CHINA’S CULTURAL REVOLUTION REVISTED – LINDA JAIVIN

In 1966, with the words “Bombard the Headquarters!” Mao Zedong unleashed the full, violent force of a movement that he called the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. By the time he died ten years later, millions had perished, China’s cultural heritage was in ruins, its economic state was perilous, its institutions of government were damaged and its society was bitterly divided. The history of this period is so toxic that China’s rulers have gone to great lengths to bury it for, as both they and the Party know, to grasp the history of the Cultural Revolution is to understand much about China today. To help discussion of all this, Linda Jaivin – cultural commentator, essayist and author of, most recently, Bombard The Headquarters! The Cultural Revolution in China addressed The Sydney Institute 16 June 2025.

CHINA’S CULTURAL REVOLUTION REVISTED

LINDA JAIVIN

In August 1966, with the command “Bombard the Headquarters!” Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Communist Party of China, launched the Cultural Revolution that the Party had, with mixed emotions, endorsed two and a half months earlier. The Great Helmsman was convinced that the revolution that he had helmed was in mortal danger.

Mao had been one of the original founders of the Communist Party of China in 1921. By the time the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949, he had been working towards a Chinese revolution for 28 years. He’d fought and sacrificed and thought a lot about what that revolution should look like.

After the Communists won the Chinese Civil War and founded the People’s Republic in 1949, Mao put China on a crash course of ideological indoctrination and economic collectivisation. In 1958, he launched the Great Leap Forward. He believed that by harnessing the will of the people he could propel the nation into a state of true communism. Private property was abolished. The nation was divided into people’s communes. The Party ordered everyone to throw their cooking woks and metal window frames into neighbourhood furnaces to forge steel and told farmers to plant crops four times as densely as usual.

Mao claimed this would lead to a quadrupling of the nation’s agricultural and industrial output. He refused to listen to the objections of agricultural scientists and others and when one of the collective leadership, his defence minister and long time comrade Peng Dehuai, dared to warn of imminent starvation, Mao had him purged. He threatened that if the rest of the party supported Peng, he, Mao, would go to the countryside and raise a new army to overthrow his own government. His command to bombard the headquarters in 1966, in other words, wasn’t the first time he threatened to overturn his own Party’s leadership, and it was closely related to that first time.

The Great Leap was of course an unmitigated disaster. The furnaces produced pig iron and crops failed. Combined with natural disasters and the withdrawal of all Soviet aid when the Soviet Union and China broke off relations, it led to nationwide famine and tens of millions of deaths by 1961. It only ended because others in the Party, notably General Secretary Deng Xiaoping and President Liu Shaoqi, introduced mitigating measures such as allowing farmers to keep or even sell some of the food they grew.

Mao, who may not have known the extent of the famine due to a highly politicised system by which the leadership received information, was furious. He believed that Deng and Liu were diverting China from its revolutionary path towards capitalism: they were “capitalist roaders”. He came to believe, in fact, that they and other colleagues were in a conspiracy to undermine him and his vision. That vision called for continual revolution, class struggle “every year, every month every day”. If the Chinese people failed to maintain vigilance and class consciousness, then academic elites and a re-emergent bourgeoisie would undermine the revolution itself.

This had happened, he believed, in the Soviet Union. He saw Khruschev’s policies of de-Stalinisation, a cultural “thaw” and the denunciation of personality cults as a direct threat to his own legacy. He described the state of communism in the Soviet Union as “revisionism”.

All of these factors contributed to his determination to launch a Cultural Revolution that would re-activate “class struggle”, prioritise mass movements over administrative process and take down his enemies. The overall goal was to destroy China’s traditional culture, including habits and beliefs, so that a new socialist culture could take its place. The means for carrying out the Cultural Revolution would include “mass dictatorship” – the exercising of dictatorship over the masses by the masses themselves. Citizens were to monitor, report on and even prosecute and punish each other for criminal and ideological wrongdoing.

Mao had been concerned that China’s youth had grown soft on socialism, and would not take up the baton as the revolution’s successors. So, when they leapt into action at the start of the Cultural Revolution to defend him from his enemies and be the advance troops of the Cultural Revolution, calling themselves Red Guards, this was a development he had not foreseen, but happily endorsed. They took their slogan from his saying that “the myriad threads that make up the principles of Marxism come down to one thing: to rebel is justified.”

By the end of August, nearly 2,000 people had been persecuted to death or driven to suicide in Beijing alone. The city’s crematoriums couldn’t keep up. The Cultural Revolution soon spread from the campuses to factories and offices, from the cities to the countryside, where some of the most brutal killings took place. The radicals split into factions and brawled in the streets and on the campuses. After the army got involved – over the objection of many veteran generals – factional battles became ever more deadly, as students and workers and others fought one another with everything from automatic weapons, grenades, tanks and in at least one case, warships.

The politics at the top level were impossibly complex and the messages issued by the Party and its media were frequently contradictory. To call it a form of civil war is not an exaggeration. In fact, at the end of 1966, at a dinner for his 73^rd birthday, Mao shocked his closest colleagues in the Party – not that they dared show it at the time – by toasting to “civil war”.

By the time the Cultural Revolution wound up in 1976, close to two million people were dead. Millions more were left with life changing injuries. More than 70,000 families were wiped out in their entirety. The entire nation was left in trauma.

It may seem like those events in China are long ago and far away, but this history is not just of academic interest. The history of the Cultural Revolution is vitally important to our understanding of China today – and beyond, as I will show. To begin with China itself, the Communist Party has since the late seventies put itself on quite a different path than the one Mao envisioned. That has involved the relaxation of many social and cultural controls, the opening of the economy to market forces and an opening of the country itself to the West. Over the nearly 50 years since Mao’s death, China has grown rich and strong, even if there are serious structural issues with the economy, inequalities the distribution of wealth and ongoing human rights abuses including in regions such as Xinjiang and Tibet.

In 1981, the Party declared the Cultural Revolution to have been a “catastrophe”. They admitted Mao had made mistakes but insisted that he’d been “bamboozled” by “counter-revolutionaries”, a word that has proven to be one of the most flexible ones in the Chinese language. They then told the people to move on and began progressively to censor reportage and literary or artistic work that reflected too acutely or described too explicitly the horrors of the Cultural Revolution.

The authorities also began quietly shutting down the archives and discouraging even serious academic work on the subject. The process of burying the true face of Cultural Revolution history accelerated under Xi Jinping, who has made a campaign against “historical nihilism” – the telling of history in any way that differs from the official version – a hallmark of his rule.

As a result, over the years, the Cultural Revolution has faded in memory to become a kind of soft-focus, nostalgic montage of kitschy cultural artifacts, including the Revolutonary Model Operas and Mao badges alongside images of young people, their faces flush with idealism, raising their fists and Little Red Books to the sky. Many younger people today live between the rock of job burnout and the hard place of high unemployment. They witness gross inequalities of wealth and opportunity, including educational opportunities and access to health care. Some are frustrated by their inability to raise their children in cities where they have may have worked punishing jobs for many years in factories or building sites.

It’s not surprising that some have come to nurture a vision of the Cultural Revolution as an egalitarian time when prices were low, there was no corruption, young people were honoured as the revolution’s successors and the flagbearers of a new age. There is rising interest in Mao’s writings and theories.

This poses a problem for Xi Jinping. His family was badly victimised in the Cultural Revolution. His half-sister committed suicide after their home was ransacked by Red Guards. He put in years of “re-education” doing manual labour in the countryside. One legacy of this is his strong preference for control over chaos. Mao told the young people that to rebel was justified. Xi tells them to study hard, work hard, marry young and have a big family. Like Mao, however, Xi doesn’t seem to believe that anyone but himself can really be trusted to guide the country. He has thrown away the safeguards against one person potentially ruling for life that were set in place in the 1980s by Mao’s immediate successors. He has also tightened surveillance and control, including mutual surveillance and control, within society itself and especially in perennial restive ethnic minority regions such as Tibet and Xinjiang.

One can lay claim to few truly original thoughts in life. I thought I had one back in November when Elon Musk, high not just on ketamine but the whiff of power that was coming his way once his hired help took the highest office, called out on X for people to name public servants who ought to be fired once DOGE began operations. This predictably lead some of the bottom dwellers on X to heap rape and death threats and other kinds of abuse on people suspected of advancing the social goods of equity, diversity, inclusion and climate change mitigation. Here in Australia, Jacinta Price popped on her MAGA hat and declared that she and Peter Dutton would “make Australia great again”.

Absorbing all that news at the same time I was working through the edits of my book on the Cultural Revolution, my original thought was this: despite the fact that Elon Musk almost certainly knew nothing of modern Chinese history, he had launched, in effect, an exercise in mass dictatorship. At his urging the masses were calling out, policing and punishing anyone they saw as committing ideological crimes. What’s more, when, in August 1966, Mao urged his followers to “bombard the headquarters”, he was telling them, in essence, to attack China’s version of the “deep state” and make revolution great again. I began taking notes, prepping for a talk I would be giving at the Royal Asiatic Society in London in April when my book would be launched there. As time went on, I found more and more parallels between the operations and even rhetoric of Mao and his henchmen, and Trump and his.

There were the attacks on so-called academic and cultural elites (also a common sport of some conservative commentators here in Oz), the disregarding of scientific expertise and disregard of due process. Add to that the intolerance of criticism, megalomaniacal self-confidence, personality cult and mass rallies with the faithful, the threats of violence and indifference to the suffering of those deemed insufficiently loyal… History doesn’t often repeat itself, but as Mark Twain remarked, it sometimes “rhymes”.

The point about both men’s indifference to legal constraints really struck me. In a conversation with the sympathetic American journalist Edgar Snow at the time, Mao likened himself to a monk with an umbrella. Snow misunderstood Mao to be saying he was like a lone monk wandering the world in the rain. But Mao was quoting a Chinese pun. A monk with an umbrella is a man with “no hair and no sky”, wufa wutian, a homonym for the expression “neither law nor heaven” – utterly lawless.

Trump has little wit and no talent for riddles. He did, however, once boast that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and not lose any votes. He has also suggested that a president could order SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival and, on another occasion, allegedly asked why the army couldn’t fire on protesters – “Just shoot them in the legs or something?” (With US Marines on the streets of LA, that possibility appears less remote than ever.)

As it turned out, it wasn’t such an original thinker after all. Many sinologists including Orville Schell and Geremie Barmé have since written incisively and powerfully about the parallels between Mao and Trump. But what’s been even more interesting is that in current discourse in China, including on social media, many commentators have identified the connection between Trump and Mao as well. As one Chinese journalist wrote in a later-deleted post on X, “Coming from an authoritarian state, we know that dictatorship is not just a system – it is at its core the pursuit of power. We also know that the Cultural Revolution was about dismantling institutions to expand control.”

This is not to suggest that Trump has taken cues from Mao. And neither would I or anyone else suggest that the ideology or intellects of the two are in any way similar.

For one thing, as I wrote for the Big Issue in the UK,”‘Mao was a more intelligent and interesting thinker than Trump, more original, well-read and articulate. He drew the sort of million-strong crowds that Trump could only dream of – or lie about. He was a revolutionary, Trump a reactionary. Mao wanted to destroy the old world to build an imagined new and communist one. Trump wants to destroy the new to restore an imaginary past. Mao helped miners organise a famous strike. Trump posed with a bunch of mining executives pretending to be miners.”

Some commentators, even while noting the resonances between Mao and Trump, hasten to note the scale of human death and destruction of the Cultural Revolution. Trump may be trampling liberty and destroying educational institutions, they protest, but he’s not killing people, certainly not at the scale we saw in the decade-long Cultural Revolution, when nearly 2 million people lost their lives. Think again. The cutting off of USAID programs to deliver vital HIV medicines as well as vaccines and other life-saving medications is expected to cost that many lives in sub-Saharan Africa alone, including the lives of some half a million children, in the next five years along.

The great scholar of authoritarianism Ruth Ben-Ghiat has written that “Authoritarianism depends on breaking the horizontal bonds of solidarity and empathy that lead people to risk their safety to protest injustices against others… There is nothing stronger than solidarity shown publicly, which is why the state responds with outsized threat and violent acts.” Rebecca Solnit, who quotes Ben-Ghiat in a recent edition of her newsletter “Meditations in an Emergency”, notes that “authoritarians want our worst selves: gullible, fearful, hateful, obedient, tolerant of cruelty or actively cruel.”^[1]

Knowing what we do about history, including in Mao’s China, our duty here in Australia, our duty to Australia is to hold onto our best selves with all our might.

ENDNOTE

1. Rebecca Solnit, ‘The Heart of the Matter’, Meditatios in an Emergency, 12 June 2025 ↑