Getting to Grips with the Cultural Revolution

If I'm honest, History really only comes alive for me when it's challenging. The teaching of History should be a subject area that forces the student (and teacher) to take a long hard look at the 'facts' and question the accepted version of events. If you take a look at the new Stage 6 Modern History NSW Syllabus you'll see that the outcomes are very much geared towards facilitating this kind of historical thinking - the curriculum wants us to analyse sources so that we can better ascertain the nature of bias, the curriculum wants us to contest the 'official' narrative and engage with competing versions of events so that we can make our judgements, the curriculum wants us to gather up as much information as we can so that we can offer individualistic evaluations in response to essay questions.

Modern History isn't dry, it's something that should be passionately argued with.

The Cultural Revolution is one of two key focal points for the Change in the Modern World China option (Option B) and, as such, it's perfect fodder in regards to the aforementioned mutable nature of the syllabus outcomes. The Cultural Revolution is a notoriously tricky area of historical debate and therefore forces the student (and teacher) to create their own historical narrative in response to the available (and unavailable) information.

The first port of call is 'building the field', where students increase their knowledge of the historical period through increased engagement with appropriate vocabulary and, also, gathering an impression of the causes that could be attributed to the Cultural Revolution. Potential causes could be best summarised as the following:

• The Sino-Soviet split: a clash of ideologies leading to China's increasing independence.
• Tensions arising from Party Politics: Party members removing all references to Maoism from constitution in order to diminish Mao Zedong's power. Mao's role as 'honorary' Chairman led to ambiguity over leadership.
• The Great Leap Forward: failure of this attempt to modernise China in one quick go had disastrous consequences for Chinese society, leading to widespread death, famine and corruption.
• Permanent Revolution: the ongoing nature of class struggle in a Marxist society meant that elitism and revisionism needed to be prevented.
• Mao's Personality: Mao sought to maintain the Cult of Personality that kept him in power, and would often test the loyalty of his comrades. Different factions arose in the Party in response to desires to be identified as Mao's potential successor.
• Educational Reform: Mao saw the importance in harnessing the next generation as the future of Chinese communism, and aimed to control this through education and ideology.

The next step in teaching the Cultural Revolution is in getting students to dive headfirst into the narrative of events. This is incredibly difficult with the Cultural Revolution for a number of reasons:

1. It's near impossible to know exactly why Mao started the Revolution.
2. The Cultural Revolution happened on a huge scale, with millions of students ('Red Guards') spearheading the revolution in hundreds of independent movements that did not co-ordinate with one another.
3. The Party fractured in ways that are hard to understand - those who feared ideological attack from Mao sought to influence the Red Guards to act in a certain way, deflecting blame towards their enemies. This resulted in civil disputes between different groups of Red Guards acting under the influence of different Party members.
4. Mao remained largely aloof from the Revolution - once he had set the chain of events in motion he stepped back from direct involvement. It could be argued that he was keeping his own hands clean of any wrongdoing, however, the very nature of socialist revolution also demanded action from the proletariat (the students and workers) so it would not have made sense for Mao to have directly led them as this ran contrary to Marxist ideology.
5. In the simplest of terms, China was plunged into chaos between 1966 and 1976.

It is therefore best to have students shape their own understanding by gathering information through independent research. The depth and breadth of information on the Cultural Revolution is so multitudinous, so contradictory, and so endlessly fascinating, that it would be a great disservice to prescribe a single narrative for students to follow.

The solution is to set students up with scaffolded research. Here is a guide that will assist students with assembling some key information alongside their own research.

Resource: Research Scaffold - The Red Guards and the Cultural Revolution

Just for your awareness, here are some things that may come up in student research (or key words that you may find useful in directing them):

Bian Zhongyun: The first death of the Cultural Revolution. Bian was a vice principal of a school where the Red Guards rose up. Her mouth was filled with soil and her face splashed with black ink, and she was paraded around while wearing a dunce's cap before being beaten to death with nail-spiked clubs, and dumped into a garbage cart.

Other Teachers: Many authority figures in schools were the first targets for the new revolutionaries. The principal at the Third Girls Middle School was beaten to death, and the Dean there hung herself before she could face a similar fate. A Biology teacher at Beijing Teacher's School was dragged along the ground until she died, and then other teachers were forced to beat her dead body if they did not want to face a similar fate. Party member Liu Shaoqi set a quota (of 1%) for Red Guards in their targeting of teachers, which equated to 300 000 victims.

The Little Red Book: The level of fanaticism amongst the Red Guards was so intense that Mao's quotations (originally published in the Liberation Army Daily) were assembled as a little red book for all citizens to carry.

Massacres: In regional areas such as Daxing, local leaders (those that Mao had initially intended to target) murdered all the landlords and their families. 300 in total were killed in a co-ordinated night-time attack that utilised methods of stabbing, strangling, and electrocution to prevent what the leaders claimed was a chance of 'bourgeois uprising'. Even the children were included to ensure that no revenge could be taken in the future.

Rallies: There were huge gatherings in Tiananmen Square where Red Guards could catch a glimpse of Chairman Mao. The last of these took place in November 1966, and saw two and a half million teenagers gather in one day to see their great helmsman.

Destruction of the Four Olds: Many graveyards and temples were defaced and destroyed, especially in regional areas such as Tibet. Bodies of dead women were dug up in Confucian cemeteries and hung from trees, and over 10 000 graves in Shanghai alone were desecrated. In Zhengdang, ancient monuments were destroyed. Entire libraries, such as one in Zikawai, were also burned down as symbols of bourgeois culture, leading to the loss of thousands of 19th century books.

Shanghai: As one of China's most modern cities, Shanghai saw the eruption of some strange displays of Maoist outrage. At least 30 flower shops were destroyed as flowers were considered a waste of farmland. Cats were also targeted as they were considered symbols of Western decadence. Furthermore, many Red Guards saw the Revolution as an opportunity for looting, and some 30 000 'bad families' were forced to hand over property deeds - leaving nearly half a million people homeless. 704 people in Shanghai committed suicide in September 1966 alone.

The Vietnam War: The in-fighting between separate factions of Red Guards got so bad that weapons China meant to send to the Viet Cong were seized by various Chinese groups. The People's Liberation Army had to be mobilised away from the Chinese-Vietnamese border in order to help restore order in some provinces of China.

Guangxi Province: Rival Party members Lin Biao and Zhou Enlai waged war against each other in Guangxi in 1968 through the use of proxy forces of Red Guards. At least 80 000 were killed in several massacres.

Cannibalism: Rebels in Wuxuan began to practice cannibalism as a strange fusion of ritual and Marxist ideology, with at least 70 'capitalist' landlords publicly butchered and eaten alive. Mao ordered an end to this practice once he got word of it but, instead of punishing the cannibals, he sent a new statue of himself as a congratulatory present for those who had assisted with the Cultural Revolution.

Impact on the Arts: Intellectuals were the most badly scarred by the Cultural Revolution. Mao disliked intellectualism and saw it as useless in contrast to the practicality of his own view of socialism, which meant that artists and philosophers and the like were targeted by Red Guards. 1966-1976 became 'ten lost years' with no art, no music, no painting, no writing, no academic or scientific journals in China. It was a huge waste of an entire decade's worth of talent.

Ethnic Minorities: Also amongst the most persecuted were those who did not ethnically conform with the socialist Chinese majority. 800 000 Mongolians in the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia were tortured - there was widespread sexual abuse of women, removal of tongues and teeth, and many burned alive. Only 10% of the population in Inner Mongolia were actually Mongol, yet 75% of those persecuted in the area were of this ethnicity, which made it look like genocide. Mao ordered a stop to this persecution but did not punish those responsible.

The End of the Red Guard: Unable to manage the independent actions of the Red Guard groups who had radically changed China's urban society, Mao ordered for all those who had driven the Cultural Revolution to be sent to the countryside for re-education through labour. Between 1969 and 1972 some 17 million of these youths were sent to live in villages, leading to mass suicide, poverty, and depression.