had originally agreed to cooperate with the Communists before dramatically betraying them in 1927. Chiang set gangsters and thugs on unionised workers in Shanghai and pointed his own feared security forces at anyone believed to be sympathetic to the communist cause. Young students had been imprisoned, tortured or even executed. The campaign cost tens of thousands of lives, including those of most of the 60,000 members of the Party at the time. By using the phrase ‘White Terror’, Mao was equating resistance to his leadership with Chiang’s monumental and murderous treachery.
Subsequent propaganda images depict Mao writing his declaration in big, bold characters on a poster with brush and ink — a romantic revolutionary makeover of a pencil scribble in the margins of a newspaper. Widely broadcast and circulated in print, ‘Bombard the Headquarters’ helped to detonate an explosion of political violence that would tear apart Chinese politics, culture and society over the following decade. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution promised to build a new world. It would leave the old one in tatters.
Part One
1949–1966: The Buildup
Throughout history, reactionary forces threatened with extinction have waged a final, desperate struggle against the revolutionary force.
MaoZedong
It wasn’t the first time Mao had threatened to blow up the Party over which he presided.
After the Communists established the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Chiang Kai-shek fled with his government, army and followers to Taiwan. Decades of misrule, endemic corruption, foreign invasion and civil war had left China with a shattered infrastructure and dysfunctional bureaucracy. Its people were traumatised and poverty was widespread. Eighty percent of the population over the age of 15 was illiterate. There was an urgent need for hospitals, clinics and schools. Mao wanted to transform both the material conditions of the country and its ideological superstructure while eliminating all resistance, even passive resistance, to the new regime, and quickly.
Legacy of misrule
The Communist Party had developed two basic models for revolutionary action, both of which required mass participation and promoted ideological indoctrination. The first emerged from its land reform campaigns of the late 1940s, when activists had mobilised poor and landless peasants not just to seize and redistribute land held by wealthy landholders, but to hold public ‘struggle sessions’ where they ‘spoke bitterness’ (sùkŭ) about the past and confronted landowners over the exploitation of their labour. If they beat and sometimes even murdered their former oppressors, well, such was the nature of class struggle. Revolution, Mao had famously remarked, was not a dinner party. 6
The second model was that of the thought reform campaign, aimed at eliminating ‘erroneous thinking’ among the Party membership, educated people and government workers. This involved a rigorous and often brutal process of ‘criticism and self-criticism’, also known as ‘struggle’ (dòuzhēng). The first years of the 1950s saw the completion of land reform across the country and a series of thought reform campaigns to eliminate bureaucratism and other old ways of thinking and doing things.
In 1956, Mao called on the people to tell the Party how they thought it was doing: ‘Let one hundred flowers bloom!’ Although taken aback by the avalanche of criticism that followed, he may well have intended, as the Chinese saying has it, to ‘lure the snakes out of their cave’. One year later, he launched the Anti-Rightist Campaign. Overseen by Party General Secretary Deng Xiaoping, it consigned hundreds of thousands of people to labour camps, many for answering the call to speak out the year before, and created a new category of political enemies: ‘rightists’.
The Great Leap Forward
In 1958, Mao launched his most ambitious campaign to date, the Great Leap Forward. The idea was that radical collectivisation and mass mobilisation would propel China straight into true communism. Its economy would surpass Great Britain’s and catch up with that of the United States. The whole country was organised into People’s Communes. Even ploughs and the water buffalo that pulled them became communal property. The Party ordered the citizenry ‘go all out and aim high’ to quadruple agricultural and industrial production, encouraging measures such as the extremely dense planting of single crops and the sacrifice of family woks and metal window frames to ‘backyard furnaces’ to produce steel.
Mao excoriated the scientists and other experts who predicted catastrophic economic collapse – correctly, as it turned out. Realising that the only welcome news was good news, local officials and state media boasted of fancifully high harvests and industrial output. In the summer of 1959, the Party convened at the mountain retreat of Lushan. There, Peng Dehuai, defence minister and Mao’s ally of three decades, warned of the ‘winds of exaggeration’ and impending food 7shortages, saying politics shouldn’t override ‘economic principles’. Mao was livid. Though theoretically part of a collective leadership, he was used to calling the shots. He sacked Peng Dehuai and threatened that if the People’s Liberation Army was unhappy about his decision then he, Mao, would raise a new army and overthrow his own government. He replaced Peng with the wily military man Lin Biao, of whose loyalty he felt assured.
The mass famine that ensued would claim tens of millions of lives by 1961, killing somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of the entire population of 650 million. Natural disasters contributed to the death toll, as did a rancorous split with the Soviet Union under Khrushchev that saw the Soviets halt all aid to China, but the Great Leap Forward had clearly propelled China towards disaster. Mao, personally insulated from the worst effects of famine by the Party’s system of ‘special provisions’ for its leaders – and spared the worst news by subordinates who understood the price of truth-telling – remained unmoved. Finally, other members of the Chinese leadership took matters into their own hands.
Mass famine
1960–61: Capitalist Roaders, Soviet Revisionists and an Incident on a Train
In 1960, Deng Xiaoping learned that the provincial Party secretary of Anhui province, faced with potentially ten million deaths in his province alone, had assigned parcels of communal land to individual peasants. After providing the state with their assigned quota of grain, farmers could keep any excess for personal consumption or trade at local ‘free markets’. They could even raise a pig or two for consumption and sale.
Deng, President Liu Shaoqi and others began promoting Anhui’s ‘field responsibility system’ more broadly, helping to mitigate the famine. Limited financial incentives were introduced to the industrial sector as well. The economy began slowly to recover. Questioned if such a policy could still be called socialist, Deng Xiaoping allegedly replied: ‘It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white. If it catches mice, it’s a good cat.’ This would later be cited as proof that Deng was a ‘capitalist roader’.
8Under pressure, Mao initially agreed to the field responsibility system, although he felt that it betrayed his revolutionary vision. He also believed that the quotidian tasks of government were subsuming the Party’s revolutionary spirit. If revolution was not a continuous process, he argued, it would become inert and the triple evils of ‘feudalism, capitalism and revisionism’ would take root once more.
When Mao spoke of revisionism, he was talking about Khrushchev, who had denounced Stalin’s personality cult, promoted the principle of collective leadership, freed victims of Stalinist purges from labour camps and reinvigorated the Soviet Union’s consumer economy. Such policies offended Mao ideologically as much as they threatened him personally. In the 1950s, the Party had promised its citizens that ‘the Soviet Union’s today is our tomorrow’. Yet by the start of the 1960s, the Soviet Union of the day had come to represent Mao’s worst nightmare. He would not tolerate ‘Khrushchevs’ and ‘phony communism’ within the Party he had helped to found.
Worse still, Khrushchev preached peaceful coexistence with the United States – those American imperialists whom Mao considered the ‘sworn enemies of the people of the world’. In the early 1950s, Washington had signed a mutual defence treaty with Chiang Kai-shek, who continued to threaten to ‘retake the mainland’ from Taiwan. By the 1960s, the US army had military bases in South Korea, Japan and the Philippines. It trained and armed Tibetan guerrilla fighters and provided them with bases in Nepal. The Americans were increasingly involved in Vietnam as well. And now Russia and India were becoming friendly. ‘Peaceful co-existence’ sounded to Mao more like the encirclement of China by hostile forces.
Sworn enemies
Early in 1961, Mao turned his focus on his enemies within. Travelling south in his special railway carriage, he stopped in Wuhan to meet with the city’s Party secretary. While he was out and about, members of his entourage and train crew took a stroll. In his memoir, ThePrivateLifeofChairmanMao, Mao’s personal physician Li Zhisui recalled that among their number were several of the young women whom Mao kept around for his sexual pleasure. Mao had been an early champion of women’s rights, even appropriating a woman’s 9voice in a 1919 essay to complain: ‘The shameless men, the villainous men, make us into their playthings…’2 His behaviour was often at odds with his ideals, however, and his proclivities had long been a source of tension between him and his fourth wife, Jiang Qing. They were also an open secret among his entourage.
Conspiracy within
As they ambled along, a technician told one of the young women that he had heard her chiding Mao to hurry and get dressed. Shocked, she asked what else he’d heard. ‘Everything,’ he teased. She told Mao about the conversation. A sweep of his carriage turned up a pile of bugging equipment. He was furious. Several other leaders had once suggested installing recording devices in his train, so his every utterance could be preserved and every order faithfully transmitted. Mao had taken umbrage at the suggestion, yet it appeared they’d done it anyway. According to his doctor, ‘his growing belief that there was a conspiracy against him within the highest ranks of the Party dates from here.’
