Chinese Officially Avoid Unpleasant Memories of Cultural Revolution
It’s been 50 years since the start of the Cultural Revolution, but officially the Chinese government is sweeping that ugly part of China’s history under the carpet, where it joins the famines created by Mao’s agricultural policies and the Tian’anmen Massacre of 1989.
Instead, the current administration of Xi Jinping is taking pains to extol the achievements of Chairman Mao Zedong, rather than expose his ample flaws.
Mao initiated the Cultural Revolution in 1966, supposedly to wipe China’s slate clean of pre-revolutionary thought, culture, literature, politics and customs. Under the leadership of the Gang of Four, members of the Red Guard persecuted and killed thousands of Chinese, essentially for “thought crimes.”
But there are still people alive today who remember those times, and they are frustrated by the government’s unwillingness to address the past.
Wang Youqin, a University of Chicago academic who has spent nearly 30 years investigating Red Guard killings, says victims of the Cultural Revolution are struggling to shake off the emotional burden, even half a century on.
“Psychological pain is not like a scar on your skin, it’s not visible. But if you talk to them you can feel it deeply,” says Wang, who witnessed some of the Cultural Revolution’s violence as a Beijing schoolgirl and now logs her research about its victims on a website.
MacFarquhar says Beijing’s refusal to allow a truth commission like those undertaken in Argentina, Chile, South Africa and Uruguay, has left the door open to further violence. “They haven’t done the heart-searching that is necessary if you are going to put it behind you for ever.
“If I’m right in thinking that the cruelty by Chinese against other Chinese was the most terrible aspect of [the Cultural Revolution] … then I think that if one doesn’t face up to that, it could happen again.”
Likewise, China’s official history museum in Beijing ignores the famines created by Mao’s failed agricultural policies, and there are no references anywhere to the government’s brutal attacks on the thousands of student protesters in Tian’anmen Square in June 1989. Both events occurred within the lifetimes of people still alive today, yet officially those events never happened.
Further reading: theguardian.com