September 15, 2014 • 24 mins
Mao's plan to once again put China on the path to modernization was the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The first phase was a very aggressive, radical series of purges and arrests that went from 1966 to 1968. Read the show notes here.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I and we are closing
in on the end of our mini series on China
(00:21):
during the time of Chairman Mao Zedong, and we've talked
to the last two installments about how China's Greatly Forward Movement,
which started in was almost entirely a failure. Yes, it
allowed the nation to streamline some production and to build
some new infrastructure, but a lot of that work was
(00:43):
was of inferior quality. It eventually crumbled or failed, and
the consequences of deforestation and dam building, a wetlands, draining,
and other attempts to tame the land wound up being
ecologically devastating, and most notably, the Great Leak Forwards Lysses
led directly to a famine in which an estimated thirty
(01:03):
five to forty five million people died. By the time
the Great Leap Forward ended, Chairman Mountedung had been replaced
as the Chinese head of state, but he was still
the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party or CCP, and
as such he still maintained enormous power and influence, but
thanks to the failure of the Great Leap Forward, by
(01:25):
the nineteen sixties that power was really waning and he
was under huge pressure to fix things. He also thought
the People's Republic of China was heading in the wrong direction.
It lacked revolutionary spirit, and it was trending toward capitalism
and away from its communist ideals. He was really worried
that disparity and inequality were on the rise, which just
(01:47):
ran completely contrary to the egalitarian ideas that he had
been pursuing, and he thought the same thing was happening
in the Soviet Union too. It seemed to him that
after the death of Joseph Spalen, the Soviet Union was
contaminating itself with capitalism. He also suspected that some of
his opposition wanted to bring back the old Imperial regime regime,
(02:08):
which had ended when he was in his late teens.
Mao's great plan to address all of these problems and
to once again put China on the path to modernization
was the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, or just known as
the Cultural Revolution, which started in nineteen sixty six. It
fell roughly into two phases. A really aggressive, radical phase
(02:32):
of purges and arrests that went from nineteen sixty six
to nineteen sixty eight, and a revision of China's culture
and government that followed and continued until Mao's death in
nineteen seventies six. So we're gonna tackle each of these
phases in a separate episode and that will conclude this
mini series. Been a herculean effort. So I'm feeling a
(02:55):
little relieved right now. Um begin with the revolutionary ideas
that started all of this. Mao's third wife, Jiong Ching,
had been an actress before the pair married, and many
of the other party leaders were actively distrustful of her,
so at first she mostly worked low level positions within
the government. Before the start of the Cultural Revolution, she
(03:18):
was working in the Central Propaganda Department at the Ministry
of Culture. She was one of the people who decided
what kinds of operas and dramatic works could be performed
in China. In nineteen sixty five, she kind of outlined
all the things that she thought had failed about the
changes maw had tried to make in China. In China
so far, in her view, the next aspect of the
(03:38):
revolution needed to be specifically cultural. Now We're going to
talk about her specific contributions to China's culture during the
revolution in the next episode. But she was an important
figure in all this that we would really be remiss
if we put off mentioning her until later. The Central
Committee of the CCP met in May of nineteen sixty
(03:59):
six to launched the Cultural Revolution. It issued a sixteen
point set of guidelines outlining the revolution on August eighth
of the same year. It is not, unfortunately, a simple
list of sixteen things, or we would read them off.
Mao wanted to attack the quote four olds. These were
old ideas, culture, customs, and beliefs. Anything that seemed bourgeois
(04:22):
or feudal was to be destroyed, and this mouth thought
would just clear the way for new greatness in art
and literature and education. Also to be removed from Chinese
culture were the so called five Black Elements. So those
were landlords, rich peasants, counter revolutionaries, bad elements, and rightists.
(04:44):
So too specify what some of those are. Counter revolutionaries
where anyone who was critical of Mao and his plans,
and bad elements were basically criminals. Rightists were people who
had been critical of the party in the government during
the hundred Flower his campaign, which we talked about in
more detail during the Great Leak Forward episode. Mao also
(05:05):
wanted to close the gap between rural people and urban people,
and between laborers and intellectuals. About eight percent of China's
population lived in rural areas, many of them were extremely poor,
and on the other hand, there was another more privileged
class of people that included landlords, intellectuals, and others, and
these people had wealth and status while the peasantry simply
(05:27):
did not, and Mao wanted to end this disparity in
China's long history of elitism in its more privileged classes.
One of his first steps was to send university students
to the country to work and to be quote re educated.
They were going to work on farms and to learn
from the proletariat or the working class people, and this
(05:47):
served multiple purposes simultaneously. It got the young intellectuals, who
mal considered to be a threat out of the way.
It didn't end run around unemployment problems that were plaguing
China cities. If they were working the country, these students
would not be competing for jobs when they finished school,
and it provided additional labor for the peasantry, and it
(06:07):
gave the peasantry an opportunity to learn from students that
had now moved in down to basic skills like literally,
literacy and math. By the fall of nineteen sixty eight,
one point five million university students had been sent to
the country to work, and Mao had a different plan
(06:27):
for China's younger students. So while the university students were
immediately being sent to the country, the high school aged
students were encouraged to join a new organization called the
Red Guard. The Red Guard was a pseudo army empowered
to seek out and deal with the Five Black Elements.
It had the flavor of a grassroots movement and of
(06:49):
radical youth movements that existed in other parts of the
world in the nineteen sixties, but really participation was encouraged
and enabled by the government, specifically by Mao. Being in
the Red Guard was simultaneously a political act and an
act of rebellion. The Red Guard was supportive of Mao
and destructive towards his ad ever series, but at the
(07:11):
same time it was rebellious, It was violent, and it
was hard to control. It was, after all, essentially an
army of teenagers operating, operating with little to no adult supervision,
and empowered by their government to aggressively pursue enemies. Even
if adults wanted to curb the Red Guard's more extreme behavior,
(07:32):
they really couldn't for fear of being branded counter revolutionaries
and then targeted by the Red Guard themselves. This was
especially true considering how wholeheartedly Mao was in support of
the Red Guard's activities, so much so that he closed
all the schools in June of nineteen sixty six so
students could participate. Then he met them in Beijing for
(07:53):
a series of rallies. So you know anything about Mao,
you know, they had this immense cult of personality, and
he really wanted to inspire fervor in these young people,
so he made grand gestures like trying to swim across
the Yangzi River, which the youth then emulated. After this
(08:14):
series of rallies in Beijing, many of the ones who
had gotten the chance to meet the chairman refused to
wash the hands they used to touch him. He also
granted the student's free rail passes so that they could
engage in what was known as quote revolutionary tourism. The
students made what's known as big character posters, so posters
with slogans, criticisms and the like written in Chinese characters
(08:38):
and hung up on buildings. Mao made one of his
own to further cement his connection to the youth, and
probably the most memorable part of the connection between Mao
and the Red Guard. They carried with them a copy
of quotations from the works of Mao Zedong or Mao's
Little Red Book, and they would refer to it regularly
(08:59):
in their work. To seek out dissenters, counter revolutionaries, capitalists,
and anyone else who didn't fit in with MoU's ideology,
the Red Guard became zealous and ruthless. Their targets included intellectuals, teachers,
capitalists as we mentioned, and party officials who were critical
of Mao. They rated the homes of perceived enemies, who
(09:21):
they often beat, humiliated, and imprisoned. Some of their targets
were sent into force labor and re education programs around
the country, some were imprisoned, as we said, and some
were killed. The Red Guard rated more than one hundred
thousand homes in Beijing alone, one thousand, seven hundred people died.
(09:41):
Some of these were suicides following the Red Guards public humiliation.
The worst month was August of nineteen sixty six, which
became known as Red August. There wasn't just one monolithic
Red Guard, though, there were differences in how these groups
behaved and how they conducted themselves because they weren't really
report in to any kind of central leadership. In some cases,
(10:03):
the Red Guard factions formed rivalries and they clashed against
each other really violently, with each faction believing that it
and none of the others was correctly interpreting and following
the views of Chairman Mao. In Beijing, for example, many
of the Red Guards members were children of high ranking
members of the CCP. They banded together and in a
(10:26):
group known as Coordinated Action, carried out what was called
the Red Terror, a horrifying and violent campaign that was
meant to protect their parents. This was really the opposite
of what the Red Guard was intended to do, because
the parents that they were protecting were people who were
suspected of capitalist leanings. They were actually meant to be
the people that the Red Guard would be pursuing. So
(10:49):
by September of nineteen sixty seven, so the Red Guard
had been going on for about a year, it was
near anarchy in some cities, and Mao and Defense Minister
Lynn Biao deployed troops to try to restore order. The
People's Liberation Army was also stationed around nuclear power plants,
museums and the like that were threatened by the Red
Guard's violence. Mao himself was astonished at the level of
(11:11):
violence and anarchy that the Red Guard had turned to.
By nineteen sixty eight, the fervor and intensity of the
Red Guard had become a liability, so Mao started handing
more power over to the People's Liberation Army instead. A
common misperception is that the Red Guard rampaged all over
China throughout the Cultural Revolution, but really it's heyday was
(11:34):
nineteen sixty six, and by nineteen sixty eight it was
really on the wane. Mao was shocked by how violent
and zealous they had become, and he recognized that they
had really outlived their usefulness. So at that point, high
school aged children joined the university students and being sent
to the country to work. By nineteen seventy eight, sixteen
(11:54):
million students total had been sent to the country, and
sending young people into the country, we also went all
the way through the Cultural Revolution and after it was over,
with that practice ending in nineteen eighty. It reminds me
of like Lord of the Flies. That's exactly what I
was thinking as well. So before we get to the
(12:17):
other hallmark of this part of the Cultural Revolution, let's
take a brief moment for a word from a sponsor.
It sounds grand so to return to the Cultural Revolution
along with all of his goals to close the wealth gap,
elevate China's proletariat, and inspire a revolutionary spirit of the
nation's youth. Another one of Mao's objectives and the Cultural
(12:40):
Revolution was to get rid of anyone in the government
who opposed him, so that he could ensure that his
successors would carry on his work the way he wanted
after he was gone. So, running alongside the Red Guard's
work among China's intellectuals, capitalists, and right as citizens, both
real and suspected, was an ongoing purge of the same
influences in China's government. For the most part, Mao didn't
(13:03):
go directly after his highest ranking opponents. Instead, he would
go after their underlings. He would discredit them, publicly, humiliate them,
or have them arrested. Then once their support within the
party had been destroyed. He would go after those bigger
targets who became much easier to take down without their supporters. Uh.
One of these was Leo Chao Chi, who we mentioned
(13:25):
in the Great Famine episode. He was at that point
China's head of state. He had replaced Mao in nine,
at which point it was clear that Mao's Greatly Forward
was failing. We also pronounced his name just a little
bit differently in that episode because I found a different
and better pronunciation resource between when we recorded the first
two episodes and these two episodes, and neither of us
(13:47):
speaks a total language we are really trying um. Leo
had vocally argued against the Great Leap Forward when he
realized how devastating it had turned out to be for
China's farmers. Unlike other leaders who had begun to sway
Mao away from the Greatly policies, Leo had criticized Mao directly,
(14:10):
rather than shifting the blame to other people, saying they
had sort of misinterpreted or wrongly carried out Moo's vision.
And this work, while crucial to ending the famine, came
back to bite him. Leo was removed from office in
nineteen sixty six, beaten and imprisoned, and he died in
prison in nineteen sixty nine. Dong Xiaoping was the General
(14:33):
Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, and he was purged
from his office as well, along with two thirds of
the Communist Party's Central Committee. Purchase continued through nineteen sixty
seven and nineteen sixty eight, and he's mostly took place
in cities and also included members of the People's Liberation Army.
Purged officials should be exiled, imprisoned, or sent into forced labor.
(14:58):
More generally intellectual were sent into the country and re
educated as well. That often meant that the people who
had been running things were no longer there to run them,
so businessmen, administrators, engineers, and others who were doing jobs
that required an education were in since instead sent to
rural areas to du forced labor, or sometimes sent a
(15:20):
prison or killed. The people who moved into these positions
often simply did not have the knowledge or the skills
to do them. They abolished regulations and abandoned the procedures
that industries had previously followed, especially for the late nineteen
sixties years of the cultural revolution, China's economy really suffered
dramatically as a consequence. In in nineteen sixty eight, the
(15:43):
Chinese economy also started to collapse, with virtually every economic
measure dropping well below prior year's levels. Between nineteen sixty
seven and nineteen sixty nine, there was just a huge
focus on quote purifying class ranks, and this went so
far as to look back into people's family trees and
whether they had family members in the past who had
(16:06):
been counter revolutionary or had immigrated outside of China. People
were persecuted for their own family, their own backgrounds, and
that of their family members, including like in the past,
like their their parents and grandparents, whether they were still
in touch with these family members, or whether they still
held so called counter revolutionary beliefs. Tens of thousands of
(16:29):
people were killed in the resulting investigations. This through China
cities completely into chaos, with organizations failing after their leaders
were exiled or arrested. Media outlets that have been sponsored
by those organizations failed. The number of magazines and newspapers
being printed in China plummeted, and the ones that remained
(16:50):
were under the oversight of the state. In addition to
the perception that China's elite had attitudes that were threatening
to Mao's vision of order. They also had stuff. If
you were an intellectual elite person, if you made a
good income, you probably owned things like paintings and artifacts
and collections of things that were historically or culturally valuable
(17:12):
in some way. So owning artwork became considered to be bourgeois,
and so did being a professional artist. So, since China's
art had a long history of being politically oriented in
some way, a lot of the existing art also celebrated
ideals that were no longer considered to be acceptable, and
(17:33):
this is what led China, mostly at the hands of
the Red Guard, to destroy cultural and historical treasures during
the Cultural Revolution. Portrayals of this in the West are
often along the lines of every possible artifact with any
hint whatsoever of bourgeoisie or imperialism just being destroyed. And
while entire historical sites were reduced to rubble and a
(17:55):
lot of artifacts were destroyed, it wasn't quite the wholesale
destruction of a nation's entire artistic and cultural history that
you kind of see in Western portrayals. Sometimes books and
documents really fared the worst since they were easy to
burn or pulp, and the Red Guard would air on
the side of suspicion when dealing with them. But often
(18:16):
when the Red Guard rated someone's home, they would turn
over things that were obviously valuable to the state, and
as words spread of what the Red Guard was doing,
people sometimes destroyed their own possessions preemptively. They're also as
it became clear that the Red Guard was out of control,
there were some efforts on the part of the government
to protect things that were really culturally important and needed
(18:38):
to be preserved. So it wasn't as though the government
completely turned a blind eye and was like just smash
it all, like that's not that's not what's going on.
But by nineteen sixty nine, China's intellectual class had been gutted.
It's government had been cleared out of nearly all dissent,
either real or imagined, its cities had been thrown into chaos,
(19:01):
and its economy had been run off the rails. Works
of art, artifacts and monuments had been destroyed. This really
left an open playing field for Maw to recraft the
nation's government, culture, and way of thought to suit his
own ends, and that is what we're going to talk
about in our next episode. It breaks my heart to
(19:23):
think of all that art being destroyed. I kind of
have to pinch myself tonight, get choked up when we
talk about it. Do you have some listener mail for
us to enjoy? I do. I am going to read
a pretty happy piece of listener mailoray. This is from
Valentine and he says, Hello, Tracy and Holly love the show.
(19:45):
Your episode on galut at University Death President now opened
our minds to the deaf community. This led me to
attend a s L meetings and pivot the promotion of
our startup, My Bell, And he has a video that
I will put in our show notes and you can
watch it too. My bell is basically a digital thing
that you can mount on the handlebars of a bicycle,
(20:08):
so it will play like prerecorded instead of just a
regular bicycle bell, it will play prerecorded things that you
can use in place foot bill. Listening to one podcast
Yours led to some brainstorming and a string of miraculous events.
During our kickstarter we hit a plateau and we're running
out of ideas on what to do to relax and
clear my mind. I naturally listen to your podcast and
(20:30):
stumbled stumbled upon the DPN episode. This led to visualizing
how our product can help deaf cyclists. Deaf cyclists as
described in our video, and I'm going to tell you
in case you don't get to watch the video to
take a break from the letter, Um, it is by
recording things like on your left, So like having a
(20:51):
prerecorded thing this is on your left to play as
you approach someone that you're going to pass on your bicycle. UM,
do you better could be undicate with the like a
hearing cyclist in front of you, that that you're coming
up behind them. To get back to the letter. From there,
I contacted Carrie Brewer, a deaf cycling activist. Our minds
clicked and she sent us a video testimony. Also, I
(21:14):
started attending local as L meeting satisfying my childhood desire
to learn sign language. At the a s L meeting,
I met Big Wang, a filmmaker learning as L for
his next project, which is on children of deaf adults.
He played a big role in making the promotion, editing
subtitles as L voiceover and be footage simultaneously. Once the
video was done, we sent it to every deaf media
(21:37):
outlet available. Since then, we have been on the Daily Moth,
def TV, and just this Monday, I Deaf News interviewed
us and a new friend from the a s L
meeting was happy to be our interpreter and the end
their kickstarter did not meet at school, but learning how
our product can help deaf cyclists. The adventures involved are priceless.
Thank you Valentine, Thank you Valentine for writing to us.
(21:59):
I love that whole idea you so much. I do,
and and I kind of interrupted the letter a couple
of times to explain what the video is because you know,
we can't play you the video right now in this
audio podcast to see what it was he was talking about.
And it's a really cool idea and something I had
not ever thought of before, which is one of the
reasons we pick episodes like this to try to get
(22:22):
people to think about things that maybe they have never
thought of before. So I had never thought of if
you are not a speaking person, how do you communicate?
How do you communicate with the person in front of
you when you were on a bicycle Apart from just
a bell, which is not a very like there's no
bell code of yeah, ways to bring the bicycle bell
(22:42):
for people to know what you're doing. It makes noise
and it might get attention that there's no clear definition
of what it means. Yeah, well, and I think I also, uh,
there's a bike path near where I live now that
I've spent a lot of time on and so I
also am more aware of the things that cyclists do
to try to let pedestrians new what is going on
(23:03):
behind them. So anyway, I am really glad that this
podcast was able to, you know, inspire somebody to think
of a new use for something they were trying to do.
So it's pretty awesome. Yeah, if you would like to
write to us, you can. We are at History Podcast
at how Stuffworks dot com. Our Facebook is Facebook dot
com slash miss in history, and our Twitter is at
(23:25):
missed in History. Our tumbler is missed in History dot
tumbler dot com, and we're on Pinterest at pinterest dot
com slash missed in History. We also have a spreadshirt store.
You can reach it from the home page of our website,
which is missed in History dot com, or you can
just go to miss in History dot spreadshirt dot com.
If you want to go straight there. If you would
like to learn a little more about what we've talked
(23:46):
about today, you can come to our parent company's website
and put the word MAU into the search bar and
you will find MOUs just kind of unfortunate place. I'm
saying this because the circumstances were unfortunate, not the placement
was unfortunate. An article called the top ten public enemies. Uh.
(24:08):
That is that how stuff works dot com. Or you
can come to our website where we will put up
share notes that include all of the sources that we've
used for this, as well as a link to the
video we were just talking about for the digital bicycle bell.
You can do all of that and a whole lot
more at our website, which is missed in history dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
(24:32):
Because it how stuff works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I and we are closing
in on the end of our mini series on China
(00:21):
during the time of Chairman Mao Zedong, and we've talked
to the last two installments about how China's Greatly Forward Movement,
which started in was almost entirely a failure. Yes, it
allowed the nation to streamline some production and to build
some new infrastructure, but a lot of that work was
(00:43):
was of inferior quality. It eventually crumbled or failed, and
the consequences of deforestation and dam building, a wetlands, draining,
and other attempts to tame the land wound up being
ecologically devastating, and most notably, the Great Leak Forwards Lysses
led directly to a famine in which an estimated thirty
(01:03):
five to forty five million people died. By the time
the Great Leap Forward ended, Chairman Mountedung had been replaced
as the Chinese head of state, but he was still
the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party or CCP, and
as such he still maintained enormous power and influence, but
thanks to the failure of the Great Leap Forward, by
(01:25):
the nineteen sixties that power was really waning and he
was under huge pressure to fix things. He also thought
the People's Republic of China was heading in the wrong direction.
It lacked revolutionary spirit, and it was trending toward capitalism
and away from its communist ideals. He was really worried
that disparity and inequality were on the rise, which just
(01:47):
ran completely contrary to the egalitarian ideas that he had
been pursuing, and he thought the same thing was happening
in the Soviet Union too. It seemed to him that
after the death of Joseph Spalen, the Soviet Union was
contaminating itself with capitalism. He also suspected that some of
his opposition wanted to bring back the old Imperial regime regime,
(02:08):
which had ended when he was in his late teens.
Mao's great plan to address all of these problems and
to once again put China on the path to modernization
was the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, or just known as
the Cultural Revolution, which started in nineteen sixty six. It
fell roughly into two phases. A really aggressive, radical phase
(02:32):
of purges and arrests that went from nineteen sixty six
to nineteen sixty eight, and a revision of China's culture
and government that followed and continued until Mao's death in
nineteen seventies six. So we're gonna tackle each of these
phases in a separate episode and that will conclude this
mini series. Been a herculean effort. So I'm feeling a
(02:55):
little relieved right now. Um begin with the revolutionary ideas
that started all of this. Mao's third wife, Jiong Ching,
had been an actress before the pair married, and many
of the other party leaders were actively distrustful of her,
so at first she mostly worked low level positions within
the government. Before the start of the Cultural Revolution, she
(03:18):
was working in the Central Propaganda Department at the Ministry
of Culture. She was one of the people who decided
what kinds of operas and dramatic works could be performed
in China. In nineteen sixty five, she kind of outlined
all the things that she thought had failed about the
changes maw had tried to make in China. In China
so far, in her view, the next aspect of the
(03:38):
revolution needed to be specifically cultural. Now We're going to
talk about her specific contributions to China's culture during the
revolution in the next episode. But she was an important
figure in all this that we would really be remiss
if we put off mentioning her until later. The Central
Committee of the CCP met in May of nineteen sixty
(03:59):
six to launched the Cultural Revolution. It issued a sixteen
point set of guidelines outlining the revolution on August eighth
of the same year. It is not, unfortunately, a simple
list of sixteen things, or we would read them off.
Mao wanted to attack the quote four olds. These were
old ideas, culture, customs, and beliefs. Anything that seemed bourgeois
(04:22):
or feudal was to be destroyed, and this mouth thought
would just clear the way for new greatness in art
and literature and education. Also to be removed from Chinese
culture were the so called five Black Elements. So those
were landlords, rich peasants, counter revolutionaries, bad elements, and rightists.
(04:44):
So too specify what some of those are. Counter revolutionaries
where anyone who was critical of Mao and his plans,
and bad elements were basically criminals. Rightists were people who
had been critical of the party in the government during
the hundred Flower his campaign, which we talked about in
more detail during the Great Leak Forward episode. Mao also
(05:05):
wanted to close the gap between rural people and urban people,
and between laborers and intellectuals. About eight percent of China's
population lived in rural areas, many of them were extremely poor,
and on the other hand, there was another more privileged
class of people that included landlords, intellectuals, and others, and
these people had wealth and status while the peasantry simply
(05:27):
did not, and Mao wanted to end this disparity in
China's long history of elitism in its more privileged classes.
One of his first steps was to send university students
to the country to work and to be quote re educated.
They were going to work on farms and to learn
from the proletariat or the working class people, and this
(05:47):
served multiple purposes simultaneously. It got the young intellectuals, who
mal considered to be a threat out of the way.
It didn't end run around unemployment problems that were plaguing
China cities. If they were working the country, these students
would not be competing for jobs when they finished school,
and it provided additional labor for the peasantry, and it
(06:07):
gave the peasantry an opportunity to learn from students that
had now moved in down to basic skills like literally,
literacy and math. By the fall of nineteen sixty eight,
one point five million university students had been sent to
the country to work, and Mao had a different plan
(06:27):
for China's younger students. So while the university students were
immediately being sent to the country, the high school aged
students were encouraged to join a new organization called the
Red Guard. The Red Guard was a pseudo army empowered
to seek out and deal with the Five Black Elements.
It had the flavor of a grassroots movement and of
(06:49):
radical youth movements that existed in other parts of the
world in the nineteen sixties, but really participation was encouraged
and enabled by the government, specifically by Mao. Being in
the Red Guard was simultaneously a political act and an
act of rebellion. The Red Guard was supportive of Mao
and destructive towards his ad ever series, but at the
(07:11):
same time it was rebellious, It was violent, and it
was hard to control. It was, after all, essentially an
army of teenagers operating, operating with little to no adult supervision,
and empowered by their government to aggressively pursue enemies. Even
if adults wanted to curb the Red Guard's more extreme behavior,
(07:32):
they really couldn't for fear of being branded counter revolutionaries
and then targeted by the Red Guard themselves. This was
especially true considering how wholeheartedly Mao was in support of
the Red Guard's activities, so much so that he closed
all the schools in June of nineteen sixty six so
students could participate. Then he met them in Beijing for
(07:53):
a series of rallies. So you know anything about Mao,
you know, they had this immense cult of personality, and
he really wanted to inspire fervor in these young people,
so he made grand gestures like trying to swim across
the Yangzi River, which the youth then emulated. After this
(08:14):
series of rallies in Beijing, many of the ones who
had gotten the chance to meet the chairman refused to
wash the hands they used to touch him. He also
granted the student's free rail passes so that they could
engage in what was known as quote revolutionary tourism. The
students made what's known as big character posters, so posters
with slogans, criticisms and the like written in Chinese characters
(08:38):
and hung up on buildings. Mao made one of his
own to further cement his connection to the youth, and
probably the most memorable part of the connection between Mao
and the Red Guard. They carried with them a copy
of quotations from the works of Mao Zedong or Mao's
Little Red Book, and they would refer to it regularly
(08:59):
in their work. To seek out dissenters, counter revolutionaries, capitalists,
and anyone else who didn't fit in with MoU's ideology,
the Red Guard became zealous and ruthless. Their targets included intellectuals, teachers,
capitalists as we mentioned, and party officials who were critical
of Mao. They rated the homes of perceived enemies, who
(09:21):
they often beat, humiliated, and imprisoned. Some of their targets
were sent into force labor and re education programs around
the country, some were imprisoned, as we said, and some
were killed. The Red Guard rated more than one hundred
thousand homes in Beijing alone, one thousand, seven hundred people died.
(09:41):
Some of these were suicides following the Red Guards public humiliation.
The worst month was August of nineteen sixty six, which
became known as Red August. There wasn't just one monolithic
Red Guard, though, there were differences in how these groups
behaved and how they conducted themselves because they weren't really
report in to any kind of central leadership. In some cases,
(10:03):
the Red Guard factions formed rivalries and they clashed against
each other really violently, with each faction believing that it
and none of the others was correctly interpreting and following
the views of Chairman Mao. In Beijing, for example, many
of the Red Guards members were children of high ranking
members of the CCP. They banded together and in a
(10:26):
group known as Coordinated Action, carried out what was called
the Red Terror, a horrifying and violent campaign that was
meant to protect their parents. This was really the opposite
of what the Red Guard was intended to do, because
the parents that they were protecting were people who were
suspected of capitalist leanings. They were actually meant to be
the people that the Red Guard would be pursuing. So
(10:49):
by September of nineteen sixty seven, so the Red Guard
had been going on for about a year, it was
near anarchy in some cities, and Mao and Defense Minister
Lynn Biao deployed troops to try to restore order. The
People's Liberation Army was also stationed around nuclear power plants,
museums and the like that were threatened by the Red
Guard's violence. Mao himself was astonished at the level of
(11:11):
violence and anarchy that the Red Guard had turned to.
By nineteen sixty eight, the fervor and intensity of the
Red Guard had become a liability, so Mao started handing
more power over to the People's Liberation Army instead. A
common misperception is that the Red Guard rampaged all over
China throughout the Cultural Revolution, but really it's heyday was
(11:34):
nineteen sixty six, and by nineteen sixty eight it was
really on the wane. Mao was shocked by how violent
and zealous they had become, and he recognized that they
had really outlived their usefulness. So at that point, high
school aged children joined the university students and being sent
to the country to work. By nineteen seventy eight, sixteen
(11:54):
million students total had been sent to the country, and
sending young people into the country, we also went all
the way through the Cultural Revolution and after it was over,
with that practice ending in nineteen eighty. It reminds me
of like Lord of the Flies. That's exactly what I
was thinking as well. So before we get to the
(12:17):
other hallmark of this part of the Cultural Revolution, let's
take a brief moment for a word from a sponsor.
It sounds grand so to return to the Cultural Revolution
along with all of his goals to close the wealth gap,
elevate China's proletariat, and inspire a revolutionary spirit of the
nation's youth. Another one of Mao's objectives and the Cultural
(12:40):
Revolution was to get rid of anyone in the government
who opposed him, so that he could ensure that his
successors would carry on his work the way he wanted
after he was gone. So, running alongside the Red Guard's
work among China's intellectuals, capitalists, and right as citizens, both
real and suspected, was an ongoing purge of the same
influences in China's government. For the most part, Mao didn't
(13:03):
go directly after his highest ranking opponents. Instead, he would
go after their underlings. He would discredit them, publicly, humiliate them,
or have them arrested. Then once their support within the
party had been destroyed. He would go after those bigger
targets who became much easier to take down without their supporters. Uh.
One of these was Leo Chao Chi, who we mentioned
(13:25):
in the Great Famine episode. He was at that point
China's head of state. He had replaced Mao in nine,
at which point it was clear that Mao's Greatly Forward
was failing. We also pronounced his name just a little
bit differently in that episode because I found a different
and better pronunciation resource between when we recorded the first
two episodes and these two episodes, and neither of us
(13:47):
speaks a total language we are really trying um. Leo
had vocally argued against the Great Leap Forward when he
realized how devastating it had turned out to be for
China's farmers. Unlike other leaders who had begun to sway
Mao away from the Greatly policies, Leo had criticized Mao directly,
(14:10):
rather than shifting the blame to other people, saying they
had sort of misinterpreted or wrongly carried out Moo's vision.
And this work, while crucial to ending the famine, came
back to bite him. Leo was removed from office in
nineteen sixty six, beaten and imprisoned, and he died in
prison in nineteen sixty nine. Dong Xiaoping was the General
(14:33):
Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, and he was purged
from his office as well, along with two thirds of
the Communist Party's Central Committee. Purchase continued through nineteen sixty
seven and nineteen sixty eight, and he's mostly took place
in cities and also included members of the People's Liberation Army.
Purged officials should be exiled, imprisoned, or sent into forced labor.
(14:58):
More generally intellectual were sent into the country and re
educated as well. That often meant that the people who
had been running things were no longer there to run them,
so businessmen, administrators, engineers, and others who were doing jobs
that required an education were in since instead sent to
rural areas to du forced labor, or sometimes sent a
(15:20):
prison or killed. The people who moved into these positions
often simply did not have the knowledge or the skills
to do them. They abolished regulations and abandoned the procedures
that industries had previously followed, especially for the late nineteen
sixties years of the cultural revolution, China's economy really suffered
dramatically as a consequence. In in nineteen sixty eight, the
(15:43):
Chinese economy also started to collapse, with virtually every economic
measure dropping well below prior year's levels. Between nineteen sixty
seven and nineteen sixty nine, there was just a huge
focus on quote purifying class ranks, and this went so
far as to look back into people's family trees and
whether they had family members in the past who had
(16:06):
been counter revolutionary or had immigrated outside of China. People
were persecuted for their own family, their own backgrounds, and
that of their family members, including like in the past,
like their their parents and grandparents, whether they were still
in touch with these family members, or whether they still
held so called counter revolutionary beliefs. Tens of thousands of
(16:29):
people were killed in the resulting investigations. This through China
cities completely into chaos, with organizations failing after their leaders
were exiled or arrested. Media outlets that have been sponsored
by those organizations failed. The number of magazines and newspapers
being printed in China plummeted, and the ones that remained
(16:50):
were under the oversight of the state. In addition to
the perception that China's elite had attitudes that were threatening
to Mao's vision of order. They also had stuff. If
you were an intellectual elite person, if you made a
good income, you probably owned things like paintings and artifacts
and collections of things that were historically or culturally valuable
(17:12):
in some way. So owning artwork became considered to be bourgeois,
and so did being a professional artist. So, since China's
art had a long history of being politically oriented in
some way, a lot of the existing art also celebrated
ideals that were no longer considered to be acceptable, and
(17:33):
this is what led China, mostly at the hands of
the Red Guard, to destroy cultural and historical treasures during
the Cultural Revolution. Portrayals of this in the West are
often along the lines of every possible artifact with any
hint whatsoever of bourgeoisie or imperialism just being destroyed. And
while entire historical sites were reduced to rubble and a
(17:55):
lot of artifacts were destroyed, it wasn't quite the wholesale
destruction of a nation's entire artistic and cultural history that
you kind of see in Western portrayals. Sometimes books and
documents really fared the worst since they were easy to
burn or pulp, and the Red Guard would air on
the side of suspicion when dealing with them. But often
(18:16):
when the Red Guard rated someone's home, they would turn
over things that were obviously valuable to the state, and
as words spread of what the Red Guard was doing,
people sometimes destroyed their own possessions preemptively. They're also as
it became clear that the Red Guard was out of control,
there were some efforts on the part of the government
to protect things that were really culturally important and needed
(18:38):
to be preserved. So it wasn't as though the government
completely turned a blind eye and was like just smash
it all, like that's not that's not what's going on.
But by nineteen sixty nine, China's intellectual class had been gutted.
It's government had been cleared out of nearly all dissent,
either real or imagined, its cities had been thrown into chaos,
(19:01):
and its economy had been run off the rails. Works
of art, artifacts and monuments had been destroyed. This really
left an open playing field for Maw to recraft the
nation's government, culture, and way of thought to suit his
own ends, and that is what we're going to talk
about in our next episode. It breaks my heart to
(19:23):
think of all that art being destroyed. I kind of
have to pinch myself tonight, get choked up when we
talk about it. Do you have some listener mail for
us to enjoy? I do. I am going to read
a pretty happy piece of listener mailoray. This is from
Valentine and he says, Hello, Tracy and Holly love the show.
(19:45):
Your episode on galut at University Death President now opened
our minds to the deaf community. This led me to
attend a s L meetings and pivot the promotion of
our startup, My Bell, And he has a video that
I will put in our show notes and you can
watch it too. My bell is basically a digital thing
that you can mount on the handlebars of a bicycle,
(20:08):
so it will play like prerecorded instead of just a
regular bicycle bell, it will play prerecorded things that you
can use in place foot bill. Listening to one podcast
Yours led to some brainstorming and a string of miraculous events.
During our kickstarter we hit a plateau and we're running
out of ideas on what to do to relax and
clear my mind. I naturally listen to your podcast and
(20:30):
stumbled stumbled upon the DPN episode. This led to visualizing
how our product can help deaf cyclists. Deaf cyclists as
described in our video, and I'm going to tell you
in case you don't get to watch the video to
take a break from the letter, Um, it is by
recording things like on your left, So like having a
(20:51):
prerecorded thing this is on your left to play as
you approach someone that you're going to pass on your bicycle. UM,
do you better could be undicate with the like a
hearing cyclist in front of you, that that you're coming
up behind them. To get back to the letter. From there,
I contacted Carrie Brewer, a deaf cycling activist. Our minds
clicked and she sent us a video testimony. Also, I
(21:14):
started attending local as L meeting satisfying my childhood desire
to learn sign language. At the a s L meeting,
I met Big Wang, a filmmaker learning as L for
his next project, which is on children of deaf adults.
He played a big role in making the promotion, editing
subtitles as L voiceover and be footage simultaneously. Once the
video was done, we sent it to every deaf media
(21:37):
outlet available. Since then, we have been on the Daily Moth,
def TV, and just this Monday, I Deaf News interviewed
us and a new friend from the a s L
meeting was happy to be our interpreter and the end
their kickstarter did not meet at school, but learning how
our product can help deaf cyclists. The adventures involved are priceless.
Thank you Valentine, Thank you Valentine for writing to us.
(21:59):
I love that whole idea you so much. I do,
and and I kind of interrupted the letter a couple
of times to explain what the video is because you know,
we can't play you the video right now in this
audio podcast to see what it was he was talking about.
And it's a really cool idea and something I had
not ever thought of before, which is one of the
reasons we pick episodes like this to try to get
(22:22):
people to think about things that maybe they have never
thought of before. So I had never thought of if
you are not a speaking person, how do you communicate?
How do you communicate with the person in front of
you when you were on a bicycle Apart from just
a bell, which is not a very like there's no
bell code of yeah, ways to bring the bicycle bell
(22:42):
for people to know what you're doing. It makes noise
and it might get attention that there's no clear definition
of what it means. Yeah, well, and I think I also, uh,
there's a bike path near where I live now that
I've spent a lot of time on and so I
also am more aware of the things that cyclists do
to try to let pedestrians new what is going on
(23:03):
behind them. So anyway, I am really glad that this
podcast was able to, you know, inspire somebody to think
of a new use for something they were trying to do.
So it's pretty awesome. Yeah, if you would like to
write to us, you can. We are at History Podcast
at how Stuffworks dot com. Our Facebook is Facebook dot
com slash miss in history, and our Twitter is at
(23:25):
missed in History. Our tumbler is missed in History dot
tumbler dot com, and we're on Pinterest at pinterest dot
com slash missed in History. We also have a spreadshirt store.
You can reach it from the home page of our website,
which is missed in History dot com, or you can
just go to miss in History dot spreadshirt dot com.
If you want to go straight there. If you would
like to learn a little more about what we've talked
(23:46):
about today, you can come to our parent company's website
and put the word MAU into the search bar and
you will find MOUs just kind of unfortunate place. I'm
saying this because the circumstances were unfortunate, not the placement
was unfortunate. An article called the top ten public enemies. Uh.
(24:08):
That is that how stuff works dot com. Or you
can come to our website where we will put up
share notes that include all of the sources that we've
used for this, as well as a link to the
video we were just talking about for the digital bicycle bell.
You can do all of that and a whole lot
more at our website, which is missed in history dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
(24:32):
Because it how stuff works dot com.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!