This paper examines the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) through both personal family narrative and scholarly historical research. Drawing on the Cambridge History of China, Clark's study of the Cultural Revolution, and the memoir of Mao's personal physician Li Zhi-Sui, the author explores how large-scale ideological upheaval shaped the lives of ordinary people — including the author's own grandparents, who were young party functionaries in Beijing at the time. The paper addresses the initial enthusiasm many urban youth felt toward Mao's reforms, the cult of personality that surrounded the Chairman, and the deeply personal consequences that followed, including evidence suggesting the author's grandmother was among the many young women exploited by Mao during this period.
The Chinese Cultural Revolution, which was started by Mao Tse-tung in 1966 and did not conclude until after his death in 1976, is referred to officially by the current government of China as haojie. As GAO Mobo notes, "haojie is ambiguous because it can be a modern term for 'holocaust' or a traditional term to mean 'great calamity' or 'catastrophe'" (Gao 15). To some extent, those who lived through the Chinese Cultural Revolution, such as my grandparents, are uncomfortable with any discussion of its effects.
As a small child, I had often wondered what happened in China in the 1960s and 1970s that my grandparents refused to discuss — refused to discuss not only the events themselves, but their lives before emigration, first to Taiwan and then to America. But this was just one of the peculiarities of my "F.O.B." ("Fresh Off the Boat") grandparents, to use a term that sometimes recurs in Chinese-American conversations. For example, they were also scared of the medical field and scared of working in it. So even though they emphasized the greater availability of education in America, when my older cousin first enrolled in medical school, my grandparents did not live up to the "Tiger Mother" stereotype of pride over such an achievement — they instead seemed panicky. What I eventually learned came from my parents, who still spoke carefully and in the most guarded of terms, but whose accounts demonstrate the way in which a large-scale historical event like Mao's Cultural Revolution could profoundly affect the lives of ordinary people.
My grandparents had been young party functionaries in 1966, newly moved to Beijing from Zhongdian, and thus were more likely to be on the side of Mao's reforms than on the side of the entrenched elites. The customary view of the Chinese Cultural Revolution is that it represented a strictly ideological attempt to recapture the initial revolutionary fervor of Mao's early "Long March" period by setting young party members — like my grandparents — against those entrenched elites. Contemporary historical research, however, notes that the Revolution's effects varied significantly depending on one's background and location.
For my grandparents, the chief effect was personal and familial. The influence of Mao Tse-tung's personality could literally be felt within the Cultural Revolution at large, but also within the confines of my grandparents' small Beijing apartment in the years before emigration. My grandparents were part of a generation that felt the Cultural Revolution was a good idea and responded to it enthusiastically. Turning to the Cambridge History of China for this time period, Whyte's article on urban life in the People's Republic of China notes a significant shift among precisely the new urbanites of this period — people like my grandparents:
"For many urban young people this was an exhilarating time, at least initially. Instead of being locked into a tight competition to try and secure future opportunities in the urban job hierarchy, they found themselves called to act on a larger and more important stage as the vanguards in a new revolution. Although most were uncertain and even frightened at first and somewhat dubious about the 'crimes' committed by their own teachers and Party leaders, many soon found the rewards of activism exciting. No longer required to study long hours and submit to school disciplinary rules, they played out their new role by traveling around the country, parading in front of national leaders, viewing places they had always wanted to see, and engaging in intense exchanges of ideas and experiences with other young people. They were able to take control in their own schools, draft new rules, require teachers and administrators to submit to humiliation, raid confidential files, and publish uncensored newssheets." (Whyte 717)
The means whereby Mao's policies were used to engineer changes in thought — on the order of Orwell's 1984 — are thoroughly catalogued in Clark's 2008 study The Chinese Cultural Revolution, which demonstrates the full extent to which intellectual and even artistic life were subject to ideological "re-education." For anyone raised in a free, Western-style society, the prospect seems horrifying.
"Mao's personal behavior and rock-star-like status"
"Grandmother's likely involvement in Mao's exploitation revealed"
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