Collectivization in 1950s China.

By the end of 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under its leader, Mao Zedong (pre-1978 translation Mao Tse-tung), had taken full control of China.   During the many previous years of revolution, the communists gained peasant support by promising to break up the large landed estates and divide the resulting small holdings among the peasants.  However, this promise was kept and maintained very temporarily.  During the early 1950s there were so-called trials throughout China in which peasant tenant farmers were made to accuse their former landlords of crimes against them.  Very often these claims of crimes and mistreatment against the peasants were pure fiction, but the CCP made the powerless common people utter them anyway.  And the result of these “show trials” was that millions of landlords were executed (Houn, 158-160; Waller, 122-3).  All of this occurred at the same time that factories were taken over by the regime.  Henceforth, private owners, having a profit incentive to produce worthwhile products for sale, were replaced by communist-party-approved government managers.  The inevitable consequences of this new policy was a decline in industrial production.

After the massive extermination of China’s traditional gentry, the peasants were themselves betrayed as the CCP gathered the new peasant holdings into Soviet-style collective farms.  In most of these farms the peasants were allowed a small family plot and could sell their produce on peasant markets.  However, most of the land was held in common and worked by all of the farm’s peasants who were paid a wage.  As a result of the human need for a profit motive and instinctual pride in ownership, the common plots were poorly worked, and family plots were cultivated with great care (Houn, 162-4; Waller, 124).  Consequently, the collectives failed to raise overall agricultural production (Waller, 122-3, 127; Houn, 166-7), but this basic lesson in Natural Law did not dissuade the communist overlords.  Their ideology forbade them to consider establishing a practical and natural economic policy in place of their anti-Nature illusions.  That is, they would not dare allow their deranged conception of truth to be compromised by facts.

The Hundred Flowers Campaign (1956) and the Anti-Rightest Rectification Campaign of 1956 to 1958.

  Having faced minor resistance during his draconian collectivization policies, Mao in 1956 proclaimed a free speech program called the “One Hundred Flowers Campaign.”  Mao assured the people that they were now free to make constructive criticisms of his party and his government.  Naturally, after years of repression, people were initially reluctant to voice their true opinions.  But some courageously spoke their minds, and these few were not punished.  Subsequently, others spoke out and were not punished.  Then, after more than two weeks passed, a volcano of criticisms rose up against the communist regime’s policies and its incompetence and its hypocritical brutality.  Thereafter, increasingly larger numbers of people even began to demand that the CCP and Mao be removed from power.

As a result, this free speech experiment lasted only five weeks, and it was immediately followed by an “anti-rightest rectification campaign” that lasted almost two years.  During this period, people who made the major criticisms lost their jobs.  Moreover, Mao intensified his policy of mass brain-washing that he first established in 1942 and was then known as the “Zheng feng.”  Throughout the country, small study groups were organized in which people read the latest party doctrines or had it read to them.  This was followed by a period of criticism and self-criticism.  That is, based on the latest party literature (which dictated what is supposedly good and what is evil), people were encouraged and often forced to denounce others and to confess their own “anti-socialist errors” in thinking.  Subsequently, many CCP members were purged from the party, and about five per cent of all urban workers were declared “rightists.”     

The “Great Leap Forward,” 1958-1960.

In 1958 Mao Zedong began the “Great Leap Forward” program with the purpose of using communist methods to bring about rapid economic development in China. In harmony with the Marxist worldview, central planners demanded regimented mass participation of the people.  Moreover, quantity and speed of production were emphasized at the expense of quality.

One aspect of these policies was the requirement that each worker must keep a small smelting furnace at his home, and after their normal factory working hours, they had to produce cheap iron.  However, the home-made pig iron turned out to be of such poor quality that it was worthless (Pye, 130).  In addition, masses of people using primitive tools were set to work building public works projects such as bridges, dams, and roads.  However, as Franklin Houn (1967, p. 167) reported, “In many instances floods were caused by the collapse of dams and dikes hastily built during the Great Leap Forward, while the unprecedented insect pests appear to have been a result of the much-publicized campaign to eliminate sparrows, which had been important killers of insects.”

In the agricultural sphere, communes were created with the purpose of combining education and economic and social life for about thirty collective farms comprising 4,000 to 5,000 households.  In each commune, the peasants had to give up their private plots and family households.  In some extreme cases, even married couples had to live in separate male and female dormitories, eat in communal mess halls, and keep their children in nurseries (Mehnert 1972, 252-3; Waller, 129).  And the peasants were paid based partly on the Marxist communist principle of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” (Houn, 62; Waller, 129).  China expert Klaus Mehnert (1972, 252) aptly summarized these policies.  “Within a matter of a few weeks, more than half a billion Chinese peasants found themselves living and working in ways that were totally new not only to them, but to the entire history of mankind.  Their private lives were completely disrupted…..” 

The communes were total failures.  By ending all profit incentives, they severely damaged the economy, and the peasants hated the new communal living (Waller, 130; Houn, 166). Meanwhile, food production dropped so drastically that an estimated 20-40 million people died of food shortages.  China scholar, Tai Sung An (1972, p. 5-6) summarized this economic disaster: “Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the commune system … proved catastrophic failures.  They plunged the country into economic disorder, the people came near to starvation, and Communist China lost ten years of industrial growth.  Indeed, they were economic mismanagement on a colossal scale….”    Consequently, in 1959 the Great Leap Forward ended, and the communes remained in name only, that is, merely as units of local government.  The full-communism-inspired Great Leap Forward was in fact a great leap backward.  It was not until 1965 that economic production rose to the low level of the years prior to the program (Waller, 131).  And to make matters worse, in 1960 the less fanatical (post-Stalin) USSR withdrew aid to China, and the two giant communist countries became rivals.

“Red” Versus “Expert” in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976.

After the 1958-59 failure of Mao’s attempt to establish full communism, he managed to remain CCP chairman and retain control of the PLA or “People’s Liberation Army” (that is, the armed forces).  However, he lost much of his influence and control in the CCP, and other leaders persuaded the Party to adopt relatively practical methods of economic development at the expense of Natural-Law-defying Marxist ideology.  This so-called expert faction was led by the new head of state and party first vice chairman, Liu Shaoqi, and his chief follower was Deng Xiaoping.  Therefore, the CCP became divided internally between what came to be called Mao’s “Red” faction and Liu’s “expert” faction (Tai, 6-17).

This rivalry led to Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution from 1966 through 1976.  This greatest of all ideological rectification campaigns had two twin purposes.  First, it was a drastic means of reasserting Mao’s absolute rule over the Communist Party and over the entire country.  It was also heralded as another attempt to impose full communism, that is, to rid China of “bourgeois revisionism.”  And for this purpose, Mao established the “Red Guards.”  These were primarily high-school-age teenagers (Tai, 22) who were brainwashed during a period in their lives in which their adolescent brains had not yet fully formed.  Their Maoist mentors convinced them that they did not need experience or mental effort or analysis of the facts of human nature or awareness of the lessons of human history.  Instead, they were convinced that all wisdom was contained in the condensed version of the Quotations of Chairman Mao, commonly known as “The Little Red Book.”   They were convinced that their closed-minded adherence to the Little Red Book bestowed upon them the absolute truth of all the epochs of human society.  Their egos were flattered into the uncompromising conviction that they were now the possessors of the absolute truth regarding social justice, morality, goodness, and rationality.  The totalitarian conditioning of these regimented young fanatics instilled in them the conviction that they must not tolerate even the most minor dissent or inward thought process or outward indication that contradicted their anti-Nature (anti-Asha) creed.

Mao unleased the Red Guards throughout China in May 1966, and with his encouragement, their numbers swelled to nearly thirteen million (Mehnert, 250).  Wherever they marched, the Red Guards staged massive demonstrations in support of Mao and his “Red” doctrine.  Most significantly (especially in light of current events in America) is that their main goal was centered on the destruction of the “Four Olds,” that is, old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas (“Burn ….” 2013).  Subsequently, as China scholar Tai Sung An described, they broke “into schools, museums, libraries, and private homes to destroy antiques, religious articles such as ancestral tablets, and books” that they considered “bourgeois” or “reactionary.”  In effect, they sought to destroy anything that is characteristic of normal and traditional human society.  One of their most significant targets was in 1966 (as described in “Burn, Loot …” 2013) when about “200 students from the Beijing Normal University [invaded] the 2,000+ year-old temple of Confucius in Shandong with the express aim of thoroughly demolishing it.  While the temple itself survived, over 6,618 cultural artifacts from paintings to scrolls to graves were destroyed.” Furthermore, during the entire Cultural Revolution, seventy-two percent (4,922 of 6,843) of sites in Beijing alone that were designated as of “historical interest” were destroyed (MacFarquhar, 2006).

This type of destruction was repeated throughout the country. Individual items such as antiques, books, and scrolls, were destroyed (Ibid).  And these attacks on historical and cultural objects were soon accompanied by attacks on people who were arbitrarily deemed “bourgeois revisionists.” In effect, this persecution applied to ordinary people and party officials who were relatively normal in their thinking.  Girls or women were attacked and beaten for wearing makeup.  Government and party officials who were believed to be of the “expert” faction were attacked.  And many were murdered by the young mobs.  China expert Lucian Pye (China 1972, 310) added this overview: “the attacks on authority were matched by attacks on all who in the slightest way deviated from the Guards’ view of correct behavior.  People whose hair was too long, who wore clothes that seemed strange, whose speech was not filled with the right clichés, were all violently attacked.” Moreover, these victims were soon to be deprived of any protection from the police.   Specifically, on August 22, 1966, the Mao-controlled central government ordered the police to not protect people from Red Guard assaults and murders.  Consequently, such attacks became more numerous and more violent (MacFarquhar 2006, 124, 515).

In the face of this orchestrated anarchy, local government and party officials defensively allied with the local peasants and workers, and in many places, there were violent clashes between them and the Red Guards (Tai, 23-25).  In addition, the Red Guards compounded this nightmarish bedlam by splitting into rival factions.  As is to be expected of fanatical adherents to anti-nature doctrines, each faction proclaimed their own interpretation of the Little Red Book as the only correct Maoist doctrine.  The inevitable outcome of this mentality was that Red Guard factions began fighting and killing each other.  As described by Tai Sung An (1972, p.35):

For the second quarter of 1967 the participants in these factional struggles used poles, daggers, small arms, automatic weapons, mortars, artillery, and even tanks and armored cars in rare instances.  Looting, murder, robbery, immorality, workers’ strikes and desertions, arms thefts, profiteering, and black markets were widespread by the end of August, 1967. 

As the chaos worsened, in January 1967 Mao ordered the PLA (People’s Liberation Army) to restore order.  The PLA then took over administration in most provinces and took over the task of purging thousands of expert-faction party members (Tai, 67).  Among this purge’s victims was the expert faction’s leader, Liu Shaoqi, who was executed.   Also included was his chief follower, Deng Xiaoping, who was sentenced to life in prison (Tai, 25-26).

Nevertheless, during the spring of 1968 Mao again unleashed the Red Guards.  However, the Red Guards were still divided into rival factions.  Subsequently, with their renewed freedom, the factions once again began fighting and killing each other over who represented the purest Maoist thought.  Through the summer of 1968, this factional fighting was accompanied by looting, the burning, of thousands of houses, and the destruction of railroads.  Red Guard factions hijacked trains and seized Soviet weapons in route to the communist regime of North Vietnam (Tai, 55).  And with these weapons, about 50,000 Red Guards killed each other (Ibid).   In reaction to this renewed mass insanity, in August 1968, Mao again ordered the PLA to restore order.  At this point, the Red Guards were disbanded.  Moreover, between forty and fifty of their leaders were executed, and most of the others were sent to reeducation camps for re-indoctrination (Tai, 54-59).

However, the Cultural Revolution continued without the Red Guards until late 1976, that is, until soon after Mao’s death. During the entire 1966 to 1976 Cultural Revolution, a huge number of intellectuals and party and government officials were sent to special farms.  These so-called May Seventh Schools combined hard labor with ideological re-education.  Meanwhile, peasants, workers, and soldiers were put in charge of the universities.  At one point, grades were dropped while manual labor and ideological purity were emphasized at the expense of academic subjects.  The result was that student morale fell and enrollment dropped by seventy per cent (Mehnert, 249-251; Tai, 58-59).

Moreover, throughout the Cultural Revolution, traditional Chinese opera, literature, and other popular pillars of China’s historical arts were banned. In their place, Mao’s wife Jiang Qing (a former third-rate actress) created eight simplistic propaganda plays that broke with Chinese traditions even more by using ballet and Western musical instruments (Mehnert, 138-148).  These musical plays and some other indoctrination tools were to replace China’s long cultural history (Ibid).

A prominent feature of the Cultural Revolution was the so-called Cult of Mao.  While the CCP-controlled mass media downplayed or justified the murders and destruction committed by Mao’s henchmen, it cultivated an image of Mao as the embodiment of goodness and wisdom.  Numerous articles were published alleging how people were inspired by Mao’s Little Red Book to overcome hardships, to commit acts of heroism, and even to solve technical problems (Mehnert, 162-4).  By the early seventies, there were even articles describing how some people were miraculously healed of physical afflictions by Mao’s mere physical presence.

Altogether during the nearly eleven years of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, nearly one million people were either killed or committed suicide (US News and World Report, 10/4/99, p. 35).   Furthermore, during the anarchistic conditions created by it, old clan feuds were revived, and common crime greatly increased (Ibid).  It was only a few weeks after Mao’s September 1976 death that the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution ended.  It was then that Deng Xiaoping was released from prison and the expert faction took control.  Since early 1977, the CCP has denounced Mao’s last few years in power, but the party rules to this day. 

Déjà Vu: The American Cultural Revolution.

Déjà Vu is the sensation that a person is having an experience for the second time even if there is no conscious memory of it.  In a similar fashion, traditional Americans have been subjected to an historical déjà vu, that is, a subtle type of Marxist-led cultural revolution similar to that which plagued other people in the past.  First, for a few decades the Marxist-Socialist media oligopoly has been systematically destroying the four “olds,” that is, traditional civilization-preserving culture, customs, habits, and ideas. The media moguls have been significantly aided by much of the academic world, government, and the mainline churches.  As a result of a combination of tactics—including misinformation and operate conditioning in news and entertainment,  threats of social isolation and reputation, threats of loss of income, and increasingly legal suppression–this self-appointed cultural elite has succeeded in destroying one civilization-and-virtue-preserving trait after another  Over a period of decades, the media has used propagandistic news programs and Pavlovian and mind-dulling entertainments to bring about a destructive cultural revolution.  And by the twenty-first century, it seemed to have achieved absolute control.

However, in 2015 a superrich civic nationalist stepped into the political arena and quickly won massive support from long-suppressed traditional Americans.  This proverbial gadfly began disrupting the plans of the Marxist-nihilist internationalist elite who included prominent members of both political parties.  By this time, the media elite and their allies were so spoiled and incompetent because of their easy decades-long dominance that they reacted to the resourceful maverick with uncontrollable hostility.  The elite’s previous barely-concealed bias exploded into a rage that is obvious even to people not accustomed to analytical thought.  And in the summer of 2020, some billionaire internationalist elites (who have long used Marxism for their own ends) began sponsoring a city-to-city Maoist-style insurrection.  New red guards were sent into major cities to engage in anarchistic rioting and terror.

And like Mao’s Red Guards, these young fanatics have been destroying any symbol of the historical past.  Having already started with statures of Confederate generals, the self-righteous mob then directed their anarchistic rage on George Washington, Columbus, and Lincoln.  And as in Mao’s China, the riots, destruction of property, beatings, and murders committed by these neo-red-guards are downplayed by the mass media, and they are depicted as peaceful demonstrators. Moreover, as in Mao’s China, but on a smaller scale, the new red guards are aided by leftist major-city mayors and some state governors who weaken and prevent local police from restoring order.  All of this has been made possible by the gradual transformation of society caused by a combination of factors.  These include the impact of major universities, in which degrees have been increasingly won through conformity with the biases of deranged Marxist professors, and by the rigged anti-Western public-school curriculum.  Equally significant have been the decades of Maoist-style criticism and self-criticism sessions called “sensitivity training.”  These American versions of Mao’s Zheng feng have been used most extensively in the military and schools and many large corporations.  And they have the effect of destroying the traditional Americans’ will to resist their dispossession. 

References.

“Burn, Loot, and Pillage!  Destruction of Antiques During China’s Cultural Revolution.”  February 10, 2013.  AFC China: The Specialist Guide to Chinese Antiques.

Houn, Franklin W.  1967.  A Short History of Chinese Communism.  Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall, Inc.

MacFarquhar, Roderick and Michael Schoenhals.  2006.  Mao’s Last Revolution.  Harvard University Press.

Mehnert, Klaus.  1972.  China Returns.  New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., Inc.

Pye, Lucian W.  1972.  China: An Introduction.  Boston: Little, Brown, and Co.

Waller, Derek J.  1971.  The Government and Politics of Communist China.  Garden City, N. Y., Doubleday and Co., Inc.

Tai Sung An.  1972.  Mao Tse-tung’s Cultural Revolution.  Indianapolis, IND: Pegasus (a division of Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc.).