CHALLENGE / December 2, 1976
Ten years ago this fall, millions of Chinese students and workers were joining the Red Guard groups to spread the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution throughout China. The Red Guards attacked the leaders of the Chinese government and Chinese Communist Party for adopting policies which were leading China back towards capitalism. As a result of monumental struggles, the Red Guards were able to develop and to implement new policies. Like the Paris Commune and the Russian Revolution, the Cultural Revolution greatly expanded our understanding of how socialist society actually works.
The current leadership of China claims to be communist; if they were communists, then they would be in the vanguard of the struggles to extend the socialist policies introduced in the Cultural Revolution. But for the last five years the leaders of the Chinese “Communist” Party have been dismantling the gains of the Cultural Revolution as fast as they could; sometimes they ran into massive resistance, so they had to back-peddle a bit, but on the whole they have been successful in smashing the left’s opposition to attacks on the Cultural Revolution. These leaders are revisionists; that is, they may think of themselves as socialists, but actually they are restoring capitalism to China. The new leadership under Hua Kuo-feng is speedily restoring the pro-capitalist policies of the pre-Cultural Revolution days.
This week, we will look at the gains won in the Cultural Revolution and how they are being reversed in the areas of culture, education, and health. Next article we will look at the factories, the fields, and the government offices.
Before the Cultural Revolution, education in China was basically capitalist in character: most children from worker and peasant families only got the rudiments of education, while the children of the bureaucrats and old capitalist families competed heatedly for the prestigious positions reserved for university graduates. The Red Guards changed all that. There was less emphasis on competitive exams, and more emphasis on collective learning, with the students who learn faster helping the slower ones. Teachers and professors were no longer treated like mini-gods, but comrades to help in the learning process. Courses were made more relevant to the needs of the Chinese masses; students integrated their studies with work in factories and fields. Political activists and people from worker or peasant backgrounds were given priority in admissions to university and high school. Enrollment was expanded and the course of studies shortened by several years so that education would no longer be the preserve of a small elite.
The educational reforms are slowly being whittled away under the guise of restoring “quality” to education (the same excuse used here for racist cutbacks like eliminating open admissions). The old competitive “high academic standards” admissions procedure for universities is coming back in place of consultation with the masses. There have been some sharp attacks recently on the “open air universities” set up in factories and fields to extend education to many more people (often by correspondence courses); instead of upgrading these universities, the new leadership wants to restrict or eliminate them. In the classroom, old-style exams are returning and politics are being banished in place of more “academic” subjects.
The same process is at work in health. There is little mention now of the “barefoot doctors”; there are reports that some officials openly ridicule them. Before the Cultural Revolution, there were a few fancy hospitals and highly trained doctors in the cities, but most people never got any medical attention. The “barefoot doctors” were a vast corps of peasants and students who brought some elementary health care to the hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants. The plan, now scuttled in the name of “quality” (for the few), was to continually upgrade the training of the barefoot doctors and to supplement them with medical stations scattered throughout the countryside.
There is no question that bourgeois culture was dominant in pre-Cultural Revolution China. The old operas (or new ones in their style) dominated, glorifying individualism, the ruling class, material wealth, and escapism or passivity in the face of oppression. The attempts to create communist culture during the Cultural Revolution were seriously hampered by the absurd personality cult around Chairman Mao; a typical scene would show a peasant defying a winter storm bare-chested warmed by “Mao Tse-tung thought.” Plus there was the incredible egotism of Chiang Ching (Mao’s widow, denounced as a traitor by the new rulers), who ruled her cultural empire with an iron hand; she forced all of China to listen to her eight “model operas” (nothing else could be performed) for almost two years. But even the limited gains of the Cultural Revolution are now being washed away: already, old-style operas are being performed informally in Peking. (To be continued.)