On the 50th anniversary of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in socialist China
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A cultural revolution is the ideological reflection of the political and economic revolution and is in their service. - Mao, ‘On New Democracy’, 1940This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) in
socialist China. Many years in the making, this revolution began in the cultural field and took
the form of a mass upsurge by mid-1966. It continued for three tumultuous years in a zigzag
course and passed through several stages before the Ninth Congress of the Communist Party
of China (CPC) announced its victorious conclusion and summed up its results in 1969.
Although the GPCR continued for another seven years in various forms till mid-1976, it was
in its high-tides in the three initial years and constituted its most significant period. This
unique and unprecedented revolution in the superstructure shook the Chinese society to its
roots, touched the Chinese people to their very souls and made a worldwide impact. On the
call of the Left in the CPC led by Mao, millions upon millions of people in China entered the
arena of intense class struggle across the country against bourgeois ideology, politics and
practice, against bourgeois control and influence over the party, army and government and
against all the old-world muck pulling the wheels of history backwards. Not a single Party
committee, factory, commune, collective farm, public institution or organisation was left
untouched or unaffected by this fierce struggle between two classes, two ideologies, two
politics, two lines, two roads and two goals. The revolutionary masses confronted the class
enemy in each and every field and rose up in a great upheaval to shake the citadels of the
reactionaries to their very foundations. The struggle that ensued unleashed the unbound
creativity, energy and enthusiasm of the revolutionary masses on an unprecedented scale.
Guided by the revolutionary line of the CPC, they introduced wide-ranging innovations in the
forms of organisation and struggle and in the fields of government, military, industry,
agriculture, trade, science and technology, education, health, culture, literature and art – i.e.,
in all spheres of class struggle, struggle for production and scientific experiment.
The most pernicious and deceitful representatives of the old-world much were the revisionists
ensconced in the higher echelons of the Communist Party, the People’s Liberation Army
(PLA) and the people’s government. The CPC had a long history of fighting revisionism
within its ranks since its inception. Till the country’s liberation, the Party had successfully
carried out six major two-line struggles against the revisionist lines of Ch’en Tu-hsiu, Ch’u
Ch’iu-pai, Li Li-san, Lo Chang-lung, Wang Ming and Chang Kuo-tao, without defeating
which the victory of the Chinese new democratic revolution would have been impossible.
Within a decade after liberation, the revolutionaries in the CPC were once again called into
battle against the revisionist lines of Kao Kang and P’eng Te-huai. Two-line struggles under
the conditions of dictatorship of the proletariat, however, differed significantly from those
during the pre-liberation days. The internal ideological struggle became more acute after the
countrywide seizure of power and the establishment of the proletarian dictatorship, since the
revisionists now tried to supplement the authority of their top party positions with that portion
of state power which they had surreptitiously usurped from the This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) in socialist China. Many years in the making, this revolution began in the cultural field and took the form of a mass upsurge by mid-1966. It continued for three tumultuous years in a zigzag course and passed through several stages before the Ninth Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) announced its victorious conclusion and summed up its results in 1969. Although the GPCR continued for another seven years in various forms till mid-1976, it was in its high-tides in the three initial years and constituted its most significant period.
This unique and unprecedented revolution in the superstructure shook the Chinese society to its roots, touched the Chinese people to their very souls and made a worldwide impact. On the call of the Left in the CPC led by Mao, millions upon millions of people in China entered the arena of intense class struggle across the country against bourgeois ideology, politics and practice, against bourgeois control and influence over the party, army and government and against all the old-world muck pulling the wheels of history backwards. Not a single Party committee, factory, commune, collective farm, public institution or organisation was left untouched or unaffected by this fierce struggle between two classes, two ideologies, two politics, two lines, two roads and two goals. The revolutionary masses confronted the class enemy in each and every field and rose up in a great upheaval to shake the citadels of the reactionaries to their very foundations. The struggle that ensued unleashed the unbound creativity, energy and enthusiasm of the revolutionary masses on an unprecedented scale.
Guided by the revolutionary line of the CPC, they introduced wide-ranging innovations in the forms of organisation and struggle and in the fields of government, military, industry, agriculture, trade, science and technology, education, health, culture, literature and art – i.e., in all spheres of class struggle, struggle for production and scientific experiment.
The most pernicious and deceitful representatives of the old-world much were the revisionists ensconced in the higher echelons of the Communist Party, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and the people’s government. The CPC had a long history of fighting revisionism within its ranks since its inception. Till the country’s liberation, the Party had successfully carried out six major two-line struggles against the revisionist lines of Ch’en Tu-hsiu, Ch’u Ch’iu-pai, Li Li-san, Lo Chang-lung, Wang Ming and Chang Kuo-tao, without defeating which the victory of the Chinese new democratic revolution would have been impossible.
Within a decade after liberation, the revolutionaries in the CPC were once again called into battle against the revisionist lines of Kao Kang and P’eng Te-huai. Two-line struggles under the conditions of dictatorship of the proletariat, however, differed significantly from those during the pre-liberation days. The internal ideological struggle became more acute after the countrywide seizure of power and the establishment of the proletarian dictatorship, since the revisionists now tried to supplement the authority of their top party positions with that portion of state power which they had surreptitiously usurped from the people. Misusing their positions of authority, they struggled against the revolutionary line of Mao, opposed socialist construction, exercised dictatorship over the proletariat and worked towards reversing the socialist revolution. They did this by promoting capitalism in the economic base and propagating bourgeois ideology in the superstructure. They suppressed the socialist new things that were sprouting in the course of socialist construction.
Moreover, while the revisionists of the pre-liberation period used mainly open forms and methods of struggle against the revolutionaries, in the post-liberation period they adopted increasingly more secretive, conspiratorial and deceptive forms and methods, making their line even more damaging. This resistance became even stronger in the process of socialist industrialisation and socialist ransformation of agriculture, handicrafts and trade, which was basically completed by 1956 and China was all set to enter the stage of socialist constructio throught the Great Leap Forward. This vindicated Lenin’s teaching that the overthrown reactionary classes would increase their resistance to the revolution manifolds after the establishment of the proletarian dictatorship. With their counter-revolutionary line and practice, the revisionists in the CPC tried to transform the revolutionary party into a socialfascist party, the dictatorship of the proletariat into a bourgeois dictatorship and socialist China into a capitalist one.
After 1956, the position of the revisionists in China was further strengthened by the seizure of power by the Khrushchev revisionist clique in the CPSU and the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union. Not surprisingly, while all the two-line struggles in the CPC before liberation and the struggles against Kao Kang and P’eng Te-huai’s lines could be settled within the party through internal struggles, by the time of the GPCR the revisionists had become too powerful and influential to be defeated through the old method of internal struggle within the party alone. Mao pointed out that capitalist-roaders had usurped one-third of state power in China by 1966. It was only by relying on the vast masses of people and mobilising them in the largest numbers by applying the class line and mass line could political power be seized back from the bourgeoisie and the socialist revolution further advanced.
As the revisionists consolidated their position during the six years since the anti-rightist struggle against P’eng Te-huai line in 1959, Mao and the CPC relied on the broad masses to prevent the party and the country from changing colour. They called upon the masses to rise up in rebellion against the handful of party persons in authority taking the capitalist road and to bombard their counter-revolutionary headquarters. Thus began the GPCR. The masses – students and intellectuals to begin with, and workers and peasants following in their wake – responded overwhelmingly and took the enemy strongholds by storm. The creativity, energy, initiative and militancy of the masses came into full play. This was nothing short of one more power seizure from below.
In the course of questioning, criticising and overthrowing the bourgeois representatives in authority and the bourgeois-revisionist world outlook, party leaders, cadres and the masses self-examined, self-criticised and remoulded their own world outlook, which in fact was the goal of the GPCR. As Mao explained, “To struggle against power-holders who take the capitalist road is the main task, but it is by no means the goal. The goal is to solve the problem of world outlook: it is the question of eradicating the roots of revisionism” (‘Speech to the Albanian Military Delegation’, 1 May 1967). The slogan – “Fight Self, Repudiate Revisionism” – aptly encapsulates the main task and the main target of the GPCR. It was a revolution to accomplish a revolutionary transformation of the people’s world outlook by ideological remoulding, to bring the consciousness of the masses in conformity with the new conditions of life under socialism and to forge new human beings fit to build society anew.
Revisionism had its roots in the exploiting classes, the remnants of which continued to exist in China even after liberation. The new democratic revolution had expropriated the private property of the landlords and the bureaucrat capitalists - the old ruling classes - but it was still a long way to the ideological remoulding of the members of these classes. Some elements of the overthrown classes like former landlords escaped identification during the land reform movement and even managed to reach leading positions in the party, government, collective farms, etc. Moreover, the removal of imperialist and feudal fetters by the new democratic revolution created favourable conditions for the expansion of the bourgeois and pettybourgeois elements and their ideological influence in the society.
People from these classes had joined the communist party in large numbers during the antifeudal and anti-imperialist stage of the revolution as they too were oppressed by the imperialists, landlords and bureaucrat-capitalists. But having failed to remould their nonproletarian world outlook and unwilling to continue on the revolutionary road beyond the democratic revolution, they failed the test of socialism and became dead weights holding back the society. Many of them pursued a revisionist line to resist the transition of the democratic revolution to the socialist stage. Also, since the CPC had to adopt a policy of allowing the middle bourgeoisie (and the rich peasants who constituted the rural bourgeoisie) to earn a certain amount of profit under conditions of state control and restriction, they continued to exert ideological, political, economic and cultural influence on the society.
Moreover, it was a fact that China had a huge rural petty bourgeoisie (the middle peasants) and the urban petty bourgeoisie (including the three levels of intellectuals) too were in considerable numbers. Though the vast majority of them supported socialism and followed the socialist road, they mostly retained their narrow class outlook emanating from small proprietorship, and their remoulding had only just begun. The proletariat and the semiproletariat (workers and poor peasants) were firmly committed to the socialist road, but they were vulnerable to the machinations of the revisionists because of the relatively inadequate spread of Marxism. Indeed, it was no easy task to promote Marxism and establish proletarian ideology and culture by uprooting feudal ideology and culture which dominated the thinking and practice of the Chinese people for thousands of years. The revisionists often made use of the backward ideologies and ways of thinking prevalent among the masses in their fight against Marxism.
In addition to all this, the transformation of private ownership of means of the production (whether feudal or bourgeois ownership) into socialist ownership by the whole people required a number of intermediate stages and a relatively long period of time. This transitional period too preserved the grounds for the preponderance of partial or narrow selfinterest over the interest of the whole people, and hence the grounds for revisionism and the anti-revisionist class struggle. As Mao pointed out, even though the socialist transformation
in the system of ownership in China was basically completed by 1956,
…there are still remnants of the overthrown landlord and comprador classes, there is still a bourgeoisie, and the remoulding of the petty bourgeoisie has only just started. Class struggle is by no means over. The class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the class struggle between the various political forces, and the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in the ideological field will still be protracted and tortuous and at times even very sharp. The proletariat seeks to transform the world according to its own world outlook, and so does the bourgeoisie. In this respect, the question of which will win out, socialism or capitalism, is not really settled yet. Marxists remain a minority among the entire population as well as among the intellectuals… the influence of the bourgeoisie and of theintellectuals who come from the old society, the very influence which constitutes their class ideology, will persist in our country for a long time(‘On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People’, February 1957).
Thus, the party persons in authority taking the capitalist-road were not isolated individuals but represented the formidable social forces of the old and new reactionaries. The struggle to defend and develop the correct line in CPC after liberation therefore got inseparably linked with the struggle to build socialism, consolidate the dictatorship of the proletariat and advance the socialist revolution to attain communism by eradicating the material and ideological foundations of revisionism. For this, the economic base as well as the superstructure had to be repeatedly revolutionised. The strategy adopted by the Left in the CPC led by Mao was to carry out these two transformations as a series of uninterrupted revolutions alternating between the economic sphere and the ideological-political-cultural sphere in a zigzag course. As Mao put it in 1958,
I stand for the theory of permanent revolution. Do not mistake this for Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. In making revolution one must strike while the iron is hot – one revolution must follow another, the revolution must continually advance. The Hunanese often say, ‘Straw sandals have no pattern – they shape themselves in the making.’ Trotsky believed that the socialist revolution should be launched even before the democratic revolution is complete. We are not like that. For example after the Liberation of 1949 came the Land Reform; as soon as this was completed there followed the mutual-aid teams, then the lowlevel cooperatives, then the high-level cooperatives. After seven years the cooperativization was completed and productive relationships were transformed; then came the Rectification. After Rectification was finished, before things had cooled down, then came the Technical Revolution(‘Speech at the Supreme State Conference’, 28 January, 1958, MSW Vol. 8).
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