Episode 170 – Mao: The Cultural Revolution with Carl Zha

Macro N Cheese – Episode 170
Mao: The Cultural Revolution with Carl Zha
April 30, 2022

 

[00:00:03.050] – Carl Zha [intro/music]

The monasteries in Tibet, they were the largest landowners, especially the upper echelon of the monks. They’re the top of the society. It’s kind of like medieval Europe in a way.

[00:00:14.020] – Steve Grumbine [intro/music]

Yeah.

[00:00:14.500] – Carl Zha [intro/music]

Very much so. So, there’s a lot of reason for their resistance to the communist reform in their areas.

[00:00:23.490] – Carl Zha [intro/music]

In the words of one of his comrades, General  [inaudible 00:00:26], he said, Mao is both a great revolutionary but also an emperor in the feudal mode. I think that kind of sums it up. He embodies the contradiction of different aspects of China around his time.

[00:01:35.130] – Geoff Ginter [intro/music]

Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

[00:01:42.960] – Steve Grumbine

Hey, folks, it’s Steve with Macro N Cheese podcast and my guest Carl Zha for the final of our three part series on Mao. This one covers the Cultural Revolution. Enjoy. It sounds to me like one of the other aspects of this is Mao had his ears plugged. He wasn’t listening. He was so convinced in the vision that any evidence to the contrary did not allow him to make adjustments.

And the scientific method that is deployed under Marx would tell him that the material conditions have changed and that he’s got a change with them, but he didn’t. And so this is the contradiction that Mao is guilty of.

[00:02:26.570] – Carl Zha

Yeah. Basically by 1958-1959 when Marshall Peng Dehuai was purged, that’s kind of the death of any Democratic practice within CPC because people saw even a prominent figure as a PLA commander got purged because his criticism of Mao. And after that, any criticism of Mao just basically ceased. Anything that could be construed as remote criticism was silenced because people practice self-censorship.

They can see what happened to Peng Dehuai, they don’t want to be next if they want to preserve their post. And this also reminds you, this is age before social media, before internet. It’s a lot harder to hide something that scale today.

[00:03:11.790] – Grumbine

Yes.

[00:03:12.430] – Zha

Today people would whip out their cell phones and the clip would be going viral online. Back then with Mao sheltered in Zhongnanhai in Beijing, he might not be aware what’s actually going on on the ground until it’s too late.

[00:03:29.690] – Grumbine

Sure. And his deployment of the peasants being in the rural areas, you have to figure even by horseback or by foot traveling back and forth, it was still a different era. Yes, the telephone existed. And yes, there were different means of communication, but it was still vastly different than it is today.

[00:03:47.250] – Zha

Yeah. That was back in 1950s. To give you an example, even back in 1980s when I lived in China as a child. Because my dad came to the United States in 1985, so for my family to make a phone call to my dad, because we don’t have a phone in our house, and to make an international call, we can’t just make call from any phone. We had to travel to the city center to make a call at a China Post Office.

My mom had to take a day off from work, take me. We traveled to the city center, waiting for hours to finally make less than an hour phone call to my dad in United States. That was like 1986. And we are in a big city in China, Chongqing, one of the biggest metropolis in China. You can imagine 1950 in countryside, in the rural area. It’s vastly different.

[00:04:44.790] – Grumbine

I had gone in 2008 to Shanghai, and I’m walking from the interesting Old World meets New World hotel that we were staying in to go to a Starbucks. And on one side of the street, you feel like you’re in the middle of something out of the Jetsons. It’s just amazingly beautiful. And the next minute you’re stepping back five centuries into the ancient world where there’s old leaking sewers from the middle of the street.

And my shoe got stuck in open sewage because I didn’t see it. It was dark. So there I am. What the heck is going on? I thought I was in the middle of the Jetsons. And our teacher said, yes, it’s interesting that Shanghai’s kind of trapped between a future and a past. And when you’ve been around that long and you’ve been involved in so many changes, it’s hard to change everything.

And they’re in the process. But they have exceeded everyone else in terms of technological advancements now. It’s amazing to see how it really did leap past all these powers.

[00:05:48.450] – Zha

Yeah, that’s a good point, because in 1950s, 1960s, Mao wanted to use the Communist bureaucracy as a tool to change Chinese society, like a huge social engineering project to mold Chinese society into the utopia of his vision. And the difference on after Mao, Deng Xiaoping, he used the same bureaucracy, but just to focus on development and just focus on improving livelihood of people.

More practically, because Mao was more concerned with ideology or with class struggles, do you raise the class difference? He was more concerned with equality. But Deng Xiaoping said, look, if socialism cannot provide good livelihood to its people, then what good is socialism? If socialism wants to hope to ever compete with capitalism, first thing we need to do is to provide our people with well being, with good lives.

That’s the only way we can convince our people the socialist system is a superior system is that we can out compete a capitalist system in providing a good life. That’s how you win the hearts of people. That’s kind of a different approach and kind of a different pattern of the Chinese development. But one thing I do have to say is that, on the other hand, despite Mao’s mistakes, which there were some very great mistakes, Mao did do several things right.

One is universal education, because as I mentioned before the war, 90% of the Chinese population is illiterate. And he launched a campaign to improve literacy across all China. So, the Chinese literacy was already high by the time Deng Xiaoping assumed the mantle. So China already have a well educated workforce by the time Deng Xiaoping decided to open China up to outside investment.

At that time, China already had a high quality workforce. But that just worked for cheap because China was poor. And another thing is, Mao did improve life expectancy of the Chinese people, because if you look at the life expectancy of Chinese person before 1949, it’s something like matches today’s Afghanistan. Which, like I said, China before was like a giant Afghanistan. Before 1940s.

A Chinese person’s life expectancy is the late 30s, 35 or 39 or something. But a lot of that is because of the infant mortality, because a lot of the Chinese people die in their infancy. And once the infant mortality got curbed, there’s a sharp jump in the Chinese life expectancy. And that’s something that Mao did correct. He sent out the barefoot doctors to serve the rural areas.

So Mao is concerned with equality. So he thought, okay, right now, all the medical resources, all the medical care is concentrating the cities to provide the urban dwellers. We need to train doctors to go into the countryside to serve the poor, to the rural population, which at the time was the majority of the Chinese population.

And the barefoot doctors system actually greatly reduced the infant mortality at the same time raising the Chinese life expectancy. So people can Google online about the map of Chinese life expectancy from 1900 to recent. There’s actually a big jump in the middle of the Cultural Revolution. You kind of flatline during the famine years because people are dying and there’s not much birth during the famine.

But after that, the life expectancy actually took off. For me first, it was a shock. Cultural Revolution was very tumultuous time in China from 1966 to 1976. Why is there jump in life expectancy? That’s when I realized, oh, it’s because Mao’s barefoot doctor system. By sending medical professionals into countryside to serve the peasants, they reduce infant mortality.

That’s what sharply raised life expectancy. And one of my family members is a testament to that, because my mom grew up in the city, but right after nursing school, she was like 18 or 19, she got sent to the Tibetan areas of western Sichuan. So this area was not politically part of Tibet because the current Tibetan Autonomous Region maps to the area that under Dalai Lama’s government control before 1950.

But there’s still a lot of Tibetan cultural areas outside of that. In Western Sichuan, for example, that’s still part of Tibetan Plateau. It’s still culturally Tibetan, but it’s not politically part of Tibet. But my mom straight out of nursing school in 1968, she got sent there with bunch of other nursing students to serve the Tibetan herders who have their high altitude pastures up there.

Five girls, straight out of nursing school, they live in a shack up in the Tibetan Plateau. My mom told me they didn’t have running water, they didn’t have electricity, they didn’t have heat. Life was difficult, but they did improve the medical services of their area. That’s something Mao did right.

[00:11:11.790] – Grumbine

Let me ask you a question about Tibet. I know so little about this, and I’m sure there’s a lot of propaganda, but I’ve heard various things about Mao’s brutality with the Tibetans, and some have even called it cultural genocide. But what’s really the story? You don’t have to go into depth, but I would like to know what is the deal?

[00:11:32.910] – Zha

Okay, so basically, Tibet used to have its own Empire. Tibetan Empire was one of the most powerful on the Asian continent. Like a thousand years ago during the Tang dynasty, the Tang Dynasty China and Tibetan Empire were rival Empires. There was one point when Tang Dynasty went into decline, the Tibetan Army actually marched into the Tang capital, Chang’an, and installed their own puppet Emperor.

And at one point, as the Tang Empire went into decline, the Tibetan Empire went into what is today Xinjiang. They took over the whole area. The Tibetan control extended into Kabul, Afghanistan. And the Tibetan Cavalry also crossed the Himalayas. They subjugated Nepal and they even subjugated several Indian kingdoms. They marched as far as present day Bangladesh.

So Tibetan Empire has this glorious, glorious past. But the Tibetan Empire collapsed after 840 AD. And after that, Tibet has various different chieftains. Tibet entered its own kind of warlord period until the Mongol conquest. So Mongols are actually the ones who brought different pieces of China together. What we see as Chinese map today that was brought together under the Mongols.

Mongols brought in areas like [inaudible 00:13:00] , they subjugated the [inaudible 00:13:02]  Kingdom, they subjugated Northern China, then Southern China. Because before the Mongol conquest, Northern China and Southern China are ruled by different Kingdom. So Mongols unified the whole area finally in centuries. But then after the end of the Mongol rule in most of China, Tibet, they were still under the different Mongol rulers.

So in mainland China, the Mongol Khan got pushed out, but there are still Mongol chieftains ruling parts of Tibet. And then during the Manchu Qing dynasty, the Manchu Army, because Manchu was engaged in a struggle for the supremacy of inner Asia with Mongol Khanate, or the Zunghar Khanate that’s based in present-day Xinjiang. As a result of that war, the Zunghar Khanate sending their own army to conquer Tibet.

So the Qing Army followed into Tibet and the Qing Dynasty Army conquered the whole area. Mongolia, Tibet, Xinjiang brought it all within one single unit, together with Han China. And that’s kind of the map that was inherited by Republic of China in 1911 after the Chinese Revolution. However, the Chinese Revolution that overthrew the Qing Empire threw the whole Empire into chaos.

So that’s when Outer Mongolia declared independence and then Tibet also declared independence. But Tibetan independence at the time, it was not recognized by anyone. So Dalai Lama was just happy to return to Lhasa to rule as kind of the God King without any more interference from the central government. Because before the Qing Dynasty would post what’s known as Ambans, who kind of supervised the local Tibetan government.

But that was removed after 1911 Chinese Revolution. So Tibet enter into this kind of de facto independent period where the Dalai Lama’s government in Lhasa ruled the area autonomously. But however, none of the great powers countries recognized Tibetan independence. That’s why all the World War II maps, for example, they still label Tibet as part of China.

Even though at the time, China was really just various factional warlord controlled. As I mentioned before, Chiang Kai Shek’s Najing government really just controlled a very small part of central China. Then in 1949, when Communist victory happened elsewhere, first the People’s Liberation Army marched into Xinjiang. Xinjiang at the time was divided into northern and southern half.

The Southern half, ironically the most Uighur populated area, was under the KMT. And in the Northern three district was controlled by the Uighur Communist. And the KMT garrison surrendered to the PLA. And the Uighur Communists just decided to merge their government with the new People’s Republic of China because they’re all Communists. So the Uighur Communists merged their party into the Chinese Communist Party.

And then in Tibet in 1950, Deng Xiaoping, who was in charge of Southwest China, he sent in the 18th army into Tibet. They defeated the Tibetan Army in the Battle of Chamdo in October 1950. And then at that time, the People’s Liberation Army stopped. Instead of marching into Lhasa, they entered into negotiation with Dalai Lama’s government. And what came out was 17 Point Agreement that was later signed in Beijing.

The 17 Point Agreement (the formal name is 17 Point Agreement for Peaceful Liberation of Tibet) was that Tibetan government recognized the leadership of the central government in Beijing. And in return, Tibet will retain its autonomy. Everything will be as is. Dalai Lama’s government will continue to rule in Lhasa, but the People’s Liberation Army will get posted into Tibet.

They will take over the national defense, all the border issues. That’s when the Sino-Indian border issue surfaced, because that’s when PRC government actually realized there was a border dispute between the Tibetan government and the Indian government. That’s a different separate story. So the promise is that Tibet will get to keep its own separate political economy, including its serf system, that they get to keep in place.

However, that promise was made to the Dalai Lama’s government and the area under their control, which maps to today’s Tibetan Autonomous Region. But as I mentioned earlier, there’s a lot of outlying Tibetan regions that lies outside of Tibet politically, but they’re still culturally, ethnically Tibet. This is an area of so called the Great Tibet area.

There’s Tibetan area in Sichuan, in Gansu, in Qinghai, in the outlying Chinese provinces. And in those areas because they do not fall under the 17th point agreement, in the early 1950s, the Chinese Communist Party started land reform in those areas. And that caused a big backlash because the land reform involved taking away land from the monasteries, from the local feudal lords, and redistributing them.

And that sparked a rebellion. So the Tibetan rebellion started outside of Tibet. And the rebels, as they’re being defeated by the PLA, they start to flee into the Tibet proper. And at this time, the ruling class in Lhasa, they start panicking because they saw the writing on the wall. They said, okay, sure, we have the 17 Point Agreement where the Chinese central government promised that we get to keep our way of life.

But look at these outlying Tibetan areas. They’re already starting land reform. They’re already abolishing serf system. They’re already taking the land away from the monasteries. It’s just going to be a matter of time. They’re going to come to Tibet and do the same thing. So we got to take the matter into our own hands.

At the time when central government in China was signing 17 point agreement with Lhasa government, Dalai Lama’s older brother was actually traveling to meet with the CIA. And the CIA held training camp for the Tibetan rebels in Colorado, teaching them guerrilla warfare. And then they would air drop them back inside Tibet to fight the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.

So a lot of the Tibetan rebels, they would cross the border from the area under Dalai Lama’s government control, which had a high degree autonomy, and cross into the other provinces of China, the Tibetan areas where the rebellion was full blown, with CIA training equipment, et cetera. As more and more Tibetan rebels poured in from outlying area into Lhasa into the area under Dalai Lama’s government control, the situation became increasingly destabilized.

And in 1959, the trigger point was Dalai Lama was invited to go to the People’s Liberation Army garrison to attend a performance which had happened frequently before. But this time, a rumors start circulating in Lhasa that PLA intend to kidnap Dalai Lama and that sparked a full riot. And the rebels and the Tibetan government, basically at the time, they made a pact together to throw the PLA Garrison out of Lhasa.

That’s a 1959 Tibetan rebellion in Lhasa. And as a result, the PLA moved in and put down the rebellion. Dalai Lama fled to India. And as a result of Tibetan rebellion, the Beijing government decided to abrogate 17 Point Agreement. Before 17 Point Agreement promised great autonomy to Tibet, that the Dalai Lama government gets to keep its way of life, including the serf system.

So after the Tibetan rebellion, they decided they are going to carry out the same reforms that was carried out in the other areas of China which included land reform, taking away the land from the monasteries and taking away the land from the feudal lords and redistributing them. And this is the background. But the Tibetan rebellion was kept going through the CIA support because CIA had a base for the Tibetan rebel in Mustang, this area in Nepal.

And they also worked with the government in India to airdrop supplies and Tibetan rebels inside Tibet to ambush PLA convoy. My mom went to work in the Tibetan areas in Sichuan which is already pretty far from the border. She remember in 1968 the rebellion was still going on because she originally went with a bunch of other girls from the nursing school.

They were hosted in PLA garrison to receive military training for one month. But before that happened, PLA company had to depart because the Tibetan rebel attacked in another area. And then one night the girls were woken up when they heard a gunshot outside. So they came to see what happened. So they were left with only the one PLA commander at the time at the camp there was a Tibetan man who came by with Tibetan women.

So he wanted to trade his women for the nursing students. He told the commander, look, you have a lot of girls here, right? I have two women, let’s trade. And so the PLA commander thought that was ridiculous. He refused but the Tibetan man thought he was trying to haggle. Okay, how about this? I do two for one deal. I give you two Tibetan women for one nursing student.

In a heated argument the PLA commander pulled out his gun and shot a warning shot into the air. And then finally the Tibetan man said okay, this guy is serious, it’s no good and turn away. But that just kind of shows the cultural clash. It’s almost like the clash of civilization. Culturally there’s a lot of difference between the Han Chinese and the Tibetan society.

For example, Tibetans have a lot of hot springs in Tibet and the Tibetan men and women, they bathed together and so there was a time when my mom and her fellow nursing students were bathing in the hot springs and some Tibetan herders, Tibetan cowboy came by with his yaks and he was going to take off his clothes and jump in. And then my mom, they are city girls, had never seen this. So they start screaming.

The Tibetan man just look at them, it’s like you guys are so weird. And he laughed and he left. These are kind of the cultural clash. And there was another story. The nursing students also got recruited by the PLA to put up cultural performances for the local Tibetans and my mom was pretty so she was chosen to perform. She was star of the performance troop.

And later after her performance the Tibetan locals told her, “oh you were great last night. You know what? The Tibetan rebels, they came down from the mountains to watch your performance. They really enjoyed it.” Like my mom only knew Tibetan locals told her the rebels came down from the mountain to watch her performance. So the Tibetan insurgency continued until 1971, after Nixon visited China.

Afterwards, the CIA withdrew support from the Tibetan rebel base in Nepal. And my mom remembered from 1971 the remaining Tibetan rebels coming down the mountain to surrender to the PLA because they’re no longer being supplied. So that’s my anecdotal story that I hear from my mom.

[00:25:28.510] – Grumbine

Sure.

[00:25:30.550] – Zha

The thing is, there are policies in Tibet that, basically what happened during Great Leap Forward in other parts of China, that also affected areas of Tibet. Not the Tibet proper, because Tibet proper in 1959, they’re still fighting the counterinsurgency war. But in the cultural areas of Tibet, that’s on the outlying regions. After the reform, there’s a sharp polarization.

The monasteries, they’re all against the PLA because their land has been taken away. And the Tibetan monastery were kind of like the social political center. They can mobilize pretty quickly. The monks also get caught up in the time of war. They have weapons in the monastery. Because Hollywood version of the Seven Year in Tibet or whatever, we imagine like the peaceful Buddhist monks and stuff.

But the monastery orders in Tibet, they also have like martial orders. In times of a war, the monastery get organized quickly. All the young man goes to the monastery for training. So in the time of war, the monastery quickly became the center for rebellion. The monks armed themselves with weapons and resisted the PLA. So that’s why a lot of the monastery did get damaged during the Tibetan rebellion.

And also during a lot of the radical policies, like the collectivization policy that was pushed down in the rest of China, that also got pushed down to Tibet. So that did lead to problems. But the famine in Tibet wasn’t as bad as in some other area of China, but it also did happen. So most of the death happened in the counter-insurgency war and also between 1959 to 1961 period.

Much of the Tibetan area at that time was a war zone. But then on other side of the story, China fought a border war with India in 1962. And at that time, the PLA was mostly supplied by the Tibetan locals who carried supplies on their backs. That’s kind of anecdotal evidence of locals showing their support for the PLA. So not all Tibetans are happy, obviously, especially if you are the head of the monastery or if you’re a former feudal lord because your position has been taken away.

[00:28:11.390] – Intermission

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[00:29:02.250] – Grumbine

That’s interesting. I didn’t realize that. But that makes sense. In Haiti, you have the plantation owners and the landowners who would try to seduce Toussaint Louverture to try and keep their properties and then Dessalines just slaughtered them all. But there’s always that bourgeois element. In this case, they are dealing in serf land. So an entirely different economic and cultural model that was clashing once again with communism. It’s a very interesting perspective.

[00:29:34.300] – Zha

Yeah. It’s kind of both ideological and sometimes there’s cultural clash like the story I related to. Those are funny stories. But the monasteries in Tibet, they were the largest landowner. Especially the upper echelon, with the monks. They are the top of the society. It’s kind of like medieval Europe in a way. Very much so. So there’s a lot of reason for their resistance, the Communist reform in their areas.

But today’s Tibet is a whole different story. People can travel to Tibet. They have a policy that requires you to get a permit, but all you need to do is just sign up with a group tour. But there’s a lot of Tibetan travel agency. If you just go through them, you can arrange a personal tour with a Tibetan guide that will take you even as one person or a few groups.

You just have to pay a little bit more money. You can’t go just backpacking by yourself. If you hook up with a local Tibetan guide, they will take you and they will fix all your papers. They’ll take you to travel around. Today’s, Tibet is a vastly vastly different place from the 1950s.

[00:30:44.910] – Grumbine

Understood. One anecdotal point because you brought up the Mongols. I thought it was very interesting. I studied the Black Death and the plague, and the very first biological weapon came from the Mongols as they shot a plague infected body over the walls. In I think it’s Florence.

[00:31:05.850] – Zha

I think Kaffa, Crimea is one of the fortress in Crimea I think, where it happened.

[00:31:12.210] – Grumbine

It just is mind blowing to think about that. Instant plague.

[00:31:16.690] – Zha

Yes.

[00:31:17.390] – Grumbine

So let’s get back to Mao. We’ve gotten through the Great Leap Forward. We’ve seen the famine, we’re talking about land reforms, and now we’re at a point where…

[00:31:27.570] – Zha

So Mao has said that there are two things in his life, there are two deeds in his life that he has done that’s worth mentioning. Number one, to kick Chiang Kai Shek out of mainland China to Taiwan. And number two, the Great Cultural Revolution. Now the Great Leap Forward kind of paved the way for Cultural Revolution.

As a result of the Great Leap Forward, by 1961, the central Chinese leadership realized there’s a problem. And by that time, Mao kind of got pushed into the background. Mao still remains the supreme leader, but he was already not in charge of everyday running of the country. And the people in charge, which was Liu Shaoqi, which was Mao’s designated successor, and also Deng Xiaoping.

They started a process, reversed some of Mao’s policies leading into the Great Leap Forward. And by that they allowed, for example, the farmers to keep the plot of land to produce for themselves. And then they also allow a limited private enterprise. So they’re kind of scaling back and they’re moving back towards the new economy model that PRC originally was founded on with mixed private enterprise and public ownership.

They just wanted to incentivize farmers to produce more grain in order to feed the country. And the crisis had finally passed by 1962. My dad went to College in 1961. So at the end of the Great Famine. My dad actually remembered when he was in boarding school, in high school, his mom, my grandma would send him food. But the food was so limited. Normally it’s a Chinese custom to share.

So one of their dorm mates would receive food from his family. But because he’s too embarrassed to not share with the whole dorm, what he would do is he will take the food under the blanket and start munching trying as much as he can not to make noise so people could hear, but everybody could hear it. Everybody was hungry and everybody could hear this guy trying to munch away his food.

So that was kind of comedy that was created under such condition. My dad actually said he didn’t have his growth spurt until after he was 18 years old. So he didn’t have his puberty til after 18 because of lack of food. But somehow he ended up the tallest among his family. I don’t know how that happened. My dad is five foot eleven, pretty tall for his generation of Chinese, but he did not have a growth spurt until 18.

And he remember when he went to college in 1961. At that time there was no Yangzhou bridge across the Yangtse to Nanjing. He had to take a ferry boat. And he remember famine refugees coming from the north side to the south because the famine hit northern China particularly hard. And you remember a lot of refugees were clogging up the river port to come into the south where there was a little bit more food.

But after 1961, the famine ended. This is also significant because this is really the last major famine in China. After that, the Chinese government have taken measures to make sure that does not happen again. And at this time, Mao is already removed from everyday running of the country. The country was run by the Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping.

Then a few years later, Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, the policies they pursue kind of deviate with this kind of fast forward to communism path that Mao has set forward. Because you feel like this was a step backwards to revert back to kind of the mixed private public ownership of the economy. And at the same time you also feel like the Communist bureaucracy has ossified.

The Communist bureaucrats is becoming the new Mandarin class, lording over the people and that’s one of the reasons he launched the great proletarian Cultural Revolution. He wanted to destroy the Communist bureaucracy and he wanted to build a more bottom up governance. And again, it’s one of Mao’s greatest experiment.

And it didn’t work out very well because in China, this is known as ten years of chaos or ten years of turmoil from 1966 to 1976. But I talked to my mom about this. She actually gave me a very interesting perspective. By the way, my mom is like totally anti-Mao now. But my mom said Cultural Revolution really sucks. But without Cultural Revolution, all these Communist leaders, all these Communist cadres who have been cast down and purged, they would not have known what it feels like to be on the other end of the political struggle.

What she’s referring to is the fact that her own father, my grandfather, has already been cast out. In 1957, anti rightist campaign. Purged and sent to the labor camp. What Mao is saying is that he did recognize the mistake of the Great Leap Forward, but he still thinks that his general direction was correct.

And the reason why the Great Leap Forward failed was because the saboteurs in the Communist bureaucracy who tried to intentionally bungle implementation. And again, this is one of Mao’s personality traits. He believed himself to be so right that sometimes he refused to recognize his own mistakes. He blamed it on saboteur.

And then to correct this, of course, he needed to purge the class enemies from the Communist bureaucracy. Also at this time, the Communist bureaucracy is run by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. And Mao wanted to destroy that system. He felt like these people totally going contrary to what he had in mind for the development of China. And that’s when Mao used young students.

He called up the students to come to Beijing, their so called Red Guard. And he told them “there’s reason to rebel. To rebel is not a sin in itself.” So he asked basically all the students to rise up to overthrow the authorities. The authorities happen to be the Communist bureaucracy that was in place at the time. Mao felt was kind of slipping away from his control and his vision of China.

And that ended up being kind of ten year lawlessness. Hours and hours of podcasts can talk about Cultural Revolution. But I just want to say commonly in China today, this is seen as kind of the lost decade in China. College entrance exams were ended. The College not functioning anymore. People are still being educated in elementary school, high school level, but not really beyond that.

To get into College, you need a special recommendation and then you have to prove you are from a working class background. So, for example, I already told the story earlier of my uncle. He was an older uncle. He wasn’t allowed to go to College because of my Grandpa’s background. My dad got lucky because again in 1961, that’s the period where Mao kind of stepped down and Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping took the helm.

And Marshal Chen Yi gave a talk televised nationally. He said people are not responsible for the family they are born into. They’re not responsible for their background. What determines a person’s worth is their own action. So that allows my dad, who came from a quote unquote bad class element family, to be able to get accepted into College.

And even so, my dad was scared to apply to the top engineering school which is Tsinghua because he thought he might get rejected because his background. So he applied for the number two school in Xi’an Jiaotong University, and he got accepted. The Cultural Revolution interrupted his study in 1966. So he still has a year to go.

But then at that time, Mao is asking all the College students to congregate in Beijing to overthrow their local government officials. And my dad actually did relate to him. And his fellow students went to confront a local government Communist official. And he did say, this guy’s attitude, this guy act like he’s an Imperial Mandarin. Totally. This guy feel like he could dictate to us.

But at the same time, I understand from the Communist officials, who are these young College kids telling me what to do, right? And so this was a situation. But lucky for my dad, also the College school official finally ordered them, okay, you guys had one year from not taking classes. To continue revolution, you have to be educated. So they were made to stay two years to finish their school.

So in 1968, my dad graduated from College. At that time, you go to University for free. The College education was free, but the state gets to assign where you go after College, where you work. Yeah. And my dad would prefer to go back to his hometown. But at that time, Mao also realized Cultural Revolution was kind of getting out of hand.

And he achieved his goal to bringing down some of the top government officials, like the Chinese President, Liu Shaoqi. So Mao decided to send the students now to the countryside. There is a campaign to send educated youth to the frontiers and to the countryside to accept education from the peasant class. My dad a College student, he originally was assigned to the countryside in Sichuan.

But then one of his classmates who was assigned to go to the Tibetan area, didn’t want to go to Tibetan area. So he worked his connection and got my dad’s spot instead. So my dad then got sent to the least wanted position, which is to the Tibetan area where he eventually met my mom. When my dad arrived in the Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, the local party official, they’re so happy to receive a College grad because at that time, less than 1% of the Chinese population get College educated.

So they were excited to receive them. But they’re like, okay, so what is your training? My dad’s like, I’m an electrical engineer. And the party officials don’t know what electrical engineers do. But he said, okay, engineer. Okay, great. We need roads. You can help us supervise building roads. So he did that for a couple of years.

And then finally when they decided to build a hydroelectric power plant to supply electricity, that’s the first time that he will actually finally apply his training, basically, right. And while he was building the hydroelectric power plant, he met my mom. And that’s also the time when your family background determines everything. Because my mom’s first boyfriend was a PLA officer.

Because I mentioned earlier, my mom had to receive PLA military training. She was recruited by the PLA to put on performance for the locals and stuff. So her first boyfriend was a PLA officer. But they were already planning to get married. But he has to submit application to get married to get approved from his superior.

And the superior said, look, we’re grooming you to rise up the ranks. You cannot marry someone with bad class background. They’re talking about my mom. So they rejected their marriage application and my mom’s first boyfriend chose his career over my mom, of course.

[00:44:02.490] – Grumbine

What a mistake.

[00:44:03.610] – Zha

Well, it’s lucky for me, right? My dad became the rebound. Basically, Cultural Revolution is a national tragedy for China. But luckily for me, it all worked out because my mom and my dad, who were from totally different part of China, managed to meet in the remote region of Tibetan Plateau.

[00:44:26.790] – Grumbine

Wow.

[00:44:27.300] – Zha

Where I was conceived actually. But my mum didn’t want to give birth to me there because the healthcare and education system over there is not very good. So my mom went back to her hometown, Songqi, to give birth to me. But at that time, at the end of the Cultural Revolution, China already started to put forth of one child policy, first at selected cities, then they roll out to the whole countryside.

So Songqi is one of the first city to implement first child policy. I’m the second born. I have an older sister who is four years older. But when my mom trying to go to hospital, the hospital she tried to register is a model hospital for implementing family planning in Songqi. They didn’t want to take my mom in to break hospital records.

Like, wait a minute, we’re a model hospital for family planning while you have a second child who allow you to have a second child. And my mom trying to explain, look, one child policy doesn’t apply to the Tibetan region. The hospital director, she didn’t understand that. She was like, what do you mean? Tibetan is not part of China.

My mom had to go through my grandma’s connection, finally find another hospital to take her in and then finally give birth to me. And my mom had to leave me after two months giving birth because at that time they didn’t have maternity leave my mom managed to stay home for six months for the birth of my sister. For that, she had to do self-criticism when she went back to work.

So when she gave birth to me, she couldn’t stay long. She only stayed two months and she left. And I didn’t see my mom until I was three years old. I didn’t see my mom til three years old. And that’s the first time I actually went to Tibet. My grandma took me. We rode a bus for like three days to go to Tibet to see my mom. That’s kind of my personal anecdotal story, but I’m lucky.

I’m born after the end of Cultural Revolution because Mao died in September 1976. And around October, there was a power struggle because just before Mao died, Mao made another successor. Hua Guofeng, but there was still a lot of power among Mao’s widow and her associates. And then Hua Guofeng. Basically, some describe as a coup.

Hua Guofeng work out a plan with at then the Commander of PLA to arrest Mao’s widow and the so called Gang of Four, ending Cultural Revolution in October 1976, the month I was born. And that brought an end to the Mao era. So when Deng Xiaoping finally came to power much later in 1978, 1979 there was a significant portion of the Communist Party at the time that wanted to denounce Mao for Cultural Revolution.

But Deng Xiaoping said wait a minute, we can’t denounce Mao. If we denounce Mao, we denounce the Communist Party because the Communist Party is so tightly entwined with Mao. So instead, Deng Xiaoping passes judgment on Mao. He did 70% good, 30% bad. That’s kind of the official Chinese evaluation of Mao that he made some mistakes in his later years.

But then again, I think we can take hours to dissect into the minutiae of the Mao era. What Mao era did, though, was to build a foundation, because what it got right was universal education. Chinese literacy rate has been raised from 10% to over 90% today. And the status of women has been raised because Mao said women hold up half the sky.

And Mao did raise up a lot of people who were on the bottom of the society. So that’s why Mao remain a very controversial figure. People based on their own memories and their family memories from my family members, evaluation of Mao, unfortunately, is mostly negative. It goes through their own Cultural Revolution experience because my grandparents did come from kind of the intellectual class, the old Chinese gentry.

They were being targeted, right? But some more working class Chinese people from the very poor, they might have a different evaluation of Mao. So I wanted to throw that out. Mao is a highly complex figure. I heard he’s like the great man and devil in one body.

[00:49:14.630] – Grumbine

He said something to the effect of he was both the lion and the monkey, or something to that effect. Dragon and the monkey, the lion and the monkey. In other words, he inhabited both the ruling class, the power, and also the chaos. He was a contradiction in and of itself. But he even admitted in his own writings basically that he was a contradiction. He did have these two sides to him.

[00:49:40.730] – Zha

Yes, this is what makes Mao a very highly complex person. I do recommend for earlier life of Mao, Edgar Snow’s “Red Star Over China” because he is one of the first English language journalists who actually personally interview Mao. Where Mao divulged a lot of details of his early life and also some observation of the Chinese Red Army at the time just before the breakout of the Sino-Japanese War.

And also recommend the land reform book Fanshen by American author William Hinton who witnessed the land reform first hand in Northern Chinese village in 1947. So the legacy of Mao is very complex. In the words of one of his comrade, General [inaudible 00:50:29] Tsengen. He said, Mao is both a great revolutionary, but he is also an Emperor in the feudal mode. I think that kind of sums it up. He embodies the contradiction of different aspects of China around his time. I think that might be a better way to sum it up.

[00:50:52.730] – Grumbine

This was fantastic. Carl, you absolutely are not only an amazing storyteller, but you have just been able to rattle off for hours the most incredible story and this has been all learning for me with very few moments where I could interject. You have filled my mind with so much to think about. I’m so excited about learning more about China and learning more about this controversial figure in Mao.

I want to learn the good stuff and the bad stuff because the Black Panthers modeled themselves around Mao. There’s a lot of other factors that go into how we would think of Mao today and how we might think of socialism in general and revolution as a whole. So this was incredibly enlightening. And for my first time ever talking to you, I just want to tell you how grateful I am because you have been truly sacrificial of your time. Thank you so much for the time that you spent with me and plug your podcast. Plug anything else that you want to take us out.

[00:51:53.560] – Zha

Sure. Before that, I also do recommend read Mao’s own writing. Mao has some great writing. Maos Little Red Book. They have encapsulated some of the great quotes I do recommend. Mao’s writing, I would say is mostly good. I would recommend. And I’m the host of the Silk and Steel podcast which focus on China and surrounding regions, history, culture, and politics.

I’m actually glad that you asked me to do this episode because many, many people have asked me to do an episode on Mao and Cultural Revolution. I kind of shy away from because I feel it’s such a big weighty topic. We could get lost in hours. We did get lost in hours like 4 hours. I only kind of crammed the Cultural Revolution in 1 hour. It probably didn’t do it justice.

Eventually I plan to do a series on Cultural Revolution itself. But currently I’m still working on the Chinese civil war series, as I mentioned earlier, particularly on the Manchurian campaign because that was one of the most important theaters in the Chinese Civil War. And I also did a series on the opium trade and the Golden Triangle.

How the CIA helped the KMT remnant army escape to Northern Burma to turn that area into the world’s major supply base for opium and heroin before NATO occupation of Afghanistan, which is another fascinating. I mean, there’s so many I also had a chronological retelling of Chinese history series which I intend to pick up again. I have all these concurrent project going on, but I’m kind of going all over the place.

Recently I spent a lot of time on Twitter doing Twitter space talking about China’s position in the Ukraine war, for example. I was glad to hear a lot of voices from all over global south, from Africa, from Southeast Asia, from Latin America. And these global voices present a very complete different picture from what we are being fed by our mainstream media narrative in our western and global media.

So people have a chance to go check that out. Check out my podcast and if you like it, please subscribe to my Patreon, Silk and Steel podcast. You can just search Silk on Patreon.com. I think my podcast is the first that comes up and that’s how I support my family on Bali, my wife and my kids. So I highly appreciate it if you do subscribe. And thank you again for this opportunity to speak.

[00:54:36.230] – Grumbine

The pleasure’s all mine, Carl. Thank you so much. My name is Steve Grumbine. I’m the host of Macro n cheese. My guest, Carl Zha. Please check out his podcast Silk and Steel. And with that, we’re out of here.

[00:54:55.350] – End credits

Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts and promotional artwork by Andy Kennedy. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressive Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit Patreon.com/realprogressives.