The Cultural Revolution

[hskwarrior]

The cultural revolutions.......such as the Tai Ping Rebellion killed over 20 million people. much of those people included Choy Lee Fut people.

I can't speak for the Chan Family, but the Hung Sing people were always fighting in them. Sometimes two hundred of them at a time.

it's definately a sad thing, because our elders had been killed, even murdered.

[AJM]

My Ha Say Fu Shifu escaped the cultural revolution in 1969. I dought I will ever trust the government of the PRC.

[hskwarrior]

sucks.

but, Wu Qin was a Hung Sing man, and also a personal body to Dr. Sun Yat Sen. He received this position for blowing up a japanese war ship by swimming out to it.

Sadly, Wu Qin and his wife were ambushed by the KMT and killed. Fut San has a martyr museum dedicated to him. or something to that effect.

[Lama Pai Sifu]

My teacher fought during the cultural revolution. He often talked about what a sad time/event it was. His worst memory as he told us, was of him actually fighting and killing a close friend of his - whom happened to be on the opposite side. It was a bad time and he would get quite upset when he would speak of it. He said that there was nothing worse than Chinese fighting against Chinese.

One can only think of how many martial arts masters were killed during this time and how much kung-fu was lost.

[GeneChing]

China's curious cult of the mango
11 February 2016
From the section Magazine



Fifty years ago, China was plunged into the most chaotic and traumatic decade of its recent history - the Cultural Revolution. During this period, the nation was gripped by a peculiar hysteria: a mania for mangoes. Benjamin Ramm discovers how the fruit became an object of deep veneration, and a vehicle for the promotion of the cult of Chairman Mao.
In 1966 Mao had called on the student Red Guards to rebel against "reactionary" authorities. His aim was to reshape society by purging it of bourgeois elements and traditional ways of thinking. But by the summer of 1968 the country had become engulfed in fighting, as Red Guard factions competed for power.
To quell the forces that he had unleashed, Mao sent 30,000 workers to Qinghua University in Beijing, armed only with their talisman, the Little Red Book. The students attacked them with spears and sulphuric acid, killing five and injuring more than 700, before finally surrendering. Mao thanked the workers with a gift of approximately 40 mangoes, which he had been given the previous day by Pakistan's foreign minister.
They had a huge impact.



A 1969 propaganda poster showing Mao and detail of a worker with a plate of mangoes

"No-one in northern China at that point knew what mangoes were. So the workers stayed up all night looking at them, smelling them, caressing them, wondering what this magical fruit was," says art historian Freda Murck, who has chronicled this story in detail.
"At the same time, they had received a 'high directive' from Chairman Mao - saying that henceforth, 'The Working Class Must Exercise Leadership In Everything'. It was very exciting to be given this kind of recognition."
This power shift - from the zealous students to the workers and peasants - offered respite from the anarchy.
"Some people in Beijing told me that they perceived that Mao had finally intervened in the chaotic random violence, and that the mangoes symbolised the end of the Cultural Revolution," Murck says.

Mao's Cultural Revolution


Wax replica mangoes cushioned on silk are carried in glass cases during the re-enactment of Beijing's National Day Parade in Harbin, October 1968
In May 1966, Chairman Mao launched the Cultural Revolution
The 10-year political and ideological campaign was aimed at reviving revolutionary spirit and purging the country of "impure" elements
Young Chinese people were sent to the countryside to learn from the hard life of the peasants
Millions of people were persecuted and killed during Mao's rule
BBC History

Zhang Kui, a worker who occupied Qinghua, says that the arrival of one of Mao's mangoes at his workplace prompted intense debate.
"The military representative came into our factory with the mango raised in both hands. We discussed what to do with it: whether to split it among us and eat it, or preserve it. We finally decided to preserve it," he says.
"We found a hospital that put it in formaldehyde. We made it a specimen. That was the first decision. The second decision was to make wax mangoes - wax mangoes each with a glass cover. After we made the wax replicas, we gave one to each of the Revolutionary Workers."
Workers were expected to hold the sacred fruit solemnly and reverently, and were admonished if they failed to do so.
Wang Xiaoping, an employee at the Beijing No 1 Machine Tool Plant, received a wax replica. The fruit itself was destined for higher things.
"The real mango was driven by a worker representative through a procession of beating drums and people lining the streets, from the factory to the airport," says Wang.
The workers had chartered a plane to fly a single mango to a factory in Shanghai.


The text on this poster from 1968 reads: "Our Great Leader Chairman Mao forever joins his heart with the hearts of the people"

When one of the mangoes began to rot, workers peeled it and boiled the flesh in a vat of water, which then became "holy" - each worker sipped a spoonful. (Mao is said to have chuckled on hearing this particular detail.)
"From the very beginning, the mango gift took on a relic-like quality - to be revered and even worshipped," says Cambridge University lecturer Adam Yuet Chau. "Not only was the mango a gift from the Chairman, it was the Chairman."
This association is reflected in a poem from the period:
Seeing that golden mango / Was as if seeing the Great Leader Chairman Mao!
Standing before that golden mango / Was just like standing beside Chairman Mao!
Again and again touching that golden mango: / the golden mango was so warm!
Again and again smelling the mango: / that golden mango was so fragrant!
The mangoes toured the length and breadth of the country, and were hosted in a series of sacred processions. Red Guards had wrecked temples and shrines, but destroying artefacts is easier than erasing religious behaviour, and soon the mangoes became the object of intense devotion. Some of the rituals imitated centuries of Buddhist and Daoist traditions, and the mangoes were even placed on an altar to which factory workers would bow.


The worker-peasant propaganda team in Qinghua cheers the gift of mangoes - the ribbon reads: "Respectfully wishing Chairman Mao eternal life"

China has a long history of symbolic associations with food, which may have encouraged extravagant interpretations of Mao's gift. The mangoes were compared to Mushrooms of Immortality and the Longevity Peach of Chinese mythology. The workers surmised that Mao's gift was an act of selflessness, in which he sacrificed his longevity for theirs.
Little did they know that he disliked fruit. Nor were they concerned to learn that Mao was simply passing on a gift he had already received. There is a tradition in China of zhuansong, or re-gifting. It may be regarded as vulgar in the West, but in China re-gifting is widely seen as a compliment, enhancing the status of both the giver and the recipient.
The mangoes also proved to be a gift to the propaganda department of the Communist Party, which quickly manufactured mango-themed household items, such as bed sheets, vanity stands, enamel trays and washbasins, as well as mango-scented soap and mango-flavoured cigarettes. Massive papier-mache mangoes appeared on the central float during the National Day Parade in Beijing in October 1968. Far away in Guizhou province, thousands of armed peasants fought over a black and white photocopy of a mango.



But not everybody was so enthusiastic about the fruit. The artist Zhang Hongtu told me of his scepticism.
"When the mango story was published in the newspaper, I thought it was funny, stupid, ridiculous! I'd never had a mango, but I knew it was a fruit, and any fruit will rot."
Those who expressed their doubts, however, were severely punished. A village dentist was publicly humiliated and executed after comparing a "touring" mango to a sweet potato.
The mango fever fizzled out after 18 months, and soon discarded wax replicas were being used as candles during electrical outages.
On a visit to Beijing in 1974, Imelda Marcos took a case of the Philippine national fruit - mangoes - as a gift for her hosts. Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, known as "Madame Mao" in the West, tried to replicate the earlier enthusiasm, sending the mangoes to workers. They dutifully held a ceremony and gave thanks, but Jiang Qing lacked her husband's sense of political timing.
The following year, as Mao lay ill and with no clear successor in sight, she commissioned a new film, Song of the Mango, to enhance her credibility. But within a week of its release, Jiang was arrested and the film was taken out of circulation. It was the final chapter in the mango story.

Find out more

"The precious gift presented by Great Leader Chairman Mao to the Capital Worker-Peasant Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams - a mango, 5 August 1968"
Listen to Mao's Golden Mangoes, on BBC Radio 4 on Friday 12 February at 11:00 GMT or catch up later on the BBC iPlayer.

Now mangoes are a common fruit in Beijing, and Wang Xiaoping can buy "golden mango" juice whenever she likes.
"The mystery of the mango is gone," she tells me. "It's no longer a sacred icon as before - it's become another consumer good. Young people don't know the history, but for those of us who lived through it, every time you think of mangoes your heart has a special feeling."
Mao, like the mangoes he gave the workers, now lies preserved in wax in a crystal glass case.
Historians have tended to regard the mango craze as a bizarre fad, but it is one of the few occasions when culture was created spontaneously from the bottom-up, initiated and interpreted by the workers. During a period of great cruelty, the mangoes represented for people an emblem of peace and generosity. They wanted to believe the promise written on the enamel trays: "With each mango, profound kindness."

This is one of the craziest CR tales I've heard so far.

[GeneChing]

China's Cultural Revolution must be confronted
The enemies of the state existed nowhere but in the muddled head of the ageing "Great Helmsman".
24 Feb 2016 11:41 GMT | Arts & Culture, Human Rights, Politics, Asia Pacific, China


Without confronting the past and learning the lesson, the 'China Dream' - the country's drive towards national rejuvenation - will, sadly, remain a dream, writes Zhang [Getty Images]

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lijia Zhang is the author of "Socialism is Great!" A Worker's Memoir of the New China.

Spotting my grandfather's stiffened body hanging from the wooden beam in the hall was my earliest memory. I was four then and the year was 1968, at the height of the Cultural Revolution. Grandfather, a small-time grain-dealer in his 50s, took his own life because he was terrified that his politically problematic background - he wasn't from a poor farmer or worker's family - would land him with the fate he had often witnessed: humiliation and torture at public gatherings.

This year will see the 50th anniversary of the movement, formerly called the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which lasted for 10 years. In May 1966, Chairman Mao Zedong launched the mass movement, intending to preserve "true" socialist ideology of the new regime, and purge those "capitalist elements" that had supposedly infiltrated the Chinese Communist Party. In reality, the enemies of the state existed nowhere but in the muddled head of the ageing "Great Helmsman".

In response to the call from the chairman who was worshipped like a god, wars were fought between different factions, each believing themselves to be the "true revolutionaries". Leaders of all levels were overthrown, couples denounced each other, students beat up their teachers, intellectuals and other "bad elements" were persecuted and were banished to the countryside, and ancient temples and cultural relics were destroyed.

Cultural disaster

In 1981, the Communist Party announced the Cultural Revolution a disaster, and more or less told its citizens to forget about it and look forward. And this year there will be no public event to mark the start of the movement that shaped contemporary China.

The authorities obviously don't want to associate themselves with something that could damage their credibility. Not being the most confident regime, the Chinese government is extremely concerned with its legitimacy.

During the Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao practised a prerogative system which protected the privileged stratum, a fertile breeding ground for corruption. While the ordinary people survived on rationed rice, luxury villas were built for Mao and other top leaders.

In contrast to the official silence, the internet is abuzz with a debate. Many liberal intellectuals are calling for 2016 to be made the year to "thoroughly reflect on the Cultural Revolution", yet some ultra-leftists are calling for the movement to be re-evaluated, arguing that the Cultural Revolution has been demonised.

Demonised? It appears the majority of those who hold such a view have little idea what actually happened during one of the most traumatic decades in recent Chinese history, let alone the scale or the depth of its horror.

In some ways, they can't take all the blame for their ignorance. The excesses of the Cultural Revolution have been very much glossed over. Books and films on the topic are subject to strict censorship - at school, pupils can learn only the skeleton of the event.

Ba Jin, a renowned writer who described the movement as a "spiritual pollution", and requested - on his death bed - that the government build a Cultural Revolution museum. Many renown writers, such as Feng Jicai, who risked his life by recording the stories of that mad decade, have joined in the chorus. So far, their wishes have not been fulfilled.

The official stance that ignores what happened and encourages Chinese citizens to forget about it is deeply disturbing. As Confucius says: "Study the past if you would define the future"; we have to study the past, especially a past event of such significance.

Unless we truly confront the Cultural Revolution, certain aspects of it may repeat themselves.

The complexity of the movement

One wonders why so many Chinese are not willing to face the country's past. I guess there have always been disasters in Chinese history. For some, the best way to cope with past tragedy is to forget about it and move on. Others passively accept the official verdict as they believe that in an undemocratic society, their views on the Cultural Revolution don't make any difference.

Some die-hard leftists, as well as those who have not benefited much from the reforms and opening-up, tend to look at the Cultural Revolution nostalgically, arguing that there was no corruption under Mao and that people were more equal.

The reality was quite different. I believe that some of the social vice in today's China, such as moral decline, the lack of trust among the people and corruption, are rooted in the movement.

During the Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao practised a prerogative system which protected the privileged stratum, a fertile breeding ground for corruption. While the ordinary people survived on rationed rice, luxury villas were built for Mao and other top leaders.

Apart from the official silence on the Cultural Revolution, I find the attitude of some patriotic youth equally troubling. The country's fast-growing economy and its rising position in the world has generated a growing nationalism among some young people, who choose not to examine the mistakes China has made.

A decade of horrors

Despite the authorities' effort to keep the lid firmly in place, more and more information is coming to light. Last May, a well-respected academic, Qin Hui, published an essay entitled The Rejection of the Cultural Revolution is not Thorough and the Truth Still Needs to be Further Revealed, on a liberal intellectual website Aisixiang.

Qin detailed the horrors that took place in Southwest China's Guangxi province in 1967, horrors too deplorable to describe, including cannibalism. In dozens of cases, even the wives and daughters of the accused were not spared. They would be raped first. After their murder, their breasts and private parts were cut out and sometimes their livers were eaten. All in the name of the revolution. Qin's piece is still being circulated widely among netizens, together other articles shedding lift on the turbulent decade.

I welcome articles like Qin's and the debates they have sparked as the anniversary is approaching. Hopefully they will push the Chinese people to ask some hard questions: Why did the Cultural Revolution take place? What happened exactly? Why did so many people participate with religious zeal? What did it say about the national characteristics of the Chinese people? What lessons can be learned from the catastrophe? And, more importantly, what can be done to prevent it from happening again?

I, for one, will never forget about the Cultural Revolution, for the sake of my family as well as for the nation. Without confronting the past and learning the lesson, the "China Dream" - the country's drive towards national rejuvenation - will, sadly, remain a dream.

Lijia Zhang is the author of "Socialism is Great!": A Worker's Memoir of the New China.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

Popped up on my newsfeed. Thought it might sit well here.

[David Jamieson]

The Cultural Revolution in retrospect (1966-1976) was about purging intellectualism, free thought, political freedom etc in favour of, or the creation of a cult of personality around Mao. Mao further used communist idealism and tainting of the youth through artificial empowerment by giving them authority over others.
Immature of mind, it is not hard to see how people can be made to rise up easily by simply giving them a perceived notion of power.

If you have at least two kids, you can experiment with this to rise to tyranny easily.
Make one the authority over the other. Both will view you as the ultimate authority in the end.

A testament to the human condition. Mao exploited it like all others who are regarded as "great".

"Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely and all great men are fundamentally bad men." - Lord Acton

[Jimbo]

The Cultural Revolution in retrospect (1966-1976) was about purging intellectualism, free thought, political freedom etc in favour of, or the creation of a cult of personality around Mao. Mao further used communist idealism and tainting of the youth through artificial empowerment by giving them authority over others.
Immature of mind, it is not hard to see how people can be made to rise up easily by simply giving them a perceived notion of power.

If you have at least two kids, you can experiment with this to rise to tyranny easily.
Make one the authority over the other. Both will view you as the ultimate authority in the end.

A testament to the human condition. Mao exploited it like all others who are regarded as "great".

"Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely and all great men are fundamentally bad men." - Lord Acton