At last, someone dares to blame Mao

By Hamish McDonald
China correspondent

May 14, 2005
Anti-Mao ministers Lu Cheng-tsao, left, Minister for Railways, and
Wu Ching-tien, Vice-Minister of Railways, wearing corn hats being
paraded through Beijing during the Cultural Revolution.

Anti-Mao ministers Lu Cheng-tsao, left, Minister for Railways, and Wu Ching-tien, Vice-Minister of Railways, wearing corn hats being paraded through Beijing during the Cultural Revolution.

A museum hightlights the chaos of the Cultural Revolution that led to the death of 35,000 people.

A new museum in southern China, defying communist sensitivities about the Cultural Revolution, puts the blame squarely on Mao Zedong.

The displays include scenes of a country in the grip of madness on a mass scale. Gilded statues of Buddha plastered with signs saying "sentenced to death" are being burned. Smoke billows from factories and colleges. Teachers, priests and officials are paraded in dunce caps and made to grovel.

Heads are wrenched back by the hair to face the camera, like that of Han Suzhen, a vice-director of the Shanghai Academy of Music.

And always the crowds of jeering, grinning young faces, the Red Guard armbands, and the big character banners and posters proclaiming the "smashing" of counter-revolutionary, revisionist or bourgeois vestiges.

It was the time when China's age-old order of respect for seniority and hierarchy was reversed, when ignorance and slogans and mob violence ruled. It lasted 10 years, caused the persecution of 750,000 people and the deaths of 35,000 of them, put the world's biggest country into economic stagnation and blighted the lives of a generation.

It was the Great Cultural Revolution, launched and maintained by the founding leader of the People's Republic of China, Mao Zedong, which stopped only when Mao died in 1976 and his successors dared to arrest Mao's key aides, known later as the Gang of Four.

In an unlikely location - the steamy southern industrial port of Shantou (formerly known as Swatow), better known for its toy factories and knitting mills - China's first museum devoted to the Cultural Revolution has just opened.

"The Cultural Revolution was the most wild, brutal, blind and ridiculous tragedy," says a plaque with the words of writer Ji Xianlin. "It blackened the face of the Chinese nation. We should never forget it."

But how to remember it?

This week, the terse announcement that the ideological brains of the Gang of Four, former vice-premier Zhang Chenqiao, had died on April 21 emphasised the careful way the ruling Communist Party still tries to push the blame on this group of "extremists" and somehow absolve the party and Mao from central responsibility.

But the granite panels around the walls of Shantou's Cultural Revolution Museum, a three-storey building in traditional pagoda-style in a hilly park overlooking the city, tell a different story.

Mao is everywhere, appearing in picture after picture with Zhang and other leaders of the Cultural Revolution, on review stands and balconies, in key meetings, often wearing a Red Guard armband.

Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution.

Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution.

It is a politically touchy message for a regime whose top leader recently went out of his way to deliver a eulogy on the 110th anniversary of Mao's birth and which still gives the late chairman iconic status, despite applying all the bourgeois and capitalist economic policies that Mao himself opposed to the end.

Why Shantou? The museum is the work of a former vice-mayor of the city, Peng Qian, who was persecuted by Red Guards and decided to build the museum after he found the graves of about 20 victims of the Cultural Revolution on this hilltop.

The city saw one of the period's most bizarre and tragic episodes on July 28, 1969, when 553 young soldiers and students drowned when they plunged into a breached sea-dyke during a typhoon, inspired by a propaganda slogan that "mankind can conquer the heavens".

The exhibits may indicate the independent thinking that often breaks out in the south, leading to the emergence of revolutionary figures such as Sun Yat-sen, who inspired the overthrow of imperial rule in 1911.

Mr Peng seems to have crucial support from senior regional communist figures, including former Guangdong provincial party secretary Ren Zhongyi, an advocate of radical political reform. Adding to the intrigue, one contributor to the museum's 11 million yuan ($A1.7 million) cost was Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, known for his impeccable ties to Beijing.

The museum pays tribute to one of China's most venerated modern literary figures, the anarchist and novelist Ba Jin, who was persecuted as a counter-revolutionary during the period and who has long called for institutions to fix their memories.

Possibly it is the sheer obscurity of the location - on the far coastal fringe of China in a regional culture often derided in the country's northern capital for its commercial and epicurean crassness - that has allowed it to stay open since it was quietly inaugurated in January. Similar attempts to open such museums in Chengdu and Jiangsu have not yet succeeded.

What impact the museum will have is too early to tell.

Among the visitors this week was retired physics and chemistry teacher Yang Zhaobo, 70, who said it "cried out" about a decade-long catastrophe in which he saw some of his fellow teachers beaten to death.

"I was in my 30s at the time," he said. "It should have been a golden period in my life, but I wasn't able to use my energy and knowledge to the full. I feel sad about that."

Yang and his wife Wu Guixing, 61, differed about how to evaluate Mao in the light of what the museum presented. "His offences cannot be compared to his contributions," Mr Yang said. "He was guilty," his wife said.

Wandering through the museum in tracksuits and red "Young Pioneer" scarves was a group from a Shantou middle school, among them Yu Yihao, 14. Asked who was responsible for the Cultural Revolution, his answer was unhesitating: "Mao Zedong," he said. So where did that leave Mao's reputation? "He was a still a great leader," Yu said. "Without him there would be no new China."


Our Advertisers