Mao’s Cultural Revolution Pt 4: Radical Changes in Culture

barefoot doctors serve the people

Kasama would like to share “Evaluating the Cultural Revolution in China and its Legacy for the Future.” It was written by the by the MLM Revolutionary Study Group in the U.S. This comprehensive paper describes the course of the Cultural Revolution (CR) from 1966-1976, its achievements and shortcomings, and why future movements for revolution, socialism and communism must stand on its shoulders.”

This is the fourth of 8 articles composing a paper that was written by the MLM Revolutionary Study group.

Part 1, 2, and 3, are available on Kasama. The other parts will soon follow.

Evaluating the Cultural Revolution (4): Revolution in Culture, Education and Internationalism

The Achievements of the Cultural Revolution

The many practical achievements of the Cultural Revolution deserve recognition as the most advanced forms of socialist transformation achieved in the world to date.[1] Below we describe these “socialist new things” in education, healthcare, culture, foreign policy, industry and agriculture. We also discuss in greater detail the advances in combating patriarchal authority and inequalities between women and men.

Revolution in the Superstructure of Socialist Society

The Cultural Revolution was first and foremost a revolution in the political and ideological superstructure of Chinese society. One of the most important parts of this superstructure under socialism is the Communist Party. According to the “16 Point Decision” that became the political charter of the Cultural Revolution, its principal task was to overthrow “those within the Party who are in authority and taking the capitalist road.”[2]
The Cultural Revolution moved into high gear in January 1967 with a seizure of power from below in Shanghai. In the plants, neighborhoods and at the city-wide level in Shanghai and many other cities, rebel workers criticized and replaced revisionist party officials with their own representatives. Through revolutionary committees, made up of representatives of the mass organizations of workers, revolutionary party cadre and political cadre of the People’s Liberation Army, millions of people began to play a more direct role in economic and state affairs. Likewise, revolutionary committees were established in many areas of the countryside based on self-organized mass associations of peasants and workers in local factories and shops.

Mao and the revolutionary forces in the party advanced other methods for overcoming the power inequalities between full-time government officials and party cadre and the masses of workers and peasants. While increasing numbers of peasants attended universities and agricultural colleges, May 7 Cadre Schools were set up in the countryside. All government officials and full-time party cadre were to be rotated through these schools, where they would do manual labor, live simply, and engage in intensive political study. Cadre returned to their work units after completing courses lasting six months to one year. According to one estimate, more than three million cadre attended these schools in their first year of existence.[3] Despite the wide availability of cadre schools, there were often more applicants than accommodations.[4]

As important as the political tasks of the Cultural Revolution were, the ideological objective—transformations in people’s thinking about the world and themselves—was even more fundamental. As Mao explained:

The struggle against the capitalist roaders in the Party is the principal task, but not the object. The object is to solve the problem of world outlook and eradicate revisionism… If world outlook is not reformed, although two thousand capitalist roaders are removed in the current great cultural revolution, four thousand may appear next time.[5]

Revolutionary Culture

Because it springs from people’s hearts, minds and imaginations and reaches people in ways that politics does not, culture is a powerful weapon for maintaining the status quo or for transforming society. Thus, the call of the Cultural Revolution to criticize the “Four Olds”—Confucian and bourgeois ideology, culture, customs and habits–cleared the way for a multi-media explosion of music, plays, ballets, paintings, short stories and poetry that served the building of socialism. These new cultural works were based on the rich life experiences of China’s workers and peasants, the “laobaixing,” and extolled work for the common good.
In order to reach an audience of several hundred million semi-literate workers and peasants, the emphasis was on the visual arts, especially cinematic and theatrical productions. In addition, the new encouragement given to nonliterary culture led to a revival of folk arts, especially in the minority nationality areas.
Referring to the state of culture prior to the Cultural Revolution, especially the Beijing Operas based on imperial court dramas that exalted the wealthy and powerful, Mao made the comment that “the Ministry of Culture should be renamed the Ministry of Emperors, Kings, Generals and Ministers, the Ministry of Talents and Beauties or the Ministry of Foreign Mummies.”

In order to create new dramas with socialist content, artists developed “8 Model Works,” operas and ballets of high quality that in many cases used Western wind and string instruments. These musical works portrayed scenes from the period of the Chinese revolution, featuring heroic characters many of who were literally breaking their chains. One of these model works was the hugely popular ballet “The Red Detachment of Women,” in which a slave girl runs away to join a newly organized women’s detachment of the Red Army. Many of these revolutionary operas and ballets had strong, independent leading women characters who challenged sexist stereotypes of what they could accomplish.

The concept of “model works” in the performing arts has been a controversial one. While they limited artistic creativity and variety in some ways, these model works served to set a new direction in the performing arts by their class stand–putting workers and peasants on center stage.[6] A Chinese scholar who was living in Gao Village in Jiangxi Province during the Cultural Revolution writes:

The rural villagers, for the first time, organized theater troupes and put on performances that incorporated the contents and structure of the eight model Peking operas with local language and music. The villagers not only entertained themselves but also learned how to read and write by getting into the texts and plays. And they organized sports meets and held matches with other villages. All these activities gave the villagers an opportunity to meet, communicate, fall in love. These activities gave them a sense of discipline and organization and created a public sphere where meetings and communications went beyond the traditional household and village clans. This had never happened before and it has never happened since.[7]

Professional performers from the cities also formed troupes that traveled widely, learning more about their countrymen and women than they had at any other time in their lives. A woman describes the tours of her parents—who came from a renowned national theatre–to factories, mines and remote villages:

My parents’ passionate belief in ordinary people, and their sincere efforts to reform themselves into revolutionary artists, deserving of the working class’s trust, remain among my most prized impressions from the time I spent with them at the dinner table…. It was the responsibility of socialist artists to be accepted by the ordinary folk, for only this approval could qualify them to depict the latter’s revolutionary acts on stage.[8]

In the fine arts, China held four national exhibitions between 1972 and 1975.

 

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In Beijing they attracted an audience of 7.8 million, a scale never reached before the Cultural Revolution. Sixty five per cent of the exhibited works were created by workers, peasants and other amateurs from all over China. They included oil painting, watercolor painting, sculpture, picture storybook painting, charcoal painting and paper cuts.[9]

 

Myriad forms of journalism, official and unofficial alike, sprouted during the Cultural Revolution. There were 542 official magazines and journals and 182 newspapers in circulation throughout China. More than 10,000 unofficial newspapers and pamphlets were published by the “laobaixing,” with 900 publications in Beijing alone.[10] The dazibaos that were plastered on the walls of streets, factories and schools were the antithesis of a tightly state-controlled media. They allowed millions to debate and express themselves on an unprecedented scale.

Common Western characterizations of the struggle against the “Four Olds” during the Cultural Revolution rely on photographs of Red Guards burning old books and destroying religious temples and historical relics. While incidents such as these took place in some cities, the government stepped in to try to protect cultural relics from destruction.[11] According to a woman who lived in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution, her neighborhood library had a variety of literature from the West. Recent editions of books had brief introductions which provided a political context and discussion of the author’s viewpoint. Feudal literature was on the shelves in order to help readers learn about the old society.[12]

There are also widespread misconceptions about the destruction of monasteries in Tibet during the Cultural Revolution. These monasteries were run by lamas who, with feudal landlords, exploited millions of serfs chained to the land. It was ex-serfs themselves who destroyed idols, prayer wheels, drums made of human skin and other symbols of their oppression that were housed in the monasteries. Later in the Cultural Revolution, some monasteries were restored so they could serve as religious shrines and museums that exhibited relics from the bitter past.

During the Cultural Revolution, archaeological excavations produced new discoveries of Lantian Man and Peking Man (c. 600,000-400, 000 years ago) and bronzes, ceramics and other artifacts from ancient dynasties. [13] When foreign visitors saw such discoveries or the Ming Tombs outside Beijing, they were told that these great artistic achievements were built with the sweat of the common people, and now the common people finally had the right to enjoy them.

Education: “Red and Expert”

Promoting Evolution

In pre-revolutionary China, education was the preserve of the feudal landlords and big capitalists, from whom a handful of “scholars” would be chosen as government officials. The scholars’ long fingernails symbolized their disdain for manual work of any kind. In 1949, 85% of the people, 95% in the rural areas, could not read or write.

 

As the Red Army successively fought and defeated the Japanese and Guomindang armies led by Jiang Kai-shek, one of its highest priorities was setting up literacy classes in the newly liberated areas. Mass literacy campaigns in the cities and countryside were conducted throughout the 1950s. However, rote learning was still the norm in classrooms, since the teachers had been trained in the old society. The teacher was the absolute authority. Teachers lectured and wrote on the board; students copied and memorized the material. In higher education, as late as 1958, more than 90% of the professors had been trained in the old society or in the West.[14]

In the early 1960s, the political line of the revisionists in education served their program of strengthening the power of factory managers, technical experts and government officials to modernize the country. Building up a well-trained core of experts, regardless of their political outlook, took priority over developing the knowledge and skills of millions of workers and peasants. Important aspects of feudal and bourgeois systems of education were maintained, such as utilizing nationwide admission tests to determine who would go on to the next level of schooling, thereby excluding most workers’ and peasants’ children. Resources were concentrated on a few “key schools” to train the new urban elite.

Education in the countryside was badly underfunded, and the few workers and peasants who received a higher education rarely returned to their communities.[15] Students were driven to study for high marks in order to seek personal fame and high positions.[16]

In contrast, the educational policies of the Cultural Revolution had the goal of producing graduates who were both “red and expert.” Students were expected to gain knowledge and skills that could be used to solve society’s pressing problems. A second goal was to make more educational opportunities available to working class and peasant children. Third, a system of mass education was developed so that primary or middle school graduates would continue their educations throughout their adult lives. The last and perhaps most important objective was to provide political education. During the Cultural Revolution, the understanding was that a student must first have the idea of serving the Chinese people. Then she or he would work hard to develop the ability to do so.

During the years of the Cultural Revolution there was a vast expansion of education in the countryside, where 80% of the people lived. Since primary education was already universal in the cities, the goal was to introduce at least five years of primary schooling in the rural areas. State education funds were redirected to the countryside, so that primary school enrollment in rural areas increased from 116 million to 150 million from 1966 to 1976.

 

criticizing reactionary authoritie

Educated local villagers were recruited as “barefoot teachers” to teach in new schools built by the villagers themselves.[17] Middle school enrollment rose from 15 million to 58 million as new middle schools were built or added to primary schools. [18] In many of these schools, representatives of peasants’ and workers’ associations entered the schools to provide educational leadership and practical advice to students and teachers.[19]

 

Special efforts were made to develop the educational systems in the remote national minority areas, composing 6% of China’s population. Schools and teacher training institutes had to start almost from scratch in some areas in the 1950s. By the early 1970s, the vast majority of youth were in schools, where they studied their native languages, music, crafts and customs alongside a regular curriculum. At the same time, minority cultures were popularized among the 94% who are Han in schools, films and on TV shows in order to combat Han chauvinism.[20]

During a trip in 1971 through China, the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (CCAS) visited schools in Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Guangzhou and Xian.[21] In a Beijing primary school, the younger children had five basic courses: politics, Chinese language, mathematics, sports, and art and culture. The students did not just recite lessons, but asked questions and attempted to solve practical problems together. In their sports classes, winning was not emphasized; at an early age students learned the principle of “friendship first, competition second.” Children who were falling behind received extra assistance from their teachers and fellow students. Every student could learn. Their potential just had to be cultivated.

Particularly in the lower grades, many lessons consisted of stories of heroines and heroes of majority and minority nationalities, children and adults, workers, peasants and soldiers doing noble and realizable deeds. At a combined primary and middle school, the CCAS delegation reported that:

We were surprised to find a sixth-grade reading class using as a text Rent Collection Courtyard, a series of articles about life in the old society. It was a new text, published during the Cultural Revolution. In a fourth-grade politics class, we heard the teacher discussing imperialism with her students. The lesson for the day was that United States imperialism was the leading enemy of Asian peoples and all peoples of the world. She gave an account of the Korean War and of two decades of American aggression in Southeast Asia.[22]

The children also worked in school workshops. Groups of older children used stamping and electroplating machines to make parts for oil filters. The teachers explained to the visitors that learning facts and theory in the classroom and then applying them in the workshops helped the children to learn.[23]

Textbooks, too, were changed during the Cultural Revolution. Districts experimented with writings their own textbooks, relating them to local problems and conditions. For example, schoolchildren in Nanjing used a book about the recently completed Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge. Instead of professional administrators, schools were governed by revolutionary committees composed of students, teachers, neighborhood people, workers propaganda team members and members of the PLA.[24]

Before the Cultural Revolution, primary school graduates had to take entrance examinations to be admitted to middle school, institutionalizing a tracking system.

A few elite schools took the children with the highest scores, usually from non-working class families, while those with low scores had to leave school. The Cultural Revolution abolished this system. All children could receive a middle school education, and each middle school had a mixture of students with different abilities and family backgrounds.

At the middle schools these American scholars visited, middle school course offerings were similar: Chinese language and literature, math, basic agricultural and industrial knowledge,[25] physical education and military training, revolutionary art and culture, history-geography, and politics, including the study of Mao Zedong Thought and Marxism-Leninism. Often, the material studied in English and Chinese literature classes would be about political affairs.[26]

A combination of open and closed book exams, along with evaluations by teachers, fellow students and the students themselves, was used to test how students were progressing.[27] In addition, most middle school students in Beijing spent one month a year learning in a school workshop or in a factory outside the school, as well as one month working in an agricultural brigade. During these periods, the students read and discussed scientific books related to the work they were doing.[28]

In study and work, individual and collective creativity was encouraged. While it was understood that students had different abilities, creativity was not seen as only individual. Rather the view was that it comes from the combined intelligence and cooperative efforts of many people.

This course of study and work graduated middle school students ready to contribute to socialist society. Of the 1970 graduates of one Beijing middle school, 60% started working in factories, 30% went to the countryside to work in small factories, health clinics, schools or in the fields, around 10% joined the army, and some went on to study at universities or technical institutes.

No classes were held in the universities in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution because of political turmoil and due to the effort to enable students to take part in political movements at their schools and in other parts of the country. When the schools reopened, they scrapped the old nationwide university admissions examination. Instead of taking senior middle school students in their graduation year, applicants were selected from among outstanding young workers, peasants and soldiers with two or more years of practical work behind them. Each province, district, city, factory and commune received a quota of applicants to fill. Then university admission committees made the final selections based on extensive interviews.

When Tsinghua University in Beijing reopened in June 1970, 45% of the students were selected by factories, 40% by the rural communes, and 15% by the PLA. Before the Cultural Revolution, 60% of the students were of non-working class origin. It was expected that these “worker-peasant-soldier students” would be more mature, more motivated, and have greater knowledge of the pressing problems of Chinese society.
For students who hadn’t graduated from senior middle school, a special half-year course was provided before they began the regular program at Beijing University.[29]

At the new socialist universities, the course of study was shortened to two or three years. They had three faculties—arts, sciences and languages. In addition to the familiar college-level subjects with newly designed courses, political study and discussion was built into the curriculum. It was particularly important to keep politics in command of the universities so that their graduates, the most highly educated members of Chinese society, would not develop into a new bourgeois intellectual elite.

 

Focus on revolutionary ideology

Teaching methods also changed radically. According to one professor, the old “injection method,” through which “we thought we could inject knowledge into students like serum into a patient,” was replaced by self-study and classroom discussion. One student commented that while books are important, “the more important thing is for us… to learn to think by ourselves, to use our own brains. Otherwise we will not be able to understand the real meaning of theories and their connection to practice, and we will not be able to solve the problems we encounter.”[30]

 

Just as in the middle schools, work was incorporated into university courses of study. Beijing University had its own pharmaceutical factory, where students of organic chemistry and biochemistry were experimenting with and producing medicines. The factory also ran a two to three week course for workers from Beijing factories. After a visit to China in 1971, William Hinton reported that

Some engineering schools have in effect been dissolved and merged with nearby plants and design units so that students, teachers, engineers, draftsmen, workers, and technicians rotate through what can be called urban production communes, producing, learning and creating in turn, and then spinning off production teams capable of setting up new producing and learning communes. Just as in the rural communes, much emphasis is placed on the use of advanced workers and engineers in production as teachers in their special fields. These become part-time teachers on a regular basis.[31]

Some technical institutes moved out of the cities altogether. For example, mining schools were moved to mining areas where students and faculty could combine theory with practice, work with and learn from the miners, and provide them with theoretical knowledge.[32]

The Cultural Revolution also brought about changes in the administration of the universities. Workers and members of the PLA were assigned to the universities in order to ensure that students would not study in isolation and acquire knowledge that was irrelevant to the needs of the Chinese people. Students also served on the revolutionary committees that, together with workers, soldiers, professors and professional educators, administered the universities.[33]

Another important question was the political consciousness and worldview of the teachers and professors. They were challenged to question what they taught and the methods they used, and to accept criticism from their students. And they had to combine theory with practice. At one teachers’ college in Shanghai, the professors divided their time equally between teaching, research and physical work in factories or the countryside. In teaching colleges’ second year, the study of pedagogy was combined with practice teaching in middle schools for a minimum of eight weeks. Once student teachers graduated, they often served as apprentices to more experienced teachers, a system that produced a stream of well-prepared new teachers.[34]

Both newly trained teachers and veteran teachers who had felt suffocated by traditional teaching practices found their voices during these years. In the dozens of volumes of debates about education reforms published in different provinces during the Cultural Revolution, the most vocal condemnations of the old teaching methods came from teachers, and the most thoroughgoing proposals for changes were also made by teachers.[35]

Education was not limited to the schools, but was viewed as an ongoing process of raising one’s cultural level, technical competence and political consciousness throughout adult life. One Canadian observer wrote about the varied arrangements for mass education during the Cultural Revolution:

There are study groups at workplaces and in neighborhoods that focus on the immediate problems of the group and on political issues. There are spare-time courses, part-work, part-study courses, correspondence and radio courses, and full–time workers’ colleges and peasants’ colleges offering programs in general “cultural knowledge” and technical skills.

A number of factories and communes she visited had their own libraries, and some advanced workers in Shanghai were engaged in studying Marxist philosophy and determining how to apply it to practical problems they faced in their plants, as well as to political issues in their work units.[36]

In the early 1970s, a sharp struggle broke out among educators and within the party over whether to preserve the new system of education pioneered by the Cultural Revolution. In the film “Breaking With Old Ideas,” released in 1975, the two opposing lines were sharply presented. The first struggle was whether to build a new agricultural college in the countryside or the city, followed by the question of whether to admit peasants and workers with limited education or to require passing traditional exams. The film also featured the students’ demands for a curriculum that combined scientific knowledge, production skills and the development of political consciousness –to become red and expert– so they could return to serve their communes and factories.[38]

The significance of these socialist educational policies was underscored by the restoration of pre-Cultural Revolution practices after Mao’s death. In 1977, the National College and University Entrance Exam was reinstated. According to one scholar, the extreme emphasis on standardized tests and curricula in the middle schools that did not fit the needs of rural people produced a drop-out rate of over 80% in some provinces during the early 1980s. During these years, large numbers of junior and senior middle schools were closed in the name of “raising standards.”[40]

Collective Values and Internationalism

Supporting revolution in Vietnam

In all of the arenas of the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese people were called on to reject narrow self-interest and embrace their collective interests. The story of Lei Feng, a young soldier who distinguished himself with ordinary acts of courage and devotion to his fellow soldiers and the masses, as well as the “Three Good Old Articles,”[41] were essential parts of people’s political and moral education. “Serve the people” was more than a slogan. During the years of the Cultural Revolution, workers rejected material incentives, students turned away from chasing privileged careers to integrate their education with the lives of workers and peasants, and doctors left the cities and settled in the countryside.

 

Political study was a part of daily life in factories, farms, schools and the military using a variety of materials. The Red Book, which the Western press pictured being waved at mass rallies like little Bibles, was used widely. First developed for use in the People’s Liberation Army, Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong introduced hundreds of millions of people to Marxism-Leninism and Mao’s political thinking. This 312-page pocket-sized book contained sections of Mao’s writing on areas such as classes and class struggle, socialism and communism, the people’s army, the mass line, investigation and study, and culture and art. In addition, 86 million copies of Mao’s Selected Works were printed in one year alone, and study of the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin promoted deeper political education.

An internationalist spirit and support for people’s struggles around the world was a significant part of the Cultural Revolution. Massive rallies were held in 1968 to support the students and workers in France and the Black liberation movement in the U.S. in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. At demonstrations in support of the Vietnamese war of liberation, pictures of Mao and Ho Chi Minh together were common. According to one scholar, the call to “resist America and assist Vietnam” penetrated into every cell of Chinese society.[42]

Visitors to China during the Cultural Revolution were struck by the number of times workers and peasants would speak about how their work was in service of the world revolution. A veteran woman worker interviewed at the Red Flag Embroidery Factory said, “We should try to do our job well. We have liberation, but the world’s women do not have liberation yet. We should work to help them get liberation.”[43]
During a visit to Nanjing in 1971, the CCAS delegation saw a long and complicated dance skit about African workers:

The young Chinese boys and girls wore dark brown tights and sweaters and makeup, and for music they had huge bongo drums and flutes. The story was of workers exploited on a plantation, the owner often beats his workers and one dies of a very severe beating. The others, enraged, rise up against the owner and drive him away. In this way the ‘fighting back’ spirit of the oppressed peoples is constantly portrayed and admired….It turned out that there had been a group of Tanzanians who visited China and performed for cultural circles. The Chinese dancers learned the movements and rhythm, then popularized them. From this, each local group had developed its own variations on an African theme.[44]

At the government level, during the years of the Cultural Revolution the Chinese Communist Party intensified its criticisms of the Soviet revisionists, who were promoting a “peaceful road to socialism” and denying support to revolutionary movements in many parts of the world. In 1968, the CCP strongly opposed the Soviet Union’s brutal invasion of Czechoslovakia. These ongoing polemics, the sharp struggle to criticize and remove revisionists lodged in the CCP, and the social transformations of the Cultural Revolution all inspired young revolutionaries in a number of countries to break with pro-Soviet parties that had become serious obstacles to the development of revolutionary movements.[45]

In countries such as India, the Philippines and Turkey, new communist parties based on Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought adopted the strategy of people’s war and raised mass struggles to new heights. In the U.S. a number of Maoist organizations were formed, including the Revolutionary Union, which became the Revolutionary Communist Party in 1975.

* * * * * *

Notes:

1. Foreign friends of socialist China perhaps inevitably received a rosy view of the Cultural Revolution at the time. Leftist forces grouped around the so-called “gang of four” controlled publications such as Peking Review and China Reconstructs, provided an unbalanced picture of the strength of the leftist forces and the breadth and depth of the social transformations brought about by the Cultural Revolution. This skewing of perceptions of the Cultural Revolution also took place when foreign visitors were shown model workplaces, neighborhoods and communes.

Nevertheless, even though the revolutionary transformations of the Cultural Revolution were not universal and met stubborn resistance from revisionist forces, it is the politically advanced experiences of the Cultural Revolution that are most important to understand and uphold.

2. Decision of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, 11th Plenum of the 8th Central Committee, August 8, 1966. http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/classics/mao/cpc/cc_res_11p.html

3. Meisner, pp. 371-372.

4. Ruth Gamberg, Red and Expert: Education in the People’s Republic of China, 1977, p. 233.

5. A Talk by Chairman Mao with a Foreign [Albanian] Military Delegation, August 1967. http://www.marxists.org

6. According to the program for an exhibition in Germany in 2001: “We often hear that the music of the Cultural Revolution was monolithic—that people were allowed to perform only the same ’eight model operas’ throughout the period. While this characterization is partly true, only a few years into the Cultural Revolution, eighteen works were officially designated as models…in their various incarnations as Beijing operas, local opera adaptations, ballets, symphonies, concertos, chamber music, and choral arrangements—which constituted a staple of the Cultural Revolution musical diet. Musical composition and performance collectives adapted and readapted the model works in a variety of formats, a practice common throughout much Chinese musical history.” “Rethinking Cultural Revolution Culture,” http://www.sino.uni.heidelberg.de/conf/propaganda/musik

7. Mobo Gao, “Debating the Cultural Revolution: Do We Only Know What We Believe?” Critical Asian Studies, Vol. 34, No. 3, 2002, pp. 427-428. See also Gao Village, pp. 162-164 on cultural activities and sports in his village.

8. Some of Us; Chinese Women Growing Up in the Mao Era, eds. Xueping Zhong, Wang Zheng and Bai Di, 2001, p. 80.

9. Mobo Gao, “Debating the Cultural Revolution”, p. 429.

10. Ibid., p. 428.

11. In May 1967, the CCP Central Committee issued a document calling for the protection of traditional cultural institutions and relics. Ibid., p. 426.

12. Zhang Zhen in Some of Us, p. 171.

13. Some of these finds, with commentary about the slave and feudal societies in which they were created, were exhibited at galleries in Washington D.C. and Kansas City in 1975.

14. Ruth Gamberg, Red and Expert: Education in the People’s Republic of China, 1977, p. 230.

15. In one large county in Shandong Province, of the 1600 students who graduated from high school between 1953 and 1965, few returned to their villages, and none of those who went to college returned. Dongping Han, pp. 28-29.

16. The method of “surprise attacks” and trick questions in examinations that was used to instill fear in students was one of the most oppressive features of the feudal and revisionist educational systems.

17. Mobo Gao, Gao Village, pp. 103-107, 159-161. The author, from a poor peasant family, was recruited from his village to be a primary and middle school teacher from 1969 to 1973. He was then selected to attend Xiamen University.

18. Meisner, p. 362.

19. Dongping Han, pp. 107-112. The author conducted a study of Cultural Revolution educational reforms in a county of 800,000 people in Shandong Province.

20. Gamberg, pp. 51-55.

21. While foreign delegations were often sent to visit model schools where educational transformations were most advanced, these schools’ teaching methods and structure provide valuable insights into the changes that were being made in schools nationwide.

22. China! Inside the People’s Republic, by the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (CCAS) 1972, p. 203.

23. See Gamberg, pp. 92-97 for a description of children at work in a Nanjing primary school.

24. Ibid,, pp. 77-78.

25. In Jimo Country, Shandong Province, physics textbooks included theoretical material about thermodynamics and magnetic fields, as well as the application of these theories to the real world of diesel engines, electric motors and water pumps. Dongping Han, p. 114.

26. Gamberg, see pp. 131-38 on school curricula during the Cultural Revolution; CCAS, p. 211; and Dongping Han, pp. 112-114.

27. Gamberg, pp. 147-153.

28. CCAS, p. 212.

29. Gamberg, p. 67.

30. Ibid., pp. 140-141.

31. Turning Point in China, pp. 99-100.

32. CCAS, p. 147.

33. Ibid., pp. 224-27.

34. Gamberg, pp. 236-40.

35. Dongping Han, pp. 117-119.

36. Gamberg, pp. 271-82.

37. Beginning in 1972, Premier Zhou Enlai led efforts to reinstitute the old system of entrance examinations for senior middle school students applying to universities. Barnouin and Hu, Zhou Enlai: A Political Life, 2006, p. 277.

38. “Breaking With Old Ideas” is available at http://www.archive.org/details/Breaking_With_Old_Ideas

39. Jing Ling, Education in Post-Mao China, 1993, pp. xiii, 27.

40. In 1980 alone, 23,700 middle schools were closed, affecting 14 million students. Mobo Gao, Gao Village, p. 114. In Jimo County, Shandong, the number of high schools dropped from 89 in 1977 to 8 in 1987. Dongping Han, p. 166.

41. These were tributes to people who died in the service of others—the Canadian surgeon Norman Bethune who died operating on Red soldiers in the 1930s, an army charcoal burner in “Serve the People,” and “The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains.” The latter was based on an old Chinese folk tale in which an old man removes two mountains in front of his house with a hoe; Mao urged the Chinese people to remove the two mountains of imperialism and feudalism from their backs in the same way.

42. Chen Jian, “China and the Vietnam Wars,” in Peter Lowe, The Vietnam War, 1998, p. 167.

43. Janet Goldwasser and Stuart Dowty, Huan-Ying: Workers’ China, 1975, p. 144..

44. CCAS, p. 251.

45. For a fuller discussion of these developments, see pp. 11-19 of “Chinese Foreign Policy During the Maoist Era and its Lessons for Today.” (document by the MLM Revolutionary Study Group)