Ring in the year 2000: celebrate the birthday of Mao Zedong

by MC44

On December 26, MIM celebrates Mao Zedong's last birthday of the century in which he led the greatest communist revolution to date by continuing the struggle against imperialism and applying the lessons of the Chinese revolution to our work in the imperialist countries. Part of MIM's task is to provide communist leadership and education to a generation of youth today who became politically aware after the collapse of the former Soviet Union, and who have been educated about socialism and China entirely by the bourgeoisie.

Even at the end of 1999, MIM observes the portrayal of the Chinese revolution by the hegemonic bourgeois forces of academics, journalists, and policy-makers. To wage our own continued struggle against U$ imperialism, we need to understand the dominant culture's view of Mao and China so that we can undermine it and build the people's independent culture and worldview.

Toward the end of his life, Mao made one of his greatest contributions to the advancement of the human condition when he helped launch the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) in 1966. The Chinese revolution had made great advances since the people's victory in 1949, and Mao recognized the need for continued revolution within the communist leadership itself to consolidate and further advance the construction of socialism in China. A key policy within the GPCR promoted the movement of urban Chinese youth to the countryside to labor alongside the peasants, sharing their own technical expertise and at the same time being reeducated in class orientation by the peasants.

Academic journal blasts GPCR

In February 1999, a leading Amerikan academic journal, the American Sociological Review, published an article assessing the later life course of children who were "sent-down" to rural areas during the GPCR.(1) Much of this debate is a well-worn path for MIM -- as we confront the familiar charges that these youth, along with their intellectual parents, were "persecuted" during this time. But the article offered some new information, and it provides another opportunity to expose the bourgeois hypocrisy embedded in imperialist education, and to celebrate some undeniable truths about the Maoist experience.

The first problem with the article, "Children of the Cultural Revolution: the State and the Life Course in the People's Republic of China," is that the authors, Xueguang Zhou and Liren Hou, do not make a distinction between the revolutionary government of 1949-1976, and the reactionary leadership which seized power in a coup following Mao's death and restored capitalism to China.

So when the article talks about promises the government made to youth in the early 1970s -- including employment upon their return to the cities -- the authors talk about the betrayal of those promises in the 1980s as if they were dealing with the same political leadership. Similarly, the authors portray changes in China's educational system under the reactionary capitalist-roaders, such as the restoration of "merit" based college entrance exams in 1977, as a cruel deception by the revolutionary government instead of the actions of new and entirely different regime.(2)

As Maoists, we take responsibility for mistakes made by Mao and the Chinese Communist Party, including those that led to the capitalists' victory. But we make sure people understand that once the capitalist roaders took power, they changed the political, economic and social development of China. The authors are right about the period after 1976, and the worsening conditions they portray only underscore MIM's support of revolutionary China under Mao, and our opposition to the restoration of capitalism that took place after his death.

The second problem with the ASR article is that its measurements of well-being later in life of the sent-down youth -- persynal income, position in the urban labor force, age of marriage and bearing children, and educational attainment -- are fraught with petty bourgeois individualism. In recounting the experience of urban youth in the countryside as it happened and its later impact on their lives, never do the scholars wonder about the effect of this state policy on the well-being of the rural peasants -- the majority of China's population. Were the peasants better or worse off during and as a result of this policy? Like the bourgeois China scholars before them, they don't care.

Nobel prize committee rewards service to the people

But the bourgeoisie wants to have it both ways. In October, an international organization called Doctors Without Borders won the Nobel Peace Prize for its work providing international emergency medical services -- usually in the context of a national crisis. Recent recipients of their help have been in Turkey following the massive earthquake in August 1999, and even more recently in East Timor.

In an acknowledgement (that pretends to be apolitical) of how rare and unusual it is for people with lucrative professions in First World countries to leave their comfortable lives, go somewhere dangerous and serve the people, Doctors Without Borders got a prize worth a million dollars. At the same time, academic scholars, policy makers, journalists, and the rest of the bourgeoisie continue to vilify China's GPCR for taking this important principle and making it mandatory policy affecting millions of people.

The press release announcing Doctors Without Borders' Nobel Prize reads, "Since its foundation in the early 1970s, Medecins Sans Frontires [the group's French name] has adhered to the fundamental principle that all disaster victims, whether the disaster is natural or human in origin, have a right to professional assistance, given as quickly and efficiently as possible. National boundaries and political circumstances or sympathies must have no influence on who is to receive humanitarian help."(3) MIM asks, so why didn't Chinese peasants have this same right in the 1970s? If they did -- and we believe they did -- why was it wrong to express this right in a mandatory state program?

As long as the prize committee wants to recognize advances in medical care and service to the masses, they could also have looked at Mao's China in the 1960s. "One of many socialist programs developed in China was the barefoot doctors, who were peasants trained for a few months in basic medical care and then worked in their village to prevent disease and injury, improve sanitation, and treat common medical problems."(4) Neither Mao, nor anyone in the Chinese government under Mao was ever offered the Nobel Peace Prize, but the impact of their work achieved more just in terms of saving lives and providing medical service to people than Doctors Without Borders will ever achieve.

Urban intellectuals in the countryside

Between 1967-1978, 17 million urban Chinese youth were sent to the countryside.(5) The movement began as a volunteer effort among the Red Guards in 1967, and the Communist Party soon endorsed the effort and made it into policy.(6) Although the bourgeoisie likes to portray the program as "anarchic," the authors of the recent ASR study admit that the government made deliberate and materialist choices about who was sent.

First, the authors concede students most likely to be sent down were those that had completed high school, and that "most urban youth graduated from secondary school during the Cultural Revolution."(7) Second, the authors state that "an increase in urban employment opportunities reduced the probability of being sent to rural areas."(8) And as every anti-Cultural Revolution scholar before them, Zhou and Hou criticize China for making urban youth work "12 hours a day, 7 days a week." There is no mention of whether the peasants who they worked alongside had to work those hours (or more) before, during or after the program.

As usual, the petit bourgeoisie is outraged when privileged people have to live like the great majority -- but they turn a blind eye to the sufferings in the countryside, and don't care to acknowledge the unprecedented improvements in peasant life during the Mao years.

The international proletariat measures the success and failures of the send-down practice in different terms. We observe that the practice helped to destroy class differences by requiring youth of privileged classes to perform manual labor, at the same time as it recognized that educated youth had a lot to learn from the peasants. We recognize that the peasants were served by this program, as students brought technical and scientific expertise to remote villages. Of Long Bow village in 1978, William Hinton writes in The Great Reversal, a book about the de-collectivization of Chinese agriculture under the capitalist regime:

"The educated youth in the village, ninety strong in 1977, but reduced to a handful by 1979 as the authorities stopped sending city dwellers to the countryside, were evenly divided between young men and women. ... Their contribution to the life of the village was deep and many faceted. There contribution to the life of the village was deep and many faceted. There were science majors, musicians, actors, dancers, artists, and athletes among them. ... they helped to discover how to overcome the alkalinity of Long Bow's soil."(9)

During the GPCR, Hinton explained how socialism developed and old oppressive educational ideas were dismantled in the context of a famous institute of science and engineering:

"Students now spend as much time in the factories and on the construction sites of greater Peking as they do in classrooms and laboratories, and professors devote as much energy to developing liaison with the scores of factories and enterprises with which the university is allied as they do to lecturing and advising students. No longer will thousands of privileged young men and women withdraw into the leafy wonderland of Tsinghua to crack books until they are too old to laugh. No longer will they stuff their heads with mathematical formulas relating to the outmoded industrial practices of pre-war Europe and America, sweat through 'surprise attack' exams, and then emerge after years of isolation from production and political engagement unable to tell high-carbon steel from ordinary steel or a 'proletarian revolutionary' from a 'revisionist.'(10)

How does capitalism measure up?

Bourgeois academics continue to insist that the Cultural Revolution "interrupted" the education of China's urban youth, even though they recognize that education in general was vastly expanded and improved in China after Liberation in 1949. In 1997, an article in the American Journal of Sociology about education in Cultural Revolution, explained: "... the Chinese government sought to increase educational opportunity for the children of workers and peasants by providing more schools. The number of schools at each level and the portion of school age children enrolled in them both increased continuously from the 1950s through the 1970s. By 1981, primary schools were three times more numerous than they had ever been before 1949. The fraction of children of primary school age enrolled in school rose from 20% in 1949 to 85% in 1965 and to 93% in 1981. By 1981 [right before the commune system was dismantled by the capitalists -ed], almost every commune had its own lower secondary school. Also, the number of tertiary educational institutes in China increased from 210 in 1950 to 434 in 1965 and to 704 in 1981."(11)

This article too portrays China seamlessly from the revolutionary government into the capitalist era in 1981. But the principal gains made were under Mao. And what can the United Snakes count as its contributions to the education of the international proletariat? That it has financed and set up reactionary dictatorships around the world, squelching the education and well-being of youth from Soweto to Palestine to South Central Los Angeles.

At the end of the century MIM finds that the petit bourgeois propagandists for imperialism keep trying to have it both ways. A charity project to help some people in need is considered nice, and given a small reward and a lot of press. But they vilify an unprecedented social revolution intended to eliminate the basis for the continued suffering and premature death of millions from similar causes. The Chinese Revolution, led by Mao Zedong, shone a light on the revolutionary path to wiping out starvation, needless deaths from illness, oppression and inequality. It is that path that MIM attempts to travel in the next century.

Notes:

1. "Children of the Cultural Revolution: the State and Life Course in the People's Republic of China." American Sociological Review. February 1999, v. 64, no. 1. pp. 12- 36.
2. ASR, p. 15
3. http://www.nobel.se/announcement-99/peace99_eng.html
4. "Myths About Maoism," from What is MIM.
5. ASR, p. 12.
6. ASR, p. 15.
7. ASR, p. 26.
8. ASR, p. 22.
9. The Great Reversal. by William Hinton. p. 35.
10. The Hundred Day War: The Cultural Revolution at Tsinghua University. by William Hinton, available from MIM for $15.
11. "The impact of the cultural revolution on educational attainment in the People's Republic of China," Zhong Deng and Donald J. Treiman. American Journal of Sociology. Sept. 1997, v. 103, n.2. p. 39. article edited by MC17