This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution, but little attention has been given to the commemoration of this major historical event in Chinese official or unofficial spheres.
The Cultural Revolution was a major turning point in the evolution of China’s state socialism from the Maoist era to the Reform period. As with other developing countries, China’s quest for modernization was immensely painful because of the compressed timescale and the intense endogenous and exogenous pressures for change.
Founded in 1949, the People’s Republic of China has distinguished itself in its extensive use of power to remodel politics, society, economy and culture. Neither a mere reproduction of the Soviet Union model nor a reincarnation of the Confucian empire, the Maoist state created numerous institutional mechanisms to impose strict top-down control over and surveillance of the population. It advanced socialist ideology and enforced oppressive policies at all levels, dominating political, socioeconomic and cultural domains in an unprecedented scale.
Yet, the Cultural Revolution that set out to activate popular radicalism and revolutionary fervor in support of Mao Zedong (毛澤東) against his political opponents almost brought down the communist regime. The state only survived by suppressing the popular outpourings that Mao had encouraged. Since then, communism as a belief system and a behavioral norm collapsed utterly, materialism and pragmatism prevailed under former Chinese president Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) and his successors. From the 1980s onwards economic growth has become the only hope and desire among ordinary people, and thus the road to the Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy.
Relying solely on the transformative power of a market economy and the stability of authoritarian rule, the communist leaders have introduced, adapted and manipulated specific tenets of capitalism, such as welcoming foreign investment, deregulating the labor market and building urban infrastructure, while maintaining strict control over government institutions, the military, public security, and people’s access to the Internet. Accompanying the nation’s remarkable economic growth are dictatorship and domestic conflicts, not liberalization and democratic transition.
Because of explosive grievances exacerbated by the state’s top-down development strategies and its reluctance to reform its autocratic rule, a 21st-century China that dismisses the historical lessons of the Cultural Revolution and denies equality and freedom is bound to push discontented groups to mobilize against the state. In this volatile situation, unprecedented growth only gave China a temporary reprieve, because the state is still trapped in a perceptual cycle of discontent and unrest.
Joseph Tse-Hei Lee is professor of history at Pace University in New York.
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