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Who Were the Victims of the Cultural Revolution?
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12605 |
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Book World
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6 / 1987 |
4,054 Words |
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Maurice J. Meisner
Maurice J. Meisner is professor of history at the University
of Wisconsin at Madison. His most recent book is Mao's China
and After: A History of the People's Republic. |
In the epilogue of Anne Thurston's superb compilation of the harrowing stories of the victims of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, one of her informants, Song Erli, describes the upheaval as "a revolution by the people, a revolution crushed by the combined efforts of the army, Mao, Lin Biao and the Gang of Four" (p. 296). Earlier in the volume, where Song Erli (a brilliant university student whose parents had been branded "rightists") relates in considerable detail his experiences and his bitter fate as a "revolutionary rebel" during the days of the Cultural Revolution, he states: "The army was the greatest perpetrator of atrocities during the Cultural Revolution. Most of the cruelty happened after 1967" (p. 197).
Song Erli's account, as related to Thurston, reveals two fundamental truths about the Cultural Revolution, both of which have been largely ignored by Western scholars and both of which the leaders of the post-Mao regime in Beijing have taken great pains to expunge from the official record (and indeed the unofficial records) of the "decade of catastrophe." The truths, simply put, are these: first, while persecutions and killings came from a variety of political quarters during the Cultural Revolution, it is clear that the greatest toll in human lives was taken by the People's Liberation Army in its various campaigns of repression of "ultra-lefists" in 1968 and after. Second, although the victims of the Cultural Revolution were many and varied, the great majority of those killed during the upheaval were the young people who were the first and most ardent to heed Mao Zedong's call to "dare to rebel" against established authority.
Thurston seems to be aware of these elemental (if officially unacknowledged) facts of
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