HKU Bulletin October 2016 (Vol. 18 No.1)

Having autopsied the early years of Communist Party rule and the Great Leap Forward to much acclaim, historian Frank Dikötter has now turned his sights on the Cultural Revolution – a period he divides into ‘red’, ‘black’ and ‘grey’ years and where, surprisingly, he finds the seeds of China’s economic reforms. Meanwhile, journalism students have been gaining insights into this period in Chinese history by studying newpapers from the time. CHINA’S COLOUR REVOLUTION good, others not so convincing, but in the end very few have anything to say about what the Cultural Revolution actually meant to people of all walks of life,” he said. His narrative starts with the aftermath of the failed Great Leap Forward of 1958–1961, which killed at least 45 million people and left Mao in a precarious position. Mao was determined to protect his position and his legacy and by 1966 he was ready to move – or at least, to get others to move for him. One thing after another At Mao’s urging, the Red Guards rose up in 1966–1967 – what Professor Dikötter calls the ‘red years’ of the Cultural Revolution, when students attacked teachers and ordinary people attacked Party members. “These are the years of willed chaos, where the Chairman uses the people at large to unsettle Party members, including his close colleagues in the higher echelons of power,” he said. This turmoil was followed by the ‘black years’ of 1968–1971 when a military dictatorship restored order. Soldiers fanned out to factories, schools, government units and other areas of daily life. Purges affected up to one in 50 ordinary people. The planned economy, which in the countryside had been relaxed during the red years, came back with a vengeance. But none of that sufficiently soothed Mao’s paranoia about his legacy. He turned against the The Cultural Revolution has been written about by countless scholars, who have picked apart a period that seemed both chaotic and organised – of Little Red Book-waving Red Guards running amok, destroying the old and denouncing counter-revolutionaries, and of labyrinthine backroom politics with Mao at the centre. But if anyone can shed new light on the period, it is Chair Professor of Humanities Frank Dikötter. Professor Dikötter’s two previous books, Mao’s Great Famine and The Tragedy of Liberation, drew extensively on Party archives that were newly-opened in the late 1990s and contained reports that the Central Government had otherwise kept out of view. He unveiled cruel directives, such as killing quotas, an official disregard for lives lost, and the impacts on ordinary Chinese. He returned to these sources for his latest book – albeit probably for the last time because the Government has started to pull down the shutters on its archives – and has again lifted a veil on a period that many might have thought was exhausted of new insights. “There are books and books written about the ‘court politics’ of the time, some of them very The punchline is, the people are as usual far ahead of their own government. The people are the true architects of economic reforms, not Deng Xiaoping. Professor Frank Dikötter The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962–1976 is published by Bloomsbury. Propaganda poster from the period of the Cultural Revolution. military, which was allied with Mao’s number two Lin Biao, who died mysteriously in a plane crash in 1971. The internal chaos in the Communist Party that ensued led to a period that Professor Dikötter calls the ‘grey years’, from 1971 to 1976. Here is where Professor Dikötter’s archival work is revelatory. He found reports compiled by the Party’s own investigators that revealed the Cultural Revolution was failing in its aims – it was not overturning the old culture or capitalism, but quite the opposite. “The Cultural Revolution started off as an attack against the Party itself, unleashed by the Chairman himself. Now that the army is gone, ordinary people realise that the Cultural Revolution has badly damaged the organisation of the Party, that Party members no longer have the clout they once had.” People take things into their own hands And so they embark on a ‘silent revolution’, in which whole villages turn capitalist by setting up markets and trading on the black market. “This was the biggest discovery of the archives,” he said. “The pretence of the collective economy is maintained because farmers give a share of their private crop to the local cadres who can then deliver what they have to deliver to the State. They keep the State off their back.” All of this happened some years before Deng Xiaoping came to power and heralded economic reforms – it was even starting to happen during the Cultural Revolution, when there was a thriving black market in aluminium badges of Mao. “The punchline is, the people are as usual far ahead of their own government. The people are the true architects of economic reforms, not Deng Xiaoping,” Professor Dikötter said. In that sense, the Cultural Revolution was a period of transition from the experimentation and terrible collectivisation failures of the first 17 years under Communist rule, to the market- oriented economy that persists today. But it has also left a darker legacy, he said: “As ordinary people were able to wrench basic economic freedoms away from the State, the Party became even more determined to repress their political aspirations.” Having pulled the roots of modern China into the light, Professor Dikötter’s next project is to look at how dictators, such as Mao, Hitler, Stalin and Kim Il Sung, forge their image and build up a cult of personality. “You cannot truly understand the machinery of repression without looking at the cult of personality. They go hand in hand,” he said. Professor Frank Dikötter’s division of the Cultural Revolution Red years Black years Grey years 1966−1967 1968−1971 1971−1976 25 | 26 The University of Hong Kong Bulletin | October 2016 Research