The Cultural Revolution however inspired and
directed, easily degenerated into a witch hunt manned by ignorant immature
youth, who in their own turn were then sent down to the country when their
behavior became a serious threat to order and State control. Ultimately the generous description is to
call it another gross miscalculation right along with the infamous Great Leap
Forward of the Fifties.
The good news is that that generation is now
passing from the stage. As this shows,
there is still room for personal contrition and this is welcome to remind
everyone how much was lost. As
importantly, the last of the leadership brought up in this tradition is also
passing from power. That is the present
source of stress over the recent transition of power. Some of those folks still matter but not for
much longer.
I do not think that truth and reconciliation is
in our future in China. There can be
forgiveness for past excesses as the Chinese civilization evolves into the
future but little else except the death of memory.
Facing the Truth in China
The following essay draws on Gail Pellett's experiences
working with Bill Moyers on the documentary special "Facing the
Truth," about the South African Truth & Reconciliation Commission, and the year she spent in China as the first American broadcast
journalist ever hired by Radio Beijing, about which she currently is writing a
book.
The blogosphere
reporting news from China is abuzz this week with the story of the former Red
Guard – now in her 60s – apologizing for her behavior and expressing remorse
for what occurred at her elite Beijing high school during the first months of
the Cultural Revolution.
As reported by
Chris Buckley in both Toronto’s The
Globe & Mail and The
New York Times, Song Binbin, the daughter of a veteran revolutionary
general, Song Renqiong, returned to the school where she was a student Red
Guard leader in 1966 during the opening salvos of the decade long Cultural
Revolution. That’s where she had encouraged a confrontation with Principal
Bian, the school’s administrator. According to Chinese news sources, Bian died
from the beating she endured from Red Guards. It was, apparently, the first
killing of a teacher or school administrator in Beijing – August 5, 1966 — as
Mao’s new anti-authoritarian revolution took off. Within the first month of
that complicated and cataclysmic movement, in Beijing alone there would be more
than 1700 murders of teachers and administrators.
The Beijing News reported the story earlier this week and
the Chinese media and blogosphere have posted responses to Song Binbin’s act of
contrition. According to these reports, some are pleased with her expressions
of remorse, but not everyone is satisfied with her apology. Particularly Wang
Jingyao, the widower husband of Principal Bian, who has tried to keep his
wife’s story alive for almost 50 years. He thinks Song Binbin did not go far
enough in claiming responsibility for the murder of his wife.
Coming to terms with
what really happened during the Cultural Revolution is still controversial.
Because ultimately it leads to questioning the culpability of not only Mao but
the Communist Party. So the Cultural Revolution is still a censored and
delicate subject. It is especially meaningful to me.
In the summer of 1980, I
arrived in Beijing to work as a “foreign expert,” the first American broadcast
journalist to be hired by the English Department at Radio Beijing, the Chinese
equivalent of Voice of America. Just then, four years after the official end of
the Cultural Revolution and the death of Mao, stories of the pain and suffering
of that chaotic political and social movement were starting to ooze out in new
movies and short stories – called Scar literature. Mostly they were stories of
family separation when young people or parents were sent off to rural areas.
The horrible crimes of beatings, maiming and murders were not being addressed.
In our scripts at Radio Beijing the nomenclature for what started as the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution was now reduced to “those ten years of
turmoil.” There was a sense that the upcoming Trial of the Gang of Four would
somehow be a reckoning for all that went wrong. A public exorcism.
I proceeded to edit
scripts, and to teach broadcast
journalism and classes in American popular culture.
In a way I was a Deng Xiao Ping hire, the result of the Chinese leader’s Four
Modernizations policy. Engaged in gearing up China for economic reforms, as
well as a little political reform, he wanted to reach the West with news that
contained something other than Mao’s slogans. The Cultural Revolution was being
put to rest.
I was a member of a ‘60s
generation in the West that had been bamboozled by the propaganda of the
Cultural Revolution. Since China had been cut off from the West pretty much
since Liberation (The Communist Party victory in October 1949), no authentic
reporting or scholarship had reached us about what went wrong with this
revolutionary movement. Even in the mid-1970s, when some of my progressive
friends went on highly curated trips to China, they were kept in the dark about
the brutalities of that period. Many Westerners were ignorant about how a
movement with admirable ideas about egalitarianism could have gone so awfully
wrong. How mob behavior had been manipulated.
But by being there, we
caught and heard glimpses of it. I and other foreign experts who worked for
Chinese institutions would hear rumors of humiliating confrontations, beatings,
of bodies wrapped in blankets and thrown out of third story windows, of
suicides after torture, of wrongful arrests, solitary confinement, and famous
writers being sent to remote regions to clean latrines.
From my colleagues, I
could never get direct answers to the questions I posed about what had happened
at Radio Beijing. But at the time I was able to understand that both victims and
perpetrators, in what became for at
least one year the equivalent of a civil war, now sat beside each other at
their desks, having no options to change jobs nor to seek justice. A
kind of purgatory. Given the chaos, twists and turns of political directions
and confrontations, victim and perpetrator could also have been mixed in the
same person.
It took almost 25 years
for the accumulation of reliable reporting on the statistics of the Cultural
Revolution. At the trial of the Gang of Four in December 1980, the Chinese
Communist Party put the death toll at roughly 34,000. Scholars gathering
information from within China are now placing the figure in the countryside
alone at 1.5 million deaths.
Chinese and Western
scholars have written extensively about the causes, directions and details of
some of the brutalities of the Cultural Revolution, and now estimate that at
least 100 million people were persecuted in some way: arbitrary arrests, brutal
confrontations, beatings, torture, outright murder, serious injuries, forced
suicides, denied medical treatment after beatings, houses looted, forced
banishment to remote rural provinces. Top officials were not spared. A half
dozen of them committed suicide in the opening overtures of the Cultural
Revolution. Deng Xiao Ping’s son, Pufang, was thrown out of a window during a
“struggle” session and left paralyzed for life.
A few victims later
confessed to “naming” a family member, a spouse, a colleague as a “bad” element
in order to save themselves from more abuse.
Some 16 million high
school and college-aged students were sent to the countryside to work in
factories, mines or farms. Many could not return to their families and home
cities for 10 years or more. Every work unit in cities sent their comrades
to re-education farms for two years at a time. One of my colleagues at
Radio Beijing had been sent to the countryside three times for two-year stints.
While the violent
behavior and consequences are being tabulated, harder to assess is the trauma
and suffering of families when children turned against parents or witnessed
their grandparents’ suicide, or a husband’s humiliation, or parents, children,
or couples separated for years. When I arrived in Beijing the news was filled
with the problems of unemployment and a housing crisis as many of the “sent
down youth” were returning to their home cities. During the years of the
Cultural Revolution most schools were closed, faculties decimated and
facilities destroyed. There was and still is the sense of a “lost generation.” In
June of 1981, while I was working in Beijing, the Chinese Communist Party
released a statement: “The Cultural Revolution was responsible for the most
severe setbacks and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the state and
the people since the founding of the PRC. It was initiated and led by Comrade
Mao Zedong.”
That seemed to lay all
the blame on the Great Helmsman. A convenient washing of the hands. Let’s move
forward.
What fascinated me about
Song Binbin’s public act of contrition was the language she used:
“How a country faces the
future depends in large part on how it faces its past,” she said, according to
a text of her statement published on Consensus Net, a Chinese website.
“I hope that all those
who did wrong in the Cultural Revolution and hurt teachers and classmates will
face up to themselves, reflect on the Cultural Revolution, seek forgiveness and
achieve reconciliation” (as quoted in Chris Buckley’s posting in
The Globe and Mail).
In 1998, I produced an
award-winning documentary with Bill Moyers for PBS called Facing the Truth about
South Africa’s Truth & Reconciliation process. The South African model
became the standard for questions of seeking justice and reconciliation in
countries trying to move forward and recover from traumatic violent pasts when
massive human rights crimes have taken place. It offered up the possibility
of restorative justice – achieved through truth-telling – versus retributive
justice which is played out in courts and involves punishment. In our
interview with Archbishop Tutu, he said:
“The past
has a way of returning to haunt you. It doesn’t go and lie down quietly.
We need to acknowledge that we had a horrendous past. We needed to look the
beast in the eye so that the past wouldn’t hold us hostage anymore… This is a
moral universe. We have to take account of the fact that truth and lies,
goodness and evil are things that matter.”
So given the extent of
the crimes of the past that have remained unresolved and that have left an
ocean of suffering and resentment and disillusionment, the question for China
is whether the Chinese Communist Party — or a grassroots movement — has the
courage, humanity and strength to take on its own project of truth-telling and
justice seeking, forgiving and reconciliation. They are all linked.
The clock is ticking.
The generations involved are aging and dying. The husband of Principal Bian,
who was fatally beaten to death, is now 93. The Chinese people deserve a
reckoning. Forgetting is not a way forward.
For Song Binbin, who
after her Red Guard years came to the US to get a degree at MIT and worked in
the US until very recently, perhaps her US education has included learning
about a famous statement from Martin Luther King:
“The arc of the moral
universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
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