The International Institute of Social History has a collection of Chinese propaganda posters with translations and explanations in three categories:
1. Early years (1949-1965);
2. Cultural Revolution (1966-1976);
3. Modernization (1977-1997).

“Elect Good People to Do Good Things”

You’ve maybe heard the name “Watchman Nee” before. That’s because he founded one of the largest Christian groups in Chinese history before dying in a Chinese labour camp. Here’s a summary of a longer article on him and his work, with a link to the PDF of the original article: Watchman Nee and the Little Flock Movement in Maoist China

A basic understanding of the place of Watchman Nee and the Little Flock Movement in Chinese history adds some helpful nuance to understanding the relationships between the Party, Chinese Christianity, the TSPM, and Chinese patriotism and anti-foreignism.

The recent tragic death of a toddler who was run over twice while eighteen passersby ignored her (all caught on camera) has scandalized China and provoked disturbing questions about the moral state of Chinese society. I suspect a significant part (though not all) of the answer to those questions is found in the legacy of the Great Leap Forward (大跃进), which is brutally catalogued in the 2010 book Mao’s Great Famine. (Other, deeper cultural factors are explored here.)

Of the 45 million abnormal deaths during the Great Leap Forward (大跃进), one to three million were suicides and 2.5 million people died from beatings/torture. Most of the rest starved to death, though many were murdered outright, worked to death or deliberately starved. That was Mainland China, 1958-1962. It’s been called “one of the most deadly mass killings in human history” [pp.x-xi], and eventually led to the Cultural Revolution.

The stats above are the findings of Dutch historian Dr. Frank Dikötter in Mao’s Great Famine: the History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962, which claims more accurate statistics compiled from archive sources not previously available, and connects the dysfunction and decisions of the central government with their end results at the village and family level. Dikötter also connects the dots between the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution at the political level and at street level, showing how the Cultural Revolution was rooted politically and historically in the Great Leap Forward, and that when it comes to the violence and abuse of the Red Guards, the Cultural Revolution actually invented very little. He pins the blame for the disaster on Mao and the central government and demonstrates how government policies greatly exacerbated so-called natural disasters like flooding (on which the excess deaths from the time period are officially blamed).

That all interests me, but what interests me even more is the experience of that generation of Chinese at a personal, family and village level, and how that might relate to the present. Particularly the impact the Great Leap Forward must have had on relationships and moral standards at the time, during the Cultural Revolution, and down to today. While this isn’t the focus of Dikötter’s book, in several instances Dikötter discusses the impact of forced collectivisation, the Party’s culture of violence, and mass starvation on relationships and morality.

[C]oercion, terror and systematic violence were the foundation of the Great Leap Forward. [p.x]

Mao… extend[ed] the military structure of the Party to all of society… Every aspect of society was organized along military lines… in a continuous revolution. These were not merely martial terms rhetorically deployed to heighten group cohesion. All the leaders ere military men attuned to the rigours of warfare. They had spent twenty years fighting a guerrilla war in extreme conditions of deprivation… They glorified violence in which the end justified the means. In 1962, havng lost millions of people in his province, Li Jingquan compared the Great Leap Forward to the Long March, in which only one in ten had made it to the end: “We are not weak, we are stronger, we have kept the backbone.”
[...]
The brute force with which the country had been conquered was now unleashed upon the economy — regardless of casualty figures… The country became a giant boot camp in which ordinary people no longer had a say in the tasks they were commanded to carry out… They had to follow orders, failing which they risked punishment. Whatever checks existed on violence — religion, law, community, family — were simply swept away. [pp.298-9]

In a moral universe in which means justified the ends, many would be prepared to become the Chairman’s willing instruments, casting aside every idea about right and wrong to achieve the ends he envisaged. [pp.102-3]

Despite the vision of social order the regime projected at home and abroad… So destructive was radical collectivization that that at every level the population tried to circumvent, undermine or exploit the master plan, secretly giving full scope to the profit motive that the Party tried to eliminate. As famine spread, the very survival of an ordinary person came increasingly to depend on the ability to lie, charm, hide, steal, cheat, pilfer, forage, smuggle, trick, manipulate or otherwise outwit the state… [T]hese phenomena were not so much the grit that stopped the machinery as the oil that prevented the system from coming to a complete standstill… Obfuscation was the communist way of life. People lied to survive… [p.xiv]

Collectivization forced everybody, at one point or another, to make grim moral compromises. Routine degradations thus went hand in hand with mass destruction. [p.xv]

Life in the countryside has always been tough in China, and strict observance of traditional notions of filial piety would simply have been beyond the reach of all but the wealthiest households before the communist takeover… But in most cases, before 1949, [the elderly] could count on a measure of care and dignity: their mere survival demanded respect.

Yet by the time of the Cultural Revolution a completely different set of values seemed to dominate, as young students tortured their teachers and Red Guards attacked elderly people. When did the moral universe turn upside down? While the Party was steeped in a culture of violence… the real watershed was the Great Leap Forward… [T]he people’s communes left children without their mothers, women without their husbands, and the elderly without relatives: these three family bonds were destroyed as the state was substituted for the family. As if this were not bad enough, collectivisation was followed by the agony of famine. As hunger stalked an already distressed social landscape, family cohesion unraveled further; starvation tested every tie to the limit. [p.263]

If that was the relational and moral world of your grandparents, which was reinforced again less than a decade later in the Cultural Revolution, wouldn’t you expect a society where injured toddlers are left to die in the road (to reference only one of a long list of examples)? Previously on this blog I’ve pointed out aspects of China’s pre-Liberation cultural heritage that encourage or at least enable the shocking, apparently amoral state of contemporary Chinese society. And I think that’s valid. But I also think it’s crucial to highlight the legacy of the Great Leap Forward in tearing apart the social and moral fabric of Chinese society (not to mention the decades of civil war and foreign invasion before that). With that as the immediate social and moral inheritance of today’s generations, and given the enabling cultural heritage, the stark mutual disregard for the basic welfare fellow human beings, while not excusable, is certainly more understandable. Just reading this book, with its endless, gruesome train of anecdotes, is enough to kill off a small piece of your humanity — but what if you’d actually lived through it?

My parents were born in the mid-50s. That means they would have been young children during the Great Leap Forward and possibly old enough to remember some things. But Chinese who are now in their 60s and 70s certainly remember. It’s incredible to imagine that the old guys on the corner who introduced me to báijiǔ 白酒 and tried to teach me Chinese chess 象棋 lived through this, at least as children. Mainlanders’ general relationship to the state and its resources and the obvious lack of general participation in ‘civil society’ makes so much more sense after glimpsing what the grandparents experienced.

So I recommend the book, with the suggestion that you become aware of the criticisms noted in the wikipedia entry, and with the warning that the brutality catalogued in its pages — which goes far beyond the sheer numbers or the biological and social nature of famine and starvation to the almost incomprehensible animalistic abuse that became routine — will gnaw on your humanity.

Related stuff:

• How can I be proud of my China if we are a nation of 1.4bn cold hearts? (The Guardian)
• Shocking Foshan incident reveals an unspoken illness at China’s core (The Guardian)
• Why Didn’t Peasants Riot During China’s Three-Year Famine? Part 1, Part 2 (Inside-Out China)
• About sharing the uglier sides of our China experience
• Judging China
• The Good Samaritan with Chinese characteristics (Pt.1): examples
• The Good Samaritan with Chinese characteristics (Pt.2): explanations, excuses, & scapegoats
• (How to be a) Good Samaritan with Chinese characteristics (Pt.3)

P.S. – I found these photos by doing a Google image search for 大跃进 (Great Leap Forward) and 超英赶美 (“Surpass Britain, Catch Up with America”). Many propaganda images from the era are explained at ChinesePosters.net here and here. Apparently the only images publicly available are propaganda photos and posters.

P.P.S – The cover photo of the book “incorporates a 1962 image of Chinese refugees to Hong Kong begging for food as they are deported back to China.”.

It’s rare, but not entirely unheard of. Here’s a story translated from the Chinese media about some former Red Guards who have finally tried to apologize to their victims — 40 years later. See A Letter From Deep Inside History: Forty-four years later, finally some red guards apologize publicly.

See Chinese Openings, about one Chinese city’s official memorial to victims of the CR:

That’s a hopeful sign. I spent too long covering the bloody wars in the Balkans not to believe that history denied can devour you.

If we do ‘math with Chinese characteristics,’ then we can say it’s been “60 Glorious Years” since the end of China’s civil war and the beginning of the current dynasty. Here are some interesting reflections from two very different Mainlanders who’ve lived through it all.

A poor Chinese lantern maker, born in 1934:

In my lifetime, we’ve been through so many political movements. All national ones which were no concern of ours, like the 1954 Suppress the Counter-Revolutionaries, the 1957 Anti-Rightest movement, the Cultural Revolution, sending intellectual youth to remote country areas, stuff like that. But I never stopped making lanterns. I never though making revolution meant getting rid of festival traditions! I always thought the reason I was brave enough to carry on with my craft in secret was because I wasn’t educated, and had no idea what feudalism, capitalism and revisionism meant. I didn’t know about Party principles, or what the revolutionary Four News were meant to be. I wasn’t the only one who didn’t understand that. Most ordinary people had about as little education as I did. In fact, how many of those anti-everything revolutionaries with their movements for this and that understood what is was all about? Making revolution was just a pretext for people to settle private scores. If those movements really had been good for China, then we wouldn’t have been poor for so many years. People today wouldn’t be so fixated on money, and wouldn’t ignore traditional arts like they do. [pg. 220]

From an interview with an American-born Chinese female general, born in 1930, who worked 40 years in military education:

Xinran (the author): After the end of the feudal Qing dynasty, China never stopped changing — from Empire to Republic took just a few years, and the change from GMD to CCP also happened quickly. Especially in the cities, regime change was really rapid. It’s like you said, in Shanghai people’s political outlook changed in twenty-four hours. How is it possible, in your view, for ordinary people to cope with such rapid change?

General Phoebe: Ordinary people don’t care. You change the dynasty or the emperor, it’s all the same to us. We’ll follow any emperor, so long as you don’t stop us going about our business . . . I think they got used to things, and didn’t care. It’s “I’ll obey anyone, any authority, who’s good to me”.

Xinran: Political authority is like a god for an awful lot of ordinary Chinese.

General Phoebe: Authority is very important, not just for a nation, but also within the family. The patriarch of the great Chinese family is an authority who cannot be disobeyed by family members. A family without an authority figure will quickly disintegrate; the children and grand-children may scatter, and some will begin to fight between themselves. Within the family, the main head of the family is basically a ruler. If he or she is an enlightened and wise one, then they can deal with all family relationship problems, and guarantee that future generations have family rules to follow – rules which can make those family ties indissoluble and keep generations together. When that authority weakens, then other family members may involuntarily gravitate towards a new authority, and this may bring conflict in its wake. Interestingly enough, we can see the reappearance in national history of the traditional cultural consciousness of the great Chinese family, as the “cells” of family life penetrate the bone and marrow of the nation. [pg.282]

(Quoted from China Witness: Voices from a Silent Generation by Xinran, a collection of extended personal interviews with members of China’s most fascinating generation.)

P.S. – This is more about people than politics. Please remember that in the comments.

Related Posts:

• Chinese women & high heels
• Mainlanders and their past; Mainlanders and their selves — from China Witness by Xinran
• Why Mainlanders are taking it personally, racially, and facially – the short answer
• What do the Olympics mean to “their China”?

The Foreign Expert translates a magazine spread where writers recall their childhoods from the ’60s through the ’80s. The essays “follow the thread of China’s modernization and opening up, from the simple, hopeful lives of the Cultural Revolution to the first big influx of products and ideas two decades later” — Bread, Milk, and Pocket Change: A Brief History of Childhood.

For me personally, the Mainland’s grandparents and great-grandparents are China’s most interesting generation. As soon as I could string a few sentences together I was trying to get our neighbours to tell us about their stories and experiences. But Xinran, the author of China Witness: Voices from a Silent Generation, is Chinese, and this means she can go light-years farther in an interview than I can with my novice Mandarin, mere beginner’s cultural understanding, white face, and 大鼻子。

In China Witness she’s interviewed twenty people, all at least in their 70’s, in order to “help our future understand our past.” She had to deal with the expected hurdle of actually getting her interviewees to share their own stories, and this led to some interesting remarks about individual and collective Chinese identities, generational differences, the importance of remembering these particular chapters in China’s modern history and their connection to individual and national dignity, and the real danger of those experiences never being shared. Everything that follows comes from the book’s Introduction.

“This book is a testament to the dignity of modern Chinese lives.
[. . .]
“For Chinese people, it is not easy to speak openly and publicly about what we truly think and feel. And yet this is exactly what I have wanted to record: the emotional responses to the dramatic changes of the last century. I wanted my interviewees to bear witness to Chinese history. Many Chinese would think this a foolish, even a crazy thing to undertake — almost no one in China today believes you can get their men and women to tell the truth. But this madness has taken hold of me, and will not let me go: I cannot believe that Chinese people always take the truth of their lives with them to the grave” [p.1].

“…China’s freedom of speech continues to be hedged with idiotic obstinacy, ignorance, and fear.

“But I can wait no longer. Thanks to the destruction of the Cultural Revolution, and the ongoing censorship of the media and control of school textbooks, China’s younger generations are losing with earlier generations’ struggles for national dignity. The individuals who fought for twentieth-century China are mocked and dismissed for their unquestioning loyalty to now outmoded revolutionary ideals. As they search for new values against the uncertainties of the present and the debunking of the past, many young people today refuse to believe that, without the contributions of their grandparents and great-grandparents, the confident, modernising China they now know would not exist” [p.2].

“After almost twenty years of interviews and research as a journalist, I am worried that the truth of China’s modern history — along with our quest for national dignity — will be buried with my parents’ generation” [p.2-3].

“When I said that I would talk to them in person, my interviewees began to get cold feet; even to pull out completely. More and more subjects became out of bounds; some asked not to be filmed, or taped; others asked me if I knew what might happen after the interviews were published. I could tell that they were torn between the yearning to take this opportunity — quite possibly the last of their lives — to speak out, and the anxiety for the possible consequences. Could I get hold of a government permit to speak to them? several people suggested. Or an official “interviewee protection” guarantee? As if the decision to talk about their lives was one for the Communist Party, rather than the individuals themselves, to make.

“All of which only confirmed what I already knew from two decades of working as a journalist in China. . . .the Chinese people have not yet succeeded in escaping the shadow of three millennia of imperial totalitarianism and a twentieth century of chaotic violence and oppression, to speak freely without fear of being punished by the prevailing regime” [p.7].

“For the last hundred years, the Chinese people have been hesitating between affirmation and denial of the self . . . Very few people can understand and define themselves as individuals, because all their descriptive vocabulary has been colonised by unified social and political structures. A person can readily respond to external stimuli — to political injustice, to frustrations at work, to the praise of others — but only rarely succeed in making independent sense of themselves” [p.9].

(You can buy China Witness: Voices from a Silent Generation here.)

Related posts:

• Sharing Chinese New Year’s with the neighbours (Mr. Song & Mrs. Li)
• Meet Mrs. Shǐ – Striving Hard for a Stable Future
• Meet Mr. Lù – a living Léi Fēng
• Defining “You”
• Objects and Their Contexts
• Heros – and the Greater Good

Mr. China’s Son is a special book for a number of reasons. Unlike most of the other “scar literature” I’ve read so far (memoirs written by victims of the Mainland’s 20th century policies and society), which conveys the experiences of female, urban, educated, socially privileged victims, Mr. China’s Son was written in English by a Chinese peasant. Not only do we get a first-hand account of life at a time and level of Chinese society where most people didn’t have the ability to write their own stories, He Li-yi‘s English is unique. He writes many idioms and terms literally, giving the narrative a special flavour (“university” is “big-school,” for example). This, along with many quoted conversations and his surprisingly blunt honesty, makes the culture just shine through. He writes for English speakers, and each chapter contains footnotes that explain various details of the story. It’s great material if you’re interested in what it took for a regular guy and his family to survive the second half of China’s 20th century.

The author has a couple web address (owing to the difficulty in accessing them in the Mainland), which are an extension of his desire to be a “cultural bridge.” I especially encourage you to click around this one; it’s got to be one of the most charming places in the whole internet:

• Mr. China’s Son Cultural Exchange Bridge

Several parts of the website are worth checking out. The reader response Q&A section displays some of his remarkable and disarming honesty. Some samples:

7. How did your experience during the CR influence your life after it was over?
After the CulturaI RevoIution, I became very nervous about political affairs. I no longer believed people. I always kept silence in all kinds of meetings, and didn’t want to express my thoughts directly. I taught my two sons to think over everything again and again before speaking out. Above all, I would not allow my sons and grandsons to rebuild our old house in the village into a very modern one, I told them to keep it poor looking, just repair it, but don’t sell it.

8. Did you see anything positive come out of the ten years of oppression?
Yes, there are three things: (1) People realized that relationships between family members are extremely weak. (2) People realized that to faithfully run after somebody great might not result in a good end. (3) People realized that the poor-and-lower class is by no means great.

I also see three negative things. (1) People became poorer; (2) People do not trust each other, (3) Many people became more selfish.

10.Did you ever feel that there were times when you had to compromise what you believed during the revolution? If so, what made you keep your faith in your morals and beliefs?
Yes, at that time, only if I could manage to live on and on, then I would compromise anything. If I refused to compromise, then the only way out was TO DIE. For a time, I had become a person who had forgotten ‘I had received a college-level education’. When I first heard some government workers came to apologize, I thought people were making fun of me again. I thought they wanted to fool me again.

At that time, I compromised because I wanted to be alive. I believed: “If I could keep the mountains green, no need to worry about ‘no firewood to cook’. ” Later, facts proved those who refused to compromise were struggled to death or committed suicide. Luckily I compromised. A wise leader (Mr. Deng) appeared in Beijing. I was able to become a teacher, and be able to write a book to tell the world what had happened in China.

11. What values of today do you see replacing that of yesterday? How do you feel about these values?
After 1979, an economic construction began in a BIG WAY. The result was: CHINA HAS BECOME STRONGER AND STRONGER, BUT AT THE SAME TIME, EVERY BODY RAN AFTER MONEY. Some people earned (made) money through hard work, but some became rich NOT from hard work. The situation looked like we did almost everything in a CRAZY WAY. In other words, in whatever we did, we did TO EXCESS. I don’t think this is the correct way of solving problems. I hope our next generation will learn a lesson from our history. What we must do is to try our level best to avoid, get rid of ‘ TOO CRAZY’! If we keep on doing everything in a TOO CRAZY way, new problems will certainly appear again.

(The author’s other links are here and here.)