Blood Red Sunset

"There are lots of memoirs – ‘I was a Red Guard’ and ‘I did this and I did that.’ What is strikingly consistent about most Red Guard memoirs is how un-guilty the authors are of any of the crimes, brutality and destructiveness that we know the Red Guards were guilty of. It seems that the authors were always disapprovingly looking on. There are exceptions, there is some frankness here and there, but on the whole, we’re getting an outsider’s view, rather than an insider’s view, even though the people were Red Guards. Ma Bo is different because when he was sent down to the countryside, like 12 million others, during the years from 1968 onwards, he was still a red-hot enthusiast. He was sent to the north, to Mongolia, to herding areas, and their orders were to plant grain. What is fascinating about the Ma Bo book is that it describes an ecological disaster, and he accepts guilt for it. I like this book for several reasons. Firstly, because it’s a first-hand account. Secondly, because it’s by a writer who is a writer, and therefore it’s very good reading. Thirdly, because it admits to a disaster. Fourthly, because it shows the kind of policies that are prevalent when orders come from on high and no one has the courage to disobey them, because of the dangers to their career. There was in China, during the Cultural Revolution and just before, a famous brigade in Dazhai, which was a very poor agricultural community in northern China. And peasants, peasant leaders and local Party officials from all over the country and, indeed, foreigners made the pilgrimage to Dazhai. For the foreigners it was just sightseeing, but for the Party officials it was ‘this is the way you have to do it’. And, across China, all sorts of agricultural regimes were destroyed as a result of attempting to copy a totally different agricultural environment and its agricultural policies. It destroyed the natural habitats of the herds, which was the income and way of life of the herders. There are other books on the Cultural Revolution that are more widely read than the ones I’ve suggested. I’ve chosen books that ordinary readers are less likely to come across, so I thought it was useful to bring them to people’s attention. The Cultural Revolution is still a very live issue in China today, not just because so many people suffered as a result of it. The official figure is that 100 million people were affected by it one way or another – and I assume that means that at least one member of their family was killed or ill-treated. So there is still a lot of bitterness about what happened. Secondly, the Cultural Revolution is important because without it we wouldn’t have the China that we see today. It was the disasters of the famine and then the Cultural Revolution that made Deng Xiaoping and his colleagues decide “This is ridiculous, we are tearing ourselves apart, we must have a New Deal, or the party will be thrown out because we have not benefited the people at all.” So you have the total transformation of the last 30 years of the reform era. Most importantly, in a psychological sense, the Cultural Revolution is important because countries do have to come to terms with their own history. The Chinese are always talking about the Japanese not coming to terms with what they did in World War II. There’s some justice in that. But the Chinese themselves have not come to terms with the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution’s violence is not just to be put at the door of Chairman Mao, though he fired the starter’s gun. It’s to be put at the door of individual Chinese who were incredibly cruel, in many cases, to other individual Chinese. I have taught a course on the Cultural Revolution on and off since 1988. More recently, Chinese students have been coming out to American universities as undergraduates. Last year, out of 150 students, 15% were Chinese – either directly from the mainland, or who came over to America when they were 3 or 4. On occasion, these Chinese students come up to me and thank me for teaching the course, because their mum and dad, or granny and granddad, never told them anything about the Cultural Revolution. And you can see why. Because they were either humiliated themselves, or they humiliated — or perhaps worse — other people. So there is this great big lack of memory about the Cultural Revolution that’s very unhealthy. So the Cultural Revolution is absolutely relevant to present-day China, and absolutely relevant to our understanding of why China abandoned Communist economics and went capitalist."