September 17, 2014 • 25 mins
In 1969, the tone and direction of the Cultural Revolution shifted dramatically. For the next seven years, until Mao Zedong's death, he tried to remake the government, and the country, after his own vision. Read the show notes here.
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Episode Transcript
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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 D. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. And this
is now the conclusion of our mini series on China
under Chairman. Now the first few years of the Cultural Revolution.
(00:24):
To very briefly recap our previous episode, uh, we're marked
by intense protests and unrest. So from nineteen sixty six
until nineteen sixty eight, a radical youth movement known as
the Red Guard did everything from invading people's homes to
warring against itself, all in the name of revolution. Art
(00:46):
artifacts and other cultural treasures were destroyed under the idea
that they were bourgeois, counter revolutionary or imperial and at
the same time, the Chinese Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong
undertook a coordinate effort to purge his adversaries and his
perceived adversaries out of the Chinese Party, Chinese Communist Party,
(01:07):
and the government. In nineteen sixty nine, the tone and
direction of the Cultural Revolution really shifted dramatically. All those
people who had been purged and imprisoned and sent to
the countryside to work or put into forced labor and
re education camps had really made room in the party
from Maw to replace them with his allies, and the
Red Guard themselves had also been sent to the country
(01:29):
getting them out of the way and quelling all of
their violent activities. With many of the existing art and
artifacts destroyed, the nation was also primed to create new work.
So for the next seven years until Mao's death, he
treated he tried to remake the government and the country
after his own vision. And we mentioned uh Mao Zedong's wife,
(01:53):
Xiang Ching in the previous episode, and she was from
Shanghai and before marrying Maw, she had been an actress.
She was working in the Ministry of Culture prior to
the start of the Cultural Revolution, and she was one
of the people who said the revolution should specifically address
Chinese culture. To that end, Jiang had a hand in commissioning, planning,
(02:13):
and producing all kinds of new theatrical, musical, and artistic projects.
These celebrated the themes of the revolution. They glorified the
the proletariat as heroes, and they portrayed intellectuals, landlords, rightists,
and capitalists as the villains. They incorporated the work of
all kinds of other artists creating costumes, promotional materials and
(02:36):
the like. These new works also incorporated some Western instruments
and techniques. The steeps kind of counterintuitive since the whole
focus of this was to to be authentically Chinese. But
by selecting exactly what Western influences to incorporate, and by
planning out exactly how and when those influences would be incorporated,
(03:00):
Jiang was able to manage the influence of Western culture
rather than having it just roll over and drown out
everything Chinese. This was also the inspiration for new theater
and art. A huge part of the cultural aspect of
the revolution were eight quote model operas, and these are
actually created during the cultural revolutions first tumultuous years, but
(03:23):
they really proliferated after that. Five of them were Beijing
operas that told stories that in the relatively recent past,
and these stories had revolutionary themes. This was a really
big departure from the Beijing opera tradition, which had generally
relied on morality tales based on China's dynastic history for
its subject matter. There were also two ballets and a
(03:46):
symphonic work. These pieces were performed all over China in
a way that was standardized down to exactly how the
costumes should be made. Often attendance was actually mandatory and
the old traditional as were banned. These were heavily documented.
There was like a giant book that was everything, not
(04:06):
just the script, but what the costume should look like,
and what the music should be like and how it
should be performed. One thing to note in these new
works is that gender equality was a really frequent theme.
Although the Cultural Revolution itself did not use the word
feminist or any other analog to the word feminist, many
of the model operas featured resourceful, empowered heroines who made
(04:29):
their own decisions. So these model operas continued to be
performed for years, and they were actually made into film
versions in nineteen seventy. The drive to create new art
went beyond just these model operas. People were encouraged to write, paint,
and otherwise create new works that celebrated China, Mao and
the revolution. New periodicals began to come out in nineteen
(04:53):
seventy two, and new Chinese made feature films started to
come out in nineteen seventy four. There were four national
Fine Arts exhibitions between nineteen seventy two and nineteen seventy five,
with almost eight million people attending the exhibits in Beijing.
That was really record breaking in terms of attendance at
artistic exhibitions. Because so many cultural artifacts had been destroyed
(05:16):
and so many influences on art and literature and and
drama had been weeded out during the nineteen sixty six
to nineteen sixty eight years. A lot of this new
work picked up an aesthetic and themes from the Cultural
Revolution itself. Costumes and fashions drew more from the Red
Guards utilitarian uniforms than on Chinese fashion trends from the
(05:38):
past as a general trend. Clothing and artwork took on
kind of a militarized look and feel as another general trend.
This had an overall homogenizing effect on Chinese culture. As
we mentioned at the very very top of this series,
China is home to many diverse peoples, each of their
unique cultural aspects, but the standardized, mass produced art and
(06:00):
entertainment of the Cultural Revolution glossed over a lot of
that and created as surface level uh an overall unified culture. Now,
although this was called the Cultural Revolution, a lot of
went on, what went on was really overtly political and
had to do with the government itself, and we will
talk about some of that after a brief word from
(06:21):
a sponsor. And now back to China and the Cultural Revolution.
So just like the purges had primed the population for
the cultural shifts that were to come, they had also
primed the government for a near total shift in leadership.
While the Chinese Communist Party's Ninth Congress convened in nineteen
sixty nine, many of its members were newly promoted by
(06:43):
Mao to replace people who had been purged between nineteen
sixty six and nineteen sixty eight. The ninth Congress also
selected its new Central Committee, almost entirely remaking it with
new members. Only about thirty percent of the committee's new
members had also served on the committee. Like the party
in general, this committee was almost entirely new blood. Lynn
(07:06):
Biau was also named as the vice Chairman of the
Communist Party. He was to be Mao's successor. However, he
overstepped his power pretty quickly, instituting martial law and saying
it was due to clashes along the Soviet border. Mao,
threatened by what was essentially a power grab, started trying
to counter maneuver against Lynn's efforts along with Joe and Lai,
(07:28):
the Prime Minister. Things came to a head in nineteen
seventy one when Lynn, or possibly lower level officials who
were loyal to him, organized a coup against Mao, which
included an assassination attempt. There's some evidence that it might
really have been Lynn's son and other supporters rather than
Lynn himself who did the plotting. It all failed after
(07:50):
Lynn's daughter informed Show of what was going on. Regardless,
Lynn and family apparently tried to flee to the Soviet Union,
but the plane they were on crashed on September thirteenth,
nineteen seventy one, and there's some speculation here too that
they were drugged and put onto the plane, which was
then crashed deliberately to get rid of them. In the
(08:12):
wake of the coup and Lynn's death, Mao was afraid
that the incident would rattle people's confidence in the government.
I mean, at this point he had purged all of
his detractors. This guy was like the next in line
under him, essentially, and people were very curious about what
in the world had happened for somebody that seen here
to go rogue that way. Mao canceled a National Days
(08:36):
celebration and parade that were to take place that October,
and then he, along with Joe, purged Len's allies and
advisors all out of the government. Authorities tried to come
up with good explanations for why Lynn, who had been
Mao's close confident in the central part of the government,
would have betrayed him. But this whole process was really secretive,
with the people at large waiting for answers and gradually
(08:59):
becoming this enchanted with the way things were happening as
they did while he was still in favor with the party.
Lynn's calligraphy had been part of statues of Mau, so
there would be a statue of Mao with this calligraphy
that was in Lynn's calligraphy writing that just had statements
about what a great leader Mao was. Once Lynn had
(09:22):
died and this whole scandal had come to life, these
inscriptions were stripped away from all of the statues, all
part of the purging uh. The Tenth Party Congress convened
in nineteen seventy three, and unlike the ninth Congress, which
had replaced about seventy of the surviving Eighth Party Congress,
members with new members. The tenth Congress had included a
(09:44):
lot of previous members who had been quote rehabilitated in
work camps. About forty of the new Central Committee members
fit this description. So these are people who had been
purged since it work camps, and now we're allowed back
in to the fold because they had been rehabilitated. One
of these quote rehabilitated officials was Dong Xiaoping, who had
(10:07):
been exiled during the earlier years of the revolution. He
was named Vice Prime Minister and was tasked with working
with Prime Minister Joe and Leigh on a modernization program.
And at this point it was clear to both Mao
and Joe that they were getting older and needed someone
with experience to lead China after they were gone. By
this point, Mao had experienced a stroke and Joe had cancer.
(10:31):
In spite of his past, Dang seemed like the best candidate.
Joe was actually more moderate than Mao. He had been
one of the people who had protected some of China's
cultural artifacts that were at risk earlier in the revolution,
and he had also been campaigning for pretty reasonable modernizations
in agriculture, industry, science and technology, as well as national defense.
(10:54):
So it looked like things, you know, had a pretty
strong chance of returning to relative normalcy after all the
years of chaos. But Mao's wife, Jiang Ching had really
become a lot more radical than he was. She and
three of her biggest supporters became known as the Gang
of Four, and they worked against Joe, especially as it
(11:16):
became clear that he was not well. The balance of
power really teetered between Joe's pretty reasonable, moderate way of
doing things and Jiang's very more aggressive, revolutionary radical way,
and this went on until Joe died in January of
nineteen seventies six. In the protests that followed, let in
(11:38):
part by Jiang in the Gang of Four, Dang was
purged once again a few months later in September of
nineteen seventy six, Mao died as well, and Jiang and
the Gang of Four really made a power grab. Soon thereafter,
a coalition that included the military, the police, and political
figures rounded up and purged the Gang of Four. Dean
(12:00):
returned from his exile and took the reins of the
Chinese government, and he actually remained in power until nineteen
ninety two, and he died in nineteen ninety seven. In
nineteen eighty one. The Gang of Four, as well as
Lindiau's top generals were all put on trial and blamed
for everything that had gone wrong. The trial was televised
(12:21):
and it was very public. The charges included persecuting seven
hundred and twenty seven thousand, four hundred twenty people and
killing thirty four thousand, two hundred seventy four. There were
ten total defendants. Jiang Chang was sentenced to death, although
this was later changed to a life in prison. Jane
committed suicide in surprisingly, considering all that had gone on
(12:45):
three years of purges, and also very reasonably, Dang did
exactly what Mao had feared before the revolution started. He
incorporated elements of a free market, free enterprise, capitalist economy
into Anda's very planned economy. UH. And before we talk
about a couple of things. One is there were some
(13:07):
actual positive developments during the Cultural Revolution, and the other
is the aftermath of what happened afterwards. Before we talk
about that, let's have a brief word from another sponsor.
And now let's keep talking about Chinese history. Let's get
back to a few of actual, legitimately positive things that
did happen during the Cultural Revolution. UH. Some people interpret
(13:29):
all of this is that uh Dan came in after
Mao had died, had really started modernizing China, and for
a long time this was even the official account from
China of what had happened. For a while after Mao's death,
it was extremely uh poor form to comment on him
in a positive way at all. But really a lot
(13:51):
of the seeds of China's future growth were planted during
the Cultural Revolution, as destructive and chaotic as it was.
During the Revolution, people were guaranteed food, clothing, and education, fuel,
and a funeral. These were called the Five Guarantees. China
also expanded its healthcare system and made healthcare much more
(14:12):
affordable to a lot of people. About two million peasants
were given basic medical medical training, and they became known
as barefoot doctors. They were sort of like E. M.
T s. More hospitals were built out in the country,
and by the end of the Cultural Revolution, two thirds
of the hospital beds in China were in rural areas,
which really helped because that's where of the population lived.
(14:37):
It also expanded school programs for young people in rural areas,
and it put laws into place to encourage gender equality,
and unfortunately Dang did roll back a lot of these
reforms after the Cultural Revolution was over, and the Cultural
Revolution was also a time where a great deal of
research work was taking place. Medical research during these years
(14:59):
led to the disc every of artemi isn't in. This
is a plant derived medicine that had been used in
other forms in China for a thousand years, but this
research led to it being refined significantly into an effective
treatment for malaria. Literacy really improved in rural areas where
illiteracy had been just completely rampant, and the number of libraries, museums,
(15:22):
cultural clubs, and cinemas grew. Life expectancy at birth also grew.
It had been thirty five years in nineteen forty nine,
and that was sixty five by nineteen eighty. Many of
the officials who had been purged were eventually returned to
offices and sometimes given preferential treatment or preferential treatment for
(15:43):
their children as a make good on what had happened
to them. Much of the confiscated property was returned as well,
with more than thirty thousand unclaimed works of art being
put on display in the hope of finding their owners. However,
but pretty much every historian looked ing at the the
Cultural Revolution is a big picture puts it into the
(16:04):
not a good experience for China category. Writing for The Guardian,
Tanya Brannigan called it quote a lost decade of tragedy
and waste. In nine one, the CCP called the Cultural
Revolution quote the most severe setback and the heaviest losses
suffered by the Party, the state and the people since
the founding of the People's Republic. And they also put
(16:27):
the blame squarely on Mao Zedong. That's another thing that
a lot of times the West gets wrong about it.
There's sort of this perception that there has been a
constant and unending deification of Mao Zodong and that China
has never really acknowledged what happened, which is absolutely the
opposite of what we just said. You could not be
(16:49):
further from the right. At the end of the revolution,
China was still very, very poor, but since it had
eliminated a whole class of more wealthy people, this is
one of those blessing and a curse kind of things.
There was a lot less class division and a lot
less wealth disparity. The Great Leap forward and the consequent
(17:11):
famine had been hardest on China's laborers, particularly rural laborers
working on farms. The Cultural level Revolution, though, was hardest
on the affluent, so the educated who were sent to
the countryside to work and learn from common people, and
the people who had the money and the means to
become targets of the Red Guard were also significantly impacted.
(17:33):
So while the Great Leap Forward had killed millions of people,
had most who had mostly been on a more or
less subsistence level existence. The Cultural Revolution killed people who
had the money to own works of art or had
otherwise become suspects. So like the first tragedy had had
(17:53):
killed poor farmers and the second one killed intellectuals and
teachers and people who had money. People who were between
the ages of fifteen and twenty five during the Cultural
Revolution really missed out on having an education. High schools
came back by nineteen sixty seven, but universities did not
begin admitting people again until nineteen seventy. There was also
(18:17):
a really extreme and negative impact on minorities, both in
terms of being targeted by the Red Guard and the
Purgas and by having their cultural or artifacts destroyed. Previously
popular artists and musicians gave up their work rather than
being forced into propaganda for the new regime. And then
at a more basic social level, family members turned on
(18:39):
each other and began turning in their family members, their neighbors,
you know, people they had previously trusted for criticizing Maw,
sometimes not even because that had happened, but in an
effort to protect their own appearance as someone who supported Now,
about one point five million people died during the Cultural Revolution,
(19:01):
many many more went to prison or were tortured or beaten,
Some had their property seased. As we mentioned, thirty six
million were harassed or persecuted in some way. Even so,
even with those numbers, which are really pretty astronomical, there
were not a lot of specifics known about the Cultural
Revolution until more recently. People who grew up during the Revolution,
(19:24):
and we're members of the Red Guard, are now in
their sixties or seventies, and many of them have started
to talk more openly about what happened, so that the
history of it is not lost. So we're sort of
seeing the same kind of thing as people who lived
through the famine, you know, ten or fifteen years ago,
wanting to tell the story of the famine so that
(19:44):
the uh, the history of it would not be lost
to the world forever. And in some cases, there are
people that want to atone for their actions during the
Cultural Revolution, so as they're nearing end of life and
they're taking stock, they're trying to make good on what
they feel you've done wrong in their lives. Yeah. I
read just some really heartbreaking stories that are basically boiled
(20:06):
down to I was fifteen years old and I turned
in my mother. Like so, there are just a whole
lot of stories of people who have carried around this
um remorse and regret, sometimes having caused the deaths of
their family members for decades after this was over. Um.
(20:27):
It's horribly sad story. It is a yeah. Well, and
what's weird to me? The Cultural Revolution has been on
my list of things that I wanted to talk about
pretty much since coming on the podcast. It is a
thing that I knew very little actual detail about beforehand.
(20:52):
I feel like most of my knowledge of the Cultural
Revolution was in UH, some college courses that talked about
Mao's Little Red Book, right, which is a tiny piece
of it, um, and then the Chinese language movie Farewell,
My Concubine. There's not a lot to go on, and
I had the sense that it was just heartbreaking and
(21:12):
disruptive and upsetting and uh at the same time, as
as it grew into this mini series, which is the
first time that I have tried to tackle something that
ambitious in the podcast. At the further I got into it,
the more I was like, why did I do this? Um? So,
I really hope that those of you who are listening
(21:34):
have gotten something out of this, this four part now series,
um because wow, it was a lot to tackle. I
am not going to do another four part series for
a long while because you're crazy. Uh. Do you have
some fun listener mail to offset the sadness of the day.
It is much more fun. I'm not going to read
(21:54):
all of it, but it is from Faith who wrote
to us about our History of Colors episode, which is
I did to break up like the extremely distressing topics
I had been researching for a while. Uh So, Faith says,
longtime listener, but this is the first time I've really
felt compelled to write in thank you so much for
the excellent episode on the history of color. There are
(22:16):
as I'm sure you now know, whole libraries of material
on various aspects of color and on individual shades that
can draw you down any number of research paths, like
good as Beef with Newton, or the history and influence
of Owen Jones's Grammar of ornament, not to mention public
health and ecology see Dan Figgin's Toms River, and of
(22:38):
course colonialization in global trade as a brief aside, I
actually originally in the introduction had this whole thing about
what Newton thought color was and what all of these
other people afterward thought color was. And it became number
one really long and number two not really Germaine to
the direction that episode really end up going, which was
(23:01):
about more pigments and dies than the theory of color. Um.
Another fun fact to return to the letter about the
development of synthetic dies is how it intersected with that
of artificial lighting in the larger context of the Industrial Revolution.
In effect, the industrialization of light enabled and responded to
(23:23):
the industrialization of color. That is a fascinating observation that
we had not thought about, or I had not thought
about at all. Yeah, and then faith says just one
more analin dies also proved useful for staining sales on
microscope slides, thereby aiding the bacteriological revolution. That was the
thing that I thought that I had mentioned in the episode,
(23:44):
but I think maybe I did not. So thank you
Faith for writing into us with all of this. If
you would like to write to us, we were a
history podcast that how Stuff Works dot com. You can
write to us about this or any of our other episodes.
You can send suggestions. Please do not suggest another four
part series because it was really hard. Um. We're on
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(24:05):
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in History dot tumbler dot com, and we are on Interest.
We have a new store where you can buy shirts
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(24:25):
the search bar and you will find a really interesting
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That underground city was started while Mao was in office.
And you can come to our website which is missing
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(24:46):
dot com or how stuff Works dot com for more
on this and thousands of other topics. Stuff works dot
com in
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy D. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. And this
is now the conclusion of our mini series on China
under Chairman. Now the first few years of the Cultural Revolution.
(00:24):
To very briefly recap our previous episode, uh, we're marked
by intense protests and unrest. So from nineteen sixty six
until nineteen sixty eight, a radical youth movement known as
the Red Guard did everything from invading people's homes to
warring against itself, all in the name of revolution. Art
(00:46):
artifacts and other cultural treasures were destroyed under the idea
that they were bourgeois, counter revolutionary or imperial and at
the same time, the Chinese Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong
undertook a coordinate effort to purge his adversaries and his
perceived adversaries out of the Chinese Party, Chinese Communist Party,
(01:07):
and the government. In nineteen sixty nine, the tone and
direction of the Cultural Revolution really shifted dramatically. All those
people who had been purged and imprisoned and sent to
the countryside to work or put into forced labor and
re education camps had really made room in the party
from Maw to replace them with his allies, and the
Red Guard themselves had also been sent to the country
(01:29):
getting them out of the way and quelling all of
their violent activities. With many of the existing art and
artifacts destroyed, the nation was also primed to create new work.
So for the next seven years until Mao's death, he
treated he tried to remake the government and the country
after his own vision. And we mentioned uh Mao Zedong's wife,
(01:53):
Xiang Ching in the previous episode, and she was from
Shanghai and before marrying Maw, she had been an actress.
She was working in the Ministry of Culture prior to
the start of the Cultural Revolution, and she was one
of the people who said the revolution should specifically address
Chinese culture. To that end, Jiang had a hand in commissioning, planning,
(02:13):
and producing all kinds of new theatrical, musical, and artistic projects.
These celebrated the themes of the revolution. They glorified the
the proletariat as heroes, and they portrayed intellectuals, landlords, rightists,
and capitalists as the villains. They incorporated the work of
all kinds of other artists creating costumes, promotional materials and
(02:36):
the like. These new works also incorporated some Western instruments
and techniques. The steeps kind of counterintuitive since the whole
focus of this was to to be authentically Chinese. But
by selecting exactly what Western influences to incorporate, and by
planning out exactly how and when those influences would be incorporated,
(03:00):
Jiang was able to manage the influence of Western culture
rather than having it just roll over and drown out
everything Chinese. This was also the inspiration for new theater
and art. A huge part of the cultural aspect of
the revolution were eight quote model operas, and these are
actually created during the cultural revolutions first tumultuous years, but
(03:23):
they really proliferated after that. Five of them were Beijing
operas that told stories that in the relatively recent past,
and these stories had revolutionary themes. This was a really
big departure from the Beijing opera tradition, which had generally
relied on morality tales based on China's dynastic history for
its subject matter. There were also two ballets and a
(03:46):
symphonic work. These pieces were performed all over China in
a way that was standardized down to exactly how the
costumes should be made. Often attendance was actually mandatory and
the old traditional as were banned. These were heavily documented.
There was like a giant book that was everything, not
(04:06):
just the script, but what the costume should look like,
and what the music should be like and how it
should be performed. One thing to note in these new
works is that gender equality was a really frequent theme.
Although the Cultural Revolution itself did not use the word
feminist or any other analog to the word feminist, many
of the model operas featured resourceful, empowered heroines who made
(04:29):
their own decisions. So these model operas continued to be
performed for years, and they were actually made into film
versions in nineteen seventy. The drive to create new art
went beyond just these model operas. People were encouraged to write, paint,
and otherwise create new works that celebrated China, Mao and
the revolution. New periodicals began to come out in nineteen
(04:53):
seventy two, and new Chinese made feature films started to
come out in nineteen seventy four. There were four national
Fine Arts exhibitions between nineteen seventy two and nineteen seventy five,
with almost eight million people attending the exhibits in Beijing.
That was really record breaking in terms of attendance at
artistic exhibitions. Because so many cultural artifacts had been destroyed
(05:16):
and so many influences on art and literature and and
drama had been weeded out during the nineteen sixty six
to nineteen sixty eight years. A lot of this new
work picked up an aesthetic and themes from the Cultural
Revolution itself. Costumes and fashions drew more from the Red
Guards utilitarian uniforms than on Chinese fashion trends from the
(05:38):
past as a general trend. Clothing and artwork took on
kind of a militarized look and feel as another general trend.
This had an overall homogenizing effect on Chinese culture. As
we mentioned at the very very top of this series,
China is home to many diverse peoples, each of their
unique cultural aspects, but the standardized, mass produced art and
(06:00):
entertainment of the Cultural Revolution glossed over a lot of
that and created as surface level uh an overall unified culture. Now,
although this was called the Cultural Revolution, a lot of
went on, what went on was really overtly political and
had to do with the government itself, and we will
talk about some of that after a brief word from
(06:21):
a sponsor. And now back to China and the Cultural Revolution.
So just like the purges had primed the population for
the cultural shifts that were to come, they had also
primed the government for a near total shift in leadership.
While the Chinese Communist Party's Ninth Congress convened in nineteen
sixty nine, many of its members were newly promoted by
(06:43):
Mao to replace people who had been purged between nineteen
sixty six and nineteen sixty eight. The ninth Congress also
selected its new Central Committee, almost entirely remaking it with
new members. Only about thirty percent of the committee's new
members had also served on the committee. Like the party
in general, this committee was almost entirely new blood. Lynn
(07:06):
Biau was also named as the vice Chairman of the
Communist Party. He was to be Mao's successor. However, he
overstepped his power pretty quickly, instituting martial law and saying
it was due to clashes along the Soviet border. Mao,
threatened by what was essentially a power grab, started trying
to counter maneuver against Lynn's efforts along with Joe and Lai,
(07:28):
the Prime Minister. Things came to a head in nineteen
seventy one when Lynn, or possibly lower level officials who
were loyal to him, organized a coup against Mao, which
included an assassination attempt. There's some evidence that it might
really have been Lynn's son and other supporters rather than
Lynn himself who did the plotting. It all failed after
(07:50):
Lynn's daughter informed Show of what was going on. Regardless,
Lynn and family apparently tried to flee to the Soviet Union,
but the plane they were on crashed on September thirteenth,
nineteen seventy one, and there's some speculation here too that
they were drugged and put onto the plane, which was
then crashed deliberately to get rid of them. In the
(08:12):
wake of the coup and Lynn's death, Mao was afraid
that the incident would rattle people's confidence in the government.
I mean, at this point he had purged all of
his detractors. This guy was like the next in line
under him, essentially, and people were very curious about what
in the world had happened for somebody that seen here
to go rogue that way. Mao canceled a National Days
(08:36):
celebration and parade that were to take place that October,
and then he, along with Joe, purged Len's allies and
advisors all out of the government. Authorities tried to come
up with good explanations for why Lynn, who had been
Mao's close confident in the central part of the government,
would have betrayed him. But this whole process was really secretive,
with the people at large waiting for answers and gradually
(08:59):
becoming this enchanted with the way things were happening as
they did while he was still in favor with the party.
Lynn's calligraphy had been part of statues of Mau, so
there would be a statue of Mao with this calligraphy
that was in Lynn's calligraphy writing that just had statements
about what a great leader Mao was. Once Lynn had
(09:22):
died and this whole scandal had come to life, these
inscriptions were stripped away from all of the statues, all
part of the purging uh. The Tenth Party Congress convened
in nineteen seventy three, and unlike the ninth Congress, which
had replaced about seventy of the surviving Eighth Party Congress,
members with new members. The tenth Congress had included a
(09:44):
lot of previous members who had been quote rehabilitated in
work camps. About forty of the new Central Committee members
fit this description. So these are people who had been
purged since it work camps, and now we're allowed back
in to the fold because they had been rehabilitated. One
of these quote rehabilitated officials was Dong Xiaoping, who had
(10:07):
been exiled during the earlier years of the revolution. He
was named Vice Prime Minister and was tasked with working
with Prime Minister Joe and Leigh on a modernization program.
And at this point it was clear to both Mao
and Joe that they were getting older and needed someone
with experience to lead China after they were gone. By
this point, Mao had experienced a stroke and Joe had cancer.
(10:31):
In spite of his past, Dang seemed like the best candidate.
Joe was actually more moderate than Mao. He had been
one of the people who had protected some of China's
cultural artifacts that were at risk earlier in the revolution,
and he had also been campaigning for pretty reasonable modernizations
in agriculture, industry, science and technology, as well as national defense.
(10:54):
So it looked like things, you know, had a pretty
strong chance of returning to relative normalcy after all the
years of chaos. But Mao's wife, Jiang Ching had really
become a lot more radical than he was. She and
three of her biggest supporters became known as the Gang
of Four, and they worked against Joe, especially as it
(11:16):
became clear that he was not well. The balance of
power really teetered between Joe's pretty reasonable, moderate way of
doing things and Jiang's very more aggressive, revolutionary radical way,
and this went on until Joe died in January of
nineteen seventies six. In the protests that followed, let in
(11:38):
part by Jiang in the Gang of Four, Dang was
purged once again a few months later in September of
nineteen seventy six, Mao died as well, and Jiang and
the Gang of Four really made a power grab. Soon thereafter,
a coalition that included the military, the police, and political
figures rounded up and purged the Gang of Four. Dean
(12:00):
returned from his exile and took the reins of the
Chinese government, and he actually remained in power until nineteen
ninety two, and he died in nineteen ninety seven. In
nineteen eighty one. The Gang of Four, as well as
Lindiau's top generals were all put on trial and blamed
for everything that had gone wrong. The trial was televised
(12:21):
and it was very public. The charges included persecuting seven
hundred and twenty seven thousand, four hundred twenty people and
killing thirty four thousand, two hundred seventy four. There were
ten total defendants. Jiang Chang was sentenced to death, although
this was later changed to a life in prison. Jane
committed suicide in surprisingly, considering all that had gone on
(12:45):
three years of purges, and also very reasonably, Dang did
exactly what Mao had feared before the revolution started. He
incorporated elements of a free market, free enterprise, capitalist economy
into Anda's very planned economy. UH. And before we talk
about a couple of things. One is there were some
(13:07):
actual positive developments during the Cultural Revolution, and the other
is the aftermath of what happened afterwards. Before we talk
about that, let's have a brief word from another sponsor.
And now let's keep talking about Chinese history. Let's get
back to a few of actual, legitimately positive things that
did happen during the Cultural Revolution. UH. Some people interpret
(13:29):
all of this is that uh Dan came in after
Mao had died, had really started modernizing China, and for
a long time this was even the official account from
China of what had happened. For a while after Mao's death,
it was extremely uh poor form to comment on him
in a positive way at all. But really a lot
(13:51):
of the seeds of China's future growth were planted during
the Cultural Revolution, as destructive and chaotic as it was.
During the Revolution, people were guaranteed food, clothing, and education, fuel,
and a funeral. These were called the Five Guarantees. China
also expanded its healthcare system and made healthcare much more
(14:12):
affordable to a lot of people. About two million peasants
were given basic medical medical training, and they became known
as barefoot doctors. They were sort of like E. M.
T s. More hospitals were built out in the country,
and by the end of the Cultural Revolution, two thirds
of the hospital beds in China were in rural areas,
which really helped because that's where of the population lived.
(14:37):
It also expanded school programs for young people in rural areas,
and it put laws into place to encourage gender equality,
and unfortunately Dang did roll back a lot of these
reforms after the Cultural Revolution was over, and the Cultural
Revolution was also a time where a great deal of
research work was taking place. Medical research during these years
(14:59):
led to the disc every of artemi isn't in. This
is a plant derived medicine that had been used in
other forms in China for a thousand years, but this
research led to it being refined significantly into an effective
treatment for malaria. Literacy really improved in rural areas where
illiteracy had been just completely rampant, and the number of libraries, museums,
(15:22):
cultural clubs, and cinemas grew. Life expectancy at birth also grew.
It had been thirty five years in nineteen forty nine,
and that was sixty five by nineteen eighty. Many of
the officials who had been purged were eventually returned to
offices and sometimes given preferential treatment or preferential treatment for
(15:43):
their children as a make good on what had happened
to them. Much of the confiscated property was returned as well,
with more than thirty thousand unclaimed works of art being
put on display in the hope of finding their owners. However,
but pretty much every historian looked ing at the the
Cultural Revolution is a big picture puts it into the
(16:04):
not a good experience for China category. Writing for The Guardian,
Tanya Brannigan called it quote a lost decade of tragedy
and waste. In nine one, the CCP called the Cultural
Revolution quote the most severe setback and the heaviest losses
suffered by the Party, the state and the people since
the founding of the People's Republic. And they also put
(16:27):
the blame squarely on Mao Zedong. That's another thing that
a lot of times the West gets wrong about it.
There's sort of this perception that there has been a
constant and unending deification of Mao Zodong and that China
has never really acknowledged what happened, which is absolutely the
opposite of what we just said. You could not be
(16:49):
further from the right. At the end of the revolution,
China was still very, very poor, but since it had
eliminated a whole class of more wealthy people, this is
one of those blessing and a curse kind of things.
There was a lot less class division and a lot
less wealth disparity. The Great Leap forward and the consequent
(17:11):
famine had been hardest on China's laborers, particularly rural laborers
working on farms. The Cultural level Revolution, though, was hardest
on the affluent, so the educated who were sent to
the countryside to work and learn from common people, and
the people who had the money and the means to
become targets of the Red Guard were also significantly impacted.
(17:33):
So while the Great Leap Forward had killed millions of people,
had most who had mostly been on a more or
less subsistence level existence. The Cultural Revolution killed people who
had the money to own works of art or had
otherwise become suspects. So like the first tragedy had had
(17:53):
killed poor farmers and the second one killed intellectuals and
teachers and people who had money. People who were between
the ages of fifteen and twenty five during the Cultural
Revolution really missed out on having an education. High schools
came back by nineteen sixty seven, but universities did not
begin admitting people again until nineteen seventy. There was also
(18:17):
a really extreme and negative impact on minorities, both in
terms of being targeted by the Red Guard and the
Purgas and by having their cultural or artifacts destroyed. Previously
popular artists and musicians gave up their work rather than
being forced into propaganda for the new regime. And then
at a more basic social level, family members turned on
(18:39):
each other and began turning in their family members, their neighbors,
you know, people they had previously trusted for criticizing Maw,
sometimes not even because that had happened, but in an
effort to protect their own appearance as someone who supported Now,
about one point five million people died during the Cultural Revolution,
(19:01):
many many more went to prison or were tortured or beaten,
Some had their property seased. As we mentioned, thirty six
million were harassed or persecuted in some way. Even so,
even with those numbers, which are really pretty astronomical, there
were not a lot of specifics known about the Cultural
Revolution until more recently. People who grew up during the Revolution,
(19:24):
and we're members of the Red Guard, are now in
their sixties or seventies, and many of them have started
to talk more openly about what happened, so that the
history of it is not lost. So we're sort of
seeing the same kind of thing as people who lived
through the famine, you know, ten or fifteen years ago,
wanting to tell the story of the famine so that
(19:44):
the uh, the history of it would not be lost
to the world forever. And in some cases, there are
people that want to atone for their actions during the
Cultural Revolution, so as they're nearing end of life and
they're taking stock, they're trying to make good on what
they feel you've done wrong in their lives. Yeah. I
read just some really heartbreaking stories that are basically boiled
(20:06):
down to I was fifteen years old and I turned
in my mother. Like so, there are just a whole
lot of stories of people who have carried around this
um remorse and regret, sometimes having caused the deaths of
their family members for decades after this was over. Um.
(20:27):
It's horribly sad story. It is a yeah. Well, and
what's weird to me? The Cultural Revolution has been on
my list of things that I wanted to talk about
pretty much since coming on the podcast. It is a
thing that I knew very little actual detail about beforehand.
(20:52):
I feel like most of my knowledge of the Cultural
Revolution was in UH, some college courses that talked about
Mao's Little Red Book, right, which is a tiny piece
of it, um, and then the Chinese language movie Farewell,
My Concubine. There's not a lot to go on, and
I had the sense that it was just heartbreaking and
(21:12):
disruptive and upsetting and uh at the same time, as
as it grew into this mini series, which is the
first time that I have tried to tackle something that
ambitious in the podcast. At the further I got into it,
the more I was like, why did I do this? Um? So,
I really hope that those of you who are listening
(21:34):
have gotten something out of this, this four part now series,
um because wow, it was a lot to tackle. I
am not going to do another four part series for
a long while because you're crazy. Uh. Do you have
some fun listener mail to offset the sadness of the day.
It is much more fun. I'm not going to read
(21:54):
all of it, but it is from Faith who wrote
to us about our History of Colors episode, which is
I did to break up like the extremely distressing topics
I had been researching for a while. Uh So, Faith says,
longtime listener, but this is the first time I've really
felt compelled to write in thank you so much for
the excellent episode on the history of color. There are
(22:16):
as I'm sure you now know, whole libraries of material
on various aspects of color and on individual shades that
can draw you down any number of research paths, like
good as Beef with Newton, or the history and influence
of Owen Jones's Grammar of ornament, not to mention public
health and ecology see Dan Figgin's Toms River, and of
(22:38):
course colonialization in global trade as a brief aside, I
actually originally in the introduction had this whole thing about
what Newton thought color was and what all of these
other people afterward thought color was. And it became number
one really long and number two not really Germaine to
the direction that episode really end up going, which was
(23:01):
about more pigments and dies than the theory of color. Um.
Another fun fact to return to the letter about the
development of synthetic dies is how it intersected with that
of artificial lighting in the larger context of the Industrial Revolution.
In effect, the industrialization of light enabled and responded to
(23:23):
the industrialization of color. That is a fascinating observation that
we had not thought about, or I had not thought
about at all. Yeah, and then faith says just one
more analin dies also proved useful for staining sales on
microscope slides, thereby aiding the bacteriological revolution. That was the
thing that I thought that I had mentioned in the episode,
(23:44):
but I think maybe I did not. So thank you
Faith for writing into us with all of this. If
you would like to write to us, we were a
history podcast that how Stuff Works dot com. You can
write to us about this or any of our other episodes.
You can send suggestions. Please do not suggest another four
part series because it was really hard. Um. We're on
Facebook at Facebook dot com, slash missed in History and
(24:05):
on Twitter at miss in History. Are tumbler is miss
in History dot tumbler dot com, and we are on Interest.
We have a new store where you can buy shirts
and iPhone cases and stuff like that, and that is
at missing history dot spreadshirt dot com. You can come
to our parent company's website, which is how stuff Works
dot com, and you can search the word Mau in
(24:25):
the search bar and you will find a really interesting
article called why is there an underground city beneath Beijing? Uh?
That underground city was started while Mao was in office.
And you can come to our website which is missing
history dot com and you can find show notes, all
of the episodes and archive of everything we have ever
done so, come and visit us at miss in history
(24:46):
dot com or how stuff Works dot com for more
on this and thousands of other topics. Stuff works dot
com in
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