How did China's Cultural Revolution failed?

[Hexen]

While I do know that Lenin didn't follow Marx's words since the revolution was not supposed to take place in feudal agricultural societies like Russia was at the time but rather developed industrial societies like Germany/Britain/etc but can anyone fill in history why China's Cultural Revolution failed? From the High School Commie's Guide (http://www.revleft.com/vb/high-school-commie-t22370/index.html) I spotted this quote from RedStar2000:


Places like Russia and China were shitholes still living in the middle ages before their revolutions; socialism created their modern economies out of nothing.Someone told me that this was Eurocentric about China "Still living in the Middle Ages" which China already abolished the Monarchy and had a Republic at the time before the Cultural Revolution. Of course if someone knows about Chinas history (without being Eurocentric) can explain how the Cultural Revolution didn't live up to Marx like the Russian Revolution did and how and why it failed?

[Clarion]

Do you mean the Cultural Revolution specifically or China's "communist" revolution in general?

The Cultural revolution was essentially Marx turned on his head. Instead of development of the means of production driving changes in the relations of production causing changes in civil society, politics and culture. In the Cultural Revolution Mao and the Red Guards tried to change the mode of production through attacks on bourgeois and feudal cultural products, and attempting to force China to accept a new "proletarian" culture.

[Hexen]

Do you mean the Cultural Revolution specifically or China's "communist" revolution in general?

I would go with both.

[Drosophila]

The Cultural Revolution didn't exactly succeed, but it didn't exactly fail either. One good thing that came out of it was an end to ancient traditions, especially the patriarchy. Women were empowered and regarded as equal to men during the Cultural Revolution. Many reminders of the empire were also done away with, in an effort to bring the Chinese people out of that culture.

As for the bad things, well, it did result in mass chaos. Civil unrest and power struggles within the party made for a very chaotic time period. Mao's personality cult also grew during this time period, which could be seen as a negative aspect of the GPC.

Refer to the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist (http://www.revleft.com/vb/group.php?groupid=10) group for more info.

Also, some books:

*The Battle for China's Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution by Mobo Gao (http://www.amazon.com/Battle-Chinas-Past-Cultural-Revolution/dp/074532780X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1343773788&sr=1-1&keywords=mobo+gao)

*The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History by Paul Clark (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521697867/sofa-20/ref=nosim)

*The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Life and Change in a Chinese Village by Dongping Han (http://www.amazon.com/The-Unknown-Cultural-Revolution-Chinese/dp/1583671803)


It's best to stay away from a lot of the mainstream stuff (like Jung Chang/ John Halliday and the "doctor" book). Always research the titles ahead of time to make sure it's not BS.

[islandmilitia]

Places like Russia and China were shitholes still living in the middle ages before their revolutions; socialism created their modern economies out of nothing.

I don't know who this guy is, but this is downright Eurocentric, borderline racist stuff. China was not in the "middle ages" before 1949 or even before 1911, in fact China showed all the signs of indigenous capitalist development before the nineteenth century, and even after that point represents a perfect example of combined and uneven development, rather than simple "backwardness". For example, Shanghai had textile mills before any state in the whole of the southern United States, and by 1930 had the largest textile mill in the entire world, which shows that, in much the same way as Russia, China was able to draw on the most modern forms of industrial technology as a result of foreign investment (often Japanese) in port cities such as Shanghai. The first cinema opened in Shanghai only five years after the first large cinema in San Francisco, which shows that the dynamic of combined and uneven production extended to leisure and consumption as well as industrial production. As part of the same process, there were also sweeping changes in the countryside, such as the undermining of peasant handicraft production under the weight of foreign competition, and a shift towards absentee landlordism. These social changes during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century set the context for the Chinese Revolution, and they are certainly not supportive of the Orientalist representation of China as a static, unchanging society.


Of course if someone knows about Chinas history (without being Eurocentric) can explain how the Cultural Revolution didn't live up to Marx like the Russian Revolution did and how and why it failed?

The Cultural Revolution was rooted in Mao's specific understanding of the nature of socialist society, and as such was about engaging with a set of problems that Marx himself was not able to predict, given that he never witnessed an actual attempt to construct socialism. Mao's understanding of socialism was that class divisions and class struggles do not disappear, but are given a new form under the conditions of socialism. Mao was conscious that even though the socialist revolution eliminates the wealth and direct political power of classes like the landlords and the bourgeoisie, these classes are still capable of undermining socialism through their ideological influence, which, combined with certain economic features of socialism, such as the division between mental and physical labour, and the existence of different forms of ownership, creates the risk of the revolutionary state itself being weakened, and certain cadres seeking to transform themselves into a new ruling class. The Cultural Revolution, in Mao's vision, was about transforming the ideological superstructure in order to weaken the ideological influence of the bourgeoisie, but it was also about introducing changes in the basic economic and political organization of socialism, in order to eliminate those inequalities which generate capitalist ideology on a spontaneous and ongoing basis.

By making these theoretical interventions and launching the Cultural Revolution, Mao was seeking to avoid what he took to be the fate of the Russian Revolution, in that he believed that the Russian Revolution had failed in the 1950s precisely because Lenin and Stalin had not launched a thorough struggle to eliminate bourgeois control of the superstructure. The book recommendations by one of the previous posters are good but off the top of my head I would also recommend Elizabeth Perry's Proletarian Power, the edited collection Some of Us, and the works of William Hinton.

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

The existance of the Cultural Revolution seems to suggest by itself that the Chinese Revolution was a failure for socialism. The struggle to uproot bourgeois/bureaucratic control should have taken place during that Revolution, not nearly 20 years later.

In any case the first two years of the Cultural Revolution were the most radical, filled with occupations and urban insurrections. What began as an attempt by Mao to regain control over the party, spiraled out of control and threatened the party as a whole as workers and students began to experience some autonomy for the first time in their lives. As a result of this the state began to crack down on certain factions within the Revolution, allowing it to come back under control of the party. From there it just became another tool for state repression, with a few progressive elements thrown in to keep it looking authentic.

I would suggest the documentary Morning Sun http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0381430/ if only for some of the great archival footage. Though it does seem to have a bias towards the current Chinese State's account of the cultural revolution.

[eric922]

The Cultural Revolution seems like a very Idealist thing to me. Instead of trying to change the material conditions of China, the Party tried to change the ideas of China and force the country to adopt socialist ideas when the conditions weren't there. At least that is my take on it. Keep in mind I am no expert and could be wrong about it, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

[L.A.P.]

Someone told me that this was Eurocentric about China "Still living in the Middle Ages" which China already abolished the Monarchy and had a Republic at the time before the Cultural Revolution.

Yeah, the Xinhai Revolution led by the Kuomingtang was a bourgeois revolution but the feudal elements still persisted until the Communist Party took over.

[islandmilitia]

The existance of the Cultural Revolution seems to suggest by itself that the Chinese Revolution was a failure for socialism. The struggle to uproot bourgeois/bureaucratic control should have taken place during that Revolution, not nearly 20 years later.

However, the Cultural Revolution did not come out of nowhere twenty years after 1949, because in the intervening period there was a constant struggle between bureaucracy and mass mobilization, and Mao himself initiated a number of movements and policies that were designed to keep the party-state in check. In the mid-1950s, there was a set of debates within the party about whether collectivization would have to wait for the wide distribution of advanced agricultural technology, or whether it would be collectivization itself that would enable the technical development of agriculture, and in that debate, Mao not only supported the state pushing for rapid collectivization, he also looked to the spontaneous changes that were already taking place at the base through the role of grassroots cadres, which shows that, even at an early stage, before the Sino-Soviet split, Mao prioritized mass involvement. In a similar way, in the early 1960s, after the Great Leap Forward, it was Mao who initiated the Socialist Education Movement, which, when proposed by Mao, was designed to combat capitalist resurgences in the countryside in the post-Leap reconstruction period, and prioritized the role of the peasant associations, whilst also calling for cadres to be involved in production work. This too reflects Mao's continuing emphasis on mass initiative and the struggle against bureaucracy. In fact, part of the immediate context for the Cultural Revolution was that the Socialist Education Movement was distorted by Liu Shaoqi so that initiative was given to work teams rather than the associations and the peasants themselves became the main targets of the movement.

On those grounds, we certainly shouldn't see the Cultural Revolution as something that Mao suddenly came up with, it was the culmination of a long set of struggles and tensions within China, between different sections of the CPC itself. That being said, I am sympathetic to your argument about the Cultural Revolution being undermined in 1968/69, and Mao having some responsibility in that process.


The Cultural Revolution seems like a very Idealist thing to me. Instead of trying to change the material conditions of China,

The Cultural Revolution wasn't just understood as being about ideas though. It brought about dramatic changes to the way government and workplaces were organized, and at its original inception, as articulated in the Sixteen Points of August 1966, it was also presented as "a powerful motive force for the development of the social productive forces of our country", which shows that there was also an expectation that the Cultural Revolution would allow for a rapid acceleration of economic development, according to firmly socialist logics and criteria. It is really the issue of criteria that should be emphasized here, because a key part of the theory of the Cultural Revolution is precisely that there is no such thing as economic development as such, and that what really matters is what kind of economic development we are talking about, whether it is economic development for socialism or capitalism. Taken together, the Cultural Revolution was about introducing a whole set of changes across Chinese society to ensure that China would be able to rapidly develop along a socialist road.