COLUMNISTS

I survived China's horrific Cultural Revolution (column)

York College professor recalls that cataclysmic event, which began 50 years ago on May 16.

Zehao Zhou
Guest Columnist
The personality cult of Mao helped fuel China's Cultural Revolution in 1966.

I have long dreaded revolution, as it seems to be inextricably associated with violence, destruction and terror. So I came to America in search of a land free from revolution, only to find myself in the home of the “York Revolution.”

Fortunately, the revolution that people in York are proud of is not the same one that I have dreaded.

It is the Chinese Cultural Revolution that has haunted me all my life.

May 16, 2016 marks the 50th anniversary of that cataclysmic event in human history. Fifty years ago that day, the dictator Mao Zedong lighted the flames of Cultural Revolution to purge his opponents and preserve the “true” communist ideology.

“Revolution is not a dinner party!” Mao proclaimed, unleashing millions of Red Guards to every corner of the country to launch the “Red Terror.” An internal power struggle quickly spilled over into all facets of the society. Destruction and violence of unspeakable proportions ensued.

China's one-child policy was hurting families, professor says

I was 11 that year. Half a century later, the haunting memory of the Cultural Revolution still lingers as a nightmare that never seems to end.

Red Guards, mostly brainwashed teenage hooligans, stormed into any neighborhood they pleased, assaulted anyone they wanted, and tortured their victims to death with impunity – all in the name of revolution.

"Be violent!" Mao told the impressionable students that he had just christened as Red Guards. Legions of them then embarked on a rampage across the country to carry this new gospel of destruction to every corner of China. There was no real resistance; the state was Mao and Mao was the state.

Zehao Zhou

I remember the “Chinese Crystal Night” in summer 1966 when waves of Red Guards from different factions repeatedly stormed my “bourgeois neighborhood” in the former French Concession of Shanghai over a period of weeks, terrorizing the innocent, ransacking homes and parading their victims through the streets for the purpose of public humiliation.

Screaming, shouting, yelling and cries for help rang out all around me — nearly every household was subjected to such abuse. Chaos was the order of the day.

Two enemies of the state lived under the same roof as me — my sister and my father.

My sister’s crime was being a school principal, which qualified her as a “capitalist roader.”

My father’s crime was his experience as a World War II veteran who served with the Flying Tigers in China, which qualified him as a “historical counterrevolutionary.”

York native in Paris: Attacks were terrifying

My sister initially went into hiding, only to return to Shanghai on a day slated as a “city-wide humiliation parade for school principals.” The Red Guards herded my sister, who was disabled, and hundreds of other school principals for miles on foot in downtown Shanghai. No evidence was necessary; educators necessarily deserved the iron fists of the Red Guards and proletarian dictatorship.

My father’s wartime service with the Americans made him an easy target for Red Guards. Yet, despite being gravely ill and defenseless, he somehow managed to turn aside the assault. As the Red Guards approached his sick-bed, my father said in a calm voice, “I am sick with tuberculosis. It is contagious.”

Hearing that, the Red Guards, who recited “Fear neither hardship nor death” from Mao’s Little Red Book every day, turned tail and fled. While Dad dodged that assault, the cumulative effect of years of persecution caught up with him — he died shortly after that at age 49, and we were not even allowed to mourn this “enemy of the state.”

When word came that the Red Guards were on their way to raid our neighborhood, my mother hurried to destroy any “incriminating evidence” that could be used against our family. After closing the curtains, she started to burn books, notebooks and the entire collection of family photos. I saw my mother gingerly putting one photo after another into the flames. I had never seen most of them before. The only time I got to see what my parents looked like at their wedding or how my father looked in uniform was in those fleeting moments before each photo started to curl and blacken in the flames.

As all of this was unfolding, waves of violence swept across the country: foreign embassies were sacked; political untouchables were summarily deported from the city or even buried alive; suicides became widespread.

Among the most atrocious events that occurred during the tumultuous summer of 1966 was the “Destroy the Four Olds Campaign.” Anything that expressed old ideas, old habits, old customs and old culture was subject to the wrath of the Red Guards. In just a few weeks, the material representation of 5,000 years of Chinese civilization was summarily destroyed or irrevocably damaged — the equivalent of the eradication of all material symbols of the Greek, Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions.

During China's Cultural Revolution, historical artifacts were destroyed and burned.

 

The numbers are mind-boggling: almost 90 percent of Tibet’s monasteries and temples were razed to the ground and roughly 74 percent of the historical sites in the birthplace of Confucius, China’s Jerusalem, were obliterated. In my own Shanghai neighborhood, what I will always remember is when a pack of Red Guards attacked our community church, brought out all of its Bibles into the middle of the street, and set them on fire. That horrific moment – seeing the sky darkened by the floating ashes of burned Bibles – remains seared in my memory even now.

Half a century has gone by. Yet although Mao is dead and China has become an economic powerhouse, the dark legacy of the Cultural Revolution can still be felt almost everywhere. Behind the façade of apparent wealth is a people who are still harvesting the bitter fruits of the chaos sown by Mao 50 years ago – widespread cynicism, hedonism, pessimism, materialism, opportunism and ignorance.

The result is a curious kind of doublethink. Mao led the country to ruin and is responsible for more deaths than either Hitler or Stalin, but he remains the political idol of millions of ordinary Chinese. The Red Guards were eventually denounced as aberrant radicals, but the ruling faction of the Chinese Communist Party is composed of a significant number of former Red Guards.

Communism as an actual policy is rejected, but membership in the Chinese Communist Party is at an all-time high. The Chinese government's anti-corruption campaigns have been going on for years and have ostensibly achieved great successes, yet the names of Chinese political and business elites still top the Panama Papers. The Dalai Lama is a proscribed figure, but the Tibetan branch of Buddhism is more popular than ever in China.

The Chinese education system is lauded by many in America, but Chinese students have chosen to enter American college in droves. Revolutionary songs from the era of the Cultural Revolution are played everywhere in China, but the events of the Cultural Revolution itself are remembered poorly or not at all.

The ancient Greeks had a saying that the gods would first make mad those they wished to destroy. Perhaps there is wisdom in this, and the madness of the Cultural Revolution was a prelude to the demise of a truly atrocious regime that claimed over 70 million innocent lives and destroyed many more. Perhaps a revolution is indeed what China truly needs — but a revolution like the American Revolution that returned power to the people, built a foundation for freedom, threw off the shackles of an oppressive system, and gave rise to a government of, by and for the people.

When that day comes, I will be the first to recommend that the baseball team in my old hometown be named the “Shanghai Revolution."

Zehao Zhou is an assistant professor at York College of Pennsylvania. He lives in Manchester Township.

Video: Zehao Zhou speaks about his father in this video about The Flying Tigers