Three decades later, Zhang Jian Tsai is still haunted by the humiliating scene of his boss, an innocent man accused of political crimes, being paraded through the streets of this factory town like a bullied schoolboy.
A dunce cap on his head and a sign around his neck identifying him as an enemy of the people, Yang Chiu Cheng was led by a jostling crowd, his head pushed forward and arms pinned into the torturous position called “the jet plane,” which told onlookers that here was a man to be reviled and abused.
This was a moment like many from China’s disastrous Cultural Revolution, the 1966-76 political movement that destroyed tens of millions of lives and cost the economy 10 years of productivity in a horrifically misguided attempt by Chairman Mao Tse-tung to reassert his power and reinvigorate passion for revolutionary communism.
It is 25 years ago this month that “the great proletarian Cultural Revolution” ended, and 35 years this summer since its start. But it is an anniversary going unrecognized in China, a society that otherwise loves to commemorate important political dates with speeches and giant banners.
There have been no memorial services or retrospectives in the media, and only a cursory acknowledgement of the 25th anniversary of Mao’s death on Sept. 9, 1976, the event that led to the Cultural Revolution’s end weeks later.
Understandable silence
The silence from survivors, scholars and the media reflects the fact that the Cultural Revolution is too big an embarrassment to the government to remember. In an era defined by the rousing development of a free-market economy, communist ideology is already outdated. A full accounting of the Cultural Revolution’s horrors would further reduce the party’s depleted legitimacy.
According to several Chinese scholars, a longtime ban on the research and publishing of serious works on the Cultural Revolution remains in place. That leaves only a smattering of personal memoirs in the form of books and movies as reminders of the political anarchy that turned China upside down.
Chinese students learn few facts beyond some dates, and they are taught not to ask about the period that began as a political campaign but descended quickly into violent chaos.
The Cultural Revolution is one of the great social tragedies of the 20th Century. Urged by the government to uncover and destroy all vestiges of Western thought and traditional Chinese values, countless people were persecuted on the flimsiest of charges, targeted in many instances by friends and co-workers whipped into a frenzy they could not control and were afraid to question. Youthful Red Guards, a paramilitary group, led the ideological charge.
Victims were fired from jobs, humiliated and tortured, jailed, murdered or driven to suicide. The atmosphere of extremism produced forced confessions and public “struggle session” meetings at which workers were expected to attack bosses and anyone else who could be accused of being counterrevolutionary.
Factories and schools shut down or wasted time obsessing over Mao’s writings. Trainloads of students were banished to the countryside to work as idealized peasants, where they suffered miserable conditions. Some were ripped from families they would not see for years. Many were robbed of their education.
Admission, but no apology
Officially, the government acknowledged in 1981 that the Cultural Revolution was wrong and Mao had made mistakes. Victims were rehabilitated and the “gang of four,” including Mao’s wife, was tried and convicted of usurping power. But there was no apology, and Mao’s revered status was preserved.
Since then, silence about the entire era has prevailed. There has been no opportunity for a full public disclosure of the persecution and no chance for a complete healing of the wounds.
Hidden wounds
There is no way to measure the psychological scars and no way to judge how the generation that endured the Cultural Revolution has recovered. Victims, villains and those who stood by have been left to make their own peace, to try to forget or to continue suffering alone.
“Many Chinese people have psychological problems because of the Cultural Revolution,” said Xu You Yu of the China Academy of Social Science, who has written a memoir on the era. “If they think they don’t have problems, the only reason is they have chosen to forget. It’s a very sad thing.”
The danger of sweeping the legacy of the Cultural Revolution under the carpet is not just an obstruction of the healing process. As in all failures of history, those who forget risk repeating that failure. Even if China never repeats its mistakes, it could happen elsewhere.
“It’s human nature to forget–it’s easy,” said Song Yongyi of Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, who was jailed as a teenager in Shanghai for four years for participating in a book club that read Western works like “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.” “The responsibility for remembering is with the government and the Chinese intellectuals.”
Song has tried to remember, and it has cost him. In 1999, as chief editor of a major American academic project to catalog original materials from the Cultural Revolution, Song–a U.S. resident at the time–was arrested in China for endangering state security. His crime, he said, was collecting two boxes of newspapers from the era. They are the kinds of old papers still found in libraries and some flea markets, but it took an international political campaign to free him.
“I’ve devoted my life to the Cultural Revolution,” Song said. “Like the Jewish people who have a strong collective memory of the Holocaust, it’s the only thing I can do.”
Without the freedom to look back and question, the most common option for survivors is to hide their feelings or try to forget.
Tale of two survivors
An examination of one incident in one city rent by the Cultural Revolution shows the victim recovered better than the zealots who tormented him.
In Zhengzhou, an old industrial city in central China, Yang the factory boss was rehabilitated. He lives in comfortable retirement. Zhang, a former Red Guard, and his wife quietly dwell on the cost of the chaos.
Though they live in the same neighborhood, Yang and Zhang have never spoken to each other about the incident, but they remember it in more or less the same way: A boss who had done nothing wrong was stripped of his job and his dignity and was charged with political crimes because the revolution demanded victims. He was a convenient target.
He lost his position and was held captive in the factory canteen for four months. In shifts his former employees paraded him through the streets to be taunted.
Both men feel they were caught up in events they could not control, but it is Zhang and his wife who are troubled by their reflections and disappointed with their lives. Yang, the victim, appears at peace.
“I don’t feel anger or resentment,” Yang said. “After the Cultural Revolution the factory held a big-scale meeting and restored my good reputation.” He retired as director of engineering and was even asked to help write a factory history.
Zhang, along with wife, Guo Xiang Min, regret what the Cultural Revolution did to them.
Zhang, who was laid off from a factory job and now sells bean juice for a living, said he can’t apologize directly to Yang or anyone else because no one made the choice to participate.
“We understand each other,” Zhang said. “I still chat with many people in my neighborhood who used to be criticized. I didn’t mean to criticize them, but I had to, or people would have criticized me.”
But Zhang and his wife talk with sadness about these events, partly because, unlike Yang, they never got back what they lost: education and a chance at a different future.
“Our whole generation was destroyed,” his wife said.
