Son of the Revolution

"This book really is a very easy read. It’s a memoir of Liang Heng who himself had been a rather young Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution. And what I like about this book is that it gives a first-hand understanding of why Chinese during the Cultural Revolution did the things they did. We now look back on that period of the 1960s and say, ‘Oh, all of China went crazy, there was this large cult of personality, Chairman Mao manipulated everyone to do this, that, and the other.’ But I think Liang Heng gives a very good appreciation of the mindset of a young Chinese at that time. They really thought of Mao as a quasi-divine figure, and they had all of the energy and enthusiasm of new religious converts as they actively participated in the Cultural Revolution. And then he goes on to show the disillusionment of the Red Guards towards the end of the Cultural Revolution. They begin to realise that Chairman Mao isn’t quite the deity they thought he was, and they’re particularly dismayed when they are told that Mao’s closest comrade-in-arms, Lin Biao, the head of the military, has supposedly carried out an assassination attempt against the Chairman. They begin to lose their faith in the infallibility of Mao and of the Chinese Communist Party. It is a book that, in very simple but engaging language, allows one to understand the Cultural Revolution from the perspective of actual participants in it. Instead of just seeing that period as something that was mobilised from on high, through coercive force by Mao, it allows one to understand much better why it was that there was such an outpouring of popular support for this extraordinary movement. It’s very important because it’s the Cultural Revolution generation that is really in charge of China now. That generation of people, now in their early 60s, comprise the leadership of China in all sorts of different areas. They went through the Cultural Revolution, and they experienced the disillusionment of it. And yet many of them still retain a certain kind of idealism of the sort that they felt at the outset of the Cultural Revolution. And I think one can say that about both of the two paramount leaders of China today: Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao. Both of them clearly have a great deal of sympathy for people in the countryside, people who have not enjoyed the fruits of economic reform as much as people in the cities. Many of their current policies – the policy to develop some kind of universal medical insurance programme in China, the policy to try and get some sort of social safety net – are geared towards helping those who have been left behind. And I think those sympathies derive in large part from their Cultural Revolution experience, when they were sent down into the countryside and saw the massive inequalities in China. Now they’re attempting to bring about change through laws, through government policies, through an institutionalised kind of method, rather than through mass mobilisation and disruption, which was Chairman Mao’s preferred way of trying to get things done. They remain interested in achieving many of the Cultural Revolution’s ideals, they see themselves as trying to continue that mission – though obviously through very different means. So I think it remains very important for understanding a lot about China today. The whole reform era would not have happened with such urgency without the Cultural Revolution experience that preceded it. The first generation of post-Cultural Revolution leaders were trying to turn their backs on the Cultural Revolution. But I think in the current generation, one sees an effort to rebalance the ship of state and an appreciation that a lot of the inequalities and problems that motivated Mao to launch the Cultural Revolution have re-emerged in the reform period. His father is an intellectual who is sent out of the city to go and help the peasants, and Liang Heng goes with him. And he is quite shocked to see the conditions in the countryside and the difficulties the peasants face. And that’s typical of this generation of Chinese; so many of them spent, often, a decade down in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution and became aware of a China that was very different from the one they had grown up in. I do think that for so many people in China of that age group, the Cultural Revolution remains a very important yardstick against which they judge contemporary China. There is still a deep-seated kind of idealism in them. It’s not on my list but there is a book by Li Cheng, who is a political scientist at Brookings, called China’s Leaders: The New Generation . He talks about this current generation of Chinese leaders and how formative the Cultural Revolution experience was in their policies, and how that has differentiated them from the previous, the Jiang Zemin, the gung-ho development-no-matter-what generation. And that the current generation really have a rather different take on the problems of inequality and the problems of corruption and so forth."