CHINA: ‘Remember Natural Disasters, Not Man-made Ones’

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Antoaneta Bezlova

BEIJING, May 18 2006 (IPS) - In a year full of traumatic anniversaries for China, the dates Chinese leaders choose to remember and commemorate speaks volumes about the political climate in the country – oddly dissimilar to its vibrant economy.

They choose to remember the Tangshan earthquake – one of the most devastating natural disasters in Chinese history, which on Jul. 28, 30 years ago, levelled the northern city, killing at least 240,000 people and exposing the country’s weakness and isolation during the rule of Chairman Mao Zedong.

But they chose to forget the 40th anniversary of the launch of the Cultural Revolution on May 16 – a man-made calamity unleashed by Mao- that saw hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people persecuted and killed in a whipped up frenzy of public denunciations, tortures and beatings.

In the run up to the Tangshan earthquake anniversary, Chinese media has been inviting experts on geological monitoring to talk about the country’s preparedness to deal with nature-inflicted disasters. Reporters took advantage of a recent government edict, which decreed that data of casualties from natural disasters would no longer be considered a “state secret”.

No such liberty was allowed in the retrospection of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). The subject is still taboo. The Communist Party guards the archives of those times. A blanket ban on its coverage was imposed on newspapers, TV, radio stations and all popular websites. The government did not hold a commemoration.

But in avoiding talking about the censored past, the country still faces the possibility of history repeating itself.

Asked about the history verdict during a press briefing last week, foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao repeated the official line that the movement was “10 years of chaos”. “The verdict on that historical period was already reached,” he said. “There has been no change to that.”

But while official records term the Cultural Revolution as the “years of chaos”, nearly everything was orchestrated from the top leadership and staged with careful planning.

Mao Zedong used the Cultural Revolution to destroy his enemies within the Communist Party – those who had criticised his handling of the economy during the Great Leap Forward (1958-62) and the man-made famine, which took the lives of 30 million people.

Mao launched the campaign on May 16, 1966 by issuing a circular, which called for a life-or-death struggle against the traitors who had “taken the capitalist road”, like the President Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. He urged young students and followers, his “Red Guards”, to lead the persecution of “all class enemies”.

Hundreds of thousands of intellectuals, artists and liberal party cadres died in orchestrated purges and battles between political factions, including Mao’s one-time designated successor, Liu Shaoqi. A recent biography of Mao written by Jun Chang and Jon Halliday estimates that the number of people who died in the 10 years was three million.

The movement was officially called the ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ but nevertheless it was more about education than workers or factories. Mao asked students to destroy the education system and “smash the four olds: old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits”.

The most violent outbursts in the capital occurred during the month of August, which came to be called Beijing’s “Bloody August”. Red Guards groups sprang up everywhere and thousands were killed. According to Wang Youqin, a Chinese historian of these events at Chicago University, a total of 1,772 people were killed in the capital alone – many of them beaten to death as they tried to escape Beijing on outgoing trains.

“Why are we forbidden to mourn and commemorate?” Wang, who witnessed the Cultural Revolution in Beijing, asked in her published account of what happened. “Because the names and the stories of all the victims prove the evil of the revolution,” she answers. “By erasing their names and stories, one can diminish the enormity of evil and wipe out the leaders’ responsibility for the crimes”.

Wang’s astonishing research, which pieces the stories of hundreds of persecuted is titled: “Victims of the Cultural Revolution: An Investigative Account of Persecution, Imprisonment and Murder”. It could only be published abroad. The Communist Party continues to ban all works scrutinising its role in the calamity.

“It is exactly because Mao Zedong’s body and portrait are still on display in Tiananmen Square that we are not allowed to speak or write about the victims,” Wang says.

But while the Communist Party has gone to great lengths to erase that collective memory of Chinese people, individual acts of defiance continue to emerge and researchers continue to probe the past, piecing the scattered evidence together.

Last September saw the publishing in Hong Kong of a daring account of the atrocities committed by the Communist Party during the three years of the Great Leap Forward famine. “The Great Leap Forward – The Bitter Days” contains a never before published photo of a starving peasant who had murdered and eaten his own child.

Indeed, the years of Mao’s rule remain such a raw period of history that present leaders fear that allowing even a small retrospection or commemoration could trigger calls for responsibility and compensation of the victims.

Their fear was palpable when they censored an ongoing art festival in Beijing by ordering the removal of a dozen paintings featuring Mao Zedong and references to the “bloody periods” of his rule.

The Cultural Revolution is the main theme of this year’s Dashanzi International Arts Festival, one of the capital’s biggest avant garde events. But the removal of Mao’s portrayals, that censors deemed too sensitive, has left the exhibitions with garish depictions of the period.