The Sino-Soviet Schism Mao and the Cultural Revolution
Correct thinking in Chinese communism owes much to Mao's political personality and ambitions and, as in the case of Lenin in the Soviet variant, arises in part from the need to impose a general line on the party cadres and the population as the party attempted to modernise the country. Factors peculari to China would be the role of face and the leagacy of Confucianism (Lin, 1991, Lipman & Harrell, 1990). From Confucianism comes the custom in Chineses culture whereby disciplies of some revered master, in the firs instance Confucius, would collect the master's sayings (yu-lu) for posterity (Chuang, 1968, 7-8). The Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (Mao chu-hsi yu-lu) have been put together with the Confucian tradition in mind.
The Soviet precedent also helps to explain why Mao wanted to launch the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.[15] In Dr Zhivago, one of Pasternak's characters, looking back at the 1930s, argues that collectivization was such a calamity that the party could not acknowledge it and so in order to hide the failure all means were used to force people to lose the habit of independent thought and judgment (Pasternak, 1957, 519). Precisely the same problem confronted Mao after his policies caused a massive famine which in terms of human suffering, misery and the numbers of dead, has no parallel in human history. Objective reality, that is the deaths of millions by starvation, had to be forced from people's minds by terror. So the stage was set for this great and ancient nation to descend into self-inflicted madness goaded on by Mao and his teenage thugs. The masses, that category of amorphous, docile worker ants so beloved of Marxist theorists everywhere, had to be kept in a state of permanent frenzy and suicidal enthusiasm. Acting not thinking was the requirement of the time.[16] Scepticism was a heresy, and so by one of those paradoxes in which communism abounds, correct thinking meant in essence not thinking at all.
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[size=1][15] Note the changes fromt he original "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" in the 1960s to "Cultural Revolution" in the 1970s & 1980s to, currently, "cultural revolution" (Schoenhals, 1992, 109).
[16] Jung Chang, the author of Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, who lived through the cultural revolution, admitted that on hearing of Mao's death she had to hide the lack of 'correct emotion' (1993, 658). The expectation that every Chinese was supposed to be stricken with grief on hearing of Mao's death has a parallel with the capricious blood-letting inflicted by the Zulu king Chaka on his people after his mother died. Hundreds, possibly thousands, were executed for failing to make appropriate and prolonged displays of grief. (Baker, 1974, 389-390).
[17] Lin provides confirmation of the broad definition of Soviet political correctness given above. She notes that: '[...] there is in any given situation just one "correct line" of policy, all others tend to lead to ruin, and so on' (Lin, 1991, 70). Michael Schoenhals's study is a painstaking analysis of the extreme importance attached by Chinese Communist Party theoreticians to the use of correct formulations (tifa) andconfirms the fundamental approach to language and power shared by both the former Soviet Union and Communist China (Schoenhals, 1992). Thom (1989) in her study of Soviet Newspeak anticipates many of the points made by Schoenhals.
Last edited by Alex Linder; May 14th, 2013 at 11:44 PM.
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